by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week
I just heard from Tony Brown that Denizen Jim Cripwell has passed a way, a brief notice is [here]. Jim was suffering from cancer, and remained active at Climate Etc. until about a month ago. Jim will be missed here, my condolences to his family.
From my twitter feed:
Reason: Climate Change Costs By 2100: Doing Nothing Has the Same Price Tag as Doing Something http://bit.ly/1qbIgQe
Amartya Sen, economics Nobelist: Focus on climate change externalities distracting from other energy issues: [link]
Powerful incentives in science push young scientists to avoid innovative, breakthrough work & stick with the routine [link]
What are the chances of #UNFCCC #COP21 being a success? Excellent examination by @bradplumer [link]
Ross Pomeroy: Can a scientist’s writing style reveal fraud? [link]
Predatory journals and defective peer review are general academic problems, not open access problems. http://bit.ly/GRFM6L
NEW BLOG by @PeterGluckman Post-normal science advising in an era of post-normal policy formation http://bit.ly/1rBtgO4
The Hill: Climate plan spooks Dems [link]
‘The Aftershocks’: lovely piece on the 7 Italian scientists convicted of manslaughter after L’Aquila http://bit.ly/1wyfhLd
Pretty accurate assessment of the #UNFCCC #COP21 process, by @MLiebreich [link]
Why is the EU burning wood from the American South to generate “renewable” energy? http://bit.ly/1BWfhES
Bravo: Yale President Welcomes Freshmen with Free Speech Advocacy (@thefireorg’s blog) http://buff.ly/1AOWhXq
Clearly argued essay on sci integrity, politicisation of sci and science and values [link]
Steve McIntyre: EPA on Mann’s “Fraud” Invective [link]
Very good article #climatechange and emotions- How We Feel Matters More Than What We Know. [link]
Economist – Oceans and the climate: Davy Jones’ heat locker [link]
“The Best Way To Deal With #Climate Change Is By Integrating It Into Other Development Goals” [link]
New Republic: Stop obsessing about global warming – Environmentalists ignoring poor countries’ needs [link]
Joe Duarte’s scathing review of John Cook’s ‘97% consensus’ nonsensus paper http://wp.me/p7y4l-u0q
Obama Gives Up On the Global Climate Treaty http://wp.me/p4ja0Z-pi3
Settled Science Catches Up with Steyn http://goo.gl/fqxs6J
Scientific misconduct: what is the ultimate cause? Vanity, popularity, favorites & likes? http://ow.ly/AzFto
A sobering essay: How California’s carbon market actually works (or not) from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. [link]
Learn to separate sloppy science from solid research – open access online course “Solid Science: Research Methods” [link]
In an intriguing development this week, Nature reported on Thursday that controlled hydrogen fusion in the core of the Sun steadily generates solar energy [1], . . .
but Science reported runaway fusion in supernova SN 2014J (in the nearby galaxy M82) [2] on Friday, much as Aston had warned might happen to “the whole of the hydrogen on the earth” in the last sentence of his Nobel Lecture on 12 Dec 1922 [3].
This raises a fundamental question: Does the Sun contain a special form of nuclear physics?
– Oliver K. Manuel
References:
1. Borexino Collaboration (~100 coauthors), ” Neutrinos from the primary proton-proton fusion process in the Sun,” Nature 512, 383-386 (28 Aug 2014): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7515/full/nature13702.html
2. Daniel Clery, “Supernova breaks the mold,” Science 345, 993 (29 Aug 2014): http://m.sciencemag.org/content/345/6200/993.summary
3. Francis W. Aston, “Mass spectra and isotopes,” Nobel Lecture, (12 Dec 1922): http://veksler.jinr.ru/becquerel/text/books/aston-lecture.pdf
The rate of fusion in the Sun may be controlled by the rate of neutron-emission from the solar core:
“Solar energy,” Journal of Solar Energy (submitted 25 July 2014) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Preprint_Solar_Energy.pdf
These new papers will be included in the manuscript to be submitted for publication tomorrow: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Solar_Energy.pdf
This manuscript was submitted for publication at ~6:30 am this morning.
An implicit self-selection process is thus now in process:
1. If the 97% consensus community consists of genuine scientists, they will openly address all of the nine pages of precise experimental measurements that disagree with the Standard Solar Model of Hydrogen-filled stars.
2. If the 97% consensus community consists only of phony scientists, they will refuse to address any of the nine pages of precise experimental data that disagree with the Standard Solar Model of Hydrogen-filled stars.
Interesting news from Australia about the BOM changing long term cooling trends into warming trends.
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/08/hiding-something-bom-throws-out-bourkes-hot-historic-data-changes-long-cooling-trend-to-warming/
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2014/08/weathermans-records-detail-heat-that-didnt-happen-graham-lloyd/
Update on Max Anacker:
On a previous thread Beth wrote:
Dedicated ter Max Anacker.
bts.
http://beththeserf.wordpress.com/2014/08/30/19th-edition-serf-under_ground-journal/
Tony Brown also forwarded this email for Max’s wife, Marianne:
A memorial was held with the family and friends at Sea Ranch, California on August 10, 2014 which was very beautiful and entirely in the spirit of Max. His ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean. The ocean took his ashes while sea lions were watching.
The world is lessened by his passing. I will always treasure the lighthearted banter he brought to us here.
Obit from US Naval Academy, Class of 1954:
http://www.54net.org/2014/06/death-of-classmate-max-anacker-15th-co.html
A picture of Max two years ago at a Dow 40th anniversary party:
http://www.dow.com/friends/newsletter/fall2012/connected/anniversary.htm
Vaya con Dios, my friend.
David
Many thanks for those two links. It was great to see the background.
I really liked Max and was very pleased to have met him and his wife in Switzerland a couple of years ago. He had a great interest in climate science and the physics involved and was also keenly interested in past climates. He lived in an area where previous silver mines had been worked in Roman times, then became iced up as the climate changed.
He was very interested in my historical work and I shall miss bouncing ideas and information off of his very agile mind.
tonyb
Max was a gentleman who could disagree without being disagreeable. He will be missed.
Yes was a gentleman and a scholar who quite easily detected discrepancies in the global climate stories.
State of Fear
The late Michael Crichton’s thriller State of Fear is now evidenced in the latest poll:
DEMOCRATS MORE AFRAID OF GLOBAL WARMING THAN ISIS
From the link in the main post:
Solid Science: Research Methods
Discover the principles of solid scientific methods in the behavioral and social sciences. Join us and learn to separate sloppy science from solid research!
*****
This has been a long time coming. Let’s hope Cook et al attend.
The US should avoid the emulation of Europe like the plague.
From the article:
Summary
Data published earlier this month show that the euro area is not only close to deflation, it is back on the brink of yet another recession.
The combination of low inflation and low growth, which Japan has experienced for the best part of two decades, is increasingly becoming a feature of the single currency bloc.
Comparing the experience of the euro area today with that of Japan through the 1990s and the 2000s, we find it convenient to align the start of the crisis with the peak in equity prices in each country or region.
The profile of the Euro Stoxx 50 around its peak in June 2007 is remarkably similar to that of the Nikkei 225 around its peak in Dec 1989.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2461305-can-europe-avoid-its-own-lost-decade
From the article:
…
New Technology Could End The Debate Over Pipeline Safety
Aug. 30, 2014 12:35 AM ET | Includes: ENB
…
New technology available to transform the pipeline sector.
Pipeline companies starting to invest in upgrades and better monitoring.
Huge cost savings for the industry.
Who could have ever imagined that North America would surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas liquids? A decade ago, that would have seemed laughable.
Yet that’s exactly what has happened; and it’s not just Saudi Arabia that has been left in North America’s dust – Russia has, too.
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2461075-new-technology-could-end-the-debate-over-pipeline-safety
From the article:
Commodities Today: Drilling In The U.S. Arctic And Looking At A Permian Driller
Aug. 29, 2014 10:30 AM ET | Includes: BP, COP, RDS.A, RDS.B, ROSE, XOM
…
Summary
Update readers on the latest geopolitical events around the world.
Highlight the latest regarding Arctic drilling in the US.
Answer reader questions about shorting certain Permian players which have seen their shares remain relatively strong.
…
We do not condone essentially telling Russia to do what they please with Ukraine, which is what the President did yesterday, but think that many have underestimated the capabilities of ISIS. What the market has missed about this situation is that ISIS has been fighting a war against established states (two different ones mind you) on multiple fronts. There are many decent sized armies which are well equipped which could not pull this off, yet ISIS is currently fighting successfully against Syria as well as the various factions of Iraq (mainly the Kurds though).
With the UK now raising their terror level and speaking of ISIS moving to expand their territory, it appears that NATO will focus on deploying resources to the Mediterranean and Turkey in an effort to quickly end the rapidly expanding influence of ISIS.
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2459945-commodities-today-drilling-in-the-u-s-arctic-and-looking-at-a-permian-driller
jim2
Is Obama on a permanent holiday or has he abdicated being the leader of the West?
tonyb
tonyb,
Even the left in the US is beginning to realize that electing someone as president who has absolutely no experience in accomplishing anything, is a bad idea.
When a progressive politician loses Maureen Dowd, the party is officially over.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-the-golf-address.html
GaryM
I am quite dismayed as to how weak Obama has turned out to be, although I always thought him to to be as full of hot air and meaningless talk as Tony Blair was.
If JiMD or any of the other alarmists are reading this, do you really believe that AGW is as much of a pressing problem that warrants taking up so much of your country’s time, money and energy, as the threat from Russia in the Ukraine and ISIS in Iraq and Syria not to mention the festering wound that is Afghanistan?
tonyb
I would say the energy policy has worked well. It has reduced imported oil a lot, partly through fuel efficiency standards that will strengthen even more in the future, and increased natural gas production that replaces less efficient coal for cheaper energy. This while providing an environment that encourages alternative energy growth.
The only thing worse than the chaos that results from Obama not having a strategy is the chaos that results when he DOES have a strategy.
He’s been ‘leading from behind’ his whole life. He’s famous for voting ‘present’ as a state senator. He never took initiative to get any legislation passed at any level of politics. He never got anything done as a community organizer, never published anything as editor of the law review, and after terrorist buddy Bill Ayers gave him the gig as head of the Annenberg Challenge he managed to hand out $150 million for education in Chicago and the results got worse. He had absolutely no idea what was happening with the implementation of Obamacare. He’s abdicated from all responsibility his whole life.
Note — He does care about basketball and golf, but he’s terrible at both.
Shhhh, don’t tell anybody, but Obama has a strategy. It’s to call skeptics flat-earthers. There, that’ll fix ’em.
==============
W never accomplished anything in his entire life other than reaching the bottom of a bottle or a can in record time. He is a decent painter.
Ah, yes, JCH, the good ol’ days.
====================
Kim
To a Brit such as me, the levels of excitement that Obama generated during his two election campaigns was incomprehensible as clearly he was a lightweight. I doubt I would have voted for him, although I am probably closer to the Democrats than to the Republicans.
Looking some years on from his crowning it appears to me that he has sharply diminished global American influence and has failed to live up to his position as leader of the Western World.He seems to me to be indecisive and resembles Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
Mind you, I cant see the current crop of Presidential hopefuls being much better than the present incumbent. Where do you keep finding them?
tonyb
They come out of the degenerate two-party machine. Or perhaps I should say “two-party” machine. Nobody on either side actually wants an effective president. Just a figurehead for the power struggles within the bureaucratic/congressional complex.
Consider McCain’s candidacy in this light: despite appearances, none of the power wielders in the Republican party wanted him, or expected him to get anywhere. He was a figurehead, intended to fall back for the major candidates.
But the voters didn’t agree. His record as a reformer combined with their dissatisfaction with the party machine(s) to give him the nomination.
IMO his choice of running mate showed an awareness of why the voters gave him a nomination none of the party power wielders intended him to have. A fresh reformer, to supplement his stale and, frankly, soiled record.
In my view, the Republican party stalwarts barely went through the motions of supporting his candidacy. They wanted somebody they could control.
Tony,
What you might have missed was the contrast between the inarticulate malaprop prone Bush, who rightly or wrongly was widely perceived as a dummy, and the elegant, often eloquent Obama. By the end of Bush’s failed presidency…the great recession, the stupid unfunded war in Iraq, the godawful waterboarding…Obama with his message of hope and change..however empty it turned out to be…was galvanizing.
I fell for it. Never been more wrong about a person in my life.
Jim D: Do you have a link to the energy policy?
Tony, the press over here is more interested in sustaining a narrative than in reporting, and it’s biased.
One of my favorite jokes is that Murdoch found a niche market for Fox News, half of America.
===============
Hi Tony,
I like your historical articles.
I have no idea why Obama was elected. My best guess is 1. Because he is black. Not only did blacks and liberals vote for him, whites feeling guilty over slavery here might have added to the total. 2. Because he is very liberal and was a community organizer – so he got a lot of support from the liberal infrastructure. 3. Google helped him with sophisticated analytics so the Obama team knew where to concentrate resources at the critical end of the race.
Good question on from where/how candidates get put in the race. I’m more libertarian than anything else. Letting people do what they want and keeping government small sounds really good right now.
rls, OK, I just Googled it and this is where you can find it. Glad to help.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/energy
In future dictionaries there will be a photo of Obama next to the entry “empty suit”. Worse than Jimmy Carter, and that takes a lot of doing. At least most believe Carter’s intentions were well placed. He was just plain incompetent. Obama, on the other hand, appears to have some reason for running the country into,the ground.
Tony asks the alarmists if AGW is really such an issue in light of the disintegrating world around us, and typical of the Obama faithful Jim D responds completely off topic that the “energy policy” is effective. Can’t quote the policy, mind you. In short, the lunatics are running the asylum here in the US.
David Cameron raises his country’s terror threat to “severe”. Obama responds that we are safer now than 20 years ago. Complete. Total. Disaster.
Tonyb and Brits here, how do the people feel about Cameron possibly presiding over the break-up of the United Kingdom after its 400 years of existence. Was he weak in some way? Doesn’t seem this would have happened under a more successful government.
Always with the misdirection Jim D. Doesn’t build credibility you know. Look, a squirrel!
Google Inc. (GOOG) executive Megan Smith is close to heading to the White House.
Smith, 49, who was most recently a vice president at Google’s X lab, is a top candidate for the role of U.S. chief technology officer, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the process is private.
Smith would become the third person to fill the CTO job, after Aneesh Chopra and Todd Park, who recently resigned and is returning home to California this month. Park will take on a new role for President Barack Obama’s administration as a technology adviser based in Silicon Valley, the White House said yesterday.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-28/google-s-smith-is-said-to-be-top-u-s-cto-candidate.html
tonyb aks:
Where do you keep finding them?
Don’t have to look for ’em. They jus’ keep coming out of the woodwork.
Jim D: Thank you for the White House Link to “Advancing American Energy”. Much of the policy is worthy but does not account for the decline of imported oil. The policy is about plans, promises, and research. The Better Buildings Initiative started in 2011 but can’t be counted as having a noticeable effect yet, and new fuel standards were started under Bush; Obama’s higher standards have not yet been implemented. The most likely reasons for lower imports are increased private natural gas drilling and higher fuel prices.
rls, one of Judith’s links above mentioned that oil imports have dropped at least partly because of increased fuel efficiency, so that is where that came from.
It was the Liebreich article. Worth reading.
Jim D loves to ignore the elephant in the room. Oil imports declined because we in the US are awash in shale oil.
From the article:
As the North American shale boom propels domestic production to near 9 million barrels per day, some believe that America’s geostrategic interests could realign—and focus more inward.
While still in its infancy, the U.S. oil and gas boom is credited with offsetting supply disruptions from conflict-ridden places such as Iraq and Libya. Despite turmoil there and in other petroleum-exporting countries, U.S. oil prices have remained remarkably stable.
…
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101934367
Jim D: Fuel efficiency started improving in the late 90s, has been linear since then and accounts for 7% of reduced consumption today; reduced vehicle miles accounts for 25%. Actually consumption has been flat since 2004 and “reduced” means lower than expected. Doesn’t look like the result of the president’s energy policy.
Yes, I think fuel consumption mostly went down when oil prices went up courtesy of the wars and then the recession reduced demand. We can thank Bush, perhaps.
Unfortunately, not only is he as poor a President as I had expected, he is worse. Ineffective and feeble as the Leader of the Free World, IMO he has failed in every way that a President can fail.
lol If you think Obama has run us “into the ground,” where do you think we were in 2009 when he took offfice?? You Republicans are hilarious…
where do you think we were in 2009 when he took offfice??
Yeah, who would’ve thounk thubk
Interesting…hiccup…didn’t hit Post Comment’.
Who would’ve thunk it could get worst?
The Middle East was actually in better shape when Bush left office. Even a total id-i-jit can see that one. And not only that. Long before Bush, liberals were whining about the activities of the CIA and whining about the dictators maintained by the US. Looks like that was the best way to handle the Middle East to me.
Flexibility is very important he said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyuae0Z9_hA
Now we have seen, he may keep a promise. This is not rocket science either.
Iraq and Afghanistan were time bombs with lit fuses. If you want to call that in better shape, well, I’m LMAO.
The country is doing just fine. According to Bernanke, the country was in worse shape than it was in the Great Depression. That would be when W turned over the keys.
As for Obamacare, I know this indigent person who had a huge growth hanging off his body. He looked like a circus sideshow freak. The county hospital had run him through their routine more than one dozen times, and in a place where they claim to be training doctors, they could not get themselves to do anything except redo tests and prescribe more medications. So I grabbed him and took him to my house and signed him up for Obamacare. A new doctor diagnosed his problem. One of his prescription drugs was causing it. The growth is shrinking. What came before Obamacare was an amoral disgrace. Healing people is never wrong.
What could Obama have done to stop what happened in the Middle East?
We’re losing over 800,000 jobs a month?
What could have Obama done? Left the military where it was while a viable defense was set up before a drawdown. He could have put in place a network of spies so that we knew what was happening on the ground. He could have not enabled the “Arab Spring.” He could stop praising our enemies. If he had just maintained the status quo by doing nothing, it would be better than what we have now.
Joseph
‘Strong men’ rise to the surface in many middle eastern countries precisely because they are strong. They keep law and order because they maintain a lid on the numerous factions that arise from warring tribes, sects, regions and a divided religion whereby the two main groups hate each other for a 1400 year old reason and given the opportunity would commit murder against each other.
Syria Iraq Egypt and Libya all had strong men, most sympathetic to the West, which doesn’t excuse their brutality, but they were frankly better than a weak government or no government where the various factions can act out their centuries old hatreds or differences without any sort of restraint and the general population lose the everyday expectation of security..
tonyb.
Longer than that. The book of Joshua could be interpreted a a Jihad 2900 year ago, although most scholar think it was created out of older traditions of more local holy war. Or murderous holy mobs, or whatever.
But certainly by Hellenistic times (2300 years ago) the same sort of thing we see today was going on. The Maccabees offer an early prototype for ISIS. Josephus, as well as several (Apocryphal) biblical books (1-4 Maccabees), offer histories of their wars from several viewpoints.
We were going to have a residual force in Iraq, but the Iraqi government would not agree to a status of forces agreement.
How do you know that was not attempted? Why do think that was possible? It would seem the Israelis who are in the region would have done the same thing.
How did he do that? The origin of the Arab Spring was an uprising of the people and had nothing to do with Obama. Nor could he have stopped it.
Dumb..
Tony the only dictator that we removed was Saddam.
I forgot about Libya, but that was a humanitarian effort and was in support of an ongoing rebellion. If we had not acted when we did, Kaddafi would have continued to slaughter his own people. I think we did the right thing.
For Libya, the air support was a joint NATO effort, not just US.
Another thing Obama really screw’d up on is releasing prisoners from Guantanamo. Some of those people are already back in positions of power in the terrorist groups or simply fighting for them again. Obama should have tried them in a military tribunal and sent them to prison for life, or given them a death sentence if they killed any Americans anywhere at any time.
Joseph, your take on Libya is infantile. You try to pull the wool over our eyes – people are still being killed in Libya. The US was better off with Kadafi in power.
