Alert readers will have noticed the fewer-than-normal postings over the last couple of weeks. This is related mostly to pressures associated with real work (remember that we do have day jobs). In my case, it is because of the preparations for the next IPCC assessment and the need for our group to have a functioning and reasonably realistic climate model with which to start the new round of simulations. These all need to be up and running very quickly if we are going to make the early 2010 deadlines.
But, to be frank, there has been another reason. When we started this blog, there was a lot of ground to cover – how climate models worked, the difference between short term noise and long term signal, how the carbon cycle worked, connections between climate change and air quality, aerosol effects, the relevance of paleo-climate, the nature of rapid climate change etc. These things were/are fun to talk about and it was/is easy for us to share our enthusiasm for the science and, more importantly, the scientific process.
However, recently there has been more of a sense that the issues being discussed (in the media or online) have a bit of a groundhog day quality to them. The same nonsense, the same logical fallacies, the same confusions – all seem to be endlessly repeated. The same strawmen are being constructed and demolished as if they were part of a make-work scheme for the building industry attached to the stimulus proposal. Indeed, the enthusiastic recycling of talking points long thought to have been dead and buried has been given a huge boost by the publication of a new book by Ian Plimer who seems to have been collecting them for years. Given the number of simply made–up ‘facts’ in that tome, one soon realises that the concept of an objective reality against which one should measure claims and judge arguments is not something that is universally shared. This is troubling – and although there is certainly a role for some to point out the incoherence of such arguments (which in that case Tim Lambert and Ian Enting are doing very well), it isn’t something that requires much in the way of physical understanding or scientific background. (As an aside this is a good video description of the now-classic Dunning and Kruger papers on how the people who are most wrong are the least able to perceive it).
The Onion had a great piece last week that encapsulates the trajectory of these discussions very well. This will of course be familiar to anyone who has followed a comment thread too far into the weeds, and is one of the main reasons why people with actual, constructive things to add to a discourse get discouraged from wading into wikipedia, blogs or the media. One has to hope that there is the possibility of progress before one engages.
However there is still cause to engage – not out of the hope that the people who make idiotic statements can be educated – but because bystanders deserve to know where better information can be found. Still, it can sometimes be hard to find the enthusiasm. A case in point is a 100+ comment thread criticising my recent book in which it was clear that not a single critic had read a word of it (you can find the thread easily enough if you need to – it’s too stupid to link to). Not only had no-one read it, none of the commenters even seemed to think they needed to – most found it easier to imagine what was contained within and criticise that instead. It is vaguely amusing in a somewhat uncomfortable way.
Communicating with people who won’t open the book, read the blog post or watch the program because they already ‘know’ what must be in it, is tough and probably not worth one’s time. But communication in general is worthwhile and finding ways to get even a few people to turn the page and allow themselves to be engaged by what is actually a fantastic human and scientific story, is something worth a lot of our time.
Along those lines, Randy Olson (a scientist-turned-filmmaker-and-author) has a new book coming out called “Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style” which could potentially be a useful addition to that discussion. There is a nice post over at Chris Mooney’s blog here, though read Bob Grumbine’s comments as well. (For those of you unfamiliar the Bob’s name, he was one of the stalwarts of the Usenet sci.environment discussions back in the ‘old’ days, along with Michael Tobis, Eli Rabett and our own William Connolley. He too has his own blog now).
All of this is really just an introduction to these questions: What is it that you feel needs more explaining? What interesting bits of the science would you like to know more about? Is there really anything new under the contrarian sun that needs addressing? Let us know in the comments and we’ll take a look. Thanks.
Oh, got it, the “.” got included in your link
Here’s the correct link: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_etal.pdf
CSS – well some aspects are definitely mature. Separating out CO2 is done all the time in natural gas plants, pumping CO2 into ground is also common in oil extraction.
Funnily enough the research efforts in storage side of CCS is pretty heavily dominated by questions of long term storage etc. At first glance, a natural reservoir that has held methane for a million years or so stands a reasonable chance of holding CO2 for a long time too. Have a look at http://www.co2crc.com.au for more detail into this research. My section is involved with some of these projects.
I wouldnt rush to writeoff a technology that might be part of the solution before the research results are in.
“The question of feedback “negative and positive”, ocean currents, aerosols, solar influence, magnetic influence, orbital anomalies and a whole bunch more are yet to be answered in any detail.”
Uh, there’s a whole shedload of difference between the current knowledge of those elements and “yet to be answered in any detail”.
Care to enlighten us with your knowledge?
Press wrote: “I understand more than you might believe and for that very reason also understand that our fact base is far from complete. The question of feedback ‘negative and positive’, ocean currents, aerosols, solar influence, magnetic influence, orbital anomalies and a whole bunch more are yet to be answered in any detail. How do various factors interlace?, do cosmic rays have an effect?, what causes ice ages?, why has the climate varied so much over the ages?”
You are misinformed about what climate science does and does not know.
Press wrote: “When you can answer these points with authority I will listen and worship – until then – lets try to learn instead.”
You can correct your misunderstandings if you try to learn from the resources on this site.
At present, practical, cost-effective, functional carbon capture and sequestration technology for coal-fired power plants exists only as an excuse for building more coal-fired power plants that don’t have such technology, but can be marketed as “CCS Ready”.
