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NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory Set For Launch Tomorrow
bughunter writes "The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) is slated for launch tomorrow, February 24, 2009. OCO is the first earth science observatory that will create a detailed map of atmospheric carbon dioxide sources and sinks around the globe. And not a moment too soon. Popular Mechanics has a concise article on the science that this mission will perform, and how it fits in with the existing 'A-train' of polar-orbiting earth observatories. JPL's page goes into more detail. And NASA's OCO Launch Blog will have continuous updates as liftoff approaches and the spacecraft reports in and checks out from 700km up."
Am i the only one to read Orbital Canon in the title ? I freaked out just before realizing... No more C&C for me.
EULA : By reading the above message, you agree that I now own your soul.
I presume by "they", you mean atmospheric scientists? Presumably, they'd follow the scientific method and adjust their theories to fit the new data.
If by "they" you mean career warming deniers, then they will use it as "evidence" when they go on talk shows and sell their newest book to the ignorant on the internet.
If you fall into the latter camp, I wouldn't get your hopes up.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Stop and figure out which one is right, just like when the satellite troposphere temperature data disagreed with everything else. But the main point of this mission is to gather new data that can't readily be collected from the ground.
As long as it doesn't collide with another satellite. :)
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
I dunno. What will the climate change critics do when it shows that the theories are spot on?
Not a typewriter
Who will win the battle: the pro-troleum anti-AGW crowd, the creationists who believe that man cannot corrupt the Earth since it was created by a loving God, or the Flat-Earthers who think all satellites are a conspiracy from Big Spheroid?
Whoever wins, we lose.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Very classy there. Oh, sure, go ahead -- lump us in with those two groups of anti-scientific, peer-reviewed-research-denying kooks. But I can assure you, we'll be getting the last laugh when you sail off the edge of the Earth.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
If there is any discrepancy between data sets, those folks are going to use it as proof that Global Warming is a hoax. Like this businessman, well he is in the business of climate, I guess that makes him an "expert" to some people and qualifying him to call Global Warming a hoax.
Its interesting that no matter how much knowledge, data, statistics, etc, are gathered, there will always be those that are never convinced. Be the subject, evolution, global warming, or that the earth is round.
I can find people that will vehemently deny the validity of all three of the above. Sometimes you just want to throw your hands up in the air and quit trying.
My favorite one in the right here and now is "Clean Coal" - Well, if you want to convince us that coal is clean energy, then why don't you build a clean coal plant, and let people come in and measure and analyze your work? If they can demonstrate just one "Clean Coal" plant, then that would be worth more than the tens of millions of dollars put into advertising for clean coal. Sorry, but when this OCO gets running its going to be interesting to see the patterns and observations received on the coal plants spewing CO2, NOx, trace Mercury, Sulfur, and other goodies into the air.
But that doesn't mean it will convince some people...
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
presume by "they", you mean atmospheric scientists? Presumably, they'd follow the scientific method and adjust their theories to fit the new data.
Or, they would have just been wrong. Hansen, Gore, etc, wrong. Just like everyone else who gets up on the soap box, makes a statement about the universe, and comes back down smacked down by reality. Wrong.
If you fall into the latter camp, I wouldn't get your hopes up.
Hey, I'm hanging onto my lack of sunspots. 2008 came in cooler, and we'll see how 2009 does.
This is my sig.
Because the models can be made better?? When the models can predict sea level rise to the nearest mm in each region of the globe, the exact quantity of ice during the winter of 2094, or the new ocean currents after a 3 degree rise in average temperature, there will still be improvements that can be made.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
from the summary: "And not a moment too late". Am I missing some hidden meaning, or did they mean not a moment too _soon_?
Seeing everything as a dichotomy = your problem. A lot of others suffer from the same disease.
Most of the life on earth today is evolved for the current conditions, not the conditions that existed when that carbon as sequestered from the environment. At a minimum going back to those levels of CO2 would be uncomfortable. Studies have shown that when the CO2 level in a room is 1000 ppm then over 20% of people feel discomfort from it. With business as usual we could reach that level around 2100.
I hope you're right. If the climate in the future is cooler, I would admit that global warming does not seem to be caused by greenhouse gasses. I wonder if you will admit you're wrong if the climate does keep warming. If there's less Arctic ice in twenty years than there is today, will you admit it?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Whoa, dude, you just freed my mind.
We could totally turn the oceans back into primordial soup, man. It'll still be all the same, right? Better maybe - we could all be trippin on our oceans of carbonic acid, and snorting ammonia. Transcendental Peace, brother.
Its interesting that no matter how much knowledge, data, statistics, etc, are gathered, there will always be those that are never convinced. Be the subject, evolution, global warming, or that the earth is round.
What you don't understand, as you triumph evolution or the round earth, is how many times scientists have been WRONG. Before the earth was round, it was flat, it's been shaped like a disk. It's been hollow, filled with magma, it's had a liquid core, a solid core, and now it might have two cores orbiting each other.
First we heard that mega-disasters could not happen and the dinosaurs died of disease because mega-disasters are bible thumping things, and then we find a comet smashed into the earth, and then it is possible that not only did a comet smash into the earth, but the siberian traps exploded at the same time and then maybe there was a big disease after all or maybe just rats ate all the damn dino eggs.
And don't even get me started on diseases... first you bleed people and then you got some guy sticking his finger into Lincoln's brain and then you got a cure for all bacteria and soon viruses and cancer then woops we're nowhere on cancer and viruses and bacteria are going to win after all.
Hot damn.
But, before you go on about how science progresses and is never wrong, let's apply that same standard of excellence to our former President? I mean, George Bush wasn't wrong when he invaded Iraq. He merely learned that Saddam did not have WMD, and the original plans for the invasion needed to be revised to consider an increased number of soldiers. He wasn't wrong... he just learned!
Now, my point is really this. The ratio of right to wrong in science will most definitely approach 0, but, the consequences of each step will also approach 0. Basically, the big stuff smart people figured out long time ago, fire, food, water, and that had big consequences. Then lesser consequences as more was learned, different kinds of fire, food, water... the air... and we keep drilling down and also learn about things that don't matter as much... the earth is flat / round. really, if you are a 10th century farmer, why care? Doesn't matter. Same thing today... the Higgs is X ev or Y ev, is that going to make my dick bigger? It might, down the road, but the dirty secret of science is that the more we know, the less it matters, and, since we know so much, and invalidate so much, scientists are pretty increasing the probability of being wrong.
So, rather than worry about whether or not there's global warming, I'd build a fire, have a drink and a cigar, and don't sweat it. Science has given you enough to have a pretty darned good life, anything else it gives you is nice to know but probably obsolete as soon as you hear it, so why bother with it?
I mean, seriously. You rail on the ignorant, but, look at what science says : the ignorant are everywhere, so obviously, they must be better than you... that's what Darwin says.
This is my sig.
I know where it went; it is called the carbon cycle. All that CO2 is either in the oceans, in plants/animals and in the air as CO2. I just saved you $273 million dollars, and I take a 10% cut. Check please.
The point is to know precisely where it's going, to know how much its future capacity to soak carbon will be. For example, here's a known case: the oceans. Since we know that a lot of it is going to the oceans, and how much, we can determine what it's carbon soaking capacity will be in the future as it gets more and more saturated. But, to pick some random possibility... carbonates formed from exposed surface rock. If we don't how much CO2 is going into forming additional carbonates naturally, we have no ability to model how much that ability will fade off in the future.
The current models, which generally assume that unknown carbon sinks will remain equally able to keep sinking an unlimited amount of carbon into the future, are likely very overly optimistic on this front on this front.
We've probably made the world a better place for our friends who breathe the stuff.
Most of the world's oceans (2/3rds of the world's available area for photosynthesis) are not CO2-limited, but nutrient-limited. In particular, iron.
Can someone please answer this: If we are burning fossil fuels; presumably all this carbon we are burning was part of the carbon cycle 100s of millions of years ago.
Not necessarily. Oil, and even natural gas and coal deposits are just a fraction of all entombed carbon. There's also shales and all sorts of carbonate minerals. Carbon levels are constantly in flux. Back during the Cambrian, they hit as high as 7,000 ppm. By the mid-Carboniferous, they were down to around 350 ppm. But that took place over the course of 250 million years, an average change of 1ppm every 40,000 years. Some periods were steeper than others, of course; the mid Devonian dropped a ppm every few thousand years, and there are probably more dramatic spikes that we just don't have the resolution to see (more like what we see in the Holocene record). But nothing in the historical record even approaches a relentless 1 1/2 ppm/year.
It's not *that* the Earth is changing. The Earth always changes. The problem is how fast it's changing. I don't know about yours, but my species certainly can't rapidly evolve over the course of a few dozen generations. And much of our infrastructure is fixed in place, unable to adapt at all; you can't just pack people up from areas that are drying out and move them to new Canadian/Siberian farmland without huge expense and hardship.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Assuming all the free carbon in the cycle now was available then; wouldn't the amount of CO2 in the air 100's of millions of years ago been far greater than it is today?
