by Judith Curry
“The first rule of climate chess is this. The board is bigger than we think, and includes more than fossil fuels.” – Jon Foley
The strategy to limit global warming is tied directly to limiting the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. Emissions targets are a centerpiece of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement. The goal of the emissions targets is to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably 1.5 degrees Centigrade, compared to pre-industrial levels (typically the baseline period 1851-1900). For reference, the climate has warmed in 2020 by about 1.2oC
Using the medium emissions scenario (SSP2-4.5), the IPCC AR6 constrained global mean temperature projections indicate that there is a 50% chance that the 1.5oC threshold would be crossed around 2030 and the 2oC threshold would be crossed around 2052. There is uncertainty in the year for which the thresholds would be crossed (2026-2042 for the 1.5oC threshold and 2038-2072 for the 2oC threshold), mostly owing to the range of climate sensitivity to CO2 among different models.
This post illustrates now natural climate variability could influence the global mean surface temperature change through 2050, and hence influence the time of crossing the 1.5 and 2.0oC thresholds. Specifically, alternative scenarios of volcanic eruptions, solar variability and internal climate variability are considered. The risk from not realistically accounting for natural climate variability is that critical possible future climate outcomes are being discounted, potentially causing maladaptation. Each of the scenarios presented here is arguably more plausible than the high emissions scenarios RCP8.5/SSP4-8.5 LINK. For additional reference, see also theis previous blog post.
Natural internal variability
Variations in global mean surface temperature are linked to recurrent multi-decadal variations in large-scale ocean circulations. Not taking multi-decadal internal variability into account in predictions of future warming runs the risk of over-estimating the warming for the next two to three decades, when the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation is expected to shift into its cold phase.
While climate models simulate the large-scale ocean circulations and internal climate variability, the magnitude in the multi-decadal band is too low in most models and the phasing of the variability is not synced with the actual, observed climate variations in long-term simulations. Averaging multiple simulations from climate models effectively averages out the internal variations, leaving only the forced climate variability (e.g. CO2 forcing).
Maher et al. (2020) used six single model initial condition large ensembles (SMILEs) for 21st century simulations found that on a 15-year time-scale, surface temperature trend projections are dominated by internal variability, with little influence of structural model differences or the emissions scenario. On a 30-year time-scale, structural model differences and emissions scenario uncertainties play a larger role in controlling surface temperature trend projections. However, even for projections out to thirty years, most of the globe could still experience no warming due to internal variability even with continued CO2 forcing.
So, for the period between 2020 and 2050, will natural internal variability contribute to warming or cooling, relative to the underlying warming trend from emissions? Most analyses have identified the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) as having the dominant multi-decadal imprint on global temperatures. It has been estimated that there is a peak-to-trough impact of the AMO on global mean surface temperatures of 0.3 to 0.4oC The climate has been in the warm phase of the AMO since 1995; hence in 2021 it has been 26 years since the previous shift. Analysis of historical and paleoclimatic records suggests that a shift to the cold phase of the AMO should occur within the next 12 years (by 2032), with a 50% probability of the shift occurring in the next 5 years (by 2026).
While we are currently in the warm phase of the AMO, we are past the peak of the warm phase. Hence we consider the following three scenarios for the contribution of multi-decadal internal variability to global mean surface temperature change averaged for the period 2021-2050:
- The None scenario (0oC) assumes no net impact of multidecadal internal variability on the global mean surface temperature, which is implicit in constrained projections of the IPCC AR6.
- The Moderate scenario (-0.2oC) assumes a shift to the cool phase of the AMO in the 2030’s with a moderate impact;
- The Strong scenario (-0.3oC) assumes a shift to the cool phase of the AMO in the 2020’s with a stronger impact.
The Moderate and Strong scenarios are contingent on the assumptions that the AMO is the primary driver of multi-decadal internal climate variability and that a shift to the cold phase of the AMO is expected in the next decade. Other facets of multi-decadal and decadal scale internal variability could come into play over the next three decades, but these scenarios illustrate the magnitude of plausible outcomes over the next three decades.
While the scenarios presented here focus on cooling over the next three decades, it is noted that the same reasoning leads to the expectation that internal variability will contribute to warming during decades in the 2nd half of the 21stcentury.
Volcanoes
The instrumental period covering the past 150 years has been relatively quiet with regards to volcanic eruptions, and thus it is tempting to ascribe potential volcanism a minor role in future climate projections. However over the past two millennia, there have been periods with considerably stronger volcanic activity. Clusters of strong tropical eruptions have contributed to sustained cold periods such as the Little Ice Age.
Explosive volcanoes are omitted from scenarios used for future climate projections, because they are unpredictable. Due to the direct radiative effect of volcanic aerosol particles that reach the stratosphere, large volcanic eruptions lead to an overall decrease of global mean surface temperature, which can extend to multi-decadal or even century timescales in the case of clusters of large volcanic eruptions. (see IPCC AR6 Cross-chapter Box 4.1)
Explosive volcanic eruptions of the magnitude of the 1991 Pinatubo eruption or larger have occurred on average twice per century throughout the past 2500 years. (Sigl et al., 2015). About 8 extremely explosive volcanic eruptions (more than 5 times stronger than Pinatubo) occurred during this period. The largest of these are Samalas in 1257 and Tambora in 1815, the latter resulting in “the year without a summer” with harvest failures across the Northern Hemisphere (Raible et al., 2016). It has been estimated that a Samalas-type eruption may occur 1-2 times per millennium on average.
Given the unpredictability of individual eruptions, the CMIP5/CMIP6 climate model simulations either specify future volcanic forcing as zero or a constant background value (Eyring 2016). The background value used in the CMIP6 simulations has been estimated from the historical record 1850. Background estimates of volcanic cooling determined from climate models range from 0.1oC (Bethke et al. 2017) to 0.27oC (Fyfe et al. 2021), the differences arising from model structural differences.
The IPCC AR6 states that it is likely that at least one large eruption will occur during the 21st century. The AR6 further acknowledges that a low likelihood, high impact outcome of several large eruptions would greatly alter the 21st century climate trajectory compared to emissions-based projections. (Cross Chapter Box 4.1) How much cooling could happen from explosive volcanic eruptions in the 21st century? A cluster of explosive eruptions such as happened in the first half of the 19th century is estimated to have caused 0.5oC cooling averaged over several decades. (Figure 7.8 IPCC AR6)
This analysis considers three scenarios of volcanic cooling for the 21st century:
- Low Baseline scenario, equivalent to a weak response to the average volcanic forcing over the historical record since 1850, estimated at -0.1oC;
- High Baseline scenario, estimated at -0.27oC;
- Extreme Cluster of volcanoes, analogous to the explosive eruptions that occurred during 1810-1840, estimated to have caused a decadally-averaged cooling of -0.5oC
Solar variations
A detailed analysis of the rationale for selecting scenarios of solar variations is described an a recent blog post LINK
There are several reasons to expect lower solar activity during the 21st century, relative to the 20th century. The recently completed solar cycle 24 was the smallest sunspot cycle in 100 years and the third in a trend of diminishing sunspot cycles. Some solar physicists expect cycle 25 to be even smaller than Cycle 24. Further, a grand maximum is more likely to be followed by a grand minimum than by another grand maximum. Empirically-based projections imply a new solar minimum starting in 2002–2004 and ending in 2063–2075. It has been estimated that there is an 8% chance of the Sun falling into a Grand Minimum during the next 40 years. However, the depth and length of a phase of low solar activity in the 21st century is largely uncertain.
If the Sun did fall into a minimum during mid 21st century of the magnitude of the Maunder Minimum, how much cooling could we expect? Estimates from climate models and other analytical models expect the cooling to be small, ranging from 0.09 to 0.3oC. These models assume that solar-climate interaction is limited to TSI forcing alone.
Recent research suggest that solar indirect effects could amplify an anomaly in solar insolation by a factor of up to 3-7. If such an amplification factor is included, then a surface temperature decrease of up to 1oC (or even more) from a Maunder Minimum could occur.
In light of these considerations, three scenarios for solar variability in the mid 21st century are considered here:
- CMIP6 Reference scenario: approximately -0.1oC
- Intermediate: -0.3oC, corresponds to high Maunder minimum estimate without amplification effects, or a weaker minimum with amplification effects
- High: -0.6oC, a low solar scenario (which is not a Maunder Minimum) with amplification by solar indirect effects
Global surface temperature projections to 2050
Synthetic scenarios building upon historical and paleo data, climate model outputs, process models and storylines based on physical reasoning provide a broader range of outcome scenarios than global climate model simulations, particularly with regards to natural climate variability.
The scenarios presented in the previous subsections are integrated here to assess how natural climate variability could change our expectations for the amount of warming expected by 2050, in particular the years in which the 1.5 and 2.0oC thresholds will be crossed. All of the scenarios of natural variability considered here point in the direction of cooling through 2050, for reasons justified in the preceding subsections.
This analysis adopts the SSP2-4.5 emissions scenario as the most likely scenario to 2050 [LINK], based on analyses by the IEA.
The final integral temperature change is the sum of temperature changes driven by:
- SSP2-4.5 emissions – 3 scenarios that span the AR6 likely range (+1.6, +2.0, +2.5oC), referenced to the baseline period 1851-1900
- Volcanoes – 3 scenarios relative to a nominal baseline of -0.1oC in the CMIP6 simulations (0, -0.17, -0.4 oC), referenced to a baseline of 2020
- Solar – 3 scenarios relative to a nominal baseline of -0.1oC in the CMIP6 simulations (0, -0.2, -0.5 oC), referenced to a baseline of 2020
- Natural internal variability – 3 scenarios (0, -0.2, -0.3 oC), referenced to a baseline of 2020
With four sources of variables and three scenarios for each variable, we can produce a total of 81 scenarios by adding combinations of scenarios inputs for the individual variables. Three of these outcome scenarios correspond directly to the AR6 values associated with SSP2-4.5, while the others include some combination of the scenarios of natural climate variability.
Figure 1 shows a histogram of the 81 different scenario outcomes. The outcome frequencies are indicated on the y-axis. For reference the temperature in 2020 is 1.2oC above the 1851-1900 baseline, which is indicated by the red vertical line. The scenario with the most warming is 2.5oC, which corresponds to the upper bound of the likely range from the AR6 (with no additional impacts from natural variability). The scenario with the lowest amount of warming is 0.4oC, which corresponds to the lower bound of the AR6 likely range with the most extreme scenario for each of the components of natural variability – this extreme outcome scenario for 2050 is 0.8oC cooler than the temperature in 2020.
Temperature change, oC
Figure 1. Distribution of scenarios of global temperature change for 2050, referenced to a baseline of 1851-1900. The vertical red line corresponds to 1.2oC, representing the warming to 2020. The y-axis is frequency of outcomes, based on 81 scenarios.
There is weak justification for providing likelihoods of the individual outcomes. While each of these scenario outcomes is arguably plausible, the distribution of outcomes in Figure 1 does not in any way reflect the probability of the outcomes. Are some of these scenarios more likely than others? Selecting the intermediate scenario for each variable produces an outcome scenario of +1.43oC, indicating that we would not cross the 1.5oC threshold before 2050 (compared to an expected crossing circa 2030 using the AR6 best estimate for SSP2-4.5). It is seen in Figure 1 that for the intermediate scenario outcomes between 1.0 and 2.0oC, there are multiple pathways to the same temperature outcomes, supporting a greater likelihood for these intermediate outcomes. However, judgment about the likelihood of individual outcomes rests on the assessment of the likelihood of the individual input scenarios.
All of the components of natural variability point to cooling during the period 2020-2050. Individually these components are not expected to be large in the moderate scenarios. However when summed, their magnitude approaches, or could even exceed, the magnitude of the emissions-driven warming for the next three decades. The odds of all three natural variability inputs maintaining at the IPCC baseline levels to 2050 seems low to me.
Studies using global climate models to assess the probability of decades in the 21st century being characterized by net cooling have mostly focused only on natural internal variability (Maher et al. 2020 Knutson et al..2016), with a single study that I’m aware of that considers volcanic eruptions plus internal variability (Bethke et al. 2017). Volcanic-induced cooling becomes increasingly important in facilitating neutral or negative temperature trends on longer timescales, in conjunction with natural internal variability effects. Several studies have addressed the combination of internal and solar variability LINK Apart from the ‘wild card’ of volcanic eruptions, the big uncertainty is solar indirect effects. The growing likelihood of a solar minimum of some magnitude during the mid 21st century emphasizes the need for a resolution to the debate over low versus high variability solar reconstructions, and improved understanding of solar indirect effects.
The bottom line is that uncertainty in global temperature projections to 2050 is skewed towards lower values, as uncertainty in near term scenarios of emissions is decreasing. The confluence of cooling contributions from solar, volcanoes and natural internal variability during the period 2020-2050 could extend by decades the time horizon for keeping the global mean surface temperature below the thresholds of 1.5 and 2.0oC. This extension has important implications for the urgency of emissions reductions and planning for geoengineering interventions.
The targets of 1.5 and 2oC are easy to measure and communicate, and have been effective at galvanizing political will and public support. However, these targets are vague approximations to some of the dangers of climate change and mis-represent the nature of the scientific knowledge upon which these numbers are claimed to rest. (Hulme, Fetishizing the number) These targets have arguably become a “fetish” that exert excessive power over our imagination of the climatic future, narrowing our policy options and directing our policy making. Further, these targets encourage goal displacement (Jerry Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics), which occurs when attention becomes focused on hitting the target while obscuring the real reasons why we are concerned about climate change in the first place – the wellbeing of humans and ecosystems.
The long way of saying the emperor has no clothes.
Warm surfaces in the eastern Pacific may have seen a millennial peak (1). A solar decline contributes to more wavy intrusions of Arctic air into lower latitudes (2). As for the vagaries of thermohaline circulation and climate change – God only knows (3).
But this is far from saying that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not a greenhouse gas in the globally coupled nonlinear Earth system. Like it or not – dynamical complexity is given as the rationale for the temperature targets. And you would need a whole new science to show the Earth system ain’t spatiotemporal chaotic.
(1) https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/26/3/jcli-d-12-00003.1.xml
(2) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/5/2/024001
(3) https://connectusfund.org/7-strong-prayers-for-sailors-at-sea
Imperialism and fashion have nothing to do with the case. But the the assumptions and calculations of those concerned with global warming (whether they want to “promote” the hypothesis or “debunk” it are worthy of consideration. As always, those who aren’t interested, shouldn’t bother reading this.
Always if empiricism is out of fashion.
Judith’s last sentence says:
Further, these targets encourage goal displacement (Jerry Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics), which occurs when attention becomes focused on hitting the target while obscuring the real reasons why we are concerned about climate change in the first place – the wellbeing of humans and ecosystems. (bold added).
Empirical evidence overwhelming shows that warming is beneficial for the wellbeing of humans and ecosystems and for the world economy. Therefore, there is no valid justification for policies to attempt to reduce global warming.
Climate policy needs to be justified on the impacts of global warming (which are net beneficial), not the projected amounts. This is largely ignored by climate scientists and IPCC.
Peter Lang commented:
Empirical evidence overwhelming shows that warming is beneficial for the wellbeing of humans and ecosystems and for the world economy.
No, only junky economic models that make laughable assumptions.
Didn’t yours’ find benefits up to 2 or 3 C of warming? Despite the fact that that amount of warming would inundate every coastal city in the world.
Peter Lang commented:
Climate policy needs to be justified on the impacts of global warming (which are net beneficial), not the projected amounts. This is largely ignored by climate scientists and IPCC.
Climate scientists think climate economists’ models are a joke. For one thing they completely ignore the possibility of tipping points. For another you price damage reclamation as a positive contribution to economic growth while ignoring the damage itself.
“warming is beneficial” – yes, but only up to a point before desiccation and soil salinisation begins. Then its a long trend downwards.
As mentioned in posts below, these have happened in the past, with ‘dyings’ blamed many times on a host of issues that may be collateral to the above. These all happened post warm periods, and we may be seeing the beginning of a return.
“Despite the fact that that amount of warming would inundate every coastal city in the world.”
Assuming this is going to happen a fair time frame is 50 years from now. So we have this one thing that doesn’t say much about everything. There are many benefits of cheap reliable energy that are can be had right now.
Is Lomberg too using junky economic models too?
One problem is that the target of +1.5º or +2.0ºC can be reached or not regardless of what the climate does.
Between 2000 and 2015 a total of +0.4ºC were introduced into datasets by cooling the past and warming the present, as this figure for GISS demonstrates:
https://i.imgur.com/8TQRmcB.png
Prof. Ole Humlun keeps a record in his Climate4you.com site.
AR6 recognizes that warming from AR5 includes +0.1ºC from dataset changes.
So since 2000, +0.5ºC warming has taken place in datasets. Doing the same again will make us surpass +1.5ºC whenever they want. Undoing it will make us never reach +1.5ºC.
It is hard to play this game when the cards are marked.
The believe in a 21st century solar grand minimum is largely misplaced. I expect about the same level of solar activity for the 21st century as for the 20th.
https://i.imgur.com/7vftVRy.png
SC25 is already having a little more activity than SC24, as I projected in 2016.
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
Permafrost thawing? Failure to reduce CO2 emissions?
Elvis lives? The questions are endless.
Regarding multidecadal variability, the climate shifted into a warm phase in 1976, and shifted again into a cool phase in 1997. AMO lags these shifts as part of Marcia and yourself “stadium-wave” hypothesis.
If I have to guess I would say the climate will shift again to a warm phase c. 2030, during the next solar minimum. This means little warming or even some cooling (not much, perhaps -0.2ºC) until c. 2035, when warming will resume.
Based on stadium wave analysis, and lack of a cold AMO transition so far, we estimate warming to resume circa 2040
Javier:
As I have previously pointed out, Earth’s temperatures are solely controlled by varying amounts of SO2 aerosols circulating in the atmosphere . There is no effect from CO2, sunspots, or ANY cycles.
Future temperatures cannot even be estimated because of their unpredictability.
See: http://www.skepticmedpublishers.com/article-in-press-journal-of-earth-science-and-climatic-change/
And: https://www.osf.io/b2vxp/
Sorry, but I don’t believe that even for a nanosecond.
In response to Ragnaar about this comment on the previous thread:
https://judithcurry.com/2022/01/08/week-in-review-science-edition-132/#comment-969428
If Judith is interested in an article of mine about my knowledge (as a molecular biologist) and experience with COVID, and how to manage its risk, I have the time to write it at present. She just have to let me know.
A guest post would be most welcome, thx!
Javier,
I read your comment and would be very interested in a longer article on the same subject. I have thought for most of this pandemic that we were ignoring how our immune system and most viruses behave. I would like to know your thoughts on viral evolution and the likelihood that this virus will continue to evolve around our immune system response and cause mostly mild disease in the future.
Hello Javier
I look forward to your commentary on Covid, and vaccines.
The last vaccine I took of any type was for polio in the late 1950’s. At the time when the jab was replaced by a small oral dose. You are correct, the individual needs to focus on their own health and educate themselves.
Would you be so kind as to perhaps also give some insight into these data analysis mainly from the UK health system.
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/01/20/public-health-data-confirms-vaccinated-more-likely-to-die-of-covid/
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/01/19/vaccines-double-chance-of-catching-covid/
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/01/23/world-government-data-shows-covid-vaccinated-suffering-ade/
Regards
See this quote from and check Figs 1-5 at :
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2021/08/c02-solar-activity-and-temperature.html
“Net Zero threatens Sustainable Development Goals
Abstract
This paper begins by reviewing the relationship between CO2 and Millennial temperature cycles. CO2 levels follow temperature changes. CO2 is the dependent variable and there is no calculable consistent relationship between the two. The uncertainties and wide range of out-comes of model calculations of climate radiative forcing arise from the improbable basic assumption that anthropogenic CO2 is the major controller of global temperatures. Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between the phases of cyclic processes of varying wavelengths and amplitudes. At all scales, including the scale of the solar planetary system, sub-sets of oscillating systems develop synchronous behaviors which then produce changing patterns of periodicities in time and space in the emergent data. Solar activity as represented by the Oulu cosmic ray count is here correlated with the Hadsst3 temperatures and is the main driver of global temperatures at Millennial scales. The Millennial pattern is projected forwards to 2037. Earth has just passed the peak of a Millennial cycle and will generally cool until 2680 – 2700. At the same time, and not merely coincidentally, the earth has now reached a new population peak which brought with it an associated covid pandemic, and global poverty and income disparity increases which threaten the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. During the last major influenza epidemic world population was 1.9 billion. It is now 7.8 billion+/. The establishment science “consensus” that a modelled future increase in CO2 levels and not this actual fourfold population increase is the main threat to human civilization is clearly untenable. The cost of the proposed rapid transition to non- fossil fuels would create an unnecessary, enormously expensive. obstacle in the way of the effort to attain a modern ecologically viable sustainable global economy. We must adapt to the most likely future changes and build back smarter when losses occur. “
I cannot see Figure 1
oops let me fix that
A sober and logical analysis. Heaven forbid. Thank you, Judith.
A question. We see how above water volcanoes affect temperatures by cooling due to the aerosols. What are the numbers and geothermal affects of underwater volcanoes on ocean temperatures and currents?
See previous post on this topic, but this is highly uncertain
https://judithcurry.com/2019/07/21/geothermal-ocean-warming-discussion-thread/
Thank you!
The “science is settled” crowd spare themselves all this complexity by simply asserting the 450 scenario for 2 degrees Celsius and recently the 430 scenario for 1.5 degrees. Easy peasy.
https://rclutz.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/co2-mauna-loa-projected.png
Pingback: Crossing (or not) the 1.5 and 2.0C thresholds – Climate- Science.press
Of course the LIA was caused by savage white men, not by volcanoes. So as long as white men don’t move about, there should be no more ice ages ;)
According to the study, the Native American genocide, often referred to as “The Great Dying,” not only reduced the continent’s population by countless millions but subsequently made global temperatures fall drastically.
“The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO2 and global surface air temperatures,” said the study’s lead author, Alexander Koch.
The mass death of Native Americans through contact with foreign diseases or murder on behalf of the settlers purportedly left so much abandoned native agricultural land to be reclaimed by nature that it drew enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cause the Little Ice Age, which was a period of global cooling between the 15th and 18th centuries.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/little-ice-age-cause
Does this make sense? Seems that the big attraction of the New World was land, that was quickly put to use for agriculture- think sugar plantations in the Caribbean the planting on the Great Plains, etc. Related, how many samples of pre-1850 ish air are there to put the “base” CO2 level at ~ 280 ppm?
Pete – personally, I believe Dr. Curry’s account of the LIA. But this article (about the demise of indigenous peoples) just goes to show there are some nut jobs out there when it comes to the intersection of woke and global warming.
Pete Bonk commented:
Related, how many samples of pre-1850 ish air are there to put the “base” CO2 level at ~ 280 ppm?
Proxies.
Jim2:
No, the LIA was not caused by carbon dioxide being drawn from the air. It was solely caused by increased volcanic activity
Burl Henry commented:
No, the LIA was not caused by carbon dioxide being drawn from the air. It was solely caused by increased volcanic activity
Well, now it seems to depend:
“Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age triggered by volcanism and sustained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks,” Gifford H. Miller et al, GRL (2013).
DOI: 10.1029/2011GL050168
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011GL050168/full
“Little Ice Age abruptly triggered by intrusion of Atlantic waters into the Nordic Seas,” Francois Lapointe et al, Science Advances, 15 Dec 2021 v7i51
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi8230
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi8230
Davidappell02: Jan23, 2002 11:03
“Well now, it seems to depend”
I am familiar with the references cited, but they are either incomplete, or wrong.;
For the correct cause, see https://www.osf.io/b2vxp/
Interesting observation. There is little info (afaik) of the past from the new world, other than that from the south continent.
But the LIA dying, and every 980yrs before that up to some 8k ago. are traceable in the old world.
The dying occurred across the globe during the LIA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas
I am going with 40 million combined for total for North and South. These days, we can do some plowing. Around 1400 AD, not so much. Any CO2 released after 1500 from the Americas saw functioning local sinks in a lower CO2 environment.
Feedbacks are beginning to kick in and will likely offset any AMOC cooling.
1.5 C is already locked in, and if we clean up air pollution 2.0 C is already locked in too.
Regardless of any internal variability, which doesn’t warm or cool the planet in the long-term but merely shift warming somewhere else for a few decades. When the AMOC shifts phases again warming will be above the trend again.
The issue is timing of crossing these thresholds: early/mid/late 21st century makes a big difference in terms of the urgency of the energy transition and the types of technologies (and on what time scale) we are willing to contemplate.
Happily we skeptics do not believe any of this so there is no urgency issue
or transition issue.
Speaking of the so-called transition, I just developed a simple reliability analysis for solar that is rather fun. The storage amounts are enormous, making the cost absurd.
https://www.cfact.org/2022/01/19/unreliability-makes-solar-power-impossibly-expensive/
I just use the predictable intermittency. Nighttime and 5 cloudy days.
Anyone who knows how much electricity is consumed and understands the first law of thermo understands that compensating for the intermittency of solar and wind with storage is a practical impossibility. For example, all of the new storage installed everywhere in the world in 2020 would replace one large power plant for only about 24 hours, and then only if that storage was operated outside of its design.
dougbadgero wrote:
For example, all of the new storage installed everywhere in the world in 2020 would replace one large power plant for only about 24 hours, and then only if that storage was operated outside of its design.
Storage isn’t everything with respect to solar and wind.
How much of today’s electricity generation with coal and gas is stored?
curryja wrote:
The issue is timing of crossing these thresholds: early/mid/late 21st century makes a big difference in terms of the urgency of the energy transition and the types of technologies (and on what time scale) we are willing to contemplate.
No this isn’t an issue Judith. All you have are guesses and assumptions and suppositions. No hard science.
The world is going to keep warming. AMO cooling, if any, could well be countered by increased feedbacks, or positive internal variability, as your post seems to allude to but won’t admit.
All you want to talk about in any detail are potentially negative factors, while ignoring all potentially positive factors.
People are suffering and dying at 1.5 C of warming. Even more people will suffer and die at 2.0 C of warming.
You want to ignore that for sake of continued fossil fuel profits. (No, I don’t think at all that energy or electricity nonintermittency is foremost on your mind. That can be figured out with sustainable energy sources, and will be. Are you for or against a full-on effort/war to do that?)
Speculating about volcanoes is really quite a pathetic attempt to deny action on climate change, I have to say. I’m flabergasted.
davidappell02 | January 24, 2022 at 12:00 am:
“All you have are guesses and assumptions and suppositions. No hard science.”
That perfectly describes climate science.
Javier commented:
That perfectly describes climate science.
How much of it have you ever studied?
Especially mathematically?
davidappell02 | January 24, 2022 at 1:13 am:
“How much of it have you ever studied?”
As much as you but with better avail.
“People are suffering and dying at 1.5 C of warming. Even more people will suffer and die at 2.0 C of warming.”
Says you
“Climate change has led to more than half a million fewer deaths over the past 20 years, analysis from the Office for National Statistics suggests.
There has been a reduction in deaths caused by cold winters since 2001 in England and Wales, as the climate warms, while there was relatively little increase in deaths due to hotter weather, the figures show.
Temperature-related deaths, with the UK experiencing fewer cold days and more warm days, have fallen by 555,103 or an average of 27,755 deaths a year between 2001 and 2020.”
Says the ONS.
davidappell02 | January 23, 2022 at 11:06 pm |
dougbadgero wrote:
For example, all of the new storage installed everywhere in the world in 2020 would replace one large power plant for only about 24 hours, and then only if that storage was operated outside of its design.
“Storage isn’t everything with respect to solar and wind.”
“How much of today’s electricity generation with coal and gas is stored?”
Appell – The fuel for Gas and Coal is stored – but you cant store the fuel for wind and solar . when the wind doesnt blow there is no fuel for the windmills, When the sun doesnt shine, there is no fuel for the solar panels.
“Storage isn’t everything with respect to solar and wind.
How much of today’s electricity generation with coal and gas is stored?”
If you have a big pile of coal, there’s your store.
Where’s the big pile of sunshine? Where’s the big pile of wind?
So of course storage is ‘everything’ for solar and wind if you’re going to rely on it.
Appell writes – “People are suffering and dying at 1.5 C of warming. Even more people will suffer and die at 2.0 C of warming.”
Appell – the great die offs occurred during periods of cold – where as civilizations grow during periods of warmth.
1/3 of the worlds population died during the LIA, where as there was tremendous growth of the world population during the MWP.
Just another example of climate science ignoring well known world history.
02
“ People are suffering and dying at 1.5 C of warming. Even more people will suffer and die at 2.0 C of warming.”
An absurd Gretaism. Instead of reading the cataclysmic stories for adolescents, why don’t you read the actual science.
“ How much of it have you ever studied?
Especially mathematically?”
That is your problem. You get down in the weeds and have convinced yourself that those equations are reality, when they are human constructs that oversimplify reality. 8th grade equations are so yesterday.
“That is your problem. You get down in the weeds and have convinced yourself that those equations are reality, when they are human constructs that oversimplify reality. 8th grade equations are so yesterday.”
And so beyond you.
Frequently the equations are reality. The problem is the gross conceptual error regarding what those equations mean in the real world. A typical thermal-hydraulic model will have three equations on three conserved quantities…mass, energy, and momentum. That model will then solve those equations in multiple fields, e.g. liquid, vapor, and droplet.
The issue is that the equations are both coupled and non-linear. The modeler can select plausible inputs and construct plausible probabilities for parametric parameters and still get wildly incorrect answers. That is why, IMO, there are so many different climate models with so many different results.
That is also why such models are best used to create inequalities, e.g. temperature will be no greater than “x”, not precise predictions.
dougbadgero commented:
That is also why such models are best used to create inequalities, e.g. temperature will be no greater than “x”, not precise predictions.
Climate models can’t make predictions, only projections.
Climate models give different results because they make different assumptions and choose different schemes to model the physics.
Climate modelers rarely care about their projections, they mostly use models as experiments to see what happens if they change one subroutine or another, viz. try different representations for parts of the underlying physics.
Every six years or a few really big, global models run long projections out to the year 2100 to satisfy the requests of IPCC report writers. Then they go back to doing science.
Assuming all feedbacks are positive – increasing warming – may be their greatest blunder ever. 🤣
Robert I. Ellison commented:
Assuming all feedbacks are positive – increasing warming – may be their greatest blunder ever.
