by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Richard Muller
While I have been critical of Muller’s recent op-ed and attribution arguments, here are two interviews that remind me of why I like Muller:
Barry Woods has transcribed Muller’s interview with the Progressive Radio Network. Muller speaks his mind about climategate, Al Gore, Bill McKibben etc., he doesn’t hold any punches. This is definitely worth reading for entertainment value. I appreciate that Barry Woods has transcribed this, since it is much quicker to read than to listen to.
That said, this youtube interview with Muller is superb. It is one hour long – I would rarely last this long listening to an interview, but he held my attention the entire time. In the first half, Muller discusses his approach to science and how he came to critique of the hockey stick. In the second half he discusses energy issues, and he is clearly very knowledgeable. This is highly recommended.
As a follow up to blogospheric critiques of their recent paper re volcanic forcing, Rohde, Mosher and Zeke have a post at the Blackboard entitled Volcanoes and Their Climate Response.
Department of unintended consequences
This one is painful. The NYTimes has an article entitled Profits on carbon credits drives output of a harmful gas. Excerpts:
But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity.
They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, but could earn more than 11,000 credits by simply destroying a ton of an obscure waste gas normally released in the manufacturing of a widely used coolant gas. That is because that byproduct has a huge global warming effect. The credits could be sold on international markets, earning tens of millions of dollars a year.
So since 2005 the 19 plants receiving the waste gas payments have profited handsomely from an unlikely business: churning out more harmful coolant gas so they can be paid to destroy its waste byproduct. The high output keeps the prices of the coolant gas irresistibly low, discouraging air-conditioning companies from switching to less-damaging alternative gases. That means, critics say, that United Nations subsidies intended to improve the environment are instead creating their own damage.
The Fleetowner blog has an article titled Dams not diesel now in climate change crosshairs. Excerpts:
In a story published on the WSU website and now getting wide distribution Deemer said she measured dissolved gases in the water column of Lacamas Lake in Clark County and found that methane emissions – a substance 25 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere – jumped 20-fold when the water level was drawn down.
A fellow WSU-Vancouver student, Maria Glavin, went on to sample bubbles rising from the lake mud and measured a 36-fold increase in methane during a “draw down,” which is when water is taken out of the reservoir by the local municipality to supply fluid for drinking, washing clothes, fire suppression, etc.
Deemer went on to say that while dams and the water behind them cover only a small portion of the earth’s surface, they harbor “biological activity” that can produce large amounts of greenhouse gases.
“Reservoirs have typically been looked at as a green energy source,” Deemer told WSU science writer Eric Sorenson. “But their role in greenhouse gas emissions has been overlooked.”
Adaptation front
At Huffington Post Green: “Cattle are being bred with genes from their African cousins who are accustomed to hot weather. New corn varieties are emerging with larger roots for gathering water in a drought. Someday, the plants may even be able to “resurrect” themselves after a long dry spell, recovering quickly when rain returns.”
Funnies
This is an article you won’t want to miss: Climate Activism With Tattoos. Excerpts:
Social responsibility doesn’t usually jive with a macho image and Edwin Stafford and Cathy Hartman argue here that climate communication needs to be more macho if it is to reach new audiences.
In my part of the world, tattooed Rugby League players are the epitome of macho.
With his ever-accurate social radar, Bill Clinton put his finger on it recently when he said –
The more people with visible tattoos who advocate for clean energy, the more success it will have in Washington. You win the tattooed vote and we’ll have the damnedest environmental policy anybody ever saw.
And finally, check out Josh’s latest cartoon Climate Olympics.
The whole AGW business is replete of “unintended consequences”, with the European ETS already able to enrich large power companies in Europe, let alone obscure gas producers in China.
This won’t surprise at all anybody familiar with recent history. Nobody has killed as many Communists as Stalin. Nobody has killed as many Muslims as Osama. Ad of course, nobody will harm the environment as much as the environmentalists. QED.
You are exactly right, omnologos!
While we argue endlessly over President Obama’s ability to control climate,
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-pledges-response-drought-100602367.html
And the insanity of those who took government funds to inflate the egos of power-hungry, but foolish politicians [The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics]
http://www.amazon.com/The-Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Politics/dp/161039044X
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903703604576584933251186542.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/psychopaths-in-chief_comments.html#disqus_thread
Especially leaders of the US National Academy of Sciences, the UK’s Royal Society, the UN’s IPCC, The Nobel Prize Committee, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, U Chicago, Caltech, UC-Berkeley, etc. and the editors and publishers of Nature, Science, PNAS, MPRS, JGR, BBC, PBS, Time, Newsweek, The NY Times, etc, must take full credit for failing to instead support these common interests of ordinary citizens:
1. We all want world peace.
2. An end to racism and nationalistic warfare.
3. An end to the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation.
4. Cooperative efforts to protect Earth’s environment and bounty.
5. Governments controlled by the people being governed, including.
6. Transparency and veracity (truth) of information given to the public.
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-720
Society is troubled and may break soon – no matter what we do or say.
Official responses to the Climategate emails and documents that surfaced in Nov 2009 destroyed any illusion that deception in government science was only the work of a few rogue scientists.
Guilt-ridden scientists and world leaders were manipulated into abandoning constitutional limits on government after the sudden death of thousands of innocent citizens on 6 Aug 1945, as documented here:
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-720http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-720
We need to move beyond debate and work together for common goals. That was the point of my recent comment in the New York Times:
http://tinyurl.com/9ea7ras
Any cornered animal cornered is dangerous, especially naked apes:
http://www.infowars.com/national-weather-service-follows-dhs-in-huge-ammo-purchase/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/14/wtf-national-weather-service-buying-hollow-point-bullets/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/14/wtf-national-weather-service-buying-hollow-point-bullets/
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://www.omatumr.com
” nobody will harm the environment as much as the environmentalists. QED”
Is this a general truism?
Can we also write QED after statements like:
Nobody will harm climate scepticism as much as climate sceptics?
Nobody will harm capitalism as much as the most pro-capitalist, climate denial libertarians?
Nobody will harm conservatism…………
The volcanoes and climate response discussion is worth checking out. Eli Rabbet of all people even mentioned comparing regional response to volcanic forcing. It appears he thinks that “global” impact may not paint the proper picture. Imagine that?
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/kmartvolcanicanalysis.png
How the oscillations in the Northern tropical and southern regions vary with perturbations is fun to watch.
Volcanoes are just like the epicycles.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120809.html
They can play the GHG/aerosols game for a very long time and cannot even be wrong. But, the nut is cracked and the herd will swing around.
Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice weblog continues to gain in reputation:
Neven’s well-considered analysis recalls a famous mathematical aphorism:
This illuminates an emerging theme of climate-change research. This research is difficult; thus errors and imprecisions are inevitable, and verification and validation are vital.
Grothendieck’s aphorism helps us appreciate that the quibbling and cherry-picking of climate-change denialism — that justifies itself as the search for error-free certainty — is in fact a retreat from truth that is induced by fear.
Conclusion Fear of climate-change must not induce a retreat from truth … this is the main challenge of the summer of 2012 … and perhaps this is the main challenge too of the 21st century. :shock: :sad: :eek:
The truth: 1936 was the hottest July in the USA for 75 years … and was ignored by the AGW cult.
The NOAA says in 2012, only nighttime (TMIN) temperatures helped put July 2012 slightly ahead in average temperatures (TAVG).
And suddenly it is the sign of the apocalypse, even though higher TMIN is a sign of UHI.
“The truth: 1936 was the hottest July in the USA for 75 years …”
How a denier admits that July 2012 was the hottest on record.
It was the NOAA spokesman Jake Crouch:
“What made this year different from the Dust Bowl summer of 1936 was nighttime temperatures, he said. In the Dust Bowl years, the warmth was largely driven by daytime highs. This July, the record heat was also pushed by warm nighttime temperatures — the overnight lows weren’t that low.”
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-08-08/business/sns-rt-us-usa-heat-julybre8770y2-20120808_1_crop-insurance-hottest-month-dust-bowl
UHI
weather
Only Virginia set a state record for warmest July.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/noaa-july-2012-hottest-july-ever-but-not-for-any-state/
Record July’s by decade for states in CONUS
189x 1
190x 4
191x 1
192x 4
193x 15
195x 6
198x 2
199x 4
200x 6
201x 5
Robert | August 11, 2012 at 3:35 pm said: ”How a denier admits that July 2012 was the hottest on record”
Robert, what was the GLOBAL temperature for 2012? Because nobody on the planet knows, what was the temp for 2012, don’t keep it a secret, please tell us; you must be the only one on the planet who knows – or, you are a bigger liar than all the rest…. There is a strong competition, lots of bull-shine merchants, for you to be the best of the best, needs recognition. Congratulation!
@Robert:
Naughty little Robert!
This is your 1st warning young man, you should not start calling the other kids names if you are loosing, “denier” is not a nice word!
The other kids won’t wanna play with you anymore, Robert, if you keep calling them naughty names! Now go over to Ms Trenberth to change your pants, you had an accident…..again.
I will note these advances in your understanding.
1. That the 1936 record is complete enough and trustworthy enough to make claims about it. congratulations, you have moved on from skeptic kindergarten to first grade.
2. You now understand that UHI is found in TMIN. This does not mean
that higher Tmin ENTAILS UHI, but the opposite. If you want to
look for UHI, look in Tmin. To repeat: if you want to look for UHI,
look in Tmin. On the other hand, if you find increased TMIN, you cannot conclude UHI. Why? because increased Tmin can also be
due to changing cloud cover. sunhsine is your name. you should know this.
If you think NOAA is accurate why did BEST totally fail to find cooling in the Southeast?
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/best-minus-noaa-wow-best-has-cooled-the-pre-1960-data-and-warmed-the-post-1960-data-for-alabama/
may I suggest that you read and comprehend the readme.
you cannot simply compare the regional expectation with a estimate from another method that does not include information from the larger field.
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Regional/TAVG/Text/alabama-TAVG-Trend.txt
In simple terms.
A NOAA average for Alabama is based ONLY on the stations within the Alabama border. Borders are arbitary. The berkeley method estimates a field based on lat/lon altitude, station quality, seasonility and climatology. The estimate for Alabama includes information from the surrounding areas.Its not comparable to the average of alabama STATIONS. its the estimate for the alabama REGION using all the data.
If you want to compare like with like, then you would do something entirely different. You would take only those stations in alabama ( not those just across the border ) and you would create an estimate based on that. You can do that for yourself by downloading the station data.
select only alabama stations. Then make sure that you apply the final QA flags in the dataset. otherwise you will be making more mistakes.
Then you have to figure out how NOAA did its averaging and use that method. or you could Krig them both. I suggest using gstat.
try KED, krigging with external drift. Its easy and well within your skill limit.
The southeast region has cooled. I think a few extra stations outside the Alabama border should not make much of a difference.
NONE of the states that show a negative trend in NOAA from 1895 show a negative trend in BEST.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/best-why-no-cooling-in-the-southeast/
““Research suggests that the temperature of the southeastern United States has been decreasing over the past 100 years. The Southeast is distinct from other regions of the United States that do show distinct warming. Cooling in the Southeast, however, is not necessarily due to recent temperature trends. Rather, the large scale cooling is readily apparent when looking at the extended period of record. Temperatures in the early 1900s were generally cool then warmed between the 1920s and the 1940s. Starting in the 1950s, temperatures decreased until the 1970s when a general increase in temperature began. Because of the warming in the 1920s through 1940s is greater than the warming after 1970, the overall trend of the century is a cooling trend.””
http://www.dnr.sc.gov/climate/sco/Publications/temp_study/temp_discussion.php
2) Was the higher Tmin caused by increased cloud cover? Isn’t that recorded somewhere?
More likely a thermal inertia effect in the soil of all the prior warm months. Being in a long-term warmer climate helps this.
Could be all that extra water vapor pouring out of A/C units (which didn’t exist in 1936). And triple the population. And a lot more cars which emit a lot of water vapor. Or a lot of badly sited weather stations.
USCRN is trending down, down, down.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/uscrn-tmax-off-a-cliff-as-of-july-2012/
sunshinhours1, Why don’t you take the data from the same starting month to the same ending month to remove potential seasonal bias in the trends?
Did you also perform this analysis for the world?
cloud cover is recorded by a subset of stations. If you are interested GIYF. However, it will require a certain amount of skill.
You could also, use the previous cloud cover data I pointed you at.
or you could look at MODIS and get other data.
The job of sorting out why TMIN changes is harder than speculating.
one could just say “Its UHI” I compare that to people who look at rising temps and conclude on inspection that its GHGs.
Its best to put forth a testable hypothesis and then try to find the ways you are wrong. If you dont show any signs of testing your own speculations, then folks will conclude you are not interested in the truth
Web:
For comparing BEST to NOAA I compared the same start Year/Month to the same end Year/Month and I calculated NOAA anomalies for the same reference period as BEST.
So anomaly to anomaly is being compared.
As for USCRN, I used a 5 year reference period and showed all station data from 2007 even if a few of them didn’t start data until a little later.
No, I didn’t compare the world.
sunshinehours1 | August 11, 2012 at 5:41 pm |
sunshinehours1, water vapor is NOT a GLOBAL warming gas. Don’t let Mosher & telescope to keep your head in the clouds. Texas and surrounding states are hotter, because of lack of ”water vapor” this year. The lack of ”water vapor” is, because: it was more water in Arctic ocean without ice cover as ”insulation” -> water absorbed extra coldness and the currents brought extra coldness in North Atlantic = above the ocean is colder = less evaporation -> less water vapor produced -> less moisture going west from central Atlantic. Cooler over Atlantic -> hotter ”DAY TEMP” in Texas and other states. Like ”children’s see saw plank” the more one side goes up -> the more the other side goes down; both sides cannot get even theoretically warmer or colder simultaneously.
Mosher, JimD & telescope are here to mislead and muddy the water, not to inform; because they are scared off people discovering the real proofs. You cannot get Alabama, or Texas, or any other state; without incorporating the temp over the sea. The winds blow in both directions, 24h a day. The hottest minute in 24h is much less relevant, than the other 1439 minutes that they avoid to aknowelege. Every minute in 24h heat, over the land + sea are of same value! Get correct informations here: http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/water-vapor/
Mosher, I don’t consider it my job to decide if bright sunshine or humidity or cloud cover has changed enough to alter temperatures, only my hobby.
But I would think if groups like BEST blame GHG’s, they would have done some due diligence to rule out the other variables.
“verification and validation”
Fan,
Let us know when they begin doing this. ;)
Andrew
Thank you for this request, Bad Andrew! :) :) :)
If there is a Golden Principle of climate-change verification and validation, it is this: “The energy books must balance exactly, and the entropy books must show a loss” … and by the way, the Katzav, Dijkstra, and de Laat article is enfeebled precisely because it ignores the two fundamental principles of verification and validation … that are widely known as the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.
Therefore Bad Andrew, your commendable quest for verified validity (V&V) in our understanding of climate-change should focus upon the literature that validates and verifies climate-change models by comparison to multiple, independent, redundant channels, that cover all of the earth’s energy-entropy reservoirs.
And by the way, rigorous insistence upon “multiple, independent, redundant channels” of information, is precisely the design philosophy that the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory mandates for the Mars Curiosity Rover and for all the simulations of it.
Thus NASA’s V&V for earth’s climate and simulations of it, is structured very similarly to NASA’s V&V for Curiosity and simulations of it. Which is good, eh? :) :) :)
So in a nutshell, Bad Andrew, if the global energy-entropy books are observed to balance, and the individual entries fluctuate in reasonable accord with climate models, then you may repose reasonable confidence in those models! :grin: :grin: :grin:
Otherwise not, eh? :oops: :oops: :oops:
Conclusion climage-change V&V is not complicated … it’s just not easy! :lol: :lol: :lol:
Thank you, Bad Andres, for a fine request! :) :) :)
Fan,
I’m not talking about the models. I’m talking about “observational” data. ;)
The models aren’t even worth the discussion.
Andrew
“Mars Curiosity Rover”
Can we stick to Climate Science please? ;)
Andrew
Bad Andrew, to ignore NASA/JPL verification and validation (V&V) methods would be a crippling mistake!
Katzav, Dijkstra, and de Laat made that crippling mistake in “Assessing climate model projections: state of the art and philosophical reflections” (which Dr. Curry promises to discuss next week).
Conversely, James Hansen and his colleagues take care to *AVOID* that mistake in their already-celebrated Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications.
Bad Andrew … Judith Curry … Katzav-Dijkstra-deLaat … it is well to learn practical lessons regarding climate-change V&V from NASA/JPL’s Curiosity, eh? :) :) :)
“The models aren’t even worth the discussion.”
Certainly not with the scientifically illiterate, like you.
Robert, your post’s pointlessly disrespectful abuse of Bad Andrew contributed *nothing* of value to Climate Etc discourse.
Past Climate Etc. posts by you, and by Bad Andrew too, have been fact-driven, rational, good-humored, and respectful.
Let us hope and ensure that future posts are too! :) :) :)
Robert | August 11, 2012 at 3:37 pm said:“The models aren’t even worth the discussion.”
Robert, why are you from both camps constantly using only ”model cars & fire- trucks” on the sandpit? Wrrrrrm, wrrrrrrmm wrrrmmmm!
@Robert:
Naughty little Robert!
This is your 2nd warning young man, you should not start calling the other kids names if you are loosing.
The other kids won’t wanna play with you anymore, Robert, if you keep calling them naughty names! Now go over to Ms Trenberth to change your pants, you had an accident…..again.
Bad Andrew, please let me commend to you the validation and verification (V&V) principles that were responsible for this week’s wonderful success of the NASA/JPL Mars Curiosity Rover:
It’s no surprise — is it Bad Andrew? — that James Hansen’s research strategy for verifying and validating climate change science, as set forth in his Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications so strikingly embody the same NASA V&V principles that are associated to successful spacecraft design … particularly in emphasizing the absolute necessity for multiple, high-quality, redundant, cross-checked, climate measurements of global span! :) :) :)
Bad Andrew, how can I futher assist your growth in understanding of the vital role of long-established real-world methods for verification and validation (V&V) in climate science? :) :) :)
Quoting Hansen: “particularly in emphasizing the absolute necessity for multiple, high-quality, redundant, cross-checked, climate measurements of global span!”
Assuming that Hansen’s “measurements” are “raw observations”, who could disagree? If, however, he means the residue from blending, homogenization, adjusting, bucketing non-compliant class 3 with “compliant site” classes 1 and 2, then the results are not “measurements”. Further, models tuned to the “residue” are likely to reflect (imitate) the effects of the adjustments. 8-(
To be sure, Watts did omit adjustment for Time Of Observation (TOB/TOBS, assumed equivalent), and has taken his draft paper back for correction. Overlooking that would be easy to do; I have searched for requirements documents, and did not find mention of adjustments for TOB.
If anyone knows where consolidated Requirements are, I would be obliged to know their location. (Requirements are the high level document(s) to which Specifications are the response.)
Notice how the extremist trolls have to change the subject.
Dependable revealing and uninended humor from a dependable troll.
Models have 50% too few clouds
Observations of stratocumulus clouds and their effect on the eastern Pacific surface heat budget along 20°S, Simon P. de Szoeke et al.,
Journal of Climate 2012 ; e-View doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00618.1
h/t Hockey Sticht, via Climate Depot
& citing Roy Spencer
A “small” error in cloud cover goes a long way! Its hard to take climate model predictions seriously when such small errors can project twice the global warming – OR global cooling!
The IPCC showcased Mann’s graph and reproduced it over and over again, even after Mann’s graph had been thoroughly debunked. It is obvious that the IPCC deals only in the politics of fear and from the beginning was never driven by truth and honesty. Obviously, Muller is a break from that approach.
“The IPCC showcased Mann’s graph and reproduced it over and over again, even after Mann’s graph had been thoroughly debunked.”
Climate deniers whining and crying and threatening to murder Dr. Mann does not constituting “debunking.”
Rather, Mann’s hockey stick debunked the deniers . . . which is why they hate and fear it.
You don’t seen realize that even Mann has since admitted–e.g., ‘Yes, Virginia, there really was a MWP and LIA.’ And, we now know that the Roman warming period was only warmer than today it was much warming than previously realized.
Wagathon | August 11, 2012 at 5:29 pm lied: ” And, we now know that the Roman warming period was only warmer than today it was much warming than previously realized”
Wagathon, what was the temp in Australia + south / north America + Antarctic + central Pacific, during the Roman period? Why are you hiding that data and who was collecting it, from us?! It doesn’t match with my data:http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/open-pandoras-box/skeptics/ Wagaton, one of us is wrong and telling wooffy fairy-tales, offensive to the nose… shame, shame!!! Wagaton, the Roman thermometers were made in China, not reliable; don’t stick your credibility on Romans monitoring the temp in mid Pacific. Pacific is much larger than the Roman empire. America wasn’t on their globe, maybe Antarctic was; if you say so…
@Robert:
Naughty little Robert!
This is your 3rd warning young man, you should not start calling the other kids names if you are loosing, “denier” is not a nice word!
The other kids won’t wanna play with you anymore, Robert, if you keep calling them naughty names! Now go over to Ms Trenberth to change your pants, you had an accident…..again.
What half-wit gave you the term “climate deniers?” No one on the planet denies climate unless perhaps they have lived their entire lives in a cave and believe that climate is merely a myth or rumour created by those who venture outside. It is a remarkably stupid phrase and should probably be avoided unless you actually want to sound lile a politician.
mann’s chart has not been thoroughly debunked. The argument is over the shaft. There are good arguments on both sides about the shape of that shaft and the amplitude. In truth the question may be very difficult to settle. Put it this way. Mann argues for a flat shaft, others argue for more wiggles and higher wiggles. neither case is what we can referred to as conclusive science. Those who argue that mann has been vindicated understand this as little as those who argue that he has been debunked.
I think the blade was debunked when proxies went down after 1960.
True, true… M&S showed there is no signal in the data whatsoever and before that M&M demonstrated that inputting white noise into Mann’s program will generate a hockey stick graph.
err. no. The problem with the blade is that a small set of proxies in a specific geographic region diverged after 1960.
other proxies do not diverge.
The position you are arguing is that we should believe a small set of treemometers rather than thermometers.
The position you are arguing is that diverging proxies should be believed rather than UHA.. for example.
Logic is a good subject.
My position is that if the treemometers go down starting in 1960 in opposition to the temperature record then one of several things is true:
1) Thermometers / GTA is wrong. I suspect you would not agree.
2) Treemometers are not any such thing for any time. If they go down in 1960 they are not useful ever. Therefore the flat handle is most likely no such thing.
Therefore the blade is debunked.
Steve Mosher’s point is excellent, and amounts to the following validation and verification (V&V) principle:
That is the robust hockey-stick V&V strategy behind the 2011 prediction by Hansen et al. of “acceleration of sea-level rise this decade.”
The rate of sea-level rise is the hockey-stick blade; the relative stability of sea-level since Roman times is the hockey-stick shaft; and sea-level satisfies the NASA/JPL V&V of being a multiply-observed, experimentally robust, globally integrative measure of the earth’s energy budget.
It is striking — though perhaps not surprising — that for the past several decades, every aspect of James Hansen’s research strategy has faithfully mirrored well-documented NASA/JPL V&V practices.
The NASA/JPL V&V practices require a considerable capacity for sustainment, analysis, and foresight … three traits that James Hansen and his NASA colleagues have shown plenty of, eh? :) :) :)
“The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.59 \pm 0.15 W/m2 during the 6-year period 2005-2010, confirms the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change.”
You need to re-calibrate your BS detector.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Reasonable people understand that Mann’s hockey stick is simply a stistical artifact. Hans von Storch called it “quatsch.”
CaptDallas, please consider that the page you linked shows a full centimeter of sea-level rise this past 12 months. Yikes! :eek: :eek: :eek:
If that rise-rate persists, for the physical reason that James Hansen and his colleagues are correct to assert that in the past decade aerosol-induced cooling has largely balanced CO2-induced warming, such that in future decades, when aerosols wash-out of the atmosphere and CO2 stays, the AGW that we see now will greatly accelerate … well …
Then isn’t the dystopian outcome that some posters foresee on Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice weblog scientifically plausible … perhaps even politically inevitable?
“Yikes!” perhaps is too weak an expression. eh? :cry: :cry: :cry:
So 12 months is a trend now? Is this your current research?
http://phys.org/news205599757.html
Fan
In my article carried here:
‘Historic variations in sea levels-part 1-the Holocene to the Romans’
I followed that subject to 700ad when sea level was higher than today. I am working on part two at present but if you can persuade dr Hansen to relinquish just a small part of his budgets to me I will be able to finish part two much quicker. Have a word with him will you?
Tonyb
Tonyb, attracting collaborators *is* a vital scientific skill, at which James Hansen *has* been outstandingly effective.
So perhaps you should study James Hansen’s collaborative methods and apply them TonyB! The impact upon your research can only be positive! :) :) :)
Fan
Thanks for that inspirational link demonstrating that having so many collaborators, each with their own funding, means that if each of them gave just a few hundred dollars for my research efforts they wouldn’t even notice it was missing.
Tonyb
Dood. Seriously. Your pompom swinging for Hansen is getting downright weird. Creepy crawly weird.
Wow, you mean creepier than the personal fetish that you and “lurker” have for *me* :?: :!: :?: Gosh “discord”, that *is* pretty darn creepy! :roll: :roll: :roll:
Hey here’s an idea — let’s become mutual fans of the outstanding discussions of climate-science that are presented on Neven’s Sea Ice weblog! :lol: :lol: :lol:
Wouldn’t that make good sense, little “discord”?
Steven Mosher | August 11, 2012 at 4:18 pm
Mosher, you are using the word ”truth” beware, if you use that word – your tongue may get paralyzed. The ”truth” is on my blog, why all the fear from ”real truth” instead of you creating ”phony truth”? Confusing the real / constant climatic changes with any phony GLOBAL warmings; is opposite than the truth… what’s called on English for ”opposite than the truth”?
It’s Fake’s tactic, ”fighting lies with bigger lies” keep away from them – they will make you more rotten than you already are (friendly advice)
Steven Mosher,
It is debunked because there is no shaft.
I must say, Muller as inkblot is fascinating.
People see in him the shape of whichever biases they want to use him to confirm.
Good job Joshua. Finally a post of yours I can agree with. Perhaps I will start reading your comments again.
Perhaps I will start reading your comments again.
My prayers paid off, Hank
Let me try again with proper formatting, plus some additional snark:
My prayers paid off, Hank.
And Hank – reread your post again and see if you can find a Jupiter-sized logic problem.
The key to understanding Muller is that he is just as interested in energy topics in their own right, irrespective of the relationship of fossil fuels to AGW. If one were to read his book “Physics for Future Presidents”, you an find he has lots on hydrocarbon reserves and alternative and renewable energy concepts.
It looks like he has a new book called “Energy for Future Presidents”, published just this month.
http://www.amazon.com/Energy-Future-Presidents-Science-Headlines/dp/0393081613/ref=pd_sim_b_2
This goes into even more detail on energy supplies and the need for developing alternatives.
It’s enough to make a fake skeptic’s head explode.
Web, Make a Skeptics head explode? Not really. Hydrogen, however it is stored, is the most likely long term transportation energy solution. Making energy is not a problem, storing energy is the problem. Most skeptics think the “green” approach is just putting the cart before the horse.
Muller also thinks that it is silly to attempt to legislate energy morality. BRIC and the ROW will grow and will use more energy. The developed countries shooting themselves in the foot won’t change that. So focusing on cleaner more efficient uses of current energy reserves while moving into newer alternate energies would be leading by example not decree, generally a more rational approach.
Since you still stubbornly stick with the diluted notion that ocean out gassing and fossil fuel consumption are the sum total of CO2 concentration increase, ~50,000,000 kilometers squared of the land surface area of the earth have been modified by man in the past 10,000 years. That is almost 10% of the total surface area of the Earth. About 10,000,000 kilometers squared of that land is above latitude 45 North. Between the Virgin lands campaign, the green revolution and the great leap forward, huge amounts of carbon have been released from the soil and no longer allowed to accumulate. The largest annual CO2 signal is due to land use. Modifying land use, will more dramatically reduce CO2 concentrations than any warm and fuzzy carbon Ponzie scheme and might actually solve other issues in the process.
