With the axing of the CNN Science News team, most science stories at CNN are now being given to general assignment reporters who don’t necessarily have the background to know when they are being taken for a ride. On the Lou Dobbs show (an evening news program on cable for those of you not in the US), the last few weeks have brought a series of embarrassing non-stories on ‘global cooling’ based it seems on a few cold snaps this winter, the fact that we are at a solar minimum and a regurgitation of 1970s vintage interpretations of Milankovitch theory (via Pravda of all places!). Combine that with a few hysterical (in both senses) non-scientists as talking heads and you end up with a repeat of the nonsensical ‘Cooling world’ media stories that were misleading in the 1970s and are just as misleading now.
Exhibit A. Last night’s (13 Jan 2009) transcript (annotations in italics).
Note that this is a rush transcript and the typos aren’t attributable to the participants.
DOBBS: Welcome back. Global warming is a complex, controversial issue and on this broadcast we have been critical of both sides in this debate. We’ve challenged the orthodoxy surrounding global warming theories and questioned more evidence on the side of the Ice Age and prospect in the minds of some. In point of fact, research, some of it, shows that we could be heading toward cooler temperatures, and it’s a story you will only see here on LOU DOBBS TONIGHT. Ines Ferre has our report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
INES FERRE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Will the day after tomorrow bring a deep freeze like that shown in the movie? Research more than 50 years ago by astrophysicist Milanchovich (ph) shows that ice ages run in predictable cycles and the earth could go into one. How soon? In science terms it could be thousands of years. But what happens in the next decade is still up in the air. Part of the science community believes that global warming is a man-maid threat. But Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute predicts the next 20 to 30 years will actually bring cooling temperatures.
Dennis Avery is part of the ‘science community’? Who knew? And, while amusing, the threat of ‘man-maids’ causing global warming is just a typo. Nice thought though. Oh, and if you want to know what the actual role of Milankovitch in forcing climate is, look at the IPCC FAQ Q6.1. Its role in current climate change? Zero.
DENNIS AVERY, HUDSON INSTITUTE: The earth’s temperatures have dropped an average of .6 Celsius in the last two years. The Pacific Ocean is telling us, as it has told us 10 times in the past 400 years, you’re going to get cooler.
For those unfamiliar with Dennis Avery, he is a rather recent convert to the
bandwagonidea of global cooling, having very recently been an advocate of “unstoppable” global warming. As for his great cherry pick (0.6º C in two years – we’re doomed!), this appears to simply be made up. Even putting aside the nonsense of concluding anything from a two year trend, if you take monthly values and start at the peak value at the height of the last El Niño event of January 2007 and do no actual trend analysis, I can find no data set that gives a drop of 0.6ºC. Even UAH MSU-LT gives only 0.4ºC. The issue being not that it hasn’t been cooler this year than last, but why make up numbers? This is purely rhetorical of course, they make up numbers because they don’t care about whether what they say is true or not.FERRE: Avery points to a lack of sunspots as a predictor for lower temperatures, saying the affects of greenhouse gas warming have a small impact on climate change. Believers in global warming, like NASA researcher, Dr. Gavin Schmidt disagree.
I was interviewed on tape in the afternoon, without seeing any of the other interviews. Oh, and what does a ‘believer in global warming’ even mean?
DR. GAVIN SCHMIDT, NASA: The long term trend is clearly toward warming, and those trends are completely dwarf any changes due to the solar cycle.
FERRE: In a speech last week, President-elect Obama called for the creation of a green energy economy. Still, others warn that no matter what you think about climate change, new policies would essentially have no effect.
FRED SINGER, SCIENCE & ENV. POLICY PROJECT: There’s very little we can do about it. Any effort to restrict the use of carbon dioxide will hurt us economically and have zero effect on the Chicago mate.
Surely another typo, but maybe the Chicago mate is something to do with the man-maids? See here for more background on Singer.
FERRE: As Singer says, a lot of pain, for no gain.
Huh? Try looking at the actual numbers from a recent McKinsey report. How is saving money through efficiency a ‘pain’?
(END VIDEOTAPE)
FERRE: And three independent research groups concluded that the average global temperature in 2008 was the ninth or tenth warmest since 1850, but also since the coldest since the turn of the 21st century.
DOBBS: It’s fascinating and nothing — nothing — stirs up the left, the right, and extremes in this debate, the orthodoxy that exists on both sides of the debate than to even say global warming. It’s amazing.
This is an appeal to the ‘middle muddle’ and an attempt to seem like a reasonable arbitrator between two opposing sides. But as many people have previously noted, there is no possible compromise between sense and nonsense. 2+2 will always equal 4, no matter how much the Hudson Institute says otherwise.
FERRE: When I spoke to experts and scientists today from one side and the other, you could feel the kind of anger about —
That was probably me. Though it’s not anger, it’s simple frustration that reporters are being taken in and treating seriously the nonsense that comes out of these think-tanks.
DOBBS: Cannot we just all get along? Ines, thank you very much.
Joining me now three leading experts in Manchester, New Hampshire, we’re joined by Joseph D’Aleo of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project. Good to have with you us.
JOSEPH D’ALEO, CO-FOUNDER WEATHER CHANNEL: Thank you, Lou.
DOBBS: He’s also the cofounder of The Weather Channel. In Washington, D.C., as you see there, Jay Lehr, he’s the science director of the Heartland Institute. And in Boston, Alex Gross, he’s the cofounder of co2stats.com. Good to have you with us.
Well that’s balanced!
