Yeah but I think the key point is that there wouldn't be 35 (or even 25) meltdowns/year if the nuclear industry scaled up to replace coal-powered generation. Worldwide we've had two really serious 'meltdown scale' nuclear accidents in the 50 years of the civilian nuclear industry and that includes a lot of reactor-years running dodgy designs that were more about manufacturing bomb material than generating power.
A much bigger nuclear sector that replaced the coal sector but had a TMI type of incident once per decade (not that I think it would be that frequent) would be a major improvement over our current situation.
The 'dead zones' are, paradoxically, developing extremely diverse and rich ecosystems - the enforced absence of humans (barring the aforementioned crazy geezers who won't be told) allows the wildlife to bounce back very quickly. You see the same thing at places like Bikini Atoll, which were bombed to smithereens back when atmospheric nuclear testing was all the rage.
Humans are unusually susceptible to radiation poisoning - most other species are perfectly happy in areas which are long-term uninhabitable for people. It's why Lovelock has (mischievously) suggested randomly dumping caches of high level nuclear waste in the amazonian rain forest.
Climate changes naturally, the sun has a variable output that changes through time, and it's been hotter than it is now during recorded history (the Medieval Warm period). The data, in fact, says that it's been a lot warmer than this in prehistoric times.
Sorry you are wrong. The Medieval Warm period was a regional event - it was warmer in the North Atlantic and Europe, but the globe was cooler overall than it is now. 'Prehistoric' covers a lot of ground, but you have to go a fair way back to find a global average surface temperature in the proxies higher than the present.
Climate certainly changes naturally (ie non-anthropogenically) but it can also be changed anthropogenically. The main issue with the current situation is the rate of change - current estimates of the heating trend are 0.1-0.15C/decade; this is at least an order or magnitude faster than any natural change observed in the geological record and a matter for some concern I think.
I read and agreed with everything in your post. One sentence needs a little comment however:
On the facts above, it's sheer hubris to claim that anything that we do now can damage the planet in the short, medium or even long term.
This is absolutely correct, however no-one who's worried about GW that I've encountered over the past couple of years seriously believes that a planet damaging scale of effect is remotely on the cards.
What they do worry about are the large array potential damages that are sub-planet busting and yet which could still be civilisation/nation/region-busting. We don't have to screw up the entire ecosphere to make life extremely uncomfortable/unviable for significant fractions of our descendants. The hoary example is the North Atlantic Conveyor (aka Gulf Stream). It has stopped before (Greater Dryas was the last time IIRC) and the planet's still here, so clearly it's disruption is not a planetary threat - however it'd suck to be me, and ~60 million other Brits, if it stopped again (and that's not counting the other ~300 million people in Europe and the Near East that'd get hit by the first order effects).
You're kidding, right? All the way back in Jr. High, they taught us in math class how to calculate a formula that fit multiple data points. Good "backcast" - start with a set of data points for the past, then calculate formula that fits data points.
No. A backcast (in the context of climate modelling) is where you take a model, load it with the known starting conditions at a certain point in time (eg. Jan 1, 1900), then run the model forward for a period of time (eg 100 years) and compare what the model says should happen during that period of time to what was actually measured.
For instance last year a couple of Scripps researchers (Barnett & Pierce) anounced a very close fit between the measured oceanic warming over the previous 40 years and the backcast produced by the HadCM3 model.
I (and I suspect the GP post) don't know it. But I've yet to find anyone who's credentials I respect (astrophysicists and atmospheric scientists chiefly) who think a Venus style hothouse can be reached from our current situation and likely future trajectory. From what I recall there isn't enought carbon easily accessible in the lithosphere to create Venus' atmosphere on earth.
Please explain to me why the martian polar ice caps have been melting and receeding at a brisk pace over the past 3 yrs of their being monitored? is this due to global warming?
Probably not. Three martian years is nowhere near enough to be able to ascribe a cause with any certainty, but given the little we do know about how Mars works the recent recession in the southern ice cap is almost certainly within the bounds of a highly variable system.
