> Please confirm that you wish to make a serious and highly public
> accusation of scientific fraud against Professor Mann, in the
> knowledge that it will almost certainly be defamatory …
This sounds like “let’s you and him fight” — do you think there’s any way you can pursue a defamation claim for someone else, even if you provoke someone into doing something that could be called defamation?
What happens if you provoke someone into an act that could be defamation leaving the person defamed facing the choice of either suing over it, or accepting it without responding?
Are you trying to trigger a statute of limitation to force legal action?
Are you sure you’re doing the best thing here?
Philippe Chantreausays
Edward, you are profoundly mistaken if you think that France does not have people protesting against nuclear power. You’re also mistaken if you think that safety standards are lower there, IMO.
Wow! You are one of those guys that reads stuff on the intertubes from a guy that by all reasoned accounts presented his ideas out of context of what is known about radiative forcing; and he convinces you that industrial based CO2, CH4, N2O and High GWP’s are not really the problem.
So you post in RC, talk about your MS EE which would be called MS CE nowadays and say followers of RC are buying dogma. A religious inference, what a surprise.
Well, forget about dogma and consider the evidence in context.
1. With all this verification you’re doing, did you notice that GCR”s don’t correlate with warming?
Hey, how a bout that Laschamp event. No indicated warming??? I wonder why. Modern and paleo assessments indicate that GCR’s may have an effect but that it is much less than Svensmark thinks.
3. If the assertion for 2 W/m2 is correct then you also have to prove that the added GHG’s in the atmosphere from industrial sources are not adding to forcing. Add into your considerations that we know how much GHG’s we have added to the system.
Generally I don’t denigrate those that disagree with me, I ask them to substantiate what they are saying. I do denigrate mindless assertions that are based on fluff and mirrors though.
You simply can’t understand that GCR’s and temps don’t correlate, even though the GCR levels dropped and temps continued to rise. Hmmm, there’s a word for that.
But all of this is well quantified with GHG’s and aerosols. Hmmm…
You claim to want an open debate, but what you don’t realize is that it’s about evidence, not debate.
So feel free to prove industrial GHG’s do not trap infra red long wave radiation. You think it’s 2/3 natural 1/3 AGW. On what basis. We have tipped this system positive above thermal equilibrium. So even though the Co2 has only gone up about 1/3 in the atmosphere, the warming trend is virtually all human caused. We should be relatively stable within natural variability, we are not.
Finally, you say Co2 is not a pollutant, but you failed to parse based on the definition of pollutant. I really think it’s funny that you assert that you are intelligent and others are lacking, when you use a word that you don’t even know the definition of.
Pollution:
1 : the action of polluting especially by environmental contamination with man-made waste; also : the condition of being polluted 2 : pollutant
Now, since you are so intelligent I will illustrate for you. Co2 from the natural system is not a pollutant. Co2 that is form industrial aka manmade waste, is a pollutant.
I know, but a guys gotta dream… especially when it’s as important as this.
All I can do is keep pushing and washing the egg off my face. In this case though, I think it is critical that we get the education level up before they sign a deal. There is a lot at stake here and I don’t think people realize how expensive cap & trade will be.
MattInSeattlesays
SecularAnimist: “The USA, not France, generates more electricity from nuclear power than any other country in the world. So, obviously the suggestion that nuclear was “argued out of existence” in the USA is absurd.”
You are comparing a small country and a large one. And you know better. What if the US were at 80% of our electricity consumption were from nuclear, like France?
That 60% increase would be be 700M tons of CO2 per year LESS that we’d emit. That’s the equivalent of not driving 116M cars per year.
Sucks we didn’t do that in 1990, eh?
Keep on hoping. And in 20 years, when the status quo still shows big oil is in charge, you can pat yourself on the back. I met guys like you back in the 70’s and 80’s all over the place. Alt energy was “here and now!” back then too.
Greg Goodknightsays
It does appear that old habits will die hard here. Picking one out of the target rich environment…
“As for your “2/3 natural” attribution–ever hear of analysis of variance, O you who claim to be a physicist?” – barton paul levinson
This is exactly the sort of snarkiness that has no place in science *or* serious politics. Perhaps it’s evidence that it’s easier for a scientist to move towards writing science fiction than for a science fiction author to become a scientist.
