That's a nice rant. Here's the deal though. We can use fossil fuels or build nuclear power plants. People claim that solar power will be as cheap and reliable as coal in 5 years. Okay, so what do we do for the next five years? It's burn coal or develop nuclear power. Then what happens if these promises of cheap solar energy doesn't happen? Then we're burning coal or using nuclear power.
At least if we start with nuclear power now we have something low carbon to fall back on if solar doesn't meet it's promises of being cheap. Burning coal until solar gets cheap could mean burning coal until the sun goes out, and then for a few years after.
One of the reasons no one wants to build new coal plants is that solar and wind are already so cheap the coal plants wouldn't be able to compete with them and the reason that no one built nuclear plants is that coal was cheaper than they were. It would be nice if we could get the cost of nuclear down enough to be competitive but there appears to be no prospect of that in the foreseeable future. The only thing holding solar and wind back is that it takes time to build it out just like it took 100 years to build out the existing power system. Once the price of storage gets low enough there's not much to hold wind and solar back.
No, coming out of the last ice age (glaciation) ended about 8,000 years ago. Since that time the climate has been slowly cooling as you would expect from an examination of Milankovitch cycles. Each interglacial is a bit different because the individual cycles that make up Milankovitch cycles don't synchronize that well. There's no reason to expect that just because the last interglacial was a bit warmer that this one would be just as warm.
The US Department of Energy was created 40 years ago with the mandate to provide energy independence for the USA.
The primary job of the Department of Energy is nuclear safety. It is in charge of the country's nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors and nuclear waste. It also does energy research and other related things but nuclear safety comes first.
The surface elevation of Lake Okeechobee is less than 20 feet above sea level. Do you seriously think people are going to willing to spend the trillions of dollars it would take to raise it and all of the streams that feed into it plus raising all the other terrain the cities and farms are built on. How much are your taxes going to go up to pay for it all? It ain't going to happen.
During our lifetimes you may be correct but as I said the last time CO2 levels were 400 ppm sea levels were 70 feet higher than they are now. It would probably take 500 years or more to get there but it may be inevitable. On top of that where is south Florida going to get fresh water from? As sea level rises it pushes into the fresh water aquifers they are currently using.
What does 10 feet of sea level rise do to Miami and much of Florida? Doesn't that much rise move the coastline back 20 or 30 miles around much of the state? I agree it's slow enough that it's not going to be a sudden disaster but it's not something that will be stoppable either.
The science that says you can expect 10 feet or more of sea level rise in 150 to 300 years. Yes you can probably make good things like you're talking about happen over the next 50 or 75 years but sea level will be rising for a long time until the great ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica catch up with the warming that's already occurred. The last time CO2 was over 400 ppm as it is now sea level was around 70 feet higher than it is now. There's no guarantee that won't happen now either, it will just take time as the ice doesn't melt instantly.
We are in a fucking interglacial, it is SUPPOSED to be warming. However, overall trend of the entire Holocene is down. Eventually we will freeze dickhead.
Actually if you pay attention to the state of Milankovitch cycles the interglacial reached its peak about 8,000 years ago and are going in the direction of cooling now. And in fact that is what was happening. There has been a very slow cooling trend since about 8,000 years ago. So no, it's not supposed to be warming now.
Yeah, great theory. But I think you've got the financial motivation of the climate scientists backwards. They don't have Hell to pay for promoting climate change/global warming. Instead, they get continued funding....
Do you think we wouldn't be spending money studying the climate if anthropogenic global warming wasn't a thing? It's still useful to study climate regardless of that.
I haven't read the report yet but I doubt it says anything different than the latest IPCC report. It just contains more details pertinent to the United States. If you're dismissing it for any reasons other than scientific reasons you're doing it wrong and the reality may come back to bite you in the end.
Yeah, globally it is cooler than 2016 and may or may not end up being cooler than 2015 but that's all. 2017 is going to end up being the 2nd or 3rd warmest year in the temperature record.
Fortunately the report was basically completed before he took over the reigns of power. He can have it scrubbed from Federal web sites but the report is out in the wild now and he can't do much about that.
I'm not trying to make La Nina a big deal. If there's a La Nina this year going into next year it will be a weak one. But if you look at long term global temperature records generally the years with El Ninos are the warmest, the years where ENSO is neutral are in the middle and the years with La Ninas are the coldest. That doesn't necessarily mean it always happens that way but that's what usually happens.
