What part of your post contradicted anything I wrote?
The Tesla Roadster's battery pack weighs about 1000 lbs. The vehicle is about 700lbs heavier than the Elise. Hence, if the battery energy density increased to 3.4x of what it is now, the vehicle would be *lighter* than the Elise.
Battery energy densities have increased by about 8% per year for the past 20 years. Let's ignore that drivetrains are getting lighter, too. The current 8% rate, if anything, is speeding up, not slowing down, and there are plenty of techs that could easily carry it for decades more. This means that in 16 years, a vehicle like the Roadster would be *lighter* than its gasoline equivalent.
False. Most EV charging is done at home. Rapid charging is only needed on long trips, which make up a fraction of the demand. Gasoline vehicles must get all their gasoline at gas stations.
But in a world where all cars are electric, everyone just used them.
Huh? What is the meaning of this past tense?
Which is often the case at times people fill up (rush hour, early weekends).
Commuting doesn't require rapid charging unless you commute hundreds of miles to work every day. Furthermore, I advise you to look at random gas stations during rush hour. It's an exercise I've done many times. You'll find that only rarely do they have lines, and even when there are lines, 80% of the time a pump spends, it's not actually filling a vehicle. Gas pumps spend most of their time sitting idle, even during rush hour.
Every car supported adds that much more to the cost of the system,
An 8 pump gas station costs ~$1m, give or take half an order of magnitude in either direction. Bulk storage is about $150/kWh. With an average future-world charge of ~30kWh, the incremental cost per vehicle is $4,500. And that's *not* counting any energy accumulated A) while the vehicle is charging, B) the vehicle is connecting/disconnecting, or C) which vehicle is at the charger is changing, which actually gives you extra vehicles chargeable during that time period. And they can actually make money when they're idle by buffering power for the electric company.
Not. An. Issue.
plus capacitors slowly leak charge so storing up too much of a charge ends up wasting a lot of electricity.
1) I didn't suggest capacitors. The most cost-effective bulk electricity storage systems today are PbA and flow batteries like vanadium redox. 2) It takes over a month for a modern unusued supercapacitor to lose half its charge. Not. An. Issue.
They actually were a staunch competitor around the turn of the century. The combination of the electric starter, the assembly line production of gasoline vehicles, and major improvements in gasoline vehicle performance killed them. They relied on PbA (and to a lesser extent, NiFe) batteries. There wasn't much better than that for the majority of the 20th century. NiCd came out later, then NiMH, and now li-ion -- each a huge jump over their predecessors. Gasoline technology has not remained stagnant, but it hasn't had the nearly order of magnitude improvement seen in batteries. Which is why they're getting a new lease on life.
Batteries have been increasing in energy density by about 8% per year for the past 20 years. The rate only seems to be increasing, and there's literally dozens of lab techs that could continue to carry that rate for decades more. It's like a sort of mini-Moore's Law. I find it very doubtful gasoline can keep up its lead indefinitely.
Actually, the motor does come into the discussion. Namely, because while batteries are much heavier than gasoline per unit energy (and even per unit range, although not nearly as much), electric motors are notably *lighter* than internal combustion engines. So you're increasing some weight while decreasing other weight. Overall, currently, electric vehicles tend to be heavier, but it won't take a huge jump for the weight savings in the drivetrain to offset the weight increase in the "fuel".
The nice thing about electricity is that it's so cheap that it's not all that expensive of a perk or loss leader. Even a free outlet that's merely 110V could draw EV owners, but a vehicle hooked up to it for an hour would only cost you about 15 cents.
Gee, putting charging stations everywhere doesn't sound expensive, and I suppose they should raise taxes to pay for all of this? No thanks, I'll stick with the series hybrids, and on the rare occasion when I travel over 40 miles and the battery gets low I'll pull in any of the millions of existing gas stations.
1900s iamhassi: "Gee, putting gas stations everywhere doesn't sound expensive, and I suppose they should raise taxes to pay for all this? No thanks, I'll stick with the horse, and on the rare occasions when I travel over 40 miles and I need to feed the horse, I'll pull into any of the millions of existing places that sell oats."