300
Groundhog Day the movie is what Gavin is referring to – where an unfortunate time traveller gets caught in a loop with slight variations and keeps repeating the same day over and over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)
Beyond that Wiki is your friend
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day
Press – “do cosmic rays have an effect”. Not that we can measure so far. “what causes ice ages” – um, what do you find wrong with current models? Yes, figuring out the details of some north/south variations and some bumps remain issues but the broad pattern? (or for that matter much of fine pattern)? The issues in paleoclimate is not trying to find some unknown causative process, but constraining what was happening with the well-known influences (like atmospheric composition, insolation, volcanism). Want to guess what the thermohaline regime was 90myr ago?
Press, The fact of the matter is that all you have done is go to a couple of denialist blogs and absorb the talking points. You know it, and anybody who has actually done the work to understand the science (which is most folks here) knows it.
Would you say that electromagnetism is in its infancy? How about statistical mechanics? The theory of evolution? Yet these fields are roughly the same age as climate science.
In constructing a scientific theory, you start with your long poles–the things that are most important to the phenomenon. Certainly greenhouse forcing is such a long pole, and CO2 is the second most important greenhouse gas after water. That is why CO2 forcing is very tightly constrained in the models. Are there other things we need to know better? You bet. They don’t change the amount of CO2 forcing much though, because CO2 forcing has some very unique properties and is independetly constrained by 9-12 independent sources of data.
Likewise, if you are working with a dataset, you know it will be imperfect. So you study the imperfections and figure out ways to filter or correct them. Temperature is a spatiotemporal field. It should be roughly continuous. We know nearby stations shouldn’t vary too wildly from each other for no reason, and consecutive readings shouldn’t vary too wildly either without reason. We know there will be a yearly dependence, a daily dependence, etc. Using these facts we can construct an algorithm that ensures that we get reasonable data. How do we know it works? Well, we have independent measures of temperature–including satellite measurements, proxy data, the independent reconstructions of other researchers, etc. We also have qualititative factors like the fact that ice is melting all over the globe and corroborative observations such as stratospheric cooling, etc. If we had to rely on only one of these, we might be worried about systematic errors. However, the chances of simultaneous systematic errors seeping into independent analyses in all these different fields is infinitesimal. And you don’t have to take my word for it. You can listen to the National Academies of Sciences of more than 70 countries (including pretty much all developed nations), every professional scientific society that has reviewed the data and taken a position, the Department of Defense–hell, even Exx-Mob’s own sicentists!
Look, Press, you owe it to yourself to at least look at the history so that you get that right. Read this excellent history by Spencer Weart from the American Institute for Physics:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/
I know Spencer. He’s a good physicist, good historian and a good guy. Please read it. By rejecting good science, all you are doing is ensuring that the solutions we develop will not have your input.
“It shows that the Rural stations have been cooling and the Rural + Small Town + Adjusted Urban are flat since 1950. ”
Well is shows some regions of US are – ones closer to equator. Note also the broad agreement between rurul and rural + Small town + adjusted Urban. Now look at the global map. GISS is more than just US regions. Also look at plate 2. You see same warming if you just use rural.
I would like to add my voice of thanks for the effort made by the team here.
One thing I would appreciate is something on the implications for agriculture (I’d have a go myself as regards the crops, except that I no longer have ready access to the literature). The simplistic ‘don’t worry, everything will work out fine’ argument is that, for crops, more CO2 = more growth = higher yields but it is much more complicated than that. For example, higher temperatures = heat stress = poor pollination = reduced yields. There are also potential problems with diseases, pests, the movement of agriculture into areas with poor soil and no infrastructure and so on.
For some of the non-scientists, especially those who think that 4 years can determine a trend, a simple description of the procedures for measuring variability and the meaning of ‘variance’ and ‘significance’ might be useful, concentrating on the concepts rather than the mathematics. Alternatively, give a link to a suitable site. I had a quick search, but the ones I found assume more background in statistics than is probably appropriate.
Ray Ladbury writes: “Read this excellent history by Spencer Weart from the American Institute for Physics.”
And speaking of which, it was exactly 150 years ago yesterday (5+ months before the publication of “On the Origin of Species”) that John Tyndall gave his first public presentation on his experimental work on the absorption of various wavelengths of the electro. spectrum by various gases, including ozone, water and CO2, showing definitively the strong absorption–and re-radiation–by certain molecules and gases in the infra-red (the “ultra-red” as he called it). Very interesting reading here, by Tyndall describing his experiments in great detail, e.g.:
“Those who like myself have been taught to regard transparent gases as almost perfectly diathermanous, will probably share the astonishment with which I witnessed the foregoing effects. I was indeed slow to believe it possible that a body so constituted, and so transparent to light as olefiant gas [ethylene, C2H4], could be so densely opake to any kind of calorific rays; and to secure myself against error, I made several hundred experiments with this single substance.”
“De Saussure, Fourier, M. Pouillet, and Mr. Hopkins regard this interception of terrestrial rays as excercising the most important influence on the climate. Now if, as the above experiments indicate, the chief influence by excercised by the aqueous vapor, every variation of this constituent must produce a change of climate. Similar remarks would apply to the carbonic acid diffused throught the air, while an almost inapprecialbe admixture of any of the hydrocarbon vapours would produce great effects on the terrestrial rays and produce correspondin changes of climate. It is not therefore, necessary to assume alterations in the density and height of the atmosphere to account for different amounts of heat being preserved to the earth at different times; a slight change in its variable constituents would suffice for this. Such changes may in fact have produced all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal. However this may be, the facts above remain; they constitute true causes, the extent alone of the operation remaining doubtful.”
