by Judith Curry
It’s your turn to introduce topics for discussion.
A few items from my twitter feed:
Arthur Petersen: Roger Pielke Jr.’s Blog on our new paper on disaster losses and climate change[link]
The Onion: Climate Change Skeptics Could Reach Catastrophic Levels By 2020 http://buff.ly/WP4Ym3
Matthew C. Nisbet: Why we need knowledge-based journalism in politicized science debates http://goo.gl/D9NPlQ
Megan Darby: Harvard historian: strategy of climate science denial groups ‘extremely successful’ | Graham Readfearn http://gu.com/p/4v7k5/tw
And finally, a cartoon:
This is some interesting time series analyses I recently worked on:
http://contextearth.com/2014/07/17/correlation-of-time-series/
Webby
Nice work
tonyb
Nice
I noticed that first graph (dipole) looks like it has an upward trend from 1955 to 1998 and downward after that; pretty much like global temperature.
good work web!
That’s a well-known compensating effect of a La Nina event, as it will lead to a temporary transient cooling of the average global temperature. String a few more La Nina events than El Nino events in a row and the global warming can be partially compensated by transient cooling.
Thats what I figured, but you explained it very well.
Come on guys – it is bizarre nonsense. The SOI is defined as an index of the standardised SLP at Darwin and Tahiti.
SOI = 10 [ Pdiff – Pdiffav ]/ SD(Pdiff)
The differences occur for physical reasons to do with ENSO processes. Now that’s a surprise.
The SOI is not defined separately at Tahiti and Darwin. It just isn’t.
I didn’t go any further than that – guaranteed waste of my time.
Tahiti and Darwin form a standing-wave dipole. It is not a perfect one but based on circumstances of their geographical location it is fortunate to have. The quality if the dipole is how well it is anti-correlated. A correlation coefficient of -1 is as good as it gets.
The value of the Tahiti Darwin dipole is -0.55 which makes it more than adequate as a characteristic for measuring the strength of ENSO.
‘From the exhaustive correlation studies of Walker in the 1920’s to the 1980 Kelvin wave-front theories of Wyrtki and others, the phenomenon known as the Southern Oscillation has attracted the considerable interest of many capable meteorologists and oceanographers, yet a comprehensive explanation of the observed characteristics has not yet been obtainable. The present study, as distilled from numerous original and review articles, presents an outline of the historical development of the observations and theories pertaining to the Southern Oscillation, with an emphasis on the evolution in thought on this fascinating subject.
The earliest work on the Southern Oscillation (SO) was detailed in a presidential address to the Royal Meteorological Society by G.T. Walker in 1928 (contained in Walker, 1928). The rudiments of the SO were first suggested in 1897 by H.H. Hildebrandsson who took ten years of pressure data from a world-wide network of 68 stations and noted certain relationships between the interannual trends of some to the plotted time series. Again using purely graphical techniques, Norman and W.J.S. Lockyer in 1902 confirmed Hildebrandsson’s discovery of an apparent “seesaw” in pressure between South America and the Indonesian region. Hildebrandsson felt that these interannual variations, affecting such a large portion of the globe, could not be caused by anything of tropical or even temperate origin, as he believed these regions were dominated by “circumstances” of too regular a nature. Instead he felt that the variations must be explainable by changes in the ice conditions of the polar seas.
In the 1920’s and 30’s, Sir Gilbert Walker and his collaborator, E.W. Bliss, were interested in the development of a seasonal forecast scheme for the prediction of the strength of the Indian monsoon. Walker’s efforts, which have been thoroughly summarized by Montgomery (1940a), were largely based on the compilation of voluminous tables of contemporaneous and serial (lag) correlation coefficients. Walker obtained pressure, temperature, and rainfall records, usually of around 40 years duration, from a much more extensive station network than had been available to Hildebrandsson. Each record was averaged by season within each year and then grouped by season to form four time series for each variable at each station. Walker also included time series of such miscellaneous variables as river flood stages, mountain snowpack depths, lake levels, and sunspot activity in an effort to detect cause and effect relationships between these and the standard meteorological parameters. In an examination of any coefficient that was “greater than the probable largest” he noticed that in large regions the seasonal parameters tended to behave uniformly and that there were pairs of regions in which the parameters tended to act in unison but in an opposite sense to each other. Furthermore, these characteristics were found in each season around the same “centers of action” with only minor variation in their position or in the shape of the areas under their influence. Since a major portion of the Southern Hemisphere was affected by the phenomenon (and there was already a North Pacific Oscillation and a North Atlantic Oscillation), Walker decided to call it the “Southern Oscillation” and described it as “the tendency of pressure at stations in the Pacific … to increase, while pressure in the region of the Indian Ocean decreases.”
‘ http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/misc/hxsoi.html
Those who don’t know history – are condemned to be misguided twits.
WHUTever.
If anyone is interested in unlocking the math behind ENSO and El Nino, we have an open-source effort going on at the Azimuth project.
http://azimuth.mathforge.com
http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com
People are approaching this from several different angles and we are using various statistical techniques to judge what works the best.
Well, FWIW, I would suspect that since La Nina lasted about 25 years from the late 50s and El Nino about 25 years after that then La Nina should go on for another 10 years or so. Like you always say, though, its chaotic so there is no use in predictions.
A continuum exists between predictable models and completely chaotic regimes. Within that continuum lies a class of nonlinear models that show erratic behavior yet can be solved given the forcing function. The premise is that ENSO falls into this description — and we can’t know this unless somebody tries out these models.
Chaos in the physics sense is completely deterministic. It implies that the system consists of control variables and multiple negative and positive feedbacks leading to abrupt shifts between states. It is only by looking at long term behavior that one can begin to grasp some of the dynamics.
The particular dynamic starts with upwelling in the eastern Pacific that sets up feedbacks across the Pacific – including seesawing pressure fields. At some stage there is a relaxation event in the western Pacific – a shift in pressure and winds fields that seems to be triggered by the Madden-Julian Oscillation in the right circumstances.
So this is the starting point – but it explains none of the longer term modulation of the intensity and frequency of ENSO. Twenty to forty year patterns of shifts between states but also centennial and millennia shifts in intensity and frequency.
e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Vance2012-AntarticaLawDomeicecoresaltcontent.jpg.html?sort=3&o=188
Shifts to enhanced El Nino in the 20th century – along with changes in ENSO period. Longer term persistence in a La Nina dominant state for centuries beforehand.
Multi-decadal variability in the Pacific is defined as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (e.g. Folland et al,2002, Meinke et al, 2005, Parker et al, 2007, Power et al, 1999) – a proliferation of oscillations it seems. The latest Pacific Ocean climate shift in 1998/2001 is linked to increased flow in the north (Di Lorenzo et al, 2008) and the south (Roemmich et al, 2007, Qiu, Bo et al 2006) Pacific Ocean gyres. Roemmich et al (2007) suggest that mid-latitude gyres in all of the oceans are influenced by decadal variability in the Southern and Northern Annular Modes (SAM and NAM respectively) as wind driven currents in baroclinic oceans (Sverdrup, 1947).
SAM and NAM are in turn linked to higher and lower solar activity – and we go full circle with spinning up of the gyres setting the conditions for enhanced upwelling.
‘Figure 12 shows 2000 years of El Nino behaviour simulated by a state-of-the art climate model forced with present day solar irradiance and greenhouse gas concentrations. The richness of the El Nino behaviour, decade by decade and century by century, testifies to the fundamentally chaotic nature of the system that we are attempting to predict. It challenges the way in which we evaluate models and emphasizes the importance of continuing to focus on observing and understanding processes and phenomena in the climate system. It is also a classic
demonstration of the need for ensemble prediction systems on all time scales in order to sample the range of possible outcomes that even the real world could produce. Nothing is certain.’ http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full.pdf
Chaotic is not chaotic and webby has not the slightest clue.
This is a meaningless statement.
That exact quoted phrase has zero occurrences on a Google search and indicates a desire to replace science with poetic license.
As I took some pains to discuss – deterministic chaos as it is more formally known is not chaotic in the dictionary definition. It is completely deterministic.
I find it difficult to believe that someone could not understand this. Clearly the more rational explanation for this latest ingenuous display is misdirection, duplicity, bad faith. It would be in keeping with past behavior.
But the rule is never to underestimate the power of human stupidity.
Rob Ellison said that “Chaotic is not chaotic”. And another guy from Oz by the name of angech said that the correlation coefficient of coin tosses is 0.5.
The objective is to find out if a phenomena such as the SOI is in any way predictable. This is no different than any other challenge that has confronted scientists through the ages. No use for you guys to obscure it by applying misdirection.
Naw – I am suggesting that the system needs to be understood first. Something that webby – oddly – seems to neglect.
Understanding is the key. That is why I am starting from first-principles and evaluating the hydrodynamics of sloshing. Most of the research on sloshing on a smaller scale has come out of the scandinavian countries.
Yes – sure – sloshing.
http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/26/open-thread-19/#comment-611908
The hydraulics of fetch dynamics has a long and interesting history – but no one mistakes a periodic solution for an elliptical bathtub as anything more than homeopathic math when madly applied to ENSO.
Well – no sane or credible scientist. Perhaps only in the maddest recesses of the blogosphere.
Like the phrase “Chaotic is not chaotic”, he has again fabricated a phrase “elliptical bathtub” that exists nowhere else but in his own mind.
I have discussed the difference between deterministic chaos and dictionary twice just above. It is something that should be understood before discussing weather, climate, models or ENSO. Webby doesn’t begin to have a clue.
There are 2nd order partial differential equations that can be analytically solved to give periodic solutions for standing waves for an elliptical water body of constant depth. The math as it applies to ENSO is homeopathic – diluted to the point of ultra-trace irrelevance. Sloshing is a bathtub model of ENSO lacking any of the physical processes I have outlined above.
I believe the purpose is to delude people into imaging he knows what he is talking about – and so gain a fleeting self affirmation otherwise lacking. Mixed with deliberate misdirection – repeated endlessly for effect – and ongoing abuse and aggression. Do you see the pattern?
Whether he actually believes his mad math and fantasy physics is another question. There is lots of mad pseudo science on the web.
The assumption of an elliptical geometry for the volume is irrelevant when considering a generic sloshing model. What we are looking at is perturbing a sinusoidal equation of state with a nonlinear response function so that we can capture the erratic nature of the ENSO sloshing. There is absolutely nothing crazy about this analysis. Skeptics and deniers are always screaming about scientists assuming a linear response, and then when you consider nonlinearities, the deniers are still up in arms.
I put the code on the site so anyone else can try it out for themselves. You have to have the skills for how to solve differential equations or have something like Mathematica available, but there is really nothing mathematically unusual about this approach. NOAA and NASA and all the other climate sites continue to use the term “sloshing” to describe the behavior of ENSO, so it is only logical for the curious-minded to seek out the formal math behind sloshing. It is apparently a very precise term in the hydrodynamic literature and one that has much current interest.
Amazing. I know better than to get into a discussion with webby. However, the level of deception and dissimulation is just immense. I can just shake my head in dismay.
The elliptical bathtub equations have analytical solutions for standing waves that look like this.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Mathieuplots_zps3ec1411a.png.html?sort=3&o=28
There are 2 ways to solve differential equations. Analytically in concise expressions or numerically. There are no analytic solutions for these equations for more complex cases and numerical solutions that involve a whole different set of procedures. Webby takes periodic solutions that are analytical solutions for an elliptical bathtub and at least tries to convince others – if not himself – that they apply to the Pacific Ocean. This is not using anything to solve differential equations. It calls up the solutions for an elliptical bathtub built into Mathematica. This is just one of the deliberate – or self deluded – deceptions in play.
They allow – however – webby to delude himself that they magically describe ‘sloshing’ in the Pacific and that this has some relevance to ENSO. The periodic solutions look nothing like ENSO however. It is merely sympathetic magic – homeopathic math that provides a convenient periodic starting point. The method then is to modulate the curve with something that does look like ENSO.
See panel A.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n5/fig_tab/ngeo2138_F2.html
Thus it is simple curve fitting using dissimulation – deliberate or delusional – to describe the process as something else.
Sloshing might conceivably be an ENSO mechanism – described always as Reynolds and Kelvin waves. However, no one in their right minds imagines that this is anywhere near the totality of ENSO processes.
Sorry Rossby waves – Reynolds has to do with hydraulic flow regimes.
You still have it wrong in that sloshing dynamics does not require an elliptical volume. In terms of a historical progression, the nonlinear Mathieu equation formulation was initially developed for elliptical membranes, such as what is found on drumheads, and then adapted for other applications.
Yet as far as modern analyses of sloshing, the nonlinear perturbation does not require an elliptical geometry. Furthermore, in the blog post I linked to above, the solution is not analytical but purely numerical as I use the Mathematica NDSolve routine as shown in the charts. The code is all right there.
The analytical solution you use works only for elliptical bathtubs of constant depth. It is not remotely relevant to the Pacific. You are modulating a trigonometric curve with the QBO. It is all described above.
That you then say this is a numerical technique is just lies or delusion. It is all
… utterly evident – using numbers to solve an equation through time is vaguely a numerical technique but it is not what is meant by numerical solutions of differential equations.
Webby is nothing but dissimulation and misdirection – prattling and preening.
That is part of the theory behind separable partial differential equations. The temporal and spatial components can be separated and solved independently. They might not teach this to civs, therefore the confusion.
Another red herring – the solution for the interference pattern of standing waves is a trig function. Plugging the x coordinate into it isn’t separation of variavles – which is btw an algebraic technique.
Nor is it numerical solution of differential equation in or more dimensions using finite difference or finite elements methods.
Stop with the trivial and disingenuous math babble – it just makes you look sillier. If that is possible.
Another red herring – the solution for the interference pattern of standing waves … is a trig function. Plugging the x coordinate into it isn’t separation of variables – which is btw an algebraic technique.
Nor is it numerical solution of differential equations in one or more dimensions using finite difference or finite elements methods.
Stop with the trivial and disingenuous math babble – it just makes you look sillier. If that is possible.
It is late here – but what a deluge of nonsense from webby. I had almost forgotten what a persistent pest he is with his mad math and freaky physics.
He can’t believe it all – it must include much that he spouts just to make silly points about irrelevancies that he thinks might convince someone he is clever – for the frisson of ego affirmation.
The guy is very much the contrarian skeptic, unable to consider any science that will move the yardsticks and advance the science.
It is worthwhile commenting here because this is where the desperation for proving any aspect of climate science wrong is the strongest. Definitely more negative feedback here than at the Azimuth Project, where several models are being considered as plausible candidates to explain or to characterize ENSO.
http://azimuth.mathforge.org/discussion/1358/4/experiments-in-el-nino-analysis-and-prediction/#Item_23
See you there, if you dare.
A contrarian is someone who thinks webby’s nonsense is total bonkers.
Azimuth is taking baby steps with networks to extend predictions – copying a recent paper – the most basic of process description and a teaching model that is decades old. Although a good teaching tool no serious progress can be made with this.
It is a bunch of amateurs just starting to get up to speed. I have nothing against interested amateurs – wake me up if anything interesting happens.
See how this guy treats everyone — as if they are a bunch of amateurs. Yet the Azimuth Project is already way beyond what he is capable of. It will be interesting to watch AP advance while he spins his wheels.
They are a bunch of amateurs who have not spent the years necessary to make real progress. Honesty is the best policy. They should be glad to acknowledge it. The admission of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.
They are not amateurs when it comes to machine learning&other advanced techniques that may reveal connections not spotted by others.
You certainly have a negative outlook on science and what we can do if we put our brains together.
You certainly have a negative outlook on science and what we can do if we put our brains together.
OK, the Consensus Climate People refuse to put their brains together with anyone who disagrees! They were invited to the Climate Change Conference and none came. They will not discuss or debate with anyone who disagrees. Real Science is always Skeptic and Real Science always discusses and debates with those who disagree.
They do know that the government will not continue to fund their alarmist programs if they express any Skeptic views.
This IS THE PROBLEM!
This makes it really easy for most people to get a negative outlook on “so called” Consensus Climate Science!
This will continue to grow the Skeptic Camp. This is Good! This is Wonderful!
Their Chicken Little Messages are doing what our Skeptic Messages cannot do.
WEB you state
The Southern Oscillation embedded with the ENSO behavior is what is called a dipole [1], or in other vernacular, a standing wave. Whenever the atmospheric pressure at Tahiti is high, the pressure at Darwin is low, and vice-versa.
This is not true.
There is no physical reason for the atmospheric pressures at Tahiti and Darwin to be aligned in a standing wave. You can have the same atmospheric pressure at both places on the same day if not at the same time many times a month.
You can of course drop a standing wave on it by thousands of different mechanisms and become excited at fin ding a fit temporarily.
The pressures like ENSO take a random walk around set limits and patterns evolve which are random WEB.
“That is why the standing wave is not perfect and far from being a classic sine wave.””
You state “the Anti-correlation between Tahiti and Darwin. The correlation coefficient is calculated to be 0.55 or 55/100.Note that this correlation coefficient is “only” 0.55 when comparing the two time-series, yet the two sets of data are clearly aligned. What this tells us is that other factors, such as noise in the measurements, can easily drop correlated waveforms well below unity.
A correlation of 0.55 as you choose to calculate it is simply not flipping enough coins. Go back a few hundred years and you will find series where the correlation is 0.45, ie the opposite of what you statel. Take it all into account and you will arrive at 0.5 ie toss a coin.
‘Furthermore, these characteristics were found in each season around the same “centers of action” with only minor variation in their position or in the shape of the areas under their influence. Since a major portion of the Southern Hemisphere was affected by the phenomenon (and there was already a North Pacific Oscillation and a North Atlantic Oscillation), Walker decided to call it the “Southern Oscillation” and described it as “the tendency of pressure at stations in the Pacific … to increase, while pressure in the region of the Indian Ocean decreases.”
‘ http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/misc/hxsoi.html
Oh – for God’s sake learn something and don’t just pull nonsense out of your arse.
Time series in, time series out. [yawn]
angech said:
This is just plain wrong. Independently tossing two perfect coins will give a correlation coefficient of 0 in the limit of an infinite sequence. For short finite sequences, any value between -1 and 1 is possible. That is when significance testing becomes important.
Typical mad math and fantasy physics from webby.
How do you confuse correlation between series with probabilities in a coin toss?
No, your Aussie countryman angech was the one that was having problems.
It is just insane. Mind bogglingly so. Just what do you imagine that anyone with any slight understanding of statistics and probability imagines this means? It is divorced from reality that it seems random notions plucked from the air to sow confusion. Perhaps one echoing your own. I just don’t know what you imagine you are doing.
The red noise variation of random walk has often been used to describe ENSO. More discussion here:
http://azimuth.mathforge.org/discussion/1393/blog-el-nino-project-part-6/?Focus=11640#Comment_11640
[1]D. L. Rudnick and R. E. Davis, “Red noise and regime shifts,” Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers, vol. 50, no. 6, pp. 691–699, 2003.
Change the subject? You are well advised to.
But everything in climate is deterministic – even chaos. You really don’t have a clue.
Sloshing dynamics are described by equations that have solutions that are on the verge of chaotic. Yet they are much more “well-behaved” than the typical Lorenz equation used to describe climate. As a for instance, sloshing equations are far less sensitive to initial conditions and to forcing functions, in that they smoothly vary in more predictable ways when the conditions change. That is one measure of determinism — when you can predict the direction of a response given a change in the input. There are many nonlinear differential equations that will change wildly in their solution with the slightest change of inputs, but the hydrodynamic sloshing equations are not of this class when operating in the stable regime.
Best not to think about this too deeply – that way lies madness.
Are you projecting? You seem to have quite the talent for hair-trigger rage.
The power of dissimulation and misdirection? Do you believe any of the cr@p you spout?
Do you say it without believing it – bad faith – or do you believe it – delusion. Perhaps a little from column A…
You do have a rage problem.
Judy – this comment from webby needs to be removed. It serves no purpose at all and I find it deeply offensive.