Let’s put a few numbers out here, the empirical discussion and see what we can make of it. First is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has very good records on temperatures, average temperatures in the United States, dating back to 1880. And here’s what these numbers look like. You’ve all seen those. But help us all — the audience and most of all me to get through this, they show the warmest years on record, 1998, 2006, and 1934. 2008 was cooler, in fact the coolest since 1997. It’s intriguing to see that graph there. The graph we’re looking at showing some question that the warming trend may be just a snapshot in time. The global temperatures by NOAA are seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001. The ten warmest years have all occurred since 1995.
So let me start, if I may, Joseph, your reaction to those numbers. Do you quibble with what they represent?
D’ALEO: Yes, I do. In fact, if you look at the satellite data, which is the most reliable data, the best coverage of the globe, 2008 was the 14th coldest in 30 years. That doesn’t jive with the tenth warmest in 159 years in the Hadley data set or 113 or 114 years in the NOAA data set. Those global data sets are contaminated by the fact that two-thirds of the globe’s stations dropped out in 1990. Most of them rural and they performed no urban adjustment. And, Lou, you know, and the people in your studio know that if they live in the suburbs of New York City, it’s a lot colder in rural areas than in the city. Now we have more urban effect in those numbers reflecting — that show up in that enhanced or exaggerated warming in the global data set.
D’Aleo is misdirecting through his teeth here. He knows that the satellite analyses have more variability over ENSO cycles than the surface records, he also knows that urban heat island effects are corrected for in the surface records, and he also knows that this doesn’t effect ocean temperatures, and that the station dropping out doesn’t affect the trends at all (you can do the same analysis with only stations that remained and it makes no difference). Pure disinformation.
DOBBS: Your thoughts on these numbers. Because they are intriguing. They are a brief snapshot admittedly, in comparison to total extended time. I guess we could go back 4.6 billion years. Let’s keep it in the range of something like 500,000 years. What’s your reaction to those numbers and your interpretation?
JAY LEHR, HEARTLAND INSTITUTE: Well, Lou —
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I’m sorry.
DOBBS: Go ahead, Jay.
LEHR: Lou, I’m in the camp with Joe and Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, and I think more importantly, it is to look at the sun’s output, and in recent years, we’ve seen very, very low sunspot activity, and we are definitely, in my mind, not only in a cooling period, we’re going to be staying in it for a couple decades, and I see it as a major advantage, although I think we will be able to adapt to it. I’m hopeful that this change in the sun’s output will put some common sense into the legislature, not to pass any dramatic cap in trade or carbon tax legislation that will set us in a far deeper economic hole. I believe Mr. Obama and his economic team are well placed to dig us out of this recession in the next 18 months to 2 years, but I think if we pass any dramatic legislation to reduce greenhouse gases, the recession will last quite a few more years and we’ll come out of it with a lower standard of living on very tenuous scientific grounds.
DOBBS: Alex, the carbon footprint, generation of greenhouse gases, specifically co2, the concern focusing primarily on the carbon footprint, and of course generated by fossil fuels primarily, what is your thinking as you look at that survey of 130 — almost 130 years and the impact on the environment?
ALEX WISSNER-GROSS, CO2STATS.COM: Well, Lou, I think regardless of whatever the long-term trend in the climate data is, there a long- term technological trend which is that as time goes on our technology tends toward smaller and smaller physical footprint. That means in part that in the long term we like technology to have a smaller environmental footprint, burning fewer greenhouse gases and becoming as small and environmentally neutral and noninvasive as possible. So I think regardless of the climate trend, I think we’ll see less and less environmentally impactful technologies.
Wissner-Gross is on because of the media attention given to misleading reports about the carbon emissions related to Google searches. Shame he doesn’t get to talk about any of that.
DOBBS: To be straight forward about this, that’s where I come down. I don’t know it matters to me whether there is global warming or we’re moving toward an ice age it seems really that we should be reasonable stewards of the planet and the debate over whether it’s global warming or whether it’s moving toward perhaps another ice age or business as usual is almost moot here in my mind. I know that will infuriate the advocates of global warming as well as the folks that believe we are headed toward another ice age. What’s your thought?
Curious train of logic there…
D’ALEO: I agree with you, Lou. We need conservation. An all of the above solution for energy, regardless of whether we’re right and it cools over the next few decades or continues to warm, a far less dangerous scenario. And that means nuclear. It means coal, oil, natural gas. Geothermal, all of the above.
DOBBS: Jay, you made the comment about the impact of solar sunspot activity. Sunspot activity the 11-year cycle that we’re all familiar with. There are much larger cycles, 12,000 to 13,000 years as well. We also heard a report disregard, if you will, for the strength and significance of solar activity on the earth’s environment. How do you respond to that?
Is he talking about me? Please see some of my publications on the subject from 2006, 2004 and 2001. My point above was that relative to current greenhouse gas increases, solar is small – not that it is unimportant or uninteresting. This of course is part of the false dilemma ‘single cause’ argument that the pseudo-skeptics like to use – that change must be caused by either solar or greenhouse gases and that any evidence for one is evidence against the other. This is logically incoherent.
FEHR: It just seems silly to not recognize that the earth’s climate is driven by the sun.
Ah yes.
Your Chad Myers pointed out it’s really arrogant to think that man controls the climate.
This is a misquoted reference to a previous segment a few weeks ago where Myers was discussing the impact of climate on individual weather patterns. But man’s activities do affect the climate and are increasingly controlling its trends.
90 percent of the climate is water vapor which we have no impact over and if we were to try to reduce greenhouse gases with China and India controlling way more than we do and they have boldly said they are not going to cripple their economy by following suit, our impact would have no — no change in temperature at all in Europe they started carbon — capping trade in 2005. They’ve had no reduction in groan house gases, but a 5 percent to 10 percent increase in the standard of living. We don’t want to go that route.