Muller said this in his latest book:
It’s a global crisis, the USA doesn’t get much a reprieve.
A reprieve is luck. It is better to make your own luck than count on a reprieve. One of the reasons I am a fan of Integrated Combined Cycle Gasification is that it can use a variety of feed stocks and blends of feed stocks to produce a variety of transportation fuels or energy storage. Urea and Ammonia are good hydrogen storage forms with a variety of uses. It is a lot easier to storage a few thousand liters of hydrogen in urea pellets than trying to contain hydrogen. If Urea doesn’t catch on as a fuel, well, you are stuck with fertilizer or animal feed supplement, damn the bad luck. ICCG has some issues, but $5 per gallon fuel cost allows for some fine tuning.
A hydrogen economy of some kind is inevitable, may as well start with simpler technology then work on the fancy stuff when you are not bouncing from one crisis to the next.
WebHubTelescope | August 11, 2012 at 1:32 pm said: ”It’s enough to make a fake skeptic’s head explode”
Don’t worry Telescop, empty space cannot explode (laws of physics).
I must say, Muller as inkblot is fascinating.
+1
Even more interesting is Hansen as Fan’s inkblot. Or something.
Climate Science is Mosher’s inkblot. Almost literally. Note the extensive use of drawings.
Andrew
Heh. Best Joshua post ever.
What week in review is complete without a few regular round ups?
Andrew Revkin comments in a NYT Op-Ed on, well, http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/a-closer-look-at-climate-studies-promoted-before-publicatio/ the title says it all. I only mention him because Dr. Curry is not Andrew Revkin. (Which is a good thing for all involved.)
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ writes informatively about MODIS, and the Greenland melt earlier in July, but also mentions casually that 2012 has broken the record for the week in low ice extent (and volume). However, as it’s also the hottest year on record to date either by running 12-month or calendar, globally or in the USA (here’s a taste: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/its-official-its-been-really-hot-in-the-northeast-warmest-year-on-record-so-far/2012/08/07/f23e298e-e0b2-11e1-8d48-2b1243f34c85_story.html), and has had a record number of record-breaking heat, drought, flood, late frost, early melt, low water table, high sea level events across the board, this isn’t surprising. And we’re only 3% to 17% of what Global Warming might look like.
The Progressive media (is that MSM, or fringe, these days, I’ve lost track?) was quick to document the Climate credentials of Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential nominee, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/11/677051/meet-paul-ryan-climate-denier-conspiracy-theorist-koch-acolyte/ says it all (see how many techniques of propaganda from http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/08/consensus-by-exhaustion/#comment-227737 you can identify in the article). His choice ought delight our own k scott denison, the Wisconsinite for For Global Warming, and put some dent into President Obama’s own coal-interest backing, as Paul Ryan’s even more pro-coal protectionism than Obama.
In Canada this week, Peter Kent — the man who zealously blocked and manipulated Kyoto negotiations at Durban using Canada’s weight as a Kyoto signatory to extract significant cuts and inflict diplomatic obstacles, then announced it had been Canada’s plan to withdraw from Kyoto for some years the day after negotiations ended (how’s that for exhausting?) — admitted http://www.windsorstar.com/business/Canada+must+work+emissions+says+Kent/7062194/story.html .. by claiming that 7% is halfway to 17%, and taking credit for the 7% that had _nothing_ to do with his own activities, other than that he had worked to block those measures every step of the way too. When doing business with Canadians, remember these sharp practices. From my experience, they are out to get you, and you will feel cheated after a business meeting with a Canadian. And like taking a shower.
In India, on a completely different note, the topic of the role of gender differences in climate policy in developing nations is becoming visible. http://www.bridge.ids.ac.uk/go/bridge-publications/cutting-edge-packs/gender-and-climate-change
One wonders why no one talks about this in the developed world. Certainly climate is a women’s social issue, as women’s traditional roles and traditional concerns are heavily affected by climate outcomes in policy.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.v32.10/issuetoc has many fascinating articles, and is a must-read this month even if for the teleconnections and the Western Antarctic proxies articles alone, though I recommend reading at least six articles. (No, really, this month’s is a particular page-turner, and extremely relevant.)
Bart R says:
“When doing business with Canadians, remember these sharp practices. From my experience, they are out to get you, and you will feel cheated after a business meeting with a Canadian. And like taking a shower.”
I do not know where that came from but it is a breathtakingly offensive and gratuitous insult to Canadians.
Bart R is clearly suffering from dyslexia. He mistyped ‘Canadians’ for ‘climatologists’.
Once this mistake is corrected his remarks make perfect sense.
+1
Latimer Alder | August 11, 2012 at 12:30 pm |
Really, Latimer. Judith Curry, Climatologist may disagree with you. Or not. As may Anthony Watts, who’s being called a Climatologist by many (I think he may deny this), and Ross McKitrick, the Climate Economist (oh, wait, he’s Canadian, too), and John Christy of UAH, and Roy Spencer. Though you know, you and I don’t always disagree about all things.
By the way, insightful and informative, http://www.degreefinders.com/education-articles/careers/how-to-become-a-climatologist.html is very enlightening. $56K a year for a PhD with concentrations in no less than four major fields of specialization is not very much. It appears ‘lying about climate change’ does not pay nearly so well as Heartland claims. They still have job openings at Heartland, btw, if anyone’s looking for work in the field.
@bart r
But the only one of those you cite who would be recognised as such by the Guild of Self-Declared Superintellects, Climatogical Wizards and The Only People Permitted To Have An Opinion (Cleanse The Deniers) is Judith. And her membership must be in some doubt because she has shown distinctly worrying signs of Independent Thought.
I think my point stands.
And thanks for the link to the ‘How to be a Climatologist’ site. Best laugh I’ve had all day. I think the highlight for me was this gemmette:
‘Climatologists must have good communication and interpersonal skills and ability to present their research findings to a variety of people’
I wonder how many of the current breed of
‘Listen up, Evil Deniers. We are Climate Scientists so just f…g do what you are told you stupid ignorant peasants’
communicators would qualify on this score……
Or Chris (Mr Arrogant) Colose
‘Nobody without a PhD in radiative physics is even entitled to have an opinion about climate science’
Latimer, this is a hoot (from the ‘How to be a Climatologist’ page):
Really? :lol:
PE illustrates why he’s not qualified to have an opinion.
@robert
With every one of your content free posts, you beautifully (if unconsciously exemplify the
‘Listen up, Evil Deniers. We are Climate Scientists so just f…g do what you are told you stupid ignorant peasants’
model of climate communication I referred to above.
Keep it up! You are the sceptics best secret weapon. Every time you write another few waverers have their doubts about the Climatocracy confirmed and fall into the sceptic camp.
@Robert:
Naughty little Robert!
This is your 4th warning young man, you should not start calling the other kids names if you are loosing.
The other kids won’t wanna play with you anymore, Robert, if you keep calling them naughty names! Next time its of to the naughty corner with you.
Robert Austin | August 11, 2012 at 12:22 pm |
And yet, if you ask most who do business across the border to speak honestly, you’re sure to find the characterization well-supported by direct testimony.
If you doubt this, look up the NAFTA hearing process, and cases that have gone to it. And relations of the EU with Canada on trade. And complaints Japan and Korea have had about auto trade with Canada. Or read the Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, a seminal Canadian work of fiction by Mordecai Richler.
Now, I know testimonial evidence is a form of logical fallacy, and moreover a technique of propaganda, and citing works of fiction as a foundation for an argument is overdone on climate blogs overall (WUWT, Idsos, I’m lookin’ at you), but documentation of international bodies in disputes should be adequate.
Also, Peter Kent’s public use of sharp practices speak for themselves to warn you what you’re getting into when dealing with Canadians.
Remember the FOI DNS Mosher’s so proud of was organized on a Canadian blog as an attack on a UK institution. This is not a country full of people ashamed to be seen using any cheap trick to get ahead. Or aren’t you watching the Olympics?
but the DNS failed miserably. they responded to the FOIA in under 18 hours. As predicted.
that said I would not characterize myself as a US citizen. I’m a citizen of the world, concerned about the dangers of climate science and the institutional abuse of power. They happened to coincide in that matter.
even so, wouldn’t expect you to win WUWT’s popularity contest.
Well vuk,
popularity isn’t my goal. It is possible, logically possible, to believe in climate science and criticize some individuals behavior. When you do this, you will quickly see that it is not about the science. Its about choosing sides. You can also, believe that the behavior of some climate scientists was less than perfect AND criticize bad skeptical posts, bad skeptical analysis, and bad skeptical data practices. When you do this the faithful will also get pissed off. because its not about the science, its about choosing sides. I refuse to choose sides. I choose to criticize what I disagree with, no matter who says it. Even when my friends are wrong. So, ya, I’m a lousy friend and you don’t want me as an enemy.
But as you know from your dealing with me if you ask for help or a suggestion I will gladly do either.
I’d pay to have friends like you Mosh
I excel at all of them : bad skeptical posts, bad skeptical analysis, and bad skeptical data practices. See ya.
Thanks Omno.
Vuk!! true I do give you shit. my suggestion is to post more of your methods. Somebody may steal your work and take all the credit.
You will sleep at night. They won’t. Those of us who follow your work will know the truth. hmm I saw some interesting work on magnetics and polar storms.. wish I could recall where. I thought of you.
Probably one of my posts :)
Steven, I can’t beat dr.S or you at the science application, but intuition is a useful alternative. For professionals it is serious business, for me it is a spare time lark.
Tanks the for wind-up. Take a few days break.
Bart R,
You your lame reply just reinforces the fact that your original allegation was gratuitously offensive.
Robert Austin,
Bart relies on lame replies like a phony handicapped parking sticker.
Robert Austin | August 11, 2012 at 9:59 pm |
Did I claim it wasn’t offensive or even gratuitously so?
I was just addressing your implied question, “Where did that come from?”
Which, while it underscores how gratuitous it is to point out that Canada has a scuzzball international reputation because of its scuzzball elected international leaders, when they point it out to everyone paying attention (which clearly doesn’t include Canadian voters) whenever they pull scuzzball stunts like Peter Kent.
Fish stink from the head, but the stink goes all the way down.
In a democracy like Canada’s case, it gets the stink it deserves.
http://updatednews.ca/2012/08/12/facebook-page-calls-for-american-only-hours-at-u-s-costco/
http://www.diplomaticourier.com/news/opinion/1051-the-dark-age-of-canadian-diplomacy
And even when Canada appears to be helping a just cause(www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2012/08/11/canadas-fm-visits-syrian-refugee-camp-in-jordan), oh look, they fund it through an Al Qaeda-linked organization(www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1241375–stephen-harper-defends-aid-money-to-unregistered-syrian-charity).
Your real friends aren’t the ones who tell you you’re doing well when you’re not. They’re the ones to tell you when you forgot to put on your pants before you walked out of the house. So you can believe people who tell you it’s offensive and gratuitous to point out Canada’s warts, or you can take a good long look in a mirror.
Personally, I recognize there’s a bit of pointing out the mote in your eye while ignoring the beam in my own, but that’s my problem.
The Bridge gender stuff looks a bit daft to me. In passing, if I may make a very broad generalisation about a very large and diverse community, Indian women seem very earthed to me, the men are more more likely to be taken up with impractical ideas and fancies. (Based on about two years in and around India from 1972-75 and shorter visits since, and working with Indian communities elsewhere.)
Blame Canada!
Here is Paul Ryan in his own words.
He was eloquent on the impacts of the cap and trade bill:
Representative Paul Ryan R-WI Cap & Trade HR 2454
VP Candidate Paul Ryan: Climatologists “Intentionally Mislead The Public On Climate Change”
He has an excellent grasp of the issues.
“climate is a women’s social issue”
Who says Warmers can’t regurgitate canned sloganeering? ;)
Andrew
From the blurb:
http://www.bridge.ids.ac.uk/go/bridge-publications/cutting-edge-packs/gender-and-climate-change
I believe it goes a bit above sloganeering.
Or did I miss that you were tacitly offering to go fetch the daily water of an African family during your next vacations?
“opportunities that climate change presents in the struggle for gender equality”
More sloganeering! Hooray! ;)
Andrew
I agree with B.A. here. Clearly, advocating that women have an equal voice in decision-making (as just one example) is mere sloganeering.
“an equal voice in decision-making”
Is this conclusion the result of a Climate Science paper or something?
You guys are Ate Up. ;)
Andrew
B.A. nails it yet again.
Let’s get back to the important discussion about what is in climate science papers.
You know, like whether or not Muller is a “skeptic,” tattoos, Josh’s cartoons, and that whole AGW cabal thingy.
Usually, a slogan is a proposition, Bad.
Climate is a women’s social issue. They carry the water and gather the firewood. In many parts of the world they do all the farming. Climate and climate change are both a women’s issue.
“Climate is a women’s social issue”
It’s not a man’s “social issue” then? Cool. Let’s let the ladies take care of it so we can focus on important stuff like diversity and tolerance and Muslim outreach.
Ate Up.
Andrew
Affordable Energy is a woman’s social issue.
If you’ve got electricity something called a ‘pump’ will carry the water, Something called a ‘heat pump’ will negate the need for firewood.
Something called a ‘stove’ will boil water so that it is drinkable.
And educating women is a climate change issue.
So I’m trying to figure out what your point is, harry. Are you saying that advocating for an equal voice for women in policy-making is merely sloganeering?
The simple truth is that feminism wouldn’t have emerged from the esoteric academic swamp if not for the electrical appliances that turned homemaking from a full-time occupation into a 2-hour-a-day set of chores during the middle of the 20th century. Energy is most certainly a woman’s issue. Electricity liberated the homemaker, and allowed her to go out and work.
P.E. | August 11, 2012 at 12:48 pm |
You know, I keep hearing this, but I see no evidence for it. In point of fact, all the studies I’ve seen point up to the rebalancing of workloads due domestic home power moved against women’s interests: multiplication of appliances, Industrialisation segmenting the home with wage-capable members drawn out of the household to workplaces, leaving those with the least wage-earning power to shoulder more of the burdens, a spiral of increasing budget items chasing the Joneses.
Do you have a reference to cite to support your assertion?
Because this is patently another case where the ‘cheap energy’ argument of neobullionists results in net increase in cost burdens to all.
Tell you what, Bart. If you think great-great-gramma had the life of Riley, next time you need some laundry done, why don’t you take it all down to the river and wash it with a scrub board and hang it up to dry. And then you can take the carpets out and beat them, and while you’re doing that, dinner’s on the wood stove, and you got to make sure the fire doesn’t go out, and great-great-gramma sure had it easy, didn’t she?
P.E. | August 11, 2012 at 10:53 pm |
Before the Industrial Revolution, things were pretty awful.
The only reliable light was daylight; all work of most types had to be done between sunrise and sundown; the benefits of specialization were barely known. Things were pretty awful. But they were less evenhandedly awful after the start of the Industrial Revolution, with the benefits of specialization requiring men to serve in commercial functions, and women in domestic ones whereas before domestic functions were shared, as were commercial ones.
Who had it worse in that exchange? Men (and some women) sent into sweatshop factories, or women forced to take up every duty and chore, role and responsibility, on top of everything they had done before in shared nuclear family roles? Impossible to say, possibly, but whatever else, many had worse outcomes.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
I’m going to admit I was wrong.
I came off sounding, I’m certain, like a boorish loudmouth know-nothing.
Which may have just been me trying to fit in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w
Hans Rosling explains much of my position, and I think P.E.’s, a bit better.
But watch the whole thing, and understand the process and the thinking, before leaping to conclusions.
Rosling posits a world with 50% higher population, 400% better standard of living globally, and 25% lower fossil energy consumption by 2050, with the goal of every child in the world having the opportunity to achieve the same standard of education and the same access to reading as any child has today.
How?
http://saveenergy.about.com/od/energyefficientappliances/p/eneffwashingmac.htm
http://whitepaper.ises.org/ISES-WP-600DV.pdf gives some first-hand views, or you may prefer http://whitepaper.ises.org/ISES-WP-600DV.pdf as a starting point.
Here we go…factors affecting child mortatlity in Bangladesh.
Presence of ‘piped water’ and presence of ‘electricity’ are big factors as are educational attainment levels.
Somehow I think ‘child mortatlity’ is a ‘woman’s issue’.
http://www.ispub.com/journal/the-internet-journal-of-tropical-medicine/volume-6-number-1/factors-affecting-on-child-survival-in-bangladesh-cox-proportional-hazards-model-analysis.html
more importantly the best thing we can do to control emissions is educating poor women.
I’d like to see more about that. Seems like it’d be important, but “best?” Got a link or two?
It’s pretty simple. If you look at the projections for emissions you will see that the uncertainty is dominated by population growth.
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.php?idp=99
and that uncertainty is probably greatest in developing countries.
as you probably know some of the keys to curbing population growth in developing countries include education
http://www.unfpa.org/pds/poverty.html
Whether this is the “best” of course is subject to debate. When I say best, I suppose I mean a course of action that actually is feasible, and a course of action where there are far more winners than losers, and a course of action that is laudable on many other ethical grounds than “saving” the planet or protecting hansens grand children. I consider best in a practical sense. The top of all doable things. I dont consider rapid cuts of emissions as doable.. winners and losers will fight about that shit for years.
basically, controlling the growth of emissions in developing countries by addressing poverty and over population and doing that by addressing inequalities between the sexes which are noxious regardless of the temperature of the planet.
make sense? For me the way through the current impass is to cut across it. That doesnt mean you stop efforts to curb emissions in the developed world. Btu understand that this fight will be long and hard and will require an entirely new generation in charge. In the mean time work where you can have success. dont let perfection be the enemy of the best we can do today.
Anything by Rostling is worth watching, e.g.:
> And we will be just 10 billion in this world, if the poorest people get out of poverty, their children survive, they get access to family planning. That is needed. But it’s inevitable that we will be two to three billion more. So when you discuss and when you plan for the resources and the energy needed for the future, for human beings on this planet, you have to plan for 10 billion.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html
“So when you discuss and when you plan for the resources and the energy needed for the future, for human beings on this planet, you have to plan for 10 billion.”
So if we leave Earth, will there be same amount: 10 billion on Earth?
Say, by 2100 there is more 1 million people not living on Earth.
Say +100,000 on Mars, +100,000 near Earth [LEO and L-points], +50,000 on the Moon, and +50,000 Mercury or elsewhere.
Say to get somewhere in space [move there] it requires around 2 years worth of work [the cost a house, but you also need to buy a house- so a second house] So might take 5 years before were in black.
Or if was expensive option but it’s equal to buying house or getting higher levels of education.
Elon Musk, thinks getting about 1000 or more to Mars for about 1/2 million seat price may possible within 2 decades- so what talking about less cost than this, and after a couple decades where there has been these types of lower population settlement.
it would a similar situation as early 1800’s America- price getting from Europe to America is expensive. To do this require no particular change in present technology- it’s mostly related to market forces and/or economics of scale.
Question is in such a situation, does Earth’s population remain at 10 billion or does human population in solar system remain at 10 billion?
Steven –
Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks. I had a different conceptualization behind the word “best” – but when we consider what is doable as one of the contributing criteria for determining “best,” I get your point.
I think that what is or isn’t doable is a moving target. In some ways what you describe should be more doable. Then again, it’s still a pretty tough nut to crack. One of the reasons is because part of something being “doable” is it also being “realistic.”
There are many people who will line up to argue why any attempts to educate poor women in other countries, let alone this country, is not feasible or even worthwhile. In fact, while I don’t like making predictions, I do see reasons to be concerned that even educating poor people in this country (girls included) will become less and less of a shared goal – especially if our economic prosperity flounders. There is no short-term, private sector profit in educating poor people.
But all things considered, I’m with you 100% on that post.
Thx Joshua.
Watch the ted talk that willard linked to. I love all the talks given by that guy.
In AR5 population enters the picture in a different way that it did in Ar4.
In some ways it’s an advance. The assumed populations for 2100 are
from around 8.5 to 12B.
The 12Billion figure is used for the highest emissions scenario RCP 8.5
RCP 6 is around 10 Billion and RCP 4.5 is 8.5B..
Obviously the other thing that can be done to curb population growth is peace.
Steven Mosher | August 12, 2012 at 12:05 am
Mosher, human overpopulation is bad for many different reasons. Even if Pacific was full of diesel, even if burning fossil fuel was releasing milk and honey, instead of CO2 –
Bottom line: fossil fuel is keeping / increasing human population artificially. Because you people are obsessed with CO2 CON, the real problems are completely overlooked = double crime
+1
Steven Mosher | August 11, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Mosher, unless you educate ”the poor women” to keep their legs crossed and control overpopulation; nothing will help, and you are not doing your job corectly
stafan.
educating women, especially poor women, has many good results and most importantly it’s the right thing to do. One result, of course, is that they realize that they are more than baby machines. You can think of reduced emissions as a good unintended consequence of doing the right thing WRT the education of poor women in developing countries.
stefan –
Has anyone ever explained the birds and the bees to you?
Steven Mosher | August 11, 2012 at 10:21 pm
Mosher, educating women is just wishful thinking. 2] you believe in IPCC’s fairy-tales, see if they can control human overpopulation; by getting read of the storks. They have many similar solutions to many problems; should encompass that one too. For them is: less water vapor + CO2 = green…?! Those clowns overlook that trees / grass are made from H2O+carbon.
Civilization cannot convince; the Muslim women not to have that hijab / rag over their heads in the subtropics and tropics – imagine when one is prepared to cover up his mother, wife, daughter, sister with that black rag on the heat… to let her make decisions about children?,,,
Dreaming is one thing, but reality: We are addicted to fossil fuel, lets burn it – then cold turkey. Natural selection will reduce the population to less than 3 billion, without fossil fuel. Carbon tax is only; making smaller chairs on Titanic = empty talk
Joshua | August 11, 2012 at 11:00 pm said: ”Stefan – Has anyone ever explained the birds and the bees to you?”
Unfortunately no, Josh, I’m all ears. Also somebody should explain it to the Pope. Does it really say in the bible: ”no condoms and no contraception pills”?
Was here on local TV; an Afghan refugee in Pakistan, complaining to the reporters that: ”he doesn’t have enough food for his 3 wifes and 14 children”… You go and tell those ladies, to have a say about the number of children.
2] Latin america, Pakistan, Kenya are doubling their population every 30-40 years… talking about saving fuel is more stupid, than saving an ice-cube in the desert.
gbaikie | August 11, 2012 at 9:30 pm
gbaike, shifting people to Mars? I always thought that you Green People are from Mars. You have only left eye (one eye critters) You like ”colder planet + hate water vapor” Mars is colder and no water vapor.
gbaike, look what the Green People did to their own planet; it’s cool, no water vapor, no trees and rich people on Mars – that’s what they are trying to do to the earth.
Fantasizing to populate another planet, confirms that your head is already in the clouds – you are already half way there. Call the rest of the Green People to follow you, so that normal people on the earth can build extra dams and save more storm-water, to IMPROVE the climate on this planet. Martian climate is not suitable for normal people.
That was the last satellite the Yankees can afford. Start collecting feathers and earwax to stitch them on – so they can get airborne. Most of the Warmist & Fakes are ready to relocate to cuckoo’s land, that can help
“That is because that byproduct has a huge global warming effect.”
“Huge” doesn’t even cover it. I’d go so far as to say GIGUNDOUS. At the very least, there’s major, major bigness going on in the global warming realm.
In the interview Professor Muller does dance around a bit. The interviewer obviously wants Muller to support the IPCC consensus view more strongly, but he resists.
He agrees that the data show our planet has warmed by two-thirds of a degree over the past 150 years, he does not agree that it is now warmer than it has been for 1,000 years (Mann hockey stick) nor that most of the warming has been caused by humans. He agrees that (IF the IPCC consensus is correct) AGW could become a major issue in the future, which should be addressed at the policy level. But it is important that we do the RIGHT things (and NOT the WRONG ones).
As for practical solutions, he agrees that the problem is NOT the USA, it is the developing world (primarily China). No matter what the USA does, it will not make much difference. China’s nuclear program will help a little, but that it will take more than that. He suggest giving China the US fracking technology to develop their natural gas resources in order to switch from coal to gas. He quoted an estimate that 50,000 Chines die every year from the pollution from coal-fired power plants, so that this would be reason enough for China to switch from coal to natural gas. He also believes that increasing energy efficiency will be the second major action that could help, pointing out that the USA is currently twice as “energy efficient” as China (and several times as energy efficient per GDP generated).
Muller does not believe that the problem is related to transportation, nor that we are approaching a “Hubbard Peak” on oil (since we have lots of coal and this can easily be converted to liquid fuels with existing “clean” technology). Electric cars are not a viable answer (battery life will not likely be increased dramatically in next 10 years). Solar is nice but will not make much difference. He did not mention wind power as an alternate.
He feels that distortions and exaggerations have caused a lot of harm for the AGW cause with the general public, citing Al Gore’s movie as one bad example and the false IPCC claims in AR4 as another. The claim that there are more frequent or more intense hurricanes as a result of AGW is not scientifically supported, according to Muller.
While I might not agree with everything he said, there is no question that the guy is both a knowledgeable scientist and a slick politician.
Max
Max –
Ellipses added for clarity:
Aarrghh!
Ellipses added for clarity:
More evidence of Muller as inkblot. People see shapes in what he says that confirm whatever they want to believe.
FWIW, I have difficulty having any faith in your analysis of the science when you get such basic, non-technical information so completely wrong.
The closer we look, the more we see funny shapes in Max’s post:
Muller, from the interview:
What do you see in the shape of those words, Max?
Just as a matter of curiosity, when we have finally stamped out the evil of producing energy through the combustion of fossil fuels and replaced fossil fuels by ‘green’ wind and solar, does someone already have the environmental impact statement ready that describes, in excruciating detail similar to that required for fossil and nuclear plants, exactly how the extraction of a few thousand gigawatts of energy from the wind will affect weather patterns and the climate in general? Or the environmental impact of producing the raw materials and manufacturing the batteries to replace the IC engines in a few hundred million automobiles, trucks, and busses? Or how the manufacture and installation of hundreds of square miles of solar cells and the associated power lines from the locations where solar is feasible to the area where the power is needed will impact the environment? I KNOW that the construction of high capacity transmission lines-the lines themselves, never mind the coal plant-from remote coal plants to service growing urban needs is an environmental abomination, because I live in an area where such a transmission line was proposed and EVERY environmental group SAID so and fought it with ever fiber of their being. Will they do the same for lines fed by wind and solar?
Is it simply an axiom that ‘green’ energy, as identified by the environmentalists and climate scientists, HAS no environmental impact?
Or, as would seem to be the case empirically, is the intent to simply halt, for all intents and purposes, the production and widespread distribution of energy in any form, at least in anything like the quantity that we currently REQUIRE to maintain our civilization?
Dr. Jerry Pournelle has said often, and I believe accurately, that cheap, plentiful energy is the key to freedom and prosperity. With that principle in mind, I note that the administration and the climate science community and environmental groups that support it (that would be ALL of them) are doing everything in their collective power to decrease the supply of energy and increase its price.
+1
“exactly how the extraction of a few thousand gigawatts of energy from the wind will affect weather patterns and the climate in general? Or the environmental impact of producing the raw materials and manufacturing the batteries to replace the IC engines in a few hundred million automobiles, trucks, and busses? Or how the manufacture and installation of hundreds of square miles of solar cells and the associated power lines from the locations where solar is feasible to the area where the power is needed will impact the environment?”
That’s just the unavoidable footprint of human civilization. With time technology should improve to reduce that footprint.
The difference with burning fossil fuels is that it’s rapidly pushing atmospheric CO2 and ocean surface PH into abnormal territory which are changes that have a global rather than local reach.
Well, I’m in the oil business and I have absolutely no interest at all in supplying anybody with cheap energy.
Ah, that explains something I’ve long suspected: those in the oil business can’t do elementary arithmetic.