I most certainly don’t have a rage problem of any sort with anyone.
A conversation with webby inevitably descends into personal abuse and aggression – and this just goes that step too far into unwarranted and unjustifiable personal slander. As he has time and again.
I find this insult especially offensive having spent decades doing martial learning the sort of self discipline that webby seems to find alien. My responses are always measured – if occasionally abrupt when presented with persistent foolishness.
Let’s face it – there is no greater or persistent foolishness than webby’s. I have gone into some depth – including on the quite incredible confusion of correlation and probabilities with a simple coin toss. He has no credible responses at all to my quite exact descriptions of his curve fitting methods – a quite different but rational description from the mad math and freaky physics he prattles and preens with.
I am assume he says the things he says off the top of his head – but whether he has self knowledge to recognize that it is incredible nonsense – or whether he convinces himself it is the height rationality. Perhaps the latter – bizarre behaviour either way.
Let’s correct this typo.
I find this insult especially offensive having spent decades doing martial (arts and) learning the sort of self discipline that webby seems to find alien.
Does this guy even know how to communicate in English?
Sloshing is a physical behavior that most people have some intuitive feel for. Water that piles up on one side of the volume is fighting against gravity and building up an impressive store of potential energy. This energy is released when the water tends to flow back in the reverse direction. Yet since this is somewhat of an inviscid environment, i.e. free from viscous frictional losses, the flow back overshoots and the water piles back on the other side. As one can see, this process will continue similar to a pendulum, and if there is a consistent periodic forcing, from solar or lunar influences for example, the sloshing behavior will get reinforced periodically.
This blog post features animations of the sloshing dynamics
http://contextearth.com/2014/07/05/sloshing-animation/
The buildup of water has to come from somewhere and part of the replenishment will be exchange of warm surface waters with colder deep water. This leads to a concurrent oscillation of SST.
Saying that, all I am after at the present time is to describe the mathematics of the sloshing behavior. Returning to people’s intuition, everyone has a feel for how hard it is to anticipate sloshing motions as the oscillations set in motion are very often erratic unless one is very careful in avoiding fast movements. Yet that is exactly the behavior that researchers such as Faltinsen and Frandsen try to model with their nonlinear mathematical formulations.
One can only be a callous anti-scientific contrarian to continually attack the premise that similar equations may apply to larger volumes of water such as the Pacific Ocean, without any specific flaws to point out. The points you made such as the requirements for an elliptical basin do not hold any water.
[1]O. M. Faltinsen and A. N. Timokha, “Sloshing,” 2009.
[2]J. B. Frandsen, “Sloshing motions in excited tanks,” Journal of Computational Physics, vol. 196, no. 1, pp. 53–87, 2004.
The claims grow more incredible and the insults more predictable.
Momentum is conserved and defected when moving water comes up against an obstacle. In the equatorial Pacific water and waves are moved westward by the prevailing winds. It is reflected in the western Pacific as prevailing winds pile up water against Australia and Indonesia. Until there is a relaxation event – winds change – and water flows west.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-148.68,1.92,374
These set up complex interference patterns of waves and currents. As much Coriolis as wind generated. These are the subject of global coupled earth/ocean climate models.
For far simpler cases – prominently an elliptical surface with vertical sides and under constant vibrational forcing – equations can be solved analytically to describe the standing wave interference pattern that emerges.
Can this describe ENSO? Not so much – ENSO is a complex interactions of many physical processes in a physically immensely complex basin of immense size subject to planet spanning and hugely variable forces.
That it doesn’t is easily demonstrated – it produces a harmonic curve that in no way resembles ENSO.
And the mathematics of sloshing dynamics could be used to describe this erratic behavior, just like the math that gives rise to sinusoidal functions can be used to describe purely oscillatory behavior.
These kinds of nonlinear equations are the first step to characterizing the erratic nature of ENSO.
Sure – the interference pattern of standing waves in an elliptical bathtub with vertical sides and a constant depth under vibrational excitation has immense relevance.
And the bathtub solution to standing waves is periodic.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Mathieuplots_zps3ec1411a.png.html?sort=3&o=28
It looks nothing like ENSO at all.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/ts.gif
But the way to get it to look like ENSO is to modulate it against the QBO.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n5/fig_tab/ngeo2138_F2.html
Haven’t I said tis before? The insanity just keeps on giving.
Rob Ellison ia now scoring own goals, pointing out how the much more clearly periodic QBO may have similar forcing functions as the highly erratic ENSO.
Perhaps the behavior is not as chaotic as it first appears.
Obviously from the nature study the QBO is about as periodic – and as predictable – as ENSO These are not independent phenomenon.
See panel a – http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n5/fig_tab/ngeo2138_F2.html
The resemblance seems pretty remarkable – but haven’t I said that several times?
More meaningless claptrap from webby? I guess you gotta expect it.
There is something seriously wrong with this guy. The periodic nature of QBO is quite striking and worlds apart from ENSO.
http://www.jisao.washington.edu/data/qbo/qbo.jpg
The quasi part of quasi-biennial is an indication that the period is about 28 months, and so not on a precise 2-year period.
If ENSO were to align with this more periodic oscillation, our predictive capabilities would become much easier.
The guy is essentially a contrarian t r o l l, taking the opposite side of any argument because he can and no one is able to stop him.
Let’s map it against ENSO – see panel a
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n5/fig_tab/ngeo2138_F2.html
And not just eyeball it in. Webby’s eye is particularly prone to error.
‘Figure 12 shows 2000 years of El Nino behaviour simulated by a state-of-the-art climate model forced with present day solar irradiance and greenhouse gas concentrations. The richness of the El Nino behaviour, decade by decade and century by century, testifies to the fundamentally chaotic nature of the system that we are attempting to predict. It challenges the way in which we evaluate models and emphasizes the importance of continuing to focus on observing and understanding processes and phenomena in the climate system. It is also a classic demonstration of the need for ensemble prediction systems on all time scales in order to sample the range of possible outcomes that even the real world could produce. Nothing is certain.’
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751/F12.expansion.html
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full
What was it he said about fig 12 after eyeballing it in? It all zeroes out? He has no clue about the science of ENSO and insists on pulling it out of his arse.
The chart shows a quasi-periodic process that reverts to a mean value of zero over the long term and does not show long runs away from the mean. This makes it a good candidate to express as a sloshing model equivalent.
‘The results indicate that this network synchronized several times in this period. We find that in those cases where the synchronous state was followed by a steady increase in the coupling strength between the indices, the synchronous state was destroyed, after which a new climate state emerged. These shifts are associated with
significant changes in global temperature trend and in ENSO variability. The latest such event is known as the great climate shift of the 1970s.’
http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/21743.pdf
Webby’s problem in a nutshell – denying both science and reality. He probably counts Julia Slingo and Tim Palmer as climate clowns.
The reality is that his equation doesn’t describe ‘sloshing’ and that even if it did the application to ENSO is vague and ill-considered.
ENSO is a bi-stable system – the shift between states is the result of the interaction of a number of physical mechanisms. Changes in ENSO frequency and intensity on multidecadal scales is the critical understanding. It is chaotic as Julia Slingo and Tim Palmer said.
ENSO shifts of means and variance occur across the Holocene.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ENSO11000.gif.html?sort=3&o=247
What a funny little Webster he is.
I have a good model for ENSO.
‘And I know this first-hand because I actually take the equations and solve them numerically and can testify that it is very easy to create a long time-series that is very erratic and free from any easily observable repeat period.’
He takes an equation or an elliptical bathtub and applies it to the Pacific Ocean. And then imagines that some special conditions for a rectangular tank under vertical excitation – a solution he doesn’t use – has some relevance to ENSO or to the solution he does use.
Mathematica pulls up a trig function and plugs some numbers into it.
He then modulates it against the QBO so that it looks like ENSO.
It is all totally bonkers.
This guy doesn’t read what I have written. One of the substantiating arguments that I have discovered is that machine learning algorithms will find the same nonlinear perturbation to a sinusoidal wave equation in the ENSO data. Go to the section on Validation at this link:
http://contextearth.com/2014/05/27/the-soim-differential-equation/
Fortunately, the great thing about machine learning and other automated procedures is that one cannot use absurd arguments such as calling it “bonkers” — these procedures are cut-and-dried and introduce no spin.
Incidentally, we at the Azimuth Project are currently using a variety of machine learning approaches in evaluating El Nino occurrences
http://azimuth.mathforge.org/
Seriously – ENSO has a ‘beat’ frequency of 5.3 years? Gee – we did not know that ENSO has a periodicity – using sprectral analysis – of 6 to 7 years in the high activity mode.
It is not a modulation of a sin wave by the QBO – it is driven by complex physical processes in the Earth climate system.
Machine learning – wtf does he mean by machine learning? Azimuth is certainly no help. Their forums seem elementary and certainly not very advanced yet.
But – against my better judgement – I looked at his validation.
He used the Mathieu function – which he is equal to the SOI – and fits a couple of sin curves to the soi using estimated parameters.
It is all totally bonkers.
It is called exploratory data analysis. Maybe you want to look into it. I am guessing they don’t teach that in civ.
He should try to explore reality – but I don’t think ENSO or indeed waves and oceanography in general is taught in electrician school.
It is like the Azimuth ENSO project – wake me up when they discover more than the basics. But I’ll presume at least that they aren’t totally bonkers.
So you have been sleep-talking all this time?
Here you go for when you wake up:
http://contextearth.com/2014/07/17/correlation-of-time-series/
So back to the beginning of this long and pointless – other than amusing myself – thread.
The ‘dipole’ is the basis of the SOI as discovered by Gilbert Walker oh so long ago. His reference by the has to do with identifying other dipoles in ways that are not the manual techniques used by Walker and everyone since. There is zilch connection to anything does. This is what makes actually looking at anything webby does such a waste of time. It all falls apart into disparate and unrelated parts on any closer inspection.
He fits curves to data using various contrived expressions and calls it correlation. It is totally bonkers.
Let me correct typos.
So back to the beginning of this long and pointless – other than amusing myself – thread.
The ‘dipole’ is the basis of the SOI as discovered by Gilbert Walker oh so long ago. Webby’s ‘reference’ by the way has to do with identifying other dipoles in ways that are not the manual techniques used by Walker and everyone since. There is zilch connection to anything he does. This is what makes actually looking at anything webby does such a waste of time. It all falls apart into disparate and unrelated parts on any closer inspection.
He fits curves to data using various contrived expressions and calls it correlation. It is totally bonkers.
And you have done exactly what?
Would that be zilch?
I have spent decades researching ENSO and related phenomenon – not spent 10 minutes with bonkers science and math on a loser website.
But webby knows a lot about St. Louis. He studied up on St. Louis. It seems he thinks Brandon lives there. That’s all I’m saying.
Certainly, a dim-witted oaf spending that amount of time on a subject would still be a dim-witted oaf. What have you published? That’s the only criteria that we can use to separate a poseur from a non-poseur when it comes to research. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog — is the time-tested adage.
I predicted the pause – publicly – in 2007. Although it was evident well before that.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/enso_variation_and_global_warm.html
‘Finally, the presence of vigorous climate variability presents significant challenges to near-term climate prediction (25, 26), leaving open the possibility of steady or even declining global mean surface temperatures over the next several decades that could present a significant empirical obstacle to the implementation of policies directed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions (27). However, global warming could likewise suddenly and without any ostensive cause accelerate due to internal variability. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the climate system appears wild, and may continue to hold many surprises if pressed.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/106/38/16120.full
Chaos suggests that the current cool Pacific mode can last for decades more. Webby is aggressive and abusive and has not the slightest clue.
The site http://americanthinker.com is not a peer-reviewed journal and it really isn’t science. And so it goes dealing with poseurs.
American Thinker is a publication read by millions. context.whatever is a lonely blog outpost read by 3 at best.
I predicted and continue to predict stuff webby can’t quite get his head around. It is all in ENSO data – but he is so clueless. So what has webby ever predicted. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
What a sad character. He seems to exist to abuse sceptics and to prattle and preen about nothing of any significance. It seems to be his entire rationale for infesting the blogosphere with abuse and calumny.
All he has is American Thinker rag, quite pathetic as a citation CV.
No one is remotely interested in webby’s repetitive and abusive nonsense.
Did I get it right by chance. Not a chance. It is evident in the science that webby can’t quite get his head around.
Well, within the last 3 years I have been involved in a $4 million Department of Interior funded project involved with creating models of the atmosphere, ocean, and land for vehicle and transportation applications. This involved working out wave equations, standard atmospheric pressure conditions, etc and trying to simplify them enough so they could become practical for design engineers. I was the lead scientist on the project and stitched together the final report along with 4 papers that have been sent around for peer-review.
Part of the outcome of that project was that all the simulation software was open-sourced, so that I decided to start up the http://ContextEarth.com blog and a semantic web server that accompanies it.
Obviously the guy from Oz always thinks the worst of people, and seems to lash out at anyone trying to make a difference. I started this this comment thread and can take it as well as dish it out, so if he wants to continue, I have a lot more ammo to spare.
This is less than third rate nonsense that I have actually looked at when I was actually still looking at webby’s stuff.
There are well developed engineering design – and data acquisition – techniques for nearshore wave environments. This seems particularly a waste of time – and if the US government paid for it – a waste of money.
Similarly – terrain modeling is well advanced.
e.g. http://www.terrainmodels.com/
I don’t actually recall the details – and don’t intend to refresh my memory. The stuff is totally useless for real world engineering. That seems about right for someone who seems to imagine that the wheel hasn’t been invented and then builds a square one.
Where did this start?
This is some interesting time series analyses I recently worked on:
The SOI is defined as the standardized index of SLP at Darwin and Tahiti. It starts from a seesawing of SLP that occurs for good physical reasons – as noted nearly a hundred years ago – and is an indication of the state of ENSO.
But the correlation tells you nothing about the physical processes.
There are other and more subtle analyses of the physical processes.
‘Here we attempt to monitor ENSO by basing the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) on the six main observed variables over the tropical Pacific. These six variables are: sea-level pressure (P), zonal (U) and meridional (V) components of the surface wind, sea surface temperature (S), surface air temperature (A), and total cloudiness fraction of the sky (C).’ http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
With the MEI – we can clearly see the change in frequency and intensity of ENSO events. Blue to 1976, red to 1998 and blue again since. It provides one of the central clues to the deterministically chaotic nature of the Pacific system – and therefore the chaotic nature of surface temperature and global hydrology.
Web,
Kudos. That is a lot of work.
What does it look like when you run it forward 10 or 20 years?
Can you do that?
Run an historical time series forward? WTF do you think that might accomplish?
Rob,
I’m only asking if it has any importance.
Web thinks that it does.
He said that it is simple to predict the ENSO state.
So what is the point of predicting the past?
There are other analyses one can do before trying to predict the future trend. I am still at the stage of determining whether there is any statistical significance in the model.
For example, I am also looking at historical records which form a proxy for SOI from the coral data at Palmyra Island:
http://contextearth.com/2014/06/25/proxy-confirmation-of-soim/
The same mathematical patterns seem to emerge, which provides more confidence that this approach may be on the right track. I have said the model is simple and it will be simple to predict the future, especially the near term, if it models the physics correctly to first order.
Atmospheric pressure ‘dipoles’
In Pacific: Darwin – Tahiti
In Atlantic Azores –Reykjavik
Tahiti and Azores are only minor players (more a consequence than the cause), while Reykjavik is in the ideal location, Darwin is too far to the west; Port Moresby would be a better location.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PM-MVE.htm
This led me to the how simple is simple post, I have to read that, looks very interesting….
An ordinary differential equation is linear if the dependent variable and its derivatives appear in the equation to the first power. The linear equation does not contain products of the dependent variable and its derivatives. Otherwise the equation is nonlinear
The first equation in this post is a linear, second-order ordinary differential equation. It is nonlinear. If the F(t) on the rhs is solely a function of the independent variable t, and not the dependent variable x, even if those functions contain nonlinear terms, the equation remains a linear equation. If the rhs actually contains functions of x and those are linear in x, the ODE remains linear. Representing F(t) as a series in trigonometric functions in t does not make the equation nonlinear.
Both the Wiki and Mathematica tutorial MathieuAndRelatedFunctions show the homogeneous form of the above-mentioned equation to be the Mathieu equation.
A single, linear, second-order ODE cannot exhibit chaotic response. A single, or systems of, linear ODEs of any order cannot exhibit chaotic response. That is impossible.
I recall that the minimum requirements for the potential to exhibit chaotic response is a system of three ODEs, some of which must be nonlinear, having three dependent and one independent variables. The dependent variables represent the axises in phase space.
It is nonlinear. should be It is not nonlinear.
The Mathieu equation is non-linear. You missed the cos(wt) term. Find a reference that says otherwise.
The solutions to the Mathieu equation can be linear combinations of the MathieuC and MathieuS basis functions. But those will get complicated fast if the forcing is much beyond an impulse function.
In any case, this is academic as I solve the equations numerically.
What a confusion of terms. Examples of nonlinear functions include exponential and trigonometric.
Thus the Mathieu equation that appears in the analysis of elliptical shapes is non-linear. The Mathieu equation is a special case of the wave equation for elliptical shapes. It has been used in relation to standing waves in elliptical, constant depth water bodies under vibration.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MathieuFunction.html
Plugging numbers into the equation is evaluating numerically but is not numerical evaluation of differential equations in 1, 2 or 3 dimensions using finite difference or finite element methods. Plugging in numbers has no bearing on the nonlinearity of the function.
Nonlinear is commonly for chaotic in the sense of physics. We have multi-dimensional equations such as the Lorenz equations that defined a simple convection model that exhibits certain behavior. The math is less important than recognizing that climate has similar behavior – especially abrupt change – and what this implies about the modes of internal functioning of the systems.
Chaotic is nonlinear – but nonlinear is not necessarily chaotic.
It would be significant if Rob Elllison pointed out actual scientific shortcomings of what goes into a sloshing model, but instead he twists the wording into something it is not. Never trust anyone that cannot take the math on its own terms. This is a poisonous atmosphere that he creates.
Thus the Mathieu equation that appears in the analysis of elliptical shapes is non-linear. The Mathieu equation is a special case of the wave equation for elliptical shapes. It has been used in relation to standing waves in elliptical, constant depth water bodies under vibration. Wave it in the direction of ENSO and you have a homeopathic sloshing model.
It has absolutely no relevance to the Pacific Ocean and most particularly to the disparate processes that drive ENSO. Which I have described above in brief. Sloshing is something that is preeminent only in webby’s brain pan.
ENSO is far more at the visualization stage described by both Feynman and Einstein. Although it is likely to involve a control variable that triggers responses across the Pacific to create the distinctive – and deterministically chaotic – patterns of ENSO
data. Given that we are looking for a control variable it may be subtle but lead to wide ranging responses. People are suggesting spinning up of the sub-tropical gyres as a result of top down modulation of the polar modes by solar UV/ozone interactions in the stratosphere.
‘The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thoughts are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. . . . The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.’ Albert Einstein
At any rate – sloshing doesn’t begin to describe it and the only way you can fit the resulting trigonometric curve to an ENSO time series is by modulating it against the QBO.
See panel a.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n5/fig_tab/ngeo2138_F2.html
A curve fitting sleight of hand in other words.
As for a poisonous atmosphere – webby’s standard mode of operation is aggression, abuse and denigration. His off campus activities include compiling a list of climate clowns on which many of us figure – and some few of us aspire to. He has not the slightest self awareness allied with what I can only describe as mad math and freaky physics. It is one of those slow motion train wrecks.
WHUT’s up wid dat? The guy brings in Einstein and Feynman as if that has any bearing on the discussion? Pretty lame and evidence that he has lost the argument.
ENSO is barely understood – there are competing theories. We are at the stage of building accurate conceptual models – and none of the complex numerical models have come close. ‘Sloshing’ is not on the same planet.
I suppose he believes all his guff – weirder things have happened.
This guy just strings words together without understanding their meaning. A conceptual model by its nature needs math before it becomes an accurate representation of a phenomena.
