I don't think it is a stupid concern. Maybe changes in wind will cause a fertile region to become less so. The referenced paper says, "high levels of wind development... could result in significant changes in atmospheric circulation even in regions remote from... turbines". This is because wind turbines represent an increase in surface friction. In order to keep global dissipation of kinetic energy constant (or at least nearly so) dissipation will have to go down elsewhere which will change surface conditions. I still wonder what the net effect will be since all of the energy is going back to the atmosphere as heat, though it will be released in a different pattern than it would otherwise.
You'd have to change the rotation rate of the earth (this is happening already due to tidal dissipation of angular momentum, the moon is also moving farther away). Coriolis has nothing to do with the wind. Wind is affected by coriolis not the other way around. Ultimately extract wind power will reduce wind speed in the output of the turbines (fans). This will result in changes in wind, perhaps far away from the point of extraction. At this time studies suggest that the changes in wind due to energy extraction on a large scale would have measurable effects. This could be quite negative if it changes temperatures or rainfall patterns.
It looks like Sweden is indeed doing better than many countries in the electric power generation game. Renewables in this case are primarily hydro-electric? -
"Primary Energy Supply Swedish primary energy supply depends mainly on nuclear energy, oil and renewable sources. The share of nuclear energy (37%), as well as the share of renewable sources (26%), is much higher than the corresponding EU-27 average percentage (14% and 6% respectively). The consumption of solid fuels (6% share) and gas (2% share) is significantly lower than the EU-27 average (18% and 24% respectively)" -- ec.europa.eu/energy/energy_policy/doc/factsheets/mix/mix_se_en.pdf
It's not so simple. Clouds (contrails included) can cool or warm. It depends on their composition, density, altitude and location. Contrails are no exception. Also, a lesser know phenomena, the distrail, can open a hole, or stripe in a cloud letting more radiation in and out. Finally, ship tracks, contrails above ships, are widely observed. These "contrails" are lower in the atmosphere. Yes, clouds are very important to climate (positive and negative feedbacks). No, all of the details have not been worked out.
For goodness sake. Look at the first sentence of the press release.
"Oceanographers have long known that the 20-year-old paradigm for describing the global ocean circulation -- called the Great Ocean Conveyor -- was an oversimplification. It's a useful depiction, but it's like describing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as a catchy tune."
Silly but we get the idea. Also, "this finding may impact the work of global warming forecasters."
At least WHOI isn't responsible for the perception that this study actually changes anything important.
Ocean models model the physics of the ocean. They certainly don't attempt to model a cartoon (shown in the linked Deep Sea News article) presented years ago as a way to illustrate a principle. The cartoon had utility but no physical oceanographer actually thinks it really reflects reality any more. Many versions of the cartoon have been made including some with many more complex flows and recirculations. All of them are attempts to simplify something spanning spatial scales from millimetres to thousands of kilometres and time scales from seconds to thousands of years. None of these gross simplifications was ever accepted as "the real, actual, true circulation".
I don't think that this study has any significant implications for ocean and climate models.
One of the highlights of the paper for my wife is the crossword which she tears out and carries around. How does she do that on an epaper device? I guess the display will be able to connect to our printer at home. Seems silly but there are a lot of people who would be frustrated by this simple extra step.
Fortran was written for and by scientists and mathematicians. In physics, matrix notations use i,j,k to indicate the dimensions of a matrix that are related to the x,y,z spatial coordinates. You often need another set of three counters for a different set of matrices that you are carrying (think about transformations between different representations of space) so l,m,n are convenient. There are more rules to Fortran's implicit typing than that though. All of this makes perfect sense if you have training in physics. For those whose training overlapped in physics and computer science the "implicit none" expression is a common sight at the top of every Fortran routine.
The code I worry about at work (a climate model written in Fortran) has been under development for about 18 years now. In that time computer speed has grown incredibly but our code still integrates roughly the same number of model years per day of CPU time. The reason is that we have added and continue to add new features all of the time. In our case the features are important new components that allow us to do new science based on the model we are using at the moment. So now we can study more complex feedbacks and relationships in the same time that we could study simpler processes in the past.
