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What They Don't Tell You About Climate Change (economist.com)
Countries are scrambling to limit the rise in the earth's temperature to just two degrees by the end of this century. But Slashdot reader dryriver shares an article titled "What They Don't Tell You About Climate Change."
No, it is not that Climate Change is a hoax or that the climate science gets it all wrong and Climate Change isn't happening. According to the Economist, it is rather that "Fully 101 of the 116 models the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses to chart what lies ahead assume that carbon will be taken out of the air in order for the world to have a good chance of meeting the 2C target."
In other words, reducing carbon emissions around the world, creating clean energy from wind farms, driving electrical cars and so forth is not going to suffice to meet agreed upon climate targets at all. Negative emissions are needed. The world is going to overshoot the "maximum 2 degrees of warming" target completely unless someone figures out how to suck as much as 810 Billion Tonnes of carbon out of Earth's atmosphere by 2100 using some kind of industrial scale process that currently does not exist.
That breaks down to 1,785,742,000,000,000 pounds of CO2, "as much as the world's economy produces in 20 years," according to the Economist.
"Putting in place carbon-removal schemes of this magnitude would be an epic endeavour even if tried-and-tested techniques existed. They do not."
In other words, reducing carbon emissions around the world, creating clean energy from wind farms, driving electrical cars and so forth is not going to suffice to meet agreed upon climate targets at all. Negative emissions are needed. The world is going to overshoot the "maximum 2 degrees of warming" target completely unless someone figures out how to suck as much as 810 Billion Tonnes of carbon out of Earth's atmosphere by 2100 using some kind of industrial scale process that currently does not exist.
That breaks down to 1,785,742,000,000,000 pounds of CO2, "as much as the world's economy produces in 20 years," according to the Economist.
"Putting in place carbon-removal schemes of this magnitude would be an epic endeavour even if tried-and-tested techniques existed. They do not."
Designed to grow quickly and fix carbon quickly ... but need something not found in nature to grow -- thus preventing them from becoming an invasive species.
Clean coal is magical
... we're screwed.
It's just that no one listens. Reduce the population by billions. Take the CO2 output down to 19th century levels. The problem is of course it's not possible in that many decades to cut the population by 75% without resorting to forced birth control and mass murder - which won't happen because those in charge will be sacked with extreme prejudice. The only thing you can do is convert to less CO2 output in energy production and adapt to whatever changes occur.
You already have the tools and technology to convert to more green energy sources. Even nuclear is better than fossil fuels. But it's going to cost a lot and it will be painful. It's either that, or future generations will have to accept what is going to happen. Take your pick and damn the torpedos.
In other words, "How Long Can You Tread Water?"
duh
Carbon Dioxide is a gas. The terms are NOT interchangeable.
guess what, trees are made out of carbon so when they die all the carbon they absorbed gets released back in to the environment, unless you cut them all down before they die and make lumber or paper or some other product out of them
Drat! Trees are completely unsuitable for removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Damn you "some guy on the internet", for pointing out the obvious flaw in the plan.
Now we have to come up with some other solution.
When Carter was president of the US (late 70's), he was trying to get Climate Change on the national radar, but then Regan got elected and he stopped any action that could have had a chance of making a significant impact.
I remember as a kid him saying something like "We need to start now, otherwise we will not have enough time". Well I guess all young people can do now is try and live on high ground and I would say various coastal cities need to re-evaluate where to build new high-rises.
Of course now it seems coastal real-estate is hotter then I have ever seen it. So, seems the future looks gloomy.
One is now a paleoclimatologist specializing in tree rings, the other a historical hydrologist. Between one thing and another, I still get together with them a couple times a year. When climate change/global warming comes up in the course of conversation, they have a lot to say, but one thing comes through quite clearly even when they don't say it outright. (And they have both said it outright to me at different times.) They're scared. And despite both being married, neither has any children. Make of my anecdote what you will.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
Look into hydrology. Water goes somewhere, even when you "pump" it away from a city. When you pump fresh water into the ocean you change the salinity, and lots of things start to die quickly. Pump it into a river and it expands, too much then that creates a marsh or delta. Do that enough and you kill everything that lived on the land before. Then you are really fucked when something moves back in with no predators.
What about the hundreds of millions who live in coastal cities? Remember that many of the worlds major cities are coastal.
The problem is that global warming will render large populated portions of the globe inhospitable to human life, and there will not be a comparable "expansion" as some imagine in fantasy. Those people don't just die, the become environmental refugees as everything in the environment gets disrupted. Diseases spread by new vectors, and spread to new areas. Think a lot more.
Oh please... I'm not a denailist. But let's be serious, a lot of the people promoting Global Warming also tell you (if you listen/read long enough into the rhetoric they're spewing) that their plans can't work, were never going to work, and that it's probably hopeless. You really think those dunces were ever trying to help when they're literal nihilists? No. They were trying to make a buck.
With every day that passes and every pessimistic article like this that I read, doomsday peppers look and sound progressively less crazy.
You're pumping the wrong direction. You want to pump water out of the ocean and into a cistern of some sort, someplace convenient.
While it's helpful for a number of reasons to plant trees, note that humans put about 40 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. That's a lot of trees -- equivalent to growing 30,000 Giant Sequoias from seed to maturity in one year, every single year.
A mature 100 acre woodland captures enough carbon annually to offset seven automobiles driven an average amount.
So while trees help for many reasons like flood and erosion control, and can be part of a strategy to reduce fossil fuel emissions (e.g. by cooling cities), they're not really a attractive climate engineering option for bulk removal of CO2. Fertilizing the ocean to increase phytoplankton production is more easily scalable, but has potentially devastating side effects.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sadly it seems it doesn't matter; only money seems to matter. Around where I live, I've seen at least 100 acres of forest razed in the past year to put up shopping centers and subdivisions. And yes I mean forests - there is plenty of blighted urban area around, but instead of re-using that, they are razing forests...
It's like there isn't even any consideration of how this will affect the overall environment - what happens is the city planners say "sweet, we'll get property tax revenue on 300 more housing units!" and forget about all the ancillary effects. They even gloss over the short term effects like massive increases in traffic (putting 300 new residential units in an already congested area is baffling), how can you expect them to consider effects on climate change that will manifest over 50-100 years?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Dr. Roy Spencer, funded solely by Government grants (not "Big Oil"), lays out the actual data and shows that 95% of all climate models agree that actual measured data is wrong. The models, basically, do not model actually all that well. Puts a bit of a damper on the whole "models assume we have negative carbon output!" kind of thing, doesn't it?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
According to this link and taking some round numbers, an Albizzia lebbek can sequester 70 lbs of CO2 per year.
Assuming a 40-year project lifetime, we would then need 637,765,000,000 trees to pull the mentioned amount out of the atmosphere.
For comparison, the Amazon rainforest has an estimated 390 billion trees.
Dividing these two numbers indicates that the world would have to plant and grow [the equivalent of] 1.6 Amazon Rainforests for a 40 year period.
I'm not saying that this is a bad solution, only that it is an incomplete solution. We should probably plant trees in areas where it makes sense and is easy to do, but we'll still need an epic-level solution to the problem.
I have a possible solution. We could fight global warming with nuclear winter!
I hate to say it, unless something 'real' can be done to limit Climate Change, this could very well be the result. From what I read, a decent part of the world will be almost inhabitable and the various "bread baskets" of the work will see their yields decline a lot.
So if people star starving on first world countries you could very well see 1 or more nuclear wars.
Either way, doesn't matter to me. I rent, and am some 700 feet above sea level. Best case? I win the lottery, buy this apartment complex, and soon own beachfront property. Worst case? Buncha folks I never met drown while I have a barbie on the grill.
The old alarmist predictions of climate catastrophe have proven false again and again and again, so why do people believe the new ones?
You would expect that a group that consistently makes inaccurate predictions would lose credibility because of that and the public would stop believing what they say. Or, well, maybe not.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Designed to grow quickly and fix carbon quickly ... but need something not found in nature to grow -- thus preventing them from becoming an invasive species.
Another question about your solution, which is not at all a bad solution, is the availability of useable Nitrates.
Trees can pull Carbon out of the atmosphere, but get Nitrogen from the soil. The Nitrogen has to be in bio-available form, and there are limited places to get it on Earth (ie - fertilizer). So much so that about 5% of all the world's energy production goes into making Ammonia, mostly for nitrate fertilizers.
I'm not sure we even *could* plant that many trees and expect them to grow - the amount of Nitrogen needed is enormous, and we can't simply add fertlilzer because it costs us energy to make it. (See: Haber Process.)
Again, I'm not saying this is a bad solution, only that it is incomplete. It should be used in conjunction with as many other scaled-up solutions as we can come up with.
,,, Made of concrete or steel or something. You could even have saltwater canals.
"Simple" is questionable (lot of politics there, especially with regards to land ownership) but even if you could replant the entire rain forest, I'm not sure there would be enough carbon extraction happening in a short enough time frame to correct the problem.
There's also a couple of other things to consider:
1) Anything we do has generate less carbon than its removing, or its not helpful. That includes any carbon produced from mining and manufacturing the materials and products needed as well as transportation of those things to the site(s) that they'll be operating and finally (and most obviously) the operation itself. In the case of tree planting for example, that involves all of the transportation involved in getting both the saplings and the planters to the location as well as the production of any fertilizers used to grow the saplings and so on.
2) While CO2 is the big issue due to how much of it we produce, there are other greenhouse gases (and some much more powerful than CO2.) So we need to ensure that anything we do to reduce CO2 doesn't inadvertently boost something else (for example if we replaced gasoline say, hydrogen fuel.. we're increasing the atmospheric H2O which could actually be worse than CO2 if it stays up there rather than just creating heavier rainfall.)
3) CO2 levels being "high" means, right now, a bit over 0.04%. That may be enough to cause climate change, but its still way too sparse to do something like atmospheric scraping and expect to have any useful effect.
4) Or we could try to use some other chemical to bind to CO2 and precipitate it out of the air.. but most such chemicals are even worse, either for climate change or more directly for the health of humans, plants and/or animals. Not to mention the (dollar) cost involved.
In the meantime, islamic countries fear energy, food and water shortage, but they censor reports released to the public about that.
There's an easier solution to rising water -- move further inland. Its not like the 6 or 10 or whatever it is these days foot rise will happen over night.
The bigger issue is things like food shortage -- all those plants and animals we like to eat have a good chance of not being able to survive in a significantly changed climate. It likely won't kill humans off (we'll find the species that can survive and farm the hell out of them..) but it will significantly reduce our quality of life when the only things left on the menu are horse meat and GMO algae blooms. And only enough of that to feed a billion people, leaving the other (by that time) 8 or 9 billion to slowly starve to death.
I'm guessing by your tone that you were mostly joking but still.. there are serious issues to consider and we're absolutely looking at a mass extinction event if we don't find a way to undo the damage, and just hoping that we're not among the species to disappear.
Yeah. Just like nuclear fusion...always a few decades away.
40 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. That's a lot of trees -- equivalent to growing 30,000 Giant Sequoias
Your math is way off. A sequoia weighs roughly 1000 tonnes, but only 500 tonnes of that is carbon. 40 G-tonnes of CO2 is about 11 G-tonnes of carbon. So that is 1.1e10/500 = 22 million giant sequoias.
If you extrapolate current emission scenarios to 2100 with no artificial carbon scrubbing, you end up with below 1000 ppm CO2. Basic science tells us that even such an unrealistic scenario gives us perhaps 3C warming over current conditions. In the past, when there have been such carbon concentrations, mammalian life was flourishing and primates became established. But that scenario is unrealistic anyway because economies are already motivated to reduce emissions all by themselves: fossil fuels are expensive, and they are getting more expensive the more we use them up. That drives both energy efficiency and renewable energies. In reality, we're probably going to end up with maybe 600 ppm CO2, leaving us with less than 2C temperature increase.
The problem with climate science isn't the science, it's the fear mongering, corruption, and politics people misuse the science for. Yes, carbon emission growth and temperature increases are real, but Paris is not the answer. In fact, government attempts to intervene are likely going to make things worse rather than better.
You mean this Roy Spencer
https://skepticalscience.com/R...
right ?
What is it with the slashdot crowd and the "lone wolf" saviour thing ? Is it just the usual right wing astro turfing, or do they really think that it's normal for lots and lots of scientists to be wrong AND lie about it, but that one person is the real purveyor of truth.
Roy Spencer is right but 95% of the climate scientists on the planet are wrong ? really?
