Well, the term tundra in the Arctic generally refers to only the areas where permafrost exists. When you get further south you're getting into the taiga where trees start to grow. Taiga soils tend to be nutrient poor and acidic and while there is plenty of daylight in the summer the winters will still have short days and cold weather. And the sunlight that does come in is never as strong as further south as the Sun never rises so far above the horizon there regardless of the time of year. I just think it's not going to be as easy as you think to develop big agricultural production in the northern latitudes.
Much of that tundra you refer to is permafrost that will take hundreds of years to turn from a swampy peat bog into usable land once it thaws out. Meanwhile it will be outgassing large amounts of methane as the organic material in it breaks down.
Sea level rise over the 20th Century was around 20 cm, an order of magnitude larger than what you said. Current predictions for SLR by 2100 are around 200 cm, another order of magnitude.
At the far end of your logistics curve sea level has risen over 200 feet. At the beginning of a logistic curve growth is approximately exponential.
James Hansen is one of the preeminent scientists in the field. He is alarmed by his findings and is using his prestige to try and do something about it.
The real question is how much is it going to cost you (and the rest of us) that you don't care about trees (and a myriad of other natural systems that sustain all life including human life on this planet)? The human economy is a subset of the natural systems of this planet.
Throwing money at it may not guarantee quality education but underfunding education just about guarantees a poor outcome. One reason home schooling and private schools can work so well is the class size. More individual attention for each student from the teacher.
So is the money I paid to Portland General Electric, a private company, for the failure of the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant a tax as well? Because it's paying for the same thing, the costs of the failure of a power plant project.
And even though those customers had to pay that "tax" as you call it they were still paying less for their power than any customers of privately owned utility companies in the area.
Sigh is right. You refuse to believe a public entity can ever be run efficiently even though there are many examples of it.
Most of the PUD's I'm aware of have boards of directors or commissions who are elected by the members (customers) and are directly answerable to their members.
I challenge you to find an example of even one Public Utility District that is covering losses with taxes.
Sounds to me like you're so invested in your "Government can't do anything right" attitude that you can't accept reality and believe a PUD could possibly be well run.
Boy now, I think comparing me to Hitler was a Godwin;-)
I agree with you about DHS & TSA. It's mostly a lot of security theater. Unfortunately too many people in the US are more worried about their security than they are about their liberty. Brings to mind a quote from Ben Franklin.
The customers are the Public Utility Districts and some large power users who buy directly from WPPSS. It has nothing to do with municipal, county or state government. In the Northwest you generally have one choice for power, the utility (public or private) that serves the area you live. That's fine with me. I don't care to spend a lot of time wading through a bunch of choices to find the right one. Just give me dependable electricity at a reasonable price.
From wikipedia:
Energy Northwest (formerly Washington Public Power Supply System) is a United States public power joint operating agency formed by State law in 1957 to produce at-cost power for Northwest utilities.
While WPPSS can issue tax free municipal bonds it has no taxing power and exists entirely what it charges it customers for delivery of electricity. I suppose they may have received some seed money from the State of Washington to get started but I'll bet they paid it back long ago.
The biggest difference between WPPSS and a similar private power provider is that they operate on a non-profit basis.
Despite the default the customers of WPPSS still enjoy one of the lowest electricity rates in the nation because most of their power comes from BPA and their hydroelectric dams. I wish I could become a customer of the PUD that is across the river about 2 miles from me. It would shave 25% off my electric bill compared to what I pay Portland General Electric.
I doubt you can find a PUD in the Northwest that is more expensive than any of the private utility companies that serve us.
It was customers and the bondholders that paid for the WPPSS failures, not the taxpayers in general. That was my point.
When the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant here in Oregon ran into problems and was shut down prematurely it was customers (including me) and stockholders who paid. Trojan was run by Portland General Electric, a private utility company. And don't get me started about PGE being owned by Enron for a while. What a fiasco.
Pretty much the same difference as far as I can see.
The "green movement" had little to do with it. WPPSS seriously overestimated the demand for power and mismanaged the project and they paid for it.
BTW, When you see Bonneville Power Administration think Tennessee Valley Authority for the Northwest. They market power from some 31 hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River and tributaries and build and maintain most major transmission lines and major power substations in the region. Every year they pay something around $500 million to the Federal Government to help pay off all of the dams that were built.
One other thing, I've never heard Gavin Schmidt's name mentioned in relation to the Climategate emails. Phil Jones, Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth but never Schmidt.
Ok, but after reading the excerpts that everyone was all excited about a year ago and figuring out the context I decided it wasn't worth my time to delve in that deeply. I've heard nothing new since then. After hearing the results of several official inquiries into the matter there are still no big revelations, just some nits to pick that don't affect the fundamental science.