We can start back in the 50s and 60s when the big fear was global cooling. There were even project on the feasibility of launching large mirrors to the Lagrange points to collect more sunlight to send to the earth. Well, that changed...
No, there was never any big fear about global cooling in scientific circles. Svante Arrhenius predicted in the 1890s that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere would lead to increasing temperatures. In the 1930s Guy Callendar expanded on Arrhenius. In the 1950s Gilbert Plass published several papers on CO2s effect on climate including "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change". In the 1960s scientists brought the global warming effects of CO2 to the attention of President Lyndon Johnson who spoke about it to Congress. In 1967 Manabe and Wetherald developed the first primitive computer climate model whose predictions have turned out to be remarkably accurate 50 years later. In the 1970s there were a couple of articles in Time and Newsweek about potential cooling but a survey of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1979 found 7 times as many papers on global warming as they did on global cooling.
Then there is the multi foot sea level rise that started pushing in the 70s but really kicked off in the 80s. Also never happened.
Again no scientist predicted that kind of SLR that fast. Sea level has risen about 9 inches since 1900. We could well get to multi-foot sea level rises by the middle to late 2000s. That's what scientists have predicted.
How about the "tipping points" we were supposed to hit in 1990, 1990, 2005, 2010, and 2015. We have another one in 2020 we will also not hit. Also, by about the same dates as the tipping points above, we were supposed to lose the polar ice cap. Also never happened.
Again, again the scientific predictions about losing the Arctic sea ice point to somewhere in the 2040s or 2050s. And that means the sea ice will melt out every summer but it will still ice up in the winter for a long time to come. Also the big ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica will take thousands of years to melt regardless of how hot it gets.
This is the problem with literate people over 40. We remember reading the stuff.
The problem with you is that you read that stuff but you never bother to check it for accuracy. You never bother to understand the time frame for those predictions. You just accept that they must be true and will happen in a decade or less without skepticism.
I was born in 1952 and I don't remember reading any of that stuff except the Time and Newsweek articles. At the time I thought it might mean something but as I continued to educate myself I learned better.
A broad Russian strategy rather than targeting US election specifically.
Yep, Russia's strategy is to sow discord throughout the western world to weaken them to Russia's advantage. When we fight amongst ourselves we have less attention to focus on them.
You're free to go get the raw temperature data and compare it to the "manipulated data" on your own (although I'd be surprised if you had the statistical chops to be able to do that on your own). You appear to believe it's all a giant conspiracy but if it was it would be the biggest in world history involving tens of thousands of climate researchers around the world. It's an untenable conspiracy theory. Scientists generally are smart enough to know that if they are wrong the physical reality will catch up to them sooner or later and show them to be wrong. Any scientist would make his/her name by breaking away from such a conspiracy and pointing out the errors.
This tends to be the number one way that they're "never wrong". A lot of revisionism. When articles are pulled up, they're claimed to be fringe and "nobody really supported that". That front page of the Times probably being the most notable one of these ever. Granted "An Inconvenient Truth" is now giving the Times one from the 60s a run for it's money now. It's easy to never be wrong when you refuse to acknowledge you made your previous predictions that were later shown to be wrong.
And as an FYI, this is why those of us who don't have piss poor memories kind of get angry at people like you. What you're doing in the world of psychology is called "gaslighting" and it's considered one of the most horrific forms of psychological abuse one can do. The nice thing we've got going for us is the internet that has archives of you types saying these things, even if you do later try to deny it.
The problem with guys like you is that you read some hyperbolic headline and believe it's true without ever going to check the actual scientific sources. You tend to ignore the timelines they put on the predictions and expect them all to happen in a decade or so. I'd be happy for you to point out something from the internet archives that you think said sea level would rise that fast. I'll bet I could easily disprove it.
To be fair it has been speculated that there could be sea level rises on the order of a foot or more on decadal time scales if there is a catastrophic collapse of some of the glacial outlet glacier in Antarctica (like the Pine Island glacier). Rapid SLR like that has happened in the past but it's currently impossible to predict with any accuracy if and when that might happen.
The current conditions are borderline La Nina but they haven't lasted long enough to be officially called one yet. La Nina tends to be cooler so if one develops it will be the warmest one ever measured.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the cost of "fuel" for solar and wind is 0.
That's a nice rant. Here's the deal though. We can use fossil fuels or build nuclear power plants. People claim that solar power will be as cheap and reliable as coal in 5 years. Okay, so what do we do for the next five years? It's burn coal or develop nuclear power. Then what happens if these promises of cheap solar energy doesn't happen? Then we're burning coal or using nuclear power.