We're dumping GIGA tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, a heat trapping gas, and it's doing NOTHING ?
oh wait, I forgot it's all natural variability. oh that's awesome, i'm glad you thought of that. before Roy Spencer came along nobody thought to check to see if maybe this warming is due to natural variability. wow- what a brilliant insight !
Well, all of those lying climate scientists on their big fat research paychecks showed that it isn't natural variability, but THEY'RE ALL WRONG. and they're liars. and Al Gore is fat.
Absolute statements are never true
Getting all the countries on earth to actually get their people to participate in this just seems like a complete impossibility.. so we're completely fucked, and so are most of the species on the planet. Good to know.
#2 interesting point. Any links that show how much h20 would be released if every car was a hydrogen fuel car and whether that would be a significant impact?
Unlike CO2, atmospheric H20 concentrations are determined by temperature, so if more H20 is added that isn't supported by temperature it would condense out...at least that's the laymans science version I believe.
From what I can see, water vapor concentrations are 1000x that of CO2 so it would take considerably more to have the effect. That being mitigated somewhat by the different greenhouse gas strength of the 2 gases but they aren't 1000x different.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
There is a huge difference between what they know and what they believe. CO2 forcing occurs as part of a complex feedback system. The truth is they don't f*cking know what a significant increase in [CO2] will do. The mass of the atmosphere is about 5.2E18 kg but the mass of the oceans is about 1,400E18 kg. And yet they continue to mostly ignore the biggest heat sink on the Earth's surface. Why? because they really don't know what the oceans are going to do as [CO2] increases. As is true with ANY feedback system, small perturbations can be amplified into huge responses. But people continue to confuse the science and the politics. The Kyoto treaty was about as reasonable (imho) as suggesting a nuclear exchange to solve the problem. Either one would work, but neither would be without enormous economic (and human) consequences, but in reality, a nuclear exchange is more likely to happen than the Paris accord is.
"Countries are scrambling to limit the rise in the earth's temperature to just two degrees by the end of this century."
Really? Which countries are doing this? Germany? Shutting down clean nuclear plants and burning dirty coal in its place? Seriously - I don't see anybody doing too much of anything about it.
Do you have ESP?
And where are you going to get all the necessary phosphorous for the new trees to grow?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Phosphorous is a bigger issue than Nitrogen. We are already to soon have an agricultural shortage of Phosphorous.
People are very bad at large numbers.
Plants are very efficient at taking co2 out of the atmosphere. That's where it all came from to begin with.
What is the average size of a hardwood tree in North America, in a temperate range?
How many hardwood trees are there in North America?
What is the average growth, in kg, of a hardwood tree?
How do those numbers compare with the reduction needed?
That is useful information. Your approach is not.
..don't panic
Links?
... in something that will preserve it well and ensure that your children and grand-children can read these words long after you are dead. They will curse your name!
That would take effort on my part ;-) I saw it on a recent episode of NOVA, "Killer Hurricanes" or something like that.
We were told this as children in the 70s, that in the future, if things didn't change between now and then, we'd pass the point of no return.
In the 80s, folks were distracted by the hole in the ozone layer.
In the 90s, folks in the US were distracted by war, a dying economy, and the prospect of globalization diminishing the standard of living.
By the 2000s, it was too late.
There's a reason I don't have kids. My condolences to future humanity, hopefully the end will be kinder than one might imagine.
But there aren't 6 billion Irish people in existence...
Keep your eyes to the sky.
even if tried-and-tested techniques existed. They do not.
Solved that part for ya. Here you go: tried-and-tested techniques
When we have the technology to make Mars or Venus habitable, we'll also have the technology to keep the Earth habitable. The idea that we would have the technology to make habitable a planet with almost no atmosphere or a planet where it rains sulphuric acid but not be able to take the CO2 out of our own atmosphere is bonkers.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
calcium carbonate (CaCO3).
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
Just because it is hard, or some would even say impossible to avoid the 2 C temperature increase, doesn't mean we should not try to do our best.
If it ends up the temperature raises by "only" 4 C instead of say, 7 C if we give up all efforts, it's still a big win.
How about we plant more trees? You know, that whole breathes-CO2-exhales-O2 symbiotic relationship we have with plant life.
Solid carbon block has a density of about 3500 Kg/m^3, so this 810 Billion ton(ne)s would represent 232 Billion cubic meters. A patch of land 30 km square would need to be piled 258 meters high, which will keep the top above sea level even after the ice all melts.
Alternately, every person on earth can have a 30 m^3 carbon water filter
We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions as fast as physically possible. This is far faster than what is convenient or affordable.
The current scientific thinking is there is a remaining carbon budget, anything we do to slow the amount of greenhouse gasses added to the atmosphere will help. For individual actions one scientist chronicled how he faced needing to change. Both individual actions that he took, and the way he tried to deal with the emotional challenge.
Being the Change
But what we need to do is this The Climate Mobilization where every possible thing in society is being re-engineered to avoid greenhouse gas emissions.
Models are wrong by definition. Otherwise they wouldn't be models. Modelling an analogue systems with infinite levels of complexity will always involve a degree of error.
This notion that we can simply ignore scientific models and not act on them just because they have some degree of error in them is idiotic. If throughout history we based all our decisions on such logic we would still be in the stone age, which is what climate change deniers will return us to if we choose to listen to their moronic arguments.
A tree can absorb as much as 22kg of CO2 in a year. Humans emitted 40 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2015, about half of which was absorbed by existing plants and (mostly) oceans. So we need to plant around 900 billion more trees - just to stop it getting worse.
You think we can do that, find the land to grow and keep that many trees - and to lock down all their fixed carbon to stop it decaying right back into the atmosphere? Still think plants are the answer?
Or maybe it's just gonna be easier to get off coal.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I do my part. I take about 1,540 tons of CO2 out of the air a year, sequestering it in the soils, trees and meat. Everyone can do their part in some way. If everyone does that we'll solve 0.6% of the problem...
Sure, models are simplifications - but in this case the models are off by more than twice their error bars. And they continue to diverge even further. At what point do we choose to ignore what the "models say for the future" and go all-in on new models? Or do we keep basing decisions on the outputs of provably inaccurate models? If you were doing a circuit based upon V=I^3/R^5, and your data as you increased I for a given R was way off from what your model, at what point would you stop, examine the data and basic theories, and try to build another model?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Claiming some kind of taxation or subsidy to solve this problem will not work. So long as people can vote the people will vote away a tax they view as unfair, excessive, or otherwise not in their interest. Same goes for subsidies, although far worse. We can subsidize house insulation upgrades, electric cars, energy efficient bulbs, solar panels, or whatever else we tried. All this does is make the poor poorer (they are paying the taxes to support this subsidy in some fashion, though not always directly) and the rich richer (to collect the subsidy one has to have money to spend on the subsidized item).
The only way to fix this is to make CO2 expensive naturally. Raising the cost artificially, with taxes, can go as quickly as it came. How do we raise the cost of CO2 naturally? Well, for one it is going to rise as we keep using it up. The price goes down naturally with increased technology and economy of scale. Same applies for low CO2 energy, we need to fix this with technology and economy of scale.
We already have an artificially high cost of a low CO2 energy source, nuclear power. Make the process of getting a license to build a clear and straightforward process would help a lot. There's plenty of people that have applied with what I assume are reasonable applications, just issue the damned license already. We've been building very safe nuclear power plants in the USA for a long time, I think we have it figured out. Allow economy of scale to take place. If one reactor is approved then every one after it should only need approval for updates and site specific differences.
Wind and solar have already enjoyed economy of scale cost savings, I have difficulty believing we can improve much here. This will need technology improvements and after 50 years of trying real hard on this there's not likely to be much left to gain.
Once we stop digging deeper with nuclear we can learn to fill this hole by carbon sequestration. This was mentioned in the article but claimed it can only be done at great expense. A professor in Idaho (I forget his name) claims we might be able to mine a common rock called basalt and use that as fertilizer. It's rich in lime which farmers already spread on their fields to control acidity from spreading manure and such. This is an ongoing process so they have to keep applying more. Right now they mine limestone for this, which is "cooked" into the lime they need and this process produces a lot of CO2.
Basalt is a much harder rock than limestone, and it produces only half the lime content per mass. To make this a viable alternative to limestone we need energy that is too valuable to use to turn limestone into lime. This has an inherent contradiction since it's cheap energy that makes cooking limestone worthwhile. The solution, as I understand it, is to make energy cheap enough that it's easier to simply mine and move the readily usable (but more massive) basalt than mine, cook, and move the "lighter and softer" limestone.
This professor believes the only way to do this is with an energy source as cheap, reliable, and plentiful as nuclear power. Solar and wind will not do since the mines for basalt will have to run full speed, day and night, in all weather, to compete with limestone.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This is the magnified minority effect - Roy Spencer and his co-worker John Christy are the most frequently-quoted of the 3% of climate scientists that minimize or reject human-caused global warming (in their case, minimize). As if simply repeating their opinions ad nauseum makes them correct.
Yes, I've seen that post by Roy Spencer before. His graph relies largely on choosing a very short baseline (1979-1983) to exaggerate the difference between models and measurements (because the difference between models and observations was unusually large in 1979-1983). In contrast, it is normal to use a 30-year period for baselining to eliminate short-term artifacts.
Spencer's graph also shows that measurements of the troposphere are not as high as models predicted; climate scientists generally agree about this but have explored many possible reasons (technical discussion here), whereas Spencer/Christy emphasize just that one interpretation of the data that minimizes global warming. A paper published soon afterward confirmed the hot spot, but I've seen how people who don't want to believe it can dismiss that paper based on its title alone (the title contains the word "homogenised", which deniers take as an indication of fraud.)
It's interesting that Lynnwood highlights that Spencer is 'funded solely by Government grants (not "Big Oil")' - at the same time as other 'skeptics' argue that climate scientists cannot be trusted because you supposedly "have to" believe in man-made global warming in order to get government funding. One thing I've learned well from talking to skeptics is that they are very good at burning the climate science candle at both ends. Another example: mainstream models are claimed to be useless because they are not perfectly accurate, but apparently if a model is produced by Spencer/Christy it can be trusted.
Lynnwood is also confused about the topic of discussion when he says "Puts a bit of a damper on the whole 'models assume we have negative carbon output!' kind of thing". The supercomputer models of the atmosphere, oceans, land and vegetation which Spencer is criticizing are completely different and separate from "models" of future economic activity, some of which optimistically include negative-carbon technology.
The two sets of models are even made by totally different people (economists et al vs physicists, oceanographers, ecologists, et al) Folks like Lynnwood simplistically reduce the work of thousands of scientists around the world into a single concept called "models" which can then be dismissed in its entirety, with little thought.
Cooling was due to particulates. There was a massive response to limit all industrial releases and it brought the release under control. There was also ozone damage from aerosols. Both prove human industrial activities have already reached the scale of earth scale effects. Global warming is from increased greenhouse effect due to similar industrial scale release of a different compound: previous stored CO2 from hydrocarbons, as well as methane, etc. with runaway heat increasing release rates from natural stores built up over eons.
The problem isn't the housing, its the fact that people keep breeding. There wouldn't be demand for the 300 new housing units if there weren't people spreading their legs and popping out more babies, and the govt provides incentives for this to happen. Ever notice all those road side signs that start popping up around tax season for the child tax credits, generally aimed at low income people. It just incentives people already on govt assistance to keep popping them out for more govt assistance cash (food stamps) and tax credits. Perhaps the govt should think about incentives for people who aren't breeding and adding to the problem maybe even tax credits for sterilization.
The "climate change" concern in the 60s and 70s was global cooling, not global warming.
That was never a "concern", that was a newspaper hoax. I doubt any scientist believed in global cooling, that we have global warming was pretty clear around that time.
The only bit you got correct is that Carter got involved; he signed the National Climate Program Act to deal with "the global cooling crisis."
Never heard of that, you have any references?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
When chatting with a beer drinking German Catholic preacher on Saint Patty's Day I had him tell me we're all Irish one day every year.
So, just wait.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
On the other hand, the cost of nuclear power in the USA is pretty much 95% the fault of Democrats. Various Democrat sub-groups came up with a plan to use the courts to make nuclear power too expensive, and it worked. This has been very well known for about 3 decades now, despite nonstop gaslighting to push the myth that the cost of nuclear power is either a mystery or the natural consequence of physics or engineering.
See that "Preview" button?
Einstein on consensus. Just takes one set of data to invalidate a model. The fact that so many work so hard to obfuscate that fact of science - by appealing to consensus - makes most skeptics dig in further. It's OK to say your models are wrong - and get to work making them better.