If some budding entrepreneur came to you with an energy proposal that would cost you as a supplier one third your current price, so that you could charge the customer half his current price, then according to you you would turn him down because you didn’t want your customer to get cheap energy. OMG. OMG. OMG.
You must not have been very good at arithmetic in school. The customer could afford to buy twice as much energy so you would get the same amount from the customer while your own cost for that energy would go down to 2/3 of what you’re currently paying for only half as much energy.
Vaughan Pratt | August 13, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Vaughan, not only 2/3 of the cost, but electricity from coal costs only 7% of what solar electricity costs. Your teacher didn’t tell you that. 2] plus interest for next 100y on the borrowed money, to buy solar panels from China.
3] in China, family or factory pays only 6% than what USA, Australian family / factory pays per kilowatt of electricity. That’s why Warmist like you will be taken to justice, for treason.
Solar / wind powered tractors / harvesters… WOW!
Stefan, your economics lesson may well be relevant to something, but certainly not to JCH’s straightforward statement “I have absolutely no interest at all in supplying anybody with cheap energy,” which flies in the face of how capitalism is supposed to work. As competitors come on board with cheaper sources of energy, JCH will see his customer base erode if he doesn’t respond to the resulting price pressures. JCH gets relatively little of my energy money because I have a roof covered with solar panels that give me cheaper energy than I can get from people like JCH.
Vaughn Pratt,
I doubt you are getting cheap energy from solar, although you might think you are. I’ll suspect you have not included the amortisation and depreciation of your plant, the much shorter economic life than you are probably basing your figures on, and the much lower life-time capacity factor that you will get in practice. If, despite having done all this and using realistic figures, you do actually benefit financially, then you are being heavily subsidised by rate payers, tax payers and other electricity consumers.
Solar power is very high cost. According to the just released AETA report for Australia, PV would cost about $293/MWh. That is about 10 times the cost of electricity from the existing coal fired power stations.
But that is for large commercial PV power stations with good maintenance (e.g. cleaning) optimal orientation, long life expectancy, etc. The average cost for residential PV is probably nearly double this cost – say $500/MWh. But then you must add the cost of the back up generators. These run at less than optimum efficiency and frequently have to be started and stopped and run part loaded. Add say $200/MWh. Then add the upgrades to the distribution system.
It would seem the true cost of solar power is very high. Few people look at this.
Furthermore, according to “Deaths per TWh by energy source” http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html solar generation causes about 10 times as many fatalities per TWh as nuclear (excluding the fatalities from the essential back up generators). If we include the fatalities from the back up generators (assume natural gas) solar power causes about 90 times as many fatalities as nuclear per TWh of electricity supplied.
The simpler explanation is that JCH was being sarcastic.
Inside joke and all, see the behavior of the Saudis, etc.
Alas, Jerry Pournelle is a huge bore with nothing new to say (that is an inside joke as well to anyone who read his opinion columns).
Joshua
Muller “likes wind and solar” but, as I wrote, just does not believe that these will contribute greatly to getting the world off of fossil fuels.
That was my point.
Got it this time?
Max
Max –
Go back and reread what you said w/r/t Muller and wind energy. You were wrong. Wrong. Now I can understand making a mistake because you read the excerpts and didn’t read the entire interview.That doesn’t justify your laughably lame attempt to back track – but it is understandable.
But what is more interesting to me is why you’d be so completely wrong about what Muller has to say about attribution.
I have little doubt that you have read or heard his comments about attribution many times, yet still you had a completely mistaken belief about his take on attribution. And you even went so far as to write a post, with complete confidence, that incorrectly states his beliefs.
Why do you think that you made such an obvious errors about such a simple issue, Max? I suggest it is because you look at Muller and see in him shapes that confirm whichever biases you wish to confirm.
Your weak response to my second point while you ignored my first point only seems to reinforce my interpretation.
And Max –
This is a direct quote:
It’s one thing to make a mistake. It’s another to deny saying what you said.
““Reservoirs have typically been looked at as a green energy source,” Deemer told WSU science writer Eric Sorenson. “But their role in greenhouse gas emissions has been overlooked.””
So EVERY source of energy that has the slightest positive contribution to our energy needs is to be fought tooth and nail, bringing to bear the full force and majesty of our regulatory juggernaut to not only prevent the development of new resources but to destroy existing resources (drive to destroy Hetch Hetchy dam, which supplies power and a large part of the water for SF Bay area for example and will be replaced with ???) in the fight to ‘save the planet’? Over 300 coal plants-for now-being regulated out of existence. Zero chance of offshore drilling permits. Pipeline permits printed exclusively on unobtainium, fracking demonized daily in the media and fought in the courts, massive deposits of our highest quality coal placed off limits (by Bill Clinton, with the stroke of a pen without discussion), zero chance for new nuclear construction, drive to replace gas/diesel cars with electric cars-charged from what, ad infinitum.
The good news? When ‘smart meters’, voluntary for now but soon to be mandatory, become widespread, the inevitable ‘rolling brownouts’, which can only be accomplished now by shutting down entire substations, can be effected by shutting off power to the hoi polloi (me, for example) on an individual basis while the nomenklature are inconvenienced not a whit.
“So EVERY source of energy that has the slightest positive contribution to our energy needs is to be fought tooth and nail, ” EXACTLY!
Methane release from decaying organic matter is a major problem. You have to think several moves ahead in climate science.
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/will-vegetarian-humans-one-day-emit-more-carbon-dioxide-methane-than-cows.html
The geniuses who think that wind felled timber is better to be left to rot than harvested are causing massive methane releases from the termites. This kind of thing makes it clear that it’s not about climate, or even the environment. It’s about romantic primitivism.
“This kind of thing makes it clear that it’s not about climate, or even the environment. It’s about romantic primitivism.”
A bureaucratically controlled primitive tribe.
Or Occupy.
Must be one of levels of Hell.
captdallas2 0.8 +0.2 or -0.4 | August 11, 2012 at 12:08 pm
captain, stop playing with your water pistol, methane is released from your behind. Use a champagne cork, give a rest to your water pistol. Methane is NOT a GLOBAL warming gas!!! Become an officer and a gentleman, don’t be scared from the truth, Fear only from fear itself: http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/methane-ch4/
I kind of enjoy deconstructing TheDenier’s chemistry:
Typical deep skeptical thought process. Remember that TheDenier is on your side.
Go Team Skeptic!
WebHubTelescope | August 11, 2012 at 10:59 pm
Telescope, thanks for pointing the mistake. Few times I was thinking to correct it from ”O4” to 4O, or 2O2; but didn’t, because people hate me for being perfect, so I left it as it is, to make you happy, PLUS, to see if you have capacity to see that I’m correct about everything else.
Webhub, this is serious: you are obsessed with oil; I would like; for you to review my post on ”creation of crude oil”; http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/creation-of-crude-oil/ so we can see if you have any honest molecule in your body. Be a good sport, it’s your turf. Then I’ll correct from O4,, to 4O; or, would you suggest 2O2
Typical believer ‘reasoning’, with sides. There are no sides in science WHT. No wonder you believe in AGW.
WHT
You got that chemistry wrong.
It’s true that
2H2O + CO2 (+ UV) = grass
But:
Cow + grass = Milk + Beef = food for humans (+ to a small extent CH4 + 2O2)
Max
You guys are seriously deluded. I was laughing at the implausibility of creating molecular detailed balance equations involving elements that aren’t molecules (cows).
This is all so supremely absurd. The fact that The Denier now proposes his equations as a theory for the creation of crude oil tops them all.
Go Team Skeptic! Giving The Onion a run for its money.
The Team in Team Skeptic is a side in the same way that a kiddie soccer team is a side. All the tykes know which direction the goal is, but they all have different ideas on how to put the ball in the net. Quite comical to watch.
Experienced scientists know how to work together and build on each others work. It is so seamless that the notion of team is irrelevant, as their is no competition. Or, more properly, the mysteries of nature is the competition. Listen to what Fan says, as he gets it.
Your gloom and doom is justified when applied nationwide, but progress is not being stopped everywhere. In Georgia and South Carolina, new nuclear power plants are being constructed, and new dams are being planned. The Greens are still fighting the nuclear plants tooth and nail, even though many of their own scientists tell them that they are the greenest energy of all.
The dams were initially considered green because hydropower boosted the amount of renewable energy the Greens could claim. In fact, they were the major source of renewable power they listed; they hated the dams themselves. Now, a dam can no longer be justified based on power generation, but one can be justified based on water supply, and that is being done.
California is off doing their own thing. Other parts of the country are getting on with business.
In about 4 weeks we will be at the peak of the hurricane season in the North Atlantic. I find the history this year interesting, though I have no idea what the numbers mean. We have had 6 named storms, and the accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) value is 17; abour 3 per storm. Looking back over previous years which had 6 named storms total; in 1977 the ACE value was 25; in 1982 the ACE value was 29; and in 1956 the ACE was 54. This year the storms do not seem to have been as strong as in previous years.
As one who is consistinly called a “denier” for bringing up “hide the decline” and the “hockey stick” as bad science, I think I am coming to like Muller. Do not agree with everything, but he is more rational on the subject than the CAGW fanatics.
The only real global warming problem we have now is the army of government-funded academics who have erected a Tower of Babel to make war on capitalism and the free enterprise system. These self-important gurus of climatism seek political and commercial advantage over society by praising one-another, looting our earnings and hooting-down everyone that sees through their science fiction. These uni-dimensional junk science professors are confident in their intellectual abilities to continue getting away with indulging in their idle speculations and spreading their flapdoodle about things that have proven to be untrue; and, they demand that we appoint them as elites to rule over the rest of us despite a complete absence of supporting evidence for their many predictions that have been falsified by real-world observations. Anytime now is a good time to begin the overdue job of cleaning out the global warming alarmism temple of absurdity that has taken over Western academia.
Scientists: Majority of groundwater reservoirs may run dry in coming years
The Petri Dish | Daniel Liden | Saturday, August 11, 2012
Water balance of global aquifers revealed by groundwater footprint
Tom Gleeson, et al. Nature Letters Nature 488,197–200(09 August 2012)doi:10.1038/nature11295
It is sad California has stopped building dams even as the population grew.
http://nature.berkeley.edu/departments/espm/env-hist/projects/calif_dams/ca_dams_per_decade.htm
It was nice to hear the emphasis that Muller gave on energy efficiency as my only remaining academic duty is to contribute to the energy efficiency related research (perhaps also teaching) at my university. Muller is not alone in his assessment but experience has shown that finding good ideas for energy efficiency related research is not easy.
Many simple options that improve energy efficiency to some extent are readily available but satisfying the high expectations is really difficult.
How about – ‘Why are the building trades so slow to adopt technological innovation and how to change that’ as a research project.
Issues of that nature have come in our activities. I’m a member of a group that tries to promote multidisciplinary research where scientific value and practical potential meet and which are not pure technology or physics but involve also issues like user needs and acceptability or perhaps perhaps solutions that can take advantage of market mechanisms.
The Aalto University has schools in physical sciences, various fields of engineering, economics and also industrial design, architecture and urban planning and the hope is to get all of the schools involved in the activities.
The trades change slowly, but they change. But they’re not the only obstacle. We have an energy code in our state that limits the brightness of illumination in buildings and parking lots. The fact of the code is no defense in a lawsuit in case of an accident (or mugging outside) due to insufficient lighting. We have a basic problem when the energy codes are in direct conflict with safety considerations like that.
There’s another similar problem with making buildings too airtight when there’s an indoor air pollution problem (such as radon). How do you resolve these conflicts? Hospitals are very energy inefficient because they don’t recycle air. Should they be required to recycle air through a heat exchanger? What if the exchanger develops a leak?
Until a rational set of practices can be developed that don’t have health and safety risks, this is all going to be controversial and for good reason.
Should art galleries be forced to use fluorescent light? Even the best fluorescent lights don’t have the color rendition of incandescents. Etc., etc.
I would highlight Neven’s whole coverage of the arctic over our post at Lucia’s
Sorry, messed up the blockquotes … Let me try that again …
In the interest of “truth in posting” …while Barry drew from a transcription of Muller’s interview on PRN for his commentary, the actual transcription was done by Alex Cull who has done a number of other very useful transcriptions as well.
SUMMARY OF THE DEBATE SO FAR from two wise Climate Etc posters:
Appreciation and thanks are extended for your common-sense, Captain and Pekka! :) :) :)
Lesson from History I: America’s Founders and Framers During the years 1787-8, the anonymous author Publicus — in real-life Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay — published the series of essays that today are known as The Federalist Papers. These essays provide the clearest portrait we have of the thinking of America’s Founders and Framers, and in particular, they are a master class regarding the necessity, wisdom, and art of compromise.
Consider for example this passage:
In the above to passages, we find clearly expressed the reason for the failure of both left-wing and right-wing political dogma.
Too-simple leftist dogma fails for the simple reason that fools and scoundrels often are elected to office. Is it wise to give fools and scoundrels access unrestricted power, even temporarily?
Too-simple rightist dogma fails for the simple reason that unregulated markets do not accomodate what America’s Founders and Framers called “indirect and remote interests” — the integrity of the earth’s ozone layer providing a concrete case-in-point, to which we now turn our attention.
Lesson from History II: The Science of Ozone-Layer Protection The UW Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains a terrific web-page titled The Science of Ozone Layer Depletion, to which the attention of Climate Etc readers is directed.
Although there are considerably many complexities to be considered, the main elements are the climate-change debate are captured in the proposition: Climate-change induced by CO2 is comparable to ozone destruction induced by CFCs, except that ozone destruction happens on a time-scale of decades, whereas climate-change happens on a time-scale of centuries.
Who looks ahead centuries and more? America’s Founders and Framers. Wendell Berry. James Hansen. The Pope. Your mother and father.
In contrast:
• senators look ahead 6 year,
• presidents 4 years,
• representatives 2 years,
• business CEOs 1 year,
• radio pundits one week, and
• scoundrels and fools, not at all.
Is it any wonder that the former group regards climate-change seriously, and the latter group does not? :eek: :sad: :cry:
Thank you, Captain and Pekka, for your common sense observations. Latimer Alder, take notes! :grin: :grin: :grin:
The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so. (Ronald Reagan)
like evolution and that climate change thing
And that whole idea about black people voting. They’ve never forgiven us for that idea.
Robert, negatively cherry-picked, zero-scientific-content, rudely phrased comments contribute nothing to Climate Etc.
Conservatives and liberals alike have much to celebrate regarding the environment in general, and climate-change in particular. Isn’t that true, Robert? :) :)
When we celebrate the accomplishments of conservatives and liberals alike, and the wisdom and courage and commitment that were required to achieve them, then we thereby prepare ourselves for future, harder accomplishments, eh?
That’s my 2 ¢ Hey, a new smiley! :) :cent; :grin: :cent; :lol:
OK, let’s try once more:
That’s my 2¢. :) 2¢ :grin: 2¢ :lol:
This is just plain common-sense, eh?
Whiny, emoticon-cluttered complaining contributes nothing to Climate Etc. Whereas I was contributing long before you ever showed up.
Careful what fights you pick, whiny little fan. I am not the pushover our “special ed” deniers are. ;)
Climate does change and we are made of star dust… those things?
LOL yes, the world urgently needs Reagan-style conservatives who appreciate climate-change/CO2 science as wisely and foresightedly as Ronald Reagan appreciated ozone-destruction/CFC science!
Thank you Wagathon, for reminding everyone on Climate Etc of a wise and foresighted conservative statesman, who rejected willful ignorance and ideology-first political dogma, and who possessed the courage to deal wisely with inconvenient scientific truths!
Yes, when it comes to climate-change, America *definitely* needs more Reagan-style leadership! Thank you, Wagathon! :) :) :)
Three cheers for a great proclamation from America’s greatest conservative president: Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Where is the conservative statesman, who will show leadership in climate-change/CO2, comparable to the statesmanlike leadership of Ronald Reagan in regard to ozone-descruction/CFCs?
Thank you Wagathon, for reminding Climate Etc readers of the immense value, and the vital necessity, of wisely statesmanlike, politically brave, science-respecting, conservative leadership! :) :) :)
Fan
How do we know whether the ozone hole wasn’t always there?
I asked the max Planck institute and Cambridge university this once and they said they had the instruments to detect it in the 1950’s but couldn’t say it didn’t exist prior to this.
Tonyb
Freedom doesn’t defend itself. That’s the 2¢ Reagan and Bush. When you enage people like “Fan” you must keep in mind that liberals and Leftists have turned English into a liars language.
In this regard, with the wisdom that historical hindsight affords, everyone on Climate Etc can appreciate the wisely conservative governance of Ronald Wilson Reagan, in ratifying the Montreal Accords, as guided by the ‘inconvenient truths’ of atmospheric science — truths that none-the-less are verifiably valid (V&V)! :) :) :)
Are the above not simple, inarguable, verifiable, historical/scientific facts, Wagathon and TonyB? :lol: 2¢ :lol:
No one should have any doubts: the next election is between Americanism and Eurpean-style communism — between socio-economic systems where in one everyone is cheered to succeed versus in the other, everone is Frenched.
Frenched? Feels more like Greeked :)
ahem.
You could probably be of more use, Steven, volunteering your analytical skills for Romney/Ryan campaign. The climate crap isn’t going to be settled one way or the other until mother nature speaks out in her own good time. BEST isn’t going rate as even a footnote in history. A presidential campaign on the other hand has a definitive outcome and you could be useful mathematically sorting out voter metrics in battleground states. Just a thought. I really don’t like see talent go to waste. I’d be happy to see Willis working for the Obama campaign. ;-)
I did give serious consideration to the French-speaking, insurance-mandating, pro-gay, pro-choice draft-dodging liberal.
But in the end I’ll probably go with Obama.
In tribute to Climate Etc’s own Beth Cooper, here is an extended excerpt from poem from which Publicus (Alexander Hamilton) quoted:
So a little more charity & clarity in the climate-change debate — together with a diminution of ideology & demagoguery — these would be no bad things, eh? :lol: 2¢ :lol:
I see your 2¢ worth of chariy & clarity and raise you truth and honor of those who actually provide something of value to society.
Yeah! Stupid poet/essayists like Alexander Pope! Stupid politician/essayists like Alexander Hamilton!
What did the likes of *THEM* ever contribute, that was of lasting value to society?
Other than the Enlightenment that is … and the US Constitution of course.
Oh … never mind … 2¢ :grin: 2¢ :grin: 2¢
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
~Emerson
Hamilton and Pope agree:
fan’s smiley obsession is funny, in a creepy Stephen King sort of way.
Fan
You sidestep quicker than a champion ballroom dancer. I made no comment on the merits of Regan I merely asked how we knew whether or not the ozone hole has always existed. A question that defeated the combined brains of the Max Planck institute AND Cambridge University. It seems to have defeated you as well as you merely pont me to a myths page.
Do you have an answer Fan or do you want to continue your waltz?
tonyb
TonyB, to answer seriously, it would be helpful to know what portions of The 2010 Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion and also Environmental Effects of Ozone Depletion and its Interactions with Climate Change: 2010 Assessment are accessible to your technical understanding, particularly in regard to physical chemistry and the quantum theory of radiation transport.
A considerable portion of this material is deeply technical, TonyB! :) :) :)
Fan
As regards the ozone hole, as your link shows we do not know the historic measurements and do not know if we may have been trying to fix something that was not broken. Sounds familiar. James Hansen made his pronouncements on temperatures without knowing at the time that the figures he prduced for Giss merely plugged into the latest part of a long warming trend that, according to CET, was in motion by 1660 and according to BEST since 1753.
tonyb
Hi Tony
You are wasting your time with trolls.
Mount Erebus volcano is close enough to the pole (13.5 degrees) for its gasses to be lifted into stratosphere by polar vortex, destroying ozone layer. Major Known eruptions were in 1972, 1963, 1957-58, 1955, 1947, 1915, 1912. Only question is how long the gasses are retained in the stratosphere.
Icelandic volcanoes are about 30 degrees away from the pole, too far except for the strongest eruptions, to be swept-up (in suficient enough concentration) into the stratosphere by polar vortex, hence the ozone layer there is more stable, despite fact there was more CFC around in the Nth than Sth hemisphere.
Latitudes:
Erebus – 77.53°S
Krafla – 65.73°N
You are right… we need more wise statesmen like Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Most surely we must learn that the Leftists’ climate porn and politics of fear will not heat homes and run factories that provide jobs. The only thing Bush ever did is what the Left has long feared to do: be enthusiastic about standing up for America with his whole heart.
Actually many of them, no one more public about it than the pope, look forward unto eternity. Write that down.
@A Fan
Thank you for your remarks.
It seems I qualify higher than senators and presidents on your scale, since I frequently ask the question on this blog and elsewhere:
‘Exactly why should we be worrying about a sea level rise of 1 or 2 feet in 100 years, or a temperature change of 1 or 2 degrees in the same time?
And it is rare that I get a sensible answer at all. Most just stop after lots of use of ‘unprecedented’. Or ‘dramatic’. As if such emotional adjectives are all that was needed to prove their argument.
Let me tell you a secret..I can walk down the street at night without seeing bogeymen hidden in every shadow. I do not need a light on in my bedroom to sleep. And even when I was a wee youngster I always knew that the tales of ghosties and ghoulies were fantasy not fact. And – because of that – I never found them particularly interesting or frightening. I didn’t think much of people who told them either.
So when somebody tells me that such and such a a thing is truly frightening or worrisome or will Bring The End Of The World As We Know It, they have to come up with something that actually is frightening. Not just something that they loudly and persistently assert is frightening.
And after 30 years of such panic-stricken propaganda, but no evidence of any unusual climate changes, the topic is just falling out of people’s consciousness. They only have a capacity to worry about a few things at a time. And climate has fallen right off the radar. Shouting louder will not put it back…just help it reduce into history..like Rubik’s Cube – an interesting historical artefact.
I forgot to add the most recent of the bizzare answers to my simple question.
‘Because Jim Hansen says so!’ seems to be the formulation du jour. Perhaps I have missed his transformation from an outspoken climate activist to unchallenged prophet with a cult (sp) following.
But don’t count me among those who take him seriously. The West Side Highway remains stubbornly above the water line. As a true prophet he just lacks one skilll…..prophecy. Otherwise he’s great at it…got the threads, talks sometimes in riddles, high profile, got a bunch of deluded but fervent followers/acolytes/nutjobs to touch the hem of his robe etc etc.
For technical economic reasons, we thinks thou dost protest too much, Latimer Alder! :lol: 2¢ :lol: 2¢ :lol:
More broadly and truly, here’s a link in tribute to Climate Etc‘s own Beth Cooper!
And may I mention also to Climate Etc readers, that Arlo Guthrie’s cover of this song is stupendously good too! :lol: 2¢ :lol: 2¢ :lol:
Please enjoy “the stillness of the wind” while you can, Latimer Alder! :lol: 2¢ :lol: 2¢ :lol:
‘Exactly why should we be worrying about a sea level rise of 1 or 2 feet in 100 years, or a temperature change of 1 or 2 degrees in the same time?
Well, “worry” is a subjective state. I don’t have any desire to insist that people worry about anything they don’t find worrisome. The implicit message here, though, is that the effects of climate change are going to be no big deal, which is different than what’s been predicted.
I’m assuming you’re accepting for argument’s sake that there will be some effect, but that it’ll be limited to “1 or 2 feet” and “1 or 2 degrees” of warming. This is a lowball estimate, but even at this level you’re going to see increased coastal erosion, and much more damaging storm surges – even at the present frequency and severity of tropical cyclones.
What you miss with “only 1 or 2 degrees” is that this is a global increase. It doesn’t mean that if it’s 25°C today and so it’ll be 26°C in thirty years’ time. You’re adding all that energy into the system and global circulation patterns will not distribute that equally. But every degree of increased temperature increases how damaging heat waves are, and heat kills more people than cold.
There are a lot of people dependent on snow and ice melt for water. Higher temperatures mean less snow, which means less water, which means people die.
There’s been a lot of work done looking into this. Saying you’ve never gotten an answer suggests you haven’t really looked for one. You could start with Solomon 2009, maybe Barnett 05.
However, if one has made one’s mind up about something, it’s unlikely that much in the way of new information can penetrate. This is sadly true about all of us.
Why would anyone accept for argument’s sake there will be any warming over current in 2100? The sun during the latter half of twencen was in a grand maximum. It now sun appears to have done a 180 and entered into a grand minimum. Grand minimums are historically associated with falling temperatures. Recent experimental work at CERN supports an hypothesis that solar magnetic activity throttles formation of cloud water droplet condensation sites and this then explains the correlation between solar magnetic minima with cold epochs.
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/CLOUD-en.html
The earth could just as easily be wound up into another Little Ice Age by the end of this century. I consider anthropogenic global warming a hedge against the forces (the Holocene Interglacial is getting long in tooth to begin with) arrayed in favor of a cooling planet.
Latimer’s question was specifically “what’s the big deal about a couple degrees?” That’s called “accepting for the sake of argument.”
Oh, we get it. And it was a good comment.
Why would anyone accept for argument’s sake there will be any warming over current in 2100?
Excellent point. It seems pretty obvious from the BEST temperature record of the past 40 years that the world is about to cool down during the next 90 years. :)
PDA, that is an outstandingly well-phrase and thoughtful post. Please let me offer a more optimistic appraisal of it! :) :) :)
It is indeed likely, for the present time, that you will have great difficulty persuading *any* denialist to look (say) two centuries into the future. Which is a great pity, because economic analysis of past civilization collapses indicates that a two-century lookahead is vital to effective leadership of any civilization. An in-depth example is the Good-Reuveny Effect that set forth in the eponymously authored “On the Collapse of Historical Civilizations“ (2009).
However, it is plausible that in coming months, Climate Etc commenters like Latimer Alder will (slowly) evolve a rational appreciation the force of the Good-Reuveny arguments, and this fresh appreciation will act to increase the range of their future economic foresight, which in turn will lead to a Hansen-compatible appreciation of the economic and moral implications of climate change.
And thus, via a rational economic path, conjoined with inexorably strengthening scientific evidence that AGW is real, serious, and accelerating, we will all of us here on Climate Etc eventually learn to “just get along”, very much in the spirit of America’s Framers and Founders, eh Latimer Alder? :lol: 2¢ :lol: 2¢ :lol:
Pfft. I’d be delighted if they could be persuaded to look at the present. But they don’t have the spine for that — that’s why they’re deniers.
fan, the nested reply structure seems to be broken down, which usually means that someone wrote a Bad Thing and had to be deleted. So I’m not sure if this reply will make sense wherever it ends up…
“On the Collapse of Historical Civilizations“ (2009) looks interesting, but is sadly behind a very steep par-per-view-wall. Is this the same paper?
PDA, yes the nesting is broken … most likely there has been another regrettable outbreak of pointlessly abusive posting … so here is the answer to your question (above).
Various on-line versions of Good & Reuveny’s (regrettably) paywalled “On the Collapse of Historical Civilizations“ (2009) — some of which are early drafts that (apparently) differ from the as-published article only in minor respects — may be reliably identified by concluding text similar to the following passage, which is taken verbatim from their as-reviewed as-published article:
The provocative answer to the natural question “Under what circumstances do economically rational Good-Reuveny societies *not* collapse?” is embedded in the body of their article:
With respect to climate-change the Good-Reuveny Effect means, essentially, that two-century foresight (or longer) is *necessary* to rational economic strategies.
Obviously, the Good-Reuveny Effect requires radical adjustments to the thinking of many Climate Etc posters (Latimer Alder and Dave Springer, for example), and it is not reasonable to expect them to adjust their cognition so radically *and* rapidly.
That’s the common-sense reason why it’s rational for us all to be patient, polite, *and* cheerful here on Climate Etc! :lol: 2¢ :lol: 2¢ :lol:
PDA, thank you for a great question! And please hurry to adapt your thinking, Latimer Alder et al.! :lol: 2¢ :lol: 2¢ :lol:
A fan of *MORE* discourse [John Sidles] | August 12, 2012 at 6:51 pm | Reply
“PDA, yes the nesting is broken … most likely there has been another regrettable outbreak of pointlessly abusive posting …”
I don’t really think it’s your pointless abusive posts at fault but if want to blame yourself I think that would be a healthy first step for you on the road to repair your personality disorder and whatever other demons haunt you.