To show how much the CPUs have improved I run a piece of code (unchanged since the early 1990s) on every machine we use. We started on an IBM 390 where it ran in 532 seconds. It now runs on a new quad-core Intel XEON in about 17 seconds. That's a factor of about 31 times in almost 20 years. That gives us a doubling time scale (six generations from 1 to 32 times the computational power) of about 3 years.
Presumably, in the world of commercial software the same thing is happening. People are actually doing much more in the same time as before. What the more is I can't say but it must be more expensive to run the pretty new user interfaces at high resolution than it was to run the previous generation of simpler graphic or text only displays.
It's kind of a crappy book really. Poorly written, not particularly novel, and larded with cliche. I'm sure that the screenplay will be an improvement on the book.
The problem is your definition of the system. You are standing inside the system, on the surface of the Earth. The system is the Earth on the whole. You need to be standing outside the atmosphere looking down on the Earth as a whole. When you do that you see that the system is in balance with the external forcing. Now back to the surface you need to ask why we see warming there? The reason is that the internal structure of the system is very complex and riddled with sub-systems connected by feedback loops. The external forcing is not constant, it changes on various (long) timescales. At any particular point on the surface we have forcing that varies from seconds to days to months to a year to thousands of years(rotation of Earth, seasonal variations due to the orbital inclination and distance to the sun, changes in orbital parameters). All of this shortwave (the part that isn't reflected due to albedo affects at the surface and in the atmosphere) forcing is integrated by the components of the system, passed through the feedback loops and eventually passed out of the top of the atmosphere as longwave radiation. Meanwhile, internally, the subcomponents adjust to each other causing the different phenomena we observe, such as increased temperatures at high latitudes, changes in large scale patterns of rainfall, daily weather etc etc. Some of these subcomponents respond quickly to the external and internal forcing some respond slowly. For example skin temperature is strongly affected by what the surface is made from, sand responds quickly, soil and rock more slowly, water slowest of all. In fact the ocean is very important at long timescales since it takes thousands of years, on the whole, to respond to the external forcing.
_Additional_ carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere affect the system by changing the internal, column radiation balance in the atmosphere. From the point of view of the surface the greenhouse gases provide an additional source of downward energy flux, resulting, in the broadest terms, in increased surface temperatures.
The natural greenhouse is what causes our toasty (compared, for example, to the moon) surface temperatures in the first place. The additional gases are changing that pre-existing balance.
Some basic thermodynamic concepts, coupled with observations of what the actual external forcing is go a long way to explaining most of the basic observations of gross climate effects on the surface and in the atmosphere. The details get more and more complex as you look at finer resolution in time and space. No we don't no everything, but this basic stuff has been clear for a long time (Fourier described a lot of this in 1824!). Really it's high school math and any introductory climate course would clear up most of the nonsense that appears in other comments here.
Really. This is a science FICTION series. Do you think that the ending was the only thing on the show to be implausible? The series was fun to watch but it's just entertainment (even though they included much commentary and critique of current problems in human society). The people who made the show can do whatever they want.
As snow melts any crud that is on the surface or embedded in the pile collects and makes the surface darker as the pile gets smaller. The clean snow piles that you observed melting more quickly weren't as large or were less dense than the dirty snow piles. I suspect that you probably didn't perform careful observations (as no reasonable, casual observer would) and that if you did you'd soon see that it all makes sense. Also I think you'd find it very difficult to find a clean snow pile in an urban environment. Maybe behind an arena? Even then airborne matter would accumulate on the surface. This happens just about anywhere that snow sits for a long time.
There's probably no point but this simply must be replied to.
Firstly, weather and climate are different and distinct problems. Weather is the current state of the atmosphere. It is a process sensitively dependent on initial conditions, i.e. chaotic (at least to some degree). It is now and will always remain imposible to predict with accuracy more than, say, two weeks in advance. It won't matter how much more precisely you can collect your initial conditions or how perfectly you can design your model the state of the weather in your forecast will diverge from the observed state. This is not new. This is not a surprise. You just don't have a clue.
