I own my house and finished paying off the mortgage 5 years ago. Now I only have to save the ~$200/month needed to pay my property tax*. It's amazing how fast your net worth can go up once you're no longer paying the monthly rent/mortgage. BTW, I paid off my 30 year mortgage in about 17 years so I saved that way too.
*Not counting ongoing maintenance of course. I'm going to have to put a new roof on sometime in the next 5 years.
So you're saying that you support expensive energy, and further with that creating misery for those who can't afford cheap energy? If Obama was really looking towards the future he'd be open arms on nuke plants, but he isn't.
If you want expensive energy nuclear is the way to go.
It's true that the rate of sea level rise will be slow but it's also something that's probably unstoppable at this point. The last time CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as they are now, 400 ppm, sea level was over 60 feet higher than it is now. It might 500 or 1000 years to get there but it's going to happen regardless of what we do (unless we actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere to get it back down below 350 ppm).
In order for scientists to fully understand the climate they have to understand all sources of climate change both natural and man made. If all known sources of natural climate change are taken into account we should actually be cooling since 1990 or so. The phrase "hitting the brakes on our world economy" is just alarmist nonsense. In fact responding to global warming in some ways gives a boost to the economy because all of the things we need to change will have to be replaced with some other means of doing them. That means a lot of capital expenditures which put money back into the economy because of the materials and labor that goes into making them.
I agree that draining the reservoir because one person peed in it is rather silly but the global warming situation is more like behind the guy peeing in the reservoir there's an endless line of others waiting there turn to pee. Eventually there will be enough pee in the reservoir to make a difference.
Your post was pretty confusing to me. I think that's because you don't really understand what natural variability is and that it can easily overwhelm global warming for a decade or two. Natural variability consists of a lot of quasi-cyclical things that can't be easily predicted ahead of time, that vary on multi-year and decadal scales. That includes things like the solar cycle, ENSO, the PDO, the AMO, volcanic eruptions and other things. These are things that can cause greater than 1K of temperature variation at the extremes but in the long run average out to zero effect on the temperature. For instance to say that temperatures have flat-lined for the last 17 years you have to cherry pick the extreme outlier super El Nino year of 1998. Since then the ENSO cycles have been dominated by La Nina's, the solar cycle has been weak, there have been enough moderate volcanic eruptions to keep things a bit cooler and the PDO was in a cool phase. But sooner or later those things go back the other way. Meanwhile the underlying forcing of global warming continues unabated.
So I can have it both ways. Natural variability can have large effects in the short run but on climatic time scales (30 years or more) they largely cancel out and have zero effect. If you run climate models with the actual natural variability as inputs rather than the parametrized effects they use when they make projections of the future they come a lot closer to matching the actual temperatures observed in the real world. That says to me that they're getting it mostly right.
Yes, another nuclear power plant may be possible. But I don't see it happening. I'm not against nuclear power but I'm skeptical that it can be built cheaply enough to compete with other sources of electrical power, particularly here in the northwest where hydro power is king and wind power is strong.
I've spent time around Hanford. There's nothing there that would attract private business away from the nearby Richland/Pasco/Kenniwick area. But it's a moot point because the government is never going to sell it off.
Why is it that the only people who really care about Al Gore are the climate change deniers. If you can't effectively counter the science he presents then all you have to fall back on is to vilify him. The same technique is used on real scientists like Michael Mann and Phil Jones.
I have to defend SkepticalScience a bit. Most of their articles have cites directly to peer reviewed literature to support their assertions, something that WUWT seldom does. But your other cites are good as well but I'd take Curry with a grain of salt.
Like gay marriage the prohibition of marijuana will start falling state by state. Colorado and Washington have already done so. When people see that it isn't going to be a huge disaster other states will follow suit and eventually it will become untenable to maintain the prohibition. It's just a matter of time.
Of course the truth will bubble to the surface. It doesn't respect reputations or consensus, does it.
On that we can agree.
I sounds to me like you expect climate models to be better at projecting short term variations than they are. That's an unrealistic expectation. The classical climatological period is 30 years for a reason.
What Santer said is that it takes at least 17 years for statistical significance to emerge. Tamino wrote a good post about the current situation called Uncertain-T.
If CO2 is *NOT* a following temperature, what is your explanation for the fact that temperatures are not rising along with it?
Short term natural variability. The 17 years of supposed no rise in temperature is too short a period for the signal to rise above the noise and that can be proven statistically.
Take a cup with water at 4 degrees C (it's maximum density) and heat it up and measure the change. Then you tell me if water expands when it gets warmer. To help you out here is a graph of how the density of water changes with temperature. Hint, lower density means larger volume.
While saying the world may officially end is rather hyperbolic I think I mostly agree with you. I see our global civilization collapsing toward the middle of this century from not only the effects of global warming but other resource depletion as well. That includes the collapse of ecosystems that humans are dependent on.
But I assume (there's that word again) you saw the recent post on the unstability of the West Antarctic ice sheet. That finding pretty much guarantees 10 feed of sea level rise in the next several hundred years.
Slashdot Mirror
I own my house and finished paying off the mortgage 5 years ago. Now I only have to save the ~$200/month needed to pay my property tax*. It's amazing how fast your net worth can go up once you're no longer paying the monthly rent/mortgage. BTW, I paid off my 30 year mortgage in about 17 years so I saved that way too.
*Not counting ongoing maintenance of course. I'm going to have to put a new roof on sometime in the next 5 years.
