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China's Coal Power Plants Mask Climate Change
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports on new research revealing that the huge increase in coal-fired power stations in China, up from just over 10 gigawatts (GW) in 2002 to over 80GW in 2006, has masked the impact of global warming in the last decade because of the cooling effect of their sulphur emissions. But scientists warn that rapid warming is likely to resume when the short-lived sulphur pollution – which also causes acid rain – is cleaned up and the full heating effect of long-lived carbon dioxide is felt. 'Reductions in carbon emissions will be more important as China installs scrubbers [on its coal-fired power stations], which reduce sulphur emissions,' says Dr. Robert Kaufman. 'This, and solar insolation increasing as part of the normal solar cycle, [will mean] temperature is likely to increase faster.' The effect also explains the lack of global temperature rise seen between 1940 and 1970 as the effect of the sulphur emissions from increased coal burning outpaced that of carbon emissions, until acid rain controls were introduced, after which temperature rose quickly. 'Warming due to the CO2 released by Chinese industrialization has been partially masked by cooling due to reflection of solar radiation by sulphur emissions,' says Prof Joanna Haigh. 'On longer timescales, with cleaner emissions, the warming effect will be more marked.'"
'Reductions in carbon emissions will be more important as China installs scrubbers [on its coal-fired power stations], which reduce sulphur emissions,'
So basically never?
Scrubbers have been required in America since the 1977 revisions to the Clean Air Act. And they're still not used in China. My understanding of the situation (although, full disclaimer I do not speak Chinese nor have I ever been to China) is that the companies simply don't follow regulation. The latest news is that they just move to non-urban areas to avoid such regulation:
Carlson Chan is in charge of air quality policy at Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department. He says companies found ways around the stricter limits.
"When we tightened the sulfur content of industrial diesel from 0.5 percent to 0.005 percent in 1998, the resistance then was not very big, mainly because many manufacturers have moved their factories across the border," he said.
Just across Hong Kong's border is Guangdong province, the center of China’s export industry. As the factories there multiplied, the air pollution returned to Hong Kong.
I found it impossibly hard to believe that it's cheaper to move your entire operation than install scrubbers -- failing that, surely a bribe is cheaper. So I dug around and as recent as 2006 the cost seems to be very high (anyone know today's rates?):
The average cost for scrubbers today (2006) is roughly $300 per kilowatt. For a 1,000-megawatt power plant, a relatively common size for coal-fired facilities, the cost for scrubbers for all boilers would be approximately $300 million.
I guess that would be a death knell for a Chinese company (and, let's face it, much of Asia is guilty of over polluting). If China introduces "regulation" that would stunt their free market, the free market simply circumvents it one way or another. It's the story time and time again in China and I think that a large part of their government is complacent with it because their economy is comparatively gangbusters.
... it's going to cost everyone eventually. But oooh, that free market fueled cheap shit at Wal-Mart is just so tantalizing! How can you not buy it? Everybody wins (except the environment)!
And when a country trades with China, they're just exporting their pollution. I mean, we're all on the same planet
My work here is dung.
It's there, you just don't see it.
The last decade was simultaneously the hottest on record, and we did not see a warming trend. Clearly we need more money for our research.
Doesn't this give us a steer towards a short-term fix? Not my area, but if the doomsayers are right, and evidence suggests they may well be, then we could offset warming with some floating mirrors or something. Or get kids around the world to fly tinfoil kites. Or just pump some more dust up there. I realise this is not the solution but it is a genuine question.
Indubitably!
If The Global-Warming-Junque-Science-Promulgators want to be taken seriously (instead of just scooping up grant money), they need to take into account variations in the solar cycle, which very few do.
These 'scientists' with Phds, and you with...? Probably not much.
Except the ability to jerk off at the keyboard while thinking about how much smarter you are with all of your common sense that the 'elite' scientists lack hey?
This is going to be taken by both supporters and detractors of Climate Change: Warming Trend as evidence for their cause. Let me go get the popcorn.
Nothing productive will come of this so I might as well sit back and enjoy the fireworks. Nevermind we are trying to figure out a complex model as it changes under conditions that about as far from scientifically controlled as possible. My only hope is we don't accidentally cause an Ice Age trying to fix this.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
Didn't China sign on to the Kyoto Protocol? Of course China is categorized as a "developing nation" which means that they aren't subject to as stringent a reduction in emissions as an "industrialized" nation such as the US would be.
These 'scientists' really make me laugh...
Because they are all the time revising their models and theories in order to make them more acurate? What a stupid thing for a scientist to do!