See:
http://onramp.nsdl.org/eserv/onramp:16571/n3.Tyndall_1861corrected.pdf
http://books.google.com/books?id=mOAEAAAAYAAJ&q=lampblack&source=gbs_keywords_r&cad=1#search_anchor
Gavin, there is no need to “calm down” – it is just a scientific question, one that climate scientists seem ill equipped to handle. Despite the great work done by climate scientists to inform the public, when it comes to energy, you folks are embarrassing yourselves. Here is the basic perspective you should consider adopting:
1) Any energy technology has two components – theoretical models and prototype demonstrations. This is true for solar PV, gas turbines, nuclear reactors, ethanol plants, oil refineries, you name it. If the claims are not supported by models and prototypes, they are worthless – like climate claims unsupported by models or data. OK? That’s a very basic point in energy technology science, which is routinely under assault from nonsensical claims – i.e cold fusion, zero-point energy, and yes, coal carbon capture.
2) You should be able to build a benchtop model and a computer model, just as is done with other systems. So, let’s get some coal, build a little mini-turbine, and send the exhaust down a scrubber system, and work out the details – but no, we don’t see that, do we? Why not?
The reason is pretty obvious – anyone who studies engine thermodynamics knows the answer. If you block the exhaust, what happens? Anyone who has ever seen the output of a coal plant at full tilt knows what I’m talking about – it will never happen.
Consider secondly that a typical full-size coal power station generates 30 million tons of CO2 per year – as a 10% CO2 mixture in flue gases. Are you really going to sit there with a straight face and claim that you can bury all that CO2 “in the ground”? How many miles of steel pipe, how many pumps along the line – it would be at least as hard to transport as natural gas, but what would supply the power? What do you think the energy loss would be for 100% carbon capture from coal? I seriously doubt you could break even, meaning all the coal energy would go to capture the coal emissions.
There’s no possible way it can be justified, and no one dares try – even your claims are not based on any scientific platform, are they? Are you really claiming we will be able to capture even a tiny fraction of coal plant combustion in the U.S.? Show me some models, or some prototypes, or just admit you are wrong.
For solar PV, I can supply dozens of different prototypes, full-scale systems, theoretical models – you name it. The same goes for natural gas turbines and nuclear reactors – but coal carbon capture? Not a single working prototype exists – not one! Oh, they claim to have them – but the performance data? It’s proprietary. So are the models. What would you say if some climate researcher said you couldn’t look at his model because it was proprietary?
In reality, this is an astounding fraud being perpetrated on the American public by the DOE, the coal lobby, and academic scientists who have found a berth as long as they agree to promote the propaganda. That’s a disaster for science and for the American public.
Face it – the whole notion is wildly unsupportable, as unscientific a notion as creationism. Name one single person who is willing to defend such technology at a nitty-gritty level of detail – I’m positive I could easily demolish their arguments. If you like, send this to Frank and ask for a response on this blog, and we can have the debate right here. Or maybe Jeffrey Sachs can weigh in on the thermodynamic issues involved, as he is an ardent supporter?
Yes, I am saying that there is not a single person inside the entire DOE-coal complex who dares to debate this topic in a public forum – any takers?
In reality, this is an astounding fraud being perpetrated on the American public by the DOE, the coal lobby, and academic scientists who have found a berth as long as they agree to promote the propaganda. That’s a disaster for science and for the American public..
Completely out of line Ike. I’m not in favor of CCS at all either, but insinuations of scientists in a conspiracy, and being bought out, not to mention the trashing of Gavin’s book based on this one topic, are not going to get you anywhere.
Press and the denier blog fans may just have a very sharp bone to try and swallow tomorrow in Nature
Carbon Emissions Linked To Global Warming In Simple Linear Relationship
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610154453.htm
•••
Press…..some up to date reading that is very current and available on line.
Climate book – new and very up to date – worth the time
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/ClimateBook/ClimateVol1.pdf
The following recent Nature study could use some expert interpretation.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7248/abs/nature08047.html
The results seem to challenge the notion of “climate sensitivity” by saying that CO2-related warming is dependent on emissions instead of atmospheric concentration, although the results appear mostly consistent with current projections.
[Response: It’s cumulative emissions – similar in many ways to the studies we discussed in April (‘hit the brakes’). -gavin]
> What would you say if some climate researcher said you couldn’t
> look at his model because it was proprietary?
As I recall we’ve had at least one climate researcher visit here whose work is to some extent proprietary — recall the discussion of how to figure out where to drill for oil and gas by modeling the climate of the past in which the sedimentary basins actually formed and, as one of our more notorious congressmen put it, quite recently, “just drifted” up to Alaska. Nice fellow as I recall. I wish we heard more from those who are doing models that are proprietary, they must be rather well funded and work well for their purposes. It’d be quite a contribution if they were made public.
Same for anything to do with coal, certainly time for proprietary ideas to come forward — particularly if they’re getting the DOE money just announced in the last day or so for demonstration plants.
What kind of magic would it take? Oh, a cheap way to break water into hydrogen and oxygen would help, magic nanotech/solar; burn the hydrogen in air; use the oxygen for a closed pure oxygen coal plant making pure CO2 output; mine the result for all the thorium and uranium, oops, now we’re threatening hard rock mining industry …
Doesn’t make a lot of sense does it?
So there’s a topic for someone — looking at the money DOE just committed, close to a billion for energy projects. Closely. Maybe not here. What became of that Real Climate Economics group, did they get there yet?
