by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Antartica’s ice melt has accelerated [link]
Upcoming research by Jay Zwalley will buck the consensus and show Antartica is still gaining ice [link]
Antarctica’s Ice May Be More Durable Than We Thought [link] …
Steve McIntyre: about 2.5 years ago, I did a thorough parsing of Antarctic ice mass loss, observing,that contribution of the glacio-isostatic adjustment (GIA) was more or less equal to the reported ice mass loss and HUGE discrepancies in GIA [link] …
New study questions long-held assumption that surface melt in Antarctica is confined to summer | [link]
Large scale climate oscillation impacts on temperature, precipitation and land surface phenology in Central Asia (open access) [link]
Article on statistics of CO2, including cascading uncertainties [link] …
New paper by Craig Loehle: Disequilibrium and relaxation times for species responses to climate change [link] …
Ice core evidence for decoupling between mid-latitude atmospheric water cycle and Greenland temperature during the last deglaciation [link]…
Atmospheric Methane over the Past 2000 Years from a Sub-tropical Ice Core, Central Himalayas [link]
increasing precipitation whiplash in California, including analysis on the rising risk of an 1862-like flood: [link] …
Drought, Heat, and the Carbon Cycle: a Review [link]
“Pre-industrial T have been more variable than previously thought…currently used reference level [for preindustrial] represents end of the Little Ice Age, the coldest phase of the entire last 10,000 years” [link] …
Paper relating the internal variability of climate models to their sensitivity is out in this month’s Journal of Climate: [link]…
Temperature extremes in Alaska: temporal variability and circulation background [link]
Cycles in oceanic teleconnections and global temperature change [link]
On the Cause of Recent Variations in Lower Stratospheric Ozone [link]
Difference between the North Atlantic and Pacific meridional overturning circulation in response to the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau [link]…
Predictability of the European heat and cold waves [link]
Now in NatureClimate – Perspective: Climate reddening increases the chance of critical transitions [link]
How the ice age shaped New York [link]
´Practice and philosophy of climate model tuning across six US modeling centers´ [link]
Atlantic-Pacific Asymmetry in Deep Water Formation [link]
The Effects of Younger Dryas Orbital Parameter and Atmospheric pCO2 Changes on Radiative Forcing and African Monsoonal Circulation [link] …
Model tropical Atlantic biases underpin diminished Pacific decadal variability [link]
A new angle on climate model uncertainty: changing the order in which different climate processes are computed can vary climate feedback parameter by half the full CMIP5 spread in climate feedback. [link]…
Hurricane Harvey Links to Ocean Heat Content and Climate Change Adaptation (open access) [link]
Ocean Carbon Cycle Feedbacks Under Negative Emissions [link]
Decreasing Indian summer monsoon on the northern Indian sub-continent during the last 180 years: evidence from five tree-ring cellulose oxygen isotope chronologies [link] …
New paper on “radiative feedbacks from stochastic variability in surface temperature and radiative imbalance” [link]
An Energy Balance Model for Paleoclimate Transitions [link]…
A decade later, the most recent US AMOC Science Team report captures progress the community of researchers has made on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation [link] …
“A multi-approach strategy in climate attribution studies: Is it possible to apply a robustness framework?” [link] …
Social science and policy
Nuclear power won’t survive without a government handout [link]
Pielke Jr: Scientists as both experts and political myth-makers [link] …
Massive climate funding by wealthy foundations [link]
Sucking CO2 from air is cheaper than thought [link]
Pirates and Climate Change: A Dispatch From the Bangladeshi Sundarbans [link] …
Economically robust protection against 21st century sea-level rise [link]
“Coastal flood damage and adaptation costs under 21st century sea-level rise” [link] …
Philanthropy, group think and climate change [link]
About science and scientists
How a belief in beauty has triggered a crisis in physics [link]
Fellows of the Royal Geological Society push back over climate position [link]
Bret Stephens: They Dying Art of Disagreement [link]
Two years ago, NASA dismissed and mocked an amateur’s criticisms of its asteroids database. Now Nathan Myhrvold is back, and his papers have passed peer review. [link]
Questioning truth, reality and the role of science [link]
From the article “Antarctica’s Ice May Be More Durable Than We Thought”:
Does anyone know the source of the 65-feet figure?
The whole shooting match.
https://www.dur.ac.uk/images/geography/research/researchprojects/antarctic_erosion/present_day_big.jpg
Thanks Ragnaar, I don’t recall seeing this map before. It seems that the majority of West Antarctica ice is “marine-based”, being grounded below sea level. And in much of the area, well over 1000 feet below sea level.
Like Indiana Jones is an archaeologist, a real scientist would melt Antarctica to see how much ice there really is.
Dr. Judith, I just wanted to offer my profound thanks for your unceasing efforts to broaden the understanding of the climate by means of your “Week In Review”. Always something in there to study, always something to make me go “Hmmm” …
My best to you and yours,
w.
I second that.
These week-in-review compilations will be useful down the road to researchers writing histories of the topic.
And thanx to all of you bloggers and contributors for all that you do (WOWZA!!!)…
Just as Willis finds in Judy”s edited view of the world :
” always something to make me go “Hmmm” …”,
his own often deserve the terminal epithet “bug”
Now that’s 10 seconds of my life I won;t get back.
In Antarctica, here’s where I found the below quote:
https://yellowhammernews.com/upcoming-research-will-buck-the-consensus-and-show-antarctica-is-still-gaining-ice/
Easy math. “The paper (from the 80, not Zwally) estimates that Antarctic(a) is losing, on net, more than 200 gigatons of ice a year, adding 0.02 inches to annual sea level rise.”
100 gigatons of ice is 0.01 inches of SLR. 1 teraton is 0.1 inches of SLR.
According to the 80, the accelerated rate is 0.2 inches per decade. Do policy for this specific issue for 50 years out or not. I doubt it will make a difference.
When we spend money, for policy guidance we can decide this is money well spent. In this case, we can have a consensus, of something that does not matter. The 80 has told us, don’t worry about it. There are more important things to worry about.
Here is my latest for CFACT:
http://www.cfact.org/2018/06/16/help-epa-rethink-regulatory-cost-benefit-analysis/.
“In yet another welcome reform effort, EPA is considering changing how it does cost and benefit analysis for new regulations. This is great news, because the Agency’s analyses have often been biased in favor of regulation, sometimes to the point of absurdity.”
I include a number of specific cases as examples. This could be exciting.
The bottom line of their new policy is that if it is too expensive to stop harmful pollution, they won’t. Money over people. Typical.
Basic economics, actually. For example we do not ban cars to stop their pollution. (Would you?) We only fight pollution where it makes sense. And this is a fundamental principle of all regulation, not just EPA, in fact of all rational behavior.
My personal view is that there are no sensible solutions left for EPA to implement. This is why they have to cheat so heavily on their cost and benefit analyses.
There is no new policy. That benefits must outweigh costs is long-established Federal policy. What is new is the desire to be honest, and that is revolutionary when it comes to EPA.
Downweighting health and environmental costs is never a good direction to go. There should be no situation where harmful pollution is necessary.
This — “There should be no situation where harmful pollution is necessary. — is simply absurd. You might as well wish away the second law of thermodynamics. All processes produce waste and sometimes it harms someone. Would you ban everything that anyone is allergic to?
This is a perfect example of pushing one policy to the detriment of all others. It is pure zealotry.
Your position seems to be if it is harmful pollution and the factory owners can’t afford to stop it, they get a pass and can pollute anyway cost-free to them. That’s where a poorly thought out policy leads. The point is, it is not just money (cost-benefit). There are many factors to consider, and maintaining environmental standards is the bottom line that matters.
Jim D wrote, ” There should be no situation where harmful pollution is necessary.”
Moral absolutism is an ethical view that particular actions are intrinsically right or wrong. Stealing, for instance, might be considered to be always immoral, even if done for the well-being of others (e.g., stealing food to feed a starving family), and even if it does in the end promote such a good. Moral absolutism stands in contrast to other categories of normative ethical theories such as consequentialism, which holds that the morality (in the wide sense) of an act depends on the consequences or the context of the act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_absolutism
Found in many religions. Anathema to science.
This is a case of benefit to the few to the detriment of the many. Environmental cases often fall along these lines.
‘Money over people.”
I think you mean “reason over sentiment”. Bad news for huckster middlemen engaged in the sentiment trading business, admittedly. Maybe time for a change.
A clean environment is just sentiment to you? That’s so twisted and evil.
“A clean environment is just sentiment to you? ”
Nope, but it is to you. And I agree about that being twisted and evil.
What do you mean by “nope”? Now you’re not dismissing the environment like you did at first? Which is it?
Practicing environmental scientists have little respect for amateurs or government.
Luckily the government has environmental scientists too.
You didn’t get the distinction between practicing and government hacks?
Like Pruitt?
A lawyer?
He’s the boss.
Scientists and engineers have ethical responsibilities regardless of who the boss is.
http://www.professionalengineers.org.au/rpeng/ethical-commitment/
Not sure what you’re getting at. The government scientists are no different from the national and international scientific communities. The ones at the EPA are being rather muzzled at this point, but science goes on.
Most practicing environmental scientists have little regard for amateurs or government at the environmental coalface. You know I have little regard for climate science.
The point was simple – but you choose again to pretend it isn’t. Do you think I should have to deal with such culturally motivated disingenuousness?
How about when they study pollution? Is there a difference between government and university and foreign environmental scientists in your worldview? Which do you prefer, and what is better about their publications?
Most efforts in recent years have been to stop everything do do with fossil fuel even when there was no evidence of any harm, at great cost while causing much harm. That must stop.
That is why we elected Trump to pick the right people to clean up the EPA and many other problems in our government.
He certainly has the oil and coal people on his side, if no one else.
Jim D :
“The bottom line of their new policy is that if it is too expensive to stop harmful pollution, they won’t. Money over people. Typical.”
Completely misses the point. When the government steps in and decides that activity A is clean and activity B is dirty, without doing a real cost and benefit analysis it leads to more environmental harm. For example, there has been no cost benefit analysis that I am aware of that shows that solar or wind power is cleaner than nuclear or fossil fuels. When all of the costs and benefits are taken into consideration then a legitimate decision could be made. This includes mining the materials, manufacturing the materials, building the plants, the opportunity costs (land could be put to other use), expected lifetime, disposal costs, the amount of power produced, etc.
It is easy to point a finger and say that nuclear power or fossil fuels equates to harmful pollution, but you would be ignoring the harmful pollution that is produced with solar and wind power. Just assuming that solar and wind is superior does not make it so. How are solar panels made for instance? It is obvious to me at least that mining, manufacturing, and land use are not pollution free. Same with wind power. What about all the birds that get killed by the props? I am not saying that nuclear power or fossil fuels are pollution free either. What a cost benefit analysis does is allow the comparison to be made free of preconceived notions.
Include all of the costs and benefits and publish the results and calculations so that they are open to criticism. This is not the way things have been done in the past. Hopefully the new policies will get us closer to making good decisions with real science rather than simply trusting the EPA to do the right thing.
As far as the “new policy” goes, it is not a new policy at all. Economics has always had some affect on policy. The old Freon was not banned until a new Freon was available. The fuel efficiency regulations on cars is based on what is economically feasible. Same with smog controls. Many of the drinking water standards are based on economically detectable quantities. To say that economics has not had an affect on regulations is to be blind to the realities.
Just because there is a new administration that is focused in a different direction does not make what they are doing all that different than the last administration. The congress passed part of this has not changed so there is a limit as to how much can actually change. Congress could change the rules, but that is a different matter entirely and not what this is about. The president has the power to replace the head of the EPA, but no one else. He can also hold their feet to the fire and make them do things that are already required, but he does not have the power to rewrite the regulations.
If wind turbines and solar panels are causing pollution at their source, that is where regulations should clean up their act, at least to avoid polluting the air and water at those factories. This is what the EPA is for. No free passes or favors. Maybe that increases the price slightly, as is certainly the case for cleaning coal emissions up. Prices should have these effects factored in and if they become uncompetitive, like coal, so be it. If pollutants like CO2 are allowed despite downstream effects, they should be taxed like tobacco to pay for those effects. However, when a factory is spewing particulates, or there is lead in the drinking water, there is already an environmental violation that needs immediate fixing and probable penalties, and costs don’t come into it. It is clear who pays. With established pollution laws, cost-benefit doesn’t matter, so it is not a one size fits all, or a loophole to say it is too expensive.
“The existing command and control model for environmental management is inherently incapable of reversing declining Australian environmental trends. Environmental problems are not necessarily technically difficult but they tend to have political, economic and social dimensions that aren’t amenable to legislated controls. Our systems are rules oriented and therefore inflexible. They cannot respond quickly to changes in technology or emerging problems, local or regional variations or changing environments. A move to local, flexible, efficient, autonomous and voluntary systems must occur. In Queensland, the central organising environmental legislation is the Sustainable Planning Act. It specifies a number of activities that trigger assessment under other environmental legislation. The associated environmental legislation is the Environmental Protection Act, the Fisheries Act, the Vegetation Management Act, the Coastal Protection and Management Act and the Water Act.
One of the problems of the system is complexity, with thousands of pages of legislation and associated policy and regulation. The Sustainable Planning Act is possibly a perfectly adequate vehicle for town planning, roads, water, building and structural certification, sewerage, storage of flammable materials and a host of other traditional activities. The Environmental Protection Act applies to industry and development. Its main concern is emissions of noise and air and water pollutants. The main outcome is a host of end of the pipe limits on emissions. The Fisheries Act protects marine vegetation and approves structures in marine waters. The Vegetation Management Act rules on clearing of native vegetation. The Coastal Protection and Management Act at least theoretically addresses sustainable development of the coastline. In practice, it approves development in the coastal zone. It applies to very limited areas of the coastline with the bulk left to weeds, 4WD’s, goats, pigs and cats. The Water Act applies to diversion of water resources.”
https://watertechbyrie.com/2015/05/01/changing-our-approach-to-the-environment/
The problem with the top down command and control model of government environmental regulation is that it fails the objective test of environmental conservation. I imagine the situation is similar in the US.
There is an alternative bottom up process pioneered by Elinor Ostrom that applies messy human scale solutions to complex problems in many applications with far better results. It involves trusting people at local and regional scales to arrive at sensible solutions. Something that the left cannot possibly imagine endorsing. We can’t possibly allow these evil bastards free rein – they need to be controlled by government fiat.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/collective-scales.png
What we need to do – globally – is ignore silly little would be despots with their sanctimonious moralizing and empty heads.
That looks like idealism. What if some international conglomerate puts a polluting factory into your neighborhood before you had any regulations for those pollutants. How do they get the scientists and lawyers to make the case against them, especially if they are employing locals and funding the local political campaigns. Does every town have to separately regulate pollutants when you have no nationally determined standards to go by? Isn’t that just a wasteful repetition and a boon to the lawyers. Or perhaps you don’t mean to do pollution like that.
JimD:
“If wind turbines and solar panels are causing pollution at their source, that is where regulations should clean up their act, at least to avoid polluting the air and water at those factories. This is what the EPA is for.”
I disagree as not all technologies are born equal. Producing one thing will not yield the same pollutions as another thing. The only way to compare two technologies is by taking all of the cost and benefits into account which includes externalities. If this is done in an open way where everyone can see what is taken into account and what is not, then the process can be amended until the comparison is as fair as it can be.
JimD:
“No free passes or favors. Maybe that increases the price slightly, as is certainly the case for cleaning coal emissions up. Prices should have these effects factored in and if they become uncompetitive, like coal, so be it.”
By that definition wind and solar are uncompetitive, without subsidies wind and solar are in general more expensive than fossil fuels or nuclear. It is true that currently coal is more expensive than natural gas, but only marginally so, and not when comparing existing coal plants with new natural gas plants. This is the reality (currently) on the ground; it does not make sense to close coal plants and build new natural gas plants. It does make sense to replace end of life coal plants with natural gas plants.
JimD:
“If pollutants like CO2 are allowed despite downstream effects, they should be taxed like tobacco to pay for those effects.”
I agree that externalities should be taken into account. I disagree that there is an open and honest study that shows that the current affects of CO2 are net negative. In fact, the preponderance of the evidence I have seen point to CO2 increase being net positive environmentally to date. Further, I see no evidence that at the 1.5-1.7 ECS rate (which is derived by assuming that the IPCC temperatures records are correct and that all of the warming to date is due to CO2) will not be positive environmentally until economically available fossil fuels are used up.
JimD:
“However, when a factory is spewing particulates, or there is lead in the drinking water, there is already an environmental violation that needs immediate fixing and probable penalties, and costs don’t come into it.”
In a perfect world there are some pollutants that when their concentration is above a threshold, costs should not be an issue. The government normally designates these sites as superfund sites and cleans them up. The realities are quite different, however, and the EPA’s record on lead in the drinking water, for instance, is less than stellar. (Flint Michigan)
JimD:
“It is clear who pays. With established pollution laws, cost-benefit doesn’t matter, so it is not a one size fits all, or a loophole to say it is too expensive.”
I disagree. It is not clear at all. How much environmental damage does wind and solar do? How much land do they use up? What are the opportunity costs of using that land? When wind and solar is not integrated with fossil fuels or nuclear what are the environmental costs of the batteries that are needed when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine? A cost benefit analysis which includes externalities and cradle to grave costs is the way to compute the costs and compare between technologies.
The people who have wind and solar on their land are happy with the income they get. Sometimes that is the only good use, or they can mix the use with other things. Also cats kill more birds than wind turbines by a factor of many.
On the costs of CO2, I have seen it estimated at 500 trillion dollars by 2100. I have not seen anyone say it is net plus with a dollar amount attached. That side appears to be just talk and no numbers so far, and I don’t expect that to change. Similarly taking AR5’s mitigation cost amounts to a tenth of that, so mitigation is a good bargain in cost-benefit terms.
My view on renewables is that you can have subsidies to encourage clean energy, just the way you have, or instead of, taxes on externalities. This is by virtue of them reducing damage to a much greater extent than the subsidy costs. It has the side effect of keeping energy costs down for the consumer.
@jim d
“If wind turbines and solar panels are causing pollution at their source, that is where regulations should clean up their act, at least to avoid polluting the air and water at those factories. This is what the EPA is for.”
??? So, you are saying that coal imported rather than domestic would be ok?
Not in the context of international agreements. That’s why they are needed.
The Donahue and Caldwell paper is quite important in its implications for GCM’s utility for predicting climate. Generally, the problem here is that one should at each time step “converge” the interactions of the various sub grid models. Computationally that is impossible and the ordering of the applications of the models makes a large difference. I wonder if applying each model to the start of time step state might not be a better method than applying them sequentially.
“Computationally that is impossible”
I wonder if it is? You’d like to apply them coupled, but do it consecutively as a rough solver treating the joint equation as triangular. That is a kind of approximate inverse, as might be used in your preferred inexact newton method. The convergence you suggest would be to this process.
I wonder if a search for a better approximate inverse to the joint application (of parametrizations), perhaps empirical, might be profitable and take pressure off convergence.
I was surprised that these parametrized processes do need to be resolved on the scale of timesteps. Usually in our explicit N-S solves, the timestep is forced to be so fast by the need to resolve sound waves that other processes can be updated less frequently. Maybe here it is different because the elements are so flat in the vertical, and the time step depends on the horizontal length and wave speed.
Yes Nick, In the weather or climate case, they filter out the sound waves as they can’t resolve them anyway and they were causing bad solutions. This was a contribution of Joe Oliger at NCAR in the 1970s I think. It’s an obscure point and I only know about because I was a graduate student there and heard a lecture by Gerry Browning on the issue.