It is a pleasure to take one concrete step toward establishing a principled common ground with you, Dave Springer! :) :) :)
Davy is sadly unfamiliar with the punctuation of the English language.
Not surprising, I suppose, for someone whose idea of a snappy comeback is “you a lying sack of sh!t.”
“You a” not so intelligent person, Davy. That may be why science is so hard for you. ;)
The David Springer-versus-Robert exchange is a juvenile race-to-the-bottom, that would be pretty darn funny if Climate Etc weren’t (at its best) a forum for serious discourse.
“Gentlemen. You can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!“ ;)
He scored in the upper 1/2 percent. Even among jarheads that is pretty high.
It’s common for your ilk to unconsciously solicit abuse. It’s in the nature of US Marines to dish out abuse. So don’t feel like you’re inconveniencing me or anything. Happy to bitch slap you as much as your inner bitch wants. Ask and ye shall receive.
Vice president to be Ryan, would of course agree with you on looking at the long term when it comes to problems like social security and medicare.
Ryan’s unlikely to be elected, but leaving that aside, he has no long term plan except to cut senior’s benefits and Medicaid, shifting the costs to the old and the poor, and spend trillions on tax giveaways to the rich.
Scrapping Medicare for coupons in order to lower Mitt Romney’s tax rate to less than 1% is hardly long-term thinking.
If we don’t reign in the rampant borrowing and spending supported by brain-dead liberals we won’t have 200 years to look forward to in the United States. We’ll be bankrupt in 20 years and China will buy us for pennies on the dollar. Liberal imbeciles led by Borrower-in-Chief, in the name of the environment, likely consigned Canadian tar sand oil to Chinese combustion. This will benefit no one except the Chinese who will burn it in less clean manner and it will take additional oil for fuel for the tankers to move it from Canada to China. Isn’t that just precious. Harm the U.S. economy, harm the environment, and benefit the Chinese economy. The epitomy of stupid and undoubtedly enjoying the full support of liberal parrot John Sidles. Correct me if you happen to support the Keystone Pipeline, John Sidles. It would be the first time you actually corrected me on anything of course and while there’s a first time for everything I doubt this is it.
the rampant borrowing and spending supported by both parties
FTFY.
http://factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/2012/02/DebtReaganObama.png
PDA – Your statistical lie here is this: George Bush ran up the 4.9 trillion debt over two terms, eight years. You Socialist-in-Chief is running up debt at twice that rate, ~ 4 trillion in not even 4 years.
“You Socialist-in-Chief”
You not too smart. Me just saying. :)
The Bush Recession has been expensive — his financial crash, two unnecessary failed wars, massive tax cuts, a huge and costly expansion of medicare . . . none of which vanished magically when a disgusted public finally tossed the Rethugs out into the street.
Can you name a single thing Obama has done that has been as costly as any one of those Bush blunders? I think not.
Robert – your propaganda does not pass the smell test. This is more like the Barney Frank recession. It started with government interference in the housing market via Freddie and Fannie. The government, Democrats in particular, have forced banks to loan to people who can’t afford it. There is a long history of Democrat interference with the housing market. Maybe the people you hang out with believe this garbage, but I know better.
It is indeed interesting how often you read this kind of thinking from “skeptics.” It makes me wonder if there’s some correlation between being a “skeptic” and a binary analysis of complicated issues.
Given that there seems to me to be a strong correlation, I’m led to wonder about causation. Does a binary mentality explain their views on climate change, or do their views on climate change (and other issues) require a binary analysis?
“Robert – your propaganda does not pass the smell test.”
Jimmy, the facts are what they are, and grown-ups have to cope with them.
Your excuses for Bush’s recession are beneath contempt.
You have failed to give a single example of anything Obama has done that is as expensive as any of Bush’s blunders — his financial crash, two unnecessary failed wars, massive tax cuts, a huge and costly expansion of Medicare.
Apparently you can’t. Discussion over. Your attempt to blame Barney Frank for Bush’s failures is laughable.
It’s obvious from your insults that I have hit the nail on the head, Robert. You are wrong, you know you’re wrong … just take a deep breath and change your point of view to one of reality.
“It’s obvious from your insults that I have hit the nail on the head”
Sorry, Jimmy, but your utter failure to give a single example of anything Obama has done that is as expensive as any of Bush’s blunders — his financial crash, two unnecessary failed wars, massive tax cuts, a huge and costly expansion of Medicare — means you lose.
It’s time for you to grow up and face the facts. Whining about imaginary “insults” is going to change the reality. Get a spine.
It is obvious that you believe me to be correct in my assertion that socialist-leaning liberals over the years have enacted regulations that cause the housing market crash. You keep trying to get me to point out something Obama did – but his socialist cohorts over the years are responsible. He is in the same boat as them. Sorry, Robert. Your attempt to divert attention from the liberal’s mess don’t escape me – or anyone else for that matter.
“It is obvious that you believe me to be correct in my assertion . . .”
Obviously you’re in denial. And your little conspiracy theory where evil liberals tricked Bush into wrecking the economy is silly. You utterly failed to give a single example of anything Obama has done that is as expensive as any of Bush’s blunders — his financial crash, two unnecessary failed wars, massive tax cuts, a huge and costly expansion of Medicare — because you can’t.
Reiterating your paranoid delusions isn’t going to change the facts. Rethug waste, Bush’s Wall Street wipeout, two unnecessary and incompetently waged land wars in Eurasia, a huge entitlement expansion,
That’s the Rethug legacy. You can’t begin to point to anything Obama has done that blew up the deficit like EVERY ONE of those Rethug blunders. Facts are facts.
Robert – although Republicans played a small role in causing the housing bubble, Democrats led the charge. Your pathetic attempt to blame it all on Bush is just that – pathetic.
“The low interest rates of the early 2000s may explain the growth of the housing bubble, but they don’t explain the poor quality of these mortgages. For that we have to look to the government’s distortion of the mortgage finance system through the Community Reinvestment Act and the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae (nyse: FNM – news – people ) and Freddie Mac (nyse: FRE – news – people ).
In a recent meeting with the Council on Foreign Relations, Barney Frank–the chair of the House Financial Services Committee and a longtime supporter of Fannie and Freddie–admitted that it had been a mistake to force homeownership on people who could not afford it. Renting, he said, would have been preferable. Now he tells us.
Long-term pressure from Frank and his colleagues to expand home ownership connects government housing policies to both the housing bubble and the poor quality of the mortgages on which it is based. In 1992, Congress gave a new affordable housing “mission” to Fannie and Freddie, and authorized the Department of Housing and Urban Development to define its scope through regulations.
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Shortly thereafter, Fannie Mae, under Chairman Jim Johnson, made its first “trillion-dollar commitment” to increase financing for affordable housing. What this meant for the quality of the mortgages that Fannie–and later Freddie–would buy has not become clear until now.
On a parallel track was the Community Reinvestment Act. New CRA regulations in 1995 required banks to demonstrate that they were making mortgage loans to underserved communities, which inevitably included borrowers whose credit standing did not qualify them for a conventional mortgage loan.
Comment On This Story
To meet this new requirement, insured banks–like the GSEs–had to reduce the quality of the mortgages they would make or acquire. As the enforcers of CRA, the regulators themselves were co-opted into this process, approving lending practices that they would otherwise have scorned. The erosion of traditional mortgage standards had begun.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/13/housing-bubble-subprime-opinions-contributors_0216_peter_wallison_edward_pinto.html
“Robert – although Republicans played a small role in causing the housing bubble, Democrats led the charge.”
Your pathetic attempt to deny responsibility for the Bush recession is just sad.
First it was all Barney Frank’s fault. Now you admit that you Rethugs contributed just a little tiny bit. You’re getting closer!
Of course, it wasn’t the housing bubble that caused the Bush recession, so that’s a little problem for you. Good luck with it!
For my part, I’m just enjoying your hypocrisy in blaming Obama for the deficit spending caused by the recession and tax cuts inherited from Bush, yet instantly denying that a Repuglician president is responsible for the economic conditions on his watch. You can’t have it both ways, I’m afraid.
Robert
At what point do you hold the current administration responsible for the effectiveness of their own policies?
Which policies?
Jim couldn’t name a single policy of Obama’s as expensive as any one of Bush’s big five.
In term of the deficit, I see Obama as mostly unable to get his agenda passed — for example, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for the wealthy. We could save hundreds of billions if that policy were enacted, but Congress hasn’t allowed that.
Obama just isn’t much of a spender. I certainly would hold him responsible if he proposed and enacted wasteful spending. Arguably he should have called Republicans’ bluff and let all the Bush tax cuts expire. That would certainly have reduced the deficit in the long term, but might have suppressed growth in the short term.
“Jim couldn’t name a single policy of Obama’s as expensive as any one of Bush’s big five.”
That’s the biggest laugh I’ve had all day, Robert. You are truly the Master of the Meaningless.
If you look at the history of depressions and recessions in the USA, there are more than 30 going back to “The Panic of 1797”.
Its easy to be partisan and claim that Party X is more responsible for the latest recession (depression?) than Party Y , but its not really getting to the root of the issue. The latest downturn is blamed on housing policies, but the bubble and subsequent crash in that market can also be viewed as a symptom rather than the cause of the underlying instability in the system. If history is any guide , then we can certainly say that If it hadn’t been about that, it would have been something else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States
Jim2 and Robert
I dont have a dog in this particular fight being British, but surely American debt is far higher than either you or Robert have stated?
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
At some $140000 debt per taxpayer it is a real and present danger to the world economy and the continued well being of America as a viable state. I first realised that the US was living beyond its means during the Clinton years and the enactment of the ‘ninja’ Housing rules which turned the notion of ‘moral hazard’ on its head.
I stand to be corrected as I wouldnt follow things as closely as you guys would, but the net result is surely that the US have a clear need to generate energy at the lowest possible price in order to remain compettitive which is likely to impact on your carbon reduction plans and also you must rein in the various projects that will increase state spending. Your new health programme is likely to become a voaracious consumer of funds.
tonyb
“I dont have a dog in this particular fight being British, but surely American debt is far higher than either you or Robert have stated?”
No — because I haven’t estimated the size of the debt. It’s certainly quite large. The Rethugs did a number on us.
“I first realised that the US was living beyond its means during the Clinton years . . .”
You mean the last time we ran a budget surplus, the surplus Bush turned into trillions of dollars in new debt?
“Your new health programme is likely to become a voaracious consumer of funds.”
Healthcare is sure a major expense — about 17% of the GDP. Analysts think the current reforms will save money, but not a lot. Of course your system provides unlimited healthcare to all free of charge, so it must be much more expensive than what we have, right?
Robert
Our healthcare is free at the point of delivery so consequently there is a lot of demand and it now caters for things the original instigators had no conceptoin of. In addition medical advances tend to require expensive care and of course people are (fortunately) living longer and expect good health. So unless there are very clear guidelines the costs of your new system are likely to rise very quickly over what is currently planned.
As for Clinton-this from Business week.
.http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/hotproperty/archives/2008/02/clintons_drive.html
Lending money to people who couldnt afford it was always a recipe for disaster obvious to everyone except to populist politicians. The size of your overall debt is genuinely worrying to your friends overseas. You appear to be living way beyond your means (like many of us) and so far have managed to stave off problems by the world lending you even more money due to your position as a reserve currency.
At some point the Chinese for example are likely to decide they dont want to play that game anymore. Its a car crash in slow motion and its difficult to see who is doing anything about it.
tonyb
President Bush launched an initiative to build ~5.5 million houses for people who stood little chance of paying for them. His goal was to bridge the gap between minority and white home ownership. This was after Clinton left office, and absolutely nobody making Bush do it.
Once the housing and mortgage industry realized they could also qualify unqualified white buyers under the same rules, the floodgates were fully opened.
JCH – Read this!
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/13/housing-bubble-subprime-opinions-contributors_0216_peter_wallison_edward_pinto.html
I actually spoke with Malcolm Forbes a couple of times. Great guy. Built a version of the Capitalist Tool for him. His son is one of the biggest liars on the planet.
I’m sure he would be interested to hear you call his son a liar. At any rate, this information is public knowledge. Forbes didn’t just make it up. It’s just that the main stream media refused to talk about it. Bad for their team.
Then you should be able to better track the decades long chain of events that led to bubble mania.
http://www.openthegovernment.org/sites/default/files/otg/dereg-timeline-2009-07.pdf
That is a good read. Always remember, stupidity is bi-partisan
There is no long chain. There are decades of proper, fully sustainable management, and one decade of colossally bad, totally unsustainable management.
Brilliant sustainable management.
“• 2000, Commodity Futures Modernization Act – Passed with support from the Clinton Administration, including Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, and bi-partisan support in Congress. The bill prevented the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating most over-the-counter derivative contracts, including credit default swaps.”
Absolutely brilliant :)
Bush managed the act, not Clinton.
So if I tamper with your brakes and you wreck the car, it is your fault? There was no management. Bush did make a feeble attempt to manage, but too little too late, the train had left the station.
http://www.openthegovernment.org/sites/default/files/otg/dereg-timeline-2009-07.pdf
That is about the least biased history of the problem I have seen. You really do think W was a genius. No one man can deregulate the main industry that government should regulate. Now who do you think was pulling the strings for 3 decades?
There was absolutely nothing in the way of the Bush administration and proper management of the financial sector. Well, themselves, but other than that, nothing.
I thought you were good at puzzles?
I thought you were good at thinking? Bush had the same thing in his way that Clinton had, Wall Street.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/15/antitrust-aig-reback-technology-internet-antitrust.html
“This approach continued even when the Democrats took control of the nation’s antitrust enforcement apparatus in the 1990s. Citing increased efficiency and the potential for economic growth, President Clinton signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, permitting commercial banks to expand into new markets by acquiring investment banks. As a result of lax merger policies, markets of all types became increasingly intertwined–and therefore more efficient, government officials assured us.”
That has been a democratic plank forever right? Allowing too big while complaining about big. Clinton was a genius too right?
Cap’n
The Dems (read Larry Summers) certainly had their hands dirty with the repeal of Glass-Steagall, but much more impactful, actually, was the CFMA – which was also bi-partisan although largely driven by Repubs like Phil Gramm pushing the anti-government dogma to lay cover fire for their greed.
Joshua, I totally agree this is a bi-partisan f”up. Plenty of blame to go around.
“Everybody thinks that the repeal of Glass-Steagall allowed banking and investment banking to come together. That’s absolutely not true, under the rules of the game when we went and talked to Citicorp we were able to… as an insurance company, we were able to buy a bank provided that we had two years to comply with the bank holding company rules and that could be extended five … and the only thing where we were out of compliance was insurance underwriting not investment banking, not trading, that had all changed. … Glass-Steagall didn’t have anything … it started that way … but that evaporated from 1933 to 1985.” – Sandy Weill
“. The deal was technically illegal, but as the law stood, the bank would have two years to divest itself of its insurance business. This did not deter the executives and their regulators. They were so confident that Congress would repeal Glass-Steagall in the meantime that they went ahead with the deal. Citigroup became the world’s largest financial services company, formed by the largest corporate merger in history, at that time. For many, this represented just another step in the evolution of a national banking system. ”
That must have been an interesting phone conversation with President Clinton :)
“A high-profile example of consolidation came in April of 1998 when Travelers Insurance Group and Citicorp, the parent of Citibank, announced their plans to merge and form Citigroup, Inc. Before the announcement, the executives of Travelers and Citicorp placed personal calls to Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and President Bill Clinton.”
http://www.openthegovernment.org/sites/default/files/otg/dereg-timeline-2009-07.pdf
I think that there is legitimate question as to the degree of impact from Glass-Stegal (for example, look at which banks failed and whether the repeal affected their business model) – but that there is no question about it having some level of impact (by changing the basic shape of the financial market sector, primarily).
Once again, however, there is not doubt that the CFMA had a pronounced impact.
Tracing what led to institutions to leverage their assets 40-1 to buy bundles of bad debt, and then insure that debt with institutions who were similarly irresponsibly leveraged, will lead you down many avenues: Poor mathematical modeling, greed, changes in the definition of “insurance,” deceptive marketing, predatory lending, government overreach, lack of government oversight, etc. The list is long.
It’s a bit of an inkblot – not entirely unlike the climate debate: People so motivated can find whatever they like to confirm their biases. The trick is to determine which people in the debate are completely locked in to confirmation bias mode.
Joshua, I told JCH there was a chain of events. Alan Greenspan played a large role in the chain. Most of the political names are just pawns. They got played like fools.
It’s also the case that asset bubbles and financial panics have been a fact of life for centuries. Various decisions by various actors contributed to the disaster, but that doesn’t mean better policy would have meant nothing like that would have ever happened.
Robert, of course not. Sh&t happens. That is why failure is an option. Bush and Obama both screwed up by prolonging the agony. Banks will strike their own deals with mortgage holders if they want to survive. Forcing solvent banks to “share the pain” is BS. The whole thing about evolution and capitalism is survival of the fittest.
This is the kind of “certainty” that has me question your reasoning process, Cap’n.
Most (bi-partisan) economic analysis suggests that what you have determined “prolonged the agony,” actually diminished the agony. Of course, it can’t be proven for certain either way. And it doesn’t mean that agony didn’t continue. But the balance of data lie with the opposite of your conclusion.
It’s not a problem for me that you think that the balance of data lies elsewhere. Maybe you’re smarter than the predominant opinion among experts – but two questions need to be asked: (1) to what degree is your view of the evidenced biased by your ideological identity (you clearly have a very strong ideological identity on this issue) and, (2) how could you possibly state a certainty about such a counterfactual in such a highly uncertain context?
That #2 is huge, Cap’n.
This is exactly what I was talking about w/r/t the selectivity of “concern” about uncertainties.
(1) Zero.
(2) What makes you think it is counter factual? Credit defaults swaps were unregulated. They are still unregulated. Remember those same bi-partisan “experts” agreed they didn’t need to be regulated. So you think the “experts” are right this time?
Bush hinted at and Obama said “cramdown” The government cannot manage a “cramdown” better than the financial institutions that don’t even know where the original mortgages are stored. If the government wanted to do something they should do what they said they would do, buy the CDS at auction starting at a dime on the dollar. That was the plan, not fiddle farting around making it legal to not pay your debts.
Cap’n
I’m using counterfactual in the sense of stating “what has not happened but could, would, or might under differing conditions.”
I don’t agree with you assessment of the probabilities at a number of levels. And as I stated – the prominent opinion as reflected in meta-analysis of experts also lies in contrast to your analysis.
But again, that isn’t really the point. And I’m not going to get into a discussion with you about that analysis because it would clearly be pointless as you are so certain about your opinion…
But the point larger point, again, is that you are stating certainty about a events that would, could, or might have happened in an incredibly complex context with numerous, and huge, uncertainties.
You talk often about quantifying uncertainties. It is a strength that you bring to the discussions of climate change. The problem, however, is your selectivity. The situation with your unsubstantiated certainty w/r/t economics does not necessarily generalize to your approach to climate science, but your failure to acknowledge an obvious case of being overly certain does suggest, I’d say strongly, a systematic problem in your approach to uncertainty. It’s a very human problem that is applicable to us all. The only possibility of controlling for that problem is acknowledging that it is applicable to us all. Including you, Cap’n.
Except when you’re talking about bacon, of course.
“The principle of distributing errors: (1) no single individual, institution, or corporate unit should have the ability to make an error consequential enough to affect the overall system (CONCENTRATION); (2) Crowds should be organized in a way to never be able to act synchronously as a single crowd (TEMPORAL HOMOGENEITY);” Taleb?
Finance and climate science seem to have issues.
The auction of the credit default swaps would set a value on the paper and put the paper in the hands of individuals and institutions with an interest in resolving the mortgage/real estate crisis. Skin in the game. As it is, the same two issues, (1) and (2) that caused the problem are still part of the problem. Investors foolish enough to have all their eggs in CDS baskets will suffer because they were fools. There is no need for us to suffer the fools, and damn sure no reasons to keep the fools in business.
The “Expert” advice is to maintain (1) which may maintain (2). They are wrong. There needs to be break ups of insolvent financial institutions so there will be new blood in the game.
Joshua? What happened? Did you have to consult the “experts”?
The main role of government regulation is to reduce systemic risk. None of the actions taken so far by either the Bush or Obama administration address that role.
There is no way to reduce systemic risks. The process by which one would try to reduce systemic risk would in itself present a potential systemic risk. That is why societies that do not allow borrowing, the elimination of a broad range of systemic risk, live in mud huts.
JCH, there is a major difference between reducing and elimination. You can reduce risk but never eliminate risk. A federalism is less risky than a monarchy. Central Banks are less risky than a central bank.
Doesn’t improved infrastructure result in lower systemic risks?
Rob, definitely, but infrastructure also needs some redundancy. The whole systems needs enough flexibility to adapt to changing requirements.
Repeal of Glass-Steagall was the biggest mistake ever made. It had worked so well for so long, it was one of too few good regulations, and Clinton killed it along with a Republican Congress.
JCH – Bushes program was a paltry few millions. Nothing like Barney Frank’s huge waste of tax payer dollars via Freddie and Fannie.
Posted like a true defender of the faith. Why consider all the factors contributing to a problem when you can Barney Frank the blame?
it started with the community reinvestment act. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.
“The President’s down payment assistance initiative, increase in funding for housing counseling services, and stronger partnerships with faith-based groups will pave the way for thousands more to achieve the dream of homeownership.” That is typical Rah Rah speak. Faith-based initiative is code for pass the buck from government to the communities. “absolutely nobody making Bush do it”, is an indication of poor understanding of politics.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CEQQtwIwAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DysTbqC755wE&ei=uDIpUNO0Kc6u2AXU7ICoAg&usg=AFQjCNGsRn7kzqxOibJZW7u1BEppf6KBUQ&sig2=Zi8N_-6I5SnpOEtO6yIhxA
The Community Reinvestment Act was Clinton’s. Part of the problem, nowhere close to part of the solution.
Nobody made Clinton do it. First clue, he didn’t do it. Nobody made Papa Bush or Reagan do it. First clue, they didn’t do it. Nobody made Carter do it. First clue, he didn’t do it.
Nobody made W do it, but he did it anyway.
JCH – when you are so blatantly biased, everyone can see it, and eveyone ignores what you say.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act Carter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Holding_Company_Act Clinton
It looks like you think W was a political genius capable of single handedly altering the American financial system.
The housing and banking crisis appears to have been one of the few truly bi-partisan efforts since 1950.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riegle-Neal_Interstate_Banking_and_Branching_Efficiency_Act_of_1994
Only 4 nay votes.
http://www.openthegovernment.org/sites/default/files/otg/dereg-timeline-2009-07.pdf
Jim2: the “Socialist-in-Chief” is still running behind George H.W. Bush and FAR behind Communist Party Chairman Ronald Wilson Reagan. That was my point.
@A Fan
Not being an academic I do not have general access to the paper you cite. So I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
It is very strange that the cult of AGW buries its basic documents in places inaccessible to the ‘layman’. And writes them in dreadfully turgid and complex prose. Hence needing a ‘true believer’ to interpret them for us. Which is an interesting historical parallel with the need for a priesthood prior in the Catholic Church prior to the Reformation…..
Maybe the lack of access isn’t so strange after all……
@PDA
At least you’ve got as far as some definite things you think might happen.
I’m not at all sure that heat kills more people than cold. The human race first evolved in Africa and then spread out towards the poles, And notably our primate ancestors are pretty much warm world rather than cold world creatures.
Increased coastal erosion. Not sure about that either, I can understand that as the level of the sea goes up, you will get a wee bit more land underwater. But you seem to think that erosion will increase as well. Why?
Less snow…..I can understand that argument. But I was led to believe that there will be more rain (more water evaporating from warmer seas) so I don’t follow the rainwater argument you propose.
But what I think you are showing is that you are actually deeply conservative and you are just frightened of anything different from what you are used to.
The human race is very adaptable and the changes that so frighten you will be so slow as to be imperceptible. It will take five generations to get a 1 foot increase in sea level..just as it took the same for the previous foot and the one before that.
I’m happy to accept that if the climate changes we will need to change some of the things we do. But I see no reason to imagine that they are especially difficult or urgent or hugely expensive. And so far you’ve not come up with anything to change my view. Got any more?
I’m not at all sure that heat kills more people than cold
Mortality increases 1.59% in cold snaps versus 5.74% to heatwaves. Medina-Ramon 07 So increasing deaths from heat won’t be offset by decreasing deaths from cold.
For the most part, erosion is not caused by things being underwater, but by the wave effect on the coast. 10cm of sea level rise could lead to as much as 15m of coastal erosion. Leatherman 2000
A lot of people are dependent on snow melt for their water, not rain: as many as one in six: Barnett 05 I wasn’t making a rainwater argument.
These examples were just off the top of my head. I’m sure without too much time spent Googling you could come up with many more. Again, it seems to be rather that you haven’t looked for answers to your question, as opposed to thee not being any.
@PDA
‘Mortality’ in this paper just seems to mean immediate death rates in a hospital when there is a cold or hot spell.
But that is not a valid comparison to what is being suggested at all. If the AGW hyothesis were to come ture, then we would expect to see a general rising of temperatures. OS (I’m guessing a bit here on the geography), that average temperatures in Minneapolis would generally rise to their current values in Oklahoma City (similar longitude, different latitude).
And so if ‘hot kills more people than cold’ you should be able to show, even now, a significant difference in life expectancy between the two cities. Can you? (*)
The ‘eroison paper’ refers to those place which have gently sloping sandy beaches. They aren’t very common, even in UK where we have lots of much harder rock to worry about – ever see the White Cliff of Dover? And a loss of 15 m (45ft) per 10 cm sealevel increase, though regrettable, isn’t going to cause me to scrap all our economic infrastructure overnight. Even less should it matter in the US where you have much less coastline per surface area than we do.
I couldn’t access the Barnett paper because it is paywalled (nothing like stopping the unwashed non-academics from reading the sacred runes by themselves, of course :-( ), but from the abstract the figure of 1 in 6 seems to be pretty much an assertion. Please can you trace back where it comes from? And who the 1/6th are supposed to be? If it should be the IPCC, then we can safely assume that it is some daftitude like Himalayagate. Thanks.
(*) It also casts doubt on he wisdom of those who retire to Florida..’Move to Miami Beach and DIe Young’ doesn’t seem to have much of a ring as a real estate sales pitch)
Latimer,
I gave you some references off the top of my head. I had no doubt that you can offer quibbles off the top of yours; this is neither here nor there. You had said you never got a “sensible answer” to your question about effects. My comment was to offer some ideas on where you might be able to find such an answer, not to engage in a ping-pong match where I offer research papers and you offer assertions.
Enjoy the week.
@PDA
OK.
Let’s get this straight, I asked for some rational evidence that AGW (if true) would have bad effects. You came up with three papers. (thanks – you did better than lolwot or webster or Robert or Joshua ever managed). I looked at the papers, raised some questions/objections, and now you withdraw from the debate.
Jeez – you are going to have a hard time persuading your kids that AGW is going to be BAD if you can’t even answer first level questions from an (educated) layman. Are all your fellow believers equally poor at it? I hoped for better.
And – on such flimsy evidence, why do you believe it at all? Ideological commitment? Coz it sure as hell ain’t the ‘science’. Or if it is, I have this nice bridge I’d like to sell you…only one careful owner….
Latimer, I’m not sure why you assume my responding to you means I am duty-bound to engage you in debate on the entire corpus of climate research. I’m not pretending to be a scientist, but even if I was, I’m not sure how I would respond to airy hand-waving (“average temperatures in Minneapolis would generally rise to their current values in Oklahoma City”). or massively question-begging assertions (“scrap all our economic infrastructure overnight”).
Arguing about what we “believe” is, by definition, pointless. As evidence, let me point you to millennia of religious conflicts based on the question “why do you believe it at all?” We, each of us, has to decide what to believe or not. You seem to find it believable that the vast majority of scientists in the climate field – researchers, grad students, reviewers and national academies – are actively falsifying their work out of some combination of greed, confirmation bias and ideology. Having personal acquaintance with many academics, and aware of their inability to organizing something so simple as a picnic, I am – to say the least – skeptical of that premise.
