Slashdot Mirror
2014: Hottest Year On Record
Layzej writes Data from three major climate-tracking groups agree: The combined land and ocean surface temperatures hit new highs this year, according to the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United Kingdom's Met Office and the World Meteorological Association. If December's figures are at least 0.76 degrees Fahrenheit (0.42 degrees Celsius) higher than the 20th century average, 2014 will beat the warmest years on record, NOAA said this month. The January-through-November period has already been noted as the warmest 11-month period in the past 135 years, according to NOAA's November Global Climate Report. Scientific American reports on five places that will help push 2014 into the global warming record books.
closing eyes, plugging ears and singing naaaa naaa naaaaaaa. unbiblical! 'murrican dream for all
...it was the warmest year in the CET (Central England Temperature) record, which goes back to 1659.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ha...
CO2 levels measured in the middle of the ocean, far away from most humans:
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_full_record.png
I'm not speculating what CO2 level is normal, what caused it, or how long it will take to go down again, but looking at that graph I would be very surprised if the average temperature temperature didn't rise.
But... but... all the science-deniers keep telling me there's been a "pause" in global warming, and ask me to explain it!
Nuclear energy is the only viable technology we have at the moment that can both reduce CO2 emissions meaningfully and avoid throwing an additional billions of people into poverty.
[citation needed]
You people keep making these bald assertions, but I don't see any reason that wind and solar can't handle this problem. We need more power storage, yes. So what? We're building it, and we know how to build more of it. Since solar power produces the most power when we need it the most, and pays back its energy investment in less than a decade but lasts more than two, I'm having a hard time figuring out just where you people got the idea that nuclear was the only answer. Most people who think that there is only one answer are wrong. The world is a lumpy place.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is a legitimate question
Since the answer is a trivial google search away, I doubt that. I found this in 5 seconds: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...
Was that before or after the historical data was fudged in ways the 'climate science" community won't disclose?
(And no, moderators, I'm not trolling. This is a legitimate question.)
Have you finally stopped beating your wife?
Stephan
The inability of the human species to extract itself from personal state to think globally is going to be our demise. If we can't recognize that we are responsible for maintaining our environment in a livable state we are in big trouble.
And it really is not "globally" any more. The entire planet is our personal space.
Of course it's a legitimate question. It's not that you're asking loaded questions in bad faith and have no intention of believing anyone who gives you an honest answer. And people who are asking legitimate questions always put climate science in scare quotes. And they would never ask a leading question that they could easily learn more about with some google searches. Nor is it trolling to make unfounded, baseless, and unsourced accusations about climate science being shadowy manipulators of data that refuse to provide any details about how they derive their work.
You're not a troll at all. Just a reasonable person interested in honest discourse. Exactly the kind of person I frequently see here on Slashdot.
(For those who are truly interested in learning more on the topic of how they correct biases in sea level temperature, unlike the guy "just asking questions" above, perhaps you might find this NASA paper informative and interesting)
It takes more energy to produce a solar panel than it produces in its lifetime of use
This isn't just bullshit, it's obvious bullshit. Buying panels at consumer prices has a measurable RoI, which is 3-10 years depending on various conditions (and most of the cost for consumer installations is the labour cost of the installation). Buying them at wholesale prices has a much shorter RoI. If they cost more energy to produce than they generate then even with manufacturing and raw material costs of zero then this wouldn't be possible.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No doubt man contributes to it, but Solar activity and earth history going back millions of years indicates this is a normal pattern shift.
The temperature seems to be defying its historical link to solar activity. Based on solar activity we should have been seen fairly severe cooling over the last few decades: http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...
Even assuming that we do invent those magic baseload batteries soon, your all-renewable energy system is a wavery network (requiring a "smart grid", to be built from scratch at the cost of teradollar or so) of fluctuating sources requiring vast amounts of mechanical maintenance. I would rather have a few AP-1000s chugging away in secluded valleys while we work on getting thorium up to commercial speed.
Cautionary tale: Germany is now in the throes of building out its smart grid. The flat-earth lobby, now that it no longer has anything nuclear yo protest, has turned its attention to stopping the new transmission lines needed to bring renewable power to market:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...
No, "fudging" means to adjust the data with intent to mislead. In this case, the data is adjusted to correct for errors. If you want to accuse the scientists with intent to mislead you need to substantiate your accusations with some proof.
Solar power repays its energy cost in production in 6 to 12 months, not decades and it lasts over 30 years, not just 20 ... talking about PV obviously.
Sigh. You obviously know nothing about avoiding people accusing you of exaggeration. I'd say you must be new here, but...
Also, you're exaggerating. It takes around three years for a thin-film panel to repay its energy investment. But I'm accounting for the entire system, installation, side preparation, et cetera. And then I'm anti-exaggerating, as mentioned previously. All that's important is to show how foolish the claims are.
Storage is interesting if you want to take your house (or boat or caravan) off grid. For a nation spanning grid it is nearly irrelevant until you approach 100% production of peak demand.
That's nice. We don't have a nation-spanning grid. You can't just move power from anywhere to anywhere at will. It doesn't work like that. First, there are far too few links; many cities are served by a single point of ingress for electrical power. Second, we lack long-haul capacity, even if we could get the power to the long-haul links, we couldn't carry it.
We need more storage, or to dramatically improve the grid. It would be nice to do both. But storage pays revenues when the grid fails, which it can do even if you improve it. We clearly need more storage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is a problem with public policy. even though the overall group could be better off because of government intervention, there still could be sub groups of winners and losers. I think that a lot of the deniers will only admit there is a problem when they are sure the solution does not make them a loser. So it could be beneficial to start implementing solutions and see which one get shot down because these 'denegotiators' think the cost is to high to their group.