Never assumed that, but the three major feedbacks are all positive.
1. water vapor feedback
2. ice-albedo feedback
3. cloud feedback
I don’t know what I can suggest to David.
Positive feedbacks- appell
Can y explain why positive feedbacks didn’t sent the earth into the death spiral during any of the prior warming periods ? Is there something climate scientists know that this co2 caused warming is different
Robert I. Ellison commented:
I don’t know what I can suggest to David.
You can suggest equivalent negative feedbacks instead of meaningless videos.
The Planck feedback is the biggest negative – stabilising climate. But I as thinking more of thermohaline circulation and ice sheets.
Joe – the non climate scientist commented:
Can y explain why positive feedbacks didn’t sent the earth into the death spiral during any of the prior warming periods ?
Sure, this is taught in every basic climate science course. You should go learn about it.
Appel man
Sure it’s taught in every climate science course!
But why do climate science courses teach that positive feedbacks react different when the warming is “caused by man made co2”
Warming is warming
How are the positive feedbacks able to tell the difference
Joe the non climate scientist commented:
But why do climate science courses teach that positive feedbacks react different when the warming is “caused by man made co2”
I doubt they do.
What’s your evidence they do?
Robert I. Ellison wrote:
The Planck feedback is the biggest negative – stabilising climate. But I as thinking more of thermohaline circulation and ice sheets.
Yes, the Planck feedback, and while it ultimately limits warming, it doesn’t prevent a bunch of it.
Not sure what you mean by “thermohaline circulation” and “ice sheets.” Ice sheets have disappeared in Earth’s past. So not a limiting feedback. As they disappear they’re a positive feedback via the ice-albedo feedback.
groan…
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-11/2%20Heinrich%20and%20Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger%20Events%20-%20Final-OCT%202021.pdf
Robert I. Ellison commented:
groan…
Click to access 2%20Heinrich%20and%20Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger%20Events%20-%20Final-OCT%202021.pdf
What’s your point Re: feedbacks?
Ice sheets come and go.
Robert I. Ellison wrote:
Ice sheets come and go.
guffaw cackle cackle lol
A reduction in thermohaline circulation reduces heat moving into northern latitudes – in low NH summer insolation ice sheets grow in a runaway feedback.
I did hint that some rudimentary oceanography an atmospheric physics might help David bridge the yawning chasms in his education.
If all feedbacks were really positive, we would all be dead. We aren’t, so not all feedbacks are positive.
Sorry, I should have written AMO above, instead of AMOC.
The best storage option is a nuclear power plant; several years energy stored in fuel at plant. Coal is next at several months of energy stored in coal piles at power plant. Natural gas a few hours, with fuel stored in pipelines.
Green energy does not store energy and in fact screws up the grid’s reliability.
In passing, anyone who thinks climate models can predict the planet’s future temperature is seriously out of touch with reality. The models are not fit for that purpose owing to fundamental mathematical limitations
Mike Keller commented:
In passing, anyone who thinks climate models can predict the planet’s future temperature is seriously out of touch with reality. The models are not fit for that purpose owing to fundamental mathematical limitations
Fundamental limitations such as?
PS: Models project, they don’t predict.
“Feedbacks are beginning to kick in and will likely offset any AMOC [AMO] cooling.”
The feedback kicked in notably from 1995, with the AMO warming in response to weaker solar wind states since then, it’s a negative feedback. The corollary of that was much stronger solar wind states in the mid 1970’s, mid 1980’s, and early 1990’s, driving colder AMO anomalies. With a colder AMO there is more low cloud cover, and conversely less low cloud cover with a warmer AMO. So it’s a self amplified negative feedback with overshoot. Aerosols have little to do with it.
Given that rising CO2 forcing should increase positive North Atlantic Oscillation conditions, by default it can never drive a warmer AMO which is dependent on negative NAO conditions.
You cannot blame rising CO2 forcing for surface warming which is the result of negative feedbacks to weaker indirect solar forcing.
All intelligent info but missing the bigger and simpler picture. Many ideas essential if mainstream view are correct make perfect sense regardless of the nature, extent, cause and direction of climate change; they also work if we get an unexpected volcanic winter, ocean current shifts cause localised cooling in a warming world or a major food crop fails. Examples include less waste, restoring fish stocks, alternatives to fossil fuels, silviculture, regenerative farming, combining conservation with careful use and growing fewer cash crops, especially livestock feed. Sorry to sound anti-intellectual but look up the Time for Action scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Time, effort and cash need to be put into such win-win options not into more discussions.
Sorry but any forecast, “good” or “bad”, based on climate models is unreliable at best (NB. I’m talking about GCM-type models, ot Marcia Wyatt’s). Our far more accurate weather models show that once a GCM-type model has moved more than a couple of days forward it is out of territory that is predictable from initial conditions and is firmly into random number generation territory. There is no point in using such a model – or any number of such models – to investigate climate even as little as 10 years ahead.
Mike Jonas commented:
Sorry but any forecast, “good” or “bad”, based on climate models is unreliable at best
Climate models don’t make forecasts, they make projections.
To evaluate climate models, you have to correct them for the actual emissions, solar variations, volcanic eruptions, aerosol emissions, etc that actually took place, because no one can forecast the future of these. Then:
“We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful [14 of 17 projections] in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model‐projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.”
“Evaluating the performance of past climate model projections,” Hausfather et al, Geo Res Lett 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085378
figure:
https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1202271427807678464?lang=en
Appell 02 – Climate models don’t make forecasts, they make projections.
In psychiatry a projection is a defence mechanism by which your own traits and emotions are attributed to someone else. It seems to me that our climate projection models follow that trait rather too accurately and do not track what Planet Earth is likely to be doing next whatever at all.
Is there a computer on the planet that can accurately project a series of coin tosses and how far does it get before it fails in what is a fifty/fifty game of chance? Randomness is a truly hard taskmaster.
When it comes to weather our forecasting models do rather better in settled weather than they do with unsettled weather. That should give us a clue as to why our computers struggle as much as we do when it comes to seeing into the future. It is so much harder to get things right even a short time ahead when there is so much more going on.
Logic machines have their virtues but they are as hopeless as their designers when it comes to foreseeing what lies ahead. Resolution is the key to seeing anything clearly and we are still really raw creatures when it comes to understanding how nature works via observational and recorded data. Our history makes it pretty clear that at times long gone we may have had a much better sense of harmony with nature than we do now.
IMO we have lost our way by focusing on carbon dioxide and not paying attention to meeting our energy needs by the most efficient, reliable and effective means we have (i.e. nuclear energy, backed up by coal, gas and hydro, but not solar, not wind, and not battery nonsense). Who knows what breakthroughs we may have if we stop being so precious about what we may be doing wrong?
UK-Weather Lass commented:
Appell 02 – Climate models don’t make forecasts, they make projections.
You don’t understand.
No one knows how much CO2 will be emitted next year, or the year after, or the year after that, etc. Or how much of that will stay in the atmosphere.
Same for CH4, N2O, and all the other GHGs.
Same for aerosols. Volcanic eruptions. Solar irradiance.
Hence no one knows what the actual forcing will be year-by-year.
But climate models have to assume something, so they use the various IPCC scenarios.
But none of these scenarios will actually match the actual emissions, volcanic eruptions, irradiance, etc.
So you can’t compare model scenario outputs to what actually happened.
You can try if you go back and adjust the models for what actually DID transpire, year by year, using actual emissions (really the atmospheric levels of CO2, CH4, N2O, etc), solar irradiance, etc.
That’s all you can do. Because no one knows the future.
Models don’t predict, they project.
Weather models can predict, because the underlying conditions don’t change much over a few days. No assumptions are needed.
UK-Weather Lass wrote:
IMO we have lost our way by focusing on carbon dioxide and not paying attention to meeting our energy needs by the most efficient, reliable and effective means we have (i.e. nuclear energy, backed up by coal, gas and hydro, but not solar, not wind, and not battery nonsense).
Are fossil fuels “efficient” and “effective” is they prematurely kill one in five people, change the climate for the next 100,000 years, raise sea level by meters over the next few centuries, acidify the ocean, melt tens of trillions of tons of ice, intensify storms and rainfall, degrade agricultural growing conditions, and kill more in heat waves, increase wildfires, decrease snowpacks, intensify droughts? Do you have any idea what 3 C of warming will do to the planet, then to civilization? Do you understand that 3 C of warming is half of the difference between 2 miles of ice over Chicago and pre-industrial civilization?
davidappell02 | January 25, 2022 at 11:43 pm
During the last 5000 years, drought and wildfires have been most profound during grand solar minima periods, such as the 4.2 kyr and 3.2 kyr aridity events. Partly because El Nino conditions increase. But the intensity and frequency of major heat and cold waves won’t have changed as they are dependent on discrete indirect solar forcing rather than the mean state of the global climate.
They cannot be random number generators or predictions of +1,000,000 degrees would occur with frequencies of -273 degrees.
Why exactly is the global temperature during the 1850 -1900 period the perfect Earth Temperature…from which it should never naturally deviate?
We had just barely emerged from the coldest 2 centuries of the Holocene Interglacial. And with CO2 being the “control knob” of Earth Temperature… how did we ever climb out of the LIA with stable CO2 levels?
See my earlier post on the Goldilocks dilemma
https://judithcurry.com/2012/12/22/the-goldilocks-principle/
Because change is bad. They’re conservatives. They cannot think outside the box.
Let me point out that model projections are inconsistent with spectral line calculators. Both a 3.7W/m2 2xCO2 forcing, as well as 1.8W/m2 in vapor feedback, can be optained in spectral line calculators in the absence of overlaps. If you remove other GHGs (and clouds), this is the growth of the respective SFR (single factor removal, or “gross”) figures.
With overlaps included (intra-GHGs, clouds), you get much lower numbers. Surface emissivity btw. (~0.91) also has a role to play. Under these realistic circumstances, 2xCO2 forcing is rather only 2W/m2, vapor feedback ~0.65W/m2. With these the current 5 decadel warming trend can not be explained by CO2 emissions.
Indirectly this is an analogy to the attribution problem. The “science” is far off in terms of the GHE attributable to GHGs. A GHE of 150W/m2 (or more) is an undue simplification, even more so if you simply blame it on GHGs.
a) the surface is not emitting some 390W/m2, but only about 355W/m2, consistent with an emissivity of 0.91
b) clouds may “add” 30W/m2 to this GHE, but that is only the SFA (single factor addition) figure. The SFR contribution by clouds is rather ~75W/m2.
c) it follows that the non-overlapped exclusive GHG share in the GHE is a mere 355 – 240 – 75 = 40W/m2.
Only these ~40W/m2 are the variable part so to say, if you change GHG concentrations (be it CO2, vapor..). That is opposed to some 100W/m2, or more.
https://greenhousedefect.com/
You can’t just say RADIATIVE energy get converted into Heat. It’s more likely it stays Radiative energy.
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
The spectrum of the radiation will tend to be shifted towards the red (and infra-red) with time as it interacts with the surface of the earth. Entropy increases in these interactions.
Judith
I’m interested in your level of confidence in the 1850 global temperatures.
Pre 1900 the Southern Hemisphere had only 12% of station coverage. The SST measurements pre 1900 was scanty, limited mostly to sea lanes. The OHC measurements pre 1900 were mostly from the Challenger expedition and even that left millions of square miles not sampled.
The best I can see, we had very little reliable data that was somewhat spatially complete until after 1900.
Here is just 1 tide gauge. The SLR rate is of little importance. I’m looking for the significant acceleration effect of CO2 over the last 170 years that should be apparent.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=120-022
How would you best describe your level of confidence in the 1850 global temperature. Thank you. As always, this post is superb.
“limit global warming to well below 2, preferably 1.5 degrees Centigrade, compared to pre-industrial levels (typically the baseline period 1851-1900).”
When I search for industrial revolution, I get start dates between 1750 and 1850. Most references I find show the Little Ice Age ending between 1850-1890. If the 2 degrees reference is between 1850-1900, it is inaccurate to call it “preindustrial.” It more accurately should be reference to as the end of the Little Ice Age.
Inaccurate use of the term “preindustrial” preconditions the reader to blame industry. Using the phrase “end of the Little Ice Age,” preconditions readers to wonder why they would want to live during the Little Ice Age. It is hard to win a debate when you accept your opponent’s inaccurate verbiage without challenge. Words matter!
Lewis Carroll addressed this in 1865: ““When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.” In 2022, it is still about who is to be master, alleged dangerous warming is only a weapon in the battle for power.
Thanks for the reply.
I don’t think there is any fuzz on 1851-1900 is not “preindustrial.”
I fail to see how someone can win a debate when they not only don’t challenge their opponents pejorative phrases, but actually adopt them.
“Explosive volcanoes are omitted from scenarios used for future climate projections, because they are unpredictable.”
Hansen (1988) attempted to deal with this in his infamous presentation to Congress by arbitrarily picking a couple of dates for hypothetical eruptions, which didn’t take place on schedule.
I think that an alternative approach that should be considered, is to increase the uncertainty range (error bars) of projections, in the direction of cooling as the time increases from the last significant eruption.
Uncertainty ranges tend to get short shrift from climatologists, but they can provide useful information beyond the implied precision of measurements.
Clyde Spencer commented;
Hansen (1988) attempted to deal with this in his infamous presentation to Congress by arbitrarily picking a couple of dates for hypothetical eruptions, which didn’t take place on schedule.
In other words, Hansen was generous with assumptions about volcanic cooling, yet they still didn’t come true and here we are with the warming they didn’t cancel.
(As if anyone expects anyone to predict future huge volcanic eruptions, let alone “on schedule,” LOL.)
davidappell02,
Unsurprisingly, you misunderstood. Hansen hypothesized two eruptions that didn’t take place, and yet the projections still ran warm compared to reality.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/30/analysis-of-james-hansens-1988-prediction-of-global-temperatures-for-the-last-30-years/
Clyde Spencer commented:
Unsurprisingly, you misunderstood. Hansen hypothesized two eruptions that didn’t take place, and yet the projections still ran warm compared to reality.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/30/analysis-of-james-hansens-1988-prediction-of-global-temperatures-for-the-last-30-years/
Clyde, if you think something from WUWT is going to convince me of anything, you are seriously off base. That site bans me, and many others, from even commenting. They aren’t interested in science.
You said, “That site bans me, …” I suspect that is a personal problem from what I remember about your comments.
However, the link I provided is something written by me. It is not the official position of WUWT. WUWT is just acting as an honest-broker publisher, with a history of allowing non-skeptic pieces such as by Nick Stokes.
If you are unwilling to even read something because of WHERE it was published, then again that is your personal problem.
Clyde Spencer commented:
However, the link I provided is something written by me. It is not the official position of WUWT. WUWT is just acting as an honest-broker publisher, with a history of allowing non-skeptic pieces such as by Nick Stokes.
WUWT is an “honest broker” — LOL LOL LOL.
If you want to be taken seriously, Clyde, don’t publish there. You’ll be ignored and get the site’s cooties, too.
WUWT blocks every serious commenter & blogger I know of. It also blocks them on Twitter. It also blocks me on Twitter, just because it can.
Watts is afraid of honest, direct commentary, while lying about me several times. He’s made his bed; his reputation is forever ruined. Your’s will be too by putting your writing there.
I would call the post by JC wishful thinking. It’s all if, if, and if. It seems if we don’t cross the 1.5 or 2 C threshold in the next 80 years, we don’t have to do anything about CO2 emissions. That somehow, it’s not a problem. Even if what she says is true — that’s a big if — all it does is slowdown the CO2 effect. It doesn’t stop it or reverse it. We have one shot at fixing this. There is no mulligan on this one. Policy has to be based on the worst-case scenario.
Let’s look at each component of natural variability.
Internal variability
This component is comprised of ocean circulation. That has zero impact on planetary temperature. I’ve gone through this before. To cause the temperature of the planet to change, energy has to be added to or subtracted from the planet. Moving energy around does not accomplish that. Sure, surface temperatures go up and down but that does not cause an energy of the planet to change.
https://climate.nasa.gov/internal_resources/2266/
I’ve used this graph before. Look at the period between 1880 and 1940. The temperature changes in the planet tracks solar irradiance. Where is the impact of internal variability? What happened? Did it decide to take a vacation?
There was a discussion of the impact on ocean currents on albedo. There is not a lot of data on this, but I found NASA link that discusses this:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/84499/measuring-earths-albedo
Bottom line, there is no significant change in albedo.
Volcanoes
It true that volcanoes emit aerosols that can cool the planet by increasing the albedo. It is also true these are short lived. It is also true that volcanoes emit greenhouse gases. It’s a mixed bad. There is no way to predict volcanic activity or how it is going to impact planetary temperature. What happened in the past means nothing.
Solar radiation
If you look at the graph, I posted of planetary temperature vs solar irradiance by year and look at the years from 1985 – 2020, you’ll notice that solar irradiance is decreasing but temperature change is increasing. It tracks CO2 ppm. That means solar radiation is going to have to decrease significantly more than it has in order to have an impact on planetary temperature change. Is there any evidence that is going to happen? NO!
You can’t base policy on effects that have no impact on planetary temperature or effects that are having minimal impact that could have an impact that you can’t quantify.
So you are saying if an ocean current ferries hot water from the equator to the poles, where it is emitted into space, then it has no impact on climate? Interesting, that.
The “it” being energy of the hot water emitted into space as IR.
What I’m saying is that if you transfer the hot water to the poles and that radiates energy into space where it came from at the equator is colder and that radiates less energy into space. Net-net is zero. I went through this when I invalidated the planet rotation theory.
You can’t change planetary temperature by moving energy from place to place on the planet. The temperatures adjust to satisfy the energy balance.
jim2 commented:
So you are saying if an ocean current ferries hot water from the equator to the poles, where it is emitted into space, then it has no impact on climate?
What physics says it’s emitted to space?
Even the poles are hotter than space. Therefore, energy will flow from the poles to space.
In radiative heat transfer energy always flows from a body with a temperature above absolute zero. Whether a body gets hotter or colder depends on how much radiant energy comes from other sources that the body absorbs.
Outer space is not hotter or colder. That applies to things that have mass.
JJB
You said, “You can’t change planetary temperature by moving energy from place to place on the planet.”
However, you can be fooled into thinking that the surface temperature is increasing if heat energy “hiding” in the deep oceans is moved to the surface. Using sea surface temperatures as a proxy for the volumetric temperature only works for ‘Flat Earthers.’
Ever hear of the First Law of Thermodynamics? You can’t increase total energy by moving energy around. That’s like taking money from one pocket and putting it into another and thinking you have more money. That’s what these guys keep trying to argue.
Planetary temperature is a function of the total amount of energy on the planet. It can only increase by an energy imbalance at TOA. Changes in the greenhouse effect can cause that imbalance.
JJB said: Outer space is not hotter or colder. That applies to things that have mass.
Space does have a radiation temperature. You are confusing energy contained in moving particles, sometimes referred to as heat, with radiation temperature.
Empty space can’t have a radiation temperature because it can’t create energy. Any radiation that passes through empty space originates from something that has mass.
However, there’s also what’s known as the cosmic background temperature, which is minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit. So what would a thermometer in space reveal? Somewhere between those extremes — depending on whether it’s in the sun or the shade.
https://www.space.com/14719-spacekids-temperature-outer-space.html
Cosmic radiation that is responsible for that temperature is not coming from empty space. A body(s) are responsible for that.
If you took a thermometer and tried to measure the temperature of space with no radiation passing through. The thermometer reading would drop and drop toward absolute zero but never reach it. By the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you could say the temperature of space is absolute zero.
I think it depends on how you think of energy being transferred. If you think energy is transferred “to” space, then you could make a case for absolute zero. If you think energy is transferred “through” space, then the temperature is undefined. I think energy transferred “through” space is the correct way to think about it.
And if you travel out far away from everything in the Universe, you can never get lower than a minimum of just 2.7 Kelvin or -270.45 Celsius.
This is the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which permeates the entire Universe.
In space? It’s as cold as it can get.
https://www.universetoday.com/77070/how-cold-is-space/
“Policy has to be based on the worst-case scenario.”
Just policy or all decisions? Worst case, an asteroid could take us out.
We could be speaking Chinese in 30 years. What about that? I can come up with a lot of worst cases.
We can do something about climate change. It a much more serious threat. Asteroids are another matter. Even there we are looking at ways to deflect them.
Green extremist policy is sure-fire worse than climate change.
Crossing (or not) the 1.5 and 2.0C thresholds Overview
The strategy to limit global warming is tied directly to limiting the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.
There is uncertainty, mostly owing to the range of climate sensitivity to CO2 among different models.
This post illustrates now natural climate variability – alternative scenarios of volcanic eruptions, solar variability and internal climate variability are considered.
Variations in global mean surface temperature are linked to recurrent multi-decadal variations in large-scale ocean circulations.
Volcanoes Clusters of strong tropical eruptions have contributed to sustained cold periods such as the Little Ice Age.
Solar variations. There are several reasons to expect lower solar activity during the 21st century, relative to the 20th century. solar activity in the 21st century is largely uncertain.
Synthetic scenarios building upon historical and paleo data, climate model outputs, process models and storylines based on physical reasoning provide a broader range of outcome scenarios
–
–
The uncertainty in climate sensitivity to CO2 is due to misuse of the science. CO2 sensitivity is well known and a lot lower than the models use due to feedback loops that are skewed in one direction only.
–
Variations in global mean surface temperature can only be due to the solar output variation.
What we do not understand due to orbital, inclination, wobble , rotation speed changes is the effect of the solar output in forming winds and currents.
Recurrent multi-decadal variations in large-scale ocean circulations exist and can be mapped but are the result of previous heat input and the cloud cover this created.
This is no to dispute measuring ocean circulations and the effects that a variable temperature density surface has on shifting radiation to space can give a valuable way of trying to assess future climate changes. It means they are not the primary cause.
It is a surrogate way of assessment due to our lack of knowledge of the chaos caused each day by the sun and the absence of the sun.
–
Natural variability certainly outweighs the probable small CO2 effect.
To such an extent that it might take centuries to sort out a small associated temperature rise that does exist.
–
More to the point we need to have the estimate of solar output put to better use as the major starting point and then consider why the globe is not following it as expected to work out the cloud formation and current physics interplay that determine the range of natural variability.
angech commented:
Natural variability certainly outweighs the probable small CO2 effect.
Why?
—
If that’s true, explain why cumulative warming has so far been closely proportional to cumulative emissions.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0095069618302122-gr2.jpg
davidappell02 | January 24, 2022 at 1:05 am:
“explain why cumulative warming has so far been closely proportional to cumulative emissions.”
A force acts over the velocity of a body, not over its position. The same way a forcing, like CO2, should act over the velocity of warming, not over temperature.
The velocity of warming is responding mainly to multidecadal variability, not to CO2.
https://i.imgur.com/7PksH7H.png
Where do you get this stuff?
An UNBALANCED force does work on a body. That work is energy, and that energy becomes kinetic energy or energy of motion of that body. Velocity is the measure of that kinetic energy.
CO2 increases the kinetic energy of atoms and molecules through radiant heat transfer. Velocity is the measure of the kinetic energy of a body and temperature is the measure of the kinetic energy of the atoms and molecules that make up a body.
Velocity of warming? Just more junk science.
02
This paper indicates that as much as 60% of recent Arctic warming is from internal variability. It used to be under 50% in papers and then 50% in more recent papers. Now in this new paper it is 60%. I see a trend here.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28047-8
JJBraccili | January 24, 2022 at 11:16 am:
“Velocity of warming? Just more junk science.”
That’s good because if you think that accelerating increase in atmospheric CO2 is consistent with decelerating rate of warming (temperature first time derivative) it means you don’t understand the essence of the hypothesis you defend, so I don’t have to waste my time arguing with you, as you join the mass of people that don’t have a clue.
It’ pretty obvious you have no idea what you are talking about.
Even if the rate of warming is decelerating, that doesn’t mean the temperature stops rising. That’s what happens as you approach steady state. Is that part of your warming velocity theory?
BTW CO2s greenhouse’s effect will be at a quasi-steady state at an increase of another 30 – 50 C. That when the 15 MM band no longer can drive climate change, but the other two bands still can. It will take a very long time before they have a serious impact.
I wouldn’t debate me either. I have this unique ability to expose charlatans.
JJ
“ I have this unique ability to expose charlatans.”
Are you certain you aren’t their numero uno goodwill ambassador?
Positive!
JJBraccili | January 24, 2022 at 2:02 pm:
“Even if the rate of warming is decelerating, that doesn’t mean the temperature stops rising. That’s what happens as you approach steady state.”
You keep demonstrating you have no clue what you talk about. No model shows multidecadal decrease in warming rate with accelerating increase in CO2 levels. It is just not possible according to theory. Go play with KNMI climate explorer to see what models do with temperature rate of change under RCP8.5
Temperature stops rising if/when the rate of warming reaches the zero line. At the current rate of decrease it would take 30 years to get there so it is unlikely to happen, but expect very little warming for the next couple of decades regardless of what CO2 does. Your hypothesis cannot accommodate that even with low climate sensitivity. It gets refuted.
You came up with a new term “velocity of warming”. I have done extensive reading on climate change and have never come across that term. I have heard of climate velocity, but that has nothing to do with how you are using “velocity of warming”. I just did search and there is nothing on the internet about “velocity of warming” The graph you provided has units of Deg C/year. On the usual plot its temperature change/year vs year, but that looks nothing like that plot. Here’s the usual plot:
http://assets.climatecentral.org/images/uploads/gallery/2017EarthDay_TempAndCO2_en_title_lg.jpg
“A force acts over the velocity of a body, not over its position. The same way a forcing, like CO2, should act over the velocity of warming, not over temperature.”
Here’s why that statement is BS. We are dealing with energy. Velocity is the measure of the kinetic energy of a body. You apply a force to a body the velocity increase and the kinetic energy increases. In this regard, velocity is a state variable.
Temperature is the measure of the kinetic energy of the atoms and molecules in a body. CO2s greenhouse effect increases the kinetic energy of the atoms and molecules of earth and raises its temperature. In this regard, temperature is a state variable.
In terms of energy, velocity and temperature are a measure of the same thing. Your graph says the warming velocity is temperature change per year but looks nothing like mine. Since I cannot find a reference for this BS, I have to assume, like most junk science, it’s pure fiction.
JJB
You said, “Here’s why that statement is BS. We are dealing with energy. Velocity is the measure of the kinetic energy of a body.”
You are demonstrating the you are out of your element, yet still acting as if you are the final arbiter.
The common use of the term “velocity” is to designate the change in position and direction of an object over a unit interval of time. It is the slope of the plotted positions, or the first-derivative in calculus. Any property that changes with respect to time can be assigned a ‘velocity’ (y’) or an ‘acceleration’ (y”), in the conventional notation of calculus.
The kinetic energy of a body is a function of the velocity squared, as in, KE = 1/2 m v^2, but also takes into account the mass. Velocity alone is not a “measure” of the KE, but, importantly, also takes into account the mass.
I think that you should be asking questions rather than pontificating on subjects with which you obviously only have a passing acquaintance.
Guess you don’t know much about thermodynamics. All energy state properties are reported independent of mass. We have specific internal energy and specific enthalpy. That is energy/mass.
I’m using velocity as a measure of kinetic energy. In that regard it is a state variable. Guess you also don’t realize that climate change is all about energy and how it’s building up on the planet. Guess you also don’t realize that the poster was using the term velocity in the context of energy — not speed.
All this proves is that you have no idea what you are talking about, and you need to stop promoting junk science. I don’t need to ask you any questions because you’ve now proven you’re not capable of answering them.
You erroneously said, “Guess you don’t know much about thermodynamics. All energy state properties are reported independent of mass.”
Except for the energy necessary for a change of state — energy/mass
And, specific heat capacity — energy/mass
You are a legend in your own time, in YOUR mind.
What are you talking about?
Specific internal energy and enthalpy are independent of mass. If they weren’t then those properties would vary with mass.
I can see why you have such screwed up opinions about climate change.
Are you saying that specific heat capacity and energy requirements are not part of the “energy state properties” of matter? They are certainly important to “thermodynamics.”
Specific heat is a measure of the inertia of a body to temperature change. The higher the specific heat the more energy it takes to raise the temperature. Internal energy and enthalpy are measures of energy.
I’m not here to teach you thermodynamics. Go buy yourself a copy of “Thermodynamics for Dummies.”
Javier wrote:
The velocity of warming is responding mainly to multidecadal variability, not to CO2.
https://i.imgur.com/7PksH7H.png
Your graph is a laughable pile of horsesh!t.
Total warming is very close to proportional to total emissions. This is settled science, and not complicated at all. Mean value is 1.65 degC/Tt carbon
Matthews, H., Gillett, N., Stott, P. et al. The proportionality of global warming to cumulative carbon emissions. Nature 459, 829–832 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08047
angech wrote:
Variations in global mean surface temperature can only be due to the solar output variation.
Ridiculous. Writing this shows you aren’t even the slightest bit serious.
Judith mentioned 5 causes of possible natural variation of global surface temperature.
CO2, ocean currents, solar variability, volcano and synthetic simulations.The effect of CO2 is too small to be measured against natural variability. Ocean currents are a result of solar input, not a cause on their own.
Synthetic means not real.
Clouds can cause albedo changes hence temperature changes but are dependent on what comes in
Volcanoes only cause intermittent variation.
When looking at global surface temperature change it all comes back to the suns output.
Has the earth become hotter in the last 40 years?
Then an increase in heat from the sun is the only sensible conclusion
Solar irradiance has been decreasing for the past 20 years. So much for that theory.
JJBraccili | January 24, 2022 at 10:55 am |
“Solar irradiance has been decreasing for the past 20 years. So much for that theory.”