Chuckle. A first step might be to arrange for all these papers to be made available to the public to read, even just starting with 2009. As long as the research is paywalled, even “non-proprietary” doesn’t mean people can actually read the work.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&safe=off&scoring=r&q=carbon+capture+coal&as_ylo=2009&btnG=Search
But, Ike, you could start here — first hit from that page. Main link doesn’t work; Google’s cache does, for now.
http://66.102.1.104/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&safe=off&scoring=r&q=cache:LXOePX9Ke8QJ:aiche.confex.com/aiche/s09/preliminaryprogram/abstract_145731.htm+carbon+capture+coal
“… The SECARB team, led by the Electric Power Research Institute and Southern Company, conducted a Phase II Saline Reservoir Field Test at Mississippi Power Company’s (a subsidiary of Southern Company) Plant Victor J. Daniel, a power generation facility capable of delivering over 1,000 megawatts of coal-fired electricity into the Jackson County power grid. The field test was conducted from October 2-28, 2008, with a total of 3,027 tons of natural CO2 injected. The project was a success, with the lower Tuscaloosa reservoir demonstrating excellent injectivity as evidenced by an average wellhead pressure of 1,100 pound per square inch during the injection of 180 tons of CO2 per day (about 3 MMcfd). Post-injection plume monitoring tools, vertical seismic profile and a neutron log, were deployed in December, and the results will be assessed during early 2009. This data is of paramount importance to the design and implementation of the Anthropogenic Test.
The SECARB Phase III development project consists of two related field demonstrations; an “Early Test” that utilizes pipeline CO2 and the “Anthropogenic Test” that will use coal-fired power plant CO2. In addition to field test at Plant Daniel, the reservoir properties of the lower Tuscaloosa are being studied in the SECARB Phase II Stacked Storage project led by The Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) at the University of Texas at Austin. This small-volume injection field test currently is underway at the Cranfield Oilfield, located near Natchez, Mississippi. The Phase III Early Test will expand the Detailed Area of Study of the current Cranfield test and take advantage of ongoing CO2-enhanced oil recovery (EOR) efforts by the field operator, Denbury Resources, International, during 2009 and 2010. This presents SECARB with the opportunity to monitor the large-volume injection of approximately 1.5 million tonnes of CO2, injected over a 1.5-year period, in the down dip water leg of the oil reservoir in order to test commercial and experimental monitoring, verification and accounting (MVA) protocols. Both field tests at Cranfield will provide important data in preparation for the Anthropogenic Test. …”
They’re from Missippi. They should be willing to show their work.
# 309 Read page 25 of http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_etal.pdf. He seems to sgree with Anthony. However, two years later in http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Hansen_etal.pdf Hansen changes his view.
Jim N
JIm, I appreciate the Tyndall quote, and all the more as it cites Pouillet, about whom I just published a short article. (“The Science of Global Warming In The Age Of Napoleon III.”) Not included is this bit of cool trivia–is there anything Pouillet didn’t investigate?:
“He also published an image of a sample waveform. This could be a facsimile of an actual recording Pouillet had made in the way he described. If so, it’s arguably a “record” of the vibrations of a tuning fork made before the invention of the phonautograph. It dates, though just barely, from the first half of the nineteenth century.”
In other words, Pouillet may have created the earliest surviving sound “recording.” (The site includes an MP3 of the “playback.”)
http://www.firstsounds.org/features/pouillet.php
There’s a link to an MP3 of the image “played back.”
Also coincidentally, the 14th–Sunday–will be the 131st anniversary of Pouillet’s death.
Quit being an ass, it was no such thing.
You said:
Now … you tell me where there’s a question in that paragraph.
Please be precise.
Just a comment on John Mashey’s post (216) about my analysis of Plimer. I am not mounting a defense of “mainstream” climate science (others like RealClimate and my colleague David Karoly do that so much better than I do). I am mounting an attack on the lack of scientific integrity. Thus I don’t attack Plimer for disagreeing with the IPCC, I attack him for lying (extensively) about what is actually in the IPCC reports. Similarly, I am concentrating on where he misrepresents his cited references, and where his time series are something other that what he claims. I seem to be getting slow in my old age. It was only yesterday that I noticed that figures 38,39, 40 repeat Michale Crichton’s scam of making the trend look different by using different vertical scales. Since I am only halfway through my list of potential leads, this more targetted role seems to be enough to go on with.
re: #322 Ian Enting
Ahhh, good distinction.
At a bare minimum, work ought to get numerous basics right, and if it doesn’t even do that, serious arguments about real science are fairly pointless. From Ian’s current list, numerous simple “errors” are easily findable.
[I recommend Ian’s nice book Twisted, which does actually ship outside Australia.]
But, this just reinforces my general advice: when something is so bad that people can easily find pervasive simple “errors”, and are doing so, doing it again does not seem a good use of RCers’ time.
RE #241 & 252, I know a biologist who is studying climate change – Dr. Camilla Parmesan (UT-Austin). I believe her findings relate to how plants and animals are out of sync due to earlier warming — e.g. some bug eaten by some baby birds is coming too early or the birds are born too early and they die of starvation. Or another example — some pollinator coming at the wrong time & crops or plants don’t get pollinated. Things like that… Apparently it’s a pretty big problem for many species worldwide. Examples of how minor climate changes can wreak havoc.
“What is it that you feel needs more explaining? What interesting bits of the science would you like to know more about?”
I’d like you to revisit the role of the oceans in the carbon cycle.
The amount of fossil carbon we can “get away” with emitting will depend to a large extent on how natural processes of carbon uptake/release respond to rising temperatures and elevated levels of carbon dioxide. Important natural processes include those of oceanic uptake and release of atmospheric carbon.
I recently looked into this issue, attempting to make sense of the relevant passages in the 4AR. I found what I thought was the definitive source to be very unclear on the topic and possibly incorrect in some respects.