I would argue and there was a paper by Forrester Johnson et al around 2010 that in the case of Reynold’s averaged NS codes, you need to solve the turbulence model “fully coupled”, i.e., put it into the Newton method with the conservation laws. That’s not done very much because its quite difficult to get it right. The jury is still out on this issue though in reality.
You were very strong against Mann & Titley. We need more like you.
Thanks for the link to Trenberth’s latest paper on the supposed human juiced-up Hurricane Harvey. Stupid on display:
“Abstract
While hurricanes occur naturally, human-caused climate change is supercharging them and exacerbating the risk of major damage. Here using ocean and atmosphere observations, we demonstrate links between increased upper ocean heat content due to global warming with the extreme rainfalls from recent hurricanes. Hurricane Harvey provides an excellent case study as it was isolated in space and time. We show that prior to the beginning of northern summer of 2017, ocean heat content was the highest on record both globally and in the Gulf of Mexico, but the latter sharply decreased with hurricane Harvey via ocean evaporative cooling. The lost ocean heat was realized in the atmosphere as moisture, and then as latent heat in record-breaking heavy rainfalls. Accordingly, record high ocean heat values not only increased the fuel available to sustain and intensify Harvey but also increased its flooding rains on land. Harvey could not have
produced so much rain without human-induced climate change. Results have implications for the role of hurricanes in climate. Proactive planning for the consequences of human-caused climate change is not happening in many vulnerable areas, making the disasters much worse.”
I watched the NAS climate communication initiative March 6, where Titley discussed the freshly online rapid response team.
Many of the speakers self-identified as liberals, while others of them questioned whether the NAS should engage in such advocacy at all.
They are intent on preserving and controlling the public science narrative with definite explicit plans to marginalize skeptics, who they tagged as a ‘dismissive’ 10% of the populace that can be maneuvered around and minimized. I saw the pre-planning of Obama-style political activism by climate scientists acting as community organizers wrt climate change.
The main thread expressed was about using the prestige of the academies to enforce AGW doctrine in the media in all places in the US with a ‘rapid response team’. The rapid response org is there now to be what is clearly set-up to be a one-sided political media enforcement tool of the false CAGW ‘science’ narrative.
They are the real dismissives. They fear the majority of American people will ultimately realize they’ve been had by AGW proponents, the NAS and other institutions like NASA that have been pushing the CAGW storyline for 35 years, so they are riding out Trump by keeping the narrative going in the public square, on their terms.
Which is why we now need more people like Dr. Curry to stand up publicly against the faulty AGW ‘science’ and political ideology.
It would be interesting to compare the methane record to soil nitrogen in the region. Wonder if it’s possible.
Are there maybe fossil records of plant nitrogen uptake?
The Dying Art of Disagreement
“Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves. We take exaggerated and histrionic offense to whatever is said about us. We banish entire lines of thought and attempt to excommunicate all manner of people — your humble speaker included — without giving them so much as a cursory hearing.”
He starts out by thanking people for not being disinvited from speaking and covers some of those better known episodes as well. From the SJW’s perspective, someone like Milo is chaos on the chaos/order spectrum. They protect their order, their world. At the same time, some consider the SJWs chaos. It depends on which side you are on. Free Speech is a kind of order. It’s all over our laws and history. At the same time, Free Speech can lead to chaos in one way by allowing challenges to order. Earlier I have written about the line between chaos and order. That’s Free Speech.
Another one on nuclear power:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/06/indonesia-and-thorcon-continue-working-towards-thorium-reactor.html
It looks like a story worth following.
Dr Curry,
Thank you for these “week in review-science edition[s]”.
Matthew
My vision for energy futures involves the emergence of synergistic technologies. Implementation in the real world can only succeed with cost competitive products.
https://images.hgmsites.net/med/audi-e-diesel-plant-in-laufenburg-switzerland_100632046_m.jpg
High temperature modular nuclear providing baseload electricity but also – at periods of lower demand – electricity for carbon capture and heat and power for efficient high temperature production of hydrogen and oxygen from water.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/em-break-even.png
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-thermochemical-water-splitting
Hydrogen can be catalyzed with carbon dioxide to produce liquid fuels for efficient linear generators powering efficient and powerful electric motors for transport.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdEBG1gDtxw
https://www.proteanelectric.com/
Combine this with a high capacity low cost supercapacitor bank for that racing start.
“Supercapacitors have many advantages. For instance, they maintain a long cycle lifetime—they can be cycled hundreds of thousands times with minimal change in performance. A supercapacitor’s lifetime spans 10 to 20 years, and the capacity might reduce from 100% to 80% after 10 or so years. Thanks to their low equivalent series resistance (ESR), supercapacitors provide high power density and high load currents to achieve almost instant charge in seconds. Temperature performance is also strong, delivering energy in temperatures as low as –40°C.”
http://www.electronicdesign.com/power/can-supercapacitors-surpass-batteries-energy-storage
In my future Paris-Dakar entry. Not because it is low emission – but because it is fun.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/ev2.jpg
Robert I Ellison: High temperature modular nuclear providing baseload electricity but also – at periods of lower demand – electricity for carbon capture and heat and power for efficient high temperature production of hydrogen and oxygen from water.
On this you and I are in agreement. You probably don’t care, but some posted a few months ago that I should note when I agree with you, not just disagreements.
electricity for carbon capture What a waste, spend money to damage how green plants grow.
Capturing carbon for liquid fuels returns carbon to the atmosphere when burnt. But it provides an alternative to limited fossil fuels whose price fluctuates wildly at my fuel bowser.
Sucking CO2 from air is cheaper than thought
Emphasis on machinery, not photosynthesis. If it has to be by electricity-powered machinery, I hope they go the route of manufacturing liquid fuel.
In the end, the economics of CO2 extraction will depend on factors that vary by location, including the price of energy and whether or not a company can access government subsidies.
I hope they realize that Sucking CO2 from the air is dumber than dirt and stop doing it.
popesclimatetheory: electricity for carbon capture What a waste, spend money to damage how green plants grow.
…
I hope they realize that Sucking CO2 from the air is dumber than dirt and stop doing it.
I doubt that anyone can suck out enough to have much effect on atmospheric CO2 concentration in the next 100 years. But continuous development of technologies to manufacture liquid fuels is a good idea. And so is continuous development of nuclear power technology.
Try using coal gasification to create synthetic fuels; lot more carbon to work with. Significantly more logical than taking CO2 out of the air which is more or less just plain dumb.
increasing precipitation whiplash in California, including analysis on the rising risk of an 1862-like flood:
Another addressing the question: Why would California, with its limited resources, invest more money in new wind farms. solar farms, and a fast rail system than on improving its flood control and irrigation systems? Granted, the warning is based on numerical simulations, but so is the CO2-reduction strategy.
Hurricane Harvey Links to Ocean Heat Content and Climate Change Adaptation (open access) [link]
“Harvey could not have produced so much rain without human‐induced climate change”
The meteorologists got it right the first time; Kevin, not so much. Hurricane Harvey stalled over Huston Tx allowing more water to be drawn into the storm, coming out as rain. A blocking high pressure system, do in part to the Polar Vortex dipping down into the mid-West, delayed Harvey’s moving further North onto land, and then veering Northeastward as other tropical storms have.
“Heat and cold waves may have considerable human and economic impacts in Europe. Recent events, like the heat waves observed in France in 2003 and Russia in 2010, illustrated the major consequences to be expected.”
The 2003 heatwave occurred on the same type of quadrupole heliocentric Jovian configuration as the major heatwaves in 1976, 1949, 1934, and even the very warm year of 1686 in the middle of the Maunder Minimum. The next one is in 2045, and by looking at Earth and Venus positions I can safely predict that a major heatwave will peak in the first half of August 2045. The driver is fast solar wind conditions.
For 2010 I predicted UK heatwaves for the end of May, and further heatwaves in June through into July. Later in June and through July did see a positive shift in the AO/NAO, and with all the previous many months of negative NAO, the Moscow region had strong drought, and hence was highly prone to extreme heat, with forest fire smoke exacerbating the heatwave conditions.
2010 long range solar based weather (NAO/AO) forecasts:
http://phonic.fm/2010/sunny-festival-times-ahead/
With the solar forcing of such events the world of weather would be very banal and uneventful.
Typo…! *Without* the solar forcing of such events the world of weather would be very banal and uneventful.
The UK heatwave at the end of May 2010 did occur.
Daily NAO:
ftp://ftp.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/cwlinks/norm.daily.aao.index.b790101.current.ascii
More simple math:
“The Antarctic Ice Sheet represents the largest potential source of future sea-level rise: if all its ice melted, sea level would rise by about 60 m (Vaughan et al., 2013). According to satellite observations, the Antarctic Ice Sheet has lost 1350 Gt (gigatonnes) of ice between 1992 and 2011 (1 Gt = 1000 million tonnes), equivalent to an increase in sea level of 3.75 mm…” – https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/cr/2016/06/22/marine-ice-sheet-instability-for-dummies-2/
In about 20 years, we got about 0.15 inches of SLR from Antarctica. 60 meters is about 2,300 inches.
“This sector of West Antarctica contains enough ice to raise global sea level by 1.2 m.”
“Marine-based ice very well could and in fact is already starting to contribute to sea level rise,” said Shakun, “and that alone holds an estimated 65 feet of sea-level rise.” – Durable Ice, linked above
The collapse of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, if initiated, would add no more than several tenths of a meter during the 21st century (medium confidence). – AR5
Watching paint dry or sea level rising… kind of boring. But there is something that is happening 10 times faster, our changing ocean biology.
So I think it’s not how high the water rises, it’s what’s in the water (or not: oxygen) that is more interesting. We can easily estimate what it will cost to adapt to a few feet of see level rise in 40-80 years but the cost to restore the chemical balance of all the worlds oceans would be orders of magnitude greater. Oxygen levels have only dropped 2% in about 50 years so far but the dead zones are growing many times faster because there are many more variables in play besides temperature. Add in all the other chemicals including hundreds of thousands of man made molecules like plastics, micro-fibers, pharmaceuticals and you have a real witches brew. We probably passed the point of no return a long time ago so there is no need to worry about it now. There is a reason nobody worries about what the climate will look like past the year 2100. If homo sapiens haven’t genetically modified themselves to a new species by then we probably all died off in the previous century.
So we should do a better job with water runoff. I pay a little bit on my water bills for storm water management or whatever it’s called. And I virtue signal by growing wildflowers on a hill on my front yard. Once they’re established their maintenance drops off. Now I pull some weeds and throw some more seeds on the thinner spots. I’ve noticed wildflowers are becoming more of a thing in my status symbol land.
“Unlike native plants which tend to have deeper roots and allow for much greater water infiltration during rainfall, Kentucky bluegrass and most other lawn species have shallow root structures that don’t allow for much infiltration, meaning that rain does not infiltrate the ground well enough and ultimately runs off the lawn into sewers, carrying with it fertilizer and all the other pollutants it comes in contact with on the way.”
https://www.cleanwateraction.org/features/solutions-stormwater-runoff
These people:
http://www.minnehahacreek.org/
are doing projects with runoff and planting prairie grass and probably some wildflowers here and there as the situation warrants.
Above the deeper roots, that’s carbon in the soil and so they say, aquifer replenishment. Yes these are small things.
Ragnaar,
If it makes you feel better plus protects the environment it’s a win-win. Good for you. Lakes, rivers and aquifers are much easier and cheaper to restore. The oceans suffer more from the tragedy of the commons syndrome I think. Everybody claims they own their territorial waters and can extract anything that has value but are exempt from keeping them healthy and clean. I don’t expect that part to change no matter how many UN resolutions they pass.
To a large extent, grass develops deep roots or not depending on if it was not watered too much or was watered too much. When you water too much grass does not develop deep roots and cannot live long without watering. A neighbor of ours, watered regular, when they moved, the new neighbor did not water and the grass died, it took several years but the grass gradually came back without watering.
I’d suggest you look to Elinor Ostrom – beyond the tragedy of the commons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZGtzvOHzRA
https://watertechbyrie.com/2015/10/04/biological-abundance-and-economic-growth/
Re: Nuclear Power Won’t Survive Without A Government Handout
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nuclear-power-wont-survive-without-a-government-handout/
Wrong approach. Once governments start handouts for selected industries, the end is nigh. They are very hard to remove once started. They just keep increasing, as has been done with renewables for the past 50 years or more.
The correct approach is to remove the impediments to nuclear power that have been steadily increasing since the late 1960s – e.g. 10 years and many $ billions to get through the design approval and licencing. If not for the disruption caused by the anti-nuclear power protest movement – starting in the 1960s and continuing ever since – nuclear power could be around 10% of current cost … providing cheap, clean, reliable, safest electricity generation.
What could have been – if nuclear power deployment had not been disrupted https://www.thegwpf.com/what-could-have-been-if-nuclear-power-deployment-had-not-been-disrupted/
More likely, current version of nuclear power in the West will not survive. The technology is simply obsolete and unable to compete. Happens to all mature technologies overtaken by more advanced developments.
Are there advanced nuclear technologies that will successfully emerge? Maybe, but they are not those championed by the US DOE which epitomizes the DC “swamp” culture unable to deal with a competitive world. Pretty much how we ended up with inane subsidies for renewable energy.
I agree,
But for the new technologies the US DOE, UK and EU regulators and the IAEA need to remove the massive impediments that are blocking progress. Once they are removed, vendors can compete to bring much better, cheaper faster to build small modular reactors to market. This is where we would be now if not for the impediments imposed since the 1960’s see this: https://www.thegwpf.com/what-could-have-been-if-nuclear-power-deployment-had-not-been-disrupted/ and follow ,links to relevant notes in Appendix B.
For the most part, the advanced nuclear reactors are passively fail-safe, unlike their older cousins. However, the existing regulations are geared for reactors that require power and water to keep from melting the fuel as well as keeping the containment structures from rupturing.
I am not so sure the regulators will back-off obsolete regulations because most of the bureaucrats would be out of work.
“Swamp” is a convenient scapegoat. The problem with nuclear energy is political- the entire “left” side of the political spectrum has invested 50 years in the fake message that nuclear can’t be safe. In the US, that means one entire political party faces the choice of either admitting the truth and looking foolish, or denying the truth and pretending renewables are the answer that the evil other party prevents via “denial.”
If you’re a bureaucrat, it’s kinda tough to advocate something half the government and most of the media will demonize.
The odd fact that the allegedly “climate concerned” are wholly on board with the left’s political strategy (with notable exceptions like James Hansen), gives rise to the completely reasonable observation that the “climate concerned” aren’t.
The problems with nuclear energy are fundamentally financial in nature, with over-regulation making the problems much, much worse. Why would anyone want to make an investment whose risks vastly exceed the potential profit?
If nuclear power is to survive, it needs to be absolutely fail-safe and able to compete. That rules out conventional nuclear plants unless the risk is essentially taken over by the government ( i.e. taxpayer). Not no, but hell no. Ditto for renewable energy. Compete or end up on the dung heap of the bad ideas. Suspect that would cause a lot of bleating in both industries, but ultimately the consumer and taxpayer would have more of their own money to spend as they see fit. The environment would be just fine as such an approach inherently leads to higher efficiencies with less pollution.
The regulatory costs are obscene, you’ll be pilloried in the press for even trying to do it, and it’s entirely possible that after blowing millions on the project, some know-nothing Democrat will come along and pull the plug on the whole thing just to be a hero to the anti-science set.
Plus, natural gas is cheaper (a fact that peak oil “science” told us was impossible.).
If the climate concerned were concerned, there would be a hard and fast rule against any subsidies of renewables that replace nuclear power, the scientific consensus would be eager to shift climate change funding to R&D on nuclear (it is “urgent” and “settled” after all), and any carbon tax, or other arbitrary climate price on carbon, would be tied to fast-tracked permission to build nuclear power.
No danger of any of that happening. The climate concerned haven’t shown any interest in actually reducing emissions for the last 30 years and won’t for the next.
Peter,
I am a pro nuclear guy – especially modular designs.
If you want a level playing field for nuclear power I would hope you would support overturning the Dick Cheney “Halliburton loophole”. Sometimes when you complain about burdensome regulations you shouldn’t ignore the regulations that give other types of energy resources an unfair advantage.
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060023558
PS: How many contractors are still in business designing and building reactors? General Electric looks like it might go under. Last time I checked there were only two companies left that are qualified to design and build a nuclear plant in the US, GE and Westinghouse and Westinghouse isn’t actually an American company since it was bought by Toshiba.
I agree it should be a level playing field for all technologies. I should have mentioned that removing impediments also means removing incentives and subsidies for any technology. Extending this further ( a long way out) all resources used for making fueling and decommissioning and disposing of the technolgies should be included in the price of the electricity they produce. This included resource rent tax for the materials and fuels mined and used. If this was the case, nuclear would be just about the only viable electricity generator. Gas should not be used for electricity. it is a limited resource and will be needed for petrochemical industries for ever.
You criticized Dick Cheney, but not Presidents Carter and Clinton for the enormous set backs they caused to nuclear development. Why not?
Peter Lang:
What do you think of this project?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/06/indonesia-and-thorcon-continue-working-towards-thorium-reactor.html
In my view, would not touch with a 10 foot pole. Having extremely radioactive liquid fuel moving around in a power plant would be fiendishly difficult to deal with from a design, operations, maintenance and regulatory standpoint. That translates into a massive financial risk with the likelihood of a return on the investment pretty close to zero.
Why would anyone want to do this?
Matthew,
IMO, Thorium reactors will be viable at some time in the future, as will breeder reactors using uranium fuel. However, I think it is probably a long way off. A UK Government’s National Nuclear Laboratory report argues that we’d need to build about as much thorium capacity as we already have built uranium capacity before it is likely to become commercially viable. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/65504/6300-comparison-fuel-cycles.pdf
However, I don’t follow the development of thorium or other individual technologies closely. I am more interested in investigating the root cause of the disruption to nuclear power progress, and how to remove the impediments to progress going forward. Then let the commercial world compete to reduce costs and improve the technologies.
Peter, in 2011, Southern Nuclear in Georgia and SCANA in South Carolina each claimed they could build an AP1000 technology two-unit addition to their existing reactor sites at Vogtle and at VC Summer for roughly 12 billion dollars per site;
Both corporations claimed further that the 12 billion dollar estimates would be enough to cover all applicable federal, state, and local regulatory requirements, including the NRC’s nuclear safety and nuclear quality assurance requirements.
By the end of 2016, the cost estimates for each project had climbed to roughly 25 billion dollars each, more than twice the original estimates.
These massive cost increases occurred in the space of just five years, forcing the VC Summer project to be terminated outright and the Vogtle 3 & 4 project to be delayed until the early to mid 2020’s.
Peter, do you have a factually supported explanation as to why the cost estimates for these two nuclear projects doubled in the space of just five years?
Construction financing probably the primary cost driver. Likely driven by regulation and legal hurdles.
If Innovation Makes Everything Cheaper, Why Does It Make Nuclear Power More Expensive?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/21/if-innovation-makes-everything-cheaper-why-does-it-make-nuclear-power-more-expensive/
Peter, thanks.
Peter, the Michael Shellenberger article from Forbes Magazine makes some good points. But he is mistaken in theorizing that a well-experienced nuclear construction workforce always needs to have a highly standardized reactor design available to keep itself reasonably efficient in completing the specialized component fabrication and in-field construction work.
If you’ve ever been involved in the end-to-end process of designing and then building a large nuclear facility, you know that the skills and the prior experience of a well-trained nuclear workforce are readily transferable to evolutionary advances in new technologies. A nuclear quality mindset and a disciplined approach to getting the work done at every level of the project organization is a primary key to success.