So one concept that NOAA, NASA, and others have put forward is that the ENSO dynamics is described by a sloshing.
http://johncarlosbaez.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/sst-wind-cur-eqt-20c1.gif
http://johncarlosbaez.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/t-dyn3.gif
And the nonlinear differential equations that I solved numerically are examples of the math involved in describing the sloshing dynamics.
‘The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.’ Albert Einstein
The guy is seriously clueless. He equates an interference pattern of standing waves in an elliptical bathtub with vertical sides and constant depth under vibrational excitation with ENSO. It isn’t even remotely rational. It is seriously obtuse.
He takes function that looks like this.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydr ologist/media/
Mathieuplots_zps3ec1411a.png.html?sort=3&o=28t
It is of course a nonlinear, periodic equation of a trig form – it is not deterministically chaotic. As I think I may have said – the difference is critical with ENSO.
He modulates it with this.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n5/fig_tab/ngeo2138_F2.html
To make it look like this.
http://www.emad thingssrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
Mathematical legerdemain in other words – in which he seems utterly and unswervingly convinced. Why do people believe mad things? God only knows.
wow
a function like this
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Mathieuplots_zps3ec1411a.png.html?sort=3&o=28
to look like this
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/ts.gif
If only he could say that he takes a trig function and modulates it with the QBO. We would say – duh – so what. But it mightn’t be totally insane.
So this guy thinks that the math behind sloshing dynamics is wrong, in spite of the recent successes in the numerical simulation of the phenomena.
That’s why I have investigated applying it to large-scale sloshing behavior such as ENSO. It is worth my time and effort to determine where it will lead. So far I haven’t seen you supply any effective debunking.
No – the math for oil tankers, high rise sway cancelling, coffee cups etc is not wrong.
Your application of an analytical solution for the interference pattern of standing waves in an elliptical tank with vertical sides and constant depth under vibrational excitation is just totally bonkers.
You may as well just map the QBO, call the clown college and call it ENSO. Oh wait.
Here’s one someone prepared earlier.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n5/fig_tab/ngeo2138_F2.html
But if he uses an analytical solution for standing waves – a trig function – and call it sloshing he can convince himself it is deep and meaningful. In reality it is just totally bonkers.
‘AOS models are members of the broader class of deterministic chaotic dynamical systems, which provides several expectations about their properties (Fig. 1). In the context of weather prediction, the generic property of sensitive dependence is well understood (4, 5). For a particular model, small differences in initial state (indistinguishable within the sampling uncertainty for atmospheric measurements) amplify with time at an exponential rate until saturating at a magnitude comparable to the range of intrinsic variability.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full
If he ever knew what he was talking about it wouldn’t be so easy.
A Mathieu equation solution can have a very long repeat period, which makes it difficult to distinguish from a chaotic time series.
He finds it difficult to distinguish climate data from an irrelevant function for standing waves in an elliptical bathtub? Says it all really.
An elliptical bathtub????
Read harder, that’s what words formed into sentences and equations are there for.
Bathtub models of ENSO are especially silly oversimplifications.
The Mathieu function is an analytical solution of the wave equation for an elliptical tank with vertical sides and constant depth under vibrational excitation. It is purely periodic.
To imagine that this has any implications for ENSO data is just plain bonkers.
The Mathieu function for standing waves in an elliptical tank with vertical sides and constant depth under vibrational excitation looks like this.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/standingwaves_zps4b3b64dc.png.html
I have defined the defined conditions for the analytical solution several times.
It is purely periodic – it is not chaotic – it is not on the verge of chaos – it does not have a long ‘repeat’ whatever that might mean. It is an instantaneous interference pattern where waves combine and cancel to produce standing waves.
As a bathtub model of ENSO it doesn’t remotely work. The periodic function needs to be modulated with the QBO shear index to make it resemble ENSO. The QBO and ENSO are related – one in the equatorial stratosphere and one in the equatorial ocean. So – as I say – sleight of hand. Call I sloshing – which it isn’t – and then bait and switch with the QBO which by no stretch of the imagination improves ENSO forecasting. Instead of forecasting ENSO the problem is switched to forecasting the QBO.
It is all totally bonkers.
Mathieu-type equations also provide a formulation to the sloshing dynamics of any arbitrarily shaped volume. Why don’t you just read the literature instead of spouting off?
And it is not perfectly periodic as the same cite explains:
And I know this first-hand because I actually take the equations and solve them numerically and can testify that it is very easy to create a long time-series that is very erratic and free from any easily observable repeat period.
‘Mathieu-type equations also provide a formulation to the sloshing dynamics of any arbitrarily shaped volume. Why don’t you just read the literature instead of spouting off?’
Total BS. They build equations for a rectangular bathtub.
‘And I know this first-hand because I actually take the equations and solve them numerically and can testify that it is very easy to create a long time-series that is very erratic and free from any easily observable repeat period.’
He takes an equation or an elliptical bathtub and applies it to the Pacific Ocean. And then imagines that some special conditions for a rectangular tank under vertical excitation – a solution he doesn’t use – has some relevance to ENSO or to the solution he does use.
Mathematica pulls up a trig function and plugs some numbers into it.
He then modulates it against the QBO so that it looks like ENSO.
It is all totally bonkers.
Watch how the anti-science weasel works. Now it is rectangular and not elliptical. The fact is that a Mathieu equation is a perturbation to a sinusoidal wave equation and so works as a first-order approximation to the nonlinearities produced by sloshing volumes of water.
Frandsen [1] provides a derivation for this perturbation and as happens with most of these derivations, the complicating second and higher-order terms are dropped, leaving behind the cos(wt) Mathieu modulation.
[1]J. B. Frandsen, “Sloshing motions in excited tanks,” Journal of Computational Physics, vol. 196, no. 1, pp. 53–87, 2004.
There is a function for an elliptical bathtub – that he uses – and one for a rectangular bath that he doesn’t.
Cue the usual math babble, blatant lies and insults.
It is totally bonkers.
I should point out that it is a bathtub model of the Pacific Ocean. Ludicrous.
The differential equation that I solve is for sloshing. Note how the guy keeps changing his story while I have remained steadfast in my approach.
I haven’t changed at all. That’s just lies and misdirection. He claims to use an analytical solution for an elliptical surface – but then introduced an irrelevant paper on rectangular surfaces.
It is a bathtub model of ENSO – in the well known sense. These absurdly oversimplified ideas are simply ludicrous.
But it seems worse than that. He puts the elliptical solution on the LFS and fits the RHS with trig expressions and estimated parameters to the soi.
It is bonkers science.
BTW – he didn’t solve the wave equation by separation of variables for an elliptical surface. That was done by Mathieu a long time ago.
The Right hand side (RHS) is the forcing function while the LHS is the differential equation response.
Thanks for your interest, you may yet catch on.
The RHS = 0 is the Mathieu function. It is really quite eccentric. The LHS is a curve fitted to the SOI using estimated parameters. Bait and switch in other words. Does he believe himself? Seems to. As I say – quite bonkers.
This guy really knows very little about differential equations. The RHS is the forcing function. In the impulse response case it is a delta function delta(t), subject to initial conditions. This will give the MathieuC and MathieuS basis functions in a linear combination to match the initial conditions.
For more complicated forcing, the impulse response is convolved with the forcing.
People that know this stuff deal with it, guys like the civ here don’t have the chops and so vent their frustration.
My honours thesis involved various schemes for solving differential equations.
The Mathieu equation describes vibration in an elliptical cylinder. What webby does is take the periodic solution and – assumes it is equal to the soi and fits a curve to the soi using trig functions and estimated paramaters.
I just can’t believe how bonkers it all is.
Where have you contributed any kind of evidence that you can actually solve anything? All talk and no action.
Where has he proved he has contributed anything more to ENSO modeling than a contrived curve that is just bonkers?
The sloshing model is a variation of the delayed action oscillator model of ENSO, cast in a continuous differential equation rather than the discrete equation form. The delayed action oscillator what is commonly used to model the back-and-forth behavior of the ENSO effect. There is a possibility of applying the delayed Mathieu equation formulation as well:
Insperger, T., and G. Stépán. “Stability chart for the delayed Mathieu equation.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 458.2024 (2002): 1989-1998.
The goal is to reproduce the oscillator dynamics through modeling and then using that model to potentially predict the natural variability into the future.
The goal is to fit a curve to the soi without letting any of the messy physics of ENSO intervene – and use irrelevant math babble as window dressing.
Where have you contributed any kind of evidence that you can solve something?
When has webby.
Huh? What I am doing is real physics of the sloshing behavior of volumes of liquids – with the premise that the scaling to larger volumes will retain the first order perturbation in the dynamics.
That is the traditional and often powerful technique of scaling of physical phenomena. It is worth the effort to see how far this idea can be extended, and substantiated when the approach can begin to model the phenomena accurately.
p.s.
80 research articles and books and 1750 citations according to Google Scholar, charaterizing oscillating or periodic physical phenomena are my academic forte, with two widely used analytical characterization techniques named after me.
Again, what have you done?
I have spent 30 years studying ENSO effects and underlying mechanisms as a professional hydrologist. I occasionally write science communications on the subject.
Paul Pukite is an electrical engineer with zilch background in Earth sciences. It shows.
http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?hl=en&user=TgqlMYcAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&cstart=60
He contributes bonkers science and insane oil pontifications on neglected blogospheric outposts and comments widely but not rationally on blog sites whining about sceptic stupidity and their lack of science and maths.
None of this is at all publishable in any reputable science publication and he justifies this to himself in some unconvincing way or other. His one insight into ENSO is ‘sloshing’ – on the basic of which he misuses a solution for standing waves in an elliptical cylinder. We can scale up standing waves to the Pacific basin?
e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/standingwaves_zps4b3b64dc.png.html?sort=3&o=1
Quite obviously not – and nor is that relevant to Rossby and Kelvin waves or to real ENSO processes. But what he actually does is invent a periodic function and modulate that to the QBO.to make it look like ENSO.
see Panel a.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n5/fig_tab/ngeo2138_F2.html
On top of it all – he misdirects and misrepresents shamelessly. It is mostly insults nonsense repeated ad nauseum.
Bob Ellison: Can you recommend a primer on the ENSO?
http://www.youtube.com/user/taichiatduke
You then need to understand the longer term modulation of frequency and intensity that takes it from being an aperiodic bistable phenomenon to chaotic.
http://heartland.org/policy-documents/new-dynamical-mechanism-major-climate-shifts
Thank you Rob
This guy Rob Ellison has never published a peer–reviewed research article, yet claims to understand how cutting-edge research is supposed to work. Lots of those people running around in these forums. We refer to them as scientific poseurs.
I have degrees in engineering – specializing in hydrology – and in environmental science. I have studied ENSO for 30 years . I have studied ‘dipoles’ for nearly as long. We generally call them indices. There are many and they relate to the hydrology of the planet.
e.g. http://stateoftheocean.osmc.noaa.gov/all/
I have a broad range of interests appropriate for an environmental scientist – from environmental policy to abrupt climate change. My professional background include much modeling – rivers, estuaries, coastal – for both hydrodynamics and water quality. I have written articles on environmental policy and on ENSO. I predicted the hiatus back in 2007 – publicly although it was quite evident before that.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/enso_variation_and_global_warm.html
I currently have a couple of articles submitted on abrupt climate change, an ENSO review article for formal review and one on climate dissensus and the uncertainty monster.
His name is Paul Pukite – by all means look at what he has done. Third rate control systems work. There is nothing in Earth sciences and he has very little understanding of system he imagines can be defined by correlations between Darwin and Tahiti and fitted curves without any substantive basis in physical processes.
He publishes this unpublishable guff on a lonely outpost of the blogosphere and astonishingly prattles and preens about fundamental breakthroughs. There is a lot of it on the web. It is all bonkers.
Abrupt climate change involving changes in the frequency and intensity of ENSO events – btw – implies non-warming at least for decades yet. One of the many things he can’t quite get his head around.
webby has no clue about the nature of ENSO variability – I continue to make a prediction. A state of more frequent and intense Le Nina and less frequent and intense El Nino will persist for 20 to 49 years from 2002.
‘This study uses proxy climate records derived from paleoclimate data to investigate the long-term behaviour of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). During the past 400 years, climate shifts associated with changes in the PDO are shown to have occurred with a similar frequency to those documented in the 20th Century. Importantly, phase changes in the PDO have a propensity to coincide with changes in the relative frequency of ENSO events, where the positive phase of the PDO is associated with an enhanced frequency of El Niño events, while the negative phase is shown to be more favourable for the development of La Niña events.’ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL025052/abstract
Quoting the relevant literature – as I do quite a lot – is a lot different than going down irrelevant, trivial and frankly bonkers webby rabbit holes.
This is the most critical understanding in ENSO. Intensity and frequency vary as a result of deterministic chaos at multi-decadal scales and vary substantially over centennial to millennial scales.
e.g http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Vance2012-AntarticaLawDomeicecoresaltcontent.jpg.html?sort=3&o=190
and http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ENSO11000.gif.html?sort=3&o=249
Here is an extended discussion on a website I am slowly adding to – http://watertechbyrie.com/2014/06/23/the-unstable-math-of-michael-ghils-climate-sensitivity/
AmericanThinker Elliison, ha ha
The first paragraph of my comment above is exactly consistent with all definitions of linear and non-linear ODEs. For example, here is a more complete discussion of the subject for second order ODEs, including the homogeneous case.
Note that while the formulations show products of the dependent variable with the independent variable they do not show products, in any form, of the dependent variable or of the dependent variable with derivatives of the dependent variable, nor of the derivatives of the dependent variable raised to powers other than one. Note especially that products of functions of the independent variable with linear functions of the dependent variable or linear functions of its derivative wrt the independent variable do not make the equation nonlinear.
In the second paragraph I pointed to a specific equation and said that that equation is linear. I said nothing about the existence, or lack thereof, of non-linear formulations of the Mathieu equation. I was discussing only the equation to which I pointed. If you Google ‘nonlinear Mathieu equation’ you’ll get lots o’ hits. And every one of them will be consistent with the definition in my first paragraph. Specifically they will contain nonlinear terms in the dependent variable and/or its derivatives wrt the independent variable. The case of the dependent variable raised to a power greater than one often appears.
And speaking of the homogeneous case, this link, to which Rob Ellison points, is an excellent example of a linear, second-order, homogeneous ODE. Compare that equation to the general case in these notes and point me to the terms that make that equation nonlinear.
I repeat my third paragraph here:
A single, linear, second-order ODE cannot exhibit chaotic response. A single, or systems of, linear ODEs of any order cannot exhibit chaotic response. That is impossible.
ooops
For example, here is a more complete discussion of the subject for second order ODEs, including the homogeneous case.
Compare that equation to the general case in these notes and point me to the terms that make that equation nonlinear.
Hope this works, Had a , where a ” is required.
Well, I have been using Mathematica all along so I don’t quite understand how you are trying to play stump the chump with me in regard to those links.
I have been mainly using the term erratic rather than chaotic in describing the solution of nonlinear Mathieu equations so no skin off my nose. No one can deny however that these solutions are on the path to chaos and create behaviors existing somewhere between linear sinusoidal composites and Lorenz-like chaotic behaviors.
As I recall, place an absolute value on the cos(wt) term and the solution is definitely chaotic, and sensitive to the slightest change in initial conditions.
Math babble from webby as usual.
Chaos happens when solutions diverge from close starting points.
e.g. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709/F1.expansion.html
Mathieu functions cannot and do not. Chaos is a metatheory as it applies to complex dynamic systems – it is characterized by behaviors – noisy bifurcation, slowing down, synchronized networks.
We are not on the edge of chaos – except as it relates to webby comments and that only in the dictionary sense. Shall we call his behavior it erratic? Systems are chaotic or they are not with with behaviors characteristic of the broad class of deterministic chaotic systems.
The guy gets caught in a recursive definition, saying essentially that chaos is identified by systems characterized as being from that class. Not much insight there, but what can one expect ?
.
Wrong place.
‘AOS models are members of the broader class of deterministic chaotic dynamical systems, which provides several expectations about their properties (Fig. 1). In the context of weather prediction, the generic property of sensitive dependence is well understood (4, 5). For a particular model, small differences in initial state (indistinguishable within the sampling uncertainty for atmospheric measurements) amplify with time at an exponential rate until saturating at a magnitude comparable to the range of intrinsic variability.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full
Chaotic systems – these are not necessarily systems of maths equations – are identifiable by their behavior. As I mentioned elsewhere in this or the other long thread behavior – abrupt change, non-stationary time series – are keys to understanding the nature of climate and the nature of ENSO.
If he ever knew what he was talking about it wouldn’t be so easy – or boring or tedious. .
Yet you cannot distinguish easily a chaotic system with an erratic periodic system that has a long repeat period.
That just is babble.
What is very interesting about the Pacific ocean’s sloshing dynamics is the huge amount of inertia that it sustains. To move water at the scale of ENSO is not something that can stop on a dime. Once it gets set in motion the inertial momentum can keep it going — and to top it off, it will even effect the rotation of the earth as evidenced by the connection between ocean hydrodynamics and the Chandler wobble (see Gross from JPL).
This is definitely a topic that merges climate science and geophysics.
What drives ENSO is winds. Strong trade winds pile water up against Australia and Indonesia. At some stage a relaxation event happens and water flows eastward. Where does he imagine the energy comes?
The winds drive LOD changes. The shift in mass causes the spin on the axis to wobble. This is interesting in passing but has no climate implications of any note.
It’s partly a chicken and egg situation. What causes winds? And what causes the erratic nature of the winds?
The wind can be both a response and a reinforcing forcing function to the sloshing behavior. At this time and from a phenomenological POV, it is enough to point out that something is providing the forcing to the behavior observed. Winds can come about as a result of atmospheric pressure gradients, as are seen with the Tahiti-Darwin SOI gradient.
Where does this guy imagines the energy comes from? Does he think winds occur by magic?
The propagation of cold upwelling across the Pacific is a feedback as Walker Circulation intensifies in La Nina. It is cause and effect.
This is the originating impulse for high water levels in the Indo-Pacific warm pool.
Flipping the polarity of one series and then computing its correlation with another scarcely constitutes insightful time-series analysis. And one has to be sloshed on bathtub gin to accept the physical “explanation” of the SOI/ENSO phenomenon provided here.
Here is another one of these deniers that doesn’t even believe that we can trust the global average temperature time series, let alone make progress on any factors contributing to natural variability.
So it us pure projection on John S’s part, where the S stands for soused. Isn’t gin the stuff made from juniper berries, WHUT’s up wid dat?
You are absolutely right John – and I have absolutely no idea what the relevance of the temperature series is.
The former relies on SLP at Darwin and at Tahiti. Anti-correlated? Gilbert Walker worked that out nearly a century ago. It is the basis of the whole deal.
The ‘sloshing’ function he uses has no relevance for water ‘sloshing’ back and forth. It has no time dimension. It is purely spatial describing patterns of standing waves in an elliptical cylinder.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/standingwaves_zps4b3b64dc.png.html?sort=3&o=1
How he gets from there to the SOI is pure bonkers.
The analysis that I did here was to interpret how strong the Tahiti-Darwin dipole is using a simple correlation coefficient
http://contextearth.com/2014/07/17/correlation-of-time-series/
What makes one think about this correlation is that the CC is only 0.55, in spite of the fact that the dipole is obviously there. This points to the fact that the noise in each of the time series reduces the measure.
So when I fit the SOI to a sloshing model solution, I am aware that an extremely high CC that ranges into the greater than 0.9 range will likely become impossible to achieve.
Let me put the goal here another way. Say that we are both being chased by a bear. I don’t have to be faster than a bear, all I have to be is faster than you. So if the goal is to be able to make long-term predictions of ENSO, I am working to model the phenomena in a simple and potentially more accurate manner than others.. Everyone realizes that the modeling of the ENSO has been relatively poor for predictions, so that I have nothing much to lose to see how far I can go with a sloshing model.