And yes, Spencer's actual, measured data (NOT a model) starts from 1979 - a relatively short time! GIven that there is so much divergence between the model and actual measured data over such a short time, wouldn't that lead one to conclude that the errors in the model are not 2nd or 3rd order effects, but primary effects? If you can get factors of 2 or more divergence in a relatively short time - what confidence does that provide when extrapolating those models to 2, 3 or more times longer durations?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Or, you know stop thinking about the slowest form of plant...
There are many forms of Algae that consume CO2 very rapidly in the right environment, on the order of nearly 1 ton of CO2 per 2 tons of algae limited primarily by availability of CO2. If you bubble CO2 through the algae, they will consume it in a couple of days with the right nutrients (most of the necessary nutrients could be found on the seafloor and vacuumed up to the surface using compressed, bubbled air and pipes. If it really is an emergency, you can consume your 40 billion tons of CO2 in about 4 years by seeding a 500 mile x 500 mile section in the pacific ocean near the equator (647 billion square meters with ~650 GW of light energy available for the algae) with plant food and algae and then harvesting it using 1000 tanker ships pulling up 200,000 tons of algae per trip (or more likely a neutral buoyancy underwater pipeline). This assumes that you could grow the algae from the surface to ~7 feet in depth, giving you a total growing volume of ~1.75 trillion cubic feet of growing water for your algae (~1.75 billion tons of algae every week, assuming you miss a lot in the filtration/separation process). If your tanker ships each made round trips at 6 day intervals (or you set up a neutral buoyancy pipeline to shore), you could recapture all that carbon in ~4 years, assuming your harvester ships could keep up. You would have to pump the Algae into old empty mines or otherwise sequester it so the carbon couldn't escape, but this is hardly the apocalypse... After 4 years you could probably start using the Algae as a fuel or food source, so most of the equipment would continue to be useful at a lower rate of use.
If global warming actually becomes a problem, we can fix it. Call an engineer when it is a real problem (don't ask a politician, an empty suit journalist or a "climate scientist", their answers are only more money to fund more research).
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
assuming Roy Spencer is correct.
uh-huh. You get to assume that the lone wolf is correct, but if I argue that knowledgeable people, who have studied the problem are correct i'm engaging in some sort of "if all your friends jumped in a lake" argument.
"my friends" believe CAGW because knowledgeable people who have studied the problem believe it.
Make an argument on CAGW that is not an appeal to authority then I might believe you
Do you even know what "appeal to authority" as an argument means ?
if i tell you that quantum physics is real because a bunch of physicist think it's real, is that an appeal to authority ?
Description: Using an authority as evidence in your argument when the authority is not really an authority on the facts relevant to the argument.
climate scientist are, in fact, an authority on the facts relevant to the argument.
Well, we can at least halfway agree here. I'll let you ponder on which half.
No we're not agreeing halfway on anything. You make false and disingenuos arguments. we have nothing to agree about. you're denying reality because of some bullshit worldview.
Absolute statements are never true
Hydrogen, is short term at least, not a solution. Neither for burning nor for fuel cells.
Producing Hydrogen makes it nearly as expensive as gasoline. And: you need to produce it. It costs a lot of energy.
Long term it could be a solution when we have enough solar/wind power to produce it. But then again we simply can use batteries instead of building up an hydrogen infrastructure. Or create hydrogen and feed it into the gas grid.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There's an easier solution to rising water -- move further inland. Its not like the 6 or 10 or whatever it is these days foot rise will happen over night.
Does not work for plenty of people/countries/islands.
Look on a damn map.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As the sibling post points out well, the high cost of nuclear is largely because of the cost of regulations that need to be met. I watched a talk by an experienced engineer and student in nuclear engineering that the cost of materials and engineering between coal and nuclear power were effectively identical. The cost difference was entirely in regulation, inspection, and licensing.
Here's what I expect to happen. We can have a gradual acceptance of nuclear power. This will come after just one new nuclear power plant gets built in the USA. After that we'll see a half dozen more people try, probably two will succeed. Another half dozen will try, four will succeed. When the success rate of nuclear power gets somewhere on parity with other power plants then nuclear power will reach a tipping point and we'll never go back.
Another possibility is a crisis, much like the oil crisis in the 1970s that likely started off the nuclear power plant construction boom then. We'll have some kind of crisis that will leave us with no other choice but to turn to new nuclear. The problem with this is that in a crisis we'll have cut corners, spiking prices for everything, and general economic suckage. This means what I guess will be a 50/50 chance of some big nuclear accident. Depending on if such an accident happens, and how deep the crisis becomes, we can come out as strong as ever or merely beaten and bruised but alive.
We have another option though. We can have people agree, in a calm and measured argument, that we are going to have to turn to nuclear sooner or later. The difference is that the sooner we turn to nuclear the better we can ride through some future energy crisis, or avoid it completely. By agreeing that nuclear power is inevitable we can agree to take a close look at how we regulate nuclear power and find a way to make the production of nuclear power as inexpensive and safe as reasonably possible. Not that there is a safety problem now, but we'll need to better understand the diminishing returns on the higher margins of safety.
I'll hear people tell me that solar power will be cheaper than coal in 5 years and too cheap to meter in 10. So, what should we do until then? What do we do if the promise of cheap solar is never fulfilled? I don't care much what we choose, so long as we are honest. Saying nuclear power is too expensive and will always be too expensive to build is not honest.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Uhm... well... I think there's some merit to your plan, but you seem not to have thought it out quite far enough. That 40bn tons of CO2 was released in a single year; if your math is correct, your plan will take 4x as long to recapture it all; at which point, assuming the rate of release does not increase, we'll have released another 160bn tons, which will take 16 more years to recapture. Again, assuming your math was accurate.
And at the end of that 16 years, well, we'll have released another 640bn tons of CO2. Care to know how much more will be released in the 64 years that will take to recapture? 2.56 TRILLION tons. Of course, by then we're 84 years into the process and have increased our lifespan by 21; we'll have ~37 years left, of the 256 required to sequester all of the carbon that was released during the previous cycle.
I really wish I had better news for you. And I might, if I chose to check your math; you may well be severely overestimating the amount of carbon we could sequester in that manner. But I have better things to do with my time, like upgrading my computers and servers to newer, more power efficient hardware, and streamlining the software I run and (more importantly, as I can have the greatest impact here) create, introducing efficiency optimizations wherever possible in order to reduce processing requirements and, thus, the carbon footprint of the machines running said software.
That's what a lot of people really don't see: everyone, every job anyone does, has an impact on this problem. It's easy to say, as in my software example, "well, the processing power is there, we might as well use it" but, really, might we just as well not use it and, instead, let those increases in processing power let those systems sit idle (and consume less power for longer periods?
Might not we be better off turning these technological advances which enable a steady stream of ever-faster computers and mobile devices into a net energy savings, by striving to use as many or fewer (but not more) CPU cycles on the newer, faster, CPUs capable of more calculations per watt, rather than instead bloating our software so that the old devices become slow and obsolete and the new devices feel just as fast as the old ones used to?
Of course, that would mean devices would only be replaced when they actually wore out, which manufacturers would not like. The new shiny would still sell, of course; and the benefit would be longer battery life as, after a few generations, things would have already become fast enough that you wouldn't notice the difference even if you doubled the performance -- your old device and a brand new one with a faster CPU (which thus spent more time idle) would feel identical performance-wise, but the newer one, sitting idle more often, would consume less power.
But no, let's bloat, bloat, bloat.
Because cycles spent rendering a drop shadow or animating a window opening or closing have zero carbon footprint. Oh, there's no carbon footprint in all those devices we refurbish, recycle, or destroy each year, either, right? Nor in making the new ones to replace them? It's not just about the software; in fact, the software itself would have a negligible impact. It's about the hardware, and the ever increasing demands on said hardware which cause it to become obsolete way too fast.
Then we can get on about transportation and agriculture. But a whole lot of transportation is just moving raw materials to make more devices, moving devices to warehouses, then to stores, then to homes, then to landfills. And a whole lot of agriculture is just growing corn for ethanol to enable much of that transportation. A lot of oil consumption is for that transportation, as well; not to mention all of the plastics used in these devices, as well as their retail packaging and shipping materials.
In all seriousness, I had started this tirade about the carbon footprint of inefficient software as somewhat of a troll but, the more I go on, the more I think there might actually be something to it.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I appreciate the frustration. I was looking for somewhere to post this - there is one solution I heard 15 years ago that had believable realistic calculations, and it was the most guaranteed successful solution - a 3% carbon tax. I bet the % is higher now, but the point is that there are always financial incentives, like the real estate ones you describe, to release carbon. The *only* solution is to change the financial incentives, so people invest in some of the ideas discussed here. And, get this, it doesn't cost us anything. We've seen Germany launch a photovoltaic revolution that spurred their stock market and real estate values. So if no country has a carbon tax, the first country that creates one, even if it's not the 3%, will actually gain money, because we can sell technology and services to others. I know this isn't a direct answer to the point of this story, but I just want to repeat it so everyone is aware. Hopefully some will mention to politicians.
Dr. Roy Spencer [drroyspencer.com], funded solely by Government grants (not "Big Oil"), lays out the actual data and shows that 95% of all climate models agree that actual measured data is wrong [drroyspencer.com]. The models, basically, do not model actually all that well.
So: the models could be underestimating the warming: which is what the article says?
Puts a bit of a damper on the whole "models assume we have negative carbon output!" kind of thing, doesn't it?
No: just the opposite. If Dr Roy is right, and the models do not predict within the expected error, then it is just as likely that they are underestimating as overestimating: in fact, all sorts of disastrous consequences that we had ruled out (due to modelling) come back into the range of possibilities to consider. So if he is right, then the correct course of action is a massive, unprecedented intervention to prevent further climate change and avoid the worst effects. Not the relatively gentle (but still robust) course of action suggested by modelling.
Unless you have some secret knowledge that proves the models are overestimating: knowledge you could only obtain from a better model. In which case, where is this model?
I don't know where you're getting information from, but you're so wrong. Starting in the 90's, when the scientists agreed on the size of the problem and that humans were causing it, I immediately said I'd give up on every other issue if we'd just solve it - because it was cheap to do back then! And yes, since then, I've also been pro-nuclear. Other dems haven't argued much with my viewpoint.
This. I have references. Omg they were so hard to find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://skepticalscience.com/i...
If they wanted to pretend that nuclear power isn't the most ludicrously expensive power source ever invented by man, sure. It never would have existed without many billions of taxpayer dollars underwriting each and every plant that's ever been constructed.
You don't need to link to Roy Spencer (if you don't want to). You can link to peer reviewed studies. There are plenty of studies showing they're wrong. This too.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Which you'll have no shortage of, if you rely on quacks like Spencer. When even Exxon-funded scientists admit that climate change is happening and humans are driving it, why bother with this line of denialism?
Sure, models are simplifications - but in this case the models are off by more than twice their error bars. And they continue to diverge even further.
Sigh. References?
You want to get rid of the nuclear power subsidies? So do I. The subsidies largely just pay for the costs imposed by the government anyway. Take away some of the government costs and nuclear won't be so expensive.
While we're at it let's get rid of the wind and solar subsidies too.
If the goal is low CO2 power and the government supporting it with regulation and subsidies then wind, solar, and nuclear should all be on an equal footing.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
We need technology which uses solar energy to convert airborne CO2 back into hydrocarbons. The technology is to be deployed in deserts. They hydrogen could be provided by pumping water to those deserts.
For transporting large quantities of energy, hydrocarbons are better than batteries. They are safer than batteries, because the technology does not depend upon making barriers, among different chemicals, as thin as possible. When using batteries to transport energy, you must transport both materials which react to release the energy. When transporting hydrocarbons, you need to transport only one material, because the other material (oxygen) gets transported for free in your behalf by Nature.
The biggest drawback of the technology is the entrenched interests in using fossil fuels from deep in land and in sea. Those interests would face huge losses if people switch to usage of solar-created hydrocarbons in their factories, cars and airplanes.
Right. Just like the campaign to eradicate polio. And mandatory seat belts in cars. And banning lead paint and asbestos. Librul gubbmit power grabs, I tell you.
Just because some of what the government does is a money and power grab does not mean that all of them are.
Because nuclear power is completely and utterly unjustifiable based on cost alone.
Can we let the market and not the government decide that? As it is now new nuclear power costs are infinite because the government is not issuing licenses. Once they can show that they are at least willing to issue licenses then we can tell if it's "utterly" justifiable or not.
The CIA and even Mossad have said for 15 years that Iran has had no nuclear weapons program.