The AP1000 is an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, power reactor design. The fundamental reason why the costs of VC Summer and Vogtle 3 & 4 doubled after site construction started in earnest in 2012 was that both projects were grossly mismanaged at every level of the project organization, from the very bottom of the project organization on up to the very top. Every classic mistake that can be made in managing a large ‘design-build’ type of construction project was made. They didn’t miss a single one of these classic mistakes.
An inexperienced Engineering/Procurement/Construction (EPC) project management team was chosen to run both projects. (It was later replaced, but not before the damage was done.) The facility designs, including the ancillary systems and equipment not directly associated with the reactors themselves, were far from complete at the start of construction. Large swaths of project activity workscope were totally missing from the project cost and schedule baselines. The labor force and the technical staffs didn’t have the skills and the experience needed to do the design, the fabrication, and the field construction work to nuclear quality standards. The written QA programs were never seriously applied in the fabrication shops or on the construction work sites resulting in much rework of components, systems,and structures. The customer organizations for the projects lacked the technical skills and the management priority needed to quickly identify and resolve emerging problems and issues.
The other major problem with VC Summer and Vogtle 3 & 4 is that the state regulatory agencies didn’t fulfill their obligations to the public in overseeing the progress of construction. For example, the technical staff at the Georgia Public Service Commission knew from the very start of construction that serious project management issues were developing. These issues were documented in a series of Georgia PSC staff reports starting in 2013.
For those of us who worked nuclear construction in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, reading the Georgia PSC staff reports is deja vu all over again. If the PSC commissioners had done what their staff had recommended in 2013 and had begun putting severe pressure on Southern Nuclear to get its act together, then what happened at Vogtle 3 & 4 could have been avoided. Cost overruns and schedule slippages might have still occurred, but they wouldn’t have been nearly of the same magnitude as what actually happened.
What would be the cost of a two-unit AP1000 reactor site built here in America if — contrary to what was done at VC Summer and at Vogtle 3 & 4 — design, fabrication, and construction are being performed under an effective and disciplined project management team, one which follows the QA program to the letter and which is highly proactive in tackling emerging problems and issues? As opposed to 25 billion dollars, would it be maybe 16 billion dollars? 17? 20?
there is an Arctic site, arctic sea ice forum, that has been putting up PIOMAS on a 2 weekly updated basis when available. Someone called Wipneus. Nothing up yet but I will mention it if and when he puts mid July up. There were a lot of comments after each posting due to the sad state of the sea ice volume but the site seems to have blocked most comments after the last two bi weekly postings.Only one Administrator’s comment has made it through linking to his blog [which has 12 comments].
An Energy Balance Model for Paleoclimate Transitions
Really interesting account of a model that shows tipping points, bifurcations, and multiple stable states at a given forcing especially in regards to when ice formed at the poles in paleoclimate. Even if you don’t like energy balance models, it is a good summary of the history and problems.
Been there done that got the t-shirt.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/unstable-ebm-fig-2-jpg1.jpg
Solutions of an energy-balance model (EBM), showing the global-mean temperature (T) vs. the fractional change of insolation (μ) at the top of the atmosphere. (Source: Ghil, 2013)
The 1-D climate model uses physically based equations to determine changes in the climate system as a result of changes in solar intensity, ice reflectance and greenhouse gases. With a small decrease in radiation from the Sun – or an increase in ice cover – the system becomes unstable with runaway ice feedbacks. Runaway ice feedbacks drive the transitions between glacial and interglacial states seen repeatedly over the past 2.58 million years. These are warm interludes – such as the present time – of relatively short duration and longer duration cold states. The transition between climate states is characterised by a series of step changes between the limits. It caused a bit of consternation in the 1970’s when it was realized that a very small decrease in solar intensity – or an increase in albedo – is sufficient to cause a rapid transition to an icy planet in this model (2).
Ghil’s model shows that climate sensitivity (γ) is variable. It is the change in temperature (ΔT) divided by the change in the control variable (Δμ) – the tangent to the curve as shown above. Sensitivity increases moving down the upper curve to the left towards the bifurcation and becomes arbitrarily large at the instability. The problem in a chaotic climate then becomes not one of quantifying climate sensitivity in a smoothly evolving climate but of predicting the onset of abrupt climate shifts and their implications for climate and society. The problem of abrupt climate change on multi-decadal scales is of the most immediate significance.
That one was only for Ice Ages. This one was looking at the last 100 million years and needs to be more sophisticated as a result.
The relevant bit is the last 100 years.
The relevant bit is how much the forcing matters even when you include other factors like continental drift and ocean circulations. Also that tipping points occur as a result of large forcing changes.
“What defines a climate change as abrupt? Technically, an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause. Chaotic processes in the climate system may allow the cause of such an abrupt climate change to be undetectably small.” NAS 2002
It seems you don’t quite get it.
If you don’t move along the curve, you don’t even get to the tipping point.
In the real world small changes – such as solar variability or insolation in Milankovic cycles – push the system past a threshold and change then occurs at a rate determined by internal responses in ice, dust, cloud, vegetation, etc,– abrupt and unpredictable – as a different behavior emerges in the system. It is the responses that change the energy dynamic of the planet.
This is seen in climate data at many scales. A dynamical systems explanation for Hurst effects in Nilometer data for instance – rather than infinite memory first proposed. All completely deterministic but seemingly random shifts in quasi standing waves in spatio-temporal chaos.
Milankovitch changes are not small in the same way that the current GHG changes aren’t. Even 1% is a lot.
Believe it or not they are very small.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/power-flux1.jpg
There is negligible net global forcing from Milankovic cycles. The big changes are in ice sheet responses. Or at smaller scales – shifts in ocean and atmospheric circulation.
Now – while you are still misrepresenting science rather than me – seems a good place to leave it.
They are ~1%. You can call that small or very small, but significant when sustained for long periods. We would not have Milankovitch cycles if there were not sustained, even if small, forcing changes.
I disagree.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2018/06/10/a-maximum-entropy-climate-earth-in-transient-energy-equilibrium-2/
You disagree with Milankovitch or what? How wrong was he?
Some of your graphs show how massively forcing dominates the OHC, but then you say things as though you don’t believe that forcing could possibly be important. It’s just incoherent ramblings through mainstream data making wrong assertions about it along the way.
Δ(ocean heat) ≈ Ein – Eout
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/ocean-heat-and-power-flux.jpg
This is just data and the majority of change in the system is not greenhouse gases.
Should I have to put up with your incredulity and misrepresentation?
See that trend? Greenhouse gases.
“What I find intriguing is the steady increase – with the annual cycles – in cumulative energy in less energy out. This is an apparent discrepancy between ocean heat and cumulative radiant imbalances early in the record that is a mystery. I’d suggest that there is a problem with the early Argo record – and that the planet has been warming – for multiple reasons – this century.”
But when you look at the second graph – there is annual cycle of negative to positive radiant imbalnces a large variability that cannot be greenhouse gases
That’s the elliptical orbit as I told you before. We are closer to the sun in January.
And yet both the rationale for retaining original units and an annual orbital eccentricity sketch (0.0167 eccentricity currently) are given. In this case only co-variance of the two data stream matters. J/m3 are of course simply W/m2 over the relevant period – months here. Can easily be done but there is no actual point to it.
The elliptical orbit causes a solar variation of 6%, so that should show up, and being integrated the peak would be in April. The point of showing J/m2 is that it would be the correct way to integrate W/m2 over time. What do you have there, Watt-months/m2?
The first two graphs are original and I don’t know anything like it Earth system science. The other graphs are the CERES data it is based on. The interpretation of which is starkly evident. Half of these are the raw data – rather than anomalies – that I haven’t seen anywhere but the CERES data products page.
It is far too short a record to say much meaningfully. Although I think that the discrepancy between Argo and Ceres in the early part of the record is likely a problem with Argo.
You may wave your hands around and call it incoherent – but I expect something a little more in a dispassionate science discussion – and you always disappoint.
Having a cumulative flux in W/m2 makes no sense. It should be J/m2, so I can’t figure out what you are trying to show there. As we’ve been through CO2 alone provides three times as much Joules as it takes to warm the ocean that much over that period. It is the dominant part of Ein-Eout when averaged over decades.
This is now all over the place. I can’t keep up.
But just finally – it is a cumulative radiant flux imbalance at toa. I could multiply it by a constant to get Joules but that doesn’t advance the point any. It should and it does co-vary with ocean heat. The correlation is 0.8.
And what I actually say is that greenhouse gas forcing is an artifice – what matters for changes in ocean heat is the instantaneous energy imbalance as it evolves over time. It surprised me that it is now possible to make a reasonable stab at this using raw CERES data.
That imbalance averages out to nearly 1 W/m2. CO2 alone provides 2 W/m2. Just saying.
Power flux imbalances change from negative to positive on an annual basis. The average is 0.8W/m2 – consistent with rates of ocean warming. The trend over the period of record is negative. Such large swings in imbalances cannot be due to greenhouse gases.
The result is a very large annual variation in energy from the Sun – the energy in component. Annual variability has significant implications for ocean heat change. Ocean heat does not change slowly as a result of greenhouse gases and thermal inertia but warms and cools rapidly in response to the very large annual signal.
2W/m2 as I gave said to yet again below assumes no response in the system – but the system has of course responded and the energy imbalance from greenhouse gases is not remotely 2W/m2. If there is energy equilibrium on an annual basis – and there is – the current greenhouse gas energy imbalance is at most 0.03W/m2. This is an order of magnitude less than obtained by assuming that all ocean warming is anthropogenic – it is not.
You may repeat your memes as much as you like endlessly it seems. But no you are wrong. And I resent needing to quote for the likes of you from something I wrote to show that your would be gotcha points have been considered and discussed.
The imbalance is due to the lag. The warming can’t keep up with the forcing change. The forcing change is dominated by GHGs, and 2 W/m2 is CO2 alone, and that is increasing by 0.3 W/m2 per decade, so the 0.8 W/m2 imbalance means that the lag is about 25 years. The earth has warmed enough only now to balance the forcing level as it was 25 years ago. There is thermal inertia. The deep ocean takes up energy that doesn’t go into the surface temperature (Planck) response, so the response lags the forcing.
.03 W/m2?!
Robert, are you saying that the expected 2 W/m2 has been reduced to .03 W/m2 because of, what, negative feedbacks? (or am i not understanding something here?)
That’s the annual increase in greenhouse gas forcing. Whether that results in larger energy imbalances at TOA depends on the time that it takes oceans to equilibriate. The so-called warming in the pipeline due to thermal inertia. Thermal inertia is of course a real thing – but the boundary conditions include both very small increment of greenhouse gas warming – and very large changes due to annual orbital variability. The oversimplified math of estimates of ‘eddy diffusion’ neglects the very rapid annual heating and cooling of oceans. The range of estimates of ‘eddy diffusion’ is even greater that the uncertainty of clouds. Somewhere between a year and a 1000 years. Physically the processes of heat transport in the oceans are fast involving turbulent mixing and convection. -.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bw0qrC4FB_l
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bw0qrC4FB_I
Jim D, i was testing this link here because i was having trouble posting it over with the new system at watts’. (some foul mouthed doofus needed some schooling on economics a la fonz… ☺️) i think that you might be interested in seeing this. It’s about u.s. federal reserve monetary policy post ww2. Former fed chair Bernanke gave this lecture at GWU. The first half hour of the video is the history lesson. (then he goes into quantitative easing for the remainder) This 30 minutes of video comprises just about everything one needs to know about the federal reserve and what it does. People can’t possibly understand economics without understanding what the fed does. i think this is very important for you in particular because i know that you have some interest in economics, particularly left leaning economics (as do i). It took me a decade+ to piece together the information in this video on my own. It was so wonderful to see it all put together into one short video. Plus, i learned a thing or two new and had a few others confirmed. i think this will be very much worth your while (even if its importance doesn’t sink in right away)…
Robert Ellison, i think that you should watch this video, too…
afonzarelli,
There is a fellow named Doug Noland that has been posting economic statistics, analysis and commentary for over a decade. His latest post is here:
http://creditbubblebulletin.blogspot.com/2018/06/weekly-commentary-great-fallacy.html
Where would your economic viewpoint fall compared to his?
I suspect the fed is becoming unprofitable and essentially must raise rates. It’ll really suck if we have an economic crises and it turns out the fed can’t lower rates to finance stimulus because it already blew its wad digging and refilling ditches since 2009.
The Fed gives almost all of its profit to the US Treasury:
https://i.imgur.com/rU2UZZt.png
Jack, i’m not exactly sure what his view point is. From the link that you gave, he came across as a reporter, objectively reporting the news. (it was kind of hard to tell by his bio, too) My take is that inflation in a growing economy is a non issue. As long as economies grow, that’s an indicator that folks are having no problems affording higher prices. Even when economies stall because of high inflation, it’s no worse than economies stalling from fed action of raising interest rates. Essentially, fears of inflation are way overblown and at great cost. And that cost is an economy that never reaches its full potential, lifting people out of poverty. (and as a dire consequence of this, poor people need subsidizing to the tune of trillions) It was refreshing to read in your link that chairman powell talks about a natural unemployment rate. i suspect that it’s his goal to get us to that rate, so i find that encouraging. Already, the u. s. unemployment rate is within .1% of being the lowest that it’s been in half a century. (we’re always better off with a bigger economic pie in spite of inflation)…
fonzie’s motto*:
better higher prices that people can afford than people so poor that they can’t afford cheaper prices
*(☺️)
Excellent lecture by Bernanke, one of the top experts on the Great Depression.
He mentioned William Martin, Chairman of the Fed in the 1950s and 1960s. Martin famously said that the Feds job was to take away the punch bowl just as the party was getting started.
Bernanke correctly recounted the role of the Fed in causing the 1981-82 recession by increasing the Federal Funds rate, eventually to 20%, in order to jump on runaway inflation with both feet. Just a few months into Reagan’s term the Democrats viciously attacked Reaganomics for the recession and double digit unemployment. Any Econ 101 student knew exactly what was going on. It was the Fed strategy of increasing interest rates. It was the correct strategy. The Democratic Party counted on the economic illiteracy of their base to lap up that criticism without blinking an eye. I’m sure to this day some older Democrats blame Reagan alone for the Recession.
The usual nonsense.
JFK ran on a plan to cut taxes. The republicans insisted tax cuts would cause inflation. JFK won and he cut taxes.
Inflation essentially doubled during the terms of each subsequent President. Johnson doubled JFK’s ~1%; Nixon doubled Johnson’s ~2%; Ford doubled Nixon’s ~4%.
Carter stopped that freight train, and was thanked with an election loss.
President Carter was determined to reign in inflation. He interviewed several prospective candidates to become Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He decided the person with the best plan was Paul Volcker.
Both Democrats.
Reagan wanted to replace Volcker, but people around him who knew he didn’t have a clue what he was doing persuaded him to keep Volcker.
Ceresco, nice to see you… It’s ironic that Reagan would get the blame because it was actually Carter who appointed Volker to the chair in August of 1979. That would make Carter, in essence, the godfather of conservative monetary policy(!)
i disagree that it was the correct strategy… As evidenced by the staying power of the economy then (even in the face of higher interest rates), people were able to handle the higher inflation. Were that not the case, the economy would have recessed on its own as it did after the first oil shock circa 1975. We’re never better off in a recession than we are when not in one. It’s always better when people are buying and selling more goods and services regardless of inflation(.) The solution to the higher inflation did not come from monetary policy under Reagan, rather it was the diversification of sources of oil that ultimately solved the problem. Once that happened, inflation returned to pre-embargo levels after the Reagan economy regained its footing (the recession being inherently low inflation). It was no mystery as to why we had the high inflation in the first place. It’s also no mystery as to why it ultimately went away.
The legacy of Volker is the never ending obsession of the fed over inflation to the detriment of the folks to this very day…
JCH, you’re ignoring the fact that when Kennedy took office unemployment stood at 7% and by the time Nixon took over, it had been cut in half to 3.5%. Further, when Ford became president we were still dealing with the fallout from the embargo and the crisis in ’79 came about after the sky rocketing price of oil after the Iranian revolution. A robustly growing economy is inherently inflationary and so are oil shocks. (there’s nothing wrong with the former, and the latter should’ve been solved by dealing with the energy crisis) The tragedy of Volker is that his implementation of conservative monetary policy has dogged us to this very day…
Volker should read Volcker…
I understand that Carter appointed Volcker but my point was that the run of mill Democrat knows zip about monetary policy and they have been brainwashed to be Keynesians and to believe the economy lives and dies from everything else but monetary policy. Apparently Bernanke and every other economist is wrong about what caused the 81-82 recession. Clearly having Fed Fund rates 18-19% higher than recent rates has a dampening effect on capital formation and business decisions to add jobs..
I’m not sure what JCH is blathering on about. He might have been zoned out in those days drinking the Carter kool aid.
No, ceresco, Bernanke knew that interest rates caused the recession. (he even mentions it in the video) In fact, higher interest rates have caused every recession at least as far back as the one in the early 80s. That’s the glory of Volcker, making sure that the fed keeps people out of work and money out of their hands…
i’ve got a reply to JCH stuck in moderation. (shouldn’t be too hard to convince him that the appointment of volcker was not one of carter’s greatest achievements)
afonzarelli,
I don’t understand why you like inflation. It’s not inflation that makes people better off. It’s real economic growth (i.e. after inflation). If not carefully controlled inflation can spiral out of control into hyperinflation. Inflation can benefit the rich to the detriment of the poor. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) mandate is to maintain Australia’ inflation between 2% and 3%. That has proved to be an excellent policy and the RBA has managed it well.
I’m not following our disagreement. Yes, Bernanke knew interest rates caused the recession. I’ve said it as much a couple of times. Maybe you don’t think it was the right strategy to throttle its neck before it became runaway inflation like they had in Germany in the 1920s where wheelbarrows were needed for the Marks to buy a loaf of bread. On that point I guess we do disagree. Actually, the Fed had a hand in causing recessions a few times before the 80s.
As Bernanke discussed, the Fed made a few miscalculations right from the start and some think they had a major role in the Great Depression, including the 1937-38 recession within the Big Enchillada. A couple of authors go as far as saying that if the long time NY Fed Chair, Benjamin Strong, had not croaked in 1928 we could have avoided the Depression. Maybe a stretch but interesting how dominant some personalities are seen as having affected the course of our economy.
I forgot a minor quibble I have with Bernanke’s depiction of the causes of the housing bubble. He mentioned it briefly but not with enough emphasis. That is the shift of the banking industry, including the shadow banks away from having “skin in the game”. Getting those mortgages off their balance sheet and creating tranches and securitizing those exotic instruments and creating those derivatives guaranteed the eventual outcome. It changed the behavior of everyone in that entire decision making process of making and underwriting mortgages. Even though the change occurred well before the bubble, I’m convinced that if the banks had to have kept those mortgages on their books their decisions would have been much more cautious and conservative. But there was an entire chain of incremental decisions by innumerable parties that made the entire system extremely vulnerable.
Housing and investments in housing had become so “risk free” over several decades that everyone put down their guard believing there was no risk. One executive VP at a major shadow bank said he spent less than 1% of his time on risk management of their housing investments. Bad choice.
In general inflation/deflation are an economy’s way to adjust for supply and demand in evolving markets, and I think there is a lot of politically motivated overreaction to both.
For instance, read articles about zero/negative interest rates. They’re hysterical.
JCH, thanks for the graphic.
https://www.google.com/search?biw=964&bih=725&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=SSMpW5C2DYP2zgKVgqzgCw&q=federal+reserve+profits&oq=federal+reserve+profits&gs_l=img.3..0i30k1j0i24k1.159065.159572.0.160387.2.2.0.0.0.0.80.158.2.2.0….0…1c.1.64.img..0.2.158….0.n1hfpagJgaY#imgrc=HRX_CmYamLMdtM:&spf=1529422826299
JCH, I agree. I even think aversion to deflation probably prolonged the recession.
