The problem is you take something like the paper you cited and act as if it's the only thing causing ice melt rather than one factor among several. Also, do you have any idea how long those geothermal heat sources have been active? Unless they just became active in the last decade or two how can you say they have much to do with the current melting?
These EPA regulations are going to be a lot more expensive than that, in both terms
That would be a first since it the past EPA regulations have generally cost less than expected and have provided benefits that far outweigh any costs they may impose.
There is nothing inherently anti-big business in the recommended solutions, just big business (especially the fossil fuel industry) as it is currently practiced. There are plenty of big businesses that are more or less environmentally responsible and they don't get that much attention for it.
Because colony sites never changed before humanity existed?:)
Did I say that? No, climate change is but one factor that can affect the location of penguin colonies. It's disingenuous to imply that since the colonies moved before that climate change is not a factor.
Including the oceans there is only no real lapse in warming, just a slightly different and temporary distribution of the heat energy. Climate models are coupled to the oceans but we don't have the computer horsepower necessary to fully model the oceans in the climate models, only the surface interaction between the atmosphere and oceans. So what happens deeper than the top layer of the ocean gets parameterized in the models.
The natural climate forcings are always operational but the forcing due to human emitted greenhouse gases are enough to override the natural forcings on longer time scales (3 decades or more). Lately natural forcings have been more negative than positive side.
La Nina conditions have dominated in the past decade. During a La Nina the trade winds are somewhat stronger which piles up water in the Western Pacific (around the Philippines sea level was up 8 or 10 inches because of that). When the water piles up like that it starts driving warmer water down into the deeper ocean. When an El Nino develops as expected this year the water sloshes back to the Eastern Pacific off the coast of South America and some of that stored heat is released. Right now the waters off Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are some 2.5-4 degrees C above normal. If a strong El Nino develops this year I expect new record high temperatures will be set.
Well it's not volcanoes that are underwater but volcanoes that are under the ice sheets. And they are not the only thing causing those ice sheets to melt, just one factor.
there is no way any "climate change" in the next hundred years will be anywhere as near severe as has occurred in earth's past
I challenge to find any period in Earth's history outside of something like an asteroid strike or a supervolcano eruption where climate changed as fast as it is during the present period.
The oceans have continued to absorb heat energy and the Argo floats show they haven't slowed down. Since the oceans absorb over 90% of the energy imbalance to begin with it doesn't take much change in how much it absorbs to affect the atmosphere and surface temperatures. In the ENSO (El Nino/Southern Oscillation) cycle the oceans release heat during the El Nino part of the cycle and absorb more heat during the La Nina phase. La Ninas have dominated over the past decade. There are other factors that affect surface too such as the increase in aerosols from industrialization in China and the lowest activity solar cycle in a century. Another thing that affects the surface temperature record is the fact that we don't have a lot of good data from the high Arctic where the warning has been greater than at the mid and tropical latitudes. Despite those things the evidence shows that the energy imbalance continues and the the geophysical system continues to retain more heat energy.
I think you misunderstand the differences in chaos in climate and chaos in weather. Climate describes the boundaries of weather. It contains all of the chaos of weather. Here is a post on the subject.
Imagine a pot of boiling water. A weather forecast is like the attempt to predict where the next bubble is going to rise (physically this is an initial value problem). A climate statement would be that the average temperature of the boiling water is 100C at normal pressure, while it is only 90C at 2,500 meters altitude in the mountains, due to the lower pressure (that is a boundary value problem).
You have only yourself to blame for not knowing the oceans are an important part of the equation. It was something that was talked about in the IPCC's first report back in 1990 when they estimated the amount of sea level rise over the past century due to thermal expansion to 2-6 cm. But the data from the Argo floats has helped us quantify it much better since the early 2000's so it's easier to make quantified statements about it now.
The Price-Anderson act is necessary because private insurance won't touch the needed levels of insurance for a nuclear plant. The cost of the cleanup at Fukushima is estimated to be $58 billion.
They weren't ignored previously. I've known the oceans were important for over 20 years. I can't imagine that climate scientists weren't aware of it since at least the 1950's. Since they started deploying the Argo floats in the early 2000's the amount of data we have on the oceans has gone up by orders of magnitude. They show that the ocean continues to warm. The emphasis started out on surface temperatures because that's where we live and so it's important to us. But anyone who studied weather or climate would know that there are large energy exchanges between the atmosphere and the ocean. It's really kind of obvious.
Let's take the example of Tesla Motors, mentioned above. The received $465 million in government guaranteed loans which they've since paid off. In January of 2014 they employed about 6,000 people (up from nearly 3,000 in December 2012), most of them well paid. They're also have supply chains for the parts they don't make in-house. They had over $2 billion in revenue in 2013. That's a nice chunk of economic activity they're driving. I'd say that's a pretty good return on investment.
They are deliberately hiding the other sorts of failures, such as building something that has negative ROI.