An answer to that question can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth's_atmosphere
Changes in carbon dioxide during the Phanerozoic (the last 542 million years). The recent period is located on the left-hand side of the plot, and it appears that much of the last 550 million years has experienced carbon dioxide concentrations significantly higher than the present day.
We are adding it back quickly; but bringing it to levels where it previously has been. An we went through ice ages AND heat spells then. Are we really changing anything?
I am going to paraphrase your question:
It gets warm in the summer and cold in the winter. But then it gets warm again. So does anything really change?
A huge plume of CO2 located off the eastern coast of Florida.
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
Particularly apt name.
I'm not assuming anything. One person made a prediction that the Earth will get cooler, based on the natural cycle global warming hypothesis. I asked if that didn't happen, would he admit he was wrong. I predict that the Earth will get warmer, based on the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. If the Earth gets colder, I will freely admit I was wrong.
It's called the scientific method. You know, use hypotheses to make predictions, then see which prediction matches our observations.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Hmm. Lets think polar ice cap. 365 ppm / 290 ppm * 273 Celsius gives us 343 Celsius.
The unstated assumption being that temperature is a linear function of CO2 concentration. Any particular reason why that should be true ?
Tasty pig parts smoked w/pecan and applewood. low and sloooooooow. The plume should be visible from space. Now will just have to see if anyone from NASA shows up for dinner...
Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to 365 ppm today and that increase is NOT having a significant effect on climate.
Day length has increased from 9.2 hours on the Solstice to 12.5 hours today and that increase is NOT having a significant effect on weather. February tends to be colder than December even though the days are longer. Is this evidence that the seasons are not caused by the Earth's position with respect to the Sun?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And not a moment too late.
Actually, some are saying it may already be too late to do anything about global [climate change|warming].
Maybe OP meant to say, not a moment too soon?
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Oceans of soup? Sweet... That would solve the hunger crisis.
It seems impossible to have any reasoned discussion about carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to 365 ppm today and that increase is NOT having a significant effect on climate.
Oh really?
In the 'global warming' scenario, short wavelength radiation from the sun passes through the atmosphere and warms the earth. The warmed earth then re-radiates long-wavelength infra-red radiation back into space, or at least tries to but is allegedly stopped by carbon dioxide. So...what's wrong with this? CO2 absorbs infra-red radiation in only a narrow wavelength band and it will not absorb any infra-red radiation with a wavelength outside of its absorption band. There is already far more CO2 in the atmosphere than is needed to effectively absorb ALL infra-red radiation in the CO2 absorption band. (A much bigger absorber of infra-red radiation in the atmosphere is...water vapor...but that's another movie.)
Sorry, but you should really start reading peer-reviewed research and stop listening to viscounts. First off, for something to be a greenhouse gas, it *needs* to be selective on what it blocks. An optimal greenhouse gas is *transparent* to light in the visible and near-IR spectrum, and *opaque* to far-IR. You need to let the sun's energy in (mostly visible and near-IR) while making it harder for what the Earth radiates (mostly far-IR) out. A gas that blocks everything evenly is not a greenhouse gas.
Secondly, your argument is akin to saying that if a reflective blanket keeps 95% of your heat in, putting another reflective blanket around you won't help much. Earth is not a simple physics problem with a surface, a single one-pass medium, and an energy input. Light is constantly absorbed and re-radiated all throughout the atmosphere. The upper layers are colder than the upper layers. The higher the absorption of far-IR, the slower energy can transfer from the lower layers to the upper layers; the lower the absorption of near-IR and visible, the faster energy can transfer from the upper layers to the surface (or even straight to the surface). In short, until a 10-meter or so column of atmosphere can absorb 95%, increasing CO2 levels is a *major* impactor on surface temperature.
Lastly, water vapor is 100% feedback, not forcing. Water vapor has a tiny residency in the atmosphere (days), while CO2 has a long residency (hundreds of years). Any disequilibrium in water vapor is rapidly remedied. Now, on *geological time scales*, CO2 is feedback, mostly to Milankovitch cycles. But that's on the scale of tens of thousands of years.
The effect of increasing CO2 concentration is therefore only to cause absorption to occur at a slightly lower altitude in the atmosphere and after carbon dioxide absorbs infra-red radiation, it quickly collides with nearby, and far more abundant, oxygen and nitrogen molecules, transferring heat to them. These then re-radiate heat out into space.
Wow, was the person you read that from a comedian or just an idiot? CO2 is perfectly capable of radiating IR. *All* objects in the universe are. It doesn't matter whether it's CO2, O2, N2, or what. There are different spectral lines (rather than a perfect blackbody), but it's not a practical distinction. The energy can be radiated in any direction -- up or down. It's almost invariably reabsorbed unless it's in the outermost fringes of the atmosphere. As mentioned before, the more transparent the atmosphere is to "incoming" radiation types, the faster solar energy can migrate to the surface. The less transparent it is to "outgoing" types, the slower far-IR energy can migrate away from the surface. I can make you a drawing or a rudimentary python script to illustrate this concept if you're still having trouble with it.
So...if carbon dioxide is not changing our climate, what is? Look to the Sun
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
The upper layers are colder than the upper layers.
Erm, colder than the *lower* layers.
the lower the absorption of near-IR and visible, the faster energy can transfer from the upper layers to the surface or even straight to the surface
Poorly phrased; most visible and IR energy makes it direct to the surface (~1400W/m^2 arrives, ~1000W/m^2 hits a perpendicular plane on the surface on a clear day). And it's not such a simple correlation of altitude and temperature as I presented it for simplicity. That relationship holds in the troposphere, reverses in the stratosphere, reverses again in the mesosphere, then rises very high in the thermosphere. But that's all beside the point; the fact is that for energy to escape from Earth's surface, it has to be absorbed and reradiated many times. Increasing the CO2 concentration significantly increases the expected number of times to be re-radiated.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
No, I did not assume the climate model would cause warming. How can a model cause warming anyway? I used the hypothesis that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause warming, which is the consensus among climatologists. If the predicted warming is not observed, I will admit that the hypothesis does not seem to be accurate.
My question is simply if the cooling predicted by the OP is not observed, is he willing to admit that his hypothesis might be wrong. It's very simple. Two predictions from the hypotheses. Let's see which prediction is correct.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Presumably, they'd follow the scientific method and adjust their theories to fit the new data.
Just like Mann et al did when it turned out some of their tree ring proxies were problematic, and it only took them a decade to replace them with better ones, which produced a conclusion that was similar to but far less sound-bite-worthy than the original.
This is the way science actually works: people generally defend their favoured belief kicking and screaming until they are absolutely forced to give it up. To suggest that people who find the popular press reports of impending doom from anthropogenic global warming less than compelling are in any way anti-scientific is a nice ad hominem that doesn't really belong in a scientific debate.
There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about climate science: our inability to figure out what is happening to 30% of the CO2 we're polluting the atmosphere with is one of them, and this satellite will hopefully help figure that out.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Oh really?
Pointing to temperature change as evidence of a CO2 effect is circular reasoning.
An optimal greenhouse gas is *transparent* to light in the visible and near-IR spectrum, and *opaque* to far-IR. You need to let the sun's energy in (mostly visible and near-IR) while making it harder for what the Earth radiates (mostly far-IR) out. A gas that blocks everything evenly is not a greenhouse gas.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and a much stronger one than CO2.
In short, until a 10-meter or so column of atmosphere can absorb 95%, increasing CO2 levels is a *major* impactor on surface temperature.
A '10-meter' column of atmosphere is an insignificant height.
Water vapor has a tiny residency in the atmosphere (days), while CO2 has a long residency (hundreds of years).
Water is ALWAYS present in the atmosphere. We even have a special term for it. We call it 'humidity' and it is caused by the presence of oceans of water that are in constant contact with the atmosphere. Similarly, CO2 is always present in the atmosphere. Of course, the same specific molecule of H2O or CO2 is not perpetually present in the atmosphere but, when it comes to those molecules, one is as good as another.
CO2 is perfectly capable of radiating IR.
Yes, but there is so little of it present in the atmosphere compared with other molecules such as oxygen and nitrogen.
I hope you're right. If the climate in the future is cooler, I would admit that global warming does not seem to be caused by greenhouse gasses. I wonder if you will admit you're wrong if the climate does keep warming. If there's less Arctic ice in twenty years than there is today, will you admit it?
The earth may get cooler but that would NOT be evidence that greenhouse gases had no warming effect, just as a warming earth is not evidence of a greenhouse gas warming effect. The temperature change, by itself, whatever it is, is not evidence of anything. As far as the physics of infra-red absorption, there is nothing to admit either way. The absorption spectra of CO2 are fairly well known as are the atmospheric dimensions and composition. There might be less arctic ice in 20 years, there might be more, or it might be about the same. Whatever the case, it says nothing about the cause of any underlying global temperature change.
