I was more interested in nailing down what you're talking about.
Other evidence suggests ocean circulation patterns shifted to bring warmer seawater into the North Atlantic.
Yes, this sort of thing often happens when something changes the climate. Again, what's your point? If you're attempting to show CO2 has no significant role in our changing climate, I don't see how.
I'm not sure where you're trying to go with all this - I hadn't mentioned the greenhouse effect, nor did the "prior poster".
Yes, climate scientists are aware that the great majority of trapped warmth is from water, and the effect of CO2 is relatively small. But even tiny effects add up over time when the equilibrium is altered, and we're observing exactly that. The calculated decrease in radiative transfer from the IR blocked by all the extra CO2 agrees very well with these observations - and no other potential cause comes close.
The evidence shows that the localised RWP, MWP, and LIA events were triggered by factors other than CO2 - like fluctuations in solar irradiance and vulcanism.
Proponents always trot out the mortality rate from nuclear, rather than any more-inclusive safety measure, because the elapsed decades between potential irradiation and death from cancer makes it nigh-impossible to tie the two together. We really have virtually no idea how much nuclear power has actually affected health, except in a very few specific and much more immediate cases.
I suggest an alternative safety measure; cost. You could try comparing the cleanup and recovery cost of accidents at various types of energy plants, or perhaps compare insurance rates for a proxy of estimated costs & risks.
It's a fraction of the Earth's energy budget, not a ratio of the absolute temperature (47 TW of internal heat vs 173,000 TW of solar heat). See the references here for details.
I don't think you get many points for being correct about something not relevant to the subject. Yes, science reporting sucks at a lot of popular sites, we know. And given the rest of your comments, it sounds like you still haven't read the paper, which is somewhat less obvious than you appear to think.
our experimental setup consists of a pair of WiFi nodes for transmission and reception of wireless signals. One of the WiFi nodes is configured as a Tx, which constantly transmits wireless signals. The other WiFi node, which acts as a Rx, measures the signals that are emitted from the Tx node and records the corresponding signal strength
It would've taken much longer to write out your rant above than to spend two minutes locating the paper and bypass all the misinterpretation.
I don't doubt the methodology could be refined further. I'm assuming your assertions are based on more comprehensive studies, rather than just personal assumptions - care to cite one?
As an example, it's true that some states produce emissions from power generation, exporting energy to states which consume it, and shifting the CO2 load. But California has the fourth-lowest energy consumption per capita, so they're efficient with their consumption. Yet they rank among the highest GDP per capita, so their production is also efficient. Still sounds relatively green to me.
I agree we're pretty unlikely to hit a runaway tipping-point there - the negative feedbacks currently outweigh it. But it'll still increasingly magnify the effects of our other emissions.
Per capita, it's the third-lowest state - the average Texan causes three times the emissions, to say nothing of Wyoming. If CA were a country they'd rank about on par with Germany - far below the US national average, far below Canada or Russia or Australia or Japan or S.Korea. So yeah, they're a lot greener than most of their peers.
Methane does indeed break down with UV light after a few years - into CO2. So it has long-term as well as powerful short-term effects.
Water isn't a concern as a greenhouse gas because it's already in the atmosphere, and won't build up any further - it saturates and rains out.
Unless the air gets warmer, which will allow it to hold more moisture. That would trigger another positive feedback loop. We might want to watch out for that.
Yes, those pollutants are dangerous to your health, and greenhouse gases won't kill us - directly. But in the quantities we've released over decades, their impact is a lot more dramatic and widespread. Even water is dangerous if you release too much too quickly, as a sibling troll post ironically alludes.
and there are dollars to be had - but *vastly* more from causing and denying AGW than merely observing and reporting its effects. If you believe otherwise, let me know when "big green" gets within a couple orders of magnitude of the $2.3 trillion collected annually from oil and coal by 5 of the 10 richest companies in the world.
I do wonder at denialist intelligence - mostly how they keep saying "follow the money" with so little thought about where it actually leads.