Secondly, climate is the statistical summary of the weather over different spatial and temporal scales. It is not chaotic. In fact it seems that, though complex and though driven by many interconnected positive and negative feedbacks, it is not something that we can't work out. Changes in the climate, the averages, the extremes and the standard deviations of different observables are obtainable with a (relatively) greater degree of confidence for long times into the future. This is an endeavour where improvements to understanding of the physics of the interconnected systems does lead to incremental improvements in the "forecast" of the climate.
Realise also that studying the climate will lead to understand of how the statistical distributions of weather events are most likely to change. The most advanced climate models will never predict exactly how great (or small) the additional rainfall will be. It will never predict the precise hottest (or coldest) new temperature extreme. What it will tell you is how likely such events will become in a changed climate compared to today.
Individual floods, heat waves, droughts, snow storms, cold snaps or what have you are all weather events that occur following statistical distributions in time and space. They are weather events and unattributable to anything but the state of the atmosphere in the (relatively brief) time before they are observed.
Does that make it more clear?
Also, and I've basically said it above, global warming or climate change does not mean we won't have cold winters any more! Even though people perceived 2008 as being cold in many northern latitude countries it is still one of the top ten warmest years ever observed.
As far as I can tell the ratio of useless to useful "tweets" on twitter has been much higher than two out of every three for a long time already. This is a novelty site with no long term value.
Larry Gonick has been doing this in english for a long time. His books are good. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they have been translated into japanese.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it is a stupid concern. Maybe changes in wind will cause a fertile region to become less so. The referenced paper says, "high levels of wind development ... could result in significant changes in atmospheric circulation even in regions remote from ... turbines". This is because wind turbines represent an increase in surface friction. In order to keep global dissipation of kinetic energy constant (or at least nearly so) dissipation will have to go down elsewhere which will change surface conditions. I still wonder what the net effect will be since all of the energy is going back to the atmosphere as heat, though it will be released in a different pattern than it would otherwise.
You'd have to change the rotation rate of the earth (this is happening already due to tidal dissipation of angular momentum, the moon is also moving farther away). Coriolis has nothing to do with the wind. Wind is affected by coriolis not the other way around. Ultimately extract wind power will reduce wind speed in the output of the turbines (fans). This will result in changes in wind, perhaps far away from the point of extraction. At this time studies suggest that the changes in wind due to energy extraction on a large scale would have measurable effects. This could be quite negative if it changes temperatures or rainfall patterns.
"shamelessly and flagrantly lie"
But it's a business lie, not a life lie.
It looks like Sweden is indeed doing better than many countries in the electric power generation game. Renewables in this case are primarily hydro-electric?
-
"Primary Energy Supply
Swedish primary energy supply depends mainly on nuclear energy, oil and renewable sources. The share of nuclear
energy (37%), as well as the share of renewable sources (26%), is much higher than the corresponding EU-27 average
percentage (14% and 6% respectively). The consumption of solid fuels (6% share) and gas (2% share) is significantly
lower than the EU-27 average (18% and 24% respectively)" -- ec.europa.eu/energy/energy_policy/doc/factsheets/mix/mix_se_en.pdf
It's not so simple. Clouds (contrails included) can cool or warm. It depends on their composition, density, altitude and location. Contrails are no exception. Also, a lesser know phenomena, the distrail, can open a hole, or stripe in a cloud letting more radiation in and out. Finally, ship tracks, contrails above ships, are widely observed. These "contrails" are lower in the atmosphere. Yes, clouds are very important to climate (positive and negative feedbacks). No, all of the details have not been worked out.
"while in science it doesn't even have to compile. It only has to work in some ideal world with unlimited resources and non-existent foreign factors."
-
-
This is so terribly wrong.
Why do we read slashdot? It's becoming almost as bad as Digg. Where can people on the internet actually discuss things? Candy mountain?
Actually I'm having second thoughts about my use of the word "becoming" above.
For goodness sake. Look at the first sentence of the press release.