Be well.
@PDA
I’m glad we both agree that the general ability of academics to organise a pissup in a brewery is probably bordering on zero.
And I don’t think that they are all actively falsifying their work. Though some of them – if innocent of that charge – are doing a bloody world class Gold Medal performance of pretending to do so. And there are a lot of ‘useful idiots’ on their coat tails that seem to be helping them in their endeavours.
We’ll have to agree to disagree about AGW. I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever that – even if it were to be true – the consequences will be severe or unpleasant overall. Nor any to show that we need collectively or individually to take any immediate, drastic or disruptive action. You obviously feel differently, but I have to remark that the reasons you gave ‘from the top of your head’ do not seem to me to be of much relevance to the nature of ‘the problem’ that you believe to be there.
BTW I think my comparison between Minneapolis and Oklahoma City is extremely relevant. As temperatures increase, we are led to believe that there will be a general march of climate bands towards the poles. MSP is just about due north of OKC. And so we should eventually find MSP having the climate that today exists in OKC. This is not difficult stuff….I could find it from my schoolboy atlas from 1964. Tell me where its wrong?
@PDA
Just done the sum for the continental USA. If sealevel rises by teh IPCC expected amount, ten by 2112 you will have lost up to 0.004% of your total land area to increased coastal erosion – assuming that both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts are totally composed only of very erodable sandy beaches.
99.96% will be unaffected. And of course 100% in the landlocked States like Iowa or Arkansas or Oklahoma. Hard to sell them on the dreadful consequences of such a minimal loss to their fellow citizens 1000 or more miles away.
There is no “IPCC expected amount” so there’s your first error.
There’s an estimate for sea level rise from thermal expansion alone, is that what you mean?
@robert
That’ll do for me.
That’s the headline figure that the IPCC bruited around the world on publication. If they meant something else they could/should have written it that way. They are supposedly grown up scientists providing the best checked and most reliable document ever. If they’ve ballsed it up they’ve had 5 years already to issue a correction. AFAIK they haven’t.
“That’ll do for me.”
So if you’re content to lie about data, where do you see the conversation going from here?
You lied about the AR4. You had a chance to correct your mistake, but instead decided to double down on the lie. That’ll do for you, indeed.
@robert
Exactly where am I ‘lying about data’? What data am I lying about? What is the nature of the lie you accuse me of? Show me – and everybody else the rap sheet buster, not just the vague unfounded and unevidenced accusation.
But I’m not going to get into some pointless semantic argument about IPCC ‘expected amount’ vs IPCC ‘estimate’. To anybody but an acdaemic these are pretty much synonymous. And the IPCC report was deliberately written (supposedly) for non-academics.
It is the propensity of you and your cohorts to quibble about trivia while missing the big picture that gives rise to many suspicions that you are chronically mendacious. Or just too dumb to work out the impression you give.
If you had a good case you could argue it simply and straightforwardly so that everybody could easily grasp the key points. And you could do so without resorting to word games and small points of academic etiquette.
Your inability to do so says volumes.
Latimer,
The Barnet paper works for me.
http://meteora.ucsd.edu/cap/pdffiles/barnett_warmsnow.pdf
Tx Andrew. I’ll take a look via your link.
It’s a shame you can’t infuse some of your courage into the deniers pissing themselves with terror at the thought of a carbon tax.
Unfortunately, though, all kidding aside, it’s hard to take your self-estimation at face value. Deniers are ultimately cowards; you are afraid to face reality, which is why you take refuge in denial.
Brave folks face reality and deal with it. Somebody so scared to face the world that exists that they excuse their fear by desperately pretending there’s “no evidence of any unusual climate changes” — well, that’s just a spineless wimp. No other word for it.
You really need to worry about those stoner hippies in your attic, though. That can really get out of hand.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/103809/hippie-infestation
Threading’s all messed up on this thread. That’s caused by climate change too, isn’t it?
Latimer,
I’m sure you’ve no reason personally to be worried about either climate change or rising sea levels.
You won’t be at all affected in your lifetime, and that’s all that matters isn’t it?
@tempterrain
As far as i can tell, neither of them are going to have much effect in fifty or a hundred or a hundred and fifty years either. And though I certainly won’t be around in a hundred years, there’s a sporting chance that another fifty is not beyond me.
I don’t want my great (*n) grandchildren to suffer any more than my great(*n) grandparents wanted me to.
If all the bad things you guys are so convinced were going to happen were indeed going to happen all of a rush – say in a year or less – then maybe I;d be a bit more convinced that we need to take urgent, immediate and drastic action now. But the more I look at all the scary forecasts the more lightweight and superficial pieces of work they become.
And the changes you so fear, if realised at all, will not be overnight ones. They will be very slow. There will not be a two foot tsunami wizzing up the Thames or the East River obliterating everything in its path. Sea level rise will be a gradual (so gradual as to be almost imperceptible in a human lifetime) process – just as it has been in the past few hundred years. And we have unconsciously accommodated that.
Or take crops. Every year new crops must be planted. The farmer has a choice which ones he will grow and which variety to use. Maybe sometime in fifty or a hundred years he decodes that wheat is no longer suitable and he chooses maize as the climate warms. Fine. He has a hundred opportunities between now and 2112 to make that choice. There is no immediate reason (nor any evidence) to do it today And the prudent thing is not to rush to destroy everything that exists already but to evolve it as time progresses and circumstances change.
Sees to me that many alarmist commentators are already predisposed to panic. And just love to see themselves as Saviours of the Planet. Many climatologists have self-selected themselves from the same pool of flighty romantic individuals. But running around like headless chickens shouting ‘Catastrophe’ is not the way to deal with such a threat (if indeed there even is a threat at all). The length of my future lifetime is not of great relevance. But taking wise and rational decisions (if any are needed at all) is of central importance. Chicken Littles should not apply.
Sea level rise will be a gradual (so gradual as to be almost imperceptible in a human lifetime) process
What if it isn’t? What if the issue is not mean sea level rise per se but increased storm surges. Many, many millions of people on Earth live on the coasts.
He has a hundred opportunities between now and 2112 to make that choice.
What if he doesn’t? What if the issue is not mean temperature change per se but temperature combined with hydrological changes? What if multi-year droughts becom commonplace, and there is not enough water for wheat or corn/maize will grow any more?
And the prudent thing is not to rush to destroy everything that exists already
What if this is an utter straw man? What if nobody is “rush[ing] to destroy things,” and if this is just a caricature existing in your head and nowhere else?
That’s not what this rare transcript of Hansen’s 1988 presentation says:
Congressman: Hansen! What is best in life?
Hansen: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Congressman: That is good! That is good.
Once upon a time, Andy explored that idea:
http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/07/06/it-would-be-nice/comment-page-1/#comment-10441
Perhaps he was wrong about his overall conclusion.
Willard, the role of government is simple, the interpretation of “risk” is the bitch. If you think of “systemic risk” Too big to fail is a major “risk”, both of business and government.
“The principle of distributing errors: (1) no single individual, institution, or corporate unit should have the ability to make an error consequential enough to affect the overall system (CONCENTRATION); (2) Crowds should be organized in a way to never be able to act synchronously as a single crowd (TEMPORAL HOMOGENEITY);” Taleb?
If you add government as an institution you may become enlightened. Everything will fail eventually, smaller failures are easier to deal with.
qltm
Fan, I am not sure you would appreciate the Goldilocks (right sized). That generally means both extremes are equally dissatisfied. Not an easy political move to make.
Agreed 100%, Pooh Dixie … it will be interesting to see Watts’ amended results.
Moreover, Anthony Watts/WUWT made a similar data-processing gaffe in the post “An ‘inconvenient result’ — July 2012 not a record breaker” — specifically, Anthony omitted to apply an altitude correction — that Nick Stokes corrected very kindly and politely.
Yet by far the *worst* and most heedlessly *destructive* mistake that Anthony Watts/WUWT made — by far! — was to respond to Nick Stokes’ generosity not with thanks, but with mockery and personal abuse.
Pooh Dixie, don’t you think that skeptics and scientists have a shared moral obligation to work together, in validating and verifying (V&V) climate-change science? :) :) :)
And isn’t it plain common sense, with regard to climate-science V&V, that personal abuse, cherry-picking, enemy-listing, and sloganeering, are all of them utterly futile pursuits? :grin: :grin: :grin:
For Richard Feynman’s simple reason: “Nature cannot be fooled!” :lol: :lol: :lol:
That is why all who take care that Nature is on their side, can be confident of being on the *right* side. Eh Pooh Dixie? :lol: :lol: :lol:
Wow that’s amazing.
Stokes: “This is comparing the absolute temperatures of two different networks. You don’t know whether, for example, the USCRN network has relatively more high altitude stations. And while you say that USCRN has “near perfect geospatial distribution” (measured?), the validity of the comparison will depend on whether the old network is comparably distributed. That’s why climate scientists generally prefer to deal with anomalies. Otherwise you can’t compare across networks.”
He’s right of course, you can’t blindly compare absolute temperatures in two different networks. There IS a reason climate scientists use anomalies (several).
But this is Watts reply, a gish gallop of irrelevance, avoiding the point:
“And anomalies are in the eye of the beholder, pick your own baseline, like Hansen does. Record temperatures for single months reported to the public, as NOAA did today, are not useful when reported as anomalies. The fact is that a better sited and maintained network shows a cooler result.”
I like how he starts with a simultaneous smear of Hansen and an irrelevant swipe at anomalies. Then anomalies are “not useful” to tell the public, as if that justifies making an invalid comparison of absolute temperatures between two networks. Ridiculous. Doesn’t even try to address Stoke’s point.
Does he really not get it? Later on he says he considered making a lapse rate adjustment, which if true would mean he DID understand the problem with comparing absolute temperatures from different networks but just somehow forgot(?) to mention it. hehhehheh
There is a crazier background story here.
Long ago there was a concern voiced by EM Smith, Watts and Daleo, and Ross McKittrick that GHCN was biased because of the great thermometer drop out.
The story went like this: NOAA dropped thermometers that were from higher altitudes and higher latitudes introducing thereby a cooling bias.
So basically they argued that the late record was biased because of different spatial coverage and different altitudes.
Nick, Zeke and I took this apart in a post on WUWT.
IF you use anomalies then these types of changes dont bias the record.
However, if you use absolute temps you must insure similar distributions.
Other posters at WUWT have repeated the error of trying to compare records without either
A) anomalizing or
B) correcting for differing altitudes.
I’m kinda weary of seeing people repeat the same errors over and over again.
No doubt Mosh, you wrote to NOAA and chastised them for quoting absolute temperatures of July 2012 and make it a comparison with absolute temperatures of 1936, isn’t it? I’m sure you must have got weary of distortions and I’m sure you must have pointed out to them as well as aired this in blogs right?
You and the two trolls here who go on and on about WUWT and talk how Anthony is wrong here somehow have not a peep to say about the fact that it was NOAA who compared two absolutes from two different systems and sent out a press release.
What a bunch of hypocrites you are!
“No doubt Mosh, you wrote to NOAA and chastised them for quoting absolute temperatures of July 2012 and make it a comparison with absolute temperatures of 1936, isn’t it?”
NOAA compared absolute temperatures from the same record which is valid. The record has been homogenized so it’s an apples to apples comparison.
What isn’t valid is to compare absolute temperatures of two separate records. That’s apples to oranges.
Yeah lolwot, homogenised, pasteurised and adjusted by NOAA.
And the USCRN network also belongs to OAA and is more modern and is more accurate with no need for ” adjustments ” and TOBS etc. as it is a continuous record with the most modern measuring equipment. So there’s no need to ” adjust ” that? It is a good enough data for a monthly absolute temperature. What’s wrong with that record, pray tell me?
You are like a Watts parrot. None of the things you argue makes a jot of sense. You are not only wrong but immune to correction. You talk the talk about the details yet remain suspiciously unable to actually comprehend the actual issue which is quite simple, and instead conveniently wander upon non-sequiturs whenever reality threatens you. All the time smearing the likes of the NOAA, etc when it is you who is making the mistakes.
“And the USCRN network also belongs to OAA and is more modern and is more accurate with no need for ” adjustments ” and TOBS etc. as it is a continuous record with the most modern measuring equipment. So there’s no need to ” adjust ” that?”
Even if the apple doesn’t require adjustment that still doesn’t justify comparing it directly with the Orange does it?
I can only hope such a simple analogy will get finally past your obfuscation filter, but I doubt it, I’ve seen how well Watts avoids the obvious and I have no doubt you will just follow in his footsteps.
Venter.
Since I was the person who pointed Anthony to LeRoy’s study and use in the UHCRN I think you might do well to review some history.
Since I was the person who sent an FOIA to NOAA when they removed site information that Anthony was using back in 2008, you might want to review some history.
Since I’ve suggested using CRN stations to see how good the historical network is ( I can post my mail to folks if you like ) I suggest you review the history.’
Since I have pushed hard on the TOBS adjustment ( see threads at CA) I suggest you review the history.
When you compare using absolute temperature, no matter who you are, you have to do it correctly. That is why I suggest using anomalies. That is why I use them.
Mosher, I know my history and have been following the publications as well as blogosphere for a long time You might brush up your reading comprehension skilled, as an english major and stop trying to create strawmen and stop obfuscating. The issue under discussion is
1.] NOAA posted ” absolute ” temperatures of 2012 and compared it with ” absolute ” temperatures of 1936 and issued a press release that 2012 is the record hottest year ever. Got it? Note the word ” absolute “. They did not talk about anomalies. They did not talk about trends.
2.] They did not give out details of how they calculated Tavg.
3.] They did not give out details of USCRN . They did not give ” absolute Temp ” calculations based on USCRN values. They kept quiet about this new network. This network is good enough to calculate the ” absolute ” temperature for July 2012 and has the most modern and continuously recording instrumentation.
4.] Anthony pointed this out and calculated ” absolute ” temperature for July 2012 based upon USCRN from their database. He showed links to how and where he got the data from and how he did the calculations. Compare this to NOAA not giving out details till today of how they calculated Tavg.
5.] Anthony also wrote to NOAA asking for details of how they calculated Tavg on their press release and asking about the USCRN calculations. Till date they have not replied. Anthony mentioned clearly that once he receives the replies he will post that also and discuss that calculation also. The onus is upon NOAA to respond.
6.] You have been going on about anomalies and crap about Anthony. You are deliberately obfuscating the point that NOAA did not calculate anomalies and gave out absolute temperatures. You are deliberately creating a strawman as if Anthony was wrong in this aspect. Anthony is simply doing what NOAA did, which is calculate absolute temperatures. He based his calculations upon their most recent and newsest database. They used the older database. Then he asks questions about why the new database data is not reported, especially when it shows an absolute temperature for July 2012 as 2.1 degrees lesser than the older database.
This is simple enough for anyone to understand except you and the trolls here who insist upon mindless diversionary tactics.
Venter: “Anthony pointed this out and calculated ” absolute ” temperature for July 2012 based upon USCRN from their database. He showed links to how and where he got the data from and how he did the calculations. Compare this to NOAA not giving out details till today of how they calculated Tavg.”
Anthony compared absolute temperature for July 2012 based upon USCRN with the absolute temperature for July 1936 from a different network to claim July 2012 was cooler than July 1936.
That’s a big no no. You can’t compare absolute temperatures across two different networks like that because separate networks can easily have an absolute difference.
In fact Anthony claimed “USCRN is 2.1°F cooler” in July 2012, but he didn’t seem to even consider that might have been true in 1936 too had USCRN existed back then. His comparison relies on the unsupportable assumption that both networks would have shown the same absolute amount in 1936.
Both you an Anthony owe the NOAA an apology.
Lolwaot, you really are brainless. First you started off with an irrelevant distraction about anomalies. Once I pointed out that you went silent on that and now are stating that Anthony calculated absolutes from two different networks and that’s a no no, Hello Einstein, Anthony clearly said he calculated from USCRN and asked why NOAA did not do so. So what’s new? That was clearly stated in his pot.
The question is
Why did NOAA not give out the figures for Tavg from July from USCRN. What is USCRN there for, after spending millions?
Who decides comparing July 2012 absolute Vs. July 1936 absolute and issuing press releases about ” hottest ever July ” is OK but comparing with July 2012 USCRN absolute is a no no? You?
Why did NOAA have to go to press with absolute figures? After all, you, Stokes and Mosher say absolutes are useless and anomalisation is correct right? So where were your howls of protest about NOAA doing the very same thing. You were quick enough to pile on Anthony. Where were you, Mosher and Stokes when NOAA did it first?
The answer is that NOAA’s action re-inforced the ” It’s getting hot and human made CO2 is a big problem ” scare. Since that a message you all like to spread you went along with it.
That’s exactly the reason why I called you bunch as hypocrites.
And by the way, the USHCN / COOP network used currently for record determination is much different from the network used in 1936. So it is not the same network. So one more facet of your argument goes kaput.
Recently it’s just getting weirder and weirder at WUWT:
The astounding thing is, 200+ subsequent WUWT commenters all perceived that Anthony’s personally abusive response, to Nick Stokes factually correct, polite, helpful, and respectful advice, was … perfectly normal! :roll:
WUWT at WUWT? Whatever weird mental activity nowadays passes for cognition at WUWT, it’s no form of rational skepticism, eh?
Which kind of makes me worry that the pessimistic posters at Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice weblog may be correct. :sad: :sad: :sad:
Here’s a (hopefully) working link to a notably thoughtful block of commentary on Neven’s weblog:
Dear Fan: I am still looking for consolidated Requirements.
In section PA-06, “Understand Customer Needs and Expectations”, there is section BP 06.03 Develop System Requirements.
In my experience, Requirements are the essential starting point, since “An example is a sequence of an activity that produces a work product, and a verification activity, which checks that requirements are satisfied.” (SE-CMM)
Here is an example of the importance of requirements. A system that took 6 people 18 months to implement was up for revision due to a contract change. We were given 3 people for 6 months to revise 50% of it and move it to a database. As you no doubt know, that means re-write 100%.
We spent six week with users creating requirements. During that time, as a requirement became known, specifications and the user interface were created and reviewed. When the package was accepted, we taught users how to create a systems acceptance test (suite) while programming was in process. We lost one programmer with 6 weeks to go.
The users completed the systems acceptance test three days early. The testers became the end-user trainers.
The first revision (a last-minute requirement) was installed six weeks later.
The first error occurred one year later. The system was back up within the hour. It was a false error. Fixed it.
So what is the point? You can not do V&V without documented requirements.
Having well-documented requirements is also faster and cheaper.
Credit for the transcription is due to Alex Cull, who responded to a tweet to help do this.
And I wrote about it at WUWT
my key thought is to listen to R Mullers statement to respect the public.
Helping us understand what amounts to purposeful ignorance in the face of easily observable phenomena Dr. Tim Ball observed, as follows:
The analogy that I use is that my car is not running that well, so I’m going to ignore the engine (which is the sun) and I’m going to ignore the transmission (which is the water vapor) and I’m going to look at one nut on the right rear wheel (which is the human-produced CO2) … the science is that bad!
It really is a case of projection. The evidence that recent warming is due to CO2 is far stronger than that it’s due to the Sun.
When it comes to the Sun climate skeptics are advocates of certainty based on scant evidence. Like Ball, a lot of them will profess to know “it’s the Sun”, yet ask them to present their “proof” and you’ll be faced with a very poor selection of cherrypicked, even doctored data.
Contrast that with their strict demands on science at other times.
You’ll never hear a climate skeptic bemoaning the poor science behind the solar-climate link.
The fact is that the climate science consensus which Ball attacks is presenting a far more accurate understanding of the role of the Sun on climate. It’s climate skeptics who in their zeal to exaggerate the Sun’s role in climate, gloss over the fact their evidence is fantasy and accuse climate scientists of ignoring their fantasy evidence.
And if anyone has a problem with that please present the evidence that the Sun is the major cause behind the recent warming.
lolwot | August 11, 2012 at 7:04 pm
lolwot, the sun not guilty – the butler did it. If the Fakes can use their brains – they would have seen that is SAME SUN for the WHOLE planet, where is good and bad climate. 2] they would have realized by now that: nobody is monitoring the WHOLE planet’s temp = nobody knows what’s the GLOBAL temp, warming is in people’s heads, not the earth. .
You conning them; that ”the planet is getting warmer” made the section of their brains for ”common sense” clinically dead = it’s your fault!!! I’m not going to tell you, where to shove your loaded comments (why is getting warmer) – when they get the wool off their eyes, they will give you that advice.
Wagathon | August 11, 2012 at 5:34 pm
Wagathon, for blind Warmist & Fakes, is not recommended to drive even mechanically sound car . Too much wool over your eyes, doesn’t make a good drivers… trust me.
The analogy that I use is that my car is not running that well, so I’m going to ignore the engine (which is the sun) and I’m going to ignore the transmission (which is the water vapor) and I’m going to look at one nut on the right rear wheel (which is the human-produced CO2) … the science is that bad!
Your logic here is undermined by an incident that happened to me a few months before the second DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. In preparation for a trip from the SF Bay Area to Barstow where we were testing our autonomous vehicle, I replaced the rear brakes on my S10 but stupidly neglected to tighten the nuts on the left rear wheel. The upshot was that halfway there the truck started to steer strangely (going south on I-5 late at night at 80 mph). As I was part of a group driving there I was reluctant to stop, but eventually it got so bad I felt I had to. Turns out the nuts had worked loose on that wheel and one of them had even broken the bolt it was on.
Had I neglected the loose wheel nuts and examined only the engine and transmission and decided they were fine, my double neglect could have gotten myself and my passenger killed.
I would modify your analogy to say that our neglect in allowing CO2 to increase by 30% should not itself be neglected.
You didn’t understand Tim Ball’s analogy very well. He said the car was not running well. Ball didn’t say the car wasn’t steering will… as in your situation. For you, the car was not steering well and you looked at the engine and transmission and maybe even checked your coolant level without ever considering whether any of the nuts on any of the wheels were loose.
That is not the situation we face in the global warming matter. We already know know we have a bunch of nutty shoolteachers running with a screw loose.
That is not the situation we face in the global warming matter. We already know know we have a bunch of nutty shoolteachers running with a screw loose.
My apologies, I had completely misunderstood the point of your “loose nut” analogy.
Just as politics boils down to donkeys vs. elephants, this climate debate seems to boil down to nuts vs. cannons, both loose.
Here is a better analogy: There are like 20+ crackpots asserting theories to replace AGW on this blog’s comments section. All 20+ can’t be right. Something is seriously broken in the climate skeptic’s drive-train. Remember the old saying that the most important part of the car is the nut behind the wheel
All AGW True Believer thinking is stymied by global warming’s version of the Mpemba effect. Boiling the climate change down to changes in CO2 may seem to streamline everything but there is a reason eskimos have 20 different words to describe what we would simply call snow. Precision of thought takes effort but we don’t see either in today’s dropout factories because the system is rotten from the head down and truth does not mater anymore.
One thing that caught my eye this week, or rather today, is how many climate etc denizens are seemingly incapable of analyzing emission scenarios, imagining that that actual greenhouse gas emissions have followed either Hansen’s scenario A or the AR1 BAU scenario. This has the (desired?) effect that they can then exaggerate the difference between projected and observed temperatures.
The total warming projected for scenario A and AR1 BAU was made up of warming from continued increases in CO2, methane and CFCs. The aforementioned point out that CO2 rose in line with BAU projection and then proclaim therefore we should have expected BAU warming.
But hang on a second, did CFCs and methane in line with BAU projections? No. So how do the denizens manage to avoid that fact? By literally ignoring it.
That’s right, it’s stated plainly enough in AR1 and Hansen 88, which they are even quoting from, but they ignore the parts about methane and CFCs.
When pressed on the matter they give some very denialy sounding excuses, eg:
“Methane is a different story but methane doesn’t come from burning fossil fuels.”
That’s an actual excuse given for ignoring the fact the BAU scenario contain methane which fell short of the scenario.
I have no doubt this false claim will continue to be made in future. I think this is now a matter for psychological analysis to figure out how these individuals can read the papers, even quote them, fully convinced they are doing it right, while missing the blatantly obvious and clearly stated fact that the scenarios include significant methane and CFC components.
A lot of it is rationalization as well.
My favorite empty argument starts with the assertion that AGW is not occurring but if it was, warming is good for mankind. This weekly rationalizes the case that the protesting skeptic may in fact be wrong. It’s risk mitigation to prevent damage to their psyche.
Children often use this argument when they don’t get what they want. “I didn’t like that toy anyways!”
“My favorite empty argument starts with the assertion that AGW is not occurring but if it was, warming is good for mankind. ”
Mankind has always regard warming period as ideal period- use words like optimal. The so called father of global warming thought adding CO2 would be beneficial because it cause an increase of 5 C to global average temperatures.
Homeless will tell you they like it when it’s warmer, whereas those living in modern housing are disconnected to realities of the climate they live in.
Life flourishes in tropics. Whereas tundra regions, not so much.
In regards to AGW. UHI are obvious regional climatic effect, easily measured.
Whereas global temperature effects from human activity are apparently very difficult to precisely quantity and instead are characterize as some level of confident being assigned to the amount warming caused by human activity. Though natural climate variability could explain this apparent small increase thought to be human caused.
What is known is that during the period called Little Ice Age, global glacial were advancing, and starting around 1850, instead advancing global glacier became retreating, this trend of glacial retreat continues to the present time, but not all glaciers adding during the Little Ice Age have not yet melted. And is thought that within 50 years all glaciers built up during LIA may have melted.
So it’s very obvious that compared to the LIA, we are in a warmer period.
And few think the switch from cooling of LIA, to warming of present time was caused by human activity.
gbaikie uses the rationalization of caring about homeless bums to advance his argument !!!
Calling George Lakoff.
” “Homeless will tell you they like it when it’s warmer, “
gbaikie uses the rationalization of caring about homeless bums to advance his argument !!!”
Hub paints me as sleazy democrat.
Such a sting.
If only he could feel my pain.
Seeing gbaikie skills at projection and framing, he should be running the booth at a local cinema.
@webbie
It is ‘global warming’, not just ‘that little bit of one continent called the USA warming’
People from all around the world read and contribute to this blog…not just USAers. Perish the though that you should be thought narrowly parochial…
Now, WhoTF is George Lakoff and what is his relevance to our discussion?
I would hazard a guess that the homeless would prefer a political solution that found them somewhere to live, the means to pay for it etc. to warming the planet to make their life a little less uncomfortable.
@LA: Now, WhoTF is George Lakoff
Either Latimer hasn’t mastered Google yet or is jealous that unlike George Lakoff he doesn’t have his own Wikipedia article.
gbaikie | August 11, 2012 at 8:42 pm
gbaike, you are the champion in ”empty arguments” the Telescope is getting only bronze medal. Sorry telescope, you have to work much harder, for next time. My advice to you is: set the alarm, to wake you up earlier, and get yourself a bigger wheelbarrow, for shoveling more B/S.
Practice makes perfect; you can learn from gbaike. He is stuck into methane also, because he is got much bigger shovel METHANE IS NOT a GLOBAL warming gas, boys, let it out, before you explode!…
please don’t talk about the homeless. Come with me to the tenderloin. I’ll introduce you to some, you can ask them for yourself. They have voices and you dont speak for them.
lolwot
one thing caught my eye this week.
lolwot and a couple of other CAGW flag-wavers kept trying to keep the failed 1988 Hansen warming projection alive by fogging the issue up with secondary trace GHG trends.
CO2 is the principal human GHG. Its emissions grew at levels higher than those projected by Hansen for his business-as-usual projection, Scenario A.
Yet temperature increased by less than half of the rate projected by Hansen.
In fact, they increased at the same rate Hansen had projected for Scenario C, a case where CO2 emissions stopped in 2000.
No matter how much one tries to fog this up by interjecting minor trace GHG emissions, it simply won’t wash.
Max
PS Interestingly, none of the supporters of Hansen’s failed 1988 forecast have presentedquantitative estimates of the relative growth rates and warming impacts of these other human GHGs – it’s all just “hot air”.