Anyway, I have some snake oil to sell you for your headaches... you know, your grand-grandfather used it, so it is sure it works!
Why can't
This is why many American companies outsource manufacturing to china. lax regulations, and those regulations are ignored. It's far cheaper to make your phone in a location where waste can be dumped into the stream behind the building or just thrown into the trash stream and bury those heavy metals in the landfill.
But as long as we ignore that and enjoy low priced products it will all be ok.
Environmental regulations hurt jobs and business! And because of them, business has to outsource overseas because they won't be able to compete! And then there are the taxes .... American business has to go overseas for the cheap labor and the lower taxes in order to compete with the rest of the World.
Translation:
We want to lower our costs to the bare minimum so the CEO and other executives can get filthy rich off of the backs of the workers and shareholders all the while poisoning the people and land of foreign nations because their leaders want to enrich themselves - (fascist) capitalism working with despots.
In the meantime, the super rich propaganda machine has brain washed us peons into thinking that if we work hard and get educated, we too can one day join their ranks - it's a given! As long as we can keep those pesky environmental regulations and taxes low for the very wealthy ($10 million+ assets) out of the way.
In the meantime, the entire World spirals down economically and ecologically and the super rich hang out on their yachts and private jets.
Want to know who to go after? Get the Gulfstream, Bombardier, Cessna (Citation Jets), and the other "corporate jet" makers client lists and then get the individuals behind those corporations.
Does this mean that I'm supposed to be pro-pollution or pro-global warming? As some people age, they can't figure out the remote control. Me, I have trouble keeping up with the world-ending-panic-du-jour.
"I know that every word that man just said is true, because it's EXACTLY what I wanted to hear." -- Space Ghost
Who would've ever thought that Walmart's slogan could be taken so literally!
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
The only thing you have to do is to inject the sulphur dioxide or similar stuff into the stratosphere which has hardly any weather and as such it will stay there for a long enough time to make the whole operation feasible , and rather cheap.
We had a talk of it at the university - one of the professors in there is working on the delivery system - you have to pump quite a quantity of material quite high... besides the tubes have to hold themselves up (by baloon / air anchor)
Good thing then that sulphur scrubbers had already been installed on Nabro, Grímsvötn, Puyehue, etc. etc. Wouldn't want them to interfere (see last sentence of the paragraph) with global warming.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Perhaps the supposed rise in temperature in recent decades isn't due to CO2 emission; perhaps our nasty coal plants in the west prior to that were holding off an increase by putting aerosols in the air, and cleaning them up unmasked that effect.
If coal plants really have this sort of major effect, and they aren't accounted for in the much-vaunted climate models, the models are pretty much junk. If they are accounted for, why is this news?
When I leave the freezer door open and everything melts I don't blame the cooling system for not working well enough, I close the fucking door!
I'm not sure how Mann and Co. can keep a straight face whilst publishing rubbish like this. They've basically tweaked an existing computer model - one that did not in any way conform to actual reality - and added further fudge factors to make things balance out and *shock* it does! That is to say, rather than admitting the CO2 hypothesis is wrong and that changes in solar activity and the oceans are more convincing explanations, they prefer to fiddle around with what is an over-parametrised model.
The entire paper is predicated on the assumption that the climate model (and climate models in general) code for sufficient amounts of internal variability. Given that models rarely, if ever, show this, one can safely say that they do not and that they are therefore invalid.
Mod parent down, he's completely and utterly wrong.
..America's industrial pollution, being the product of democracy, leads to a surfeit of hot air, which will cause the climate to change.
Chinese pollution, made by communists, cancels out the democratic American pollution and so overall nothing happens either way.
'zat it?
So.. it has come to this
The Sun's input into global climate is well studied and acknowledged by climate scientists. However, the Sun itself is not the primary driver of climate change because it has been in a solar minimum while some so-called skeptics have been claiming it's driving the temperature increase. The point is that we may start seeing additional temperature increase that is actually attributed to the sun, which will be further inflated by our CO2 emissions.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Right, the problem is that they don't understand the solar cycle.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It may affect warming, but it doesn't fix ocean acidification
Let's overlook the fact that we have a big fat admission that temperatures haven't been going up for about a decade and how no one wanted to readily admit that to the public...
Global warming theory, as presently constructed, can't be falsified. "The theory's valid! It's the sulfur, the ocean cycles, the -fill in reasons for lack of warming-."
How can we even disprove this current assertion? They have no idea.