From the article:
…
Whatever it may be, Amy, the point is that in the eastern side of Libya, in Benghazi, there is a murderous war being fought between Ansar al-Sharia, you know, a terrorist organization, and Khalifa Haftar. And in Tripoli, as well as other cities in western Libya, there is a murderous war being waged between two militias, the Zintan militia, the militia of the town of Zintan, which has now been defeated largely, and the Misurata militia, led by a man who really needs to see a doctor. His name is Salah Badi, who suffers terrible post-traumatic stress disorder.
…
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/8/25/libya_in_chaos_vijay_prashad_on
People like jim 2 blame the USofA for all of the worlds problems. As a patriot, the irrationality of the blame America crowd is easily visible.
==> “People like jim 2 blame the USofA for all of the worlds problems”
Only when there’s a Democrat in the executive office.
Correlation is not causation, but I could propose a few mechanisms, one playing golf like there’s no tomorrow.
=============
Well, I’ve seen suggestions that the reason Nero “fiddled” while Rome burned was to try to keep the people around him from panicking. Riiiiight!
Sorry to hear about Jim Cripwell. His views, while rather rigid, did offer a perspective that made you think about the fundamental aspects of AGW and the meaning of climate sensitivity. My engagements with him were rather philosophical, as with many others here.
:( We will miss you here, Jim Cripwell. But I hope to swap Climate stories with you, when the Lord brings us together.
Andrew
:)
Very much missed. I didn’t realize it until it was pointed out. Same with Max.
Hope his family is well.
Sorry to hear of Jim’s passing. His views on attribution and whether anything was in fact being measured and not merely the product of theory alone were strongly held and made intuitive sense to me. Correlation is not proof of causation and in any case there is considerable doubt in my mind that CO2 and temperature changes are even correlated at all.
From the article:
…
India’s Reliance Industries Ltd plans to invest about $13 billion in energy projects, including a 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) crude refinery at its Jamnagar complex, documents seen by Reuters show.
The refinery would process cheap, heavy crudes that are increasingly available to Asia as the shale boom has cut U.S. demand for the grades.
…
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101959416
From the article:
…
On Tuesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a plan that allows nuclear waste to be stored on-site at active reactors—a decision mired in controversy, and one that underscores the influence of anti-nuclear arguments.
…
That sort of opposition has prompted the nuclear industry to go on the offensive, and roll out the big guns in an effort to rehabilitate its image. In recent months, the Nuclear Energy Institute has enlisted organized labor, as well as an array of former elected officials from both sides of the aisle, to tout the virtues of nuclear power.
They insist that in spite of surging oil and gas production, policymakers and utilities shouldn’t “put all their eggs in one basket,” Judd Gregg, a former U.S. senator and co-chair of Nuclear Matters, said in an interview with CNBC.
…
Fuel diversity, a catchphrase among those who argue that U.S. energy supply shouldn’t be dominated solely by oil and gas, is a central theme for nuclear backers. Blanche Lincoln, a former Arkansas Democratic senator and and a member of the Nuclear Matters leadership council, credited nuclear plants with helping keep New England online during the polar vortex last winter.
…
“Energy is at the core of an economy’s ability to compete,” said Nuclear Matters’ Gregg. “We would be foolish to shut down one of our core energy sources.”
Too little, too late, say prominent conservationists like the National Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club. In spite of centrist think tanks like the Third Way who believe nuclear must be part of the energy story, the environmental lobby is steadfastly opposed to expanding existing capacity.
…
“We continue to believe nuclear power is not safe, and is an incredibly expensive source of electricity,” said John Coequyt, director of the international climate campaign at the Sierra Club. In an interview, he argued that efforts to expand the U.S’ nuclear footprint “will take way too long to be a solution to climate change.”
…
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101954991
On costs of mitigation versus doing nothing, I have come to a similar conclusion that the difference is rather small when expressed in global GDP, and both costs are rather small compared to GDP growth, representing about 2 years of growth by 2100. The difference is this.
1. Under no mitigation you do get damage affecting mostly the low-GDP countries that don’t show up in global GDP measures, and at the end of the century you are approaching 700 ppm with a continuously changing climate to adapt to in the foreseeable future and continuing use of primitive fossil fuel technologies with their other environmental impacts.
2. Under mitigation, for the same cost, by 2100 you are at 450-500 ppm with the climate stabilized, and a lower damage rate to the low-GDP countries along with much cleaner fuels and fossil fuels all but gone.
Given that these both have the same cost, I prefer the second.
There haven’t been a lot of periods in human history where “do nothing” was normal. The enterprising are always trying to dream up a better way whether or not they have a personal profit in mind. Some are just better at it than others. A lot of the “do nothing” conservative types would like to do something other than outsource our problems and tell the world what to do. Getting our own house in order and accepting responsibility for our own actions is kind of a “conservative” thing doncha know.
So everyone should be careful projecting “do nothing” and “business as usual” into the future.
“Getting our own house in order and accepting responsibility for our own actions is kind of a “conservative” thing doncha know.”
Since when?
It is true that the world is already sensible enough about climate change that the “do nothing” scenario will not happen, and the only question is to what extent they can do something. I think the approach where each country decides its own way of doing something is more realistic than blanket targets like Kyoto. There are already decarbonization pathways being proposed for the major emitters (DDPP), and the only resistance now is from the self-interested, but wealthy, fossil fuel sector who still have well-funded proponents in some national political hallways.
Since Teddy Roosevelt pretty much. There is a difference between “conservative” and “republican”. Republicans tend to try and capture the “conservative” high ground much like “Democrats” do, but there is more to conservative than political affiliation.
JimD, “It is true that the world is already sensible enough about climate change that the “do nothing” scenario will not happen.”
I have no idea what the “world” will do I only know what I can do. I have also long outgrown the thought that I can make the “world” do what I like.
Climate Action costs 200% Inaction – Research & Development best
Re: “doing nothing about climate change will cost future generations roughly the same as doing something.”
Contrast Bjorn Lomborg’s testimony:
Examining the Threats Posed by Climate Change: The Effects of Unchecked Climate Change on Communities and the Economy, Tuesday, July 29 2014, 2:30pm, Room 406, Dirksen Senate Office Building
Bjorn Lomborg, Copenhagen Consensus Center
Well…
There are a couple of problems with viewing it as a binary choice.
http://img.qz.com/2013/11/global-carbon-emisssions-1850-20101.jpg?w=640
1. The China driven global CO2 emissions have gone exponential the last ten years but the CO2 increase has been linear. China will hit peak coal in 2030 and there isn’t anyone else on the planet to keep the increase going (no 2nd fiddle group of players has China’s coal reserves and GDP).
This means we will have a hard time sustaining the current CO2 increase which would give a CO2 level of 620 in 2100 let alone increase it. Claims of “doubled CO2” (800+ PPM) are deluded.
2. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 some of the technologies such as solar and some of the garbage to fuel programs will become cost competitive. When these programs become cost competitive they will start reducing CO2. Molten salt reactors using the brayton cycle look like a hot ticket which will also reduce CO2. Some out of the blue technology (such as polywell fusion) is also a possibility. Most of the other “big ticket” fusion technologies are a not practical and not likely. ITER has some real metallurgical problems particularly with the scavanging cassette.
Worrying about prevention or mitigation of a 0.7°C increase that is mostly an increase in low temperatures is sort of a joke. A 0.2°C increase in high temperatures will be hard to notice.
@ PA .. one of the major things about increased co2 production is the retention of heat that increased levels of co2 are suppose to be responsible for. The last stat that I saw and was used to estimate the rise in temps along with the rise in co2 was 240watts/m^2 retained out of the incoming 363watts/m^2 That’s when the level of co2 was around 370 ppm or so. Certainly since co2 has increased the tipping point must be near, when no heat escapes. Somehow this claim is currently missing among the debate. Above a certain level so they say, it won’t make a difference. So if the chart they used to justify CAGW, when 270ppm was balance and an additional 100ppm made the balance swing 240 watts retained, what does another 30 ppm do? 320 watts/m^2 retained?
rishrac
Re: “Certainly since co2 has increased the tipping point must be near, when no heat escapes. Somehow this claim is currently missing among the debate.”
Take a deep breath. Relax. You have been fed non-physical alarmist nonsense on “tipping points”.
Earth loses heat by blackbody radiation proportional to the FOURTH power of absolute temperature. T^4.
Conversely CO2 atmospheric absorption increases only as the logarithm of the concentration. That means earth’s temperature is inherently stable with strong negative feedback far greater than CO2 warming.
Earth’s temperature varies about 10 deg C between ~ 2C and -8C with glaciation. Sinking into the next glacial period is a far greater danger than the modest predicted warming to more comfortable productive climate.
See Don Easterbrook’s rebuttal.
Give thanks for and enjoy all the good things we have.
rishrac, we can learn from conditions when the earth has been in states well above 500 ppm before. Prior to 40 million years ago that was its normal state back through the Mesozoic Era, and heat does continue to escape, but above some critical point between 500-700 ppm it is an iceless hothouse, and sea levels are consequently 70 m higher than now, so the tipping points mostly relate to melting continental glaciers.
The 64 trillion dollar question is which came first/which controls CO2 or temperature. e.g. see:
See prehistoric CO2 and temperatures
During these periods CO2 LAGGED temperature.
There are some fairly good graphics on this now. The CO2 decline is geological burial, and the temperature follows. Note the strong relation between the presence of ice and the CO2 level.
http://www.alpineanalytics.com/Climate/DeepTime/WebDownloadImages/CenozoicCO2-7.5w.600ppi.png
Hagen. false dilemma.
the lag is actually a prediction made by hansen.
It’s easy for Hansen to predict the past; it’s the future he has trouble with.
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kim, if you don’t learn from the past, …
A seven year old once asked me why bubbles rose in her glass of soda pop. After I explained that carbon dioxide became less soluble as the temperature rose she thought for a moment, looked around, up at the sky and then on past the beach. Finally she said ‘So the carbon dioxide in the air will rise after an ice age stops?’
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Oh, JD, I have, I have, and that lag is a huge dilemma, hardly false, for the alarmists.
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It’ not a simple 2-factor system. There’s rainfall, in various areas, and dust. The latter from warm deserts as well as glacial deposits.
Oh yes, let’s:
Feedback between aeolian dust, climate, and atmospheric CO2 in glacial time by A. J. Ridgwell and A. J. Watson
Atmospheric Iron Deposition: Global Distribution, Variability, and Human Perturbations by Natalie M. Mahowald, et al.
An iron curtain in the Atlantic Ocean forms a biogeochemical divide by Douglas G. Capone
Just to start. See linked articles for full pub info and authorship.
What I think is cool is that after temperature rises, CO2 rises, and after CO2 rises, temperatures drop, always, always, always. We won’t discuss the lag for the second phenomenon.
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kim, so maybe you understand, or possibly not, that CO2 rises after volcanic periods, and temperature rises as a result, then you replace those volcanoes with an anthropogenic CO2 release and the temperature rises as a consequence of that too.
Well, we shall see, won’t we? Remember too, that Gates’s Human Carbon Volcano is a piker compared to the output of those volcanic periods of which you speak.
With present evidence, we’re not likely to be able to raise the temperature much, and it’s far more likely than not that what we can do will be net beneficial, both warming us and feeding us.
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kim, it doesn’t take much. As I mentioned and showed with a picture, 700 ppm gets us to conditions that last existed before Antarctica glaciated, while at 500 ppm Greenland and Arctic sea ice are not supported. We can just learn from the past in this way, and these are relevant amounts for policy too, being below the burn-it-all limit. Some has to be left in the ground to avoid these levels.
Well, even if that is true, what we put in the air will be re-sequestered before either ice cap melts significantly.
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Particularly if you want to make any use of the missing heat in the abyss argument.
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kim, there are various things that can mess up the sequestration which takes centuries anyway. For example the surface ocean acidifies and gets warmer holding less CO2, and the warm layer may stagnate and not sink preventing deep cold water, that you need for sequestration, from rising to the surface. Do you want to do that experiment? Meanwhile the sea level is already rising and the polar caps are melting. It’s a race between rising sea level and natural sequestration that we get into.
There’s also biological sequestration, else there’d be no hydrocarbon reserves, with a rate that rises as CO2 rises.
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And thanks for ‘centuries’. Compare with multiple, multiple millennia for icecap melt.
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There is time to finish this game of bowls.
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kim, it might have been that slow after the Ice Ages, but that didn’t have the forcing change that we will have which is more equivalent to the atmosphere of the Eocene under BAU. For example 1 W/m2 can melt a meter of ice every 10 years, not that this is the process, but it gives an idea of the power of the imbalance.
kim, yep, and Drake still defeated the Armada after finishing his game, so when Obama takes time to finish his golf, people should not complain.
That’s pretty amusing comparing the intrepid Drake with the handicapped Obama. And frankly, Obama hasn’t any idea whether the tides or anything else are going in or out.
Note that Drake had a strategy within moments of the alarm, which gave him time to bowl. Obama announced his lack of strategy, then went off to play golf.
Those who can’t learn from the past, are doomed to have Obama for President. Too bad they have to drag those who can learn along with them.
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Also, Drake hardly defeated the Armada, that’s myth. He was an able assistant at the endeavour.
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History will tell us if this was more like Drake or Bush the GW.
It seems that ice started forming around 1,000 ppm of CO2 on your picture. And what’s the meaning of the ‘implied’ on the left side. Is this more imagination?
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And even at 1 meter every 10 years, that not much before the anthroCO2 is re-sequestered. Somebody has scared the pants off of you.
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AnthroCO2 is a Calaisian fireship, not an Antwerpian Hellburner. Work around it, don’t panic and generate mitigatory disaster.
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G’nite, Jim. Nice convo.
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1. The Abyss wasn’t that good a movie.
2. CO2 is only responsible for about 1/3 the heat removal particularly from the tropical ocean, about 1/6 is from sensible heat (conduction/convection) and about 1/2 is from heat that doesn’t have any sense (evaporation). Much like pouring water through a sieve – increasing CO2 doesn’t have a lot of effect on temperature since CO2 is only responsible for 1/3 of the heat loss. The evaporation rate is basically going to follow the curve below and since the evaporation rate is going exponential for tropical water above 20°C (the knee of the curve) the claim CO2 can significantly change the temperature of sea water at the equator appears to be spurious.
http://www.hashemifamily.com/Kevan/Climate/Saturation_Concentration_K.gif
3. Claiming that low CO2 causes ice ages is like claiming the dents on a wrecked car caused the accident. Wrecked cars will always have dents, ice ages will always have low CO2.
The Ordovician ice age happened at 10X (1000%) of the current CO2 level when Gondwana drifted to the south pole. Ice ages happen when there is a large land mass at a pole, an enclosed polar sea, etc.
Currently we have a large land mass at one pole, an almost enclosed polar sea at the other end, the oceans split in two (reducing circulation), and the largest near-tropical mountain range the earth has ever seen (Everest is near the isostatic limit) which impedes circulation. The mountains and polar caps significantly reduce the earth albedo. The earth didn’t start cooling until Antarctica moved to the south pole 30 million years ago. The ice ages didn’t start until the Americas isolated the Pacific and Atlantic 2.6 million years ago.
The
Sorry if you think I’m on the side of AGW, “you would be wrong”. I put that information out there because that’s what they said and since temps have done nothing like forecast, it is question to ask the IPCC & Assocs. What happened?
And without a doubt, colder temps are a very great danger. I’ve been arguing with them for the last 10 or 12 years, it’s been a while. No planning has been given to a colder world, which I think, we are close to.
Invalid binary choice. There are infinity many flavors of “mitigation”, many much cheaper than whatever was analysed, and just as good by 2099..
Also note the care to leave out remediation as an option. There are also many flavors of remediation (removing CO2 directly from the environment), many with much lower costs than “mitigation”.
This, IMO, is the mark of somebody using the push for “mitigation” as a stalking horse for some other agenda. Probably socialist, given his past comments.
It looks binary, but you can decide whether you prefer to be nearer option 1 or option 2, and that determines what kind of action you would think is needed. Remediation for sure comes under the umbrella of mitigation. It’s the CO2 level that matters more than how we get there.
Not true. With remediation, we can rapidly expand fossil fuel use for the next couple decades, while remediation technology incubates, and takes a while to mature. Then we can pull the carbon out again. Same result by 2099.
Straight “mitigation” requires much more urgent and rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, with concomitant reduction in energy use over the next two decades. That’s what makes the distinction so important.
For instance, as I’ve often urged, if “we” go full steam ahead with gas distribution and generation, while allowing solar to follow its decades-long exponential price reduction, soon enough the technology (esp. biotech) to produce methane from solar/electrolytic hydrogen combined with CO2 from the air/ocean surface will become cost-competitive, then much cheaper. At that point, the entire infrastructure for storing, transporting, and using gas to generate electricity can be converted to run on carbon-neutral fuel. Thus preventing it from being lost to obsolescence.
Remediation plays an extremely important role in that scenario (actually, of course, an entire pencil of scenarios) because diverting some of the carbon extracted from the environment to sequestration would (IMO almost certainly) be cheaper. Far cheaper.
In addition, blurring the distinction between pure “mitigation” and remediation allows a sort of bait-and-switch: policies are sold based on impacts involving remediation, then implemented without them, thus furthering agendas that much more to do with forcing people to do without energy than reducing the pCO2.
AK, who pays for your remediation. Presumably it is not a profitable industry. Does its price get attached to the carbon price? Is it cheaper to burn fossil fuels and then remediate them than to not burn them in the first place? These are the questions, and that is without considering how many decades would pass before that even possibly becomes large-scale enough to do anything. It makes more sense to reduce fossil fuel burning now, then if ever large-scale remediation comes along, start burning them again at that point, rather than keep burning in the hope that your global-scale remediation dream is realized, because that is currently in the realms of sci-fi.
Why should anybody pay before we’re much surer than we are now that it’s needed?
Presumably it will be profitable with proper encouragement. A variety of ways can be suggested for paying for it, but the one I like best (at the moment) is to plan on diverting a percentage of carbon extracted from the environment for remediation. Start 20 years from now with 0.1% (1/1000th), and double every 5 years till it reaches 50%.
Almost certainly, if you burn them now and remediate them later.
At which time it would almost certainly be cheaper, and we’d have a much better idea whether we even need to.
Makes more sense if your real agenda is expensive energy.
Typical dismissal of anything not already on-the-shelf. You remind me of Peter Lang. Future-blind.
AK, to show it is feasible you have to start by showing that the cost per extraction of a tonne of CO2 is small compared to the fossil fuel price of putting it in the air in the first place. Otherwise you have just added a significant new cost to fossil fuel. This might have the desirable side effect of pricing fossil fuels out of the market, however, so we can keep an eye on it.
What do you mean “cost”? In dollars? That depends on technology. I’m predicting it will be. It’s important to look at the logic behind such predictions, because your approach also contains tacit predictions about relative costs.
There’s all sorts of “technology” already available and free: self-reproducing in fact, for dragging CO2 out of the air/ocean. In addition, the Navy has a process in proof-of-concept that appears to be pretty cheap in terms of energy.
But here’s the most important point: there are already a number of industries that use CO2 as input, many of them end up fixing it. Greenhouses, for instance. Or Joule Unlimited‘s “engineered microbes that harness the sun’s energy to convert carbon dioxide and water directly into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels.” While the methanogen approach I’ve suggested remains prior to proof-of-concept, it’s based on real methanogens that already exist in the deep sea. If the Navy’s CO2 extraction process ends up working out, little or no genetic modification would be required. If not, genetic engineering is proceeding as rapidly as semiconductor, so creating bio-reactors capable of dragging it out of native sea water will probably be feasible within a decade or so.
The big advantage of planning to use remediation is that it gives the CO2 extraction technology time to mature, to replace CO2 from more traditional sources. And I’m not suggesting “doing nothing”, although that
willwould eventually solve the problem (IMO). I’m suggesting targeting R&D in the appropriate areas with subsidies, both direct (paying for it from the “public purse”) and indirect (e.g. tweaking the IP laws).Thus betraying your real agenda: making energy expensive.
AK, if you have to extract fossil fuel CO2 at high cost relative to the price of the energy that same CO2 produces, this is a direct addition to its price. You can say it is OK, someone else will pay for that part, but it comes round to you as a consumer in the end. If these technologies were even close, people would be talking about them instead of BECCS which is renewable biomass burning with sequestration that really does have negative CO2 production.
