Those facile assumptions have some merits. First: they work.
Yes, 1998 is a bit of an outlier, but in fact temperatures rose back to this level within 2-3 years. And being an outlier, you can easily find in a graph. You'll find the same outlier repeated in 2004. .
My facile assumptions have another advantage: they can be tested. If you don't see the pattern repeated in the 700m-2000m data in another 7 years, well, I'm wrong. And I won't claim my model is outdated. I also won't claim you just have to modify my model or you just have to introduce yet another mechanism. It'll just be wrong.
The point is, my "model" makes the assumption that the heat from the surface speads by some kind of heat transport that is linearly proportional to the vertical distance and difference in temperature. It's nothing fancy. But at least I'm not sitting here saying that nobody can understand the models anyway and then go back to fix the model in three different mutually exclusive ways each purporting to explain exactly what happened, while maintaining that there is no disagreement or doubt.
> Do you realize that the 700-2000 m depth is nearly twice as deep therefore nearly twice as much water and nearly twice as much potential for storing heat as the 0-700 m depth?
Not only did I realize that, even the author realized it and thus used "energy content" and not temperature. You didn't.
As for the portion of 700-2000m, it's going to stop heating up in due time. Judging from page 2 of the NOAA report that the article was based on, the change in heat content of 700-2000m is delayed by about 15 years vs. 0-700m. The heat content of the 0-700m layer seems to lag by about 6 years behind global temperatures. So you'd expect the heat content of the 700-2000m layer to keep rising for another 5 years and then stop - 21 years after the atmospheric temperatures stopped rising in 1998. And that's that.
The oceans as a whole are absorbing heat at about half the rate there was at the time when the temperatures were rising 20 years ago. For the last 10 years, the 0-700m figure has been completely flat.
But what has been said publicly is the opposite of that. The heating of the oceans was supposed to be the *reason* why the air temperatures didn't rise. That is, while the air wasn't heating up, the oceans took up the slack and thus warmed all the more! Now that is just plain wrong. And given that those people knew about the graphs you've shown me for a much longer time than did, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that what they said was intentionally wrong.
Do you even realize that your source off-handedly says that ocean heating responds to surface temperatures and not the other way around? What's more, the graphs prove it. Since atmospheric temperatures stopped rising, so did ocean temperatures.
So, now what about the "explanation", that has been brought forward countless times, that the lack of warming in the atmosphere is just an illusion, because in fact, the heat is being trapped in the oceans? Well, it's just plain wrong. Because in this case, the energy content of the oceans should have risen much faster in the last 10 years than at any time before. But in fact, the opposite is the case. Less heat is being trapped in the oceans while atmospheric temperatures stagnate. All that at a time when there is supposedly a much greater forcing by CO2.
So where is the energy hiding? Not just the energy that explains the lack of warming of the atmosphere, but also the energy that explains the lack of warming of the oceans?
The numbers don't add up. The theory is wrong and your attempts to fix it just make it worse.
could it be the ENSO? No. It is too variable to explain anything lasting for over a decade.
Could it be the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation? No, if anything, it should have reinforced the warming, given that previous negative deviations coincided with cooler climate.
As for the Pacific Decadal Oscillation? That too does not show any significant departures explaining any kind of trend over the last 17 years.
Volcanic eruptions? If you look at the years since 1990, you'll find the only big ones at VEI 5 ("Very Large") and VEI 6 ("Colossal") eruption in 1991, the well published eruption of Pinatubo and mostly forgotton eruption of the Cerro Hudson. The largest and the third largest eruption of the last 100 years happend in 1991 on roughly opposite ends of the world. Since then? Nothing. VEI 4 eruptions are a dime a dozen and equally distributed over time, they cannot explain any trend whatever.
You're trying to fix a theory and it isn't working.
The last major eruption happened in 1991. Emissions of aerosols were less than expected, because the reduction efforts in industrial counties (where an increase was expected) and the collapse of the Soviet Union reduced them more than recent economic progress in China inreased them. (And the Chinese are much more concerned about their emissions today than industrial countries 40 years ago, when they were at similar levels.)
We're talking about predicitons made 13-23 years ago and compare them with the outcome today. The result: they are wrong.
If natural variability can be large enough to prevent the warming from happening, for 17 years on a scale of 0.3K per decade. That is, it not only varies randomly by 0.5K. No, in the last 17 years the natural variability happened in a consistent enough way to produce a flat-line in temperatures against an assumed linear and very strong warming trend.