"Oceanographers have long known that the 20-year-old paradigm for describing the global ocean circulation -- called the Great Ocean Conveyor -- was an oversimplification. It's a useful depiction, but it's like describing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as a catchy tune."
Silly but we get the idea. Also, "this finding may impact the work of global warming forecasters."
At least WHOI isn't responsible for the perception that this study actually changes anything important.
Ocean models model the physics of the ocean. They certainly don't attempt to model a cartoon (shown in the linked Deep Sea News article) presented years ago as a way to illustrate a principle. The cartoon had utility but no physical oceanographer actually thinks it really reflects reality any more. Many versions of the cartoon have been made including some with many more complex flows and recirculations. All of them are attempts to simplify something spanning spatial scales from millimetres to thousands of kilometres and time scales from seconds to thousands of years. None of these gross simplifications was ever accepted as "the real, actual, true circulation".
I don't think that this study has any significant implications for ocean and climate models.
One of the highlights of the paper for my wife is the crossword which she tears out and carries around. How does she do that on an epaper device? I guess the display will be able to connect to our printer at home. Seems silly but there are a lot of people who would be frustrated by this simple extra step.
Fortran was written for and by scientists and mathematicians. In physics, matrix notations use i,j,k to indicate the dimensions of a matrix that are related to the x,y,z spatial coordinates. You often need another set of three counters for a different set of matrices that you are carrying (think about transformations between different representations of space) so l,m,n are convenient. There are more rules to Fortran's implicit typing than that though. All of this makes perfect sense if you have training in physics. For those whose training overlapped in physics and computer science the "implicit none" expression is a common sight at the top of every Fortran routine.
The code I worry about at work (a climate model written in Fortran) has been under development for about 18 years now. In that time computer speed has grown incredibly but our code still integrates roughly the same number of model years per day of CPU time. The reason is that we have added and continue to add new features all of the time. In our case the features are important new components that allow us to do new science based on the model we are using at the moment. So now we can study more complex feedbacks and relationships in the same time that we could study simpler processes in the past.
To show how much the CPUs have improved I run a piece of code (unchanged since the early 1990s) on every machine we use. We started on an IBM 390 where it ran in 532 seconds. It now runs on a new quad-core Intel XEON in about 17 seconds. That's a factor of about 31 times in almost 20 years. That gives us a doubling time scale (six generations from 1 to 32 times the computational power) of about 3 years.
Presumably, in the world of commercial software the same thing is happening. People are actually doing much more in the same time as before. What the more is I can't say but it must be more expensive to run the pretty new user interfaces at high resolution than it was to run the previous generation of simpler graphic or text only displays.
It's kind of a crappy book really. Poorly written, not particularly novel, and larded with cliche. I'm sure that the screenplay will be an improvement on the book.
Also, it's going to be in 3D!
Well in proper slashdot fashion I only read the intro to your comment. I'll go back to lurking again now.
The problem is your definition of the system. You are standing inside the system, on the surface of the Earth. The system is the Earth on the whole. You need to be standing outside the atmosphere looking down on the Earth as a whole. When you do that you see that the system is in balance with the external forcing. Now back to the surface you need to ask why we see warming there? The reason is that the internal structure of the system is very complex and riddled with sub-systems connected by feedback loops. The external forcing is not constant, it changes on various (long) timescales. At any particular point on the surface we have forcing that varies from seconds to days to months to a year to thousands of years(rotation of Earth, seasonal variations due to the orbital inclination and distance to the sun, changes in orbital parameters). All of this shortwave (the part that isn't reflected due to albedo affects at the surface and in the atmosphere) forcing is integrated by the components of the system, passed through the feedback loops and eventually passed out of the top of the atmosphere as longwave radiation. Meanwhile, internally, the subcomponents adjust to each other causing the different phenomena we observe, such as increased temperatures at high latitudes, changes in large scale patterns of rainfall, daily weather etc etc. Some of these subcomponents respond quickly to the external and internal forcing some respond slowly. For example skin temperature is strongly affected by what the surface is made from, sand responds quickly, soil and rock more slowly, water slowest of all. In fact the ocean is very important at long timescales since it takes thousands of years, on the whole, to respond to the external forcing.