I’ve talked about it too. Although in my formulation, you grow/buy twice (say) as much and simply dump half (or other appropriate percentage) in some anoxic ocean trench. My bet is it would be cheaper than trying to recapture the CO2 after burning for energy.
But maybe not. There’s a potential synergy between electrolysis, which produces effectively pure O2, and carbon capture, which is easier/cheaper if you use O2 rather than air.
And it doesn’t have to be water splitting: using sodium electrolysis/fuel cells for grid energy storage is a viable option. Sodium is much easier to store safely than hydrogen.
“Under mitigation, for the same cost, by 2100 you are at 450-500 ppm with the climate stabilized,”
Nonsense.
Mitigation is not an available option now. We don’t possess adequate technology. All mitigation actions performed up to now (costing 360 billion $ per year) achieved zero mitigation (emission reduction).
It is all an illusion.
Jim D: 2. Under mitigation, for the same cost, by 2100 you are at 450-500 ppm with the climate stabilized, and a lower damage rate to the low-GDP countries along with much cleaner fuels and fossil fuels all but gone.
You wrote in favor of a 50-100 year phase-out of fossil fuel use; at least you mentioned it as a possibility. It is possible that a 50-100 year phase-out of fossil fuel will have no impact on CO2 concentration in 2100. And it is possible that there will be no decrease in climate variability. And it is possible that the increase in CO2 will have produced a more beneficial environment for growing crops.
In looking at the two choices, not only the values of the end states need to be considered, but the likelihood of achieving them. And the possibility that some of the effects of increased CO2 may be beneficial should also be considered.
Personally, I prefer “business as usual” for the next 20 years, a steady rate of continued business, scientific and engineering innovation and research. Along with more investment in flood control and irrigation.
To Obama’s energy policy: (1) the administration’s strong support of solar through subsidies to crony industries such as Solyndra has been a colossal waste; (2) the administration impediments to increased oil extraction and exploration on lands under its control have been a severe impediment to a development (energy sufficiency) that his administration has attempted to take credit for. Not to put words in their mouths, but vulnerable Democrats are either directly critical of the administration (Landrieu), or hoping that voters ignore the energy issue.
–Not to put words in their mouths, but vulnerable Democrats are either directly critical of the administration (Landrieu), or hoping that voters ignore the energy issue.–
If vulnerable Democrats succeed in their hope voters will ignore a very important issue, what do the want voter to pay attention to?
I just curious, what they done for the voter, lately?
Why would we even want to remediate CO2?
Increasing CO2 is increasing food production.
We would want CO2 at 600 PPM ideally.
The problem the anti-fossil fuel lobby has is there isn’t a convincing case that the costs of more CO2 are greater than the benefits.
Greenhouses use 1000-1200 PPM to spur growth:
http://www.hydrofarm.com/resources/articles/co2.jpg
You make me think of Jean Béliveau, JimD, who turns 83 today:
https://twitter.com/CanadiensMTL/status/506192724341850112
A great ambassador.
Jim D | August 30, 2014 at 10:39 am | Reply
“On costs of mitigation versus doing nothing,…”
There are actually 3 options:
Mitigation, do nothing, and do the wrong thing.
Despite what some would argue, the problem, if there is one, is so poorly understood that at this point “mitigation” would almost certainly be “the wrong thing.” On second thought maybe there really are only 2 options: do nothing or do the wrong thing.
There is the mindset, echoed again by Steyn’s piece, that mitigation will collapse the world’s economy, and I think that despite the 3% GDP numbers by the experts, some still think that way. That is what the fossil fuel industry wants you to think, and they have put that message out there as a means of fearmongering. Don’t fall for it.
Jim D, “There is the mindset, echoed again by Steyn’s piece, that mitigation will collapse the world’s economy.”
COULD cause a collapse or near collapse of the world’s economy. That fat tail thingy. If the mitigation plans become too big to fail they will.
The fossil fuel economy is like the tail wagging the dog. Not a big part of GDP, it turns out. No biggy losing it.
Jim D, “The fossil fuel economy is like the tail wagging the dog. Not a big part of GDP, it turns out. No biggy losing it.”
Well now that we have virtual food and clothing, oh wait! You actually have to transport goods. High speed rail and all those wonderful “needs” don’t replace the boring semi delivery truck. Now if you would like to joint the progressive thinkers in Untopia (Sahel) with the solar powered tractors and food stuff conveyor systems go right a head. But in the real world there will be a long slow transition to a less than Utopian compromise.
Now it would be inspirational if the “progressive” thinkers that know how to save the world used teleconferencing instead of business class.
captd, if you were replacing all fossil fuels tomorrow or next year, you may have a point, but I think mankind given 50 years to think how to replace delivery trucks the right way can come up with something.
JimD, ” but I think mankind given 50 years to think how to replace delivery trucks the right way can come up with something.”
You are right, but there is no reasonable time frame mentioned, only the need to act “NOW”. The “progressives” need to learn how to communicate things like time frames and rational approaches that allow for the unexpected and unanticipated instead of saying things like “they can build it, but we will bankrupt them.” A cleaner coal plant with potential to upgrade to mixed fuels and/or carbon capture would have a useful life of about 30 to 50 years.
Typical rates for 450 ppm scenarios are a linear 20% less emissions per decade for 50 years. For 10% per decade, in a century you level off at 500 ppm. I think we will end up somewhere between these lines. These are doable, if technologically challenging, goals. Lots of scope for competing new industries to bloom.
Jim D | August 30, 2014 at 12:19 pm |
“There is the mindset, echoed again by Steyn’s piece, that mitigation will collapse the world’s economy..”
Just like the climate seems to self adjust, over a period of time sanity does prevail and the economy does self adjust. In the meantime diversion of resources and talent from real and serious known and well understood problems of disease, malnutrition, sanitation, lack of potable water, etc. etc. etc. is killing people.
And it is not a mindset. It is a logical conclusion. Proposing a solution to any problem before it is understood results in a low probability of success. Of that I am “95% confident” (I am using the same math that the IPCC used to come up with “95% confident”).
So there are 2 options: do nothing or do the wrong thing.
Notice the continual effort to force peoples thinking into the Procrustean Bed of “Gotta Start Now!”
Jim D, “Lots of scope for competing new industries to bloom.”
Not with “progressives” or anyone else in government picking winners and not having a clear regulation policy. The “threat” of regulation keeps a lot of money on the sidelines. The best thing government can do is set flexible goals and get out of the way as much as possible. Remember, “progressives” have fought hydraulic fracturing and it is likely the largest reason the US has reduced emissions. Several US solar businesses were harmed more by the “grid” mentality than were helped with numerous utility companies facing issues with unrealistic buy back rates. Government mandates are great only if the government knows exactly what it is doing, which is not very often.
PMHinSC, most countries have by now agreed that doing nothing is the wrong thing, so things are being done and the only remaining questions are how much and how quickly.
Jim D says “most countries have agreed…”
Like they agreed to not do anything about Hitler?
ksd, you make my point for me. Doing nothing in the face of a potential threat is always wrong.
Sure Jim D. The threat from climate change is equal to that from Hitler. What mess make you see those as equivalent?
*meds*
ksd, I thought you were making that connection. I played along.
Then you must agree, Jim D, that ISIS is a big threat today and we must do something. So,what would you encourage Obama to do? Golf or something more productive?
ksd, I think Obama has a lot more info than me and might do different anyway. I would suggest helping the Iraqis and Kurds drive ISIS back to the Syrian border by continuing to be air support and cut off the support lines to their remaining pockets in Iraq. However, once back in Syria, there is not much to do without a “friendly” ground army and there are no obvious candidates. Let them fester there for a while, perhaps reduce their area of influence with Iraqi help, then they may just quit, seeing no prospects for expansion. That would be my strategy.
Yeah, let them fester on Syria, sort of like Bin Laden did in Afghanistan/Pakistan. What could possibly go wrong with that strategy?
Oh, and good luck with “they may just quit”. Wishing is not a strategy Jim D.
ksd, you haven’t said what you would do differently. There is no American appetite for boots on the ground, understandably, given the cost of the last two wars. Perhaps we will have time for policing again when we have recovered economically from the last time. Drones also work pretty well to prevent any more desert training grounds, so the festering would be accompanied by the occasional strike, and perhaps limited in and out raids, as they are doing elsewhere.
Appetite or not, and there was no appetite for WWII prior to Pearl Harbor, boots on the ground are the only solution. The military knows it but Obama won’t do it. So we are doomed to repeat the past. Only questions are where and when it happens and will it be worse than 9/11.
ksd, unlike you think, you don’t solve terrorism with boots on the ground. The world has moved on. These are decades old tactics being used for a modern war. There are more modern techniques of attack and ways to be prepared now.
Really Jim D? Some who seem to know what they are doing say the strategy is to keep the terrorists occupied on their turf so as to limit their ability to attack on yours. Keep them on the run. As opposed to giving them turf and money to fund their activities. Like they now have in both Syria and Iraq. How do you think that will turn out for us? When the King of Saudi Arabia is warning us, should we listen?
ksd, while it is true that putting troops in Iraq and Afghanistan drew terrorists in to try to kill them like moths to a flame, I don’t think a flycatcher is the way to use American troops.
My favorite Obama quote to date: “The world’s always been messy … we’re just noticing now in part because of social media.”
Wish away Jim D. Boots on the ground, whether in post WWII Europe or Iraq and Afghanistan, work. History proves it.
“mitigation will collapse the world’s economy,”
It will collapse some significant part of the world economy, without achieving any real mitigation (emission reduction).
Jim D: that mitigation will collapse the world’s economy, and I think that despite the 3% GDP numbers by the experts, some still think that way.
3% is not a large fraction of GDP, but it is a large fraction of GDP growth and re-investment. Redirecting that much re-investment away from productive investments into wasteful investment could in fact halt GDP growth.
A great deal more likely is that rapid impulsive reinvestment in alternatives to fossil fuels will dramatically reduce GDP growth to half or a quarter of what it otherswise would have been over a long period of time. That is not a negligible loss. One of the reasons that I favor “BAU” for the next 20 years is to postpone massive substitutions for fossil fuels until after all the alternative technologies have had their costs cut.
Meanwhile, the scientific support for expectations of benefit from rapid abandonment of fossil fuels is so flimsy that I would greatly prefer that the power and cost of the federal government not be increased.
Jim D: and I think that despite the 3% GDP numbers by the experts, some still think that way.
To reinforce my earlier point, that is greater than the average US gdp growth over the last 7 years. There is a distinct possibility that Obama’s wasteful investments in solar power and restrictions on oil development were responsible for it not being greater over the last 4 years.
Matthew Marler, 3% is about two years of growth in GDP, so instead of having a certain GDP in 2100, you get it in 2102 with a mitigated climate as a bonus. A small price to pay.
No Jim – higher energy prices lead to a permanent reduction in productivity and GDP which pushes millions of marginal people over the edge. Two years later it is still x amount reduced in a poorly quantified and highly uncertain calculation.
It you fit it in with optimum economic go for it. Otherwise – go phuck yourself.
Jim D: 3% is about two years of growth in GDP, so instead of having a certain GDP in 2100,
If you invest more money in alternative energy than in the economy, but get the same energy output, then gdp will not grow.
Jim D: ksd, unlike you think, you don’t solve terrorism with boots on the ground. The world has moved on.
Can you solve terrorism without boots on the ground?
Matthew Marler, sure, special ops work OK if they need to do that for some reason.
By the way, I prefer Obama’s attitude where he wasn’t going to even give them the pleasure of interrupting his golf, and he stays cool in his speeches. It was an attitude of not giving them what they want. Contrast others who do interrupt vacations and give scared shi#less speeches, while raising national threat levels to maximum, just what the terrorists want. They win when you are openly scared like this. That’s why it is called terrorism.
I am with jimmy dee on the ISIS thing. Obama should continue to call the little rascals JV and play a lot more golf. That will really piss-them-off and they will get tired of not scaring us and quit, because it won’t be any fun for them if we don’t act all scared. Do I have that about right, jimmy?
And jimmy, can you show us your calculations on the comparative GDP growth rates that you say only make a difference of two years? Don’t forget about compounding, jimmy.
Don M, yes, he is probably just thumbing his nose at them while doing a lot behind the scenes, maybe even while he was on vacation, that is obviously not being revealed to the press. We will find out soon enough.
On the compounding thing, yes, the annual 0.04% in WG3 compounds to quite a small amount even by 2100, so that is where the 3% comes from and seems to be the number Lomborg uses. The upper estimate from WG3 is 11% that might take about 5 years instead of two. The total GDP growth would be about 600% give or take 100%, so it is somewhat within the uncertainty anyway.
You are a trip, jimmy. Impervious to reality.
It presumes increased energy over time – resulting in permentantly lower GDP – by several percent each and every year. Not counting risk from unforeseen outcomes and economic shocks from misguided and ramped up interventions.
There are conservative ways to run economies – none of them understood by Jimbo. As I suggested earlier – if he can decarbonize by allowing the market and innovation take it’s course so be it. If not he can sit on it and rotate. It seems to me I am not the first to suggest this to him today.
Well…
It seems to be generally agreed at this point that it isn’t going to warm until 2030.
Proponents of catastrophic warming (which is the only kind of warming that really needs a response) have a track record that is worst than lousy. The climate models would have to improve to be really bad. The rate of CO2 emission is worst than RCP8.5. So the warming should be worse than the climate models suggest, we should not be having a hiatus. Despite that the CAGW proponents have a fire-ready-aim approach to CO2 emissions.
We have at least 16 years sort through our options. It won’t be 2-3°C warmer in 2020 as predicted by Hansen. Perhaps we should quit doing studies with invalid models and focus on atmospheric science and natural forcings.
There are currently 38 explanations (and counting) for the pause. Reasonable people would actually like to understand the situation rather than just guess at it.
The skeptics can’t prove the warmers are wrong. The warmers can’t prove that CAGW is at least as likely as a asteroid strike.
We should split the difference and devote about as much money to global warming as we do to asteroid defense. In a decade or so we will have better information and can revise our policy accordingly.
Jim D: I prefer Obama’s attitude where he wasn’t going to even give them the pleasure of interrupting his golf, and he stays cool in his speeches. It was an attitude of not giving them what they want.
Obama was not the only audience for the video. The videos of beheadings reportedly live on the internet for considerable lengths of time, and are recruiting tools. Reportedly, they are effective at attracting the kind of recruits that the videographers want. In response to the video, Obama promised to be relentless in his pursuit of the executioner. To prove it, his administration revealed that they had approved a mission a month or so earlier to release some captives, but were unsuccessful; right when Obama was promising that there would be no boots on the ground.
To continue on this tangent: it looks to me like IS (ISIL, ISIS) will not be defeated without sufficient boots on the ground, and a long-term commitment in support of other groups in the region. I think that is something that Obama is fundamentally strongly opposed to. Not that it is a fundamentally vacuous set of ideas or moral indifference or any such on his and his primary advisers’ part. But he has to date underestimated the capacity of IS to grow and expand.
Jim D: “By the way, I prefer Obama’s attitude where he wasn’t going to even give them the pleasure of interrupting his golf, and he stays cool in his speeches. It was an attitude of not giving them what they want.”
Yeah, stay cool, just like Europe and US did with Hitler. But it will work this time, I’m sure.
Regarding boots on the ground, if it is needed it should be a coalition. The Europeans have more of a threat at home from these people, and should contribute more than they have in the past, plus Arab neighbors. It seems that many ISIS leaders were in Saddam Hussein’s military, and they have what resembles a conventional army, but importantly without any air support, making them sitting ducks and easy to outmaneuver. There is a lot of behind the scenes action in getting a coalition together. Thankfully Congress is still on vacation, and can’t interfere much.
@ Jim D
“captd, if you were replacing all fossil fuels tomorrow or next year, you may have a point, but I think mankind given 50 years to think how to replace delivery trucks the right way can come up with something.”
Right now our choices are nuclear or solar, or both; both are infeasible for transportation given any technology visible from here.
So, replacing our (US) energy supply with solar at 30% conversion efficiency requires that roughly 5000 km X 5000 km be populated by solar collectors backed up by enough storage capacity to ride out nights and cloud coverage. With no empirical evidence that large commercial solar collectors have a COP>1 over their lifetime. If you insist that we use biofuels, the efficiency plummets and the acreage requirements go up accordingly.
If you replace the IC engines in our (US only) 250e6 cars with Tesla-style battery packs, you’re talking 75e6 metric tons of lithium cobalt oxide batteries. Where are we going to get the Li and Co, how much energy is it going to cost us to convert a Chinese or South American desert to batteries and install them in our cars, and what happens to the electrical grid when 100e6 people drive their cars home at night and plug them into their handy garage chargers, drawing 50 kw–or more each? For an hour or more? Or if everyone that is now pulling into filling stations and filling up with evil fossil fuel were to pull into a charging station, plug in, and started sucking down 50 kw. For an hour instead of 5 minutes. Oh, and don’t forget the rare earth metals required for the motors powered by the batteries. There is a REASON that they are called ‘rare earths’.
And cute little Tesla’s aside, any ideas on a non-fossil fuel fuel solution for powering a long haul truck towing a 40,000 kg trailer? Now or 50 years from now?
Bob Ludwick, I will defer to the DDPP chapter for the USA on this.
http://unsdsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/DDPP_interim_2014_report_United_States_chapter1.pdf
“Despite high levels of electrification across sectors, certain end uses remain technically challenging to
electrify, especially in industry and long-distance transportation (commercial and freight trucks, freight
rail, shipping), where battery electric energy densities appear insufficient for the foreseeable future.
Where technically feasible, these end uses are switched from existing fossil fuel supplies (coal, diesel,
gasoline, and fuel oil) to “pipeline gas” as the preferred combustion fuel, including compressed (CNG)
and liquefied (LNG) forms. Pipeline gas refers to fuel carried in existing natural gas pipelines, which is
partially decarbonized over time using gasified biomass. Biomass constitutes 55% of the pipeline gas
supply by 2050, resulting in an emission intensity 60% lower than pure natural gas and more than 66%
lower than most petroleum-based fuels. Almost all available biomass in this scenario is converted to
gas, rather than liquid or solid fuels, requiring 16.7 EJ of biomass primary energy, slightly less than the
17 EJ maximum limit for sustainable biomass energy use assumed in this study. “
@ Jim D
“Pipeline gas refers to fuel carried in existing natural gas pipelines, which is
partially decarbonized over time using gasified biomass. Biomass constitutes 55% of the pipeline gas
supply by 2050, resulting in an emission intensity 60% lower than pure natural gas and more than 66%
lower than most petroleum-based fuels. Almost all available biomass in this scenario is converted to
gas, rather than liquid or solid fuels, requiring 16.7 EJ of biomass primary energy, slightly less than the
17 EJ maximum limit for sustainable biomass energy use assumed in this study. “
At 30% conversion efficiency, direct solar can produce roughly 1-2 kw-hrs/day/m^2 in the US. How many net kw-hrs/day/m^2 can land devoted to biomass gas production deliver?
It’s highly unlikely that mitigation will destroy the economy. Just as it’s highly unlikely that global warming/weirding/whatever it is will destroy the world’s economy.
But it’s a great way of identifying those at either extreme of the rainbow.
Wouldn’t that depend on how it’s done? And the agendas of those whose “solution” is used?
Are you denying the existence of a body of “leftists” who want the economy destroyed?
@ Matthew R. Marler
“Please explain that to me.”
B. C. was a comic strip penned by Johnny Hart that was run all over the world from 1958 until Hart’s death in 2007. It has been continued by his family.
One of the characters was ‘Curls, master of sarcastic wit.’ Example:
On Curls’ introduction into the strip, he is introduced to another character (I don’t remember which) by B. C.:
B. C. : ‘This is Curls, master of sarcastic wit’.
Other character: ‘Say something sarcastic.’
Curls: ‘Pleased to meet you.’
Similar to your question about the likelihood that the CO2 doomsday cultists are rabid supporters of nuclear.