If this is so, then all the warming we've seen in the last 150 years (~0.8K) can easily be explained by precedents of this exact same kind o natural variability happening in the past, when CO2 variability was much less than today. Because you should remember that the 0.5K virtual cooling through natural variability that you claim has offset another 0.5K of virtual warming, is on the scale and shape(!) of all REAL warming that happened over the last 80 years.
You can't have it both ways. Either natural variability is very much larger than currently admitted (remember any natural variability in terms of warming on this scale has been absolutely ruled out) or the warming models are wrong.
> For starters, the models can't predict the influence of aerosols
Then why does the First Assessment Report waste so much paper on the influence and modelling of aerosols? Also, wasn't the sun supposed to have neglible influence? Also, if 1998 skews the results of the Third Report, why are its models essentially the same as those of the Second Report in 1996 and the first in 1991?
Your argument is treated in the IPCC report as "Cold Start" - the fallacy of failing to account for the rise of CO2 in previous decades which would have already started to heat up the oceans. In their estimate, this effect has already been accounted for. So, then how come the First Assessment Report of the IPCC gives a best estimate of a rise of 0.3K (0.2K-0.5K) per decade since 1990?
Global temperatures are also below every single projected scenario of the Third Assessment Report 13 years ago, that also took everything into account which you are complaining about. The scenarios included an immediate stop of the rise of CO2 emissions in the year 2000.
Reality consistently contradicts the models. The models are wrong.
The accuracy of global temperature measurement is +- 0.1K. CO2 concentrations rose by a bit more than 10% over those 17 years. Logarithmically speaking (which is all that counts), that's 14% of a doubling. Suppose a doubling would cause a rise of 1.5K (low end of IPCC projections), then we should have seen a rise of 0.2K. That's easily detectable, very well above noise level over a period of two decades (you can take 5 year averages) and just didn't happen.
Suppose a doubling would cause a rise of 4.5K (high end of IPCC projections), the rise should have been 0.6K or about as much as in the last 80 years. Any idiot can see that this didn't happen either in the last 17 years.
Well, Stiglitz wasn't taken seriously at the time. You could have shown what Stiglitz said to Alan Greenspan and he would have rejected it, along with most other mainstream economists.
It doesn't matter who debunked the unrealistic assumptions in climate science, since you won't take it seriously anyway. If you don't think the fact that temperatures are 0.5 degree below the predictions that were made 25 years ago and again 13 years ago, is any indication that the models failed, it doesn't matter what evidence I present. That's because you don't care about normal scientific standards that say: if the prediction is consistently wrong, the theory is wrong.
Do you remember how much support the standard model of macroeconomics enjoyed in 2006? The great moderation was proof that we finally understood how the economy works, a global recession was perfectly impossible because you could always just lower interest rates and be fine. If you had sampled 12000 articles in economic journals, you would have found very little dissent indeed.
Surely, they must have been right, because we all know that consensus is the best way to judge the veracity of scientific theory.
"Every US specification Nissan LEAF® is backed by a New Vehicle Limited Warranty providing: 36-month/36,000-mile basic coverage (whichever occurs earlier)"
$30,000 for a car that is equivalent to a $10,000 car that can be fuelled in minutes and has essentially unlimited range. If I get my imperial units right, you can by some 5000 gallons of fuel for this price ($4 per gallon seems to be the high end in the US) and drive about 200.000 miles @ 40mpg. And of course electricity isn't free either. The 50,000 kWh you need to drive this distance will cost you at least $5000 plus the price of at least one new set of batteries which are probably in the $10,000 range.
You may contemplate the numbers much more thoroughly than I did, while waiting a couple of ours for your Leaf or Tesla to charge up.
Especially when it's in a magnetic field. That's not a loose end, that's a black void. So far nobody has any good idea how to predict the behaviour of something as simple as a gas after electrons have been separated from the nucleii. Dito neural networks. And that's the just the two things that come to my mind immediately.
Erm, wasn't there something the greenies used to say? Like save the trees? Protect the forests? Leave room for nature?