What? Accounting for the garbled nature of this response, he was probably trying to say that 90% of the greenhouse effect is caused by water vapour. This is both wrong and, even were it true, irrelevant.
DOBBS: Alex, you get the last word here. Are you as dismissive of the carbon footprint as measured by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
GROSS: No, not really. But I think in the long term, efficiency is where the gains come from. I think efficiency should come first, carbon footprint second.
DOBBS: Thank you very much. Alex, Jay, and Joe. Folks, appreciate you being with us.
FEHR: Thank you.
In summary, this is not the old ‘balance as bias‘ or ‘false balance‘ story. On the contrary, there was no balance at all! Almost the entire broadcast was given over to policy advocates whose use of erroneous-but-scientific-sounding sound bites is just a cover for their unchangable opinions that nothing should ever be done about anything. This may make for good TV (I wouldn’t know), but it certainly isn’t journalism.
There are pressures on journalists that conspire against fully researching a story – deadlines, the tyranny of the news peg etc. – but that means they have to be all the more careful in these kinds of cases. Given that Lou Dobbs has been better on this story in the past, seeing him and his team being spun like this is a real disappointment. They could really do much better.
Update: Marc Roberts sends in this appropriate cartoon:
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Nigel Williams Says (20 January 2009 at 6:08 AM)
“James! You seem to think that we are talking about total replacement of carbon-energy with renewable sources; we’re not.”
Who are you including in “we”? You may not be: SecularAnimist and others are.
“Nuclear is not renewable – not the build, the extraction or the disposal or disestablishment. Even I it can be made right it just won’t fly in time.”
I don’t quite follow your logic here. How long does it take to build a nuclear power plant, using the French model? And why, given available construction workers & equipment (and with current economic conditions, there should be a goodly amount) should it take longer to construct many plants than one?
The same logic holds in reverse for wind & solar, but I think sometimes people fail to see it. Because one wind turbine, or solar cells on one roof, are relatively small, quick & inexpensive, they overlook the cost of scaling up. For example, if you read back quite a few posts, you’ll find one claiming that the (high) $7 billion estimated cost of a nuclear plant is too expensive. That plant will put out 1 GWatt 24/7, with (on recent experience) better than 90% reliability. With solar cells at $3/Watt, how much will it cost to build a solar array to generate the same amount of power? (And I’ll give you free storage for nights :-)) How long will it take to build enough solar panels or windmills to replace an appreciable fraction of coal-fired generation?
“And windmill BIRD KILLS for goodness sake!!”
Did I mention anything about that?
“Maybe you could take a pause and think about what our world is going to be like under the triple blows…”
I have. Maybe you should too.
“Renewable is our only hope!”
That’s where I think you’re wrong. Renewables should be a big piece of the solution. Nuclear is another big piece. We need both.
I’ll ask you to do two things. First, look at the current status of the so-called “Dead Zone” around Chernobyl. It’s become a wildlife refuge, and by some reports is one of the ecologically healthier places in Europe. Now try to imagine what it’d be like if it was completely cut off from sunlight.
Hank Roberts Says (20 January 2009 at 1:33 AM):
“James, anything that _reduces_ how much is reflected from solar panels is likely to _increase_ the efficiency, not hurt it, I think.”
So covering solar panels with bird crap increases their efficiency? Humm… maybe you ought to patent that one :-)
dhagoza, 395, who’s trivialising what?
The best way to remove a pest animal isn’t to kill the pest but the food of the pest.
So if you’re so concerned about the raptors being killed (as long as they’re falconidae) is to worry about the little birds they feed on.
Now get that stick out.
James, you’re not using facts. Try looking this up.
http://www.google.com/search?q=reflectivity+'solar+panel“+efficiency
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?sourceid=Mozilla-search&q=reflectivity+%22solar+panel%22+efficiency
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?sourceid=Mozilla-search&q=albedo+guano
FYI, there’s a little action over at NASA Watch. Hansen taking some hits, some of us coming to his defense.
I saw the Lou Dobbs piece. It left me with the feeling that I was sprayed with a large volume of well-mixed gases prepared by some prat at Very Naughty Chemists Indeed, Ltd.
Nuclear Energy:
1. Who will fund nuclear energy? The banks haven’t put out the money for it since 3 mile Island blew out a $1 billion plant. Bad investment. Now the banks won’t fund anything.
2. How much energy is put out (EROI) compared to what is put in? Some people think there’s not much left after nuclear waste disposal.
3. Nuclear waste disposal? Hasn’t happened yet. Only place to put it is Yucca mountain in Nevada, and that won’t be ready for another 10 years and won’t happen while Reid of Nevada is Senate Majority Chairman.
Gavin:
You must have been alerted by now to Steve McIntyre’s latest on your performance on the Lou Dobbs program. The essence of SM’s exposition is:
“Contrary to Gavin’s assertion, there is no evidence that CRU or NOAA correct their records for urban heat island effects. They make a very slight allowance in their ‘uncertainty’ for UHI relying ultimately on an estimate made in Jones et al 1990, [edit]”
By itself, the description by Brohan et al (2006) of Hadcrut3 appears to support SM’s findings. Any comment?
[Response: I made no specific comment about the CRU or NOAA UHI adjustments – either on Dobbs’ show or in the post above. I suggest reading the documentation for those products for such information (here for instance). GISTEMP takes its trend only from rural stations, and there is plenty of evidence that there is no substantial UHI effect in any of the large scale indices (Parker, 2004; 2006; ocean changes, glacier retreat etc). -gavin]
“Hansen: Obama has only four years to save the world”
405 – That is exactly the sort of thing that I’ve been bitching about. A 4 year timeline?! bah, he doesn’t deserve to be defended. The science isn’t there to do that, but of course everyone will point me back to their models and say read IPCC blah blah blah your just not convinced by evidence. I mean you might as well go ask a Louisiana mystic to make a prediction. You can almost hear her raspy voice saying: “You’re gonna die!”