At it again, I see, Jimmy old bean … very tedious
Same question you always evade: *what* “mitigation” measures do you endorse that guarantee affordable, reliable power 24/7
Do answer the question, old bean
People have thought about this a lot more than any of us have. Here is an example to look at.
http://unsdsn.org/what-we-do/deep-decarbonization-pathways/
Jim D: http://unsdsn.org/what-we-do/deep-decarbonization-pathways/
Thanks for the link. I think that is a good paper to save in a safe place and reread in 20 years. They propose a 2/3 reduction in human CO2 emissions by 2050. I think their alarmism is unsupported by careful study of the science. I would be in favor of policies, adopted no earlier than 2025, whereby human CO2 emissions might begin to fall sometime between 2050 and 2060. They want action starting now!
For the US they have three pathways, renewable-intense, CCS-intense and nuclear-intense. All possible, or some combination, that can achieve deep decarbonization by 2050.
Here’s the problem I see:
Anybody who thinks 2050 technology will be based on “Minimize[d] use of non-commercialized technologies” as of 2015 is living in a fantasy world. A century ago, even half a century ago, it might have been realistic to assume that the world 50 years on, or even 30 years on, would be like “today’s world”, but nobody who thinks that today can really be considered sane.
In trying to set up a plan reaching 2050, it’s essential to start by accepting the fact that the technological environment will be at least as different from today’s as today’s is from 1980. For instance, the “Jim D”s of that world (1980) would have called the idea of a personal computer on almost every white-collar worker’s desk, and in their homes, “currently in the realms of sci-fi.” The same goes for mobile phones in every pocket, with built in cameras, credit cards, etc. If asked, they would probably have insisted that such things wouldn’t be there for a century or so, despite that the early rudiments of most of the technology involved were already on the lab bench.
The question isn’t whether the world of 2050 will be at least as different from ours as ours is from 1980, the question is how. And how much control we can exercise over making sure specific technologies are developed.
It’s typical of socialists that they want to put an end to such technological destabilization, because the constant unpredictable change puts a premium on individual competence in dealing with it. Thus the future-blind “Analysis Approach” offered by Jim D and his link. But that’s not going to happen, and efforts to shoehorn planning into the Procrustean Bed of “technologies that are already commercialized” is a guaranteed failure that will simply deny us the ability to steer new technology development in ways that might help the fossil carbon problem without impacting our constantly improving lifestyle.
Jimmy is the master of simplistic absurdities.
Pretty accurate assessment of the UNFCCC COP 21Process.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nakedpastor/2010/05/cartoon-crystal-ball/
Jim D: For the US they have three pathways, renewable-intense, CCS-intense and nuclear-intense.
If it were my decision, I would postpone the “intense” phase of the transition for at least 20 years. I expect that when they announce their cost estimates, no tax-payng and rate-paying voting public outside of California will go along.
I drove past the large wind farms in the upper Columbia River catchment area this summer. With the drought, I am kind of glad they are there. But California and other large parts of the world need better flood control and irrigation more than we need new alternative energy sources or CCS.
A question for you about the “nuclear-intense” part. Is it your impression that nuclear power has majority support among the people who believe that CO2 accumulation is a serious problem? We have seen that it doesn’t in Germany. California does not support nuclear power as a part of a program to reduce fossil fuel consumption.
@ Matthew R. Marler
” Is it your impression that nuclear power has majority support among the people who believe that CO2 accumulation is a serious problem?”
A comment worthy of ‘Curls, master of sarcastic wit.’
Bob Ludwick: A comment worthy of ‘Curls, master of sarcastic wit.’
Please explain that to me.
@ Matthew R. Marler
Sorry Matthew, posted this in the wrong place:
@ Matthew R. Marler
“Please explain that to me.”
B. C. was a comic strip penned by Johnny Hart that was run all over the world from 1958 until Hart’s death in 2007. It has been continued by his family.
One of the characters was ‘Curls, master of sarcastic wit.’ Example:
On Curls’ introduction into the strip, he is introduced to another character (I don’t remember which) by B. C.:
B. C. : ‘This is Curls, master of sarcastic wit’.
Other character: ‘Say something sarcastic.’
Curls: ‘Pleased to meet you.’
Similar to your question about the likelihood that the CO2 doomsday cultists are rabid supporters of nuclear.
Is a practical fusion source finally here? If so, private enterprise has, once again, proved that capitalism trumps socialism.
From the web site, various bits and pieces:
…
Through a series of prototypes, Helion has demonstrated that fusion is now within reach. We aim to have a commercial plant operational in six years.
…
The technology and engineering required for net-production fusion finally exists. But the big government projects have either stalled or have spent billions of dollars chasing difficult-to-commercialize solutions. By combining our years of experience in fusion, newly available electronics technologies, and a revolutionary design using cutting-edge physics, Helion is making a fusion engine 1,000 times smaller, over 500 times cheaper, and realizable 10 time faster than other projects.
…
We are a proven team of entrepreneurs and scientists who are making fusion happen. The Helion team has designed and built award-winning technology and prototypes many experts in the field consider the most promising approach to commercial fusion. This is our lives’ work.
…
Magneto-Inertial Fusion: By combining the stability of steady magnetic fusion and the heating of pulsed inertial fusion, a commercially practical system has been realized that is smaller and lower cost than existing programs.
Modular, Distributed Power: A container sized, 50 MW module for base load power generation.
Self-Supplied Helium 3 Fusion: Pulsed, D-He3 fusion simplifies the engineering of a fusion power plant, lowers costs, and is even cleaner than traditional fusion.
Magnetic Compression: Fuel is compressed and heated purely by magnetic fields operated with modern solid state electronics. This eliminates inefficient, expensive laser, piston, or beam techniques used by other fusion approaches.
Direct Energy Conversion: Enabled by pulsed operation, efficient direct conversion decreases plant costs and fusion’s engineering challenges.
Safe: With no possibility of melt-down, or hazardous nuclear waste, fusion does not suffer the drawbacks that make fission an unattractive alternative.
…
http://www.helionenergy.com/
(End of quotes from the company’s web site)
From another article:
…
So it came as a surprise to hear that Y Combinator and Mithril Capital Management are investing $1.5 million in Helion Energy, a Redmond, Washingon-based startup that says it has a plan to build a fusion reactor that breaks even on energy input and output, a challenge whose solution has been considered decades away for, well, decades. Helion CEO David Kirtley says that his company can do it in three years.
Helion was founded by four scientists working at MSNW, an organization spun-off from the University of Washington that focuses on determining the feasibility of turning plasma physics research into commercializable hardware with aerospace and power-generation applications.
…
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-invest-in-helion-a-nuclear-fusion-startup/
From a third article:
A nuclear-fusion company just graduated from the Y Combinator accelerator, which is known mostly for helping consumer Web and mobile-app startups get off the ground.
Not only did Redmond, Wash.-based Helion Energy Inc. participate in the latest YC batch, it also brought in venture funding at a time when few investors dare take on the risks involved in new energy technologies–especially in the nuclear-fusion sector, which has seen no commercial projects to date.
Helion has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from Mithril Capital Management, a firm founded by Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan; and Y Combinator, according to David Kirtley, the company’s chief executive.
“Interestingly, one of YC’s biggest strengths is in helping to build and shape business that are capable of very rapid growth. If fusion works the way we hope, Helion has the potential for the kind of rapid or exponential growth that mobile apps see,” said Dr. Kirtley, who has a doctorate in Aerospace Engineering and who previously worked for MSNW LLC, which conducts research for the government in nuclear fusion, among other areas.
…
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/08/14/vc-funding-y-combinator-power-up-nuclear-fusion-co-helion-energy/
I’m not so sure. I looked at something like this long ago, and decided the magnetic field required to capture the high-speed charged particles couldn’t be created. But my calculations were old, based on old tech. And I certainly could have missed something.
But I don’t understand why they aren’t using lithium and hydrogen. And I don’t understand why they seem to be using deuterium/deuterium fusion creating “helions”, which would leave very high-energy neutrons as the other outcome. Or is it deuterium/helium3, creating an alpha particle and a proton? But they don’t say anything about where they get the helium3 (“helions”), so does it come from deuterium/deuterium fusion?
Still, that doesn’t mean it’s unworkable. Just that, from my ignorant perspective, it could well be a scam.
AK – The web site has no diagram of the nuclear reactions involved.
My guess is:
1. deuterium reacts with He-3 to form He-4 and a proton.
2. The proton reacts with deuterium to form He-3.
3. Etc.
@jim2…
So I noticed. Makes me suspicious, although they could just be keeping some secrets.
This is where I get left behind. It’s been a long time, but IIRC the probability (cross-section) for reactions like this where there’s no further particle to carry away the energy is pretty small.
If I were doing this as background for a science fiction story, it would be a scam. If I intended it to be real, I’d use lithium hydride.
But, as I say, it’s been a long time, and I didn’t know everything (by quite a ways) even then.
AK – from what I’ve read, Du/proton reaction will proceed – I’m having trouble finding how fast it will proceed, however. It is part of the reaction chain found in the Sun. Also, the product is He-3 and a gamma ray. The gamma ray will have considerable momentum. At any rate, I can’t find anything that indicates it wouldn’t be a useful reaction.
Also, if these two reactions are the only ones, it is an aneutronic process. Much easier to engineer than a process that produces neutrons.
Thanks for this Jim. My two most preferred fusion developments are focus fusion and polywell fusion. The polywell fusor is in the next stages of its development but it is being developed behind closed doors by the US Navy. Focus fusion also seems to be close to being a commercial reality – I can’t find much that seriously questions it’s methodology or results. It looks very promising indeed. Have you seen these?
I have. If any of these pan out, at least the electricity supply would be taken care of. Just getting rid of all the ugly windmills would be a great side benefit.
jim2: Is a practical fusion source finally here? If so, private enterprise has, once again, proved that capitalism trumps socialism.
No.
You know what they say about investing: Don’t invest any money you can’t afford to lose.
I think that they are a real great group of hard-working honest guys. But they do not have a working prototype yet.
They aren’t a public company, so I couldn’t invest anyways. Obviously, someone is willing to put their money behind this, and in this case it means more to me because it ain’t the government just wasting my money.
Helion Energy has announced that its fourth prototype nuclear fusion system is operational. Previous prototypes demonstrated the breakthroughs that made possible a new path toward commercial fusion and yielded significant fusion yields with Helion’s design. This prototype will take Helion one step closer to commercial scale fusion.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/10/helion-energy-starts-up-fourth-nuclear.html
jim2: Helion Energy has announced that its fourth prototype nuclear fusion system is operational.
Sorry for the ambiguity: I meant a prototype of a unit that could be sold to produce, rather than consume, electricity.
Of course you could invest. Walk up to them with your investment money and negotiate with them.
I won’t be giving them my millions ;)
“Very good article #climatechange and emotions- How We Feel Matters More Than What We Know”
UN seeks ‘Malala’ on climate change
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28958227
Sad to hear of Jim Cripwell’s passing. My condolences to his kin.
P
We have lost a fine denizen at Climate Etc in Jim Cripwell.
Dear Jim, we will miss you. Beth the serf.
Declare climate change health emergency, say charities
http://www.rtcc.org/2014/08/29/declare-climate-change-health-emergency-say-charities/
From the emotions and climate change article:
==> “There was another important finding too. The emotion of “fear” was NOT strongly associated with those who want action taken. ”Worry” was, and the feelings of “Hope” and being “Interested”. But not “fear”.”
Hmmm.
If that is true, we’ll have to throw out many of the comments here at Climate Etc.
Odd aspect of the article – first they say this:
==> “It turns out those emotions were stronger predictors of whether people supported or opposed various climate change policies than people’s politics or their cultural/group affiliations. ”
Then they say this:
==> “Other cognitive research has found that when we say we feel worry or fear or disgust, or any emotion, we are just giving a conscious semantic label to instinctive biological responses triggered by some stimulus. Fractions of a second after that stimulus sets those biological responses in motion, we become consciously aware of how those initial responses make us feel, and we give those feelings names. So, for example, an Egalitarian/Communitarian might say they ‘worry’ about climate change, but it’s the underlying cultural group affiliation that has been triggered by thinking about global warming that causes them to express that emotion.”
Not sure why that qualifies only as a “caveat.” Seems like a fundamental question related to the causality they suggest in the first paragraph.
Cultural group ===> labeling of emotional response to climate change.==> reaction to policies.
or even
Cultural group ==> reaction to policies ===> labeling of emotional response to climate change.
“I just heard from Tony Brown that Denizen Jim Cripwell has passed a way,”
Jim will be missed. What stands out in my mind in addition to his valuable contributions, is the abuse he got from some. That he was an elderly fellow…though his muscular writing style gave no hint of that…should give those inclined in that direction pause. To insult someone from behind your keyboard….someone you can’t see and don’t know….is when you stop and think about it pretty cowardly. In this area my own hands are not all that clean. I’ll try and do better.
RIP, Jim.
Unfortunately the Liebreich article starts out fine but then moves on and starts including a few inaccuracies. The subject is very complex, we all tend to have agendas, and this tends to show in what we write.
I thought it was very centrist, and has criticisms of both sides. Some may not like the certainty expressed about climate change in there, and some may not like that the top-down UN approach is criticized.
I was twitching a little bit but kept reading until I got to this part:
“The cost of PV modules has dropped by 80%, to the point where solar is cheaper than daytime retail power prices in increasingly large swathes of the world. The cost of wind power has dropped by 15%, making it the lowest-cost form of new electricity generation in many places.”
This is misleading. It’s the reason why I sat down to write Green Self Deception. Material like this keeps people dreaming and supporting unworkable solutions.
Fernando Leanme: “The cost of PV modules has dropped by 80%, to the point where solar is cheaper than daytime retail power prices in increasingly large swathes of the world. The cost of wind power has dropped by 15%, making it the lowest-cost form of new electricity generation in many places.”
Where is the falsehood? They don’t say everywhere, just in many places. There are places in the world where deliveries of fuel and performance of the grid are less reliable than sun and wind, and the resultant power more expensive. For powering schools in Tucson Arizona, solar is worth considering, especially if you expect natural gas prices to increase in the future. With nearby California sucking up increased amounts of natural gas without developing its own supplies, that is a likely scenario.
Cutting emissions pays for itself, research shows
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-emissions.html
Jamaica and other Caribbean nations have Asthma problems related to Saharan dust fallout. There is also an asthema issue related to Indoor Air Quality, mainly molds. Most linear no threshold “sales” science models don’t adequately consider those silly confounding factors. Do you think your link “underestimated” the benefits?
So there’s no need to impose anything because the market will embrace it?
Joseph – I don’t see much in the way of proof. It’s easy to find estimates of what the health effects cost, but not so easy to find estimates of what removing fine particulates will cost. This is another of those situations where you have to watch the pea and thimbles.
Also, how much of the fine particulates are natural, like fungal spores, or natural, as in dust as capt dallas has pointed out. You can’t just wave a set of incomplete figures and expect societies to burden their economies with yet more economy killing regulations. We in the US have so much of that already, our economy is barely squeaking along.
I am not sure how that is relevant because we know pollution from coal fired power plants can cause health related problems and therefore they can estimate the effect of reducing this pollution will have on the health care related to these problems.
Joseph, “I am not sure how that is relevant because we know pollution from coal fired power plants can cause health related problems and therefore they can estimate the effect of reducing this pollution will have on the health care related to these problems.”
http://www.beijing-kids.com/blog/ellisf/2013/06/28/More-Pollution-More-Problems-China-Asthma-Rate-Up-40-Percent
Pollution definitely does cause asthma, but knowing US coal fired power plants are the main cause is a bit trickier. Just about every potential health savings statistical analysis has issues. It is one of those wicked problems. China though is providing a wonderful control group while they try to limit their population growth problems.
http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/4/e001132.full?rss=1
Jamacia, almost 1/5 of 2-17 year olds have some asthma symptoms.
I don’t have any problems with cleaner air regulations/guidelines, unless they are part of a witch hunt.
The worst president in the history of the United States can’t wait to shut down the entire coal industry, but he wasted the chance to prevent the public beheading of an American journalist because he couldn’t make up his mind.
http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2014/08/24/Obama-Fretted-Over-His-Image-and-Golfed-While-Foley-Languished-for-a-Month
Historians will have to re-write the trope about the emperor having no clothes. In the US, the tan suit has no president.
Tony
As millennia and centuries progress life span of the great empires gets shorter and shorter.
Bush the Younger had a fairly bad presidency. It started with 9/11 and ended with a recession, with two endless wars and Katrina between. Obama has done better, but it wasn’t much to beat.
No, he’s done worse. And I’m someone who voted for the guy. The world right now is more unstable than when Bush left, the U.S. even more bitterly divided. I lay that squarely on Obama.
Lol. Bernanke – worse than the Great Depression.
Jim, correlation is not causation. One might expect those frequenting a science site to know that. The recession was caused by the internet and Y2k bubbles before he was prez. And he wasn’t any more responsible for Katrina than he was for Abu Ghraib, although fevered lefties love to scream about both.
[btw – isn’t interesting how Bush was supposed to be at fault for what some prison flunkies did on the other side of the world, but Obama has no responsibility for the felonies committed by people working directly under him that helped him win election?]
The destabilization of the Middle East could be said to have started with Bush toppling two national governments, followed by improper management that led to internal sectarian divides and violence in Iraq and its alignment with Iran, then the domino effect of the Arab Spring began, including now going back to Syria and Iraq with a full-blown sectarian war that makes it hard for America to take sides any more. Does he side with Bush’s former top enemies, Iran and Syria, to stop ISIS? It is a mess, not of his making.
Bush should have taken Iran’s offer to help in Afghanistan. And thrown Iraq to the Iranian wolves. But that wouldn’t have pleased his buddies (his, not the US’s) in Saudi Arabia.
pokerguy, I could be stark and quote numbers (3000 on 9/11, 1000 in Katrina, 6000 in Iraq and Afghanistan). How does Obama measure up in these types of numbers, which are after all the bottom line in some way.
Jim D still subscribes to the quaint idea that the Katrina deaths were from climate change rather than from local officials running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
How long since the last landfall of a hurricane? And yet CO2 keeps rising.
==========
kim, Katrina is a bit indirect, but having Brownie, a cronie inexperienced horse breeder, as head of FEMA didn’t help.
jimd
At least with Katrina we are getting back to climate (albeit Katrina wasn’t man made) I think that particular event perhaps marks the time when it appeared that America had lead feet and was just an ordinary nation with no special powers. Its response was shockingly slow.
What on earth is happening in Ferguson when police need to be armed like that? What is happening over there that you (The US) can waste so much time money and effort on AGW when so many more desperately important things need fixing in your own country and further afield?
Its all of a piece with my comments on the parallel thread running here that America seems to have abdicated its position as leader of the western world and perhaps stopped believing in its own capabilities as well.
Is the ineffectiveness of Obama merely the end result of the US seeming to have run out of steam? Climate change is a trivial and as yet unproven threat compared to the real ones we can all see clearly in front of us.
tonyb
pg, did you catch the bit where he said that the world only seems more unstable now because of increased awareness from social media.
This is delusional if he believes it. Oh, and it’s a big fat lie if he doesn’t believe it. Worse, he wants us to ignore trouble.
Impeachment would be a mercy.
=============
ended in wrong place.
Tony
As millennia and centuries progress life span of the great empires gets shorter and shorter.
Tony, if he’d been armed with a Bobbie’s stick, that policeman might be dead, now. That ‘gentle giant’, who’d just robbed a convenience store, was charging him, and it took multiple shots to bring him down.
I don’t blame you for not understanding the situation. The press over here isn’t reporting very well, either.
==============
Kim
The full circumstances were reported over here. My point was the sheer overwhelming military like response from a police force that was pretending to be an army rather than a community based upholder of law and order.
Tonyb
Well congrats, your press is doing better than ours. My local paper still has him shot down while surrendering with his hands up.
I share your concern about the militarization of the police. It’s gotten out of hand, and looks to get worse.
In Ferguson, there was a riot going on. The National Guard(militarized) would have been the option if the police couldn’t handle it, and it took days even as it was.
I realize this is somewhat self-contradictory. We’re in a mess, here.
========================
By the way, on many stories your press reports better than does ours. It’s remarkable how often your reporters get the story, and ours sustain a false narrative.