At least if we start with nuclear power now we have something low carbon to fall back on if solar doesn't meet it's promises of being cheap. Burning coal until solar gets cheap could mean burning coal until the sun goes out, and then for a few years after.
One of the reasons no one wants to build new coal plants is that solar and wind are already so cheap the coal plants wouldn't be able to compete with them and the reason that no one built nuclear plants is that coal was cheaper than they were. It would be nice if we could get the cost of nuclear down enough to be competitive but there appears to be no prospect of that in the foreseeable future. The only thing holding solar and wind back is that it takes time to build it out just like it took 100 years to build out the existing power system. Once the price of storage gets low enough there's not much to hold wind and solar back.
You can spend 1% of GWP now or 5% of GWP in 30 years.
The proper term is "climate science deniers".
No, coming out of the last ice age (glaciation) ended about 8,000 years ago. Since that time the climate has been slowly cooling as you would expect from an examination of Milankovitch cycles. Each interglacial is a bit different because the individual cycles that make up Milankovitch cycles don't synchronize that well. There's no reason to expect that just because the last interglacial was a bit warmer that this one would be just as warm.
Yes drought set up the dust bowl but poor agricultural practices exacerbated it greatly.
The US Department of Energy was created 40 years ago with the mandate to provide energy independence for the USA.
The primary job of the Department of Energy is nuclear safety. It is in charge of the country's nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors and nuclear waste. It also does energy research and other related things but nuclear safety comes first.
The surface elevation of Lake Okeechobee is less than 20 feet above sea level. Do you seriously think people are going to willing to spend the trillions of dollars it would take to raise it and all of the streams that feed into it plus raising all the other terrain the cities and farms are built on. How much are your taxes going to go up to pay for it all? It ain't going to happen.
During our lifetimes you may be correct but as I said the last time CO2 levels were 400 ppm sea levels were 70 feet higher than they are now. It would probably take 500 years or more to get there but it may be inevitable. On top of that where is south Florida going to get fresh water from? As sea level rises it pushes into the fresh water aquifers they are currently using.
What does 10 feet of sea level rise do to Miami and much of Florida? Doesn't that much rise move the coastline back 20 or 30 miles around much of the state? I agree it's slow enough that it's not going to be a sudden disaster but it's not something that will be stoppable either.
The science that says you can expect 10 feet or more of sea level rise in 150 to 300 years. Yes you can probably make good things like you're talking about happen over the next 50 or 75 years but sea level will be rising for a long time until the great ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica catch up with the warming that's already occurred. The last time CO2 was over 400 ppm as it is now sea level was around 70 feet higher than it is now. There's no guarantee that won't happen now either, it will just take time as the ice doesn't melt instantly.
As sea level continues to rise the Everglades (and most of Florida) will disappear under the ocean sometime between 100 and 300 years from now.
We are in a fucking interglacial, it is SUPPOSED to be warming. However, overall trend of the entire Holocene is down. Eventually we will freeze dickhead.
Actually if you pay attention to the state of Milankovitch cycles the interglacial reached its peak about 8,000 years ago and are going in the direction of cooling now. And in fact that is what was happening. There has been a very slow cooling trend since about 8,000 years ago. So no, it's not supposed to be warming now.
You're right, I messed that up.
Yeah, great theory. But I think you've got the financial motivation of the climate scientists backwards. They don't have Hell to pay for promoting climate change/global warming. Instead, they get continued funding. ...
Do you think we wouldn't be spending money studying the climate if anthropogenic global warming wasn't a thing? It's still useful to study climate regardless of that.
I haven't read the report yet but I doubt it says anything different than the latest IPCC report. It just contains more details pertinent to the United States. If you're dismissing it for any reasons other than scientific reasons you're doing it wrong and the reality may come back to bite you in the end.
I think Trump likes the discord too, at least judging by the first 9 months of his Presidency.
Yeah, globally it is cooler than 2016 and may or may not end up being cooler than 2015 but that's all. 2017 is going to end up being the 2nd or 3rd warmest year in the temperature record.
Fortunately the report was basically completed before he took over the reigns of power. He can have it scrubbed from Federal web sites but the report is out in the wild now and he can't do much about that.