[Response: You have misunderstood what Hansen is saying. He is *not* saying the world will end in 4 years, but that if action is not started on reducing emissions by the end Obama’s first term we will very likely have missed the opportunity to get the planet off the trajectory we are on. – gavin]
One of the side conversations I’m most interested in on this thread is the discussion of mitigation solutions. Renewables vs nuclear? How much do we cut and how fast? Carbon sequestration? I’d like to see an RC post or two on mitigation. Do they have a position or is it generally beyond the scope of their work? climateprogress.org covers solutions in fairly good detail.
I really wish the public would move beyond the anti-science trash that pervades the blogosphere and occasionally makes its way to media sources like CNN. The contrarian crows always likes to say that science is never settled. True, honest scientific debate is never over, but there’s nothing scientific or honest about the sort of persistent random misinformation described in this post.
For the most part, I’ve observed that those calling themselves climate “skeptics” aren’t the least bit skeptical of any and all claims made that question global warming science, no matter how obviously false they are. Seems ironic.
– Mark (from #95)
EL, just one example among many:
Federal standards for utility transformers determine outcomes for decades. Take the Dep’t of Energy regulation. DOE was petitioned by the utility companies to mandate longterm energy efficiency as the criterion for replacing outdated transformers, rather than considering only immediate short term price.
The former Administration blew this concern off.
California
http://caag.state.ca.us/globalwarming/pdf/ee_petition.pdf
and other states along with utility companies had to sue the government.
http://caag.state.ca.us/globalwarming/energyefficiency.php
The new Administration can change this — and much else like it. Simple change. Forty years of cost and carbon savings and avoided extra costs.
This is the low-hanging fruit, the no-regrets changes that only improve conditions, but that require the kind of agreement among people that is called government. Government is — can be– the new commons, not the enemy.
(407 )EL,
As a follow up to gavin’s inline response, there is a relatively recent paper (a year old) in GRL coming to a similar conclusion on the extremely narrow time window on CO2 emissions required for near present-day climate stabilization.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2007GL032388.shtml
Hank Roberts Says (20 January 2009 at 2:32 PM):
“James, you’re not using facts. Try looking this up.”
I’m not using facts? OK, but you’re not using logic. I suggest trying an experiment (even as a thought experiment). Take a solar cell, place it in the sunlight, and measure the power output. Then slap some white paint (as substitute for guano, if you don’t have some handy), and measure again. Are you seriously suggesting the output power will increase?
But that’s with PV: how about solar thermal? Commonest design is to have mirror troughs concentrating reflected light on a collector tube. So again, imagine painting those mirrors white…
I think where your error is coming from is in conflating surface reflectivity & transmissivity. If you can reduce the reflectivity of a solar panel coating without reducing the transmissivity, you’ll increase efficiency. But guano reduces the transmissivity quite a bit, as does e.g. dust. Here’s a practical example: http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/spotlight/20080420_Spirit.html
No, EL (407), we’ll point you to the simple fact that a presidential term of office is exactly four years long.
You were saying something about “alarmism,” were you?
Conflating? Heck, I’d never even heard of transmississivity. transmissivity. Sounds like something Mark Twain would have said about steamboats. But perhaps I’m dating myself.
I see your point, there were more possible physical effects than I’d mentioned, you were able to find a way to read the words to misunderstand what I was trying to say; point to you. Thanks for the new word, I’ll treasure it and try to use it only for good.
I trust you agree that making solar cells, glass, and such reflect less light is an interesting idea considering the new biology about birds using it for navigation.
There ya go. http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Atransmissivity
How have I missed knowing that word, with so many useful meanings?
dhogaza Says:
20 January 2009 at 12:20 AM
This may suggest one good way to get birds away from airports — if they look like open water from a distance to birds, no wonder we have problems!
Actually, they look like large grassy areas full of food. They look the same to coyotes (PDX – my home airport – has surrounded the perimeter with supposedly coyote-proof fence but the coyotes dug deeper more than once). PDX problems grow in winter, as a lot of birds migrate into the PNW. Particularly problematic are the large number of juvenile raptors, particularly red-tails, that move in to hunt. Think about it … predators are controlled, all those little vole-ly and other luscious mammal things become numerous. The red-tails are trapped and relocated, though quite frequently they find their way back after a few day. Last I heard (about five years ago) there were four resident pairs allowed to stay year-rounds – they’re territorial, chase off the wintering kids, and stay away from the runways.
I recall the RAF keeping a peregrine falcon at one of their airfields to scare off seabirds near the runways. One thing that attracts predatory birds is that small prey animals get disturbed by the air disturbance of the landing planes. The most ‘alarming’ experience I had was landing at Nairobi to see vultures lined up by the side of the runway! Hawks hang out by the side of highways for similar reasons.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/suffolk/content/articles/2006/05/19/hawks_feature.shtml
http://www.mod.uk/defenceinternet/defencenews/estateandenvironment/birdsofpreykeepbirdstrikesatbay.htm
Bird species attracted to open water aren’t the problem. Well, in florida, where there’s water everywhere, you’ll see egrets in large numbers hanging out at miami international … but they’re not being fooled by the pavement
The canada geese that struct the US Airways flight wasn’t an airport strike, they were flying in “V” formation at 3200 feet miles from the airport …
The canada geese are scary, I’ve encountered them at ~2000′ while flying a Cessna closing at over 100 mph, if they can bring down a Airbus imagine what they do to a Cessna.