“PS Interestingly, none of the supporters of Hansen’s failed 1988 forecast have presentedquantitative estimates of the relative growth rates and warming impacts of these other human GHGs – it’s all just “hot air”.”
Yeah they have. You obviously haven’t been reading the links. Here is the growth of all the gases in graphical form *again*:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/SolheimForcings.jpg
Reality was below scenario B and definitely below scenario A.
Your dirty trick of pretending the other gases don’t matter is nothing short of pure lying. You know full well the other gases contribute significantly to the warming, but if you admitted that you wouldn’t be able to pull the lie that actual emissions fit scenario A.
¨Well, if you mindlessly conflate human emissions and atmospheric conncetrations, you can never be wrong. That’s why I say, AGW is not even wrong.
The next thing, when the atmospheric change in CO2 declines due to the upcoming cooling, warmists wil say that the scenario C is the right one, because the forcings decrased. Just wait and see.
Sorry, “change in atmospheric CO2”!
Edim, you really are a crackpot with your insistence that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are that sensitive to global temperature.
This would be a homework assignment for any engineering or science student, who would be taught to look this up in some handbook of thermodynamic properties.
Look at the solubility of CO2 in water and then apply Henry’s Law, see “Solubility in water at various temperatures” at the following link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_%28data_page%29#Thermodynamic_properties
The activation energy is between 0.2 and 0.3 eV for CO2 in water, which means that a change of temperature of 3C will only change the concentration of CO2 by 10%.
Yet wackos such as yourself are suggesting that CO2 changing from 280 to 390 PPM is caused by a change of ocean temperature by less than 1C? That’s maybe a few percent change, not 40%.
So you want to say that oceans have changed temperature by 7C, which will get close to a 40% change in CO2 concentration. But a 7C change is catastrophic warming.
I can only conclude that Edim is a crackpot wacko catastrophic warming extremist.
Or he is aggressively stupid.
Or he is a natural-born contrarian who wants to play silly games.
Grade: F-
You can play around with Clausius-Clapeyron with Alpha here:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=exp%28-A%2F%28kT%29%29%2Fexp%28-A%2F%28k*%28T%2Bd%29%29%29+where+A%3D0.3%2C+k%3D8.6e-5%2C+T%3D300%2C+d%3D-3
WHT, I told you before and I’ll try again:
1) I don’t accept the gas data from ice core records – it was an excellent example of confirmation bias at work and it’s physically implausible. The bubbles are not gas-tight and all kinds of physical processes might be at work. So it’s 315 ppm in 1960 and 390 ppm in 2010 – 75 ppm in 50 years or 1.5 ppm/year in average, roughly.
2) The annual change correlates with the temperature level, I think even you agreed and the total accumulation over a period of observation is the sum of the annual changes or the number of years times the average accumulation, over the period of observation. Furthermore the same correlation works for longer periods – the accumulation is dependent on the temperature level over the period of accumulation.
3) From 2) it follows that it doesn’t take any increase in global temperature for the atmospheric CO2 to increase – just sufficiently high global temperatures. At this level (2000s) the change is ~2 ppm/year. At some lower temperature level the change will be lower, if the correlation continues.
Maybe there would be no correlation without the human emissions, but that would be a speculation at this point.
“Well, if you mindlessly conflate human emissions and atmospheric conncetrations, you can never be wrong.”
Except Hansen’s scenario A, B and C, and also AR1 BAU specified the concentration changes involved, not just the emissions. So we don’t need to look at emissions to determine which path reality took, we can just look at the concentrations. Concentrations have risen far short of scenario A.
lolwot, not for CO2 only. For CO2 + ‘trace gases’ maybe.
The change in concentration for all individual gases, CO2, CFCs, methane, N2O, for each scenario is described in Hansen 1988. It’s as simple as noting that actual concentrations fell short of scenario A to know that scenario A didn’t happen.
Edim (the crackpot wacko) apparently does this calculation in his head:
He obviously does the reasoning in his head, and then verifies and validates it in his head, because he suffers from a severe case of confirmation bias. He believes what he wants to and won’t let anything get in the way. That’s the way that crackpots think. Minds-eye truth is valid as long as it resides and remains in the imagination.
This passage shows that he can’t think his way out of a paper bag. You see, according to Edim, an “increase in global temperature” and “sufficiently high global temperatures” are different things. The earth has gone from a low temperature state to a high temperature state without having to go through the messy process of “increasing” in temperature.
Where do these people come from?
Web, you know the difference between a function and its derivative? It seems that you don’t.
The video is worth a look:
Among the key points Muller makes are:
Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph is bogus
There was a Medieval Warm Period, as warm or warmer than today
“Climategate” showed that CRU scientists at the University of East Anglia were cooking the books
Gore’s film has gross exaggerations and has caused great harm – people feel they have been misled
The IPCC is mainly politics – little science; rather than calculating confidence levels, the IPCC voted on them!
Operating cost for electric cars is $0.50 to $0.75 per mile versus $0.10 for gasoline powered cars once battery replacement costs are included
By 2020, Chinese PER CAPITA emissions will be higher than America’s
Does not believe that the 0.6 degree temperature rise to date is the West’s “fault,” but does believe that China is the future problem
Whatever U.S. does about emissions reduction and what people do as individuals is totally trivial in face of the fact that China is adding huge amounts of coal fired generating capacity
The most meaningful emissions reduction strategy today would be to convert China from coal to natural gas
The claim that there are more frequent or more intense hurricanes and tornadoes as a result of AGW is not scientifically supported
We can reduce emissions, but it is important that we do the RIGHT things (and NOT the WRONG ones)
Not worried about “peak oil;” coal can be converted to liquid fuel
Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph is bogus
There was a Medieval Warm Period, as warm or warmer than today
“Climategate” showed that CRU scientists at the University of East Anglia were cooking the books
Gore’s film has gross exaggerations and has caused great harm – people feel they have been misled
The IPCC is mainly politics – little science; rather than calculating confidence levels, the IPCC voted on them!
Operating cost for electric cars is $0.50 to $0.75 per mile versus $0.10 for gasoline powered cars once battery replacement costs are included
By 2020, Chinese PER CAPITA emissions will be higher than America’s
Does not believe that the 0.6 degree temperature rise to date is the West’s “fault,” but does believe that China is the future problem
Whatever U.S. does about emissions reduction and what people do as individuals is totally trivial in face of the fact that China is adding huge amounts of coal fired generating capacity
The most meaningful emissions reduction strategy today would be to convert China from coal to natural gas
The claim that there are more frequent or more intense hurricanes and tornadoes as a result of AGW is not scientifically supported
We can reduce emissions, but it is important that we do the RIGHT things (and NOT the WRONG ones)
Not worried about “peak oil;” coal can be converted to liquid fuel
That’s good, redundant but good.
Who wrote this passage?
WHT
The WEC estimates that the optimistically inferred total fossil fuel resources still available on our planet represent a total that equals around 85% of ALL the fossil fuel reserves that were EVER on our planet (i.e. we have used around 15% to date).
At current consumption rates, these reserves would last us between 200 and 300 years
These are freely interchangeable with existing technology, so we shouldn’t concern ourselves with “peak oil” (or “peak gas”), but just with “peak fossil fuels”.
The 15% used up to date have resulted in an increase of atmospheric CO2 from an estimated 280 ppmv to a measured 392 ppmv.
This means that the remaining 85% should result in an increase from 392 ppmv to around 1,030 ppmv WHEN THEY ARE ALL 100% USED UP.
It is very likely that fossil fuels will be replaced to a large extent by something else long before the remaining reserves have been completely depleted, so the 1,030 ppmv can be seen as an absolute absolute maximum that will probably never be reached.
Let’s don’t panic WHT.
Max
@Webbie
If we’re playing ‘Guess the Author’, then who wrote this?
‘ the most successful political movement of the past few decades, environmentalism, has relied so heavily on apocalypse: on the suspension of rational risk assessments, and the stimulation of wild, runaway fantasies. The equivalent of running into a room screaming: “We’re all going to die! So do as I say.” As a political technique it has been very effective’.
…as it seems to describe the alarmist position very well.
As to a rebuttal of the scary scary story you pose I think Max (manacker) has nailed it very well. Of course we are all (individually) going to die sometime. But there is no rational reason for us to suspend our better judgement and do what you say.
Yesterday I asked:
It was in fact Mitt Romney, in his 2010 book “No Apology; The Case for American Greatness.”
Who would have thunk that a major presidential candidate would flatly claim peak oil as critical in policy decisions?
It is possible that Romney read Richard Muller’s book “Physics for Future Presidents”, and took his advice.
I say game over. The crises of AGW plus fossil fuel depletion makes the arguments of contrarian scientific skeptics moot. Moot means that the debate is still arguable but irrelevant to the bigger picture. That is what Muller understands and what is so baffling about the Debbie Downers out there that prefer to wallow in BAU.
Muller ideas are definitely ones to rally around. They are really well-rounded and can bring the sides together.
@webbie
Looks like you missed out on your weekend reading.
The New York Times (not noted as an arch-conservative newspaper I believe) seems to think that the predictions of Peak Oil have been somewhat premature….
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/us/10iht-letter10.html?_r=1
I just wonder if your deep analysis of oil production predicted this surge? Or are yours like the climate models that didn’t get the recent unwarming period either? Great models, lovely and super intelligent modellers, the best supercomputers money can buy, lots of extra complex equations, but with only one fatal flaw… no relationship to reality!
Latimer,
You linked to research by a former oil-industry executive who has been completely debunked. Leonardo Maugeri has been shown to not understand the arithmetic behind depletion numbers. He was shown to have problems with what percentage decline means.
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/07/24/1094111/is-peak-oil-dead/
see also this one
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9327
http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.it/2012/07/peak-oil-debunked-mechanisms-of-denial.html
A surge in global oil? What you need to be concerned about is where Team GB is going to get their own oil from now that the North Sea is in deep decline.
I predicted the deep decline in UK North Sea oil quite well several years ago:
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2005/10/uk-north-sea-simulation.html
This is what has transpired since:
http://www.iii.co.uk/articles/27580/oil-industry-warns-declining-north-sea-production
Leonardo Maugeri can’t do math, ha ha. He would have completely messed up the UK prediction if it was up to him. Latimer thinks that is what is needed — incompetent morons trying to drive policy decisions. Are you going to sic the UK legal system on me for calling Maugeri a bad name, Lattie?
http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/10/fuzzy-dice/#comment-228387
What a contrarian moron you are too, Lattie.
In another way, what Maugeri said has blown the skeptics cover. Look at what the NY Times editorial said that you linked to.
They let the cat out of the bag, and now can’t get around the fact that alternative fuels are increasingly necessary to compensate for declining oil, just as what Muller and Romney are asserting.
@webbie
Great rant. But little content.
If you have a beef with the article, contact the NYT and/or Reuters. Or you could simply provide a graph of total oil production by year and show us when ‘Peak Oil’ occurred. That would be the best ‘debunking’ of all.
Oh wait. There’s a graph like that just here! How very convenient. And its the first hit on Google for ‘global oil production’. Simples!
http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?product=oil&graph=production
Don’t see any ‘Peak Oil’ there yet, Webbie. Can you?
And it seems like history is littered with failed predictions of when this event will occur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicting_the_timing_of_peak_oil
Funny how peak oil and climatology seem to march in lockstep… soothsayers in both cults predicting dreadful events that stubbornly refuse to occur……
And just before I forget. Seems to me that the only purpose of being a soothsayer like yourself is to get the predictions right.
Not ‘sort of right’. Or ‘if you squint a bit and look sideways then they’re not far wrong’. Nor ‘go under the street lamp and use a very small scale map and you’ll find you’re on the right continent’ rightish. But bang spot on the nose right.
Same goes for climatologits. The seem to specialise in Texas sharpshooting…making so many – and so vague – predictions that chance means one or two of them will have a tolerable agreement with the real outcome. The trick then is to make the world forget about all the other failed ones to give an illusion of skill.
It is a trick that Hansen regularly tries to perform. His fervent acolytes fall for it, but increasingly the rest of us see the way the stunt is pulled and don’t get fooled by it.
I’ve done that you naive little twerp.
http://TheOilConundrum.com
The book (and the precursor blog) includes a crude oil depletion model of the world and many different regions of the world.
I have since done analysis of unconventional regions such as the Bakken on this more recent blog:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com
You have a problem with that? Well, of course you do, because you are a contrarian.
WHT – Muller said Hubbert’s peak oil may be delayed for an indefinite period. Why is that so hard for you to understand?
@webbie
You have linked to a super duper, ever so technical, only accessible to people of really Great Brains and well beyond my pay grade.essay. How would you expect a ‘little twerp’ like me to understand such a thing?.
But all I asked was ‘when is your prediction for Peak Oil’. Which is a simple question that needs only a simple answer. You could say ‘1974’ or ‘2075’ or ‘never’ or ‘it was three weeks ago last Tuesday Michaelmas’..or anything like that. SImple stuff that the rest of us normal folks can understand.
So wheer in your Great Tome is it? Page number will do, cahpter and para number if you wish..or you could juts plain old come out directly and tell us.
Becaause, Webbie mon vieux, you are in danger of not convincing anyone that you have the faintest idea if you can’t give a direct answer to such a simple question.
.
But since it
Hey Lattie, you moron. You linked to the indexmundi.com site that has bad crude oil stats. The numbers for crude oil are short by about 2 million barrels in 2004 but only about 1 million barrels in 2011.
That means you are trying to hide the decline . It kind of figures that you would do something like that.
What we are seeing is a broad peak. The economies of the world desperately need to maintain current levels of oil production to maintain their GDPs. The oil companies are willing to oblige by raising the price of oil tremendous amounts to help to squeeze more production out of their oil rigs and alternate sites. What we don’t see any longer is production growth, which is nearly impossible to do, as I have described in depth.
This isn’t tenths of degrees we are talking about as in establishing global warming, but significant declines in the rate of production.
Latie said:
I gave him the link http://theoilconundrum.com/ and told him to look. My chart is sitting right there on the main page.
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/3640/ddos2010.gif
He really is truly hopeless. I don’t think people like Latie want to advance knowledge, being almost reactionary in their views.
WHT
For the USA it is critical to replace the millions of barrels of expensive imported crude oil used primarily for transportation with local alternates, i,e, more US oil, shale oil or gas, biofuels (NOT corn!), even coal to liquid fuels (if this route is economically attractive at projected prices). So Romney is right.
The global picture remains as I depicted it: there are enough fossil fuels to last us for 200-300 years at current usage rate and when they are all 100% gone some day in the far distant future when you and I and our great grandchildren are all long gone, the maximum ever CO2 level will be around 1,000 ppmv.
Nothing to get your knickers all twisted about, WHT.
Max
The important point is not how my emotional stability is affected, but on whether the analysis is correct and that it is useful for policy decisions. That is why Muller wrote the book, and why I have worked the problem as well, completely free of any hint of doomerism. It’s just a problem to be confronted and solved
WHT
I’d agree with you that the USA having and implementing a sound energy policy is a problem worth solving.
Panicking is not the solution.
Max
Max –
I notice that you’re ducking this post and the one subsequent:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/11/week-in-review-81112/#comment-228259
Is there a reason for that – other than just that you have no accountability when you make blatant errors in blog comments?
I’ve now watched the Muller interview. Interesting. He handled the interviewer well.
Interviewer, Greg Dalton, is clearly a strong advocate for CAGW, renewable energy and electric cars. He was clearly biased, clearly an advocate for a cause, clearly advocating his beliefs, and clearly politically biased (anti-Republican).
Muller is a strong advocate for change from coal to gas for electricity generation. However, while that is a valuable step for many reasons, he overplays the amount it will benefit emissions reductions. Substituting natural gas for coal won’t have great effect over several decades, especially if renewable energy is being built as well. If natural gas substitutes for coal for baseload and intermediate load generation, the emissions can be roughly halved. But if gas is being used to back up for intermittent renewable energy sources (such as wind and solar), the emissions will be reduced by around just 25%. The reason is that the efficient Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGT) are used for baseload and intermediate load. But if the requirement for gas generators is to back up for intermittent renewable energy technologies, the highly flexible, but inefficient, Open Cycle Gas Turbines (OCGT) are required. They emit much more CO2 than the CCGT, and are only marginally better than new coal plants.
If we invest in natural gas instead of nuclear, we are stuck with the investment for 40 years. Take this as a rolling period, each gas plant that is built instead of nuclear extends the much higher emissions for some 40 years. Similarly6, if we invest in renewables, we also have to invest in the low efficiency OCGT which are only little better than coal. Investing in any gas instead of nuclear means a slower trajectory to cut emissions than if we focus on making nuclear affordable for all.
Natural gas is important step in the right direction. But cannot achieve much. We need zero emissions electricity if we re going to make a major cut in emissions.
Muller said in answer to a question that gas produces about twice as much emissions as oil and coal is worse still. He has the order correct, but not the ratios. The emissions intensities (from fuel combustion alone) are roughly:
Black coal (super critical) = 773 kg/MWh
Open Cycle Gas Turbine = 515 kg/MWh
Combined Cycle Gas Turbine = 368 kg//MWh
Nuclear = 0 kg/MWh
If we really want to cut emissions, we need to replace coal (a baseload generator) with a zero emissions baseload generator. About 75% of our electricity is baseload, so baseload (coal) is what is most important to replace with a low emissions electricity generating technology. Playing around with renewable energy is fiddling on the edges. And it requires the less efficient natural gas generators for back up.
“The emissions intensities (from fuel combustion alone)”
You can’t say Muller was wrong based on fuel consumption alone. In the case of natural gas, you have to take into account how much methane and CO2 are lost to the atmosphere during the mining, storage, and transport. That number is hotly debated.
“Playing around with renewable energy is fiddling on the edges. And it requires the less efficient natural gas generators for back up.”
This is an oversimplification. Intermittancy is a function of how mix power comes from intermittant sources, what the mix of those sources is, and how wide a radius you can gather your power from.
I like nuclear energy, but it has its own problems. It’s very expensive, takes a long time to build, creates long-lived nuclear waste and requires a lot of water for cooling, water that may not be available or usable in conditions of drought or extreme heat.
The shortcomings of nuclear can certainly be addressed, and should be. There is no need to “pick winners” in low-carbon energy. Price carbon emissions appropriately and the market should sort that one out.
Yes I can say Muller misstated the difference in emissions between coal, oil and gas, because the other components of life cycle emissions (such as the fugitive emissions you referred to) are small compared with emissions from fuel combustion. So they make negligible difference to the ratios Muller spoke about. [As an aside, when you include life cycle emissions solar power (even without including the emissions from the back up generators) has a significantly higher emissions intensity than nuclear].
I could have included the life cycle emissions, but it gets more complicated and would just confuse the point. More important would be to add the higher emissions caused by cycling the fossil fuel generator plants to back up for intermittent renewable energy generators. The figures I quoted above are for the fossil fuel plants operating continuously at optimum efficiency . However, they do not achieve this in practice because they have to cycle up and down and operate at well below their optimum efficiency for part of the time. They have to start up and shut down and run as spinning reserve. Open Cycle Gas Turbines start up and shut down frequently and have to power up and down to follow the load. They run at part load and often as spinning reserve (just in case they are needed and waiting for the call to generate power). Intermittent renewable energy increases the inefficiency of the fossil fuel generators.
That statement is misleading and obfuscation. The cost of renewables is very high, the cost of the additional transmissions systems they require is very high, and the intermittency causes a very significant increase to the cost of electricity. Unreliable, intermittent renewable energy generators require fossil fuel back up generators (inefficient and high emissions). This means a duplication of capacity and more than doubling of the costs (because the renewable energy generators are much higher cost than the fossil fuel generators which are essential back up and could do the job on their own).
Renewable energy is a very high cost way to generate electricity and a very high cost way to reduce emissions.
I agree. That is why we should remove all the impediments we have imposed on nuclear. We should remove all the subsidies, regulations and other incentives for renewable energy. Let renewable compete in the market without being mandated, subsidised and many other sorts of help renewables are given. Remove the massive burden on nuclear. It makes no sense to demand that nuclear must be 10 to 100 times safer than other technologies (or 1000 times safer according to this summary http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html )
Remove those requirements and allow the manufacturing countries to produce small modular nuclear power plants in factories. Then there will be no need for a carbon tax,
The carbon tax idea won’t work anyway (explained clearly elsewhere).
Any amount of renewable energy is very costly. As an indication of how high the costs are a limit analysis was conducted based on modelling that claimed to show how the Australian electricity market could be powered by 100% renewable energy.
In a similarly sobering vein, on WUWT Anthony Watts has been posting examples of non-rational cognition that are not easy to distinguish from florid delusion.
What’s striking is that hundreds of WUWT commenters are falling right into line, in mimicking Anthony’s non-rational outbursts.
WUWT at WUWT? Are we humans really a rational species? :sad: :sad: :sad:
Since we are on this psyche kick, tempterrain had an apropos comment in another thread:
Somebody like George Lakoff can probably explain all these absurd arguments that the anti-agreers (AA) engage in.
WHT
A tip: Don’t start quoting tempterrain (it won’t make you look more intelligent).
TT has missed the point.
There are many “follow-up” arguments, but the key argument used by the rational skeptics of the IPCC CAGW premise is simply that it has not been corroborated by empirical scientific data, derived from actual physical observations and/or reproducible experimentation.
IOW the CAGW premise is an uncorroborated postulation, based on theoretical deliberations and model simulations. Nothing more.
Pretty simple, actually.
Max
@manacker
You have, as ever, succinctly put the point. None of the postulates have been shown by experiment to be true. Mother Gaia is not cooperating.
And I’d add that the next part of the argument – that if it were to be true the consequences would be so horrific that we must take immediate, drastic and highly disruptive action now to prevent them – are deeply unconvincing. They seem to have little basis in anything other than a deep-rooted conservatism and fear of change.
Shrouds are waved, apocalyptic predictions portentously made, every minor unusual occurrence seized upon as yet another foretaste of the coming disaster. Exactly like every other doomsday cult in history.
I also note that the split between true believers and arch sceptics is almost completely between those who work in academia and those who don’t. Which is hardly surprising. We know that academia is a huge net beneficiary of ‘climate change’ funding and all the rest of us are huge net contributors. ‘Follow the money’ is usually sound advice.
@Latimer Adler
Thanks.
You raise a very pertinent point: the “money trail”.
CAGW has become a (taxpayer-financed) multi-billion dollar big business, with “academia” the primary benefactor today.
But others are lining up at the trough.
Oink, oink!
Max
Max,
Before you are in any position to claim that others have “missed the point”
you yourself have to understand what the point actually is.
WHT is commenting on how deniers will jump backwards and forwards from one argument to another. To make it a bit simpler for you I’ll remind you again of what we are saying , in cartoon format:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7143/6598104233_0d5fa8d87d.jpg
Judith and readers,
And it will always be so.
This extract shows why government intervention to try to distort markets doesn’t work. It is why the Kyoto protocol didn’t have the intended consequences. It is why carbon pricing schemes are highly unlikely to achieve what is intended and highly likely there will be serious deleterious consequences.
As a Wall Street Journal article last week said: people believe the “cure is worse than the disease”. I am convinced the people are right.
However, there is a cure. It is the opposite of adding ever more regulations. The cure is to remove unnecessary regulations on energy. Free up the market. Remove the distortions we’ve imposed by the interventions we’ve imposed to favour one technology over another and one group of consumers over another. Remove the subsidies for renewable energy. Remove the mass of regulations on nuclear that is making it more expensive than it should be and is inhibiting its development and ability to compete on a level playing field..
And therefore, the ozone layer would be better-protected if market restraints on CFC gases were lifted?
Peter Lang, that is delusional cognition! :eek: :eek: :eek:
The world does not need more crazy denialists! :sad: :sad: :sad:
Please return to rationality Peter Lang! :lol: :lol: :lol:
Correction to this sentence in my previous comment:
“This extract shows why government intervention to try to distort markets often doesn’t work and often causes unintended consequences.”
The regulation of CFC’s is not comparable to the proposed mitigation policies for greenhouse gasses. The regulation of CFC’s is like the regulation of contaminants such as lead, arsenic etc in drinking water or toxic air emissions.
I’d urge readers to seriously consider the point I’d made.
To those who share the opinions and beliefs of Fan, I’d make this comment. As long as the deniers of rational economic policies continue to try to impose their irrational policy prescriptions, there will be no solution. If they get their way, there will be more costly, but ineffective, policies like the Kyoto Protocol and EU ETS.
I too, would like to commend you for your qualification of your earlier statement, Peter.
Now in a point similar to the one that Fan made, I will ask you whether you think the following statement is true:
Joshua, then you know that under regulation and over regulation both have unintended consequences. The trick is to find the Goldilocks regulation. That requires giving the market the opportunity on a level playing field and old intervening when there is a real issue.
Govern lightly but carry a big stick :)
Now in a point similar to the one that Fan made, I will ask you whether you think the following statement is true:
“We can come up with numerous examples to show how a lack of government intervention to try to adjust markets often doesn’t work and often causes unintended consequences.”
Give one, the best one.
I forgot about recent crisis created by the government controlled Fannie Mae:
“Fannie Mae is a government-sponsored enterprise chartered by Congress to keep money flowing to mortgage lenders, to help strengthen the U.S. housing and mortgage markets, and to support affordable homeownership. We are a national mortgage finance company, but we don’t offer home loans. We stand behind mortgage lenders – local and national banks, thrifts, credit unions, and other financial institutions in all 50 states – to securitize or buy the mortgage loans they originate, enabling them to replenish their funds so they can lend to other homeowners. Similarly, we work to keep funds flowing to support rental housing.”
http://www.fanniemae.com/portal/about-us/company-overview/about-fm.html?
That should have been “only” intervening… I can’t believe I used bold and a smilie! This thread has definitely gone to pot.
gbaikie –
The mortgage crisis is actually a perfect example to illustrate my point to Peter. It well illustrates that both regulation and a lack of regulation can have unintended consequences.
If you want to discuss the matter with me, you need to use The Google to examine a couple of things first:
Look up the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. Look up ENRON. Look up Larry Summers. Look up leveraging assets 40-1 to buy bundles of bad debt. Look up mortgage ratings agencies. Look up the bad statistical modeling that lenders used to predict loan defaults. Look up Phil Gramm. Look up the history of the CRA, and the history of problems with discrimination on mortgage lending. Look up how many years the CRA existed before problems with subprime loans became prominent. Look up the %’s of bad loans issued by Fanny and Freddy relative to other lending institutions.
Then get back to me. We’ll talk. There is more to look up, but that should give us a basis to begin the discussion.
Oh – one more thing, gbaikie – look up deceptive marketing practices used by lenders to sell subprime loans (you can start that search with the keywords “predatory lending.”)
Joshua | August 12, 2012 at 12:00 am responding to gbaikie on August 11, 2012 at 11:45 pm
“The mortgage crisis is actually a perfect example to illustrate my point to Peter. It well illustrates that both regulation and a lack of regulation can have unintended consequences.”
Since you bring up the mortgage crisis, you might be interested in tracing it back to the Affordable Housing Act. In the 1990s, AG Janet Reno threatened banks to provide more “affordable housing”. The banks, forced to make loser loans, spun them off in bundles. That was the start. People found ways to play for pay. The rest of the debacle is too long to explain here. See: Sowell, Thomas. The Housing Boom and Bust. 1st ed. Basic Books, 2009.
The hubris of government bureaucrats can become incredible at times. It appears that some believe they can out-think the knowledgeable and creative expertise of a country of some 300 million. Bad odds.
“The mortgage crisis is actually a perfect example to illustrate my point to Peter. It well illustrates that both regulation and a lack of regulation can have unintended consequences.”
I am curious to know how experienced and able a politicians needs to be to pass laws they haven’t bothered to read?
Also how complicated loaning money to homeowner actually is, that after many decades politicians careful crafting laws they still require to add more regulations due to a shortage.
And how many hundreds of lobbyists and staff [whom are looking for better paying jobs] is required per year to insure the lack of regulation is adequately being addressed?
Cap’n O Cap’n
Sorry if I don’t think that statement is terribly profound. It is obvious. Only political extremists would disagree with such a statement.