As I said before, the idea that climate scientists are part of some big conspiracy to falsify the science and have been successful at it for as long as they have (since at least the 1980's) just doesn't make sense to me given the attention the matter has received over the years. There are too many people involved over too long a time to sustain such a conspiracy. Any scientist could make his name overturning the current consensus.
On the other hand there is good reason for the fossil fuel industry to oppose the conclusions. The necessary response would eventually eliminate their industries. It's an amoral business decision.
Well, I haven't read them directly but I followed the news. All I saw was a bunch of misinterpretation. There was no interference with peer review. The kerfuffle over "hide the decline" and the "trick" was way overblown. Without more context about how the code in question got used the comments in the code are meaningless. Kevin Trenberth's comment that it's a travesty we can't account for the lack of warming was a comment on the observation system's inability to comprehensively track the energy flow in the system.
Yes, I figured you were a Swede based on your Sig although I don't get what Troed refers to if anything. I will say it's impossible to tell just based on the way you write English. I'm about half Swedish blood myself from my mothers side. Her maiden name was Englebretson.
Climate science is a multidisciplinary field that includes physics, chemistry, geology, paleoclimatology and a number of other fields. I think physicists studying radiative transfer are kind of the leaders in the field though. I would say Arrhenius's work on the greenhouse effect qualifies him as somewhat of a climate scientist. I know he thought it would be beneficial but he also thought it would take 3000 years to double CO2, not less than 300 years (at our current pace). Of course that was at the end of the Little Ice Age and our understanding has improved over the years. If CO2 doubled over 3000 years it would give the natural systems a much better chance of being able to adjust successfully. I think ocean acidification is as big a problem as simple global warming.
I am a computer geek (system/DB admin) not a scientist but I've had a lifelong love of science. I've had 200 level and some 300 level science courses in college so I think I understand the field better than most people. But that means nothing. I know there is a difference between the laboratory and the real world but that just modifies what we see in the laboratory. It doesn't eliminate it.
There is heat transfer both ways between the ocean and the atmosphere. If you don't think the atmosphere can transfer heat to the ocean (and land surface) you should look into the term "downward longwave radiation". I'm not saying the upward and downward transfer are equal just that it goes both ways. At night if the air is warmer than the water there will definitely be a net positive transfer to the ocean from the atmosphere.
I've never seen any evidence that ENSO is driven by changes in cloud cover. I would tend to think it's more likely that changes in cloud cover are driven by ENSO. But it's not a subject I'm all that studied up on.
I wouldn't call myself desperate about it at all (and I'm sorry about using that term on you). I mostly just believe that scientists in the field know what they are talking about and are not deliberately trying to mislead anyone. If they changed their tune and started saying ENSO is important then I'd listen to them.
Scientist generally don't set out to deliberately try to falsify or find other explanations for a theory. Instead they say something like "That doesn't seem quite right." or "We need to understand this better. Let's investigate it." Occasionally they'll make a discovery that leads in a completely different direction but it's a relatively rare thing.
Certainly there will be enough evidence to confirm of falsify the theory in another 20 or 30 years. But it may not be safe to wait that long to act.
WPPSS still exists. It is now called Energy Northwest. On the Energy Northwest Wikipedia page is this link that gives a short explanation of what happened.
There is no smoking gun in "Climategate". Maybe a smoking cap gun. You read scientific malfeasance in it only if you are already primed to do so.
... willing to publish results that overturn scientific consensus, even if data are preliminary...
That's one of the main reasons why I don't ever trust Realclimate on anything that has to do with science. Gavin especially.
I don't understand. What does a scientific journals willingness to publish "results that overturn scientific consensus" have to do with RealClimate and Gavin Schmidt?
The idea that CO2 in the atmosphere affects temperatures was first advanced by Savante Arrhenius in 1896 in his paper "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground". That's not just a few decades ago and long before any serious models were developed. More recently scientists such as Richard Alley have come to the conclusion that it's impossible to understand temperatures on the Earth at any time in its history without taking CO2 levels into account. Alley calls it "the big dial" on Earth's thermostat.
It looks to me like you're just trying desperately to find a reason other than CO2 for most of the current warming. To do that you have to overcome the physics of CO2's absorption of infrared radiation. Tell me again how CO2 is not capturing IR in the atmosphere like it does in the laboratory.
Regarding ENSO I want to know what drives it. As I said before Tisdale shows correlation but is pretty weak on causation. It certainly is a major factor in natural variability with global effects but what is the mechanism that drives it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the term tundra in the Arctic generally refers to only the areas where permafrost exists. When you get further south you're getting into the taiga where trees start to grow. Taiga soils tend to be nutrient poor and acidic and while there is plenty of daylight in the summer the winters will still have short days and cold weather. And the sunlight that does come in is never as strong as further south as the Sun never rises so far above the horizon there regardless of the time of year. I just think it's not going to be as easy as you think to develop big agricultural production in the northern latitudes.