Yep. The proper number is right before that in the quote:
Typical microturbine efficiencies are 25 to 35%. When in a combined heat and power cogeneration system, efficiencies of greater than 80% are commonly achieved.
Sorry, but Carnot's Law will not be disrespected like that;)
As for the "second and third" car thing... yeah, what's wrong with that? There are sixty million American households with two or more cars. How fast do you really think electric car production is going to be scaled up? Low hanging fruit will obviously be the first target; there's not going to be enough production to replace every car on the roads for decades, even if everyone wanted one. But decades from now, the picture will be totally different. Batteries increase in energy density by about 8% per year. Do the math.
1) There's only one "pump" available. 2) There's a line at this one-"pump" station (no breaks in between) 3) Only the amount to precisely charge one vehicle is stored in the battery bank, rather than several cars worth, enough to statistically guarantee a minimum X% uptime.
First off, gasoline vehicles use their energy input about 1/5th as efficiently as EVs (give or take). Secondly, your numbers are wrong. Gasoline is 132MJ/gal. The EPA forbids refilling at faster than 10gpm, so the legal max is 1320MJ/m, or 22MW. So we're actually down to 4.4MW electricity-equivalent at the maximum flow rate. But on top of this, EVs are generally built more efficiently than gasoline vehicles (better aerodynamics, for example).
Next, the time spent filling is not most of the time spent. Let's look at a typical refill scenario.
1) You decide you need gas. 2) You pull off onto an onramp and decelerate from highway speeds (~0.5m lost) 3) You turn down the surface street and drive to the gas station (~0.5m) 4) You turn into the gas station and drive to a pump (~0.5m) 5) You turn your engine off, unbuckle, pop your gas tank, get out of your car, and unscrew the gas cap (~0.5m) 6) You select your fuel type, pick up the pump, and insert it into your gas tank, then start fueling (~0.5m) 7) You fuel (~1m) 8) You disconnect the pump and pay (~0.5m) 9) You put the gas cap back on, get in your car, put your seatbelt back on, and restart your engine. (~0.5m) 10) You drive back out of the gas station and turn back onto the surface street (~0.5m) 11) You drive down the surface street back to the highway (~0.5m) 12) You accelerate back to highway speeds (~0.5m lost)
Total: ~11m
Now, what happens if we increase that 1m fuelling time to 10m fuelling time? Despite an order of magnitude increase in fill time, the time lost merely doubles to ~20m.
But that's not the end of the story. Because the reality is that people rarely drive long distances nonstop (and they never *should*). Driving without breaks is dangerous, as studies have shown that your accident rate rises. Trucking companies often mandate breaks for their drivers. Government transportation agencies the world over often have recommendations on how much time you should have off the road (usually about 5 minutes average per hour driving). Rest areas are built specifically for this purpose. And even ignoring deliberately taking a break, people eat meals, too, and that's downtime.
You can't really get much of a break while fuelling with gasoline, unless you stop to go in and buy something to eat, use the restroom, etc. And if you were charging during that, then that isn't wasted time at all. If you were charging while at a rest stop, that wouldn't be wasted time, either. If you were charging while eating lunch, that's not wasted time. So there's no practical difference between the daily distance travelled of a long-range rapid-charged EV and a gasoline vehicle unless you're trying to (with added risk) drive great distances without any breaks (meal, restroom, stretch, etc). And even then, it's a small percent difference.
Now, obviously, we're not quite to that point. But we're closer than most people realize. The biggest thing that's missing is not tech, but infrastructure and pricing. We can make rapid-charging EVs with hundreds of miles of range -- but they currently cost too much. Aerovironment makes chargers as big as 800kW -- but they're not exactly available at every rest stop right now. These are the things that must change for EVs to become a universal replacement for gasoline cars. Until then, they're primarily "second cars" in two-car households.
When you charge a battery, you are ALSO doing an energy conversion from electrical to chemical. That's much more hazardous.
Defend your assertion that storing energy in chemical bonds is more dangerous than forcing combustible fuel-air vapors from a gas tank by injecting more gasoline.