Sorry, but I think those statements are absurdly simplistic. The real world is much more complicated than that. There is no Goldilocks. It is myth. You can learn lessons from that myth, but the myth in itself doesn’t directly reflect reality. The market does not create a level playing field. It never has. It never will. Reality requires a series of compromises, and acceptance that sometimes no matter the best intentions to strike the correct balance, unintended consequences will occur. Only extremists: (1) Think that unintended consequences can be avoided (as a rule) or, (2) That any particular example of an unintended consequence is necessarily proof of systemic failure. Binary mentality won’t don’t cut it, in my book.
Except when it comes to bacon.
Oh, and one more thing. Do you think that the following statement by Judith is accurate? I’ve been trying to get a smart person to give me a straight answer on that question, and no one has done so yet. You sometimes take pity on my ignorance, maybe you’ll give me an answer:
I lay out my question in a little more detail in the thread started by this comment:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/10/fuzzy-dice/#comment-227616
Joshua,
Never underestimate the value of simple. There are already anti-trust and RICO laws that more than adequately cover nearly all eventualities.
Goldilocks was a fairy tale but a middle is not. That kinda eliminates the binary don’t it.
Some portion of the heat waves is due to Anthropogenic causes. Part of that is due to the anthropogenical enhanced greenhouse effect. A larger part is due to natural variability. Get with me in five years and I can give you an estimate of how much should be attributed to each :)
Cap”n
There’s a difference between simple and simplistic. I used simplistic, and there’s a reason for that.
Simple is often good. Simplistic is rarely good.
Then you are looking at the sentence simplistically :)
The laws and the constitution are adequate. What is missing is common sense enforcement. It is not the government’s job to regulate my bacon consumption, just to prevent a bacon monopoly and prevent bacon theft. The government can recommend that I consume less bacon and certify the quality of bacon, but unless my bacon consumption does real harm to another, they need to stay away from my bacon.
The government can also provide assistance to the bacon poor, but not demand that I give my bacon away, sell my bacon below cost or force me to loan my bacon to someone I know can’t repay me for my bacon.
The government should govern, the market should market.
In re the discussion of unintended consequences from government intervention, there are also intended consequences from government intervention:
One in every 15 million prospective voters.
This is what some of our “fiscally conservative” friends want to spend money on going after – at the very real expense of fewer votes from elderly people and minorities, disproportionately.
Stay class, my friends. Stay classy.
Invoke the law of unintended consequences from government intervention as you turn a blind eye to intended consequences.
(And yes, II know that this is not an intervention in the market, and yes I know that not all conservatives so “concerned” about government intervention in the market support the voter ID laws).
The revised statement is more sensible, but I would suggest you critically examine your concept of “distorting markets” particularly as regards what economists term “unowned resources,” such as a breathable atmosphere, fields or forests held in common (as in the original “Tragedy of the Commons”), stocks of fish in the ocean, or drinking water from lakes and rivers.
Economic theory predicts that it is owners who optimize the value of resources. When no one owns a resource, there is a market failure by definition.
The optimal solution from a free-market perspective is to either privatize the resource (practical in the case of a field or a forest, less so as regards the oceans or the atmosphere) or mimic “ownership” by imposing a cost (like a rent) on those whose use damages the resource or make it less useful to others.
Such a cost is not a “distortion” of the market; it improves the functioning of the market by bring it to bear on a situation it otherwise cannot cope with.
I find systems of emissions trading and so forth needlessly complex and would much prefer a simple carbon tax. I prefer a carbon tax over legislating cuts in emissions because I believe in the power of markets and human ingenuity to carry out the necessary adaptation with a minimum of cost and disruption.
You are learning, Peter Lang! That is very good! :) :) :)
Your next developmental step is the far simpler, logically equivalent, and therefore equally true principle: “Unregulated markets destroy commons.” :eek: :eek: :eek:
One of those commons being, a planet in which Florida, Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, Maryland, etc. are above sea-level.
Your cognitive progress impresses us Peter Lang! :grin: :grin: :grin:
The devil is in the details – again.
Peter is absolutely right in is his revised formulation and it is a serious concern. I would list this as a well established fact not merely an opinion.
I consider it also well established that government intervention is necessary and very important in many cases. There may be a little more opposition to this claim but I trust that most by far agree also on this.
That means that we cannot discuss meaningfully whether government intervention is good or bad without stating precisely the details, but how often is that done in web discussion?
And, what’s perhaps most problematic, we have often situations where government intervention seems to be necessary but where any specific intervention is likely to have serious problems, possibly serious enough to make the whole intervention futile as it’s expected net value may be close to zero and even negative. The need to intervene does not prove that we are able to intervene productively.
We have seen many examples where government actions have had a negative net effect. That by itself does not prove that they had a negative expectation value and there might have been many simultaneous positive experiences that dominate the net outcome. Unfortunately my own feeling is that much that is presently proposed and even implemented is on the wrong side of the borderline, i.e. the expected outcome is negative in comparison with realistic alternative policies of less government intervention.
The fundamental problem is that strong government intervention leads often to a larger increase in stupid solutions than in wise ones because there are always more ways to act stupidly than to act wisely. It opens also almost invariably also opportunities for outright fraud. The negative ratio is almost certain to grow highly nonlinearly with the strength of intervention. For this reason I’m mostly opposed to strong intervention but support many less strong actions.
Pekka Pirila,
I agree with what I think you are saying. That is, appropriate regulation is needed (and essential). Almost no one would disagree.
The important word here is “appropriate”. What is “appropriate”. That is where the arguments begin.
I believe the evidence is incontrovertible that light regulation is preferable. We should lean toward minimum government interference in markets. On balance, people’s buying decisions will make better choices (overall) and spur more and better innovation than government regulators, bureaucrats and lawyers.
With regard to AGW we have many examples of bad regulations imposed by governments. Here are a few that come to mind:
• Kyoto Protocol
• EU ETS
• Australian CO2 tax and ETS
• Mandating and heavily subsidising ($/TWh delivered) renewable energy
• Masses of inappropriate regulations that have inhibited the development of nuclear power, made it perhaps five times more expensive now than it should be, slowed its development, slowed its roll out, caused global CO2 emissions to be 10% to 20% higher now than they would otherwise have been, meaning we are on a much slower trajectory to reduce emissions than we would be and, most importantly, we are locked in to fossil fuel electricity generation that causes 10 to 100 times more fatalities per TWh than would be the case if we allowed nuclear to develop (or perhaps 1000 times according to this: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
• Making building regulations that effectively prevent people from selling, refurbishing or updating their houses if they are close to sea level (the damage to property values and to property owners’ life savings is enormous as many examples in Australia are already demonstrating.
The Australian Carbon tax and ETS will cost at least $10 for every $1 of projected savings. But the costs will be much higher and the benefits will not be realised (http://jennifermarohasy.com/2012/06/what-the-carbon-tax-and-ets-will-really-cost-peter-lang/ ). This is an example of the really bad policies being advocated.
We can cut GHG emissions, but to do so rapidly means we need to take an economically rational approach. To me that means remove the impediments that have blocked and slowed nuclear power development for at least 50 years.
There is an alternative to more regulation. It is to remove many bad regulations that are badly distorting energy markets.
I think you have a logical problem there in that you are saying that the possible “stupid” outcomes grows with the strength of intervention, but dismiss the possible growth (perhaps unintended) in “smart” outcomes that might be a function of strength of intervention. You also ignore a potential ratio in that the strength of benefit from an outcome might be proportional to its strength.
And further, I think that your analysis is a little skewed in that you are comparing intervention to intervention, but many folks – whether they will own up to it or not – are comparing more categorically. Notice the categorical nature of Peter’s statement before he qualified it. Now everyone makes mistakes every now and then, but if you read his comments you will know that this is far from the first time he has made that sort of categorical statement, and the rest of Climate Etc. threads are littered with them.
I agree with you fully that it only makes sense to consider intervention carefully, and with a stronger intervention more care should be taken. I do not think that you can apply some rule, however, to advance weaker interventions over stronger ones, and certainly given political realities, ignore that most of the debate is whether or not government (as a representative body in a democracy) should have any power to intervene.
And make no mistake about it, Pekka. Peter is first and foremost a political warrior. He uses climate as a proxy for his political advocacy.
Joshua,
I have had my fights with Peter, enough to remove illusions.
That doesn’t mean that he could not be right on some points, perhaps even some important principles. My preference is to admit the correctness of arguments even when they are presented by a person whom I know to disagree with me strongly on some other points. Recently that has been the case with Peter and some other people on the skeptical side as well as with some on the other side.
Concerning your argument on the influence of highly set incentives, to use another expression, I do certainly agree that they may in some cases lead to positive results as well but I maintain that the stronger the incentive is the worse gets the ratio of wasteful and fraudulent results to the positive ones. R&D can be supported strongly but trying to get the research going by non-specific very high support for the deployment of some new technology gets easily very wasteful. High level of support for the deployment leads also often to large scale investments to the readily available technology even in cases where it’s virtually certain to become obsolete by development of new alternatives not yet ready for investment. The development of the better technology might in some cases be even delayed when resources are directed in the deployment rather than research and development.
Pekka –
Yes, I agree that the focus should be on aligning values, not quibbling over positions that belie common values. I don’t doubt that Peter has some very similar values with you, and actually with me also. So your point about that is taken.
I agree with your caution about dangers from incentives increasing proportionally to their strength. I think that in balance, that is an important caveat. I will repeat, however, that into that equation it is important to consider that sometimes, also, the benefit gained from incentives is proportional to their size – so that also needs to be part of the equation.
I will use the example of the US interstate highway system – which was largely built through a system of incentives. Or the US railway system, which was substantially backed by a system of incentives. We could also consider government intervention to build public transportation. None of these phenomena have been free of negative unintended consequences, and the magnitude of those negative unintended consequences is proportional to the size of the “interventions.” On the other hand, they have also all had huge positive consequences – both intended and unintended, and they are also proportional to the magnitude of the “interventions.”
In the end, as a governing rule, I would prefer care and effort -with as much openness about biases as possible, over assumptions about negative unintended consequences being proportional to the magnitude of the intervention. That is not a dismissal of your concerns – but to say that on all sides of the debate, when people are operating openly from an attack on the values of those they’re debating with, the benefit of their input is limited.
Joshua,
Investing in infrastructure is a normal activity of governments. Sometimes they do it directly, sometimes supporting private activities that lead to the same goal. To compare that with worries that I have we must consider the hypothetical case where an open offer is made to pay highly for every mile of 4-lane highway built anywhere in the USA, so highly that far too many roads would get built.
Something comparable to that is really done in Germany and some other countries with wind and solar energy generation. There’s some difference as the renewable generation plants do not (yet) compete so directly with each other, but many of the investments have been of as little value as unneeded highways.
I’d make these key points I make;
1. The vast majority of people want to minimise damage to the environment, and minimising damage to the climate is a component of this.
2. For most rational people, there is another side to the ledger. It is the economic consequences of proposed policies – i.e. consequences for human well being. We can do more for human well being and for the environment, and do it faster and better, if the world is wealthier. Many people do not understand, recognise or acknowledge this fact, or do not give appropriate weight to it.
3. The balance between points 1 and 2 is the main point of disagreement over climate policy.
4. Nordhaus (2008) “A Question of Balance” makes it clear the cost competitive alternative to fossil fuels policy (the ‘Low-cost backstop’ policy) is by far the best option for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
5. There is an obvious ‘cost competitive alternative to fossil fuels’. Unfortunately, it is blocked by ideological beliefs and irrational radiation phobia and has been for 50 years. It is an ideological blockage to progress.
6. There has been a long history of forcing very bad policies on society. Advocating carbon pricing and renewable energy and blocking the development of nuclear power are clear examples.
7. Why would any rational person want to block nuclear power, given that, nuclear power is far safer than what we accept now for electricity generation and by far the least cost way to substantially cut global greenhouse gas emissions. According to Nordhaus (2008) “A Question of Balance”, http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/Balance_2nd_proofs.pdf the ‘cost competitive alternative to fossil fuels’ policy is better than the “Optimal Carbon Price” policy (‘Low-cost backstop’ policy) is better than ‘Optimal carbon price’ policy by a large margin. Comparing these two policies the ‘Low cost backstop” policy gives 3 times higher benefits, 5 times lower abatement costs, 5 times higher net benefits, and a 50 times lower implied carbon tax. I’ll summarise the figures below and hope it is understandable when posted in the comment field. The five columns are: Item; Units; ‘Optimal carbon price’ policy; ‘Low-cost backstop’ policy; Table (reference to the Table number in Nordhaus (2008).
Costs and benefits of the proposed mitigation policy compared with no mitigation policy (Costs in 2005 US $ trillion)
Item Optimal Carbon Price Low-cost backstop
Benefits (Reduced damages) 5.23 17.63
Abatement Cost 2.16 0.44
Net Benefit of policy 3.37 17.19
Implied CO2 Tax 202.4 4.1
CO2 emissions in 2100 (Gt C/a) 11 0
CO2 concentration in 2100 (ppm CO2) 586 340
Global temperature change in 2100 (°C from 1900) 2.61 0.9
Source: Nordhaus (2008) A Question of Balance, Tables 5-1, 5-3, 5-6, 5-7.
http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/Balance_2nd_proofs.pdf
Tol has a new paper on carbon tax. http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/sussusewp/3312.htm
Given the complexity and the equity issues this paper reveals, I’d ask those who advocate carbon pricing to explain how and why they believe these issues can be overcome (given the reality of international politics, negotiations and agreements)?
The economic assumptions that underpin the carbon price analyses assume there is a substitute for fossil fuels. They assume that as the price of fossil fuels rises, these energy sources will substitute for fossil fuels. However, there is no viable alternative at the moment. If we rely on a progressively increasing carbon price to get to the point where sufficient resources are directed to getting us a viable alternative, we’ll be waiting a long time before we start.
Tol’s latest paper and many others persuade me that the economic approach of carbon pricing is not viable. The carbon pricing approach depends largely on efficiency improvements. However, although efficiency improvements can achieve some reduction in emissions, the benefits are small compared with the reductions being advocated.
Therefore, I am further persuaded by Tol’s latest paper that carbon pricing is the wrong approach.
Instead, we need an engineering solution. We need to focus our efforts on what needs to be done to get nuclear power cost competitive with fossil fuels. This must be done for all countries, all sizes of economies and for all grid sizes. Therefore, we need small, factory built, modular nuclear power plants at sizes equivalent to gas turbine plants (20 MW to 300 MW).
There is only one problem raised by the paper, to wit:
It’s an interesting way to look at carbon taxes; obviously countries cannot for the most part double or triple their tax burdens in order to raise the price of carbon.
But there’s a gaping hole in the analysis. Tol says directly:
Phase in the carbon tax over time, and all the issues presented by Tol in this paper disappear. Also note:
Almost 2% of global emissions! Stunning!
I kid. This is an interesting analysis, but it doesn’t raise any real problems with a carbon tax. The believable constraint (carbon tax revenues shouldn’t exceed current tax revenue, raising the tax rate) doesn’t raise a problem, and the tougher restriction he pulls out of his butt (no more than 10% of current revenues) has no obvious empiric basis, and in any case could easily be addressed by phasing in a carbon tax over five or ten or twenty years, which is something advocates for a serious carbon tax endorse anyway.
Robert,
You keep reminding me of why it is pointless to debate with you. You clearly are not interested in a proper debate. You apparently are only interested in scoring points, no matter what it takes to do so. You have cherry picked bits from the Tol paper that support your beliefs. I trust you will recognise why I mostly do not respond to your comments.
You say:
Please explain how you propose that could be done?
Here are some questions you might like to address:
1. What is the cost to non participants if there is less than full participation in the pricing mechanism (i.e. less than all man-made GHG gasses are included, less than all emissions sources are included, and less than all countries are included) Hint: Nordhaus says that if just 50% of emissions sources, globally, are included the cost penalty on the participants is 250%. Given that, how do propose global carbon pricing could be implemented?
2. How do you propose to keep fraud within acceptable bounds?
3. How do you propose to implement an emissions measurement and reporting mechanism globally that is sufficiently precise and accurate for international trade in the commodities (green house gasses)? http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13578&page=0
4. How do you propose to get the all countries to act in unison to raise their carbon price or constrain their permits?
5. For more background see SkepticalScience here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1325#82373
Why advocate the carbon pricing approach when there is clearly a better way (as explained previously in many comments including in the first response to Pekka Pirila’s comment on this sub-thread http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/11/week-in-review-81112/#comment-228863 )? Why do you not consider the alternative seriously?
Because I read the sources cited, think about them, and respond to them?
Yeah, you’ve got a hard time of it. [/sarc]
Nonsense. Tol did one thing in the paper, which I accurately summarized, or more precisely allowed him to summarize.
Seriously? OK, I guess we’ve got the slow class today.
Step one: Pick an carbon tax that approximates the social cost of carbon — say $80/ton.
Step two: Start at 5% of that $4/ton.
Step three: Raise it by 5% of the target each year for 19 years until you reach your target.
You go on to bring up a bunch of questions about a carbon tax unrelated to Tol’s paper. They are mostly not about a carbon tax; they are about international treaties in general (how do we monitor and enforce them, etc.) I suggest you look at some successful international agreements and see how they have worked. In the meantime, you asked someone to look at the issues raised by this paper, which I have done.
As previously stated getting the details right is critical. Imposing a carbon tax in a particular nation or state with the goal of reducing CO2 emissions makes no sense unless one 1st understands the relative elasticity of the fossil fuel upon which the tax is being contemplated. It is very different in different nations. Another point is that all nations will not impose such a tax and those that do not will thereby gain a competitive advantage over nations that impose such a tax because their cogs will be lower.
Hence the concept of an international agreement.
If you can’t reach agreement with a major emitter, those included in the treaty can agree on trade sanctions on countries that refuse to implement a carbon price.
That would erase any “competitive advantage” for a rogue state.
Robert
What is your evidence that that a trade agreement as you have outlined can be agreed upon by the nations of the world including the sanctions you have described? The evidence is that such an agreement, with some reasonable means to verify compliance is unreachable.
In your fantasyland such an agreement may be possible, but nowhere else.
“The evidence is that such an agreement, with some reasonable means to verify compliance is unreachable.”
That’s the wonderful thing about you fake “experts.” You can go from pretending to be a climate science expert to the next moment — Poof! You’re an expert in international relations.
OK, you have the floor. What is your evidence that such an agreement is unreachable?
My question and Robert’s response:
You’d have to wonder how a guy who thinks he is smart hasn’t been able to cop onto why, if it’s that easy, it hasn’t been able to be done in 20 years of international negotiations on this issue. And, yes, in case you don’t realise, we’ve been arguing and negotiating about CO2 taxes and ETS for over 20 years.
[e.g. Tradeable emissions permit Scheme ABARE Research Report 93.5). The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) did pioneering research in this matter leading up to the 1992 RIO Conference and to Australia’s commitment to the “Toronto Targets” – “Australia commits to cut its CO2 emissions to 20% below 1988 levels by 2005”.
Robert, zealots do more harm that good for their cause.
Peter, do you have an argument in there somewhere?
Because “We haven’t done it yet therefore it is impossible” is not really an argument.
You asked for a discussion of Tol’s paper. I showed you how to overcome the problem he poses very simply and easily.
“But we don’t have a carbon tax now!”
No we don’t. The economics of it is very easy, the politics is more difficult, which is entirely beside the point under discussion.
You’re ducking the serious discussion you said you wanted in favor of a Gish Gallop.
There is no point debating with zealots. You accuse me of not addressing your issues. I did. I pointed out you’d said nothing that warrants discussion. You didn’t address the substance of the points here http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/11/week-in-review-81112/#comment-228944 or anywhere else. Your a waste of time.
Peter, I’m going to remind you of what you asked for:
I gave you exactly what you asked for, but your fanaticism blew right through it and Gish Galloped your way to a dozen other questions with frack-all to do with Tol’s paper which you asked someone to discuss with you.
I think it’s fairly obvious you are projecting your own “zealotry” onto others. You were never interested in what Tol wrote. Did you even read the paper you directed us to?
Of course I’ve read it. But your comments revealed you haven’t the slightest understanding about the complexities it makes so clear, nor the relevance to policy.
It is clear from your comments you have no idea about the implications of any of this for policy at all.
You clearly are not able to combine the Tol paper with the other material I’ve been presenting. As I said, your comments on the Tol paper are those of a simpleton, as is your discussion of policy.
It’s also clear your mind is tightly shut. You believe in Left ideology and can’t even seriously consider anything the Left does not endorse.
Ah. So you’re not going by what the paper actually says in plain English. More of the subtext.
But you should be able to deal with the explicit meaning, not run away from it. I based my discussion on what the paper actually said, and you ignored that. A little too postmodern for me, Peter!
What the paper actually did was compare carbon tax revenue to total tax revenue and consider what that might imply about practical limitations to how countries can price carbon. It’s all there in the abstract:
Do you see anything there about the political barriers to a carbon tax, or enforcement mechanisms, or fraud prevention? You do not, because that is not actually what this paper is about. Tol is talking about other things.
Deal with the explicit, overt, declarative meaning of the actual words written, and then maybe we can sit in a nice drum circle and talk about how Tol’s paper makes you feel.
Peter’s so cute when he gets wound up. The irony burns.
Hey – Robert,
The whole discussion makes me a little sad. If you get asked to look at a specific paper, you read the whole thing, and you address the points raised, what more can you do?
Who said anything about “unregulated”? You are using strawman tactics. What’s more you, yourself, are doing exactly what you accused me of doing.
Well said Peter. Don’t let the cranks get to you.
I have already entered a comment, but it seens to have disappeared into cyberspace.
I also had to reenter my identity details.
WordPress is like the climate system. It just does its own thing.
ESTIMATIION OF CLIMATE SENSITIVITY
Using the Stefan-Boltzmann equation
Q = kT^4 (Equation 1)
Where Q is the radiation energy emitted by the surface of the earth and k = 5.67 x 10^(-8) W/(m^2 K^4) is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant.
Differentiating Equation 1 gives:
dQ/dT = 4kT^3 = 4*(kT^4)/T = 4Q/T (Equation 2)
Taking the reciprocal of the above equation gives:
dT/dQ = T/(4Q) (Equation 3)
From the above equation, the small change in global mean temperature (GMT) as a result of change in the radiation energy emitted by the globe may be calculated using the equation:
dT = T*dQ/(4Q) (Equation 4)
Approximately, the increase in the radiative forcing for doubling of CO2 concentration is dQ = 4 W/m^2. The earth’s surface temperature is T = 288 K, and using Equation 1 gives Q = 390 W/m^2. Substituting these values in Equation 4 gives an estimate for the increase in global mean temperature for doubling of CO2 concentration:
dT = 288 * 4 /(4*390) = 0.74 deg C.
Which means, Climate Sensitivity = 0.74 deg C.
This is much less than IPCC’s estimate of 1.5 to 5 deg C global warming for doubling of CO2 concentration.
If the average radiant layer were 288K @ 390Wm-2 and you didn’t have to consider other non-radiant means of energy transfer, that would be a fair estimate. But you can’t make that assumption so it ain’t. The increase in resistant/forcing would be near the tropopause. At 249K degrees (218Wm-2) your formula would result in 1.14C increase with 4Wm-2 added. So you are right back where you started.
But even that is not much help because 249K or -24C is a reference temperature above a significant portion of the surface temperature range. The Antarctic most of the year and the Arctic parts of the year are below that temperature. Technically, they would be cooled by the increased CO2. :) Imagine that?
Girma
“Which means, Climate Sensitivity = 0.74 deg C.”
Thats the change in temperature for a change in forcing of 1 Watt.
doubling C02 gives us 3.7Watts.
3.7 * .74 = the sensitivity to DOUBLING C02
congratulations your answer is 2.74C for a doubling of C02
i dub thee a lukewarmer
Thanks dallas and steven.
Points taken.
no problem. see Lucia’s for another way of looking at the derivation.
Note that assuming the radiation energy emitted by the earth is equal to the solar energy it absorbs, we have:
Q = S*(1-a)/4 (Equation 5)
Where S is the solar constant of 1370 W/m^2 on the projected area (PI*r^2) of the earth, which when divided by 4 gives the solar energy per m^2 on the spherical surface area (4PI*r^2) of the earth. “a” is earth’s albedo that is defined as the ratio of the reflected solar energy by the atmosphere to the solar constant.
Substituting Equation 5 into 4 gives:
dT = T*dQ/(S*(1-a)) (equation 6)
The non-feed back warming for doubling of CO2 concentration (dQ = 4 W/m^2) may estimated from the above equation with a = 0.3 as
dT = 288*4/(1370*(1-0.3)) = 288*4/(1370*0.7) = 1.2 deg C.
Which means the non-feed back climate sensitivity = 1.2 deg C.
The problem with this analysis is it assumes a constant albedo of 0.3, which is incorrect. The albedo value changes with the size of the daytime global cloud cover, which is the umbrella of the globe.
Girma,
As you can see, it is hard to not be a lukewarmer since there will be some increase in temperature. The question is how much, relative to what?
I think the relative to what is the most important unknown.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/climate%20stuff/60000yearsofclimatechangeplusorminus125degrees.png
If that paleo reconstruction is right then at the high normal, there would appear to be a “sensitivity” of about 0.8C and at the low normal the sensitivity would appear to be about 3.0 C for the majority of the surface because of the larger range of natural variability. We probably won’t have a good idea of the range of natural variability of a few years, then we can find out if “sensitivity: really makes any sense as it is currently defined.
Girma | August 12, 2012 at 2:03 am said: ”Note that assuming the radiation energy emitted by the earth is equal to the solar energy it absorbs”
Girma, if that was the case – just heat released from the volcanoes, from geothermal heat releases, heat released from fossil fuel; by melting minerals; would have overheated the planet. Time for you to realize that: expansion / shrinking of oxygen & nitrogen are in change of temperature – controlling / regulating the heat in the troposphere, by INSTANTLY shrinking / expanding, full stop!! All the rest is avalanches of crap
You can use nature’s alternative showing 3C/2xCO2 and the great benefits of global warming.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/00f.htm
:)
vukcevic | August 12, 2012 at 2:55 am
Vuk, stop telling lies that ”warmings” are GLOBAL!!! When some place is warmer than normal -> other place must be colder than normal… that is not a good climate. Milder climate is the best – climate can be improved by human; but because of chronic liars like you – ”water in controlling the climate” is ignored.
Everywhere on the planet, where is water storages, topsoil moisture and water vapor = is good climate. Where regular H2O is not available = bad / extreme climate. STOP WITH YOUR PAGAN BULL!!!
Girma, your calculation of climate sensitivity ‘0.74C’ (for doubling CO2).
This is an over estimate for two reasons:
(1) You assume that CO2 intercepts all the Stefan-Boltzmann black-body radiation from the earth. Not so. In fact it only intercepts significant heat at its resonant frequency of about 14.5 microns. How much? Say 5% of your Q. So 95% of Q escapes harmlessly into space.
(2) Even at its resonant frequency CO2 can only accept a finite amount of energy which it turns into motion. Once that energy limit is exceeded, the excess energy escapes harmlessly into space, as in (1). A dramatic example occurred 1940 when a rapidly rising temperature was reversed to rapidly falling. New sensitivity? now <5% of Q.
Girma, I don't intend to be critical of your analysis. Indeed it is good to see someone putting some real science into this 'wicked' problem.
Hans Rosling demonstrates that the population hockey stick is broken, Women from all religions and parts of the globe are having fewer children. Access to education and employment are the big game changer. Cheap energy and technological innovation are the catalyst for opportunities for women as well as men so dinosaur government controls and punitive taxes on energy jest ain’t the way ter go.
US Vice Presidential Candidate on ClimateGate
At issue …are published e-mail exchanges from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). These e-mails from leading climatologists make clear efforts to use statistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.
The CRU e-mail scandal reveals a perversion of the scientific method, where data were manipulated to support a predetermined conclusion. The e-mail scandal has not only forced the resignation of a number of discredited scientists, but it also marks a major step back on the need to preserve the integrity of the scientific community. While interests on both sides of the issue will debate the relevance of the manipulated or otherwise omitted data, these revelations undermine confidence in the scientific data driving the climate change debates.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/8/11/the-vp-candidate-and-climategate.html
The mouth of a right-wing ideologue is the appropriate vehicle for these delusions.