At the very least, this gives credence to the Freakanomics folks. Instead of wrecking the world's economy, how about we just shoot sulfur in the upper part of our atmosphere if you are worried about global warming?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Sorry, it is more like
1: Use scientific data to show we are all going to die from global warming unless we make changes.
2: Suggest government regulation of CO2. Something everyone produces by breathing.
3: Start company selling Carbon Credits.
4: PROFIT!
There is no profit in fixing the problem and the government does not get more power by fixing it. Therefor it will not be fixed.
No, burning coal without scrubbers releases both CO2 and SO2. CO2 has a long term warming effect, SO2 has a temporary cooling effect. Overall it's still climate change and with a long term warming effect.
Actually, when "The Icelandic Volcano" erupted, it was calculated that the decrease in airline activity was a net gain in terms of CO2, even with the volcano factored in.
From the figures on the spreadsheet, just the world airline industry dwarfs world volcanic CO2 emissions with over 3.5 times more CO2
If The Global-Warming-Junque-Science-Promulgators want to be taken seriously (instead of just scooping up grant money), they need to take into account variations in the solar cycle, which very few do.
Given that solar cycle 24 (the current one) has failed to behave that's normal. You can't include what you don't understand in your calculations. Of course that means that the predictions in AR4 are as wrong as the ones in AR1, 2 and 3 (AR1 and 2 because it's far cooler than predicted in their 95% certain intervals. AR3 we're at the bottom of the 95% certainty interval and dropping fast, and AR4, which does not actually predict temperature, but does include a prediction for solar cycle 24 which has now turned out to be flat out wrong).
But don't worry "the science is settled" (btw : I not a denialist : the science that termperature rised (past tense) due to increased co2 emissions during 2 periods in the past 2 centuries, that I believe. That any organisation can predict temperature variation 100 years out, or even give a faint idea what effects will be dominating temperatures even 10 years out, now that's bullshit). Climate is chaotic, and attempting to predict the climate ... is impossible. And before you say "but computer models ...", yes, but any computer model that can predict a chaotic system would be able to predict every last stock curve, and even lotto numbers. Know of any such models ? Thought so. Why climate predicting models get any more credibility than any other "get rich quick with stocks and bonds" book, now that is beyond me. Why can't scientists simply say the truth ?
Science is incapable of providing reasonable predictions for any chaotic system. This is not a "current level of science" issue, solved with bigger supercomputers, it's a fundamental mathematical issue. It is *far* easier to break 9999999999999999 bit private key encryption than to predict the climate, so presumably we'll learn that one first. Solving chaotic problems, like predicting the climate, is NP-hard. If you find a working climate model, you can literally solve any NP-hard problem, from traveling salesman for absurd numbers of cities, to reverse folding (ie. taking an atomic structure, any atomic structure, and creating a DNA code that produces that structure), to breaking every known form of encryption.
So why is it so hard to believe that every prediction is wrong ? We have
1) historical predictions have turned out to be wrong. Not just those from the IPCC, but almost every climate prediction since the 1950's has turned out wrong
2) there are fundamental theoretical issues that prevent any exact or statistical prediction (and if you think that you can still do statistical modeling, please slap yourself and grab an advanced theoretical statistics book and look up if that's true or not)
Yet we base huge policy decisions on a chaotic system. We are mad, and we will get burned badly.
Even I can spot bullshit from my armchair. Completely dismissing 30 years of evidence just because it doesn't conform to your pet idea--that's bullshit. And it's not how science is supposed to work.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Remove those scubbers from American plants!!
Grand claims are needed (if you're referring to the claim "anthropogenic air pollution very probably results in significant warming of Earth's climate", which is pretty much the biggest claim scientists made). There's a reason to think that way, and that reason has been questioned by tens of thousands of capable minds over the course of decades. Intelligent humans would listen to the warning, and act even when the above is not completely certain. Nothing can ever be completely certain, but scientific results will always be the closest thing.
By the way, we *are* able to predict the weather to a known level of accuracy, which is also rather high for short-term forecasts. Climate simulation is the same thing but much simpler (because we don't care about where and when it will be what temperature, only the average), but of course more difficult because of other reasons. That said, there are many uncertainties, some so uncertain that no value is given, but their range *is* known. The possible ranges can be read in the IPCC documents from 2007. This-and-that effect cannot be bigger than some limit, and these values are quite trustworthy, because if some effect was HUGE, then it would necessarily also be evident. The sun's impact is actually pretty well known - the changes in power output have been much too small to account for detected changes.