====================
tonyb, yes, the police militarization was a direct consequence of free Iraq surplus being handed out to police forces. Now they think it was not such a good idea after all. Some police forces are tempted to be overzealous with their new shiny equipment.
Tony: The use of armored vehicles, helmets, etc. is seldom used in the US. I live in a suburb of Detroit and have never seen these, other than on TV (tele?). In Ferguson businesses were being burned and looted, almost entirely by outsiders, hence the need for force and protection.
Tony, you’ve got to excuse a little ranting. ISIS runs rampant in the Middle East, and Obama tells the American people he has no strategy and runs off to play golf. If we had a free press, this would be the beginning of the end.
Well, if we had a free press, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
======================
Sure, Jim D. Over 100,000 dead in Syria, 5,500 in Iraq from ISIS and 2,500 plus in Ukraine. Obama is a real winner.
kim, don’t you consider Fox and Rush your version of a free press. What is all this complaining? Perhaps they are not credible to even you.
ksd, is the US the world’s police force? Why do we have to pay to solve these things every time? Would you have weaponized Assad’s opponents many of whom later became overrun by or converted to ISIS? Do you see how that might have been a mistake? Most would say we are glad to have stayed out of that mess in Syria, and in hindsight it looks like an even better decision.
Vuk
That was a really nteresting observation.
As technology speeds up life, will institutions such as govts, philosophies and ways of life do the Same? The roman empire lasted 1000 years. The British empire 250 .
Has the American empire run out of steam after 50 Years? If so what will replace it? I would hate to think that America has lost its swagger and confidence, but judging by obamas inaction and the nonentities that are in the frame to replace him in a couple of years I hold out no great hope that America will resume its leadership role except in pointless side shows such as agw.
Tonyb
Yes, Jim D, I would have the US be the world’s police. Fewer people die when we lead instead of follow. I don’t put a higher value on US than other lives.
The left keeps saying things like “should Obama have left troops in Iraq and Afghanistan permanently?”
Well, yes. Just like in Europe and Japan after WWII, which, not surprisingly, worked to maintain peace. Pretty clear that bailing out of Iraq hasn’t worked out well for the Iraqis.
Tony, it is sad sitting her in the US to see how quickly Obama has put the US on the sidelines and worse, how many innocents around the world have died as a result. We are at a state in this country that is very similar to where we were before entering WWII. The general thought appears to be that if we ignore what is going on elsewhere it will just be fine and go away. I fear what it will take to wake us from this fantasy.
Pokergiy
Did you vote for Obama because of what he represented rather than for what he a actually is? If so you are not alone as can be seen by the ridiculous pantomime of him being awarded a Nobel prize within a few weeks of election.
There is a NATO meeting next week. He needs to assert the wests position or the Russians will have their suspicions confirmed that he is all talk but no effective action. That will send a message to ISiS as well. And to china. And north Korea. And Iran.
Tonyb
==> “Tony, if he’d been armed with a Bobbie’s stick, that policeman might be dead, now. That ‘gentle giant’, who’d just robbed a convenience store, was charging him, and it took multiple shots to bring him down.
This from a self-described “skeptic.”
What’s your evidence, kim, for your version of the events? Eye witnesses? Police report (have you seen the police report, btw)? Surveillance tape?
Surely, being a “skeptic” you wouldn’t state with certainty what happened without evidence. I haven’t seen any that confirms your description – would it be too much trouble to ask you to provide link?
Seems to me Tony that most who voted for Obama (and I did not) did so because of what they wanted to believe, how they wanted the country and world to work in some fantastical vision where everyone just gets along and there is no evil in the world. Where all our problems can be solved by taxing the rich.
It’s an old technique. Paint a compelling vision and make sure the majority knows it can all be obtained without their own personal sacrifice if we only take something from the minority of successful people who “can afford it”.
And people think snake oil salesmen are a thing of the past! Ha, Obama is the best of them all.
tonyb –
==> ” He needs to assert the wests position or the Russians will have their suspicions confirmed that he is all talk but no effective action.”
Just out of curiosity – what would your recommendation be for “effective action?”
==> “That will send a message to ISiS as well. And to china. And north Korea. And Iran.”
Yes Perhaps launching an invasion would send the right message? After all, it worked so well for the Bush administra…
Oh.
Wait,
Nevermind.
Tony, it is not a coincidence that so many cars over here that have left over “Obama-Biden” stumper stickers also have the aspiration all “COEXIST” bumper stickers with the letters fashioned from religious symbols. As if simply stating coexist will solve the problems in the Middle East, say.
Hey, Joshua, which country did Russia invade under Bush, I seem to have forgotten?
You see, Tony? Look at Joshua.
Joshua, audio of an eyewitness and video of the strong arm robbery in the convenience store. They are on the internet.
==============
“It may be surprising to learn, then, that the vast majority of the assault rifles, body armor, and armored vehicles seen in Ferguson did not come from the Pentagon. They did not come from the National Guard. They came from the Ferguson and St. Louis Police Departments’ own budgets.
That’s not to say local police around the country aren’t getting weapons from the military. In response to the war on drugs in the late 1980s, Congress passed a law in 1990 allowing local police departments to request excess military equipment from the Defense Department.”
http://www.nationaljournal.com/defense/no-the-ferguson-police-s-weapons-did-not-come-from-the-pentagon-20140826
This might be a bridge too far. War on drugs, war on carbon. Reefer madness, more extreme weather.
The USA has attempted to control the production of drugs in Central America with less than ideal results. This seems similar to saying, here is a solar panel. Yes we have no coal plants today.
Georgia, and within hours Bush had established air control and put cruise missiles within range of the only good tunnel leading from the north, by sailing into the Black from the Med.
=================
Russia still occupies the parts of Georgia it wanted.
Thank you Kim. I was hoping that Joshua might actually remember and then have a moment of awakening when he realized what Bush did about it. Your note serves the same purpose I suppose.
Funny, Joshua. Actually, it did work out well, after much sacrifice and tortuous difficulties, and then Obama blithely tossed it all away and went off to play golf.
================
No, Jim D, Russia wanted it all and would have gotten it had not Bush moved so fast. They remain in the Russian ethnic part.
==============
Yes Jim D, it does. But note that it wasn’t until Obama opened the door by “resetting” relations with Russia that Russia decided it could resume operations. Oh, and after letting Russia take Crimea Obama did nothing to stop further aggression. So now it’s likely all,of Ukraine. How far do you figure Putin has to go to get Obama’s attention? Does he have to bomb Pearl Harbor?
Georgia sets the tone for what Russia wants from Ukraine. Russia will try to occupy the parts that want them there, and will have no desire to occupy over people who don’t want them there. It is hard for countries outside to do more than try to mediate peace.
Yeah, that’s what they thought about Hitler’s Germany at first too Jim D. Doomed to repeat history.
This Russian aggression is a good example of why the US should NEVER reduce its nuclear inventory. This idea that having the US do this will somehow bring about peace is idi-ot-tic.
==/> “Joshua, audio of an eyewitness ”
Really? Audio of an eyewitness? That backs up you description of the event?
I haven’t seen that.
I think you’re just pulling that out of your a@@. Provide a link, please, and show me I’m wrong.
==> “Funny, Joshua. Actually, it did work out well,”
Wow. Really. It worked out well. I love it when “skeptics” show that they’re the same dead-enders that are deluded enough to think that the Iraq invasion “worked out well.”
You know, kim – some “skeptics” make some pretty interesting arguments, IMO, but when a “skeptic” displays total lack of skepticism, as you have just done, and show that hardcore partisan true colors, well, I just hafta wonder.
Yep, pacified and holding democratic elections. Now? Well you be the judge. No, not you Joshua, you are incapable of judging in this matter.
The audio is out there. Tony seems to have heard of it in Great Britain. How come you don’t know about it?
==================
If I recall correctly the eyewitness said that Brown was bumrushing the officer, and speculated that he must have been stoned to act so crazy.
=============
Heh, search ‘Brown bumrushes officer’. I wasn’t going to give you any more clues, but that was just too easy.
===============
‘Brown bumrushes’ works too, but not the top hit. An electronic epitaph.
=============
And I think you’ve been bumrushed by a false narrative. Whatsamatta, was your skepticizer out of ammo?
==================
Quite remarkable, kim –
==> “If I recall correctly the eyewitness said that Brown was bumrushing the officer”
What is the name of this “eyewitness” that you’re referring to?
Do you really not know that the person references in those links has said that she’s a friend of Wilson – and is not an eyewitness?
You tell me how to Google for it, and you didn’t even read any of the links?
What is the name of this “eyewitness,” kim?
This is bad. Even from you.
C’mon. You’re a “skeptic.” You rely on evidence to support your statements.
Who is the “eyewitness” who you’re speaking of?
Heh, I deliberately said ‘search’ not ‘google’.
So far as I know the name of the eyewitness has not been disclosed, if it is known. Why are you insistent upon the name making any difference?
Listen to the audio, or a read a transcript.
And now, have you seen the video in the convenience store of the ‘Gentle Giant’?
================
And the eyewitness of whom I speak is a man.
Use Bing.
=======
==> “Listen to the audio, or a read a transcript.”
Wow. You’re really spinning madly, aren’t you? This is really bad, kim. Even for you.
Here’s what you said:
OK, a correction. I had recollected incorrectly. It was the non-eyewitness friend of the officer who used the term ‘bumrushed’. The one of whom I’m speaking used the term ‘doubled-back’. And it’s still there on Bing, under ‘Brown bumrushes officer. Top hit, scroll down a bit.
========================
Easier to search ‘Brown doubled back’. Sorry for the misdirection and thanks for the clues. Truth will out.
===========
==> “OK, a correction. I had recollected incorrectly. It was the non-eyewitness friend of the officer who used the term ‘bumrushed’. The one of whom I’m speaking used the term ‘doubled-back’. ”
Oh. Right. Right. “Recalled incorrectly.” That’s why you told me to search for “bumrushed” and told me how it would return the evidence, even though “bumrushed” was from “Josie’s” account, and not the video.
Multiple posts telling me that was the phrase I should search for. So I’m expected to believe that didn’t provide a link, and told me to search for that phrase, based on “recall[ing] incorrectly” a phrase that no eyewitness used?
Here’s what you told tonyb:
==> “That ‘gentle giant’, who’d just robbed a convenience store, was charging him, and it took multiple shots to bring him down.”
“Charging” him? Where did you get that from the video, or the “transcript?” So you must made that up, and then went on to “recall incorrectly” the “bumrush” and the “must be stoned to act so crazy.”
“Multiple shots to bring him down?” Where did you get that from? That is also from “Josie’s” account, not an account of any known eyewitness. That is an awful lot of incorrect recollection you got goin’ on there, kim.
Just connecting those dots again, eh kim? You know, the dots that don’t have to actually have to connect but you can get a picture anyway, right? Like you said in that favorite quote of yours? Here. let me link it again.
I do believe we’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg about Rezko and Obama’s Muslim sympathies and associates. There are a lot of dots to connect there, and you know with dot to dot you don’t need to connect them all to have a revelatory picture.
=================================
There you go. Paint a “revelatory picture” of Brown “bumrushing” the cop, high and acting crazy. Just connect those dots.
And the “double-backed” is entirely consistent with the known eyewitness reports, that you just happened to have neglected to mention to tonyb. Interesting, isn’t it, that you “recalled incorrectly” an eyewitness saying something that no eyewitness said, and didn’t happen to remember anything that any of the actually known eyewitnesses said? Fascinating, I’d say.
This is bad, kim. Even for you this is bad.
Heh, still there on Bing under ‘Brown bumrushed officer’, but now the second hit. Scroll down to the link marked ‘doubled back’ about halfway through the post. It’ll take you to the transcript, but it’s better to listen to the audio.
===============
And kim –
Since you’re a lover of language, I just have to commend you on this little ditty:
==> “Top hit, scroll down a bit.
========================”
Top hit.
Scroll down a bit.
How is it a “top hit” if you have to “scroll down a bit.”
Wouldn’t scrolling down a bit make it not the top hit?
But I guess if you connect the dots that you don’t have to connect, you can paint a “revelatory picture” of a “top hit” that you have to scroll down to read?
Double Heh Heh. There is less need to connect the dots about Obama; he’s drawing them in himself.
==============
Meh, scroll down a bit in the top hit, which is now the second hit.
How amusing, you can find a random comment of mine on a random blog from six years ago and can’t find this audio or transcript. Whatsamatta? Help gone on strike?
=============
==> “It’ll take you to the transcript, but it’s better to listen to the audio.”
I’ve already listened to it, kim. The question is why would you want people to listen to it when it shows that what you said about the “eyewitness” is false.
==> “but it’s better to listen to the audio.”
Yes, I agree – because the transcript for some reason leaves out all the discussion about how Brown was shot when he was down, how Brown was running away, about how there where multiple shots, a pause, and them multiple shots.
And this is stunning:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2727321/Conversation-recorded-bystander-just-moments-Michael-Brown-shooting-casts-doubt-claims-teen-surrendered-Officer-Darren-Wilson.html
See if you can count the number of things that The Mail gets flat out wrong.
People are dying all over the world for various reasons, many of which are preventable. We can’t save everyone without going bankrupt. And if you recall Obama was going to call for airstrikes after Assad was caught using chemical weapons, but Congress wasn’t going to approve it. And we would have troops in Iraq but the Iraqi parliament wouldn’t agree to the status of forces agreement.
Ah, you found it. Thanks for the link. It sure backs up what the friend of the officer said about bumrushing. I’ll let others judge. You have a great need for the false narrative sold by the racebaiters.
=================
The mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana are first in the line of responsibility for the lack of response to Katrina. They were and are the first responders and when Katrina occurred, they were supposed to ask the Federal Government for help. It wasn’t the Fed first in line to respond. Get it?
Geebus, kim
===> “How amusing, you can find a random comment of mine on a random blog from six years ago and can’t find this audio or transcript.”
Over an hour ago, I told you that what you reported that an eyewitness said was not in the video
Here’s a hint. In order to know that wasn’t in the video, I necessarily had listened to it or read the transcript.
Complicated logic, I know – but you’re up to it.
So, you were asking me for the link when you already had it? You’re complicated alright.
=================
==> Ah, you found it. Thanks for the link.
So can you figure out what the Mail article obviously got wrong, kim?
==> It sure backs up what the friend of the officer said about bumrushing. I’ll let others judge.
So, “doubled-back” equals “bumrushed?” or “charged?”
==> You have a great need for the false narrative sold by the racebaiters.
Racebaiters? You mean the eyewitnesses? Who gave their account on national TV, along with their names? In contrast to the supposed friend of the officer who called up to a radio show anonymously?
So they’re “racebaiters.” On what basis do you make that assertion? Why would an eyewitness describing what she/he saw = “racebaiting.”
Interesting how some witnesses are “racebaiters,” isn’t it?
And don’t forget, the “double-back” is consistent with what each of the known eyewitnesses said – as is the audio recording that captured the shots being fired in real time. 10, or 11 shots. One volley of shots, a fairly long pause, and another volley of shots.
And the video you want folks to listen watch? Do you see the distance of the vehicles from the body? Did you hear the accounts of how he was running away as Wilson was firing? Do you know that the laws about use of deadly force have to say about that?
==> So, you were asking me for the link when you already had it? You’re complicated alright.
I wasn’t asking you for a link to that video. I was asking you for a link that verified your claims about what an “eyewitness” said.
The reason why I asked is because I doubted you could provide one. That’s why I said that you were pulling your claim about of your a@@. And lo-and-behold, I was right. You have no evidence of an eyewitness reporting what you claimed. There was none.
And notice how you fail to respond to any of the other points I made about that video, kim.
I have no idea what happened, but at least you could talk about what actual evidence exists, rather than pulling stuff out of your a@@.
Seems to me that you’re the one who has a need to believe something one way or the other – because you’re not talking about the actual evidence.
Yeah, j2, and Coast Guard helicopters were on the scene pretty early.
It’s the press. They needed to blame Bush. It’s amazing how many people still believe that it was Climate Change and Federal dysfunction that caused that disaster, instead of local dysfunction immediately and in the decades preceding the storm.
=================
Anyway –
Time for me to “hit my sack.”
Thanks for just being you, kim.
Oh well, as someone mentioned above look at the autopsy. Not running away, charging, AKA bumrushing.
I’ve got you in an uproar, haven’t I? Didn’t know you were quite so needy.
==============
Heh, surrendering at top speed. Oh, wait, he was running away. With his hands up no less.
C’mon, Joshua, face it; a thug defied a cop and attacked him. Mebbe because he was high as a kite. Note that from the autopsy.
=========
Kim,
Have you considered the possibility that mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse are induced by mistrust of our government?
The solution is not a war on drugs but a return of integrity in government.
You are about to burst a vein, joshie. Calm yourself down. Kim confessed that “bumrushed” was not the word used by the eyewitness that actually said that the Gentle Giant doubled back. That was a candid observation that was picked up on audio by chance, just after the shooting. It’s not likely contrived.
Look joshie, you obviously don’t know any more about it than kim does. Your kneejerk reaction is to swallow the story offered by the Gentle Giant’s accomplice. It’s not surprising whose side he is on. Other witnesses in the Gentle Giant’s hood have similar stories. Are they unbiased bystanders? We have not heard from the policeman. Why do you think the policeman shot the Gentle Giant, joshie? Good day for a murder?
Yes the Katrina responce did cause a huge decrease in Bushs popularity and probably moe than any other event may have forever tainted his presidency. However the actual historical record paints a different picture.
On august 27th three full days before Katrina landed, Bush called Govenor Blanco and pleaded with her to ask for federal assistance. She refused. The next day Bush declared a state of emergency that allowed for Fema to start it’s staging operations. It wasn’t until after Katrina hit on August 29th and two more days passing that Blanco finally relented on september 1st and placed the order to ask for federal assistance. Without that order Bush was powerless to take action.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1484139/posts
There is two facts about Ferguson one is a young man was shot dead by a police officer and the other is the police officer ended up in the hospital with a fractred orbital eye socket. I don’t pretend to know what happened but I do have a question that nobody seems to ask. It seems to me that in this situation and many others like it that there is a problem with how police react and what training they receive. All too often, it seems to me, the police rush in to exert authority and cause the problem to get worse. I realize they are there for the public safety but I think often times it requires a measured response. Is there times when the police should stand off and wait for back up or allow for the situation to diminish on its own. It looks like the policeman was trying to exert authority when he was unable to bring it to bear and he was over powered. Also the threat itself of two guys walking in the street may have not been that ominous of a threat. Perhaps there should be an overview in police training as to what constitutes a threat to public safety and how to provide a controlled and measured response.
I am with ordvic, on this one. He should probably should not have annoyed them about walking in the middle of the street. This mess would have never happened. Hell, just stay out of neighborhoods where police are generally not liked or respected. Put that in the training manuals. The cops I know don’t want to go there anyway.
===> “There is two facts about Ferguson one is a young man was shot dead by a police officer and the other is the police officer ended up in the hospital with a fractred orbital eye socket.
Oh, brother.
It’s actually a bit hisheartening just how predictable is the inevitable production of misinformation – just like kim’s “eyewitness” account.
Where is your evidence of the “fractured orbital eye socket,” Ordvic. Check the source of that evidence.
Please be careful. Research what you hear from rightwing news sources. Be skeptical.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/43759_Exposing_Gateway_Pundits_Dishonesty-_He_Altered_a_CT_Scan_Image_to_Trick_His_Readers
Ferguson is a pretty bad neighborhood.
AFAIK I’ve never been there, butI’ve often had to be in Florissant, just to the north, and I’ve eaten several times at the Burger King at West Florissant and I270. It’s definitely a depressed neighborhood. Note that the Burger King gives its address as St. Louis, although the map includes it in Ferguson. And I’ve often been in the KMart just across I270 from it, which AFAIK is the one that was looted.Personally, I’m not ready to make any judgements about what happened, except that IMO the journalists probably deserved
whatworse than they got. Journalists, especially for such trash rags as HuffPost, always blow any trouble up into the worst they think they can get away with. Been that way since, at least, the Watts riots, to my knowledge, and there’s much documentation that it goes back much farther than that.BTW, the headquarters of Emerson Electric are located in Ferguson. For whatever that’s worth.