Correlation is not the same as causality. Sometimes the apparent correlation is strictly a matter of coincidence, or choice of endpoints. Try running the same series of C)2 vs temperature starting about 500 million years ago. Do it also for Carbon-14 vs temperature. Let us know what you find.
BFJsays
The title of this blog says “…….suggestions for potential future posts are welcome.”
How about “The Inner Workings of the IPCC” ?
MattInSeattlesays
Anne van der BOM: “I might be looking at the wrong thing, so feel free to support your case with evidence (not a sales brochure of a nuclear company”
I think the most accurate data you can look at is data that is created by a person standing there with money in their hand ready to buy the wind farm or nuclear plant. They have billions on the line, so you can bet they have paid a room full of very smart people to do the calcs.
If there was a clear winner, then various government agencies (including DOE) wouldn’t be showing world wide neck-and-neck growth for nuclear and alternate energy over the next 20-30 years. And nuclear wouldn’t still be knocking down the wins that it’s showing. And let’s not forget that today’s projections for nuclear in 2025 are 25% higher than 5 years ago. That’s from the International Energy Outlook 2009 from US Energy Information Administration. And that revision occurred during the most wind-friendly period we could ever imagine.
Keep in mind, too, that nuclear is artificially more expensive that it should be due to excessive regulation. And wind is artificially cheaper than it shoudl be due to subsidies. And if they are being built at about the same rate…that alone should convince you that operational costs of nuclear are indeed lower in an even comparison.
If someone lives in a place where their population is concentrated near areas that are very windy, then fantastic. Build wind power. But if your population lives 2000 miles from the windy spots, then I can promise you wind isn’t as cost effective. And so what do they do? Build wind anyway and have it cost a fortune and fail? Do nothing and stay on petroleum?
There is now overwhelming evidence that water vapor increases warming in a positive feedback:
Brown, S., Desai, S., Keihm, S., and C. Ruf, 2007. “Ocean water vapor and cloud burden trends derived from the topex microwave radiometer.” Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium. Barcelona, Spain: IGARSS 2007, pp. 886-889.
Dessler AE, Zhang Z, Yang P 2008. “Water-Vapor Climate Feedback Inferred from Climate Variations.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L20704.
Held, I.M. and B. J. Soden, 2000. “Water vapor feedback and global warming.” Annu. Rev. Energy Environ., 25, 441–475.
Minschwaner, K., and A. E. Dessler, 2004. “Water vapor feedback in the tropical upper troposphere: Model results and observations.” J. Climate, 17, 1272–1282.
Oltmans, S.J. and D.J. Hoffman, “Increase in Lower-Stratospheric Water Vapor at Mid-Latitude Northern Hemisphere Site from 1981-1994,” Nature, 374 (1995): 146-149.
Philipona, R., B. Dürr, A. Ohmura, and C. Ruckstuhl 2005. “Anthropogenic greenhouse forcing and strong water vapor feedback increase temperature in Europe.” Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L19809.
Santer, B. D, C. Mears, F. J. Wentz, K. E. Taylor, P. J. Gleckler, T. M. L. Wigley, T. P. Barnett, J. S. Boyle, W. Bruggemann, N. P. Gillett, S. A. Klein, G. A. Meehl, T. Nozawa, D. W. Pierce, P. A. Stott, W. M. Washington, M. F. Wehner, 2007. “Identification of human-induced changes in atmospheric moisture content.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 104, 15248-15253.
Personally my interest in climate change lies in its consequences only. The science is probably okay, although as any human activity it is probably not as pristine as eg RC make out. You could gain credibility by admitting a mistake every now and then.
Anyway my interest lies in the consequences to our lives, so maybe you could discuss topics such as
1- what should to be done
2- what cna be done
3- and how much does it cost??
or maybe that is out of your scope. Or maybe you already have.
BFJsays
What would constitute proof of agw, Ray Ladbury asks above?
Of at least as much importance, is : what would constitute falsification?
In simple terms, 20 years of no overall temperature increases in keeping with CO2 increases?
Ray Ladburysays
ZT,
As long as the water stays a vapor, it will increase the greenhouse effect. Once it condenses into clouds (no longer vapor), it will either
a)precipitate out fairly rapidly
b)cool things by reflecting sunlight
c)warm things by reflecting outgoing IR
The net effect of the clouds is uncertain, but current research indicates a slight net warming effect.
john McCormicksays
Greg Goodknight, in your case,
“putting my finger to the wind”
conjures more than the usual connotation.