Peter, it’s not that i like inflation, it’s that the cure is worse than the disease. Bernanke gives the reason for higher inflation in the video as low unemployment. So, their solution is to keep the u. s. unemployment rate artificially high. (originally at 5%, with greenspan down to about 4%) Not only does this keep people out of work, but when they do manage to land a job wages are less than they otherwise would be. In essence the fed is curbing inflation by making people so poor that they can’t afford cheaper prices. (hence fonzie’s motto… ☺️) You are right when you say that it’s real economic growth (i.e. after inflation) that makes people better off. People are better off when they are buying & selling more goods & services. (we’re always better off with a bigger economic pie regardless of inflation)…
Peter, just out of curiosity, what does the unemployment rate in australia look like (over time)?
Cerescokid: “the shift of the banking industry, including the shadow banks away from having “skin in the game”. Getting those mortgages off their balance sheet and creating tranches and securitizing those exotic instruments and creating those derivatives guaranteed the eventual outcome.”
I totally agree. But a more complex constellation of malignancies leading up to the housing bubble can be traced back over 50 years ago. During the LBJ administration the courts began weakening Glass-Steagall by liberalizing its interpretation in order to allow for expansion of banking activities. The consequence from 1960’s era court rulings created a securities framework allowing banks and non-banks to develop unique financial instruments that blurred the distinction between banking and securities products. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency continued issuing aggressive interpretations of Glass-Steagall up to the late 1970s, upheld in the courts. Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act wouldn’t have been possible without the liberalization of Glass-Steagall interpretation. While the CRA didn’t cause the crash (nor did his deregulation of the S&L industry directly tie-in), the CRA was certainly a cog in the wheel later on when it was ultimately given teeth by Clinton who used punitive measures to force banks to play ball.
Besides the liberalization of Glass-Steagall, consider that the first Mortgage Backed Security was created by Fannie Mae in the early 1970’s; and the first subprime in the early 1990s. One can easily piece together the the 2008 crash by following the bread crumbs all the way back to 1960s courts, the genesis. It took nearly 50 years for the constellation of financial malignancies to metastasize, starting with liberalized banking policies, then; legislative actions, creative banking, house flipping, Wall Street shenanigans; etc. A terminal disease fueled by excesses. The years leading to the Great Recession were symptoms from all the poor policies and excesses that compounded over decades.
Australia has had uninterrupted economic growth since inflation targets were introduced in 1993. 5% is about the ‘rate of structural unemployment’ – people between jobs, moving in and out the workplace, etc. Unemployment rates have hovered about that 5% mark.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/inflation-long-run.gif
Last para should have read:
As “consequence”
of the liberalization of Glass-Steagall, consider that the first Mortgage Backed Security was created by Fannie Mae…
Ceresco, we knew where the inflation was coming from in the early 80s. Oil price shocks. So the way do deal with it was address the reason for higher oil prices (as eventually did happened under reagan). The way not to deal with it is by causing a recession a la the federal reserve. If the higher inflation ever got to the point where the populace couldn’t handle it, then a recession would happen on its own (as happened after the first oil shock under nixon/ford). If the high inflation of that period wasn’t causing a recession on its own, then we were better off with the inflation than with heavy handed monetary policy. We’re no worse off with inflation than we are with the fed undermining the value of labor…
Robert, i see that your unemployment rate was somewhere down around 2% from the 40s through the mid seventies. i’d be interested to see what inflation adjusted (or real) wages looked like from the 40s onward. From what little i’ve been able to gather, it seems they’ve just started with those records a couple decades ago (am i correct about that? and if so, how come?)
The first two slides were obvious enough. It was the failure of the US to stick to first principles since the tech bubble burst and 911 that initiated the crisis. Then there was QE that still hangs like a sword of Damocles over global economies.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2016/03/11/all-bubbles-burst-laws-of-economics-for-the-new-millennium/
Mop up crew
I agree. This chain of events, as innocuous and small at each step as they were, still set up the entire financial system for one big fall. Even the CRA, as well meaning as it was, still added fuel to the fire. I’ve never spoken to a banker who didn’t say they felt a gun to their head from the enforcement provisions of the CRA.
In sure those politicians who voted along the way over the 40 period for some of these changes feel no responsibility for their part. Only from the perspective of decades later can an autopsy be performed and contributions be assigned.
“The currently used reference level 1850–1900 [the ‘reference level’ baseline] represents… represents the coldest phase of the last 10,000 years” and, solar activity in the latter half of the 20th century was the most active in 3,000 years. Put it altogether and you’ve dished up a heaping helping of hot, scientific malarkey.
The whole argument about what is driving natural climate change is about to be turned on its head.
The rate-of-change in mean global atmospheric temperature is a much better indicator of climate forcings than just the mean temperature.
If you filter-out periods in the rate-of-change in the global mean temperature that are less than 7 years, you find that there are periodic warming events that can be simply explained using the 9.1-year and 20.3-year cycles in the lunar tidal strength caused by extreme Perigean Spring tides.
The simple reason for this is that extreme Perigean Sring tides that align with the Equinoxes and Solstices coincide with the times where the times where the lunar-induced variations in the Earth’s rotational acceleration change sign. The most extreme of these events produce Kelvin-like waves that propagate along the Earth’s (Coriolis) equator in the form of Madden-Julian Oscillations (MJO’s). It is these that periodically trigger El Nino events that play an important role in the overall warming and cooling of the Earth.
Paper I – Published
Ian Robert George Wilson* and Nikolay S Sidorenkov, A Luni-Solar Connection to Weather and Climate I: Centennial Times Scales, J Earth Sci Clim Change 2018, 9:2
Paper II – out soon
Ian Robert George Wilson* and Nikolay S Sidorenkov, A Luni-Solar Connection to Weather and Climate II: Extreme Perigean New/Full Moons and El Niño Events
astroclimateconnection: The rate-of-change in mean global atmospheric temperature is a much better indicator of climate forcings than just the mean temperature.
Please let us know when the second paper appears. And how well the modeling results hold up in future data.
Meanwhile, what do you think of this one?
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/4/6/eaao5297.full.pdf
The paper you cite uses multiple regression with known forcing factors. The results are flawed because they do not include the effects of extreme Perigean New/Full tides upon the ENSO phenomenon. GIGO.
astroclimateconnection: GIGO.
I did ask. As with yours and others, I shall be interested to see how will the model fits with future data.
astroclimateconnection The results are flawed because they do not include the effects of extreme Perigean New/Full tides upon the ENSO phenomenon.
How much could their prediction accuracy improve if they did include those effects?
Matthewrmarler, Thank you for your comments and questions. I will let you know here when the second and third paper in the series when they are published. It is difficult to know the effects of not including the following forcing factors upon future changes in World mean temperature:
a) The 11-year cycle in up-whelming of cold water along the eastern borders of the South Pacific Ocean
b) The 9.1-year and 20.2937-year Perigean New/Full Moon cycles
c) The 59.75, 88.5 (Gleissberg), 146.25 and 208.0(de Vries)-year lunar tidal cycles
d) The lunar tidal influences that initiate El Nino events roughly once every 4.5 years.
b) alone can explain most long-term warming events over the last 150 years.
astroclimateconnection: I will let you know here when the second and third paper in the series when they are published.
Thank you. I look forward to them.
Sucking CO2 from air is cheaper than thought [link]
They wrote:
In the end, the economics of CO2 extraction will depend on factors that vary by location, including the price of energy and whether or not a company can access government subsidies.
CO2 causes known good. No proof that CO2 causes harm has ever been provided.
Removing CO2 from the air is damaging the growth of green plants and the taking of taxes to pay subsidies is damaging our economy and damages our energy production. The tax money should be spent on something useful, not something harmful.
CO2 in the atmosphere doesn’t cause plants to grow. It is a phenotypical adaption of many plants to varying levels of CO2 that reduces water loss in high CO2 conditions. The evolutionary advantage of this adaptation may arise from rapidly varying levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Something not seen in the ice core record – but is seen in stomatal indices. There is an unresolved paradox there.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/steinthorsdottir-fig-9-e1519868798827.png
Water is a key limiting factor in plant growth – but there are many limiting factors and all these – including water availability – are better addressed in cropping and grazing systems by restoring carbon to soils.
Robert I Ellison: CO2 in the atmosphere doesn’t cause plants to grow.
Right. If there is a “cause” of plant growth, it is sunlight. CO2 is merely the main ingredient in a process that is dependent on CO2 concentration.
Water is commonly a limiting factor. The phenotypical adaptation allows access to the required CO2 with reduced water loss in high CO2 conditions. It is not CO2 that is limiting growth.
https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2013/Deserts-greening-from-rising-CO2
http://broome.soil.ncsu.edu/ssc051/Lec3.htm
Robert I Ellison: The phenotypical adaptation allows access to the required CO2 with reduced water loss in high CO2 conditions.
that being the case (we have read it multiple times these past few years), would not CO2 levels higher than they are now be beneficial, hence desirable?
You have read it have you? If you had read any of the science or watched any of the videos I have posted – you would understand how problematic it might be.
“On the face of it, elevated CO2 boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forestry and agriculture in such areas; however there will be secondary effects that are likely to influence water availability, the carbon cycle, fire regimes and biodiversity, for example,” Dr Donohue said.
Now you might deny that on the basis of absolute ignorance – but you might also understand that there are much better ways to enhance productivity and to build a more drought and flood resilient agriculture.
There is a level of ignorance here that promotes a one dimensional magic CO2 bullet over living soils, enhanced water holding capacity, enhanced nutrient and micro nutrient status of soils, recharging aquifers, drought and flood resilience, reduced impact on aquatic ecosystems, greater food security, faster economic development, biodiversity conservation, etc.
But yeah – CO2 in the atmosphere is great and he loves it. He should spend less time positing absurdities and more time seeking knowledge.
Dr Curry,
I add my thanks to Willis at the top of the comments for your unceasing efforts in climate education, integrity and helpful connections.
As I mentioned to you this Jan, I retired after 46 years and lost access to scientific resources without extra efforts at library’s and great expense.
Your week in review and general articles and presentations have been so helpful in allowing me and, i am sure, others to keep abreast of the science.
Thanks again.
Scott
Bret Stephens: They Dying Art of Disagreement [link]
This fellows argument is incoherent. He basically says that “if only we had better (elite sponsored) journalism and better (elite sponsored) education, we would be better able to communicate and find different bridges to the same truth.”
Essentially, his argument is for better social engineering, i.e. to kill all dissent via sophisticated forms of brainwashing.
Typical New York elitist intellectual garbage.
Alan Bloom, author of the “Closing of the American Mind”, was a student of Leo Strauss, who advocate the ‘Noble Lie’, i.e. that a select few elites should get together and fool the masses with lies about religion, Russian enemies, a war on Terror, etc, etc… to fool the masses into having some sense of reason and purpose, which, of course, as nihilistic and brilliant elites, they could certainly not hold in their own.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-iraqwarphiloshophy/article_1542.jsp
Questioning truth, reality and the role of science [link]
I am happy to see someone stand up for philosophy amongst the quagmire of half wit nerds who dismiss it in favor of mindless scientific materialism.
The following is a very interesting takedown of such dimwits and a very interesting expose on the very specific, narrow, and, ultimately, only slightly interesting type of information that science provides:
Stephen’s entire argument is that disagreements are a result of people not being as properly educated as himself. consider:
To which I give an alternate view. Which, of course, by Stephen’s argument should not exist, because, all disagreements are a result of someone being wrong, not because there are differing interests and power elements in play:
Australia’s carbon tax Mark II
Posted on 11:13 am, June 18, 2018 by Alan Moran
“I have an article this morning in Quadrant-on-line addressing the latest developments involving The National Energy Guarantee (NEG) Australia’s new carbon tax. This is to operate by requiring electricity retailers to ensure their supplies conform to a progressively declining level of greenhouse gas emissions. And, as each generator has a unique carbon footprint, there will be a diversity of prices.
We are, therefore reintroducing a price on carbon, the carbon tax, enclosed in a vanilla wrapper, disarmingly advertised as “technology neutral”.
Not only do we have a carbon tax but its implementation adds a new complexity to the electricity market.
As renewables are more costly than coal and gas the average price to households and businesses will increase.
It is easy to see why this economy-wrecking policy has been put into place. The original carbon tax was introduced by Julia Gillard and devised by the then Secretary of the Climate Change Department, Martin Parkinson. Malcolm Turnbull, as leader of the Opposition, supported that policy and, after refusing to reconsider, was defeated on the issue by Tony Abbott. Under Gillard, Parkinson was promoted to the Secretary of Treasury.
On becoming Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, in line with his commitment, repealed the carbon tax. After a decent interval he also fired Martin Parkinson.
On becoming PM, Turnbull appointed Parkinson to head up his own Department, from which position he has immense influence to dictate energy and climate policy. Moreover as head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Parkinson is able to play a key role in selecting appointments in the bureaucracy proper and in the quangos that administer and advise on energy policy.
This has placed irresistible pressure on the Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg who has to sell the policy and seek out ways he can neutralize some of its features.”
The article in Quadrant Online is here: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/06/neg-standing-fast-sinking-ship/
Peter,
Thanks for the link of the article. Very good graphic re reductions.
Did we say thanks for the destruction of Australian industrial systems via high energy costs? Also thanks to Germany.
China and India continue rationale emissions policy and promise us reductions in the far future for religious absolution for decades to come.
These politicians make up problems they claim to solve with magic windmills and solar panels while real hard problems continue to be ignored. Much easier to fight and solve an imaginary problem.
Scott
While Australia is limiting its citizens’ access to coal, it’s doubling it’s exports of coal to other nations.
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-06/19/c_137264467.htm
What do you call a global warming policy that simply moves emissions to other nations? One thing you don’t call it is an emissions reduction policy, but that’s what they call it.
It is absurdities like this that, in the United States, we note and like to say “if you want more Trump, this is how you get more Trump.”
The hypocrisy goes deep. The next generating plants built in Australia are likely to be high efficiency low emission (HELE) designs albeit with considerable angst. HELE technology is ultra clean and safe with lower CO2 emissions. The technology is being deployed widely in Asia, Africa, China and India. All perfectly in accord with Paris commitmnts.
Adani is an Indian company with a coal project in development in the Galilee basin in Central Queensland. Serial and vexatious litigation – all actions brought over years have been lost – have delayed the project and added to costs. The litigation it turns out – as was revealed just days ago – was funded by an American foundation with ties to Hilary Clinton. The coal from the Adani mine would bring energy and development to hundreds of millions of Indian poor. The legal actions have failed at every step – but have succeeded in frustrating development. The challenges are trivial in themselves but serve a wider agenda.
Indian coal imports are expected to increase to a quarter billion US dollars in the next 16 years. It is this demand that the Adani Carmichael coal mine in Central Queensland is planned to help meet. All within India’s Paris commitments. Using trivial legal points to game a system to delay such projects in the hope that they will just go away is a profoundly undemocratic fraud – using foreign money allied to foreign political parties to pay for it doubly so. To do so in support of denying energy and development to the world’s poor exposes the moral vacuum at the heart of our green elites.
If you want use coal (or gas or nuclear) to make electricity in India you will need to boil a lot of water.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-water-crisis-shortage-niti-aayog-report-drought-mismanagement-a8403286.html
“India is suffering from the worst water crisis in its history and around 600 million people face a severe water shortage, according to a government think tank.
Approximately 200,000 people die every year due to inadequate access to clean water and it’s “only going to get worse” as 21 cities are likely to run out of groundwater by 2020.”
This could be fake news. Anyone find a link that debunks this?
Climate has nothing to do with this crisis. It’s all man made by Turkey and Iran. Check out the money quote ‘lowest levels in living memory”!! Come on folks this is Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization.
“A severe water crisis in Iraq has forced the government to suspend all cultivation of rice, a staple in the war-torn country’s diet.
An unusually bad drought, coupled with new dam projects upstream of its main rivers, has led the government’s agriculture ministry to take the drastic step of halting all farming of rice, corn and cereals that demand large amounts of water.
“The agricultural plan for the summer was modified because the quantities of water needed are not available”, Hamid al-Nayef, a ministry spokesman, said. “The ministry does not take this decision lightheartedly.”
The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which supply some 98 per cent of the country’s water, are at their lowest levels in living memory.”
I think the death estimate is on the low side. Sure water is boiled but it is then cooled and discharged or recirculated. And if you look at the paper on the Indian monsoon you might notice a pattern. Think Sir Gilbert Walker. I am happy to discuss global water management at the drop of a hat. But you need to make some effort in understanding it’s context.
It’s really not a lot of deaths if you just remember India is adding about 15 million people a year to their existing 1.3 billion population. Logic would dictate using only closed loop systems with such a tight water situation. This might help:
http://news.mit.edu/2018/new-system-recovers-fresh-water-power-plants-0608
I gave not a clue why I was moderated. I said – and it was – just above that the estimate of deaths from polluted water is more likely low and that the
water in generating plants is either returned to the source – more often – recirculated. I said ge should read harder.
It is a quite pointless discussion if what he imagines I said is quite obviously not what I said.
RE: How a belief in beauty has triggered a crisis in physics
From Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder:
“I can’t believe what this once-venerable profession has become, Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can’t explain what was not observed. And they’re not even good at that.”
The Multiverse Madness by Sabine
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/01/22/579666359/scientific-theory-and-the-multiverse-madness
Sabine is one of the best theoretical physicists. She also makes music videos
She’s so crude.
I’m sure her grandparents are so proud of her.
I spent a bit of time getting to know this lady’s writings.
She is somewhat interesting in her extreme self-confidence, her snarky charisma, and her general wit.
However, she seems to be stuck in a vortex of incredibly stagnant thinking.
Her tweets are constantly leftist social justice warrior nonsense, about how Trump is Hiddler, immigration for Europe is great, Brexit is horrible, etc, etc… But her attitude is interesting, because she takes a 100% elitist view that the people who support such political positions are stupid, and she knows better and is there to school us.
Scientifically she seems to be a sort of bland Richard Dawkins wanna-be, complete with the metaphysically stunted arguments that the new atheists love to toss around about scientific determinism, lack of free will, etc… In one tweet she talks about how scientists should answer the layman’s questions as ‘this is the state of knowledge as it stands’, with absolutely no room for discussion or doubt. Yet, on the other hand, she admits in her book that science is, generally, a bunch of baloney theories with no grounding in reality and no evidence.
A lack of cognitive dissonance, arrogance, political delusion, and stagnant adherence to the failing Whig ideology of Scientism seem to plague this potentially talented lady.
Rather: overabundance of cognitive dissonance.
She is an atheistic cliche.
Fick dich
Angela Gossow is proud of her and your boring verbosity proves you’re extremely jealous of her
This was highlighted at the upper right of this page:
The land ice contribution to sea level during the
satellite era
https://t.co/VROZqfGiCN
An argument has been used that says, since AR5, new studies have been done. At the study I am seeing less than an inch a decade of SLR from major sources ice melt. Spit balling that that is half of SLR, we are about 2 inches per decade. The plots say to me that this is ice. Ice accumulated over thousands of years in cold places. The ice covers an area when compared to the area of the oceans that is small.
Antarctica plus Greenland land area is about 3% of the total of the Earth’s land area. So you need 33 feet of ice no more across it all to get a foot of SLR. Or 330 feet over the most vulnerable 10% of it.
Is the ice unstable? We don’t do unstable. It’s hard.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1727294937386761
Some US examples.
The numbers of wetland birds have increased – although migratory shore birds continue to decline. Other bird population continue to decline. “North American grassland and dryland species have declined by 28 per cent and 27 per cent respectively since 1968; but North American wetland bird species have increased by 40 per cent (Butchart et al. 2010; NABCI US Committee 2009).”