Well, obviously I must have been hallucinating all the ways through the 90ies. And don't worry, I'll see a psychiatrist about this decade-long delusion at once. But let's pretend there had been an environmental movement in the second half of the last century, when people said that there is some inherent value in nature itself. Wouldn't you think that people in this movement would have been somewhat upset about the prospect of converting huge tracts of land that used be called "forests" into industrial fuel plantations? Well, I for one would imagine they'd be, but they are not.
Hence my suspicion that I was merely hallucinating. If I don't respond, I guess I stuck in comfy happy white room.
Why is it that everytime I think I'm being unfair to the Japanese I find out that I'm actually not?
Seriously, why do the Japanese put up with that shit? Whole cities are being destroyed left and right, thousands die - not just in the Tohoku earthquake, but also the Kanto, the Great Hanshin and the dozen or so large earthquakes in the last century? If they are so serious about their fear for the lives as they seem to be regarding radiation, then why not about earthquakes, which isn't a risk, but merely the next catastrophe waiting to happen in a place like Japan?
Can I write a sentence that isn't a question? Yes.
It seems to me that the root of the Tohoku Tsunami disaster was the decision to build cities in a places where there was even the remotest chance of Tsunami damage. The government of a country whose history is littered with Tsunami disasters [wikipedia.org] should have known better. The design basis for tsunamis at cities along the Tohoku coast was about 5.7 meters, it should have been: "Don't build a city plant within 20-30km of the coast and even then put it on high ground"
You know, it's just people. People can die. Tens of thousands can die. Nobody cares. They're just dead man.
But radioactivity. Now that is something different. That is terrible!
What is that "qualification" you are asking for? What kind of qualitifaction does it take, to make a statement as simple as "you can't lose what you don't have" AND have it accepted?
What we have here is a situation that is the exact same thing as a politician claiming that crime is on the rise: Just look at the amount of money that has been stolen in each of the last 30 years. It has been rising consistently, it is now 3 times larger. Crime is three times worse!
Not so says Joe Public pointing out that people now also earn 3 times as much money and are carrying around 3 times as money. There is 3 times as much money around to steal. So you would expect the same level of thievery to net 3 times as much money.
But of course, what is clearly a fearmongering politician in the case I described here, is suddenly perfectly plausible as soon as the climate crowd moves in. You, sirs and madams, are disgusting.
We cannot know the truth about something that we are not able to actually read. And slapping an unnecessary 40 Euro bill on an article that is probably less than 40 pages long has exactly that result. It exactly the same as back when people were not deemed fit to read the bible themselves and were instead fed a redacted version of it by priests. You may remember that people had good reason not to be OK with that.
I don't say we cannot know the truth about politicized subjects. What I say is that we cannot know the truth about something we don't know.
No, you won't read the same thing around Fukushima, even if the paper is correct, because there has been no release of Strontium-90 to begin with. Mind you, there is some in the cooling water, but not in the fallout. One of the advantages to have an intact, though leaking, containment is that only volatile components can escape from it. Strontium is not among the volatile components, only noble gasses, Iodine and Caesium. You can keep most of the Caesium inside the containment, if you either have a containment spray system (which the BWR Mark I and Mark II don't have). In this case it takes about 15-20 minutes to remove 90% of it from the containment air. Without the spray, it takes about 8-10 hours to fall out inside the containment.
Unfortunately, GE said about the Mark I containment all the way back in 1966 (part 1, page 50) that it would definitively leak very soon after a meltdown, unlike PWR containments (which also have containment sprays). The old BWR containments were designed around 1960 to prevent "catastrophic death tolls", in case of any accident. Back in their time, they were not designed to prevent fallout in the surrounding area. This came later. In order to prevent those with a Mark I or Mark II, you need reinforced, passively activated, filtered containment vents. Those are required by law in Germany, France and Sweden in all nuclear power plants, including PWRs. Not so in the US or Japan for that matter. In the US, the general rule is that nuclear power plant operators are required to keep their plants up to date, but are explicitly not required to perform major changes to the plant. So, there is a lot of grandfathering going on. Installing filtered vents, seems to constitute such a "major change".
In short: Nuclear power plants are exactly as safe as they are designed to be. And they are designed to be as safe as whatever law (that currently applies to them) requires them to be. Fukushima Daiichi worked exactly as required, it's just that the requirements they were held to by the law weren't exactly stellar.
Slashdot Mirror
Those facile assumptions have some merits. First: they work.
Yes, 1998 is a bit of an outlier, but in fact temperatures rose back to this level within 2-3 years. And being an outlier, you can easily find in a graph. You'll find the same outlier repeated in 2004. .