The temperature measurement network isn't grand, but it's also not giving out random numbers. We know that. The numbers don't look random. The signal-to-noise ratio is big enough that we can use those numbers, and other effects are accounted for (right, some thermometers are next to asphalt, but guess what - asphalt warms up the ground, there's now more asphalt than 50 years ago, thus asphalt indeed contributes to global warming (I suppose these effects go under the label of "land use" in IPCC documents if you want to look it up)).
Scientists are sceptics and continue to be that. But this means more than just questioning findings. Turns out the scientists have long ago researched the problem of how good their results are, and the 2007 report was groundbreaking indeed because then, for the first time ever, scientists concluded their results are "very probably correct". And mind you, their result was that the humans cause warming in the range of 0.6 - 2.4 watts per square meter. Of course there's always a tradeoff between dependability and accuracy of some result, now the numbers add up such that scientists can very confidently say something that's very approximate, but still useful.
By the way, the biggest uncertainty in climate forecasts is the amount of pollution humans spew out in the future. How would they know that? They wouldn't. We might be able to cut pollution by 50% in 20 years, or we might quadruple it in the same time frame. No way to know.
That's what I hate about scientists: such consistent grant whores. How we ever learned anything at all from them is just beyond me.
Revelation 16:8 The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and the sun was given power to scorch people with fire. 9 They were seared by the intense heat and they cursed the name of God, who had control over these plagues, but they refused to repent and glorify him.
Reading all the ways scientists anticipate we are screwing up the planet sounds like a refresher on Revelation.
- Jasen.
This.
Seriously - we hear so many radical and emotional viewpoints, that rational discussion can't get a word in edge-wise.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
One of the major costs of installing scrubbers is building a whopping great big ash dam and moving a lot of water around. You need that to an extent with only small units so the cost per MW is going to be very high compared with a larger plant. It's nothing like a linear cost and playing with numbers as if it is will dump you deep into the land of ridiculous bullshit at either extreme.
Also there's a lot less sulphur in Chinese coal than some of the unfortunate stuff the USA is stuck with, but they are burning a lot so that's why it's looking worse than the USA before pollution controls.
Anyway things are getting so bad in China that pollution controls will be enforced more strongly fairly soon and being China some plant managers will probably get executed for blatant contempt of pollution regulations.
"Earth's climate swings hotter-colder-hotter-colder."
Yes. Yes it does. It does so seasonally. It does so on El Nino / La Nina decadal scale. It does so on ~100k glacial/interglacial scale. It does so on ~250Ma "Icehouse/Greenhouse" scale. The question is, what cyclic process accounts for the average temperature increase of the last century or two? That's not clear at all. Furthermore, we can see secular, long-term changes that are pretty unique over geological time, such as the dramatic changes in the isotopic composition of the CO2 in the atmosphere that are caused by introducing so much "old" carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
And, no, humans do not put out less CO2 than one volcano. There are various estimates of human CO2 output, but it is more than 30 000 Mt/year and increasing. Total output from volcanoes is tougher to estimate, but is about 300 Mt/year on land [PDF]. Estimates for total output inclusive of underwater volcanism vary widely because of the uncertainties, but those totals are all less than 500 Mt/year [PDF], and some are less than 200Mt/year. Any way you slice it, this is far less than human input, let alone the comparatively minuscule amount from a *single* typical volcanic eruption. Even if you take some of the biggest eruptions in deep geological history, far in excess of eruptions that have occurred in historical times, humans still rank highly or on par with them. These sorts of "supereruptions" are rare things -- once in 100000 to million-year events. Think "Yellowstone Caldera" scale, which erupted about 2 million years ago. In effect, it's as if we're pumping CO2 into the atmosphere on the scale of some of these "biggest eruptions in Earth history" every single year, but without the mitigating effect of as much airborne ash or sulphate particles. An insightful calculation in the second article above is to use the well-studied, second-largest eruption of the last century as a measure -- the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 in the Philippines. It produced ~50 Mt of CO2 output. The equivalent of human CO2 output would be more than 600 Pinatubos a year (conservatively -- the article uses more realistic numbers and gets 700 Pinatubos/year).
You're promoting a "volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans" myth that has been shown to be wrong many times. It's not even in the ballpark. It's several orders of magnitude wrong. This does not inspire confidence.
I did manage to find one situation where your statement might be considered correct -- for a period of a few hours in a major volcanic eruption the output may be on par or greater than human CO2 output. It's explained in more detail in the second article above. But that's only briefly during the peak eruption. It's not sustained day-in, day-out, every hour over years like human outputs are. It would be pretty misleading to refer to that momentary comparison as if it was relevant in any general sense. Averaged over a year, those momentary volcanic spikes in CO2 output are pretty irrelevant.
