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Global Temperature Set To Reach 1 Degree C Over Pre-Industrial Levels (metoffice.gov.uk)
Layzej writes: Based on data from January to September, the HadCRUT dataset shows 2015 global mean temperature at 1.02 degrees C (±0.11 degrees C) above pre-industrial levels for the first time. The Copenhagen Accord recognizes "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius (PDF)." Physicist Ken Rice points out that the next degree Celsius may be closer than we think. "It's taken us about 160 years to warm by about 1 degree C. This is associated with emissions of about 550GtC (550 billion tonnes of carbon, or ~2000 billion tonnes of CO2). Current emissions are around 10GtC/year. If we continue emitting as we are, we will double our cumulative emissions in about 50 years. If we continue to increase our emissions, it will be even sooner.
Is it possible that 160 years ago that we were in the midst of a cyclical cool down and now we're on a cyclical warm up?
Have gnu, will travel.
Thought the cabins in the woods were powered mostly by solar panels and the odd wind turbine now?
There is a target to keep warming below 2C as there is an expectation of large negative impacts at that level of warming. We're now 1C away from 2C. The next 1C will come much faster than the first at the current trajectory.
How accurate were the thermometers they used in pre-indistrial times? Even now most temperature sensors are +/- 1 Degree C or worse. For a few quid you can get something that is accurate to +/- 0.2 degrees, provided you have it installed properly and it's only guaranteed that accuracy for the first few years after it's made (Sensirion sht75 for example)
Also known as one degree warmer than the Little Ice Age.
So is this milestone due to an increase in current temperatures, or a decrease in temperatures in pre-industrial times?
Since the current "trajectory" as measured by real satellites has been flat for over twenty years
No, it hasn't.
& who indeed measured broadly enough to be statistically good measurement?
Scientists.
& who determined that it was not one of many long term cyclical changes that have occurred for millions of years.
Scientists.
& who will pay the cost of all the government activity? Every reader of Slashdot along with everyone else.
Yes, it's much better to pretend that nothing happens and then scream for the government help once your house is underwater or your tap runs dry in a drought.
& what if their efforts do not work?
And what if they do work?
So what?
1) Global Climate change is disruptive and people will unnecessarily die or live worse-off because of the resulting displacement of peoples.
2) We can be carbon neutral in 30 years if we create large scale subsidies in existing state of the art in nuclear power. (oh and throw in a few renewable sources for up to about 30% of the total requirements)
And
3) If you think we can be carbon neutral and meet the energy needs of civilization with just subsidized renewables then you are the same as a "climate denier" because pretending to solve a problem (to get your extremely inadequate pet projects funded) is in effect no better than denying the problem and just waiting to run out of economically viable fossil fuels.
Global warming pause Is now such a widely understood concept that even the IPCC talks about it.
If you want to really understand things, you have to stop being a closed minded denier of data.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After we start investigating every single motor vehicle manufacturer out there and find out how many of them (all of them?) have been cheating emissions testing to meet mandates, how much CO2 and other 'greenhouse gasses' humans are actually responsible for.
Oh, and all you climate change-deniers out there? Get yourself a CPAP mask, hook it up to the tailpipe of your car, and see how healthy it is for you to breathe that. Regardless of 'global warming' being a thing or not, isn't it time we started moving away from internal combustion engines? And burning coal? Even natural gas isn't that great in the long run. Time to grow up, everyone, and stop using these baby technologies that are poisoning us regardless. Redesign fission power plants so they're safer, operate them safer, build lots of them. Continue to develop fusion technology until it's practical. Better electric storage technologies so plug-in electric vehicles are more practical. Keep researching and developing high temperature superconductor technology, to eventually improve the efficiency of electric vehicles (and everything else that uses lots of power). Solar and wind to fill in the gaps while we're working on all the above (and by the way how would high temp superconductors improve solar?). Don't know about you but I'd welcome a motorcycle with a 500 mile-on-a-charge range and a superconducting powertrain, that would out-perform the best superbikes currently available.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Here's a comparison of the HADCRU data mentioned in the article to the satellite data (UAH) and to another surface station data set (GISS). They all show warming of about the same magnitude over the last few decades: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/g...
You do realize all of that climate gate conspiracy bullshit has been discredited and that you're linking to something from 2009, right? ALL of that drivel which claimed to show manipulation was pretty much bullshit.
So either you like to trot this out because you haven't kept up to date, or you know damned well you're posting links to stale information which has been discredited.
Because, really, a Telegraph article from 2009 about how the Russians have confirmed that climate data was manipulated? That's about the least quality source of information you could pick.
In which case I assume you know you're full of shit. If you don't, well, you should fix that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No one is blaming 'industry' per se. ;) ... )
We point out, it is: CO2
Regarding to your questions, if you have not learned that stuff in school, I suggest google (I prefer it over bing, you likely either have to enter 'google.com' in your search bar and then do the 'real search' or get a friend help you to change the default search engine
Ok, I admit, I was in a mean mood.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes, it's much better to pretend that nothing happens and then scream for the government help once your house is underwater or your tap runs dry in a drought.
Your Logical Fallacy Is: Strawman, Black & White
For those people that live close enough to the ocean for this to be an issue they will have decades of warning before their house can even see water, much less be "under" said water, unless you are talking about hurricanes which have been submerging dwelling since before industry existed.
If we continue emitting as we are, we will double our cumulative emissions in about 50 years. If we continue to increase our emissions, it will be even sooner.
We all know the oil reserves will be severely depleted by 50 years from now if we just keep the current consumption rate. I doubt we can just keep the pace at which we are emitting greenhouse gases for 50 years. Before we reach the 50 years milestone, the oil price will skyrocket and consumption will collapse.
Achille Talon
Hop!
actually, in pre industrial times, from the analytics I did on the data were somewhat better than now.
Back then there were thousands of stations all over the world (although missing in the poles)
now there is only a few hundred.
But since we are talking about the "global" temperature, which is highly varied, 1'C is insignificant - i.e. even back when we had 1000s of measurements a day, there still wasn't enough to get a measure of the "average" temperature of the earth with 1'C of accuracy.
For example
you still can't estimate the average temperature of mount Everest of the course of 1 year with that accuracy.
"The whole world" - No frickin chance.
So warmer than the early 1800s which were colder than the early-to-mid 1400s?
The only reason for claiming that the early 1800s are the correct zero-point is to support a (false) claim that the only reason for the change can possibly be industrialization.
There was a slow cooling for about 6000 years, followed by an abrupt change in trajectory over the last century. The warming over the last century has been attributed to fossil fuel emissions.
Everything that doesn't bait Republicans and Conservatives does, by default, bait liberals, Democrats, and all others.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
...but what a load of hogwash. Today, we are one entire degree warmer than "pre-industrial temperatures", which they define as around 1850. Coincidental, I'm sure, that the "Little Ice Age" ended around 1850, meaning that they could hardly have picked a colder point in time. I should certainly hope that we are warmer than that! The Little Ice Age saw the largest glacier extents for thousands of years, devastating many communities as they were inexorably covered with ice.
Note, also, the temperature graph in that article - a lot more than one degree drop from temperatures a couple of centuries before, which brings us to the next point. They label today's temperature range as "uncharted territory", despite the fact that the planet was almost certainly warmer than this during the Medieval Warm Period, and before that during the Roman Climate Optimum.
The rest of the TFA is all about beating the panic-drum.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I don't take the specifics of the post seriously, but the idea that this fear-mongering in the press about global warming is really a power grab by statists at the national and international levels isn't new. By and large, who is paying for the studies that indicate mankind is largely responsible for changes in climate? Who stands to gain from the public policy changes (i.e. increased regulations, carbon taxes, etc) implied to be necessary to stem the tide of these changes? The answer to both questions is government. It increases their power over both commerce, and over ordinary people's lives. The more influence they have, the more influence they have to peddle. Corporations also pay for their own studies, and I should say their results should be looked at just as critically. My point in focusing on government in this case is because I too often see cognitive dissonance regarding "following the money," with people only doing so when private firms/individuals are involved, but never governments.
What's a "Global" temperature?
So, up until now I understood this primarily as a problem that would really hit future generations, long after I die of old age. Now you are telling me that I might suffer from the consequences during my retirement???
I am officially angry, and will start demanding legislation to force other people to pay up to fix this.
I agree that moving away from IC engines would be good for the enviironment, and I agree that motor vehicles are a significant contributor to human-caused emissions of greenhouse gasses, but lets get this into persspective:
The entire transportation sector only accounts for about 27% of the total man-made greenhouse gas (MMGG) emissions:
http://www3.epa.gov/climatecha...
Of that 27%, Road transport accounts for 72%,
http://www3.epa.gov/climatecha...
the rest is aviation and marine. That means about 19% of all MMGG is road vehicles.
From http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/clima...
About 23% of that 19% is from heavy duty vehicles (so 18 wheelers etc are responsible for 4.37% of all MMGG), which means that all the millions of family cars on the road are actually only responsible for 14.6%.
Clearly we need to target electricity generation (31%) and industry (21%) long before just beating up on car drivers more.
Cabin-dwellers are evil now? I would have thought that they were the environmentally friendly types that we should all aspire to be. For one, their cabins are made from local materials, if they hunt and grow veg they aren't dependent on industrial and tractor-based food production. Even if they run an average size diesel generator for a few hours a day they probably still burn less fuel than your average stereotypical suburban 'mom' does with her SUV or people carrier going to and from Mal*Wart
Scientists.
The same ones who, in pre-industrial society, were also quite sure that they could measure someone's criminality by feeling the lumps on their skulls? Those sorts of pre-industrial scientists?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
recognizing the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius
There is no such scientific view. I admit there is a consensus that humans have caused some degree of warming and I even agree with that. But to blandly claim without a bit of supporting evidence that there is a consensus on what temperature range is best for us is ridiculous.
What makes it worse is the lack of support for a temperature increase that small. There are a lot of countries that simply aren't on board with curbing human activities enough to avoid the cutbacks that are claimed to be necessary for holding warming to below 2 C. Time for a plan B that isn't stupid.
lol.
Gasoline is such a small part of emissions. You want a real target? Look at the meat farming industry!
A vegan driving a hummer makes far less emissions than a meat-eater driving a bicycle. ;)
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Correction:
Industrialized society has thrived over the past 150 years, not all have benefited from it.
Why are you using the premise that 'industrialized societies thriving' means that they should not be blamed for the increase in pollution. Usually if one area of society thrives another area does not do so well. This does not always hold true, but in many instances it does. Then there are the arguments of what 'thriving' really is... You seem to be tossing out soundbites instead of establishing any real critiques, similar to politicians that come back to a reasonable argument with 'THINK OF THE CHILDREN' and then leave it at that...
Still waiting for low lying islands to go underwater. Let that happen, then I will give your ideas a second look.
That's the attitude that keeps any meaningful change from happening. Let the mass disasters start to happen, then we'll try to figure out a solution, because it definitely won't be too late by then and fuck all of the people living near sea level anyway. Once the refugees are knocking on your door, maybe you'll give a shit then, right? Why bother to improve the energy economy of the entire planet unless there is a specific need to do it immediately, right? God forbid the fossil fuel companies wouldn't be able to post record profits for another year, when there is no more coal or oil in the ground then we can start talking about deploying things like solar and wind power. Let's use up everything we possibly can, and then start figuring out what to do next. No fucking need to try and plan for the future here, because we're all a bunch of fucking idiots just out to consume everything we possibly can.