John McCormick
Critical Thinkersays
@701 – Apparently anyone who questions Ray’s logic for a particular item phrased in blatantly unscientific terms is a troll. Nice neat state of affairs that is!
dhogazasays
Correlation is not the same as causality. Sometimes the apparent correlation is strictly a matter of coincidence, or choice of endpoints. Try running the same series of C)2 vs temperature starting about 500 million years ago. Do it also for Carbon-14 vs temperature. Let us know what you find.
Do we get to take into account plate tectonics and solar physics or will you scream that it’s unfair to point out that no one claims that CO2 is the only thing that affects climate?
Dalesays
Joe #760, you haven’t been here long. There is so much information that you can glean from making RC one of your daily reads. Every one of you criticisms is completely wrong. RC has had to spend a lot of time dealing with people who have the least amount of information while at the same time they seem to possess the strongest convictions.
On this page alone poster like Barton Paul Levenson, John Reismean, Hank Roberts and Ray Ladbury will give you a lot of insights as well as linking you to some very good articles and data not to mention the topics of disscussion written by gavin and the other scientists.
Know the truth and the truth will set you free.
Blair Dowdensays
I would like to comment on James Hansen’s claim (in the 2008 Bjerknes Lecturereferenced by #473) that a human induced runaway greenhouse effect (Venus Syndrome) is possible. He claims that a forcing of 10 to 20 watts per square meter (which I roughly translate into four doublings of CO2, or about 2000 ppm) would be sufficient. We had this situation during the Cretaceous, when the solar constant he cites was about 1% lower, and I do not see how slow feedbacks such as weathering have much affect on a runaway greenhouse.
More to the point, after citing the “snowball earth” events in the past, he failed to spell out how the Earth recovered from them. According to this paper, Ken Caldeira and Jim Kasting estimated that carbon dioxide reached 0.12 bar (120,000 ppm!), and calculations by Raymond Pierrehumbert suggesed that tropical sea-surface temperatures reached 50 degrees Celsius. While these extreme events are controversial, I have never seen them challenged on the basis they would cause a runaway greenhouse effect.
I would expect such a dramatic challenge to not only the current consensus of the climate community, but also to a major geological theory, would appear in a submission to a peer reviewed journal, with plenty of time allowed for discussion in the scientific community, before it is presented as fact to the public. I consider this to be an example of irresponsible alarmism that scientists who want to be taken seriously should avoid.
Lynn Vincentnathansays
Here’s a topic — some of the (here) uncovered ideas in Hansen’s book.
For instance (and I feel a bit betrayed that I didn’t know this, as if it weren’t important enough to mention, even though I’ve brought up the possibility of climate hysteresis & runaway warming several times here & could have found this information enlightening) —
On page 46 (okay, I’m a slow reader), Hansen discusses climate sensitivity, and in the 4th paragraph brings up a caveat re climate sensitivity being a constant…..come to find out it’s actually a U curve (and we’re just in the huge climate range at the flat bottom). That is “if the planet becomes much colder or much warmer [as in going into climate hysteresis], climate sensitivity will increase; indeed we will meet [not really, bec we won’t be extant at that point] the ‘snowball Earth’ and ‘runaway greenhouse’ instabilities.”
A U curve, who’d have known….except all scientists here.
Walter Mannysays
Ray, it is absolutely the case that I cannot find another, better model than what comprises the consensus model at the moment. Obviously, that does not mean the consensus model is correct, though it is of course enormously appealing to our chronocentric minds to believe otherwise. We theorized a crisis, we found the crisis, and we saved helpless future generations from the result of our potential folly. What could be more gratifying for a scientist to go to his grave thinking he has changed the world for the better?
Trenberth’s “travesty” lament gives you [and Trenbeth] no pause, no doubt, and you are convinced we are still anthropogenically warming even if our instrumentation is not quite what we want. I read stuff, as you know, and I am unable to share in your monotheism yet. I find any and all single-shooter theories to be logically unlikely, and I doubt I am the only [insert pejorative here] who shies away from: It’s The Sunspots, It’s The Cosmic Rays, Its The CO2, It’s The Aerosols; It’s The Excess Marshmallow Fluff. Surely it’s a mix of things, and even more surely, once we jettison the politics, we will find a better, more complex model that will make our current models look silly. Seems as though history could teach us something there, plus which the last time I looked to the skies, I could swear I saw some Brownian motion up there.