You don’t like this, obviously because you have some sort of stalking compulsion against any research somebody tries to do with respect to climate. You might want to get that socio-behavior looked into.
The “analysis” webby did was sheer bonkers because the only thing that matters is the pressure gradient. This is a measure of the intensity of the phases of ENSO. There is no pure dipole and no noise – it is all physical phenomenon. That’s the reality of physical data that webby just doesn’t understand. Reality diverges from his reality so he redefines it. Pure bonkers.
The thing he doesn’t understand is that I am decades ahead of him. I predict a continued spin up of the South Pacific Gyre and more frequent and intense La Nina for decades.
This stalker guy from Oz appears to be way behind in the current research. The U of Minnesota climate research project headed up Vipin Kumar is actively seeking out ways to identify the best dipoles.
[1]J. Kawale, S. Liess, A. Kumar, M. Steinbach, A. R. Ganguly, N. F. Samatova, F. H. Semazzi, P. K. Snyder, and V. Kumar, “Data Guided Discovery of Dynamic Climate Dipoles.,” presented at the CIDU, 2011, pp. 30–44.
We are having discussion on this topic over at Azimuth
http://azimuth.mathforge.org/discussion/1405/blog-exploring-climate-data-part-1/#Item_40
Yes I read the paper – which you don’t seem to understand so I won’t hold out much hope for a rational discussion from you.
I discussed this paper briefly above. There are dipoles everywhere in the system and the idea of using automated data analysis instead of the manual methods that are spatially limited and time intensive has real interest.
Not that you are really noted for rational discussion at the best of times.
They are not pure dipoles – as I said. They don’t change polarity with precision such that a perfect anti-correlation occurs. That is the real world – not webby’s fantasy Earth systems where everything that is not rounded out perfectly is noise.
Well I am working with some of the people at the U of Mn trying to solve these problems — and you aren’t.
Yet the best webby can do is correlate SLP at Darwin and Tahiti. Totally bonkers.
Total misdirection on the Stalker of Oz’s part. The anti-correlation of the Tahiti-Darwin dipole (-0.55) is used as a yardstick to gauge the limit to how well a model can correlate. A model can never perfectly match the Tahiti-Darwin time-series due to the noise in the data which will keep the anti-correlation from ever achieving -1.
The Darwin/Tahiti anti-correlation was the subject of the original comment. He is only nearly 100 years behind.
Expecting a perfect correlation – and calling it noise when it isn’t – is just a measure of his delusion. Stalker is another measure if another was needed.
Rob Ellison: Can you recommend a primer on the ENSO?
Earth Is On The Cusp Of A Sixth Great Mass Extinction
As David Biello writes in Scientific American:
To avoid the sixth mass extinction we will probably have to employ more aggressive conservation, such as moving species to help them cope with a changing climate . Think re-wilding: reintroducing species like wolves or beavers that were once present in a given ecosystem but have since disappeared. Aggressive conservation might also mean killing off newcomer species to preserve or make room for local flora and fauna.
As another study in Science notes, we’ve already made headway in saving some animals from what seemed like certain ruin.
But if humans as a species don’t want to take our chances with a sixth mass extinction, we need to start taking drastic measures now. The momentum is already moving against us.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/most-earths-species-destroyed-giant-220539502.html
A Manifesto for Rewilding the World
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/17/climate-change-is-sucking-funding-away-from-biodiversity/#comment-1664325
Why do the Greener-than-thous proselytize their devotion to unnatural unquestioning biodiversity?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/17/climate-change-is-sucking-funding-away-from-biodiversity/#comment-1664385
No, Monbiot: Britain Needs More Wolves Like it Needs the Black Death
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/07/21/No-Monbiot-Britain-needs-more-wolves-like-it-needs-the-Black-Death
Ever since I read Mann’s “False Hope” in Scientific American” I tend to take their content with a dose of salt. When my subscription expires I may have to avoid renewal, and stick to the Spanish version, which seems to have different editors.
@Fernando
The hysteria about a 6th extinction is just that, hysteria. However the advocated response, the rewilding , and the biodiversity dogma are parts of a very real politico/religious/cultural agenda.
Thanks to Dr. Roy Spencer (Spencer’s AGW Trend Calculator: T = s[L x D x I x ƒ]) we now have a quick way to calculate the Earth’s Global Temperature Trend (T). Simply multiply the number of Liberal politicians (L) times the Dollars they’ll throw at global warming research (D) times whatever the imagined problem is to be linked to global warming, like dying polar bears (I) times an alleged frequency of the imagined problem (ƒ) and depending on the gullibility of the audience, apply freely a scaling factor (s) that can be changed at will to magnify the results of the calculation.
A lot of very interesting climate related research out this past week or so:
On the “pause”: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-global-natural-fluctuation.html
On potential effects of future warming on crop yields: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-climate-crop-slowdown-years.html
On warming in the Pacific and Atlantic at the end of the last ice age:
http://phys.org/news/2014-07-synchronization-north-atlantic-pacific-abrupt.html
and on sea level rise in the Western Pacific:
http://phys.org/news/2014-07-team-sea-western-tropical-pacific.html
Gates
Thanks for sharing the link which says there is cooling since 1998. Seems like a year ago your compatriots refused to accept the words “pause” or “hiatus”. Now you are introducing “cooling” to the conversation. I call that progress.
Not one of the major datasets — GISS, HadCRUT4, NOAA, UAH LT, or RSS LT — shows cooling since 1998. All show warming. Cowtan & Way show 0.20 C of warming.
David
I’m simply repeating the very fine link that Gates provided.
You misunderstood the link to the article about Lovejoy’s work — it doesn’t say the world is cooling.
david appel,
Cowin & Way is a data set? How?
As R. Gates refers to:
“The study found that synchronization of the two regional systems began as climate was gradually warming. After synchronization, the researchers detected wild variability that amplified the changes and accelerated into an abrupt warming event of several degrees within a few decades.
“As the systems become synchronized, they organized and reinforced each other, eventually running away like screeching feedback from a microphone,” said Alan Mix, a professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and co-author on the paper. “Suddenly you had the combined effects of two major oceans forcing the climate instead of one at a time.””
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-synchronization-north-atlantic-pacific-abrupt.html#jCp
One form of synchronization destroys itself. Above it apparently didn’t for decades, but should have. The question is what physical process could cause this? My guess is ice sheet collapse which had effects similar to a flooded river. A flood contains energy, more than average and can sustain itself.
If the ice sheet collapse was the control variable, it took over two oceans for awhile. So we had high sensitivity to the ice sheets. It’s easy to simplify ice sheets as a result. Sometimes they are a cause.
If CO2 is so good for plants, why are there no plants on Venus, whose atmosphere is 96.5% CO2?
It is the absence of Venusians (as well as an absence of a magnetosphere) that allows co2 to be high.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v340/n6233/abs/340457a0.html
“If CO2 is so good for plants, why are there no plants on Venus, whose atmosphere is 96.5% CO2?”
For the same reason that the doctors shouldn’t have used pure O2 in the incubator after you were born, David Appell!
David, why are there plants on Earth?
============================
“If CO2 is so good for plants, why are there no plants on Venus, whose atmosphere is 96.5% CO2?”
david appel doesn’t know chemistry and the instability of amino acids at temperatures.
david appel didn’t know the meaning of the word “population” in statistics.
david appel doesn’t know that “Cowin & Way” is not observed data.
David Appel,
Venus is AN OTHER PLANET!
Where there is NO LIFE.
With out regard to the quantity of carbon!
Duh! And double squared Duh!
@David Appell | July 26, 2014 at 10:06 pm |
If CO2 is so good for plants, why are there no plants on Venus, whose atmosphere is 96.5% CO2?
*****
I’m sure that even the other CAGWers winced at that one.
“On potential effects of future warming on crop yields: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-climate-crop-slowdown-years.html”
Really?
1. More CO2 means more growth. Doubled CO2 triples (200% increase) cotton yield. Greenhouses routinely use 1000-1200 ppm of CO2 for this reason.
2. More CO2 means less water is needed for growth. The vacoules partially close reducing water loss due to transpiration. A graphic of change in vegetation patterns in the last 20 years will show greening around the deserts.
3. The warming (from USHCN data) appears to be an increase in nighttime temperatures (low temps).
a. From my understanding this is not compatible with AGW predictions.
b. This doesn’t stress plants but results in a longer growing season.
No, I think warming at night is predicted by GHG effects. But also by UHI effects.
The pause is killing the cause.
The warmest April, May and June in recorded history have just taken place. What pause?
The (US definition) liberal approach to a big government which “directs” the economy has failed. (There could be an analogy here to big government “directing” the climate, I think.) After throwing trillions in stimulus and bailouts at the economy and keeping interest rates at zero or even at times negative, the economy is still sucking wind. The Keynesian approach does not work, I would say.
But in the past, there was one depression and the government reacted by raising interest rates and cutting government spending. The economy rebounded quickly.
From the article:
…
When the Fed considers raising interest rates, or is in the midst of tapering, the question becomes can the economy stand on its own? A mixed report on the U.S. economy Friday did not clarify things for the economic bulls. From Reuters:
Shipments of these so-called core capital goods fell 1.0 percent. Core capital goods shipments are used to calculate equipment spending in the government’s gross domestic product measurement. It was the third month of decline in shipments, prompting some economists to temper their second-quarter growth estimates. “The weak performance in core capital goods shipments during the quarter suggests that this segment of the economy is unlikely to contribute much to economic activity,” said Millan Mulraine, deputy chief economist at TD Securities in New York. .
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2345195-fed-may-help-open-crack-in-correction-door
More support for this theme.
From the article:
…
The US macro backstop does not seem to support the rally. I understand that increasingly more of the S&P’s revenues are being generated outside of the US (currently 45% of S&P revenues are from overseas), but one would think that the recently reported 2.9% decline in US GDP for Q1 2014 would have at least some effect on the exuberance. A glance at the above chart suggests otherwise. Additionally, as stated in the previous letter, the most significant data point that belies this rally is the dearth of U.S. Net Investment over the past decade. With Tesla’s Gigafactory being a notable exception, the slump in capital expenditures (even in a period of record profits) does not bode well for the sustainability of this move.
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2332875-market-outlook-s-and-p-500-and-the-tsx-venture
@Jim D | July 26, 2014 at 1:10 pm |
jim2, “superb infrastructure”? No, other countries have better airports, roads, railways, internet, power grids, and bridges. The US is falling behind due to a lack of spending on infrastructure. The lack of a sizable wealthy middle class puts a squeeze on the government income to do these things too.
*****
Yep. Too much wasteful spending on social programs and wars and big government. Too much money going to taxes and not enough towards a prosperous economy – meaning money left in the private sector to promote economic activity.
==> “Too much money going to taxes and not enough towards a prosperous economy ”
Why those dang statists just look at the advantages of countries that don’t have functional governments?
You’d think that they’d just see what a paradise can be enjoyed in places like Somalia and just get with the program!
As discussed on Bill Maher’s program last night, a natural consequence of capitalism plus globalization is for manufacturing jobs to be shipped out of the capitalist countries to places with cheaper labor, which maximizes the profits of the few at the expense of good jobs for the middle class.
An excellent observation. Capitalist countries have a more expensive labor force.
It probably depends on your definition of capitalism. El Salvador? Honduras? Guatemala? India? Bangladesh? Thailand?
it’s called efficiency, and “eastern bloc” aka Soviet empire economies showed for many decades how foolish it is to ignore international economic efficiencies….
We agree that “middle class” standards of living are important (certainly politically) to people in “advanced” economies, but they will not be maintained by futile efforts to corral jobs that can be done more efficiently elsewhere. Increases in productivity, inventions and innovations, making USA/Europe more attractive for location of factories etc. will be the only adequate responses to this sort of concern.
To the extent that western economies are pricing their production out of a competitive advantage, they also need to focus upon what economists term “comparative advantage.” Some number of new factories are being built again in western countries. Whether that will be enough to limit the flow of jobs to less developed countries.
as an aside, anyone who has had to deal with customer (dis-)service call centers in India, the Philliipines, et al. knows that it should be possible to re-emphasize the overall emphasis upon quality as against the “race to the bottom” in labor costs.
CG, capitalism seems to lead naturally to a wealth gap, and a weak or non-existent middle class, if you consider those to be capitalist too.
p.s. I don’t care for Walmart, and a lot of their goods seem rather crummy (technical term ha ha), but if millions of consumers want to shop there, then that falls under the rubric of freedom. I am generally willing to pay more to shop elsewhere, often much more, but it is up to rivals to Walmart to make that case to a lot more people. Quality and customer service over lowest price suits me much of the time, but everyone else has the right to make their own choices. Don’t they??
If statists in the west disdain the impact of Walmart and similar trends, the answer is to offer something that consumers prefer more, not to disdain and block the consumers who like the Walmarts of the world.
You take your lessons in economic history from a comedian?
But capitalist countries like the US (had) built up a superb infrastructural and has political stability. That is a huge positive. Right now, we are losing businesses due to a corporate tax of 35%. This is in part due to the sucking up of resources by our increasingly socialist government, which is growing in power unrestrained.
If we cut the size of government and concomitantly its spending, then cut the corporate tax to zero, a lot of companies would relocate back to the US and repatriate trillions of dollars. Our economy would take off like a rocket again. Jobs would be created. We also now have the advantage of cheap natural gas which is also incentive to locate here.
Capitalism per se ain’t the problem.
jim2, “superb infrastructure”? No, other countries have better airports, roads, railways, internet, power grids, and bridges. The US is falling behind due to a lack of spending on infrastructure. The lack of a sizable wealthy middle class puts a squeeze on the government income to do these things too.
And this is an insight? Or has he just finished Economics 101. I’m sure he didn’t cover the world wide loss of 100 million manufacturing jobs due to automation and digitization. The loss of manufacturing jobs in the US is not a recent phenomena. Since 1944 , as a percent of the total workforce, manufacturing jobs have been dropping. That year we had 16 million manufacturing jobs out of a total 42 million jobs. In the next 35 years, manufacturing jobs rose by 3 million while 45 million non-manufacturing jobs were created. In the last 35 years manufacturing jobs went down from 19 million to 12 million while non-manufacturing jobs rose 55 million. The shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy is a lot older and more complicated than blaming one factor.
30% of US manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000. That is 6 million jobs. It held steady for a couple of decades before that. I suspect globalization had something to do with it.
Much of the world gets it: http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4f79d556ecad045834000000-480/chart.png
Our politicians pander to whomever doesn’t like corporations. Our C Corporations are double taxed. Once at the entity level and once again when the individuals who receive dividends are taxed on those. There’s a straightforward answer. End the corporate tax and tax the individual on their share of any profits.
Here’s Medtronic taking care of its shareholders:
http://www.startribune.com/business/263385221.html
Our politicians being out smarted by Irish politicians.
While some of the shareholders are unhappy with having to pay some capital gains taxes, Medtronic will be paying less income taxes in the future which should help its net worth.
Yeah capitalism really sucks! Communism is the way to go!! The great leaders will definitely put the kibosh on global warming!!!
Jim D: I have a hunch that many of you on this thread have never had a manufacturing job. And thankfully I have never had a manufacturing job. However I have worked as an engineer in manufacturing plants and can vouch that those workers are not happy campers. The work is drudgery, the environment is hot, dirty, and noisy, and the pay is lousy. The loss of manufacturing jobs in the west is a sign of improvement.
Jim D
The digital age and internet are creating elements of capitalism never envisioned 200 years ago. Capital is certainly benefing now more than labor but what is the core reason? Look at how businesses used to grow. One investment gaining returns for more expansions and more returns. The marginal production costs were significant as the customer base grew. Now some internet companies with very little investment can scale up from thousands of customers to hundreds of millions with virtually zero marginal production costs. Businesses used to need massive initial investments and required decades of profitable operations to have millions of customers or billions of market capitalization. Now with relatively small operations they can have a customer base across the globe. A company with 15 employees was bought by Facebook for $1 billion.
I don’t think any reasonable person wants to forego the upside of capitalism.
Someone said that manufacturing jobs are being replaced by service jobs. Service jobs include burger-flipping and unskilled jobs that are typically low-paying and that would bring up the minimum wage issue, which is currently sinking to inhumane levels for full-time work. All these issues are tied together. High-tech jobs (e.g. Google, Apple) are fine, but are prime examples of few employees reaping large rewards from having many customers. This is not the solution to the middle-class secure jobs problem. There are only going to be a few of these types of companies that will survive long-term, and they employ a very small percentage of the population. Similarly super-companies like Amazon, Walmart, etc. have taken over in some markets and have resulted in net less middle-class jobs and small businesses in those areas. It’s a demise of the middle class.
Jim D, it’s mainly energy-intensive manufacturing jobs that are being lost – to countries where energy costs are lower
a lot of selective (cherry picked) figures go into wailing about the decline of the US middle class….
every generation since the early 1800s has seen wailing about how technological changes are going to end labor life as we know it, yet, remarkably, innovation and change seems to bring about new opportunities many many millions
Among the changes ignored are large improvements in quality-for-price over the years, changes in household size (fewer and fewer people per household is making comparisons of “household” income and wealth highly misleading), more and more non-wage benefits, more leisure time than ever before etc. etc.
Also, all comparisons about “inequality” do not demonstrate anything at all about how the middle 90% of the population lives. (I am right smack in the middle of all incomes so I am not writing as some complacent rich person) There is tremendous envy about rich CEOs etc. (spurred by charlatans like Robert Reich and most of the Demagogic Party), but the wealth of the “1%” is simply irrelevant to measuring the quality of life of the middle 80-90%.
Sure, envy and class warfare can make people FEEL beleaguered and downtrodden, but that is different from actually being so. I have been right about in the center of the middle class all my life, and my material quality of life, leisure, medical care etc. have improved dramatically since the 1960s and 70s…. without any relative improvement in my household income.
I know, anecdotal, but there are wider trends that look the same:
“The Myth of a Stagnant Middle Class
Household spending on food, housing, utilities, etc. has fallen from 53% of disposable income in 1950 to 32% today.”
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323468604578249723138161566
Jim D: How about the growing health care industry, the growing need for truck drivers, warehousing, food distribution, construction, auto and home repair, …..? My preference when I was young and unskilled was the military; free room, board and training, led to free college and an engineering degree. One of the best decisions I made. My brother made the same decision and became a lawyer. And BTW, last time I checked, low paying jobs are closely linked to being young.
Skiphil: It was devastating in 1812 when I lost my job making candles; did not view the kerosene lamp very kindly at the time.
rls
I worked in manufacturing 50 years ago for parts of 3 years and your description is right on target. A great motivator for an education.
While it is a nice ideal to have that America doesn’t have to produce anything to export, but everyone in the US exists to provide services to each other and meanwhile buy things from other countries, I think a more productive country has more value to the world. Also is a net importing country sustainable? As it is America does export energy and agricultural products, but not much else. Not judging. Just things to think about.
The US can and does export coal.
Exports:
(From page 8)
Chemicals 189,333 12.0 77,535 41.0 110,716 58.5 1,081 0.6
Transportation Equipment 240,347 15.2 75,432 31.4 161,704 67.3 3,212 1.3
Petroleum & Coal Products 118,224 7.5 41,842 35.4 76,331 64.6 51 (-)
Computer & Electronic Products 122,654 7.8 39,104 31.9 81,854 66.7 1,696 1.4
Machinery, Except Electrical 141,871 9.0 38,516 27.1 101,532 71.6 1,823 1.3
Miscellaneous Manufactured Commodities 43,683 2.8 16,517 37.8 26,004 59.5 1,161 2.7
Electrical Equipment, Appliances & Components 38,318 2.4 13,704 35.8 23,448 61.2 1,166 3.0
Fabricated Metal Products, Nesoi 42,912 2.7 12,767 29.8 28,224 65.8 1,921 4.5
Food & Kindred Products 67,285 4.3 12,077 17.9 54,642 81.2 566 0.8
Plastics & Rubber Products
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/2013pr/aip/related_party/rp13.pdf
Jim D: Perhaps you thinkith too much. I recommend reading Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell.