Pointing to temperature change as evidence of a CO2 effect is circular reasoning.
No, it's a direct counter to your claims of there not being any effect.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and a much stronger one than CO2
Did you even read my post? Water vapor has such a short atmospheric residency that it can only act as feedback, not forcing. And water vapor's net results are actually mixed, depending on where it is in the atmosphere, as clouds reflect sunlight.
A '10-meter' column of atmosphere is an insignificant height.
Apparently you're 15 meters tall. The rest of us here live near the surface, and it's the surface temperature that matters to us. The atmosphere's ability to absorb far-IR on the scale of the very bottom of the troposphere is tiny. And that's what matters when it comes to surface temperature.
Water is ALWAYS present in the atmosphere.
Any more non-sequiteurs you'd like to mention? I point out that water vapor has a tiny residency, on the matter of days, and you point out that it's always there? Duh! And a given molecule of water vapor still only remains in the atmosphere for a matter of days on average. Water is constantly cycling in and out. You could take every last molecule of moisture out of our atmosphere and (neglecting that the plants would die), things would be back to normal in a matter of months. Water vapor cannot force climate change for this reason. It can only react to other types of forcing (say, more water vapor because of hotter seas, or less because of more aerosols increasing cloud formation) because it lasts for such a short period. Hence, it can *amplify or suppress* other types of forcing, but it cannot *be* forcing on its own.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Because as more and more evidence piles up, the point on the IQ bell curve at which people are able to deny the facts moves to the left.
Don't worry, we'll get to you eventually.
I hate printers.
Some of us love our kids, not because some divine entity told us we must, but simply because we love our kids. Anyone that says loving one's children is conditional on a belief in God is a fool or a lier.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Meanwhile, you can browse interactive maps of US antropogenic fossil fuel CO2 emissions based on the data produced by Project Vulcan at Purdue. Google Earth browser plugin is needed, or you can load all data in a KML file in Google Earth directly. There is also a flythrough video explaining the different data views. Full disclosure - I'm the programmer who created the maps. Yes, the page is slow to load, but once a layer is accessed, it'll stay cached.
Pointing to temperature change as evidence of a CO2 effect is circular reasoning because the assumptions in that conclusion are that the CO2 effect would manifest itself as a temperature change and that the only cause of such a temperature would be the CO2 effect. Google on 'circular reasoning' for more information.
Water vapor has such a short atmospheric residency...
Water does not have a 'short' atmospheric residency. It is ALWAYS present in the atmosphere. And no, that is not a non-sequitur but is apparently central to your argument.
I point out that water vapor has a tiny residency, on the matter of days, and you point out that it's always there? Duh! And a given molecule of water vapor still only remains in the atmosphere for a matter of days on average. Water is constantly cycling in and out. You could take every last molecule of moisture out of our atmosphere and (neglecting that the plants would die), things would be back to normal in a matter of months. Water vapor cannot force climate change for this reason. It can only react to other types of forcing (say, more water vapor because of hotter seas, or less because of more aerosols increasing cloud formation) because it lasts for such a short period. Hence, it can *amplify or suppress* other types of forcing, but it cannot *be* forcing on its own
Both water and carbon dioxide are constantly cycling in and out of the atmosphere, including from your body. That has absolutely nothing to do with the alleged effect of a longterm change in their average atmospheric concentration on the global climate unless you're trying to build a strawman.
If NASA suddenly spotted a large asteroid and told us that there was a 85% chance of it hitting earth, would that make them "nuts"?
This isn't some crazy dude sitting in a basement reading tea leaves... and while the science isn't as solid as using telescopes to predict orbits as in my analogy, the science is getting pretty darned good.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about climate science
Well, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the exact numbers and timelines that their models come up with, but I don't think that there are any serious detractors in the scientific community to the basic concept of anthropogenic warming... most of the debate revolves around data and the models - will the warming be 2 degrees or 5 degrees in 100 years... not, will there be warming.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I wonder if it will be able to measure its owe carbon dioxide from its launch...
Of course, greenhouse gasses do have some warming effect, by definition. The question is whether the warming we've noticed so far is primarily caused by an increase in greenhouse gasses (the AGW hypothesis) or is part of a natural cycle (the NC hypothesis). The AGW hypothesis predicts the temperature will continue to increase. According to the OP, the NC hypothesis predicts the temperature will reverse course and decrease. If that is the case, it is a simple matter to make an observation and confirm one hypothesis and falsify the other. It does not prove conclusively which one is correct, but then again, science never does prove anything conclusively. My question is a simple, straightforward one, and one that requires a simple yes or no answer. If the observed warming continues, will the NC advocates admit they were wrong?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Being an armchair scientist can be fun, but why in the world do you think that all the scientists have missed something so simple as the effect of the sun on global warming
I would say its pretty simple. There's not actually that many scientists that are building climate simulation engines and the result is so vague that it is easy to experimentally verify. The basic output is that the earth is getting warmer since the industrial revolution coincident with a rise in CO2, and that really means, to people in the field, to look for signs of warming, and to look for CO2, and then also to then try to understand the effects.
My skepticism is with the model. Wall Street models were quite successful too, but they never actually ran them in a regime of falling housing prices to see what would happen. Woops, and I think the same sort of woops is extremely likely in climate software. This to me isn't a failing of the climate scientist community per se, as much as I think it is actually a failure of the software community as it is simply too hard to create complicated models, and scientists are notoriously the worst of all programmers.
My bet on sunspots is really well, indicative of some unknown or seemingly benign assumption turning out to be wrong. I'm looking forward to seeing the results from this CO2 satellite as, if the manmade theory is right, we should really see CO2 plumes rising up from, well, the USA, and spreading throughout the world. If they time it right, we should see highways without traffic without CO2, and highways with traffic, with more CO2, and that CO2 should not be consumed by anything on the way. I understand that they've already got a pretty good amount of evidence that says that the CO2 in the air is from human activities largely because of some weird radio thing, but, the graphic evidence of that, and where these concentrations are, is what's interesting. We should expect to see local fluctuations in temperature in CO2 plume areas, I would think. You should be able to take all the temperature data, match it up to all the CO2 plumes, and see anomolies fall off as the concentration of CO2 falls off around where the CO2 is introduced, even if only a small amount. But of course, there could be surprises. It could turn out that there is some massive unknown source of CO2 bubbling up out of the unexplored regions of the earth. It could turn out that the CO2 coming from the USA is getting consumed by the USA due to some new thing that they discover. It could actually turn out that the USA is actually covering up what should be a fairly big and natural sinking of CO2 caused by sunspots, and we should otherwise be in an ice age, if it were not for our SUVs. It could actually be something new, beautiful and unimaginably cool, and that, my friend, is why we give scientists billions of dollars, to make us wonder, more than to answer questions.
This is my sig.
>So...if carbon dioxide is not changing our climate, what is? Look to the Sun.
Yes, and in particular look at the direct measurements of solar output outside the atmosphere since 1978. Look at whether there's a trend, and look at how the current numbers compare with the numbers from the first measurements. Then look at what average temperature has been doing over the same time span.
Look to the research on proxy measurements of solar activity going back 250 years. Look at the upper bound it sets on the fraction of climate change that could be caused by solar output changes.
>There is already far more CO2 in the atmosphere than is needed to effectively absorb ALL infra-red radiation in the CO2 absorption band.
There's a complicated answer to this, but a simpler one is to look at Venus.
>It seems impossible to have any reasoned discussion about carbon dioxide.
Not impossible, but it's made difficult by a campaign that repeats provably false assertions so often that even technically literate people start taking them seriously.
I doubt these models. Computer models predicted that the financial crash would never happen. The derivatives were just too advanced to ever possibly crash, right? Look at the weatherman. He has a hard time predicting rain 48 hours from now. You think you really know anything about the weather 50 years from now? Give me an f'in break.
I doubt these models. Computer models predicted that the financial crash would never happen. The derivatives were just too advanced to ever possibly crash, right?
[citation needed]
Look at the weatherman. He has a hard time predicting rain 48 hours from now. You think you really know anything about the weather 50 years from now? Give me an f'in break.
It is not unreasonable to predict with a high degree of certainty that a person who drives to work will arrive on time and without incident when required. This should be true three years from now, as well as ten years from now. This assumes that the individual is not fired or does not lose their job some other way. However, one can predict that isolated events will occur in ten years, traffic accidents, unusually slow traffic, or their car not starting due to a -35 deg F morning. What you cannot predict as easily is something like an outright bridge collapse, especially when in this case a flawed computer model was used. Granted, the bridge still had serious structural flaws that were only partially taken into account by the previous computer models.