My facile assumptions have another advantage: they can be tested. If you don't see the pattern repeated in the 700m-2000m data in another 7 years, well, I'm wrong. And I won't claim my model is outdated. I also won't claim you just have to modify my model or you just have to introduce yet another mechanism. It'll just be wrong.
The point is, my "model" makes the assumption that the heat from the surface speads by some kind of heat transport that is linearly proportional to the vertical distance and difference in temperature. It's nothing fancy. But at least I'm not sitting here saying that nobody can understand the models anyway and then go back to fix the model in three different mutually exclusive ways each purporting to explain exactly what happened, while maintaining that there is no disagreement or doubt.
> Do you realize that the 700-2000 m depth is nearly twice as deep therefore nearly twice as much water and nearly twice as much potential for storing heat as the 0-700 m depth?
Not only did I realize that, even the author realized it and thus used "energy content" and not temperature. You didn't.
As for the portion of 700-2000m, it's going to stop heating up in due time. Judging from page 2 of the NOAA report that the article was based on, the change in heat content of 700-2000m is delayed by about 15 years vs. 0-700m. The heat content of the 0-700m layer seems to lag by about 6 years behind global temperatures. So you'd expect the heat content of the 700-2000m layer to keep rising for another 5 years and then stop - 21 years after the atmospheric temperatures stopped rising in 1998. And that's that.
The oceans as a whole are absorbing heat at about half the rate there was at the time when the temperatures were rising 20 years ago. For the last 10 years, the 0-700m figure has been completely flat.
But what has been said publicly is the opposite of that. The heating of the oceans was supposed to be the *reason* why the air temperatures didn't rise. That is, while the air wasn't heating up, the oceans took up the slack and thus warmed all the more! Now that is just plain wrong. And given that those people knew about the graphs you've shown me for a much longer time than did, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that what they said was intentionally wrong.
They lied.
Do you even realize that your source off-handedly says that ocean heating responds to surface temperatures and not the other way around? What's more, the graphs prove it. Since atmospheric temperatures stopped rising, so did ocean temperatures.
So, now what about the "explanation", that has been brought forward countless times, that the lack of warming in the atmosphere is just an illusion, because in fact, the heat is being trapped in the oceans? Well, it's just plain wrong. Because in this case, the energy content of the oceans should have risen much faster in the last 10 years than at any time before. But in fact, the opposite is the case. Less heat is being trapped in the oceans while atmospheric temperatures stagnate. All that at a time when there is supposedly a much greater forcing by CO2.
So where is the energy hiding? Not just the energy that explains the lack of warming of the atmosphere, but also the energy that explains the lack of warming of the oceans?
The numbers don't add up. The theory is wrong and your attempts to fix it just make it worse.
Well,
could it be the ENSO? No. It is too variable to explain anything lasting for over a decade.
Could it be the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation? No, if anything, it should have reinforced the warming, given that previous negative deviations coincided with cooler climate.
As for the Pacific Decadal Oscillation? That too does not show any significant departures explaining any kind of trend over the last 17 years.
Volcanic eruptions? If you look at the years since 1990, you'll find the only big ones at VEI 5 ("Very Large") and VEI 6 ("Colossal") eruption in 1991, the well published eruption of Pinatubo and mostly forgotton eruption of the Cerro Hudson. The largest and the third largest eruption of the last 100 years happend in 1991 on roughly opposite ends of the world. Since then? Nothing. VEI 4 eruptions are a dime a dozen and equally distributed over time, they cannot explain any trend whatever.
You're trying to fix a theory and it isn't working.
The last major eruption happened in 1991. Emissions of aerosols were less than expected, because the reduction efforts in industrial counties (where an increase was expected) and the collapse of the Soviet Union reduced them more than recent economic progress in China inreased them. (And the Chinese are much more concerned about their emissions today than industrial countries 40 years ago, when they were at similar levels.)
We're talking about predicitons made 13-23 years ago and compare them with the outcome today. The result: they are wrong.
If natural variability can be large enough to prevent the warming from happening, for 17 years on a scale of 0.3K per decade. That is, it not only varies randomly by 0.5K. No, in the last 17 years the natural variability happened in a consistent enough way to produce a flat-line in temperatures against an assumed linear and very strong warming trend.