Jim2: Thank you for the export data. But I’m not sure that a trade deficit is bad. It seems the US had them for years even while we were having substantial growth.
Jim2: just confirmed it after reading a few pages of Sowell. The US ran record breaking trade deficits during the 1990s at the same time that it had booming prosperity.
“As it is America does export energy and agricultural products, but not much else.”
Services, such as education, design etc can be exported too. They also tend to provide non profit-sheet benefits, such as greater acceptance that the USA is not the devil incarnate, for example.
At the same time we have seen family wages stagnate we have seen an increase of two wage earners in the household. I wouldn’t call that an improvement in quality of life or evidence of more leisure time.
“owntrodden, but that is different from actually being so. I have been right about in the center of the middle class all my life, and my material quality of life, leisure, medical care etc. have improved dramatically since the 1960s and 70s….”
I would also add that household debt has skyrocketed and personal savings has fallen precipitously since that time. Which might explain why their “material quality of life” has improved. But it is really an illusion.
Jim D:
Looking at this from the point of view of the places with cheaper labor – over time, won’t the increased demand for labor increase the worker’s wages?
Over time – will not the places with cheaper labor find wages rising until they are on par with the USA cost of labor. Or perhaps the cheaper places will actually get have wages which are higher than the USA and jobs will flow back to the USA because we are the place with cheaper labor in that future world.
The jobs slosh back and forth and and wages ratchet up everywhere.
I don’t see the consequences of capitalism as a bad thing for the places with cheaper labor – or ultimately for the USA.
Jim D,
The trend in the USA over the last 80 years is for less and less free market and more and more government spending, taxing, and regulations. We have retained free markets in some areas and periodically we remember the value of them and make tiny moves to make some more free or to decrease taxes (but rarely spending). Be careful not to confuse cronyism in the presence of a capitalistic system as pure capitalism. I would argue that some of the increase in the income gap is simply due to a doubling of our population so that someone like Bill Gates can provide things most people use and get very rich. But, much of the income gap IMO is also due to cronyism and tax and regulatory policies. One can’t simply ignore the increasingly complex tax and regulatory codes and assume they have nothing to do with promoting the growth of larger companies while penalizing smaller ones and increasing the income gap. This disparity has grown as government has grown. It’s not like we keep getting closer and closer to pure laissez-faire capitalism every year. It’s closer to the opposite.
“…the question becomes can the economy stand on its own?”
There’s an idea that without the Feds active control, our economy would not be able to stand. The economy is a patient and needs doctors to fix it.
Absolute rubbish – the economy always fairs better without busy-bodies trying to fix it.
GFC: this could have been neatly bypassed by subsidising the borrowers directly, but big finance said “they won’t learn their lesson if you do that”. Oddly enough (or not), the “too big to collapse” banks managed to learn their lesson well enough even with a subsidy, right? Suuure…
I wonder if seeing economic foolishness in the past, contributes to climate skeptics conclusions? From the other point of view, committing to economic foolishness, yes that’s Republicans at times, pushes towards a less critical evaluation of climate science. If you believe we should spend $100,000 to, so we say, create 1 iron ore mining job, you’re ready to subsidize a windmill, made in America of course. So what are Libertarians like myself good for? Learning how ‘not’ make an economic argument. Yet there may be something to learn from that in how to win the climate change argument.
I agree comparing climate science with economic science. If we say we lost the Economics argument, we can look at what was done wrong and what can we learn? With economics, Libertarians have the role of skeptics with the Republicans being the lukewarmers, Keynes had the role of James Hansen with his sensitivity value. Macro Economists wish to be more than bean counters. They want to put their hands on the controls. It’s the same with some climate scientists. The claims of cheap green energy are recycled economic arguments. Short term recessions are a call to do something based on the advice of those with no better wisdom than an overpaid underperfoming stockbroker that doesn’t know anymore about where the market is going than my cat does. Too big to fail is a call to shovel scarce resources to the people who messed up the situation in the first place. The system is teetering and must be saved.
Good summary.
Joshua has difficulties discriminating zero government from small government.
Jim2: You may be giving Joshua too much credit. My guess is that doesn’t want to distinguish between small government and zero government. His belief is based on his belief, and he will not change that belief because it is also the belief of all his professors, all his friends, and all he reads.
I note the link for the ‘need for knowledge-based journalism.’
After the past 30 years of climate hysterics, I’d Love to see some.
To tell the truth, if I weren’t told it was “The Onion,” I’d have thought the referenced article came from the UK Guardian.
Coal. It’s not going away anytime soon.
From the article:
…
Coal has fallen out of favor as a fuel source in the U.S. and Europe over the last few decades because burning coals creates both CO2 and particulate pollution (41% of global carbon emissions come from coal). That said, coal still represents 30% of the total global energy produced and 40% of power generation worldwide as China and other countries have dramatically ramped up their coal consumption over the past 20 years.
…
Furthermore, over 1,200 coal-fired power plants are in operation globally, including more than 450 in India and 360 in China. Keep in mind the average life of these plants is close to 40 years.
Global coal consumption increased by 3.9% a year on average between 2000 and 2013, with a 3% rise in 2013, with total consumption just topping 8 billion tons. Moreover, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), even though growth is slowing down, coal will still become the world’s top source of energy within a few years.
…
The S&P report also notes that China has increased its coal demand by 7.5% per year between 2005 and 2013, and is the largest global consumer of coal, representing 45% of total consumption. The rapid growth of coal has created a huge boom in CO2 production and has led to severe air pollution in industrial provinces and problems with clean water in some areas.
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2332115-coal-industry-facing-uncertain-future-amid-constraints-s-and-p
More and more coal use and no warming to show for it.
CO2 is plant food. More CO2 means more food. Less CO2 means less food. China, please keep up the good work. We are falling behind here in the US. I guess that China is going to get to burn the oil from Canada that we are dragging our feet on. It is important to keep CO2 levels high. That makes green things grow better with less water.
And we know with all of that all of that coal use what an environmental paradise China has become… We should all strive to be more like China…
Dr. Curry — Could you do an overview blog review on clouds (aka Cliff Notes)? Most folks say this is the biggest unknown. Is this correct? In GW science, why are clouds so hard to figure out? Who should we especially be following who seem on the verge of big breakthroughs in understanding clouds? Thanks
Hi Stephen, I have collected a bunch of stuff on clouds, the topic is almost too overwhelming which is why I am slow to get anything posted. Thanks for pinging me on this
Judith
You might be interested in the charming ‘Cloud Appreciation Society.’
http://cloudspotterapp.com/
As well as the whimsical appreciation of clouds they have done serious work with NASA and the CERES project.
tonyb
climatereason | July 26, 2014 at 12:53 pm |
“you might be interested in the charming ‘Cloud Appreciation Society.’http://cloudspotterapp.com/ ”
Which mentions “40 uniquely different cloud species.”
Wonder if any of the 40 species of clouds are threatened with extinction due to CAGW?
Judith,
if you should see this comment, I discussed a little bit about the concept of “public reason” on the last thread (not sure if it’s ever been discussed at Climate Etc. since I have not seen nearly all the threads here).
The following article might provide the basis for a really interesting new thread in the categories of policy, ethics, sociology of science etc.
This link is for a summary article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, because while there is quite a developed set of articles in the philosophy journals, all the key ones seem to be behind paywalls.
Of course one need not delve into nearly all the details of the following to discuss the idea of “public reason(s)” in the context of climate policy and climate science:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/public-reason/
I second the suggestion. Particularly interesting for me would be measurements of Earth’s albedo at different (mostly optical) wavelengths.
This is good:
http://scienceofdoom.com/roadmap/clouds-and-water-vapor/
sudden increase in Arctic ice measured by DMI:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
If this proves accurate and if it continues, it will be another point of embarrasment for all those theorists of climate emergencies in the northern latitudes.Will all the Arctic ice be gone by 2015??? Looks most unlikely.
h/t “turnedoutnice” at Bishop Hill for link to DMI graph, since I don’t monitor that frequently.
What with a trend change that large, I would first suspect a malfunction of a satellite. But I keep looking for and not finding any indication of that. I suppose it could be related to wind changes. Dr. Curry, do you have any intel on this?
I wonder about such a possible inaccuracy too, although note that DMI seems confident* in the measurement since they discuss in red the issue of “coastal masking” as newly considered in the revised graph, i.e., someone at DMI seems to have reviewed the graph again and sticks with it for public considertation.
It will be most interesting to find out more.
*this point is not decisive of course, I am noting only that there is an indication that DMI gave further attention to this graph.
Just a reminder, the stuff ( sea ice ) is not static.
It moves around and can sometimes stretch which increases the extent:
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticictn_nowcast_anim30d.gif
I appreciate the new link which shows a little different trend than the NSDIC that I am used to. I believe a Danish source has shown Arctic sea ice in the 1930s similar to today. The deeper one digs the more one finds evidence that not much about our climate is “unprecedented”.
Nottawa rafter
I wrote about the arctic ice conditions during the 1920 to 1950 period here
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=historic+variations+in+arctic+ice&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari
They were broadly similar to the modern warm period except for the two low points during the 2000’s probably exceeded those of the earlier period, for whatever reason. The Greenland temperature during the 1930 and 1940 period remain however the warmest two consecutive decades in the temperature record
Tonyb
Skiphil,
You do know that the increase in extent is not being matched by an increase in area, which means there is a whole lot of ice divergence that is causing this bump in extent. Divergence this time of year is common, but has gotten even more common as the net thickness of the ice has declined so much. The net result is that sea ice area and sea ice thickness is a much better gauge of ice health and in fact divergence leading to a bump in extent is telling you that the ice concentration is very low in areas.
The DMI sea ice extent, wrongly labelled as 30 percent in the Arctic Sea Ice blog , (first link in Judith’s Blogroll) for the last 15 months when the DMI changed their 30 percent to 15 percent is probably due to the computer algorithms taking in a massive slow down in ice melting for a few days rather than any real increase in extent at this time of year.
NSIDC uses a 5 day trialling average.
The true 30 percent DMI which shows more ice extent in current years was suspended by the DMI for this reason but can still be obtained by clicking on the incorrectly labelled graph at Neven’s.
WUWT were forced to switch to the correctly labelled 15 percent graph at that time.
The PIOMAS shows the ice is relatively quite thick compared to the previous few years at this time of year and is likely to melt very slowly this year.
Sea ice area measures the true thicker ice whereas extent takes in the broken up, thin ice hence it will always be more variable.
There is no divergence of note, both show a recent slowdown in melting due to colder arctic sea ice currents for whatever reason. They may have different timing as the main reason for the temporary divergence.
A bump in extent by definition is never telling you that ice concentration is low in areas. All such areas have more ice in them if a bump develops than they would otherwise have had
Look at the dip in Arctic temperature. Is this the infamous Arctic Amplification we hear so much about?
The link …
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Clouds would be a great subject.
Papers say they can’t predict regional responses and little over the oceans. Then we now have a controversy about are they positive or negative feedbacks or do they switch impacts depending on nearby environmental conditions. So it would be interesting.
And thanks to Zeke Hausfather for his excellent exposition on temperature adjustments.
Scott
An article from C-Fact;
How should climate change be taught in our schools?
Four organizations: National Coalition for Science Education (NCSE), the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Alliance for Climate Education, and Climate Parents, are demanding that when it comes to global warming, only the viewpoints of one side be permitted in America’s classrooms.
They call this a “bill of rights.”
They’re apparently not very familiar with another Bill Of Rights which guarantees free speech and is supposed to protect students from having political dogma foisted upon them.
If we leave it up to climate campaigners it will soon be educational heresy to correct their errors and exaggerations with scientific data and history.
You know and I both know that the debate over global warming is anything but settled.
Students can handle that fact.
They can also handle knowing that climate computer models have consistently over-predicted warming.
In fact, most students have never experienced a warming globe in their lifetimes.
Take a look at the piece that Duggan Flanakin and I submitted to National Journal on climate education.
Climate campaigners don’t fear that skeptics will teach children anything that isn’t true.
They’re afraid children will be exposed to the real facts and the climate bubble will burst.
Let’s make sure the facts remain welcome in America’s classrooms.
“Matthew C. Nisbet: Why we need knowledge-based journalism in politicized science debates http://goo.gl/D9NPlQ”
The argument for a Knowledge Based form of journalism comes at a time when journalism itself is a dying craft, and probably rightly so. More than 200 years ago, the Fourth Estate arose as an independent commentator outside the original three Estates of the Realm. From the Middle Ages on, there were few if any sources of information other than that which came directly from the clergy and nobility. The printing press and eventually syndication led to a contrary voice that was either reviled or revered depending upon whose ox was being gored.
Today we are here and not there. Today, influence peddling has become the stock and trade of news outlets/media. There is always a “spin.” The spin is the hook to attract a reader, really a purchaser as well as an advertiser. The editor has the job of selling news items/print. The journalist is in the job of “winning their Pulitzer Prize”. The advertiser is trying to increase exposure and to push product. And, just like the readership has more and more choices for news and entertainment, just like the advertiser has more options to obtain exposure, just like young people are going into new careers, the Fourth Estate no longer holds either the audience, the revenue, nor the intrigue and adventure it once had. Behold, the demise, well, not really the demise, just the diminution of a once powerful social force. No longer is the pen more powerful than the paving block.
In its stead, is where we are, the blogosphere, the current darling of scandalous tidbits of disinformation. It is also no coincidence that Nisbet and others, from established and funded university chairs, located in the disinformation capitals of our country; i.e., Boston, New York, and Washington DC, have seen that their programs no longer have students flocking to their campus doors. Now, Nisbet is calling for a new paradigm, the Knowledge Based news reporter. Where was this new paradigm when the news media devolved into talking heads and sound bites; when media personalities began to do voice over people’s statements instead of listening to what the person had to say and how they said it. Lots and lots of information has been lost from content, to delivery, to believability. Which reminds me; one of the important pieces of information lost through news print has been the presentation of the character of the person speaking. Again, in the news print, short bursts of words hiding all sorts of information about the speaker and their idea.
I expect the blogosphere, as an information source to eventually be corrupted and something else will take its place, like UTube, or some other multi sensory presentation will become dominant. More likely than not, there will be a diversity of multi-sensory news, entertainment, and participatory outlets in our near future. We shall see what we shall see.
1+
Nisbit is delusional;
In recent years, other non‐profit media organizations such as
Mother Jones, The Nation, Grist.org or Inside Climate News.org
have built up sizable online audiences, and received prestigious awards including the Pulitzer Prize. Yet these foundation-‐funded
media operations also raise questions about the boundaries between journalism and advocacy.
Talk about laughable obtuse understatements about “questions” or the audacity to list any of these groups as “non-profit media organizations” when they are sole operators of political advocacy and agenda setting (of the worst kind).
Nisbit like Ezra Klein are creatures of the past pining for the ancient days when liberal ideology could define the very terms of language, decide who the “experts” were and how a stacked debate would be conducted. They’ve been exposed and no amount co-opting of the term “knowledged-based” is going to save them. The article is a liberal fantasy written for those who live in a liberal fantasy world. Basically a majority of the traditional legacy MSM media.
The Guardian had a headline today
“Gaza truce in peril after Hamas attacks on Israel continue”
So HAMAS cannot break a truce by attacking Israel, only Israel can break truces.
I’ve been reading this blog for about a year now, and to my recollection the science has always couched in terms of uncertainty. In my read, the author has an even handed position (earth’s climate is complex, and we don’t really have a good understanding of what adding CO2 will do). I’m having a hard time recalling when she ever made a claim of certainty, with perhaps the exception of the proper role of the IPCC and consensus science. Even with the models, which necessarily imperfectly instantiate current physical mechanisms, I can’t recall an outright condemnation of them, just a warning they do not appear to be panning out and perhaps we ought to think of alternates.
In one way of thinking, this is blog is knowledge based reporting.
In Nisbet’s paper, he defines “The Knowledge Broker:” Offers up expert knoweldge, offering up alternate viewpoints, analysis, etc. That’s what this blog does, IMO. It is also done in a conscientious way.
Yet, look through the comments section here, and it consistently devolves into street fighting with stilettos and knives. I’m not making a moral judgement here, mind you. It’s great fun to watch intelligent grown men go at each others throats.
But, if you can’t have an honest broker here, and get reasonable dialogue, how could it be possible in the real-world jungle? I think it is not possible. Here in the US, the country is already divided. Even in less polarized Europe, the AGW debate seems to be coming back, as the costs of implementing the policy based on consensus science is exorbitant, and new questions arise from observations.
On the one hand, I think the short-sighted approaches of some climate scientists has so polarized the scientific debate only actual measurements will move the debate to a consensus view that can sustain non-partisan policy. Today, only partisan approaches are possible. (Oddly, I think climate could be flat for another twenty years, and the debate would largely be the same as it is today. Sure, it would move around, with more emphasis on ocean acidification, and such, but the same arguments would be made as today. If temperatures go up significantly, the debate will probably stop in any meaningful sense, and skeptics will migrate to a more consonant view.)
In short, it is hopeless to disentangle the mess of a highly polarized people, especially given the questionable activities of some climate scientists. In my view, climate scientists would do well to pull back on any predications except the most well founded, non-controversial of them, and describe certainty around observations only. This will help to protect science, at least in the US, from the massive disunity of the people, and potential mistrust of future generations of science.
The Need for Knowledge-‐Based Journalism in Politicized Science debates
There is nothing in this that is really about seeking knowledge.
It is all about how to promote the Consensus Alarmism.
You all have made up your mind to support the Consensus Alarmism and you do not care that the Alarmist Model Output has not matched real data for decades.
Knowledge-‐Based Journalism would be a good thing. They did not even show up at the Climate Change Conference in Las Vegas this month.
If you don’t talk to or listen to people who disagree, you are the problem.
Talk to us Skeptics. Don’t just talk about us.
Talk and Listen. You don’t do that. I read and listen to you and try to get some discussion going, but Consensus rules everything else out.
Don’t pretend to be right if you will not work with us to get at the truth.
Knowledge based-journalism is not about seeking knowledge. It is about avoiding sensationalism. W.R.Hearst killed it, and American journalism has never recovered – look at http://www.nytco.com/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/. He built a fake (of course) castle with a fraction of the proceeds. It pays to be a gravedigger.
Sweet dreams, everybody.
The “new”…..that is “new” epiphany regarding U.S. carbon taxes is circulating the journOlist circuit;
http://www.newyorker.com/news/hendrik-hertzberg/carbon-tax-goes
One tax lowering another in the land of unicorns, ancient statist dogma and 99% false on average. This looks like a fat lady singing moment, capitulation that the agenda is dead for the foreseeable future. Anticipating the Senate loss and all that will come with it, activists will throw out into the arena imagined “new” ideas that are in fact as old as the hills to console the defeated followers less they jump ship and realize why they really deserved to lose in the first place.
It also gets to the point that Australia’s carbon tax rejection and the defunding of the climate complex there might well be an El Alamein moment in the climate wars. It deserved a topical thread.
Since icebergs supply cold fresh water and cool the oceans, is there any coorelation to the cooling of the tropical oceans preventing El Nino? With huge pieces like pine island and thwaites drifting and melting isn’t there an additional influx of cold water going in?
Is it the ocean heat that matters? Or is ocean heat a result, not cause of El Nino?
I tend to believe the the circulation change that brings El Nino is also what raises global temperature by changing where the sunshine does and doesn’t reach the surface.
Global temperatures are highest during Northern Summer because orbital variation makes most of the sunshine fall on land.
ENSO may change global temperatures by changing the location of clouds, either from land to ocean or from low latitudes to high latitudes, or in some other configuration which increases incoming solar.
This El Nino ( which at least for the moment has lost some juice ) was ‘predicted’ on the basis of ‘westerly wind bursts’:
http://cobblab.blogspot.com/2014/03/all-eyes-on-tropical-pacific.html
Great. Now, what caused the ‘westerly wind bursts’?
Arrangement of waves in the Jet Stream would seem to be a ready answer.