Going back to your financial models, are the models you are referring to a small number of cherry-picked simple simulations that only were done to confirm a bias? Are there financial models that did predict trouble accurately, or are they no longer important? Part of the problem was that too many non-mainstream "economists" and even armchair economic theorists became influential. Most of these types did not develop their theories by using the Scientific Method, attempted to inappropriately apply limited thought experiments from microeconomics to macroeconomics, or did not fully research, distorted the facts to fit their bias, omitted facts contrary to their position, or even outright lied about historical and present day events and data, then used these anecdotes as facts to push their deeply flawed pet theories. The only major figure I have seen to date admit that he was almost totally wrong on the economy was Alan Greenspan. That takes a large amount of testicular fortitude, his announcement not very long after the beginning of the crisis was even more impressive. I would compare this to the Republicans in Congress and in the conservative pundits in the media espousing the same old rhetoric, cut taxes, especially on the rich, and cut spending across the board, especially for the poor.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
I'm referring to net 0 sum financial models which state given enough time (infinite) the system will rebound, never mind the amount of death and destruction in between now and infinity. It's funny you should bring up Alan Greenspan, the creator of these creative financial instruments which are the reason why the system is collapsing right now. One accurate model which predicted the current collapse is Larouche's triple curve function, which basically says as production decreases, financial aggregates and money will increase at an inversely proportional rate. We can't have less production globally and support a growing population. It's just not possible. This crash is a reflection of that fact. Now, it's still quite possible to reform and change our economic models. It remains to be seen if our leaders are ready to confront the parasitic "international" interests and do the right thing.
In regards to Global Warming, I think we need to look at the ocean floor. Some seashells contain carbon records that are quite contradictory to the ice core measurements Gore hyped up. My mind isn't made up about global warming. There are astronomical functions that researchers are blowing off. The Earth's axis shift (precession), the earth's elliptical degree of orbit, and the sun's position in galactic space all play roles in the climate cycle. Also, isn't the human contribution to CO2 only a small fraction of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses? This new satellite is great because it will give us more details. We're overdue for an ice age anyway. Maybe this is the only thing saving us from glacial advance. You know, in an ice age, the southern hemisphere is supposed to get quite warm in the summer =) (think Australian wildfires). We'll know soon enough I suppose.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco/main/index.html
Ohwell...?
How pious of you. I assume by your tone that you must be in the global warming alarmist camp. The article clearly states that the scientist can only find 40% of the carbon in the atmosphere that they were expecting. Add the lack of sunspots in this cycle and it seems that we are actually headed for a freeze. Are we human beings prepared for that? I genuinely feel that someone is selling global warming like a peddler selling bottled water to me while I hold a water hose in my hand.
That should be sufficient to keep all the other satellites in line lest they lose their funding.
It's the new scientific method...
1. Find popular concept.
2. Craft language to demonize and silence the opposition.
3. Control the discussion without regard to civility.
4. Assume a forgone conclusion.
Has anyone stopped to consider what will happen to politics if we reduce carbon emissions?
I think not.
s
In regards to Global Warming, I think we need to look at the ocean floor. Some seashells contain carbon records that are quite contradictory to the ice core measurements Gore hyped up.
Sign of a climate crackpot: he brings Al Gore into the discussion as if he's relevant to the science.
But go ahead, please explain what ocean cores are inconsistent with the ice core record of the glacial-interglacial cycles. (Also explain why ocean cores are more reliable than ice cores, considering that ice cores actually store trapped atmospheric gas.)
There are astronomical functions that researchers are blowing off. The Earth's axis shift (precession), the earth's elliptical degree of orbit, and the sun's position in galactic space all play roles in the climate cycle.
Researchers aren't blowing off orbital factors. The Milankovitch cycles are far too slow to act appreciably on century timescales. As for the Sun's position in galactic space, you're probably referring to the hypothesis of varying cosmic ray flux, except cosmic ray flux hasn't been varying recently.
Also, isn't the human contribution to CO2 only a small fraction of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses?
Yes, but a few-degree contribution to a 30-degree natural greenhouse effect is still climatically significant.
We're overdue for an ice age anyway.
Probably not.
Did this fail because they wanted it to fail, or because NASA couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a bass fiddle?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Orbital won part of the ISS re-supply contract. But, l-mart, boeing, and atx are suing saying that they had a better plan. In point of fact, NASA said that the alternative had better points, etc. Now, Orbital loses an important sat. This may well lose that contract for Orbital or at least allow that partial contract to be cut in half (half to each). To be honest, I would not mind seeing that happen. We NEED multiple launchers. But if that happens, I would love to see Boeing, L-Mart, or even the US buy a bigelow station and attach it to the ISS. If we buy one at costs, it helps bigelow move forward quickly, while expanding the ISS inexpensively. The important thing is that it would get bigelow moving forward which would allow all 3 launch companies to survive and thrive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yes, and in particular look at the direct measurements of solar output outside the atmosphere since 1978.
You apparently have not actually looked at the solar data but, if you did, you would see that the data is compiled by eight different platforms since 1978, the newest of which is SORCE, the solar irradiance has generally declined, and is now at the lowest levels measured. The ACRIM platform website (www.acrim.com) puts it thusly: "TSI monitoring, cosmogenic isotope analyses and correlative climate data indicate that variations of the TSI have been a significant climate forcing during the current inter-glacial period (the last ~ 10 Kyrs.). Phenomenological analyses of TSI monitoring results during the past (nearly) three decades, TSI proxies during the past 400 years and the records of surface temperature show that TSI variation has been the dominant forcing for climate change during the industrial era."
There's a complicated answer to this, but a simpler one is to look at Venus.
Other than the fact that Venus is a lot closer to the sun, has an atmosphere with sulfuric acid clouds and without oxygen and nitrogen, and has a mass only 80 percent of the Earth's, they are a lot alike. Yes, your answer is a simple one.
NASA satellite crashes minutes after launch:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/02/24/nasa.launch/index.html
It seems impossible to have any reasoned discussion about carbon dioxide.
You're not contributing to the reasoned discussion here.
Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to 365 ppm today and that increase is NOT having a significant effect on climate.
A large amount of science disagrees with you. (And by the way, it's more like 388 ppm today.)
There is already far more CO2 in the atmosphere than is needed to effectively absorb ALL infra-red radiation in the CO2 absorption band.
This is false, and is directly contradicted by the line-by-line radiative transfer codes which calculate this absorption (e.g., MODTRAN), as well as actual spectral measurements of increasing IR saturation in the CO2 bands (e.g., here).
In particular, this response to another poster is also false: "The re-radiated infra-red radiation would mostly be outside of those spectra and would either radiate out into space or radiate into the earth. Your conceptual model about radiation bouncing around between CO2 molecules in the atmosphere does not agree with the physics of absorption." Molecules radiate infrared according to their temperature. If they absorb IR from molecules of a similar temperature, then the re-radiated IR will be in the same band as the absorbed IR. Since nearby molecules are generally of a similar temperature, "radiation bouncing around among CO2 molecules" does happen. That is, in fact, what leads to the exponential temperature-forcing relationship you mention: partial absorption by nearby molecules radiating in similar bands as they absorb. Which, again, is verified by actually calculating the radiative transfer. There is a vertical thermal gradient, so eventually the high cold layers are passing most of what makes it out of the warm lower layers, but by that time some more of the outgoing IR has already been re-reradiated back to the surface.
The best estimate is that a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from the pre-industrial value (290 to 580 ppm) would increase global temperatures by 1.2C.
(Pre-industrial is usually taken to be 280 ppm.)
Yes, the forcing/concentration relationship is logarithmic due to partial saturation of the absorption bands, and yes, CO2 doubling leads to an unamplified ~1.2 C of warming by itself. However, the net feedbacks in the climate system are positive, according to theory, instrumental observations, and paleo data regarding the climate sensitivity. That increases the climate sensitivity from 1.2 C to somewhere between 2-4.5 C.
Based on our current CO2 output it will take us another 100 years to reach 580 ppm, by which time we will have probably exhausted our fossil fuels anyway, if we believe the gloomy forecasts about petroleum reserves.
Ha! Not even. "Current CO2 output" isn't going to stay the same; it's been continually increasing. Under high emissions scenarios we could pass 800-900 ppm this century. Don't forget that petroleum is not the only source of fossil fuels: coal is far more abundant. Power plants use fossil fuels too, more than the transportation sector. And if we really want to go digging in the sands and shales, there's probably several thousand ppm worth in there, although it would take a few centuries to exhaust all that.
So...if carbon dioxide is not changing our climate, what is? Look to the Sun.
Solar irradiance trends and cosmic ray trends disagree profoundly with the modern warming period, as I'm sure has been pointed
Pointing to temperature change as evidence of a CO2 effect is circular reasoning
It is not circular reasoning. It's how inductive science works. "Hypothesis X predicts we will observe effect Y. Alternate hypotheses W predict different effects Z. We observe Y, but not Z. This observation is evidence in favor of hypothesis X, and does not support alternate hypotheses W."
Water does not have a 'short' atmospheric residency.
Water molecules do have a short atmospheric residency.
It is ALWAYS present in the atmosphere.
That does not contradict the preceding statement.