They agreed to inspections as a trade for civilian nuclear power technology. They've been caught violating this agreement several times and a report from 2015 shows them to be uncooperative at best in holding up their end on openness of their civil nuclear power program. If they want civil nuclear power so badly then they are going the wrong way about it.
I don't care if they aren't building nuclear weapons. So long as they chant "death to America" in their parliament I see no reason for any Western nation to trade with them. That counts double for anything of military value.
North Korea has nukes because:
North Korea has nuclear weapons because the nation is run by an increasingly paranoid group of little dictators. They allow their citizens to starve instead of open themselves up to trade. Like Iran they openly state an intent to kill Americans unprovoked and I see no reason to trust them with a rusty butterknife.
No shit, Sherlock. Why don't you got volunteer for the Fukushima clean up crew and ponder why regulations are needed with nuclear power plants and the waste they create.
I see, you equate a policy of issuing licenses as lifting all regulation completely. You do know that Fukushima is older than Chernobyl, right? That site should have been shut down a decade ago but the inability to build new nuclear power means forcing old reactors to run long past their originally designed lifespan. We can retire these plants ourselves quietly or they will retire themselves violently. To retire them means we need something to replace them.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Hold on to your tinfoil hats, crazy speculation follows.
First some background. Back in early 2000's the IPCC was criticized for fear-mongering, when they included a worst case scenario in their projections. Measured warming since those predictions has far outstripped the worst case scenario predictions, and warming has shifted gears again in the last 5 years, outstripping revised predictions. 16 of the 17 hottest years on record global are this century. I've read a few articles and papers that notice this mismatch between what as supposedly solid science and measured reality, nobody is talking about if there was more motivation there than just cautious science. There's a number of reasons for real though, better models, new stuff we know about global climate. But still, one wonders.
Now we are also getting studies popping up forecasting quite alarming warming and sea level rises, along with studies of paleo-climate revealing how fast the climate can actually change when it's really pouring it on (Try 1 degree warming... per *decade*) they appear to outliers that can be dismissed in the light of the totality of good research, but there's a good many of them. We're also getting analysis like the original article, showing that we're being fed some form of optimistic scenario deliberately, it's being played down, and perhaps intentionally - they know slack science-illiterate journalism will miss that kind of thing hiding plain sight.
I'm thinking there is a good chance climate change is worse than predicted and there is a big chance that we can't really humanly do much about it, even if we up-ended the global order to focus on this one task. I also suspect a faction of the deniers (the non-crazy faction of them) know it's real and worse that expected, but for economic reasons are casting doubt to stall drastic action which would be devastating to some special interests (Of which a number aren't even really related to the petroleum industry). The are taking their last runs at revenue extraction from every pie they have their fingers in before the sunset. Some which may prefer a disaster to befall humanity because they can capitalize off that too.
My point is, it's not a case of truth vs denial, within each side of the issue there are sub factions driving their own take on what to do. Even in the cautious science end, through best intentions toning things down to not frighten everybody too much, but frighten them enough to do something. But ultimately we're being lied to by absolutely everybody.
After all when motivating populations to act, the "we can fix climate change" is a better sell than "we can slow it down a bit".
It's a nutty idea to entertain, but much milder than many conspiracy theories and I'm starting to get creeped out at things supporting this idea. I like my crazy theories better when they aren't the least bit real! Very open to debunking please.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Nature produces and absorbs more than 10x the CO2 than that, even climate alarmists admit that: https://www.skepticalscience.c...
The extra CO2 we produce is allowing plants to grow faster, causing the earth to become greener over the past 30 years (since we have sattelites measuring it): https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/1222...
These are facts the establishment won't tell you because it disrupts their agenda for more government power. When you're only and always hearing about the negatives of one thing (fossil fuels) and only and always hearing about the positives of another (green energy), you're probably being bamboozled.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
The only effective way of binding CO2 that we know of is planting forests, but the problem is that that amount of land that is available for forests is decreasing rather than increasing as people convert forest into agricultural, commercial and residential land. When the global population is increasing with no signs of stopping or clear ways to stop it, this development is unfortunately only going to get worse as time goes on.
Only solution I can think of is to try to make the use of land much more effective so that de-fortestation can be stopped and maybe even reversed. Building higher density housing (i.e apartments) increasing crop yields (i.e more GMOs and better ways of farming) and trying to make commercial land in a more effective way (factories and warehouses stacked on top of each other?). None of these are however going to be easy to get done, specially in the U.S people want their massive houses, thanks to neo-ludite scaremongering many people view GMOs about as favorably as leaded gasoline and companies sure as hell won't like the idea of having to build their warehouses and factories more compactly or having share buildings with other companies.
I suppose this once again runs into the #1 problem when trying to fight for any environmental cause, it often inconveniences people and people don't like being inconvenienced. Instead they try to avoid being inconvenienced by either claiming that the environmental cause is a hoax, that other people should be inconvenienced rather than them or that the inconvenience is so burdensome the environmental cause is a lesser problem than the inconvenience.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
My attempts at humor get modded troll, my attempts at trolling get modded funny... I swear, some of the moderators on this site are on drugs.
And I wish they'd share.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Wow, these democrats are really powerful—they managed to influence even the construction of nuclear reactors in Finland!
The Olkiluoto reactor #3 has been a spectacular failure for years. Works started in 2005, slated to finish in 2010 for 3 billion €. Works are still unfinished, with completion slated for 2019 at 8.5 billion € (barring further fuck-ups, which at this point have become a habit).
Building the plant is not some Finnish farmer, it's Areva and Siemens, top-notch companies in the nuclear industry. If that's what nuclear can provide, well some politicians looking for a humongous boondoggle may be happy with that, but I as a consumer and taxpayer, not so much.
Your link appears to be mostly a whining rant about how terrible it is that nuclear power plants are forced to respect minimum standards of environmental decency: this, in particular, blew my mind [my bold]:
So as long as it's not commercially harvested, it's all right to exterminate species in the ocean? The temperature may seem mild to us, but higher temperatures do reduce oxygen content in water, and for every GW of power out of nuclear power plant there are 2 GW of heat; that could have altered the ecosystem significantly. Look at the location of the Seabrook, NH plant: it is right on the inside of Hampton Harbor, which has a very narrow inlet. Heat would easily accumulate in there over time. And boo-hoo, they had to build 2 miles of pipe, cry me a river.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
The UK too has nigh on unaffordable nuclear power also without any Democrats. I think you'll have to dig up a new conspiracy scapegoat to justify your prejudices.
I've heard this before. It's used often as an argument, and it works now with me just about as well as it worked on my parents when I was in high school. I don't care if all your friends believe in CAGW, that just makes a lot of people wrong, assuming Roy Spencer is correct.
Why would we assume that?
Make an argument on CAGW that is not an appeal to authority then I might believe you. What would help a lot to convince me is a focus on finding solutions.
That reeks of intellectual dishonesty. Do you also refuse to believe in diseases that don't have cures?
And whose problem is it, if you don't accept the reality of CO2 driven climate change? Because it sounds like you are trying to make it our problem: a classic burden of proof fallacy. If you have some better explanation as to what happens when the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are doubled, feel free to post that explanation, along with observational proof.
And our descendants even more so.
Actually this is already very doable without any need for GMOing or patenting life. It's called pasture with managed rotational grazing. Trees pull about 1.4 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere a year. Managed rotationally grazed pasture pulls double that and produces a side benefit of natural, organic fertilizer spread on the land by the animals and meat to eat.
Save the planet - eat more (pastured) meat.
Buying up the land under a blighted neighborhood is more complicated than you think. Your options are to use eminent domain to seize the land (which is never popular with voters, no matter how bad the neighborhood), or go door-to-door buying up property. Hopefully you can convince everyone to sell, and don't run into any holdouts who jack up their price because they know you need their land.
You think that in an energy crisis a handful of people can create a ruse of incompetent people to fail at building a nuclear power plant to show nuclear power is too expensive? What of the other dozen companies capable of building nuclear power plants?
They can't all make the same kind of plants, but there are perhaps a dozen of companies building these reactors in the USA for civil and military use. Some make big ones for aircraft carriers, small ones for submarines, some really big for civil power plants, and maybe even some that make really small power plants for moving on site by truck or rail.
As it is now the US Navy usually asks for a new aircraft carrier every four years, and they need two reactors. That's their minimum production rate. The Navy likes to second source everything so there is another company that can make carrier power plants, that means they can also produce two reactors every four years minimum. Then there are the destroyer and cruiser reactor designs on a shelf. Two of three submarine designs with the ability to produce one of those per year. That's four or six companies ready to make nuclear reactors for just military nuclear power.
For civilian power there's another half dozen or more. Total we have something like a dozen of companies ready to produce nuclear power if only given permission. In a crisis the government will pull out the stops and open purse strings. They cannot allow the country to have the power go out.
We'll have reactors go from drawing board to first critical in months. Small reactors will be mass produced as quickly as possible for use in military vessels. Larger ones will be for providing power, clean water, and synthetic jet fuel. Those coal and gas miners will be busy piling up coal and gas for the fuel synthesis factory. If any joker wants to try to play games and take government funds but not produce will simply find themselves replaced by someone that can produce. If the powers that be see this as sabotage and not mere incompetence then they can find themselves charged with treason.
In a true energy crisis it won't be pick and choose, it will be all the above. Coal miners will still mine but that might be used as industrial feedstock for aluminum, steel, and synthetic fuel. We might not even bother to burn it for energy. Biofuel will disappear, except maybe the ethanol plants might be used to make medical grade antiseptics, solvents for gunpowder, and I'm sure a bit "lost" on the way here and there for "cough medicine". Everything for the cause. We will either be at war at this point or the threat of war so high that everyone is put to task of getting ready to fight.
Again, any one that wants to mess with the nuclear power build up in a hope to restore coal as dominant will find themselves fighting a strong current. They will also be stupid to try to get people to burn coal, that will be needed as and industrial product. Plastics, fertilizer, graphite, lubricants, paints, polymers, metal alloys, ans so much more.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The funny part is that the only effective path to reducing population growth without resorting to force is economic development and industrialization. Economic development brings an economic disincentive for having children - they are incredibly expensive and provide no economic benefit. Whereas in undeveloped regions, there is an economic incentive to reproduce as much as possible - many of them will probably die and the survivors are cheap labor for subsistence farmers, care for the elderly and infirm, etc.
And whose problem is it, if you don't accept the reality of CO2 driven climate change? Because it sounds like you are trying to make it our problem: a classic burden of proof fallacy. If you have some better explanation as to what happens when the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are doubled, feel free to post that explanation, along with observational proof.
I'm saying this again. My doubt arises from the lack of urgency on responding to the problem. I offered an "all the above" solution. That is, "all the above" includes nuclear power. If you want to convince me that CO2 output is a problem then just tell me that you accept nuclear power as part of the "all the above" solution.
If you cannot accept that we, as Americans, need to build a new nuclear power plant every month, then we have a problem.
If you cannot accept that we, as a species, need to build a new nuclear power plant on Earth every week, then I question your commitment to solve this problem and perhaps even that the problem exists.
These two are tied together in my mind, to accept that CAGW is a real threat then nuclear power must be a large part of the solution. If anyone cannot support nuclear power to avert the problems of CAGW then I must assume that CAGW is not the threat so many claim it is.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
"appeal to authority"
Fallacy: The CEO of Shell said the earth is flat, therefore I believe him. (CEO's do not necessary possess physics knowledge)
Good: All Climate Scientists agree: AGW is real.
Listen dude, we all listen to experts. Thats a good thing.
This is happening all the time where I live as well. As a conservative, I don't always fall in line with most of the greens on the climate change stuff. I do care about the environment though. Preservation of natural spaces so my children and grand children will be able to hike (for days or weeks seeing few roads), hunt, fish, camp, etc is highly conservative!
It really pisses me off when I know we have a town full of disused structures and trash, and someone clears a giant new space to put up yet another strip mall, which will be a disused trashed out space 20 years from now, in all likelihood.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
...and whatever "problems" you think your country has due to immigrants... well, it's going to get a lot worse. Given the political difficulties various countries are having right now with that particular subject, it's not looking too bright for us in the future - not necessarily any 'real' problems, but imagined and perceived ones turned into political problems. Yep, plenty of upheaval coming up.
Paris Accord , like Kyoto, is a major political joke. Until ALL nations stop building new coal plants, CO2 will continue rising. At this time, the world would be better off figuring out how to deal with much higher global temps, along with higher ocean levels. Personally, I'm hoping that amoc stops enough to trigger ice age.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Japanese culture makes effective crisis management difficult in situations where the solution doesn't revolve around peacefully queueing up. They should have hired some on-call Americans to Gaijin Smash the crisis.