And now for some spin and inflammatory language from the other side – http://www.ecoearth.info/newsdesk/
“Rogue German Ship Fertilizing Southern Ocean in Dangerous Climate Geo-Engineering Experiment”
“…a desperate attempt to put off hard climate change policies by using technology to further create a human dominated “Frankensphere”
“…defies agreements against dumping of wastes in the sea.”
(18 German & 30 Indian scientists are “rogues”? fertilizer=”waste”? fertilizing 300 km2 of the 20.327 Million km2 Southern Ocean is “dangerous”?)
The “rogue ship” is the RV Polarstern, a German research ship from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. From the Wegener Institute website –
“LOHAFEX: An Indo-German iron fertilization experiment – What are the effects on the ecology and carbon uptake potential of the Southern Ocean?”
“The Federal Ministry of Education and Research has asked the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association to hold the iron fertilisation experiment LOHAFEX until an independent, international third party produces a scientific evaluation of the potential environmental impact of the project. The Alfred Wegener Institute will only start the fertilisation if this evaluation does not produce any objections.”
I think that ocean fertilization probably won’t work as well as some have suggested, and potentially has bad side effects. But I don’t think burying our heads in the sand and NOT doing the science is a wise course of action. It also was a Bad Idea for the Wegener Institute and the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), India, to rely on their internal evaluation of possible environmental impacts instead of an independent risk assessment before starting the expedition.
” I LOVE that video. I’ve actually seen it before, and it made complete sense to me. Thanks for reminding me about it.”
I think its the best video on this topic so far…
Kudos to this man..
The first time i saw it i was very happy…Finally … after all those years…a soulmate.
“Maya is my real name. It’s unusual enough that being confused with another poster is unlikely, but I don’t particularly want to use my last name because of a crazy-stalker-ex-husband.”
no problem..
From your writings i can deduce that you understand the problem and i do find your approach honest…Good enough for me..
I am also careful before posting personal stuff online…But in this case it was necessary..
Good luck with your ex….
Science 30 November 2007:
Vol. 318. no. 5855, pp. 1368 – 1370
DOI: 10.1126/science.318.5855.1368
CARBON SEQUESTRATION:
Should Oceanographers Pump Iron?
Eli Kintisch
Companies and countries are planning a series of controversial experiments to help determine if seeding the ocean with iron can mitigate global warming. (The article is behind a paywall; the one e-letter, from Dr. Seitz, is publicly readable here and interesting)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/318/5855/1368#10731
Russell Seitz
Cambridge, MA, USA
E-Letter:
Re: Ocean Iron Fertilization
E. Kintisch’s article, “Should oceanographers pump iron?” (News Focus, 30 November 2007, p. 1368) reminds us that controversy surrounds ocean fertilization as a means of offsetting atmospheric carbon dioxide. Biologists are skeptical, because despite the late John Martin’s famous assertion, “Give me a half tanker of iron and I’ll give you an ice age” (1), many offshore areas sequester little carbon because their waters are perennially deficient in nitrogen and phosphorus as well.
But Martin’s wish for a series of massive experiments may have been realized anyway—before he was born. During the decades before oil became the dominant marine transportation fuel, burning coal to raise steam at sea spewed literally megatons a year of iron, nitrogen, and phosphorous into nutrient-deficient surface waters. ….
—-end excerpt—–
More at the link above
Worth a topic of its own?
And the info is there; this was easy to turn up, I’m sure there’s better:
“… From 1914 to 1950 world shipping shifted from coal to oil using
percentages reported in Fletcher (1997). Coal used for shipping purposes was taken to be 80,000 metric tones in 1915 (Fletcher 1997). Values for intermediate years were found by scaling scaled with shipping tonnage, assuming a 50% improvement in efficiency from 1915 to 1940….”
Fletcher, M.E. (1997) “From coal to oil in British shipping” in Williams, David M. (ed.) The World of shipping (Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, VT: Ashgate)
http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_reports/PNNL-14537.pdf
PNNL-14537
Historical Sulfur Dioxide Emissions 1850-2000: Methods and Results
S.J. Smith, E. Conception, R. Andres* J. Lurz
* Department of Space Studies, University of North Dakota
January 2004
El, 409. Take a racing car analogy. If you don’t start braking long enough before the corner you will be unable to brake hard enough to slow down to a speed able to maintain the grip needed to turn the corner. You haven’t reached the corner yet, but if you haven’t started braking as hard as possible by now, you are inevitably going to crash or at best fail to make the corner.
At some point this becomes an inevitable, unavoidable result of your lack of foresight.
Ask any F1 driver.
And THEY don’t have a pony in the AGW camp, do they.
James, 401. Scaling up of windmill and solar is linear. Scaling up nuclear isn’t. The waste product from coal burning is radioactive but spread so far and wide by the very process that makes it available that there is little increase over background.
However, nuclear is increasing the density of the radiactivity by the very process that makes it usable (refinement of uranium).
Therefore nuclear doesn’t scale linearly. The problem of clearing up becomes bigger the more plants you have.
And you can’t put a nuke power in any old place, the places you can put one of those is VERY limited (for both NIMBY, safety and national security reasons).
Microgeneration may help but that’s not being done for political reasons (teh terrists may get a nucler weepon!!!) but that is a scaling of the power generation and location availability, not the waste processing problems.
And without breeders that can produce weapons-grade material (Iran nearly got invaded for daring to try fast breeder nuclear power “Why do they need it? They have plenty of oil? Must be TERRISM!!!” forgetting the reserves in the US yet the nuclear power they produce), uranium doesn’t have a very long life at current rates of use, never mind increasing it.
And uranium is not renewable.
Fusion is still years away.