Both water and carbon dioxide are constantly cycling in and out of the atmosphere, including from your body. That has absolutely nothing to do with the alleged effect of a longterm change in their average atmospheric concentration on the global climate unless you're trying to build a strawman.
Yes, it does have to do with the long term accumulation of gases. CO2 remains in the atmosphere for much longer than water vapor does. If you put a bunch of excess water vapor into the air, it quickly precipitates back out and concentrations return to normal. If you put a bunch of excess CO2 into the air, it hangs around for centuries before being scrubbed out. That's one reason why it's accumulating so fast, and will affect the climate for so long. (The other reason is because we're just emitting so much of it.)
Now, if you raise the temperature of the planet, you shift the evaporation-precipitation balance, so that more water can stay in the air at one time on average. That water is a greenhouse gas and adds to the original warming (whatever the source). This is how the water vapor feedback on climate works. Conversely, if you don't change the temperature of the planet, then excess water vapor into the air won't accumulate and change the overall long term average; it will just rain out because you haven't change the evap-precip balance. That's why water vapor is not a forcing by itself.
The Japanese satellite Ibuki has been in orbit since January.
Launch Failed this morning. Fairing around satellite failed to separate and it went into the ocean down near the Antarctic.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/02/24/nasa.launch/index.html
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
Atmospheric mixing is not instant. You may have noticed that our atmosphere is not a uniform temperature. Both convection and radiation play important roles in atmospheric heat transfer.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
"Pointing to temperature change as evidence of a CO2 effect is circular reasoning"
It is not circular reasoning. It's how inductive science works. "Hypothesis X predicts we will observe effect Y. Alternate hypotheses W predict different effects Z. We observe Y, but not Z. This observation is evidence in favor of hypothesis X, and does not support alternate hypotheses W."
So, to use your inductive science model, my hypothesis is that washing my car will cause it to rain. I washed the car yesterday and...guess what...it rained. Hypothesis proved.
If you put a bunch of excess CO2 into the air, it hangs around for centuries before being scrubbed out.
Fuzzy thinking. The atmosphere is a 'reservoir' for CO2 to which CO2 is constantly being added and removed. If more is added than is removed, the concentration increases. If less is added than is removed, the concentration decreases. If you look at the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measured at Mauna Loa since 1958, it rises and falls during the year in a regular cycle apparently related to photosynthetic activity. The long-term average concentration has shown a slight increase from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to a current value of 387 ppm as the average value for January. The increase is probably due to the increased combustion of fossil fuels, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere as a byproduct of combustion. Your statement above is pure nonsense as it is impossible to "put a bunch of excess CO2 into the air" due to the sheer global scale that such an effort would require.
So, to use your inductive science model, my hypothesis is that washing my car will cause it to rain. I washed the car yesterday and...guess what...it rained. Hypothesis proved.
Are you really this dumb?
You don't prove hypotheses, you support or contradict them by evidence. In your strawman example, you don't have a real prediction (I could equally well claim that washing my car will prevent it from raining; you are lacking a mechanism), and you haven't considered any alternate hypothesis for rain.
EVERY scientific theory amasses support by (a) making predictions which are supported by observations, and (b) demonstrating that alternate hypotheses are not supported by observations. It is completely absurd to claim that passing an experimental test is "circular reasoning". It is evidence for a theory. It may be evidence for another theory too, but that doesn't make the first theory circular.
You also falsely claim that it is assumed "that the only cause of such a temperature would be the CO2 effect".
Fuzzy thinking. The atmosphere is a 'reservoir' for CO2 to which CO2 is constantly being added and removed. If more is added than is removed, the concentration increases. If less is added than is removed, the concentration decreases. If you look at the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measured at Mauna Loa since 1958, it rises and falls during the year in a regular cycle apparently related to photosynthetic activity. The long-term average concentration has shown a slight increase from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to a current value of 387 ppm as the average value for January. The increase is probably due to the increased combustion of fossil fuels, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere as a byproduct of combustion.
All of this is generally true, but then you jump to:
Your statement above is pure nonsense as it is impossible to "put a bunch of excess CO2 into the air" due to the sheer global scale that such an effort would require.
The increase of atmospheric CO2 from ~280 to 388 ppm is precisely "the bunch of excess CO2 into the air" I'm referring to. The point is that with CO2's long residence time, an imbalance between source and sink leads to a long-term shift in concentration (until the CO2 can finally be removed), whereas with water vapor's short residence time, the imbalance is quickly neutralized (unless something happens to change the source-sink relationship, like an external increase in global temperature).
(And by the way, it's more like 388 ppm today.)
Actually, the January average was 387 ppm. A typo prevented me from saying 385 ppm in the OP.
"There is already far more CO2 in the atmosphere than is needed to effectively absorb ALL infra-red radiation in the CO2 absorption band."
This is false, and is directly contradicted by the line-by-line radiative transfer codes which calculate this absorption (e.g., MODTRAN), as well as actual spectral measurements of increasing IR saturation in the CO2 bands (e.g., here).
No, it isn't false, it's simple physics. Absorption of electromagnetic 'light' radiation passing through a medium is described by the Beer-Lambert equation: I = Io x exp(-kL) where I is the exiting radiation intensity, k is the 'extinction coefficient' determined by the molecular species and concentration, and L is the path length. It's easy to calculate, using the known extinction coefficients for CO2, that 99% of the radiation in the CO2 absorption bands is absorbed within a few hundreds of meters from the source, which in this case is the Earth. The extinction coefficients are derived from measurements in modern, high-resolution spectrometers and are widely published.
Molecules radiate infrared according to their temperature. If they absorb IR from molecules of a similar temperature, then the re-radiated IR will be in the same band as the absorbed IR. Since nearby molecules are generally of a similar temperature, "radiation bouncing around among CO2 molecules" does happen.
You have very fuzzy understanding of what is happening and the principles involved. Molecules absorb infrared radiation based on their vibrational modes and do not care if there are nearby molecules of a 'similar temperature.' The absorption spectra for a particular molecular species is specific to that species, so much so that the absorption spectra are commonly used to 'fingerprint' or identify the presence of a particular molecule. After absorption, the molecule is excited to a higher temperature and subsequently collides with other molecules in the gas, thereby transferring thermal energy to them resulting in a uniform temperature for the gas mixture. Since by far the majority of molecules in the atmosphere are N2 and O2, most of the collisions involving CO2 will be between CO2 and either N2 or O2. All of the molecules in the atmosphere reradiate infrared radiation. The emitted wavelength of the thermal radiation is not the same wavelength as the absorbed radiation, as you claimed, but is instead a probability distribution depending only on temperature that can be predicted with Planck's law.
"Current CO2 output" isn't going to stay the same; it's been continually increasing. Under high emissions scenarios we could pass 800-900 ppm this century.
You apparently believe that CO2 production from fossil fuel combustion is about to explode or something. Therefore, you must also believe that there's some new huge deposit of fossil fuels that is going to be exploited soon. The reality is that fossil fuel use is likely to be flat to declining for the forseeable future due to the increasing scarcity and cost of developing new fossil fuel resources. It takes the discovery of enormous new petroleum reserves just to maintain our current production rate of these. Developing the shale oil resources you allude to will require an enormous expenditure of capital and will not occur until petroleum reserves have been much more depleted than they are presently. Based on current fossil fuel use and the measured atmospheric CO2 changes, it will take approximately 100 years for the atmospheric CO2 concentration to reach 2x the pre-industrial value or 580 ppm. The effect of this increase on global temperature would be an increase of approximately 1.2C which would not melt any antarctic ice sheets or lead to global calamity. On the other hand, severe global cooling events have occurred in the recent past and are likely to occur again. Such an event would, unlike a small amount of warming, be a true global catastrophe that would cause enormous hardship and the deaths of billions of people. The sun's output has declined in the last two years so if you want to worry about something, worry about that.
Your thought process on this seems to be:
1) A rising CO2 concentration will cause an increase in the average global temperature.
2) The average global temperature has increased.
3) Therefore, the rising CO2 concentration caused an increase in the global average temperature.
This is obviously circular reasoning but if you cannot see that, you're unlikely to ever see it and I'm unlikely to convince you.
No, it isn't false, it's simple physics. Absorption of electromagnetic 'light' radiation passing through a medium is described by the Beer-Lambert equation
You want the Schwarzschild equation, not Beer-Lambert, which ignores emission. Beer-Lambert works well for shortwave absorption, because the atmosphere doesn't radiate in shortwave, but doesn't fully capture what's going on in the longwave. Upwelling IR is modified by neighboring layers of GHGs, as long as they're warm enough.
Molecules absorb infrared radiation based on their vibrational modes and do not care if there are nearby molecules of a 'similar temperature.'
I said that molecules RADIATE infrared based on their temperature, and that CO2 molecules absorb infrared in wavelengths which correspond to a particular (range of) temperature. As I said, if you're in the high cool atmosphere, then the difference between the radiating temperature's wavelengths and the absorption window is large, and the IR largely escapes. But when the radiating temperature is near the absorption window for the gas, as is the case in the lower atmosphere, then CO2 molecules do absorb and re-radiate between neighbors.