This will cause little joshie some consternation:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/08/21/darren-wilson-had-an-eye-bone-fracture-after-scuffle-with-michael-brown-family-friend-says/
Heh.
Another example of “skepticism.” Reliance on what a “family friend” said.
So the dude had an orbital eye socket fracture…
There have been no reports of him being treated by EMT at the site.
There are videos of him walking around after the shooting – with no indications of him showing signs of the kind of problems that would be caused by an orbital eye socket fracture.
And we are expected to believe that he had an orbital eye socket fracture and didn’t go to the hospital until the next day?
Possible? Sure. Likely? You tell me. You’re a “skeptic.”
And what we do know is that a rightwting fanatic blogger picked up an X-ray of an orbital eye socket fracture off the Internet somewhere, scrubbed identifying information, and tried to pass if off as an X-ray of Wilson’s orbital eye socket fracture. And guess what? Fox News and other rightwing news sources licked it right up. As unskeptical as it gets.
So maybe he did have an oribital eye socket fracture. I don’t know and neither do you. But what you don’t have is evidence of an orbital eye fracture (except 2nd hand, anonymous claims from Wilson’s friends). But don’t let that stop you from claiming with certainty that he did, or deliberately moving from no actual evidence to trying to create a convincing case that he did.
It’s fascinating how in this thread certain kim, don, (and ordvic I suspect unwittingly) step right around the actual evidence (known eye-witness accounts, an audio tape of the shooting, video tape that shows the distance of the body from the police vehicle, etc.) that does exist to “connect dots” – to create a scenario of a crazed killer “bumrushing” a cop who was shooting at him – and accuse witnesses of “race-baiting” because they have their description of the events. And we have the Mail Online and rightwing media publishing factually incorrect material.
I just love me some “skeptics.” They never fail to amuse.
These are reported by Carol D. Leonnig in the WP, not attributed to any source. (Thus they’re responsible for their accuracy.) My guess is that the ” fractured eye bone” is exaggeration, but there was probably a blow to the face. Whether that justifies a fatal shooting is a hard call. Police have every reason to be paranoid under those conditions. It doesn’t really matter anyway, what happened. People are going to believe what they want.
Look at here.
My comment landed in moderation. Here it is again without the tweak:
I didn’t say it was true that Wilson had a fractured eye socket. You were yammering about the report coming from a right-wing news source and I gave the same report from one of your lefty sources. And if you actually read the report in the WaPo, you would know that officer Wilson was taken to the hospital and apparently pictures of alleged facial injuries will be presented to the grand jury. Does it matter to you that Wilson may have been attacked by the Gentle Giant who may have tried to take the officer’s gun? Or are you ideologically committed to the “hands up don’t shoot story”?
What’s up? Am I in moderation?
http://www.theonion.com/articles/michael-brown-audiotapes-conclusively-reveal-exact,36794/
Extract from the Onion:
“Michael Brown Audiotapes Conclusively Reveal Exactly What You Want Them To
“NEWS IN BRIEF • News • ISSUE 50•34 • Aug 27, 2014
“FERGUSON, MO—An audiotape released yesterday that purportedly captures the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown at the hands of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson definitively proves exactly what you want it to, according to experts. “This recording, in which two distinct bursts of gunfire can be heard, is irrefutable evidence that Officer Wilson either briefly paused before consciously deciding to kill an unarmed black teenager, or that Brown charged at him and caused him to use deadly force in his own self-defense,” said audio forensics specialist John Kilpatrick, adding that the 12-second clip recorded from a nearby apartment provided the kind of indisputable support for your point of view that would finally end weeks of speculation about the incident. “It’s impossible to listen to these tapes and not be utterly convinced that the shooting transpired exactly as you thought it did all along—the proof is right there.” ”
==================
The one lesson both sides can agree on about of this affair is that police dashcams and bodycams should be deployed more widely. (The Ferguson PD decided to let the ones it had sit on the shelf.)
==> “Michael Brown Audiotapes Conclusively Reveal Exactly What You Want Them To”
Bingo.
we only have second evidence of everything.
as long as we are judging the skepticism of folks it might be interesting
to do so completely.
In other words what can one doubt about this case and why.
Do i have first have evidence of anything.
is elvis dead
Would we be witnessing an international media frenzy, protests, riots, looting and racebaiting if the Gentle Giant had taken the cop’s gun and killed him? Would the Ferguson locals be holding vigils for the dead cop? Would little lefty kneejerk joshie care, at all?
Josh, I stand corrected! I heard it on the radio (not Fox) and assumed it was true.
I don’t watch tv at all so im not always up on the latest news.
roger –
http://news.yahoo.com/unrest-over-shooting-ferguson-police-now-wear-body-012949403.html
Roger,
You mentioned ‘both sides’ that, sadly, seems to be the case. So this comes down to are you on the side of the black youth or the white cop? I purposely used black instead of african american since I used white instead of whatever lineage the cop is. Are we really that polarized? Is it possible to believe part of what the consensus coughs up and still take some of what the skeptics seriously? I guess not, one has to pick side.
In all seriousness, can one just regret the incident and feel sad that a young man lost his life but at the same time hope that justice is served in the case against the policeman? As I said above perhaps a good hard look at police training should take place. I don’t know if they are trained in threat assessment but it looks like to many of these situations occur when the police rush in to situations where they should instead stand off.
A few years ago here in Fullerton CA, just down the street from me, a homeless guy named Kelly Thomas was beaten to death by police. There was no news about it until a british newspaper had a picture of the victim, taken by his father, in a story and it went viral. The first policeman, who had delt with Thomas before, was responding to a possible robbery. Thomas had a backpack with papers that didn’t seem to belong to him (turned out it was stuff he picked up in a dumpster). The cop was having trouble with Thomas and he put on a pair of gloves and told him he was going to eff him up. He started to beat him and then his partner, who was inspecting the bag, joined in and back up came and four more cops joined in. One smashed his face in with a taser. It turns out the cause of death was afixiation from all the bodies on top of him. It was all caught on a permanent police camera set up in there area and watched real time at the station. Thomas’ dad was formerly in law enforcement and actually trained officers in marshal arts and the use of force. The DA tried three of the cops. They were acquitted believing a cop expert witness that the officers followed police training and procedures.
I just have to wonder what these police are taught? Shouldn’t there be a push to review police procedures? Shouldn’t they be better trained in threat assessment and use of force? Something is seriously wrong there. They are suppose to protect the pubic safety not pummel citizens.
I found the “sobering essay” on California’s carbon market, which looked at “leakage” in the systems for carbon used in power generation to miss a much more sobering problem. The article was about power produced in coal fired power plants out of state in the southwest finding its way into the California market without paying for carbon credits. I think their bigger problem may be on the supply side given that one of the two nuclear facilities (San Onofre) has shut down and a scientist at the NRC is recommending that the license for Diablo Canyon be pulled. If that weren’t enough, California gets a lot of its power from hydroelectric which is in short supply in the drought although they can still import a lot of power from the Colombia river hydroelectric plants. However, if the EPA has its way, they will push the states of Washington and Oregon to eliminate more than 2/3 of their fossil fueled power by putting greater reliance on hydroelectric. If that weren’t enough, the low carbon fuel standard from AB32 has companies producing ethanol from sugar beets in Idaho and also tapping the same hydroelectric source for much of the ethanol processing to meet the LCF standard. With some of the highest electricity prices in the continental US, the squeeze that AB32 is putting on the state will likely be very painful.
Ya know, I’m wondering if they’re hoping that without air conditioning the riots in the summer of ’16 will be bad enough to justify cancelling the elections
It’s disturbing to me that Jim D is the only one making sense when the discussion devolves into politics. If we could get back to scientific issues, I could realign the way I’m accustomed. Fortunately, Joshua gets in his usual cheap shot.
Joshua– re Ferguson, it shouldn’t take a malignant skeptic to look at the autopsy diagrams to see that the victim may not have been surrendering. I am sympathetic to the intense feelings in the community (really, truly), but it is possible that this was the wrong case to make an issue about.
Rick
Rick –
==> “but it is possible that this was the wrong case to make an issue about.
The case that I’m making an issue of is the arguments constructed evidence-free from “skeptics.” I am not making any particular “case” about what happened.
There isn’t sufficient evidence for any of us to know whether he was surrendering or not – but the evidence that exists is the evidence that exists. It isn’t what has been stated by my much beloved “skeptics.”
The autopsy results could be consistent with many scenarios. The scenario being presented evidence free, by my beloved “skeptics,” is that after running away and being fired at while fleeing, Brown turned and “charged” a cop that was firing at him. There is no actual evidence that was the case. The eyewitnesses present a different description. There is nothing in the evidence that has been made public that indicates that Brown was charging, only that the evidence could be consistent with such a scenario.
Why would someone first flee and as shots are coming his way, turn and charge a cop firing at him? Is there evidence to give us an answer? Why would he change his mind from first fleeing and then charging? Is there evidence to give us an answer? What was the distance from which the fatal shots were fired? If it was 35′ as some speculate, then that means that he would have been what, 50′, or 75′ feet away when he first decided to turn after fleeing and then charge the cop?
My point, again, is that we don’t know the evidence. Maybe Brown did present a mortal threat to the cop or someone else. But if you look back through the thread, you will see that what I’m challenging are assertions being made which are either simply based on ignorance of the evidence or a clear misrepresentation of the known evidence.,
https://xanonymousblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/111.jpg
It’s unlikely to be nothing, It’s unlikely to be all of it……On just about anytime scale, there’s little evidence that natural climate change is predominately forced, or that unforced changes do not cause warming/ cooling trends. On this basis, there’s little reason we should take the IPCC’s 110% argument seriously, no more than we should take their entire paradigm seriously. We know there should be some warming, its just the uncertainties of the climate system are so great that we have no idea on where to start.
On these grounds, 50% seems to be both fair and logical.
This comes from Judith’s circular logic. Half the warming is CO2, but the other half cannot be feedback, even though it occurred at the same time and in proportion, therefore the sensitivity must be low.
JIM D
No better than the other sides circular logic. Gavin’s point seems to be that this argument is not about being fair, however, that implies there is a reasonal scientific agrument that can be made. Your simply kidding yourself if you believe in such fairy tails. 50% is fair because the question is scientifically unanswerable.
Indeed, to accept the IPCC’s position is to accept the oxymoron which is mainstream climate orthodoxy.
The science is simply way to immature at this point, get over it.
> the sensitivity must be low.
Which reinforces Judy’s 63-36 argument.
The AGW side is more linear. Physics says how much the temperature changes when you change the GHGs and aerosols by the amount they changed since 1950, and observations show a very similar value. It is the parallelism of the trend lines from physics and observations. Judith’s first assumption is to ignore what physics says should happen when you change the atmospheric composition, basically taking away the ideas that helped atmospheric scientists to understand why the atmospheric temperature is what it is even in a steady climate, why greenhouse gases add 33 C, for example. Once you take away the physics part of the understanding, everything is up for grabs.
> Once you take away the physics part of the understanding, everything is up for grabs.
Everything except chaotic understanding, Jim D:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2014/8/24/gcms-and-public-policy.html?currentPage=6#comment21029692
Enjoy,
w
Half the warming is CO2, but the other half cannot be feedback, even though it occurred at the same time and in proportion
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1996.6/mean:12/normalise/plot/hadcrut3sh/from:1996.6/mean:12/normalise
The chirality suggests almost surely, that the so called forcing and a number of the so called climate metrics are not invariant (nicolis and nicolis 2007) and highly non linear as the equations suggest (Zaliapin and Ghil 2010)
maksimovich, are you one of those people who suggest El Ninos are part of the forcing or responding to it? Average those out if you want to see the forcing. You need at least a 10-year average to also remove solar cycles. See what’s left when you do that.
What part of the solar cycle being inverse to the temperature response do you not understand?
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1996.6/mean:12/normalise/plot/hadcrut3sh/from:1996.6/mean:12/normalise/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1996.6/mean:12/normalise
Closer examination of more cycles shows it is in phase. One way to see this is with the derivative of the 10-year filtered temperature that is highest just as the sunspots are increasing. It is easier to see in the derivative because otherwise the large warming trend dominates.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1900/mean:80/mean:40/derivative/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1900/scale:0.00002/mean:12
We’re happy that we’re improving our understanding of CO2 and aerosols and their effect on climate change. Our happiness is tempered by the realization that there are many other things where our understanding falls short.
Which is why many of us are surprised and even angered when people propose high impact policies based on only the two components we understand.
Lost keys, night, drunk, lamp post…
We don’t know everything, therefore we’re drunk.
https://xanonymousblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/111.jpg?w=651
https://xanonymousblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/111.jpg?w=651
http://www.news.gatech.edu/2009/11/09/reducing-greenhouse-gases-may-not-be-enough-slow-climate-change
“Across the U.S. as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes”
One of many problems with the climate debate is attribution of warming among the various causes (anthropogenic doesn’t mean anything other than “I don’t think its natural”) does not appear to have gotten the attention it deserves.
If CO2 is only responsible for less than 1/2 the observed land warming – limiting CO2 will reduce less than 50% of projected land warming. If anthropogenic causes are responsible for only 50% of the observed warming the effect due to CO2 would be below 25% which is getting into the “I don’t care” range.
It would seem to me that roads, cities and other land use changes would have a huge effect. Dams and artificial lakes would have a dramatic effect on seasonal temperatures as well as significantly increase albedo.
If the historic land anomaly for the various cooling/heating/hiatus periods were plotted against time of year the results might be educational.
PA,
Thanks for the comment about land use changes. UHI and changes due to monoculture farming vs natural landscapes could have a huge anthropogenic effect. That plus the changes to historic temperatures and thus trends account for much that is beiing ignored in the literature and arguments.
Scott
All I can say from reading this thread is that Climate Etc has some of the finest low information, economically and historically illiterate commenters anywhere.
Gary M: All I can say from reading this thread is that Climate Etc has some of the finest low information, economically and historically illiterate commenters anywhere.
Personally, I look forward to sound corrections from anyone more knowledgable.
Matthew R Marler,
Wasn’t actually referring to you. But is you have any comments you would like to have reviewed, post a link. :-)
Settled Science Catches Up with Steyn http://goo.gl/fqxs6J
It is always a pleasure to read Mark Steyn, even when the topic is not pleasant.
About the L’Aquilla earthquake, the false prediction and conviction of 7 scientists to prison terms for involuntary manslaughter.
Those scientists failed to say what climate scientists fail too: they failed to say “I don’t know” – which is the truth.
They said instead (publicly) “there is low probability of an earthquake”. This statement is false. The truth would be: “we don’t know what the probability is” (despite being very clever and experienced scientists).
Many people believe, and claim to know, things they don’t. This is natural. Scientists should do better, be more rational, more diligent, more cautious and less prone to boast and parade their beliefs as knowledge.
The inimitable Mark Steyn’s latest. (Mann vs. Steyn is becoming disturbingly indistinguishable from Pee Wee Herman vs. Muhammad Ali.)
http://www.steynonline.com/6540/settled-science-catches-up-with-steyn
“This is the tragedy of ‘climate science’. Imagine if it hadn’t fallen into the hands of a cabal of insecure, neurotic, ideological enforcers like Michael E Mann. Imagine if, instead of serving as eunuch cheerleaders, the guys at Think Progress had said, ‘Yeah, this Steyn guy’s an assh*le, but these climate models don’t seem to be panning out. Maybe we should look into it…’ As it is, it took the ‘denialists’ and skeptics and lukewarmers to open up the conversation in the face of a closed-minded ‘hockey team’ and media fan club that did everything it could to shut it down. Five years on, the climate mullahs are belatedly changing their tune.”
“Now, the White House seems to be acknowledging the futility of the GCT movement,”
I just hope this turns out to be true.
Another Steyn article, on the horrific story of the complicity of progressive community leaders in the destruction of the children under their care. While western progressives dither over phantom rises in “global average temperature,” a war is being waged that has a better chance of returning us to the stone age than anything Michael Mann might propose.
“…Rotherham, a drab town in South Yorkshire in which over the course of a decade and a half some 1,400 girls (as young as 11) were ‘groomed.’ drugged, raped, traded and, occasionally, doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight. All the while, the entire apparatus of the state, from the political class to the police to the ‘child protection’ agencies, looked the other way – for fear of appearing ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’. The BBC describes the predators’ actions as ‘brazen’, which it certainly was. They would turn up at children’s homes, select the ones they wanted, and drive off with them….”
http://www.steynonline.com/6543/the-reformation-of-manners
A strong argument for control of immigration – everywhere in the West.
As a lurker, I enjoyed the comments of both Jim and Max. I loved the way they seemed to live in the heads of the faithful as represented in this thread from Bart’s blog (Judith also mentioned here):
Launching ClimateDialogue.org
“dhogaza Says:
November 17, 2012 at 16:50
Moderation is now tightened to send more comments to the “off-topic” stream.
It needs to be tighter. I think the non-expert comments should be in the unapproved state until after a moderator reviews them.
Currently, for instance, there’s a small string of Max Anacker, Jim Cripwell, and similar “climate science is a hoax” types whose comments are being prominently displayed.
Which means they’ll draw responses, which leads to thread hijacking around “CO2 doesn’t cause warming”, “there’s not been warming for 16 years”, “look! antarctic sea ice” and similar themes, which of course is exactly what the Cripwells of the world hope to do.
It’s bad enough the Curry’s been invited to the dance, though it is good to see her “more snow in winter!” stuff counterbalanced with questions about the overall trend of decreasing snow cover in the NH during those months in which real cherries can actually be picked…”
and…
“SteveF Says:
December 2, 2012 at 13:20
I think it’s quite a good idea myself. However, the quality of the debate will be much improved if comments that include the terms “warmist” and “CAGW” are not allowed. This is a simple yet effective way to help improve the signal to noise ratio. In specific terms it will mean not allowing Jim Cripwell to post, which will result in an immediate jump in comment standards.
BTW, this sounds mildly snarky but I’m being completely serious. Moderate any comments with those terms and the site will be much improved.
Bart Says:
December 2, 2012 at 14:24
SteveF, fwiw, I completely agree with you.”
Good stuff! Thanks guys and RIP.
link: http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/launching-climatedialogue-org/#comment-17824
Noble warriors, both.
===========
Well…
CAGW as originally used stood for Catastrophic Anthropomorphic Global Warming (the theory that 2100 will be 4-11°C warmer). The 20th century warming trend which mostly affected low diurnal temperatures is BAGW (beneficial anthropomorphic global warming) since it extends the growing season.
For CAGW to be valid as a theory CO2 (as attributed by the IPCC at 110%) has to be 100%+ responsible for the forcing behind the climate trends, since CO2 has to be the primary factor with a lot of positive feedback to get those horrible increases in temperature. If CO2+feedback is a 25% or less bit player there is no point in worrying about CO2.
If we aren’t discussing CAGW then talk of mitigation or remediation is crazy and we should let technology take its course since the US air is cleaner than it was in the middle of the 20th century.
Skeptics (usually labelled “deniers”) sometimes use CAGW as “Cult of Anthropomorphic Global Warming” since believers in global warming ignore evidence, manipulate evidence, “excommunicate” (damage the careers) of skeptical scientists, and view debating skeptics like the Catholic church would view a debate over switching to the Hindu pantheon,
The skeptics probably don’t mind being called skeptics. If the global warming faction (GWF) doesn’t like being called warmist, I’m fine with whatever accurate non-propagandist name they want.
As long as the GWF doesn’t use the term “denier” I’m fine with extending them the same courtesy. Labelling the opposing view distracts from a discussion of the issues.
The real cause for concern is that mainstream scientists didn’t predict the pause – which would mean they don’t understand long term climate very well. The people who predicted the pause (like Esterbrook) say it is going to get colder. Trillions spent for CO2 mitigation in the middle of a little ice age is unwise. We will know who is right by 2030 if not earlier.
David Rose has a new article in the Sunday Mail (I have a few quotes): Myth of the Arctic Meltdown
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2738653/Stunning-satellite-images-summer-ice-cap-thicker-covers-1-7million-square-kilometres-MORE-2-years-ago-despite-Al-Gore-s-prediction-ICE-FREE-now.html
The Arctic Death Spirit was definitely unprecedented – and still is.