Really, did they offer an explanation for why the Martian polar caps are receeding?
Why yes, yes they do. Here's what an astrophysicist has to say on the matter.
they keep making computer models that are nearly 100% inaccurate then they tweak them to match their desired results. Amazing!!!!!
Modelling is extremely tough for sure - but how do you account for the fact that there are models that can do a very good 'backcasts'? Or that investigations of discrepancies between models and observations sometimes reveal that it is the observations that are at fault? Pure, dumb luck I guess.
They ignore history for thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of years.
This is bullshit. Utter, complete and total crap. There are thousands of scientists working on paleoclimatology. It is a very active discipline.
Correction: They have data that shows a definite warming trend. They do NOT have sufficient data to prove that it is not a natural cycle..
But they know many of the likely candidates for such natural cycles and none of them fit the observed trend, which is large, global and extremely fast (~0.1C/decade at present). If you have a candidate forcing I'd like to hear about it.
In fact, a lot of data suggests that global warming will soon precipitate global cooling, the exact opposite of what was the concern.
This I'm bemused by. I'm aware that global warming can give rise to local/regional cooling (eg if the thermo-haline transport were to slow or stop), but I'm flummoxed as to how global warming (average surface temperature of the globe rises) leads to global cooling (average surface temperature of the globe falls).
Other data suggests that the Earth was about to enter another ice age right around the time that humans arrived. Thus we've been keeping the climate comfortable for ourselves by merely existing.
Firstly a nitpick - anatomically modern H. sap arrived on the scene about 150,000 years ago, which was about the time that the last ice age got started - so the first sentence is correct, but not the second (since that ice age most definitely occurred). I think what you're referring to is the recent research (Ruddiman, 2003) which suggests that GHGs released by agricultural societies over the past ~9000 years has countered what would otherwise have been a slight cooling trend in the global climate. The jury's still out on this hypothesis - but if, for the sake of argument, we take it as being correct; what is your basis for accepting that human activity can affect the global climate (by clearing forests for agriculture, draining swamps and so on) and yet other human activity (mining fossil fuels out of the ground, burning them and dumping the resulting CO2 into the atmosphere) isn't having any effect at all? Even though the latter, industrial era, activity is running about twenty times faster than the previous, agricultural, practises when it comes to tonnes CO2/year.
Still more data shows that the heat and greenhouse gasses dumped into our atmosphere can be as simple as having a city full of people existing, much less polluting.
Not sure what you're getting at here - is this the urban heat island thing? UHI is a known factor and has been accounted for (Parker, 2004; Petersen, 2003). The warming trend is still in the instrumental record after UHI has been corrected for.
Finally, there's absolutely no data (other than wild fantasies) to suggest that the pollution on Earth will ever precipitate into a Venus-like situation.
Correct. There are no such data. Which is why every climate scientist's opinion on the subject that I've seen has said that a next-stop-Venus runaway temperature excursion is impossible under current conditions.
Or rotate the main axis of the turbine 90 degrees and run it along the ridgeline of a conventionally pitched roof, for a home solution. I saw an architectural proposal a few weeks back that did that - the turbine also got input from the temperature control airflows that were routed up to it from the living areas of the building.
Okay, I'm getting a bit sick of this. "So-called theory" is charged language (flamebait); it's a theory. When we're not in the realm of pure math (and we're not), a theory is a conjecture used to explain a phenomenon.
Nope. You are in fact describing a conjecture. Once the conjecture has been extended to include some falsifiable predictions it becomes a hypothesis and if those predictions match the observed evidence (and the new observations give rise to new conjectures and hypotheses that turn out to be productive) it becomes a theory. ID has made no predictions and thus has no supporting evidence and the 'observed phenomena' (all those irreducible complexity examples - a couple of decades ago it was eyeballs, now its bacterial flagellum) are problems being attacked by real, actual, scientists.