If an asteroid was going to hit the planet in 10 years I bet you would wait until you could see it in the sky before you start thinking about if we should do anything.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Although scientists don't have a great track record of predicting the end of "peak oil" ... it does seem to me that we're on track to phase out the burning of fossil fuels as a primary means of energy production.
Without any legislative interference, we're going to find "supply and demand" will dictate a change of course in coming decades, if localized pollution issues don't dictate it in some cases first.
What we DO know is that the major oil companies have been investing larger and larger amounts of money to drill ever further off-shore. That's not something that makes ANY financial sense at all, given the risks + cost, except for the fact they're not finding much "low hanging fruit" anymore with easier to drill locations. The new thing of extracting oil from shale deposits gave them a new supply source too -- but how long is that really going to last, especially as we move towards safer, more reliable versions of nuclear power plants?
Scientists? Which Scientists? What equipment did they use. Where is their raw data collected from pre-industrial times?
Answer: there isn't any. You are lying. The claim isn't being made through measurements from the pre-industrial age. It is arrived at by MODELING. More misleading crap.
Really? Here is a graph you should really have a look at. Ice core samples show that CO2 levels have not been at current levels in the past 650,000 years.
http://climate.nasa.gov/eviden...
You're talking about it as if there isn't any cost. Do you have ANY idea how many people will starve TO DEATH if fuel becomes more expensive? Is it really worth murdering 50 million Africans in the most horrible way possible to prevent a disaster that might only be real in your mind?
Another alarmist like you used the asteroid analogy. I came back with this: you predicted the path that would intersect with Earth. We observed the area where it should have been at a given time and found nothing was there. Does that modify your claim that we will be hit? If so, you are a scientist, if not, then you are a religion. Guess what climate alarmists do every time one of their predictions fail?
What a flat trajectory may look like.
This is nothing to worry about, though. As we know with 100% certainty, the rate of output of greenhouse gases has zero effect on the global climate. My gut tells me that we can double the amount of CO2 we release every year and see no meaningful change in any measured statistic.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
And I bet you'd complain if he asked to see the calculations proving said asteroid was going to hit earth.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
No, the ones that actually INVENTED the industrialized society.
So you refuse modern medicine too, right?
No, I prefer medicine as it's practiced now, not medicine as scientists from the pre-industrial period practiced it. Are you having some reading comprehension issues? I wonder how a scientist from the pre-industrial period would evaluate your intelligence, and on what they would blame your tendency to get what you read exactly backwards.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
& what if their efforts do not work?
A better question is what happens if the models are correct and we do nothing.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
How about drought? Or hurricanes (that can affect cities well within a continent)? Or tropical diseases that are moving steadily north? Or skyrocketing food prices and hunger rebellions that might happen?
While it is pithy and simple to set a target temperature goal, like 2C, i think it misses the overall implications of a changing climate. As the Nature article today on slashdot points out, even a mild temperature change could possibly do something like turn the entire Middle East extremely humid making it basically uninhabitable. Something this trivial, like a local increase in moisture over a relative small region, could provoke war, even nuclear war.
There could be a change in ocean currents, or moisture content/cloud cover of other regions, or any number of other effects from relatively small changes in temperature that in themselves aren't dangerous but human reactions to them could actually be a 'doomsday' level.
You're talking about it as if there isn't any cost. Do you have ANY idea how many people will starve TO DEATH if fuel becomes more expensive? Is it really worth murdering 50 million Africans in the most horrible way possible to prevent a disaster that might only be real in your mind?
And people who believe that CO2 causes temperatures to rise are the alarmists. Right.
Citigroup released a report not long ago which showed that investing in renewable energy was the more profitable way forward. In other words, that it is actually more expensive to keep using fossil fuels. Also consider this: if much of the civilized world stops using fossil fuels to generate power, will you expect the price of fuel oil to go up or down?
And, how about this: if solar power becomes a cheap reality, what is that going to do for the quality of life of those 50 million Africans?
Here's another question for you: can we continue to use fossil fuels indefinitely? If not, what is the appropriate time to begin moving to alternatives? That time obviously isn't now, according to you, so what metrics do we need to hit before it would be a good idea to start heading in the direction of renewable energy?
I came back with this: you predicted the path that would intersect with Earth. We observed the area where it should have been at a given time and found nothing was there.
So your "come back" to the hypothetical that an asteroid would hit us is to state that hey, new data shows it's not going to hit us. OK. Fantastic come back.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
It would if it was an analog control loop but of course it isn't. Most people think analog.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Are you seriously posting with a link to desmogblog.com ? A propaganda site founded by a PR firm and expert from Canada, who is on the board of directors of the Suzuki foundation?
An article writen by Kenvin Grandia and green activist and political expert manipulator in that area.
Really?
You need to vet your "debunking" much more carefully before you go spreading it all over the place.
Of course he knows its discredited.
When clowns like that post those FUD articles they know that your local libertarian will eat it up.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Myth.
Fake data isn't even an actual concern - the error bars in the Chinese emissions data are bigger than the amount of emissions necessary to trigger warming or not trigger of warming according to the current AGM models. The models suck, the data sucks - as usual the same advice applies: don't panic.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But I like my truck and use it for Boy Scout trips. Are you against Boys learning life skills? You monster!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
We can be carbon neutral in 30 years if we create large scale subsidies in existing state of the art in nuclear power.
And start using electric cars.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Do we have the evidence that shows that the amount of CO2 increase should actually increase the temperatire by 1C?
Maybe the amount of CO2 we released only accounts for 0.5 degrees and there is some other yet undiscovered source for the other 0.5 degrees unrelated to humans and to CO2.
I'm just saying, do we have proof of this? Do we really know there is no alternative explanation for sure?
Droughts are natural and they havent been increasing in frequency or intensity, unless you can otherwise prove it.
Same goes for hurricanes.
Tropical disease spreading has not been linked to an increase of 0.8c, that would be rediculous.
Food prices have skyrocketed because of so called GREEN initiatives like wasting maze/corn for fuel production.
Look it up. The rise in world wide food prices is directly linked to the idiotic ethanol projects.
Thats a logical fallacy, not a question.
There's an overwhelming amount of evidence. Look again at the NASA link in my original post. Many scientific observations are tied together into a coherent picture. It's spelled out there pretty clearly, in simple English, with references if you want to dig deeper. If you want to dispute what's presented there, please provide details in your reply.
Are we really 100% completely sure that the reason is humans and that it could have been avoided?
Do you have any training in science? Because it's not designed to offer indisputable proof. I can't prove indisputably that you are being serious. I don't expect to ever have 100% proof of that.
I can see you're still struggling with this. The point is that both understanding of larger concepts and specific tools and techniques in science change over time. Our ability to rely on the comparatively small number of working (and hobby) scientists from the pre-industrial period to establish a global temperature from that time, and making the absurd assertion that such a number is globally accurate to within a single degree is preposterous. Science, at the time, didn't have the global scope or systematic technical precision and record keeping to make such a simultaneously sweepingly world-wide and detailed minute conclusion, especially not to standards that we could use to make apples-to-apples comparisons to temperatures in the centuries before and since that point in time.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
How does this nonsense get modded up to 5.
A sketchy .jpg stating data from the 2 propaganda in chiefs scientists?
The hockey stick fool?
There is no reasoning with ideologists.
http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
Now, are you willing to listen?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You waited 30 seconds to reply to my post. That suggests you're not being very open-minded, and I'm wasting my time. Look at what I wrote again. There will never be 100% proof. Just like I will never be 100% certain about why you're asking the question.
I'd like to think that I do. I went to school for Software Engineering, but I would say that I do like science. But science to me is usually about the hard, provable facts. I'm more inclined to trust the mathematics where things require indisputable logical proofs.
For example, do you have any reading on anything like the math behind how much CO2 we have released and any scientific experiments that show that that amount of CO2 should be expected to raise the temperature of the planet by 1C?
To me, science is about the experiments used to verify reality. All I ever hear is data like the globe is warmer, we have released all this CO2, but does it really add up correctly in practice? From what I have read, it seemed like we really don't know whether or not the increase in global temperature we see is really what we should have expected to see given our measurements. It seems like too much uncertainty yet for the topic of global warming because there is too much data that we don't know and too many variables that we can't accurately isolate the one we are testing.
In the past It's been both much warmer and much cooler than it is today. You could just as easily have headlined the article "Global Temperature Set To Reach 1 Degree C Under Pre-Industrial Levels".
My mind is open, but it needs to be filled with facts, and math. Not random numbers and uncorrelated information. "Trillions of tons" is meaningless out of context...
I just wanted to see for instance where the experiments and measurements and math are that show that trillions of tons accurately predict a 1C increase.
(It doesn't have to be 100% accurate obviously, but accurate enough for science which does have it's measurement of uncertainty that we use to determine how good of a conclusion it makes.)
Also, it was not 30 seconds... It was 9 minutes if you rad the timestamps. How is 9 minutes not an adequate enough time to respond to:
"So, the TRILLIONS of TONS of CO2 being put into the atmosphere would have another source?"
It's not exactly a difficult response to respond to since it didn’t actually address my previous question, so my response was mostly restating my question again. Which I have had to do somewhat a third time.
I never said the trillion tons had to come from another source. I am well aware that we know that the vast majority of the additional CO2 did in fact come from humans. I am asking how we know that the trillions of tons are actually enough to cause the entire increase alone or whether it’s possible there are other factors that also contributed that would have raised the temperature had we not released that much CO2.
I was born in the second coldest capital city in the world. Now fallen too fifth coldest. Not due to global warming but the breakup of the Soviet Union causing more new capital cities. Warming a few degrees is a good thing.
I understand where you're coming from, I like the predictable nature of math and logic too. The problem with the physical world is that we can't measure everything to provide a precise answer; we might get a few significant digits at best. To get full mathematical precision, we would need to measure what's going on over the entire planet at a microscopic scale, which is not only unrealistic, but we'd probably interfere with the Earth's processes if we tried. Plus, CO2 is not the only, single factor; the atmosphere is composed of an incredible array of gases. Plus, the Earth's atmosphere is leaky in ways that we don't fully understand. Plus, cloud cover can change the amount of solar radiation absorbed by the ground and the atmosphere, and cloud cover is extraordinarily hard to predict or model.
The best analogy I can offer is that no matter how hard we try, the picture will always be slightly out-of-focus. This doesn't make the resulting picture useless. It's in focus enough to see important relationships. Here is a paper that goes a little deeper into the relationship between CO2 and global average temperature:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
I don't take the specifics of the post seriously, but the idea that this fear-mongering in the press about global warming is really a power grab by statists at the national and international levels isn't new.
It isn't new, but "this is a conspiracy by statists to grab more power" is a conspiracy theory that doesn't make a lick of sense.
Saying "be afraid of terrorists! We need to put policemen armed with tanks and bazookas in every schoolroom, and strip search everybody who ever gets on an airplane"-- now that's a power grab. Saying "we need to make changes in the regulatory system that will, over the course of decades, change the distribution of new power systems and will encourage more efficient use of energy" really is not-- that's pretty much the most incompetent "power grab" ever.