I tentatively concluded that the key oceanic process is turnover of surface waters, i.e. the large-scale circulation of the oceans. Compared to the equilibrium case (i.e. absent anthropogenic carbon) this process moderates atmospheric CO2 increases, NOT by removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but by releasing LESS than was the case at lower atmospheric CO2 levels.
I’ve posted my conclusions on my blog:
http://unchartedterritory.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/ocean-carbon-uptake-further-reflections/
I’m a generalist with an interest in climate science. I’d be interested in reading a discussion of this issue by a Realclimate expert.
Chris Dudley,
The surface area of the Earth is about 5.1 x 10^14 square meters, more than a hundred times your figure.
Well, the surfacestations.org freaks seem to be out in force.
Watts’s so-called analysis is worthless for the following reasons:
1. No quantification. He shows photos of temperature stations allegedly next to air conditioners and so on. We don’t see them in three dimensions, so he could easily have shot them so apparently almost-touching objects were really ten feet apart.
2. He doesn’t get that a HIGH temperature is not the same as a RISING temperature.
3. He has no model for how the alleged hot stuff affects the temperature stations. No calculations. Nothing. This goes back to point 1.
4. Statistical investigation of the urban heat island effect shows that it is negligible. Example studies:
Hansen, J., Ruedy, R., Sato, M., Imhoff, M., Lawrence, W., Easterling, D., Peterson, T., and Karl, T. 2001. “A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change.” J. Geophys. Res. 106, 23947–23963.
Peterson, Thomas C. 2003. “Assessment of Urban Versus Rural In Situ Surface Temperatures in the Contiguous United States: No Difference Found.” J. Clim. 16(18), 2941-2959.
Peterson T., Gallo K., Lawrimore J., Owen T., Huang A., McKittrick D. 1999. “Global rural temperature trends.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 26(3), 329.
5. The trends found by the surface stations are also found in sea-surface temperature stations. Are there urban heat islands on the ocean? They are also found by borehole temperature analyses, balloon radiosonde readings, and temperature readings. The land stations simply aren’t anomalous. Watts’s contention therefore falls under the logical fallacy of “subverted support”–he’s providing an explanation for a phenomenon (too-high temperature trend from surface stations) that doesn’t exist.
Watts’s work is worthless. Repeat that until it sinks in.
CAPTCHA: “steamier City”
I have an idea. Maybe the denialists need a site like Answersingenesis that tells them what arguments are so embarrassingly discredited that even they don’t recommend them. My first three nominees are:
1)the greenhouse effect violotes the 2nd law of thermo
2)climate change is in its infancy
3)saturation
Press writes:
You might want to learn something about climate science before you lecture the rest of us about it.
Jean-Baptiste Fourier proposed the existence of the atmospheric greenhouse effect in 1824. Louis Agassiz demonstrated that ice ages had existed in the 1850s. John Tyndall showed that the major greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere were water vapor and carbon dioxide in 1859. Svante Arrhenius proposed Anthropogenic Global Warming theory in 1896.
That would make climate science older than quantum physics or relativity. It predates the explanation of the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion, the invention of radiocarbon dating, the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, heavier than air flight, and space travel. As scientific fields go, climate science, hving had nearly 200 years to develop, is one of the oldest and most thoroughly developed of the sciences.
That doesn’t mean we know all we need to know about climate. It does mean climate science is not “in its infancy” and therefore easily set aside by crackpots with a political agenda.
Press, still resolutely refusing to actually crack a book on the subject, writes:
Could you be more specific?
On global warming? No. The cosmic ray profile has been flat for the last 50 years.
Milutin Milankovic worked that one out in 1930 and his answer was generally accepted by the 1970s. Google his name.
Because of the changing luminosity of the sun, composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, and changes in the arrangement of the continents and ice caps.
Physician, heal thyself.
“# Barton Paul Levenson Says:
12 June 2009 at 4:48 AM
Chris Dudley,
The surface area of the Earth is about 5.1 x 10^14 square meters, more than a hundred times your figure.”
I was wondering about that. I had thought (though I couldn’t remember where that thought started) that ~5atmospheres was what you’d get with the hydropshere puffed up into the atmosphere, so the 30bar atmosphere Chris got did seem a little high.
Kept meaning to check.
Mind you, I’ll have to check YOUR figures now, since 0.3bar seems to me to be a little low.
Barton (#326),
The order of magnitude is OK. I used non-standard notation: 488×1012 square meters for the surface area of the Earth which in standard notation comes to about 4.9×1014 square meters, close to your 5.1×1014 square meters. So, the factor of 100 is not a problem. There is a smaller discrepancy though. Your 5.1 looks to be correct. I got 4.9 by dividing 361 square kilometer, the area of ocean, by 0.74, the fraction of coverage given here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean
My guess is that the 0.74 figure is for the area of the Earth covered by water rather than by ocean alone as stated in th article and this may be the origin of the actual discrepancy between the two figures.
I did neglect to multiply by g so that the 3 million kg/m2 should have been converted to 30 million N/m2 and thus 300 atmospheres rather than 30. The surface temperature would then have to be about 400 C to keep that mass aloft.
Currently, the amount of hydrogen that can be lost from the atmosphere is limited by the dryness of the stratosphere. One may not need to evaporate all the oceans to change that. But, a wet top of the atmosphere still faces a random walk problem for losing hydrogen.
Thanks for raising the question since it turned up an order of magnitude error though in a different place.