ID isn't a theory. Its not even a hypothesis. You might call that 'charged language', I'd call it 'stating an objective fact'.
This is not the case; the idea has been around for as long as I can remember (admittedly, that's only about two decades, but still...), and has long been held as a possibility by Christian scientists
If you're talking about irreducible complexity, then this has been around for a very long time - Paley was going on about the presence of a watch on a heath implying the existence of a watchmaker back in 1800 - so the basic concept predates Darwin (Charles at least) by several decades. The problem the basic conjecture has is that to date every example of something irreducibly complex that has been advanced as evidence for a designer has turned out, upon examination, to not be irreducibly complex after all.
At one level you are correct and a large part of this was (and is) down to some incredibly naive assumptions about the complexity of 'intelligence' and the nature of the problems that AI throws up.
However (and you knew there was a however, right?) there is a countervailing tendency whereby any of the sub-problems that get solved by the AI research community as they decompose the problem get redefined as "not really intelligence - we don't know what intelligence is, but clearly it can't be that". As you can imagine, this sort of thing (especially when combined with "you're always ten years away" comments) winds up the AI guys I know something rotten.
Well a carbon trading scheme would help with this, although since the quantity of carbon credits in the market is essentially a fiat decision you don't get away from *some* group of people will be setting what the level will be - which means there will be all sorts of low politicking about who gets to be in on the decision and what sort of factors they are required to take into consideration. But its a start.
The current issue of Scientific American has an article discussing carbon sequestration BTW.
Unfortunately I can't help the fact that these journals operate a subscription policy. The articles are relevant, the abstracts are online (and indicate that the common sense you rely upon may well be a false friend) and I have given you full citations so you can track down the article if you are interested and have the time.
I note that you haven't even posted a link to the study you offer in rebuttal - never mind author, journal or any of that other useful stuff that would help me to assess the facts that you claim support your position. Why is that?
If somehow, conclusive evidence were released showing that humans have nothing to do with global warming, and it is simply a climate trend, how many self-dubbed ecologists would be pleased by this news?
I couldn't care less about how such a report would be received by "self-dubbed ecologists" - I'm much more bothered by the fact that no such study has appeared despite a huge number of extremely talented and ambitious people putting a hell of a lot of work into the field over the past three decades.
Thats means that either (i) everyone in the climate sciences is in on a massive conspiracy to supress the facts or (ii) that everyone in the climate sciences has a seriously deficient understanding of what is going on or (iii) that there are no such facts to be found.
Option (i) Is tin-foil paranoia country IMO, option (ii) is just about concievable I suppose, but would require a theoretical breakthrough on a par with Special Relativity in its impact and I see no indication that such a thing is in the offing. Which leaves option (iii).
I'm sorry but you are incorrect. The UHI effect has been studied and does not appear to have any significant impact on the temperature metrics. See for instance the following papers that have recently appeared in peer reviewed journals:
Peterson, T.C., Assessment of urban versus rural in situ surface temperatures in the contiguous United States: No difference found, Journal of Climate, 16, 2941-2959, 2003.
Parker, D.E., Large-Scale Warming is not Urban, Nature 432, 290, doi:10.1038/432290a, 2004.
Why add an orbital rendezvous requirement to all missions?
Because then you only have to man-rate the launch stack for the CEV and can boost the other modules up on non-manrated stacks, which are a hell of a lot cheaper.
Furthermore, given the low throw-weight of current boosters (when compared to Saturn frex), orbital rendezvous is going to be required for pretty much any mission beyond a quick hop to LEO - so what does it hurt to mandate it for every mission? Also, by going with a modular system you get the opportunity to leverage alternative launch systems. NASA may not be entirely enthusiastic about paying ESA, JSA or (heaven forfend!) a private outfit to put some of their payloads into orbit, but if these other players have the launch capacity and it saves NASA having to spend a umpty billion expanding their launch capacity, then it makes a lot of sense.