The belief that there are "statists" out there who are trying to increase the power of government not for any particular reason, but just to increase the government, is really quite silly. There are many many people out there who want to use the power of government to accomplish specific goals-- both left and right-- and those can be frightening. But the idea that there are statists out there who simply want governments to have more power for no reason at all other than power: no, that's a boogeyman. Not real.
...My point in focusing on government in this case is because I too often see cognitive dissonance regarding "following the money," with people only doing so when private firms/individuals are involved, but never governments.
Because the "follow the money" trail is very clear when looking at climate change deniers: they are massively funded by fossil-fuel corporations or by lobbying organizations which are funded by fossil fuel corporations, and the fossil fuel industry is literally a multi-trillion dollar industry. It's easy to follow the money: you can see who's paying, you can see who they are paying, and you can see what they are asking for and why they want it. It's so not-secret an agenda that you can find the actual memos written by the American Petroleum Institute laying out their strategy.
But the "follow the money" trail just peters out when looking at climate scientists. They're funded by a range of government agencies, true, ranging from NASA to NOAA to the Max-Planck Institut für Aeronomie to the Japanese Meteorological agency, but now you're telling me that they all have the same secret agenda... to do what, exactly? Really, the Max-Planck Institut für Aeronomie does not have a secret desire to increase the amount of regulations in the world. Even if the German government somehow did have this goal... how do they it tell the Max-Planck Institut? Memos saying "make sure that the scientists you fund are instructed to only give results saying climate change is real?" Do you really think that dozens of scientific agencies in as many countries are all going to be getting this memo (why? From who?) and not a single person is going to leak it?
You can try to follow the money... but when you do, there just isn't anywhere it goes. And then, how exactly do the thousands of scientist get their instructions?
There are indeed a lot of people who want to influence government-- plenty of them. But they all do so to anticipate actual, tangible benefits.
That's not actually what I said.
What I actually said was.
We could be 5'C hotter than preindustrial times
We could be 5'C colder.
We just have no way of comparing, because the real climate scientists mostly gave up measuring the temperature.
Probably because the only people who really care about it is the politicos that want j6p to pay more tax... sorry I mean buy carbon credits.
A plan that was originally designed to attack Chinas economy.
A plan that backfired massively when china didn't fall for it and catapulted their economy to be the biggest in the world. (Soon if not already).
it is a false statement that only nuclear will meet those needs.
it is equally false that renewables are only pet projects and cannot meet those needs.
Nuclear is the only proven technology. With nuclear power you have France having demonstrated for many decades that nuclear can provide nearly all the electrical power for a large modern country. Hydro is a proven technology, but it has already been largely tapped out in much of the world and hydro can disrupt river ecosystems. Solar and Wind just don't cut it without either some other large scale supplies of energy... which hydro can't provide... or a massive overbuilding of Solar and Wind to account for the variability. Solar and Wind just can't cut it alone by a long shot, so its either Natural Gas, then coal or Nuclear.
If you can't offer a realistic solution then you are part of the problem.
Listen, dude, I'm not an 'alarmist' of anything so stop accusing me of shit I'm not guilty of, and how does your rant really have anything to do with what I'm talking about? We keep putting a band-aid on 100 year old technology and fooling ourselves that we're 'helping' when what we need to do is get away from it entirely, and by the way they keep cutting down the rainforests in South America (I keep hearing about this every so often) which is what converts CO2 back into O2 for us to breathe; how is this being an 'alarmist' anyway? We need to knock all this shit off, sooner rather than later, and I can't see how anyone can argue that it's a bad idea unless you're just too lazy to want to change things. Sure, change is always hard, but isn't it time we, as a planet full of supposedly sentient beings, stopping being big babies about all this and just move towards things that don't cause unnecessary pollution and waste? Can you really give me a rational, intelligent argument against this idea? I don't think you or anyone can.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You really know nothing about the procedures and methodologies we're discussing here.
Yes, I do. The procedures and methodologies that were recording temperatures in a handful of specific pre-industrial spots on the planet cannot be used to extrapolate a precise single "global temperature" within 1 degree C. There isn't enough data. There's no there there, there is only subjective modeling, at best. Suggesting that such a model is hostorically accurate to within a fraction of 1 degree is silly. You know it, I know it, and every scientist worth their salt knows it. The only people who hold that laughable position are those who need the hype. The situation could be WAY worse than a 1 degree change, or nowhere near that bad. It doesn't matter which position you embrace, the point is that talking about "a" global temperature is nonsense in that context.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
There is no reasoning with ideologists
Said with no sense of irony or self awareness XD
It's not a logical fallacy, it's a risk/reward equation. Break down the problem into the risk and reward of action versus inaction and decide what to do from there. The answer should be obvious. What is the risk of taking action on climate change? What are the possible things that can go wrong if we do that? What is the reward? What is the reward with inaction on climate change? What is the risk?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I know a guy whose family will shoot a deer any time of the year. If they need more food, and don't have the funds to buy beef at the store, they go out into their property (large and heavily wooded) and get food the old fashioned way. They just don't advertise that fact. His neighbors all do the same as needed. They only do it when needed, so it's not enough to wipe out the local deer population.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Yeah, I hear those vegetable farms don't use a single drop of fuel for their tractors and harvesters. And their canning and packaging plants run on fairy dust and rainbows.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Actually, we are probably at about 8C above temperatures 20000 years ago, and good thing too: if it was still that cold, most of the northern hemisphere would be covered in ice sheets. We're probably still 1-2C below the Eemian maximum temperature of about 130000 years ago.
We're still about 10C below the Eocene maximum.
The reason nuclear power plants aren't successful or competitive is massive NIMBYism and a suppression of efficient and clean nuclear power technologies because they might be used to generate weapons-grade material. Neither of those can be solved with more subsidies.
Of course, that's still better than "renewables", which simply aren't cost effective at all.
As of this writing, only 10 of 272 responses rate a 4 or 5. Come on, Slashdot editors, can't you see that topics like this aren't productive?
I now have two turbines, the second was put in during the late summer. I live in the woods. I'm also on the side of a mountain, when home. They're also in a clearing. But, it's still pretty woodsy. I have solar as well. I now create more power than I consume. I'm unlikely to really "break even" with upgrades and maintaining them but that's not why I did it.
The power company doesn't have to pay me for the power that I create but they do have to give me credit. I can then sell those credits or I can donate them to a local school (or charity) and write down the amount on my state tax bill. It's not that much of a clearing either but the trees will never get tall and there's an obscene amount of wind power on the side of the mountain. They're up above my place so they're at a higher elevation.
There's a solar and wind guy down in Starks, does a good job and took care of the whole process for me. A portion of my basement is now its own separate room and houses some racks full of batteries and all of the equipment is in there. I'm a bit tired or I'd go through my back posts. I've shared pics of the partial setup in the past.
My vehicles are, for the most part, efficient for what I do. I don't own a Prius or anything but I do plan on picking up the new model of Tesla that has a 500 mile range. That will be enough to get me to town and back as well as remain heated during a crisis involving snow or ice - should I get caught in a squall or blizzard and be taken by surprise. It happens up there.
It's not looking likely that I'll be home at all this winter. So I won't truly be able to say that I have enough power for winter consumption but I should based on prior history. Obviously, I've still got a mains connection. Yes, I do have diesel backup and a permitted underground storage tank. However, I'm not really some ecological disaster that is hell bent on destroying Mother Nature. I'm kind of fond of her, that's why I moved there.
I just figured some reality from someone who actually does live in the woods might be pertinent. I'm pretty sure that the OP, up the thread, was just trolling. Ah well, I didn't have anything better to do.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
No. The Marcott reconstruction has proxies that extend to 1940. The surface station data are shown along side the reconstruction (and so is the Mann reconstuction), but this is for reference. They are not used in the reconstruction. The paper is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
Zero hard numbers and not a single fucking citation. Whoever modded this up shouldn't have mod points.
What? That's exactly what we're talking about: the lack of hard numbers. The HUGE lack of hard numbers, so much so that huge swaths of areas now being accurately measured are being pointlessly compared to pre-industrial circumstances completely lacking hard data from those same places. Why are you looking for a citation? OF COURSE THERE'S NO CITATION. This is all about the lack of such, which is why proclaiming down-to-the-degree comparisons is so ridiculous.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
you stupid ignorant denialist shill
Still having real trouble reading the actual words formed by the characters on the screen in front of you, aren't you. I allowed for the equal possibilities of the temperature delta (from pre-industrial days through today) to be either significantly greater (or lesser) than the exactly 1 degree claimed. I know, it's no fun when someone who's complaining doesn't fit your cartoon villain template, and instead focuses on the fact that you're latching onto inherently subjective modeling to fabricate information making up for data not in the record. I don't give a crap if the imaginary single "global temperature" claimed from a past mostly lacking in global samples is high or low. What I do care about is people like you glomming onto such dart-throwing output and pretending it's actually an apples/apples comparison with contemporary data. Never mind the means by which anyone would pretend to have a single (useful, actually representative) "global temperature" even with today's huge amount data.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It's gettin' hot in here so hot, so take off all your clothes!
Droughts are natural and they havent been increasing in frequency or intensity, unless you can otherwise prove it.
EVERYTHING is natural, up to and including asteroids slamming into planets. And as for droughts - they are increasing as a direct result of climate change: http://phys.org/news/2011-10-h...
Tropical disease spreading has not been linked to an increase of 0.8c, that would be rediculous.
ORLY? http://www.scientificamerican....
Food prices have skyrocketed because of so called GREEN initiatives like wasting maze/corn for fuel production.
Oh, prices are low right now. Just wait until a significant part of farmland becomes desert or salt marsh.
Yes, and now try to understand that graph. See how those CO2 levels keep spiking every 100000 years or so? That's a "warming period", just before temperatures decrease again and much of North America and Europe get covered in huge ice sheets, a glaciation event. We're currently at the end of one of those warming periods. Without AGW, we'd probably be heading for another glaciation event.
In fact, earth has been up to 10C warmer that it is right now, with much higher CO2 concentrations, and the climate was generally mild and wet across the entire globe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now have a look at a longer time period:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Notice how it's 8C warmer now than it was 20000 years ago? Notice how we're better off because of it?
Notice how it is still 10C colder than it was 50 million years ago? A time when every landmass was covered in lush forests and land animals thrived?
Yes, I do. The procedures and methodologies that were recording temperatures in a handful of specific pre-industrial spots on the planet cannot be used to extrapolate a precise single "global temperature" within 1 degree C. There isn't enough data.
That's incorrect. We have plenty of proxy data (ice cores, tree rings, freshwater sediment, seashell and coral rings - to name a few) to augment direct measurements, more than enough to establish the global temperature 100-200 years ago with about 0.5C precision.
And I keep reading articles like this one where it shows that NOAA has stealth-edited the temperature data, ...
Nothing stealth about it. You just have to read the original papers about it. They're not that hard to find. For example "THE U.S. HISTORICAL CLIMATOLOGY NETWORK MONTHLY TEMPERATURE DATA, VERSION 2" which gives an overview of adjustments that were made. You can find references at the end if you want to dig deeper.