Oh, and Google says that you are a liar. Those buildings were indeed "created due to voluntary safety measures" by the (military) people who were doing the early work that would eventually become the civilian nuclear industry. This was 2 years before the first "anti-nuclear" protests and about 20 years before the first "anti-nuclear power" protests in the 1970s.
See that "Preview" button?
Here you go. It was in my original post. Just take a look at the data, look at what the models predict. The data shows about 0.3 deg C increase in temperature. The mean of the models is over twice that. Many are pushing 3 to 4 times the actual measurements.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Ahhh. I see, an award winning NASA scientist, who presents data rather than models, is a quack. Attack the messenger, not the message - brilliant strategy!
Does not invalidate his data, though.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I’ve updated our comparison of 90 climate models versus observations for global average surface temperatures through 2013, and we still see that >95% of the models have over-forecast the warming trend since 1979, whether we use their own surface temperature dataset (HadCRUT4), or our satellite dataset of lower tropospheric temperatures (UAH)
OVER-forecast the warming trend. Then the graph (which should be easy to read) shows that 88 of 90 models show MORE warming than actual measurements, and the mean of those models is over twice that of the actual data. How you get from that to "underestimating", I'd like to see...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Earth needs a tailpipe.
If we can figure out a way to export it to Mars, we might kill 2 birds with one rock.
As in, what are the heat trapping effects of CO2 in the atmosphere.
But not all at the same time.
Long term it could be a solution when we have enough solar/wind power to produce it.
Agreed, the infrastructure needs to be ramped up but the physics and energy needed are all in place right now. Batteries aren't a panacea with current technology as charge times take vastly longer than filling a tank, gas or hydrogen.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
...This has been very well known for about 3 decades now, despite nonstop gaslighting to push the myth that the cost of nuclear power is either a mystery or the natural consequence of physics or engineering.
Funny how nuclear power nutters insist that nuclear power is safe, because of all the safety features the plants have (containment vessel, etc.) but at the very same time complain that those safety features are making the plants too damn expensive and should be eliminated.
Also odd, as other posters note here, that nuclear power plants are expensive everywhere in the world.
Its those all-powerful hippies crushing capitalists everywhere under their Birkenstock clad foot! Will the hippie domination of the world economy never end?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
With no "crisis", ~75% of alarmist, taxpayer-funded climate scientists will be unemployed. So of course there's a crisis, and it's worse than we thought!
What percentage of priests believe (or claim to believe) in God?
It's gonna take a lot of carbon when the AIs decide they need gigatons of Buckytubes to build space elevators.
How are YOU going to defend your Purity Of Essence when the nanobots come for your precious bodily carbon?!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
uh-huh. You get to assume that the lone wolf is correct, but if I argue that knowledgeable people, who have studied the problem are correct i'm engaging in some sort of "if all your friends jumped in a lake" argument.
"my friends" believe CAGW because knowledgeable people who have studied the problem believe it.
GP parroted a claim by Roy Spencer that the climate models 'aren't all that good'.
Forget Roy Spencer because I've seen plenty of stuff from him that was cherry picking BS.
The claim though actually rings true. Even a dead clock is right twice a year and all.
Don't take somebody else's word for it though as some kind of my church leaders are better than yours contest. The IPCC looked at climate models, many, many different peer review climate models. Here is an excerpt from many eyes looking at many different models (and a link to the full article):
For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
So that's citing at least 8 different journal articles on the subject, somewhat reliable. The state of the art in climate modelling still doesn't get clouds correct, so they have to hand tune them to make the TOA energy balance right. If they don't, the models drift to an unrealistic state.
Now, the Top Of Atmosphere energy balance is the ONLY important thing to predict regarding CAGW. Increased CO2 ONLY affects the planet by swinging the TOA energy balance. The factor that the models aren't good enough to get right without hand tuning for unknowns...
We know the planet is warming. We know our CO2 emissions are contributing. We even know that the last time CO2 stayed at current levels temperatures were much higher. What we lack, is a good century level simulation or prediction of what our annual emission trends will do to swing things. The climate models are the only good tool we have for that, and they aren't up to that task yet, period.
We know qualitatively that reducing our emissions of CO2 is good, we are NOT able to quantify it though. Is halving CO2 emissions better than adapting to the changes in climate? We don't even know the change that halving has on the climate, so we don't know.
You want to get rid of the nuclear power subsidies? So do I. The subsidies largely just pay for the costs imposed by the government anyway. Take away some of the government costs and nuclear won't be so expensive.
Bollocks. Here in the UK the government underwrite the cost of insurance, decommissioning, long term storage etc because no private company would risk or be able to afford it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So, if this is true, than it just doesn't matter what we do, and we may as well simply enjoy ourselves until the planet burns. There'd be no point in putting ourselves through all the hassle of conservation. Buy that gas guzzler now...have fun! It'll be like getting a BJ on a plane that's about to crash.
Just another day in Paradise
Current hydrogen fuel production takes fossil fuel + a lot of energy(heat). It is not a solution, but moves where the pollution happens.(at a 60-80% loss, meaning more pollution)
Sure atmospheric water is tied to the temperature, but large masses of earth can hold more. Look at much of the mid-west, or even most of Africa during the dry season. You can test how much more water the local atmosphere can hold by how fast things dry.
The only good thing about hydrogen as a fuel, is that it keeps the fossil fuel supply chain and companies relevant.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
If you have even a basic understanding of chemistry and physics, you can prove to yourself the global warming is caused by us. It's not hard. A high school AP student could derive it from basic principles and black body physics.
In fact, the first climate model for this was developed back in the 1890's by Svante Arrhenius (a.k.a, the father of modern chemistry). He predicted that man's activities, if left unchecked, would end up warming the world due to an increase in greenhouse gases.
The theory of AGW is older than relativity.
~X~
Look, I know you're all into conspiracy theories here and don't want to change cause you're anti-progress, but we literally have tree-topped pine shrubs with a two-year life cycle. They last 40 years, we top them at knee height for the root/trunk, and harvest the resulting growth above every two years which then converts into biofuel.
That fixes carbon. We're growing it in Eastern Washington. Check out the Bioresource Science and Engineering B.Sc. program at the UW, it has details.
We also do blue-green algae and are working on marine bioresource too (different program).
Stop using "tech" when we already have perfectly good plants that do this already.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
All the models showed Hillary Clinton was going to win.
Except she didn't.
All the models show AGW is real, but only 42% of Americans believe it is real.
And the East Anglia Institute showed all the "peer reviewed studies" were really just propped up facades trying to prevent nay sayers from having a voice.
So I dismiss the herd appeals. Scientists only slightly different members of the corrupt scoundrels club.
Indeed it was ALL OVER television radio and print throughout the 1970s. We were all going to die because the ice sheets would be covering most of North America by 2000. (Okay that I think is an exaggeration but ..).
Haven't we already started going this path already? A 15W intel CPU from 2017 can do more per second than an old 90W CPU from a decade ago.
I get what you're saying, that the old CPU design with today's fabs could probably make a CPU that requires even less than 15W. One good side-effect would be that people would need to upgrade their computer less often, but at some point lowering the power requirements of the CPU becomes pointless because it becomes a small percentage of the total power required by the system.
Besides, people are upgrading their computer less often already:
- In the 1980's your computer was obsolete after only a few years. Or maybe you didn't pick one of the "winning team" and ended up with something nobody else used (ex: Atari ST).
- After that, picking the PC as the standard, your computer became obsolete because it lacked modern ports. Or your GPU was no longer compatible with your new motherboard. Your CPU socket changed. The RAM type changed, the socket too. But for the most part, you could bring a few components over to your "new computer".
- But in the last decade or so, we've had slower CPU power increases and something bought in 2012 is maybe a dozen or so percent slower than one bought in 2017. A lot of people are using older hardware.
Apart from the Core 2 Duo that's showing its age in my 2010 Mac mini, I don't feel the need to upgrade. I upgraded the RAM to 16GB, removed the optical drive, installed a small SSD and moved the HDD to the optical drive bay with an adapter.
SSDs are another thing that require less power than their older counterparts, I've read they only need about 30% as much power as HDDs.
The last part that requires a lot of energy are the displays and AFAIK we haven't made great advances in panel power requirements for the last few decades.
I do agree that software bloat is the enemy of energy conservation because it's a never-ending loop, but we're already starting to see the limits of what Intel and AMD can do, maybe we're fast approaching the day were we won't have any choice but to start optimizing again. Maybe not next year, but in the next few decades, who knows?
#DeleteFacebook
Then the solution is clear: start making things out of bamboo.
#DeleteFacebook
Hydrogen can be easily produced with solar, we just need the scale of distribution and storage...which fossil fuel produced hydrogen needs as well.
My question was to your assertion that having all cars emitting H20 vapor would affect greenhouse effect. Anything to support that? (Ignore the source for the moment, as I completely agree, getting hydrogen from fossil fuels would be the wrong direction)
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I get what you're saying, that the old CPU design with today's fabs could probably make a CPU that requires even less than 15W.
Then you don't get what I'm saying. My point was more about software constantly bloating to the point that it needs all available CPU resources just to, in the user's eyes, sit idle. That 15 watt CPU is never going to sit at less than 10% utilization in Windows or macOS and you'll see a massive boost in OS responsiveness going from that CPU to its non-gimped 65-or-higher watt big brother. Your OS should not be CPU-intensive enough for that to ever be the case; and every other piece of mainstream software out there is just as guilty.
The reality is, in the comparison between say a 15 watt Ryzen mobile chip and its 65 watt desktop counterpart, at idle you can expect them both to consume next to nothing; but they're never truly at idle. Performance per watt, matching a Ryzen desktop chip to its mobile counterpart, is nearly identical -- close enough to make my point. The 65 watt desktop CPU will have roughly 4x the performance of its mobile counterpart; that is, when the mobile chip is pegged and drawing a full 15 watts, the desktop chip will be chilling at 25% an drawing just a hair more than that. And there's no reason what the user sees as an idle system should be using 10% of CPU (2.5% in the case of the desktop chip), but there it is. You've got 2 watts of idle power consumption and 1.3 watts (10% of the remaining 13 of 15 watts) of power consumption due to mostly unnecessary cruft running in the background of a clean install of macOS or Windows, even after letting indexing services and such settle down. Why?
Why does my OS need to perform 1.5 billion calculations per second when I'm giving it no input and asking it for no output? This isn't a "make CPUs faster while using less power" problem. And when my phone can go from 100% to 80% in 20 minutes with the screen off, it's not a display panel efficiency problem, either. It's a "make software more efficient" problem. Period.
P.S. -- I loved my ST 1040 and miss it dearly. It suffered a catastrophic failure of the floppy drive and I couldn't source a replacement part.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Ah, I do understand now. I agree, today's operating systems and software are bloated and inefficient and making CPUs more efficient is only part of the solution.
If you still have your ST 1040, I'm pretty sure someone will have a floppy drive for it on eBay.
#DeleteFacebook
Those were predictions of absolute worst case scenarios. Few scientists took them seriously but of course the media would rather report on unlikely sensational worst case scenarios rather then the slow burning disaster that most mainstream models predict
Not all of the predictions listed are as you describe. One was from the original IPCC report. You know, that crowd of guys who rode Al Gore's coat tails to share a Nobel Prize with him. More than a few scientists took them seriously. In fact, it seems to me it has been described as enough to make up a 'consensus'. They also weren't predicting the worst case, but the expected business as usual scenario. Here's a link to the report and a quote of the claim made:
Under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, the average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century is estimated to be about 0 3C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0 2C to 0 5C) This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1C above the present value (about 2C above that in the pre-industrial period) by 2025...
So, the IPCC's first report predicted we'd hit 2C above pre-industrial temps less than 10 years from now. We aren't on track for that, and we certainly haven't derailed our emissions away from the business as usual scenario.
Sadly, I was 14 at the time and my dad made the ultimate decision to trash it. :(
WinSTon is good enough if I just want to relive old memories; which, honestly, is mostly what I'm interested in. If it's ever not, I can pick one up on eBay, anyway. My money's not as tight as it was 21 years ago LOL
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
What you're thinking of is electrolysis of water, and thats rare as it that takes a lot of energy. Even the gasification of other carbon based biomas is used more. Basicly carbon-neutral hydrogen production is little more than a myth that can not continued to go ignored. It will take a lot to beat current battiery technology. That's all this hydrogen fuel really is. An inefficient battiery that less inefficent by using the same hydrocarbons we are trying to avoid using.