And yes, in school I was taught natural selection--but that loop seems awefully slow and tedious. I'm thinking one quicker. Maybe a way environmental changes are "written" back into the genome somehow.
Darwinist evolution by natural selection *is* slow and tedious. Being so slow and tedious was a major problem for the theory back in the late C19th, when the best estimates for the age of the earth were on the order of a million years or so. Then radioactive isotopes were discovered and the age of the planet was revised to several billion years - suddenly slow and tedious wasn't a problem any more.
A quicker feedback loop that directly writes to the genome is, in essence, the Lamarckian conjecture. No mechanism to do the write back has been identified and the faster, more 'proactive' evolution such a conjecture predicts hasn't been observed. The one possible exception to this is human culture and technology, which seems to evolve in a lamarckian fashion (and is much faster than darwinist evolution).
You do know that Mann writes this website, right? You do realize that the source of your argument (http://www.realclimate.org/) is a shill for Mann and his cronies?
I'll just note that Mann's 'cronies' (all eight of them) are climate scientists of one sort or another doing relevant, current work in the field under question and that its a stretch (and how) to call the site a shill for Mann when his name is on the front page as a contributor.
However there was a link to McIntyre and McKitrick's website in the topic summary. Why was it relevant for Timothy to include that link, but not include a link to the matching item on RealClimate.org? Is it just non-scientists who are allowed to have weblogs about this stuff?
Kyoto isn't really relevant to the topic. The whole 'hockey stick' controversy has occurred since the Kyoto protocol was finalised in '97 - so MBH98 would have had no effect on it one way or another.
Two points. Firstly methane has a very short cycle time in the atmosphere compared to CO2; so yes, molecule-for-molecule it kicks more global warming butt than CO2 but the effect is gone in a decade or so. Secondly most of that methane is shifting carbon around within the upper, biotic, part of the carbon cycle and, as such, is not the main point at issue WRT the implications of Climate Change Theory - which is that we are mining system altering quantities of carbon out of the lithosphere and releasing it into the atmosphere/biosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
Regards
Luke
Yeah but I think the key point is that there wouldn't be 35 (or even 25) meltdowns/year if the nuclear industry scaled up to replace coal-powered generation. Worldwide we've had two really serious 'meltdown scale' nuclear accidents in the 50 years of the civilian nuclear industry and that includes a lot of reactor-years running dodgy designs that were more about manufacturing bomb material than generating power.
A much bigger nuclear sector that replaced the coal sector but had a TMI type of incident once per decade (not that I think it would be that frequent) would be a major improvement over our current situation.
Regards
Luke
The 'dead zones' are, paradoxically, developing extremely diverse and rich ecosystems - the enforced absence of humans (barring the aforementioned crazy geezers who won't be told) allows the wildlife to bounce back very quickly. You see the same thing at places like Bikini Atoll, which were bombed to smithereens back when atmospheric nuclear testing was all the rage.
Humans are unusually susceptible to radiation poisoning - most other species are perfectly happy in areas which are long-term uninhabitable for people. It's why Lovelock has (mischievously) suggested randomly dumping caches of high level nuclear waste in the amazonian rain forest.
Regards
Luke
L
Climate certainly changes naturally (ie non-anthropogenically) but it can also be changed anthropogenically. The main issue with the current situation is the rate of change - current estimates of the heating trend are 0.1-0.15C/decade; this is at least an order or magnitude faster than any natural change observed in the geological record and a matter for some concern I think.
Regards
Luke
This is absolutely correct, however no-one who's worried about GW that I've encountered over the past couple of years seriously believes that a planet damaging scale of effect is remotely on the cards.
What they do worry about are the large array potential damages that are sub-planet busting and yet which could still be civilisation/nation/region-busting. We don't have to screw up the entire ecosphere to make life extremely uncomfortable/unviable for significant fractions of our descendants. The hoary example is the North Atlantic Conveyor (aka Gulf Stream). It has stopped before (Greater Dryas was the last time IIRC) and the planet's still here, so clearly it's disruption is not a planetary threat - however it'd suck to be me, and ~60 million other Brits, if it stopped again (and that's not counting the other ~300 million people in Europe and the Near East that'd get hit by the first order effects).