I honestly don't get this attitude. Why do you believe consensus is "dogma"? Is it because you disagree with it?
While I've spent many hours trying to educate myself on climate processes, to where I feel I have a reasonable understanding of the basics, I'm still firmly a layman on the subject, and as such I'm simply not qualified to second-guess actual practicing climatologists. Unlike myself, they've seen the raw data for themselves, and they have the training and experience to interpret it.
And if (when) scientists disagree on interpretation, the people that are easily the most qualified to judge who's most correct are the other scientists in that field. This is the value of consensus. Individuals can have incorrect interpretations or outright bias, but biases tend to average out among a group, and interpretations are refined by debate. If each member judges for themselves not only the evidence but the interpretations of their peers, and if these judgements converge, then we have a consensus - the result most likely to be correct from available evidence.
Of course it's still possible for scientists to be wrong - but if a dissenter can't convince the majority of scientists in the field, then that's virtually always because their arguments are simply outweighed by stronger evidence against them. Consensus can and has been overturned by new evidence, if it's strong enough, but in over 40 years of modern climate science with ever-better instruments, techniques and data, the consensus on AGW has only gotten stronger.
You may call this "dogma", but I simply trust the collective scientific opinions of climatologists - more than I trust my own judgement, because their judgement is obviously more informed. To do otherwise would be textbook Dunning-Kruger effect. We have no problem trusting scientific consensus about everything else from quantum mechanics to material science to astrophysics - why should climate science be the sole exception? Simply because we don't like the implications of what they're saying?
Your link is about medical science, not climate science. Anthropogenic climate change has been confirmed and re-confirmed by dozens of independent lines of evidence, by thousands of peer-reviewed papers from thousands of climatologists from all over the world, for decades.
how can you not assume a lot of scientists are faking things
Uh huh. The vast majority of climatologists are all faking their results in a massive global conspiracy, risking their integrity, reputations, jobs, and careers, just so they can keep collecting a middling wage for studying a subject that they regularly get harassed about. And every scientific institution around the planet is backing them in this. How could I not assume that?
Or perhaps you're just too blinded by your conspiracy belief bubble to even consider that you could simply be flat-out wrong, and the thousands of trained experts who have studied the raw data for decades might actually know what the hell they're talking about.
That's a good point; I agree that many will feel they can drive better than the car can. Yet I'd bet most people consider themselves better than their last taxi driver too, and that doesn't stop them taking taxis. You watch, they'll still be willing to let the car drive for them on an increasing number of occasions - commuting in traffic, after a couple of drinks, when they'd rather play that new mobile game etc - and trust will build.
Opinion pieces that gloss right over construction and decommissioning costs aren't reliable sources either.
LCOE is not the whole story, I agree - dispatchable power has extra value, and you need a certain amount of that. While you can make renewables more dispatchable with storage, that adds extra costs, so the big picture is going to depend on local grid needs. And I'm not against nuclear; there are cases where nuclear makes far more sense than renewables. But you have to look at the costs of both objectively, and for a number of cases, unsubsidised renewables with added dispatchable storage are still cheaper than nuclear by LCOE.
No single energy source works best for all possible cases, so why not be objective about all the costs (including LCOE, health, environment, grid stability, capital risks etc), and just use what works in a given situation for the best overall price?
Yeah, they talk about regional variations further down; keep reading. But this is just illustrative anyway, and obviously the region of Egypt will likely vary rather more from those figures. Solar, for example, is likely to be somewhat cheaper per MW than listed, given their latitude and climate. I couldn't find any equivalent reports for Egypt itself, sadly.
I can see you prefer to believe that "politics" is the main reason why nuclear isn't as cheap as wind, but the evidence cited so far does not bear out that view. Feel free to provide anything that substantiates your point of view.