University of Colorado at Boulder shows an overall upward trend since circa 1900. You should be commended for cherrypicking the a starting point coinciding with a peak of the normal 10-20 cycles.
https://spot.colorado.edu/~koppg/TSI/Historical_TSI_Reconstruction.png
I didn’t cherry-pick anything. Here’s the graph from NASA:
https://climate.nasa.gov/internal_resources/2266/
The only thing you seem to be good at is being consistently wrong.
https://spot.colorado.edu/~koppg/TSI/Historical_TSI_Reconstruction.png
JJB – here is the graph from the U of Colorado
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/solar.irradiance/
https://t-weather.net/total-solar-irradiance-tsi.php
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Reconstructions-of-total-solar-irradiance-in-the-last-2k-years-The-record-by-Steinhilber_fig13_263807238
A few more links to solar irradiance
Over eons change in energy in is solar. Some is reflected and AGW keeps it in the atmosphere nanoseconds longer. Is that what the fuss is all about? The internal response can’t be predicted but may be catastrophic (in the sense of Rene Thom) – with small changes in control variables crossing a threshold and triggering shifts in the spatiotemporal chaotic Earth system. The patterns are bound by physical mechanisms of heat, matter, motion… – the mid to late Pleistocene glacial/interglacial pattern being the current mode. I could be wrong – but internal responses to changing solar input may bring global cooling this century. But let’s pragmatically clean up the atmosphere – for we know not what we do – and do this experiment on natural variability properly.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/bifurcations.png
The whole concept of climate change is that the earth is warmed by the increasing levels of atmospheric CO2, due chiefly to the combustion of fossil fuels. The climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is, according to the IPCC, in the range of 1.5 to 4.5degC. This is a wide variation of estimates considering that climate scientists have been studying this topic for more than 30 years. What if the IPCC have got it wrong? A number of recent studies suggest that climate sensitivity is nearer 0.5degC. If this is so it presumably changes the whole of climate science and the corresponding apocalyptic assumptions.
One such study, that I am familiar with is to be found at http://www.ijaos.org/article/298/10.11648.j.ijaos.20210502.12 .
and yes I am familiar with this because I am the lead author. I am not a climate scientist, just a common or garden physicist who is experienced in infra-red spectroscopy. I thus was able to approach this issue without a dog in the fight. Using the well respected HITRAN database of gaseous infra-red absorption spectra it is possible to calculate, with some precision, the absorption characteristics of all atmospheric “greenhouse gases”, in particular CO2 and H2O both in isolation and in combination. From this it is possible to calculate the impact of those gases on the current atmospheric planetary warming from 255K to the existing average temperature of 288K. The conclusion is that H2O is responsible for 29.4K of the 33K warming while CO2 has contributed just 3.3K of warming, the remaining 0.3K coming from CH4 and N2O. Thus 90% of our warming comes from the greenhouse effect of H2O. CO2 absorption is such that further increases in concentration have little further effect because of the “saturation” of its IR absorption bands. The calculated CO2 climate sensitivity is just 0.5degC even allowing for the notorious H2O feedback effects.
Inspite of over 7000 views of this recently published work I am still waiting for its conclusions to be refuted. If my colleagues and I are correct it means that the discussion on climate change is starting with a false premise. CO2 is not responsible. It reminds me of the story of the traveller in Ireland who stopped a local farmer to ask directions. The response he got was “well if I was you I wouldn’t start from here!”.
David Coe: How can climate sensitivity be 0.5 C when global temperature has already warmed by 1.1 C and CO2 has only increased by 50%?
I don’t think my comments are getting past moderation, but I will try one more just for fun. Between you and JJB, the competition for who can post the most ridiculous nonsense is fierce.
Climate sensitivity to CO2 lower than UN models project
By David Wojick |October 12th, 2021
https://www.cfact.org/2021/10/12/climate-sensitivity-to-co2-lower-than-un-models-project/
A new research approach has found a very low value for CO2 climate sensitivity, on the order of just one half degree C. This is in stark contrast to the latest IPCC computer modeling results, many of which give sensitivity results over five degrees. Sensitivity is a standard benchmark, the warming that might be expected when the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is doubled.
This result is especially interesting because the journal that has published it conducted two separate reviews before doing so. They did this because of strong resistance from alarmists. While this double review does not guarantee the truth of the findings it certainly strengthens their credibility.
The article is “The Impact of CO2, H2O and Other “Greenhouse Gases” on Equilibrium Earth Temperatures” by Coe, Fabinski and Weigleb, in the International Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.
The article is open access so not paywalled. Take a look here: http://www.ijaos.org/article/298/10.11648.j.ijaos.20210502.12
Lead author David Coe explains the paper this way:
“The concept of this paper is to reduce the complexity of the problem of climate sensitivity determination by the separation of variables, a common technique. We conclude that The atmosphere, mainly due to the beneficial characteristics and impact of H2O absorption spectra, proves to be a highly stable moderator of global temperatures. There is no impending climate emergency and CO2 is not the control parameter of global temperatures, that accolade falls to H2O. CO2 is simply the supporter of life on this planet as a result of the miracle of photosynthesis.“
from davidappell02
to David Coe: How can climate sensitivity be 0.5 C when global temperature has already warmed by 1.1 C and CO2 has only increased by 50%?
This question strikes at the core of this whole posting. I have simply shown that CO2 increases are not the main cause of global warming. There are other factors at play. I leave it to the climate “scientists” to do some real work and identify those factors instead of simply dumping the problem onto CO2 emissions.
David Coe: CO2 isn’t saturated. This is a long-standing myth that was debunked a long time ago.
See the sidebar on page 37 of:
Pierrehumbert RT 2011: Infrared radiation and planetary temperature. Physics Today 64, 33-38
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/PhysTodayRT2011.pdf
“Saturation fallacies
“The path to the present understanding of the effect of carbon dioxide on climate was not without its missteps. Notably, in 1900 Knut Ångström (son of Anders Ångström, whose name graces a unit of length widely used among spectroscopists) argued in opposition to his fellow Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius that increasing CO2 could not affect Earth’s climate. Ångström claimed that IR absorption by CO2 was saturated in the sense that, for those wavelengths CO2 could absorb at all, the CO2 already present in Earth’s atmosphere was absorbing essentially all of the IR. With regard to Earthlike atmospheres, Ångström was doubly wrong. First, modern spectroscopy shows that CO2 is nowhere near being saturated. Ångström’s laboratory experiments were simply too inaccurate to show the additional absorption in the wings of the 667-cm−1 CO2 feature that follows upon increasing CO2 . But even if CO2 were saturated in Ångström’s sense—as indeed it is on Venus—his argument would nonetheless be fallacious. The Venusian atmosphere as a whole may be saturated with regard to IR absorption, but the radiation only escapes from the thin upper portions of the atmosphere that are not saturated. Hot as Venus is, it would become still hotter if one added CO2 to its atmosphere.”
davidappello2
IR Spectroscopy has moved on since the days of Angstrom and Arrhenius. You are perhaps partially correct in saying that the CO2 absorption spectrum is not fully saturated, but the overlapping absorption bands of H2O are, making the effects of any increase in CO2 result in the climate sensitivity of 0.5degC. H2O is responsible for 90% of the warming due to the greenhouse effect and it is H2O that provides the remarkable stability of the earth’s atmosphere. CO2 is, in comparison, a bit player. If you make the effort you will be able to see the HITRAN plots of CO2 and H2O IR absorption in the paper referred to above.
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There is a general assumption that GCMs can accurately predict the future state of the atmosphere. It is somewhat strange that the majority adhere to this idea, even when the IPCC stated that:
“long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible”
Through the MSU era, anyway, there is no demonstrated climate model capability of accurately predicting the qualitative distribution of temperature, humidity, clouds, or zonal wind speeds.
(See figures 5,6,7 & 8:
https://climateobs.substack.com/p/climate-change-vertical-profiles )
Now, there may be nuance to predictability. Imposed net energy surplus at the tropopause would appear to impose a -direct- consequence of an overall warming troposphere.
Similar direct effects would tend to directly cool the stratosphere.
These effects may be predictable, becuase the radiative terms dominate.
But many of the other imagined features ( tropical cyclones, floods, droughts, tornadoes, fires, blizzards ) are both indirect and dependent on numerous other parameters which may dominate the radiative terms or the global mean temperature. So these phenomena are probably not predictable and maybe not subject to change from a warming troposphere.
We gravitate toward the mean surface temperature number because it may well be predictable. But this may be a big distraction from actual climate phenomena which are not predictable. In fact, many now conceive of climate change solely as the change of global mean surface temperature.
This tendency obscures the fact that there are NO climate models proven to accurately predict climate on a multi-decadal scale.
So, what do we do? Wait and see what happens?
We know what is going to happen and it’s all bad. What we don’t know is how long it is going to take to get there. Doing nothing and continuing on our current path is not an option.
JJ Braccili
But these things have to be realistic. An outbreak of world peace and the immediate creation of a global grid isn’t going to happen as you have proposed.
Unfortunately wind and solar have huge deficiencies which I detailed in my post a couple of days ago. Their lack of density, reliability and proven intermittency can not be swept under the counter and nor can their enormous environmental and social damage.
Environmentalists such as Shellenberger and Michael Moore have come to realise that nuclear is-like it or not-the only answer and likely to remain so for many decades, as most other solutions rely on technologies not yet invented or can not be economically scaled up.
i am not wedded to fossil fuel but would need to see a better alternative before it is consigned to history
tonyb
Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to sit around waiting to see what happens. By the time it happens, we won’t be able to do anything about it. Everything bad thing they say will happen, will happen. We just don’t know the time frame. It could be longer, or it could be shorter. We may already be past the point of no return.
It’s like the anti-Vaxers who wind up with covid go to the hospital and tell the doctor: “I’ll take the vaccine now.” It’s a little too late at that point.
The deficiencies in solar and wind are an engineering problem. They are solvable.
I’m agnostic about nuclear power. It will probably be necessary, but the plants will have to be located far from populated areas and the waste problem will have to be solved. Both are solvable engineering wise but may not be solvable politically.
climatereason (tonyb)
I could make an argument that we should set aside in reserve enough FF so we don’t run out of the stuff making all the chemicals and plastics that will support our growing standard of living. In that light, using wind and solar to offset using such a vital resource has some merit.
We are currently dispersing 350,000 manmade molecules into the environment and expect to triple that in the next 30 years.
https://judithcurry.com/2022/01/08/week-in-review-science-edition-132/#comment-969402
JJ Braccili
“The deficiencies in solar and wind are an engineering problem. They are solvable.”
No they are not, both sources are inherently unsuited to large amounts of reliable base power. As ancillary sources in the right places they may have more merit. For example, extensive solar farms in our sunniest part of the UK at 1700 hours per year is mad. That is why they are 11% efficient. Onshore wind is 24% and offshore wind around 34%
Solar panels in the Arizona sun supplying power to a relatively small number of people might be a more practical proposition.
As say, I am not wedded to fossil fuel and will gladly switch if something better comes along but to date-other than nuclear with all that entails-it hasn’t
tonyb
I thought I went through this already.
The wider the geographic area, the less intermittency becomes a problem. Combine that with advanced battery technology and you can solve the problem.
That’s not conjecture. That’s fact. You’re looking at the way things are now when all of this is in its infancy.
I guess if you were around when the horseless carriage was invented, you’d be saying it was useless and had too many problems. Why change to that when horses are perfectly capable of getting the job done? Who wants to crank the engine manually? I don’t have to crank a horse.
JJ
“ Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to sit around waiting to see what happens”
40 years ago they thought there was no time.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2019-02-15190822_shadow.jpg
18 years ago they expected an apocalypse by 2020.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Instead of 10 feet of SLR and cities underwater, SLR is just as it has been for 200 years with no obvious and significant acceleration.
Just more failed predictions.
Oh, so you don’t think things have gotten worse over the last 40 years? Maybe, the changes haven’t met those predictions, but the situation is not exactly stable,
What I said is that the difficulty is in predicting the timeframe — not the destruction that climate change is going to cause.
JJBraccili | January 24, 2022 at 12:22 pm |
“I thought I went through this already.
The wider the geographic area, the less intermittency becomes a problem. Combine that with advanced battery technology and you can solve the problem.
That’s not conjecture. That’s fact. You’re looking at the way things are now when all of this is in its infancy.”
JJb- you keep ignoring facts. Even though it has been pointed out to you on multiple occasions, the wind doesnt always blow, the wind frequently doesnt blow over large swaths of the continents. During the Feb freeze, there was little if any wind across the entire continent for multiple days.
Europe just went through those continetnal doldroms
Just stop!
You’re basing your comments on that load data you used. There are large swaths of the country that have little or no wind power. To say that the wind doesn’t blow for long periods of time over large portions of the country is ridiculous. What proof do you have of that?
http://www.usa.com/rank/us–average-wind-speed–state-rank.htm#:~:text=U.S.%20Average%20Wind%20Speed%20State%20Rank%20%20,Wyoming%20%2F%20575%2C251%20%2047%20more%20rows%20
TX ranks 39th in average wind speed. Yet, they still manage to utilize wind power.
Wind has higher speeds during the winter:
https://www.windlogger.com/blogs/news/how-does-cold-weather-affect-wind-speed
JJ Braccili
“The wider the geographic area, the less intermittency becomes a problem. Combine that with advanced battery technology and you can solve the problem.”
Please clarify the nature of this vast battery storage needed to power millions of homes and industries for perhaps many days when renewables fail, plus the need to top up EV batteries, power heat pumps and also create blue hydrogen
I think you are talking about technology not yet invented, may not conform to the laws of physics or may be impossible to scale up economically. As I constantly say I am not a proponent of fossil fuels but there needs to be something better before we move to it.
You also seem to ignore the environmental problems with mining and processing the resources for renewables, often using coerced labour or that the balsa wood for many blades is logged illegally
You just seem to want to sweep problems under the carpet.
Provide me with a real world cost effective alternative and why wouldn’t I want to change to it? i have bought solar products for over 40 years. Unfortunately they have limitations
tonyb
Solar and wind are here to stay.
Battery technology has improved by leaps and bounds and there is no reason why that can’t continue. Batteries are meant to supplement during time of disruption — not to replace
Maybe, we wind up with a national grid or a North American grid, or an America’s grid. All that is possible. You want to dismiss all of that because you see no other solution than fossil fuels or nuclear.
Fossil fuels have problems. Coal is an environmental nightmare. Oil drilling is an environmental nightmare. Transporting oil is an environmental nightmare. Yet, that is all acceptable to you, but the problems with solar and wind, those are insurmountable. Everything has limitations.
Another reason to end the use of fossil fuels is because oil is a limited resource and we need it as a source of petrochemicals, lubricants, and asphalt, etc. New processes will have to be developed to convert what we now burn into useful products.
How much would it impact the world if we had to limit the production of plastics for lack of feedstock?
JJB – your link is to average wind speed. that is a useless measurement
the link I posted shows load factor by the hour. from that data, it is pretty easy to see when the wind blows and when the wind doesnt blow. ITs not hard to extrapolate – then again maybe it is for an engineer that ignores reality
What don’t you understand about the fact the wind power is used in a small portion of the country? We have only two offshore wind platforms. The scope of your data is too small to draw any conclusions from. Yet, you insist on doing it.
Kid
“40 years ago they thought there was no time.”
40 years ago they told us we didn’t have time to build nuclear power plants.
Today they’re burning more coal and oil to make electricity. And turning off emissions-free power plants. Time to admit it: the “climate concerned” aren’t.
JJ
Why do you think you are any different than those JJs of the 1980s or 18 years ago. Obviously, they made assumptions about the rate of warming that was significantly greater than reality. Nothing has changed from 40 years ago, just a new generation of doom sayers. In 2050 there will be a new group who have just moved the goalposts and will be making excuses for their predecessors. Just like you.
I already presented data from NASA that evaluated 17 climate models and they did a pretty good job of predicting temperature rise over the last 40 years. Even the early models did a decent job.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/
Rising temperatures means increasing energy on the planet. Everything else flows from that. No matter what the models predict, dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is currently cause the planet’s temperature to rise and that’s not good.
JJ braccili
Once again you have just ignored information you have been provided with. It seems that wind and solar can do no wrong. You do not tell me where these enormous storage batteries are to come from, they simply don’t exist, so you are hoping something will be invented that is light years away from what is possible
“Maybe, we wind up with a national grid or a North American grid, or an America’s grid. All that is possible. You want to dismiss all of that because you see no other solution than fossil fuels or nuclear.”
With respect we are not some third world nation. We have had a national grid (in which I have shares) for nearly 100 years. Here is an interesting history of it
https://www.nationalgrid.com/about-us/what-we-do/our-history
If you look at 2019 you will see we are one of the most advanced nations in the world regarding wind power generation. The huge lack of wind power at times causes immense practical problems. Generation has been around 3% of its theoretical capacity of 24GW for many weeks. This happens every year. If you look at the Wind Farms of the UK they cover a very large area and Europe had the same problem with lack of wind. That reality is one of the reasons for the Nordstream gas pipe
I see the UK National; Grid has been operating in the US since 2000 so perhaps there is more of a drive towards a national grid than you are aware of?
Certainly all advanced countries should have one. I note there is a National Grid USA. I have no idea of its size or its development potential. Perhaps you might care to tell me?
What is possible and what you would like to be possible are unfortunately 2 different things and without nuclear-another fuel with which I have no particular brief -the lights will not stay on.
tonyb
In the US we have the eastern grid, the western grid, and Texas. Not much power is transferred between grids. There are no plans, as far as I know, to integrate the grids.
You keep implying that the problems with renewables are insurmountable. They are not. They are engineering problems. Technology exists to solve these problems. Wide area grids using HVDC, offshore windfarms, batteries, supplemental nuclear power, hydroelectric, geothermal. The only thing we can’t do is to keep burning fossil fuels.
I read about technology that generates power from ocean currents. I haven’t heard much about it lately.
JJB
You said, “Battery technology has improved by leaps and bounds and there is no reason why that can’t continue.”
That sounds more like a declaration of faith than an objective analysis supported by facts. Get back to me when you can show that batteries have achieved 200% of their theoretical capacity.
How about I get back to you now:
https://magazine.scienceconnected.org/2021/11/emerging-battery-technology-renewable-energy-industry/
https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-boost-for-renewables-grid-scale-battery-storage-is-on-the-rise
JJB
You said, “… 17 climate models and they did a pretty good job of predicting temperature rise over the last 40 years. ”
How about defining “pretty good?”
I have demonstrated that a simple linear extrapolation of Hansen’s own temperature data provides an estimate that is closer to reality than his infamous model projections presented to Congress in 1988.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/30/analysis-of-james-hansens-1988-prediction-of-global-temperatures-for-the-last-30-years/
I already posted this. Try to keep up.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/
WUWT traffics in junk science.
I asked you a simple, direct question: How do YOU define “pretty good.” Your link was not responsive to my question.
You, like DavidAppell2, judge something based on where it was published, rather that its content. That is really an ad hominem attack. If it isn’t published in something you approve of, then it isn’t of value — despite not having read it.
Further, since I am the author, it is a personal insult to say that “WUWT traffics in junk science.” Your arrogance is astounding.
“I asked you a simple, direct question: How do YOU define “pretty good.” Your link was not responsive to my question.”
Really? That wasn’t the answer you were looking for? Did you want me to do an analysis? That’s what the link was for. Do you only accept sources from WUWT? I think NASA is a pretty good reference. You ought to try it and Berkely Earth as well. They do what is called real science.
The last time I was on WUWT was about 2-3 years ago and what was on there was junk science — not even good junk science. I do not intend to waste my time going through that site again. GWPF, the Heartland Institute, and WUWT are birds of the same feather.
You seem to have a talent for rationalizing your irrational behavior.
My behavior isn’t irrational. I don’t conform to your myopic view of the world. That’s your problem — not mine.
“We know what is going to happen and it’s all bad.”
Do you realize how this makes you sound?
You don’t need verification because you already know what’s going to happen. This is “revelation” a la religion.
Science has a higher standard.
It doesn’t take much to figure out where this is going. All you have to do is look at an IR spectrograph of earth’s radiant energy and think about what happens if CO2 in the atmosphere is not reduced. I can tell you where it winds up but not how long it takes to get there.
That’s not religion. That’s science.
I expect that factory fabricated mini-nukes of various sizes will be coming online more frequently by 2030 – and wind and solar will be relics languishing in the landscape. Decentralised reliable power and not continents(s) spanning grids.
Factory fabrication is significant for 2 reasons:
1. Costs;
2. quality control.
Yes, distributed nuclear reactors. What could possibly go wrong? I wouldn’t hold my breath. That’s going to be a hard sell to the NRC.
What could go wrong? Nothing much. GA is working on a 50 MWe version for delivery this decade.
https://www.ga.com/nuclear-fission/advanced-reactors
https://www.ga.com/nuclear-fission/advanced-reactors
Let’s see how many people are willing to tolerate a nuclear reactor in their neighborhood. I told you the only way nuclear power will be tolerated is if it is located in uninhabited areas far from population centers.
States won’t allow nuclear waste to be transported across the state. Think they are going to allow small nuclear reactors all over the place? Dream on.
They might allow it in TX. They’re already a toxic waste dump.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/08/29/how-far-do-you-have-to-run-after-a-small-modular-nuclear-meltdown/?sh=78b667147393
JJB
>So, what do we do? Wait and see what happens?
>We know what is going to happen and it’s all bad. What we don’t know is how long it is going to take to get there. Doing nothing and continuing on our current path is not an option.
Well, that’s exactly what we do. Wait, observe and see what is happening. Spending trillions without any evidence of catastrophe (getting slightly warmer is not evidence of catastrophe) is foolish, and in itself may have the chance of being catastrophic in itself. Obviously you’re passionate about this, but I suggest that there are many facets about warming that we just don’t know … yet. Have you read Coe’s paper, sited above. I would be interested in your critique.
As I try to keep telling you and others, where this is going is not in dispute. The timeframe is. Here’s the thing. If you sit and wait there is the distinct possibility that you wait too long, and nothing can be done about it. There is also the possibility that it becomes self-sustaining from greenhouse gases released from melting permafrost. Then there is the possibility that a prehistoric pathogen is released as ice melts.
It’s like not getting vaccinated for covid, getting it, and then asking the doctor for the vaccine. It’s too late.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a30643717/viruses-found-melting-glacier/
JJB
Your ‘Ode to a Battery,’ as in, “Researchers have been able to successfully design solid-state batteries that have UNPRECEDENTED levels of energy density.”, is long on ambiguous adjectives, but short on any kind of pertinent numbers.
I didn’t write the article. That was to show that battery technology is improving with more in the pipeline.
I was under no illusions that you had written it. However, you selected it in lieu of answering a simple question.
I saved myself a post, which I’m wasting now, had I said how I came to my conclusion you would have asked for the source. I gave you the source. Judge for yourself.
Now JJB brings up a prehistoric pathogen. Oooooooooooo. I’m scared now! Let’s build wind turbines to kill it. (Maybe it’s a flyin’ pathogen – the very worst kind!)
I’m not bringing up anything. I just stated the possibilities. Climate change is scary enough all by itself.
I’m watching the news and Ted Cruz said he’s for TX secession. I’m for that too and every other red state can go as well. Good riddance!
Worried about the ‘color’ of a state? I think that you just gave us a clue about what really motivates you and influences what you believe.
My views on climate change are based on science — not politics. I’m a progressive and I do not try to hide it. The vast majority of scientists and engineers in the US are progressive or lean liberal. Conservatism, in the US, is anti-intellectual and anti-science and they don’t try to hide it.
A pathogen that evolved when humans were scarce, and probably absent from the tundra. Therefore, it would be unlikely to be a threat to humans. (It might be a threat to steppe mammoths, so they should be very concerned!) Its just another scary thing for a hand waver to bring up, without regard to probabilities.
Viruses want to survive. They evolve. You do believe in evolution, don’t you? Who’s to say that some ancient virus can’t evolve into a threat. What was the probability that the covid virus would evolve and cause a pandemic? It must have been very low because we weren’t prepared.
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
https://thebulletin.org/2009/01/the-limits-of-energy-storage-technology/#:~:text=Assuming%20that%20we%20could%20actually,percent%20of%20a%20demonstrated%20bound.
1 Kg crude oil has 50 mega J of chemical energy.
This is about 10 kilowatt-hour per kilogram.
The physical limit for the best battery is
5 mega J for 1 Kg
This is about 1 kilowatt-hour per kilogram.
JJ Braccili
“I’m not bringing up anything. I just stated the possibilities. Climate change is scary enough all by itself.”
its only scary if you refuse to look at history .If you study the Holocene its not scary at all, but the norm.
Its morning here and lying in bed listening to the radio the BBC were interviewing an energy expert and the prospects for gas prices with the Ukraine situation. He said -as we have been trying to tell you- that the energy crisis in Europe has been brought on by a wind shortage.’
We have posted numerous official links showing the poor performance of wind. Currently once again at 3% in the UK-the largest wind producer in the world, and around the same in Europe.
We have a wind fleet of 24GW, soon to double as we go towards net zero when to replace all fossil fuel the estimate is around 120GW.
So we have 3% of 24GW. We can discount solar.
Here are the official figures
“Energy use in the United Kingdom stood at 2,249 TWh (193.4 million tonnes of oil equivalent) in 2014. This equates to energy consumption per capita of 34.82 MWh (3.00 tonnes of oil equivalent) compared to a 2010 world average of 21.54 MWh (1.85 tonnes of oil equivalent).”
Please tell me how we will store electrical power totaling over 100GW over an extended period when renewables don’t perform-around 2 months during the current session and around 12/16 weeks in an average year.
Its not an engineering problem. Its a physics p[roblem its a cost problem its a not having any energy when needed problem.
You mentioned currents. We are an island so the sea should be a more important source of power as waves are merely liquid wind aren’t they?
The ocean 400 yards from my door is dead flat. Its a useful adjunct but no more, tides are much more reliable and currents and the temperature differences between the surface and a few hundred metres down also offers some heat possibilities.
However due to its nature the sea is a very difficult medium and estimates show that we could get possibly 10% of our energy from this source but the cost and technology have meant developers have gone for the easier option of wind.
tonyb
Look, intermittency is not a physics problem. It’s an engineering problem. It will be solved with a variety of technologies — wider grids, solar, batteries etc.
What you want to do is to say there is no solution to the intermittency problem. That is not true.
I mentioned the ocean current energy generation because I read about it. I’m not an expert, and it has nothing to do with waves.
JJ Braccili
“Oh, so you don’t think things have gotten worse over the last 40 years? Maybe, the changes haven’t met those predictions, but the situation is not exactly stable,”
if you had any knowledge of Climate history you would know ‘the situation has never been exactly stable’. We are currently living through a century long relatively benign climatic period.
For the weather of the future we should look to the climate of the past and build in more resilience to our infrastructure.
tonyb
I got news for you. They can’t build infrastructure resilient enough for what is coming. There are limits — even for engineers.
JJ
Time to put the debate into context. Most skeptics accept we are warming. Most skeptics accept CO2 has something to do with that warming. Most skeptics accept we have a problem.
The nub of the issue is the level of uncertainty of the future warming and the scale of it and how quickly a transition is needed away from fossil fuels. The reason I put up articles about previous apocalyptic predictions that didn’t occur is to remind us of how little we know about the future and that if the experts we so wrong before and we are using the same assumptions in making the current apocalyptic predictions, then the prudent thing to do is to rethink those assumptions.
Let’s be more realistic about the transition time frame if there are indications that we might not be technologically capable of making a smooth transition to scale without major disruptions in our energy supply.
Sloman-Fernbach have coined the term The Knowledge Illusion. Others have warned against our predilection toward hubris. We need to take a time out. That might be the most prudent course of action.
The climate scientist that are telling us we have to address the problem now and must be carbon neutral by 2050 aren’t kidding. We should have started to address this problem 25 years ago. We didn’t and it is what it is.
Where this headed is not in doubt. The timeframe is. You may be willing to risk the future of humanity on the hope that maybe we have more time to adapt. I’m not.
JJ Braccili
Can I point you to this quote by Prof Mackay. He was the Head Scientist of the Words first dedicated climate change Govt Dept (ours) in response to the enacting of the first legally binding climate change act (Ours again).
America had pulled out of the kyoto protocol and has never been a climate leader-which is presumably why you still have reasonably priced power, whilst we here in the UK and Europe see shortages and soaring prices. We have been through all this whilst America hasn’t
Please look at the numbers cited by this highly respected scientist who died way before his time
— —- —
“Speaking on his first day as Chief scientist at DECC, (2009) Mackay set out a vision of how Britain could generate the threefold increase in electricity it needs, with nuclear power at its heart and expanded on his ideas on energy here.
Probably one of the elements that helped secure his current position is that he wrote a very good book on renewable energy options from which the quotes above-and those below- were originally taken . Available here online for free:
“Among all the energy-supply technologies, the three with the biggest potential today are solar power, wind power and nuclear power.
As a thought-experiment, let’s imagine that technology switches and lifestyle changes manage to halve American energy consumption to 125 kWh per day per person. How big would the solar, wind and nuclear facilities need to be to supply this halved consumption? For simplicity, let’s imagine getting one-third of the energy supply from each.
To supply 42 kWh per day per person from solar power requires roughly 80 square meters per person of solar panels.
To deliver 42 kWh per day per person from wind for everyone in the United States would require wind farms with a total area roughly equal to the area of California, a 200-fold increase in United States wind power.
To get 42 kWh per day per person from nuclear power would require 525 one-gigawatt nuclear power stations, a roughly five-fold increase over today’s levels.
I hope these numbers convey the scale of action required to put in place a sustainable energy solution. What about tidal power? What about wave power? What about geothermal energy, biofuels or hydroelectricity? In a short article, I can’t discuss all the technology options.
But the sober message about wind and solar applies to all renewables: All renewables, much as I love them, deliver only a small power per unit area, so if we want renewable facilities to supply power on a scale at all comparable to our consumption, those facilities must be big.
If you don’t want to build 1 million wind turbines, you can drill 1 million geothermal boreholes instead.”
Have you reached 125kwh per day per person? its still much higher than that (but has been dropping) so the calculations need to be raised accordingly.
tonyb
That interesting, but I posted a calculation that I did of how much energy could be generated if the surface area of the US were covered with solar panels. That number was 1500 TW or about 50x the current human consumption of energy.
The US occupies about 7% of the surface area of the planet. You can do a quick check to see if that number is about right. The planet absorbs 120,000 TW of solar radiation. 7% of that is 8400 TW. The efficiency of a solar panel is about 15%. That means solar panels covering the US could generate about 1260 TW. In the ball bark.
I would say his numbers are BS because he wants to promote nuclear power. The Sun is our most potent source of energy.
climatereason commented:
But the sober message about wind and solar applies to all renewables: All renewables, much as I love them, deliver only a small power per unit area, so if we want renewable facilities to supply power on a scale at all comparable to our consumption, those facilities must be big.