Currently, ICE releases small amounts of vapor alogn with it's power output. With fuel FCEV, it will produce a lot more vapor, but yes the local atmasphere will balance itse'f out, meaning it will rain more. https://www.skepticalscience.c... . But that's in places that have more normal rainfaall paterns. Places with very little humidity will(and are ) slowly becomign more humid. Things get messy here as while the water holds more energy, the evaporation lowers it. I will say it will cause climate change.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Couple climate change mass hysteria with a fear of going against the grain and public ridicule, and you don't even have to take "paychecks" into account.
You are a bully trying to assert that "models" are "facts." That is funny.
Where is this model?
So then no links supporting the claim? that water vapor is a major greenhouse gas isn't in dispute...OP was saying that H20 emitting cars would cause significant effects, but you haven't provided any supporting evidence
As for electrolysis being energy intensive, again, solar power is free fuel to power said process. 8000x more energy hits the earth in a year than we use as an entire planet. We've got all the power we need; just need to harness it.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Huh? What do countries have to do with anything? I'm pretty sure you can move from one country to another. And we've got these fancy new things called "boats" if you need to get off your island. Plus as I noted, there's a good chance we'll be losing 80% of the population to starvation anyway so that'll free up a lot of land area.
Nobody's saying it will be easy. I'm just suggesting it will be easier than inventing fusion and then building insanely complex pump systems to save a few coastal cities that may or may not even matter by the time the question comes to bear, depending on how the food supply pans out.
Algae would be more feasible than trees, sure - for some values of "feasible".
Using your figures (which seem in the ballpark from the papers I looked at), we'd still need 4x the area you cite - an ocean patch the size of Egypt - just to keep up with the CO2 emissions from a single year (assuming that doesn't keep increasing). The ocean farms would need atmospheric CO2 to be concentrated, and the gas bubbled through the algae for efficient growth, or you'd be sharply limited by CO2 absorption, needing a much larger area. Your pipelines/ships would be delivering billions of tonnes of algae a week to be sequestered somewhere where decay products would remain trapped (i.e. not food or fuel), which just creates huge new problems. Disused mines would not be adequate for long, you'd have to heat it to create stable biochar then transport and bury that somewhere, which adds even more expense.
And all of these massive costs would be ongoing, with no returns, just a continual drag on the economy. Who's going to pay for that - and keep paying for it, forever?
Do you honestly think that such a massive engineering project is actually a better solution than attacking the problem at its source by phasing out fossil fuels (which would also save hundreds of billions in associated health costs from particulates), and switching to renewables and/or nuclear?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Here's my problem with the CAGW alarmists. They say it is urgent that we reduce our CO2 output immediately. I say fine, let's build more nuclear power plant starting right now. But these people will think up every excuse they can to try to not use nuclear power. They bring up costs, safety, or whatever. I look at the numbers, nuclear is right now, today, cheaper and safer than solar, and has a lower CO2 output. Nope, still can't use it. Well, if we can't use something that is demonstrably better than solar right now then I have to question the resolve to solve the problem. If they will not accept nuclear power as part of the solution to the problem then I must wonder if there is a problem at all.
Once I hear these people demand nuclear power then I will believe their claims of an immediate problem that requires immediate solutions. Even if they give a reluctant acceptance that maybe we should do some building of nuclear power now, until solar and wind technology catches up, then I'll believe the problem is in need of an immediate solution.
So long as they scream both that we need to do something now and that something cannot include nuclear power then they are just sounding like fools to me. Which is it? Is this an immediate threat that even "bad" nuclear is an acceptable solution? Or, is nuclear so "bad" that the end of humanity by CAGW is preferable?
So long as nuclear power is "worse" than CAGW then I see no reason to fear CAGW.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Both politically driven. This is like watching the left turn on itself because 'Hollywood exploits women and children for sex'.
I'm saying this again. My doubt arises from the lack of urgency on responding to the problem.
Lack of urgency from whom?
I'll have to assume from yourself, since you are just as responsible for providing solutions as anybody else.
I'll say this again: Your refusal to accept there is a problem because the solution is difficult/painful reeks of intellectual dishonesty - like refusing to accept that there is a problem with cancer because cancer is hard to address.
If you cannot accept that we, as Americans, need to build a new nuclear power plant every month, then we have a problem.
1. I'm not an American. What a weird assumption to make.
2. No: YOU have a problem. You want a solution that is generally considered uneconomical. If you want to build cheaper Nuclear power, by all means, do so. If you want to convince others that it is cheaper than the economics say, then by all means, do that. Neither of those things is our problem to deal with.
If you cannot accept that we, as a species, need to build a new nuclear power plant on Earth every week, then I question your commitment to solve this problem and perhaps even that the problem exists.
You have some mental issue where you are fixated with Nuclear power and want others to pay for it, rather than providing an actual solution.
These two are tied together in my mind, to accept that CAGW is a real threat then nuclear power must be a large part of the solution.
The linking of those 2 things together in your mind is a problem of your mind. See a therapist.
You don't know what you're talking about. Pastured meat is superior quality to feedlot meat. The taste of pastured meat is far better and the fatty acid profile is far better. The question of quality is not about mass production. The issue with feedlots is that it is contributing to global warming. Pasturing solves this. But you failed to put it together.
We also have plenty of land for pasturing. What we need is for people like you, who don't know what you're talking about, to stop building on land so it can stay in agriculture and nature. One of the things you probably don't understand since you've already demonstrated remarkable ignorance on this topic is that pasture lands are more bio-diverse than forest lands.
No it was not. Stop making shut up. I lived in the seventies. Warming due to co2 was already being mentioned (as "we will turn the Planet into Venus") but really things like acid rain and general particle pollution were mostly talked about, with no mention of the (known insignificant) heating or cooling effects. Larry Niven got confused by early warming reports and wrote some SciFi attributing disasters in the future to waste heat.
I'm sure you will now trot out that Time article, which is actually an early denialist piece and proves that warming was being discussed enough to trigger denialist.
There are plenty of climate experts who think nuclear power will help. Stop making shut up to buttres your myopic world view.
I think it is hilarious how all the endless problems with transmission lines and electric cars that you guys spit out if solar is mentioned magically vanish when the electricity is nuclear, however.
I don't. Perhaps those who have models should work on improving them, because what they have now don't work at all for predicting what could happen. Or should we just accept continued reliance on models which are provably incorrect by a factor of 2 or more?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The New Yorker recently had a good article on the subject of carbon capture: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dioxide-removal-save-the-world. Any discussion of climate change suffers from a confusion by some people between the various levels of cause and effect: 1. The greenhouse effect: carbon dioxide (and some other gases) absorb infrared light -- that is, they have a color we can't see. The Earth's warmth emits more infrared than comes in, therefore the gases trap energy here. 2. Global warming: the cumulative effect of the greenhouse effect. To doubt this is to deny basic physics. 3. Climate change: at this level, yes, there is uncertainty -- not over whether it will change, but how. This is as complex as the planet: all the clouds, the winds, plants and oceans. Modeling it is difficult. Yet climate must change somehow in response to global warming from the greenhouse effect. Do we really want to test our ability to cope with whatever those changes may be? If we could see infrared, we would be able to see that the color of the sky has changed, and there would be no doubt or argument about global warming, and we would have done much more to avert climate change.
(Trying to fix formatting)
The New Yorker recently had a good article on the subject of carbon capture: https://www.newyorker.com/maga... [newyorker.com].
Any discussion of climate change suffers from a confusion by some people between the various levels of cause and effect:
1. The greenhouse effect: carbon dioxide (and some other gases) absorb infrared light -- that is, they have a color we can't see. The Earth's warmth emits more infrared than comes in, therefore the gases trap energy here.
2. Global warming: the cumulative effect of the greenhouse effect. To doubt this is to deny basic physics.
3. Climate change: at this level, yes, there is uncertainty -- not over whether it will change, but how. This is as complex as the planet: all the clouds, the winds, plants and oceans. Modeling it is difficult. Yet climate must change somehow in response to global warming from the greenhouse effect. Do we really want to test our ability to cope with whatever those changes may be?
If we could see infrared, we would be able to see that the color of the sky has changed, and there would be no doubt or argument about global warming, and we would have done much more to avert climate change.
We should stop worrying. It's already too late to stop warming, and it will correct itself in 100-200 years when oil and coal run out.
Long before this was a popular topic, I worried about what the planet would look like when billions of Asians start living like Americans. That time is now and for the next 50 years. Someday India, China, Africa and South America will have as many cars per capita as Americans. As soon as they make enough money they will want what everyone else has, and it will be sold to them. So as far as warming -- you ain't seen nothin' yet.
The end game is when oil/gas/coal run out. I'm guessing 100-200 years, but who knows? Humans will have to live on much more expensive nuclear power. That means population reduction and the earth will slowly return to a more natural state.
I don't.
Then I suspect your argument relies on the notion that climate forecasting can be done by using regression. It can't. If it could, scientists would use regression line instead of investing years of work in climate models.
By the way, regression off a single variable (surface land OR sea temperature) IS a model. Just happens to be a very poor one.
Perhaps those who have models should work on improving them, because what they have now don't work at all for predicting what could happen.
Well, that's your assertion: an assertion that seems to be based on an obvious error. We'll wait for evidence to the contrary I should think.
Or should we just accept continued reliance on models which are provably incorrect by a factor of 2 or more?
Since the alternative to modelling is to panic and burn our industry to the ground, I'd prefer not to be so alarmist as Dr Roy and your good self. We'll wait for you guys to provide some actual evidence before lighting the torches.
Doh, my apologies I missed the beginning of the thread. But the response:
I see the reference shows a graph of a bunch of climate models - predictions starting in 1983. The best fit line I'll guess is around 38 degree incline upward, and I know the prediction is horrible catastrophic consequences in the next 100yrs if it's fulfilled. The actual measurements show a fit line - again I'll guesstimate - around ~23 degrees, less than the ~38. But it's still tracking upwards at ~23 degrees. That's still a huge increase. If it was 1983 and some homeless guy told me he could predict the future, and global temps were going to rise, and then they did, I'd suddenly give the guy my attention. But this graph isn't even a straight line - it winds down a bit, then up, down, up, meanders. The measured temps follow it - exactly lockstep. I now think the homeless guy had traveled back from the future because he NAILED the prediction, albeit got the magnitude a bit off. Then you say no, the graph was made by a bunch of scientists with research and computer models (a few of which were exactly right btw). Now, I'm less impressed - well, sure, that's their job, I'm not surprised they were right. There must be some influence most of their models haven't taken complete account of yet. I'm sure they're working on finding it, but it doesn't discount the huge body of evidence they compiled already. When their dire predictions change, and if that happened I'm sure some scientists would become famous by proving it, then everyone, including myself, will cheer in relief. But the linked blog feels like he's trying to cherry-pick the worst results from others' work to me.
All that said, at least you really did provide some numbers, which is more than most people from the denial side, I do have to commend that.
--- retracted jokes about the website background and book sales ---
What I said was it is easy to spend money and get millions of voters on a national scale to believe. A company can try to make a big project fail, mess it up by underbidding, let shell companies fail and be left holding the bag with the egg ending up on the government's face.
Yes, that is what you said. As I said this is not going to change much if the government is committed to seeing nuclear power succeed. We know nuclear power can succeed because there are a dozen companies in the USA succeeding at it daily. We'll hear on the news about the one that failed, and the anti-nukes will prop them up as to why we can't have nuclear power, but nuclear power will succeed.
Much of the reason nuclear power will succeed is because it must succeed. We don't have any other option at this point for so many things. Without nuclear power the Navy has no aircraft carriers or submarines. Without nuclear power we'd have rolling blackouts or sky high electrical rates. We can ease into more and more nuclear power or we can have an all out mass deployment due to war, another oil crisis, or other national emergency.
We have people that can make nuclear power happen. They are making it happen now. One small group creating a failed nuclear project is not going to stop all nuclear projects. This would be like one bridge falling in a river leading to the closing of all bridges. Or, one plane crash ending all flights. We might, and have, seen such incidents lead to temporary shutdowns out of extreme caution but we return to normal as soon as the failure is identified. A management failure of a nuclear power reactor project does not keep other properly managed projects from moving forward. Sure, such a conspiracy can cost the government a lot of money but that's got nothing to do with any kind of failure of nuclear physics.