Interesting…the story is all over the blogosphere but MIA in the MSM. Nice to see you quoted!
MIA in the MSM? I wonder (no pun intended … well, alright, intended) if this is an attempt to equate it to the MIASMA issue which was an early example of scientific blinkered group-think?
(Yes, I am tired.)
Are the three bears huddling close together because (a) the expanse of ice is now so vast that they fear getting lost and lonely; or (b) because a warmist photographer got them to huddle to show the over-crowding from ice loss, and forgot to crop the photo? You be the judge.
[Ed: they are actually comparing porridge temperatures.]
Baby Bear: My porridge is too cold.
Momma Bear: My porridge is frozen solid.
Papa Bear: My porridge has a film of dry ice on it!
Judith, if your quote in the “Mail” is correct. “The Arctic sea ice spiral of death seems to have reversed.’” they’ll attack you ( “the graph is too short”, “one year says nothing”…bla,bla.) Anyway: show them the record of yearly loss of Area http://www.dh7fb.de/noaice/2014/image001.gif ( which is not autocorrelated like the record of absolute values of the minima) and show them the anomaly of Arealoss vs. average 1979-2014: http://www.dh7fb.de/noaice/2014/image002.gif . It’s true: the melting of 2014 returned to the average of all the years since 1979!
The Ice “spiral of Theodorus” Life Spiral?
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
and the daily mail? lol can the enquirer be far behind?
Wow JackRabid, it’s worse than we thought!?!?!
3.5 whole decades of data and the ice is, gulp, lower than average!!!
We… must… act… now!*!@#$!@$(I!@$
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2.1.png
Arctic sea ice volume is more important than extent. The sea ice volume will probably be at least one standard deviation above the trend line next spring and more than two standard deviations above the trend line in spring of 2016. This would invalidate the trend line.
But a big Icelandic eruption could change that so I am in wait and see mode.
Yes, despite all the optimism, we are still right on a 30-year trend line of losing 3000 cubic km per decade that loses all the summer sea ice in a decade, or sooner if it dips standard deviations below again.
Jim D. I don’t know what to tell you.
The 21st century has been neither fish nor fowl.
Much like firing a shotgun at the origin of a X / Y graph – everybody has evidence on their side.
Every Icelandic eruption darkens the polar ice and gives us a few years of low sea ice.
Except for people like Don Easterbrook everyone has been wrong about this century.
I’m waiting to see if the raw (unmolested) temperatures or satellite temperatures go down in the next couple of years. If they go down, he’s right, if things heat up global warming enthusiasts might have some game, if they continue to muddle along… I guess that means climate is just a big stack of weather.
Arctic Death SpiriL
I give up.
jim2,
You have obviously succumbed to the infamous Climate Death Spral! My commiserations to you.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
The spiral of life. Hey, wait a minute, I’m not sure I like ice expanding at both poles. Enough is enough.
=====================
Arctic Death Spiral, sounds like a garage punk rock band.
Lead singer – Michael “Hokey Stick” Mann
Guitar – James “Death Trains” Hansen
Bass – Gavin “Mr. Global Warming” Schmidt
Drums – Kevin “Missing Heat” Trenberth
Tambourine – Will Ferrell
Lyricist – Rajendra “Return to Gemorrah” Pachauri
Manager – Al “Where’s My Money Al Jazeera” Gore
Signature song (apologies to Iron Butterfly):
Now that is funny.
The guitar player has it right regarding nuclear power, but the rest of the band and the adoring fans are yelling at him to turn down the volume.
Yeah, but I meant to put Will Ferrell on cow bell. It’s late, not at my best.
Produced by: Fossil Fuels, CO2 and Human Greed
The video’s not quite as dramatic as when I heard it in the Middle Earth basement club in ’68 and the idiot roadie accidentally set the place on fire while I was on the corner of the stage.
(sigh) I’ve been modded for correct use of a term which can be considered abusive. Here’s a modified version:
Not quite as dramatic as when I heard it in the Middle Earth basement club in ’68 and the “very silly” roadie accidentally set the place on fire while I was on the corner of the stage.
Thanks for the 1968 video. As noted near the top of this page, the Creator, Destroyer and Sustainer of every atom, life and world in the Solar System – the destroyer of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the sustainer of life – are all one of the same.
“An area twice the size of Alaska was open water two years ago and is now covered in ice after the arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in a row.” (See link to DailyMail Online)
Climate Change Has an Outrage Problem
In the years to come, it’s not a stretch to imagine millions of people flooding the streets to protest—flooding in the streets.
What will it take to turn climate change into a social movement?
The struggles surrounding women’s suffrage, civil rights, the Vietnam War, South African Apartheid, the Arab Spring, and gay marriage were pervasive. They changed history.
These movements had very visible leaders. They also had a role in shaping popular culture, with iconic music and movies. In hindsight, they look inevitable.
Beyond a certain former vice president and his (in)famous PowerPoint slideshow, global warming has none of that. That’s probably because we’ve never faced an issue like this before: High stakes, yet abstract. Immediate action necessary to dislodge a (seemingly) distant threat.
snip
Yet, there are signs things are shifting. In an interview with Slate earlier this year, retired Navy rear admiral David Titley said “people working on climate change should prepare for catastrophic success.”
The language has ratcheted up a notch in recent weeks.
Last Sunday, the New York Times published an op-ed by a climate-concerned psychiatrist who’s identified “a major historical change in consciousness that is neither predictable nor orderly”.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/climate-change-has-an-outrage-problem
The Climate Swerve
By ROBERT JAY LIFTON AUG. 23, 2014
In the 1980s there was a profound worldwide shift from fragmentary awareness to formed awareness in response to the potential for a nuclear holocaust. Millions of people were affected by that “nuclear swerve.” And even if it is diminished today, the nuclear swerve could well have helped prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
With both the nuclear and climate threats, the swerve in awareness has had a crucial ethical component. People came to feel that it was deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to engage in nuclear war, and are coming to an awareness that it is deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to destroy our habitat and create a legacy of suffering for our children and grandchildren
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/opinion/sunday/the-climate-swerve.html?_r=1
What are the Origins of Extraordinary Evil
Separating Home from Hell: Lifton’s Doubling
Robert Jay Lifton, professor of psychology and psychiatry at John Jay college and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, maintains that the Nazi state could be viewed at a “biocracy”. “Just as in a Theocracy, the state itself is no more than a vehicle for the divine purpose,” he writes, “so in the Nazi biocracy was the state no more than a means to achieve a mission of the German people on earth”
http://tinyurl.com/q568jzx
Dr. Robert J. Lifton on Destructive Cults
http://tinyurl.com/oycr9wy
Robert Jay Lifton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jay_Lifton
http://tinyurl.com/osgdagv
Crickets.
OK, I take that back. Does this describe climate science or what???
From the article:
Milieu Control – The control of information and communication.
Mystical Manipulation – The manipulation of experiences that appear spontaneous but in fact were planned and orchestrated.
Demand for Purity – The world is viewed as black and white and the members are constantly exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection.
Confession – Sins, as defined by the group, are to be confessed either to a personal monitor or publicly to the group.
Sacred Science – The group’s doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute.
Loading the Language – The group interprets or uses words and phrases in new ways so that often the outside world does not understand.
Doctrine over person – The member’s personal experiences are subordinated to the sacred science and any contrary experiences must be denied or reinterpreted to fit the ideology of the group.
Dispensing of existence – The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jay_Lifton
Lifton:
“Over the course of my work I have come to the realization that it is very difficult to endanger or kill large numbers of people except with a claim to virtue”
Science makes you virtuous ??
http://judithcurry.com/2013/08/31/open-thread-weekend-30/#comment-373005
Self defense may or may not be virtuous, but it’s reason enough to kill – even to kill large numbers of people. We of the West may be faced with such a decision very soon now.
The ’80’s. Wasn’t that the era of Reagan, the “Evil Empire”, ABM’s and “Star Wars”? Somebody’s writing historical fantasy here.
Still, thinking of “Star Wars”:
Sort of reminds me of what future-blind types like Jim D and Peter Lang say about my ideas. Important to note that while the SDI didn’t end up creating the technology it was aimed at, there was substantial spin-off, and it did achieve important diplomatic results.
Actually, Reagan’s “Star Wars” policy initiative was, IMO, an effort to capitalize on the money that could be made from exploiting a public opinion shift against the use of nuclear weapons.
That’s some very senseless drivel, joshie.
Judy is the CE brain, Josh the appendix.
Unto the end of alimentation.
==========
M0tivated reasoning, Joshua. Reagan was totally opposed to “MAD” (“Mutually Assured Destruction”), and in its way the SDI was almost like Obama’s “all of the above” in response to the problem. Not really all, of course, in either case, but
trythrow money at a bunch of things, hoping one or more will work.Thing is, Reagan had no intention of “giving in” the way Kennedy did (in e.g. Cuba). By the time the SDI was pretty much gutted due to fears it would “destabilize” relations, it had already set the Soviet Union on the path to bankruptcy, trying to keep up.
Not to mention dumping them into the biggest pit trap Socialism always faces: using, and especially improving/innovation in modern complex technology requires too many people who know how to think for themselves. Totalitarian/Socialist regimes just can’t tolerate that.
IMO, of course.
AK –
So you think that the money to be made by the MIC was completely irrelevant to the policy option of huge military-industrial expenditure for technology that had huge logistical/practicability issues?
No, I think it was part of what he used to sell it to a MIC that really would have preferred more traditional approaches. I also think it was a way to pump money into high-tech industry, incenting education and the expansion of a large pool of educated talent.
Reagan’s primary constituency, AFAIK, included the educated middle class who benefited from the high-tech jobs. There was a “trickle-down” to people working in supermarkets and 7/11’s. Part of the general Republican approach to stimulating the economy.
I voted for Reagan, and as a Libertarian supported his candidacy, but I don’t really regard him as more than an honest ally. He was much more “Republican” than “Libertarian”, despite being close enough to forge an alliance.
So Reagan’s motivation for the Strategic Defense Initiative was not to protect the country from nuclear missiles, but to make money for the MIC. There was no money in the unilateral disarmament favored by the sage Soviet sympathizers who schooled little impressionable joshie.
Joshie show us again that his only source of history is from left wing periodicals that he got to read in the junior high school library. He swings and whiffs again.
The conspiracy “idealization” of Joshua yet again.
The full “Che” tee-shirt mode.
Author of first link was Eric Holthaus;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/01/get-a-vasectomy-to-save-the-planet-guy-calls-for-hurricane-to-hit-the-caribbean/
From the article:
When Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, it required health insurers, hospitals, device makers and pharmaceutical companies to share in the cost because they would get a windfall of new, paying customers.
But with an $8 billion tax on insurers due Sept. 30 — the first time the new tax is being collected — the industry is getting help from an unlikely source: taxpayers.
States and the federal government will spend at least $700 million this year to pay the tax for their Medicaid health plans. The three dozen states that use Medicaid managed-care plans will give those insurers more money to cover the new expense. Many of those states — such as Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee — did not expand Medicaid as the law allows, and in the process turned down billions in new federal dollars.
Other insurers are getting some help paying the tax as well. Private insurers are passing the tax onto policyholders in the form of higher premiums. Medicare health plans are getting the tax covered by the federal government via higher reimbursement.
State Medicaid agencies say they have little choice but to pay the tax for health plans they hire to insure their poorest residents. That’s because the tax is part of the health plans’ costs of doing business. Federal law requires states to pay the companies adequate rates.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/30/obamacare-tax-healthcare-taxpayers-eight-billion/14861405/
Really good episode on Partially Examined Life, featuring Michael Sandel:
>The stories we tell ourselves are important to who we are. Moreover, the identities we come to have are in large measure shaped by our social ties. We can agree with Michael Sandel that “we cannot regard ourselves as independent … without great cost to those loyalties and convictions whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are—as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this history, as sons and daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this republic” (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982/1999). For all that, how we conceive of our social milieus is just as important as what they are, because these conceptions are partly constitutive to what they are. If we tell the wrong story about ourselves, we cannot find the proper means to diagnose the problems we share or to come to rectify those problems. It seems to me that Michael Sandel’s attempt to come to an understanding of some of America’s modern malaises in Democracy’s Discontent (1996) relies in some part on telling the wrong story of America’s competing visions and the way these visions evolved.
http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2014/08/29/stories-we-tell-a-review-of-michael-sandels-democracys-discontent/
GaryM should appreciate that conclusion.
willard –
Relinked over at Dan’s – in a relevant thread:
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/8/28/is-politically-motivated-reasoning-rational-a-fragment.html#comments
It would be interesting to see you input, if you would feel so moved.
Make sure to ask Dan to comment on the example of civil right activists, Joshua.
Milieu Control – The control of information and communication.
** The Hockey Teams manipulation of peer review, journals, and who gets published.
Mystical Manipulation – The manipulation of experiences that appear spontaneous but in fact were planned and orchestrated.
** Hansen’s ploy to turn up the thermostats at the Congressional hearing.
Demand for Purity – The world is viewed as black and white and the members are constantly exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection.
** It’s the CO2 control knob and nothing else.
Confession – Sins, as defined by the group, are to be confessed either to a personal monitor or publicly to the group.
** The public prodding of “heretics” on social media to “repent.”
Sacred Science – The group’s doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute.
** This one speaks for itself.
Loading the Language – The group interprets or uses words and phrases in new ways so that often the outside world does not understand.
** The re-interpretation of commonly used terms in physics like “forcing” and “feedback.”
Doctrine over person – The member’s personal experiences are subordinated to the sacred science and any contrary experiences must be denied or reinterpreted to fit the ideology of the group.
** The denigration of those who point out the story of climate told in historical documents. There are many more veins to be mined here.
Dispensing of existence – The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not.
** Attempts to marginalize scientists who disagree with the Hockey Team’s interpretation of climate, to the point of removing some from their job.
This is a play on …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jay_Lifton
@jim2
Not a play at all unfortunately. Well done!
Lifton’s analysis of cults may well have considerable merit. It builds credibility.
That it is then misapplied wrt CAGW deniers.. (eg like brent) rather than the perpetrators of the CAGW scam, indicates effective propaganda technique.
cheers
brent
Some people just say “no” to effort so many times that society simply stops expecting anything from them and the time finally comes that looking for opportunity, for them, means becoming a Heaven’s Gate Cultist, Jim Jones convert or anti-productive Euro-commie global warming alarmist.
Love the cartoon: Look, look the Global Warming Crusader has no clothes!
Socialism vs Private Enterprise:
Not The Only American HLV:
SpaceX has made no secret of its intentions to send humans to the Mars, not least when the company’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, told the BBC’s Jonathan Amos that he wants to be able to go to the Red Planet himself, before he gets “too old”.
That level of personal motivation is likely to hold several advantages when compared to NASA and its constraints of being at the mercy of lawmakers.
Mr. Musk’s aspiration of tasking SpaceX with the goal of driving humanity to become a multi-planetary species is claimed to be an accelerated path, when compared to NASA’s notional roadmap.
While NASA is aiming for humans on Mars in the mid 2030s, SpaceX’s ambition is to achieve that milestone by the mid 2020s.
At the heart of that plan is another HLV, a key driver of the Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) system.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/08/battle-heavyweight-rockets-sls-exploration-rival/
Here’s another sustainable safe cheap nuclear technology on the cusp:
I like this idea also. It needs to be nurtured. As in allowed to be developed without undue interference from the government.
Obviously, we have lost something important. We used to believe a big part of growing up was to discover that that every idea we and everyone else can think of is not necessarily a good idea. Thousands of years of human societal and cultural evolution have taught us that some ideas are better than others. Science grew to be a useful tool to better help us understand how some of our beliefs were not true at all. Now, we have a government that is too big and getting bigger. The government has a lot of ideas that are not good and for that reason they are the first to exempt themselves from the consequences of these bad ideas that they have no problem burdening the rest of us with.
True, but the government does not generally produce these ideas. Instead of a disinterested and dispassionate leviathan arbitrating disputes, we have a self-interested political elite that wants to retain their power and will do the bidding of special interests to get the campaign donations the need to stay in office. That is the reason why a political donation bundler gets to walk away with a 0.5 BILLION dollar loan from the taxpayers for a a floundering solar panel company. The bungler gives the bundler taxpayer money for donations at the rate of $1.00 taxpayer money for $0.01 donation. It’s a horrible deal, unless it is someone else’s money, which it is. The bundler gets the green, the worker get’s the pink slip, the taxpayer is red faced, and the bungler gets a tan suit. Color me cynical.
‘There is a crack, a crack
in everything,
that’s how the light gets in …’
Thank goodness fer that!
“Instead of a disinterested and dispassionate leviathan….”
I assume this was sarcasm. No leviathan in history, and there have been many, has ever been “disinterested and dispassionate.”
GaryM
I asked JImd a few days ago whether he didn’t think Obama had far more important things to worry about than AGW but he danced round the answer.
There is a Nato summit this week. Do you think Obama will display the leadership that seems to have been so lacking the last few years?
Unfortunately the world is full of unpleasant groups and they respect strength and action not weakness and playing golf. At least Obama wont have the opportunity to talk about AGW but will he talk about the things that Matter? Security. So giving people the luxury to worry at their leisure about things such as AGW.
tonyb
Access to energy is the big playing card in current world strife. It’s a very odd moment for Western leaders to sleep-walk away from energy independence and industrial strength. Very odd moment indeed.
One wonders how clean and green a politically destabilised globe might NOT be.
Sorry. Sorry to talk shop, Barry. You were discussing your seven-iron approach?
mosomoso
You can’t have a prosperous green world if it isn’t a safe world. Obama has really taken his eye off the ball if he thinks that AGW is more important than keeping a lid on all the fanatics out there.
tonyb
The problem for science is that the A. Gore film insinuates itself into the public mind via a universal human bias, the “replacement hueristic”. Humans are unable to do complex calculations without expending considerable energy, leading to “ego depletion”. Since numbers are not immediately available to a person trying to solve a complex problem, the problem is replaced by a more readily available hueristic. For example, the rate of change of the polar bear population is replaced by an image of a single polar bar swimming across an expanse of open arctic ocean. That bear looks awfully lonely. Most people in the US think, but fortunately do not care, that the climate is warming because of fossil fuel use. AGW scientists are disappointed that the people believe so for the wrong reasons – the public’s perception that storms are increasing in frequency and intensity. The people believe this not because of any numbers or peer reviewed research papers published in science journals, but because of the persistence and availability of images of hurricanes Sandy and Katrina in their minds. Those images and A. Gore’s movie trump all the data all the climate scientists can ever produce. To understand how easy it is to marginalize healthy scepticism read the real noble prize winning Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow…” Then you will see what we are up against. Resolving the issue among scientists is only one problem. Effectively communicating the results to the layperson is an entirely different and more wicked problem.
Yes, Gore had some effective images. The skeptics have fallen far behind in trying to counter this kind of thing. A normal member of the public might reasonably ask why you don’t think this kind of CO2 change will have much effect, and you need an answer that they will understand. Big challenge.
http://www.antarcticanimation.com/content/thesis/Gesture-line/2006-AlGoreInData02-500×280.jpg
I just tell them about navier-stokes, the Clay Mathematics Institute, chaos, sensitivity to initial conditions, the limits of predictability, etc. The listener, with eyes glazed over, thinks “but what about the hockey stick, the flooding in Manhattan, the last polar bear swimming alone in the cold water?” For a moment I feel superior, until I remember I don’t know what I am talking about. I’ve also lost the argument. I need to learn how to create powerful images …
“I need to learn how to create powerful images …”
Here are a few image-ideas I’ve had that would make good billboard ads, or 15-second TV spots, or even print ads:
1. A flip-flopped hockey stick, looking like this /””, to reflect the current Plateau in the temperature trendline. The caption would be, “Who’s in Denial Now?”
The stick would be transparently overlaid on a graph of the running mean of GASTA (Global Average Surface Temperature Anomaly), averaged from five sources. Flipping over the hockey stick turns the tables on our opponents in a clever and memorable way.
2. Left-side text: “97%”
Right-side text: “WRONG”
Center graphic: the IPCC’s early-draft graphic of its four predictions vs. the observed Global Average Surface Temperature Anomaly (GASTA), showing its line near the bottom of the 95% confidence envelope of its projections. (There should be bold text: “95% confidence envelope.”)