You apparently believe that CO2 production from fossil fuel combustion is about to explode or something.
Emissions under business-as-usual are expected to increase quite a bit over the 21st century, yes.
Therefore, you must also believe that there's some new huge deposit of fossil fuels that is going to be exploited soon.
There are centuries worth of unexploited coal to be used for power by both the developed and developing world.
The reality is that fossil fuel use is likely to be flat to declining for the forseeable future due to the increasing scarcity and cost of developing new fossil fuel resources. It takes the discovery of enormous new petroleum reserves just to maintain our current production rate of these.
How many times do I have to tell you, there are fossil fuels other than petroleum? And business-as-usual projections already INCLUDE peak oil.
Based on current fossil fuel use and the measured atmospheric CO2 changes, it will take approximately 100 years for the atmospheric CO2 concentration to reach 2x the pre-industrial value or 580 ppm.
Once again, fossil fuel emissions is expected to increase throughout most if not all of this century under most BAU emissions scenarios. It's possible they will decrease and we'll be limited to 2x preindustrial; it's possible that they won't and we'll get 3x or more under high emission scenarios. (Or if carbon sinks weaken.) 2x is the most optimistic case absent additional mitigation efforts.
The effect of this increase on global temperature would be an increase of approximately 1.2C
This is wrong, for reasons I already explained.
The sun's output has declined in the last two years so if you want to worry about something, worry about that.
Two years of decline in solar output does not exactly compare to a century's worth of greenhouse forcing.
Your thought process on this seems to be:
1) A rising CO2 concentration will cause an increase in the average global temperature.
2) The average global temperature has increased.
3) Therefore, the rising CO2 concentration caused an increase in the global average temperature.
No. It's not. The initial reasoning is:
1) A rising CO2 will cause an increase in average global temperature with a specific rate, timing, and magnitude.
2) An increase in average global temperature with that rate, timing, and magnitude is observed.
3) Therefore, the temperature evidence supports CO2 increase as a cause. (Other causes which make the same prediction would also be supported by this observation.)
You then add:
4) Competing theories, such as changes in total solar irradiance, do not predict the observed change.
5) Therefore, these theories are weakened relative to the alternatives, and any remaining consistent theories, such as CO2, are relatively strengthened.
You then add:
6) CO2 increase makes other predictions about climate, such as stratospheric cooling, top-down warming of the oceans, etc.
7) These effects are observed.
8) Competing hypotheses do not predict all these other observations either.
9) See 5.
And so on. Now, we can discuss the individual lines of evidence involved in this reasoning (such as your citation of Scafetta and West as "proving" it's all solar), but your ridiculous strawman is just that: a strawman.
You want the Schwarzschild equation, not Beer-Lambert, which ignores emission. Beer-Lambert works well for shortwave absorption, because the atmosphere doesn't radiate in shortwave, but doesn't fully capture what's going on in the longwave. Upwelling IR is modified by neighboring layers of GHGs, as long as they're warm enough.
More nonsense. The Beer-Lambert 'Law' has not been repealed. Adding the emissions factor (see my earlier reply) does not change the underlying issue: more CO2 will NOT increase the absorption by CO2. The thermally-excited CO2 will transfer heat to the surrounding atmosphere of N2 and O2 and the atmosphere will then re-radiate infrared radiation into space in a wavelength distribution based on Planck's law. The people who are making the sorts of arguments you are making sound like people who 'know' what the answer is supposed to be before they start the experiment and they fiddle with their equations and data until they get the 'right' answer. Your last sentence above is a 'masterpiece' of crappola if you will: 'upwelling IR is modified by neighboring layers of GHGs as long as they're warm enough.' Are you a music major in college or something?
There are centuries worth of unexploited coal to be used for power by both the developed and developing world. How many times do I have to tell you, there are fossil fuels other than petroleum?
Sure there are...but exploiting and using those reserves will also take centuries. It takes a lot of time and resources to exploit coal. The extraction is difficult, the combustion equipment is difficult to operate and maintain, the logistics of transportation are complex, and the entire process is...very dirty. There is a reason why the 'great white fleet' converted to oil from coal back in 1910. It's highly unlikely that you will ever jump in the driver's seat of your coal-burning buggy to drive on down to the pub. Transportation is the biggest use of FOSSIL FUELS and is likely to remain so and those transportation fuels are likely to be petroleum based as long as they are using 'fossil' fuels. Future Electric cars are likely to be fueled with electricity produced from renewable sources, natural gas, and nuclear power rather than coal. Coal will continue to be used but will not cause any massive runup in atmosperic CO2 that you allude to with your 900ppm by 2100 nonsense.
Not that I expect somebody who resorts to ad hominem attacks to even care, but I can cite Beck (2007) Figure 5: First Reconstruction of Trends in CO2 Atmospheric concentration based on actual measurement. The figure is transposed against the Antarctic ice core samples. You can see it here. My link is free. I did not read your article. If you will copy and paste the relevant part or present it for me in a free manner, I will be happy to review it.
As you cited an article saying that we are going to experience a longer interglacial (you know, the one I can't even read the abstract on), I'm going to shoot you one that says the opposite. This is why I argue for more research to be done on what exactly is happening here, and I applaud this new orbital observatory. Note that I did not once call for continued pollution, which is insane. I think we need to be prepared for an ice age. The authors of these papers somewhere write to prevent advancing glaciers, lots high temperature nuclear reactors must be deployed with enough energy density to cull back the advancing glaciers if the situation arises. Therefore, this is just one reason that to attempt to abandon nuclear energy is insanity for the survival and prosperity of humanity. Read it here.
I prefer it to only cover the government, all banks, the disease industry, all churches, the oil industry, the media reproduction industry, and all churches and banks (bomb them twice, just to be sure). Did I forget anything? ;)
Yes. I said *only*
Oh, and use the rest of the bombing power to do that for the whole world instead of just the USA. After all, we are not discriminating any country. We hate all those bomb targets is all countries equally. ;)
Project MAYHEM
P.S.: Please ignore all mails from a project GAY-HAM. They are a cheap knock-off, except if you like big man-orgies (a la South Park) instead of big fight clubs.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The Beer-Lambert 'Law' has not been repealed.
The Beer-Lambert law has not been repealed, but it also explicitly ignores the very phenomenon we are discussing.
Adding the emissions factor (see my earlier reply) does not change the underlying issue: more CO2 will NOT increase the absorption by CO2.
This is wrong. Certainly the atmosphere re-radiates IR, but it also radiates in wavelengths which can be absorbed by other CO2 molecules, when its temperature is similar to the absorption band of CO2. This occurs in the lower layers of the atmosphere.
Sure there are...but exploiting and using those reserves will also take centuries.
No. We're already exploiting coal and can easily ramp up global production.
It's highly unlikely that you will ever jump in the driver's seat of your coal-burning buggy to drive on down to the pub.
Coal is used for ELECTRICITY, in case you didn't notice. (It can also be converted to liquid form for transportation, but this requires energy. If coal liquifaction is economical relative to electric vehicles, you'll continue to see internal combustion; otherwise, you'll get a fleet of coal-driven electric vehicles.) And, in case you didn't notice, lots of people use electricity, and lots more want to.
Transportation is the biggest use of FOSSIL FUELS
Electricity generation represents about half of fossil fuel emissions in the U.S., and it's even larger in many developing countries where the demand for a universal electricity grid outweighs the demand for more automobiles.
Future Electric cars are likely to be fueled with electricity produced from renewable sources, natural gas, and nuclear power rather than coal.
Not likely without strong economic incentives to reduce fossil fuel use. Over the lifecycle of a power plant, coal is WAY cheaper than most of the alternatives, including all renewables and nuclear power, and that's going to remain true for the foreseeable future barring explicit economic disincentives for fossil fuel use. There's a reason why China is going all-out building coal plants.
That may change with sufficiently numerous and large breakthroughs in alternative energy, but it's not going to change quickly. Nothing is even in research phase now that can beat coal in cost-effectiveness, let alone developed, let alone widely installable over the next few decades. (Remember too that it's not cost effective to simply replace existing coal plants; you want them to live out their natural lifetime, which can be 50+ years. So whatever coal plants you're building while waiting for your technological silver bullet are going to hang around for quite some time.)
Coal will continue to be used but will not cause any massive runup in atmosperic CO2 that you allude to with your 900ppm by 2100 nonsense.
You're even more out of touch with economic/energy use projections than you are with climate projections. It is not at all hard to exceed 560 ppm this century. Most projections predict that. The fossil fuel emission problem isn't just going to "solve itself" anytime soon. I'm not saying that 560 ppm is impossible or even unlikely, just that it will probably require some additional mitigation effort to limit ourselves to 2xCO2.