I agree with Elon Musk that in 20 years all rooftops on all residential and commercial buildings could be, should be and, he says, will be solar panels. That eliminates much of the need for large solar facilities. Sure it remains to work out how they will all connect into the grid, but that’s not an intractable problem and it’s a problem that has to be solved.
Above all we shouldn’t act like these things are impossible and therefore we have to stay on fossil fuels. That’s fossilized thinking and not 21st century thinking.
It’s not even fossilized thinking. These guys think that fossil fuels and the energy generation from them just dropped out of the sky. There were plenty of technical challenges that had to be overcome. No different with renewables. In fact, with the state of science at the time and the tools available to them, it was a remarkable achievement. The problems with renewables aren’t anywhere near as challenging.
Clyde Spencer wrote:
You, like DavidAppell2, judge something based on where it was published, rather that its content. That is really an ad hominem attack.
That’s funny, complaining about an ad hominem attack on a place that is the kingdom of ad hominem attacks.
No, it’s simply dismissing a site that is well known for publishing junk. Likewise I’m also not interested in spending time debunking stories from the National Enquirer.
Wind power is hardly modern, in fact it predates the mass use of fossil fuels for power. There is a good reason wind power was dropped. Today’s wind turbines are actually a step backwards in development.
Where did you get your degree in engineering? Out of a cracker jack box?
Elon Musk says, on a YouTube clip, that all US electricity needs could be handled by 150-200 km2 of solar panels. That’s a square not bigger than 14 km on a side. 9 miles. A city.
Haven’t verified this, but I’d believe him before anyone here.
Dividing the global yearly demand by 400 kW•h per square meter (198,721,800,000,000 / 400) and we arrive at 496,804,500,000 square meters or 496,805 square kilometers (191,817 square miles) as the area required to power the world with solar panels. This is roughly equal to the area of Spain.
First, he was talking about US demand for electricity — not total global demand for energy.
Let’s take a look at your numbers.
The world consumes per year 14420 Mtoe or 167,705 TWh. There are 8760 hrs in a year. The world requires 19.1 TW of power. Let’s call it 20 TW.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption
A solar panel produces about 150 w/m2. 1 TW = 1E12 watts. To generate the power required worldwide requires 133,333 sq km.
https://www.waystosaveenergy.net/2021/04/solar-energy-per-square-meter.html#:~:text=%22Solar%20panels%20produce%20about%20150%20watts%20of%20energy,this%20translates%20to%2015%20watts%20per%20square%20foot.%22
You claim it takes 496,805 sq km. You are off by a factor of 3.7. It’s worse than that because the efficiency for a solar panel I used was 15%. You can get solar panels with efficiencies in the low 20s.
The US uses 4222.5 TWh of electricity in a year or 0.48 TW of power. Let’s call it 0.5 TW. That means it would require 3,333 km2 of solar panels to power the US. Elon Musk is off by a factor of 17
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States.
CKid commented:
The reason I put up articles about previous apocalyptic predictions that didn’t occur is to remind us of how little we know about the future and that if the experts we so wrong before and we are using the same assumptions in making the current apocalyptic predictions, then the prudent thing to do is to rethink those assumptions.
What about the things that have happened that weren’t predicted?
Did anyone predict that global average sea level would be accelerating by now?
Did anyone predict that a monstrous, 1-in-1000 year heat wave in the Pacific Northwest would kill 1,000 people in 2021? 117 F temperature in Salem, Oregon?
That a horrendous wildfire in Oregon in 2020 would burn over 1 M acres, destroy thousands of homes and keep people in western Oregon trapped in their homes for two weeks due to horrific air quality conditions?
That wildfires in 2020 and 2021 would destroy entire towns in California and British Columbia? 121 F in BC?
That a wildfire in December (of all months) fueled by an unseasonal drought would destroy suburbs of Denver that no one ever thought vulnerable to such fires?
That Key West would now be looking to spend a billion dollars to raise their roads?
Were any of these disasters foreseen?
Bill Fabrizio commented:
Well, that’s exactly what we do. Wait, observe and see what is happening. Spending trillions without any evidence of catastrophe (getting slightly warmer is not evidence of catastrophe) is foolish, and in itself may have the chance of being catastrophic in itself.
Continued warming will lead to catastrophe. Guaranteed. Watching warming accumulate and only dealing with catastrophe when it gets here is absolutely stupid. It’s like smoking one cigarette one at a time, coughing steadily worse, and saying you’ll deal with lung cancer when it happens. Not very smart.
Can’t believe this has to be told to you.
In fact, catastrophes are already happening. Yet they seem not to be big enough for you to care about.
JJ Braccili
You commented about Professor David Mackay
“I would say his numbers are BS because he wants to promote nuclear power. The Sun is our most potent source of energy.”
No. David Mackay was an avowedly left wing scientist and otherwise would never have got his position as head scientist at the world first politically motivated Dept of Environment and Climate change.
Mackay once said ‘Burning gas should be made a thermogenic crime.” So hardly sympathetic to fossil fuels
However he did the stats on renewables for his book/lecture/govt advice and said it would take only ‘trivial back of the envelope calculations’ to demonstrate that renewables couldn’t provide the energy needed.
Therefore he was a reluctant proponent of nuclear in the absence of a better alternative. Others that have done the figures for a book or a film are left wing environmentalists Shellenberger, Michael Moore and Lomborg, all firm believers in man made warming and all have switched to the need for nuclear as the only practical solution.
Perhaps they have reached this position after very many years of promoting renewables for a reason? I gave you details of their books earlier, where you can see their calculations
Anyway I have enjoyed our discussion, but its time to move on with the new post, as this thread has become extremely unwieldy
with regards
tonyb
His numbers are wrong. I just went through the calcs that show if you cover the US with solar panels, it will generate 50xs the power the world uses. That means 2% of the surface area of the US would generate the power the world is using today.
The state of California is about 4% of the surface area of the US. That means covering 1/2 of California with solar panels would provide enough energy to satisfy current worldwide energy needs. That is not impossible. That doesn’t take into account improvements in solar panel efficiency. I used 15%. Some solar panels get up into the low 20s
‘So, what do we do? Wait and see what happens?
We know what is going to happen and it’s all bad. What we don’t know is how long it is going to take to get there. Doing nothing and continuing on our current path is not an option.’ JJB
We get in an epic thread from it’s all bad to some 10 million square kilometres of continuous solar panel. Small modular nuclear reactors are a better idea. That way land and soils can be conserved and restored packing away organic carbon.
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Judith Curry, thank you for this essay.
Dr. Curry, the 1.5C threshold will be exceeded within 3-6 years, according to my sun-climate threshold work regarding the solar cycle influence on the ocean, as long as SC25 equals or exceeds SC24.
The ocean will likely warm from SC25 similarly as it did from SC24. 2022 will see solar activity exceed my sun-ocean decadal warming threshold of 95SN on a monthly basis, then quarterly this year; and then onto yearly within a few years, for several years, during which the ocean will warm again by 0.3-0.5C.
The effect of TSI ocean warming above my threshold is represented by the thick red line (m) in the bottom panel (k) in Fig.13 below. We are now nearly at the same point in SC25 as in SC24 represented by (n), where the change to net decadal ocean warming starts:
https://i.postimg.cc/7ZPt9G7G/AGU-Fig13.jpg
Then we’ll be onto the 2C ‘limit’ during the next solar cycle #26, and no amount of emissions reduction or sequestration will stop it.
The only thing that will stop more warming is a Dalton Minimum or Grand solar minimum. Since we are now at a v2 SN 30ya of 62.9, about 2x Usoskin’s GS Min threshold of 31.9 for 30y sunspot activity (v2 SN), it’s going to be long time before significant climate cooling occurs other than the typical solar cycle cooling into the minimum as we’ve seen, until the warming threshold is reached again in the next solar cycle.
Solar activity will drive more warming for decades to centuries w/o a GSM.
bobweber: Why did global warming increase through the 2010s if solar cycle 24 was so much lower than solar cycle 23?
I just showed you why in Fig.13, but you didn’t get it.
I determined the 95 v2 SN threshold (120 sfu F10.7cm) in June of 2014 and the SORCE TSI threshold equivalent of 1361.25 W/m2 in 2015.
The detrended sum of TSI≥1361.25, the sun-ocean decadal warming threshold Fig.13(h), increased from (f) to (g), warming the ocean until TSI fell below the threshold in March 2016, when the equatorial OHC fell below the zero anomaly line at the TSI threshold as predicted:
https://i.postimg.cc/wTMzSGtm/AGU-Fig10.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/1zHrhxKZ/Rathore-etal-Fig-1-Asymmetrical-OHC-vs-SORCE-TSI-overlay.jpg
The ocean warming since 1980 has resulted from ENSO activity:
https://i.postimg.cc/ryYzHWhQ/30y-SST3-v-30-i-MEI.jpg
Put it together David, you have natural climate change via the sun.
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When it comes to wind, there multiple periods of 4 or more days of doldrums in Texas.
https://www.ercot.com/misdownload/servlets/mirDownload?mimic_duns=000000000&doclookupId=819154741
So, what about the rest of the country or the rest of North America, or the rest of the Americas? That’s why you need a national grid or more — especially with renewables.
JJBraccili | January 24, 2022 at 1:50 pm | Reply
“So, what about the rest of the country or the rest of North America, or the rest of the Americas? ”
When there wind doldrums in one part of the country, those doldrums typically cover large swaths of the country/continent
Do you have data to support that? Are you a non-meteorologist practicing meteorology like you do climate science?
I do watch the news and it seems to me that a day when the weather isn’t changing somewhere is non-existent. Changing weather means wind.
Let’s consider there is always winds in one third of the country.
The national grid will transfer electric power to other two thirds.
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
JJBraccili – I think that some perspective might help. The 600 year Little Ice Age was a period of frequent cold spells. The River Thames famously froze and markets were held on the ice. It did not start warming again until around 1870. Coincidentally, the temperature monitor that later evolved into the HadCrut dataset began at that time. The consequence is that the dataset is a record of the warming from the LIA. It is no surprise that almost every year brings a higher new record temperature, a fact trumpeted by the Met Office and BBC who always fail to mention the role of the LIA.
I notice that you did not mention it either. Many climate scientists fail to mention it. They don’t know why it occurred or why it ended. They probably don’t mention it since atmospheric CO2 was constant throughout and therefore it does not fit with the CO2 control knob belief system.
Today, 1.1 degrees warmer than when the LIA ended, climate scientists try to attribute this to CO2 and again ignore the LIA. Also, today, there has been no significant warming since 2016. So when all of that is looked at in perspective, we have warmed up gradually from the LIA. Since 1998 we have had a prolonged temperature pause, interrupted by several El Nino warming events.
Reality seems to suggest that there is no need for the Greenhouse Gas Effect to explain any of this, suggesting that the ECS is low and CO2 is a spent force. David Coe, who comments above, is correct. Water vapour did all the heavy lifting in the early days of our planet. That leaves a radiative legacy which is with us today. Greenhouse gases were not invented yesterday.
Peter
Unfortunately you are mentioning Historical events with which I frequently regale JJ Braccili with. Unfortunately he says history has no relevance to our current situation and point blank refuses to take any notice of data that it has been warmer or colder in the past or past extreme climate events make todays look very mild
tonyb
I’ve read all that before. There is a reason why climate scientists ignore climate history. It’s because it has no impact on what is happening today. Climate change is all cause and effect. That means there were reasons why the climate changed decades or eons ago and they have no impact on what’s happening today.
Today we can measure all things that can cause the temperature of the planet to change and fortunately there aren’t many. You have solar radiation, albedo, volcanoes, and the greenhouse effect. The only one of those that is increasing significantly is CO2. That is also what the data tells us. That doesn’t mean one of the other factors couldn’t become significant, but that’s not occurring at the moment. The other things that are discussed on this board — oceans currents, water cycle, planet rotation — either have little or no impact and I’m being generous when I say little.
Here’s is data on the temperature rise of the planet from Berkley Earth — the gold standard for that type of data:
http://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2021/
As you can see the temperature trend is straight up since 1960 and closely corresponds with CO2 increases. What the snake oil salesmen do is to take a period of several years where it appears temperature is trending downward and blow it up to make it appear the trend is down.
It makes no difference that H2O supplies most of the greenhouse effect. What is driving climate is the greenhouse gas that is significantly changing. That’s CO2. As CO2 increases and drives the temperature higher, the atmosphere can hold more H2O and increase its greenhouse effect.
The idea that CO2 isn’t the cause of climate change doesn’t conform with the science or the data.
JJBraccili | January 24, 2022 at 3:04 pm | Reply
“I’ve read all that before. There is a reason why climate scientists ignore climate history. It’s because it has no impact on what is happening today. Climate change is all cause and effect. That means there were reasons why the climate changed decades or eons ago and they have no impact on what’s happening today.”
JJB – that statement rates as one of the most idiotic statements ever , even when we compare the multitute of other idiotic statements you have made.
You simply cant know where you are going if you dont know where youve been.
That why you’re Joe – the non-climate scientist. You don’t have a clue.
Where we’ve been has no impact on where we are going. You can’t even duplicate the conditions that caused climate change in the past because stars put out more energy as they age.
It’s all cause and effect. It doesn’t matter what happened 10 minutes ago, 10 years ago, or 10,000 years ago. If the sun starts ramping up it’s energy output to the point it becomes the dominant driving force, guess what? The temperature change of the earth will stop tracking CO2 and start tracking solar irradiance. If the sun effect petered out, the temperature would start tracking CO2 again.
You need about minimum 12 knots to drive a wind turbine. When you take that into account, there is even less usable wind right now. It’s stupid to try to use unreliable power sources and needlessly complex to boot. Also, it chews up a lot of land and nice scenery. What we need is more compact NG and nuclear plants.
Yet, Texas 39th in average wind speed and Iowa which has a much higher average wind speed have the most deployed wind turbines. Two red states going green. What are they thinking?
Jim2
Yes, there is not only a minimum speed required, but a maximum speed that cannot be exceeded out of risk of damaging the turbine. Basically, there is an envelope of usable speeds, and the wind speeds need to be known with respect to time because the baseplate power output varies with wind speed, and terminates abruptly at the cutoff speeds.
“The idea that CO2 isn’t the cause of climate change doesn’t conform with the science or the data.”
So you say. I expect to soon have a guest article on WUWT addressing that point.
I can’t wait. Please post it here. I could use a good laugh.
You need to acquaint yourself with IR spectrographs of earth’s radiant energy and how they change with temperature. It might save you some embarrassment.
JJ: “I’ve read all that before. There is a reason why climate scientists ignore climate history. It’s because it has no impact on what is happening today.”
“If climate models are able to successfully hindcast past climate variables, such as surface temperature, this gives scientists more confidence in model forecasts of the future”. https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-how-do-climate-models-work
Even though historic climate parameters are used to validate the models the catastrophic AGW narrative is based on JJ has determined the historic climate record is irrelevant to estimating future global climate. Either the historic record is relevant or it’s not.
What’s your point?
If they have the conditions at a particular point in time and can match that with climate models that doesn’t mean what happened then has any impact on what’s happening today.
No, it means that the climate of the past has a big impact on what the models are telling us what the climate of the future is supposed to be.
No, what it means is that the models have accounted for the conditions in the past that caused climate change at that time. That has nothing to do with the current conditions that are causing climate change.
For example, you can’t say that at some point in the past the CO2 ppm was lower, and the temperature was higher, so CO2 has no impact on rising temperature now.
Peter commented:
The 600 year Little Ice Age was a period of frequent cold spells. The River Thames famously froze and markets were held on the ice.
Did it? I’ve also heard that the Thames River was full of silt then and much shallower. Let’s now take a painting as the final truth on climate.
Peter commented:
So when all of that is looked at in perspective, we have warmed up gradually from the LIA.
Peter the Earth doesn’t warm up from some cold period like it’s a bouncing ball.
The Earth warms when it’s forced to warm, no other reason.
There have been plenty of cold period when the Earth didn’t warm, or cooled further. Your conclusion is unscientific and blinkered.
The question is, why did the Earth warm after the LIA — which by the way WASN’T GLOBAL.
So you don’t even have the right question, let alone the right answer. You are far off of any base.
Saying the LIA “wasn’t global” seems wrong to me. There’s a bias in measurement, as most of the land area is in the northern hemisphere (40% land mass v 20%) and that’s where all the proxies are.
I must also say that when you google the LIA the first link is a wikipedia article containing Michael Mann’s ridiculous hockey stick; a graph the procedure for which involved literally throwing out any proxy that didn’t “fit”.
To someone like me, used to a 5 sigma standard, and being taught if you don’t know your error you haven’t made a measurement, this is all absolutely mind-boggling.
Robinson wrote:
I must also say that when you google the LIA the first link is a wikipedia article containing Michael Mann’s ridiculous hockey stick
Science by Google — interesting, for someone who claims 5-sigma is their standard.
Robinson commented:
Saying the LIA “wasn’t global” seems wrong to me. There’s a bias in measurement, as most of the land area is in the northern hemisphere (40% land mass v 20%) and that’s where all the proxies are.
Are they?
Proof that wind doesn’t blow over large swaths of the country. Live link, so click it now. Western third of the country is doldrums.
https://www.windy.com/-Show—add-more-layers/overlays?35.876,-84.175,5,m:eTGacWk
If you expand that to the world view, there are huge land areas of the world without wind right now. This ain’t rocket science.
There are huge areas that do. That’s the point. What is so hard to understand about that? You’re right this ain’t rocket science, and you definitely are not a rocket scientist.
The question is how you balance it out. It’s doable.
I’m not seeing these huge areas that do on land anyway. I think you want technology for technology’s sake.
Trying to power the planet is obviously a very dumb idea!
Actually, it’s a very good idea because it gives you maximum flexibility and efficiency. Probably not going to happen because of politics, but it would be the ideal.
It would be great if the politicians got out of the way and let the scientists and engineers deal with climate change.
“ It would be great if the politicians got out of the way and let the scientists and engineers deal with climate change.”
Over the course of American history some have said this.
“It would be great if politicians got out of the way and let the soldiers deal with war.”
I wouldn’t go there with politicians and war.
I have a solution for our problem with war. Implement a draft for the children, grandchildren, and great children of all federally elected officials. Order everyone in the country by net worth and draft the children, etc. of those with the highest net worth. Send the draftees to all the hot zones around the world that the politicians get us involved in so that their children, etc. are on the front lines. I guarantee you we will only have to go to war when absolutely necessary and the “wars” will be short and sweet. No more multi-decade involvements.
JJ
Jim
Here is the UK version
https://gridwatch.co.uk/
Wind is currently providing 3% and solar nil (its dark) Biomass is of course burning wood pellets.
Most power is coming from Nuclear, Gas and coal-this from the 2 power stations we haven’t deliberately blown up at the insistence of the green lobby
The references to France are interconnectors probably carrying nuclear.
Looking at my own weather diary, wind and solar have been providing very little power for some 2 months. We had the dullest December since 1956. No battery technology can cope with providing power to a 24/7 society of 66 million people as we are for such extended periods , and in the case of America that would be far larger battery needs.
tonyb
Yet, we are moving forward, and California is leading the way.
How about the other 2/3s of the country and the oceans? Don’t they count?
One excuse after another.
That’s not an excuse. That’s reality. I’m sorry to rain all over your parade — not really!
Note much of the USA today has 12 knots or over, the minimum needed for a wind turbine. Look at the data instead of specious theoretical narratives.
Minimum wind speed for a wind turbine is 12 – 14 km/h. That’s a wind speed of 7.5 – 8.7 mph.
Maybe you don’t know how to do a unit conversion. I’m looking at a wind map of the US and I’d say about 40-50% of country is above the minimum. Offshore the wind speeds are 10 – 20 mph. Give it a rest.
https://www.wunderground.com/maps/wind/current-winds
JJB
40% – 50% of the country above the minimum
That means 50% – 60% is below the minimum
How Many batteries is it going to take to cover that shortfall for 1 minute or for one hour
How much redundant fossil fuel generation will it take to cover the shortfall
None. We’ll build offshore wind platforms to make up the shortfall.
So let me understand in simple terms, Currently the projection is to hit 1.5 in 2030 under SOME models. yet if the AMO shifts then it is possible we will be at .9 at or near in 2030?
However there are some that are suggesting we will hit 1.5 in the next 3 – 6 years such as bobweber. ( which seems a little extreme but possible I suppose )
JJBraccili thinks that the end of the world has come and we are past time doing something… ( extreme paraphrasing )
JJBraccili – you also suggested that Wind and Solar is just an engineering problem. Isn’t everything? For instance we could probably come up with a way to use fossil fuels and not have CO2 go into the air. Yet we don’t because it is overly expensive to do so.
Technically dealing with warmer temperatures is ‘just ‘ and engineering problem.
Just saying.
Pretend I am horribly ignorant ( which I admit I am ) Why is Climate Change a problem in the direction of a warmer earth? I suppose I fail to see it.
Some scientists think that we are past the point of no return. I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that some point we will be past the point of no return.
Engineering problems are solvable with current technology or improvements in current technology.
If you could capture all the CO2 generated from burning fossil fuels, you could store it or convert it to something else. You can’t capture all the CO2, I think the estimate is that we could capture about 14% of it, but I’m not sure of that number. Scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere in the quantities required would take a scientific miracle — not going to happen. If you wanted to find a way to bring about Armageddon, dumping CO2 into the atmosphere would be a good choice.
JJBraccili
What I do know is that some point we will be past the point of no return.
If you could capture all the CO2 generated from burning fossil fuels, you could store it or convert it to something else. Scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere in the quantities required would take a scientific miracle — not going to happen.
–
Which came first ?
The fossil fuels ?
No a miracle! Called trees and vegetation.
Very efficient at scrubbing CO2.
Luckily for us.
We are dumping more CO2 in the atmosphere than they can handle. That’s why the ppm of CO2 keeps rising.
The planet mean surface temperature equation
Tmean = [ Φ (1-a) S (β*N*cp)¹∕ ⁴ /4σ ]¹∕ ⁴
produces remarkable results.
The calculated planets temperatures are almost identical with the measured by satellites.
Planet….Tmean…Tsat.mean
Mercury…325,83 K…340 K
Earth…..287,74 K…288 K
Moon……223,35 Κ…220 Κ
Mars……213,21 K…210 K
The 288 K – 255 K = 33 oC difference does not exist in the real world.
There are only traces of greenhouse gasses.
The Earth’s atmosphere is very thin. There is not any measurable Greenhouse Gasses Warming effect on the Earth’s surface.
There is NO +33°C greenhouse enhancement on the Earth’s mean surface temperature.
Both the calculated by equation and the satellite measured Earth’s mean surface temperatures are almost identical:
Tmean.earth = 287,74K = 288 K
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Here is new England
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/01/24/new-england-will-freeze-if-sleepy-joe-gets-his-green-new-deal/#more-55103
We have the worlds largest off shore wind farm they are expensive and difficult to maintain but fortunately can go in the shallow waters of the dogger bank, an ancient land flooded by climate change 8000 years ago
The main advantage of the offshore wind is that there are no nosey ornithologists collecting bird carcasses.
Solutions to nonlinear equations face the evolution of uncertainty. See Fig. 1 in the link. The longer the simulation the murkier it gets.
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/climate/files/rowlands2012.pdf
Sergey Kravtsov et al 2018 used a reanalysis product – a sort of a model using recorded parameters – to compare to climate models. To find no trace – there are no equations of state – of decadal scale natural variability that is as large as 0.3 degrees C over the past 40 years of accelerated energy and economic growth.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-018-0044-6
Decades ago, at the start of this “global warming/climate change” debacle, temperature emerged as a major variable, in part because temperature has been observed in many places for over a century and thus provided a basis for scientific study.
Also, temperature is an important variable because of its known effects on many chemical and physical processes, in nature and in the lab.
Philosophically, we can now ask if the importance of temperature has been overdone. (I think it has, and badly. Others might differ).
A problem exists if temperature records are inaccurate to the stage of being less than useful, such as misleading. For the last 30 years, I have done a lot of study of the Australian temperature record, with the outcome that it is dismally poor. Climategate’s Harry agreed “getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data. so many new stations have been introduced, so many false references.. so many changes that aren’t documented. Every time a cloud forms I’m presented with a bewildering selection of similar-sounding sites, some with references, some with WMO codes, and some with both. And if I look up the station metadata with one of the local references, chances are the WMO code will be wrong (another station will have it) and the lat/lon will be wrong too.” That was around year 2009.
Authorities steadfastly decline to be specific about the real magnitude of errors in these historical temperature records. My own view is that a daily maximum temperature Y can commonly be +/- X deg C, where X is 0.8 deg C (assuming normal distribution statistics apply and using 2 sigma envelopes).
How can we measure these synthetic targets of 1.5 and 2 deg C under such large error constraints?
As Peter Lang notes above, the social cost of warming is net beneficial under reasonable assumptions.
It seems that we might be feeling those benefits, but we might be in a decreasing, or steady, or rising global temperate regime right now, without the ability to accurately determine which.
And, we need to get scientists to reduce their interminable temperature chatter and concentrate on other variables, which is part of Judith’s message here. Geoff S
In Texas for the year 2021 wind turbines produced a WHOPPING average 33% of installed capacity. What a waste of resources!
jim2
Yes, the operative words being Installed capacity and average. That disguises that for days or weeks no power was produced and that intermittency problem is one that Mr Braccili seems to refuse to contemplate.
tonyb
What you can’t contemplate is that intermittency is a problem that can be solved. I’ve had to deal with it when I get involved with batch operations.
Intermittency in energy distribution is a much bigger problem, but not unsolvable.
The best solution is to use energy sources that aren’t intermittent. Then there is no intermittency problem to solve.
JJ Braccilli
Is the intermittency in batch production due to nature randomly deciding to shut down its entire input for an unknown period? Or one that in your own words would require a global response to fix?
I think you are comparing apples and sardines.
If there’s no wind or sun at random times the only way you can solve that is by storing sufficient surplus in times of plenty. But that would not only have to power the entire population and its industry but be able to top up EV batteries, Heat pumps and to supply power to create green hydrogen
You have never been able to explain how this enormous storage will be created nor its cost.
tonyb
I said that the problems that I solve involving batch operations aren’t as complicated as the intermittency problem with electrical distribution. That doesn’t mean it’s not solvable.
I don’t understand why you and others treat this problem as unsolvable. Take solar. You could ring the planet with solar. The technology to distribute it worldwide exists. Now it’s a reliable source of power. Same with wind the wider the geographic area you can collect and distribute it over, the less the intermittency problems.
I just posted that fossil fuels had problems that you would call insurmountable when it was in its infancy. How do you produce it? How do you refine it? How do you distribute it? How do we use it to generate electricity? Do you think electrical turbines just magically appeared? All kinds of problems with electrical distribution. The fight between Edison and Westinghouse over DC vs AC. You know what? We solved all of them. Frankly, I don’t view intermittency as a problem. Certainly not enough of a problem to scrap the technology.
jim2 commented:
The best solution is to use energy sources that aren’t intermittent. Then there is no intermittency problem to solve.
All energy sources are intermittent. Do you think natural gas and coal power plants don’t shut down for repairs or maintenance? Did you see how the natural gas infrastructure froze in Texas in Feb 2021 and killed several hundred people? France just had nuclear power plants go offline.
climatereason commented:
If there’s no wind or sun at random times the only way you can solve that is by storing sufficient surplus in times of plenty.
No, you can also have a smart grid that automatically sends electricity from where there’s a surplus to where there’s a shortage.
davidappell02 | January 25, 2022 at 12:05 pm |
jim2 commented:
The best solution is to use energy sources that aren’t intermittent. Then there is no intermittency problem to solve.
Appell comment – “All energy sources are intermittent. Do you think natural gas and coal power plants don’t shut down for repairs or maintenance? Did you see how the natural gas infrastructure froze in Texas in Feb 2021 and killed several hundred people? France just had nuclear power plants go offline.”
Appell – neither you or JJB have been able to comprehend that Wind in Texas shut down for a solid 9 days during the freeze,
Neither you or JJB have been able to comprehend that 4 solid days of virtually no wind across the entire NA continent.
Neither you or JJB who talks about a national grid have been able to comprehend that two of US grids were near collapse at the same time. Fortunately those grids were saved partly due to the much lower reliance on wind energy.
“Neither you or JJB who talks about a national grid have been able to comprehend that two of US grids were near collapse at the same time. Fortunately those grids were saved partly due to the much lower reliance on wind energy.”
Where’s your proof? I just searched for confirmation, and I found zip. Those other “grids” were probably attached to the east or western interconnect. TX was not, except for two counties in TX and they were just fine.
Joe – the non climate scientist commented:
Appell – neither you or JJB have been able to comprehend that Wind in Texas shut down for a solid 9 days during the freeze,
“Wind Turbines Didn’t Cause Texas Energy Crisis,” Factcheck.org, 2/19/21
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/02/wind-turbines-didnt-cause-texas-energy-crisis/
David, the reason nobody respects your opinion and why EVERYBODY debunks your assertions is because you cherry pick only sources that support your claims. An intellectually honest researcher would review both PRO and CON sources and then come to a conclusion based on the FACTS and EVIDENCE.
“Wind was operating almost as well as expected”… A Texas-sized Energy Lie
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/25/wind-was-operating-almost-as-well-as-expected-a-texas-sized-energy-lie/
“fact checking the fact checkers” by David Middleton
Read the entire article complete with charts and graphs that support David’s conclusions.
And this puts the lie to these fact checker claims:
Fact check LIES:
o Renewable energy is not to blame for the Texas energy crisis
o No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages
o No, Wind Farms Aren’t the Main Cause of the Texas Blackouts
The truth…
o Renewable energy is why Texas has less natural gas and coal capacity than it would have had otherwise.
o Frozen wind turbines are why coal-fired power plants were operating at >90% of capacity from February 9-14 and natural gas power plants were operating at 70% to more than 80% of capacity from February 11-14.
o Wind farms aren’t the main cause of the Texas blackouts because most of them had already been knocked offline by freezing temperatures and ice… Nearly a week before the blackouts! Where’s my Sam Kinison video?
The desperation on the part of the lamestream media to proactively defend wind power during this fiasco would be funny, if not for the fact that this lie quickly gained so much traction, that I have even repeated it. Wind power did not perform better than expected in any rational sense of the phrase.
That said, wind power has generally been very successful in Texas… The problem is that ERCOT’s plan for a total failure of wind power seems to have been hoping that natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants could successfully operate at about 90% of capacity until the wind power came back online.