During the Pliocene three million years ago, the climate was 2 to 3C warmer and the seas were 25–35 meters higher than today (Dowsett et al., 1994; Rahmstorf, 2007). I'm sure the critters of the time loved it, but our coastal cities would not. The last 10,000 years is of interest because that represents the birth of our civilization. It is the climate that we have adapted our infrastructure to.
I don't see anybody alleging a "conspiracy"; "conspiracy" requires secrecy and deception. I'm sure scientists and politicians promoting action on AGW truly believe what they are saying, and they aren't secret about it. But that doesn't make them right.
Where did all the scientists and politicians who promoted scientific racism, eugenics, and segregation get their instructions from? Nowhere. These aren't "conspiracies", they are social and political malfunctions. Scientists and politicians want power and money. A simple way of getting power and money is to identify a crisis and offer a solution to it. Many potential crises don't make it, but some take off due to simple, self-organizing, positive feedback: the more scientists and politicians believe in some crises or problem, the more people get rewarded for adopting the same beliefs.
Well, I'm glad that you accept that the critters loved it, because that removes the major scare scenario of global warming.
As for sea level rise, don't worry about it. Sea level rise is currently about 1ft/century. Think about what your coastal city was like a century ago. Compared to the massive changes and the massive rebuilding that has happened in most cities, adapting to 1ft/century is completely negligible.
How do we know for sure that the increased CO2 levels are entirely caused by humans ...
That's pretty easy. The increase in CO2 in the atmosphere from year to year is only about 45% of the total amount of human caused emissions.
For example, do you have any reading on anything like the math behind how much CO2 we have released ...
A crude calculation can be made from the amount of fossil fuel we use. We have fairly good statistics on global fossil fuel use. A chemical formula can tell you how much CO2 is released by any particular type of fossil fuel. For instance consider coal. The average coal is somewhere around 70% carbon. So if you burn a ton of coal that's around 1400 lbs. of carbon. The chemical formula is C + O2 ==> CO2. The atomic weight of carbon is 12 and of oxygen is 16. So you end up with a CO2 molecule that has an atomic weigh of 44. 44/12 = 3.667 so you end up with that much more CO2 than the carbon you started with. 3.667 * 1400 = 5133 lbs or 2.567 tons. Therefore burning a ton of coal produces around 2.5 tons of CO2. The same kind of calculation can be done for gasoline, diesel, natural gas, etc.
Do we have the evidence that shows that the amount of CO2 increase should actually increase the temperatire by 1C?
Yes.
Maybe the amount of CO2 we released only accounts for 0.5 degrees and there is some other yet undiscovered source for the other 0.5 degrees unrelated to humans and to CO2.
No, it's actually more than 100% human contribution, because the natural contribution is negative. That means without anthropogenic green house gases (and other sources such as land use change and albedo reductions) the earth would be cooling. So it's not just us, it's entirely us.
I'm just saying, do we have proof of this?
Yes, enough proof to convince 97% of the scientists who study this. The other 3% are mostly libertarians who refuse to accept the evidence because it's ideologically unpleasant for them.
Do we really know there is no alternative explanation for sure?
Yes
Fanatically anti-fanatical
It's gettin' hot in here so hot, so take off all your clothes!
..and amazingly, that was one of the more 'articulate' (c)rap songs. Now that's a culture worth celebrating, no really it is!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
P.S.=> You're a disgusting liar... apk
..and YOU, sir, are a disgusting lying hypocrite. Please, die slowly in a fire and do us the courtesy of filming your death that I may rejoice in your suffering from the comfort of my own home.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
It's safe proven by 57 antivirus programs recently in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
+
Its 32-bit model too https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
&
More "SALT IN YOUR WOUNDS"
No, loser, the salt is in YOUR wounds, because you're the pathetic simian who cannot let a comment about your malware go unchallenged.
Nobody cares, nobody wants to care, but don't let that stop you, keep thrashing that hate-monkey of yours, he's sure to grind out some intelligent rebuttal eventually, right?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Translation: boo-hoo, APK's anus is red and sore, now it's EVERYBODY's problem because APK needs our help, poor little baby!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
P.S.=> You're a disgusting liar... apk
Whee! Who's a disgusting liar, APK?
Certainly not the eleventy-one sockpuppet accounts that are all about to down-mod me to protect your good name, noooo!
That would be - as we all know - someone else.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
APK: boo-hoo, my anus hurts and it's all swollen and smells ugly. Whomever shall I blame for this tragedy?
The World: *ignores APK, says something unrelated*
APK: That's it! That's the 'in' I've been looking for, everyone can see that the WHOLE WORLD just took responsibility for my anus. Now I can squeal like a five-year-old girl with rattlesnake-in-the-vagina issues! Whee! I'm SO ENTITLED!! My rage is so righteous!
APK: It's all YOUR fault that my anus is so swollen, so smelly and disgorging so much pus! It must therefore be YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to make my anus feel better! Fail to do so and be prepared to be branded the ENEMY DU JOUR!
BWAHAHAHAH! APK, like progressivism, ALWAYS WINS!!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Liar, liar, APK's pants are on fire!
APK doesn't understand what 'hypocrisy' means, or he'd moderate his posts.
APK doesn't understand what 'integrity' means, or he'd moderate his posts.
APK doesn't know what citations are, or he'd include them with the ludicrous suppositions he makes in his posts.
APK doesn't know what humility is, or he'd leave off trumpeting his 'successes' in his posts. Hint: Linus doesn't big-mouth. What makes you so much better than him that YOU get to big-mouth yourself when Linus Torvalds doesn't?
APK is a one-trick-pony with only hosts-file manipulation to his name, a technique that was rightfully deposed in the 90's.
APK is butt-hurt that the world moved on and that his one-trick-pony show has waned into irrelevance.
APK learned that bluster can make up for an awful lot of substance, hence posts such as the above.
Despite the above, APK is happy to take the time to explain how positive and helpful he is as a contributor to SlashDot. The rest of us are simpletons; mere fools - just ask him!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
APK the butt-hurt baby strikes again; the more childish whinings, the more likely everyone is to agree with you, right baby? Whiny baby? What's that, cat's got your tongue? Poor baby!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Aww, poor baby's all bent out of shape because someone pointed out that his wailings were the work of a madman. Take it as a sign of CONCERN for your MENTAL HEALTH, apk, you poor sick son of a bitch you.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Ooh, poor baby seems to have pooped its pants. Whaddyagonnado now, APK? Mommy's nowhere to be seen and you're left sitting in a pile of your own shite - guess it must be someone else's fault, right APK? You set the world to right now, you go girl!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Boo-hoo, APK doesn't understand DNS, but that's OUR fault you see, because we're all HORRIBLE and INSENSITIVE to APK's unique NEEDS.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Whoops - you hear that sound, APK? That's the sound of NOBODY GIVING A SHIT ABOUT YOU. That's mostly because you're worthless and your opinion amounts to that which we scrape off our shoes having walked through the dogs-off-leash park.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Nobody cares about your 'findings', APK, because you have no integrity here on SlashDot. We've very quickly learned you are nothing but bile and spite and as such your 'programs' are viewed with well-justified suspicion and mistrust. Perhaps if you weren't such a fucking cunt of a Human being you might get a better response, but I'm not holding my breath as you seem perpetually stuck in the mindset of 'everyone else is a cunt but me' so I don't have much hope you'll ever mature or grow up in any way, especially since you're well into your fifties and still content to behave like a sixteen-year-old child.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
And they don't use Fertilizer. they don't use a drop. Or pesticides and herbicides.... Yep carbon neutral they are. It all the cows fault.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
This is why you need the forcing term. A small increases in temperature increase the water content, which is a far better greenhouse gas. This small increases in water heats it up a little more, that increase water content even more. Etc.
there are of course negative feedbacks as well. But we don't mention those. And lets just pretend our cloud and precipitation models are all good.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
I can't believe someone wrote that for people to see, expecting to make some sort of a point apart from "I am terrible at this whole science thing, but I don't like what scientists are saying, so I'll fart all over my keyboard and hope some sort of argument falls out".
Your argument isn't even internally consistent. Your descendants will laugh at you, and condemn your selfish, intentionally-uninformed laziness.
All you said is "I don't understand any of this". Thanks for playing.
Hint: If you are attempting to refute an entire field of science, at least try to cite a single peer-reviewed source which agrees with you. Otherwise you are indistinguishable from a scientific illiterate tilting at windmills.
Funnily enough, climatologists know all of that, yet they still have enough evidence to show you are entirely incorrect, or have missed the point entirely.
I have no idea why you think you can debunk an entire field of science using your poorly-constructed posts, and a very patchy understanding of the topic at hand. The hubris is strong with this one!
Thanks Pollyanna. Of course the people who actually have to plan for this do not share your optimism: http://www.rollingstone.com/po...
You are the one who thinks that's all they use to figure out historical temperatures. Strangely enough, the scientists figured that out before you. That's why they use many different sources to figure this out.
With every post you are loudly proclaiming your ignorance. You might as well be saying "I don't know how this works, but I spent 30 seconds, and because I am clearly awesome, I will now explain how all these scientists are incorrect". You are clutching at straws, and it's sad. I feel sad for the society which created you, for the educators who failed you, and for the future you have no problem leaving for others who were not so intellectually lazy as you appear so desperate to be.
You should probably read about what increases in sea level mean to storm surges. You'd probably not spout something so ridiculous if you did. It's like you're desperate to not learn.
That's a terrible post, even for you. You really think you are proving anything by posting false claims and using them as evidence for your false conclusions?
The only thing you demonstrated is that you are either scientifically illiterate, hell-bent on deception, or both.
I have read about it. What point are you trying to get at?
nope, not flamebait
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Pollyanna describes you: someone who reads disaster porn and scifi in Rolling Stone Magazine and thinks it's science. From the article you link to:
So, Rolling Stone assumes a ten-fold faster sea level rise than is actually occurring and then spins a fairy tale around that.
More importantly, Miami had a population of 300 in 1896. That is, a little over a century, it hardly existed at all. So, it would hardly be a big problem if, in another century, it has moved inland a few miles.
In any case, even without any sea level rise, it was unwise to build such a metropolis in such a location to begin with, and it can only exist there because of massive subsidies for things like flood insurance and civil engineering. To demand that Americans elsewhere pay even more money to preserve Miami in such a place is ludicrous. It's crony capitalism at its worst. Stop subsidizing flood insurance and public civil engineering projects, and you'd be amazed how motivated people become to move out of Miami to a safer location.
Really? What am I supposed to be "entirely incorrect" about?
I'm not trying to "debunk an entire field of science". I accept temperature and sea level rise as a given. The question is what, if anything, we should do about it. That's not science, it's policy and economics. Even the IPCC reports discuss this and say that action and inaction on climate change cost about the same amount under their economic assumptions, so even they don't believe utter disaster is looming. And their economic assumptions are, indeed, debatable, as are the tradeoffs and values they choose.
You need to lay off the "420", Dave. And you need to start like an adult citizen of a democracy and think for yourself, rather than hoping that strong patriarchal leader will fix your problems for you.
'solar and wind cant cut it alone'
Again.
That statement is purely false.
We know that more solar energy lands on the Earth in one hour than all of humanity consumes in an entire year ( it actually only takes ~40 minutes ). We need only harness a small fraction of that. and you also conveniently ignore any and all potential storage solutions, or advancing grid technology.