Beck (2007) Figure 5: First Reconstruction of Trends in CO2 Atmospheric concentration based on actual measurement
I was right. You are a crackpot. Even a halfway intelligent skeptic knows better than to cite Beck or Jaworowski. You don't see, say, Steve McIntyre embarrassing himself like that.
Let me clue you in: Beck's whole "reconstruction" is based on hopelessly flawed and unrepresentative flask samples from a period before anybody learned how to do a controlled experiment. First, those measurements are based on surface fluxes. There are HUGE spatial and temporal variations in surface fluxes based on proximity to e.g. urban sources, vegetative sinks, and atmospheric turbulence in the boundary layer. Furthermore, early practitioners had almost no quality control in place to ensure against sample contamination. There's a reason why Keeling is famous in this area: he spent the 1950s through 1970s carefully demonstrating how flawed previous methods of measurement are. Beck's graph shows ridiculously huge fluctuations in global CO2 which, if they actually existed, would represent physically impossible changes in terrestrial and ocean sinks: the global biosphere and ocean mixed layer literally cannot exchange CO2 that quickly. You'd have to do something like burn down half the planetary biomass in a decade or two.
I wonder why you think that a graph by a random schoolteacher untrained and unpublished in the scientific literature overturns all other work in the field. (P.S. "Energy and Environment" is not a scientific journal, it's a vanity journal and dumping ground for crackpots.) I mean come on, have a little less credulity here. You're supposed to be a "skeptic", right? Then why do you uncritically accept any heterodox claim, no matter how absurd? Simply because you like to feel they're "sticking it to the man"? Or they agree with your political philosophy?
I did not read your article. If you will copy and paste the relevant part or present it for me in a free manner, I will be happy to review it.
That would violate copyright. You can try going to a university library. They will surely have it; Science is one of the top two scientific journals in the world, and pretty much every university subscribes to it.
As you cited an article saying that we are going to experience a longer interglacial (you know, the one I can't even read the abstract on), I'm going to shoot you one that says the opposite.
And, once again, you fail to cite anything from the scientific literature. You do realize the difference between a peer reviewed scientific publication a top scientific journal and a random web essay, don't you? I also note that your article is almost 10 years older than the work which re-evaluated the Milankovitch cycles and found that they favor a long interglacial.
It appears that you get your entire knowledge of climate science from skeptic web sites. Hell, the ice age article you cite is from an all-around crackpot site attacking quantum theory, relativity, biology, etc. Imagine my surprise.
I'm not going to the library for the purpose of this discussion. For now, let us agree to disagree. We'll see the new data from the spacecraft soon enough.
Here is something I found while looking for the sea shell study from the 70s. I couldn't find the one I mentioned earlier. Again, I don't think we should be using fossil fuels. We should be using oil solely for petrochem manufacturing like plastics, fertilizers, etc. My position is that I don't agree that we're going to have as drastic changes as people like you claim, and I don't think the solution is low-tech renewable energy. The solution is fast-breeder high tech nuclear energy (you know, the reactors that produce more fuel than they use). That's renewable, and it being high tech will save and boost all aspects of our industries should we produce them on a wide scale. I can't say the same for windmills. Advanced design nuclear plants should be rolled out while we have a full scale drive to fusion energy. If you impose renewable energy on us it's probably going to drain the last of our resources and doom humanity to a painful die down.
I don't really disagree with anything in your latest link (to UMich). But you should note that the paleoclimate data discussed there are still consistent with modern estimates of the climate sensitivity of CO2. The science does not support your position of a weak CO2 influence on climate; paleo and instrumental data as well as physical theory and modeling all agree on a climate sensitivity of 2-5 C (3 C is what's usually used in projections, so it could be about 50% larger or smaller than that).
I agree that we ought to be using oil only for petrochem manufacturing instead of just wasting it in combustion. However, it will take some time to make that transition.
Nuclear energy has its advantages, but it's not nearly a solution to climate change. At best, it's one component. To make a large dent in fossil fuel emissions in the first half of this century would require an infeasibly large rate of construction (like, one plant per week for decades). Eventually we can get there, but it would take long enough that large CO2 increases will still occur along with the resulting significant climate change. Also, it should be noted that breeder nuclear is still not truly renewable. Furthermore, it's more expensive than many renewables like solar. Finally, while I am pro-nuclear, it should still be acknowledged that there are serious unresolved issues with very large scale waste storage and, worse, nuclear proliferation. The latter is particularly important if we want developing countries to use non-fossil power sources, considering that many of them are not necessarily allies. Nuclear power providers haven't been even able to agree on a common, verified set of engineering standards and practices, which is one reason why the U.S. AEC under the Bush administration didn't end up giving out any new construction permits, despite desperately wanting to.
Fusion energy is not even on the table as anything useful this century. It takes a long time for new power sources to become widely deployed, particularly since new power plants don't replace existing plants until the latter are retired (50+ years). That means the sources relevant to this century need to start being deployed now or in the early decades of this century. Fusion may not even be prototype-ready in the first (or second!) half of this century, let alone deployed, let alone widely deployed.
I disagree that a shift to renewable energy is going to "doom humanity". It's not going to produce all our energy needs, but we can make a major shift towards it, coupled with energy efficiency initiatives.
Well, my general point is that this cycle has been going on for quite some time. I have a hard time seeing how these ongoing cycles are going to change. They believe that these CO2 cycles are only interrupted by ice ages, correct? We probably can't stop polar melting, but we can stop glacial advance if we had the motivation. If sea levels really are going to rise any significant amount, engineering projects could keep cities safe, and the waters at bay. Also, if we completely stop using fossil fuels, this cycle will continue, because it is fueled by various factors including astrological forces and gas release from the planet.
I'm glad to hear that there is one more pro-nuclear person in the world. They have a lot of benefits nobody is talking about like being able to produce hydrogen fuels from non-fossil origins, and fresh water for agriculture. These benefits are a lot greater than the benefits I can see from renewables.
You are absolutely right about the current rate for plant production. We're limited by the quantity of casing that Japan Steel can produce (currently enough for 4 plants per year). However, we can start producing them here in the US again if a government corporation would take over surplus steel production. Additionally various types of 4th gen plants can be manufactured in our auto-plants (if retooled). Again, I think a government company should take over the unused portion of our automotive sector to start making these things.
Currently we have approximately 100 plants in the US producing approximately 20% of the power we consume. We could replace the coal portion of our power production by building 250 more. Globally, we need 6000 GW of new power generation to support provide 1.5kw per capita, which would equate to 6000 new 1GW plants. This might seem daunting, but if we made an effort like we did during WW2, and fought this economic collapse like a war it's completely conceivable to make a recovery based on new power and water systems, and new high speed rail lines. It would also undo the net production decreases the world has experienced since it began to practice globalization. 6000 new plants might seem like a large number, but just imagine how many solar arrays or wind farms we'd need to do the same (and that power is only on some of the time, you always need a reliable backup power source).
I agree that disposal could be a problem for that many plants, but we should begin reprocessing again. Carter made a blunder... we should completely burn uranium. Even without reprocessing, if you took all the spent fuel we have ever produced, it will fill a football field 5 meters deep. Not too bad... especially considering that this spent fuel is a resource that we can extract new fuel from. Additionally, the 4% that is not recyclable contains valuable medical isotopes that can be further processed.
If fusion was properly funded the past 30 years as it should have been, I'm confident we'd have a commercially viable reactor by now. I think we should roll out as many 3rd and 4th gen fission plants as we can now, while investing heavily into experimental technologies like fusion. Renewables currently power less than 1% of our total energy, and most of that is biomass. I really think it's all hype.
About the costs: I thought nuclear was the 2nd cheapest power source next to natural gas for plant construction... how is solar cheaper? I know it survives on government subsidy... can you provide me with more information on that? Also something to keep in mind are the other byproducts of nuclear, like the hydrogen fuel that is possible to create, and the fresh water. These benefits should be factored in as well instead of just watt to dollar.
Well, my general point is that this cycle has been going on for quite some time. I have a hard time seeing how these ongoing cycles are going to change. They believe that these CO2 cycles are only interrupted by ice ages, correct?
The natural glacial-interglacial CO2 cycles are coupled to orbital variations, so that part of the cycle will keep going. However, we are currently greatly over-riding the natural CO2 cycle with our excess fossil fuel emissions. The natural glacial-to-interglacial transition is about 100 ppm, and we've already added another 100 ppm on top of that. Another 1000 ppm is quite possible without conscious effort to reduce fossil fuel emissions. Whether that will disrupt the long-term glacial cycle remains to be seen (but see here and Archer's new book The Long Thaw for a sobering discussion). However, it will most definitely disrupt natural CO2 fluctuations over the next few centuries.
We probably can't stop polar melting, but we can stop glacial advance if we had the motivation.
We probably can't stop polar melting, but we can slow and reduce it by quite a bit. This is especially important to avoid crossing the threshold for runaway melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which will add a lot more sea level rise and boreal warming.