“Hope ain’t a tactic.”
Even with all of the system-wide failures, natural gas is the only reason that this energy disaster didn’t claim hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. Winter Storm Younger Dryas will probably surpass Hurricane Harvey as the most expensive natural disaster in Texas history and ERCOT was possibly within five minutes of it being possibly the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history when they began load-shedding.
The wind turbines froze because they weren’t winterized. That’s the result of conservative ideology and the “free market” solves everything lunacy. When there aren’t regulations that require winterization, why spend the money?
There were two counties in TX that winterized and were connected into the eastern and western interconnect. Guess what? They had no problems.
https://news.yahoo.com/parts-texas-not-ercot-power-080159059.html
No, the TX power failure was not due to renewables. What caused it was the usual cause — conservative ideology. Another case that proves conservatives can’t be trusted to run a lemonade stand.
David
I am not sure you have been around the last few days when we have been discussing smart grids. The only way to achieve this is to cover the entire world, according to Mr Braccili.
That isn’t going to happen for political, practical and economic reasons. In Europe there has been a huge deficit of wind and solar for many weeks. There are many interconnectors and this all covers a large geographical area. The only thing keeping it all together is Gas nuclear and coal.
Did you see the various wind drought figures posted? The UK and Europe has been seeing around 3% of installed nameplate capacity for a long time.
tonyb
I didn’t say that. I said it was the ideal solution. You have the annoying habit of attributing things to people that they did not say. Knock it off!
climatereason commented:
Did you see the various wind drought figures posted? The UK and Europe has been seeing around 3% of installed nameplate capacity for a long time.
Install more wind and solar, especially offshore and rooftop solar. Scotland was on almost 100% renewable energy last year largely due to offshore wind.
Again, these are not unsolvable problems. But the first problem that has to be overcome is the attitude that “we can’t do this because” which is endemic here and is just the latest byproduct of denying climate change not that global warming can’t be denied.
David
“Install more wind and solar, especially offshore and rooftop solar. Scotland was on almost 100% renewable energy last year largely due to offshore wind.”
if there is no wind you could have a million turbines and it would make no difference . Scotland has a tiny economy and a tiny population and little heavy industry.
Where do you believe all the materials will come from for all the green projects planned world wide? We would need a Planet A, B and C.. Where will the space come from, the vast amounts of storage needed and in the case of America and much of the world, as we already have one, the money for the grids and pylons ?.
Incidentally we already have the largest wind fleet in the world but the only thing keeping our lights on at present are gas nuclear and coal. Certainly not wind and most definitely not solar
Wind and solar have their place, but not as base load power for a large population and a big 24/7 economy.
tonyb
“If there’s no wind or sun at random times the only way you can solve that is by storing sufficient surplus in times of plenty. ”
Also we can keep a formidable energy backup having the standing-by fossil fuels burning electric plants.
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Fossil fuels were developed by private entities because they are profitable. “Green” energy wind and solar are not profitable and cannot function without government subsidies. (And, no, the depletion allowance for oil companies and miners is NOT a subsidy!)
The oil industry was subsidized in the 1920s by the government. It was called the oil depletion allowance. It’s still around. Yes, it is a subsidy.
The first programmable computer was developed at the University of PA in the 1940s. It was a DOD funded project. From that project the company UNIVAC was born, and the entire computer industry.
The internet was developed in the 1960s. It was a research project funded by DARPA.
Stick a sock in it.
JJ Braccili
“I don’t understand why you and others treat this problem as unsolvable. Take solar. You could ring the planet with solar. The technology to distribute it worldwide exists. Now it’s a reliable source of power. Same with wind the wider the geographic area you can collect and distribute it over, the less the intermittency problems.”
So you are back to an international grid serving 9 billion people? I thought you had backed down from that due to the political, economic and practical problems.
Please can you tell me where all the raw materials are to come from for this vast project? Many of them are in short supply or require vast amounts of mining and processing often in filthy conditions by coerced workers.
China has a virtual monopoly on building solar panels due to their vast amounts of cheap coal and cheap labour according to Bloomberg. There are not enough for all the green projects already proposed let alone an International grid.
This is utterly unrealistic.
I can not stress enough i hold no special brief for fossil fuels but at present nuclear and fossil fuels look the most likely way of keeping the power on until possibly the ocean or new batteries for storage come along.
tonyb
JJ Braccili
Your 2.58/ Are you saying that you didn’t say that about having a larger grid, which is the only way to distribute the power from the various turbines and solar farms you want to see globally in order to have the widest possible geographical coverage to capture whatever solar or wind is available?
tonyb
What I said is that the wider the grid the less intermittency becomes a problem. A national grid would be good. A North American grid would be better. An Americas grid would be even better. A worldwide grid would be ideal. That has nothing to do with the cost or politics of getting that done. The technology exists to do it.
In the US I think it’s a stretch to get even a national grid, even though we need it badly. For conservatives in the US, it’s ideology over common sense. All you need to look at is TX to see the problem.
The DEPLETION allowance applies to MINERs of any type. It exists because rational people understand that as a resource is extracted, the mine or reservoir becomes less valuable. The money handed to “green” energy projects has no rational basis whatsoever. JJB obviously doesn’t understand the term DEPLETION and is just a sock puppet for the left.
There is a reason it’s called the OIL depletion allowance.
In the 1920’s the allowance was raised to about 25% of income. Let’s say back then it cost $100,000 to drill a well. You strike $10 million in oil. Normally, you get to depreciate the $100,000 investment over the life of the well, let’s say 10 years or a $10,000/year tax deduction. You derive $1 million/yr. in income from the well and you get a $250,000/year tax deduction. How is that not a subsidy? It’s not as bad today, but it shouldn’t exist.
Joke!
JJBraccili | January 25, 2022 at 4:28 pm |
“There is a reason it’s called the OIL depletion allowance.
In the 1920’s the allowance was raised to about 25% of income. Let’s say back then it cost $100,000 to drill a well. You strike $10 million in oil. Normally, you get to depreciate the $100,000 investment over the life of the well, let’s say 10 years or a $10,000/year tax deduction. You derive $1 million/yr. in income from the well and you get a $250,000/year tax deduction. How is that not a subsidy? It’s not as bad today, but it shouldn’t exist.
Joke!”
JJB –
You may want to take a look at the amendments to Section 613A , US Title 26 which were made by the 1976 tax reform act before you continue to embarrass yourself.
since I gave you the citation, you should be able find your error easily.
What’s what happened in 1976 have to do with anything? We talking about the period from 1913 – 1930. The time the automobile went into mass production and the oil depletion allowance came to be and became a gigantic giveaway.
The only one who continually embarrasses himself is you.
Joe – the non climate scientist commented:
You may want to take a look at the amendments to Section 613A , US Title 26 which were made by the 1976 tax reform act before you continue to embarrass yourself.
What does a 1976 amendment have to do with massive tax advantages oil companies had back in the day LOL??
climatereason commented:
Incidentally we already have the largest wind fleet in the world but the only thing keeping our lights on at present are gas nuclear and coal. Certainly not wind and most definitely not solar
“The largest” means nothing. Build more. Build a lot more, everywhere. Same with solar, including on every rooftop. But it everywhere.
Why can’t these things be done? What’s your next excuse? Not enough of certain minerals? Too dirty to dig up? How dirty is coal to dig up? How many coal miners have died digging up coal? How many acquired black long disease? How many mountaintops ruined? How many streams and other water sources ruined? How many hundreds of millions have died from pollution from coal power plants? How much groundwater has been ruined by fracking?
Don’t you dare get on a high horse now when you wouldn’t even learn to ride earlier.
jim2 commented:
(And, no, the depletion allowance for oil companies and miners is NOT a subsidy!)
Why not?
If it’s not a subsidy, what is it?
If it’s not a subsidy, then oil companies and miners won’t mind getting rid of it, right?
JJ Braccili
“For conservatives in the US, it’s ideology over common sense. All you need to look at is TX to see the problem.”
I think we can agree on that. A national grid is surely common sense.
However as we have seen in the UK and in Europe if there is no wind or sun there is no power and the net has to be spread very wide to pick up enough of either to supply a small part of the demand.
Until massive storage batteries come along-perhaps sodium ion-wind and solar will remain adjuncts and not reliable base load power. even then there are just not enough raw materials-rare earths- to supply the demand
tonyb
The intermittency problem is solvable. It just takes more wind turbines over a wider geographic area. Battery storage will play a part.
The US already has a national grid. Texas is linked to it via two DC connectors. The winter storm in question was much colder than normal for Texas and some components weren’t properly winterized. Also, Texas could have spent the money used for wind turbines on something useful, like encouraging more natural gas gen plants. The turbines did fail to deliver during that period.
That apparently don’t work. That would be typical in a conservative run state. They don’t believe in maintenance. Tax cuts and the “free market” solve everything.
JJ
“ Tax cuts and the “free market” solve everything.”
Let me amend that sentence for you.
Tax cuts and the “free market” solve almost everything.
There. Much better.
Over the last forty years we proved over and over that tax cuts solve nothing.
davidappell02 | January 25, 2022 at 12:21 pm |
Joe – the non climate scientist commented:
Appell – neither you or JJB have been able to comprehend that Wind in Texas shut down for a solid 9 days during the freeze,
“Wind Turbines Didn’t Cause Texas Energy Crisis,” Factcheck.org, 2/19/21
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/02/wind-turbines-didnt-cause-texas-energy-crisis/
Appell – neither you or JJB have been able to comprehend the difference between the strategic failure and the tactical failure. Everyone agrees that the last failure in string of failures was the tactical failure on the fossil fuel side.
Tax cuts have been great for me and my family, and my friends too. More? Bring it on!
JJBraccili | January 25, 2022 at 11:27 am |
“What you can’t contemplate is that intermittency is a problem that can be solved. I’ve had to deal with it when I get involved with batch operations.”
JJB – I think everyone agrees that the intermittency problem can be easily solved
The first step is designing and implementing systems which doesnt create intermittency problems instead of embracing unreliable / problem laden systems
That leaves nuclear power. You can’t build them fast enough. It’s going to have to be a mix of solar, wind, nuclear, etc.
Does a workable solution of solar and wind end your argument that we shouldn’t do anything about climate change and stay the course? You need to find a new argument because that one is a loser.
“The first step is designing and implementing systems which doesn’t create intermittency problems…”
Right!
The rational course it to build NG gen plants while we build conventional nuclear plants. Concurrently, we develop SMRs and molten salt. SMRs are just about ready for prime time. And of course fusion R&D will continue a(snails)pace.
Use whatever resources are cheap and available – geothermal, landfill gas, animal waste gas, hydro, biomass, wind and solar – while burning whatever fuel meets the needs of global communities. NG in the US – higher electricity spot prices when the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow. There are two types of music – country and western.
Oh when the wind done blow
and the sun done shine
and buried in a tonne of snow
and a mountain of ice…
Oh baby missing youoooo… 🤣
Until something better comes along. For me the perfect idea is the General Atomics and Framatome collaboration on a 50 MWe – helium cooled with direct Brayton cycle turbines – fast neutron nuclear reactors. These are modern machines. I would have one in my backyard. And the US alone has 5 times the energy in global oil reserves sitting around in cooling drums and as depleted uranium. The waste stream from a closed nuclear fuel cycle is 3% as fission products that are cool in 300 years.
jim2 commented:
The rational course it to build NG gen plants while we build conventional nuclear plants.
NG is a fossil fuel that warms the planet and changes the climate. How much more warming is tolerable? Fossil fuels prematurely kill 1 in 5 global citizens and change the climate for the next 100,000 years. How much longer is this acceptable? Or do you simply not care?
From everything I can tell about you you simply do not give a f.
JJBraccili: That leaves nuclear power. You can’t build them fast enough.
The US built 100 nuclear power plants in 25 years. We could do it again, if we chose to, and again and again. Standardization in design and manufacturing would help keep down costs, should they be adopted.
The US built 88 nuclear power plants total. From conception to commissioning it takes about 10 years to build a nuclear power plant. It was all the rage in the 70s until 3-mile island and the costs ballooned. I don’t know what one of those things costs today, but in the 70s the costs tripled during construction. One of the problems was that it was all new and the NRC was changing requirements all the time.
It amazing that we didn’t have problems with more of them. We had 3 or 4 reactor designs and each plant was unique. The French did it right. A utility would contract with the government, and the government would be responsible for the engineering and construction. That resulted in more uniform plants and not the eclectic mix of plants that were built here.
JJBraccili | January 26, 2022 at 12:16 pm |
“The intermittency problem is solvable. It just takes more wind turbines over a wider geographic area. Battery storage will play a part.”
JJB ‘s solution to the intermittency problem is more intermittency
Wind power exists, is useful and a resource.
Just not very good at producing constant power which is what is needed.
David Appell,
The sun is the source of the energy for Earth’s Global surface temperature.
Not Volcanoes, not ocean currents, not albedo or clouds and certainly not CO2.
The variation in Global Surface temperature can only originate from one source.
Minor fluctuations, Natural variability, only exist due to our lack of knowledge of how that heat at that time causes currents and clouds and rainfall and wind patterns to develop..
Volcanoes are an intermittent nuisance in the scheme of things.
CO2 is only a small part of a massive atmospheric ocean of GHG.
Yes if there is more of it there will be a slight background increase in the temperature that the suns energy brings.
CO2 of itself is not a heat source, it does not produce energy De Novo.
–
The insistence of all concerned in manufacturing a Radiative imbalance that literally cannot exist means creating new energy out of nothing, out of GHG.
Since this is physically impossible it means we either have to adjust our physics or adjust our concept of heat as matter in motion.
You don’t know a damn thing.
What GHGs do is recycle earth’s radiant energy. To the earth that appears as an energy source.
Here’s what happens. Solar radiation is absorbed at 240 W/m2. Let’s say the earth is in equilibrium and it is emitting 240 W/m2. GHGs are introduced and start recycling 10 W/m2 of earth’s IR as back radiation. The earth is now receiving 250 W/m2 of radiant energy and that will force the earth’s temperature to rise until it is at equilibrium again. Initially the earth is still radiating at 240 W/m2. The earth’s atmosphere absorbs 10 W/m2 for the energy recycle back radiation. 230 W/m2 leave the earth’s atmosphere. At TOA solar radiation absorbed is 240 W/m2. Earth’s IR radiation is leaving at 230 W/m2. The earth is not in energy balance and is absorbing energy. At equilibrium, at TOA, the solar radiation absorbed is 240 W/m2. At the surface of the earth, it is absorbing the solar radiation + back radiation from GHG. That is 250 W/m2. The earth is radiating 250 W/m2 at some higher temperature. The atmosphere recycles 10 W/m2 as back radiation. At TOA the earth emits 240 W/m2. The earth is in energy balance at TOA and at the surface and the temperature of the earth is higher.
Stop making science up as you go along.
“Here’s what happens. Solar radiation is absorbed at 240 W/m2. Let’s say the earth is in equilibrium and it is emitting 240 W/m2.”
What you do is averaging solar incident EM energy.
Incident EM energy cannot be considered as absorbed Heat!
The incident EM energy INTERACTS with surface. Only a small fraction is accumulated and being IR emitted at night.
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Give it a rest. I already debunked your theory. You’re trying to resurrect a corpse.
“What GHGs do is recycle earth’s radiant energy. To the earth that appears as an energy source.”
JJBraccili | January 24, 2022 at 3:04 pm
“Today we can measure all things that can cause the temperature of the planet to change and fortunately there aren’t many. You have solar radiation, albedo, volcanoes, and the greenhouse effect. The only one of those that is increasing significantly is CO2. That is also what the data tells us. That doesn’t mean one of the other factors couldn’t become significant, but that’s not occurring at the moment. The other things that are discussed on this board — oceans currents, water cycle, planet rotation — either have little or no impact and I’m being generous when I say little.”
“It makes no difference that H2O supplies most of the greenhouse effect. What is driving climate is the greenhouse gas that is significantly changing. That’s CO2. As CO2 increases and drives the temperature higher, the atmosphere can hold more H2O and increase its greenhouse effect.
The idea that CO2 isn’t the cause of climate change doesn’t conform with the science or the data.”
JJbraccili, please don’t be so much afraid of a trace content in the earth’s thin atmosphere 0,04% or 400 ppm greenhouse gas CO2…
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
I already answered this and I’m not going to repeat myself.
JJBraccili
“Give it a rest. I already debunked your theory. You’re trying to resurrect a corpse.”
JJBraccili, you use basic physics in a flawed way. What I do is to inform the new generations of scientists and to make efforts to convince the old generations.
The Planet Surface Rotational Warming Phenomenon cannot be debunked, because it is an observed fact – it is a PHENOMENON.
A phenomenon you may not understand, a phenomenon you may not able to explain for yourself or it is very much difficult for you to accept, but that is how the things are with physics PHENOMENA – they are there.
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
How so? Because it doesn’t agree with your BS theory?
How long have you been at this? News Flash! It’s not catching on. It’s not going to catch on. Find another theory.
angech wrote:
CO2 of itself is not a heat source, it does not produce energy De Novo.
A blanket isn’t a heat source either, and does not produce energy, yet you sleep under one at night. Why?
“davidappell02
A blanket isn’t a heat source either, and does not produce energy, yet you sleep under one at night. Why?”
–
The sun is the source of the energy for Earth’s Global surface temperature.
Earth’s global surface temperature is a result of how much solar irradiation reaches the earth’s surface.
–
You trivialize this with a bit of nonsense instead of discussing the science.
–
I live in Victoria Australia, not Greenland.
Generally I do not sleep under a blanket because it would be too hot with one on the bed.
When it is cold I use a blanket to help the heat my body produces continually keep me warm.
The blanket does not produce any extra energy.
Neither does CO2..
-Back radiation can only exist when there is an atmosphere capable of redirecting the radiation.
The temperature it gets to, unlike a simple surface, has to be high enough to get the radiation back to space and as such it has to exist in a higher state of excitation [or so it appears to us] as the radiation passes through or is sent back.
–
It does not manufacture more energy de Novo, all the energy present is from the sun. not made by CO2.
Not always. Venus absorbs less solar radiation from the sun than the earth does. Its temperature is 400 C higher than it should be.
angech commented:
When it is cold I use a blanket to help the heat my body produces continually keep me warm.
The blanket does not produce any extra energy.
Neither does CO2..
So if one can create extra warmth, why can’t the other?
I’ve excerpted this article in discussions at the London Times and The Australian, and encouraged people to read the blog. Many people have strong view on dangerous (or benign) warming, but few would ever have encountered anything like Climate Etc.
During the great solar minimum there will be extremes of temperature on land, both low in winter and high in summer. This will be due to changes in the ozone zone and high levels of galactic radiation.
https://www.iup.uni-bremen.de/gome/solar/mgii_composite_2.png
https://www.iup.uni-bremen.de/gome/gomemgii.html
Continuously very high levels of galactic radiation compared to previous solar cycles.
https://i.ibb.co/G7wYpbR/Screenshot-4.png
https://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/
Hi Ireneusz.
I have a question for you, because you are a specialist in Earth’s global climate.
Do Earth’s Northern and Southern Hemispheres seasonal changes in temperatures affect the other Hemisphere?
Example: Do the Southern Hemisphere’s the summer high temperatures have an influence on the Northern Hemisphere’s winter?
In other words, do Hemispheres interact temperature-vise (climate-vise) with one-another?
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
ENSO is closely related to the ocean surface temperature around Antarctica. The low temperature in the equatorial Pacific during winter in the north affects the temperature in both hemispheres.
https://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/data/5km/v3.1/current/animation/gif/ssta_animation_90day_large.gif
In winter, the jet stream in the winter hemisphere has a strong influence on the circulation along the equator.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2022/01/25/1500Z/wind/isobaric/250hPa/orthographic=-143.29,1.71,281
Thank you Ireneusz!
Christos
Now the jet stream is falling over southeastern Europe.
https://i.ibb.co/xsgbBxy/Screenshot-1.png
Yes, it was a very much heavy snow in Greece yesterday. It was snowing for 15 hours very small snowflakes. Athens is covered in 30 sm. snow right now.
We are in an emergency situation.
Today and next few days are sunny.
It will take few days the snow to melt.
For Saturday the prognosis is rain.
The UK is spending hundreds of millions of pounds on “green” energy projects, but now this. The UK consumer is completely outflanked by “green” energy problems and government spending.
Britain’s acute cost-of-living crunch will hit in April, instantly stretching household and company budgets and penalizing the poorest households, many of which have already been most impacted by Covid-19.
The squeeze is coming from all sides. U.K. consumer price growth hit a 30-year high of 5.4% in December, and is wiping out wage gains. The Bank of England is jacking up interest rates faster than the Federal Reserve. A cap on domestic energy costs is expected to rise by 50% in April, just as payroll taxes go up in a bid to repair the U.K. public finances. Brexit hasn’t come cheap, either.
The Resolution Foundation think tank says the outcome will be a “living standards catastrophe,” with a typical U.K. household, on income of 27,000 pounds after tax and housing costs, paying 600 pounds ($818) extra just on energy bills and taxes. More broadly, the Centre for Economics and Business Research forecasts a 1,980-pound rise in overall annual living costs — even before payroll taxes go up.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-k-two-months-away-050114218.html
And in the midst of all the “green” energy hype, bluster, and waste we have this for coal:
Overall coal demand is set to grow 6% in 2021, threatening net-zero goals, the International Energy Agency said Dec. 17. This could lead global coal production — of thermal and metallurgical qualities — to rise to its highest-ever level in 2022, after output failed to keep pace with 2021’s demand rebound, IEA said in its Coal 2021 report.
This year’s demand surge — leading to all-time price highs in early October for both metallurgical and thermal — was seen due to rapid economic recovery following the COVID-19-related markets slump of 2020, when coal demand was estimated to have fallen 4.4% from the previous year.
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/metals/121721-global-coal-demand-to-grow-6-in-2021-threatening-net-zero-goals-iea
European Green Energy Crisis is Crushing Metal, Silicon Production
A quadrupling of EU energy prices is crippling energy intensive industries, but the EU sees this as a reason to invest in more renewables.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/24/european-green-energy-crisis-crushing-metal-silicon-production/
Climate Alarmists, read ’em and weep….2021 State Of The Climate Report
By Tony Heller |January 25th, 2022
https://www.cfact.org/2022/01/25/2021-state-of-the-climate-report/
A number of key metrics have been promoted by the press and politicians over the past few decades as evidence of a deteriorating climate. These include sea ice, polar temperatures, forest fire burn acreage, heat waves, drought, sea level rise, coral reef health and the fate of island nations and beaches. This past year was not a good year for their narrative.
According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, Arctic sea ice extent finished the year at the highest level since 2003.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
Green extremist energy supplier, Octopus which is backed by Al Gore, just can’t get enough tax payer dollars. Green extremists just want more and more of you money, through taxes and through higher energy bills. It will never be enough to sustain this unsustainable “green” energy graft.
(Bloomberg) — Octopus Energy Ltd. is telling customers the looming increase in household bills could be blunted by 80% if the British government allows producers to spread ballooning costs over a longer period.
The rise in U.K. energy bills could be limited to about 12 pounds ($16.19) a month, instead of 60 pounds, if suppliers could access a fund to help them bear more of the increases in wholesale costs that eventually get passed on to customers, Chief Executive Officer Greg Jackson said in an email. The statement by Octopus, the country’s fifth-biggest domestic supplier, heightens pressure on the government just weeks before a regulatory price cap is increased.
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/octopus-energy-steps-up-pressure-on-u-k-to-limit-price-burdens
jim2 commented:
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/octopus-energy-steps-up-pressure-on-u-k-to-limit-price-burdens
This article writes about a 300% surge in gas prices in the last year, but you blame higher prices on green energy.
You do this constantly in your comments, while always citing articles that are about the surge in natural gas prices, usually due to the squeeze from Russia.
You don’t even read your own articles, and you don’t apply any logic to what you post. You are irrationally obsessed with blaming green energy no matter what the facts say.
I’m writing you off as an unreliable commenter of bad intent who isn’t contributing worthwhile commentary pertaining to the facts. That means automatic filtering into my Trash folder.
More good news for the denizens of Europe …
The refurbishments at Pernis could coincide with disruption in fuels output at BP Plc’s Rotterdam plant, Europe’s second-biggest refinery, where a handful of units are out of service following a fire in late November. It also coincides with rising margins for diesel and gasoline in northwest Europe, where Pernis is located. European gasoline prices have also risen along with crude oil recently, lifting the region’s average pump price for Super 95 to 1.69 euros per liter last week.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-25/shell-is-set-to-halt-key-units-at-europe-s-biggest-refinery
Wally Broecker in a paper on his cartoon conveyor belt logo. That he elsewhere linked to the LIA.
‘My contribution lies in the idea that changes in the Atlantic’s thermohaline circulation were responsible for the abrupt and large climatic changes experienced by the northern Atlantic basin during the last glacial period.’
https://tos.org/oceanography/assets/docs/4-2_broecker.pdf
Robert I. Ellison commented:
Wally Broecker in a paper on his cartoon conveyor belt logo. That he elsewhere linked to the LIA.
‘My contribution lies in the idea that changes in the Atlantic’s thermohaline circulation were responsible for the abrupt and large climatic changes experienced by the northern Atlantic basin during the last glacial period.’
Which is why climate scientists are worried about the THC slowing down.
It varies on its own apparently.
The AMO is not unforced internal variability, it functions as a negative feedback to indirect solar forcing, with the AMO warming notably since the solar wind weakened from 1995.
It’s Australia Day 2022. This is the day we celebrate being let out of chains on boats and entering the promised land. It is a day for me to respect the Darumbal elders in Central Queensland and to drink and feast.
Robert I. Ellison commented:
It’s Australia Day 2022. This is the day we celebrate being let out of chains on boats….
You mean “….released from prison,” right?
People were transported for trifles and kept as slaves by overseers – even after they were ’emancipated’. It was a matter of clearing out the slums of England at the beginning of the industrial revolution. But the seeds of Australia’s founding freedoms were sown by Irish and Scottish intellectuals. Beef and sheep sustained a healthy and growing population. Many Australians are descended from convicts. Myself included.
Depletion Allowance ($1 billion subsidy – low estimate is $900 million) The depletion allowance allows companies to treat reserves in the ground as a capitalized asset that may be written down by 15% per year. The government only allows the “subsidy” for independent producers. Integrated oil companies such as Exxon, BP etc. are not allowed the exemption. Companies across the US are allowed a depreciation deduction for taxation purposes. The oil & gas industry should not be an exception.
…
Now let’s analyze what the oil & gas sector pays in taxes. In 2012 the top two corporations paying federal taxes in the US were ExxonMobil and Chevron paying a combined total of $45.2 billion. On average, the industry pays a 45% tax rate when all state, federal, and foreign taxes are totaled up. By comparison the Healthcare Industry pays a total rate of 35% and the Pharmaceuticals pay an estimated rate of 21%. Based upon these numbers it’s hard to believe which business sector is criticized the most for “subsidies”.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/drillinginfo/2016/02/22/debunking-myths-about-federal-oil-gas-subsidies/?sh=55f810836e1c
But facts and truth are inconsistent with climate alarmist’s narrative.
You’re talking about now. I’m talking about when oil was an industry in its infancy like renewables. It was heavily subsidized.
JJBraccili | January 25, 2022 at 4:33 pm | Reply
“You’re talking about now. I’m talking about when oil was an industry in its infancy like renewables. It was heavily subsidized.”
calling a tax deduction for out of pocket cash expenditures a subsidy does violence to the english language.
The only tax deduction that could remotely be called a subsidy is percentage depletion in excess of basis. The 76 tax reform act added section 613A which substantially curbed that deduction.
What is omitted is the subsidy that the oil companies give to the government in the form of severance taxes. Severance taxes greatly exceed any benefit from the tax deduction for percentage depletion in excess of basis.
the oil industry never received direct payments from the government
Both you and Appell display complete ignorance on the subject matter. With all due respect, consult some knowledgable in the subject matter before you continue to embarrass yourself.
“calling a tax deduction for out of pocket cash expenditures a subsidy does violence to the english language.”
That’s the point. They were given a tax deduction on the basis of the value of the asset — not what they paid for it. It would be like me paying $2 for a lottery ticket and winning $10 million dollars and then allowing me to deduct 25% of the winnings, instead of my $2 out of pocket expense.
“the oil industry never received direct payments from the government ”
Whether the government sends them a direct check, or they get the money through a tax loophole, it’s still a subsidy. You’re making a distinction without a difference.
You probably think all money belongs to the government, and if you receive an Income Tax REFUND, it is actually a “subsidy.”
The misleading assessment of “Oil Depletion Allowance” excerpted from Robert Bryce’s book, “Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate” fails to include all of the costs incurred by the well owner in each of the 10 years that the well operates. The initial outlay may have been $100,000, but every year the well operates there are expenses, and some of them are substantial. In some years, the well may even be idled due to the lowering of the sale price of a barrel of oil.
The author of this article apparently assumes that once a well is drilled, no operating costs are incurred, it operates automatically like a cornucopia, and 100% of the revenue from the well is pure profit for the life of the well. The Oil Depletion Allowance provided a buffer for the risk takers who often lost everything when wells failed to produce until an ignorant peanut farmer from Georgia removed it while creating the worst economy in modern history until Senile Gropin’ Quid Pro Joe Bidet was installed as the “So Called Ruler Of The US (SCROTUS)” and on DAY ONE said, “Hold my Beer.”
Just another topic on which you have no idea what you are talking about. It is starting to look like that applies to just about everything you say.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/oil-tax-break.asp
The oil depletion used to apply to all oil companies. Today, it reserved for smaller companies.
Standard Oil was founded in 1870. Obviously, the oil business was already off the ground – and without government subsidies.
Standard Oil was broken up in 1911. It made money from its monopolistic behavior. The oil depletion allowance was instituted in 1913 — the same year automobiles went into to mass production. The idea was to increase oil production.
The Democratic Party pushes these myths because they know their base is made up of economic illiterates who want to believe anything that is shoveled their way. These myths, including those about Hoover, have been active for generations.
JJBraccili | January 26, 2022 at 1:53 pm |
Just another topic on which you have no idea what you are talking about. It is starting to look like that applies to just about everything you say.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/oil-tax-break.asp
JJB – That investopedia article as 10-15 errors and/or misrepresentations.