Much of that tundra you refer to is permafrost that will take hundreds of years to turn from a swampy peat bog into usable land once it thaws out. Meanwhile it will be outgassing large amounts of methane as the organic material in it breaks down.
... putting Wall Street below sea-level.
That's it! I'm headed to Greenland with a blowtorch!
It will still be dark (or short daytimes) and mostly cold half of the year.
Sea level rise over the 20th Century was around 20 cm, an order of magnitude larger than what you said. Current predictions for SLR by 2100 are around 200 cm, another order of magnitude.
If I had points I'd mod that +1 Informative.
At the far end of your logistics curve sea level has risen over 200 feet. At the beginning of a logistic curve growth is approximately exponential.
James Hansen is one of the preeminent scientists in the field. He is alarmed by his findings and is using his prestige to try and do something about it.
The real question is how much is it going to cost you (and the rest of us) that you don't care about trees (and a myriad of other natural systems that sustain all life including human life on this planet)? The human economy is a subset of the natural systems of this planet.
Throwing money at it may not guarantee quality education but underfunding education just about guarantees a poor outcome. One reason home schooling and private schools can work so well is the class size. More individual attention for each student from the teacher.
So is the money I paid to Portland General Electric, a private company, for the failure of the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant a tax as well? Because it's paying for the same thing, the costs of the failure of a power plant project.
And even though those customers had to pay that "tax" as you call it they were still paying less for their power than any customers of privately owned utility companies in the area.
Sigh is right. You refuse to believe a public entity can ever be run efficiently even though there are many examples of it.
Most of the PUD's I'm aware of have boards of directors or commissions who are elected by the members (customers) and are directly answerable to their members.
I challenge you to find an example of even one Public Utility District that is covering losses with taxes.
Sounds to me like you're so invested in your "Government can't do anything right" attitude that you can't accept reality and believe a PUD could possibly be well run.
:-)
Boy now, I think comparing me to Hitler was a Godwin ;-)
I agree with you about DHS & TSA. It's mostly a lot of security theater. Unfortunately too many people in the US are more worried about their security than they are about their liberty. Brings to mind a quote from Ben Franklin.
The customers are the Public Utility Districts and some large power users who buy directly from WPPSS. It has nothing to do with municipal, county or state government. In the Northwest you generally have one choice for power, the utility (public or private) that serves the area you live. That's fine with me. I don't care to spend a lot of time wading through a bunch of choices to find the right one. Just give me dependable electricity at a reasonable price.
From wikipedia:
Energy Northwest (formerly Washington Public Power Supply System) is a United States public power joint operating agency formed by State law in 1957 to produce at-cost power for Northwest utilities.
While WPPSS can issue tax free municipal bonds it has no taxing power and exists entirely what it charges it customers for delivery of electricity. I suppose they may have received some seed money from the State of Washington to get started but I'll bet they paid it back long ago.
The biggest difference between WPPSS and a similar private power provider is that they operate on a non-profit basis.
Despite the default the customers of WPPSS still enjoy one of the lowest electricity rates in the nation because most of their power comes from BPA and their hydroelectric dams. I wish I could become a customer of the PUD that is across the river about 2 miles from me. It would shave 25% off my electric bill compared to what I pay Portland General Electric.
I doubt you can find a PUD in the Northwest that is more expensive than any of the private utility companies that serve us.
Yup, but that doesn't stop some people. I was just being preemptive.
I thought you'd probably say something like that.
It was customers and the bondholders that paid for the WPPSS failures, not the taxpayers in general. That was my point.
When the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant here in Oregon ran into problems and was shut down prematurely it was customers (including me) and stockholders who paid. Trojan was run by Portland General Electric, a private utility company. And don't get me started about PGE being owned by Enron for a while. What a fiasco.
Pretty much the same difference as far as I can see.
The "green movement" had little to do with it. WPPSS seriously overestimated the demand for power and mismanaged the project and they paid for it.
BTW, When you see Bonneville Power Administration think Tennessee Valley Authority for the Northwest. They market power from some 31 hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River and tributaries and build and maintain most major transmission lines and major power substations in the region. Every year they pay something around $500 million to the Federal Government to help pay off all of the dams that were built.
I'm not trying to Godwin the discussion but to me it sounds like something out of Nazi Germany (Heimatland).
One other thing, I've never heard Gavin Schmidt's name mentioned in relation to the Climategate emails. Phil Jones, Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth but never Schmidt.
Ok, but after reading the excerpts that everyone was all excited about a year ago and figuring out the context I decided it wasn't worth my time to delve in that deeply. I've heard nothing new since then. After hearing the results of several official inquiries into the matter there are still no big revelations, just some nits to pick that don't affect the fundamental science.