If something goes wrong, in the best case you kill your battery (excess heat), and in the worst case it blows up sending shrapnel everywhere
Name a single modern electric car that *either* of these have happened to. There were thousands on the roads in the late '90s/early '00s, and there's now thousands of Tesla Roadsters. Heck, point me to a single case of a phosphate or a manganate cell exploding under *any* circumstances. These things are used for power tools, RC planes, etc now, you know.
The sort of abuse these cells can take is just absurd. Have you seen A123's latest cells? Check them out. They're pumping 300A into 15Ah cells and they're barely getting warm from it. These sort of cells can be discharged down to zero, ran under extreme temperatures, and all sorts of other stuff, no problem.
noting that most electrical storage devices that work in this manner have had run-away discharges and other problems that have caused burns with even something as simple as a laptop recharger.
Misconception: "All batteries are the same".
Reality: Different battery chemistries have *very* different properties. Excepting Tesla and their partners, the types of batteries you find in EVs are *not* the same type you find in laptops. They're a chemistry chosen specifically for dramatically greater stability and longer life (at the cost of some energy density). And even in Tesla's case, they put *way* more safety measures into their batteries than you find in a laptop pack. Each cell is kept inside of a "can" to prevent failures from propagating to other cells, for example.
Why, because it's an irregular cylinder and can be held in the hand? Lightsaber. Pro Arctic Laser. Not the same thing. Heck, there isn't even a single lightsaber design. What do they have to do -- make it into a dodecahedron?
"Courses"? The guy has five degrees, one of which is a masters and another a PhD, and 20 years of experience. He's far beyond listing individual college courses he once took on his CV (but I should add you can't get a Ph.D in Physics without quite a few statistics courses). In fact, the guy has *taught* statistics courses -- to pick one, EVAT 793 "Statistical Climatology" at the University of Virginia.
Please excuse me, but I think asking for greater than 98-99% accuracy in bleeding-edge research in complex fields (i.e., the sort of stuff that gets published in Nature) is completely unreasonable. Nor do I think giving a paper, dozens of pages long, a "zero" for having a single error (the overwhelming majority of which were transcription/typesetting or rounding errors, according to the referenced study), which doesn't change the conclusion, is proper grading. Next up, will you be expecting all first-generation software to be released 100% bug-free?
Doctors don't prescribe medicine based on p-values. They prescribe medicine based on the conclusion of studies. And, according to your link, the conclusion was altered only a small fraction of the time. A few transcription/typesetting errors won't change this.
"At least one error" in 38% of papers is 62% accuracy? You mean that one error in a paper -- say, means that the paper is a zero? Wow, you're one damned hard grader!
If you read your own link, only 4% of errors changed the conclusion. So that's 1.52%, meaning that there's a 98-99% statistical accuracy.
Things like deforfestation are studied under a category called "land use changes". It covers everything from slash and burn of rainforests to ranching, peat mining, etc.
Studies on carbon sinks go far beyond land-use changes. For example, several studies have shown that in a warming world, rainforest will naturally convert to savanna. The wetter periods get wetter, but the drier periods get drier as well. The forest's natural response to such phenomina is physically observed and reported. Another example is the oceans. As they continue to acidify and warm, the concentration of photosynthetic organisms changes. The overall rate of photosynthesis drops and there's a big drop in the sequestration rate. These sort of studies are relatively easy to conduct, so there have been a number of them.
I strongly recommend reading parts of WG1 studies, when you want to know what has been studied so far, as virtually all peer-reviewed papers on each topic are mentioned there and it's not too dense. If you then want to know more about a paper, you can look up the paper and at least read its abstract, if not its full contents. It's aleays good to know what is being studied.
In particular, I recommend reading about how where CO2 comes from is identified. As with most aspects of study, different lines of evidence are pursued. A couple examples: 1) we can now see, via satellite, the plumes of CO2 being released from their sources and being mixed in, as well as measure them; 2) we can tally human emissions from their various sources and compare those to our natural tallies; and 3) we can study the changing rate of "old" versus "new" carbon in the atmosphere via radioisotopic analysis.