Regards
Luke
OK gotcha. I read something into your post that wasn't there. Sorry.
Regards
Luke
For instance last year a couple of Scripps researchers (Barnett & Pierce) anounced a very close fit between the measured oceanic warming over the previous 40 years and the backcast produced by the HadCM3 model.
Regards
Luke
I (and I suspect the GP post) don't know it. But I've yet to find anyone who's credentials I respect (astrophysicists and atmospheric scientists chiefly) who think a Venus style hothouse can be reached from our current situation and likely future trajectory. From what I recall there isn't enought carbon easily accessible in the lithosphere to create Venus' atmosphere on earth.
Regards
Luke
Regards
Luke
Modelling is extremely tough for sure - but how do you account for the fact that there are models that can do a very good 'backcasts'? Or that investigations of discrepancies between models and observations sometimes reveal that it is the observations that are at fault? Pure, dumb luck I guess.
This is bullshit. Utter, complete and total crap. There are thousands of scientists working on paleoclimatology. It is a very active discipline.
Regards
Luke
This I'm bemused by. I'm aware that global warming can give rise to local/regional cooling (eg if the thermo-haline transport were to slow or stop), but I'm flummoxed as to how global warming (average surface temperature of the globe rises) leads to global cooling (average surface temperature of the globe falls).
Firstly a nitpick - anatomically modern H. sap arrived on the scene about 150,000 years ago, which was about the time that the last ice age got started - so the first sentence is correct, but not the second (since that ice age most definitely occurred). I think what you're referring to is the recent research (Ruddiman, 2003) which suggests that GHGs released by agricultural societies over the past ~9000 years has countered what would otherwise have been a slight cooling trend in the global climate. The jury's still out on this hypothesis - but if, for the sake of argument, we take it as being correct; what is your basis for accepting that human activity can affect the global climate (by clearing forests for agriculture, draining swamps and so on) and yet other human activity (mining fossil fuels out of the ground, burning them and dumping the resulting CO2 into the atmosphere) isn't having any effect at all? Even though the latter, industrial era, activity is running about twenty times faster than the previous, agricultural, practises when it comes to tonnes CO2/year.
Not sure what you're getting at here - is this the urban heat island thing? UHI is a known factor and has been accounted for (Parker, 2004; Petersen, 2003). The warming trend is still in the instrumental record after UHI has been corrected for.
Correct. There are no such data. Which is why every climate scientist's opinion on the subject that I've seen has said that a next-stop-Venus runaway temperature excursion is impossible under current conditions.
Regards
Luke
All I can say is that your council must be pretty bloody useless.
I live in Hackney and even *they* can organise a weekly pickup for both regular rubbish and recyclables.
Regards
Luke
Or rotate the main axis of the turbine 90 degrees and run it along the ridgeline of a conventionally pitched roof, for a home solution. I saw an architectural proposal a few weeks back that did that - the turbine also got input from the temperature control airflows that were routed up to it from the living areas of the building.
Regards
Luke
ID isn't a theory. Its not even a hypothesis. You might call that 'charged language', I'd call it 'stating an objective fact'.
If you're talking about irreducible complexity, then this has been around for a very long time - Paley was going on about the presence of a watch on a heath implying the existence of a watchmaker back in 1800 - so the basic concept predates Darwin (Charles at least) by several decades. The problem the basic conjecture has is that to date every example of something irreducibly complex that has been advanced as evidence for a designer has turned out, upon examination, to not be irreducibly complex after all.
Regards
Luke
At one level you are correct and a large part of this was (and is) down to some incredibly naive assumptions about the complexity of 'intelligence' and the nature of the problems that AI throws up.
