The predicted high rate of warming from the early work of NASA [wattsupwiththat.com] and the IPCC [wattsupwiththat.com] has already been falsified. This is why more recent IPCC reports forecast much lower rates of warming (while still predicting catastrophe).
Your first cite is about James Hansen's 1988 model. Hansen used 3 scenarios for future emissions of greenhouse gases, Scenario 1 was continued acceleration, B was slowing to a constant growth rate and C was rapid decline after 2000. Watts' headline is based on comparing Scenario A to observations but in reality Scenario B is closest to reality but slightly higher than observations. Hansen's model also had too high a value for climate sensitivity (around 4.2 IIRC) while subsequent research came up with a value around 3.2. If you fixed those two thing Hansen's 1988 model would probably come pretty close to observed temperatures. It was still a remarkable piece of work nearly 30 years ago.
The sea level is hardly rising at all right now; it is plain to see from the actual data [epa.gov] that a massive acceleration in the rise would be required to fulfil the predictions of flooded cities and so forth. Moreover, those dramatic predictions come from sensational numbers like 7 meters [theguardian.com], but these days the IPCC is predicting a rise of less than 1 meter over the next century, which would be more than usual, but still not terribly exciting in the grand scheme of things.
There are already cities like Miami and Norfolk, VA that are flooding in areas when the king tides occur. It's only going to get worse as the slow steady rise of sea level continues. If you look closely that EPA graph does show some acceleration.
In the Guardian article I think you misread "several meters" as "7 meters". Several meters of sea level rise this century is impossible to rule out. We don't know much about the dynamics of ice sheet breakup. There could be a catastrophic failure of an ice sheet causing a foot or more of sea level rise in a decade. Even if that doesn't happen do you think a SLR of around 3 feet by 2100 wouldn't cause massive problems for low lying cities?
Section 8 of Article 1 of the US Constitution starts out:
The Congress shall have Power TO lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United State;
We can argue about what the general welfare means but the Constitution was designed to be a flexible document so it didn't handcuff future generations. I don't believe the Founding Fathers would agree with your rigid interpretation.
Bernie running as a third party candidate is not going to happen. Preventing a Trump Presidency is more important to him than any other consideration. But you can dream.
The data in your link is from 2011. As I said in another reply to you I found more than 1 source that said in 2015 the average German price was 15.22 cents per kWh.
Ok, maybe so from your sources but I searched for "electricity prices in Germany" and found more than one source that said German electricity was around 15.22 cents per kWh in 2015 and the prices are dropping a little. Try this link.
My main point was this:
But the real question here is how much is it going to cost you in 20 or 30 years when the effects of AGW really start kicking in and we're spending big money on trying to adapt. Are you really saving anything in the long run by hanging on to your cheap power now?
But at what price? Germany pays three times the price for power that the US does.
I don't really want a $1,200 power bill, thank you very much.
As others pointed out Germany doesn't pay 3 times what we pay in the USA but they do pay a bit more. But the real question here is how much is it going to cost you in 20 or 30 years when the effects of AGW really start kicking in and we're spending big money on trying to adapt. Are you really saving anything in the long run by hanging on to your cheap power now?
This is just another illustration that the people who claim that renewable energy can never supply nearly all of our energy needs are wrong. It's mostly just a matter of building out the infrastructure which takes time. Our current power system wasn't built overnight either.
"That's nice because nobody has the time or expertise to do all of that either. If you want a summary of current state of the science read the IPCC reports which are available to for free. Here's a like to the latest, the IPCC AR5 report.
If you paid attention to actual time scales in actual published scientific papers instead of sexed up headlines you wouldn't be saying that. For instance observed sea level rise has always been faster than predicted in any of the IPCC reports.
When those batteries get replaced they still have a lot of life left in them. What's the standard for replacing EV batteries? When they're down to 80% of the original range? With all that life left in them they can be moved to stationary installations where weight and volume don't matter so much and be useful for years to come.
Oh yeah, I'm sure they would have been totally on board with being hacked if he had asked.
This is democracy at stake here, we can't afford to let some incompetent and potentially corrupt officials dictate the terms. Nothing less than the next President of the US is at stake here. It is absolutely in the countries best interest for these sorts of vulnerabilities to be discovered and patched before the election, otherwise you can never trust the election. I don't care that it hurt their feelings that their system was wide open to attack and practically begging for someone to manipulate the vote, this needs to be fixed before November.
The place to start is to get rid of all of the touch screen voting machines that don't produce a verifiable paper trail. How is it possible to ever trust such a machine?
In the USA at least the personal outcomes for whistle blowers (at any level of government or business) is more likely to be negative than positive. The best they can hope for most of the time is whatever they're whistle blowing about gets improved.