If this is so, then all the warming we've seen in the last 150 years (~0.8K) can easily be explained by precedents of this exact same kind o natural variability happening in the past, when CO2 variability was much less than today. Because you should remember that the 0.5K virtual cooling through natural variability that you claim has offset another 0.5K of virtual warming, is on the scale and shape(!) of all REAL warming that happened over the last 80 years.
You can't have it both ways. Either natural variability is very much larger than currently admitted (remember any natural variability in terms of warming on this scale has been absolutely ruled out) or the warming models are wrong.
... in countries that are excessively dry and not to far from the the equator.
> For starters, the models can't predict the influence of aerosols
Then why does the First Assessment Report waste so much paper on the influence and modelling of aerosols? Also, wasn't the sun supposed to have neglible influence? Also, if 1998 skews the results of the Third Report, why are its models essentially the same as those of the Second Report in 1996 and the first in 1991?
Your argument is treated in the IPCC report as "Cold Start" - the fallacy of failing to account for the rise of CO2 in previous decades which would have already started to heat up the oceans. In their estimate, this effect has already been accounted for. So, then how come the First Assessment Report of the IPCC gives a best estimate of a rise of 0.3K (0.2K-0.5K) per decade since 1990?
Global temperatures are also below every single projected scenario of the Third Assessment Report 13 years ago, that also took everything into account which you are complaining about. The scenarios included an immediate stop of the rise of CO2 emissions in the year 2000.
Reality consistently contradicts the models. The models are wrong.
The accuracy of global temperature measurement is +- 0.1K. CO2 concentrations rose by a bit more than 10% over those 17 years. Logarithmically speaking (which is all that counts), that's 14% of a doubling. Suppose a doubling would cause a rise of 1.5K (low end of IPCC projections), then we should have seen a rise of 0.2K. That's easily detectable, very well above noise level over a period of two decades (you can take 5 year averages) and just didn't happen.
Suppose a doubling would cause a rise of 4.5K (high end of IPCC projections), the rise should have been 0.6K or about as much as in the last 80 years. Any idiot can see that this didn't happen either in the last 17 years.
"Nobody said the science is settled."
64 million hits on google disagree.
Yes, they are in random order. As you would expect after warming has stopped.
Well, I haven't seen 6-foot rabbits either. But their absence is not for want of trying.
Well, Stiglitz wasn't taken seriously at the time. You could have shown what Stiglitz said to Alan Greenspan and he would have rejected it, along with most other mainstream economists.
It doesn't matter who debunked the unrealistic assumptions in climate science, since you won't take it seriously anyway. If you don't think the fact that temperatures are 0.5 degree below the predictions that were made 25 years ago and again 13 years ago, is any indication that the models failed, it doesn't matter what evidence I present. That's because you don't care about normal scientific standards that say: if the prediction is consistently wrong, the theory is wrong.
Do you remember how much support the standard model of macroeconomics enjoyed in 2006? The great moderation was proof that we finally understood how the economy works, a global recession was perfectly impossible because you could always just lower interest rates and be fine. If you had sampled 12000 articles in economic journals, you would have found very little dissent indeed.
Surely, they must have been right, because we all know that consensus is the best way to judge the veracity of scientific theory.
Well ... no.
Google "nissan leaf warranty" first hit:
"Every US specification Nissan LEAF® is backed by a New Vehicle Limited Warranty providing: 36-month/36,000-mile basic coverage (whichever occurs earlier)"
$30,000 for a car that is equivalent to a $10,000 car that can be fuelled in minutes and has essentially unlimited range. If I get my imperial units right, you can by some 5000 gallons of fuel for this price ($4 per gallon seems to be the high end in the US) and drive about 200.000 miles @ 40mpg. And of course electricity isn't free either. The 50,000 kWh you need to drive this distance will cost you at least $5000 plus the price of at least one new set of batteries which are probably in the $10,000 range.
You may contemplate the numbers much more thoroughly than I did, while waiting a couple of ours for your Leaf or Tesla to charge up.
Especially when it's in a magnetic field. That's not a loose end, that's a black void. So far nobody has any good idea how to predict the behaviour of something as simple as a gas after electrons have been separated from the nucleii. Dito neural networks. And that's the just the two things that come to my mind immediately.
Erm, wasn't there something the greenies used to say? Like save the trees? Protect the forests? Leave room for nature?