As I said before, the idea that climate scientists are part of some big conspiracy to falsify the science and have been successful at it for as long as they have (since at least the 1980's) just doesn't make sense to me given the attention the matter has received over the years. There are too many people involved over too long a time to sustain such a conspiracy. Any scientist could make his name overturning the current consensus.
On the other hand there is good reason for the fossil fuel industry to oppose the conclusions. The necessary response would eventually eliminate their industries. It's an amoral business decision.
You know there's so much of the climategate emails to read through. Maybe you could point me to some specific examples you think I should read.
Oh, I doubt that but I'll see if I can't spend some time on it.
Glad Nyåren
Well, I haven't read them directly but I followed the news. All I saw was a bunch of misinterpretation. There was no interference with peer review. The kerfuffle over "hide the decline" and the "trick" was way overblown. Without more context about how the code in question got used the comments in the code are meaningless. Kevin Trenberth's comment that it's a travesty we can't account for the lack of warming was a comment on the observation system's inability to comprehensively track the energy flow in the system.
Yes, I figured you were a Swede based on your Sig although I don't get what Troed refers to if anything. I will say it's impossible to tell just based on the way you write English. I'm about half Swedish blood myself from my mothers side. Her maiden name was Englebretson.
Climate science is a multidisciplinary field that includes physics, chemistry, geology, paleoclimatology and a number of other fields. I think physicists studying radiative transfer are kind of the leaders in the field though. I would say Arrhenius's work on the greenhouse effect qualifies him as somewhat of a climate scientist. I know he thought it would be beneficial but he also thought it would take 3000 years to double CO2, not less than 300 years (at our current pace). Of course that was at the end of the Little Ice Age and our understanding has improved over the years. If CO2 doubled over 3000 years it would give the natural systems a much better chance of being able to adjust successfully. I think ocean acidification is as big a problem as simple global warming.
I am a computer geek (system/DB admin) not a scientist but I've had a lifelong love of science. I've had 200 level and some 300 level science courses in college so I think I understand the field better than most people. But that means nothing. I know there is a difference between the laboratory and the real world but that just modifies what we see in the laboratory. It doesn't eliminate it.
There is heat transfer both ways between the ocean and the atmosphere. If you don't think the atmosphere can transfer heat to the ocean (and land surface) you should look into the term "downward longwave radiation". I'm not saying the upward and downward transfer are equal just that it goes both ways. At night if the air is warmer than the water there will definitely be a net positive transfer to the ocean from the atmosphere.
I've never seen any evidence that ENSO is driven by changes in cloud cover. I would tend to think it's more likely that changes in cloud cover are driven by ENSO. But it's not a subject I'm all that studied up on.
I wouldn't call myself desperate about it at all (and I'm sorry about using that term on you). I mostly just believe that scientists in the field know what they are talking about and are not deliberately trying to mislead anyone. If they changed their tune and started saying ENSO is important then I'd listen to them.
Scientist generally don't set out to deliberately try to falsify or find other explanations for a theory. Instead they say something like "That doesn't seem quite right." or "We need to understand this better. Let's investigate it." Occasionally they'll make a discovery that leads in a completely different direction but it's a relatively rare thing.
Certainly there will be enough evidence to confirm of falsify the theory in another 20 or 30 years. But it may not be safe to wait that long to act.
WPPSS still exists. It is now called Energy Northwest. On the Energy Northwest Wikipedia page is this link that gives a short explanation of what happened.
There is no smoking gun in "Climategate". Maybe a smoking cap gun. You read scientific malfeasance in it only if you are already primed to do so.
That's one of the main reasons why I don't ever trust Realclimate on anything that has to do with science. Gavin especially.
I don't understand. What does a scientific journals willingness to publish "results that overturn scientific consensus" have to do with RealClimate and Gavin Schmidt?
The idea that CO2 in the atmosphere affects temperatures was first advanced by Savante Arrhenius in 1896 in his paper "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground". That's not just a few decades ago and long before any serious models were developed. More recently scientists such as Richard Alley have come to the conclusion that it's impossible to understand temperatures on the Earth at any time in its history without taking CO2 levels into account. Alley calls it "the big dial" on Earth's thermostat.
It looks to me like you're just trying desperately to find a reason other than CO2 for most of the current warming. To do that you have to overcome the physics of CO2's absorption of infrared radiation. Tell me again how CO2 is not capturing IR in the atmosphere like it does in the laboratory.
Regarding ENSO I want to know what drives it. As I said before Tisdale shows correlation but is pretty weak on causation. It certainly is a major factor in natural variability with global effects but what is the mechanism that drives it.
:)