We also already know that, using current mainstream solar technology (therefore excluding advanced panels under development that are even more efficient), it only takes ~25k square miles to power the entire planet with solar. If located in a single location, that's a square ~158 miles on a side, which isn't terribly large given the size of the planet. Some real world engineering proposals based off that call for multiple arrays located in the planets barren locations, distributed around the world. combined with emerging smart grid electrical systems, distribution between generation, storage, and consumer, while being one of the largest infrastructure projects ever proposed, becomes simple, and raises the standard of living across the entire world.
but, even that, a centralized and interlinked system, isn't required.
distributed generation, with every structure independent is also possible, if somewhat less efficient.
or a combination of the two, combining independent generation at individual structures, with a smart grid for distribution, which is actually the most realistic way forward.
analyses have already shown that if every residential structure in the United States alone were equipped with panels, we would generate roughly 140% of the entire worlds' electricity needs. Which translates into meeting America's needs, and thus energy independence, with only a small fraction of that. Similarly most any other country could also achieve total energy independence in similar fashion. This also excludes commercial (nonresidential structures), which while less numerous, tend to be larger, and even better suited to panel installation.
Therefore, I see little reason to proceed with nuclear, given all its drawbacks, when we already have the world's (nay, solar systems) greatest nuclear reactor shining on us every day. If we didn't have the sun, if we were further out, say at Mars' distance or further, yes, nuclear would be the way to go. But we aren't.
So again, I reiterate: while I get that you want to cheerlead for nuclear, what you said is patently false.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Well food prices also increase because developing nations are drastically increasing their meat use which requires a lot of crops to go into feeding pigs/chickens/cows. Which I'm okay with because everyone should get to enjoy barbecued animal carcass.
But I agree ethanol is one of the dumbest ideas out there. If you get ethanol as a biproduct of a process you already need to do and use that for fuel, okay. But to turn food land into gas land is crazy. Especially if Billy-Bob needs to drive his diesel all over the place to tend to the crop and spray fertilizer (often generated via fossil fuels). It further leads to a mono-culture which likely screws with things like bees (especially if the seed is Monsanto terminator crops where the pollen has been specifically engineered to be screwed up so you can't replant it) and moves prices so that pretty much everything you by in the store has corn or soy in it. No thanks.
Some global warming might be good for people. Our mean latitude seems to be around 30 degrees but it looks like to me there is a lot more land at higher latitudes which would then become more comfortable.: http://www.themarysue.com/worl.... Will populations need to move away from the current coasts and maybe further away from the tropics, maybe. But people migrate, always have always will.
Troll harder, you haven't mastered it yet.
Vegetables don't release 200 - 500 litres of methane a day. And why feed 20 calories of grains to a chicken to get 1 calorie of meat, when you can just eat the grain? Then you have 20 times more land to produce food for people, and we can stop clearcutting a major carbon sink like the rainforest and keep that carbon in place too.
Reality sucks, don't it? ;)
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
None of what you are saying is doable. You can't rest the fate of hundreds of millions of people on a bunch of theoretical wishful thinking. Pick a city of 50,000 people and actually disconnect from the grid and go with 100% solar and wind. You need to disconnect from the non-renewable grid to demonstrate a viable proof of concept because once you force solar and wind to provide base load capacity you explode your costs because you need large scale storage. The cities that are going to "100%" are really just buying the equivalent power from renewable sources which gets dumped into the grid. Which is fine until the fossil fuel power plants start going offline and you can't actually get that electricity all the way from your solar power stations reliably.
With the smart grid where you plan to just somehow have enough solar and wind scattered around the planet to shift electricity around when regions don't have solar or wind.... How long is it going to take you to boot strap using fossil fuels? Probably a couple hundred years.... which is too late for carbon reduction.
Like I've said before: Just prove me wrong. And prove me wrong without wrecking the environment with more pollution than nuclear would. And prove me wrong now not 30 years from now when it is probably too late to stop another few degrees of warming.
I don't see anybody alleging a "conspiracy"; "conspiracy" requires secrecy and deception.
The original poster-- "Speck'sbacon"-- was alleging a conspiracy. He was saying that we need to "follow the money", which will reveal that thousands of scientists, working for twenty different agencies in different countries on different continents, are all presenting corrupt results for money.
I was merely pointing out that not only is there no evidence for this, and not only does follow the money reveal no such thing, but that this is absurd
I'm sure scientists and politicians promoting action on AGW truly believe what they are saying, and they aren't secret about it. But that doesn't make them right.
Whether they are right is a different thread. The thread I was commenting on was pointing out the absurdities in the proposal by speck'sbacon.
Now, to the best of our knowledge, they in fact are right. But this is because they use the tools of science-- observation, calculation, and comparing competing hypotheses by measurements and use of the scientific method. And if better measurements show something different, the state of "the best of our knowledge" can change. So far, however, they haven't.
Your idea that there is a " simple, self-organizing, positive feedback" cycle supporting wrong science is a different statement, but it is also wrong. Scientists gain their reputation partly by being smart, but the way they show that they are smart is by being right. Add evidence that the existing models are right, or find evidence that competing models are right, either one works, but you do not get ahead in science by being wrong. If it looked like existing climate models were wrong, believe me, climate scientists would all be rushing to be the first to show it.
The only real surprise is how the global green-communist-jewish-scientist-lizard man conspiracy allows people to post so many climate change denial posts without kidnapping them in black helicopters or zapping them with mind control rays.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The reason nuclear power plants aren't successful or competitive is massive NIMBYism and a suppression of efficient and clean nuclear power technologies because they might be used to generate weapons-grade material. Neither of those can be solved with more subsidies.
Of course, that's still better than "renewables", which simply aren't cost effective at all.
The subsidies are needed because of the cost of delays caused by regulation and lawsuits and to make it competitive with coal and natural gas. Basically most of the private sector capital investment is going into natural gas power generation and natural gas pipelines now because there is a natural gas glut in the market and it doesn't face as much opposition because it isn't as much of a polluter as coal.
Natural gas is better than coal, but it won't get us to the carbon neutrality needed to mitigate Global Climate Change.
You build a nuclear powered railgun, and shoot the waste into the sun.
The error there is yours in assuming that making money from a fad requires a conspiracy. There are plenty of fads, from selfie stick and pet rocks to iPhones, that are self-reinforcing with no central coordination or planning. Entire startups are built on such so-called "network effects", and entire countries have gone fascist or communist not because of some carefully prepared master plan, but because a political fad took off.
The science isn't the issue here, it's the politics. Science doesn't say we need to create large statist institutions to reduce carbon emissions; that's a political choice. In fact, if anything, science tells us the exact opposite. First, if we don't act on climate change, the costs won't be any worse (and likely be lower) than if we do act; despite all the scary language, that's what the science and economics of the IPCC report amounts to. But even that assumes that governmental action on climate change would actually be effective, and the social sciences tell us that that is actually unlikely to be the case.
(As for the science itself, although I generally believe the climate models are fairly reasonable as far as climate modeling goes, whether they are "right" on predictions for 2100 can only be determined in 2100, not today.)
Subsidies aren't an effective remedy to bad regulation. In fact, if you subsidize in response to bad regulation, you economically reward bad regulation and will encourage more of it.
In different words "impose a billion dollars of additional regulations on us and then subsidize us by a billion dollars" is a good deal for a regulated industry.
Well, I disagree with the premise that carbon neutrality is even a desirable goal.
>who determined that it was not one of many long term cyclical changes that have occurred for millions of years.
Well since every other one of those led to a mass extinction, we can probably rule that out.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>Some global warming might be good for people. Our mean latitude seems to be around 30 degrees but it looks like to me there is a lot more land at higher latitudes which would then become more comfortable.: http://www.themarysue.com/worl... [themarysue.com]. Will populations need to move away from the current coasts and maybe further away from the tropics, maybe. But people migrate, always have always will.
You make it sound so easy... only trouble is, we got all these borders and things now. Look at the political difficulties right now in Europe over a fairly small number of refugees.
You make it sound like a mass migration will be a simple process... dream on, the route for such a migration has always run over a lot of dead bodies, and this one - if it happens, will have more than any other. Most of them killed by other people.
You comfortable industrialized society sure as hell wouldn't survive it either - nothing like massive resource wars everywhere to disrupt industry.
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>How do we know for sure that the increased CO2 levels are entirely caused by humans or that the CO2 levels are the entire cause of the entire 1C increase?
For one thing - the vast majority of human CO2 is from fossil fuels and their isotopes are pretty unique. No other natural source of CO2 has the same unique isotope. It excludes everything else we burn, everything nature burns, everything volcanoes do - the works.
We can count them. It's a conservative result since not all burning is fossil fuels (though nearly all other burning is actually carbon neutral so that cancels out nicely).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>But science to me is usually about the hard, provable facts
Then you known nothing about it.
If there is one thing that science sure as fuck do not promise it's hard facts. On the contrary - science is what you get when you keep questioning and retesting everything for ever. No proof is final.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
... and *5* Degrees COOLER than Mezolithic Levels"
-- "I'm not in a hurry; I'm in Hawaii." The Homeless Guy
You mean 100% of the Africans who survived the famine caused by the loss of fossil fuel enabled fertilizers?
Wait, now there's no fertilizer either? Why does that need to happen? Why do you think that moving our power production away from fossil fuels necessarily means that things like fertilizer have to go away? You're saying it's not possible to get rid of most of the coal and heavy oil CO2-producing power plants without also getting rid of fertilizer? What about cars? If half the vehicles on the road switch from gas to electric does that also mean that the fertilizer industry goes belly up? Why are you claiming that two things that are seemingly unrelated (power generation and fertilizer manufacture) are necessarily so intertwined that reduction in one of them necessarily leads to the elimination of the other? You're saying it's not at all possible to switch to a more renewable energy generation system without also completely destroying the fertilizer industry?
your grandparents who starved to death when AGW "remediation" efforts bankrupted all western countries to the point they could no longer pay pensions and thus allowed all the elderly to die.
And, again, you think I'M the alarmist. That is a fucking ridiculous scenario. Those efforts will not bankrupt a single country, let alone all of them. Get a grip on your fever dreams and come back to reality. See the Citigroup report for reasons why they will not bankrupt any country at all.
When was the right time to stop using charcoal to smelt steel? Or to use whale oil to light lamps? When the market dictates we change.
Ahh, the almighty free market, the one that made it so that we had to bail out the banks because they fucked up and everyone else had to pay for it rather than let them go bankrupt and let other companies who didn't make the same mistakes buy up their assets and continue forward. That free market? I've got news for you: the free market does not exist in a vacuum. It is not a sentient being, it is made of fallible and stupid people. It is composed of the kind of people who see their industry fading into oblivion and decide to spend millions or billions of dollars on politicians to artificially prop up their failing and fading empire. That's the free market you want to put so much faith in. I don't share your faith, I want to see action, not hoping that everything works out. Hope is not a strategy.
I know economics and peak theory about 1000x better than you do, and will crush you if you try.