Perhaps you could provide us some concrete examples of some projects that have a negative ROI but aren't contributing to the failure rate of the program. If they're as common as you say they are that can't be too hard.
Every little increment no matter where it comes from makes a difference and a ShanghaiBill points out leading by example takes the moral pressure off you and puts it on others.
Aluminum smelters can't afford to have the power cut off for any length of time. Once the aluminum hardens in the furnaces it's a long costly process to clean them out so they can be used again.
As far as load following, all of the natural gas turbine generators that have been built lately can be spun up in a matter of minutes.
The government has been running different programs like that for a long time (more than 50 years) to help encourage new technologies to get off the ground. They always write in a 10 or 15% loss rate into them and the programs seldom reach that rate. In fact the boost to the economy for the ones that do succeed probably far outweigh any losses in the programs.
Solyndra was just a talking point for the Republicans to pound the President on. The program that the Solyndra loan was a part of was budgeted for a 10 or 11% loss rate and even with Solyndra it still had less than 5% losses. Solyndra lost out because of the unexpected drop in prices of solar modules from China that it couldn't compete with. It's unreasonable to expect that everything that gets tried like this will work out.
Because of our dear President's own stance, we will not be opening new nuclear plants until he's gone.
Perhaps you can explain why the two new units at the Vogtle Plant in Georgia were allowed to go through then and even offered federal loan guarantees.
(From the article): On February 16, 2010, President Obama announced $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees toward the construction cost,
Would Obama have done that if he was against nuclear power like you believe?
Nuclear is the cheapest per megawatt power source we currently have.
What have you been smoking? The main reason so few nuclear plants have been built in the US since the 1970's was that it was far more expensive than building a coal plant. Now planned coal plants have been cancelled because they weren't expected to be able to compete with solar when they were finished.
I agree with you that we should reprocess the spent fuel rods.
Are you suggesting we should deregulate nuclear power and just trust the industry to do the right thing? I think not, especially as long as US taxpayers are on the hook for any major failure of a nuclear power plant via the Price-Anderson Act.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is you take something like the paper you cited and act as if it's the only thing causing ice melt rather than one factor among several. Also, do you have any idea how long those geothermal heat sources have been active? Unless they just became active in the last decade or two how can you say they have much to do with the current melting?
These EPA regulations are going to be a lot more expensive than that, in both terms
That would be a first since it the past EPA regulations have generally cost less than expected and have provided benefits that far outweigh any costs they may impose.
There is nothing inherently anti-big business in the recommended solutions, just big business (especially the fossil fuel industry) as it is currently practiced. There are plenty of big businesses that are more or less environmentally responsible and they don't get that much attention for it.
Because colony sites never changed before humanity existed? :)
Did I say that? No, climate change is but one factor that can affect the location of penguin colonies. It's disingenuous to imply that since the colonies moved before that climate change is not a factor.
Including the oceans there is only no real lapse in warming, just a slightly different and temporary distribution of the heat energy. Climate models are coupled to the oceans but we don't have the computer horsepower necessary to fully model the oceans in the climate models, only the surface interaction between the atmosphere and oceans. So what happens deeper than the top layer of the ocean gets parameterized in the models.
The natural climate forcings are always operational but the forcing due to human emitted greenhouse gases are enough to override the natural forcings on longer time scales (3 decades or more). Lately natural forcings have been more negative than positive side.
La Nina conditions have dominated in the past decade. During a La Nina the trade winds are somewhat stronger which piles up water in the Western Pacific (around the Philippines sea level was up 8 or 10 inches because of that). When the water piles up like that it starts driving warmer water down into the deeper ocean. When an El Nino develops as expected this year the water sloshes back to the Eastern Pacific off the coast of South America and some of that stored heat is released. Right now the waters off Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are some 2.5-4 degrees C above normal. If a strong El Nino develops this year I expect new record high temperatures will be set.
Well it's not volcanoes that are underwater but volcanoes that are under the ice sheets. And they are not the only thing causing those ice sheets to melt, just one factor.
there is no way any "climate change" in the next hundred years will be anywhere as near severe as has occurred in earth's past
I challenge to find any period in Earth's history outside of something like an asteroid strike or a supervolcano eruption where climate changed as fast as it is during the present period.
OK, and this is part of climate change how? They have done it for years, but now it's part of "climate change"?
Climate change is something that can force the emperor penguins to abandon existing colony sites and find new ones.
The oceans have continued to absorb heat energy and the Argo floats show they haven't slowed down. Since the oceans absorb over 90% of the energy imbalance to begin with it doesn't take much change in how much it absorbs to affect the atmosphere and surface temperatures. In the ENSO (El Nino/Southern Oscillation) cycle the oceans release heat during the El Nino part of the cycle and absorb more heat during the La Nina phase. La Ninas have dominated over the past decade. There are other factors that affect surface too such as the increase in aerosols from industrialization in China and the lowest activity solar cycle in a century. Another thing that affects the surface temperature record is the fact that we don't have a lot of good data from the high Arctic where the warning has been greater than at the mid and tropical latitudes. Despite those things the evidence shows that the energy imbalance continues and the the geophysical system continues to retain more heat energy.