Since you are obviously an expert in federal and state taxation, I am sure you can point those out
You don’t even understand how the oil depletion allowance works. Yet, you feel free to critique Investopedia. I shouldn’t be surprised. You don’t know a damn thing about climate change, and you feel free to share your ignorance with us.
JJBraccili | January 26, 2022 at 7:39 pm |
“You don’t even understand how the oil depletion allowance works. Yet, you feel free to critique Investopedia.”
JJB – curious where you got the expertise to ascertain that someone doesnt know how the oil depletion allowance works, but lack the expertise to notice the multitude of errors in the Investopedia article.
Can you enlighten us
Before you enlighten us, You might want to take a quick look at US title 26, sections 56, & 57 for discussions of amt, or sections 263 & 263A for IDC , or section 611, 613 & 613A regarding cost and percentage depletion, the go over to 469 for the passive loss rules. You might also skim through subchapter K for the partnership rules, then spent a few minutes reading section 1401, 1402 et seq to learn a tad bid on SE taxation.
Of course We presume you are already the expert on the subject matter.
What do I care? Were those sections of the tax code in effect in the 1920s?
You have this obsession to somehow prove that renewables getting subsidies disqualifies them as a future source of energy. Nonsense! Not only the US government but all governments subsidize nascent industries. You think China doesn’t subsidize its renewables industry? The renewables industry is going to create a lot of jobs. Do you prefer those jobs be created here or in China? The fossil fuel industry has been shedding jobs for decades. Give me a break!
Yes, fossil fuels get subsidies to this day. I already post a link to the subsidies they get. Somehow in your warped perspective that doesn’t count. Somehow tax breaks don’t count. Give it a rest!
JJB – post some supporting evidence of the alleged subsidies.
The pro greens have numerous “studies” alleging huge fossil fuel subsidies, including some from the joint tax committe and congressional budget office which I am sure JJB will shortly post. Those studies are riddled with errors.
I already went through it.
Note the countries most heavily subsidising oil and gas. Whatever the external cost is – I wouldn’t call it a subsidy either. And whatever the cost we need energy to live. It’s not even an externality. Effects in the atmosphere of are more a commonality – in a global commons – with local and technology solutions.
‘Some analysts argue that the hidden costs of fossil fuels — such as their impacts on air pollution and global warming — are, in effect, a kind of subsidy, because polluters are not paying for the damage they cause. Last month, the International Monetary Fund calculated3 total fossil-fuel subsidies in 2020 at $5.9 trillion, or almost 7% of global gross domestic product (GDP), largely as a result of these external costs. But some disagree with this approach. “The damage caused by fossil fuels is massive, but I would not call it a subsidy,” says Johannes Urpelainen, who specializes in energy policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC.’ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02847-2
JJB – we know you already went through it. However you are so grossly “mis-educated “ on the subject you have no clue how bad those studies.
Professionals consider those studies to be jokes
JJB – you didn’t go “through” any evidence. The oil business GOT STARTED without government subsidies. Not so with the Green Extremists Nightmare wind and solar. The so-called “subsidies” you harp on were put in place well after the business was thriving. It was thriving so well that the Fed had to break it up. What a bunch of hooie you peddle here.
Joe – the non climate scientist commented:
Professionals consider those studies to be jokes
What exactly is your professional job that makes you so qualified to immediately judge these studies?
Why are they “jokes?”
jim2 wrote:
The oil business GOT STARTED without government subsidies.
Not true. The oil business got started by freely spewing their pollution anywhere they wanted — into the land, water and sky. They paid no price for that damage whatsoever. Society paid the price.
Profits were privatized but damages were socialized. That’s capitalism in America.
Robert I. Ellison commented:
‘Some analysts argue that the hidden costs of fossil fuels — such as their impacts on air pollution and global warming — are, in effect, a kind of subsidy, because polluters are not paying for the damage they cause. Last month, the International Monetary Fund calculated3 total fossil-fuel subsidies in 2020 at $5.9 trillion, or almost 7% of global gross domestic product (GDP), largely as a result of these external costs. But some disagree with this approach. “The damage caused by fossil fuels is massive, but I would not call it a subsidy,” says Johannes Urpelainen, who specializes in energy policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC.’
Nothing but assertions, with no evidence or logic presented.
Fossil fuels prematurely kill 1 in 5. Society pays for those health care costs, not fossil fuel companies. That’s a subsidy.
jim2 commented:
JJB – post some supporting evidence of the alleged subsidies.
“A 2011 study by the consulting firm Management Information Services, Inc. (MISI) estimated the total historical federal subsidies for various energy sources over the years 1950–2010. The study found that oil, natural gas, and coal received $369 billion, $121 billion, and $104 billion (2010 dollars), respectively, or 70% of total energy subsidies over that period.”
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-07/imf-true-cost-fossil-fuels-53-trillion-year
Joe – the non climate scientist commented:
The pro greens have numerous “studies” alleging huge fossil fuel subsidies, including some from the joint tax committe and congressional budget office which I am sure JJB will shortly post. Those studies are riddled with errors.
Such as?
‘Nothing but assertions, with no evidence or logic presented.’ DA
Normally a quote from a Nature note is regarded as a start. But the value of burning fossil fuels exceeds any impact on commonalties – storms, pollution, respiratory and heart disease, whatever – more than not burning it at this point in time.
Robert
Your 3.48.
Excellent comment. Your last paragraph says it all, For all its faults, Fossil fuel is currently the best form of energy available
As Lomborg pointed out in his book ‘False Alarm,’ when we look back we seldom fixed big problems by telling people to live with less of everything they wanted. People don’t want to go backwards, they want to progress. He cites the example of whale oil for lighting, which was the fifth biggest industry in the United States for a century until the mid 1800’s when it was supplanted by a superior, cheaper, better smelling and longer lasting product, kerosene from petroleum.
When something better than petroleum comes along, as with the successor to whale oil lighting, we will enthusiastically embrace it
However, as yet another day here dawns with little wind and no sun, the idea of relying on wind and solar as base load power is nonsensical. Here’s to their superior successor-whatever it may be.
tonyb
jim2 commented:
Now let’s analyze what the oil & gas sector pays in taxes. In 2012 the top two corporations paying federal taxes in the US were ExxonMobil and Chevron paying a combined total of $45.2 billion
This EIA report found $4.2 B in direct federal subsidies for coal, oil, and natural gas in FY2010 (http://is.gd/ajcsv3).
U.S. government subsidies to the fossil fuel industry between 2002 and 2008.: $72 billion.
Source: Washington Post, Sept 25, 2009, http://is.gd/dbolp
Corn ethanol subsidies over the same period: $16.8 billion
Subsidies to traditional renewables over the same period: $12.2 billion
Source: Roger Pielke Jr blog, http://is.gd/dbosC
Global fossil fuel industry subsidies, 2008: $557 billion
Source: Financial Times, June 6, 2010, http://is.gd/dboxe
What have ANY of these GREEN SCAMMER (SOLYNDRA, ANYONE?) ever produced to earn these exorbitant subsidies?
It’s Time to End Subsidies for Renewable Energy
https://www.americaspower.org/its-time-to-end-subsidies-for-renewable-energy/
By America’s Power
April 17, 2020
Over $100 billion has already been spent on renewables subsidies.
Renewable energy resources—primarily wind and solar—have received subsidies through the tax code since 1979, most of which have occurred in the last decade. Through 2018, these subsidies amounted to more than $100 billion. This amount is far in excess of federal assistance received by other electricity sources. And for perspective, this exceeds the combined 2020 budgets for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Appell – all you have demonstrated in this last string of comments about the oil industry is that you have a serious lack of reading comprehension!
jim2 commented:
Depletion Allowance ($1 billion subsidy – low estimate is $900 million) The depletion allowance allows companies to treat reserves in the ground as a capitalized asset that may be written down by 15% per year.
Author Robert Bryce wrote the following about how the allowance operated in practice: “An oilman drills a well that costs $100,000. He finds a reservoir containing $10,000,000 worth of oil. The well produces $1 million worth of oil per year for ten years. In the very first year, thanks to the depletion allowance, the oilman could deduct 27.5 per cent, or $275,000, of that $1 million in income from his taxable income. Thus, in just one year, he’s deducted nearly three times his initial investment. But the depletion allowance continues to pay off. For each of the next nine years, he gets to continue taking the $275,000 depletion deduction. By the end of the tenth year, the oilman has deducted $2.75 million from his taxable income, even though his initial investment was only $100,000” (Spartacus Educational).
https://fascinatingpolitics.com/2020/10/04/the-oil-depletion-allowance-the-largest-tax-loophole-in-american-history/
02
So what. The depletion allowance has provided incentives for prospective investment in oil and gas and as a result the consumer has benefited in cheaper prices than they otherwise would have received. Tell the person who is scraping by that he should be willing to pay $6 or $10 or whatever a gallon to fill up his tank. The taxpayer might be subsidizing the oil and gas industry but he also benefits from the incentives to produce more fossil fuels. Until there are alternative cheap, reliable sources at scale, then you will have to just suck it up.
The tax system was not intended to be based on punitive incentives. It is intended to allow capitalism to do what it does best, produce optimal economic benefits. Going back to a top marginal tax rate of 94% might feel good if the purpose is to punish the evil rich, but what does it do for future investment and economic growth. There is a reason that all but the most economic illiterates on the left aren’t scrambling to reinstate the top rate to over 90%. They know there are disincentives to investment and capital formation.
The whiners are castigating Amazon for not paying “their fair share” of taxes. But they somehow overlook that Amazon has increased its workforce by 500,000 employees in recent years. The entire UAW Big 3 workforce is 1/3 of that. Which benefits society more, having an additional 500,000 employed households or more taxes to be wasted by big government?
The oil and gas depletion allowance and the lowered individual top marginal income tax rate have been the left’s whipping boys for generations. Whip up the anger against success, regardless of the benefits to all economic actors, seems to be the mantra that plays the best.
““An oilman drills a well that costs $100,000. He finds a reservoir containing $10,000,000 worth of oil. The well produces $1 million worth of oil per year for ten years. In the very first year, thanks to the depletion allowance, the oilman could deduct 27.5 per cent, or $275,000, of that $1 million in income from his taxable income.”
That oilman pays $217,000 in annual income taxes on the remaining income. And his oil generates roughly $52,000 in annual federal gasoline taxes. And his efforts reduce the leverage Middle Eastern potentates and the Russian dictator have on the United States.
A man who is paying the federal government $269,000 a year for 10 years because he invested $100,000 is not being “subsidized” by the government.
Jeff 850 – you omitted two items
1) the severance tax which runs 4-9% dependending on the state.
even considering the percentage depletion in excess of basis (the only actually true subsidy) , the severance tax wipes out any benefit from the excess percentage depletion (15% deduction of gross revenue x 30% average income tax rate = approx 4-5% reduction of tax from the excess percentage depletion). Basically a net wash resulting in zero net tax benefit to the WI or RI owner.
2) State and Federal royalties. If the property is developed on state or Federal land, the royalties range from 12% to 25%. As such, the federal or state government gets the royalty payment with bearing any of the operating costs.
I left out lots of stuff. By investing the money in the US instead of elsewhere, the federal government gets to tax the makers and installers of the equipment and the incomes of their employees.
And the oilman will be hiring people to work his rig, all of whom will pay income taxes.
By turning the $100,000 that was sitting in a bank account into a thriving company with, let’s say a $400,000 payroll, he went from zero to $24,000/year in employer social security contributions.
So an investment that sat in stock and was unrealized, turned into a third of a million in annual federal revenue and David wants to say the federal government is “subsidizing” that. Because they aren’t taking more than three times what the guy invested. Annually.
Jeffnsails850, I like your replies, but I judge that the real argument revolves around the issue of tax deductibles being a subsidy having the necessary basis that the government owns all of your income. From my libertarian point of view everybody should have a tax cut and get back to owning themselves.
I had a relative who was deep, deep into the peak oil nonsense and constantly sending me information about “oil subsidies.” I made the mistake of spending an hour or two reading one of them.
All of them, of course, were designed to produce the biggest, scariest number rather than to inform. Under one section devoted to how federally funded state and local agencies subsidized oil was an especially hilarious gem: schools, fire departments, and police departments put – now sit down for this – gasoline and diesel fuel in their cars and trucks! And they pay for it!
The “subsidy” was the fact that governmental agencies use vehicles. So they added up all the gas used by government vehicles and called the big number a scary subsidy that had to be “ended.”
He defended this inclusion, of course, so I asked him if “ending all fossil fuel subsidies” means the fire truck won’t come if you call 911. Given that fueling the thing would be a forbidden subsidy.
He didn’t miss a beat- that transitioned to the next obvious demand- nationalization of oil, rationing. The fire truck isn’t a subsidy if the government seizes Exxon.
Using wind turbines again is a multiple steps backwards in terms of human development.
Humankind has exploited wind energy ever since records first began; in fact it was harnessed to propel boats along the River Nile as long ago as 5000 BC. In around 200 BC, simple windmills were used to pump water in China, while in Persia and the Middle East there were windmills with a vertical axis and reed sails designed for milling grain. In the 11th century, new ways of using wind energy spread throughout the world: settlers in the Middle East used windmills extensively for milling grain to produce foodstuffs, and the merchants and crusaders who returned from those lands brought this idea back to Europe. This allowed the inhabitants of the Netherlands to refine the windmill and adapt it to drain the lakes and marshes of the Rhine delta.
One very familiar image in Spain is the famous windmills of Campo de Criptana, which would become so well known in the 17th century thanks to the ingenious gentleman Don Quijote of La Mancha. These emblematic windmills with sails served to pump water or grind grain, and their use was widespread until well into the 19th century, With the start of the industrial revolution, the use of these windmills declined significantly, as from that point on the main sources of energy were steam engines powered by coal and electricity.
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/technology/innovation/history-of-windpower-from-origins-to-world-war-ii/
Current temperatures in the Great Lakes region.
https://i.ibb.co/LhqjcSL/Screenshot-1.png
https://i.ibb.co/fdhbzCD/gfs-T2ma-us-1.png
“The industry that will lead this transition is, in fact, the oil and gas industry,” he says, pointing out that Santos is pursuing plans to increase investments in emissions-reduction technologies including the Moomba carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in South Australia and lower-carbon hydrogen and ammonia plants.
“We are supplying fuels and energy to most of the world’s users today, and we are used to mega-projects spending trillions of dollars globally every single year building these projects,” he says. “If someone thinks some new set of project builders is just going to arrive from somewhere else with trillions of dollars to start building some new energy infrastructure globally … they are dreaming.”
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/they-are-dreaming-why-santos-boss-kevin-gallagher-still-believes-in-oil-and-gas-20220122-p59qfd.html
JJBraccili has made a number of interventions on the topics covered here. He has magisterially dismissed those who have disagreed with him as not understanding science, and because he believes that the past has no significance for the present, he asks us to focus on the need to reduce carbon emissions in order to save the planet from a climate catastrophe. Regarding the problems of intermittent power supply of wind and solar generation he has an engineering solution: scale up the grids to connect international and even intercontinental networks of green energy distribution. What a simple proposal: let the engineers solve our problems.
Before signing off on this solution, I would urge JJBraccili to explain how a present grid as large as that of Europe, but sustained only by wind and solar power, could meet demand during periods of low supply by calling on other grids. Territories beyond Europe would have to have installed green energy capacity well beyond their normal demands. Upscaling grids also involves increasing losses of electricity in transmission over very long distances.
Clearly, the engineering solution contains its own constraints, and this before economic and political considerations are even factored in.
Very simply JJB is an expert on everything from climate science, thermal dynamic, engineering, federal tax policy, micro and macro economics.
I cant wait for Judith to post the last technology for home cooking so that JJB can express his expertise on another topic.
How about not enough wind turbines and solar panels?
Fossil fuels had technical challenges when first implemented. So did the electric grid. Guess what? Scientists and engineers figured it out. I don’t even consider intermittency a problem worthy of consideration.
Maybe, you can’t figure it out, but trust me, there are plenty of others that will.
The first computers were assembled with vacuum tubes. The term “debug” came to be because in the summertime they left the windows open to cool the computer. Insects would get into the circuitry and cause shorts. The computer had to be “debugged.”
If you were around, I’m sure you would have thrown up your hands saying computers have no future. Fortunately, scientists and engineers didn’t take that position. They’re not going to listen to you and your ridiculous arguments now.
Sure, let’s throw good money after bad and buy more intermittent wind and solar – with tax dollars and higher electric rates. What a crock you are trying to foist on us. Not to mention the extensive, complex, and hackable automation you would put in. (There is already enough attack surface on existing grids, dumb and smart.)
JJBraccili | January 26, 2022 at 12:50 pm | Reply
” I don’t even consider intermittency a problem worthy of consideration.”
JJB – that summarizies the stupidy of your idea
If you don’t think they can figure out a way around the intermittency problem, then we know why you use the moniker “the Non Climate Scientist.”
Here’s something you’re not going to like about subsides. If we end the subsides to fossil fuels, it will speed up their demise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidy
If old-fashioned energy windmills and solar panels are so great, just take away all the special subsidies and give them the regular “subsidies” other like-businesses get. The oil business worked because people wanted kerosene and later gasoline. If wind and solar are needed by anyone, it will be successful without all the special treatment. No government payments to home owners to install a system and they get the going rate for electricity sold to the grid. No special treatment for wind or solar farms either, just the usual tax treatment given to like businesses. It will never happen because it’s product no consumer would buy, use, or install at a non-subsidized rate.
Since JJBraccili is, as you say, so knowledgeable in the fields of science, I wonder if he would be so kind as to explain to me why I have got my work so wrong as to estimate the climate sensitivity as 0.5degC in the paper about which I posted earlier. And the inescapable conclusion the there is not, has never been, and can never be a climate emergency due to CO2 accumulations. He can download the paper at http://www.ijaos.org/article/298/10.11648.j.ijaos.20210502.12 .
David Coe, thank you for the link: //www.ijaos.org/article/298/10.11648.j.ijaos.20210502.12 .
David Coe wrote:
Since JJBraccili is, as you say, so knowledgeable in the fields of science, I wonder if he would be so kind as to explain to me why I have got my work so wrong as to estimate the climate sensitivity as 0.5degC in the paper about which I posted earlier.
Why don’t you submit your work to a real, peer reviewed journal like real scientists do, then you can read the referee report (if your paper isn’t rejected wholesale) and find out.
But more likely you’ll be rejected outright.
Now this is what I would call real constructive criticism! You are certainly correct in saying that it is difficult or near impossible to get publication in certain well known journals of material that questions the “concensus”. The pal review watch keepers are very very efficient. As was pointed out in an earlier post by TEWS_Pilot our paper was initially retracted by the journal in response to objections by climate alarmists, claiming that the paper was based upon scientific errors. To their credit the journal’s editors agreed to instigate a second more rigorous review to investigate these claims. The result was that the paper was reinstated without change.
David, your case is not unusual…having them reexamine your paper and then publish it IS unusual. Dr. Tim Ball had to go to court and win against Michael Mann to make any progress, and even then, Mann chose to accept a “Contempt of Court” ruling for refusing to submit his raw data …why would he refuse to submit it for examination by experts? You decide….I never refused any requests, and in fact, I alwasy included copious notes and even photocopies of my flip pad notes so they could follow my logic.
Climate Scientists Discussed Ways To Make The 1940’s Warmth Disappear
From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones
Subject: 1940s
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600
Cc: Ben Santer
So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”.
The gatekeepers at “science” journals are absolutely real. We all remember Phil Jones words about stopping skeptics papers from being published: “.. “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!“
From: Phil Jones [Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia University of CLIMATEGATE fame].
To: Many. Nov 16, 1999
“I’ve just completed Mike’s [Dr. Michael Mann] Nature ‘trick‘ of adding in the ‘real‘ temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Michael Mann hid the post-1960 decline in the temperatures, as measured by Briffa in his paleoclimate studies using tree ring data. Mann claimed that the decline didn’t match the surface temperature record, and simply erased it.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2110d7cb6b2ae21f41e63339e4cee38d1e98b0992801f70910fe7fc130e1e673.jpg
Reviewed by who? I suspect not anyone who knew anything about climate science.
David Coe: I’m afraid your publisher has been listed as a predatory journal; see this link and the references therein:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Publishing_Group
Also your sequence of referee reports is highly unusual, to say the least. I think you’ve been taken.
TEWS_Pilot wrote:
Michael Mann hid the post-1960 decline in the temperatures, as measured by Briffa in his paleoclimate studies using tree ring data. Mann claimed that the decline didn’t match the surface temperature record, and simply erased it.
The measured temperatures DIDN’T match the proxy data FROM CERTAIN TREES — those in far northern latitudes. It was a well-known issue called the “divergence problem.” Its context was the decline in tree growth at some high-latitude locations since 1960, an issue in climate science called the “divergence problem.” See http://www.skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-trick-hide-the-decline.htm for a full explanation. And you can read
“On the ‘Divergence Problem’ in Northern Forests: A review of the
tree-ring evidence and possible causes,” Rosanne D’Arrigo et al, Global and Planetary Change 60 (2008) 289–305.
Since there is an excellent surface temperature record after 1960 it makes no sense to use a few doubtful proxies at that point.
TEWS: Mann et al’s data and code have been available since 2005:
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/research/MANNETAL98/
They published in 1998, the nascent days of the Web when it was not at all common to put data and code on a Website.
TEWS wrote:
The gatekeepers at “science” journals are absolutely real. We all remember Phil Jones words about stopping skeptics papers from being published: “.. “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow
This isn’t about stopping papers from being published, it’s about deciding what papers would be included in an IPCC report. Big difference. Obviously IPCC authors are there to use their expertise to make judgements about which published papers deserve inclusion in the IPCC reports and which don’t. That’s their job.
By the way, most refereeing is blind — the referee doesn’t know who wrote a paper. “Pal review” is a myth and is just an excuse used by authors of poorly written papers that are rejected. Instead of complaining and making excuses they ought to read the referee reports, learn from them and improve their work.
You said: “The measured temperatures DIDN’T match the proxy data FROM CERTAIN TREES — those in far northern latitudes. It was a well-known issue called the “divergence problem.” ”
So for any tree-ring proxy, how do we know that “divergence” problems didn’t occur in the past, but we just don’t know about it. If you try to resolve the problem by comparing species/site results, how do you know which is the best representative of the temperature of the site? It seems to be a slippery slope. I’m asking you because you represent yourself as having expertise in this area.
PS David Coe: Your claim of CO2 saturation is one huge error, as I pointed out earlier.
We appear to disagree. The methodology behind my work and the science supporting it is clearly set out in the paper.
David Coe: the problem with your claim of saturation is that you don’t account for the face that GHG molecules *reradiate*.
This is almost always the problem with claims of saturation. When, say, a CO2 molecule absorbs an IR photon from the surface, it’s put into an excited state. If it doesn’t lose that energy by collision with another air molecule, it reradiates a photon, and because the CO2 molecule is randomly oriented the emission is in a random direction. By symmetry there will be an equal amount of such photon going in all directions, so we need only consider those going up and down (because the original photons came vertically up).
Those photons going vertically can be absorbed again, the molecule then being scattered again or reradiating again. Etc. Eventually some photons at some wavelengths above a certain pressure level will even leave out the TOA.
Also, there are an enormous number of absorption lines! You chose a resolution of 0.1/cm, but that misses a lot of lines. For fun once I looked in HITRAN and found 1,406 absorption lines for CO2 between 666-668/cm. Your calculation would only have 20.
Between 540-800/cm there are 23,021 lines. Your calculation would only have about 11% of those.
Another point is that CO2 absorption dominates at wavelengths where this is very little water vapor, such as in the polar regions and in the stratosphere. You haven’t accounted for that. And some photons that would ordinarily be absorbed by water vapor will leave the atmosphere in those regions. (That’s one reason those regions are so cold!)
Please reread Pierrehumbert’s sidebar that I linked to — he explains the situation succinctly. See his textbook for more details — I believe he has a PDF at his website now, or there are PDFs elsewhere too.
sidebar on page 37 of:
Pierrehumbert RT 2011: Infrared radiation and planetary temperature. Physics Today 64, 33-38
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/PhysTodayRT2011.pdf
Of course GHG molecules reradiate absorbed energy. They also transfer energy through molecular collisions. The reason that there has previously been such a huge range of variation in estimation of climate sensitivity is that climate scientists have been unable to untangle the complex thermodynamics of the atmosphere. However you spin it though, the atmosphere must first absorb the outgoing radiation. The question then is what happens to that absorbed energy. Some will be retained by a variety of interactions by the earth/atmosphere system, thereby increasing the earth temperature, the rest will be retransmitted through to space and must contribute to the thermal equilibrium condition at the top of the atmosphere. It is this thermal balance which determines the earth equilibrium temperature.
It s a simple calculation to determine that in order to maintain the existing mean earth temperature of 288K some 38.5% of the radiated energy from the earth must be absorbed and retained by the earth atmosphere system.(Section 1.4 of the paper). This observation enables us to calculate with some precision the individual and combined absorption effects of the GHGs leading to the result the CO2 has only contributed 3.3K towards the 33k warming required for the current 288K mean temperature. H2O contributes 29.4K while CH4 and N2O are responsible for just 0.3K combined.
I hope this helps.
Doesn’t matter. What matters is that CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere and that is driving climate change. If CO2 stops increasing, the earth comes to an equilibrium temperature and continues at that temperature until something else starts increasing or decreasing that can impact earth’s energy balance.
davidappell02
Forgive me, I did not comment about the fine structure of IR radiation. There are indeed thousands of individual absorption lines but because of effects such as pressure broadening most of these lines coalesce into a broad spectrum continuum particularly for complex molecules with multiple degrees of freedom such as CO2 and particularly H2O. Selecting a wavenumber resolution of 0.1 cm^-1 was a compromise between achieving a realistic answer and computational capabilities. 0.1 resolution resulted in in over 30,000 calculations for each 100m altitude elevation up to 35000m, for each GHG. I would be very happy to see someone replicate that effort using a 0.01 wavenumber resolution.
David Coe commented:
It s a simple calculation to determine that in order to maintain the existing mean earth temperature of 288K some 38.5% of the radiated energy from the earth must be absorbed and retained by the earth atmosphere system.(Section 1.4 of the paper). This observation enables us to calculate with some precision the individual and combined absorption effects of the GHGs leading to the result the CO2 has only contributed 3.3K towards the 33k warming required for the current 288K mean temperature. H2O contributes 29.4K while CH4 and N2O are responsible for just 0.3K combined.
It’s just not this simple David. One big reason why is that there are regions on Earth where this is very little water vapor, like the polar regions and the stratosphere, so the noncondensible GHGs dominate there. You haven’t taken this into account.
A couple more excerpts from Pierrehumbert (you really should read him):
“It should not be concluded that water vapor overwhelms the greenhouse effect of CO2, however. It would be more precise to say that the water vapor greenhouse effect complements that of CO2. CO2 absorbs strongly near the peak of the Planck function for Earthlike temperatures, but the water vapor absorption is nearly two orders of magnitude weaker there. Further, for Earthlike planets, water vapor condenses and therefore disappears in colder regions of the planet; it is only the long-lived CO2 greenhouse effect that can persist in cold parts of the atmosphere.”
– Raymond Pierrehumbert, Principles of Planetary Climate, pg 250.
==
“One sometimes hears it remarked cavalierly that water vapor is the ‘most important’ greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere. The misleading nature of such statements can be inferred directly from Fig 4.31…. If water vapor were the only greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere, the temperature would be a chilly 268 K, and that’s even before taking ice-albedo feedback into account, which would most likely cause the Earth to fall into a frigid Snowball state…. With regard to Earth’s habitability, it takes two [water vapor and CO2] to tango.”
– Raymond Pierrehumbert, “Principles of Planetary Climate,” (2010) p. 271
I am so glad that you raised the issue of low atmospheric H2O concentrations. Even ice has a measurable saturation vapour pressure. According to the Clausius Claperyon equation at 255K the SVP of H2O is a very significant 0.15%. Now the really interesting thing is that the H2O absorption is so strong that, at that concentration, total atmospheric absorption in the absence of any other GHGs is an impressive 60% and that would result in an equilibrium earth temperature of 280K. Yes only 8degrees lower than existing temperatures. Of course at that temperature the ice would melt and both the H2O concentration would rise along with temperature to around 285K. It would require the addition of 400ppm CO2 to bring us up to the current 288K. Not a lot of people know that – to coin a phrase from Michael Caine and a very well respected UK website.
David Coe wrote:
Since JJBraccili is, as you say, so knowledgeable in the fields of science, I wonder if he would be so kind as to explain to me why I have got my work so wrong as to estimate the climate sensitivity as 0.5degC
A better question for you is why you’re able to pinpoint climate sensitivity so precisely when full scale global climate models can’t.
Do you have an answer for that? After all, climate modelers know all about the HITRAN database just as you do.
Because full scale climate models are predicated on the concept that warming is attributed to CO2 and spend their time trying to analyse the complexities of atmospheric thermodynamics. We have taken a different approach and simply calculated the IR absorption capabilities of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2 and H2O to determine exactly how the earths radiated energy is absorbed by the atmosphere in order to produce the 33K warming necessary to maintain the average global temperature of 288K.
David Coe commented:
Because full scale climate models are predicated on the concept that warming is attributed to CO2 and spend their time trying to analyse the complexities of atmospheric thermodynamics. We have taken a different approach and simply calculated the IR absorption capabilities of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2 and H2O to determine exactly how the earths radiated energy is absorbed by the atmosphere in order to produce the 33K warming necessary to maintain the average global temperature of 288K.
Climate models do exactly the same thing, but with much more sophisticated physics.
BTW, climate models aren’t “predicated” on the concept that warming is due to CO2. That’s what comes out of the model’s calculation.
davidappell02
BTW, climate models aren’t “predicated” on the concept that warming is due to CO2. That’s what comes out of the model’s calculation.
That didn’t work out too well for them then did it!
David Coe commented:
>>BTW, climate models aren’t “predicated” on the concept that warming is due to CO2. That’s what comes out of the model’s calculation.<<
That didn’t work out too well for them then did it!
What do you mean?
David Coe:
Even the quickest glance at your paper shows obvious errors and lack of considerations:
1) No ice-albedo feedback. You assume no change in albedo — you take your “f” (section 1.3) to be a constant.
2) Your water vapor feedback is all wrong. Instead of the Clausius-Claperyon equation you have (section 3.5) dT proportional to dH2O where H2O is the saturated vapor pressure. That’s just bad thermo.