A single nuclear power plant building project failure is not going to create decades of renewed mining of coal. Coal is not dead but it's dying, from competition from natural gas mostly. It's not doing well against nuclear either. Germany, Japan, and France have tried to abandon nuclear power and they are seeing costs rise and air quality be reduced for it. Nuclear power is not going away. What will go away is a lot of the nonsense of nuclear power being too expensive. We'll make it cheaper just like how we've made wind and solar power cheaper, with technological advancement and economy of scale.
I find this laughable. Solar is too expensive now but with gobs of government money and years of research it can be cheaper than coal. Nuclear is too expensive, but for some reason gobs of government money and years of research can NEVER make it cheaper than coal. There's the lie though, nuclear is already cheaper than coal. We don't need gobs of money and years of research, all we need is a government willing to allow nuclear to succeed outside of where it already succeeds in military reactors.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Whenever you hear someone crying, "The sky is falling!" take a careful note of who responds and _why_.
Whether true or not, climate change has been used increasingly as leverage for people to make personal gains. Nothing wrong with that except when it could cause a greater harm. The politician who leverages the fear with promises to "address the issue" to gain office is disreputable but relatively benign. But the businessman or scientist who comes forward with a claim of being able to actually control/manipulate the climate, well take a careful measure of those claims. It is one thing to be able to observe that a change is taking place, it's another to actually be able to control that change. If science is still surprised by discoveries about the atmosphere and climate, then it probably does not comprehend the climate and atmosphere sufficiently to predict what the results of any manipulation will be. That is dangerous and potentially harmful.
Fact: the climate is changing. It has always been changing and always will.
Fact: humans by their numbers and activity do affect the climate in some way.
Not fact: humans understand how climate works. We don't.
Fact: humans can reduce their impact on the planet by simply being less wasteful, by using resources as efficiently as possible. Why can't that be the message? (Answer: because it's not profitable in any way.)
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Definitely at least once - for several million years before the planet cooled to a state that could support liquid water. Of course there was no charcoal around at the time...
Since then - I don't know. A *really* hot ground fire might do it - wood charcoal has an ignition temperature of around 700*F though, so it would take something really serious to affect more than just the top few inches of soil. You'd probably need a lava flow, sustained burning oil slick, or near-surface coal seam fire to even have a chance of burning much of the charcoal dust in the soil. And with the moisture and low airflow in soil, such fires wouldn't be self-sustaining.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Note that Dr. Spencer is not a "denialist", he's a NASA scientist who believes we are warming, but that CO2 is not the primary cause. He does what a scientist should do: collects data, and then draws conclusions. If his hypothesis doesn't stand up to the data, he tosses the hypothesis (which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what the IPCC does). And he's using the 90 models from the IPCC - not cherry picked at all. These are the actual models the IPCC uses to reach its claims. And continues to use, even though the data shows the models are wrong. Additionally, the data shows the warming "pausing" for around 10-12 years, from ~2002 to 2015.
In fact, there is ONE model that actually seems to fit the measured data: the oceanic oscillations model of Professor Don Easterbrook. His model not only tracks the historical record - but seems to match the current satellite record as well. I know that Professor Easterbrook is typically ignored by a lot of the pro-AGW side because he's not a "climatologist", but he is a geologist with a lot of good training, and a background in oceanic/land interactions. More importantly, his model actually fits better than those from the climatologists. Shall we ignore his model - even though it is better - because his background isn't "acceptable"?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You do know that Dr. Spencer does not deny warming? He's just questioning if it's driven by CO2 - because the CO2-based models don't match up with actual measurements. Plot CO2 increases relative to temperature and you'll find there is no correlation. Yet we continue to use models and decide policy for billions of people based upon the conclusion that it is all CO2 that drives any warming we are experiencing.
So just to clarify: your position is to keep using failed models (provably so) rather than start over? Ignore the data, it's the model and desired outcomes that matter?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Those movies with people & dinosaurs, they were the future!
The CO2 rises, plant life grows like crazy.
With not so many people around, reptiles and insects start growing huge again.
The few surviving people (named Rubble and Flintstone) must use their wits to survive as they go to work in the stone quarry.
PlaynBass
Well, plenty of countries are to flat, so there is no room inland.
I doubt we get world wide starvations or 80% population loss.
Sooner or later other countries will let refugees in, but the transition phases will be war times.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well, plenty of countries are to flat, so there is no room inland.
But most aren't. Certainly some like the Netherlands will be worse off than others, but again given all the other expected issues, I don't think an arbitrarily line drawn on a map will be our biggest problem. And again this isn't just going to happen over night. You won't be fine one day and then have to migrate a half billion people the next. It will be people slowly moving away from the coasts over the course of 50-100 years most likely.
I doubt we get world wide starvations or 80% population loss.
Then you're a hell of a lot more optimistic than I am. We've already got something like a billion people that are at or close to starvation level, during a time when we've got plenty of food to go around but are just too greedy to distribute it to people (and countries) that can't afford to pay or are controlled by dictators that prefer to keep their population hungry as a method of control. As our ability to farm food diminishes, that isn't exactly a scenario I see getting better.
Sooner or later other countries will let refugees in, but the transition phases will be war times.
There will almost certainly be war times regardless. We are (assuming our models are even remotely accurate) looking at the loss of a few percent of land mass, which as you pointed out will disproportionately affect some countries more than others, as well as significant extinction of a large part of the biosphere which will likely also not happen in a perfectly equal way. If we lose say, rice but keep potatoes.. you can bet for example that China will become a lot more interested taking control of Mongolia and perhaps even invading into Russia.
Again this is all a long way out. Its of course hard to say much of anything with complete certainty, especially given that fact that you never know if someone might come up with a workable solution tomorrow and just solve the problem anyway.. I'm just extrapolating from what we currently know, and what we predict based on the assumption that human behavior probably isn't going to change much until its too late and we're looking at a "me" problem rather than a "grandkids" problem.
You say that, unless the world does just what you think it should do, it's not a problem?
That's cute. There are other approaches.
So if you can find one person who's not for nuclear power, you won't believe in AGW?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And we're back to Roy Spencer, whom your advanced telepathic powers have determined is the only honest scientist in the field? And we should disregard what almost all smart people who have studied the topic thoroughly think?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And you know that his data is correct and nobody else's is - how?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Your key error is you are assuming that CO2 production would be ongoing. If CO2 was actually becoming a problem, then we would have already shifted most of the energy base production to solar, wind and nuclear. Thus, there would be no "keeping up with emissions". The production of new CO2 from fossil fuels would be the first line of attack and the algae farm would be for scrubbing the excess CO2 back down to some lower level. Just look at Germany, France, and some of the other European countries. Nearly eliminating fossil fuels is possible if you want to spend the money on it.
As far as sequestration, all the coal mines, depleted oil fields etc make the ideal location, that is where the CO2 came from in the first place...
It is really not a hard problem to solve, just expensive, and not at all clear that it is actually a problem at this point. Sea levels have been rising for thousands of years (just google underwater ruins). When it clearly becomes a problem, we will fix it.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Sorry, my implied assumption was that if global warming actually becomes a real problem for real people, not just some fevered nightmare of the eco nuts and a tool for the environmental lobby to generate more research grants and funds for their pet projects, we would first globally convert to solar, wind and nuclear power, chopping back 95% or more of our fossil fuel emissions (or switching to biofuel, etc.) since that is a cheaper first step. After we take that step, then if the CO2 levels aren't dropping fast enough, we pursue the plan that I described above.
You can't tank the global economy because a few thousand savages on some pacific island are going to have to move. All animals and humans must adapt to an ever changing environment, that is just reality. And by the way, the sea levels have been rising for thousands of years (just google underwater ruins if you were unaware). Cant blame that on fossil fuels.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
IF CO2 becomes a problem?? What on earth do you think all that science has been telling us for the last 50 years?
And honestly I didn't think you were that naïve, to think that we would "already" have fixed the source of the problem. Did you also miss how vested interests have been funneling hundreds of millions into manufacturing doubt, while covering up their own scientists' findings?
It's taken all this time just to get enough popular interest in the issue for politicians to look past the lobbyists' dollars. Only now have all the governments in the world reluctantly agreed to start doing something (with a single notable exception).
Yes it's a solvable problem, but all the solutions are expensive so political will is almost nonexistent. But because some solutions are a lot more expensive than others, it's something we should have started tackling properly decades ago.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
40 bn tonnes - but half is absorbed by oceans etc. So 20,000,000,000 tonnes excess CO2 divided by 0.022 tonnes per tree equals 909,090,909,090 trees.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Well, science doesn't tell us anything. Science is simply a collection of facts and theories of various quality. We draw our own conclusions. Anyone who tells you that the climate debate is over is full of shit and not a scientist in any way. The AGW crowd wants to shut down debate because their theory isn't panning out and more people are blowing them off by the day.
FYI, the Paris climate accord is non binding, meaning that agreement is not worth the paper it is printed on... I am 99% certain that China will wipe their ass with it before they flush it into the ocean, along with the metric tons of toxic waste that they discharge. If China does anything it is because they have a true pollution problem (with serious pollution that will damage your lungs if you breathe it unprotected.)
Regarding CO2 being a problem, I would be right there with you that CO2 is a problem if we got up into the 850PPM range. Unfortunately for you, the current levels are around 400 (we think; that value is from a single observatory in Hawii that can see the daily CO2 levels vary 400 ppm IN 24 HOURS). It is scientific and historical fact that pre industrial revolution CO2 levels were measured as high as 550 ppm and the average of all the measurements (essentially what they do today) were about 400ppm... Oh look at that! The same CO2 level as we have today! This is shocking, almost like there is some other mechanism that is absorbing the CO2 released by fossil fuels, like for instance PLANTS... If you want to wrap your head around some actual science instead of the horse shit shoveld by the MSM, "climate scientists" and politicians, give this article a read:
http://drtimball.com/2012/pre-... BTW, it is not valid to argument that this is just one guy and his data is invalid. That is not how science works. One guy with the truth can be right (and often is, see Heliocentric orbit, flat earth theory, etc.). Before we accepted many scientific theories as fact, the majority of scientists were wrong. Majority rule works for government, not truth. You must show that either his data (pulled from historical documents) is invalid (which you can't) or explain how the pre industrial scientists got it wrong (you can't because they didn't).
Beyond that, the entire thesis that CO2 is creating an increasing green house effect is pure bullshit foisted on the ignorant masses. CO2 absorbs 3 frequencies in the IR band. The earth's atmosphere is already completely opaque in those 3 bands, and probably always has been. Heat still escapes quite nicely (which is why on a clear night you will freeze your nuts off outside, all that radiant heat is just escaping between the bands that CO2 blocks. CO2 is not nor has it ever been a wide band IR absorber/reflector like water and glass. http://nov79.com/gbwm/ntyg.htm...
I have 20 years experience in applied thermodynamics and heat transfer. I have researched the global warming topic thoroughly and at least at this point, from a global warming perspective, CO2 just isn't a problem. If it got close to 1000 ppm then it becomes a problem for human and animal health (plants would love it though). The only reason the AGW myth is still even around is because there is money to be made and "climate deniers" in academia are excommunicated (i.e. their work can't get published and they usually get fired). But yeah, in another 30 years the AGW crowd will be viewed the same as the anti vaxers an the Luddites, unless they take over the world and go 1984 on our asses.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
You do know that Dr. Spencer does not deny warming? He's just questioning if it's driven by CO2 - because the CO2-based models don't match up with actual measurements.
Eesh. He'll be crushed when someone mentions that the radiative properties of CO2 aren't based on modelling, and neither is the theory of CO2 driven climate. Climate will still be influenced by CO2, regardless of how inept we are at modelling.
Plot CO2 increases relative to temperature and you'll find there is no correlation [wattsupwiththat.com]. Yet we continue to use models and decide policy for billions of people based upon the conclusion that it is all CO2 that drives any warming we are experiencing.
So now Anthony Watts is also saying that we should immediately panic and burn our industry to the ground? I'd prefer not to be so alarmist.
So just to clarify: your position is to keep using failed models (provably so) rather than start over? Ignore the data, it's the model and desired outcomes that matter?
Well, the problem seems to be that as our conversation progresses the foundation of the idea that there is a problem with the models keeps getting more and more eroded. First Dr Roy, and now Anthony Watts. My personal view: we should see some actual evidence that there is a problem with the models before panicking and and taking the more drastic approach to combating climate change.
Just like replacing coal and nuclear with wind and solar is not a "power grab". You contradicted your own thesis.
Has it ever occurred to you how much money is SAVED by regulation? Do you really think that if TEPCO and Japan's government had to do it all over again, that they wouldn't have spent a few hundred million on a higher seawall and better backups instead of a few hundred BILLION cleaning up up a disaster?