Ooooh, you're going to "crush" me, are you? How about the reports that Exxon did their studies starting in the 70s, and that their own scientists concluded that the "greenhouse effect" (as it was called then) was caused by their own products, and then they did an about-face and put out a massive amount of marketing and PR (using those helpful fellows from the tobacco industry, no less) to spread the disinformation that their products are actually OK and not responsible for any bad things that might happen to your little planet? How about the assertion that we have so much oil currently in storage and in reserve here in the US that if we burned it all we would seriously damage the environment? You don't give a shit about that, because you believe in the "free economy (sponsored by ExxonMobile(tm))", and you think that we can go along pumping 35+ billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere year over year and it will have zero effect on anything worldwide just because you can write out a chemistry equation. Tell you what: if you can get 10% of published science papers to agree with your "theory", then maybe it deserves something other than a dismissive wave. Otherwise, at present, virtually every published and peer-reviewed paper disagrees with you. So you'll excuse me if I think you're full of shit and if I question your motives.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Unless they have to pay companies aren't going to care how many tanks are needed to guard and/or kill the competition. Heck armies use resources too driving up the price/profit.
No I don't think it will be simple I just don't think we are special. We panic/fear because:
a) someone isn't nice to us
b) someone dies from a disease
c) some nutjob kills a few people in a theater
d) something happens causing refugees
While all aren't good things none of them are new. As they say in Iran Shite happens.
We all know that the planet will survive, and continue to support life, including human life. That's not in question.
Your mistake is in assuming that temperatures over five thousand years ago are relevant to what's going on now. Plant and animal life, and human civilization, has adapted to current conditions over that time, and major changes are going to cause disruption, which is expensive.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If you want some more ballpark figures, the Earth's atmosphere weighs about five quadrillion tons (probably a little more, but this is good enough for rough calculations). That means that one part-per-million by mass would be five billion tons. That's not usually what we want; we want PPM in number of molecules in the air. The atmosphere is mostly N2 (about 80%) and O2 (about 20%), with molecular weights of 28 and 32 respectively. CO2 has a molecular weight of 44, so it's about 50% heavier than the atmosphere in general, so a PPM is about 7.5 billion tons. Take the estimation above and we get the result that about 3 billion tons of carbon will increase CO2 by one PPM.
Hydrocarbons burn to H2O and CO2, but the molecular weight is usually the carbon (75% carbon at least, in methane), so you won't go too horribly wrong if you figure a little more for most hydrocarbons.
Now look up things like coal production and the like, and make your own estimates of how much they raise the CO2 content of the atmosphere when burned. I believe you'll find that not all of the CO2 winds up in the atmosphere, but human CO2 production is quite enough to explain the rise from 280ppm to 400ppm.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The scientists aren't necessarily right, but that's the way to bet, and they're a whole lot likelier to be correct than you are. They've studied the issue a great deal.
The idea of creating a crisis to profit by it is political, not scientific. The idea of wanting power is political, not scientific. It isn't true in politics, but the more scientists believe in some phenomenon, the greater the reputation reward will be for disproving it.
If you want to know what's really going on, pay little attention to the politicians and try to avoid relying on the media. Look for what the real scientists are saying.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
-Yes, it's warmer than it was during the last ice age.
-Yes, life existed during periods even warmer. But not current life, which evolved under climactic conditions that took millions of years to change....not a mere 200 years. It's not the presence of life, but the conditions it evolved under, and the rate at which it is capable of adapting to changing conditions, conditions that under natural cycles take millions of years to change.
(how many times are you going to repeat the same easily dismissed bits of moronic stupidity?)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
So then you read about how Sandy caused ~40% more damage, both physical and economic, due to the increased storm surge, than it would have without said sea level rise, and similar effects on other storms on coastal areas?
No apparently, you didn't, because if you had you wouldn't need to have pointed out the precise reason WHY sea level rise biggest risk factor isn't the static avg sea level, but its effect on storm surges.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
a global average 10C warmer than now is NOT mild and wet across the entire globe.
you truly have no bloody clue about what you speak.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Nope.
Wrong and moronic.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
So what?
1) Global Climate change is disruptive and people will unnecessarily die or live worse-off because of the resulting displacement of peoples.
Total speculation, solely based on computer models that are wrong from the ground up. Ignoring the laws of physics is always foolish, but none as much as what the warmist brigade is doing.
2) We can be carbon neutral in 30 years if we create large scale subsidies in existing state of the art in nuclear power. (oh and throw in a few renewable sources for up to about 30% of the total requirements)
And
3) If you think we can be carbon neutral and meet the energy needs of civilization with just subsidized renewables then you are the same as a "climate denier" because pretending to solve a problem (to get your extremely inadequate pet projects funded) is in effect no better than denying the problem and just waiting to run out of economically viable fossil fuels.
Carbon Neutrality is not based on science. It's based on the fertile imagination of a few, which a whole horde of lemmings following after, of which very few have actually taken the trouble to verify that the premise that underlies all the projections is valid. It turns out CO2 is a coolant, the greenhouse effect does not apply to an open system like a planet's atmosphere and there is no relationship with the amount of so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and global temperature, except that eventually an increase in temperature is followed by 'n rise in CO2 level. The former is definitely not caused by an increase of the latter.
So in the end all this uproar about pre-industrial levels bla bla and climate bla bla and warming bla bla bla, is just a lot of hot air.
And as for droughts - they are increasing as a direct result of climate change: http://phys.org/news/2011-10-h...
Let's look at the actual paper and the actual claim:
Results are given in section 3, where we present evidence that a change in the regionâ(TM)s climate has been detected and that it is unlikely that the observed Novemberâ"April Mediterranean drying since 1902 occurred due to internal variability alone. Diagnosis of the CMIP3 coupled models reveals that this detected change toward drier conditions is attributable, in part, to the Mediterranean regionâ(TM)s sensitivity to time-evolving external radiative forcing. The amplitude of the externally forced, area-averaged drying signal is roughly one-half the magnitude of the observed drying during 1902â"2010, indicating that other processes likely also contributed.
They are speaking of really poor correlation here. There are other man-made effects that need to be considered, like water table depletion, vegetation removal, and agricultural practices.
ORLY? http://www.scientificamerican....
"Climate" is used several times, but aside from empty assertions that climate affects or impacts the potential range of a disease, no connection has been claimed between the incident of tropic diseases in the US and climate change. The actual connection is travel with people bringing back diseases from the tropics.
Oh, prices are low right now. Just wait until a significant part of farmland becomes desert or salt marsh.
No, they aren't. And the primary reason why farmland would become desert or salt marsh is mismanagement both of the land and water resources. This is quite relevant because climate change might negatively impact the productivity of farmland (or it might not), but poor land and water management will negatively impact the productivity of farmland frequently to the point of the land no longer being viable farmland.
My view is that management is far more important than climate when it comes to agriculture and growing the food we need to the point that it doesn't really matter what the climate does.
Either way, going with nuclear is a good hedge with multiple benefits. It is also less polluting of the atmosphere which we do know causes lung health issues. It takes up less land area (less arable and livable land area) than pretty much all the other energy sources. It is reliable... you load up with a relatively small amount of uranium fuel rods and you can run a plant for years. And fossil fuels will eventually become harder (and therefore more taxing on the economy) to extract after some number of decades. Yes, with current technology you do start running low on usable uranium fuel after a certain number of decades or centuries, but with new generations of reactors you could stretch out that fuel for millennia. You don't need Global Warming to justify nuclear becoming a larger part of the energy supply, but if you are trying to mitigate Global Climate Change or doing so just in case, then nuclear power becomes essential.
so................ if it says so in a "model" then it will definitely happen, no if's and's or but's. scare tactics in full force. or somebody stands to make a bunch of money. (there was a coming ice age in the seventies btw). always a crisis. everybody is gonna DIE!!!! bla bla bla.
So what?
1) Global Climate change is disruptive and people will unnecessarily die or live worse-off because of the resulting displacement of peoples.
2) We can be carbon neutral in 30 years if we create large scale subsidies in existing state of the art in nuclear power. (oh and throw in a few renewable sources for up to about 30% of the total requirements)
And
3) If you think we can be carbon neutral and meet the energy needs of civilization with just subsidized renewables then you are the same as a "climate denier" because pretending to solve a problem (to get your extremely inadequate pet projects funded) is in effect no better than denying the problem and just waiting to run out of economically viable fossil fuels.
All of this won't bother me, I will be dead by then. It may however, bother my descendants. I don't pollute, so this global warning is for my grandchildren to handle.
I suppose that we will be building houses underground and living underground,
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The science isn't the issue here, it's the politics.
You seem to be arguing some point that is different from the point I was addressing.
The issue I was talking about was the science. Not the politics.
Science doesn't say we need to create large statist institutions to reduce carbon emissions; that's a political choice.
That's correct.
In fact, if anything, science tells us the exact opposite.
Nope, you were right the first time: science doesn't address this, that's a political choice. The science can tell us how much the world will warm as a function of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and (just as important) tell us why we know it, and with what error bars. How much it will cost to correct it is an economic calculation. And how we chose to correct it-- or even whether we chose to correct it-- is a political decision.
First, if we don't act on climate change, the costs won't be any worse (and likely be lower) than if we do act;
The science tells us nothing of the sort. The science does tell us what the physical and biological effect of warming will be (although predicting the detailed effects is much harder than, and hence is quite a bit less precise than, the simple prediction of how much the warming will be.) A review of what we currently know is covered in the IPCC Working Group II report, for what it's worth: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/... ("Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability").
The science does not tell us the societal or economic costs, and in no way does it tell us the cost of acting-- that's economics and politics, not science. Among other things, that first would require examining alternative plans to addressing the problem, and there really isn't any political consensus on that.
I will blame the deniers for that, by the way. By shouting "NO! IT'S A HOAX!" every time the issue of how to address the problem comes up, they have totally drowned out any substantive discussion of how, or even whether, we should deal with it; and completely derailed any discussions of the cost benefit ratio of various potential methods to deal with it. If you are arguing that all the proposed solutions are "statist"-- well, that's because the people who might have other ideas are too busy shouting "IT'S A HOAX."
...(As for the science itself, although I generally believe the climate models are fairly reasonable as far as climate modeling goes, whether they are "right" on predictions for 2100 can only be determined in 2100, not today.)
Well, that's true, but it's true because it's a tautology. The only way to tell whether any prediction for the future is right is to wait to see whether it happens.
Does this mean we can now start talking about the evils of gay scoutmasters? The AGW stuff is getting a bit boring.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Do you mean like why the Shuttle might be launched despite protests from the technical people? Real power is having people carry out your wishes without having to order them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Dyson himself has said that he doesn't know much about the technical details (he's a physicist, not a climatologist), only that he feels that the climate is very complicated, and that there's too much expert reliance on the models. That's fine as an opinion, but proves nothing.
Of your linked list, just looking through the names shows mostly qualifications in physics, geophysics, paleogeophysics, chemistry, botany, ecology, geology, biogeography - and the ex-Greenpeace guy. Compare that to the hundreds of actual, practicing climatologists who contributed their data to the IPCC reports, and the thousands more who have published studies explicitly or implicitly confirming climate change.
There's no alarmism there, only reams of scientific evidence showing that the earth IS warming, and will in all likelihood continue warming at even faster rates (as it has been doing for 150 years). There are also numerous studies demonstrating that, unchecked, this will be very expensive for us to adapt to (those that can).