Interesting, if we look at the chart provided by the article we see that temperatures were higher at least 4 times over the last 450,000 years.
I'd be a little careful about that statement. Ice core values don't continue right up to the present but stop at the point where the ice isn't consolidated enough yet to give good values. Depending on the nature of the snowfall in the region and probably other factors that's probably something like 50-100 years before the present. I doubt the chart shows temperature values after the early 20th Century.
Chances are the Eemian interglacial 125,000 years ago was a bit warmer than now due to a slightly different configuration of Milankovitch Cycles compared to today but the other interglacials probably weren't warmer than today. At no time did the level of CO2 rise above 300 ppm during those times compared to over 400 ppm today.
They should set up a national sales tax clearing house on the internet. All the sales taxing jurisdictions send their particulars in to it. Internet businesses send in the details of the transaction and the clearing house returns the applicable tax which the vendor charges the customer and then remits to the clearing house. The clearing house then passes the collected tax on to the relevant jurisdiction withholding a small percentage to fund their operation. Since there would be no charge to the business for the service it wouldn't be a barrier to them.
mi is still arguing like a lawyer. A year or so ago I gave him a link to an article that compared temperature and sea level rise to model projections and showed the models were mostly right on temperature and lagging on sea level rise. Here's a different one that does the same comparison of observations in 2007 to the projections from the IPCC 2001 (AR3) report which started its projections in 1990. But instead of taking in the information mi will reject it because it's not in his cherished format. If mi had any gumption he'd look up the projections from the AR3 report and the observations from 2007 to have his cherished 2 sources and see if what the paper said is true. Instead he's unwilling to meet anyone halfway and wants it all handed to him on a silver platter. Like I said, he argues like a lawyer.
Granted, industrialization has increased it from a low of about 180 ppm to over 400 ppm in an alarmingly short span of time.
No, industrialization has increased CO concentrations from 280 ppm to over 400 ppm. The rise from 180 ppm to 280 ppm was a result of feedbacks from the warming caused by Milankovitch Cycles.
-Most of the world's oxygen comes from the phytoplankton [earthsky.org], and their population dynamics are remarkably challenging to model. However, if they are not dying en masse, then the oxygen production will remain about the same; some may be redistributed.
Tree rings can go back close to 10,000 years under the right conditions. Older trees may have died but not decomposed to any great degree if the conditions are right and if they overlap with other more recent data they can be correlated and used.
As far as ice cores I found this article on ice core basics. Obviously as you go further back in time the the time scale gets a bit more muddled but it's not unusable. I found this reply from the author, Bethan Davies to a comment that pretty much supports my assertion:
Bethan Davies on 05/01/2016 at 9:00 am said:
In the upper parts of the ice core (last few hundred years), annual laminations in the ice allow us to derive annual CO2 and isotopic variations. As the ice is compressed deeper in the core, the annual layers are lost so several (not 1000s) of years may be amalgamated.
The trope that our environment is worse than it was a century ago, really needs to die. Sheesh.
By any measurement you may care to make our environment is is worse shape now than it was a century ago, due in large part to the explosion in human population. Yes, there were a few places like Pittsburgh where it was pretty bad but they were mostly pretty local.exceptions.
Things with annual banding like ice cores and tree rings can be dated quite accurately, sometimes less than +/- 10 years but certainly better than +/- 100 years. If there were any wild swing in temperatures for a few decades it would certainly show up in those. They can already pinpoint years when a major volcanic eruption caused tree growth to be stunted or put down a layer of ash on an ice sheet.
The cycle of glacial and interglacial periods in the current ice age appear to be largely driven by Milankovitch Cycles aided by feedbacks. The current rise in temperatures is way too fast for Milankovitch Cycles to be driving it. Just simple physics tells us that increasing the level of a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will lead to warming. It's trivial to show the increase in CO2 is due to human emissions. Ice cores tell us the current CO2 level is way above any experienced in the last 800,000 years. So what do you think is driving the current warming spike?
In the long run there really is no practical alternative to reducing carbon emissions. The other option is to let things happen and see if we can successfully adapt.
Quarantine isn't a guarantee, as seen by the two health care workers who contracted Ebola in Texas when caring for a patient.
I believe the two nurses who caught Ebola from Thomas Eric Duncan did so from caring for him before he had been diagnosed. Once they set up the proper quarantine protocols nobody else caught it.
Slashdot Mirror
Being foreign born Elon Musk is not eligible to be President of the United States.
The predicted high rate of warming from the early work of NASA [wattsupwiththat.com] and the IPCC [wattsupwiththat.com] has already been falsified. This is why more recent IPCC reports forecast much lower rates of warming (while still predicting catastrophe).