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/bird-populations.png
“The fishes of North America’s inland waters, the most diverse of any temperate region, currently face an unprecedented conservation crisis.
About 40% are imperiled or presumed extinct, and the portion of imperiled fishes is increasing.
Threats to this fauna include habitat destruction, introduced species, altered hydrology, pollution, disease, over-exploitation, and other factors.
Extinctions and imperilment of fishes occur among diverse taxonomic groups, across regions, and in a variety of habitats.
280 taxa are endangered (E), i.e., in imminent (fewer than 50 years) danger of extinction, or extirpation (loss of populations) throughout most portions of a taxon’s range.
190 are threatened (T), or in imminent danger of becoming endangered.
230 are vulnerable (V), that is, in imminent danger of becoming threatened, which is comparable to a designation of “Special Concern” by many agencies and conservation organizations.
61 are presumed extinct (X), meaning a taxon that has not been observed for over 50 years. Two subcategories are included: Possibly Extinct (Xp), a taxon suspected to be extinct, as evidenced by more than 20 but less than 50 years since living representatives were observed, and Extirpated in Nature (Xn), where all populations in natural habitats are presumed eliminated but surviving individuals are maintained in captivity.”
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/us-fishes.jpg
After 2 decades of thought to simplify comprehension of the conventional ideas of the effects of CO2 on air temperatures, I have distilled the proposition that there is no effect. The reason is that each time a photon capture happens, it increases energy in one place (the molecule) and deprives another place of the same energy. Summed over the whole atmosphere and its earthly interactions, I get a zero effect.
The simple explanation for a simple analogue concerns the blanket to keep the sleeper warmer. This effect can be felt by the sleeper who is often described, but the cooling of the air the other side of the blanket, deprived of its lot, is seldom described.
This sounds too simple to be true, so I am now in the process of showing how it is a wrong proposition. Please help. Geoff.
Geoff Sherrington: deprives another place of the same energy.
Extra Terrestrial space?
“Paper relating the internal variability of climate models to their sensitivity is out in this month’s Journal of Climate: [link]…”
When the solar forcing of natural climate variability gets misinterpreted as internal variability, the shortwave feedback can appear the complete reverse of what is. Coupled with the circular reasoning that warming drives an increase in shortwave, while the increase in shortwave actually drives the warming. The warm AMO phase related declines in low cloud cover since the mid 1990’s are a negative feedback to low solar, and have driven warming.
Solar forcing is far too modest to make much of a different. It is mostly internal responses to small changes. Such as the coupled ocean/atmospheric physics – Rayleigh–Bénard convection – that produces more open cell cloud over warm ocean surfaces.
That hypothesis is that solar UV chemistry influences polar surface pressures modulating meridional or zonal wind patterns and gyres in all the oceans. The later causing sea surface temperature variability in the north Atlantic and eastern and central Pacific. And this century has been a mixed bag.
“Solar forcing is far too modest to make much of a different. It is mostly internal responses to small changes.”
Both baseless assumptions.
“That hypothesis is that solar UV chemistry influences polar surface pressures modulating meridional or zonal wind patterns and gyres in all the oceans.”
That hypothesis is irrational, as AMO anomalies are warm around sunspot minimum during a warm AMO phase, but cold around sunspot minimum during a cold AMO phase. That rules out all solar metrics which regularly follow sunspot cycles.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/esrl-amo/from:1880/mean:13/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1880/normalise
The only solar metric that can possibly account for that phase reversal is the solar wind pressure-temperature.
https://snag.gy/d2v3aJ.jpg
http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Goode_Palle_2007_JASTP.pdf
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/5/2/024001/meta
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2017GL074342
etc etc
The problem with denizens is that they expect that everyone pulls it out of their nether regions.
But the world is complex and dynamic and I can’t imagine that clouds are not an internal response.
Robert I Ellison: Solar forcing is far too modest to make much of a different.
How is that known? Lots of your posts have large changes in outputs caused by small changes in parameters or inputs. How is it known that small changes in solar forcing can no produce surprisingly large changes in climate?
(I conjectured that you meant “changes” in solar forcing.)
I can’t imagine that clouds are not an internal response.
Limits to your imagination are not important.
Yes – your’re right – clouds radiative forcing is not a large response to small changes in the system. It is not dynamic, deterministic chaos in a complex system. They are not internal at all – they are made by aliens.
Robert I Ellison: Yes – your’re right – clouds radiative forcing is not a large response to small changes in the system. It is not dynamic, deterministic chaos in a complex system. They are not internal at all – they are made by aliens.
Final answer?
I’m following Mark Twain’s advice.
http://blog.sleepingangel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/quotescover-JPG-49qm.jpg
And it’s not that one.
Week by week solar wind variations are regularly 200% and occasionally 300-400%.
Robert I Ellison: I can’t imagine that clouds are not an internal response.
Even if cloud condensation nuclei are moderated by cosmic rays that in turn are moderated by the intensity of the solar wind? I am not saying that is what happens, but surely (a) you can imagine it and (b ) it might be important.
Solar forcing is far too modest to make much of a different. It is mostly internal responses to small changes.
How exactly is it known that a 0.1% change in TSI (or a 100% change in UV intensity) can not produce an 0.3% change in global mean temperature. I am not saying there is strong evidence of either, but how is ti known not to be possible?
And in those sentences, does not the second imply that the first is not likely true?
The standard definitions of internal and external apply.
Robert I Ellison: Solar forcing is far too modest to make much of a different. It is mostly internal responses to small changes. Such as the coupled ocean/atmospheric physics – Rayleigh–Bénard convection – that produces more open cell cloud over warm ocean surfaces.
That hypothesis is that solar UV chemistry influences polar surface pressures modulating meridional or zonal wind patterns and gyres in all the oceans. The later causing sea surface temperature variability in the north Atlantic and eastern and central Pacific.
Are you saying that UV fluctuations are unrelated to solar forcing changes?
Or that the “hypothesis” of the second paragraph is false?
I always regret any interaction with Matthew.
“Climate variations, both in the mean state and in other statistics such as, for example, the occurrence of extreme events, may result from radiative forcing, but also from internal interactions between components of the climate system. A distinction can therefore be made between externally and internally induced natural climate variability and change.”
Solar variability is at most a trigger pushing the system past a threshold.
“What defines a climate change as abrupt? Technically, an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause. Chaotic processes in the climate system may allow the cause of such an abrupt climate change to be undetectably small.”
I think I may have quoted that before.
” How is it known that small changes in solar forcing can no produce surprisingly large changes in climate?”
This gets science backwards.
1. In science there is no “knowledge” in the way we know that 2+2 = 4
There is the best explanation, which is Always contingent.
It could always be otherwise. For example, we dont know
that the laws of physics wont change tommorrow. What we observe
is that the laws we think we have identified, explain our past observations and allow us to predict, with UNCERTAINTY (lack of knowledge) future observations. We dont know those laws wont change.
We assume they will be constant. We dont know that unicorns cant produce large changes in climate.
2. History gives us a series of imperfact natural experiments. A series
of solar forcing varying peak to trough in a very small way. We observe
no consistent global climate effect of this change in forcing. That doesnt mean there could not be solar unicorns, and solar multipliers, but to date
no one has found one.
3. If you want to propose a solar unicorn, your job is to define how to look for it, and further how it does a BETTER JOB than the existing explanation. once upon a time folks thought cosmic ray unicorns could be causing changes in global climate. They looked, no luck, no unicorn
is it logically possible that there is some secret solar uncorn connection?
Sure, its Logically possible, but empirically unlikely and more importantly its empricially unnecessary to explain the observations we have.
https://i.imgur.com/yvrMXFy.png
“Since irradiance variations are apparently minimal, changes in the Earth’s climate that seem
to be associated with changes in the level of solar activity—the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice age for example—
would then seem to be due to terrestrial responses to more subtle changes in the Sun’s spectrum of radiative output. This
leads naturally to a linkage with terrestrial reflectance, the second component of the net sunlight, as the carrier of the
terrestrial amplification of the Sun’s varying output.” http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Goode_Palle_2007_JASTP.pdf
Robert I Ellison: “Climate variations, both in the mean state and in other statistics such as, for example, the occurrence of extreme events, may result from radiative forcing, but also from internal interactions between components of the climate system. A distinction can therefore be made between externally and internally induced natural climate variability and change.”
Solar variability is at most a trigger pushing the system past a threshold.
I don’t disagree with that, especially not the “may result”. I might note that “at most” is not well chosen, when the threshold is important. **
contrast with:
Robert I Ellison: Solar forcing is far too modest to make much of a different.
Pushing past a threshold could be “much of a differen[ce]”. That solar forcing (or changes in solar forcing) is “far to modest” is not something that can be considered really well supported by lots of data from relevant, sensitive research. All we can say so far is that a 0.1% change in TSI and a 100% change in UV is not strongly correlated with the the 0.3% change in global mean temperature; with the caveat that studies to date have little statistical power to detect such a relationship should it actually be present – especially if the solar forcing effect is to push past a threshold.
** As though to say: too much sodium in the diet will “at most” push the plasma concentration so high as to result in distorted electrical signal conduction in the heart muscles and hence A-FIB or V-FIB.
Carbon dioxide does warm the planet.
https://i2.wp.com/teachingclimatelaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/NaturalV.jpg?resize=355%2C300
And the only possibility for solar is a terrestrial amplification as Goode et al suggest.
This is science as investigation and not piddling around with over interpretation of may or at most. It may is that it does and at most is warranted because the temperature variability otherwise is 0.01 to 0.03 degrees C. And your skating around the distinction between internal and external variability is just monumentally obtuse.
Robert I Ellison: And your skating around the distinction between internal and external variability is just monumentally obtuse.
Robert I Ellison: Solar forcing is far too modest to make much of a different [sic].
There is no evidence for the second quote above. What you wrote, and that I quoted earlier, contradicted it, since solar forcing might make a big enough difference.
If I “skated around” the difference between internal and external variability, quote me. The quantitative effects on climate of changes in solar forcing depend on the internal dynamics of the climate system. I have not written anything contradicting that. Given the (partially studied) dynamics of the climate system, small changes in solar forcing (say 0.1%) might have appreciable effects on climate (say 0.3% change in global mean temperature.)
You should “retract” or apologize for your claim that Solar forcing is far too modest to make much of a different [sic].
Didn’t I show you this (sic).
https://i2.wp.com/teachingclimatelaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/NaturalV.jpg
SFA really. Is there a terrestrial amplification? None that you would understand.
Steve Mosher: ” How is it known that small changes in solar forcing can no produce surprisingly large changes in climate?”
This gets science backwards.
How about: What is the support for the claim that small changes in solar forcing can no[t] produce surprisingly large changes in climate? Especially in light of claims that the climate system is a chaotic system in which small changes in input can possibly produce surprisingly large changes in observed values, can indeed push the system across a threshold.
I think that your fascination with unicorns is misplaced in the climate discussion. Unicorns have less information relative to effects of small solar fluctuations than the famous “apples” relative to “oranges”.
for my specific cases: What is the support for the claim that a 0.1% change in TSI can not produce a 0.3% change in global mean temperature; or for the claim that a 100% increase in UV from the sun can not produce a 0.3% increase in global mean temperature? A search for estimable relations has not produced convincing results that they do exist, but the statistical analyses available to date have had very low statistical power to detect relationships of the hypothesized strength. Occam’s Razor should not imply Occam’s Lobotomy: what hasn’t been found to date can be confidently asserted not to exist. Think of all the entities that were found before they were necessary, like the van Allan Radiation belts.
“The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10712-012-9175-1
So we know it happened but why?
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8535
We can’t depend on these guys to find their arses with a map.
The phase change between sunspot cycles and AMO anomalies rules out TSI or UV variability being the dominant solar driver. The only plausible solar driver is the solar wind temperature-pressure.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/esrl-amo/from:1880/mean:13/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1880/normalise
What Steve MacIntyre notes about Antarctic ice “gain” is also true of “sea level rise”. Both comprise in their entirety – or even more than their entirety – in the mysterious and opaque isostatic adjustment. Take this away, and they both disappear.
Phil, I am digging into the isostatic adjustment issue. Do you have any references on this? Thx
If the altitude of the Antarctic Ice Cap were remaining constant, a large amount of ice could be flowing into the ocean and replaced from below by rebound. However, that would cause no SLR, because the ocean floor around Antarctica must be subsiding somewhere to provide the material that caused rebound. In other words, one could get SLR right even if you badly incorrect about the isostatic adjustment.
However, the consensus doesn’t use this approach. They calculate a change in the VOLUME of ocean water and apply a GLOBAL GIA that is independent from the assumptions about rebound under Antarctica. In theory, they may be assuming a large rebound under Antarctica to get a large volume change and an inconsistently smaller rebound when converting a global volume change to a global change in SLR
Judy
I don’t have a lot of references on this. However whatever correction is made for Antarctic ice gain and loss over the Holocene, and the response of the landmass to these changes, must be a difficult task requiring knowledge of what happened in Antarctica over the Holocene.
For instance, Weaver et al 2003:
http://home.sandiego.edu/~sgray/MARS350/deglaciation.pdf
show that 14,600 years ago there was a huge ice sheet collapse in Antarctica, which by then had been steadily warming under obliquity forcing for about 5000 years. This gave rise to what is called Meltwater Pulse 1A (MPW 1a), which caused 20m of sea level rise in about 500 years, and initiated the Bolling-Allerød D-O-like warm spike (followed in reaction by the Younger Dryas).
So clearly around Holocene inception there was a big loss of land ice from Antarctica. However over the course of the Holocene the warmer moist atmosphere caused more snow, so at some point Antarctic land ice loss (as evidenced by mwp 1a) would have reversed to ice gain from all that snow.
Presumably the Antarctic land mass responded to more ice by being pushed down and to less ice by springing back up. If one wants to make an isostatic correction for Antarctica one needs to know reasonably accurately the history of land ice loss then gain over the whole Holocene inception and Holocene. I’m not sure that the state of this knowledge is good enough to allow this. This all adds a significant question mark to Antarctic isostatic adjustment, which is unfortunate in regard to both Antarctic ice volume changes and sea level, which require this adjustment to be very accurate since both metrics are in fact little more than derived factors of isostatic adjustment.
thx
This link is about a recent study involved with estimates of GIA affecting West Antarctica.
https://warnercnr.source.colostate.edu/antarctic-ice-sheet-is-melting-but-rising-bedrock-below-could-slow-it-down/
I can understand the difficulty of measuring net surface snow/ice accumulation if the isostatic adjustment is uncertain. But I wonder if a more direct measurement might not be possible: set a steel rod on a fairly large base, with the base located well below the firn (that is, to the depth of more-or-less complete compaction) then use a very accurate (GPS) measurement over time at the top of the steel rod. That should give the net isostatic movement, since surface accumulation would not influence the measured altitude of the rod top.
“Pre-industrial T have been more variable than previously thought…currently used reference level [for preindustrial] represents end of the Little Ice Age, the coldest phase of the entire last 10,000 years” [link] …
You mean there wasn’t a pre-industrial garden of Eden? Blasphemy!
https://i.imgur.com/RmqKVxC.png
https://i.imgur.com/V7NhwA5.png
https://i.imgur.com/X5UgFYi.png
https://i.imgur.com/ipSvaNG.png
In General Franco sense, the PAWS keeps getting dying deader than a doornail.
30-year trend to 2014 – .166 ℃ per decade
30-year trend to the end of the 15-16 El Niño – .175 ℃ per decade
30-year trend to present – .189 ℃ per decade
Professor Curry’s forecast of a possible El Niño in late 18/early19? Looking pretty good.
Odds that the first two decades of the 21st century will average warming of .2 ℃ per decade (IPCC bullseye,) looking pretty good.
“Nothing to be done” said Estragon to Vladimir, both of them waiting for El Ninot…
Nice graphs. No error bounds.
Just scribble in your little hiding places.
When the oceans hold more energy there is more energy released by evaporation. The energy filled, water vapor filled air forms clouds and produces snowfall that does limit the upper bounds of temperature and sequesters ice for advancing into the next climate cold period. Warm phases of the climate cycle are necessary to produce ice for the next cold phase. In the cold phase, there is not enough evaporation and snowfall and ice depletes to promote the next warm phase. It is a natural cycle and we don’t cause it and we can’t stop the natural cycles.
The current climate is controlled by anthropogenic CO2, and we are causing the climate to warm.
“The current climate is controlled by anthropogenic CO2, and we are causing the climate to warm.”
Climate = global annual mean surface temeprature? No!
It’s a little more complicated than that.
One variable controls. Let’s see if that will fly? I am going to go so far as to say, that’s bold.
Lol. You would not have a flippin’ clue how complicated it is if not for the scientists who say ACO2 is the control knob of the current climate, including its complexity, which you know about because of them.
Say the sun burns out before 2100, then yeah, that controls. Lol.
Current climate is controlled by the same things that controlled past climates and it was not CO2, it was not man-made or nature made CO2.
Climate cycles are natural and we have not suddenly taken over.
As it was in the beginning
Is now and ever shall be
CO2 without end, Amen.
Except I didn’t say that. I said in the current climate.
This is exactly what cranked up thermostat looks like:
https://i.imgur.com/IBGzoGf.png
But it’s beautifully fitted at woodfordimwits.
“We emphasize that the NE Pacific cloud changes described above are tied to cloud changes that span the Pacific basin. Despite much less surface sampling in the Southeast (SE) Pacific, cloud and meteorological changes in that region generally occur in parallel with those in the NE Pacific (Figs. 2 and 3). Also, we find that the leading mode in an empirical orthogonal function analysis (15% of the variance) of global cloud cover (fig. S3) has a spatial pattern similar to that
in Fig. 3 and the time series shows the same decadal shifts as in Fig. 1, indicating that the changes in the NE Pacific are part of a dominant mode of global cloud variability.” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/325/5939/460
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/clement-et-al-e1512080464744.png
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/clement-figure-3-e1528927033848.jpg
These are all quite natural changes and have zilch to do with AGW. It is not something that was predicted or indeed predictable by the IPCC. And if they miss the reasons for these changes – and they have – then nothing about their ‘predictions’ has any meaning at all. No one has yet predicted the evolution of the Pacific system better than a coin toss over more than a few months in specific circumstances,
https://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/research/divisions/fe/estuarine/oeip/figures/2017/Figure_PDO-01.JPG
“The winds change the ocean currents which in turn affect the climate. In our study, we were able to identify and realistically reproduce the key processes for the two abrupt climate shifts,” says Prof. Latif. “We have taken a major step forward in terms of short-term climate forecasting, especially with regard to the development of global warming. However, we are still miles away from any reliable answers to the question whether the coming winter in Germany will be rather warm or cold.” Prof. Latif cautions against too much optimism regarding short-term regional climate predictions: “Since the reliability of those predictions is still at about 50%, you might as well flip a coin.”
One may predict however that a complete lack of a rational perspective results in utter nonsense.
.
Is there another way to predict changes in the Pacific system. Multi-decadal variability in the Pacific is defined as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (e.g. Folland et al,2002, Meinke et al, 2005, Parker et al, 2007, Power et al, 1999) – a proliferation of oscillations it seems. The latest Pacific Ocean climate shift in 1998/2001 is linked to increased flow in the north (Di Lorenzo et al, 2008) and the south (Roemmich et al, 2007, Qiu, Bo et al 2006)Pacific Ocean gyres. Roemmich et al (2007) suggest that mid-latitude gyres in all of the oceans are influenced by decadal variability in the Southern and Northern Annular Modes (SAM and NAM respectively) as wind driven currents in baroclinic oceans (Sverdrup, 1947).