What we DO about that is an entirely separate question. "Alarmism" could certainly apply to some proposed responses (mostly to the wilder, straw-man suggestions like "destroy the economy"), but there are also plenty of sane, well-reasoned proposals that will have a long-term net benefit to the economy, even without considering the avoided costs of climate change adaption. I leave it to the political debate as to which to choose - but that is entirely orthogonal to the science.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
To the degree that economics makes falsifiable predictions about the future, economics is a science.
Economics and political science certainly tell us that large, statist institutions are inefficient or even ineffective.
The IPCC has evaluated the cost/benefit ratios, and it comes to the conclusion that the cost of action and inaction about balance out under its assumptions, but that is assuming that action is actually successful. Since there is a high probability that action is unsuccessful yet costly, that alone means that we shouldn't take action.
Well, apparently you don't understand that fact, since you attempted to justify climate predictions for 2100 with the statement that "Scientists gain their reputation partly by being smart, but the way they show that they are smart is by being right." Generally, we don't know whether scientists are right until decades after they formulated their theories. And we won't know whether climate scientists are right for another half century.
Your problem is simply that you aren't listening to the simplest and most effective solution: do nothing. Fossil fuels are already expensive and provide a strong built-in incentive to economize on their usage. The market will therefore take care of this by itself.
Well, actually it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I am stipulating that the scientists are right on the science: the degree of sea level rise and temperature increase. They also furnish economic estimates of costs. And based on their estimates there is no justification for government action on climate change.
That is exactly what I'm doing, which is why I concluded that the media and politicians are fabricating a crisis for which there is no scientific basis.
Force what? There's already so much water vapor that the atmosphere is already opaque on its wavenumbers. Again, more will do nothing.
Clouds are a good question -- I have not heard any definitive resolution on whether the increased albedo is overwhelmed by the re-radiation blanket effect. My rough calcs say no (incoming -70% outgoing -50%)
" Why do you think that moving our power production away from fossil fuels necessarily means that things like fertilizer have to go away? " Uhh, perhaps because the vast majority of fertilizer comes from fossil fuel feedstock? Are you seriously this ignorant of the systems you seek to fundamentally change with massive firearm-backed force?
"Those efforts will not bankrupt a single country, let alone all of them"
Why? because you, in your living incarnation of ignorance says it is so? Do you think your opinons carry the weight of some sort of some sort of control language of the universe, such that the things you say simply BECOME true? Because they don't, and you are a fucking retard for thinking that.
"Ahh, the almighty free market, the one that made it so that we had to bail out the banks"
That wasn't the free market you god damn moron. That was George "We Had To Put a Bullet In The Brain Of The Free Market To Save It" "I'm A Communist Fascist Faggot Who Sucks Every Dick In The Universe" Bush. That is the EXACT OPPOSITE of the free market, and it has doomed us all to starvation and death. Just like you will with your further anti-market GENOCIDE. Christ, do you even understand what the market is? Its human beings trading with each other. That is IT. When you intervene with guns and force, it is no longer a market, but a command economy. Stop being fucking stupid, if you can. If not, kill yourself.
"How about the reports that Exxon did their studies starting in the 70s, and that their own scientists concluded that the "greenhouse effect" (as it was called then) was caused by their own products"
Bad science then as now. CO2 was assumed to be a greenhouse gas, when in fact is is H2O that is the greeenhouse gas. H2O is a major contaminate in CO2 cylinders. Dry CO2 wasn't available when the groundwork was being laid for the CO2 as a greenhouse gas theory. AGW has become so politicized that even repeated failures of climate "scientists" predictions have failed to produce ANY change in their theory, or re-examination of their premises. It's shameful.
But in any event, I don't really care. You morons can all go kill yourselves. I'm going to upload the second the tech becomes available, and pray to fucking science that I never have to see another one of you god damned apes again for the rest of fucking eternity.
Why use 1 gallon of water for one itty bitty almond to make almond milk, when cows give much more milk for the same usage?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
>Well, I'm glad that you accept that the critters loved it, because that removes the major scare scenario of global warming.
Different critters for the most part, major climate change = mass extinction.
We evolved for a world with THESE critters in them, we have absolutely basis to assume we could survive one without them and instead populated by others.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Nope... even if you got 100% of your electricity from dirty, dirty coal, the efficiency of the electric car is still so much higher than that of a standard gasoline ICE that you'll still end up putting less CO2 in the atmosphere for the same distance driven. A big coal-fired generator is a lot more efficient than a lot of small car motors.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
If the beat is good, we're gonna jam.
GCC may be more disruptive than you think, sooner than you think - and not because of temperature rises.
Rapidly increasing oceanic CO2 levels are likely to kick off a global Anoxic Oeanic Event. This would wipe out a large chunk of the planet's megafauna (including us) if past ones are anything to go by.
There are indications it may have already started.
UK:
Hinkeley Point power station is currently guaranteed to sell its electrricty at double the current rate (it was the only way the investors could be persuaded to build and under normal circumstances it would double by the time it was built anyway)
Thanks to subsidies, Renewables generators are selling into the grid at 6 to 12 times the going rate _NOW_ and thanks to much higher than advertised maintenance costs(*) they're only barely making money.
(*) Windmills keep eating gearboxes (or having them catch fire). This is expensive. Solar PV installations are not putting out anywhere near as much electricity as claimed (the absolute peak power output has been sold as "the output", whilst long-term real world figures were claimed to be about 30% of this - they're actually 15-20% of average, less still if nights are taken into account.
Even if they could replace all the CO2 generating sources (they can't, see below), having electricity prices climb that much is not feasible.
Why can't windmills replace coal plants?
1: Density: Even if safety regulations were ignored, carpeting the UK in windmills would only produce enough power on average to replace 3-5 power stations. The UK has in excess of 60 conventional stations.
Carpeting the country in windmills won't happen, because:
2: Safety regulations. Windmills need a 2 _mile_ safety clearance between them and any inhabited buildings or areas. This is due to the slightly pesky fact that the blades have been observed to go almost that far when they break - and they've been breaking more frequently than planned, thanks to gearbox fires weakening them.
Solar PV has a similar density problem. Tidal simply doesn't work economically - all the schemes which have been started up worldwide have quietly closed down.
Solar Thermal is also of dubious economics and density plays into the picture.
Importing power from elsewhere is hard. Underwater interconnectors are extremely expensive and the UK only has 3GW connectiivty to the rest of Europe. That's already peaking out at times.
Generating power in the Sahara and importing it to Europe would require the largest engineering projects ever undertaken, merely to transport the electricity. The fact that African Generated electricty being sent out of the continent when there is more than enough demand south of the Sahara to absorb every bit of that power would be seen as yet more exploitative colonial theft should also be taken into account.
Which brings up the other factor: Reduction of 1st world electricity demands won't mean much when developing world demands would completely swamp that reduction simply to bring people up to a reasonably low standard of living.
If you want to produce that much electricity, that soon, the only way forward is nuclear and lots of it. Conventional technology now and MSRs when they're ready. Fusion won't be ready for another century.
"Nuclear waste" is a solved problem. The amount produced by a conventional station over 60 years will sit in an olympic-sized pool and be safe to approach unshielded after 300 years - NOT 300,000 as the extremists claim.
That "waste" is unlikely to sit in a pool for 300 years though - it's highly likely to be useful fuel for kickstarting MSRs - which produce 1% of the waste level of conventional nukes - less still when you realise they can take the "useless" U238 depleted uranium from enrichment processes that current makes up 60-65% of mined uranium (yup, less than 40% of uranium taken out of the ground and fed into the refining process comes out the other end as useful) and "just so happens" to be highly useful as H-bomb enhancers - in other words getting rid of that "non-radioactive" waste is a really good idea.
Even if no use for kickstarting a MSR, the MSR can quickly break down conventional "nuclear waste" to much safer elements.
Why? It's only waste in the sense that it can't be used in the heath-robinson (rube-goldberg) contraption that comprises a current civil nuclear plant.
Nuclear plants currently boil water to make steam to turn turbines.
They don't run very hot, because the fuel rods are poor heat conductors and melt if it gets too warm. This means they're thermally inefficient. More than 2/3 of their heat is vented to atmosphere.
That water is also a problem because water dissolves everything eventually, even faster when it's under high pressure and at high temperature and slightly acidic to start with. You really _don't_ want it near your radioactives because some amount always ends up in solution and if there's a leak you now have large quantities of radioactive steam to dispose of, or radioactive water entering the biosphere, or (if the cooling fails entirely and the rods melt), hydrogen/oxygen being cracked out by the heat, carrying various radioactive gases along too.
Short term we have to keep using conventional water reactors.
Long term, Molten salt systems are intrinsically safe and a no-brainer to move on to - no pressurisation, no boiling, freeze sold at 400C (so they don't go far if they leak) and gassing is relatively easy to handle as extracting gases is part of the design and that extraction means they can throttle up/down quickly to follow loads, which reduces the need for nasty peaking plants. They've already been tested but not at civil nuke scale.
Using molten sodium coolant is a pretty dumb idea, as several operators have discovered. Molten lead is better but you still have fuel rods to deal with and if the lead freezes they're hard to extract. With a Molten salt system the fuel is in the liquid and that also means you can SCRAM the thing very quickly (the test system was shut down every friday night and restarted every monday morning - because noone wanted to watch over it during weekends. Try that with a "normal" nuclear reactor and see how short a period it takes to break it.)
Actually the more efficient nuclear methods are much harder to make weapons-grade materials from.
In particular, the plutonium from LFTRs is so badly polluted with the fiercely hot isotopes that it would be cheaper to build a windscale-style reactor (the one that caught fire) to make bomb-suitable stuff than to try and refine what you can get from the LFTR. Likewise, the U233 is so badly mixed up with other fiercely hot uranium isotopes that it's hard to extract for bombs.
Current uranium enrichment processes produce around 2 pounds of "useless" U238 for every pound of reactor fuel they output. Except it's not useless - it makes a great H-bomb casing (enhances yield) and there are all those bullets you can make from it - bear in mind that environmental uranium is a worse chemical pollutant than lead, so you don't really want people making bullets out of the stuff.
That existing enrichment system can also produce highly enriched uranium for weapons and the reprocessing systems for fuel rods can pull out the plutonium (uranium reactors generally produce bomb-grade isotopes) for weapons making. It's so energy intensive that the actual costs of operating such facilities for civil reactors are regarded by the USA as a military state secret.
And of course, conventional nuclear plants can burn (hydrogen gas), leak radioactive steam, explode (steam) or leak radioactive water. Molten Salt plants won't do any of these and if they leak any radioactives won't go more than a couple of feet before the salt freezes and can be dropped back into the pool. Addtionally, MSRs run so hot that you don't need to cool your output with river/sea water (air cooling is sufficient), so you don't have siting constraints and you don't have to turn them down during heatwaves, plus there's the small matter of massively reduced waste output, most of which can be kept onsite for a dozen years and then onsold as useful gasses such as helium/xenon
The comparison which could be drawn is that conventional water-based plants (and all other plants using encapsulated fuel) are like a Neucomen Steam engine and Molten salt systems are Mr Watt's improved version.
Economics and political science certainly tell us that large, statist institutions are inefficient or even ineffective.
I know way too many economists. I don't believe that I have ever heard an economist use the word "statist". That's basically a word libertarians invented to mean "anybody who supports anything a government does that I don't like."