Great. Now what caused the arrangement of waves in the Jet Stream? …
Perhaps its just the expression of multi-quasi-stable states with limited predictability that we have to live with.
Not particularly satisfying.
You made a nice concise summary of that. That is fairly consistant with what is usually surmised or at least what I usually read. I still wonder, though, if the icesheet melting has any effect? I’ve never seen that discussed, although I may not be up on all the research, and couldn’t help to think there would be some cause and effect there. I suppose since it is cold it would have more of a deep water affect?
“Is it the ocean heat that matters? Or is ocean heat a result, not cause of El Nino?”
—–
There is higher net latent and sensible heat flux from ocean to atmosphere during an El Niño, thus an El Niño cannot be the cause of higher ocean heat content. The vast majority of ocean heat comes from solar, with the flow of that heat out of the ocean being dictated by ENSO conditions over shorter periods and GH gases over longer periods.
Over on WUWT, Alec Rawls writes ““On the CO2 forcing effect it isn’t the debate that has shifted, only Keating’s awareness of it, and he must have only learned very recently (not “over the decades”) about the broad agreement among skeptics and consensoids alike that a doubling of CO2 should cause a temperature forcing of about 1°C.”
It never ceases to amaze me that sensible people like Alec continue to write this nonsense. If there is “broad agreement, which I doubt, I have no idea what this could possibly be based on. It is impossible to measure this supposed rise of 1C, so the number has no meaning, and is nothing more than a guess.
1. there is broad agreement.
2. It is possible to calculate it from first principles , so it is not meaningless.
3. You can estimate it easily.
4. numbers can have meaning without being directly measureable.
go ahead and estimate the number of stars. You’ll never measure it,
but you know that an estimate of 1 billion is better than a guess of 42.
your problem is that you misunderstand understanding and knowledge.
I would love to estimate it easily. Can you provide a guidance please?
Curious George, “I would love to estimate it easily. Can you provide a guidance please?”
Assuming a doubling of CO2 increases atmospheric forcing by 3.7 Wm-2, the primary heat reservoir energy will increase by the same amount. The best estimate of the primary heat reservoir is the average temperature of the oceans which is 4C degrees and has a Stefan-Boltzmann equivalent energy of 334.5 Wm-2. Increasing that by 3.7 Wm-2 produces and average reservoir energy of 338.2 Wm-2 or an average temperature of 4.75 C degrees.
Since there is some question about what “surface” is impacted, using the average reservoir energy is a great simplification. Also since the reservoir take up to 1700 years for one full over turning, it might take a while to realize the full impact of a doubling of CO2.
Steven, you write “your problem is that you misunderstand understanding and knowledge”
So, when the science you present is wrong, you resort to personal insults.. Let me take your points one by one.
On what basis do you claim there is broad agreement? Have all skeptics been asked for their opinion?
I agree the 1 C can be estimated easily. Whether the estimate is anything more than a guess is another issue. Unless and until any number has actually been measured, ANY estimates are nothing more than guesses.
Numbers can have meaning without being measured. However, until a number has been measured, the meaning is very strictly limited. It is, for example, wrong to claim that we know the value of CS unless and until it has actually been measured. To do so means that The Scientific Method is NOT being used.
If you want to claim that we can say anything scientific about what happens to global temperatures when more CO2 is added to the atmosphere from recent levels, be my guest. But don’t think you are being scientific. You are NOT using The Scientific Method.
Oh, George the Curious, in case you want a more complex “surface” estimate, this comes up with about the same thing.
http://edberry.com/SiteDocs/PDF/Climate/KimotoPaperReprint.pdf
There are some who don’t even understand why the surface temperature is currently 33 C warmer than the temperature earth radiates to space (the insulation effect of the atmosphere). These have tripped up at the first hurdle, and I think it is fairly hopeless to explain any further to them until they first understand the current climate.
JimD, “There are some who don’t even understand why the surface temperature is currently 33 C warmer than the temperature earth radiates to space (the insulation effect of the atmosphere).”
Very true, like those that don’t understand that the 33 C is based on a fixed albedo which is primarily controlled by the world’s oceans.
Jim
it not a personal insult to say you misunderstand.
you misunderstand.
no one listens to your weird argument now
no one will will listen in the future.
I won’t waste any more time on your argument.
sorry.
Steven, you write “I won’t waste any more time on your argument.”
Thank you.
@captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2 | July 26, 2014 at 5:16 pm |
So, captain, since you know so much about climate, calculate what clouds do after the doubling of CO2 – I don’t recall seeing anything about clouds in your post.
In fact, you have just executed some fancy hand-waving. You have to have data from the real world to prove what a doubling of CO2 will do and the data we do have says – it won’t do much at all.
Jim Cripwell ,take solace in the knowledge that someday in the not too distant future, Mosher will get his comeuppance. Professionally, that is.
jim2, “In fact, you have just executed some fancy hand-waving. You have to have data from the real world to prove what a doubling of CO2 will do and the data we do have says – it won’t do much at all.”
Actually it is fancy frame of reference selection. Using the average temperature of the oceans instead of the more chaotic “average surface air temperature”, the problem is simplified. Note I said “assuming a doubling of CO2 adds 3.7 Wm-2 of atmospheric forcing”. That would make my estimate a “no feedback” sensitivity or the classic “all else remaining equal”.
@captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2 | July 26, 2014 at 7:41 pm |
Hey there. Only a More Ron would believe that simple calculation represents in any way, shape, or form the response of climate to a doubling of CO2.
jim2, “Hey there. Only a More Ron would believe that simple calculation represents in any way, shape, or form the response of climate to a doubling of CO2.”
Arriving as such a simple estimates requires a hellava lot of research and checking. It is actually very simple though.
The best estimate of average atmosphere resistance to heat loss or DWLR is about 333 Wm-2. That energy is produced by the stored energy of the reservoir, the oceans. If DWLR increases by 3.7 Wm-2 the reservoir would have to increase by a proportional amount.
Now if you want to get into something more interesting, 4 C, the average reservoir temperature is controlled by the density i.e. salinity and the unique property of fresh water of having its highest density at 4 C degrees. Salt and other impurities vary the depth of the 4C isotherm but not the temperature which is a function of fresh water properties. Earth just happened to find the right distance from the right star where the ideal black body temperature would be about 4 C.
As far as the “actual” impact of a doubling, since it could take a thousand years, no one could possibly know. However, that doesn’t make a basic thermodynamic estimate with the stated assumptions useless.
As someone said, nature is simple – it’s people that complicate the crap out of everything.
JC SNIP David pls cool it in terms of the insults.
Steven –
==> “1. there is broad agreement.”
Indeed, you are right. There is broad agreement as long as you ignore anyone who doesn’t agree.
In other words, as long as you exclude Jim, jim2, many others who comment here, and no doubt many, many, many “skeptics” there is “broad agreement.”
Perhaps not so, however, if you don’t define your terms so as to be self-fulfilling.
Here’s some indirect evidence:
http://www.culturalcognition.net/storage/ollllllld.png?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1404405022622
Well now, look at that. When asked to choose between human caused, naturally caused, and no warming, a
pluralitymajority of “conservative” types picked no effin warming.Now how many people do you suppose agree “that a doubling of CO2 should cause a temperature forcing of about 1°C” yet also think that there has been “no warming?”
Acknowledged that having to choose between the options as being mutually exclusive might give some misleading results – but sorry, steven, but anyone who says that there is “broad agreement,” is engaging in wishful thinking.
Well, that is unless you just exclude anyone who doesn’t agree from your group among which there is “broad agreement.”
@ captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2 | July 26, 2014 at 8:20 pm |
Now if you want to get into something more interesting, 4 C, the average reservoir temperature is controlled by the density i.e. salinity and the unique property of fresh water of having its highest density at 4 C degrees. Salt and other impurities vary the depth of the 4C isotherm but not the temperature which is a function of fresh water properties. Earth just happened to find the right distance from the right star where the ideal black body temperature would be about 4 C.
*****
That’s a step forward. Now that you have discovered water, perhaps clouds will follow.
Joshua
“Indeed, you are right. There is broad agreement as long as you ignore anyone who doesn’t agree.”
there is broad agreement INCLUDING those who disagree.
not ignoring any of the seven dwarfs here who disagree.
basically to find someone who disagrees is not hard.
just read comments by ignorant people on threads.
you named some of them.
At heartland for example Monkton asked the question and there was universal agreement. Go figure throw a conference for all the heavy weight skeptics and there was universal agreement.
I say broad because you find odd balls like cripwell and others
jim2, “That’s a step forward. Now that you have discovered water, perhaps clouds will follow.”
I have discovered or rediscovered more accurately, quite a bit. No feedback sensitivity to a doubling is just one of those things.
steven –
Good point. Because an audience of climate combatants who attend a “skeptics” conference is a representative sampling for assessing general opinion.
Too funny, steven. Perhaps your best yet.
CaptDallas2: Thank you for showing me the inherent simplicity of an estimation: “Assuming a doubling of CO2 increases atmospheric forcing by 3.7 Wm-2” … I can then estimate the forcing at 3.7W/m2. I get it. Hooray! I am a climate scientist now.
George the Curious, ” I can then estimate the forcing at 3.7Wm-2. I get it. Hooray! I am a climate scientist now.”
No, to be a “real” climate scientist you have to assume that the additional assumed 3.7 Wm-2 results in about 7.4 Wm-2 at some arbitrary surface you define and that the additional 7.4 Wm-2 inspires water vapor to add 26 Wm-2 of forcing without significant “surface” cooling or negative cloud feedback. That was Kimoto’s issue in his “on the confusion of Planck feedback parameters” I referenced earlier. Using my simplification you are only a skeptical climate dabbler like Lindzen or Spencer or Kimoto or Schwartz and such.
Jim, you are quite right. It is possible to measure A supposed rise of 1C. It is not possible to measure THIS supposed rise of 1C. That is because what happens in glass receptacles is different to what happens over entire planets with largely unknown insides, largely unknown ocean deeps, a very testy atmosphere…and all affected by a rather larger variable called “sun”.
CO2 science reminds me of those miracle fabric protectors and non-stick/no-scratch saucepans which come with all sorts of attestations, endorsements and guarantees. Everything is proven in exhaustive testing by independent laboratories…and nothing works after some actual hard use. (Maybe you are interested in their new and improved models?)
Jim, your plain sense is not “theory”, nor can it be “weird”. Weird is the kiddie console approach to climate…which really should be promoted only in 3AM infomercials.
Yes I think so. That’s one reason why these disinformation campaigns have been so successful. It’s always easy to find some aspect of the science that is uncertain, or confusing, and focus on that to the exclusion of the larger picture.
Yes, it is confusing, it is uncertain, yet they say they are 97% sure.
I do say that is more than enough to apply that to the larger picture.
There is no real data that supports the alarmism. That is the big picture.
You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what it is. And clearly the Alarmists do not.
Finally there is the power of rationalization—people whose bread really is buttered by the Government Alarmist Climate and CO2 Alternate Energy subsidies and tax credits, or people who are heavily invested in the Wind and Solar and Ethanol in one way or another, and just don’t want to accept that there is a fundamental problem with the Chicken Little, the sky is falling, CO2, Alarmism.
I forgot to mention the people who got rich on Carbon Trading, at taxpayer expense and at consumer expense.
Faced with a perceived conflict between expanding global energy access and rapidly reducing greenhouse emissions to prevent climate change, many environmental groups and donor institutions have come to rely on small-scale, decentralized, renewable energy technologies that cannot meet the energy demands of rapidly growing emerging economies and people struggling to escape extreme poverty. The UN’s flagship energy access program, for example, claims that “basic human needs” can be met with enough electricity to power a fan, a couple of light bulbs,
and a radio for five hours a day.
A reconsideration of what equitable energy access means for human development and the environment is needed. As this paper demonstrates, a massive expansion of energy systems, primarily carried out in the rapidly urbanizing global South, in combination with the rapid acceleration of clean energy innovation, is a more pragmatic, just, and morally acceptable framework for thinking about energy access. The time has come to embrace a high-energy planet.’
http://thebreakthrough.org/images/pdfs/Our-High-Energy-Planet.pdf
This I came across this week – the wonder to me is why it needs saying at all.
Following some posts on WUWT, I found some interesting data on the Kaya Identity:
http://mygardenpond.wordpress.com/2014/07/25/kaya-identity-part-ii-and-a-diamond-law/
“Are some apparent CO2 emission reductions ‘too good to be true’? In this post, I discuss how the Kaya Identity leads to what might be called the ‘diamond law’ of CO2 emissions. This ‘law’ (in fact just chemistry) allows us to check the plausibility of apparently dramatic CO2 reductions.”
It’s not that “denier” isn’t a form of hate speech from climate orthodox advocates but “banning” words is a losing argument all the same;
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/07/25/In-praise-of-hate-speech
NHL Releases Report Warning Future of Hockey in Jeopardy Due to Climate Change
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2141876-nhl-releases-report-warning-future-of-hockey-in-threat-due-to-climate-change
Cannot play hockey with broken hockey sticks : )
http://www.thestar.com/sports/hockey/2014/07/23/nhl_warns_hockeys_future_threatened_by_climate_change.html
Brent
Of course the NHL could do away with all the expansion teams and revert to the “Original Six”, which is known by the Carolina Hurricanes fans as the day’s first six pack. :)
Not to worry. There are many other things that a man can do with a stick.
Meet India’s widows of climate change
The remote Indian mountain village of Deoli-Benigram has no cars and no electricity. And it hardly has any men — they were washed away by deadly floods last year
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/07/21/meet_indias_widows_of_climate_change.html
I’m sorry to hear about their husbands, but this has nothing to do with ACO2. More guilt bait, I’m guessing.
I don’t suppose it would help to mention the 1943 Indian floods (or Bangladesh 1974), since climate alarmism is about infantile point scoring. The most lethal flood anyone knows a fair bit about occurred in China in 1931, though the Yellow River flood of 1887 might have matched it. Europe’s deadliest floods all seem to have occurred in the 13th and 14th centuries.
But all this talk of stuff which actually happened is just spoiling the Star’s cheesy headline and narrative, isn’t it?
There is a lot one can do about floods – but it has to do with a dated concept called “conservation” which is a tokenistic bore for our Green Betters.
And also, picking the right spot to settle in.
@jim2
The Toronto Star is Canada’s New York Times equivalent : )
I bet that the regional deforestation had anything to do with it.
Among other measures, reforestation of steep land on Leyte has already saved lives after Thelma in 1991. In a place like that there will always be storms and threat to life, but money and engineering for conservation have already achieved great things. Cyclone Tracy, if it struck Darwin now, would not do the damage it did in 1974.
None of this is mysterious, and I doubt we need more jet trails to more climate conferences to seek a deeper definition of “mitigation”. We need to spend more money on conservation and no money at all on trying to manipulate the climate. Perhaps one last conference toward a better definition of “potty” would be in order.
Could you write or link some more scary stories? This is giving me an idea for my blog.
@Fernando.
Well, I don’t write scare stories :: ))
But know of plenty of them. It’s such a target rich environment, it’s hard to know where to start :: ))
Probably too expansive a topic to get into on this thread. But if you want to discuss further you can email me at brent_ns1 at yahoo.com
cheers
As this thread seems not to be as open as others I’ve read here, I’d like some opinion on this:
The Warmist/Alarmist political faction of the climate debate is ignoring the argument that would currently best serve it. I’m not complaining…
What I’m referring to is the current hiatus. In this Lukewarmer’s opinion, it is actually evidence (I don’t know how strong) that they have some measure of truth in their arguments.
This is because temperatures have not declined during this hiatus. I’ve mentioned this here on several other threads, but haven’t seen the implications addressed.
Back when they thought hysteria was enough, Alarmists papered over previous pauses in temperature rise, two of which are recent enough to be covered by the modern temperature record. But in one of those instances temperatures went down. In the other one it stayed the same.
Since 1998, with the change in several large scale phenomena that affect climate to states that act to bring down temperatures, temperatures have not fallen at all.
This concerns me.
Just to finish my thought, the Alarmist brigade has spent a lot of time and energy either denying the hiatus or minimizing it. What they should have been doing is pointing out the obvious–despite major changes, the temperature has not declined.
But then, they seem to have reached a collective decision to always choose the stupidest course of action from whatever options are available to them. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.
Tom, how does it matter if temps or sea levels continue to go up? We’re in an interglacial, and the few cooler centuries preceding the 20th are no more typical of that interglacial than the warmer centuries before them.
Continents are a different shape to how they were a mere ten thousand years ago because of some pretty heavy-duty climate change. Some skeptics are fussing about “the pause”. Others couldn’t care less.
The “pause” is not important because it disproves CAGW. The pause is important because it demonstrates the simple fact that the consensus does not know enough about the climate to model it to predict temperatures with any accuracy.
It doesn’t matter if temperatures stayed the same for 17 years, dropped, or increased at double the rate. They don’t understand the climate enough to model it, and therefore have no credibility in advising their policy of decarbonization.
“What they should have been doing is pointing out the obvious–despite major changes, the temperature has not declined.”
If you know what the “major changes” are that caused the pause, you might want to share them. and pick up your Nobel on the way out.
I would rather see attention to a greater understanding of the influences leading to the Roman and MWP. Until shown otherwise, we could be moving back to those states.
“What they should have been doing is pointing out the obvious–despite major changes, the temperature has not declined.”
——-
How many times has ” warmest decade on instrument record” been posted? Decadal average temperature is the absolute shortest period for using the tropospheric sensible heat metric for trying to see the longer term forcing from increasing GH gases. Anything shorter will only capture ENSO variability because sensible tropospheric heat is largely supported by the flux of sensible and latent heat from the ocean, and ENSO is the largest source of variability in this flux.
“I would rather see attention to a greater understanding of the influences leading to the Roman and MWP. Until shown otherwise, we could be moving back to those states.”
—
If you believe the paleoclimate record can tell us something about the future climate state toward which we might be headed, best to pay attention to the data coming from the mid-Pliocene record– the last time GH gases were this high.
Regarding the MWP specifically– At least two factors were low volcanic activity, and thus more net solar reaching the surface, and a bit higher TSI compared to the period before and after. From about 700 to 1200 AD there was very low volcanic activity. Then, from 1225 to 1275 (at the “gateway to the LIA”) we saw the most active volcanic period in the past 1000 years, punctuated by the mega volcano of 1257. Paleoclimate records show the global ocean heat content declined sharply beginning during this period, and had not fully recovered before the other largest volcano in the past 1000 years erupted in 1453, sending global ocean heat content still lower.
Here’s a graph of ocean heat content related paleoclimate data showing the “gateway to the LIA” period of 1225 to 1257AD circled in green. That period marked an abrupt end to the MWP.
Oops, link:
http://tinypic.com/r/ml4d40/8
“The “pause” is not important because it disproves CAGW. ”
—
Of course the “pause” is important in understanding natural ENSO and PDO related variability, but tells us very little about AGW and next to nothing about the potential for CAGW.
Peggy Noonan has an article in the Wall Street Journal that is captivating.
The War That Broke a Century
She starts with these two sentences:
Next week marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. It was the great disaster of the 20th century, the one that summoned or forced the disasters that would follow, from Lenin and Hitler to WWII and the cold war.
She ends with this:
History is human. And sometimes it turns bigger than humans can bear.
From the article:
Coolest Summer On Record In The US
Posted on July 26, 2014
The frequency of 90 degree days in the US has been plummeting for 80 years, and 2014 has had the lowest frequency of 90 degree days through July 23 on record. The only other year which came close was 1992, and that was due to dust in the atmosphere from Mt Pinatubo.
…
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/07/26/coolest-summer-on-record-in-the-us/
I tried posting this question last week, not much result:
A comparative table of climate feedback loops, positive & negative, side-by-side, from largest effect to smallest. Is there one out there? Note: not a box diagram, not a flow chart. A table.
Admittedly, I haven’t pored over the IPCC science reports, so maybe it’s buried in there somewhere.