Hank and Jim, those are not really scientific issues and Hank’s paper is about CO2 injection for oil recovery, not for storage. Calling CO2-based oil-extraction “sequestration” is just plain false.
It’s like the iron fertilization nonsense – why not just pipe the coal plant emissions to the ocean, dump in a lot of iron, and solve the problem? That’s about as plausible an approach.
Consider the full-scale economic-energy budget analysis for a coal carbon capture plant operated by a large utility. You would do this just as is done for a natural gas power plant or for an ethanol refinery.
See this discussion of waste heat recovery (CHP) in fermentation-distillation plants, for example:
Now, this is a win for the owner of the plant – invest in some reengineering and cut your costs in half. The advantages of waste heat recycling also apply to oil refineries and natural gas-fired power plants.
Now, look at the coal capture plant, where instead of reducing energy costs, you vastly increase them. A significant amount of the energy from the coal being burned will have to be used to capture the CO2 in pure form – as a gas, remember. No, what I am looking for is prototype and model-based estimates of the energy loss involved in 100% coal CO2 capture – a pretty simple question, yet no one can supply any answers.
Not only that, any contaminants in the coal emissions – hydrocarbon residues, mercury, arsenic, selenium, and sulfur, for starters – will likely poison and damage the filters and/or catalysts used in the process, leading to high equipment replacement costs.
So, let’s say our utility drops $1 billion on a big coal carbon capture plant to replace their old pulverized coal turbine system. Immediately, they would have to double, triple, quadruple? their coal purchases, at the very least – that’s in order to keep electrical output up at previous levels. That means costs skyrocket, as do emissions – instead of 30 million tons of CO2 per year, you’d have a minimum of 60 million tons per year to dispose of – and burying such quantities “in the ground” (this is just ONE coal plant) is a ridiculous notion.
The obvious first initial result would be skyrocketing electrical rates. The coal mines would love it, and so would the railroads, because they’d be shipping far more coal than now – except that the technology does not work as advertised, any more than does “iron fertilization technology”.
It’s unscientific nonsense, but it is massively supported by the Department of Energy and their primary National Labs contractor, Battelle Memorial Institute, who together control the ‘proprietary technology’ and funnel millions in research dollars towards it – all as a propaganda stunt. It’s as if the DOE started dumping a few billion dollars a year into cold fusion research – “to find out what works.”
It really is technobabble, with silly references to previous technological achievements. Try this for an equivalent absurdity:
“We can land a man on the moon, why can’t we get the world’s oceanic algae population to take up all this excess CO2 for us?”
Maybe if we asked nicely…
One other thing on Jim Bouldin’s comments – bad scientific information in a book does tarnish the entire book. What if there had been a similar chapter lauding the ability of ocean iron fertilization to “solve the climate problem”?
Jim Hansen is certainly a prolific climate scientist, as is Gavin, but the point here is that expertise in climate science does not translate into expertise in energy science – and look at how dismissive climate scientists have been of energy engineers who claim there is no atmospheric CO2 problem (with good reason, of course) – for example, see this:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution stunned those of us here at the Heartland Institute April 5 when it published a letter from Heartland friend James Rust, a retired Georgia Tech nuclear engineering professor with more than 50 years experience teaching and research in areas related to energy policy.
A prominent scientist has said something! Let’s read it:
There is no consensus on AGW. The computer models used to predict global warming can not duplicate actual conditions in the atmosphere. While carbon dioxide has been increasing at the rate of about one part per million annually the past century, global temperatures have risen, fallen, risen, and now falling the past ten years.
Ho hum… this of course does not invalidate the nuclear science work of James Rust, but it still is wild nonsense, just as is coal carbon capture.
As far as “insinuations about scientists” I was mainly referring to the DOE and Battelle-based coal carbon capture proponents and to the outside universities who tap those coal capture funding sources.
[edit for relevance]
So, yes, I stand by my comment on academic scientists trading in scientific integrity for berths in such corporate-academic-government complexes. There are just too many examples to conclude otherwise, and yes, it points to a serious, fundamental problem within the U.S. academic and scientific establishment – one that is seriously hampering efforts to bring renewable energy online as a replacement for fossil fuels.
[Response: You are not reading the same chapter Frank wrote (who is plenty qualified to discuss this). Where does it say that CCS will “solve the climate problem”? You appear to me arguing against it even being mentioned! Instead, the chapter goes into some detail about what is required in order to sequester carbon and the technologies that already exist to do so (and yes, there are estimates of the additional energy burden that would entail – roughly a 50% increase). None of us work for DOE or Batelle and attempts to dismiss discussion of CCS because of their allegedly questionable activities is simply a smear. – gavin]
Does the removal of CO2 from the waste gas stream of a coal plant necessarily require that it be purified? I think I read somewhere that activated charcoal (or biochar) could, in combination with ammonia, convert SO2, NOx and CO2 into a fertiliser, primarily ammonium carbonate with a high organic carbon composition.
I have no idea as to practicality or scalability but one would certainly be producing a high value product rather than a waste in need of sequestration.
Could anyone elaborate?
Gavin, another area where you might go into new material, perhaps — rapid events. I know these are hard to resolve in the record.
Purely as an example — I’m not asking about this one in particular, but about a topic on natural rapid change events generally:
Deglacial variations in South Atlantic deep water ventilation
Barker, S.; Broecker, W.S.; Diz, P.; Vautravers, M.; Hall, I.R.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008AGUFMPP23A1458B
“… New benthic-planktonic foraminiferal 14C results from the deep South Atlantic reveal significant variability in deep water ventilation during the last deglacial period. … Our results suggest very rapid (less than 500 yr) ventilation of the deep South Atlantic during the [Bolling/Allerod period].”