As a general thing, economists point out that some things are well accomplished by market solutions, and some things require government actions. One of the conditions where free markets are not efficient is when there are externalities to production: that is, when a company's actions affect others in a way that they do not have to pay for. Pollution is a classic example of this. If it is more expensive to produce goods with no pollution, then companies that pollute will drive companies that don't pollute out of business.
What economists usually point out as the solution to this problem is to do the free market solution: make the companies pay for their externalities. This, in layman's terms, means: tax them for polluting. The result is that the ones who really do achieve efficiencies by polluting will pay to do so, and the ones who don't will adapt by avoiding polluting. (I should point out that this is different from the usual liberal solution, which would be to simply make it illegal to pollute.)
So, most of the economists I know favor a carbon tax. It's actually sort of a no-brainer for them; if emitting carbon dioxide has costs, the people who emit it should pay the costs, and thus they will adjust their actions to find alternate production means that emit less carbon dioxide. This is a form of "substitution of resources"-- a classic (and well understood) economic effect.
However, politicians hate the word "tax", and so this will never happen. The "cap and trade" concept was invented to try to achieve the same effect as a tax, but without using that poison word.
The rest of your post puts forth a false dichotomy, in which there are only two possibilities, to not make any changes whatsoever to attempt to address climate, or to do radical changes according to some unspecified plan, in order to (I would guess) completely stop carbon emissions. In fact, you are simplifying a complicated problem, and there is a complete continuum of possible actions between "nothing" and "completely stop carbon emission," and there are a great number of possible solutions in all the shades in between. The obvious right answer is to do those things that make sense, and not do the ones that don't.
You're also wrong and misreading the IPCC reports, by the way. There is no one solution, with one well defined cost, that can be compared to one effects model, with again a well defined cost.
Your problem is simply that you aren't listening to the simplest and most effective solution: do nothing. Fossil fuels are already expensive and provide a strong built-in incentive to economize on their usage. The market will therefore take care of this by itself.
First, I'm not sure why you think I'm not considering the option of doing nothing, since I've mentioned it in pretty much every single post I've made in this thread. That is one of the things that should be in the cost/benefit analysis.
Second, if the cost of fossil fuels doesn't include the cost of all the effects of burning it and putting the waste into the atmosphere, it's not paying its way-- the people who do have to pay for the effects are subsidizing the price. And so the market won't "take care" of this, because the externalities are not part of the market price-- the price is artificially low, meaning that too much coal will be burned.
We know it's you, APK. Are you really that stupid to think we'd fall for it? Please get some help. It must be hell in your head if you think this is in any way a good way to act.
If you don't want people picking apart your grasp of science, stop making up nonsensical sciency-sounding phrases.
As for your claims about the IPCC's findings, I have no idea. As you have been so tragically wrong on other aspects of this discussion, I dare say I won't take what you say on face value.
And you can keep your father issues to yourself. I'm simply listening to what the scientific community has to say on the issue.
And all of that doesn't matter, as there is no way in hell our modern societies and agriculture can operate in a climate like that.
Aaaah I understand. Your education was terrible and now you feel scared, so like a scared drowning person you lash out at whatever or whoever you can and try to drag it down to your level so you can escape your misery. Good jerb!
You are listening to political and economic ideologues that use science to justify their ideas. A century ago, people like you fervently defended eugenics and socialism with "what the scientific community" was saying.
If you don't know the IPCC's findings, how can you claim that you are listening to the scientific community? How can you even begin to claim to have an informed argument about climate change if you don't even know in some detail what the IPCC report says?
Oh, personally, I don't believe the weaponization argument is rational; I think it's politically and economically motivated. But it's the argument that has actually been used to justify banning efficient fission reactors in the past.
Are you kidding? Warm temperatures and plenty of precipitation? Of course modern societies can operate in that; there are plenty of societies that do. It's pretty much ideal.
None of that has anything to do with the findings. It's one massive ad hominem applied to the results.
It doesn't matter if the NWO published a PDF outlining their power grab through climate change - it doesn't change the science one iota.
The amount of money available for anyone who can poke holes in this thing is amazingly massive - the fact no-one has been able to do so yet speaks volumes.
And your conclusions are patently false, which is fine.
Because you said so, in a roundabout way ("If you are arguing that all the proposed solutions are 'statist'").
We seem to have a vocabulary problem here. Doing nothing is not a "solution." Doing nothing is choosing to not solve the problem. This is indeed an option which should be considered, but you can't call it is a "solution"-- saying "we don't have to solve this problem" is not a solution.
In fact, there is one solution that is not, namely doing nothing. It's been on the table for a long time, but people with vested political and economic interests keep denouncing its proponents as "deniers".
"Deniers" are people who deny that the greenhouse effect exists, or at least deny that human-generated greenhouse gasses cause warming.
As far as I know, there isn't a word for people who agree that human-generated gasses cause warming, but propose that the optimum way to address the issue is to do nothing. I don't think I've ever met proponents of that previously-- in fact, I'd be interested if you have a citation to somebody else holding that view.
That's irrelevant to the point I was making,
No, it's not. You claimed that market forces would solve the problem. They won't, because the cost of warming is not incorporated into the market price.
namely that if your goal is to reduce carbon emissions quickly and efficiently, market mechanisms without government interference are likely to be the quickest way of accomplishing that goal,
That's an assertion. You have given no evidence to support it.
since markets already have a strong incentive to reduce fossil fuel use because it's expensive.
No, it's not. Fossil fuels are cheap. They are cheap, in part, because the cost of the externalities are not included in the price, which means that the price is subsidized The fact that the price is subsidized means that the market is not accurately accounting for it.
That point has nothing to do with externalities.
Exactly. Since you're not accounting for externalities, the equilibrium price point doesn't include them. Since the equilibrium doesn't include this cost, the solution isn't optimized to trade the cost of not reducing emission against the cost of reducing emissions.
Accounting for externalities is a good thing in principle. But the problem with that idea is the notion that governments can do this. In fact, the various carbon taxes that exist or are proposed do not account for externalities correctly, and they certainly don't go to the people who actually bear the cost from carbon emissions.
That's a reasonable point to argue. However, don't attribute it to "economists", because most economists won't agree. Dealing with externailties is hard, but most economists accept that, one way or another, governments have to be involved.
"Statism" is a term from political science referring to the concentration of economic and political power in the state;
Uhh, perhaps because the vast majority of fertilizer comes from fossil fuel feedstock? Are you seriously this ignorant of the systems you seek to fundamentally change with massive firearm-backed force?
Don't be obtuse. You know perfectly well that ammonia feedstock produced from natural gas does not require the presence of a natural gas power plant. You're trying to imply that the fertilizer industry requires power plants that burn fossil fuels, and that's not true. Using fossil fuels in the manufacture of fertilizer and using them for power generation are completely different and, like I said, eliminating fossil fuels as the major fuel source for power generation does not require changes to the fertilizer industry. Hell, there is currently plenty of infrastructure in place right now to extract natural gas and send it to fertilizer plants for decades and decades (assuming that the fertilizer industry somehow stagnates completely and no new methods for manufacturing fertilizer or ammonia are conceived).
Why? because you, in your living incarnation of ignorance says it is so? Do you think your opinons carry the weight of some sort of some sort of control language of the universe, such that the things you say simply BECOME true? Because they don't, and you are a fucking retard for thinking that.
Nice strawman. Yeah, just attack me instead. There is no evidence that investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency, and in the process using them to replace or obsolete fossil fuel power generation, will result in any widespread economic harm. If existing energy companies don't want to go the way of the buggy whip then they should be the ones leading that push to make sure that they will remain viable companies. Otherwise, they're going to be passed by and nary a soul will shed a tear for the oil company executives who aren't making tens of millions of dollars a year any more. Other people will be making that money instead. The economy will still be there, it's just going to be investing in a different product.
That is the EXACT OPPOSITE of the free market
Holy fuck, an accurate thought. I'm proud of you. Yes, what we have here in the US is the exact opposite of a free market. When business leaders pour hundreds of millions of dollars into our politicians in order to pass laws that benefit their companies, what you are seeing is not the invisible hand of the market. You're seeing artificial manipulation. You're seeing that with fossil fuel companies right now. You're seeing that with the Koch brothers and people like them. The free market isn't running shit in this country, enormously wealthy corporations and individuals are the people pulling the strings. And, yes, bankers are still doing it also because no meaningful reforms have been enacted to dissuade them. Goldman Sachs is making hundreds of millions of dollars by manipulating the price of aluminum, that's the exact opposite of a free market. The same can (and does!) happen with any other commodity, especially the fossil fuels that you want the free market to control.
it has doomed us all to starvation and death. Just like you will with your further anti-market GENOCIDE.
Again, I'm the alarmist.
Christ, do you even understand what the market is? Its human beings trading with each other. That is IT.
Haha! No, that's not it. You left out the myriad of regulations imposed by politicians paid for by the corporations that benefit. THAT is the market.
CO2 was assumed to be a greenhouse gas, when in fact is is H2O that is the greeenhouse gas.
OK, I guess you're probably right about that. We have examples too, we can just look at Venus for example with its water vapor atmosphere. Wait, no, the atmosphere of Venus is 96% CO2, which supports the balmy 900 degree temperatures on the surface. But CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
But you aren't getting it. There is nothing magic about "accounting for externalities" when talking about supply, demand, and taxes. The more you tax, the less demand there is.
Exactly. There's nothing "magic" about simple economics. The more expensive something is, the less is used. It's little more than common sense, but using numbers.
So: You just clearly and succinctly stated that this approach would work to reduce carbon emissions. We agree.
Now, a different question is whether this is the best approach, and a different yet question is whether this is even a problem that we need to solve at all.
However, you seem to be violently agreeing with me on the basic economics, so I'll stop here.
You may want to look up Pollyanna. You seem to be confused as to the meaning. While you're at it, you may want to look up the economic cost of the projected sea level rise for Miami alone. If you're going to have a strong opinion on this topic it may as well be an informed one.
I'm way ahead of you: (1) basically, even the IPCC says that the costs and benefits about balance out if we do nothing, and (2) the IPCC (as well as you) are actually overestimating the costs of inaction and underestimating the costs of action.
As for "Pollyannaism", it's people who propose action on AGW who are unreasonably optimistic: they believe that government action is effective, that its costs are lower than they are, and that we can somehow "stabilize" the climate and coastal areas. You people have all the naivite of a young earth creationist and a socialist rolled into one.
Nope. The only study that showed net benefits up to 1C warming had errors. Here's how it looks corrected: https://andthentheresphysics.w... . Say, why not answer the question? what is the economic cost of the projected sea level rise for Miami alone?
I didn't claim that there was a "net benefit" to warming. I made a statement about the IPCC. However, I didn't say what I wanted to say.
What the IPCC actually says is that the cost of mitigation about balance the benefits from mitigation. That is, according to the IPCC, we always incur a net cost from climate change, but the cost is the same whether we successfully mitigate or not.
The cost is close to zero, since essentially nothing that is in Miami today will have any economic value in the year 2100. That fact is independent of what happens to Miami in the year 2100, whether it gets flooded, destroyed by a nuclear blast, or erased in an alien invasion.
Another way of looking at it is that about a hundred years ago, Miami was a tiny hamlet with a few hundred people, so at worst, it will simply go back to that; that is, over the span of 200 years, nothing will have been lost even if Miami becomes almost completely uninhabitable.