But even if you eliminated regulations and let every nuclear Dr. Nick build a plant, nuclear power would never be cost effective because of the costs of plant decommission and waste storage.
That's Trump's spin on it, which is naturally bullshit. Not only have they been in compliance, the "deal" despite being hailed as Obama being the peacemaker was in fact Obama being a neocon warmonger.
Again: both the CIA and Mossad have said for 15 years that Iran has had no nuclear weapons program, but Obama spent years illegally threatening Iran with military force for weapons he knew Iran was not trying to obtain. He also crashed their economy with sanctions, blackmailed Iran with its own money, and if he didn't sign off on the CIA murdering Iran's nuclear scientists in terrorist attacks, he knows who did.
You want to look at a country in flagrant violation of the NPT, look in the mirror as the U.S. has not only been violating the disarmament provisions of the treaty, it's spending a trillion dollars to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal.
Are you a hypocrite of Biblical proportions or just ignorant? Serious question. The United States overthrew Iran's government in '53, backed a torture-loving dictator for decades, backed Iraq when it invaded Iran (and used chemical weapons in the process), shot down an Iranian passenger plane murdering all aboard, invaded two countries on Iran's border for bullshit reasons, and then engaged in Obama's neocon warmongering as mentioned above.
Iranians have a very, very long list of perfectly legitimate reasons to resent the United States.
Since you dodged the facts I'll just copy and paste them again:
1) they remember the U.S. flattening all of their cities and killing millions of Koreans, even if your American Exceptionalist ass does not
2) the United States has been practicing invasions of North Korea every year since the 90's - look up Foal Eagle
3) Insurance against regime change - American Exceptionalists may have forgotten that the Iraq, Libya and Syria wars have all been based on total bullshit, but they haven't
It's not paranoia when the U.S. is literally out to get you.
I see you're trying t
Yeah. He is.
It's funny how denialists accuse scientists of making shit up and then latch on to the first one who does, when his opinions match their ideology.
Influenced and driven are diferent things. YOU influence the climate, but do you drive it? The bottom line is that the models simple don't match up with the actual evidence - which is exactly what you espouse you want. Dr. Spencer shows that very thing. So if the models are provably wrong (empirical data doesn't support the models), then why should we continue to rely upon the models to predict what could happen in the future?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Because his is actual data; the model results are simply outputs of, well, models.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
So what dataset supports the model results? If your theoretical model and empirical data don't match - which do you choose to believe?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There's PLENTY of data behind those models, much of which you're free to peruse. If Spencer is the one with the Truth, why hasn't he convinced lots of people in the field?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Note that Dr. Spencer is not a "denialist", he's a [scientist that makes his argument with data]
Fair enough. I haven't looked it up yet - how much of his work is published or gone through peer-review? (if you object to that metric, then fine, we can limit the discussion, but it would definitely be more information for me to consider)
he's using the 90 models from the IPCC - not cherry picked at all
That's not what I meant about cherry-picking. I meant he's finding the easiest arguments to make, focusing on data points that aren't as clear. Which I should admit isn't wrong at all as a scientist, but to base a political decision on one point of non-absolute knowledge is cherry-picking in order to reach a pre-determined belief. Even in this climate models case, it's not the most convincing (to me, yet) argument he makes. The 90 models predicted a bunch of different paths, but followed the same slopes, and the results were not outside of the bounds. This means to me there is a factor that most of the models didn't consider or didn't weigh enough, but they were still generally right - and the global temps are still increasing, despite this respite.
It would make sense to me that the deep ocean is possibly temporarily absorbing more of the energy than previously believed, which they mention, and it explains why ocean levels are still rising (does Spencer refute that too - idk?) despite the lower temperatures than expected. The 2014 IPCC report showed there were already extreme precipitation events related to this, and I live in SE Texas, where we just burst through our previous weather event rainfall record - not by 2% or 5%, but by 57% (or 75% depending how you measure)! Nothing like 4 500-year floods in 3 years to convince me that things are changing. There's no dispute humans are contributing greenhouse gases, and most scientists agree (like 97% or so?) that greenhouse gases raise temperatures.
So it still sounds to me like nothing has changed - we should do what we can to immediately "clean up". You'd have to present just a little more refuting information to convince me for this one topic, and then repeat the process for the hundred other topics in the reports IPCC puts out. Until then, I have a risk/reward argument:
What happens if Spencer is right, and 97% of scientists are wrong, but we listen to them anyway? The US invents and produces a bunch of stuff that we can sell to the world, enriching ourselves, and providing clean air for our children. Cancer rates go down and our standard of living goes up.
What happens if Spencer is wrong, everyone else is right, but we trust him anyway? Floods, droughts, disease, food production scarcity since farmlands have to move so much, war, refugees, more war.
His model not only tracks the historical record - but seems to match the current satellite record as well.
Fine by me, throw it in there with the rest, I hope he's submitted his model and I'd like to see the peer review of the methodologies.
Influenced and driven are diferent things.
So CO2 levels can influence the climate? What level of CO2 change will cause a a shift of 1 degree in climate?
The bottom line is that the models simple don't match up with the actual evidence
If that's true, the the only logical course is for us to immediately move to shut down all our industry and cause worldwide economic chaos. Is that what you want? Do you see why we might want more evidence than you have provided before doing that?
- which is exactly what you espouse you want.
I want the models to not be accurate? I guess I don't know my own mind.
So if the models are provably wrong (empirical data doesn't support the models), then why should we continue to rely upon the models to predict what could happen in the future?
Because the alternate is that we have to assume the worst case scenario. You openly admit that CO2 levels influence the climate, but can't tell us what the extent of that influence is, or what will happen in 10 years if we continue on our current path. So, if you are right, then we need to either:
1. Invest heavily in building a model suite we can rely on - and I mean heavily, A hundred or thousand times the current funding level.
2. Give up on modeling and basically panic. Shutdown all of our CO2 emitters as fast as we can. Slaughter our farm animals, shut down the coal mines, abandon our vehicles.
Which of those strategies are you recommending?
Apparently a lot less than is claimed, given the fact that the models assume much more warming that has actually happened. So when do we change the models? Why do we keep following models that are provably false?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
And yet - the models are wrong. Data was used to "fit" the models, but the models don't fit reality. They are incapable of accurately predicting future temperatures - as proven by the satellite record. So which do you believe - the model results or the empirical data? And falling back on the "wisdom of the masses" is not acceptable in science - theories need to be proven or at least confirmed, and if data doesn't support the theory, it's the theory that is tossed - not the data. Except apparently for climate "science"...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The ones who submit their claims for peer review as opposed to making shit up? Any more is-water-wet questions?
So CO2 levels can influence the climate? What level of CO2 change will cause a a shift of 1 degree in climate?
Apparently a lot less than is claimed, given the fact that the models assume much more warming that has actually happened.
Claimed by who? Is there observation evidence to support your assertion? What level of CO2 change will cause a a shift of 1 degree in climate?
The bottom line is that the models simple don't match up with the actual evidence
If that's true, the the only logical course is for us to immediately move to shut down all our industry and cause worldwide economic chaos. Is that what you want? Do you see why we might want more evidence than you have provided before doing that?
Did you forget your glasses?
So when do we change the models? Why do we keep following models that are provably false?
Any evidence for your claim that the models are false?
So when do we change the models? Why do we keep following models that [I assert without evidence are] false?
Fixd
Because the alternate is that we have to assume the worst case scenario. You openly admit that CO2 levels influence the climate, but can't tell us what the extent of that influence is, or what will happen in 10 years if we continue on our current path. So, if you are right, then we need to either:
1. Invest heavily in building a model suite we can rely on - and I mean heavily, A hundred or thousand times the current funding level.
2. Give up on modeling and basically panic. Shutdown all of our CO2 emitters as fast as we can. Slaughter our farm animals, shut down the coal mines, abandon our vehicles.
Which of those strategies are you recommending?
Good lord, are you being intentionally daft? Claimed by anyone who uses the IPCC models/papers as justification for anything! The models simply do not match observed reality - being 2 to 4 times TOO HIGH, over a short timeframe. Look at the data I've linked many times! You just do not want to admit that the models don't work. Let's make better ones, let's figure it out - but let's STOP trying to dictate policy on provably false models!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
That it's the new name for Global Warming.
I don't recall hearing the reason for the renaming. Rebranding. Whatever.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Good lord, are you being intentionally daft? Claimed by anyone who uses the IPCC models/papers as justification for anything!
There are no IPCC models.
There are plenty of people who say that the IPCC papers justify taking a deliberate, but relatively gentle approach to tackling climate change: you say these people are wrong? So we should instead move to immediately shut down all our industry and cripple our economies because the impacts of increasing CO2 on our climate is impossible to model?
The models simply do not match observed reality - being 2 to 4 times TOO HIGH, over a short timeframe.
Incorrect. Spencers argument is that his model sort of aligns to reality over a short time, so it must be correct. Other scientists took his model and ran it over longer periods, and it failed hopelessly. Did the climate mechanisms suddenly change in the year 2001? Or did Spencer build a model that simply reproduces what he already had in terms of observations over an absurdly short timeframe and has no predictive ability at all?
Look at the data I've linked many times!
Did you look at it yourself?
You just do not want to admit that the models don't work.
You contradict Spencer, who says that his model does. Who should I believe?
It was mentioned when Mrs. Thatcher took office, yes. But no it was NOT mentioned earlier in the 70s. https://www.newscientist.com/b... No, it wasn't being talked about in scientific circles - not sure how much about climate was - but it was ALL OVER TV. Now, please consume faeces and expire. Thanks.
Science is simply a collection of facts and theories of various quality.
Let me stop you right there. A collection of facts is called "evidence". Theories without evidence are called "hypotheses". Theories with evidence are called "theories", and a theory with sufficient evidence from independent sources to convince a majority of scientists in the field that it is highly unlikely to be methodological error is accepted as "knowledge" - unless/until it is superseded by a better theory that more completely or more elegantly explains the evidence. We call this process the "scientific method", and I'll thank you not to redefine it.
The knowledge that humans are causing the climate change we're seeing is a result of the tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers in dozens of different geophysical fields accumulated over decades, which have convinced the vast majority of practicing scientists in those fields that yes, AGW is really a thing. Of course there is plenty of science to be done in the details of "where" and "when" and "how much" etc, but unless/until someone comes up an alternate theory that better explains all the evidence then anyone simply claiming "the scientists are wrong and this one guy is right" is going to get dismissed out of hand.
The fact that you cite only a blog (that cites only other blogs) to back up your claim, while ignoring the vast number of peer-reviewed studies showing otherwise (rigorously cited and summarised in the IPCC reports), not to mention the considered conclusions of every major scientific, academic, and meteorological organisation on the planet, shows only that you are happy to cherry-pick your sources and aren't too concerned about quality of evidence. Your claim that your practical expertise in a single aspect somehow enables you to contradict the conclusions of thousands of trained and practicing climatologists from many other fields who have spent decades actually gathering evidence shows only that you don't realise how little you actually know about those fields.
More directly, your evidence-free claim that contrary science is being suppressed is pure conspiracy fodder. Your reference to "money to be made" might actually be on the ball - if you had noticed that there was vastly more money being made by those with an interest in seeing climate science discredited, not to mention no shortage of documented evidence of those interests spending hundreds of millions doing exactly that. BTW I'm happy to cite reputable sources for any of these statements, but I'm assuming at this stage that you're unlikely to consider new evidence.
And if you think pages as provably wrong as that CO2 denial link are convincing, then think again. Point 1 is nonsense (greenhouse gases work by re-emission of energy back towards the surface, not just absorbing it), point 2 is apparently claiming that the Stefan-Boltzmann constant has been wrong all this time (who knew), and point 3 is true but irrelevant to the issue, which is how much energy is effectively blocked. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, perhaps stemming from the simplified popular explanation of CO2 as a "blanket" that is getting thicker, but of course the actual atmospheric science is rather more nuanced than this (as practicing climatologists are well aware).
For example, it's true that the atmospheric column as a whole already absorbs most of the IR on the CO2 absorption bands - but it cannot be "completely opaque" as absorption is logarithmic, and thus some IR still gets through. Secondly, it's much easier for IR to escape from the uppermost layers of the atmosphere where CO2 is thinner, so increasing CO2 makes a significant difference to the energy radiated from there. And third, we've directly measured the decreasing IR radiation in those CO2 bands from satellites, so we have hard experimental evidence of the increasing greenhouse effect in action.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?