_Additional_ carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere affect the system by changing the internal, column radiation balance in the atmosphere. From the point of view of the surface the greenhouse gases provide an additional source of downward energy flux, resulting, in the broadest terms, in increased surface temperatures.
The natural greenhouse is what causes our toasty (compared, for example, to the moon) surface temperatures in the first place. The additional gases are changing that pre-existing balance.
Some basic thermodynamic concepts, coupled with observations of what the actual external forcing is go a long way to explaining most of the basic observations of gross climate effects on the surface and in the atmosphere. The details get more and more complex as you look at finer resolution in time and space. No we don't no everything, but this basic stuff has been clear for a long time (Fourier described a lot of this in 1824!). Really it's high school math and any introductory climate course would clear up most of the nonsense that appears in other comments here.
Bezels.
Really. This is a science FICTION series. Do you think that the ending was the only thing on the show to be implausible? The series was fun to watch but it's just entertainment (even though they included much commentary and critique of current problems in human society). The people who made the show can do whatever they want.
As snow melts any crud that is on the surface or embedded in the pile collects and makes the surface darker as the pile gets smaller. The clean snow piles that you observed melting more quickly weren't as large or were less dense than the dirty snow piles. I suspect that you probably didn't perform careful observations (as no reasonable, casual observer would) and that if you did you'd soon see that it all makes sense. Also I think you'd find it very difficult to find a clean snow pile in an urban environment. Maybe behind an arena? Even then airborne matter would accumulate on the surface. This happens just about anywhere that snow sits for a long time.
Don't visit Digg. It's just choc-a-bloc with pointless posts anyway. Just like here ...
I think Tantor was an elephant. Trantor is the fictional city from the mediocre Foundation books. Actually they are worse than mediocre.
There's probably no point but this simply must be replied to.
Firstly, weather and climate are different and distinct problems. Weather is the current state of the atmosphere. It is a process sensitively dependent on initial conditions, i.e. chaotic (at least to some degree). It is now and will always remain imposible to predict with accuracy more than, say, two weeks in advance. It won't matter how much more precisely you can collect your initial conditions or how perfectly you can design your model the state of the weather in your forecast will diverge from the observed state. This is not new. This is not a surprise. You just don't have a clue.
Secondly, climate is the statistical summary of the weather over different spatial and temporal scales. It is not chaotic. In fact it seems that, though complex and though driven by many interconnected positive and negative feedbacks, it is not something that we can't work out. Changes in the climate, the averages, the extremes and the standard deviations of different observables are obtainable with a (relatively) greater degree of confidence for long times into the future. This is an endeavour where improvements to understanding of the physics of the interconnected systems does lead to incremental improvements in the "forecast" of the climate.
Realise also that studying the climate will lead to understand of how the statistical distributions of weather events are most likely to change. The most advanced climate models will never predict exactly how great (or small) the additional rainfall will be. It will never predict the precise hottest (or coldest) new temperature extreme. What it will tell you is how likely such events will become in a changed climate compared to today.
Individual floods, heat waves, droughts, snow storms, cold snaps or what have you are all weather events that occur following statistical distributions in time and space. They are weather events and unattributable to anything but the state of the atmosphere in the (relatively brief) time before they are observed.
Does that make it more clear?
Also, and I've basically said it above, global warming or climate change does not mean we won't have cold winters any more! Even though people perceived 2008 as being cold in many northern latitude countries it is still one of the top ten warmest years ever observed.
As far as I can tell the ratio of useless to useful "tweets" on twitter has been much higher than two out of every three for a long time already. This is a novelty site with no long term value.
I've said it before. Read The King, the Mice and the Cheese. Global scale engineering solutions are not going to help.
It won't matter what we do we're going to burn all of the carbon that we can.
Larry Gonick has been doing this in english for a long time. His books are good. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they have been translated into japanese.
Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guide to Statistics.
Brilliant!