Well, obviously I must have been hallucinating all the ways through the 90ies. And don't worry, I'll see a psychiatrist about this decade-long delusion at once. But let's pretend there had been an environmental movement in the second half of the last century, when people said that there is some inherent value in nature itself. Wouldn't you think that people in this movement would have been somewhat upset about the prospect of converting huge tracts of land that used be called "forests" into industrial fuel plantations? Well, I for one would imagine they'd be, but they are not.
Hence my suspicion that I was merely hallucinating. If I don't respond, I guess I stuck in comfy happy white room.
Why is it that everytime I think I'm being unfair to the Japanese I find out that I'm actually not?
Seriously, why do the Japanese put up with that shit? Whole cities are being destroyed left and right, thousands die - not just in the Tohoku earthquake, but also the Kanto, the Great Hanshin and the dozen or so large earthquakes in the last century? If they are so serious about their fear for the lives as they seem to be regarding radiation, then why not about earthquakes, which isn't a risk, but merely the next catastrophe waiting to happen in a place like Japan?
Can I write a sentence that isn't a question? Yes.
It seems to me that the root of the Tohoku Tsunami disaster was the decision to build cities in a places where there was even the remotest chance of Tsunami damage. The government of a country whose history is littered with Tsunami disasters [wikipedia.org] should have known better. The design basis for tsunamis at cities along the Tohoku coast was about 5.7 meters, it should have been: "Don't build a city plant within 20-30km of the coast and even then put it on high ground"
You know, it's just people. People can die. Tens of thousands can die. Nobody cares. They're just dead man.
But radioactivity. Now that is something different. That is terrible!
What is that "qualification" you are asking for? What kind of qualitifaction does it take, to make a statement as simple as "you can't lose what you don't have" AND have it accepted?
What we have here is a situation that is the exact same thing as a politician claiming that crime is on the rise: Just look at the amount of money that has been stolen in each of the last 30 years. It has been rising consistently, it is now 3 times larger. Crime is three times worse!
Not so says Joe Public pointing out that people now also earn 3 times as much money and are carrying around 3 times as money. There is 3 times as much money around to steal. So you would expect the same level of thievery to net 3 times as much money.
But of course, what is clearly a fearmongering politician in the case I described here, is suddenly perfectly plausible as soon as the climate crowd moves in. You, sirs and madams, are disgusting.
We cannot know the truth about something that we are not able to actually read. And slapping an unnecessary 40 Euro bill on an article that is probably less than 40 pages long has exactly that result. It exactly the same as back when people were not deemed fit to read the bible themselves and were instead fed a redacted version of it by priests. You may remember that people had good reason not to be OK with that.
I don't say we cannot know the truth about politicized subjects. What I say is that we cannot know the truth about something we don't know.
No, you won't read the same thing around Fukushima, even if the paper is correct, because there has been no release of Strontium-90 to begin with. Mind you, there is some in the cooling water, but not in the fallout. One of the advantages to have an intact, though leaking, containment is that only volatile components can escape from it. Strontium is not among the volatile components, only noble gasses, Iodine and Caesium. You can keep most of the Caesium inside the containment, if you either have a containment spray system (which the BWR Mark I and Mark II don't have). In this case it takes about 15-20 minutes to remove 90% of it from the containment air. Without the spray, it takes about 8-10 hours to fall out inside the containment.
Unfortunately, GE said about the Mark I containment all the way back in 1966 (part 1, page 50) that it would definitively leak very soon after a meltdown, unlike PWR containments (which also have containment sprays). The old BWR containments were designed around 1960 to prevent "catastrophic death tolls", in case of any accident. Back in their time, they were not designed to prevent fallout in the surrounding area. This came later. In order to prevent those with a Mark I or Mark II, you need reinforced, passively activated, filtered containment vents. Those are required by law in Germany, France and Sweden in all nuclear power plants, including PWRs. Not so in the US or Japan for that matter. In the US, the general rule is that nuclear power plant operators are required to keep their plants up to date, but are explicitly not required to perform major changes to the plant. So, there is a lot of grandfathering going on. Installing filtered vents, seems to constitute such a "major change".
In short: Nuclear power plants are exactly as safe as they are designed to be. And they are designed to be as safe as whatever law (that currently applies to them) requires them to be. Fukushima Daiichi worked exactly as required, it's just that the requirements they were held to by the law weren't exactly stellar.