I find the whole consensus presentation to be grossly oversimplified and, more famously, oversold. As many of the EAU emails show, there is at least some anxiety about how rock-solid the whole thing is and great concern about how matters need to be presented to the credulous public. The debate about sensitivity seems to me almost comically unresolved, the ‘thirty year’ gold standard arbitrarily established, the ten-year pause obfuscated…
I especially love the conspiracy bit, that denialism is somehow an industry, that anyone who does not buy the RC line in is some stooge in thrall to the oil-funded scientists sitting around our homes. I’m sitting in my kitchen now, as an example, chatting with Dick and Will, who are helping me edit this note – hold on, the phone just rang – never mind, it was just Exxon calling again, apologizing for the delay in payment. Oh, hi, Steve, Senator, Roger & Roger [they just walked in]. Sorry, must run… time for more indoctrination.
imapopulistnowsays
A new topic: Science Integrity.
What is needed most today is the restoration of confidence in all science, particularly climate science.
This will only happen when the public concludes that scientists and their spokespersons are bending over backwards to be fair, objective and completely open in their efforts.
You guys got caught in a trap of thinking, expecting the mainstream media and politicians would unquestioningly support your work and this resulted in a lowering of scientific standards and a politicization of the scientific process.
Now it is time to be totally open. Let the cards fall where ever, discourage the rhetoric and false accusations ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ISSUE and stick just to the facts. Do not belittle, attack the speaker, feign arrogant superior knowledge and moral authority. Rather seek first to understand the positions of everyone and seek to inform and educate. Listen to the contrarians and answer every point thoughtfully. Caution anyone who shows emotional bias – BOTH SIDES – to adhere to the scientific principals of discovery, skepticism and change as new information becomes available.
[edit]
Why not add a skeptic to you site to allow both sides to be heard. Or team up with a skeptic site to share in some capacity. Many of us truly just seek the truth. Many of us truly believe we are not being told the truth. We are not deniers, we are skeptics and rightly so. It is your responsibility not to change us into believers, but to present the facts so that we can make informed decisions.
[Response: But you have already decided. And in fact you have already decided that scientists can’t be trusted. And if everything we say is suspect, how can there be communication? Where are these honest ‘sceptics’ who don’t actually agree with the basic consensus or the six reasons why CO2 emissions are a problem? Find someone who genuinely disagrees and who doesn’t subscribe to juvenile conspiracy theories or keep repeating long-debunked nonsense and perhaps we can talk. – gavin]
Matthewsays
747, Ray Ladbury: A true skeptic must have a sufficient grasp of the subject matter to be able to offer an alternative interpretation of the evidence–all of the evidence.
A true skeptic is a person who believes that the case had been completely made, a person who gives weight to the omissions or lacunae in the scientific evidence. Einstein, for example, was skeptical of quantum mechanics, and physicists were skeptical of Wegener’s hypothesis without having an alternative explanation. Someone who believes that all the shortcomings of AGW theory will be resolved in favor of AGW is a “believer”, not a “student”.
The rate of warming from the late 70s through the late 90s has not been sustained since the late 90s. Within AGW there is not a good explanation for that. A skeptic need not have an explanation for that in order to note that it is a reason to doubt assertions by AGW proponents that the warming trend will resume imminently.
[Response: Your framing of this is all wrong. The issue is that decisions are being made right now that will strongly influence GHG levels in the future. Thus you are required to weight the potential for harm that increasing CO2 levels will have in any ethical decision. (I am assuming (hopefully without fear of contradiction) that the you think that decisions should be made ethically). If people are persuaded that there is substantial risk associated with increased CO2 in the future, then they should act on that. This does not make them ‘believers’ in the pejorative sense you imply. They might well continue to update their opinion in the light of new information. However, people who refuse to update their prior beliefs in the light of new information are rightly lambasted – and frankly that includes a lot of the so-called skeptics who have taken confirmation bias and made it into an art form. The fact that there is no coherent alternative explanation for is being observed weighs strongly in many people’s assessments of what is the most likely explanation of changes so far and thus what might be expected in the future. Informing decisions with the best available information is just common sense. – gavin]
Lynn Vincentnathansays
#760, Hi Joe. RE:
Anyway my interest lies in the consequences to our lives, so maybe you could discuss topics such as
1- what should to be done
2- what cna be done
3- and how much does it cost??