I'm not trying to make La Nina a big deal. If there's a La Nina this year going into next year it will be a weak one. But if you look at long term global temperature records generally the years with El Ninos are the warmest, the years where ENSO is neutral are in the middle and the years with La Ninas are the coldest. That doesn't necessarily mean it always happens that way but that's what usually happens.
We can start back in the 50s and 60s when the big fear was global cooling. There were even project on the feasibility of launching large mirrors to the Lagrange points to collect more sunlight to send to the earth. Well, that changed...
No, there was never any big fear about global cooling in scientific circles. Svante Arrhenius predicted in the 1890s that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere would lead to increasing temperatures. In the 1930s Guy Callendar expanded on Arrhenius. In the 1950s Gilbert Plass published several papers on CO2s effect on climate including "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change". In the 1960s scientists brought the global warming effects of CO2 to the attention of President Lyndon Johnson who spoke about it to Congress. In 1967 Manabe and Wetherald developed the first primitive computer climate model whose predictions have turned out to be remarkably accurate 50 years later. In the 1970s there were a couple of articles in Time and Newsweek about potential cooling but a survey of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1979 found 7 times as many papers on global warming as they did on global cooling.
Then there is the multi foot sea level rise that started pushing in the 70s but really kicked off in the 80s. Also never happened.
Again no scientist predicted that kind of SLR that fast. Sea level has risen about 9 inches since 1900. We could well get to multi-foot sea level rises by the middle to late 2000s. That's what scientists have predicted.
How about the "tipping points" we were supposed to hit in 1990, 1990, 2005, 2010, and 2015. We have another one in 2020 we will also not hit. Also, by about the same dates as the tipping points above, we were supposed to lose the polar ice cap. Also never happened.
Again, again the scientific predictions about losing the Arctic sea ice point to somewhere in the 2040s or 2050s. And that means the sea ice will melt out every summer but it will still ice up in the winter for a long time to come. Also the big ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica will take thousands of years to melt regardless of how hot it gets.
This is the problem with literate people over 40. We remember reading the stuff.
The problem with you is that you read that stuff but you never bother to check it for accuracy. You never bother to understand the time frame for those predictions. You just accept that they must be true and will happen in a decade or less without skepticism.
I was born in 1952 and I don't remember reading any of that stuff except the Time and Newsweek articles. At the time I thought it might mean something but as I continued to educate myself I learned better.
A broad Russian strategy rather than targeting US election specifically.
Yep, Russia's strategy is to sow discord throughout the western world to weaken them to Russia's advantage. When we fight amongst ourselves we have less attention to focus on them.
You're free to go get the raw temperature data and compare it to the "manipulated data" on your own (although I'd be surprised if you had the statistical chops to be able to do that on your own). You appear to believe it's all a giant conspiracy but if it was it would be the biggest in world history involving tens of thousands of climate researchers around the world. It's an untenable conspiracy theory. Scientists generally are smart enough to know that if they are wrong the physical reality will catch up to them sooner or later and show them to be wrong. Any scientist would make his/her name by breaking away from such a conspiracy and pointing out the errors.
This tends to be the number one way that they're "never wrong". A lot of revisionism. When articles are pulled up, they're claimed to be fringe and "nobody really supported that". That front page of the Times probably being the most notable one of these ever. Granted "An Inconvenient Truth" is now giving the Times one from the 60s a run for it's money now. It's easy to never be wrong when you refuse to acknowledge you made your previous predictions that were later shown to be wrong.
And as an FYI, this is why those of us who don't have piss poor memories kind of get angry at people like you. What you're doing in the world of psychology is called "gaslighting" and it's considered one of the most horrific forms of psychological abuse one can do. The nice thing we've got going for us is the internet that has archives of you types saying these things, even if you do later try to deny it.
The problem with guys like you is that you read some hyperbolic headline and believe it's true without ever going to check the actual scientific sources. You tend to ignore the timelines they put on the predictions and expect them all to happen in a decade or so. I'd be happy for you to point out something from the internet archives that you think said sea level would rise that fast. I'll bet I could easily disprove it.
To be fair it has been speculated that there could be sea level rises on the order of a foot or more on decadal time scales if there is a catastrophic collapse of some of the glacial outlet glacier in Antarctica (like the Pine Island glacier). Rapid SLR like that has happened in the past but it's currently impossible to predict with any accuracy if and when that might happen.
The current conditions are borderline La Nina but they haven't lasted long enough to be officially called one yet. La Nina tends to be cooler so if one develops it will be the warmest one ever measured.