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/gyre-impact-e1529034233799.png
The hypothesis is that more meridional polar wind patterns in negative polar annular modes spin up ocean gyres and facilitate upwelling in the eastern Pacific – the origin of chaotic oscillation in the system. Let’s do the experiment.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/aao/aao.obs.gif
The centennial scale evolution of polar modes seems linked to solar intensity – e.g. Ineson et al 2915. That has implications for the state if the Pacific for centuries to come. More salt in a Law Dome ice core is La Nina with global changes in cloud and hydrology.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content.jpg
But then of course we could not possibly have cloud variability in the Earth system not related to greenhouse gases.
But then of course we could not possibly have cloud variability in the Earth system not related to greenhouse gases.
Yes, clouds are water and ice drops, water, in its different states is responsible for the clouds that are important in climate and climate cycles.
Water does have so called greenhouse gas properties, and it overwhelms the greenhouse effect from CO2 and other lesser gases.
When oceans are warmer and more thawed there is more evaporation, more water vapor, more water vapor becomes water drop clouds and more ice crystal clouds and more water and ice falls back down doing more cooling.
And more IR out from the creation of more rain and snow.
There is of course more precipitation in warm conditions. But the transition to a stadial depends on the survival of snow over summer. This depends on insolation and the state of deep water formation in the north Atlantic. Snowpack survival leads to runaway ice sheet feedbacks. Transition to an interstadial on the other hand involves the expansion of deserts and dust deposition on ice.
But clouds at marine boundary layers have a much shorter lifecycle and involve nonlinear and bistable cloud states – open and closed cells.
“Marine stratocumulus cloud decks are regarded as the reflectors of the climate system, returning back to space a significant part of the income solar radiation, thus cooling the atmosphere. Such clouds can exist in two stable modes, open and closed cells, for a wide range of environmental conditions. This emergent behavior of the system, and its sensitivity to aerosol and environmental properties, is captured by a set of nonlinear equations.” https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.4973593
Sulphates whether natural or anthropogenic govern the rate of droplet formation. Sea surface temperature influences transitions between the bistable states. Closed cells rain out more frequently over warm water creating open cells that decrease global albedo and increase IR losses.
Talking about truth is beauty physics – I have a many worlds theory that we are all quantum jumping between alternate universes all the time. It would explain a lot about the climate blogosphere.
New study questions long-held assumption that surface melt in Antarctica is confined to summer | [link]
Melting during the winter months is largely being driven by strong and gusty winds, known as “foehn winds”, which bring spells of relatively warm and dry weather, the study says.
The research questions the long-held assumption that surface melt in Antarctica is confined to the summer season, the lead author tells Carbon Brief.
Winter melting could also be affecting other Antarctic ice shelves, another scientist tells Carbon Brief, which could have a significant impact on their long-term stability.
Ice is produced to cool the earth oceans, ice shelves are formed and broken off to cool the oceans. When and ice shelf melts or thaws any on top, that is a small fraction of the ice loss on the underside where it contacts the salt water in the ocean. Ice shelves are created and pushed out into the ocean and thawed and broken off. That is how it is supposed to work. Ice shelf long term stability is known, they will get pushed out and/or broken off and replaced by more. We have 800 thousand years of Antarctica ice cores. There are no ice cores 800 thousand years old for the shelves. As soon as the base of an ice sheets reaches salt water, the underside, the oldest ice, starts getting removed. This natural process, that has been going on a long time, with ice core records to prove it, is the way earth cools herself. If she gets too warm, she produces more ice to do more cooling. If she gets too cold, she produces less ice and lets ice flow and break off and ice volume deplete until she is satisfied and then she allows another warming and another cycle happens. Study the ice core data, temperatures and ice accumulation rates, the story is well told in the data.
Data does not show any long term stable temperature for earth. The data shows warmer and colder cycles that alternate. This is natural normal and necessary. What has happened is normal and will happen again.
Climate is natural AND it’s forced by man. Why is this so hard to understand? All the talk about climate and temps always changing and will happen again is absurd. Your doctor is not going to explain to you that your body temp can naturally change every time you have a doctor’s visit with a fever. She’s going to explain the infection.
We get it, but we’ve always gotten it. There were and will always be natural forcings. But CO2 is a forcing, and CO2 levels are the highest they have been in a million years.
And yes, the earth is warming, and yes it’s primarily because of CO2. Without the additional CO2 we would be holding steady or cooling. Less solar irradiance and yet we are warming… why? Where is the additional heat coming from?
As was predicted a few decades ago, and can be said about the next decade: it will be warmer, sea levels will be higher, global ice will melt, permafrost will thaw.
Your simplistic claims suggest a serious lack of understanding of the scientific debate.
“Your simplistic claims suggest a serious lack of understanding of the scientific debate.”
Wow. You have me convinced. Your simplistic insult is all I need to believe the few scientists who think CO2 is not the problem.
I’m with you guys! No WAY CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Thanks for insulting me into being a denier.
Scientists have been wrong before and scientists will be wrong again. It is naive for lay persons to put much faith in science because of that. How many false paradigms do we have to endure, before we realize this? (it’s like lucy holding the football for charlie brown over and over again) My favorite myth was that of the incredible inedible egg. We were told back in the 70s that if you eat more than two eggs a week, then it will kill you! Nowadays, not so much. My how times have changed for the egg. The yet to be proven theory of agw may turn out the same way, leading gullible lay people around by their noses. (until one day we find ourselves lying on our proverbial backs exclaiming, augh! lucy did it again!)…
We get it, but we’ve always gotten it. There were and will always be natural forcings. But CO2 is a forcing, and CO2 levels are the highest they have been in a million years.
And yes, the earth is warming, and yes it’s primarily because of CO2. Without the additional CO2 we would be holding steady or cooling. Less solar irradiance and yet we are warming… why? Where is the additional heat coming from?
The additional heat is coming from the same place it came from in past warm periods. The solar in from the sun is near to the same as it has been for millions of years and more. The tilt and orbit parameters alternate which hemisphere gets the most energy from the sun, the earth adjusts the ice in each hemisphere to bring temperature inside the same bounds. We warm when ice extent decreases, we cool when ice extent increases. Ice extent increases after warm times with more evaporation and snowfall and ice extent decreases after cold times with less evaporation and snowfall. This natural cycle adjusts to account for any change in energy in, be it due to solar in or greenhouse energy trapping. Man-made CO2 makes as much difference as spitting in the face of a hurricane. You cannot measure and identify any difference.
“We warm when ice extent decreases,”
NEAT!!! So this happens all on its own. No added warming necessary to warm.
I’m starting to get this denier stuff. Just say things, and make it so. Trust only the scientists who tell you not to trust the super majority of scientists.
This is all so easy. Did Trump U offer a climatologist degree?
Did Trump U offer a climatologist degree?
Nope, but he listens to people outside the consensus.
That is why we elected him.
You don’t get a Climatologist degree if you don’t blindly follow their consensus brainwashing.
A climate professor told me and some other NASA scientists and engineers that we would not pass his basic climate course. He was right, we don’t take courses if you can never disagree with wrong stuff.
NEAT!!! So this happens all on its own. No added warming necessary to warm.
Yep! It is a natural cycle, been going on for thousands and millions of years without us, There is a thermostat, oceans thaw and it snows more, oceans freeze and it snows less. The cooling is cycled on and off, just like the thermostat inside many people/s houses.
You build a fire in the open and sleep close to it. Mankind survived freezing cold nights for tens and tens of thousands of years. Along the way they discovered walls. The heat content of their surrounding space went way up. They figured a entrance way would be handy. The heat content of their surrounding space went down. They invented a door. The heat content of their surrounding space went back up. Doors and walls produce no heat. Then they discovered roofs. The heat content of their surrounding space went up again, but so did the smoke content. Roofs produce no heat. Then they discovered chimneys, and later they figured out they could regulate their heat content with a damper. They liked sunlight, so they made openings for light. The heat content of their surrounding space went down. New idea, glass. The heat content of their surrounding space went back up. They figure out that thick walls held more heat content. They discovered stuffing horse hair in spaces held in more heat content.
This how ridiculous skeptics work. They will try to attack the sequence of the above. I made it up, and the sequencing doesn’t one flippin’ bit of difference. None of the things climate skeptics focus on make a flippin’ bit of difference.
Somewhere along the way they discovered a thermostat, and fathers have been at war with Grandmothers and wives and teenagers ever since.
The earth system is similar. CO2 is a thermostat. Mankind, or nature, with the physics of our current earth system, adding or subtracting atmospheric CO2 will cause the surface temperature to adjust to the new CO2 setting.
Dad adjusts the thermostat from 60 to 80. The house is going to warm to 80. If a teenager opens a window, it may take a bit longer to warm, but it will warm. If Dad closes the window, warming will be right back on schedule. If an airplane crashes into the house, then yeah, the thermostat may no longer be able to control the regime change.
The AMO is now controlled by the GMST. It no longer controls the GMST. Why? Because the surface area of the North Atlantic is too small. Part of it will always stay very hot.The surface area cannot get cold enough to push the world around. Sorry.
The PDO, the big beast ocean cycle, and the cold La Niña tongue are starting to have the same problem.
ACO2 is the new bad boy on the block, and we are his father:
https://i.imgur.com/IBGzoGf.png
Climate is natural AND it’s forced by man. Why is this so hard to understand?
AND forced by man. This is hard to understand because it is not supported by any kind of actual data.
I repeat! This is hard to understand because it is not supported by any kind of actual data.
it is only supported by flawed theory and flawed climate model output. They want to scare people so the people will be OK with more taxes and control over everything.
“I repeat! This is hard to understand because it is not supported by any kind of actual data.”
I see. Except for the wealth of data that supports this, it is not supported.
You guys rock. I’m finally going to trust a bunch of non-scientists and the two remaining scientists who think CO2 is not the issue.
This is so easy.
I see. Except for the wealth of data that supports this, it is not supported.
A wealth of ice core data shows more ice accumulation in warm times and less ice accumulation in cold times. There is a wealth of ice core data that shows this to be true. There is one hundred and fifty thousand years of Greenland ice core data and eight hundred thousand years of Antarctica ice core data.
Less solar irradiance and yet we are warming…
https://i.imgur.com/yvrMXFy.png
~graph courtesy of Javier
Solar activity has actually been high in recent decades. High solar activity correlates with warming, hence we have had warming. With lower solar activity in recent years, we have had a pause in warming along with el nino warming (which has come and is now gone)…
Solar activity has actually been high in recent decades. High solar activity correlates with warming, hence we have had warming. With lower solar activity in recent years, we have had a pause in warming along with el nino warming (which has come and is now gone)…
We have had high and low solar activity in warm periods. We have had high and low solar activity in cold periods. Correlations don’t seem to matter, short term changes correlate and longer term changes just ignore the high and low solar activity. Natural thousand year cycles happen in spite of solar activity not changing that much or in the right direction.
Scott Koontz: Your doctor is not going to explain to you that your body temp can naturally change every time you have a doctor’s visit with a fever.
a. Natural body temp variation is well characterized, with slight moment-to-moment variability and a small circadian rhythm — not so for natural climate variation. (b) your Dr is not going to diagnose a 0.5F core body temp increase as anything, nor charge you a lot to reduce it.
Natural body temp variation is well characterized, with slight moment-to-moment variability and a small circadian rhythm — not so for natural climate variation.
not so for natural climate variation.
When natural climate gets warmer, it snows more and climate gets cooler. When natural climate gets cooler, it snows less and climate gets warmer. Natural Climate has means of keep the natural earth body ocean temperatures inside narrow bounds. Even major climate cycles were bounded inside bounds, the bounds were wider then, but there were still bounds.
It is so for natural climate variation.
I repeat!
It is so for natural climate variation.
“When natural climate gets warmer”
I see. So this “natural warming” is happening because… because it’s simply getting warmer with less solar irradiation.
CO2 is life! Drink it up. Plants “eat” it. We LOVE more CO2. Moore wasn’t looking like a crazy old man on stage, he was the only same person in the room.
I see. So this “natural warming” is happening because… because it’s simply getting warmer with less solar irradiation.
Yep! we came out of the little ice age when there was more ice extent, ice thawing and ice reflecting. We are in a warmer period with less ice extent, less ice thawing and less ice reflecting, it is an natural, normal, necessary warm period and CO2 was not needed to cause what was going to happen anyway. Warm periods have always followed cold periods.
Don’t you get that ice accumulates in warm times and diminishes in cold? FFS!!!!
https://i1.wp.com/www.atmos.washington.edu/~dennis/O18_500K.gif?zoom=2
Matthew,
I’d urge rational, well informed people, like yourself, to avoid discussing the science of climate change an projected temperature changes; instead redirect discussion to the impacts of global temperature change if they should occur. Only the impacts of temperature change are relevant for policy, not, the temperature changes themselves.
The climate change scientists, industry and advocates of catastrophic climate change have been arguing about the science of many decades. The debate is going nowhere.
However, we can get a handle on the impacts.
Empirical evidence suggests that any global warming that does occur would be beneficial, not detrimental and not dangerous. On the other hand, substantial abrupt global cooling would be very damaging, perhaps catastrophic for many people.
If global warming, from whatever cause, is beneficial, as the empirical evidence suggests, and GHG emissions reduce cooling and increase warming, then GHG emissions are beneficial in both cases – GHG emissions reduce cooling (reduce damages) and increase warming (increase benefits). So mitigation polices cannot be justified.
The impacts are what is relevant for policy, not hypotheticals about whether it will warm or cool, which is highly uncertain. Research and debate about the impacts is what is needed, not more, never-ending, futile discussion of the science.
Peter Lang: I’d urge rational, well informed people, like yourself, to avoid discussing the science of climate change an projected temperature changes;
Thank you for the compliments, but I think that the science of CO2 and climate change is interesting. Occasionally I write to the effect that evidence to date supports the proposition that more CO2 so far has had net beneficial effects.
Matthew,
Sure it’s interesting. But look at what is happening, and what it is doing to the world economy. The alarmists want to argue incessantly about the science and avoid talking about the overall impacts (although they love to cherry pick some and make an issue of them to imply overall damages exceed benefits).
They are being effective at continuing to scare the public with baseless arguments. That’s why I argue, those who can see the bigger picture should avoid the science and research and debate the impacts (overall, net impacts).
Yet, we never see any report quantifying a net benefit, which would surely have been adopted by skeptics if it existed. The most recent work says the opposite. They say that IPCC even underestimates the costs. Climate-change related damage is already adding up.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-change-cost_us_5b11bc9de4b010565aac04fa
Yet, we never see any report quantifying a net benefit, which would surely have been adopted by skeptics if it existed.
I see reports quantifying net benefit from any warming and from any increase in CO2 which makes green stuff grow better while making better use of water, multiple times every day. Not on main stream media, of course.
That’s like on blogs where they won’t attach any names of credible researchers or economists and their numbers. They just say stuff.
https://judithcurry.com/2018/06/17/week-in-review-science-edition-82/#comment-874855
Jim D, i have a present for you! (got yer name on it ‘n ev’rything… ☺️)
Jim D:
At your link:
“It’s difficult to quantify that (the cost),” said study co-author Thomas Stoerk, an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, when asked to give his own estimate. “That’s part of the point of the paper. It could be a lot more than the consensus.”
“In perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of domestic policymakers’ failure to account for climate change-fueled devastation, Harvard researchers found that 4,645 people died in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria last year ― mostly as a result of the failure to provide medication, treatment and electricity ― more than 70 times the official death toll.”
Not simply devastation. We account for things above by doing what? Sending hundreds of thousands of diesel generators? Temporary hospitals in tents?
https://cornwallalliance.org/2015/07/how-fossil-fuels-benefit-people-and-the-planet/
Above, we see benefits that we can measure I suppose, that really happened. We take energy and well being and then say, let’s have unicorn energy instead. And if this doesn’t work…
It gets warmer and then cooler. That should be simple enough even for Scott.
And it isn’t low frequency climate variability either
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/fig/figure3-23.jpeg
“In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.” IPCC
Absolutely – can’t possibly be real.
“To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the climate system appears wild, and may continue to hold many surprises if pressed.”
Yes I too worry the one or two scientists who expect climate surprises.
e.g. https://www.nap.edu/catalog/10136/abrupt-climate-change-inevitable-surprises
Bunch of crackpots. Of course we may just assume that the IPCC is correct and argue that that would be arguably balmy and the extra CO2 grows plants – or barmy – whatever seems more reasonable. I’ll get back to you on that.
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/10136/abrupt-climate-change-inevitable-surprises
In the meantime we could always hyper charge agricultural productivity and economic development with diverse humanitarian and environmental benefits.
Oh damn…
The increased CO2 has already caused green stuff to grow better which ha already taken more CO2 out of the air than this silly stunt. These people doing the manual labor to grow this stuff will release more CO2 than they get back. Interesting but silly. Plant all you want, just don’t tax me to do it.
Some stunt.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1603762179740038
More CO2 is helping them grow all their feel good stuff.
Carbon in the atmosphere cannot increase cropping and grazing productivity by 40% by 2030. Returning it to soils can.
“To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the climate system appears wild, and may continue to hold many surprises if pressed.”
If we listen to the climate scientists, climate is chaotic and unpredictable.
If we look at past climate cycles and expect what has happened will happen again, we will not be surprised.
I was sure I had a facetious comment here. Something to do with the crackpots at the NAS.
It is really difficult to make a comment that is Facetious when you are talking about the alarmists. Even the dumbest stuff is considered serious by them and the media eats it up and spreads it to scare everyone.
I don’r read climate bogs – other than this one – and it strains my credulity. Science is not a monolith – but it is better than the your alternative.
This video has some small relevance. It’s Jordan Peterson teaching a class. He’s has been in the spotlight taking on some SJWs. One may ask the question, does he know of what he speaks?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGLsnu5RLe8
I watched the prior year’s lectures, about 20 of them. He seems to teach a lot of value as opposed to the more out there things that we hear are now being taught.
If you read the comments sections on youtube of his lecture, you see people thanking him not for saving the world but for offering something like a helpful understanding of society.
CO2 growth is taking a big dive (to ~1.5 ppm/year) after the El Nino peak (~3 ppm/year).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/mean:24/derivative/scale:12
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/index.html
That’s a pity. The more the better.
Not when it’s sourced from decaying plant matter during el nino droughts and decreased photosynthesis.
aaron: “Not when it’s sourced from decaying plant matter during el nino droughts and decreased photosynthesis.”
Are you sure about what’s going on with photosynthesis and plant decay during an el nino?
– Droughts are not global and furthermore I expect would be just as hard on detritus-feeding microbes as on plants.
– Most photosynthesis takes place in the oceans, where drought is not a factor (cyanobacteria, algae, different forms of plankton).
– Photosynthesis efficiency and carbon fixation tend to increase as temperature and CO2 concentration rise.
– The quantity of biota capable of photosynthesis tends to increase as CO2 levels rise.
So what? The places people find to hide are amazing.
Stop projecting JCH.
Ed, iffen when we see an extended cooling spell and the growth rate stays low along with it, then AGW’s going to be whole new ball game. (and there will be a whole lotta egg to wipe off a whole lotta faces)…
Henry’s law better than Greenhouse effect
Stallinga, Peter. “Signal Analysis of the Climate: Correlation, Delay and Feedback.” Journal of Data Analysis and Information Processing 6, no. 02 (2018): 30.