This is where I have some useful knowledge…bec I’ve been doing it. (And if you’re religious, then praying for knowledge about what to do & praying for fortitude to do it really really helps….I even keep an image of a starving African madonna & child in my mind’s eye to inspire me to keep at it….Africa will be worst hit by AGW enhanced droughts & crop/livestock failure and famine).
There are the basic principles of energy/resource efficiency/conservation. Why “resource” — because the mining/drilling, processing, shipping, manufacturing, shopping, etc also entails lots of energy & GHG emissions. Water entails energy for pumping and heating. Industrial (tractor) agriculture entails lots of energy & water (which entails energy to pump). Also synthetic fertilizers entail other GHGs, as well as energy to extract raw materials & manufacture. There there is all the paperwork at all stages — that’s trees that absorb CO2.
So that main idea is to REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE, and of the 3 REDUCE is the most effective. So double think, “Do I really need this, or really desire it (or is the desire manufactured by others, by advertisers)?” “Will it really bring me greater health, comfort, and happiness?” That should cut our purchases down by 20 to 60%, depending on how frugal we were to start. And think how much money that will save us, and we won’t need ever-increaingly bigger houses to store all that junk we don’t really need or want — so lower electric bills, etc. Moving closer to work on your next move will save money & improve health (less time in fumy car, or walk or cycle to work).
REUSE is the next principle. Avoid throwaway plates, cups, napkins (we bought a bunch of cheap cotton ones with design to hide the stains for daily use, which we just throw in the laundry), hankies (to wipe hands in public restrooms; avoiding paper throwaways also reduces destroying trees, as does using the other side of paper (I get lots of quality paper at the library, reams of it, which still have one good side, and I hardly ever use new paper). Think how less your trash will be, how fewer times you have to lug it out to the curb, and if everyone did that, the garbage bills could be reduced (less taxes). A low-flow showerhead costing $6 (using 1/2 the heated water) has saved us about $100 in water & water heating bills per year (I actually measured the different with a bucket and stop watch), and that was 20 years ago, so we’ve saved $2000, AND we can’t tell the difference between the old and new showerhead! There are lots of energy/resource products that will help us reduce our bills. Also buy at garage sales; and sell your unwanted stuff there.
RECYCLE is the next principle — manufacturing from recycled materials saves energy and finite resources. Aluminum tops the list here — I think it is a 90% saving in energy, and we save the rainforests, bec that where bauxite to make aluminum comes from. Other materials have various energy savings from recycling as well. For businesses they can go on “closed-loop” systems, which save them money. I read about a plating company in Mass. in the early 90s that used a lot of water & dumped the polluted water into the river; they were trying to meet the upcoming EPA standards and finally hit upon such a system, recycling the water instead, taking out the pollutants (that were actually valuable resources); they figured they could pay for the closed loop system through water savings in a few years, but ended up paying for itself within a year — the city main broke shortly after they installed it, and they would have had to shut down operations for 3 days, but they were able to carry on, saving them $100,000.
You can also go on ALTERNATIVE ENERGY — for instance, we are on GreenMountain 100% wind-generated electricity, which is a bit cheaper that the other dirty electric companies in our area.
Now many of these have no cost or pay for themselves and go on to save money. Once you’ve saved enough and you’re on 100% wind energy, it might be time to think about your next car being an electric or a plug-in hybrid, and drive on the wind.
And that’s just for starters…..
Louise Dsays
Thank you to all the people who have suggested books for the local library I’ll follow this up after the holidays.
I’ve just got one more question for now. I’ve just watched a you tube video promoting an organisation called WeForest. Its aim is to reforest 20 million square kilometres, with the aim of slowing or preventing climate change. The film states that ‘currently global warming is adding 1.6 watts of heat per sq metre of land. If that sq metre is covered by a cloud 80 watts of heat is reflected back into space. A’2% increase in cloud cover could halt global warming in its tracks.’ I am sure there are many good reasons for reforestation but I find it difficult to believe the above statement, it seems far too simplistic. Could someone with more knowledge than I have comment please.