As does the equipment to collect any other form of energy, plus maintenance and security. AND you have to pay the fuel extraction costs - along with capital, maintenance, etc for all the mining and refining infrastructure - and the same for all the transportation too (and its fuel costs).
all the hard currency you have to send to China to buy all that equipment
As opposed to their home-grown coal & gas plants? Most solutions require importing equipment. You're still pointing out the obvious.
the environmental effects of setting up solar collection facilities
.. are a heck of a lot less than the environmental effects of mining fossil fuels, transporting it, setting up a power plant, then burning millions of tonnes of it. And what makes you think you need water to clean solar panels? Some cheap labour and a broom is enough, or you can go more high tech.
Natural Gas is the cheapskate's fuel of choice these days.
You seemed to have missed the part of TFA where the whole reason for investing in solar was because their LNG imports were too expensive. And you're completely wrong about the relative LCOE of gas vs wind (comparable) and solar (US is within 20% on average, Egypt would be cheaper) - unsubsidised of course, except for the public still paying the bill for the health & environmental costs of the gas plant's emissions. If you factor those in then gas doesn't even get close to competitive.
Autonomous vehicles have rounded the corner and already arrived. Right now they're doing, you know, autonomous driving - the kind that doesn't require a human driver.
These are merely Class 4 AVs, only capable of driving in a limited area under specific conditions, so still a long way from 100%. But those "specific conditions" include full city driving among pedestrians, buses, trucks, pets, distracted drivers, roadworks.. clearly an already-useful percentage of human capability.
I'm sure a lot of people would be just fine if merely 80% of their driving needs were automatable, or their truck drove itself 80% of the way while they napped.
Very few humans can do 100% of all driving tasks too (our accident rate is proof of that). Self-driving cars may never be perfect, but they're already good enough today for Waymo's taxis to be carrying unaccompanied passengers in Phoenix as we speak.
Slashdot Mirror
What did you think he was talking about ?
I was more interested in nailing down what you're talking about.
Other evidence suggests ocean circulation patterns shifted to bring warmer seawater into the North Atlantic.
Yes, this sort of thing often happens when something changes the climate. Again, what's your point? If you're attempting to show CO2 has no significant role in our changing climate, I don't see how.
I'm not sure where you're trying to go with all this - I hadn't mentioned the greenhouse effect, nor did the "prior poster".
Yes, climate scientists are aware that the great majority of trapped warmth is from water, and the effect of CO2 is relatively small. But even tiny effects add up over time when the equilibrium is altered, and we're observing exactly that. The calculated decrease in radiative transfer from the IR blocked by all the extra CO2 agrees very well with these observations - and no other potential cause comes close.
The evidence shows that the localised RWP, MWP, and LIA events were triggered by factors other than CO2 - like fluctuations in solar irradiance and vulcanism.
Proponents always trot out the mortality rate from nuclear, rather than any more-inclusive safety measure, because the elapsed decades between potential irradiation and death from cancer makes it nigh-impossible to tie the two together. We really have virtually no idea how much nuclear power has actually affected health, except in a very few specific and much more immediate cases.
I suggest an alternative safety measure; cost. You could try comparing the cleanup and recovery cost of accidents at various types of energy plants, or perhaps compare insurance rates for a proxy of estimated costs & risks.
It's a fraction of the Earth's energy budget, not a ratio of the absolute temperature (47 TW of internal heat vs 173,000 TW of solar heat). See the references here for details.
I don't think you get many points for being correct about something not relevant to the subject. Yes, science reporting sucks at a lot of popular sites, we know. And given the rest of your comments, it sounds like you still haven't read the paper, which is somewhat less obvious than you appear to think.
From TFA, quoted from the original release:
The transmitter sends a wireless signal whose received signal strength (RSSI) is measured by the receiver.
The original release says:
In the team’s experiments, one WiFi transmitter and one WiFi receiver are behind walls, outside a room in which a number of people are present.
In fact, why not just read the paper itself?
our experimental setup consists of a
pair of WiFi nodes for transmission and reception of wireless
signals. One of the WiFi nodes is configured as a Tx, which
constantly transmits wireless signals. The other WiFi node,
which acts as a Rx, measures the signals that are emitted from
the Tx node and records the corresponding signal strength
It would've taken much longer to write out your rant above than to spend two minutes locating the paper and bypass all the misinterpretation.