That’s fast change with only natural forcings operating.
Much more turns up, searching on terms found in that abstract:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=deglaciation+%22Mystery+interval%22
I wonder what this did to plankton/biological cycling.
Another thread possible eventually: results from the lab work on samples from Eric’s and Peter Ward’s recent trip on that icebreaker. I realize it may take a year to work up the collection for publication.
Ike Solum — There are completely straightforward ways to capture CO2 from the air. Use plants to capture the carbon, use anaerobic digestion to produce biogas. Use 100% existing technology to separate the biogas into methane (goes into the natural gas pipelines) and captured CO2. Pumping CO2 around is already done; there is such a pipeline from SW Colorado to Texas. Costs must be similar to pumping natural gas around; modest.
The difficulty is scaling up. Significant CCS from biomass would require a lot of hectares. Think Sahara Desert size.
With just the most minor web searching you can learn about the pilot CO2 sequestration project being conducted in Germany. For geochemical reasons leakage is most unlikely to be an issue.
I don’t get the point about condemning CCS either. Vattenfall’s pilot plant looks promising enough for them to believe that they can compete with today’s overall efficiency by optimizing the primary energy cycle and compete with non-CCS (but equally optimized) plants by 2015 through emission rights trading.
Of course, the renewable crowd opposes it (at least as fiercely as they oppose nuclear) and sometimes one has to wonder, what they really want – less CO2 or just more windturbines and PV panels.
Chris Dudley Says (12 June 2009 at 9:06 AM):
“…thus 300 atmospheres rather than 30. The surface temperature would then have to be about 400 C to keep that mass aloft.”
OK, this is one boundary condition – boil the whole ocean – and one that’s highly unlikely to impossible. What I’m asking, though, is whether there might be other quasi-stable states between current conditions and that, where added CO2 raises temperatures, increases amount of water vapor in the air, which adds its own greenhouse forcing, and initiates a “runaway” that stops at the new state. The stereotypical “Cretaceous steambath” might be one such, but might there be others that’d be appreciated only by thermophilic bacteria?
“Currently, the amount of hydrogen that can be lost from the atmosphere is limited by the dryness of the stratosphere.”
Wouldn’t it also be limited by the rate at which H2O photodissociates?
Re CCS; the difficulty is the shear volume of stuff involved to make any material difference. For every litre of fuel we burn or every kg of coal you end up with roughly two kq of CO2. So the ‘make it go away’ system has to have TWICE the transport processing and handling capacity as the ‘dig it up system’.
In other word to continue to use fossil fuels we have to create a parallel system with TWICE the capacity of the extraction system just to make it go away. This does not add anything to the available energy, and the additional energy demands of the ‘make it go away and stay away’ system will be huge, and if we are to sustain present-day net energy availability for end users, then we will need a hugh increase in energy production to address the CC and S, which is a double whammy as far as emissions are concerned.
Also its been calculated that to meet the increased global economic recovery expectations of the G8 will require a massive increase in demand for energy and an increase in crude production of about 25%. If we add the ‘make it go away’ system to that it will be closer to what, +50%?. And we appear to have passed peak oil in about June 2008. +25% or more is a dream. + anything is a dream. So too is any effective level of CCS that is likely to see a halt in the rate of increase in CO2 levels.
And the net result of even 100% success in this CCS effort is that we we only stop the rot. We still get the warming thats in the pipeline, and the ice will still eventually melt, etc etc.
Then we have to figure out how to pull CO2 down from 387 to 350.
The cynical side of my normally accommodating nature cant help seeing CCS and other such mitigation efforts as make-work schemes intended to divert the well-intentioned away from the key issues before us of figuring out what to do now that we have actually broken the planet while allowing the fossil fuel industry to cary on with business-as-usual-until-it-stops in the interests of their shareholders. Likewise scientists still hold out the slender olive branch of “We must..” and “This could…” and “We can..” actually achieve the required change in the climate to right this sorry wrong. I fear they may do this simply to ensure that their readers do not flatly label them as scare-mongers. I could be wrong. But Lovelock could be right.
I also had a go at figuring our what area of mature pine trees standing at 5 metres centre to centre it would take to reduce atmospheric CO2 from 387 to 350ppm. With 1 cubic metre trees that works out at timber 4mm thick over the area – about 2cm of solid dry matter and about 1mm thick of Carbon, to be generous). Wiki the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Divide by 387. Multiply by (387-350). Vent the oxygen from the CO2 to convert that to cubic metres of carbon. Divide by 1mm to give area in square metres. The answer was silly. More than all the farmable land there is.
We should be into a life-boat building mode now, the holes in our old ship are too numerous to patch.
Kevin (320):
Interesting stuff–I look forward to reading your article. It is amazing what they did in the 19th century. I sometimes get the feeling those guys made at least one great discovery before breakfast.
Hmmm. Interesting claim, I’m looking for numbers:
“If the American people were to restore the soil fertility of the Great Plains that we have destroyed in the last 150 years, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide would be reduced to near pre-industrial levels.
Seen globally, the same results would be achieved if we humans were to increase the organic matter levels of the world agricultural and grazing lands by 1.6%.
(See Allan Yeomans, Priority One: Together We Can Beat Global Warming)”
http://www.carbonfarmersofamerica.com/
“… only soils can sequester significant amounts of atmospheric carbon in the next 30 years. Every other solution will take 30 years to start shifting meaningful volumes….