However (and you knew there was a however, right?) there is a countervailing tendency whereby any of the sub-problems that get solved by the AI research community as they decompose the problem get redefined as "not really intelligence - we don't know what intelligence is, but clearly it can't be that". As you can imagine, this sort of thing (especially when combined with "you're always ten years away" comments) winds up the AI guys I know something rotten.
Regards
Luke
Well a carbon trading scheme would help with this, although since the quantity of carbon credits in the market is essentially a fiat decision you don't get away from *some* group of people will be setting what the level will be - which means there will be all sorts of low politicking about who gets to be in on the decision and what sort of factors they are required to take into consideration. But its a start.
The current issue of Scientific American has an article discussing carbon sequestration BTW.
Regards
Luke
Unfortunately I can't help the fact that these journals operate a subscription policy. The articles are relevant, the abstracts are online (and indicate that the common sense you rely upon may well be a false friend) and I have given you full citations so you can track down the article if you are interested and have the time.
I note that you haven't even posted a link to the study you offer in rebuttal - never mind author, journal or any of that other useful stuff that would help me to assess the facts that you claim support your position. Why is that?
Regards
Luke
Thats means that either (i) everyone in the climate sciences is in on a massive conspiracy to supress the facts or (ii) that everyone in the climate sciences has a seriously deficient understanding of what is going on or (iii) that there are no such facts to be found.
Option (i) Is tin-foil paranoia country IMO, option (ii) is just about concievable I suppose, but would require a theoretical breakthrough on a par with Special Relativity in its impact and I see no indication that such a thing is in the offing. Which leaves option (iii).
Regards
Luke
I'm sorry but you are incorrect. The UHI effect has been studied and does not appear to have any significant impact on the temperature metrics. See for instance the following papers that have recently appeared in peer reviewed journals:
Peterson, T.C., Assessment of urban versus rural in situ surface temperatures in the contiguous United States: No difference found, Journal of Climate, 16, 2941-2959, 2003.
Parker, D.E., Large-Scale Warming is not Urban, Nature 432, 290, doi:10.1038/432290a, 2004.
Regards
Luke
Furthermore, given the low throw-weight of current boosters (when compared to Saturn frex), orbital rendezvous is going to be required for pretty much any mission beyond a quick hop to LEO - so what does it hurt to mandate it for every mission? Also, by going with a modular system you get the opportunity to leverage alternative launch systems. NASA may not be entirely enthusiastic about paying ESA, JSA or (heaven forfend!) a private outfit to put some of their payloads into orbit, but if these other players have the launch capacity and it saves NASA having to spend a umpty billion expanding their launch capacity, then it makes a lot of sense.
Regards
Luke
A quicker feedback loop that directly writes to the genome is, in essence, the Lamarckian conjecture. No mechanism to do the write back has been identified and the faster, more 'proactive' evolution such a conjecture predicts hasn't been observed. The one possible exception to this is human culture and technology, which seems to evolve in a lamarckian fashion (and is much faster than darwinist evolution).
Regards
Luke
However there was a link to McIntyre and McKitrick's website in the topic summary. Why was it relevant for Timothy to include that link, but not include a link to the matching item on RealClimate.org? Is it just non-scientists who are allowed to have weblogs about this stuff?
Regards
Luke
Kyoto isn't really relevant to the topic. The whole 'hockey stick' controversy has occurred since the Kyoto protocol was finalised in '97 - so MBH98 would have had no effect on it one way or another.
Regards
Luke
[Regarding methane]
Two points. Firstly methane has a very short cycle time in the atmosphere compared to CO2; so yes, molecule-for-molecule it kicks more global warming butt than CO2 but the effect is gone in a decade or so. Secondly most of that methane is shifting carbon around within the upper, biotic, part of the carbon cycle and, as such, is not the main point at issue WRT the implications of Climate Change Theory - which is that we are mining system altering quantities of carbon out of the lithosphere and releasing it into the atmosphere/biosphere.
Regards
Luke