So if you go all nuclear, you have maybe a few decades to make your money to decommission and make a profit for your shareholders. And then you STILL have to get wind/solar/etc power by then unless you’ve got commercial grade fusion power working by then.
Re#399. Anne van der Bom appears to scoff at some of David McKay’s conclusions pertaining to the amount of energy/person that could be realistically supplied by wind in the UK. I admit that, by slicing and dicing his information relating to energy expenditure and production and by creating what he, himself, describes as a “cartoon Britain”, he may have misled Anne. For example, she could just as well have picked on the fact that the average Briton doesn’t take a long haul flight every year as a reason to pour scorn. However, the underlying message is that, in the UK, we use 125kWh of energy (not all electrical)/person/day, discounting a further 50kWh/person/day’s worth of imported food and stuff. With energy efficiency measures, he caculates that we might hope to reduce from 125 to 69. He suggests that onshore wind could provide 16% of the first and 29% of the second amount in the unlikely event that we were prepared to cover 10% of our land area in turbines. He further calculates that if we covered a third of our shallow offshore waters in 44000, 3MW turbines, we could produce a further 13% or 23% respectively. He neither advocates that we should go for this (maximum) level of wind nor that we should dismiss wind altogether. He is merely inviting the lay reader to appreciate the scale of the issue, something that many anti-nuclear advocates appear unwilling to do. (In fairness to McKay, he deals with nuclear energy in the same way as he approaches other energy solutions, being neither for nor against, but considering only scale and sustainability.) He does, however, conclude that ,to go carbon free, we’ll either have to import renewable electricity, probably from North Africa via mainland Europe (what with I don’t know – we seem to be running out of anything to trade with) or expand our nuclear capability because indigenous renewables will not be sufficient for our needs, let alone wants.
re417 and 419. Ocean fertilisation (Fe+/- N)
Anyone care to comment on salps (in terms of sequestration/salvation)? Seems that a single swarm can sequester 4000 tonnes of C/night by munching its way through phytoplankton. Should such be the case, 6000 swarms, with no time off for good behaviour, could take out all anthropogenic emissions. Can we be saved by jelly blobs?
Douglas, it appears lots of people have:
http://www.google.com/search?q=“climate+change”+salps
The booms in tunicates may be a consequence of rapid change at the bottom of the food chain, so understanding should precede optimism.
They aren’t as tasty as our current food choices, I hear.
Have you read Le Quere’s topic earlier here, and looked at the work she and others are publishing? Knowledge of what’s out there, let alone models about how the populations may change, is still very sketchy.
re. #82r
“I will read over his post and see what is worth responding to.” I take it by the time gap that RC has found nothing worth responding to? Or, perhaps the piece will be brought up on a separate thread?
(I apologize if I missed the response — I have not read all 424 posts but rather searched for ‘Aleo’)
Was there a study that linked cooler temperatures after WW2 to the amount of ships that were sunk during the war? There had to have been several million tons of iron added to the oceans in a very short period of time. Thats way more that “a tanker” and that extra iron could explain why increases in CO2 are only now ramping up temperature.
[Response: No way. There is a big difference between active iron (that is utilisable by phytoplankton etc.) and plain old iron. I would estimate that a sunken ship is pretty close to 100% inactive biologically. – gavin]
Douglas Wise (424), never heard of it but sounds curiously interesting. Does the eaten carbon stay sequestered when the salps die? How much salps would be necessary to have some impact? Would there still be surface water available for ships?? How much plankton to feed them?
Hank Roberts Says (20 January 2009 at 10:48 PM)
“I see your point, there were more possible physical effects than I’d mentioned, you were able to find a way to read the words to misunderstand what I was trying to say; point to you.”
No, not point to me, because it seems that I still don’t understand what you were trying to say. What I understood you as saying was that covering parts of a solar collector with opaque material would improve its efficiency, while to me it seems obvious beyond any need for discussion that if part of the sunlight is blocked before it gets to the collector, the power generated is decreased.
If you intended something else, then I missed it, so I lose a point on reading comprehension. If you’d care to explain further, please do. Until then, the point I was trying to make is that any solar collector exists in an environment. In the 15% of Nevada that some people want to cover with them, that includes things like bird droppings, dust (quite like the dust that collects on the solar panels of Mars rovers), frost & snow in season, etc. All of those are going to decrease power output and increase maintenance costs, and don’t seem to be factored in to the cost calculations of their enthusiasts.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html
Interesting survey of 3,146 US geo-scientists posted at CNN. 82% agreed that humans were a significant cause of global warming. The breakdown was also intersting showing 97% of climatologists supporting the statement, but only 64% of meterologists. What’s up with that? Are there really 12x the number of skeptics amongst meterologists?
Not so surprising, Petroleum Geologists were at the bottom of the list at 47% support.
Thanks, Hank, for your reply (#425)
I accept that artificial attempts to increase the population density of salps will probably depend upon increasing their phytoplankton feed source (either with iron or by causing nutrient rich water to upwell as suggested by Atmocean and Lovelock. In passing, I wonder whether even deeper water may be limiting in iron). Polyculture is complicated to be sure. It would probably not be a good thing to stimulate phytoplankton blooms unless one could be assured that the organisms were likely to be consumed before they died of old age and created anoxic surface conditions. However, given the voracious appetites and impressive reproductive rates of salps, one might hope that it would be possible, given the right circumstances, to engineer a situation in which phytoplankton were devoured before they could do surface damage. Those circumstances would clearly have to be researched. If the faeces and corpses of salps really do sink rapidly as claimed, it would also be necessary to see what the fate of their contained carbon was on the ocean floor. Will it be sequestered long term or munched up by other microorganisms and re-released? If it is re-released, will it stay in deep water for long enough to buy time for us to clean up our act? I accept that krill and salp densities are inversely related but this may be due to ocean conditions (? increasing acidity) rather than through direct competition. Therefore, this seems no reason not to seek potential help from salps (after appropriate research). Superficially, their potential seems too large to ignore. I was hoping to learn that appropriate investigations had been initiated.