“C Sequestration in soil and vegetation is a bridge to the future. It buys us time while alternatives to fossil fuel take effect.”
http://www.carbonfarmersofamerica.com/Kiely1.htm
To those who create Real Climate:
– You are providing a very valuable service to those of us who need to understand both the advances in climate knowledge and the answers to the sceptics. PLEASE keep it up.
– Perhaps you can share the burden and increase the value but having some professional communicators put together a ‘Real Climate for Laymen’ sub-site which provides:
a) concise summaries from Real Climate with links to the full site.
b) periodic ‘What’s new in Real Climate’ newsemails which we can sign up to.
With thanks from Hong Kong
James (#339),
As I’m inclined to read Hansen’s lecture notes, buring all the hydrocabons yields a Venus-like state because, the Sun is more luminous now and the speed with which we pollute overwhelms the negative feedbacks which might be a help. A Venus like state is characterized by a very massive CO2 atmosphere with a surface temperature around 460 oC. The hydogen is mostly gone.
Having the hydrogen gone is important because the chemistry of carbonate rock has a lot to do with water. Once the water is gone, little limestone will be formed. But, in an active planet like the Earth, the existing limestone will calcinate as it is subducted, releasing CO2. So, you end up with the massive CO2 atmosphere eventually.
So long as I’m reading Hansen correctly, this scenario is something he considers very likely, should all the hydrocarbons be burned.
The balance of the photodissociation rate and the collisional reaction rate is important. When the mean free path of a proton or hydrogen molecule to a collision with atomic oxygen is about the radius of the Earth, then a good fraction of that hydrogen will escape. But, in denser parts of the atmopshere, most dissociations will be “wasted” since the hydrogen can get mopped up by combining into new OH radicals or water etc….
Yes, the photodissociation rate is important at a certain height.
Chris Dudley Says (13 June 2009 at 12:27 AM):
“A Venus like state is characterized by a very massive CO2 atmosphere with a surface temperature around 460 oC. The hydogen is mostly gone.”
Could the “hydrogen gone” state happen in much less than a billion years or so, though? I’m thinking not so much of Venus here, than of Mars, which apparently lost the ocean it had for the first billion years or so through a similar process of hydrogen loss. From what I’ve read, that ocean was comparatively smaller than Earth’s, on a planet with lower gravity (but about half as much solar energy per unit area).
Chris,
I’m sorry, I failed to notice that your 488 was not 4.88. Sorry about that.
The usual figure I see for ocean coverage of the globe, after Sellers’s 1965 estimate, is 70.8%. Sometimes this is rounded off to 71% or even 70%. I don’t know where 74% came from.
bobberger writes:
We don’t oppose carbon capture and sequestration. I certainly don’t. We do object to pinning our hopes on a technology that doesn’t exist yet, when solar and wind and biomass already work.
Jim Bouldin, thanks. The link is:
http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Science-of-Global-Warming-in-the-age-of-Napoleon-III
It takes you back to a time when climate science was a peaceful refuge from the turbulence of power politics. . .
Bob Berger, re CCS vs. renewables
What we have here are two technological solutions with really big missing pieces. For renewables, the missing piece is energy storage. This is a big issue, but we have at least some idea on how to approach it–e.g. chemical (including Li-ion batteries), mechanical (flywheels, etc.), thermal (molten salt), improved grid, etc.
CCS on the other hand is a wildcard. We don’t know how to capture CO2 from the burning coal economically. We don’t know how to store the CO2 reliably and economically. It is difficult to foresee a solution.
Certainly, it is a mistake to pre-judge a solution. However, people are bound to have varying opinions on what is in fact still an open technical issue.
Ultimately, however, there is one argument that favors renewables over coal + CCS. That is that fossil fuels and even nuclear fuels are one-time energy windfalls–finite resources that can at best meet our energy needs for a few centuries. A sustainable energy infrastructure MUST be based on renewable energy. Now we can change our energy infrastructure now to rely on different finite resources than we do at present–and then change it again in a hundred years, or we can try as much as possible to work toward sustainability NOW. Given the economic disruption associated with replacing infrastructure, the RIGHT F***ING NOW strategy has some appeal to it.
Ray, Barton,
I think we all agree, that there won’t be a switch we can throw that simply takes us from one solution to another. CCS is not supposed to work forever (as you pointed out, coal is a finite solution anyway) but it could help solving the baseload problem at least for one or two centuries and it could do that probably faster and cheaper than renewables plus storage. I don’t say its the way to go (I’d prefer nuclear) but its certainly a way we should explore. Things like li-ion batteries, flywheels, compressed air, salt, vanadium cycles etc. already exist – true – but I have yet to see a cost calculation for an industrialized area like the US or Europe that doesn’t either rely on rediculously low future prices for renewables+storage (as if using 4 times the amount of the world’s known vanadium reserves – as seen in one proposal – would actually make vanadium cheaper rather than kick its price through the roof) or uses small, badly calculated examples and simply assumes scalability without actually doing the math. If you happen to know a serious study from that area, please let me know.
On the other hand, we actually have economies running predominantly on nuclear and they seem to work well. France has a carbon emission of 6 metric tons per capita – the US have about 20. This is only half the picture, of course. In order to get rid of the emissions not coming from electricity generation, we will most likely need more electricity, which sets the target for renewables even higher. Of course, there are ideas like “Vehicle to Grid” etc. that could help in that respect – but I haven’t seen serious, large scale calculations for those as well. And they often have the problem, that they have to rely on too many things synchronously progressing forward (like renewables, electrification of traffic, grid technology in case of V2G) and depending on one another in order to work at all.