You write, in your conclusion, “There is indeed a positive feedback effect due to the presence of H2O, but this is limited to a multiplying effect of 1.183 to any temperature increase,” regardless of your equation 5. In fact, the Clausius-Claperyon relation shows the feedback is not linear but exponential, at 7% more water vapor per degC of warming.
3) You ignore clouds completely (section 5.1), when the cloud feedback is almost certainly positive.
4) Atmospheric CH4 strongly traps heat in its initial years/decades and then much of it leaves CO2 behind, so you can’t ignore it.
Again these are just at first glance. You should definitely have asked yourself how CO2’s climate sensitivity can possibility can possibility be 0.5 C when we’ve already had 1.1 C of warming and CO2 has only increased by 50%. Unless you have some other magical warming factor in mind. From what I can tell from reading your paper, you don’t posit any other sources of warming.
I give you credit for asking sensible questions. Let me try give sensible answers.
1 Ice albedo feedback. This may indeed be one of the contributors towards global temperatures. Our aim however was to determine the impact of atmospheric absorption on temperatures, particularly CO2 which has been fingered as the demonic gas that will destroy us all if we do not take immediate action to reduce emissions to atmosphere. We have done this by calculating the absorptive effects under current earth conditions, which includes ice cover and cloud cover. We make no attempt to predict the future impact of variations in ice cover and cloud, for the simple reason that we do not know and I suspect neither does anyone else.
2 Water vapour feedback. Variation of water vapour concentration with temperature is indeed determined from the Clausius Claperyon equation and is used in the paper to determine the saturation vapour pressure (SVP) of water vapour with altitude. This is necessary to correctly calculate the atmospheric IR absorptivity variation with altitude. Actually Clausius Claperyon is itself an approximation and in the paper we have used the more rigorous “Buck” equation. As you correctly point out this indicates a 7% increase in SVP for each 1 deg increase in temperature. That 7% figure however is misleading. It is 7% of current water concentration. i.e. if H20 concentration is say 1% (a typical average figure for the earth) it will increase to 1.07% if temperature increases by 1degC. Because of the near total saturation of the H2O absorption spectrum this increase has a minimal impact upon absorption and hence temperature.
3 Clouds. Yes we ignore the future impact of clouds and specifically point this out in the paper. See my response above in item 1.
4 Atmospheric CH4. We have certainly not ignored the impact of CH4. CH4 is often claimed to be 300 times more powerful a greenhouse gas that CO2. When we analyse the spectral data we find that not to be the case. Its absorption is limited to a very small part of the earth emitted radiation and moreover it is strongly overlapped by H2O absorption bands. We find in fact that the climate sensitivity to CH4 to be 0.06K. Of course the atmospheric concentration of CH4 is low at approximately 1.8ppm. Will it rise significantly in the future? That is debatable since it oxidises over time in the atmosphere to CO2 and H2O.
Finally you ask what is causing the current warming if it is not CO2. My answer is I do not know. That is what climate scientists are supposed to be studying.
Dasvid
You say
“Again these are just at first glance. You should definitely have asked yourself how CO2’s climate sensitivity can possibility can possibility be 0.5 C when we’ve already had 1.1 C of warming and CO2 has only increased by 50%. Unless you have some other magical warming factor in mind. From what I can tell from reading your paper, you don’t posit any other sources of warming.”
you are assuming that climate was constant when you posit we have already had 1.1C of warming. Temperatures varied considerably in the past. Phil Jones wrote a paper in 2004 admitting that natural variability was much greater than had previously been accepted.
We have had some 18 periods of warming and cooling during the Holocene. Some periods much warmer than today some much cooler. These have caused weather extremes much greater than today
If we look at those countries with long temperature records such as the UK we can see for example that we have considerably exceeded this 1.1C and indeed it was the remarkable upsurge in Temperatures from the early 1700’s, at a rate greater than today, that caused Jones to write his paper as the rapid warming ended in 1740 during the coldest winter for centuries.
This general warmth was picked up in a variety of places including Europe, The Hudson Bay company and parts of America where temperature readings were being taken and also In China As Jones wrote in a later paper
tonyb
I don’t have the time to read your paper thoroughly, but I spotted something that you got wrong. The problem is in your Figures 4 and Figures 5. It looks like you used Planck’s equation to generate earth’s radiant energy profile. You used wavelength as the independent variable. That a mistake, you should have used wavenumber.
There is anomaly in Planck’s equation. It doesn’t do the conversion of wavenumber to wavelength correctly. If you integrate using wavelength, you get the peak at a wavelength of 10 MM. If you integrate with wavenumber, you get the peak at 550 cm-1 or a wavelength of 18 MM. Here, courtesy of NASA, is ah IR spectrograph of the earth’s radiant energy from satellite data
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d75b0d49b696ecedec244862e1d2ac47
Look at your graph and look what happens if the peak is at 18 MM. The 15 MM CO2 absorption band is now to the left of the peak where the slope is positive. Each change in temperature increases the incremental change in the energy CO2 has available to absorb. Where you have the peak the opposite in true. In fact, once the 15 MM band passes the peak and on the downside of earth’s radiant energy profile, it can no longer drive temperature change. Which is the conclusion you come to. I’m not going to go through it, but I suspect where CO2 is on the radiant energy curve will have an impact on climate sensitivity.
I had to go through the derivation of Planck’s to find the anomaly, it’s not discussed much. I did find a reference to it in Wikipedia.
“Evidently, the location of the peak of the spectral distribution for Planck’s law depends on the choice of spectral variable.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law
The fact that H2O is responsible for most of the greenhouse effect is immaterial. What’s driving temperature change is the greenhouse gas that’s increasing. That’s CO2. H2O is not the driver of climate change. It’s impact increases with increasing atmospheric temperature. Increasing atmospheric temperature is being caused by increasing CO2.
You should consider revising your paper. It is obviously flawed.
Oh dear. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, particularly when you have to resort to Wikipedia to support it. Wavenumber in units of cm^-1 is favoured by spectroscopists and most if not all spectrographic data uses this parameter. The rest of science, including the redoubtable Mr Planck, uses wavelength in micron (m*10^-6). Planck’s famous equation to determine the infra-red emissions from a black body provides the radiated energy density verses wavelength. The units for radiated energy at first sight appear a little strange. They are W/m3 not W/m2 as you might expect. This is because the calculate energy provides the emitted energy in terms of W/m2, i.e. energy emitted per unit area of surface, for each increment of wavelength in metres. Hence W/m3.
Planck’s equation provides energy data in terms of wavelength m, the spectral data from HITRAN is provided in terms of wavenumber cm-1. Which to use? In fact you can use either unit providing you are consistent. We chose to convert the HITRAN spectral data to wavelength and have integrated the Planck equation with respect to wavelength in order to calculate atmospheric absorptivity.
And yes we find that the dominant factor in atmospheric IR absorption and so called “greenhouse warming” is in fact H2O. That fact is not, as you say, immaterial. Mainly as a result of this dominance, the ability of the atmosphere to absorb more energy is severely limited. Adding more CO2 has little further impact on atmospheric absorption and hence temperature. Whatever is causing increasing temperatures, it is certainly not CO2!
That was a fine piece of “tap dancing,” but it didn’t address my point. Mostly it was irrelevant. Was that supposed to demonstrate your physics bona fides? I’m not impressed.
“Oh dear. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, particularly when you have to resort to Wikipedia to support it.”
Was that supposed to be some kind of “put down?” That sounds desperate. The idea behind your paper isn’t new. About 3 or 4 years ago, I got into a discussion, and someone had this paper by an expert in atmospheric radiation physics. He wrote a well-respected book on the subject. He didn’t use climate sensitivity to prove his point that CO2 is benign, but his graphs looked strikingly similar to yours. I went through the paper in detail. It had a lot of advanced math that was hard to follow because he left out a few steps. That led me to Planck’s equation, where I discovered the anomaly that discredited his paper and now disproves yours.
The paper’s author published it in an obscure pay-to-publish journal out of China with an impressive title. It also turned out that the GWPF was paying the author.
I suspect the anomaly is well known among those who know something about radiative physics. Apparently, you do not. It took me a while to figure it out because I’m not a physicist.
It’s not hard to prove CO2 is not beneficial and not a cause for alarm. You can do it with the spectrograph I linked yesterday.
The first thing you notice on the spectrograph is the big hole in the earth’s radiant energy under the CO2 15 MM absorption. There’s supposed to be energy there. That energy didn’t disappear. It went somewhere, and it’s not causing anything good to happen.
Here are a few things an intellect like yours should be able to figure out from that spectrograph:
1. If the only greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is CO2 and only considering the 15 MM absorption band, then adding CO2 to the atmosphere would heat the planet. The radiant energy profile would get “higher,” and it would shift to the right toward larger wavenumbers. The 15 MM band would “climb” the earth’s radiant energy profile toward the peak.
2. To arrive at the peak, the CO2 15 MM absorption band must be saturated. That’s impossible. That means the CO2 15mm absorption band can only approach the peak. The peak is an equilibrium point and sets the maximum temperature the planet can achieve due to the CO2 15 MM absorption band.
3. The CO2 15 MM band is not alone. There are two “outer” CO2 absorption bands. These bands become the dominant CO2 absorption mechanism once the 15 MM band reaches the peak. These bands come into play on Venus. A spectrographic of Venus shows these bands straddling the radiant energy profile peak of Venus. That sets the temperature of Venus. The “outer” bands force the 15 MM band off the peak. Once past the peak, the 15 MM band has less and less energy to absorb. It acts as resistance to temperature change and eventually becomes benign because it has very little energy to absorb.
4. The other greenhouse gases assist CO2, which permits it to reach the peak of the earth’s radiant energy profile unsaturated and continue past the peak.
You can estimate the minimum amount of temperature rise the CO2 15 mm absorption can cause from Wien’s displacement theory. Use a start peak wavelength of 18 MM and an end wavelength of 15 MM and you get a temperature rise of 30 C. That’s not benign.
Using wavelength instead of wavenumber, you have placed the CO2 15 MM band in the wrong place in relation to the earth’s radiant peak, where it has little to no impact on the earth’s temperature. That is the basis of your conclusion, and it is wrong.
Your paper is sophisticated junk science. Whether what you did is intentional or incompetence, I do not know.
David Coe: JJBraccili is right — water vapor does not drive warming. It is a condensible gas, so you can’t put more of it into an atmosphere that’s at constant temperature. But you *can* put more CO2, CH4, N2O etc. Once those gases start warming the atmosphere, it will hold more w.v., in an amount according to the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, about 7% more w.v. per degC of warming.
Hence the expression “water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing.”
David Coe: And JJ is also right about mixing arbitrarily mixing wavelengths and wavenumbers.
Wikipedia does show this very clearly — it’s the fourth line of equations in the Planck’s law article, section “The law”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law#The_law
which is
B_lambda = B_nu * d(nu)/d(lambda)
so compare the first equation in that section
B(nu,T)=…
to the fifth line of equation
B_lambda(lambda,T)=…
They have very different powers of nu and lambda and different factors in the exponential.
You can’t just jump back and forth from wavenumbers and wavelengths willy nilly.
JJB and davidappellO2
Your comments are similar so to avoid repeating myself I will respond to you jointly. I must first however congratulate you both on your resilience and persistence even when wrong!
There is no error in Planck’s equation –
Spectral Radiance L = c1lambda^5/(exp(c2/lambda.T) – 1) W/m3
It is one of the fundamentals of modern physics. From that equation we can determine precisely the radiated energy from the earth. Lambda represents the wavelength measured in m. We can also from the HITRAN database calculate the absorptivity of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. HITRAN data like most spectrographic data is presented in wavenumbers which is essentially the reciprocal of wavelength. It is a simple matter however to convert the HITRAN data from wavenumber to wavelength and from there determine the transmissivity of the atmosphere to the earths radiation by integrating the Spectral Radiance modified by the atmospheric transmissivity over the waveband 3 to 100 micron, the wavelength range of radiative emissions from a body at a temperature of 288K.
In the absence of absorbing gases this results in the famous Stefans equation R = sigmaT^4 W/m2
In section 3.6 of the paper I discus the “temperature feedback” produced by the peak radiation wavelength determined from the Planck equation moving slightly to shorter wavelengths as temperature increases. This in fact produces a negative temperature feedback which offsets 30% of the positive H20 feedback reducing it from 18% of a given temperature increase to 12%. The calculation of climate sensitivity at 0.5degC includes these feedback effects.
I can assure you that after over 30years working in IR spectroscopy I know not to mix my units. Something about grandmothers and eggs. With that said I am afraid all that is left for me to say is that you are both talking gibberish.
Finally, however, I need to repeat that while mankind has no influence on atmospheric H2O concentrations, its presence and its strong IR absorption capabilities even at very low concentrations renders the IR absorbance characteristics of the other greenhouse gases inconsequential. You would need to increase CO2 levels to over 6000ppm to cause an increase in temperature of 2degC. Have you ever wondered why atmospheric CO2 levels of thousands of ppm in the distant past did not lead to a climate catastrophe?
You know you’re dealing with someone peddling junk science when they produce a word salad like you just did. When confronted with proof that their theories are pure fantasy, its distract and deflect.
You still haven’t answered my point. On your figures you show the earth’s radiant peak at 10 MM. From spectrographic satellite data, the actual radiant peak is at 18 MM. That changes everything. Your graph shows very little transmission through the CO2 15 MM absorption band. That means there is little IR left for CO2 to absorb. If you locate the peak at 18 MM, there is a lot more IR in the 15 MM band for CO2 to absorb. That should increase the climate sensitivity considerably.
I lifted this from your paper:
“A further feedback, however, is caused by a reduction in
atmospheric absorptivity as the spectral radiance of the earth’s
emitted energy increases with temperature, with peak
emissions moving slightly towards lower radiation
wavelengths. This causes a negative feedback with a
temperature multiplier of 0.9894. This results in a total
feedback multiplier of 1.124, reducing the effective CO2
climate sensitivity from 0.53 to 0.50 Kelvin.”
If the 15 MM band is positioned correctly, increases in temperature result in an increase in radiation available and your multiplier should be > 1.
David coe’s comment in response to Appell and JJB – “Have you ever wondered why atmospheric CO2 levels of thousands of ppm in the distant past did not lead to a climate catastrophe?”
Similar question – Why hasnt prior warming never set off the positive feedbacks leading to a climate catastrphe as predicted by the esteemed climate scientists
As repetitively asserted by JJB – the past doesnt matter!
I’ll say it again. The past doesn’t matter. How accurate are those ppm values? Climate skeptics lament about the accuracy of today’s temperature data, but eagerly accept any data from thousands of years ago that they can use to make a point. Hypocritical, wouldn’t you say?
While I’m here, I found a couple of interesting articles on renewable energy intermittency.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solution-to-renewable-energy-more-renewable-energy/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/renewable-energy-intermittency-explained-challenges-solutions-and-opportunities/
The last article didn’t even consider the possibility of wide area electric grids using HVDC.
Joe – the non climate scientist commented:
Similar question – Why hasnt prior warming never set off the positive feedbacks leading to a climate catastrphe as predicted by the esteemed climate scientists
They have. Positive feedbacks always exist. Past episodes of significant climate change have led to extinctions.
There is a reason why warming doesn’t lead to a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth. You still haven’t done the basic research on that, huh?
David Coe commented:
Have you ever wondered why atmospheric CO2 levels of thousands of ppm in the distant past did not lead to a climate catastrophe?
The reason is because the Sun was dimmer in the distant past.
The Sun’s luminosity is increasing with time, by about 1% every 110 Myrs.
So back when CO2 was ~6000 ppm, 450 Myrs ago, the Sun was about 4% less luminous than today, or about 55 W/m2 at the TOA. That’s HUGE.
Lookup the “Faint young Sun paradox”
A 4% reduction in solar radiation is certainly significant. Do you have a reference for that? It might be worth noting however that following the T^4 temperature effect that 4% reduction equates to a temperature reduction of 1% or less than 3K, That is the same order of magnitude as the 1.5 to 4.5K climate sensitivity derived from climate models. Perhaps it is not so significant after all, compared with CO2 concentrations of several thousand ppm. Let me see. How many doublings is that?
JJBraccili commented:
The past doesn’t matter. How accurate are those ppm values?
That’s another good point. This widely shared cartoon of CO2 levels in the distant past
https://miro.medium.com/max/973/0*3Vm0copgT8K-pcRm.gif
The values come from proxies put into a model. The error bars are large. The data points in the distant past are often millions of years apart.
This graph is junk, yet certain people use it as if it’s sacred. Note they rarely if ever cite a source.
Appell man – you do realize you repetitively contracted yourself with your response to the positive feedbacks and climate catastrophe. Climate science advocates promote the belief that the positive feedbacks will cause to dangerous warming.
Appell’s comment – “They have. Positive feedbacks always exist. Past episodes of significant climate change have led to extinctions.
There is a reason why warming doesn’t lead to a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth. You still haven’t done the basic research on that, huh?”
Appell –
On multiple occassions you indicate that the positive feedbacks will cause catastrophic warming and cause extintions similar to what prior warming has done in the past.
So which one is your answer
David Coe wrote:
A 4% reduction in solar radiation is certainly significant. Do you have a reference for that?
A reference for the Sun’s changing luminosity? Not offhand — it’s basic astrophysics of Sun-like stars. Pierrehumbert gave an equation for the luminosity as a function of time in chapter 1 of his textbook, and I took the derivative and got the 1% per 110 Myrs figure. The derivative changes slowly.
This is also one reason that Venus had a runaway greenhouse effect but the Earth has not — we’re not close enough to the Sun, currently by about 0.05 AU, IIRC. But the Sun’s luminosity is increasing and in ~1.5 Byrs it will be enough for our ocean to evaporate and go into the atmosphere and Earth will then experience a runaway greenhouse effect.
David Coe commented:
Perhaps it is not so significant after all, compared with CO2 concentrations of several thousand ppm. Let me see. How many doublings is that?
Who said it wasn’t warmer then?
Who said CO2 is the only influence on climate?
On multiple occassions you indicate that the positive feedbacks will cause catastrophic warming and cause extintions similar to what prior warming has done in the past.
So which one is your answer
Define your terms.
To me
“dangerous” “catastrophic” “runaway”
Doing a sanity check on the CO2 transmission chart, here is the measured spectrum of CO2. David’s chart has a pretty long x-axis so it’s difficult to determine with precision, but his chart looks reasonable.
https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C124389&Type=IR-SPEC&Index=1#IR-SPEC
The band that is causing us all the problem is all the way on the right on the NIST graph. The other two are what’s causing the high temperatures on Venus.
That’s not the problem. If you look at Mr. Coe’s graph. He shows the 15 MM CO2 to the right of earth’s radiant energy peak near the bottom. Satellite data tells us it should be to the left of the peak near the top. There is a lot more available radiant energy for CO2 to absorb at that point than where he shows it. Where he shows the CO2 15 MM absorption band, it can’t drive temperature higher anymore. In fact, when the CO2 15 MM band is on the downside of the earth’s radiant energy it can no longer drive the planet’s temperature higher by reradiation. That doesn’t mean that CO2 can drive the temperature of the earth higher because there is another effect at play that impact earth’s convective heat transfer.
All the spectrographic data uses wavenumber. The HITRAN data uses wavenumber. He could have used wavenumber when solving Planck’s equation for earth’s radiant energy profile and he would have gotten a different result. I suspect much closer to the IPCC result. He didn’t do that he chose to convert the HITRAN data to wavelength and solve Planck’s equation using wavelength. There is anomaly in Planck’s equation. That caused the peak of earth’s radiant energy curve to shift from where it should be at a wavelength of 18 MM to 10 MM and change CO2’s 15 MM band from an active player in changing earth’s temperature to a passive player. That why he came to his “conclusion.”
I didn’t get into the paper enough to know if he took into account the positive feedback from CO2s impact on H2O in the atmosphere. DA02 had some questions about it which Mr. Coe did not answer satisfactorily. That would have positive feedback and affect climate sensitivity.
So far, Mr. Coe has done a lot of arm waving and claim intellectual superiority — without evidence — as his defense. That means he doesn’t have an answer.
JJ. You do write the most amazing tripe. For the last time the Planck equation derives the spectral radiance from a black body source at temperature T. That radiance is measured in units of W/m3. That is W/m2/unit of wavelength in m. To obtain the total radiated energy in W/m2 it is necessary to integrate the spectral radiance over the total waveband in question, which in the case of the earth temperature at 288K is 3 to 100micrometers. For this reason it is necessary to converts the HITRAN spectral data against units of wavelength. If you try doing this with wavenumbers, which are essentially the reciprocal of wavelength, you will soon find yourself in an enormous pickle. The correct methodology for this is clearly explained in the text of the paper.
It is clear from your burblings that you have never undertaken this type of calculation, yet you claim to have found a weakness in the Planck equation. I am afraid that the only weakness is within your head.
You didn’t have to convert the HITRAN data to wavelength. You could have integrated Planck’s equation using wavenumber. That link I gave to the Wikipedia article on Planck’s equation lists all the variations of Planck’s equation for the various spectral variables.
Why is the HITRAN data in wavenumber if wavelength is a sacred cow?
NASA could figure it out and you couldn’t? Why didn’t they just convert all their wavenumber data to wavelength and plot that up and match it to a blackbody curve. I’ll tell you why. It would have had a radiant peak at 18 MM and not 10 MM. The blackbody temperature would have been ridiculously low.
You have the wrong location for the CO2 15 MM absorption. Where you have it there is little energy for it to absorb. Where it actually is, there is plenty of energy for it to absorb. That’s how you got your result. Am I supposed to believe you or my lying eyes? Are you claiming NASA doesn’t know how to perform a spectrograph or they are lying? That’s the only set of circumstances where you could be right. Either you’re right or they are. Which is it?
Keep tap dancing. Maybe, you’ll find a way to make it work. So far, you haven’t come close. You still haven’t addressed my point or my question.
“If you try doing this with wavenumbers, which are essentially the reciprocal of wavelength, you will soon find yourself in an enormous pickle.”
What pickle? It’s a pickle for you, because you won’t get the answer you want. Wavenumber is the reciprocal of wavelength. What should happen is you get a mirror image of earth’s radiant energy profile. What should not happen is a change in the position of the absorption bands. Can you prove otherwise?
Can I prove otherwise. Certainly.
As you point out Planck’s equations can be written in different forms depending on the spectral variable used. There are three choices wavelength, frequency or wavenumber. The spectral resolution obtained by the Planck equation is in the form W/m3 or W/m2/m (wavelength), W/m or W/m2/m-1(frequency) or W/m2/cm-1(wavenumber). A wavelength increment of 1micron is different to a frequency increment in units of m-1 which is different again from an increment in cm-1. The difference is very pronounced between wavelength and frequency and wavenumber since the last two are the reciprocal of wavelength. This results in the peak of the spectral radiance occurring at differing points in the spectrum, for the three forms of the equation. Once the spectral radiance is integrated, however, over the entire waveband in question the peak spectral energy in W/m2 is consistent whichever spectral variable is used. I realise this is difficult for a layman to understand. Wikipedia, of which you are so fond says this
“Evidently, the location of the peak of the spectral distribution or Planck’s Law depends on the choice of spectral variable”.
So our graphs displayed in our paper and Gavin Schmidt’s are completely equivalent and after integration with respect to the appropriate spectral variable, wavelength or wavenumber, will produce exactly the same result.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but this so called “anomaly” is simply a change in spectral variable and is well known to scientists. We are free to use whatever spectral variable we wish, providing we are consistent with the units.
That’s about as lame as it gets.
Schmidt’s and yours are not equivalent. Yours moves the CO2 15 mm absorption band to a completely different position where it is irrelevant and why you come to the conclusion you do. If you do a point-by-point conversion of Schmidt’s plot to wavelength with wavelength as inversely proportional to wavenumber the plot is completely different than yours because the peak will be at 18 mm. That’s the problem.
If you think those plots are equivalent, you should consider getting a new pair of glasses. Your’s aren’t working.
I am sorry that you don’t understand basic radiative physics. There’s not a lot I can do about that. But of course, there is nothing in the world that will convince you that you are ever wrong about the very many subjects that you believe you are expert on.
The latest lame response is that I don’t understand Mr. Coe’s “brillance.” I’m a lesser talent and I should be bowing before his “magnificence.”
I’m here to say the “emperor has no clothes.” What Mr. Coe is spreading around is not “brilliance.” You can tell by the smell.
Mr. Coe could end all this easily. Instead of just insisting he right. He could actually try proving it. The Wikipedia article has all the equations. All he has to do is to show how using wavelength or wavenumber produces the same results. He can’t. He continues to tap dance around the issue or pretend it doesn’t matter — it does.
Mr. Coe refuses to answer the simple question of whether he or any of his colleagues has any type of association with the GWPF or the Heartland Institute. It’s a simple yes or no question. His silence speaks for itself.
Mr. Coe claims his “paper” refutes 40 years of climate science and CO2 is harmless. Something other than CO2 is causing climate change and he has no idea what. If all that is true, why isn’t he taking his brilliant discovery to the nearest oil company. If what he claims is true, Exxon or BP of Shell, will be interested. Fame and fortune would be his. The fossil fuel industry has trillions at stake and survival. For what they’re handing Nobel prizes out for these days, he might have a shot at one. The reality is they wouldn’t give him a meeting and if they did, it would last about 10 minutes before they showed him the door.
Then he could try to publish his “paper” in a respectable journal that does rigorous peer review. He doesn’t want to do that either. I suspect he doesn’t want the embarrassment of being rejected. Even if it makes it to print, he still has to endure the slings and arrows of real climate scientists who understand the science. If I could find problems with his “work”, think what they’ll find?
“All he has to do is to show how using wavelength or wavenumber produces the same results”. That simple sentence sums it all up Mr Braccili. I don’t need to show it. It is fundamental physics.
And in fact I would be proud to be associated with GWPF or Heartland. Unfortunately for you, I am not, nor are my colleagues.
“That simple sentence sums it all up Mr Braccili. I don’t need to show it. It is fundamental physics.”
Why don’t you just say you don’t want to show it because you can’t. Face it, my point discredits that paper. Everyone who kept up with this discussion knows it.
If it was me, I would find a way to prove the point was wrong or I’d admit my mistake. I wouldn’t do a lot of arm waving and dismiss the point as unworthy of consideration. That’s you modus operandi. It’s also why that paper has no chance of getting serious consideration by the scientific community. I don’t think that was ever the point of the paper. What you are trying to do is give fodder to climate denial community. They’ll read the paper, if they can read, not recognize the sleight of hand and then claim there is a conspiracy against “science” that disproves scientific consensus on climate change.
I suspect you’re getting something for this from somebody that you won’t disclose. I hope it’s worth it.
“And in fact I would be proud to be associated with GWPF or Heartland.”
You’d fit right in.
I will try for one last time to explain the Planck equation and the “mysterious” displacement of the radiation peak when using the different units of frequency of light and wavelength.
There are two different units for expressing the radiative spectrum, frequency n, and wavelength λ. They are related by the velocity of light usually designated by c. λ = c/n
A third number “wavenumber” is essentially the reciprocal of wavelength and is thus proportional to frequency. When calculating the radiated energy using Planck’s equation it is first necessary to decide which units to use, frequency or wavelength. Either system of units will provide the same answer for total radiated energy in W/m2.
Using wavelength, the appropriate Planck equation is
Spectral Radiance L = 2hc2 λ -5/(exp(hc/k λ T) – 1) W/m3
And the energy W in W/m2 is determined by
Radiated Energy W = L· ∆λ = (2hc2 λ -5/(exp(hc/k λ T) – 1) · ∆λ W/m2 …(1)
This equation represents the energy emitted in the wavelength interval λ to λ+∆λ
Using frequency, the appropriate Planck equation is
Spectral Radiance L = 2hn3/c2(exp(hn/kT) – 1) W.s/m2
And the energy W in W/m2 is determined by
Radiated Energy W = L· ∆n = (2hn3/c2(exp(hn/kT)) – 1) · ∆n W/m2 (2)
This equation represents the energy emitted in the frequency interval n to n+∆n
These two equations 1 and 2 are clearly not the same simply because they use different units, wavelength and frequency. The waveband interval λ to λ + ∆λis different to the frequency interval n to n+∆n at any given frequency or wavelength and therefore the energy in those intervals is not the same. For this reason, the peak energy appears at different points when the two Planck equations are plotted, purely because the x axis intervals are different, one is the reciprocal of the other. Which plot is correct, you might ask? The answer is both of them. They simply represent different intervals of radiation.
When the total emitted energy is determined by integrating the two equations over the full radiation spectrum, the result is the same and results in the well-known Stefans equation
Wt = sigma. T4
Here endeth the lesson.
I don’t for one second imagine this might have penetrated your skull, but I can but hope.
I’m convinced. I’m convinced that you’re a snake oil salesman.
Where did I ever say that the area under the curve of Planck’s equation was different between plots using wavelength or wavenumber? NOWHERE! That’s not what this is about, and you know it.
You could take your plot of Planck’s equation and put the peak at any wavelength and the area under it will be the same. DUH! If you look at the area under the CO2 15 MM absorption band it will be different depending on the placement of the peak. You have to move the placement of the 15 MM band to maintain its spatial relationship with peak to maintain the area under the 15 MM band, and correctly represent the amount of energy it has to absorb. You didn’t do that, did you?
I hope this lesson in “advanced” math makes you realize that your paper belongs in the trash with the rest of the junk science. Because that’s where it’s ultimately headed.
I knew that trying to educate you would be a waste of my time. I give up. Goodbye
Mr. Coe runs away with his tale between his legs claiming I don’t know what I’m talking about because he can’t refute what I said. What I said is true.
To those of you who have been following this, what you have seen is a case study in how far climate denialists are willing twist science into a pretzel to spread disinformation and attempt to muddy the waters and cast doubt on climate science. They’re not interested in disproving climate science because they can’t. They just want to prolong the use of fossil fuels for as long as possible so that monied interests can extract as much revenue as possible before the “golden goose” is put to rest. It’s a dangerous game which Mr. Coe and his ilk are willing to play to the detriment of the rest of us.
The only reason I caught this “sleight of hand” is that I saw it before and spent the time to figure out what the “trick” was. What Mr. Coe and his colleagues have done is not new. It’s just a more sophisticated flim-flam.