After all, you assumed the code (far from random if you took the time to look) was NOT used to make a graph on which the fortunes of whole economies may rise and fall.
So wait. Your standard is:
A) Find some piece of code that you know nothing of what it does, who made it, and what it was ever used for, if anything (i.e., college student assignment). B) Assume that it is something on which "economies may rise and fall"?
Wow, what a standard. So if I found a random piece of code somewhere designed to calculate pi, that I had no clue where it came from or what it did, and there was a bug in it, I should conclude that the foundations of mathematics are bogus?
Thanks for making my point for me. You saw some random piece of code written for god-knows-what and assumed it's somehow the cornerstone of climate science.
If the entire remaining 5% is strictly from man, I just can't see that being a significant contributor to the speeding of this natural process.
Take a barrel full of water. Every minute, add a gallon of water and remove a gallon of water (plus or minus a tablespoon). Now repeat the same experiment, but this time, add a gallon plus a cup and only remove a gallon. Note what happens with the barrel's water level.
Natural sources are very closely matched with natural sinks. And it's not just because "the world keeps itself in balance" or any new-agey thing like that which ascribes an almost conscious effort on the part of the planet to maintain the status quo. Volcanoes and other "old carbon" sources have a very small impact on planetary carbon, excepting extremely severe eruptions. It's a fraction of a percent of the of the carbon added to the atmosphere. Almost all carbon added to the system naturally comes from decaying organic matter. But that organic matter was created from the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or oceans. So *of course* they're going to match up; it's a nearly 1:1 relationship.
That's not what you care about. You don't care about things decaying the same amount that CO2 was taken out of the system, because obviously that's not going to change anything. To counter significant new CO2 inputs that are *not* balanced by carbon sinks, you must increase the planet's rate of sequestration, to trap more of the carbon taken from the atmosphere. While lots of carbon cycles in and out of the atmosphere from photosynthesis and decay (most of that 95% figure), the planet has a (comparably) very slow rate of removing carbon from the atmosphere and oceans for geological timescales -- only enough to roughly cancel out volcanoes and other proportionally very small "old carbon" sources. Unfortunately, the studies done thusfar show that the rate of natural sinks' carbon sequestration ability is declining, not rising, as our planet warms and our CO2 concentrations rise. In the long term, life may adapt in a manner to be able to use and sequester more CO2 (see the PETM below), but that's geological timescales.
Finally, I always like to mention to the AGW folks that 10,000 years ago the place where I live was completely covered by a glacier. I'm very glad for global warming, because where I live is now a beautiful region inhabited by a multitude of species both migratory and permanent.
The last glacial maximum peaked 20,000 years ago at about 8-9C lower average planetary temperature than today. That's a rate change of one degree per ~2350 years. We're currently increasing at about 1 degree per 40 years. Notice the difference? The last glacial was not anywhere close to what we're currently experiencing. The closest natural analogy we have is the PETM, 55.8mya, where a huge natural influx of CO2 and methane caused a rapid planetary temperature spike. The sudden climate change altered the world so much that we give the new era a different name -- the Eocene. Also, take a lesson from the last glacial about the power of a few degrees temperature change on ice coverage, sea levels, etc. The planet's climate has a lot of inertia, but inertia doesn't hold you off forever.
If you're trying to say "a warmer world is a better world", that depends. Certainly in the long-term, warm eras have tended to be more biodiverse and biomass-rich than cold ones. But we're talking geological timescales here. Transitions between climates, in the sort of timescales humans care about, are full of extinction and hardship for life. And cities and cultures don't just get up and move to areas that have been made newly "better" from areas that have been made newly "worse". Infrastructure is largely fixed in place. You can't just haul roads and skyscrapers en masse from the Florida Keys to Saskatchewan.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of your post contradicted anything I wrote?
The Tesla Roadster's battery pack weighs about 1000 lbs. The vehicle is about 700lbs heavier than the Elise. Hence, if the battery energy density increased to 3.4x of what it is now, the vehicle would be *lighter* than the Elise.