Let us hope Rep Ryan’s ideas about climate science are as well received as his plan to replace Medicare with coupons.
“Let us hope Rep Ryan’s ideas about climate science are as well received as his plan to replace Medicare with coupons.”
Making Medicare be like Food Stamp program doesn’t sound like good idea.
“In the 2011 fiscal year, $76.7 billion in food stamps were distributed. As of March 2012, 46.4 million Americans were receiving on average $133.14 per month in food stamps. Recipients must have at most near-poverty incomes to qualify for benefits, and in Washington, D.C., and Mississippi, more than one-fifth of residents receive food stamps.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assistance_Program
What could be next?
Coupons of for birth control?
Dependable unintended self-parody from a self-declared idiot is a great way to have an early morning laugh.
Thanks as always,
Robert,
Time out young man! If you don’t play nice, out of the sandbox with you! Go stand in the corner and think about why nobody wants to play with you!
Ms. Trenberth can you please escort mister naughtypants to the classroom, he acts like a 3-year old right now, he’s six for crying out loud! And leave the diaper on please, I am done with cleaning up after his tiny ass all day long…
“While interests on both sides of the issue will debate the relevance of the manipulated or otherwise omitted data, these revelations undermine confidence in the scientific data driving the climate change debates, WHICH IS WHAT WE WANT”
Just added the unsaid part there.
“While interests on both sides of the issue will debate the relevance of the manipulated or otherwise omitted data, these revelations undermine confidence in the scientific data driving the climate change debates, WHICH IS WHAT WE WANT, AND WHICH I DON’T WANT, AS IT GOES AGAINST MY DEEPLY-HELD BELIEFS”
And the other unsaid part.
What makes you think you’re immune to confirmation bias?
Society is now deeply troubled worldwide and gradually awakening to the fact that George Orwell’s nightmare prediction, “1984″, slipped quietly in control of world governments after 1945:
http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/
This conquest of democratic governments was assisted by scientists, educators and news reporters who openly promoted items (1-4 ) of the common interests of ordinary citizens, while their paymasters quietly took away items (5,6 ).
1. We all want world peace.
2. An end to racism and nationalistic warfare.
3. An end to the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation.
4. Cooperative efforts to protect Earth’s environment and bounty.
5. Governments controlled by the people being governed, including.
6. Transparency and veracity (truth) of information given to the public.
Here’s the rest of this untriguing story: http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-720
That’s The Bottom Line of the current global climate debate.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://www.omatumr.com
The interview is solid gold. I’d pay per view a Mann v Muller if it happens.
Let’s look at our most recent past. For 150 years cosmic radiation was decreasing and that caused global warming. During the time the Earth was warming there was a 9 percent decrease in cosmic ray intensity. Why? Nominally, it’s the Sun, stupid. It was the continuous increase in solar activity over the last 150 years that shielded the Earth from cosmic rays.
An active Sun caused the decrease in cosmic ray intensity. A more active Sun meant fewer cloud-causing charged particles. This relationship that cosmic rays cause clouds is real: it isn’t a theory at all—it has been demonstrated in controlled scientific experiments in laboratories right here on Earth.
Let’s follow the logic. Less cosmic ray intensity results in less cloud cover. Less cloud cover reduces the Earth’s albedo. The effect of that is less solar radiation being reflected away back into the space and that is what causes the temperature of the Earth’s surface to rise. Consequently, more heat is stored in the oceans, the rivers and lakes and in clays below the Earth’s surface.
What happens to that stored heat? Eventually all of the stored heat is given back to the atmosphere when the climate changes and swings back to a global cooling trend. And, that is the trend we have now. The Sun has been anomalously quiet for a while now. With a less active Sun there has been an increase in cosmic radiation, causing more low clouds, leading to an increase in the Earth’s albedo, and that is reflecting away of more solar radiation. Consequently, the oceans are now giving up their heat; and, the oceans have been cooling for more than a decade.
sadly the data on TSI and cosmic rays dont back up your theory.
call popper. quick
You can deny the Sun if that is what you choose to believe. A society that pays its schoolteachers to continue to preach such beliefs to its children deserves to fail.
T’ain’t TSI alone, mebbe UV & ozone & cosmic rays & biofeedback cloud forming nuclei and mebbe more.
==================
Wagathon | August 12, 2012 at 2:30 am said: ”cosmic radiation was decreasing and that caused global warming. During the time the Earth was warming there was a 9 percent decrease in cosmic ray intensity”
. Wagathon, you shouldn’t mix your astrology with any PHONY GLOBAL warmings. Leave the heavenly bodies and galactic dust, and St Peter getting angry. They are not guilty about your hallucinative phony ”global” warmings. Find if one person knows: ”what was earth’s temp for last year”? Hallucination, lies, mythology crap, shouldn’t mix with reality
We know from the geophysical record of the Earth that global warming alarmists deny that most of the Earth’s history has been spent locked in ice miles thick. We also know that just in the past 10,000 years — marking the entire history of mankind on Earth — that there have been period when the Earth has been warmer than it is today; and, much colder that it is today. Facts are facts.
Wagathon | August 13, 2012 at 10:18 pm complained: ”that global warming alarmists deny that most of the Earth’s history has been spent locked in ice miles thick. We also know that just in the past 10,000 years — marking the entire history of mankind on Earth — that there have been period when the Earth has been warmer than it is today; and, much colder that it is today. Facts are facts”
I haven’t heard the Warmist denying that crap. Their castle was built on that crap as foundation. Remove the past PHONY GLOBAL warmings / include the laws of physics – you & Warmist don’t have a case
Of course there was ice in the past and will be in the future also. But that has nothing to do with any phony ”GLOBAL” ice ages, or phony ”GLOBAL” warming. More coldness on some place means = more warm than normal on another.
2] The amount of ice depends on the amount of AVAILABILITY OF RAW MATERIAL in the atmosphere for creating ice. H2O freezes on zero C. No need extreme coldness for ice; but more heat in the sea – to produce extra raw material for ice. You are mixing mythology as facts. Genuine fact of globally being warmer, or colder cannot exist – because even theoretically is not possible, ask the laws of physics.
Your OSTRICH TACTIC, cannot recognize real facts. Warming GLOBALLY is impossible = therefore, Warmist don’t have a case!
Don’t forget tomorrow, to bring an apple to your schoolteacher!
Nominally, it’s the sun stupid. Case closed.
I have been visiting your site regularly for some time now nearly two years and this is my first comment. I have been impressed by the level of knowledge and common sense exhibited by tour many posters. Recently some posters have started with the use of emoticons on every post. These posters may have some intelligence but appeared to be deficient in common sense so I avoid or skip their postings as they are lacking some important faculties to be taken seriously in discussions here at your excellent site.
I am requesting that posters limit the use of emoticons to clever jokes and other superfluous postings here as you have a serious approach and the multiple emoticons are not appropriate here. Some posters with low common sense may not accept my reasonable request as reasonable so perhaps you may wish to refine your posting policy.
Otherwise I thank you for your excellent discussion group and the many interesting ideas you present
Jim Daly
your many posters not tour
you remind me I must really figure out how to use the smiley faces
test commences
:) :D :o :(
test successful
i wont be using them though
Here, here. I propose a cap and trade market for emoticons. All commenters will get one per page, and fans of *more* emoticons can purchase their neccesary seventeen credits in the secondary market.
As commenters will soon learn, simply replying to your own post earns you two credits.
dalyplanet,
Appreciate yer sensible comment, :-) :-) :-)
Since nobody else has done so ,I would like to point out the earth-shattering finding that the haka shown in the last humorous item that Judith liked is in fact before a Rugby Union match, though it is true that it is Rugby League players who like the big tattoos.
My website is now up and running (www.donaitkin.com) and contains two of a several-part series on ‘An Agnostic’s Guide to Global Warming’ and a piece on the ‘threatened Great Barrier Reef’.
Don, a very sane and sensible blog, but my attempts to post there have been met with “There was internal server error while processing your request” (sic). I hope that this is transient.
“Muller speaks his mind about climategate, Al Gore, Bill McKibben etc., he doesn’t hold any punches.”
Pot:Kettle:Black
“This one is painful. The NYTimes has an article entitled Profits on carbon credits drives output of a harmful gas.”
I thought it was hilarious. Like watching the Keystone Cops. No pain at all.
“The Fleetowner blog has an article titled Dams not diesel now in climate change crosshairs.”
Lashing out at the innocent should be expected as true believers in the evil of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion find their cherished belief shattered by an uncaring reality. There has to be something, somewhere deserving of their ire. The real object their scorn should of course be themselves.
“At Huffington Post Green: “Cattle are being bred with genes”
Cognitive dissonance red alert: Climate change alarmist meet genetically modified food alarmist. Pass the popcorn.
“With his ever-accurate social radar, Bill Clinton put his finger on it recently when he said -”
Something creepy about Bill Clinton putting his finger on anything. His motto these days must be something like my shop in the Marine Corps adopted – The Crossed Screwdriver and Condom – If you can’t fix it then f*ck it.
Is that your tattoo? :-)
Regarding the department of unintended consequences, we got a glimpse of the free market in action there which is profit for the few above all costs to the environment. Thankfully regulation finally won out by controlling that source of profit to a fraction of the actual coolant. Lesson learned.
Another false dichotomy, the ‘more/less’ regulation. It doesn’t matter – only quality and ‘sense’ of the regulations matter and who benefits from them. Also, very important is that the regulations are ‘corruption-resistant’, the more the better.
The free market is very motivated to look for loopholes that some might see as attempting to corrupt the system. It is a constant battle between regulation and corruption whether you talk about taxes or credits.
We have no free market – the existing ‘regulations’ benefit the very rich (the ‘1%’) and the rest is being fooled. If you think it’s free, try to do something that the rich don’t like.
I think we can agree that tax reform is needed because the very rich can get out of too much, and few pay more than 20%, like the 99% do. Anyway, my initial remark was because the anti-regulation people think the free market will solve all the problems rather than create a few (as we saw).
re; try to do something the rich don’t like
I do it every second of every day with 8 acres of campsite and scruffy natural vegetation surrounded by multi-million dollar homes sitting on manicured grounds. I was here first and I’m grandfathered against building codes that no longer permit people to do what I do. It’s for sale if anyone wants to meet my price which is far above market. Eventually someone will and I’ll move even farther away from the city of Austin to where I don’t have to look across the lake valley and see the huge pretentious homes on the other side or the gruesome idiotic ocean-going size vessels navigating an inland lake. I have a bullhorn and sometimes insult them as they pass by for entertainment purposes. I have enough trees so I can’t see anyone to the sides or rear of me but they can see my chain link fence and the dogs that patrol it and I keep piles of junk near the fence out of my site but in their sight. I also have a homemade wooden dock and old boat and 400 feet of shoreline to made into a loud party place for all my less than wealthy friends and family to come make loud drunken and disorderly nuisances of themselves. It’s all quite empowering. I love America. Where else could I get away with all that?
Jim D | August 12, 2012 at 9:14 am |
“I think we can agree that tax reform is needed”
You bet it is. 51% of the tax filers in the United States get back more than they pay in. That’s outrageous. Everyone needs to make some kind of positive contribution to the upkeep of this great nation. If they can’t afford it in money they can perform community service instead. I used to have a sign in my Chevy van when I was a kid back in the 1970’s “Gas, Grass, or Ass. No one rides for free.” I still hold that principle today and apply it to the entire nation. Go Romney/Ryan. Send freeloaders packing.
What a hilariously moronic statement. Shades of the pointy-haired boss:
http://search.dilbert.com/comic/40%25%20Sick
Yes, America has some exceptional freedoms, but not at every level and I think it is losing many at this point. You seem to be ‘lucky’ in your life circumctances.
JimD, Well no doubt. The stronger the regulatory pressure, the greater the “need” to find loopholes to make a living. The problem is not every business is corrupt. Trying to regulate out corruption, chokes the honest businesses more than the corrupt. Over regulation just leads to exactly what you don’t want, bigger businesses capable of dealing with complexity and more “loop hole” industries filling the manufactured “need”.
You suggest no solution. Let corruption happen? Let the big fish eat the small fish? Let the most corrupt survive? The free market ends up with everyone in the grocery industry, for example, either working for or owning the Walmarts of this world, and a missing middle class small store owner, but I digress.
JimD, there is no “letting” corruption happen, it will happen, so there is no solution, only a more efficient way of dealing with reality.
Take food stamps for example. The cost of oversight to stop corruption is more expensive that the reduction in corruption. If you streamline qualification and distribution, there is virtually no increase in waste but a saving in administrative costs. More money gets to the people that need it and they have the right to use it properly or screw up. You can’t make everyone a genius.
That’s defeatism talking. Like saying you can’t stop murder so just reduce the cost of capture, trial, and imprisonment to reduce the negative effect it has on society.
Let’s just make welfare fraud a capital crime and put Sherrif Joe Arapaho in charge of the prisons. This will discourage commission of the crime and force the prison population to become self-supporting. That’s triumphalism talking. :-)
David, not really. It is just allowing people to make their own decisions. It would still be against the law to abuse food stamps, just put less restrictions on the use and stronger penalties if caught abusing the system. Instead of spending so much time trying to stop minor abuse, nail the major violators. In other words, “give people enough rope to hang themselves.”
Right now you can buy cold foods and packaged foods. You can’t buy toilet paper to wipe your butt, a pot to cook the food in or buy prepared hot food. You can buy all the candy, chips, soda, snacks and junk food you like though. I could care less if someone had a cold beer and paid for it with food stamps. It does tick me off when they buy prime rib to sell at half price to get money to buy that cold beer. Let people make their own decisions. If they make bad enough decisions, nail them.
Cut out food stamps altogether and have Fed-Ex deliver pre-selected foods monthly to those who qualify. Bring back the proverbial gub’mint cheese in other words. And make it attainable only through performance of civil service in at least some semblance of equitable trade. No more freeloaders. It’s simple and effective in practice but politically difficult to put in place because there are approximately 100,000,000 freeloaders and a significant fraction of them can vote if there’s no one at the polling place checking ID cards against outstanding arrest warrants or felony convictions. Liberal politicians use entitlements to buy votes. That’s at the heart of the problem. Once the electorate figures out it can vote itself money from the treasury the democracy is doomed.
“In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.” Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
“A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul.” George Bernard Shaw
“It is often easier for our children to obtain a gun than it is to find a good school.” Joycelyn Elders
“Maybe that’s because guns are sold at a profit, while schools are provided by the government.” David Boaz
“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” P.J. O’Rourke
“When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.” James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
“The welfare state reduces a citizen to a client, subordinates them to a bureaucrat, and subjects them to rules that are anti- work, anti-family, anti-opportunity and anti-property… Humans forced to suffer under such anti-human rules naturally develop pathologies. The evening news is the natural result of the welfare state.” Unknown
“I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS.”
Malcolm Forbes***, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism
Forbes needs to get out more. A majority of tax filers get back more than they pay in so for them April 15 is the gift that keeps on giving. -Dave Springer
Regulated markets are more corrupt than free markets. In a free market greed is constrained because a majority of participants can’t benefit from it so they ostracize those who try because they are free to do so. In a regulated market the rules are set up to benefit a few rulemakers and the same rules preclude non-benefitting participants from declining to engage because they need the product or service and aren’t free to become honest providers themselves. The medical-industrial complex is a prime example. You can’t, for instance, buy a huge range of effective, well-tested drugs without permission from the medical-industrial complex. Not only can’t you purchase them for others you can’t even purchase them for yourself. So you total control of a good fraction of the nation’s free market economy is sectioned off and put under regulatory control to benefit a small number of insiders. Costs skyrocket as a result without any incremental increase in quality. The education-industrial complex is another prime example where regulation is maximal and performance minimal. In the military-industrial complex where costs are sky-high the performance is top shelf and peerless. I’m not sure why it’s an exception. Maybe we should turn over control of medicine and education to the Pentagon. They won’t reduce the cost but they’ll produce a world class product if history is any guide.
Jim D
Look at reality of higher pollution with poverty.
Compare indoor air pollution with poverty/wealth.
e.g., Indoor air pollution in developing countries: a major environmental and public health challenge Nigel Bruce et al.
Compare the actual evidence for “free market” with socialism.
Soviet Pollution: A Lethal Legacy
By contrast the greater commercial productivity with capitalism, the LOWER the pollution and greater care for the environment.
Your antipathy for the “free market” appears myopic ignorance of the full range of reality. Harping on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming ignores the far greater harm of today’s pollution in developing countries.
That looks like a stretch. I would say China and the former Soviet Union are poster-countries for lack of regulation on pollution, if anything. They put productivity ahead of the environment.
Indeed. And of course it is five-year-old reasoning to claim that if a little of something is good, a lot must be better.
The problems of a command-and-control economy don’t imply an unregulated market is the optimal state of affairs.
Hayek himself acknowledged the need for environmental regulations. But there’s the difference. Hayek was an economist and a philosopher, while his would-be followers have turned the free-market ethos into a rigid and fanatical religious faith, scornful of evidence.
The USSR and Eastern Europe generally had very low productivity, because they put first the maintenance of power and control. After the USSR collapsed, it emerged that the Eastern bloc’s economic performance had been far worse than anyone in the West suspected, and way below what any official USSR stats had shown.
“Profit for the few?” Living standards of the rich and poor were stagnant worldwide from Roman times until the advent of the Industrial revolution in England in the 18th C, since when there has been enormous growth due to Western capitalism and trade, with billions of people coming out of poverty in the last 60 years.
Jim D, glancing through, you seem totally ignorant of economic reality. I strongly recommend that you read Matt Ridley’s The Ratiional Optimist in order to become better informed.
Hmmm, a comment (at 10.59 pm) awaiting moderation, when I’m so moderate! What can I have done?
QUESTION
As the atmospheric CO2 Concentration pattern is fixed with a near prefect correlation coefficient of R = 0.9995 since 1958 as follows:
http://bit.ly/OiuxFZ
why do we need scenarios??????
Girma, my take is that the pattern will change. I predict less than 1.5 ppm/ year for the decade 2011 – 2021. Unless there’s no cooling.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120809.html
Girma
You raise an interesting question.
The exponential growth of your projection seems to fit very well for a world of “business-as-usual”, provided other factors, which might have a direct impact on atmospheric CO2, continue as they have in the past: global population growth, global degree of industrialization, global (constant currency adjusted) GDP growth, etc.
Your formula would have the CO2 level by year 2100 at 825 ppmv.
This is where IPCC have relied on various computer modeled “storylines and scenarios”, which project atmospheric levels of 584 ppmv (Case B1) to 868 ppmv (Case A1F1) by 2100.
An upper limit that could ever be reached (assuming the increase is caused by human emissions) would seem to be based on the total amount of fossil fuels remaining on our planet. Based on recent WEC estimates, this constrains the upper limit on atmospheric CO2 to around 1,030 ppmv, to be reached some day in the far distant future when all fossil fuel resources have been depleted entirely.
I’d say that your formula may well work for the next decade or two, but will give exaggerated estimates if used for longer-range forecast, such as for the year 2100.
Just my thoughts.
Max
I don’t believe for a New York minute that elevated CO2 level will remain elevated for centuries after anthropogenic emission slows or halts.
Every year since the industrial revolution began anthropogenic CO2 has been greater than the year before. Each year only half that anthropogenic production “sticks” in the atmosphere. The remainder is taken up by a natural sink. The capacity of the sink increases in proportion to anthropogenic production increase so the net accumulation is always exactly half of anthro emission. This should work exactly in reverse such that if anthropogenic emission were to halt the accumulation would reduce at the same rate it accumlated. Given most of the accumulation was in just a few recent decades a few decades is what it would take for most of it to be gone.
This behavior is characteristic of an unchanging (at least in short terms of centuries) natural equilibrium point for CO2 around 280ppm (interglacial-normal). The farther away from natural equilibrium the system is driven by anthrpogenic input the harder the system tries to move back toward equilibrium. This relationship has held rock solid for as far back as we have reliable data to look at.
I therefore have a long range concern for my descendants about what happens when we run out of fossil carbon to keep the atmospheric level fluffed up. If it starts to decline then primary production in the food chain will decline along with it as temperature falls and the atmosphere becomes less fertile. As a civilization we’re far more susceptable to harm from cooling than we are from warming. Interglacial periods don’t last forever. What if anything is going to prevent the Holocene Interglacial from ending? Not fossil fuels. There just isn’t enough of it that’s economically recoverable to keep the atmosphere topped off at some level that thwarts the return of mile-deep glaciers at any latidtude higher than 40 degrees.
We can always count on superstitious and ignorant little-minded fascists’ burning all of the corpses that their contribution to society brings about to contribute to a ‘fluffed up’ atmosphere.
You state, as though they are fact, things that are completely untrue. The CO2 has centuries before it will decline again even if emission stops now. A book on this is ‘The Long Thaw’ by David Archer. There is no controversy about this point, and I thought many AGW skeptics would be correcting you on this too.
Estimates of fossil fuel reserves are notoriously lowball, dating back to the 18th century when they doubted oil would ever be discovered outside of PA.
No doubt, there is some upper limit on recoverable fossil fuels, but it would be foolish to think we know what that is.
Also recall the carbon-cycle feedbacks will add more CO2 and methane to the atmosphere.
“Estimates of fossil fuel reserves are notoriously lowball”
WEBSTER! Paging Webster :)
Excellent. Perhaps we’ll get the pleasant Loire Valley climate in London sometime soon.
We’ve been promised it for thirty years, but no sign of it yet.
@Girma “why do we need scenarios”
Because the equation you offered is an observation in search of an explanation. Without an explanation and without a history of holding true millenia after millenia we can’t say with any assurance it has any lasting predictive power.
You need scenarios to explore uncertainty. Human emissions do not floow a law of nature. They are dependent upon human choice. Choices to have babies. choices to move to a more energy intensive economy. Choices to decarbonize. Choices to change land use.
In Ar5 there are basically these scenarios or what ifs?
What if forcing in 2100 is 3.5W, 4.5W, 6W, or 8.5W
Since we cannot know the answer we explore the range.
its called sensitivity testing.
Steven
The pattern for CO2 concentration has been FIXED since 1958 as follows:
Atmospheric CO2 Concentration => 256.065 + 96.828*e^[0.0161*(Year-1990)], with a near perfect correlation coefficient of R = 0.9995
Why do you need scenarios for projections, say, for the next decade?
Don Aitkin, Jest commented on yr site on the intellectual Robert Manne . }
Also, yr Popper quote. +1 fer the open society.
Say Robert, do wot the teacher tells yer.
(Thinks aloud,) Hmm …kids these days ain’t got no manners. Can’t spell neither. )
Major announcement…
LOD_1_13
http://i47.tinypic.com/4rtfro.png
Nastrom & Belmont (1980), Lambeck & Hopgood (1982), & Zhennian (1990) had less data cycles and thought it was the solar cycle in annual-grain decadal-extent LOD, but it’s terrestrial polar motion (which has been coherent with J-N since the late 1930s).
“Apart from all other reasons, the parameters of the geoid depend on the distribution of water over the planetary surface.” — N.S. Sidorenkov
Hindsight’s 20/20 on the interhemispheric angular momentum imbalance.
J+N (12.8) & J-N (11.07):
2 sides of the same coin.
This deserves a formal write up.
When time permits I’ll graph annual_13’s analog to semiannual_11:
http://i49.tinypic.com/2jg5tvr.png
This brings us to within one strike of publicly cracking the code of ENSO.
Now’s a good time for (careful) investors to review Dickey & Keppenne (1997).
Yer ever heard of something found with graphs called “a legend”?
Study up on it.
Those in a position to understand will …& without cosmetic delays to label time series that are well known to serious climate enthusiasts. Refinement? Yes, when time & resources permit. Something unfamiliar? Ask – & be specific.
Correction:
“J+N (12.8) & J-N (11.07)”
should of course read
J+N (11.07) & J-N (12.8).
—
A few informal supplementary notes:
variable = LOD
1 = annual-grain
P = Paul wavelet (annual-grain decadal-extent) power
M = Morlet wavelet (annual-grain decadal-extent) power
nCRm = neutron Count Rate moscow
CH = Coronal Holes
PM = Polar Motion envelope (6.4 year)
J-N = Jupiter Neptune beat (12.8 year)
If none of this is making sense, look at the Dickey & Keppenne (1997) paper in detail.
What they didn’t say:
The interannual variations are constrained in temporal aggregate.
(Does anyone remember the wisdom shared here by Tomas Milanovic? Don’t be paradoxically blinded by spatiotemporal phase mixing. Use CLT. Adjust focus to discern universal constraints on aggregates.)
update…
Further sharpening climate insight
via Central Limit Theorem & Law of
Conservation of Angular Momentum…
Decadal interhemispheric angular momentum imbalance flipped wobble polarity ~1997-1998: http://i46.tinypic.com/2zyac20.png .
Warning:
In the 1980s & 1990s, serious academics speculated (using shorter time series than we have now) that decadal-extent annual-grain LOD was related to solar activity. It’s actually decadal-extent SEMI-annual-grain LOD that relates to solar activity. Decadal-extent annual-grain LOD relates primarily to polar motion.
Why didn’t past researchers realize they were looking (cross-ENSO) at coupling of wobble & spin? It’s certainly a no-brainer with the benefit of hindsight.
One of my colleagues – after looking at the graph for several puzzled minutes – cracked up laughing when he suddenly & intensely realized the simplicity of what was overlooked by past researchers. Comical – but painfully tragic at the same time.
Implications: Semi-annual & annual LOD envelopes can be decomposed into decadal & interannual components. This finding liberates climate research in ways that few will be capable of immediately appreciating.
Apparently the current arctic melt season will be the shortest on record and the melt so far is exactly what climate skeptics expected all along.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/shortest-arctic-melt-season-on-record/
climate skepticism. Gotta love it.
Arctic ice melt is the study of noise. Average net flux is -7W/m2.
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter05/Images/Fig5-10B.htm
Interesting but academic-only. It’s also a negative feedback for what little action there is. Ice is a great insulator. As it disappears the Arctic ocean surface can release heat faster to space. It releases more than it absorbs because of ocean conveyor belt circulation pulling in tropically warmed water. If the water gets a little warmer than normal the amount of insulting ice cover decreases and the extra warmth is released to space faster. It acts very much like a thermostat in an automotive water-cooling system. The thermostat opens wider the warmer the coolant gets which allows more coolant to circulate through the radiator.
Opening up 10% more or less is noise. It’s mostly just a reflection of what PDO and AMO are doing. The green line is Antarctic Ice Extent which has been rising all the while Arctic Ice is falling. I broke Arctic sea ice extent into three trend lines… Pre-1998 mother of all El Ninos, the El Nino effect period, and post effect. You can see the sea ice rate of decrease change to a faster rate beginning in 1998 and then 10 years later grind to a halt when the recent back-back La Ninas took hold. All the while Antarctic sea ice just keeps increasing year over year. This NH/SH dichotomy is not characteristic of well mixed greenhouse gases. No doubt there’s an anthropogenic influence in the NH but all told not very much of it is GHG related. It’s land use and soot related. We can pretty much treat the SH as not-very much effected by anthropognic factors and NH as anthropogenic-influenced. The kind and distribution of the additional warming NH vs. SH are the data which tell us what kind of influences are at work. Less surface warming than cloud-height warming is indicative of a greenhouse gas. More surface warming than cloud-height warming is indicative of surface albedo change and/or fewer clouds and/or increase in solar “constant”.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/every/mean:12/plot/nsidc-seaice-s/every/mean:12/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/from:1975/to:1997/trend/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/from:1997/to:2007/trend/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/from:2007/to:2013/trend
“Arctic ice melt is the study of noise.”
It’s not just a river in Egypt, is it?
It’s some bitter wine you’ll get with those sour grapes.
Any time you feel like visiting reality, drop us a line and we’ll show you around.
So, you agree that it is a good thing that the Tea Party now has a candidate for president to stand up to the commies?