If you're concerned about glacial advance, you should want to save our fossil fuels for later when we need them, instead of using them all up now when we don't.
If sea levels really are going to rise any significant amount, engineering projects could keep cities safe, and the waters at bay.
Up to a point, we could do it, but it would be very expensive considering the number of people and value of properties which are currently near the coast. With a potential multi-meter sea rise, you'd probably have to abandon a lot of the planet's current shoreline.
There are, of course, many other serious impacts of climate change besides sea level rise.
Also, if we completely stop using fossil fuels, this cycle will continue, because it is fueled by various factors including astrological forces and gas release from the planet.
That's true, but not really the point.
They have a lot of benefits nobody is talking about like being able to produce hydrogen fuels from non-fossil origins, and fresh water for agriculture. These benefits are a lot greater than the benefits I can see from renewables.
Any power source can do that (hydrogen separation, desalination, etc.), not just nuclear, unless you're referring to processes I haven't heard of.
You are absolutely right about the current rate for plant production. We're limited by the quantity of casing that Japan Steel can produce (currently enough for 4 plants per year). However, we can start producing them here in the US again if a government corporation would take over surplus steel production. Additionally various types of 4th gen plants can be manufactured in our auto-plants (if retooled).
I can't see us realistically producing power plants at the rate I described, especially given their costs and side effects, and the political climate. But a WWII-level effort might do it.
If fusion was properly funded the past 30 years as it should have been, I'm confident we'd have a commercially viable reactor by now.
I highly doubt that. In fact, I don't know if commercial fusion will ever be commercially viable.
About the costs: I thought nuclear was the 2nd cheapest power source next to natural gas for plant construction... how is solar cheaper?
New nuclear plants are actually rather expensive, and as you note, that's not even counting the fact that they're heavily subsidized. Take away the subsidies and they do even worse b
The Beer-Lambert Law is elementary physics and accurately predicts that there is more than sufficient CO2 already in the atomosphere to absorb your 'upwelling IR' within a few hundreds of meters of the ground. The re-radiated IR is in a much wider wavelength distribution, only a very tiny portion of which can be re-absorbed by CO2. I know you will not understand this basic principle but maybe there's always the hope that someone else might. It's unbelievable that such obviously false ideas can become widely accepted without question. The world may have been warming up until 2007 but it was obviously not due to rising carbon dioxide levels.
We're already exploiting coal and can easily ramp up global production.
No we can't...because the supply of coal (and the market for it) is limited. At CURRENT production rates, there are an estimated 133 years of coal reserves remaining. However, much of that coal lies at great depths and will only be extracted at great difficulty and expense. A similar situation exists for petroleum reserves. There is no bountiful future supply of either of these and your stupid forecasts based on quadurupling production over the next 50 years are just...nonsense.
If coal liquifaction is economical relative to electric vehicles, you'll continue to see internal combustion; otherwise, you'll get a fleet of coal-driven electric vehicles.) And, in case you didn't notice, lots of people use electricity, and lots more want to.
The basic chemistry of coal means that 'Coal liquifaction' is never going to be a commercial source of internal combustion fuel. That has only been done in a time of war and desperation, produced a very low quality fuel, and was abandoned as soon as possible. Coal gasification has been done on a commercial scale for at least one hundred years, has only been done when a supply of natural gas was not available, and was quickly abandoned when natural gas supplies appeared. As well as a multitude of other problems, coal gasification produces an extremely toxic byproduct residue ("coal tar") that has required major expenditures to clean up at dozens of former coal gasification sites. Coal-fired electricity generation power plants are your only hope for any new use of coal and most of world is shutting existing such facilities down as they age. Most new electricity generation is coming from natural gas turbines, hydroelectric , and wind power. The new Three Gorges Dam in China can generate 22.5 gigawatts of electricity, which is roughly equivalent to 20 nuclear power plants. The State of Texas currently has over 5 gigawatts of wind turbine power generation capacity in operation with more planned. These kinds of projects are not being done to save the world from your stupid carbon dioxide nightmare scenarios. They are being done because they make money...a lot of money. You seem to think that coal mining is an enormous growth industry so let's see you go out and invest your personal money in...coal mining companies. You'll be rich...not.
The temperature mixing between a thermally-excited CO2 molecule and its nearby neighbors is essentially instantaneous as collisions between molecules in a gas mixture are continuous and frequent and such collisions transfer heat as a result. Therefore, the temperature of any cubic centimenter of atmosphere is essentially uniform. With your comment, you are looking at gross mixing in the atmosphere on a much larger scale which is a different process.
The re-radiated IR is in a much wider wavelength distribution, only a very tiny portion of which can be re-absorbed by CO2.
Yes, IR is radiated over a wide distribution. The same is true of radiation from the Earth's surface. That doesn't prevent a non-negligible portion from being absorbed by CO2 as it radiates upward.
The world may have been warming up until 2007 but it was obviously not due to rising carbon dioxide levels.
A non sequitur. As I noted in my first response, the models do have an approximately logarithmic forcing-concentration relationship, and they do predict an unamplified 1.2 C warming to 2xCO2. Citing these facts as if they somehow contradict model predictions of CO2-induced warming is completely bizarre. If you want to make an argument that models overpredict CO2-induced warming, you can't do it by agreeing with their quantification of radiative transfer. Try again.
NAt CURRENT production rates, there are an estimated 133 years of coal reserves remaining.
There is certainly more than "133 years" worth of coal remaining. A proven reserve is not "the amount of exploitable fuel in the ground". OPEC roughly doubled their "proven reserves" of oil overnight in the 1980s merely by changing their extraction policies. Did twice as much oil magically appear under their soil? No. A "proven reserve" is something that is economically likely to be extracted under today's demand, under today's market regulations, and with today's technology.
(Note also that the amount of time before we run out of coal isn't even the right figure if you're talking about 2100 CO2 concentrations . If production rates increase and we run out sooner, then that just increases the amount of CO2 that gets burned by 2100, since you're running through the same supply only faster.)
Personally, I'm "optimistic" that the coal supply will end up limiting us to 2x preindustrial CO2 this century, absent uncertain carbon cycle feedbacks (which could add a couple hundred ppm). (Optimistic as far as the climate is concerned; of course, from a broader perspective it's not good to run out of a cheap energy source.) But there's certainly enough coal there for more, and whether we end up extracting more depends on how quickly the world (not just the U.S.) can universally transition to non-fossil energy sources. I'm not so optimistic about that.
The basic chemistry of coal means that 'Coal liquifaction' is never going to be a commercial source of internal combustion fuel. That has only been done in a time of war and desperation, produced a very low quality fuel, and was abandoned as soon as possible.
As I said, it depends on whether it's economical; otherwise, electric vehicles will be the alternative. Whether it's economical in turn depends on how desperate we are for liquid fuel when petroleum starts to run out. And by "we", I mean the world, not just the U.S.
Most new electricity generation is coming from natural gas turbines, hydroelectric , and wind power.
Tell that to China, who has been building more than one new coal plant per week. That will probably run its course over the next few decades, but other developing countries are lining up to do the same. Coal is cheap and although its price will increase, it's likely to remain the cheapest electricity generation alternative for quite some time to come. Excluding emissions regulations, the marginal cost of building a new coal plant is lower than other technologies of equivalent capacity, excepting hydro which is already mostly tapped out. Coal isn't being ramped up in the U.S. for power generation because they're afraid of getting hit with an emissions cap or carbon taxes over the lifetime of a new plant (which they probably will be), not because other technologies are so much cheaper in comparison. When I talk about "business-as-usual" emissions scenarios, I'm r
Yes, IR is radiated over a wide distribution. The same is true of radiation from the Earth's surface. That doesn't prevent a non-negligible portion from being absorbed by CO2 as it radiates upward.
You are finally conceding that the re-radiated IR is not concentrated in the narrow CO2 absorption band. Progress. As I said, though, the re-radiated IR is in a much wider wavelength distribution, only a very tiny portion of which can be re-absorbed by CO2.
As I noted in my first response, the models do have an approximately logarithmic forcing-concentration relationship, and they do predict an unamplified 1.2 C warming to 2xCO2.
Elementary physics establish that there is more than sufficient CO2 in the atmosphere NOW to absorb all of the IR radiating from the earth's surface in the narrow CO2 absorption bands. The best (and most 'optimistic' to your side) estimate is that increasing CO2 concentrations to 580 ppm would result in an increase in global average temperatures of 1.2C which is not going to cause any global catastrophe or melting. At the present, the atmospheric CO2 is only 32 percent of the way towards even that result. Since a linear temperature increase requires an exponential CO2 concentration increase, this means that most of even that modest 1.2C increase will be...later. Again...the world may have been warming up until 2007 but the temperature increase was NOT due to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Tell that to China, who has been building more than one new coal plant per week.
They can build all of the plants they want (your numbers are doubtful and unverifiable) but there simply is not enough coal on the world market to sustain such an increase over time, nor will there be.