Battery energy densities have increased by about 8% per year for the past 20 years. Let's ignore that drivetrains are getting lighter, too. The current 8% rate, if anything, is speeding up, not slowing down, and there are plenty of techs that could easily carry it for decades more. This means that in 16 years, a vehicle like the Roadster would be *lighter* than its gasoline equivalent.
Hence my post, above.
There are just as many as in stations now.
False. Most EV charging is done at home. Rapid charging is only needed on long trips, which make up a fraction of the demand. Gasoline vehicles must get all their gasoline at gas stations.
But in a world where all cars are electric, everyone just used them.
Huh? What is the meaning of this past tense?
Which is often the case at times people fill up (rush hour, early weekends).
Commuting doesn't require rapid charging unless you commute hundreds of miles to work every day. Furthermore, I advise you to look at random gas stations during rush hour. It's an exercise I've done many times. You'll find that only rarely do they have lines, and even when there are lines, 80% of the time a pump spends, it's not actually filling a vehicle. Gas pumps spend most of their time sitting idle, even during rush hour.
Every car supported adds that much more to the cost of the system,
An 8 pump gas station costs ~$1m, give or take half an order of magnitude in either direction. Bulk storage is about $150/kWh. With an average future-world charge of ~30kWh, the incremental cost per vehicle is $4,500. And that's *not* counting any energy accumulated A) while the vehicle is charging, B) the vehicle is connecting/disconnecting, or C) which vehicle is at the charger is changing, which actually gives you extra vehicles chargeable during that time period. And they can actually make money when they're idle by buffering power for the electric company.
Not. An. Issue.
plus capacitors slowly leak charge so storing up too much of a charge ends up wasting a lot of electricity.
1) I didn't suggest capacitors. The most cost-effective bulk electricity storage systems today are PbA and flow batteries like vanadium redox.
2) It takes over a month for a modern unusued supercapacitor to lose half its charge. Not. An. Issue.
They actually were a staunch competitor around the turn of the century. The combination of the electric starter, the assembly line production of gasoline vehicles, and major improvements in gasoline vehicle performance killed them. They relied on PbA (and to a lesser extent, NiFe) batteries. There wasn't much better than that for the majority of the 20th century. NiCd came out later, then NiMH, and now li-ion -- each a huge jump over their predecessors. Gasoline technology has not remained stagnant, but it hasn't had the nearly order of magnitude improvement seen in batteries. Which is why they're getting a new lease on life.
Batteries have been increasing in energy density by about 8% per year for the past 20 years. The rate only seems to be increasing, and there's literally dozens of lab techs that could continue to carry that rate for decades more. It's like a sort of mini-Moore's Law. I find it very doubtful gasoline can keep up its lead indefinitely.
Actually, the motor does come into the discussion. Namely, because while batteries are much heavier than gasoline per unit energy (and even per unit range, although not nearly as much), electric motors are notably *lighter* than internal combustion engines. So you're increasing some weight while decreasing other weight. Overall, currently, electric vehicles tend to be heavier, but it won't take a huge jump for the weight savings in the drivetrain to offset the weight increase in the "fuel".
The nice thing about electricity is that it's so cheap that it's not all that expensive of a perk or loss leader. Even a free outlet that's merely 110V could draw EV owners, but a vehicle hooked up to it for an hour would only cost you about 15 cents.
Gee, putting charging stations everywhere doesn't sound expensive, and I suppose they should raise taxes to pay for all of this? No thanks, I'll stick with the series hybrids, and on the rare occasion when I travel over 40 miles and the battery gets low I'll pull in any of the millions of existing gas stations.
1900s iamhassi: "Gee, putting gas stations everywhere doesn't sound expensive, and I suppose they should raise taxes to pay for all this? No thanks, I'll stick with the horse, and on the rare occasions when I travel over 40 miles and I need to feed the horse, I'll pull into any of the millions of existing places that sell oats."
Wow, Michael Bay, is that you?
Meanwhile, back in reality...
48% of New Yorkers have cars.
Huh. Apparently where you live, gas station pumps work during a blackout.