In most states the solar and/or wind industry has created far more middle class jobs than the fossil fuel industry lately.
RabidReindeer is a pretty funny name for "a child of the tropics".
So you're saying that you support expensive energy, and further with that creating misery for those who can't afford cheap energy? If Obama was really looking towards the future he'd be open arms on nuke plants, but he isn't.
If you want expensive energy nuclear is the way to go.
I simply refer you to these to expositions on the subject:
What ocean heating reveals about global warming
The global temperature jigsaw
It's true that the rate of sea level rise will be slow but it's also something that's probably unstoppable at this point. The last time CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as they are now, 400 ppm, sea level was over 60 feet higher than it is now. It might 500 or 1000 years to get there but it's going to happen regardless of what we do (unless we actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere to get it back down below 350 ppm).
In order for scientists to fully understand the climate they have to understand all sources of climate change both natural and man made. If all known sources of natural climate change are taken into account we should actually be cooling since 1990 or so. The phrase "hitting the brakes on our world economy" is just alarmist nonsense. In fact responding to global warming in some ways gives a boost to the economy because all of the things we need to change will have to be replaced with some other means of doing them. That means a lot of capital expenditures which put money back into the economy because of the materials and labor that goes into making them.
I agree that draining the reservoir because one person peed in it is rather silly but the global warming situation is more like behind the guy peeing in the reservoir there's an endless line of others waiting there turn to pee. Eventually there will be enough pee in the reservoir to make a difference.
Your post was pretty confusing to me. I think that's because you don't really understand what natural variability is and that it can easily overwhelm global warming for a decade or two. Natural variability consists of a lot of quasi-cyclical things that can't be easily predicted ahead of time, that vary on multi-year and decadal scales. That includes things like the solar cycle, ENSO, the PDO, the AMO, volcanic eruptions and other things. These are things that can cause greater than 1K of temperature variation at the extremes but in the long run average out to zero effect on the temperature. For instance to say that temperatures have flat-lined for the last 17 years you have to cherry pick the extreme outlier super El Nino year of 1998. Since then the ENSO cycles have been dominated by La Nina's, the solar cycle has been weak, there have been enough moderate volcanic eruptions to keep things a bit cooler and the PDO was in a cool phase. But sooner or later those things go back the other way. Meanwhile the underlying forcing of global warming continues unabated.
So I can have it both ways. Natural variability can have large effects in the short run but on climatic time scales (30 years or more) they largely cancel out and have zero effect. If you run climate models with the actual natural variability as inputs rather than the parametrized effects they use when they make projections of the future they come a lot closer to matching the actual temperatures observed in the real world. That says to me that they're getting it mostly right.
Yes, another nuclear power plant may be possible. But I don't see it happening. I'm not against nuclear power but I'm skeptical that it can be built cheaply enough to compete with other sources of electrical power, particularly here in the northwest where hydro power is king and wind power is strong.
I've spent time around Hanford. There's nothing there that would attract private business away from the nearby Richland/Pasco/Kenniwick area. But it's a moot point because the government is never going to sell it off.
Why is it that the only people who really care about Al Gore are the climate change deniers. If you can't effectively counter the science he presents then all you have to fall back on is to vilify him. The same technique is used on real scientists like Michael Mann and Phil Jones.
I have to defend SkepticalScience a bit. Most of their articles have cites directly to peer reviewed literature to support their assertions, something that WUWT seldom does. But your other cites are good as well but I'd take Curry with a grain of salt.
Like gay marriage the prohibition of marijuana will start falling state by state. Colorado and Washington have already done so. When people see that it isn't going to be a huge disaster other states will follow suit and eventually it will become untenable to maintain the prohibition. It's just a matter of time.
I think you got it wrong. The standard fusion promise period is 20 years. ;)
Wait! Nike has a laser? When are they going to incorporate them in the shoes?
Yes and that was built back in the 1970's. A different era (an I know because I was there). Let's talk about now.
As WhiteZook said you have to take into account the effects of natural variability (the noise) to realistically understand the temperature trends.
Of course the truth will bubble to the surface. It doesn't respect reputations or consensus, does it.
On that we can agree.
I sounds to me like you expect climate models to be better at projecting short term variations than they are. That's an unrealistic expectation. The classical climatological period is 30 years for a reason.
I suppose you have scientific evidence to back that up. It would be good to provide some cites so we can all know about it.
What Santer said is that it takes at least 17 years for statistical significance to emerge. Tamino wrote a good post about the current situation called Uncertain-T.
If CO2 is *NOT* a following temperature, what is your explanation for the fact that temperatures are not rising along with it?
Short term natural variability. The 17 years of supposed no rise in temperature is too short a period for the signal to rise above the noise and that can be proven statistically.
Here's a test for you.
Take a cup with water at 4 degrees C (it's maximum density) and heat it up and measure the change. Then you tell me if water expands when it gets warmer. To help you out here is a graph of how the density of water changes with temperature. Hint, lower density means larger volume.
It doesn't have to thaw in place, it just has to slide into the ocean.
While saying the world may officially end is rather hyperbolic I think I mostly agree with you. I see our global civilization collapsing toward the middle of this century from not only the effects of global warming but other resource depletion as well. That includes the collapse of ecosystems that humans are dependent on.
Touche.
But I assume (there's that word again) you saw the recent post on the unstability of the West Antarctic ice sheet. That finding pretty much guarantees 10 feed of sea level rise in the next several hundred years.
They designed the tanks to last for 20 years and the first of them were built over 60 years ago.