Paul_K made comments on BEST methodology which needs further exploration(Comment #131322) at the Blackboard July 23rd, 2014
model assumption does not recognise any time-dependence in the geographical component other than the time-dependent variation in the global average temperature. Under this model assumption, the expected value of temperature at each location on the planet moves in lockstep with the global average temperature. In simplistic terms, the model structure recognises that the poles are colder than the tropics, but it does not recognise in any structural sense that the amplitude of temperature variation in the high northern latitudes is observably greater than the amplitude in the high southern latitudes which is greater than the amplitude in the tropics. The model has no structural recognition of the “geographical component” of temperature variation which is associated with amplification of temperature change as one moves towards the higher latitudes. (I will call this ‘polar amplification’ for short, even though it is not quite the context the term is normally used in.) Yet this is undoubtedly a realworld phenomenon, and one which manifests itself in the data input (weather stations).
Hence when a variogram or correlation-distance analysis is done on the real world datapoints under this model assumption, the only element remaining to be mapped is apparently the weather plus error terms. In the real data, it is the weather plus the temperature variation associated with polar amplification (plus error terms). There is then a very high correlation retention associated with polar amplification, and this results in a very large distance parameter being applied (with radius over 3100 kms) to the weather term, now an obvious misnomer, which results in an unjustified smoothing of all smaller-scale features.
There is another way to look at this, which is to say that since the weather term W is the only fluctuation which is left in the mathematical model, then any variation (like polar amplification) which is not explained by the stable geographical component already accounted for MUST be included as a fluctuation in the weather term. Therefore, you need the large correlation distances to correctly account for polar amplification. This is actually highlighting a structural problem in the model – which results in trying to get the same data to do two incompatible things.
I have come to the conclusion that the problem is better described as a structural deficiency rather than a choice of data problem. At the moment, the BEST methodology is trying to get one spatial characterisation to do two incompatible things – map relatively small-scale weather features and map large-scale temperature variation associated with amplitude dependence on latitude. They need to be separated.
What BEST does at the moment does not seem like a bad approach to generating an average global temperature series, and this should be relatively insensitive to choice of maximum correlation length. Its main problem is in the mapping (and the associated error calculation).
Is this worth putting up to Zeke for response and/or Cowtan and Way who may have used this method which seems to have flaws.
Thanks, angech for this clear exposition of the question. It’s gradually rising in moshe’s inbox, percolating against gravity.
==============
I ‘m a heathen, I prefer instant coffee rather than mashing about.
there are no un answered questions in my in box.
every actual user of the data gets their questions answered.
pretty simple.
42 may be your answer Steven to my question ( how many real USHCN stations are there?).
But I was asking for the actual number, not the meaning of life.
Nor have I appreciated the runaround to this question from you and Zeke. I guess I will keep mentioning it every three months and hope someone more important than me eventually notices your refusal to answer this question. We both know why.
The actual number of real stations is now so low that everyone would throw their hands up in horror and say you cannot do a USHCN with only 42 or 200 or whatever the real low figure is out of 1128.
Now I do not mind.It is only a model , but if you guys had true pride in the model you would stump up the answer and face the flack and I would be much prouder of you and your data.
We have a state of a very large quantity of matter. We call it “the climate”. It is the state of all of the matter that is in the atmosphere and is in the oceans and it is also some of the ground, of the earth.
Can we describe it with a number, one number, Average Temperature?
Can we answer that? Before we argue about the best number?
I would have thought they also used distance from the ocean and topography/geography to fill in their land data? Also, to fill in ocean areas they could use other parameters such as ocean currents, ice surface, wind fields? Are they really limited to latitude?
The basic statistical model specified by Roman M and used by BEST is structurally devoid of any sensible definition of the unknown “average regional temperature” that it attempts to estimate by assigning fixed “offsets” to each station record. Thus, by default, spatial homogeneity along with temporal coherence is tacitly assumed for the entire globe. Such a simplistic model can only satisfy an academic mind totally bereft of geophysical experience. No matter how clever the PR campaign to defend BEST’s globally-kriged data products, they are an egregious boondoggle.
John S., could you give a bit more detail?
Again John and Brandon are so desperate to find fault with the global temperature record, but conveniently forget the fact that the averaging technique is still sensitive enough to pick out ENSO effects and volcanic eruptions, which clearly impact both global and regional temperatures.
So you can’t have it both ways — if the BEST scheme corrupts the data (as you claim), it would also completely eliminate the ENSO and volcanic variations. And also the “stadium wave” and TSI for those keeping score. But it doesn’t corrupt the data to that extent, so the whiners lose the argument — end of story.
Thanks for not mentioning St. Louis again, webby. That was really getting creepy.
Please explain why if John’s criticisms are valid BEST would completely eliminate the ENSO and volcanic variations. I don’t pretend to know, but it seems to me that if one used a methodology that consistently exaggerated the trend, one way or the other, ENSO and volcanic variations would still show up. I would appreciate a straight answer, webby. I would really like to know.
Thanks for reminding me — Brandon Shollenbeger also said that “BEST adds a huge warming trend” , which is scientifically false
http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments-to-temperature-data/#comment-607417
And of course Brandon Shollenberger runs away and hides every time he is challenged. He really doesn’t have what it takes to do scientific research.
Standard run-of-the-mill internet bullies like Monfort or Springer are fine in comparison, as they aren’t trying to be something that they are not.
I have to say, of all the silly things WebHubTelescope has said, claiming I ran away may be the silliest. I “ran away” by writing multiple follow-up posts, creating numerous graphs and temperature maps (including many people requested) and providing code to replicate my results. Saying that is me running away is… interesting.
Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone accuse me of running away from anything before.* I can’t think of a time I have. I’d challenge anyone to find a single example of me running away online. If anything, I think they’d find the opposite. One of the most common criticisms I receive is I don’t let things drop.
*Aside from maybe a relationship.
You didn’t answer my question, webby. And I said please. Run away if you must.
Brandon:
On what aspect of my critique would you like more detail?
John S., primarily, I’m curious how you conclude the model “is structurally devoid of any sensible definition of the unknown ‘average regional temperature.'” That’s a serious claim, but it’s one you don’t offer an explanation for.
Look at Brandon Shollenberger run away from the challenge and Don Monfort take on the role of the bully of course. Go Team Skeptic, way to work.
Can anyone tell me what challenge WebHubTelescope is claiming I just ran away from? If I’m going to be accused of being afraid of something, I’d like to know what it is I’m supposedly afraid of.
Brandon Shollenberger is running away from the assertion that he made that “BEST adds a huge warming trend”.
Good to know WebHubTelescope. That means, according to you, I ran away by writing multiple posts to follow-up, having a series of discussions, generating many graphs and temperature maps and providing code to replicate my results.
I think I must suck at this running away thing.
Brandon Shollenberger never admitted how wrong he was when he asserted that “BEST adds a huge warming trend” .
Brandon:
In the conceptual model
data = regional ave. + constant local offset + noise
nowhere are the spatial limits of what constitutes a “region” operationally
specified. Without any such specification, what data series enter into the
estimation of the regional average becomes a matter of programming fiat.
Because in many regions of the globe the spatial coverage is very poor,
data series from very remote locations are per force utilized in the
dynamic programming algorithm that minimizes the squared discrepancy between
station data and the regional estimate by adjusting offsets.
Extensive geophysical experience, however, indicates that not only does the
average temperature level change from station to station, but so does the
year-to-year variance and indeed the spectral structure of such variation.
While spatial homogeneity (aside from fixed offsets) may be a tenable
assumption over distances of several hundred kilometers in the absence of
strong topographic and maritime influences, it cannot be relied upon in the
general case. Especially in mountainous country near coasts, the
time-series of temperature variations <100km apart often lack the strong
inter-station coherence that is necessary to construct reliable time-series
of "regional averages." And without strong coherence, there is no way of
combining snippets of record into meaningful time-series of greater length.
Hope this clarifies my critique.
WebHubTelescope, I “never admitted” that because that wasn’t true, something I showed in the follow-up posts I wrote, which included temperature graphs and maps, as well as code to replicate my results. That you repeatedly ignored people’s responses to your criticisms does not mean I ran away.
Heck, you even demonstrated you read at least one of my follow-up posts, yet you never responded to what it showed. You repeatedly refused to put any effort into examining what I said or did, and to this day, you still insist I did something I didn’t do.
The only person who has run away is you. Quit projecting.
John S., thanks for the clarification. It sounds like you’re reaching basically the same view I (and several others) have reached. We just all describe it slightly differently.
VoTech Shollenberger, ha ha.
The failure of people like Orestes and Hertzberg (in links above) to aggressively embrace nuclear power in their every public pronouncement is a sign that they are more interested in bemoaning “obstructionism” than overcoming or coopting it. Quite apart from the fact that maintaining anything like our current standard of living while drastically cutting CO2 emissions would require massive nuclear deployment, grasping the nuclear nettle in more than a pro forma way would go a great distance to establishing sincerity with skeptical members of the public. When the Urgent Mitigation cause just conveniently happens to coincide entirely with the cultural and policy predilections of dreamy greens, anti-market zealots, anti-consumptionists, and control-freak technocrats, it’s hard to overcome the “of course they’d say that” reaction of those not sharing these predilections. But strong advocacy for nukes, which go 100% against those instincts, would be a powerful signal of sincerity about the cause.
Atomkraft, ja danke.
===============
OK, OK, is it ‘ja bitte’?
===============
‘Our assessment of nine advanced nuclear power technologies, from high-temperature gas reactors to fusion, finds four factors that will most likely prove determinative in achieving any significant cost declines. We conclude that policy makers, investors,
and entrepreneurs should pursue reactors models that are:
1. Safe. Inherent safety characteristics reduce the need for expensive and redundant safety systems.
2. Ready. Ready designs will utilize existing supply chains and will not require the development or commercialization of new or unproven materials and fuels.
3. Modular. Modularity allows whole reactors or their components to be mass produced and assembled uniformly.
4. Efficient . High thermal efficiency enables reactors to generate more electricity from a smaller physical plant…
High costs of nuclear cannot simply be blamed on public irrationality. Some nuclear proponents have suggested that irrational public fears of radiation exposure, in combination with the onerous regulation of nuclear designs, construction, and operation, has had a major impact on the rising costs and slowing expansion of nuclear energy. These dynamics appear overstated. While there is strong evidence
that public fears of low-level radiation exposure are exaggerated, major nuclear accidents that result in off-site land contamination, however rare, carry substantial localized social and economic costs. The public and policy makers are justifiably reluctant to expose themselves to such risks. It is difficult to imagine public acceptance of nuclear energy technologies that are not openly and comprehensively regulated. Regulatory reforms to streamline the nuclear licensing process and more holistically regulate nuclear technologies are, without question, desirable. But absent significant technological innovation, those measures in themselves are unlikely to significantly change the basic economics of nuclear energy.’
http://thebreakthrough.org/images/pdfs/Breakthrough_Institute_How_to_Make_Nuclear_Cheap.pdf
Nuclear is a panacea in it’s current – although I have little doubt that evolution of decades old designs over the next decade or so have promise of reducing costs to US gas levels.
… not a panacea…
Rob: I was surprised a few years ago to find that there was only one foundry in the world that could make the pressure vessel for nuclear reactors, and that there was a backlog of orders for these vessels. Is that still the case?
rls,
I doubt that there is “…only one foundry…” that can make reactor pressure vessels.
France and USA have that ability. The North Koreans, Iranians, Indians, Isrealies, etc have reactor vessels. Russia and Britain have somethings.
It’s not rocket science, even SA had a bomb.
Nuclear power, in any form, is a non-starter. It is far too expensive compared to alternatives, it is unsafe, uses far too much water for cooling, and leaves toxic byproducts for hundreds of years for future generations to deal with. Boiling water, pressurized water, thorium molten salt, high-temperature gas reactors, fusion, all are equally inadequate.
A 30-part series on the Truth About Nuclear Power is at
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-one.html
Note ref Rls’s question on limited foundry capabilities: the oil industry uses very thick walled, very large high pressure vessels in refineries, upgraders, and chemical plants. The last time I was involved in a design study for a large plant (2008), the schedule had to include a provision to “stand in line” for the high pressure vessels. The most capable fabricator is in South Korea. However, given the right market other high quality fabricators can emerge in countries such as the USA, Germany, UK, Japan, etc.
Based on my experience I would lean towards smaller, modular nuclear plants. There are intangible cost savings which emerge once one moves into the “right” scale.
When we were conceptualizing these engineering designs the best solution seemed to emerge when we allowed the most expensive and cumbersome chunk of steel or component guide the design basis. In other words, I wouldn’t allow the plant design to be specified as xx megawatts. I would find out what’s the most efficient way to design, build, and maintain the nuclear reactor core and then design AROUND it. The power it delivers will be whatever is the most efficient answer, and my wild guess is about 300 megawatts.
Fernando. Thank you. That type of problem solving is needed.
I had a similar comment earlier on this thread, but it fits here. Thomas Sowell in Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, says that the US had record breaking trade deficits during the 1990s, at a time when the economy was booming. It appears that there is no correlation between trade deficits and economic growth.
To Fernando Leanme and smaller, modular nuclear plants: they are absolutely uneconomic and no safer than existing plants. Venturers into that market are shutting down their operations. see
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-eight.html
You hear silly comments like “nuclear power uses too much water” or that it leaves behind toxic chemicals and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The comparison is to coal burning, for crying out loud. Those are your only two feasible options. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that CO2 emissions are not that big a threat and coal is cheaper, so fossils over nukes is the way to go. But it’s not reasonable to say that coal is more environmentally benign than nukes.
To stevepostrel, and what is your plan for the period after economically-viable coal runs out? Dr. Curry had a recent article on that topic, the result of which is coal will be exhausted by 2070. That is very, very soon in time-horizon planning for electric utilities.
‘The very heavy forging capacity in operation today is in Japan (Japan Steel Works), China (China First Heavy Industries, China Erzhong, SEC), France (Le Creusot), and Russia (OMZ Izhora).
New capacity is being built by JSW and JCFC in Japan, Shanghai Electric Group (SEC) and subsidiaries in China, and in South Korea (Doosan), Czech Rep (Pilsen) and Russia (OMZ Izhora and ZiO-Podolsk).
New capacity is planned in UK (Sheffield Forgemasters) and India (Larsen & Toubro, Bharat Heavy Electricals, Bharat Forge Ltd). In China the Harbin Boiler Co. and SEC subsidiary SENPE are increasing capacity.’ http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-Reactors/Heavy-Manufacturing-of-Power-Plants/
The newer modular designs don’t have this problem of course.
The areas of cost reduction are defined and the necessary reduction in cost – about 30% to challenge gas in the US – seems achievable with these changes. Which would make it the cheapest power available anywhere.
The new designs – evolutionary development of decades old technology – solve nearly all of the problems of existing technology – especially waste and decommissioning. Waste is reduced to some 3% of existing technology.
I have no particular axe to grind – but these are nuclear technologies that need only be commercialized and mass produced.
My “plan” would be to stop the excessive regulatory restrictions on nuclear power and let it compete with non-coal sources of fossil fuel or any other energy technology that can compete unsubsidized going forward (assuming coal actually does become scarce enough to get priced out of the competition–I’m not convinced that that will necessarily happen). It’s always possible that fusion or magic algae or something else will come along and be cost-competitive with nuclear fission and fossil fuels, but for Urgent Mitigation advocates who want us to Start Now their only practical option is a massive ramp-up of fission power.
Jim D | July 26, 2014 at 6:20 pm |
“As it is America does export energy and agricultural products, but not much else. Not judging. Just things to think about.”
Dumbass. No wonder you’re anonymous. Things to think about my ass. You don’t think.
Top Ten US Exports:
Machinery: $213,108,199,000 (13.5% of total exports)
Electronic equipment: $165,604,449,000 (10.5%)
Mineral fuels including oil: $148,426,743,000 (9.4%)
Vehicles excluding trains and streetcars: $133,640,479,000 (8.5%)
Aircraft and spacecraft: $115,380,944,000 (7.3%)
Optical, technical and medical apparatus: $84,281,276,000 (5.3%)
Pearls, precious stones, precious metals and coins: $72,830,232,000 (4.6%)
Plastics: $60,836,970,000 (3.9%)
Organic chemicals: $46,510,903,000 (2.9%)
Pharmaceutical products: $39,742,717,000 (2.5%)
Phucking pinheads.
I thought movies and music videos would be in the top ten.
Please see my misplaced comment above
Steve McIntyre shreds Cook et al. and the University of Queensland on purported ethics and confidentiality claims:
http://climateaudit.org/2014/07/26/cooks-fake-ethics-approval/#more-19390
These people are so shameless it’s hard to find words to describe their brazen flouting of elementary ethical and scientific norms.
Who cares about accuracy, honesty, full and fair disclosure etc. when The Cause is at stake??
Fingers in the pie.A pocketful of wry.
http://climateaudit.org/2014/07/26/cooks-fake-ethics-approval/#more-19390
What Cook and others produce isn’t for academic or intellectual consumption and validation. It’s never meant to stand up to investigation. It’s produced for a short-term propaganda purpose such as any other Obama tweet, AP press clip or 4 minute segment from a partisan TV source.
It would be more constructive if consensus was reached on the “Cause” and the political I.D. associated with it then addressing every byproduct as if it was a sincere and legitimate, fact based claim. You can spend 99% of the time on the mechanics of distortion and propaganda or you can come around to what the “agenda” is and the usual suspects. Sadly, this is where many “skeptics” refuse to go and convince themselves the AGW orthodox is going to be defeated in technical proofs. Why this delusion exists is a topic in itself.
“The Cause” doesn’t care that Cook’s work is lie or distortion, everything is a means to an end in leftist statism that is the ultimate central “Cause” of the “Cause”. There is no media or objective academic moral/logic based compass that isn’t distorted by the root agenda enough to care how sleazy grubby climate scientists or political baggage carriers like Cook are behaving or what they produce for mass minion or media consumption. “97%” is obviously so laughable (and brutally totalitarian) but most self-identified “climate” academics as well as general academics will back-bench the abuse because they harbor a deep sympathy to the core advocate goal which is a central planning state that promises them more not less power and influence. Warming advocates know they lie at most levels, they’ve rationalized it. That there is little self-correcting or policing isn’t new or shocking. Cook’s paper will soon be in the ignore pile but a new version, just as if not more deceitful, of the consensus meme will be produced for MSM distribution. It will not be internally policed either. It would be progress if technical skeptics, comically addressing AGW advocacy as a “science” debate, grew up and connected publically what many know to be the case about the “cause” privately or ad hoc. Cook is a left-wing political operative at a left-wing academic outlet, work the facts from there and the uniformed public is better served.
While I think that the notion of a vast conspiracy to create a one-world government (won’t happen, ever) is a bit over the top, I must agree that sceptics waste a lot of time and effort arguing about the science.
Time and time again we see utterly dodgy “science” promulgated, and no sooner does someone squash it, three more pop up.
As I have said over at the Bishop’s place more than once, people’s energy bills are a more powerful agent for change than a thousand scientific papers, no matter how good or bad they are.
Johanna,
+1
johanna, Ian Plimer made the same point on energy bills in an IPA-sponsored book launch in Brisbane tonight. See also my quotes from Henry Ergas’ article in today’s Australian. Ergas and Plimer night be preaching to the converted, but hopefully others will connect.
A US federal court has ruled that SCC must be used in EISs under NEPA, which means in almost all projects on federal lands, including mines and oil or gas wells, pipelines and railroads, etc. He also says that if the project produces or carries fossil fuel the EIS must include the CO2 from the combustion of that fuel. This is far reaching. See page 28 of http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/231657158
In fairness he says the agency might argue that SCC is not important, but he does not say how, and it still must be included.
SCC is a green cancer spreading through the Federal system.
David, my google translate can’t handle your post. Is SCC “Supreme Court Clerks”, “Super Charged Combustion” or “System Crash Condition”?
US Social Cost of Carbon, Fernando. See
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/EPAactivities/scc-fact-sheet.pdf
It is the damage caused over the next 300 years or so, by a tonne of CO2 emitted today (or some other year), discounted to present value. It was first computed in 2009 but then recomputed 50% higher in 2013.