Yep. The proper number is right before that in the quote:
Sorry, but Carnot's Law will not be disrespected like that ;)
As for the "second and third" car thing... yeah, what's wrong with that? There are sixty million American households with two or more cars. How fast do you really think electric car production is going to be scaled up? Low hanging fruit will obviously be the first target; there's not going to be enough production to replace every car on the roads for decades, even if everyone wanted one. But decades from now, the picture will be totally different. Batteries increase in energy density by about 8% per year. Do the math.
Interesting set of assumptions you're making.
1) There's only one "pump" available.
2) There's a line at this one-"pump" station (no breaks in between)
3) Only the amount to precisely charge one vehicle is stored in the battery bank, rather than several cars worth, enough to statistically guarantee a minimum X% uptime.
Let me complete your sentence:
Ah, the charge rate misconception!
First off, gasoline vehicles use their energy input about 1/5th as efficiently as EVs (give or take). Secondly, your numbers are wrong. Gasoline is 132MJ/gal. The EPA forbids refilling at faster than 10gpm, so the legal max is 1320MJ/m, or 22MW. So we're actually down to 4.4MW electricity-equivalent at the maximum flow rate. But on top of this, EVs are generally built more efficiently than gasoline vehicles (better aerodynamics, for example).
Next, the time spent filling is not most of the time spent. Let's look at a typical refill scenario.
1) You decide you need gas.
2) You pull off onto an onramp and decelerate from highway speeds (~0.5m lost)
3) You turn down the surface street and drive to the gas station (~0.5m)
4) You turn into the gas station and drive to a pump (~0.5m)
5) You turn your engine off, unbuckle, pop your gas tank, get out of your car, and unscrew the gas cap (~0.5m)
6) You select your fuel type, pick up the pump, and insert it into your gas tank, then start fueling (~0.5m)
7) You fuel (~1m)
8) You disconnect the pump and pay (~0.5m)
9) You put the gas cap back on, get in your car, put your seatbelt back on, and restart your engine. (~0.5m)
10) You drive back out of the gas station and turn back onto the surface street (~0.5m)
11) You drive down the surface street back to the highway (~0.5m)
12) You accelerate back to highway speeds (~0.5m lost)
Total: ~11m
Now, what happens if we increase that 1m fuelling time to 10m fuelling time? Despite an order of magnitude increase in fill time, the time lost merely doubles to ~20m.
But that's not the end of the story. Because the reality is that people rarely drive long distances nonstop (and they never *should*). Driving without breaks is dangerous, as studies have shown that your accident rate rises. Trucking companies often mandate breaks for their drivers. Government transportation agencies the world over often have recommendations on how much time you should have off the road (usually about 5 minutes average per hour driving). Rest areas are built specifically for this purpose. And even ignoring deliberately taking a break, people eat meals, too, and that's downtime.
You can't really get much of a break while fuelling with gasoline, unless you stop to go in and buy something to eat, use the restroom, etc. And if you were charging during that, then that isn't wasted time at all. If you were charging while at a rest stop, that wouldn't be wasted time, either. If you were charging while eating lunch, that's not wasted time. So there's no practical difference between the daily distance travelled of a long-range rapid-charged EV and a gasoline vehicle unless you're trying to (with added risk) drive great distances without any breaks (meal, restroom, stretch, etc). And even then, it's a small percent difference.
Now, obviously, we're not quite to that point. But we're closer than most people realize. The biggest thing that's missing is not tech, but infrastructure and pricing. We can make rapid-charging EVs with hundreds of miles of range -- but they currently cost too much. Aerovironment makes chargers as big as 800kW -- but they're not exactly available at every rest stop right now. These are the things that must change for EVs to become a universal replacement for gasoline cars. Until then, they're primarily "second cars" in two-car households.
When you charge a battery, you are ALSO doing an energy conversion from electrical to chemical. That's much more hazardous.
Defend your assertion that storing energy in chemical bonds is more dangerous than forcing combustible fuel-air vapors from a gas tank by injecting more gasoline.