Abstract
“One of the ingredients of anthropogenic global warming is the existence of a large correlation between carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and the temperature. In this work we analyze the original time-series data that led to the new wave of climate research and test the two hypotheses that might explain this correlation, namely the (more commonly accepted and well-known) greenhouse effect (GHE) and the less-known Henry’s Law (HL). This is done by using the correlation and the temporal features of the data. Our conclusion is that of the two hypotheses the greenhouse effect is less likely, whereas the Henry’s Law hypothesis can easily explain all effects. First the proportionality constant in the correlation is correct for HL and is about two orders of magnitude wrong for GHE. Moreover, GHE cannot readily explain the concurring methane signals observed. On the temporal scale, we see that GHE has difficulty in the apparent negative time lag between cause and effect, whereas in HL this is of correct sign and magnitude, since it is outgasing of gases from oceans. Introducing feedback into the GHE model can overcome some of these problems, but it introduces highly instable and chaotic behavior in the system, something that is not observed. The HL model does not need feedback.
Keywords
Climate, Temporal Series Analysis, Feedback, Correlations, Hypothesis
Testing
http://file.scirp.org/pdf/JDAIP_2018051616504424.pdf
David L. Hagen: Henry’s law better than Greenhouse effect
Thank you for the link. The lag of CO2 change behind temperature change in those ancient times has been displayed before.
What was being talked about was Henry’s Law as an alternative to the enhanced greenhouse effect. That doesn’t work. Then there is a question of why an alternative is needed. There is quite natural variability but we are changing the atmosphere with no idea of consequences – and it is warming the oceans.
https://i1.wp.com/watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/ocean-heat-and-power-flux.jpg
These are two very different variables. Ocean heat and the cumulative sum of monthly average power flux in less power flux out. Argo and CERES satellite data respectively. Much of the change derives from cloud change in the eastern and central Pacific but anthropogenic greenhouse gas effects are undoubtedly there.
The oceans are huge carbonated drinks, warm them and the vapor pressure of CO2 increases, cool them and the vapor pressure of CO2 decreases. It does take time and that does cause a lag. This changes CO2 in the atmosphere, it does not influence temperature, it is influenced by temperature. Sounds like Henry had it right. Data supports Henry.
An example of not being able to walk and chew gum? Oceans are of course a net sink.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/co2-flux.jpg
http://file.scirp.org/pdf/JDAIP_2018051616504424.pdf
And the governing equation is not Henry’s Law.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/co2-flux-equation.jpg
While this guy is busily refuting Al Gore – I’ve never seen that movie – there is some appreciation of temperature and the biokinetics of respiration in terrestrial anaerobic (methane) and aerobic (carbon dioxide) conditions.
But this might not obviate anthropogic sources and consequential radiarive effects.
Oceans are of course a net sink.
Of course, that is where energy is stored that powers the evaporation and precipitation that cools the earth. Solar in warms the water on earth, the energy powers evaporation, the water vapor travels up and forms clouds and the rain and snow form, IR goes out, the rain and snow fall down to do immediate additional cooling and some ice is sequestered for cooling by thawing and reflecting later.
This is what happens, Henry does not matter, CO2 does not matter, these natural cycles take care of business.
A net CO2 sink? That is what was being discussed. You know like your humungous cherry soda?
Exactly, when the heat sink is full of energy it promotes more evaporation and precipitation and causes cooling. That what is being talked about here.
What was being talked about was Henry’s Law as an alternative to the enhanced greenhouse effect. That doesn’t work. Then there is a question of why an alternative is needed. There is quite natural variability but we are changing the atmosphere with no idea of consequences – and it is warming the oceans.
https://i1.wp.com/watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/ocean-heat-and-power-flux.jpg
These are two very different variables. Ocean heat and the cumulative sum of monthly average power flux in less power flux out. Argo and CERES satellite data respectively. Much of the change derives from cloud change in the eastern and central Pacific but anthropogenic greenhouse gas effects are undoubtedly there.
anthropogenic greenhouse gas effects are undoubtedly there.
There is no evidence in the actual data, John Christy has looked for it.
It shows up in theory and model output, nowhere to be found in actual data.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/harries-2001.png
https://www.nature.com/articles/35066553
It relies on ‘snapshots’ taken at different times through a narrow aperture from space. Figure it out.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/harries-table-1.jpg
Summer Solstice. Ol’ Man Sol at maximum insolation. A full 21 hours 43 minutes of daylight. And yet still the ice thickness abounds.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/images/FullSize_CICE_combine_thick_SM_EN_20180621.png
In the throes of winter 2008, yet paltry volume.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/CICE_combine_thick_SM_EN_20080315-1.png
bad skeptic using DMI model output like it was observations
Well that’s informative. There is apparently no difference between a fine scale, validated, process level model forced by a 144 hour ECMWF weather forecast – and the open ended theoretical nonsense of IPCC opportunistic ensembles.
it’s good hypothesis, more ice means higher atmospheric temp. Similar to 60s and 70, which, IIRC, were also preceded by NEP warm blob. Short burst of thick ice forming in arctic just before sat obs and argo cov.
SM
Lol. Yea, yea. What fun it will be when the extent starts growing. The expansive imagination to explain that away will be at its finest. The extent is the last refuge that has any credibility. But by then the see saw polar teleconnection will kick in and off and running they will be on the Antarctica sea ice. What’s not to like with a built in narrative.
If you missed my link above for Judith about the new West Antarctica study and its rising Bedrock, you should take a peek. Interesting. Changing previous assumptions is what science is all about.
“Newman: Aren’t you just whipping people up into a state of anger?
Peterson: Not at all.
Newman: Divisions between men and women. You’re stirring things up.
Actually, one of the most important things this interview illustrates—one reason it is worth noting at length—is how Newman repeatedly poses as if she is holding a controversialist accountable, when in fact, for the duration of the interview, it is she that is “stirring things up” and “whipping people into a state of anger.”
At every turn, she is the one who takes her subject’s words and makes them seem more extreme, or more hostile to women, or more shocking in their implications than Peterson’s remarks themselves support. Almost all of the most inflammatory views that were aired in the interview are ascribed by Newman to Peterson, who then disputes that she has accurately characterized his words.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/putting-monsterpaint-onjordan-peterson/550859/
To paint skeptics as monsters to be slayed. To frame them that way. From them we see anger. Against corporations and proven resource use. The Green Dream, lacking meaningful fulfillment as it’s frequently based on nonsense economics, can have the attribute of being made up. Where questions are simplified to a single variable. It fails against proven things. I’d be angry too if my challenge to the status quo full of happy thoughts, slick advertising and distortions of the current technology failed. And I’d be looking for someone to blame, preferably one who looks like a defender of the status quo. And I’d hammer on a single fact, like the gender pay gap, without going into everything that goes into that like Peterson does.
My latest Heartland podcast is here:
https://www.heartland.org/multimedia/podcasts/the-end-of-secret-science-and-carbon-colonialism-guest-david-wojick
Freewheeling and fun.
Well rehearsed reactionary nonsense. The problem with the climate debate is that it goes around endlessly in circles. Just this page should be sufficient to demonstrate that conclusively.
“We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible…Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our livliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.” F. A. Hayek
The problem with modern (classic) liberals is that they are incapable of formulating a classic liberal utopia that can capture the imagination of a planet. Here’s my attempt – one that in revisiting just now may be worth another go.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2015/09/28/a-classic-liberal-utopia/
I realize that you post a great many comments a day, most of which I find not worth replying to. Well actually I do not read them. But if you choose to reply to one of mine, please at least make some attempt to be relevant.
My interview was not rehearsed, but it does touch on several articles that I have published at CFACT. Your “reactionary nonsense” is simply stupid.
You might try thinking more and saying less, difficult as that may be.
Your commentary is well rehearsed – like most of the climate blogosphere. An insular set of ideas generated by standard bearers in echo chambers that are repeated interminably as if they are holy writ. The same talking points over and over. Not that the particular interview was rehearsed – although that seems likely as well. And this most recent comment is a confession that you cannot begin to see beyond the battle lines of the climate war. A war you are losing again and again. You might think about that – and possibilities of a new classic liberal utopia. Because repeating the same actions and expecting a different outcome… And that’s the relevance of my response that you cannot contemplate.
“Although it has failed to produce its intended impact nevertheless the Kyoto Protocol has performed an important role. That role has been allegorical. Kyoto has permitted different groups to tell different stories about themselves to themselves and to others, often in superficially scientific language. But, as we are increasingly coming to understand, it is often not questions about science that are at stake in these discussions. The culturally potent idiom of the dispassionate scientific narrative is being employed to fight culture wars over competing social and ethical values.49 Nor is that to be seen as a defect. Of course choices between competing values are not made by relying upon scientific knowledge alone. What is wrong is to pretend that they are.” http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/units/mackinder/pdf/mackinder_Wrong%20Trousers.pdf
My point was that this is not a winning strategy in the culture war. You insist you have an alternative and certain science. In reality most of “the science” — the data interpretation, the methods and the theories – fascinating at it all is – are utterly inadequate to the task of explaining climate to us. But both sides of the climate battle continue to insist on a certainty that is impossible – and continue a battle in which one side is heavily outgunned. The climate change battalion is all of the global scientific institutions, the liberal press, governments, major scientific journals, etc. Opposed is a ragtag collection of a few marginalized cheer leaders for curmudgeons with crude and eccentric theories they insist is the true science. The curmudgeons are remarkably persistent – and climate shifts may give them a strategic advantage as the planet doesn’t shifts into a different mode in the next decade. The battle is absurd and unwinnable – by either side.
The rest of us are concerned that the real objectives of humanity are not lost sight of. It is simple in principle to take the initiative on the broad front of population, development, energy technology, multiple gases and aerosols across sectors, land use change, conservation and restoration of agricultural lands and ecosystems and building resilient communities. What we really want is much more clarity on effective policy responses – a focus on the real issues of global economic progress and environmental protection. Emissions of greenhouse gases or loss of biodiversity are far from intractable problems — but economic growth is the foundation of any practical measures.
I tend to wake at 4.00 am and spent a few hours with my laptop and coffee researching and reading – in which CE is a regular resource. I have just reviewed my comments in this post. There is a diversity of ideas from energy to the Indian monsoon – all relevant to texts under discussion and topics introduced – or responding to – mostly patiently – responses to my provocative ideas. Including on Henry’s law as an alternative to the enhanced greenhouse effect. The latter seems scientifically pretty silly. .
“Decreasing Indian summer monsoon on the northern Indian sub-continent during the last 180 years: evidence from five tree-ring cellulose oxygen isotope chronologies [link] …”
Julia Slingo was rambling on about the importance of an unvarying Indian monsoon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1BEQnkdAVE
It was of course variability of the Indian monsoon that led to the discovery of ENSO – and the decline in the Indian monsoon is related to an increase in El Nino intensity and frequency in the 20th century. It seems likely driven by UV/ozone stochastic forcing of polar modes and ocean gyres. More salt in a Law Dome ice core is La Nina.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content.jpg
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00003.1
Something that is overwhelmingly likely to revert to the mean this century.
The Solar City train wreck:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-solar-exclusive/exclusive-tesla-to-close-a-dozen-solar-facilities-in-nine-states-documents-idUSKBN1JI013
“The cost of winning a customer (selling a solar system to a homeowner) through a store like Home Depot can be up to $7,000 per system, according to GTM Research, compared with a national average of $4,000 per installation.”
The headline reads, 50 cents a watt for solar panels which works out to $500 per kilowatt of generation. A kilowatt is what your home uses each hour. I can’t see that you needing more than 4 – 1 kilowatt panels and that will run you $2000. Not a lot of money.
Your goal is to find the irrelevant fact above. We can just assume the cost of the panels is nothing and just count all the other costs.
At the link is a section called, high marketing costs. I am calling that a problem and probably a fatal one. My son lined up for some new phone around a year ago. You didn’t even have to market the thing. The young people just did the marketing for them, and showed up with their money. En mass they said yes. When you have to market, including flipping $7000 per system to Home Depot or $4000 to some company with no history you need to question the value of the product.
Home solar will compete with commercial solar. Commercial is going to do a better job as we aren’t installing gutters on your home’s roof. Home solar is going to be a bunch of disillusioned people complaining to their elected representatives who were in favor of this whole thing in the first place. Because something lacking value was marketed.
“At the same time, Tesla stopped door-to-door sales, once among SolarCity’s most successful means of reaching new customers, and salespeople were no longer allowed to hold local events or buy online leads, the former employees said.”
“Such tactics are standard practice across most of the competitive residential solar industry.”
Door-to-door sales. Where objective people care about what is in your best interest.
matthewrmarler | June 24, 2018 at 9:01 pm
The support, as you note is that “a search for estimable relations has not produced convincing results”, However, you are wrong that the analyses “available to date” have “low statistical power”. I use both Fourier periodograms and CEEMD analyses, both of which can detect very small perturbations in a signal. Anything not detectable by those is not relevant because it’s lost in the noise.
w.
PS—I’ve never heard of a “100% increase in UV from the sun” … link?
Willis Eschenbach: PS—I’ve never heard of a “100% increase in UV from the sun” … link?
I’ll try to find where I read it. I remember it from a discussion at WUWT. iirc, I had mentioned a larger increase, and Leif Svalgaard corrected me and said that from min to max the ratio is about 2. (Obviously, it isn’t his fault if I remember it wrong.) I first read about changes in UV intensity around 8 years ago, but I don’t maintain a searchable bibliography.
. I use both Fourier periodograms and CEEMD analyses, both of which can detect very small perturbations in a signal. Anything not detectable by those is not relevant because it’s lost in the noise.
I mentioned this once or twice at WUWT. You have not in fact done a power analysis. For the amount of noise present, a small relationship between one of the solar variations and the slight increase in global mean temp over the past 125 or so years would not be statistically significant at the 5% level with a higher probability than about 20%. That’s not to say that a real relationship exists. I think I may have referred you to the book Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences by Cohen and Cohen, who provide a bunch of useful tables. I know I thought about it, but I may not have written it.
If the “true” relations ship (or most accurate) is between the 0.1% fluctuation in TSI and the 0.3% – 0.4% increase in global mean temp (1K increase on base of about 288K), then the power to detect the relationship is appreciably smaller.
How big could one of these relationships possibly be? R^2 = 0.02? All the big R^2 values are already taken by other causes.
Thanks, Matt. You say:
I don’t understand this. Are you saying that the ~ 0.1% sunspot-related fluctuation in TSI causes a “0.3% – 0.4% increase in global mean temp (1K increase on base of about 288K).”?
Because if it were so it would be very easy to detect. A 1°C swing would be detectable by naked eye …
w.
Here’s one:
PERSPECTIVES AND COMMENTARY
Contribution of Ultraviolet Irradiance Variations to Changes in the Sun’s Total Irradiance
By J. Lean | Apr 14th, 1989
Measurements by the Earth Radiation Budget (ERB) radiometer on the Nimbus 7 satellite and the Active Cavity Radiometer (ACRIM) on the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM) have shown that during solar cycle 21 the peak-to~peak amplitude of the 11year variation in the sun’s total irradiance was approximately 0.08% (4, 5). Solar observations at UV wavelengths, made during solar cycle 21 by the Solar Backseatter Ultraviolet (SBUV) experiment on the Nimbus 7 satellite, and by the solar spectrometer on the Solar Mesosphere Explorer (SME) have established that the magnitude of the sun’s UV irradiance variations over the 11-year cycle is approximately a factor of 2 at Lyman a (121.6 nm), decreasing to 10% at 200 nm, 5% at 250 nm, and less than 1% at wavelengths longer than 300 nm (6). These UV irradiance variations are thus considerably larger than the 0.08% solar cycle variation in the total irradiance.
DOI: 10.1126/science.244.4901.197
Science Vol. 244, No. 4901
I am no longer member of AAAS, and I can’t access a bunch of the other papers that seem relevant.
Willis Eschenbach: I don’t understand this. Are you saying that the ~ 0.1% sunspot-related fluctuation in TSI causes a “0.3% – 0.4% increase in global mean temp (1K increase on base of about 288K).”?
Because if it were so it would be very easy to detect. A 1°C swing would be detectable by naked eye …
A 1C increase in global mean temp since the late 1880s is about what is supported by BEST. If it were caused by a 0.1% increase in TSI over that period (or some such inconsistent monotonic change in a measurable solar characteristic), then the correlation of temp with TSI would be very small, and a test with a 5% type 1 error rate would have a low probability of rejecting the null hypothesis.
Recall that the dynamics of the climate system are chaotic (some of Mr Ellison’s posts are informative), so the measured earth response to a change in solar output would not necessarily have a uniform lag from the changes themselves, much less occur immediately after. Just as a gradual increase in forcing can produce a stoccato temperature response, so also stoccato series of changes in input might produce a gradual temperature output.
I don’t believe much detail about many of these claims that I have written about; I merely claim that current data and analysis are not sensitive enough to have a high probability of detecting small (but “amplified”, following RIE again) responses of of global mean temp to small solar changes. As with CO2, potentially important mechanisms have been described in part, but the quantitative relationships, if they exist, are small and practically inestimable. Well, that’s what I think anyway.
Ug. What if there’s an effect only during certain parts of some cycles. Maybe rate of change when above or below a certain threshold matters.
“Solar irradiance variations show a strong wavelength dependence. Whereas the total solar irradiance varies by about 0.1% during the course of the solar cycle, variations at the wavelengths around the Ly-α emission line near 121.6 nm range up to 50-100%. These variations may have a significant impact on the Earth’s climate system. Being almost completely absorbed in the upper atmosphere, solar UV radiation below 300 nm affects stratospheric chemistry and controls production and destruction of ozone.” https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2006/23/aa4809-06/aa4809-06.html
But this is not the simple cause of temperature variability – that depends on the dynamic response of atmospheric and ocean circulation. Here conventional maths and statistics fail utterly. Instead you need to look at linkages and nodes on a complex spatio-temporal topology.
“However, variability in ultraviolet solar irradiance has been linked to changes in surface pressure that resemble the Arctic and North Atlantic Oscillations (AO/NAO)8,9,10 and studies of both the 11-year solar cycle11,12 and centennial timescales13 suggest the potential for larger regional effects. The mechanism for these changes is via a stratospheric pathway, a so-called ‘top-down’ mechanism, and involves altered heating of the stratosphere by solar ultraviolet irradiance. Anomalous temperatures in the region of the tropical stratopause give rise to changes in the subtropical stratospheric winds, in geostrophic balance with the modified equator-to-pole temperature gradient. This signal then propagates poleward and downward and is amplified by altered planetary wave activity8 before being communicated throughout the depth of the troposphere in the Pacific and Atlantic basins14.” https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8535
There is no simple cause and effect – it is likely one of a number of factors modulating surface pressure in the polar annular modes and thus – inter alia – patterns of ocean surface temperature in the north Atlantic and upwelling in the eastern Pacific. The ocean gyre hypothesis for the origins of the AMO, the PDO and ENSO. These modulate the energy budget of the planet through Rayleigh–Bénard convection and open and closed cell cloud.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/ocean-gyre.png
“Figure 3. Global wind and gyre circulation changes hypothesized to be associated with multidecadal (a) warm and (b) cool phases of the North and South Hemispheres. White arrows indicate regions of enhanced wind and black arrows indicate areas of enhanced gyre circulation. The blue patches indicate the sinking waters in the North Atlantic. The zonal warm phase occurred from the 1910s to 1940s and 1970s to 1990s and is characteristic of strong westerly winds in the northern and southern hemisphere. North Pacific and North Atlantic subarctic gyre circulations enhance with sinking waters associated with the northern North Atlantic winter. In the Atlantic subtropical gyre circulations also enhance. Some surface waters travel from the Indian Ocean to the south Atlantic and join the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic. The meridional cool phase occurring from the 1940s to 1970s and 1990s to present consists of equatorward winds over the continents and poleward winds over the subarctic and sub-antarctic oceans, resulting as Rossby wave formations. Intensified circulation in subtropical gyre systems enhances upwelling and productivity in the California and Peru systems. Strengthened easterly trade winds increase equatorial current circulation in the Pacific.” http://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/3/4/833/htm
As I say – nodes and links in a spatio-temporal deterministic chaotic system and not simple cause and effect.