I think I can do better than Judith Curry too. Comment on “Climate Science and the Uncertainty Monster” J. A. Curry and P. J. Webster [PDF] published in the American Meteorological Society Journal, December 2011.
I think you misunderstand the differences in chaos in climate and chaos in weather. Climate describes the boundaries of weather. It contains all of the chaos of weather. Here is a post on the subject.
Imagine a pot of boiling water. A weather forecast is like the attempt to predict where the next bubble is going to rise (physically this is an initial value problem). A climate statement would be that the average temperature of the boiling water is 100C at normal pressure, while it is only 90C at 2,500 meters altitude in the mountains, due to the lower pressure (that is a boundary value problem).
You have only yourself to blame for not knowing the oceans are an important part of the equation. It was something that was talked about in the IPCC's first report back in 1990 when they estimated the amount of sea level rise over the past century due to thermal expansion to 2-6 cm. But the data from the Argo floats has helped us quantify it much better since the early 2000's so it's easier to make quantified statements about it now.
The Price-Anderson act is necessary because private insurance won't touch the needed levels of insurance for a nuclear plant. The cost of the cleanup at Fukushima is estimated to be $58 billion.
Or maybe he's in Georgia where the utilities are already charging their customers for the 2 new nuclear reactors they're building at Vogtle.
They weren't ignored previously. I've known the oceans were important for over 20 years. I can't imagine that climate scientists weren't aware of it since at least the 1950's. Since they started deploying the Argo floats in the early 2000's the amount of data we have on the oceans has gone up by orders of magnitude. They show that the ocean continues to warm. The emphasis started out on surface temperatures because that's where we live and so it's important to us. But anyone who studied weather or climate would know that there are large energy exchanges between the atmosphere and the ocean. It's really kind of obvious.
Let's take the example of Tesla Motors, mentioned above. The received $465 million in government guaranteed loans which they've since paid off. In January of 2014 they employed about 6,000 people (up from nearly 3,000 in December 2012), most of them well paid. They're also have supply chains for the parts they don't make in-house. They had over $2 billion in revenue in 2013. That's a nice chunk of economic activity they're driving. I'd say that's a pretty good return on investment.
They are deliberately hiding the other sorts of failures, such as building something that has negative ROI.
Perhaps you could provide us some concrete examples of some projects that have a negative ROI but aren't contributing to the failure rate of the program. If they're as common as you say they are that can't be too hard.
Every little increment no matter where it comes from makes a difference and a ShanghaiBill points out leading by example takes the moral pressure off you and puts it on others.
Aluminum smelters can't afford to have the power cut off for any length of time. Once the aluminum hardens in the furnaces it's a long costly process to clean them out so they can be used again.
As far as load following, all of the natural gas turbine generators that have been built lately can be spun up in a matter of minutes.
The government has been running different programs like that for a long time (more than 50 years) to help encourage new technologies to get off the ground. They always write in a 10 or 15% loss rate into them and the programs seldom reach that rate. In fact the boost to the economy for the ones that do succeed probably far outweigh any losses in the programs.
The earth atmosphere has not warmed for 12-17 years depending on which temperature series you look at.
That only works if you ignore the oceans where over 90% of the heat goes.
Solyndra was just a talking point for the Republicans to pound the President on. The program that the Solyndra loan was a part of was budgeted for a 10 or 11% loss rate and even with Solyndra it still had less than 5% losses. Solyndra lost out because of the unexpected drop in prices of solar modules from China that it couldn't compete with. It's unreasonable to expect that everything that gets tried like this will work out.
Because of our dear President's own stance, we will not be opening new nuclear plants until he's gone.
Perhaps you can explain why the two new units at the Vogtle Plant in Georgia were allowed to go through then and even offered federal loan guarantees.
(From the article): On February 16, 2010, President Obama announced $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees toward the construction cost,
Would Obama have done that if he was against nuclear power like you believe?
Nuclear is the cheapest per megawatt power source we currently have.
What have you been smoking? The main reason so few nuclear plants have been built in the US since the 1970's was that it was far more expensive than building a coal plant. Now planned coal plants have been cancelled because they weren't expected to be able to compete with solar when they were finished.
I agree with you that we should reprocess the spent fuel rods.
Quit being an alarmist.
Are you suggesting we should deregulate nuclear power and just trust the industry to do the right thing? I think not, especially as long as US taxpayers are on the hook for any major failure of a nuclear power plant via the Price-Anderson Act.
Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. Just because you have to work within the current system doesn't mean you can't work to change it.
TALK LOUDER STILL if THEY'VE BEEN RIDING for a WHILE. THE NOISE INDUCED HEARING LOSS MAKES it HARDER STILL for THEM to HEAR.
(lower case used only to get around the lame filter.)