If something goes wrong, in the best case you kill your battery (excess heat), and in the worst case it blows up sending shrapnel everywhere
Name a single modern electric car that *either* of these have happened to. There were thousands on the roads in the late '90s/early '00s, and there's now thousands of Tesla Roadsters. Heck, point me to a single case of a phosphate or a manganate cell exploding under *any* circumstances. These things are used for power tools, RC planes, etc now, you know.
The sort of abuse these cells can take is just absurd. Have you seen A123's latest cells? Check them out. They're pumping 300A into 15Ah cells and they're barely getting warm from it. These sort of cells can be discharged down to zero, ran under extreme temperatures, and all sorts of other stuff, no problem.
noting that most electrical storage devices that work in this manner have had run-away discharges and other problems that have caused burns with even something as simple as a laptop recharger.
Misconception: "All batteries are the same".
Reality: Different battery chemistries have *very* different properties. Excepting Tesla and their partners, the types of batteries you find in EVs are *not* the same type you find in laptops. They're a chemistry chosen specifically for dramatically greater stability and longer life (at the cost of some energy density). And even in Tesla's case, they put *way* more safety measures into their batteries than you find in a laptop pack. Each cell is kept inside of a "can" to prevent failures from propagating to other cells, for example.
In catastrophic failures, traditional li-ion/li-po cells burn vigorously, while phosphate cells smoke and manganate cells do nothing (as a general rule).
Why, because it's an irregular cylinder and can be held in the hand? Lightsaber. Pro Arctic Laser. Not the same thing. Heck, there isn't even a single lightsaber design. What do they have to do -- make it into a dodecahedron?
"Courses"? The guy has five degrees, one of which is a masters and another a PhD, and 20 years of experience. He's far beyond listing individual college courses he once took on his CV (but I should add you can't get a Ph.D in Physics without quite a few statistics courses). In fact, the guy has *taught* statistics courses -- to pick one, EVAT 793 "Statistical Climatology" at the University of Virginia.
Please excuse me, but I think asking for greater than 98-99% accuracy in bleeding-edge research in complex fields (i.e., the sort of stuff that gets published in Nature) is completely unreasonable. Nor do I think giving a paper, dozens of pages long, a "zero" for having a single error (the overwhelming majority of which were transcription/typesetting or rounding errors, according to the referenced study), which doesn't change the conclusion, is proper grading. Next up, will you be expecting all first-generation software to be released 100% bug-free?
Doctors don't prescribe medicine based on p-values. They prescribe medicine based on the conclusion of studies. And, according to your link, the conclusion was altered only a small fraction of the time. A few transcription/typesetting errors won't change this.
"At least one error" in 38% of papers is 62% accuracy? You mean that one error in a paper -- say, means that the paper is a zero? Wow, you're one damned hard grader!
If you read your own link, only 4% of errors changed the conclusion. So that's 1.52%, meaning that there's a 98-99% statistical accuracy.
Things like deforfestation are studied under a category called "land use changes". It covers everything from slash and burn of rainforests to ranching, peat mining, etc.
Studies on carbon sinks go far beyond land-use changes. For example, several studies have shown that in a warming world, rainforest will naturally convert to savanna. The wetter periods get wetter, but the drier periods get drier as well. The forest's natural response to such phenomina is physically observed and reported. Another example is the oceans. As they continue to acidify and warm, the concentration of photosynthetic organisms changes. The overall rate of photosynthesis drops and there's a big drop in the sequestration rate. These sort of studies are relatively easy to conduct, so there have been a number of them.
I strongly recommend reading parts of WG1 studies, when you want to know what has been studied so far, as virtually all peer-reviewed papers on each topic are mentioned there and it's not too dense. If you then want to know more about a paper, you can look up the paper and at least read its abstract, if not its full contents. It's aleays good to know what is being studied.
In particular, I recommend reading about how where CO2 comes from is identified. As with most aspects of study, different lines of evidence are pursued. A couple examples: 1) we can now see, via satellite, the plumes of CO2 being released from their sources and being mixed in, as well as measure them; 2) we can tally human emissions from their various sources and compare those to our natural tallies; and 3) we can study the changing rate of "old" versus "new" carbon in the atmosphere via radioisotopic analysis.