Thanks. It´s the wrong approach unless they get China to stop burning so much coal. As time goes by it will just ensure we move all industry to China. Or do they put the social cost of carbon on imports from China?
You know, I have been voting for the Democrats ever since Bush got elected, but I may be forced to hold my nose and switch to Republican. Ack.
China or no China, the whole idea is crazy. We do not even know that there are going to be any damages, much less what they will be over the next 300 years. This is a computer based hoax designed to justify unwarranted government action. Running the scary CAGW speculation through a computer does not make it true.
Imagine someone in 1700 claiming that people had to stop burning wood because of the damage it would do in 2000. They would be crazy but that is the measure of US SCC policy today.
The Onion piece and the cartoon were interesting. Most climate related humor tends to involve exaggerated warming or mocking of skeptics, although once in a while alarmist zealotry is targeted. I just found this video, from a series called Epic Rap Battles of History, at the Climate Crock of the Week blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yis7GzlXNM
I think there is a lot of potential for rap battles between climate personalities. Hat tip to Old Lettuceface.
It’s a pretty funny concept. Walter White vs. Rick Grimes is pretty funny as well. Nothing can top Keynes vs. Hayek for subject nuances;
Speaking of taxes, etc, in the US.
From the article:
…
At the end of 2013, the number of individuals renouncing their U.S. citizenship hit an all-time high. There is a similar trend occurring in the corporate world as global merger-and-acquisition activity picks up. The main driver for many of these deals: tax inversions, or tax-advantaged transactions. The congressional response thus far? Ready, fire, aim.
…
Rather than using “patriotism” as a performance metric, it’s time for Congress to zero in on fixing and aligning U.S. corporate tax rules with other global tax regimes. While the recent inversion trend does indeed provide a natural platform for many to publicly call out these U.S. multinationals, the reality is that if “Made in the USA” is really a national economic goal, then Congress needs to fix the problem here at home and give U.S. multinationals the impetus to stay in the USA. Until then, who can blame U.S. companies for doing legitimate strategic deals to remain globally competitive? This is the core premise of capitalism, and what could be more American than that?
…
Why are we hearing about them more now? Well, it’s no secret that U.S. multinationals collectively have over $2 trillion in foreign profits parked offshore largely because the U.S. taxes worldwide income — either currently or at some future date — and it’s also no secret that the U.S. now has the highest corporate tax rate (combined federal and state rates can exceed 40 percent) in the developed world. Thus, many U.S. multinationals don’t repatriate foreign earnings in order to defer incremental U.S. taxation. Contrast this with one solution – a territorial tax system (which all other G-8 countries have adopted) – which results in “one-and-done” taxation. Earnings are taxed only in the country in which the earnings are actually generated. The Obama administration vehemently opposes a true territorial system and congressional proposals to date still provide for some level of minimum U.S. tax to be levied on existing and future foreign earnings that are not repatriated (i.e., a “quasi-territorial” tax system at best).
…
Darned if you do, darned if you don’t. The recurring theme – U.S. companies are trying to maintain global competitiveness and leaning on tax strategies that fall squarely within the U.S. (and local country) tax rules to do so.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101867628
@ Roger Sowell | July 27, 2014 at 3:46 pm |
To Fernando Leanme and smaller, modular nuclear plants: they are absolutely uneconomic and no safer than existing plants. Venturers into that market are shutting down their operations. see
(end quote)
Hi Roger,
There aren’t a lot of estimates from industry on the cost/kw and time to build one. Given the dearth of information from the experts, the nuclear power businesses, I’m skeptical of your ability to supply the facts.
I did find this:
Conversely, small modular reactors at commercial scale could produce a 100 MW plant for $250 million. 24
Due to lower upfront costs and shorter lead times, SMRs would present lower financial risks, allowing for significantly lower costs of financing. The shorter lead times for SMRs allow for more certainty for investors,
and the ability to change with market conditions. 25
The smaller project size of each additional reactor also reduces the risks of cost-overruns. 26
This translates not only to lower absolute costs, but also lower upfront capital costs, making it easier for projects to attract financing, at better rates. 27
Shorter construction times also provide a quicker revenue stream. SMRs can be built in roughly one-half to one-third of the time required for conventional plants.
(end quote)
http://www.uxc.com/smr/Library%5CUS%20National%20Programs/2012%20-%20SMRs-A%20Possible%20Path%20Forward%20for%20Nuclear%20Power.pdf
So that is $2,500/kw. And a build time of 2 to 3 years assuming a six year build time for a large plant.
Your article mentions economy of scale. Size is one measure of scale, but there are others. In the case of SMRs, the economy of scale lies in the fact that the design is standardized, so all the part can be made on an assembly line, much of them using automation.
Also, I do have a small nit to pick with your analysis. From the link:
(begin quote)
An example illustrates using overnight costs only, where Size B is 400 MW, Size A is 1200 MW, and Cost A is $4,800. Then,
Cost B = $4,800 x (400/1200)^0.6 = $2,483 per kW overnight cost.
Then, for a total power output of 1200 MW, three of the 400 MW plants are required. The total overnight costs for the three plants is then 3 x 2483, or $7,449 per kW.
(end quote)
If the cost of one 400mw plant is $2,483/kw, then for three of them we would have:
From your numbers above, a “Size B” reactor costs
$2,483/kw * 4,000 kw = $9,932,000
kw:
3 * 400kw = 1200kw
cost
3 * $9,932,000 = $29,796,000
So, getting back to cost PER KILOWATT,
$29,796,000/1,200,000 kw = $2,483/kw
It is the same cost per kilowatt because cost per kilowatt is an intensive property.
@ jim2
The time/cost analysis you provided for small nuclear reactors reflected the time and cost cost for engineers to design and build the plant. Adding in the legal costs and delays required for obtaining the permits to build and operate the plants make the time to complete and cost/kilowatt asymptotically approach infinity.
@Bob Ludwick | July 27, 2014 at 7:31 pm | Reply
Bob. Mr. Sowell provided one analysis, I found the other on the internet, so I’m not sure to which you refer.
Let me just say that I’m skeptical that a small nuclear reactor would cost $infinity, or even asymptotically so. That being said, obviously the rules concerning nuclear reactors would have to be tweaked – a faster licensing process for example. But, there are so many acres on existing plants, SMRs could be used on existing sites. They also could be used to power mining operations, industrial sites, remote cities, etc.
Now, don’t be such a sour puss.
@ jim2
“Let me just say that I’m skeptical that a small nuclear reactor would cost $infinity, or even asymptotically so.”
Ok, I’ll assume that we actually KNOW how to build SMR’s (I haven’t done any research, but it doesn’t SOUND all that technologically infeasible on its face.)
Given that we know how to do it and given that we can use the energy, especially since the Warmunists seem bent on stamping out coal plants, work the following problem for me:
(total amount that has been spent on obtaining permits, licenses, and other pre-construction, government mandated paperwork for new nuclear plants in the last 20 years)/(number of new plants authorized, built, and commissioned in the last 20 years). Let me know what number you come up with.
Here is a piece of Robert Rubin climate hysteria from the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-rubin-how-ignoring-climate-change-could-sink-the-us-economy/2014/07/24/b7b4c00c-0df6-11e4-8341-b8072b1e7348_story.html
First, Rubin appeals to the consensus among climate “professionals” (as demonstrated by the Cook et al paper) as proof of something signigicant. If that’s not enough, he mentions that democratic mob rule, “according to Gallop” should tip us into action.
He cites an “analysis” of climate economic risk, he (someone?) commissioned and, also, offers up a link to its final report. I’m no scientist, but both documents read like lengthy high school science papers by a Very Concerned Student taught since before he could read that saving the planet from Bad People is the most important reason to live.
Someone, with a sense of wit and humor, might consider writing a letter, at the least.
…..Lady in Red
@ Lady in Red
” I’m no scientist, but both documents read like lengthy high school science papers by a Very Concerned Student taught since before he could read that saving the planet from Bad People is the most important reason to live.”
And therein lies the problem. EVERYONE from new voter in ’14 through middle aged parents of said new voter has been taught to be a Very Concerned Student. And it has been reinforced, daily, by government, academia, the MSM, the entertainment industry, and pretty much every one of their ‘input sources’ for their entire lives. A few have looked at the actual evidence and said ‘Just a doggone minute here, lets think about this a bit before we go charging off slaying the fearsome ACO2 monster!’, but, unfortunately, not enough to make a difference. The evil ACO2 monster will be taxed and regulated to death, whether it deserves it or not. And us ‘skeptics’ should stand clear. Or else. We have been warned.
Prices are best expressed as the levelised cost of electricity and the levelised cost of avoidance expressed in $/MWh. Taking into account construction, capital and operating costs.
e.g. http://www.nrdc.org/energy/renewables/geothermal.asp
A positive LACE – LCOE gives you the best option.
The clear winner in the US is geothermal – although with a near term potential of some 1.5% of supply the potential is limited. Deeper dry rock sources have much more potential but with higher costs. The breakeven technology is gas generation – although fuel costs are likely to rise.
The break even figure to aim for is a LCOE of about $62/MWh.
http://www.ga.com/websites/ga/docs/em2/pdf/FactSheet_QuickFactsEM2.pdf
GA think they can do it and be ready to roll in a decade.
Hi Rob,
Due to the great interest in petroleum, deep drilling and horizontal drilling both potentially could play a role in geothermal, I’m guessing.
OK … try again.
Due to the great interest in petroleum, drilling technology has improved by leaps and bounds.
…
Drilling into hot dry rocks is only possible with recent technology. Costs are high.
Hi Rob, once the hole is done, how long does it last? For example, does the surface of the hole spall or scale over?
Climate change is indeed being ignored…by climate change experts. And it has already cost.
Did the people who dumped rubble into the mouth of the Hudson to make more real estate not know that NY is in a notorious hurricane zone? Were they not informed? How did people forget how dry the west and south west of the US can be? Even without taking into account mega or major droughts of the pre-Columbian and Spanish eras, the drought record is pretty overwhelming: the early 19th century, the later 19th century, the Dust Bowl, the Texas Drought of the 1950s (especially). And so on.
Even the awful drought which afflicted New York City in the 1960s is not without remote precedents. Think that won’t happen again? Reason why it should not happen with even greater severity?
How do you get climate change experts to take even a cursory interest in climate change? Their minds are elsewhere.
From the article:
Americans are so down on President Obama at the moment that, if they could do the 2012 election all over again, they’d overwhelmingly back the former Massachusetts governor’s bid. That’s just one finding in a brutal CNN poll, released Sunday, which shows Romney topping Obama in a re-election rematch by a whopping nine-point margin, 53 percent to 44 percent. That’s an even larger spread than CNN found in November, when a survey had Romney winning a redo 49 percent to 45 percent.
http://theweek.com/article/index/265418/speedreads-americans-really-wish-they-elected-mitt-romney-instead-of-obama
Lifestyle’ babies– A new culprit of climate change
LONDON: A new culprit has been found causing climate change – “lifestyle” babies.
Scientists have called for a blanket ban on free fertility treatment for those making “lifestyle” reproductive choices, such as sterilization reversal or single motherhood for fertile women.
They have also called for a legislation that makes fertility clinics subject to carbon capping schemes, in a bid to help curb climate change.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/environment/global-warming/lifestyle-babies-a-new-culprit-of-climate-change/articleshow/39117026.cms
Rob Ellison, Jim 2.
Do either of you know or care how many real original USHCN stations are in actual use out of 1128/9 they started with in 1987?
Is it 650 or less.
As Mosher and Zeke are unable to provide a figure one expects it is probably less, maybe under 50 %.
The surface record is not suitable for monitoring climate. Take it I don’t care and use the satellite data.
Ta
Naomi Oreskes in the Guardian interview just tells all that’s wrong with the warmists. They cannot conceive of a population who think for themselves. They have to look for conspiracies. It doesn’t occur to them that their over-hyping is ‘wot dun it’. Pure arrogance.
For me, it was the hype of ‘never before’ has the Earth been so hot and the Arctic & glaciers melted so much. I’d been interestedly reading about the 13th Century Vikings in Baffin Island and Alpine Hunters which have only been recently revealed. Nancy needs to get out more. But even if she did, I doubt she’ll realise that all the hype is read as “they wouldn’t need to hype it up if they’d got anything to go on.”
The ENSO meter just dropped down to about 0.1. You can find one on WUWT’s sidebar.
Reducing malnutrition 3000X higher benefit/cost v climate mitigation
Smart Aid for the World’s Poor: How can rich countries best help poor ones? Matt Ridley identifies five priorities
Details: Preliminary Benefit-Cost Assessment
for 12th Session OWG Goals
This piece appeared today on the GWPF web site. http://www.thegwpf.org/peter-lilley-graham-stringer-vote-against-climate-committees-ipcc-report/
Two members of the UK Parliament (scientists by training) seemed to have listened to a range of experts, understood the discussion well and concluded that the IPCC SPM is misleading and in many ways unfounded in the underlying science documented in the main body of the IPCC reports. Furthermore they have disassociated themselves from the Parliament’s “Select Committee” report endorsing the IPCC report.
Bravo for Her Majesty’s representatives of the people.
Interesting review at the WSJ as to how climate change fundamentalists “are on the wrong side of history,” resisting technological change, which is characterised by “a dynamic of improvement that accelerates and amplifies while requiring, by any consistent unit of measure, less space and material at a lower cost.”
Want to save the world? Promote technological innovation rather than lie down in front of a bull-dozer.
http://ipa.org.au/images/Hey/WSJ_article.pdf
Oh, I dunno, Faustino. EU experts have worked out that burning American forests in England is far more effective than farming the wind. Dense, you see. I mean the woodchips are dense, not the EU experts. Although…
EU ? Hmm, wolves in charge of the flock. Not exactly wolves
in sheeps’ clothing, more like in silk shirts and Armani suits.
Global guvuhnance pays.
Climate action costs >> inaction
See Senate Hearing:
The Costs of Inaction: The Economic and Budgetary Consequences of Climate Change
Testimony of Dr. Bjorn Lomborg , Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School and Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/29/science_and_maths_knowledge_makes_you_sceptical/
“…because people classed as “egalitarian communitarians” (roughly speaking, left-wingers) are always highly concerned about climate change, and become slightly more so as they acquire more science and numeracy. Unfortunately, however, “hierarchical individualists” (basically, right-wingers) are quite concerned about climate change when they’re ignorant: but if they have any scientific, mathematic or technical education this causes them to become strongly sceptical.”
What is a hierarchical individualist?
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/6/10/what-are-fearless-white-hierarchical-individualist-males-afr.html
“…men attain status by occupying positions of authority in commerce and industry. Gun possession plays an important role for men in such groups too–enabling hierarchical roles like father, protector, and provider and symbolizing individualistic (male) virtues like honor and courage and self-reliance.”
Throw out gun possession to simplify things. To sell me on global warming is to question some of the things above. Shall I sacrifice some of the above for what I perceive is not much of a threat? I do think it’s possible some have made that trade.
‘Faced with a perceived conflict between expanding global energy access and rapidly reducing greenhouse emissions to prevent climate change, many environmental groups and donor institutions have come to rely on small-scale, decentralized, renewable energy technologies that cannot meet the energy demands of rapidly growing emerging economies and people struggling to escape extreme poverty. The UN’s flagship energy access program, for example, claims that “basic human needs” can be met with enough electricity to power a fan, a couple of light bulbs, and a radio for five hours a day.
A reconsideration of what equitable energy access means for human development and the environment is needed. As this paper demonstrates, a massive expansion of energy systems, primarily carried out in the rapidly urbanizing global South, in combination with the rapid acceleration of clean energy innovation, is a more pragmatic, just, and morally acceptable framework for thinking about energy access. The time has come to embrace a high-energy planet.’ http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/our-high-energy-planet
Technology is not the problem. This one works with evolutionary
development of decades old technology to reduce the stockpiles high level nuclear waste to some 3% of the volume. A technological solution to the legacy of nuclear insanity
http://www.ga.com/energy-multiplier-module
There are many others on some path to development or other.
This is my favorite.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/focus-fusion-empowertheworld–3
Lasers seem possible.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/high-powered-lasers-deliver-fusion-energy-breakthrough/
This one relies on adding neutrons to hydrogen progressively using electromagnetic impulses in a nickel matrix. Ultimately you get quadrium which beta decays to helium releasing energy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7pInnbzhG0&feature=youtu.be
Here’s some more.
http://www.wfs.org/blogs/richard-samson/shhh-new-energy-breakthrough-quietly-powering
You can make hot fusion reactors in your garage for about $5000. I saw it in a popular science mag at the chiropractors waiting room on Monday.
Here is a low energy reactor you can build for a few hundred bucks. Although I can’t guarantee that this is actually hydrogen fusion.
“The pteropod, or “sea butterfly”, is a tiny sea creature about the size of a small pea. Pteropods are eaten by organisms ranging in size from tiny krill to whales and are a major food source for North Pacific juvenile salmon. The photos below show what happens to a pteropod’s shell when placed in sea water with pH and carbonate levels projected for the year 2100. The shell slowly dissolves after 45 days” – http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F
What’s wrong with the above? If the sea butterflies had been given 86 years to adapt to a slow change of acidity (maybe a 2% per year change), instead of shocking them all at once, this probably wouldn’t have happened. Why the pointless animal cruelty? Have they lost their minds?
Ragnaar – you have assumed they have minds to lose.
Was Homeland Security formed to come take cars from citizens? It’s now the national, militarized police force!
From the article:
STATESVILLE, NC (WBTV) –
When Jennifer Brinkley saw a line of law enforcement vehicles coming up her driveway last Tuesday she didn’t know what to think. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”
The Homeland Security agents were not there to take her away, they were looking for illegally imported Land Rover Defenders. Brinkley had bought one via the internet last year and had invested more than $60,000 into the rare vehicle.
She thought she had checked it all out and she legally owned it. “They popped up the hood and looked at the Vehicle Identification Number and compared it with a piece of paper and then took the car with them,” she said.
It turns out that in recent years some importers have changed the VIN number to comply with import regulations. All vehicles coming into the United States must meet strict safety and emissions standards. Land Rover Defenders, for the most part, do not meet the standards.
But a quirk in the law does allow the importing of vehicles 25-years-old and older regardless of whether the standards are met. There have been cases in recent years where importers have changed the VIN to make the vehicle appear older and thereby allowing it to come into the United States.
…
http://www.wbtv.com/story/26075071/woman-has-questions-after-agents-seize-land-rovers?autostart=true
Heidi Cullen
On the importance of storytelling :: ))
Personal Stories About Global Warming Change Minds
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/29/will-fiction-influence-how-we-react-to-climate-change/personal-stories-about-global-warming-change-minds
Looks more about delusional minds rather then “changed”. The glazed eye look of “believers”.
http://michellemalkin.com/2014/07/31/the-environmental-corruption-agency/
Lake Superior Surface Temperatures:
http://media.mlive.com/weather_impact/photo/lake-sup-avg-to-now-finaljpg-7ab30e22e41d1b5d.jpg
Browsing around it occurred to me what a good thermometer Lake Superior makes. Granted these are surface temperatures. One could argue that 2014’s low temperatures are noise. I’d hope the lake is in sync with global temperatures. Like Minnesota, Western Lake Superior is distant from the oceans. Near the end of the precipitation train, for example Gulf moisture which does bring us rain. I think it’s that distance the emphasizes changes in the oceans.
If these cool temperatures continue through this season, the Gitche Gumee is likely to freeze over sooner. Attempting to retain warmth. An indicator? Maybe.
Interesting diagram related I think to climate regime changes:
http://www.uni-kiel.de/ecology/users/fmueller/salzau2006/studentpages/Ecosystem_Development/master3.html
1) Creative Destruction – the change
2) Renewal – the system stabilizes
3) Exploitation – the system encounters bounds and tries to go around them
4) Conservation – the system is mature and slows, it is old
5) Go to 1)