..regardless of which method the hairless apes select to justify controlling each other, every 75Kyears, where I'm sitting right now will be covered with two miles of ice alternating with a nice limestone producing inland sea.
WOAH! Which religion did that just come from?
Right, it has been covered by ice periodically in recent times. But only in recent millennia when there hasn't been much CO2 in the atmosphere. There have been very long periods without significant glaciation on Earth. CO2 levels are already much higher than ever before during recent glaciation events, and we might very well be in for another 250 million years without ice.
That's the key, see. Our emissions have already pushed the climate system of Earth beyond the boundaries of what it has been during the last few millions of years. The current ice age started 2.6 million years ago (with alternating glacials and interglacials), and it might be over in 1000 years. Before the current ice age there was 250 million years without glacial periods.
2: Increase albedo of earth
You forgot to mention that this can be achieved by deforestation.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Death to the counter-revolutionary running-dog lackeys of the imperialist Rationality-Industrial complex!
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Jesus, +4 insightful? This is scientific ignorance at its peak, and nearly pure ad hominem.
The point of science is that it stands up to arguments like this _easily_. And the fact that its modded up here on slashdot, of all places, makes me sad.
.
I love how the global climate change believers are so quick to blame the U.S. on the grounds that the U.S. uses roughly 25% of the world's energy. Correlation does not equal causation. But if it did, why isn't the causation China's industrialization which exactly tracks the hockey-stick graph? It's not like they're going whole-hog on "green" energy.
Since nobody is actually measuring all the stuff that is going up the stack in China any attempt to account for it is going to be a fairly rough estimate.
Lol...
University degree in physics, if you must know... Then again, I jerk off once in a while... don't you? ;-)
Of course, this is the exact opposite of what you're imply - they thought of something not taken into account by the model and demonstrated that it matched the existing evidence. (That part is also old news; it's been well known for a while that pollution reduced global temperatures over that time period. The interesting bit is that China is apparently polluting enough to have the same effect.)
Jesus, +4 insightful? This is scientific ignorance at its peak, and nearly pure ad hominem.
The point of science is that it stands up to arguments like this _easily_. And the fact that its modded up here on slashdot, of all places, makes me sad.
Scientific insight not ignorance.
None of the players are even trying to do science, so don't feel bad that they're not overly scientific.
All the players are scamming for money, glory, and most of all, control. The scientists are just a tiny subset of the "all players" therefore they're scammers.
If you want science, you won't find it in the global warming debate, or at least it'll be buried under megatons of garbage from both sides.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The point of science is that it stands up to arguments like this _easily_.
The problem is that insofar as the public policy pronouncements of scientists prominent in the AGW debate go his characterizations are not entirely off the mark. There is a great deal of good science being done by climatologists, but none of it is nearly good enough to justify the policy pronouncements that get made on the basis of it, many of which are lightly warmed-over statist policies from the last century.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Sigh... ok... let's go there one more time, since I obviously overestimated some of you. I expected at least some historical background:
First: There has been no global warming in the last decade (if there ever was). There is ample proof of that, and I am not even going to link to it.
Second: Climate 'alarmists', which are sometimes also scientists, have been very puzzled by this, trying everything in their power to dispute this fact and when this no longer worked, 'explaining' it away.
Third: Now they finally come up with something which looks suspiciously like a mistake made before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
Coupled with climategate this whole situation looks laughable to me. Also it makes me look at these scientists with some degree of disdain, hence 'scientists'.
I have an university degree myself and I am well versed in statistics and model building. More so than most, I must add. I read a lot of what these people produce and never have I seen a well-validated (using historical data) model for these claimed manmade warming effects. I _do_ see a lot of data fitting and data massaging going on and it smells bad, I will tell you. A respected scientist once said something along these lines: "If you torture your data long enough, it will finally confess". That seems to be what is going on here. You can mod me down all you want, but that won't help a thing. It only makes you look more foolish...
There are plenty of serious scientists studing AGW and getting to serious conclusions. The problem is, they didn't take part on that "conversation" you report, because they are studing AWG, not doing PR.
On a related problem, how do we hear the people that don't want to talk to us?
Rethinking email
This is all silly because some US Senators have assured me global warning does not exist. I saw it on TV, it must be true! They wouldn't lie, would they?
A lot of them have "converted" to teabagger already.
it's only temporary if they quit dumping it into the atmosphere, like CO2, if we quit dumping it in the atmosphere, it too will be reduced over time, granted, maybe not as quickly.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
Does anyone have access to the National Academy of Science paper referenced in TFA? Are the sulfur emissions countering global warming through a global dimming mechanism?