Mark Says (21 January 2009 at 4:18 AM):
“James, 401. Scaling up of windmill and solar is linear. Scaling up nuclear isn’t.”
I don’t see how you reach this conclusion. A power grid must be able to supply power 24/7/365. Wind & solar are inherently intermittent: they generate power only when the wind blows and the sun shines. If you have say 1% of the total grid generation as wind & solar, their intermittency is compensated by the other generation in the system – the reactor gets throttled back or the spillway at the hydro plant is opened a bit – and so the cost of the solar/wind generation is simply the cost of building it.
If the fraction of intermittent generation increases, you need to build facilities to store power and release it when needed. That increases the cost of the system, so that the cost of e.g. 100% solar generation is significantly more than 100 times 1% solar.
As to the rest of your comment, most of it gets into politics to an extent that I think would not be acceptable here. I’ll just point out that there are no panaceas: everything has its problems. We’re in the position where we need to deal with the CO2 problem. We shouldn’t reject nuclear as part of a solution because of ill-grounded fears. In particular, we shouldn’t accept the “oh, but terrorists will steal fuel and turn it into weapons” argument, because – as you yourself point out – they’re doing it anyway.
Remember the Midwife Toad?
A new report states: “We investigated molecules that attach to DNA and regulate various gene activities. These DNA modifications are called epigenetic factors”
See link below. Maybe it is possible to pass on acquired traits?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090118200632.htm
re: 430. I don’t find the percent difference between meteorologists (I am one) and climatologists too surprising, just disappointing. Meteorologists generally are concerned with weather (on the order of hours, days, weeks); climatologists are concerned with climate (years, decades, centuries). It is a difference of time-scales and understanding the primary influences within those time-scales. What is unfortunate is those meteorologists who make erroneous, misguided, or disingenuous statements about climate but who have little climate understanding beyond their meteorological training or background.
RE #427
Sunken ships may have iron more active than you think!
“Back in 1991, a 100-foot-long ship sank in Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge near Hawaii. Now, 17 years later, scientists studying the area say the coral reef is under attack by an organism called Rhodactis howesii. It is a corallimorph, a relative to anemones and corals that clears out competitors with it stinging tentacles. Rhodactis is an invasive species to the Palmyra Atoll, and it doubled its presence between 2006 and 2007, pushing out the diverse mix of corals that is native there.
The research team, led by Thierry Work of the U.S. Geological Survey, says the corallimorph’s drive to take over might be fueled by its love for the iron leaching from the sunken ship. Like most marine organisms, Rhodactis needs iron to grow, as does the algae with which it has symbiotic associations. Finding so many of these corallimorphs near the high-iron areas, the researchers write, means that it might be better adapted to take advantage of the extra iron than the native corals are.
From Discover Mag Aug 20, 2008.
Off-topic, but over seven million vists to RealClimate.
Congadulations!
No, James, I guess you did misunderstand, if you read that as suggesting putting _opaque_ covers on solar panels and windows. Not a useful idea; defeating the purpose of the tool isn’t helpful. Reducing external costs as we discover them would be.
Many kinds of antireflective coatings are used now. They don’t block the light; they reduce reflection.
But these are windows and solar panels. QED.
With the news that it’s the polarization of the reflected light that confuses flying animals — it’d be wise to at fixing that problem. But not by painting over the windows, eh?
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?sourceid=Mozilla-search&q=%22solar+panel%22+antireflective
> active iron … shipwrecks
It’s another rate of change question, being researched.
E.g., “Experiments were placed on the wreck site to determine the bacterial activity at the site and the rate of biocorrosion.”
http://www.pastfoundation.org/U166/U166_final.pdf
ROV INVESTIGATIONS OF THE DKM U-166 SHIPWRECK SITE TO
DOCUMENT THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE WRECK SITE
FINAL PERFORMANCE REPORT
NOAA AWARD NO. NA03OAR4600103
“… , to document the wreck site of the DKM U-166 in 5,000 feet of water in the Mississippi Canyon Area of the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, the project was the
deepest archaeological investigation ever conducted in the Gulf of Mexico…. , to produce a detailed archaeological map of the wreck of DKM U-166, place microbiological experiments, and obtains samples of the microbiological communities present at the site. … 16.5 acres of seafloor was surveyed … we have a better understanding of … the microorganisms that now thrive on the wreck, and the events that destroyed the DKM U-166. This report describes the fieldwork that was undertaken and discusses the results of the analysis of both the archaeological and microbiological findings ….”
Just one of many, I know the deep water archeologists have done a lot of study of how and how fast the metals used in ships are transformed biologically.
Aside, I wonder how much meteroic iron is falling and washing into the oceans, compared to human activity.
[Response: Tiny. The biggest natural source by far is iron carried in mineral dust. – gavin]
James 432 that’s because you misread (surprise). The siting isn’t scalable: you can’t find a place to put 10000 nuclear power stations because of safety etc as I said. And the processing of the spend fuel etc isn’t scalable because of similar problems and keeping waste too close to other radioactive sources.
But there’s no waste and many more places you can put windmills. Or photovoltaics. Etc.
Jim Eager @ 331 writes – “an increase in atmospheric CO2, regardless of source–human or natural, will raise temperature. This is simply not disputable. It was demonstrated in laboratory experiment as early as 1859 and can be demonstrated today in any high school science lab”.