Brian Dodgesays
Frank Giger — 24 December 2009 @ 12:16 PM
“The NW passage opened in the 1940’s. A one off event? Possibly. When it opened briefly a few years back, however, it was once again pointed to as unprecedented proof of AGW.”
http://hnsa.org/ships/stroch.htm
RCMPV ST. ROCH
Length: 104 feet, 3 inches
Beam: 24 feet, 9 inches
Depth of Hold: 11 feet
Draft: 12 feet, 6 inches
Displacement: 323 tons
“St. Roch was also designed to serve when frozen-in for the winter as a floating detachment with its constables mounting dog sled patrols from the ship. …Between 1940 and 1942 St. Roch navigated the Northwest Passage, arriving in Halifax harbor on October 11, 1942.”
http://www.startribune.com/local/11606756.html
“A Minnesota couple completed a 6,600-mile voyage by sailboat through the Northwest Passage.”
“Retired Minnesota hog farmer Roger Swanson and his wife, Gaynelle Templin…”
“Assisted by climate changes that have made the Northwest Passage ice-free into September, Swanson and his six-person crew completed the 6,600-mile journey through the Passage in 73 days, setting several firsts along the way.” on “Swanson’s 57-foot sailboat, Cloud Nine,”
They document at least 15 additional deaths related to progression of thyroid cancer in individuals who were children at the time of the incident. They also document a possible (observed though disputed) 5% increased rate of cancer deaths in the most highly contaminated group (61,000) of recovery workers, plus they have estimated that the incident could be responsible for up to 4000 additional future cancer deaths among the group of 600,000 recovery workers.
But aside from the deaths, have you included the 5000 or so cases of thyroid cancer which have a ‘favourable prognosis’. Note also that “the increase in thyroid cancer incidence from Chernobyl will continue for many more years, although the long term magnitude of risk is difficult to quantify”. One should also note the many health effects such as a greatly increased incidence of cataracts and circulatory diseases in exposed recovery workers (up to 600,000 of those in total).
The other Chernobyl reactors are operational but not by people who live there. They are housed in a separate village some 45 km away, outside of the 30km exclusion zone, and transported in each day. These workers are closely monitored for health effects and accumulation of radionuclides.
There are people who live within the exclusion zone, but these are mostly old people who have refused to leave their homes and have accepted the health consequences of doing so.
Molnarsays
Greg Goodknight: How about answering some of the questions asked here instead of complaining how snarky everybody is, Mr. open debate? How much is your 1/3 man 2/3 nat estimate reliable? What if you are wrong?
simon abingdonsays
#762 Ray Ladbury
“…clouds (no longer vapor) will either”
” a) precipitate out fairly rapidly”
This is irrelevant since clouds which have not yet precipitated are always replacing those that have. (And may I say again that at least 60% of the Earth’s surface is cloud covered at any time).
” b) cool things by reflecting sunlight”
Yes, clouds passing in front of the sun are cooling, as any fule kno.
” c) warm things by reflecting outgoing IR”
Obviously not more than b) during daylight hours, and while the effect of night-time clouds reduces the effect of radiative cooling, it clearly doesn’t enable any warming as such since the sun has already set.
“The net effect of the clouds is uncertain, but current research indicates a slight net warming effect.”
Perhaps this is more than a little surprising in the light of the foregoing, so perhaps you’d like to explain.
Thanks again for your time.
Martin Vermeersays
Walter Manny #769, the reason Exxon and friends aren’t paying you is, you aren’t smart enough. Lying successfully is hard work: I suggest you cheat on your wife and get a lover for training. Or study Marc Morano (seriously).
A successful liar is well familiar with, and understands, the truth he is misrepresenting. Folks like you are suckers, not liars.
But Exxon loves you anyway :-)
Jaime Fronterosays
Re #282:
“Jim Hansen clearly refers to 4th generation nuclear power. He’s thinking of reactors that use thorium instead of uranium as the primary fuel. The process also burns up weapons grade fissionable elements and nuclear waste. It reduces the danger of storing nuclear waste from millennia to centuries.”