David
Did you ever see the ECS calculations from Will Happer and Ricard Lindzen? I was sent private copies so don’t know what eventually got printed
tonyb
To tonyb,
No I don’t believe I have. I have referenced the paper by Wijngaarden & Happer (2020) where they calculate an ECS of around 1degC, but that paper is so complex it is quite difficult to follow. I would be interested to see those calculations if you were able to email them to coecharlesdavid@gmail.com
David
I will need to get permission which may take a little while
I am sent lots of interesting things by all sorts of people because I am discreet. Its no secret though that most climate scientists haven’t calculated the temperature change if we were to go net zero, nor that those that did were shocked by the tiny amount of change.
I think the figure for the UK was around 1/200th of a degree. The equivalent of walking up 2 steps with the theoretical drop of temperature at a higher altitude.
Still, worth spending several trillion to achieve that
tonyb
JJ
I don’t think anyone will ever measure up to being a flim flam man as well as George C. Scott did in his 1967 film the Flim Flam Man.
I’ve never quite figured out why anyone would be expressing their skepticism other than they see holes in the narrative big enough for Refrigerator Perry to walk through.
And I can’t finish commenting without thanking you for your comments. Every time I finish reading them I’m more confident than ever I picked the right side.
With your demonstrated lack of understanding of science, I’m not surprised.
JJBraccili | January 26, 2022 at 12:14 pm |
“How so? Because it doesn’t agree with your BS theory?
How long have you been at this? News Flash! It’s not catching on. It’s not going to catch on. Find another theory.”
JJBraccili, I have demonstrated when discussing with you:
The 288 K – 255 K = 33 oC difference does not exist in the real world.
There are only traces of greenhouse gasses.
The Earth’s atmosphere is very thin. There is not any measurable Greenhouse Gasses Warming effect on the Earth’s surface.
There is NO +33°C greenhouse enhancement on the Earth’s mean surface temperature.
Both the calculated by equation and the satellite measured Earth’s mean surface temperatures are almost identical:
Tmean.earth = 287,74K = 288 K
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Christos Vournas wrote:
There is not any measurable Greenhouse Gasses Warming effect on the Earth’s surface.
It’s easy to measure in a heuristic way. Take the Earth’s ideal blackbody curve for its surface temperature, something like this:
http://forecast.uchicago.edu/modtran_iris.jpg
Then take the radiation spectrum as it actually leaves out the TOA, also shown on that graph. The gap between those two lines is the greenhouse effect. You could do the integral numerically is you want.
Davidappello2
“It’s easy to measure in a heuristic way. Take the Earth’s ideal blackbody curve for its surface temperature, something like this:
http://forecast.uchicago.edu/modtran_iris.jpg
Then take the radiation spectrum as it actually leaves out the TOA, also shown on that graph. The gap between those two lines is the greenhouse effect. You could do the integral numerically is you want.”
“Take the Earth’s ideal blackbody curve for its surface temperature…”
Davidappello2, the method I use is “Planets Temperatures Comparison Method”.
I consider Earth’s surface being spherical because Earth is a planet.
A planet cannot have “ideal blackbody curve for its temperature”, since planets are not blackbodies and planets do not have uniform surface temperature.
It is the basic definition of the blackbody having uniform surface temperature.
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
The cost ignored by the “green” energy extremists is integration costs. Much above 20% unreliables starts to drive up integration costs dramatically. This is why countries with a high percentage of unreliables have higher electricity prices. The higher the penetration, the higher the rate.
Dr. Curry, Isn’t it about time for a post from planning engineer on the higher cost of electricity with more renewables?
Finally, prices under the higher renewable penetration were higher than the low renewable
penetration, driven primarily by a higher frequency of scarcity pricing conditions. Similar to
Independent System Operators (ISOs) today who assign administratively determined scarcity
1 RTS-GMLC is Reliability Test System-Grid Modernization Lab Consortium. For more information, see (Barrows
et al. 2019).
vii
This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory at http://www.nrel.gov/publications.
prices that set prices during periods where system reserves are insufficient to meet needs, this
analysis used an exogenous price for scarcity. The many periods of scarcity in the high
renewables cases are not meant to indicate future conditions and are specific to the test system
and operating procedure assumptions used in the study; they rather emphasize the importance of
performing sensitivities to exogenously-determined scarcity prices.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy20osti/74230.pdf
There may be a misunderstanding. Having read this blog for several years, I believe it is correct to say most skeptics here do believe that more CO2 in the atmosphere will cause additional warming. The primary differences of opinion lie in how much warming and if it will cause a catastrophe or not.
Endangered fruit crops in Florida (frost).
https://i.ibb.co/hV1RC5n/gfs-hgt-trop-NA-f072.png
It seems that if you want to know about IR absorbance, you should use IR spectroscopy. Apparently, it can measure IR absorbance. Climate scientists seem to prefer creating a model of the entire, poorly understood climate system in order to arrive at a much more speculative answer.. It is like using a model of the universe to avoid using a ruler. But then, as Pat Frank explains in his paper about models, the uncertainty becomes much greater than the warming signal that the model claims to measure.
Then we have the sustainability issues. David Coe has mentioned the climate stability, despite high CO2 concentrations in our history. This is not speculation, the evolution of life provides a detailed record showing that no temperature related catastrophe wiped out embryonic life forms in our history.
Then we have the unexplained Roman Warm Period, Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and other less well known temperature excursions in our history. These are not explained by the magical CO2.
David Coe’s efforts adds to a growing body of work that shows that CO2 alarmism is not supported by scientific evidence. It is time for the scientific establishment to draw this period of poor science to a close and get on with the real job of understanding our climate.
Peter commented:
Then we have the unexplained Roman Warm Period, Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and other less well known temperature excursions in our history. These are not explained by the magical CO2.
None of these periods were global. See any reconstruction of the Holocene, such as the recently published
Osman, M.B., Tierney, J.E., Zhu, J. et al. Globally resolved surface temperatures since the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature 599, 239–244 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03984-4
Climate models certainly do include IR absorbance — amazing you could not know this.
David Coe et al’s article is rife with errors, as we’ve been pointing out. That’s why they had to publish in a predatory journal, who took them for $1,470.
02
Of course the MWP and LIA were global. Do more research. That will show dozens and dozens and dozens of papers finding conditions all over the global that were warming or cooling in concert with those periods. You are living in your own dream world. The science has moved on from what it was 20 years ago. You just don’t want to accept it.
Quit pushing the propaganda.
All journals are commercial ventures. They either make a charge for publishing and provide free open access with copyright retained by the authors or they charge for access or often both with copyright held by the publisher.. We chose a journal with open access because we want the paper to be as widely read as possible and open to criticism. That is way that science progresses.
CKid commented:
Of course the MWP and LIA were global.
Proper scientific reconstructions, like Osman et al that I liked to, and Shakun et al 2012, show that they weren’t.
Just because you have a bunch of data points doesn’t mean those periods were global. You have to access the proxies, account for their position in space and time and add everything together, which is precisely what the reconstructions do. You can’t throw up some map on the Web with a list of points and consider it equivalent science, LOL.
David, you choose a journal that’s known for publishing junk, like “The Mathematical Law of Karma” 2012. Your own refereeing experience is highly suspect, and given that even we couple of amateurs here can find major flaws seems to indicate the paper wanted your money so finally gave you the referee report you wanted.
I mean, come on — you and your co-authors came to a conclusion, in a few mere pages, with a few little calculations, radically different from thousands of professional climate scientists who have worked on this problem for decades and published thousands of papers. I know it’s fun to play around and do calculations for oneself, but don’t let it go to your head and think you’re Galileo or Feynman.
Oh dear. That’s a bit cutting. Are you losing the argument perchance?
And how he doesn’t think past proxies are any good, well … maybe except for his cherry picked study. Awesome.
jim2 wrote:
And how he doesn’t think past proxies are any good, well … maybe except for his cherry picked study. Awesome.
Proxies over the Holocene are one thing. Proxies from 450 Myrs ago are another. Like I said, that CO2 graph into the distant past is hardly ever shown with error bars. (The Holocene graphs are.) They are quite large.
And over the Holocene we have ice core data on CO2.
These are the peer reviewed studies finding conditions consistent with the MWP and/or LIA. Note they include locations in the Southern Hemisphere which means both the LIA and MWP were global events. Many authors made that part of their conclusion.
Loehle 07, Christensen 12, du Vernal 18, MAZZARELLA 18, Chang 20, Ramos 20, Praetoris 19, Wu 12, ROSENTHAL 13, HAO 20, MAKWANA 19, Wang 17, Lan 18, Hanna 18, Cahayarini 21, WIMAN 21, VERSCHUREN 20, Bracco 11, Soon 03, Esper 12, Keigwin 1996, Novello 12, Bird 11, Divine 18, Tyson 2000, du Plessis 20, KALMAN 20, Luning 19, Fletcher 12, Ilynshuk 19, BERTLER 11, Rabatell 18, Garcia 07, Rhodes 12, Bonnefille 94, Parker 18, COFFINET 18, Chen 18, Osmont 19, Gunten 09, Zhu 16, Yan 15, McGowan 18
I have to agree CKid
One of the most bizarre claims in paleo reconstruction claims is that the mwp and the LIA were not global.
To believe that, you have to believe that one high pressure zone sat over same small portion of the globe for 300+ years and a cold low pressure zone sat over the same small piece of the planet for the next 300+ years .
There far two many conflicting pieces of evidence to believe the shaft of the hockey sticks are a valid representations of the climate
So, yeah, those periods probably didn’t happen everywhere at exactly the same time. But they happened just about everywhere that proxies can be found, at different times, but clustered within a given time interval.
CKid commented:
Loehle 07, Christensen 12, du Vernal 18, MAZZARELLA 18, Chang 20, Ramos 20, Praetoris 19, Wu 12, ROSENTHAL 13, HAO 20, MAKWANA 19, Wang 17, Lan 18, Hanna 18, Cahayarini 21, WIMAN 21, VERSCHUREN 20, Bracco 11, Soon 03, Esper 12, Keigwin 1996, Novello 12, Bird 11, Divine 18, Tyson 2000, du Plessis 20, KALMAN 20, Luning 19, Fletcher 12, Ilynshuk 19, BERTLER 11, Rabatell 18, Garcia 07, Rhodes 12, Bonnefille 94, Parker 18, COFFINET 18, Chen 18, Osmont 19, Gunten 09, Zhu 16, Yan 15, McGowan 18
This list is useless.
If you can’t provide proper citations I’m not interested in discussing this with you.
Joey he non climate scientist wrote:
One of the most bizarre claims in paleo reconstruction claims is that the mwp and the LIA were not global.
To believe that, you have to believe that one high pressure zone sat over same small portion of the globe for 300+ years and a cold low pressure zone sat over the same small piece of the planet for the next 300+ years .
To believe that you have to believe that the only way a region can be extraordinarily warm or dry or cold and wet is for a high or low pressure system to continually sit over it.
You can believe the data or you can make up reasons, based on no science, not to believe it.
02
Translation. You are too lazy to read the papers. You can’t deal with the cognitive dissonance that’s infecting your thought process. Enjoy your alternate universe. As I said before, the science has passed you by.
CKid – no, the translation is that I don’t even know how to begin to look up the papers. I’m not hunting based on nothing more than a last name and year. You’re too lazy to properly cite the papers, and likely know nothing more about them than doing a cut-and-paste. If that’s all you’re going to contribute to the topic it’s not worth wasting my time on you.
02
It’s called Google. You are in denial. If you really wanted to know the state of the science you would have done that research long ago. How do you think I found those papers? I’m not going to sit here and spoon feed all of it to you. Quit hiding behind made up excuses. Let Google be your friend.
It was the same with the literature on geothermal activity in Antarctica. You were totally oblivious to the substantial number of papers on the subject and weren’t even aware of what the issues were. Why let the Bowery Boys con you?
CKid | January 27, 2022 Of course the MWP and LIA were global
davidappell02 | January 27, 2022
Proper scientific reconstructions, like Osman et al that I liked to, and Shakun et al 2012, show that they weren’t. Just because you have a bunch of data points doesn’t mean those periods were Global.
–
No winners here.
We all know what global means and it means different things to different people.
–
Motivation is a big factor in this.
–
Global might mean rampant natural variability hence no GHG effect from CO2.
–
It is highly likely that the MWP and LIA were representative of an overall global temperature anomaly.
As seen from UAH data global changes are not necessarily reproduced in both hemispheres or the different oceans or continents.
–
The first is true, second false if you wish to argue against GHG.
The first is false , second true if you want to pugs GHG theory.
CKid wrote:
How do you think I found those papers?
I suspect you found some map like this
https://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/fraudulent-hockey-sticks-and-hidden-data/
found the list of sources and cut-and-pasted, which is all you ever do. You didn’t look at the papers at all. You have no idea if they cover the same time periods — decades, quarter of a century, century. You have no idea of the quality of the data. Neither does Joanne Nova or CO2science.org. They aren’t interested in science like that.
If you really wanted to know the state of the science you would have done that research long ago.
Already have:
http://www.davidappell.com/hockeysticks.html
The proper way to do the science isn’t merely creating a list of proxies, it’s collating all the data and then folding it together in space and time to find patterns. There are several ways to do this mathematically, and groups like PAGES 2k have used at least 7 over the last several years, and always gotten the same result: no global LIA or MWP.
“There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age….”
— “Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia,” PAGES 2k Consortium, Nature Geosciences, April 21, 2013.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/abs/ngeo1797.html
Key words: “synchronous” and “multi-decadal”
The latest such paper is, as I noted above
Osman, M.B., Tierney, J.E., Zhu, J. et al. Globally resolved surface temperatures since the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature 599, 239–244 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03984-4
which also finds no global LIA or MWP. Have you checked to see if your proxies are included in their research? Here’s their data page — let us know:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/33112
BTW they also find no Holocene Optimum.
About Thwaites, the science attributes the melting to warm water underneath, not geothermal heat.
This is from a news article in Science magazine in Dec 2021, reporting on a presentation at the AGU meeting that same week:
“Even more worrisome is the process that has weakened the ice shelf: incursions of warm ocean water beneath the shelf, which expedition scientists detected with a robotic submersible.”
https://www.science.org/content/article/ice-shelf-holding-back-keystone-antarctic-glacier-within-years-failure
See also
Pathways and modification of warm water flowing beneath Thwaites Ice Shelf, West Antarctica, A.K. Wahlin et al, SCIENCE ADVANCES • 9 Apr 2021 • Vol 7, Issue 15 • DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd7254
Here’s an article about geothermal from August 2021 that says the role of geothermal heat under Thwaites is uncertain:
“Based on their data, the geophysicists are unable to put a figure on the extent to which the rising geothermal heat warms the bottom of the glacier. “The temperature on the underside of the glacier is dependent on a number of factors—for example whether the ground consists of compact, solid rock, or of meters of water-saturated sediment. Water conducts the rising heat very efficiently. But it can also transport heat energy away before it can reach the bottom of the glacier,” explains co-author and AWI geophysicist Dr. Karsten Gohl.”
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-thwaites-glacier-significant-geothermal-beneath.html
So by no means is it clear that Thwaites is cracking up due to geothermal heating, and the science has found that the likely cause is warm water coursing underneath, warm water from climate change.
Seems you’re not up on the science at all.
I had all this info ready to go before Judith’s post disappeared for some reason.
If you really wanted to know the state of the science you would have done that research long ago.
Already have:
http://www.davidappell.com/hockeysticks.html
The proper way to do the science isn’t merely creating a list of proxies, it’s collating all the data and then folding it together in space and time to find patterns. There are several ways to do this mathematically, and groups like PAGES 2k have used at least 7 over the last several years, and always gotten the same result: no global LIA or MWP.
“There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age….”
— “Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia,” PAGES 2k Consortium, Nature Geosciences, April 21, 2013.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/abs/ngeo1797.html
Key words: “synchronous” and “multi-decadal”
The latest such paper is, as I noted above
Osman, M.B., Tierney, J.E., Zhu, J. et al. Globally resolved surface temperatures since the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature 599, 239–244 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03984-4
which also finds no global LIA or MWP. Have you checked to see if your proxies are included in their research? Here’s their data page — let us know:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/33112
BTW they also find no Holocene Optimum.
CKid wrote:
How do you think I found those papers?
I suspect you found one of those world maps that has a bunch of data points on it, like one at joannenova 12/2009 that I’m apparently not allowed to link to, found a list of sources for it somewhere and cut-and-pasted a few, which is all you ever do. You didn’t look at the papers at all. You have no idea if they cover the same time periods — decades, quarter of a century, century or how they all fit together and correlate. You have no idea of the quality of the data. Neither does Joanne Nova or CO2science. They aren’t interested in science like that.
CKid wrote:
How do you think I found those papers?
Of course you could just have the courtesy to tell us.
02 1/2
This conversation is turning more bizarre by the moment. I know you enjoy batting the ball back and forth and I know you know the literature that I’ve cited and I am sure you enjoy feigning ignorance about the science. But we’ve been on here for over a decade. What about all those newcomers who read your comments and take them seriously.
They have to be rolling their eyes and thinking to themselves “Now wait a minute. This is the guy who professes to know all that there is to know about AGW, and he is not able to even make a simple Google search for those authors. What’s wrong with this picture?”
This reminds me of the dozens of times over the last several years when I’ve linked the NOAA Tidal Gauge Graphs that showed no obvious and significant acceleration in rate of rise and you invariably accuse me of cherry picking. If you would have simply gone to NOAA and looked at all the graphs you would have known they all look the same. Various rates of rise but no obvious and significant acceleration in rate of rise.
There is one inescapable conclusion. You don’t want to face reality. Not dissimilar from the wife who knows her husband is cheating but she ignores all the signs because the truth is too painful to accept. Doing so would create disequilibrium in her sense of self esteem. Those are the same psychological dynamics involved with the Jonesians and their proselytizing to reduce the inherent cognitive dissonance. The truth is out there. The sooner you face it, the better off you will be.
CKid commented:
I know you enjoy batting the ball back and forth and I know you know the literature that I’ve cited
No, I don’t.
In fact, I don’t think *YOU* know what you’ve cited.
In fact, writing SMITH 17 isn’t even a citation. You need to go back to high school and learn again how to cite scholarly work.
Nor would citing a few papers prove anything about the MWP or LIA, for reasons I’ve already explained. The science, done properly, doesn’t show a global MWP or LIA. Don’t care what unpublished, un-peer-reviewed blogs or hack sites like CO2science say.
CKid commented:
This reminds me of the dozens of times over the last several years when I’ve linked the NOAA Tidal Gauge Graphs that showed no obvious and significant acceleration in rate of rise and you invariably accuse me of cherry picking.
LOL science isn’t done by clicking on a few data points on a graph.
If you would have simply gone to NOAA and looked at all the graphs you would have known they all look the same.
How do you know that? You don’t do science by clicking on a few links, or all of them. You have to synthesize the data. Which of course you don’t want to do or link to anyone who does. And you have to look at the quality of the data, which you also have no interest in. But scientists do:
https://sealevel.nasa.gov/news/63/tide-gauge-records-might-underestimate-sea-level-rise
Operative word might. Have you looked at 375 graphs? If you would have then the conclusion would have been obvious.
CKid commented:
Have you looked at 375 graphs?
“Looking at graphs” isn’t how science is done, LOL OMG. Science is done by carefully analyzing data. It’s a shame anyone has to be told this.
Major fail.
The LOL is reading Appell’s motivated comments and claims about the acceleration in the rate of sea level rise. It is the largest risk of AGW and the science indicates not much is happening.
02 1/2
Talk about a major fail, how many of those distinguished scientists bought into this finding that we would have 10 feet SLR in decades. Thousands probably. And you are still taking the bait. You don’t know diddly about science. Your only expertise is in being led around by the nose by the climatariat.
You probably get your science from reading Elle magazine.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2019-02-15190822_shadow.jpg
CKid commented:
Talk about a major fail, how many of those distinguished scientists bought into this finding that we would have 10 feet SLR in decades.
I see you’re trying to change the subject.
02 1/2
No, I was right on the subject. Your link showed they are making excuses for the SLR not meeting their expectations. That was what my link was all about. Failure after failure.
In 2050 they will be making more excuses on why the Ice Sheets didn’t collapse. They will be making excuses why the temperatures showed very little warming since 2000. All the catastrophes will have turned out to be as benign as a summer breeze.
By 2075 the universities will have curriculum on why CAGW turned out to be such a dud. Right along with its strongest adherents.
Really?
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/28/waikiki-hawaii-beach-climate-change-525266
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/climate-refugees-climate-change-controversy/#!
You were saying?
CKid commented:
In 2050 they will be making more excuses on why the Ice Sheets didn’t collapse. They will be making excuses why the temperatures showed very little warming since 2000. All the catastrophes will have turned out to be as benign as a summer breeze.
By 2075 the universities will have curriculum on why CAGW turned out to be such a dud. Right along with its strongest adherents.
You love to tell us what people in the future are going to think.
Oddly, they all agree with you.
It’s intellectually sad and pathetic, an admission of failure in the present.
CKid commented:
No, I was right on the subject. Your link showed they are making excuses for the SLR not meeting their expectations
You never did address my comment about all the terrible things that have happened that weren’t predicted…..
JJ
Nice try but a big whiff. The SLR is 6” per century, hardly runaway rate. Do you see an acceleration? If so, insignificant. Sorry, but Honolulu doesn’t prove anything. That rate is what has existed since mid 1800s.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=1612340
Louisiana is infamous for subsidence, in many locations at rates multiple of GMSLR. Do your homework. Neither of those examples proves anything.
You don’t know a damn thing, do you? You don’t understand how the greenhouse gas effect works. You have an excuse for everything.
https://www.businessinsider.com/miami-floods-sea-level-rise-solutions-2018-4
I know. It’s all perfectly normal and a function of natural variability. The waters will start receding any time now.
You should consider investing in real estate in the flood prone areas in Miami. If you’re right, what you pick up for a song now, will be worth millions in a few years when climate change is proven a hoax.
CKid commented:
The SLR is 6” per century, hardly runaway rate. Do you see an acceleration? If so, insignificant.
Not true, no citations, not scientific at all. Just like everything else you claim.
JJ and Appell
I get great enjoyment from playing golf in the summer and watching NFL football now. Neither is as much fun as debating you two, though. Boys, both of you are hilarious.
Apple says my contention that Honolulu SLR is 6” per century is not true.. I provided the NOAA TIDAL GAUGE graph as my source. Appell says I didn’t provide a citation, which is exactly what the NOAA link is. Now, while I was talking about the rate at Honolulu, maybe 02 1/2 thought I was talking about GMSLR and I was wrong. Appell provided a link above that says exactly that for the 20th Century.
Appell, don’t you read the stuff in your links? Or can’t you read. If so, that explains a lot.
Come on, this is like shooting fish in a barrel.
But on top of that, IPCC 6 says in Executive Summary for Chapter 9 that GMSLR was 8” for the period 1901 to 2018. That sounds very close to 6” per century.
Appell, why don’t you try reading science in scientific literature for a change, rather than Elle magazine.
JJ is no better. Instead of horsing around with 8th grade equations, you should read the actual science about sea level rise. The areas you referenced in Louisiana and Florida have subsidence problems.
Both of you need to stop getting your science from women’s magazines and political rags and do some independent Research.
One site, Honolulu, says nothing about global sea level rise.
Why even bother?
CKid commentedz;
I get great enjoyment from playing golf in the summer and watching NFL football now. Neither is as much fun as debating you two, though
So sad for you. I’d rather be playing golf, frankly. Can’t anymore though — too cold now, and a bad neck.
I hope you play golf better than you debate science. Shouldn’t be hard, frankly — double bogey golf at least?
DA
Honolulu, why bother?
I didn’t bring up Honolulu, JJ did.
Wasn’t it great fun criticizing your own link without even realizing it? Did you just read the headline in the NOAA piece without seeing what they actually said about GMSLR?
I will let both of you off the hook, it’s clear neither of you is to be trusted with a pop gun. But next time you want to lecture me about GMSLR, I guarantee I will use your link to demonstrate you don’t know what you are talking about.
Don’t complain about not being able to play golf. I’m getting close to 78 and can barely make a shoulder turn. The most fun is chunking putts, shanking chips and hitting driver and a rescue club on a 300 yard hole. Why my group even bothers is beyond me.
I rarely get into debates about sea level rise, or temperature change, or sea ice extent. It’s a waste of time. It’s hard to measure and it’s not difficult to find discrepancies. I prefer spectrographic data. It’s definitive and impossible to refute. That data confirms the greenhouse effect, and that CO2 is the cause of the current rise in global temperatures. The only thing I can’t get from it is the timeframe in which all the changes are going to occur.
I’m glad to see you put so much faith in NOAA and it’s work on sea level rise. I’m sure you’re willing to accept their expert opinion on sea level rise.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sealevel.html
Don’t be like David Coe who decided to run away with his tail between his legs when he was confronted with criticisms of his “work.” I suspect his “work” was intended for clueless people like you to keep you believing climate change is a hoax. It was never intended for debate in the scientific community. BTW I don’t think what he did was an honest mistake. I believe it was a deliberate attempt to mislead as all junk science is.
Ah, Mr Braccili, Don’t worry I am still here. It will take a better man than you to make me runaway. I just sit here boggling at your inanities.
I was worried about you — NOT! Do you still want to keep tap dancing and telling us how smart you are, or will you finally address the questions raised about that “paper” or yours?
No. I think I will just give you something else to chew on.
I previously raised the question of why there was no historical or geological evidence to show that the earth had experienced high or runaway temperatures even when evidence exists that CO2 levels has at times been in excess of 6000ppm. With a climate sensitivity, currently estimated in AR6 to be 3degs we should expect to see evidence of temperatures rising by 12 degs or more.
Now at very low temperatures there is still a measurable Saturation Vapour Pressure of water vapour enabling the atmosphere to hold water vapour . At 255K, the temperature of the earth with no GHGs, the SVP of water vapour is 0.15%, which doesn’t sound a lot. If water is present at that temperature it will be in the form of ice, but the atmosphere will still contain up to 0.15% moisture.
Now the water vapour absorption is so strong that at 0.15% concentration it will absorb some 60% of the earths emitted radiation which will cause the earth temperature to increase to 280K only 8 deg lower than the current average temperature. (this derives from IR spectroscopy which I am delighted to know that you are so keen on) Of course at this temperature the ice will melt and the SVP will increase to its current levels increasing the IR absorption further and increasing temperatures to 285K. It will take the introduction of 400ppm of CO2 to then add the final 3K to bring us up to the current 288K.
It does not require CO2 to instigate the greenhouse effect, H2O does it all by itself! And what is even more interesting is that because of the dominance of the water vapour spectrum it is not possible for the earth temperature to increase, due to the GHG effect, more than a few degrees ( possibly 2 or 3) beyond current temperatures.
Thus previous high CO2 levels of 6000ppm or more can have had little impact on temperatures at that time. There is certainly no evidence to show that the earth has experienced high or runaway temperatures.
So what is the inevitable conclusion. Well climate science has got it wrong. The scientists have got it wrong by immersing themselves in the complexities of atmospheric thermodynamics, instead of recognising what is staring them in the face.
You’ve been suckered mate!
I don’t get involved with these prehistoric temperature debates because they have zero impact on what’s happening today. I have no idea if the CO2 ppm was at 6000 ppm or higher. I have no idea what the conditions were at the time and neither does anyone else.
Let’s say somewhere in the past the ppm of CO2 was 4000 ppm 10xs what it is today, and all other conditions that impact temperature are what they are now. What happens?
The 15 mm CO2 absorption band initially is the primary driver. It will heat the planet to about 30 degree C higher than it is now. At that point it’s at the peak of the earth’s radiant energy. The next temperature change causes the 15 mm absorption band moves to the downward side of the earth’s radiant energy curve where it has less energy it can absorb. Effectively, it can’t drive the temperature of the earth higher. That job falls to the outer CO2 absorption bands, they are so far from the peak, there is very little energy for them to absorb. It’s going to take a really long time for them have significant impact on temperature. That means even though the ppm of CO2 is high, temperature is not going to change quickly. This gives the earth time to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere without runaway temperature rise.
I left out the impact of the other greenhouse and the generation of IR CO2 can absorb created from kinetic energy in the atmosphere. It gets really complex, and you need to model it to sort it all out. I will say one thing. H2O may not be as powerful a greenhouse gas as you might think. Think about earth radiant energy peak on the wavenumber plot. Absorption by greenhouse gas bands to the left of the peak have less energy to absorb as the temperature rises and those on the right have more. The amount of energy absorbed by greenhouse gases is the net of all the bands. H2O absorbs on both sides of the peak. It’s a mixed bag. It, again, requires a model to sort it all out.
As for H2O and saturation, the average atmospheric temperature will be the saturation temperature of H2O. The atmosphere will be close to saturation at that temperature. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have clouds. The water cycle and mass transfer guarantee it. There will be variations all over the planet in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere but, overall, it will be close to saturation. The idea that H2O could drive temperature change is laughable.
I have no problem with the satellite system, as long as the level of uncertainty is recognized and the number of adjustments are taken into consideration. This paper covers some of the issues.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10712-016-9389-8.pdf
You say you haven’t debated SLR. I have for about a decade. It’s a fascinating topic and one of immense complexity. A book could be written on all the factors and approaches and methodology that have been used by the hundreds of researchers in writing their writing papers. The vast majority of studies acknowledge upfront those uncertainties. They freely admit the challenges.
The scientists aren’t the problem. It’s the media and activists who take liberties about the rate of SLR and the causality at each location. Many of those communities featured in the articles have an underlying problem of subsidence. That is almost never mentioned.
I haven’t counted them, but I assume I have bookmarked 100+ SLR studies. Some rely on the satellite data. Some rely on tidal gauges. Some rely on a combination. Those using tidal gauges use various time periods, various locations and various mathematical approaches. One study found that the SLR rate was often influenced by all the above.
While most studies find SLR around 3mm, the great debate is about the level of acceleration. There is vast difference in those findings. And that is the most important issue. I can cite a few dozen saying yes with significance and a few dozen saying none or very little. Pick your poison.
I’m not sure another 30 years will clarify the trend. We might have to wait until 2100 to do a retrospective and then they can sort out who was correct and who was not in all the papers that have been written for the last 50 years.
Coe is probably digging himself out from the storm.
See JJ, you didn’t intimidate Coe at all. My sense is that he can go toe to toe with you anytime. Mano a mano
Or maybe non-binary to non-binary.