I don't doubt the methodology could be refined further. I'm assuming your assertions are based on more comprehensive studies, rather than just personal assumptions - care to cite one?
As an example, it's true that some states produce emissions from power generation, exporting energy to states which consume it, and shifting the CO2 load. But California has the fourth-lowest energy consumption per capita, so they're efficient with their consumption. Yet they rank among the highest GDP per capita, so their production is also efficient. Still sounds relatively green to me.
I agree we're pretty unlikely to hit a runaway tipping-point there - the negative feedbacks currently outweigh it. But it'll still increasingly magnify the effects of our other emissions.
Per capita, it's the third-lowest state - the average Texan causes three times the emissions, to say nothing of Wyoming. If CA were a country they'd rank about on par with Germany - far below the US national average, far below Canada or Russia or Australia or Japan or S.Korea. So yeah, they're a lot greener than most of their peers.
What crisis? Atmospheric water levels aren't changing.
Methane does indeed break down with UV light after a few years - into CO2. So it has long-term as well as powerful short-term effects.
Water isn't a concern as a greenhouse gas because it's already in the atmosphere, and won't build up any further - it saturates and rains out.
Unless the air gets warmer, which will allow it to hold more moisture. That would trigger another positive feedback loop. We might want to watch out for that.
I'm sure broke people everywhere will be delighted to learn that their wallets are merely exceptionally depleted.
Yes, those pollutants are dangerous to your health, and greenhouse gases won't kill us - directly. But in the quantities we've released over decades, their impact is a lot more dramatic and widespread. Even water is dangerous if you release too much too quickly, as a sibling troll post ironically alludes.
and there are dollars to be had - but *vastly* more from causing and denying AGW than merely observing and reporting its effects. If you believe otherwise, let me know when "big green" gets within a couple orders of magnitude of the $2.3 trillion collected annually from oil and coal by 5 of the 10 richest companies in the world.
I do wonder at denialist intelligence - mostly how they keep saying "follow the money" with so little thought about where it actually leads.
I honestly don't get this attitude. Why do you believe consensus is "dogma"? Is it because you disagree with it?
While I've spent many hours trying to educate myself on climate processes, to where I feel I have a reasonable understanding of the basics, I'm still firmly a layman on the subject, and as such I'm simply not qualified to second-guess actual practicing climatologists. Unlike myself, they've seen the raw data for themselves, and they have the training and experience to interpret it.
And if (when) scientists disagree on interpretation, the people that are easily the most qualified to judge who's most correct are the other scientists in that field. This is the value of consensus. Individuals can have incorrect interpretations or outright bias, but biases tend to average out among a group, and interpretations are refined by debate. If each member judges for themselves not only the evidence but the interpretations of their peers, and if these judgements converge, then we have a consensus - the result most likely to be correct from available evidence.
Of course it's still possible for scientists to be wrong - but if a dissenter can't convince the majority of scientists in the field, then that's virtually always because their arguments are simply outweighed by stronger evidence against them. Consensus can and has been overturned by new evidence, if it's strong enough, but in over 40 years of modern climate science with ever-better instruments, techniques and data, the consensus on AGW has only gotten stronger.
You may call this "dogma", but I simply trust the collective scientific opinions of climatologists - more than I trust my own judgement, because their judgement is obviously more informed. To do otherwise would be textbook Dunning-Kruger effect. We have no problem trusting scientific consensus about everything else from quantum mechanics to material science to astrophysics - why should climate science be the sole exception? Simply because we don't like the implications of what they're saying?
Of course interpretation can be incorrect. That's a big reason we have peer review, and precisely why consensus is important.
Your link is about medical science, not climate science. Anthropogenic climate change has been confirmed and re-confirmed by dozens of independent lines of evidence, by thousands of peer-reviewed papers from thousands of climatologists from all over the world, for decades.
how can you not assume a lot of scientists are faking things
Uh huh. The vast majority of climatologists are all faking their results in a massive global conspiracy, risking their integrity, reputations, jobs, and careers, just so they can keep collecting a middling wage for studying a subject that they regularly get harassed about. And every scientific institution around the planet is backing them in this. How could I not assume that?