Your first cite is about James Hansen's 1988 model. Hansen used 3 scenarios for future emissions of greenhouse gases, Scenario 1 was continued acceleration, B was slowing to a constant growth rate and C was rapid decline after 2000. Watts' headline is based on comparing Scenario A to observations but in reality Scenario B is closest to reality but slightly higher than observations. Hansen's model also had too high a value for climate sensitivity (around 4.2 IIRC) while subsequent research came up with a value around 3.2. If you fixed those two thing Hansen's 1988 model would probably come pretty close to observed temperatures. It was still a remarkable piece of work nearly 30 years ago.
The sea level is hardly rising at all right now; it is plain to see from the actual data [epa.gov] that a massive acceleration in the rise would be required to fulfil the predictions of flooded cities and so forth. Moreover, those dramatic predictions come from sensational numbers like 7 meters [theguardian.com], but these days the IPCC is predicting a rise of less than 1 meter over the next century, which would be more than usual, but still not terribly exciting in the grand scheme of things.
There are already cities like Miami and Norfolk, VA that are flooding in areas when the king tides occur. It's only going to get worse as the slow steady rise of sea level continues. If you look closely that EPA graph does show some acceleration.
In the Guardian article I think you misread "several meters" as "7 meters". Several meters of sea level rise this century is impossible to rule out. We don't know much about the dynamics of ice sheet breakup. There could be a catastrophic failure of an ice sheet causing a foot or more of sea level rise in a decade. Even if that doesn't happen do you think a SLR of around 3 feet by 2100 wouldn't cause massive problems for low lying cities?
Section 8 of Article 1 of the US Constitution starts out:
The Congress shall have Power TO lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United State;
We can argue about what the general welfare means but the Constitution was designed to be a flexible document so it didn't handcuff future generations. I don't believe the Founding Fathers would agree with your rigid interpretation.
Bernie running as a third party candidate is not going to happen. Preventing a Trump Presidency is more important to him than any other consideration. But you can dream.
The data in your link is from 2011. As I said in another reply to you I found more than 1 source that said in 2015 the average German price was 15.22 cents per kWh.
Ok, maybe so from your sources but I searched for "electricity prices in Germany" and found more than one source that said German electricity was around 15.22 cents per kWh in 2015 and the prices are dropping a little. Try this link.
My main point was this:
But the real question here is how much is it going to cost you in 20 or 30 years when the effects of AGW really start kicking in and we're spending big money on trying to adapt. Are you really saving anything in the long run by hanging on to your cheap power now?
But at what price? Germany pays three times the price for power that the US does.
I don't really want a $1,200 power bill, thank you very much.
As others pointed out Germany doesn't pay 3 times what we pay in the USA but they do pay a bit more. But the real question here is how much is it going to cost you in 20 or 30 years when the effects of AGW really start kicking in and we're spending big money on trying to adapt. Are you really saving anything in the long run by hanging on to your cheap power now?
This is just another illustration that the people who claim that renewable energy can never supply nearly all of our energy needs are wrong. It's mostly just a matter of building out the infrastructure which takes time. Our current power system wasn't built overnight either.
"That's nice because nobody has the time or expertise to do all of that either. If you want a summary of current state of the science read the IPCC reports which are available to for free. Here's a like to the latest, the IPCC AR5 report.
If you paid attention to actual time scales in actual published scientific papers instead of sexed up headlines you wouldn't be saying that. For instance observed sea level rise has always been faster than predicted in any of the IPCC reports.
When those batteries get replaced they still have a lot of life left in them. What's the standard for replacing EV batteries? When they're down to 80% of the original range? With all that life left in them they can be moved to stationary installations where weight and volume don't matter so much and be useful for years to come.
The carbon footprint will not matter one whit within a decade, ...
If you're saying that because you think anthropogenic global warming will be disproved you need to be prepared to be sorely disappointed in a decade.
Oh yeah, I'm sure they would have been totally on board with being hacked if he had asked.
This is democracy at stake here, we can't afford to let some incompetent and potentially corrupt officials dictate the terms. Nothing less than the next President of the US is at stake here. It is absolutely in the countries best interest for these sorts of vulnerabilities to be discovered and patched before the election, otherwise you can never trust the election. I don't care that it hurt their feelings that their system was wide open to attack and practically begging for someone to manipulate the vote, this needs to be fixed before November.
The place to start is to get rid of all of the touch screen voting machines that don't produce a verifiable paper trail. How is it possible to ever trust such a machine?
So, all whistle blowers are criminals?
In the USA at least the personal outcomes for whistle blowers (at any level of government or business) is more likely to be negative than positive. The best they can hope for most of the time is whatever they're whistle blowing about gets improved.