The average cost for scrubbers today (2006) is roughly $300 per kilowatt. For a 1,000-megawatt power plant, a relatively common size for coal-fired facilities, the cost for scrubbers for all boilers would be approximately $300 million.
I won't dispute this- the numbers are probably in the ballpark. But we also have to consider the opportunity cost. Typically you build the scrubber while the unit is running, then connect it when it is shut down. For a 1GW plant to be offline for 42 or 49 days (a reasonable time to do the work), you are losing massive amounts of money in opportunity since you are not being profitable. Most places quote the standard "million dollars a day" figure, although that may be higher or lower. Then if the plant belongs to a utility (as opposed to a independent plant) they have to buy the power from someone else so they can supply their customers. That costs them too.
Scrubbers create a big loss on the system too. They are a big restriction on the boiler, and require various power sucking apparatus. The plant efficiency drops (around 4-8%). The plant either has to eat this- forever, costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in the future, or find a way to get this back through turbine upgrades, boiler upgrades, or some other way.
Its pretty easy for a scrubber project to cost a billion dollars.
Scrubbers have been required in America since the 1977 revisions to the Clean Air Act.
This is a big blanket statement. The Clean Air Act has been revised many times over the years. Many coal plants are only now having to consider installing scrubbers of the type which we are talking about here. For many plants, it is a decision which means spending a billion dollars or closing the plant. I do think that we should have scrubbers on the plants, but we are at the point where we have clean coal and Washington keeps wanting to pile on more regulation. When is enough?
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Humans put out less CO2 than one volcano.
Please quantify that claim. Other sources differ from your assertion.
From the linked article:
There is no doubt that volcanic eruptions add CO2 to the atmosphere, but compared to the quantity produced by human activities, their impact is virtually trivial: volcanic eruptions produce about 110 million tons of CO2 each year, whereas human activities contribute almost 10,000 times that quantity.
I'll grant that the article is not numerically specific, but it is more credible than an Anonymous Coward. I'm willing to consider better supported alternatives, but this will be my working hypothesis for the moment.
WALSTIB!
China has shown that they will cheat at everything. They are required to have scrubbers per treaties with Japan. The thing is, that ALL OF THEIR 10 year old or less plants have scrubbers on them. They are simply not turned on. WHy? Because they costs MONEY. The fact is, that China cheats on just about everything. So, how does this impact Kyoto? It shows that other nations that are way behind will realize that all they have to do is cheat to get ahead. If kyoto were to happen, many nations will follow CHina's path. As it is, many are cheating by manipulating their money. Now, if other nations think that they can grab large amounts of manufacturing from America, just by adding loads of 'cheap' energy, they will do so. The fact is, that Kyoto was one of the worst ideas going, and remains so.
If we want to solve this issue, then America should tax ALL GOODS including imports based on where final and primary sub-component come from and their CO2 Emissions. The CO2 emissions should be monitored by sat and should watch how much Co2 flows in and out. Then apply it at a rate of PER SQ KM, rather than per capita (fairer and takes into account everything).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Extreme weather such as tornadoes are diminishing
Links? CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that is obviously true, hence it will push our climate through a tipping point, that is obviously not true. It has been 10-20 times higher before yet we are here.
Links that show when Man was around in which CO2 was 10-20 x higher?
Here is a clue: You will not find links for EITHER of those. The fact is, that weather is not calming down. Nor has CO2 been 10-20 higher during man's time as you imply.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hey, A john bircher still lives.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, I have no issue voting for a Republican. The problem is that the Republican party has been hijacked by neo-cons and they are NOT republicans. Worse, many of these a55holes have been working their way into the Libertarian Party. I swear the next time I hear one of those idiots get up and push anti-abortion issues at a meeting, I will simply punch him (always a guy) in the face. There is free speech, but I am now sick and tired of these MFers coming to our meetings and pushing neo-con and tea* crap into the meetings.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
all of this pollution remained in China. The problem is that CHina's pollution is going everywhere. Right now, they have accounted for more than 1/2 of ALL mercruy that man has EVER emitted. Likewise, in THIS DECADE, China will account for 1/2 of all CO2 that man has emitted. And that assumes that CHina is actually cleaning up their CO2 like they PROMISED (keep in mind that China's treaties, let alone word, is worthless).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Maybe he meant that the CO2 Humans personally breath out is less than a single volcano. I could see that being true.