I’m interested in knowing more about these lab experiments. Are we able to demonstrate precisely how much a given parcel of air will warm in response to varying CO2 concentrations?
> iron
Thanks Gavin. One of those sources is decribed here:
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/ESD-NP-iron.html
“… There were two recognized natural sources of iron out there, atmospheric dust and upwelling from below. Where we’ve looked in the North Pacific, we’re seeing a new and important third source, the continental margins. The rules for the role of iron in the ocean carbon cycle need to be revised….
…
… published their studies in 2006, concluding that the iron had indeed come from the continental margins of the Aleutian Islands, 900 kilometers to the northwest of the site where the midwinter plankton bloom had been found. Iron particles and soluble iron had been carried there along a layer of denser water roughly 100 to 150 meters deep (the pycnocline), and the iron had been stirred up by storms that made it available to near-surface plankton in the dead of winter.”
Per Hansen’s letter to Obama, Forth Generation Nukes are the only way to supply the power to replace the Coal Plants that will no longer be built. See below:
“In our opinion, 4th GNPii deserves your strong support, because it has the potential to
help solve past problems with nuclear power: nuclear waste, the need to mine for nuclear
fuel, and release of radioactive materialiii. Potential proliferation of nuclear material will
always demand vigilance, but that will be true in any case, and our safety is best secured if
the United States is involved in the technologies and helps define standards.
Existing nuclear reactors use less than 1% of the energy in uranium, leaving more than
99% in long-lived nuclear waste. 4th GNP can “burn” that waste, leaving a small volume of
waste with a half-life of decades rather than thousands of years. Thus 4th GNP could help
solve the nuclear waste problem, which must be dealt with in any case. Because of this, a
portion of the $25B that has been collected from utilities to deal with nuclear waste justifiably
could be used to develop 4th generation reactors.”
Dan, 433, the problem is that weather depends, for example, on getting the speed of advance of a low pressure system right within 5% (or your three day forcast for where the system will be will be over 4 hours wrong).
So *accuracy* of the emergent features has a big role to play in weather.
But if you average 100 similar low pressure systems because you’re adding the total change over 10 years (the appearance of the system occurs about once a month), you can be 50% wrong and see, overall, the same difference in model as in reality, because as long as the physical process is right, the errors will be random about the mean and cancel out (binomial counting statistics).
If you got the speed of a system 50% off, you’d have no forcasting ability at all!
But some weathermen don’t think that way.
Mark,
Actually what is “accurate” for a meteorologist is really defined as “skill”. Which is skill over simply using local climatology or persistence.
Rando, here’s one place to start, proof it happens:
http://www.espere.net/Unitedkingdom/water/uk_watexpgreenhouse.htm
Work back up that site’s layers to get the whole class and see the references.
You can of course find much more available about this. Start Here button at the top of the page; first link under Science in the right sidebar.
Remember CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere; the effect occurs between the ground at your feet and the heat sink of space, and the physics of the effect as you go from ground to outer space changes with the changes in altitude/air pressure. You can find all that.
You’d have to do that desktop experiment for a variety of conditions, appropriate gas mixtures for each level of the atmosphere, to get an idea of what’s going on between you and the top of the sky.
> William, Midwife Toad
William, you’re bringing up a misapprehension that was already clarified in the original topic — you confuse methylation (or surgery!) with Lamarck’s speculation that heredity might be subject to modification due to _exertion_. You can find that in the original thread.
re: #419 hank
This reminds me:
Liebig’s Law of The Minimum is pretty fundamental, and it applies as well to iron fertilization as it does to CO2 fertilization.
Planes have always been susceptible to birds. Commercial airline jet engines are only tested to withstand only one bird. I called my pilot friend and took a look on PPRUNE and the pilot handled the situation exactly as he should have. Sometimes all you can do is crash the right way, sometimes it is just nose up or nose down, For more expert commentary check out professional pilot rumor network or PPRUNE where my personal friend Pugilistic Animus, who has an ATPL and is a professor of aeronautics can further explicate on this matter as an expert; also Old Smokey and John Tullamarine are top notch experts who can answer all questions on these bird matters. Also see DP Davies, Handling The Big Jets for discussion on the bird issues.
Mark Says (21 January 2009 at 3:58 PM):
“James 432 that’s because you misread (surprise). The siting isn’t scalable: you can’t find a place to put 10000 nuclear power stations because of safety etc as I said.”
Why would we need to place 10,000 nuclear power plants? Currently about 20% of US power generation is supplied by about 100 nuclear plants. To replace the ~50% that is generated by coal would require about 250 additional reactors. As for the locations, I think it’s only fair – and efficient – to place them as close as possible to the people who’ll be using the majority of the power.
“And the processing of the spend fuel etc isn’t scalable because of similar problems and keeping waste too close to other radioactive sources.”
I think perhaps you ought to cite some source for that claim. It certainly doesn’t square with what I know of the science & technology involved, though I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I’m not an expert.
re 449. That was a figure pulled from the wherevers.
There are a limited number of places you can put a nuclear power station. You have to consider safety (why isn’t there a nuke station in the middle of Manhattan? Because of the risk), feasibility (why isn’t there a nuke station in the middle of Manhattan? Because the foundations are already in trouble). Security issues too (why isn’t there a nuke station in the middle of Manhatan? Because securing access to the station in the middle of such a densely populated area is very much more difficult).
How many places process nuclear waste? In the EU, that’s the UK. France don’t do it, though they produce a lot more waste than the UK.
Now, you’ve asked for explanations and whys, where are yours. You so far have come with proclamations about what you think will make wind or solar power unsuitable but naff all reasoning for it. Just “It will be bad, mkay?”.
Try showing us your workings.