Or perhaps you're just too blinded by your conspiracy belief bubble to even consider that you could simply be flat-out wrong, and the thousands of trained experts who have studied the raw data for decades might actually know what the hell they're talking about.
Why don't we burn all the straw men that keep getting thrown at us? They're carbon-neutral.
That's a good point; I agree that many will feel they can drive better than the car can. Yet I'd bet most people consider themselves better than their last taxi driver too, and that doesn't stop them taking taxis. You watch, they'll still be willing to let the car drive for them on an increasing number of occasions - commuting in traffic, after a couple of drinks, when they'd rather play that new mobile game etc - and trust will build.
Opinion pieces that gloss right over construction and decommissioning costs aren't reliable sources either.
LCOE is not the whole story, I agree - dispatchable power has extra value, and you need a certain amount of that. While you can make renewables more dispatchable with storage, that adds extra costs, so the big picture is going to depend on local grid needs. And I'm not against nuclear; there are cases where nuclear makes far more sense than renewables. But you have to look at the costs of both objectively, and for a number of cases, unsubsidised renewables with added dispatchable storage are still cheaper than nuclear by LCOE.
No single energy source works best for all possible cases, so why not be objective about all the costs (including LCOE, health, environment, grid stability, capital risks etc), and just use what works in a given situation for the best overall price?
Yeah, they talk about regional variations further down; keep reading. But this is just illustrative anyway, and obviously the region of Egypt will likely vary rather more from those figures. Solar, for example, is likely to be somewhat cheaper per MW than listed, given their latitude and climate. I couldn't find any equivalent reports for Egypt itself, sadly.
I can see you prefer to believe that "politics" is the main reason why nuclear isn't as cheap as wind, but the evidence cited so far does not bear out that view. Feel free to provide anything that substantiates your point of view.
Then you'd be wrong. Compare the unsubsidised LCOE columns, and look how nuclear is still double the cost of wind.
the equipment to collect solar energy cost money
As does the equipment to collect any other form of energy, plus maintenance and security. AND you have to pay the fuel extraction costs - along with capital, maintenance, etc for all the mining and refining infrastructure - and the same for all the transportation too (and its fuel costs).
all the hard currency you have to send to China to buy all that equipment
As opposed to their home-grown coal & gas plants? Most solutions require importing equipment. You're still pointing out the obvious.
the environmental effects of setting up solar collection facilities
.. are a heck of a lot less than the environmental effects of mining fossil fuels, transporting it, setting up a power plant, then burning millions of tonnes of it. And what makes you think you need water to clean solar panels? Some cheap labour and a broom is enough, or you can go more high tech.
Natural Gas is the cheapskate's fuel of choice these days.
You seemed to have missed the part of TFA where the whole reason for investing in solar was because their LNG imports were too expensive. And you're completely wrong about the relative LCOE of gas vs wind (comparable) and solar (US is within 20% on average, Egypt would be cheaper) - unsubsidised of course, except for the public still paying the bill for the health & environmental costs of the gas plant's emissions. If you factor those in then gas doesn't even get close to competitive.
Autonomous vehicles have rounded the corner and already arrived. Right now they're doing, you know, autonomous driving - the kind that doesn't require a human driver.
These are merely Class 4 AVs, only capable of driving in a limited area under specific conditions, so still a long way from 100%. But those "specific conditions" include full city driving among pedestrians, buses, trucks, pets, distracted drivers, roadworks.. clearly an already-useful percentage of human capability.
I'm sure a lot of people would be just fine if merely 80% of their driving needs were automatable, or their truck drove itself 80% of the way while they napped.
Very few humans can do 100% of all driving tasks too (our accident rate is proof of that). Self-driving cars may never be perfect, but they're already good enough today for Waymo's taxis to be carrying unaccompanied passengers in Phoenix as we speak.