“There was no conspiracy against the man—just a series of bad, hurried, self-serving decisions aimed at protecting the university from bad press in the short-term, while causing it to thoroughly disgrace itself in the long run.”
https://quillette.com/2018/06/21/a-literary-inquisition-how-novelist-steven-galloway-was-smeared-as-a-rapist-even-as-the-case-against-him-collapsed/
What was strength is no longer there, as people scurry away, lest they themselves are caught up.
Sounds an awful to like the attempt to smear Tom Karl and NOAA in a congressional hearing.
Publish and don’t be damned
Some science journals that claim to peer review papers do not do so
One estimate puts the number of papers in questionable journals at 400,000
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/06/23/some-science-journals-that-claim-to-peer-review-papers-do-not-do-so
“I do not believe in a vengeful God – if God exists at all – so I do not think of the flood as punishment for human sin. What interests me most is what happens to the story when I remove it from its religious framework: Noah’s flood is one of the most fully developed accounts of environmental change in ancient history. It tries to make sense of a cataclysmic earthbound event that happened long ago, before written language, before the domestication of horses, before the first Egyptian mummies and the rise of civilization in Crete. An event for which the teller clearly held humans responsible.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/26/rising-seas-florida-climate-change-elizabeth-rush
“I am surprised to find that it does not start with a rainstorm or an ark, but earlier, with unprecedented population growth and God’s scorn. It begins: “When human beings began to increase in number on the earth.””
So it’s a recycled ancient story. “…a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology.”
This explains why it’s used and why it works. An archetype is an archetype because it sells. Noah is a hero. He saves mankind and the animals, thus ensuring McDonald’s cheeseburgers. Any study that finds any animal in peril is proof it’s raining and they are drowning. In Greenland and Antarctica, they are studying the coming flood and interpreting the signs and prophesying. But they are not and they cannot to date build an Ark. They can’t fix the problem. Mostly they can just damn people.
Leaked IPCC “2 degrees is harmful” report. The IPCC dutifully supporting the Paris Agreement.
This just out: “Warming of 2C ‘substantially’ more harmful than 1.5C draft UN report”
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/06/27/warming-2c-substantially-harmful-1-5c-draft-un-report/
The leaked new draft Summary for Policymakers is here (scroll down to online viewer):
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/06/27/new-leaked-draft-of-un-1-5c-climate-report-in-full-and-annotated/
Models all the way down.
“This halcyon Holocene provided practically a Garden of Eden for humanity until it tasted of the fruit of technology, which it ate at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and gorged on after the Second World War. This led to the Great Acceleration that cursed the Earth and produced the Sixth Mass Extinction and other global catastrophes, including famine, drought, plagues, floods, and the war of each against all. Everyone who was not a science denialist agreed about this.”
“When the ICS recognizes the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphic/geochronological epoch (preferably during Advent or perhaps Easter), it should also sort the geologic time scale into three eras: creation, fall, and redemption. This kind of revision is the logical or conceptual consequence of the annunciation of the Anthropocene. Earth system science shall redeem future generations from the sins of their ancestors.”
https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/no.-9-summer-2018/welcome-to-the-narcisscene
It is the story of the Bible. The ancient story of good versus evil. Of heroes fighting dragons so that we can be redeemed. What is good is that it is the unknown. If it were known, we could fix the problem and it would be dragon gone. But we have a perpetual dragon, as permanent as the devil. We have the agents of the devil. The Holy scriptures have been replaced by science. While some excavate ancient scrolls to find meaning, others look back into time using paleo to find meaning. The Book of Revelations is replayed.
We have placed CO2 at the apex of the hierarchy. It replaced Nature. We have assumed the apex which we misguidedly believe is our rightful place. But man and CO2 are deranged as Pharaoh was and false Gods as well. The argument is that we have sinned and this one was a doozy. The counterargument is that we have not, or that it isn’t that bad. The reply to that is, It’s really bad and here’s some Book of Revelations science from our Bible of Science.
State regulators OK controversial Enbridge pipeline project
http://www.startribune.com/state-regulators-approve-certificate-of-need-for-controversial-enbridge-pipeline-project/486845211/
The pipeline is more or less in Trump country. Rural was Trump in Minnesota. We have a history of hippies fighting for whatever in the BWCA. At the same time, union workers wanting jobs to mine or something like that in our Iron Range. The story is, it’s urban hipsters from the metro telling rednecks what to do where the rednecks live. We do have native reservations or whatever the PC term is, that are substantial.
We have this motley crew opposing:
“Signers of the letter include Minnesota’s favorite weatherman and climatologist, the University of Minnesota’s Mark Seeley, various state congressional House and Senate members… …plus support from a host of informed national environmental experts and writers like Bill McKibben, activist organizations including the Sierra Club, and MN350…”
The surprise is Seeley. Up until now his appearances on public TV’s Almanac showed him to be non-partisan and reserved about global warming.
Our area refineries are a critical part of our infrastructure and it seems some would just rather that crumble. So it’s not so much the construction jobs the but many aspects of energy delivery that provide jobs and something we’ll pay for. They’re tearing something down and with nothing to replace it beyond bicycles and rainbows.
“More recently, postmodernists have looked upon the Enlightenment as yet another false grand narrative, in which humanism, science and reason are just more belief systems, no more nor less valid than any others.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/11/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-interview-inequality-consumption-environment
I’m looking for trouble again. Science is a belief system. So global warming is a belief system no more valid than my belief system. Then we go to the college campuses. And we find global warming and crackpot destructive belief systems. Science and reason? Who cares? Only so far as global warming goes.
“He wrote a series of well-received books about linguistics and psychology before publishing The Blank Slate in 2002, which argued that human behaviour was not simply or even largely a matter of environmental influence but instead shaped mostly by evolutionary adaptations.”
Which is science. I can make up theories about I have been exploited by the 1% or white males or even rabid liberals. Or, I can look at the science. I can build a movement of victims, frothing at the mouths, or look at the science.
“He argues that progress is not only sustainable, but essential for attaining the knowledge that will enable us to find the cleanest and most efficient use of energy. In other words, scientific progress is what will make economic progress work. The book is a kind of rallying call to replace moral posturing with clear-eyed realism.”
You are denier. There I fixed you. Banished you. I have no solutions but I hate you.
“Trying to evaluate the economic cost of all the subsidies and mandates that benefit wind or solar energy is extremely complex. A simpler computational solution exists. A kilowatt hour of wind or solar costs seven cents to generate, but its economic value is two cents for the fuel saved in the backup plants. So five cents per kilowatt hour is the subsidy that society pays for generating electricity in this fashion. This subsidy comes from the government or consumers of electricity. It is sometimes explicit and sometimes hidden by accounting tricks or different bookkeeping items.”
“As a fair approximation, seventy-five percent of the cost of wind or solar electricity is subsidized. Additional ancillary costs to improve the grid agility increase the amount of subsidy.”
“The subsidy for rooftop solar is much larger since the cost of generating rooftop solar is approximately 25 cents per kilowatt hour.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/wind_and_solar_require_massive_subsidies.html
The above is pretty good for trying to understand the subsidies. 7 cents a kilowatt for solar?
Cost of $500 per kilowatt of generation. Cost at the factory. Installed: $2500 per kilowatt. You can cost this out yourself online from the all the people trying to sell you a system.
Put down $2500. Get 25 cents an hour until the panel dies. That’s 10,000 hours of ideal sun at 90 degrees to your panels. Take 360 days times 5 hours which is 1800 hours. Cut that in half for weather and all other imperfections like seasonal movement of sun relative to the horizon and the fact that your panels don’t track. 10,000 hours / 900 hours is 11 years. Break even. This is you earning 25 cents per kilowatt hour or not paying that same amount.
In Minnesota we are rocking 2 nukes and some coal plants with coal providing 39%. No hydro worth counting, and a fair amount of wind and solar. I am paying around 13 cents a kilowatt.
Paying home solar twice what I am paying and not having them provide anything else like power lines doubles the break even time. 22 years to break even no additional costs over that 22 years.
“…accounting tricks or different bookkeeping items…” The intersection of accounting and politics. It’s B.S.
Conversations on Climate Change
Mann couldn’t help himself towards the end. Gesturing when Moore was speaking. I am sorry, the whole world doesn’t agree with Mann. When someone doesn’t agree with me and says things that I think to be untrue, I start slapping my head and whispering to other people and make sure other people can see me do this. Because even if it’s not my turn to speak, acting is still allowed. Because after all. I am the great me.
Did you notice how many satirical cartoons were in the Curry and Moore presentations? Do you think they were appropriate and effective? The Mann and Titley presentation had zero satirical content – almost 100% charts, data and photos. Try turning off the sound and use the closed caption function.
Seitz posted the video link, but his post got deleted, so here it is again.
https://youtu.be/lyNCl7NzjaM
Ragnaar, that gesturing and general mirth was when Moore was saying that glaciers are advancing. There was questioning of that, even from someone in the audience who shouted out. Later Moore said that was not what he meant.
Jim D:
I haven’t been monitoring this thread. I admit Moore stumbled at the time when Mann was acting up. There were rules. I don’t know what they were. But the general rules is that when someone else is speaking, in a situation such this one, a small one time gesture is Okay. A little head bob with a wry smile. Then I personally would look down at my notes and let the man finish. I am so good, and he is so hanging himself, everything is good. Plus it’s not about me at this specific time. Mann held it in check pretty good, right up until the end.
And it was poetic that the person from the audience was in the vicinity, saying something, when the moderator told him to cut it out. A synchronization where people act in concert. Maybe we could study this to learn something about the climate, and Mann could advance science some more.
It was the reaction to expect when someone says the glaciers are advancing in the current warm period. That is so far from the truth, there has to be a reaction from anyone who spots such blatant falsehoods from the stage. It would have been odder, and in some way worrying, if no one had reacted.
So, it turns out the whole world does agree with Mann. Lol.
Admiral Titley learned from the commanding officer of my father’s task force. Old Navy, he did not trust this this new-fangled thing called radar. Before wasting the Navy’s valuable ammo, he wanted eyes on the enemy. His catapult scout planes were supposed to be over the area, so he refused pleas to fire on the blips from younger, better trained officers. He waited just a few minutes. Still no reports from the scout planes (they could not take off from the lagoons along the slot (iron-bottom sound.) Not enough wind that night. He finally agreed to fire. Way too late. They had sailed into an enemy task force. A few minutes later, when the point-blank shooting was done, 3rd worst defeat of the US Navy in WW2. 90% of the sailors (around 190 men) forward of my Dad’s battle station were killed instantly when that valuable US Navy ammo blew up. A long lance torpedo hit them.
Being led by idots is risky.
His related quote in this meeting was that the military say if you wait for 100% certainty, you will be 100% dead.
Jim D:
“Neoglaciation has followed the hypsithermal or Holocene Climatic Optimum, the warmest point in the Earth’s climate during the current interglacial stage.”
Moore’s point was that it was warmer than now because there is more ice now when compared to the Holocene Climatic Optimum. Now he said.
When is now?
https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/figure-43.png
I listened to that part a few times just now. The Holocene Optimum was quite awhile ago. Is now the last 300 years or what? So he misstated, but if he had said, How come the glaciers were advancing until about 1780 would that have been Okay? Suppose he had said the glaciers were advancing during most of the run of the Hockey Stick?
Which brings up an unrelated question:
http://www.realclimate.org/images//Kemp_sealevel_20111.png
Reconcile to the Hockey Stick. This is confusing.
The blade of the stick falling and sea levels increasing. If Mann was measuring precipitation and not temperature.
You mentioned, No reaction as odd. It’s tough to be an adult. Mann could work on that.
If someone says up is down on a stage, there will be a reaction by those in the know both in the audience and on stage. Mann had contradicted Moore by saying now is already warmer than the Holocene Optimum. Moore was trying to justify the other way around with glaciers advancing. Later he said the glaciers are retreating because it is warmer now contradicting his earlier emphasis. In the end we don’t know what he meant, and I am not sure he does either. Sea levels are higher now for sure.
Jim D:
At times, someone will misstate something. An example is telling someone to turn right and they turn left. I know put my hand on the dash and point the direction while saying it. Why do they say the exact opposite of what they mean?
Titley mentioned Norfolk I believe.
“The new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that much-higher-than-average subsidence is occurring at Craney Island, a depository for material dredged from shipping channels, and at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, where the subsidence was most likely related to local construction during the study period. In other areas with similarly high subsidence rates, the causes of the sinking are not known.”
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-nasa-virginia-metro-area-unevenly.html#jCp
Where were the objections? I think he offered this as evidence, not the subsidence. He left that part out. It was the SLR. And the problem was probably something else, construction. The Navy loses, fighting the wrong thing.
So let’s see. Did glaciers advance during the shaft of the hockey stick? Did CO2 levels rise during the shaft of the hockey stick? How did SLRs rise during the shaft?
CO2 causes warming. Fine. The rest of the system should tie out as it’s so simple.
I was just explaining why there were audible gasps when Moore said that. It just sounded plain wrong because it was as stated. Mann might have just been reacting to the audience there.
For journalism, sub in consensus climate science.
“Activism is ends-centric. Activists pursue a particular political objective and desired outcome. They do not have to abide by centralized codes of ethics, because their means are justified by the perceived nobility of their ends. Activist journalists begin with their own worldview and collect evidence that supports it. Schneid’s idea of elevating “the voices of the oppressed” is not the purpose of journalism. However, if journalists do their jobs fairly there is a high probability those voices will be a feature of any journalism worth its salt.”
“Every decent person who understands why America has a constitutionally protected press wants to see the press succeed. As the only unregulated private sector industry in America, the free press’s entire existence is based on afflicting the single most comforted institution throughout human history: centralized authority. Afflicting and comforting anyone else is secondary. The truth—and a genuine commitment to its pursuit—must take precedence, even when it runs contrary to the interests of whoever is deemed afflicted or comforted. Journalism humbles itself in finding truth in a complex world. Activism pursues its ends with righteous certainty. Journalism is the work of describing and understanding reality; activism is the work of refashioning it. Journalists act as impediments to the acquisition of power; activists pursue power.”
“They rapidly amassed loyal followings because they met a demand and tapped a market that most mainstream digital media had ignored, particularly compared to progressive, tech-savvy, venture capital-backed, conceptually indistinguishable digital outlets like Vox, Vice, Buzzfeed, Mic, Group Nine Media, and the entire gamut of the Gizmodo Media Group. The difference is that ‘conservative’ media is accurately labeled, whereas the same standards used to detect ideological bias are not applied to progressive or centrist outlets, which consider themselves to be neutral analysts by their own standards.”
“It is also true that the limitless discretion and right of a free press—and the lack of any organized institutional check on it—comes with an immense responsibility to continuously work to earn the public’s trust and never to expect it or take it for granted. The industry owes its existence to those who have held power to account in the past. In the present and future, it must continue to scrutinize those who acquire and consolidate power in order to impose their own will on free people, almost always in the name of the best of intentions.”
https://quillette.com/2018/07/05/journalism-is-not-activism/
Forget truth, that’s too complicated. Take on B.S. It’s a given the press and other activists will take on Big Oil. Put me to sleep. Take on Big Green energy. You’re scientists, you can do math, and accounting ain’t that hard. I’d be offended if someone took my work, loaded it onto a truck and drove it off an economic cliff. I’d be a bad person if I knew that nuclear power and natural gas fracking could do something substantial, yet kept my mouth shut so as not to offended some allies. Someone here described what science is. It’s tearing things part. Not forming a musk ox defensive circle. The economic wolves were not wished away into not existing.
My latest for CFACT: Tell NSF to cut the climate alarmism — comment now!
http://www.cfact.org/2018/07/05/tell-nsf-to-cut-the-climate-alarmism/
Excerpts: Recently we have had the ability to comment on a number of proposed EPA reforms, especially putting an end to secret science. Now we all have a unique chance to tell the National Science Foundation to stop promoting climate change alarmism, especially in our schools.
Here it is:
https://www.nsf.gov/ere/ereweb/rfi2018.jsp
This important opportunity is a “Request for Information” from NSF’s Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education. The scope is quite broad, basically how to improve any aspect of NSF’s environmental research and education efforts. NSF spends almost a billion dollars a year on science education, which in the case of climate change means promoting alarmism.
Comments can be simple or elaborate. There is an online form with various specific questions, but these do not have to be answered. For simple comments there is a 200 word limit “abstract” entry. Just saying “Stop funding climate change alarmism” would be a useful start.
The RFI invites us “to think boldly about the opportunities for advancing environmental research and education into its next stage through a lens focused on economic competitiveness and/or national security.”
My bold thought is that NSF should stop funding climate change alarmism in both education and in research, which it presently does a great deal of.
There is a lot more of course.
I urge everyone to comment. This is a unique opportunity. They will not be expecting it.
“Science isn’t the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets, a procedure that is highly skewed. Once you debunk something, it is now wrong (that is how science operates but let’s ignore disciplines such as economics and political science that are more like pompous entertainment). Had science operated by majority consensus we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages and Einstein would have ended as he started, a patent clerk with fruitless side hobbies.”
“Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion to an army of lions led by a sheep. Alexander (or no doubt he who produced this probably apocryphal saying) understood the value of the active, intolerant, and courageous minority. Hannibal terrorized Rome for a decade and a half with a tiny army of mercenaries, winning twenty-two battles against the Romans, battles in which he was outnumbered each time.”
“This large payoff from stubborn courage is not just in the military. The entire growth of society, whether economic or moral, comes from a small number of people. So we close this chapter with a remark about the role of skin in the game in the condition of society. Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meeting, academic conferences, and polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere. And asymmetry is present in about everything.”
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
The majority wins, that’s CO2. Nothing can stop it. It overwhelms all. We add things up and it wins. Only there are these things resisting. Whatever they are, some of them will transform.
Are they unicorns? We have the oceans that used to be someplace else but now are recognized, while still being someplace else and it seems they do get to vote after all. We have ice that’s been around for a long time in its cold fortress. And CO2 may be resupplying it with increased precipitation. Every failed prediction might be attributed to the resistance. Everything was supposed to lay down and worship at the feet of CO2. Much time has been devoted to proving that everything is laying down to CO2. That their model of reality is the correct one. Record temperatures. Accelerated SLR. A Monster Godzilla El Nino just might happen.
Stay Woke.
“The logic of the game is thus: Hate resides within the subject (Macklemore, Donald Trump, Grandfather), and justice within the copula (he is). To make racism (denialism) disappear, attribute ignorance to someone else; name him publicly. Now you’re woke. But what masquerades as a feat of anti-racism (denialism) is really just a poorly devised self-help regime, better designed to confirm the wokeness of its participants than to inspire any awakening. For Woke Olympians, resisting racism (denialism) is as simple as bearing witness. The games rely on a theory of safety akin to the Department of Homeland Security’s (Micheal Mann) If You See Something, Say Something™ — when hate (denialism) appears, report its apparition. Winning is nothing more than performing a vanishing act, or willing injustice away. If racism (denialism) is wholly contained within malignant bodies, the easiest way to fight it is to make those people disappear. But this is the laziest kind of magic: sleight of hand that postures as sorcery.”
https://www.theawl.com/2016/04/watching-the-woke-olympics/
Debunk, takedown. Stay woke. I’m woke and you are a denier. Off with you. I have my EV and solar panels. I am woke. I wanted to vote for Sanders. I follow Gavin Schmidt. I marched for science.
Left Wants You ‘Stay Woke’ On July 4 – Liberal Sherpa – Tucker Carlson