After all, you assumed the code (far from random if you took the time to look) was NOT used to make a graph on which the fortunes of whole economies may rise and fall.
So wait. Your standard is:
A) Find some piece of code that you know nothing of what it does, who made it, and what it was ever used for, if anything (i.e., college student assignment).
B) Assume that it is something on which "economies may rise and fall"?
Wow, what a standard. So if I found a random piece of code somewhere designed to calculate pi, that I had no clue where it came from or what it did, and there was a bug in it, I should conclude that the foundations of mathematics are bogus?
OMG you actually are comparing a closed system "barrel of water" to the earth?
Apparently you're unaware that Earth contains a finite mass and volume.
No. Do you?
Thanks for making my point for me. You saw some random piece of code written for god-knows-what and assumed it's somehow the cornerstone of climate science.
Right. The journal "Nature" doesn't understand statistics. And neither do all of the scientific review boards looking into this.
As for "code", do you even know what the "code" you were looking at was from and where it is used, if at all?
If the entire remaining 5% is strictly from man, I just can't see that being a significant contributor to the speeding of this natural process.
Take a barrel full of water. Every minute, add a gallon of water and remove a gallon of water (plus or minus a tablespoon). Now repeat the same experiment, but this time, add a gallon plus a cup and only remove a gallon. Note what happens with the barrel's water level.
Natural sources are very closely matched with natural sinks. And it's not just because "the world keeps itself in balance" or any new-agey thing like that which ascribes an almost conscious effort on the part of the planet to maintain the status quo. Volcanoes and other "old carbon" sources have a very small impact on planetary carbon, excepting extremely severe eruptions. It's a fraction of a percent of the of the carbon added to the atmosphere. Almost all carbon added to the system naturally comes from decaying organic matter. But that organic matter was created from the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or oceans. So *of course* they're going to match up; it's a nearly 1:1 relationship.
That's not what you care about. You don't care about things decaying the same amount that CO2 was taken out of the system, because obviously that's not going to change anything. To counter significant new CO2 inputs that are *not* balanced by carbon sinks, you must increase the planet's rate of sequestration, to trap more of the carbon taken from the atmosphere. While lots of carbon cycles in and out of the atmosphere from photosynthesis and decay (most of that 95% figure), the planet has a (comparably) very slow rate of removing carbon from the atmosphere and oceans for geological timescales -- only enough to roughly cancel out volcanoes and other proportionally very small "old carbon" sources. Unfortunately, the studies done thusfar show that the rate of natural sinks' carbon sequestration ability is declining, not rising, as our planet warms and our CO2 concentrations rise. In the long term, life may adapt in a manner to be able to use and sequester more CO2 (see the PETM below), but that's geological timescales.
Finally, I always like to mention to the AGW folks that 10,000 years ago the place where I live was completely covered by a glacier. I'm very glad for global warming, because where I live is now a beautiful region inhabited by a multitude of species both migratory and permanent.
The last glacial maximum peaked 20,000 years ago at about 8-9C lower average planetary temperature than today. That's a rate change of one degree per ~2350 years. We're currently increasing at about 1 degree per 40 years. Notice the difference? The last glacial was not anywhere close to what we're currently experiencing. The closest natural analogy we have is the PETM, 55.8mya, where a huge natural influx of CO2 and methane caused a rapid planetary temperature spike. The sudden climate change altered the world so much that we give the new era a different name -- the Eocene. Also, take a lesson from the last glacial about the power of a few degrees temperature change on ice coverage, sea levels, etc. The planet's climate has a lot of inertia, but inertia doesn't hold you off forever.
If you're trying to say "a warmer world is a better world", that depends. Certainly in the long-term, warm eras have tended to be more biodiverse and biomass-rich than cold ones. But we're talking geological timescales here. Transitions between climates, in the sort of timescales humans care about, are full of extinction and hardship for life. And cities and cultures don't just get up and move to areas that have been made newly "better" from areas that have been made newly "worse". Infrastructure is largely fixed in place. You can't just haul roads and skyscrapers en masse from the Florida Keys to Saskatchewan.