With all due respect Mr. Jones, I can only respond to your post thusly; with a quote from Wikipedia:
“Generation IV reactors (Gen IV) are a set of theoretical nuclear reactor designs currently being researched. Most of these designs are generally not expected to be available for commercial construction before 2030, with the exception of a version of the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) called the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP). The NGNP is to be completed by 2021.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
…and from Hansen’s newsletter, quoted in your first link:
“…If that were the end of the story, I would not have any enthusiasm for nuclear power. However, it is clear that 4th generation nuclear power can be ready in the medium-term, within about 20 years.”
Now it may be that these reactors could do the job that needs doing. Someday.
But forgive me – I really do believe that this is a job which needs doing *now*. You can – maybe – have *one* of these reactors online in twenty years. Or so. And then we get to de-bug the concept with practical experience.
Personally, I prefer the idea of solar. Especially solar PV. It’s ready now. And yes, the grid needs updating – but we’re planning on doing that anyway.
Sorry. Twenty years away is too late. I won’t even go into the depressingly familiar predictions of *fusion* power generation…
> Simon Abington
> while the effect of night-time clouds reduces the effect of
> radiative cooling, it clearly doesn’t enable any warming as
> such since the sun has already set.
So, say you’re sleeping on the beach. You don’t pull a blanket over you when the sun goes down, because that won’t enable any warming. Right?
simon abingdonsays
#780 Hank Roberts
“So, say you’re sleeping on the beach. You don’t pull a blanket over you when the sun goes down, because that won’t enable any warming. Right?”
No, I think that’s quite wrong.
Because what could the source of any warming be? Only the heat of your body fuelled by internal metabolic processes. The blanket just limits the rate at which this leaks away.
Blankets aren’t a source of warming Hank.
Lynn Vincentnathansays
#770, Hi Matthew. RE:
A true skeptic is a person who believes that the case had been completely made, a person who gives weight to the omissions or lacunae in the scientific evidence….Someone who believes that all the shortcomings of AGW theory will be resolved in favor of AGW is a “believer”, not a “student”.
THE FALSE POSITIVE: If we believe AGW is happening when it is not happening, and we take measures to mitigate, we will save lots of money (see #772 above) and strengthen the economy, and mitigate many other problems — environmental ones such as local pollution (which causes “natural” abortions and birth defects among many other harms) & acid rain & ocean acidification, etc etc; and non-environmental ones, such as averting wars over oil and lives & taxes lost for those.
THE FALSE NEGATIVE: If we believe AGW is not happening, but it really is and we fail to mitigate, we will not only lose out on all those great money saving, life saving, economy strengthening actions, but will also push the world into a dying hell, and end up in a much hotter place than a globally warmed world….for all eternity no less.
So the choice is ours. As for me and my house we decide to mitigate.
Spaceman Spiffsays
simon abingdon@777
The role of clouds in Earth’s climate is complex. Clouds don’t just act as “reflectors” of visible light. They are black to much of the IR.
Clouds of any type at any altitude on the night side of the Earth keep the Earth’s surface warmer than it otherwise would have been. On the day side, high thin clouds are net “warmers”, while continuous thick low clouds (e.g., the stratus family) are net “coolers”. (Note the key word “net”.) The primary reason for the latter case is because the IR optical depth measured from low altitudes outward is already huge in clear skies, so the additional positive radiative forcing introduced by low-altitude clouds doesn’t add much to the total forcing. On the other hand, the thin clouds at high altitudes (e.g. the cirrus family) are well above much of the water vapor in the atmosphere, so their additional positive radiative forcing is a big deal.
Keep in mind that the above is still a simplification, and while the effects of clouds continue to be one of the more important uncertainties in understanding Earth’s climate, there is much that is known about them.
Ray Ladburysays
BFJ asks “Of at least as much importance, is : what would constitute falsification? In simple terms, 20 years of no overall temperature increases in keeping with CO2 increases?”
Anthropogenic global climate change is a prediction of the consensus model of Earth’s climate–not a hypothesis. If we were to observe no warming for 20 years, it would certainly indicate that our theory was missing something. It would not, however, negate the known greenhouse properties of CO2 as a well mixed, long-lived greenhouse gas.