Interesting, if we look at the chart provided by the article we see that temperatures were higher at least 4 times over the last 450,000 years.
I'd be a little careful about that statement. Ice core values don't continue right up to the present but stop at the point where the ice isn't consolidated enough yet to give good values. Depending on the nature of the snowfall in the region and probably other factors that's probably something like 50-100 years before the present. I doubt the chart shows temperature values after the early 20th Century.
Chances are the Eemian interglacial 125,000 years ago was a bit warmer than now due to a slightly different configuration of Milankovitch Cycles compared to today but the other interglacials probably weren't warmer than today. At no time did the level of CO2 rise above 300 ppm during those times compared to over 400 ppm today.
They should set up a national sales tax clearing house on the internet. All the sales taxing jurisdictions send their particulars in to it. Internet businesses send in the details of the transaction and the clearing house returns the applicable tax which the vendor charges the customer and then remits to the clearing house. The clearing house then passes the collected tax on to the relevant jurisdiction withholding a small percentage to fund their operation. Since there would be no charge to the business for the service it wouldn't be a barrier to them.
mi is still arguing like a lawyer. A year or so ago I gave him a link to an article that compared temperature and sea level rise to model projections and showed the models were mostly right on temperature and lagging on sea level rise. Here's a different one that does the same comparison of observations in 2007 to the projections from the IPCC 2001 (AR3) report which started its projections in 1990. But instead of taking in the information mi will reject it because it's not in his cherished format. If mi had any gumption he'd look up the projections from the AR3 report and the observations from 2007 to have his cherished 2 sources and see if what the paper said is true. Instead he's unwilling to meet anyone halfway and wants it all handed to him on a silver platter. Like I said, he argues like a lawyer.
Granted, industrialization has increased it from a low of about 180 ppm to over 400 ppm in an alarmingly short span of time.
No, industrialization has increased CO concentrations from 280 ppm to over 400 ppm. The rise from 180 ppm to 280 ppm was a result of feedbacks from the warming caused by Milankovitch Cycles.
-Most of the world's oxygen comes from the phytoplankton [earthsky.org], and their population dynamics are remarkably challenging to model. However, if they are not dying en masse, then the oxygen production will remain about the same; some may be redistributed.
A report published in 2010 says "Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950". I wonder how much that has to do with the drop in oxygen in the oceans.
There there are those that say that even if emissions are eliminated, that it is already to late. What then?
It's never too late to make the end results less bad than they would otherwise be.
Tree rings can go back close to 10,000 years under the right conditions. Older trees may have died but not decomposed to any great degree if the conditions are right and if they overlap with other more recent data they can be correlated and used.
As far as ice cores I found this article on ice core basics. Obviously as you go further back in time the the time scale gets a bit more muddled but it's not unusable. I found this reply from the author, Bethan Davies to a comment that pretty much supports my assertion:
Bethan Davies on 05/01/2016 at 9:00 am said:
In the upper parts of the ice core (last few hundred years), annual laminations in the ice allow us to derive annual CO2 and isotopic variations. As the ice is compressed deeper in the core, the annual layers are lost so several (not 1000s) of years may be amalgamated.
The trope that our environment is worse than it was a century ago, really needs to die. Sheesh.
By any measurement you may care to make our environment is is worse shape now than it was a century ago, due in large part to the explosion in human population. Yes, there were a few places like Pittsburgh where it was pretty bad but they were mostly pretty local.exceptions.
Things with annual banding like ice cores and tree rings can be dated quite accurately, sometimes less than +/- 10 years but certainly better than +/- 100 years. If there were any wild swing in temperatures for a few decades it would certainly show up in those. They can already pinpoint years when a major volcanic eruption caused tree growth to be stunted or put down a layer of ash on an ice sheet.
The cycle of glacial and interglacial periods in the current ice age appear to be largely driven by Milankovitch Cycles aided by feedbacks. The current rise in temperatures is way too fast for Milankovitch Cycles to be driving it. Just simple physics tells us that increasing the level of a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will lead to warming. It's trivial to show the increase in CO2 is due to human emissions. Ice cores tell us the current CO2 level is way above any experienced in the last 800,000 years. So what do you think is driving the current warming spike?
In the long run there really is no practical alternative to reducing carbon emissions. The other option is to let things happen and see if we can successfully adapt.
Quarantine isn't a guarantee, as seen by the two health care workers who contracted Ebola in Texas when caring for a patient.
I believe the two nurses who caught Ebola from Thomas Eric Duncan did so from caring for him before he had been diagnosed. Once they set up the proper quarantine protocols nobody else caught it.