3. “CO2 limits—Brought to you by the people who gave you the 55 MPH speedlimit.”
Accompanied by a picture of Gore (who presumably was in favor of that speed limit at the time).
4. Caption: “Chicken Little’s Inconvenient Goofs”
Four or six images with line graphs showing items Gore’s movie mis-predicted, such as:
Hurricanes / tornados
Polar Bear population
Sea ice
Drought / Flood
Climate refugees from threatened islands
Malaria
5. A chart of emissions of the developed vs. the developing world under two scenarios.
Caption: “If it’s affordable, it’s ineffective; if it’s effective, it’s unaffordable.”
6. A chart of the percentage of renewable power worldwide (under 5% and growing slowly.) A chart of the growth rates of coal vs. renewable worldwide.
7. Picture of a ruined wind turbine. Caption: “14,000 whirlygigs have been decommissioned since the 1980s in the US. Adding more is insanity.”
rogerknights – “Here a few …”
Pretty funny, I like them!
I have no personal experience creating content that goes viral, but I read in a book, I forgot the title, that for content to go viral it either has to be positive or, if it is negative, it has to provoke outrage. Whatever the case may be, it would be wise to copy the successful strategy of the Obama campaigns. He and his staff were brilliant. I voted for Romney. We lost.
fwiw…
“The most favorable categories (for viral videos – Justin) are comedy, animal, and entertainment.”
https://sites.google.com/site/cmuviralvideos/characteristics
Here is the book about viral content. I do not have expertise to vouch for the book’s accuracy.
http://jonahberger.com/books/contagious/
Thanks, Justin.
Here’s the article:
http://jonahberger.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ViralityB.pdf
I note the two articles that got the most emotional response:
– “Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness”
– “When All Else Fails, Blaming the Patient Often Comes Next”
If Judy’s about redefining skepticism and blaming the IPCC, I say: well played!
This is why the Dimowits want to paint Brown as a martyr:
…
“A lot of people just didn’t realize that the people who impact their lives every day are directly elected,” said Shiron Hagens, 41, of St. Louis, who is not part of any formal group but has spent several days registering voters in Ferguson with her mother and has pledged to come back here each Saturday. “The prosecutor — he’s elected. People didn’t know that. The City Council — they’re elected. These are the sorts of people who make decisions about hiring police chiefs. People didn’t know.”
N.A.A.C.P. leaders are creating a door-to-door voter registration effort with a jarring reminder as its theme: “Mike Brown Can’t Vote, but I Can.” Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, is working with others to hold a “candidate school” for people, including young black residents who say they want to serve on a city council or school board but need guidance on what a political campaign requires.
The attempt to galvanize voting comes against a backdrop of intense political struggles over the ballot in the state. In 2000, polls were kept open late in St. Louis because of long lines, and Republicans complained about possible voter fraud — one chapter in what would be a long battle over elections and voting.
…
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/us/getting-ferguson-majority-to-show-its-clout-at-polls.html
Democrats can’t win national elections without 95-98% of the African American vote. Enflaming racial hatred, on the part of blacks, has long been a mainstay of Democrat get out the vote tactics. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have gotten rich off being the front men for the race hatred industry.
==> “Democrats can’t win national elections without 95-98% of the African American vote. Enflaming racial hatred, on the part of blacks, has long been a mainstay of Democrat get out the vote tactics”
I just love the condescension that to regularly drips from GaryM’s comments.
African Americans aren’t capable of evaluating party politics on their own. The reason why the reject the Republican Party isn’t because they interpret evidence to believe that the Republican Party is less aligned with their interests Nope. Unlike Republicans, who have the good sense to vote in their best interests, African Americans are just manipulated and “enflamed” by Democrats to vote against their own best interests.
What’s funny is that GaryM thinks that repeating that condescending nonsense yet again is somehow going to strike anyone else as some kind of novel explanation for African American voting behaviors.
Almost as funny as when he argues that people who disagree with him about politics are the ones who make elitist arguments.
Joshua writes:
“African Americans aren’t capable of evaluating party politics on their own. The reason why the reject the Republican Party isn’t because they interpret evidence to believe that the Republican Party is less aligned with their interests Nope. Unlike Republicans, who have the good sense to vote in their best interests, African Americans are just manipulated and “enflamed” by Democrats to vote against their own best interests.”
Republicans aren’t capable of evaluating the Science of global warming on their own. The reason why they reject the consensus opinion isn’t because they interpret evidence to believe that the consensus is less aligned with their interests, nope. Unlike Democrats, who have the good sense to vote in their best interests, Republicans are just manipulated and inflamed by the GWPF and others to vote against their own best interests.
::grin::
=====
please forget my theories of motivated reasoning while I make my arguments.
In the article
Economist – Oceans and the climate: Davy Jones’ heat locker [http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21613161-mystery-pause-global-warming-may-have-been-solved-answer-seems?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/davy_jones_s_heat_locker]
the reporter made a factual scientific error. They wrote at the end of the article
“The process of sequestration [of heat] must reverse itself at some point, since otherwise the ocean depths would end up hotter than the surface—an unsustainable outcome. And when it does, global warming will resume.”
The deeper ocean is very cold and involves an enormous amount of mass. There is no way that the ocean depths could become hotter due to the sequestration of heat from added CO2 in the atmosphere!
As written, for example, at http://www.amnh.org/explore/curriculum-collections/deep-sea-vents/global-ocean-circulation-and-deep-sea-temperatures
“No matter how warm the surface of the ocean gets, the ocean’s huge volume and deep basins keep temperatures at the bottom of the ocean at only slightly above freezing.”.
“depths” probably didn’t mean bottom, but just below the surface. If the ocean heat content keeps increasing, but the surface doesn’t, that becomes unsustainable after a while, and the surface has to warm to keep up.
>“depths” probably didn’t mean bottom, but just below the surface.
At first I took this for sardonicism, but then realised that was so far from your preferred po-faced earnestness that you meant it
The single goalpost rotates again
It’s probably too much to ask that the reporter actually investigate the issue and learn of heat capacity before distributing yet more climate BS.
Something to pick up your Sunday.
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152657763624179&fref=nf
The hang (pronounced han) – I have seen it in Nimbin – the hippie capital of Australia. Beautiful instrument.
+1
Jim D – The authors discuss
“sequestered [heat] in the oceans between 300 metres and 1,500 metres down.”
Much of that layer is in the colder ocean; See, for example, http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Water/temp.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocline#mediaviewer/File:ThermoclineSeasonDepth.png
Under any reasonable accumulation of heat at these layers, it will n’ot become warmer than the near surface waters.
Roger P.
Roger,
Thanks for adding your sensible response. It is impossible to be rationale to Jim D and Joshua and get a thoughtful response but thanks for putting your responses out for the rest. We respect your reputation and knowlege. The are welcome additions here.
Did you see the CLIVAR deep ocean presentations on deep ocean science and observations in July 2014?
Scott
Agreed
Scott,
I found the July 2014 CLIVAR presentations online here. A lot of them, though. Was there a particular one, or ones, which you found especially valuable?
There are warm pools that become deep during La Nina periods, and then spread across the surface during El Ninos. This is the best known example of deep warm water returning to the surface. The deep warm pools can only get so large before the next El Nino cycle. It is hard for surface currents to keep the warm water down permanently.
This is quick and informative.
Looks like that video was made around the time we were warned of this years expected super El Nino. How’s that coming along?
This might show it better. You can see how the deep warm water spreads across the surface for the 1997-8 event.
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/nino_profiles.html
Jan thru July registered the 3rd warmest O of the L&O in the NOAA record. August looks like the O of L&O got warmer.
However, now I see this was the Chen and Tung paper about the Atlantic. It is less clear how that warm water gets back to the surface. I will just speculate out loud here. What could happen is a slowing of the meridional circulation due to its buoyancy that backs up the warm water at the surface which stops sinking and gets warmer. The warm deep water can’t get back to the surface unless the meridional circulation reverses, which is unlikely.
Roger
I live adjacent to the gulf stream in South West Britain. in winter the ocean is around 8degrees C so just keeps frosts off unless there is a really cold spell.
Quite how the very modest (almost imperceptible) warming we can observe (perhaps) in the upper layers of some parts of the ocean will come out and bite us hard in the form of much higher global land surface temperatures is very difficult to see.
tonyb
Global warming just eco-religion?
Berry, of Bigfork, has a Ph.D. in atmospheric physics and is a former National Science Foundation program manager for weather modification.
http://www.dailyinterlake.com/opinion/global-warming-just-eco-religion/article_171dd02a-30a6-11e4-89e1-001a4bcf887a.html
Brent – “Global warming … Religion?”
In part, yes. People are more likely to accept information that is consistent with their values. Incorporating information inconsistent with a person’s value system imposes a cognitive load.
In the name of the Fossil, the Sun, and the Back Infrared Radiation.
@JustinWonder
The New Divinity
By Julian Huxley
“What the sciences discover about the natural world and about the origins, nature and destiny of man is the truth for religion. There is no other kind of valid knowledge. This natural knowledge, organized and applied to human fulfilment, is the basis of the new and permanent religion”
http://judithcurry.com/2013/08/31/open-thread-weekend-30/#comment-373005
E.O Wilson Quotes
Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds… is not productive.
People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/17/climate-change-is-sucking-funding-away-from-biodiversity/#comment-1664385
Regarding “The Aftershocks”, I wonder if those in L’Aquila are more or less likely to believe Scientists? Note, it’s tragic what happened there, but the simply because it is not tragic should not close our eyes to the forcing factor.
They wanted to believe – they were in denial. Like people living below a dam, they have to believe it won’t collapse or they can’t sleep.
Roger Pielke,
interested in your comments –
trying to understand a bit the “deep ocean heat” issue –
keep seeing references to “missing heat” –
is it really “predicted heat” – missing only because it hasn’t shown itself in surface temp increases predicted by climate models?
Please forgive –
Not a science person, just one of the great unwashed “Joe Public” both sides claim to be interested in persuading – if answer is too much more complex than yes or no, will not be insulted if query is ignored
Scott – Thank you for your comment, I did not see the CLIVAR article. Please comment with its url.
Roger Sr
John Smith – You are correct. They refer to it as the “missing” heat as it does not fit the model predictions. :-)
A clear example of where they assumed the heat was going is in the comment by Jim Hansen
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/1116592hansen.pdf
where he wrote
“The Willis et al. measured heat storage of 0.62 W/m2 refers to the decadal mean for the upper 750 m of the ocean. Our simulated 1993-2003 heat storage rate was 0.6 W/m2 in the upper 750 m of the ocean. The decadal mean planetary energy imbalance, 0.75 W/m2, includes heat storage in the deeper ocean and energy used to melt ice and warm the air and land. 0.85 W/m2 is the imbalance at the end of the decade. ”
The GISS model was on target up to 2003 with respect to the upper ocean heat content change, but (coincidentally?), after the Argo network became global, the model has failed in this prediction.
Roger Sr.
thanks Roger –
Note to Dr. Curry –
linked to Daily Mail article on arctic ice cover –
noticed the 2014 sat image was blown up in proportion to the 2012 image to make the increase appear more dramatic –
too bad – cheesy –
checked Arctic Sea-Ice Monitor site –
hard to know who to trust …
good news though -(I think?) trend continues (hope?) at least a few years
Isn’t there and old saying – be careful what you wish for
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, The Most Popular Physics Book Ever Written, Now Completely Online
http://www.openculture.com/2014/08/the-feynman-lectures-on-physics-the-most-popular-physics-book-ever-written-now-completely-online.html
From the link:
…
You might ask why we cannot teach physics by just giving the basic laws on page one and then showing how they work in all possible circumstances, as we do in Euclidean geometry, where we state the axioms and then make all sorts of deductions. (So, not satisfied to learn physics in four years, you want to learn it in four minutes?) We cannot do it in this way for two reasons. First, we do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance. Second, the correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words mean. No, it is not possible to do it that way. We can only do it piece by piece.
Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.
The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.
We said that the laws of nature are approximate: that we first find the “wrong” ones, and then we find the “right” ones. Now, how can an experiment be “wrong”? First, in a trivial way: if something is wrong with the apparatus that you did not notice. But these things are easily fixed, and checked back and forth. So without snatching at such minor things, how can the results of an experiment be wrong? Only by being inaccurate. For example, the mass of an object never seems to change: a spinning top has the same weight as a still one. So a “law” was invented: mass is constant, independent of speed. That “law” is now found to be incorrect. Mass is found to increase with velocity, but appreciable increases require velocities near that of light. A true law is: if an object moves with a speed of less than one hundred miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in a million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law. So in practice one might think that the new law makes no significant difference. Well, yes and no. For ordinary speeds we can certainly forget it and use the simple constant-mass law as a good approximation. But for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the speed, the more wrong we are.
Finally, and most interesting, philosophically we are completely wrong with the approximate law. Our entire picture of the world has to be altered even though the mass changes only by a little bit. This is a very peculiar thing about the philosophy, or the ideas, behind the laws. Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in our ideas.
…
The Antarctic Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent with Anomaly map at WUWT has small holes in multiple spots (small black spots) on the coastline where it should be solidest for the last week. If these are being counted as water it would make the volume less than it really is.
On the Arctic Sea Ice Extent with Anomaly no such spots.
I did not see these in the last 4 years at this time.
Have they been put in deliberately to give a lower Antarctic Sea Iced extent?
Anyone?
Not sure, but the 30 day animation of sea ice area hasn’t changed in several days.
Thank you
Blog fantastic
Good luck
………………..
http://www.8ii.in
Similar things have already happened in the US. Now that the nanny state has co-opted health care, we will have the government commanding us at the point of a gun how to run our lives.
From the article:
LONDON (AP) — The grandmother of a 5-year-old British boy with a severe brain tumor accused U.K. authorities on Monday of cruelty for seeking an arrest warrant and pursuing the family abroad after his parents removed him from a British hospital against medical advice.
Hours later, a Spanish judge ordered the parents’ detention for 72 hours while a court in Madrid considers whether to grant Britain an extradition request.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BRITAIN_BOY_BRAIN_TUMOR?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-09-01-06-43-12
I found this article interesting on the subject of climate correctness.
It’s an extraordinary popular delusion and madness of the crowd. We go mad as a herd, turn skeptical one by one.
=======================
“we go mad as a herd, turn skeptical one by one”
dam* Kim, that’s good – where’d ya’ get that – if you made it up I,m impressed
and at the end of yesterday’s post – glad I caught it
Nope, stolen; God knows where.
=========
United Nations predicts climate hell in 2050 with imagined weather forecasts
‘Reports from the future’ warn of floods, storms and searing heat in campaign for climate change summit
The United Nations is warning of floods, storms and searing heat from Arizona to Zambia within four decades, as part of a series of imagined weather forecasts released on Monday for a campaign publicising a UN climate summit.
“Miami South Beach is under water,” one forecaster says in a first edition of “weather reports from the future”, a series set in 2050 and produced by companies including Japan’s NHK, the US Weather Channel and ARD in Germany.
The UN World Meteorological Organization, which invited well-known television presenters to make videos to be issued before the summit on 23 September, said the scenarios were imaginary but realistic for a warming world.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/01/un-weather-forecasts-2050-climate-change-floods-drought
We’ve lost our fear of hellfire, but put climate change in its place
“Billions will die,” says Lovelock, who tells us that he is not normally a gloomy type. Human civilisation will be reduced to a “broken rabble ruled by brutal warlords”, and the plague-ridden remainder of the species will flee the cracked and broken earth to the Arctic, the last temperate spot, where a few breeding couples will survive.
http://judithcurry.com/2014/06/01/global-warming-versus-climate-change/#comment-580680
Whenever this evergreen topic comes up, (Kevin Trenberth first started talking about missing heat in 1998), I like to remind people about the critique of Levitus et al 2000, written by the late Dr Robert Stevenson, a distinguished and “hands on” oceanographer.
“Yes, the Ocean has warmed, No, it’s not Global Warming”
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/ocean.html
This is just an extract from his comprehensive article:
“How the Oceans Get Warm”
“Warming the ocean is not a simple matter, not like heating a small glass of water. The first thing to remember is that the ocean is not warmed by the overlying air.
Let’s begin with radiant energy from two sources: sunlight, and infrared radiation, the latter emitted from the “greenhouse” gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and various others) in the lower atmosphere. Sunlight penetrates the water surface readily, and directly heats the ocean up to a certain depth. Around 3 percent of the radiation from the Sun reaches a depth of about 100 meters.
The top layer of the ocean to that depth warms up easily under sunlight. Below 100 meters, however, little radiant energy remains. The ocean becomes progressively darker and colder as the depth increases.
The infrared radiation penetrates but a few millimeters into the ocean. This means that the greenhouse radiation from the atmosphere affects only the top few millimeters of the ocean. Water just a few centimeters deep receives none of the direct effect of the infrared thermal energy from the atmosphere! Further, it is in those top few millimeters in which evaporation takes places. So whatever infrared energy may reach the ocean as a result of the greenhouse effect is soon dissipated.
The concept proposed in some predictive models is that any anomalous heat in the mixed layer of the ocean (the upper 100 meters) might be lost to the deep ocean. It is clear that solar-related variations in mixed-layer temperatures penetrate to between 80 to 160 meters, the average depth of the main pycnocline (density discontinuity) in the global ocean. Below these depths, temperature fluctuations become uncorrelated with solar signals, deeper penetration being restrained by the stratified barrier of the pycnocline.
Consequently, anomalous heat associated with changing solar irradiance is stored in the upper 100 meters. The heat balance is maintained by heat loss to the atmosphere, not to the deep ocean.
Thermohaline circulation is responsible for the formation of the bottom-water masses in the world’s oceans: the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) originates basically in the region of the Labrador Sea; the Weddell Sea is the source of the deep-water in the circumpolar Southern Ocean; and the Pacific Deep Water originates in the Ross Sea. In many other places in the oceans, and seas, as well, surface waters are carried into the depths by thermohaline circulation.
So, it is not surprising that those modellers who “need” to get warm surface waters to move into the depths of the oceans, and remain sequestered there for long periods of time, would turn to the physical mechanism of this vertical circulation system. Their hope (claim) is that there can be occasions when salinity, rather than temperature, is the prime determining factor in the density of the surface waters. Then, warm water, made dense by an increase in the sea’s salt content, would sink.
It does not happen!
The primary physical factor in determining the density of sea water is the temperature (Sverdrup, Johnson, and Fleming, 1943). In the open ocean, top or bottom, salinity differences are measured in a few parts per thousand. Thermohaline circulation takes place where the surface waters become colder than the waters beneath. The large vertical movements occur in polar seas, where accelerated radiation makes the surface waters greatly colder than the deeper waters.
In these waters, surface water temperatures are about -1.9°C, the normal salinity of the water keeping it from freezing into ice. The deep waters, being warmer than such surface waters, rise to the surface, as the upper layers sink slowly into the dark ocean depths. Because only very cold surface water is able to sink, it is simple to understand that the deep ocean can never warm up, regardless of how warm the surface ocean around the world may become. No deep lying “thermal lag” is going to take place.”
I’m very sorry to hear about Jim.
“Clearly argued essay on sci integrity, politicisation of sci and science and values”
Link is broken FYI
I just came to react about that. I found via Curry’s twitter the real link: http://www.globalscienceadvice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Scientific-Integrity-in-a-Politicized-World-2014.pdf
He’s right (the linked article): Still, to paraphrase David Roberts, you go to work in the climate you have, not the climate you might want. And, this country has to go back to work soon.
Ordvic –
In case you might happen to catch this…
If you start hearing about “photos of Darren Wilson’s injuries” – as you heard about his fractured eye orbital socket….
here’s some info for you.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/43806_Right_Wing_Radio_Host_Larry_Elder_Posts_Fake_Photo_of_Injured_Darren_Wilson
So has anybody asked the question: “even if he did have a fractured eye socket, whose fist was responsible?”
Any real skeptic would have wondered that, unless they were totally unfamiliar with informal police “procedure”, such as the throw down”
Kerry: God Wants Me to Save Muslim Countries from Global Warming
http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2014/09/03/kerry-god-save-muslim-countries-global-warming/