Didn't GT Advanced Technologies claim that their sapphire glass manufacturing process were damaged by unreliable power?
Yes, but they also explained that it is SoP for having equipment on-site to mitigate that problem, and that Apple insisted that they not install it. So in fact, the grid is already not capable of delivering power reliably, and this is hardly a mark against renewables when it's already a mark against everything. The primary reason that we can't deliver power reliably is that we have a dumb grid. Only now is this changing; PG&E for example is literally in the midst of adding sensors to their long-haul lines because they actually cannot monitor their condition. When people hear "smart grid" they think of smart meters and commercial A/C that won't activate when you want it to, but the most important parts are actually nowhere near their houses. It's all about adding sensors and intelligence to back them up to the actual transmission equipment so that PG&E knows that a line is reaching its capacity before it happens, and not after an equipment failure which is the only way they've been able to do it so far. Presumably, the other utilities in the country are in the same shape, but I don't really know about them first-hand.
Adding more nuclear production won't improve our ability to deliver reliable power, because of the inadequacy of the grid. The grid is often cited as a reason why renewables won't work, but it has to be upgraded anyway because it's not doing its job now. And it's not just monitoring; we have little unused long-haul capacity, and many towns and even cities are served by a single link. You can't call it a grid when it's star-wired.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1934 wasn't a particularly hot year across the globe. It was a very hot year in the United States, but that's not what we're talking about, is it? Science-deniers love 1934, because they love to cherry-pick data.
Q. Why can't we use just raw data?
A. Just averaging the raw data would give results that are highly dependent on the particular locations (latitude and elevation) and reporting periods of the actual weather stations; such results would mostly reflect those accidental circumstances rather than yield meaningful information about our climate.
Q. Can you illustrate the above with a simple example?
A. Assume, e.g., that a station at the bottom of a mountain sent in reports continuously starting in 1880 and assume that a station was built near the top of that mountain and started reporting in 1900. Since those new temperatures are much lower than the temperatures from the station in the valley, averaging the two temperature series would create a substantial temperature drop starting in 1900.
Q. How can we combine the data of the two stations above in a meaningful way?
A. What may be done before combining those data is to increase the new data or lower the old ones until the two series seem consistent. How much we have to adjust these data may be estimated by comparing the time period with reports from both stations: After the offset, the averages over the common period should be equal. (This is the basis for the GISS method). As new data become available, the offset determined using that method may change. This explains why additional recent data can impact also much earlier data in any regional or global time series.
Another approach is to replace both series by their anomalies with respect to a fixed base period. This is the method used by the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK. The disadvantage is that stations that did not report during that whole base period cannot be used.
More mathematically complex methods are used by NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NOAA/NCDC) and the Berkeley Earth Project, but the resulting differences are small.
Do you honestly think the scientists are going to give you a signed confession reading "Yes, we mislead you!" or something?
No, I expect you to come up with some proof. That means you do your own research, and when you get different results, then you publish them. That's how science is done.
I'm old enough to remember the first moon shot. There used to be a time when the US was willing to invest billions to achieve goals and conquer technical challenges. Funny, the economy didn't collapse. It wasn't considered socialist or un-American. In fact, it was a point of pride and helped established us as world leaders. Now "American Ingenuity" is becoming a thing of the past.
While we sit around arguing whether global warming is a real issue or not, the rest of the world is moving forward with solutions. We're getting left in the dust.
I'm not sure how so many modern conservatives still manage to think of themselves as patriots while sticking their heads in the sand. It's pathetic.
A quote from Judith Curry's blog sums it up well;
"last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 — with an error range of one tenth of a degree. True scientists would have said: this year is unlikely to be significantly warmer than 2010 or 2005 and left it at that."
http://judithcurry.com/2014/12...
I'm not making any statement on the validity of warming. I'm pointing out how even "Scientific" reports and journals like Scientific American paint a falacious picture with word manipulation. A single temperature 9 degrees higher that 19 average is NOT a meaningful statistic. It is ENTIRELY normal!
What we are reading is written for the eyes of a mass audience. The only people that know enough to understand the actual basis of their conclusions are other climate scientists. Climate variations are very hard to measure and describe for an average person to understand in the time it takes to read an article. We are past the tipping point of climate change and the environmentalists are getting more desperate every year to convince the average person to take action. It also just so happens that global warming is melting glaciers and permafrost all over the world. Things that have been frozen for longer than anyone can remember, even in the summer. Glaciers from which climate scientists have taken core samples precisely because they have existed for so many thousands of years that they still contained frozen evidence of what the atmosphere was like every single year when a new layer of snow was compacted into them. The melting is the #1 simplest evidence for an average reader to understand, and you want to criticize the wording for not being statistically meaningful? If you want the statistically meaningful results, study climate science and read what the scientists read.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
It's very interesting that 2014 was so hot for most of the world, because 2014 was also the coldest year in Iowa for a long while. Which really is not good for food production; Iowa is some of the most fertile and most valuable cropland in the United States. It just goes to show why we say "climate change" instead of "global warming": sure, global average temperatures are rising, but in anybody's local area what we're actually experiencing is instability. They'd have known that in the 70s if the climate wasn't so hard to accurately model. It sure would be great though if we could know what the climate will be like in any local area after a global rise of 4 C.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Base load is so low that it is completely uninteresting.
Spot the guy who doesn't know anything about power generation.