We are rapidly approaching a "world is flat" stupidity level on global warming skeptics. Skepticism is not always justified or acceptable -- "prove it to me" is not something we need to do for every lazy moron who can't or will not learn enough to understand the answers; their ignorance becomes a virtue to their anti-science position-- if they don't understand then you are trying to fool them and if they will not make a real effort (or are too stupid) then you will never get them out of that position. The whole thing is merely a defensive tactic to protect their ego/emotions like a childish game of saying "Why?" until the other person gets annoyed. (BTW, even science can't hold up for long against an incessant "WHY" tactic; which is infinite in scope.)
I say "anti-science" because this level of skepticism is merely a game masking a belief that the majority of experts who take a great deal of time and education mean nothing compared with a few individual's ignorant beliefs and often admitted lack of experience (often they only have just a few choice talking points.)
Sure, there are cases when the majority of experts are wrong; but it is rare and in science it is extremely rare and for the individual to not be a trained expert and come out on top of the majority of experts -- probably never happened in the last century. Then you hear the real fools claim that its a conspiracy and scientists with proper training are suspect because they were brainwashed-- when anybody who has been educated in science is not likely to make such a claim (unless the "experts" are defined and endorsed by a cult or something.)
I have talked with people who have emotional issues with college educated and "elite" experts who were unable to succeed in their own education; they likely have been burned in their past by people who were smarter than them so they take general positions on such matters which is understandable; however, when it rises to such stupid levels there is more going on than their insecurities surfacing-- they are being fooled and manipulated (again by smarter people) and they don't see it possibly because its leveraging their related deeper problems along those lines; could be they can't "get it" because its that is too complex for them, but more likely it is even more unpleasant and painful to be tricked in such a way (because it requires admitting even more than just losing their position.)
We shame people who can't read. they'd lie rather than admit they can't read. math isn't the same, but it should be. Scientific consensus should be similar-- they use science in their lives that has less confidence behind it but because their belief (and even identity/ego) is involved they ignore the hypocrisy and get unreasonable. Now expert disagreement is fine--- or the whole group being wrong that is also fine because they do the best they can with what they've got (and its a whole lot more than what the non experts / non scientists have.)
Well, that is my working theory of the situation. I study some foxtard "friends" as a hobby ("friends" because I can't trust such gullible zealots especially when they know I'm on "the other side".)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The specifics are new but global dimming is not new. NOVA did a whole show on it:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Right, the problem is that they don't understand the solar cycle.
Maybe they do understand it, but they haven't dumbed down the population enough to be able to convince them that a NWO can actually enable them to manipulate the sun's output. But, convincing them that their NWO can manipulate the planet's climate, well, that seems to be working.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I have basically come to grips with the fact that these people are going to continually publish bad science to get their carbon taxes in place, and they eventually will get them because most people are just plain stupid.
Sometimes I wonder if anyone out there has a brain. Global warming in this context is sort of a "gee whiz" sorta thing, like "gee whiz" you know all that climate data we rigged to show it was warming?
Turns out the Chinese are culprits and they are going to kill us all! See! We _told_ you so. Now give us your tax money.
Sorta goes back to a gee whiz moment people have when they are watching CNN or Fox and all of a sudden the leeeeetle light goes on in their head which prompts them to notice that all of the worlds terrorists just happen to live in countries with lots of natural resources like oil, or lithium and just happen to not have a central privatized banking system.
Awe, and whata cute weee leeetle light it is.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
You're fishing. Man didn't have to be around to be a proof that atmospheric physics allows 10-20 times higher CO2 without reaching an instability. Atmospheric physics will be unchanged, humans present or not.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/severeweather/tornadoes.html
Scroll down to the bottom. Strongest tornado frequency would seem to appear around 1970 which is also at the bottom of the cooling period that begun around 1945.
Of course the question I have is can't China simply make cheaper scrubbers? They might be substandard by other measures, but probably better than nothing, and they make everything else cheaper, why not that?
And which moron are you? The one that suggest that truth cannot be learnt because everyone is lying because of their obscure interests?
You missed that one...
Why can't
This doesn't make sense to me. If, when any contradictory data arises, you simply change the test conditions (the model), how is anyone ever to prove the hypothesis invalid? If you keep moving the goalpost by altering the model to better portray the conclusion you wish to see, how would an opponent find any contradiction? It seems to be the scientific equivalent of fudge factors. Couldn't someone who wants to see a different outcome just devise a new model with different fudge factors that portray an entirely different picture?
The existing decade and more of climate models already had sulphur emission parameters in them, but now that even the cherry picked models are failing to account for the reality that warming is not happening at the predicted rate some are grasping at straws The billions of dollars and euros wasted on climate modelling, along with the billions in fraud and manipulated markets to come with cap and trade, are in dire need of new justification.
That's not the question I was answering or what the poster above was asking.
As I said, a good level of accuracy for short-term forecasts. Though any forecast more than 10 or 14 days ahead is mostly useless. It's a known accuracy.
Hm? We have a workable model of inputs and outputs. The inaccuracies in weather forecasts are mainly from two sources; the computational resolution is awful (aye, still something like 100 square kilometers lumped in to one value), and we're feeding rubbish into them. The latter is a subtle point. If we know the laws of physics and the state of some system, we can predict the future states of the system. However, we *don't* know the state of the atmosphere. Not now, not yesterday. This is the problem. It's equivalent to calculating the orbit of some asteroid, when we only know its location, velocity and mass very approximately.
Forecasting weather is like taking a group of teenagers and coming up with their supposed incomes 20 years later. Forecasting climate is like taking the group and coming up with the group's average income 20 years later. The latter problem is simpler.
This doesn't make sense to me. If, when any contradictory data arises, you simply change the test conditions (the model), how is anyone ever to prove the hypothesis invalid? If you keep moving the goalpost by altering the model to better portray the conclusion you wish to see, how would an opponent find any contradiction? It seems to be the scientific equivalent of fudge factors. Couldn't someone who wants to see a different outcome just devise a new model with different fudge factors that portray an entirely different picture?
Well, suppose for a moment that Newton came up with F = A*m^3.4 - m^2 + B*ma - a^2 instead of F = ma. Then he made a few measurements to fix fudge factors A and B and to prove the equation. Someone else made other measurements and got some contradictory data. That invalidated Newton's original formula. Simple as that. Now, if Newton came up with another formula, they would start again. This time it might be the right one.
What hypothesis are you talking about? The greenhouse effect? Well, prove any of its parts invalid. You might prove that CO2 doesn't absorb EM radiation in the way we thought, or that it doesn't emit EM radiation in the way we thought, or that the Earth surface doesn't radiate heat the way we thought. But all these things are studied very much in the lab. The foundations are solid.
Prove anthropogenic greenhouse effect invalid? Simple, just prove that humans don't, after all, release CO2. Well..
Prove invalid the conclusion that the net effect of anthropogenic greenhouse effect is heating? Well, make very careful calculations about that and release the results amongst other scientists to see if they find errors in your logic. If they don't, then probably your study is valuable. This has indeed been done over and over again, and if one avoids deliberate fudge factors, the result always is that AGW is a fact.
Prove invalid the concept of computer models? Sorry. Computer models are nothing more than a way to make many calculations efficiently. So maybe you can go prove that mathematics is actually flawed. Good luck with that.
You could however prove invalid some specific numerical methods applied in the models. These have been studied in depth too, and people have found lots of ugly pitfalls, but these can be avoided. You could of course find out that some model falls into some pitfall, and thus the numerics are invalid.
Models are nothing more than a collection of equations of so-called "laws of nature", to see what the laws of nature mean in practice. They don't contain deliberate fudge factors. They do contain "parametrizations" - if something is not known from a law of nature, scientists go out and try to measure the value from the nature (or rather read studies from other scientists who have done that). These are questionable, but usually it's found that changing these values a bit doesn't effect the outcome very much.
The model is not the "test conditions". The model is a tool of calculation. Other calculations not done with models (but pen and paper) agree with the calculations using models. So, in short, one could prove model results invalid by showing 1) our understanding of laws of nature is mistaken, or 2) these laws are not applied properly in the models, or 3) the model result is caused by unrealistic assumptions.
I hope this answers the question although I'm not sure I understood it correctly.
The claim that the amount of CO2 being produced by humans alone will in the near-term will reach a tipping point that will cause out of control and unrecoverable global warming and in result cause catastrophic damage, bordering on an extinction event. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the level of "seriousness" that I hear being dictated. (the emphasis is mine of course based on the specific facets that are of most importance in proving)
And I guess that's my issue...you (like most AGW supporters) pick the scientific softballs that most everyone agrees with. These models aren't being used to prove such simple scientific truths They're being used to prove (just to rehash a bit...) that the degree of greenhouse effect being caused by a single gas (CO2) by a single source (humans) will dwarf all other factors and cause a major catastrophe in the very near future. I can accept the science behind the greenhouse effect. I get it. It's the slippery slope that leads from "basic scientific principle" to "global killer" that I question.