20 years? Well, we’ve already had a period of about 30 years where we saw very little if any warming, and what happened? Even at the time, several climate scientists speculated that the lack of warming might be due to aerosols from the combustion of fossil fuels. Some even speculated that this effect could become dominant and result in a mini-Ice Age–I’m sure you guys know about that one as you quote that great scientific journal Newsweek regularly. As it turned out, the reason the mini-ice-age idea was wrong was because the scientists involved thought CO2 forcing was lower than it really is. Subsequently, the effects of aerosols were modeled correctly validating the hypothesis of aerosol cooling from 1944-1974.
The net result: Our range for CO2 sensitivity narrowed and centered on 3 degrees per doubling. Far from doing away with concern about anthropogenic climate change, this episode showed it was more serious than many had thought.
If you want to make the spectre of climate change due to anthropogenic CO2 go away, your best strategy is to come up with an alterntive to the consensus theory of Earth’s climate. It it explains the data as well and if it has greater predictive power, climate scientists and the rest of the scientific community will jump at it. ‘Til then, there’s a small matter called “evidence” which we cannot ignore.
Why not add a skeptic to you site to allow both sides to be heard.
And any site run by geologists should include a young earth creationist so both sides can be heard. Any site run by biologists should include a creationist so the anti-science side can be heard. NASA’s site should include at least one blogger who believes the moon landings were hoaxed.
Etc.
Good grief.
dhogazasays
The rate of warming from the late 70s through the late 90s has not been sustained since the late 90s. Within AGW there is not a good explanation for that.
If this is true, can you explain why individual GCM runs show similar variability?
Are you *sure* you know what you’re talking about?
SecularAnimistsays
I wrote: “The USA, not France, generates more electricity from nuclear power than any other country in the world. So, obviously the suggestion that nuclear was ‘argued out of existence’ in the USA is absurd.”
MattInSeattle wrote: “You are comparing a small country and a large one. And you know better. What if the US were at 80% of our electricity consumption were from nuclear, like France?”
My whole point is that nuclear proponents are being disingenuous when they say that the USA should emulate France.
For France to generate 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear requires a little more than half as many reactors as the USA already operates. For the USA to generate 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear could easily require ten times as many reactors as France currently operates. There is no remotely plausible plan for building that many reactors in the USA, let alone fueling and operating them for decades.
Nor is there any need to build hundreds of new nuclear power plants, since the USA has vast commercially-exploitable wind and solar and geothermal energy resources, which are more than sufficient to provide more electricity than the entire country uses, with plenty left over to electrify ground transport — using today’s technology, which is already being rapidly deployed.
dhogazasays
fabio:
can anyone debunk this?
Well, we know that millions of years ago conditions one earth were such that it was inhospitable to our agriculture-based economy that supports billions of humans today.
Is this supposed to comfort us as we create conditions on earth that in the near future might also be inhospitable to our agriculture-based economy, leading to increased pain, suffering and in some cases death among these billions of humans alive today, and in the next couple of generations?
I mean … let’s go all out here … go back far enough and EARTH DIDN’T EVEN EXIST! Therefore … nothing to worry about!
SecularAnimistsays
Note the “bait and switch” argument so often used by nuclear proponents:
First, the argument is that we need to replace all coal-fired power plants with nuclear power within seven years because nuclear power is the only “mature” technology that can do this economically in such a short time frame.
Then, when the facts show that today’s “mature” nuclear technology simply cannot be scaled up that quickly, because it is staggeringly expensive, and takes far too long to build, is constrained by limited resources, and is plagued by the same safety problems as ever, as demonstrated by the actual delays and actual cost overruns and actual safety problems of “new generation” nuclear power plants that are actually under construction —
Well then, suddenly the argument is all about “fourth generation” nuclear power plants, which don’t exist except as science fiction, and are not expected even by their proponents to be ready to feed a single kilowatt into the grid for at least 20 years.
And as to the gigantic cost overruns and lengthy construction delays for new nuclear power plants being caused by “protestors”, please show me the protestors who have caused the multi-billion dollar cost overruns and multi-year delays that are afflicting the French AREVA “new generation” reactors under construction in Finland and France. Show me the news reports of the massive Greenpeace protests and lawsuits that have caused those problems. You can’t, because they don’t exist. Those problems are inherent in the nuclear technology itself.
But of course, that’s the problem, the nuclear proponents will say. AREVA shouldn’t be building the “new generation” power plants that the nuclear industry has touted as cheaper and faster to build, they should be building “fourth generation” power plants that won’t have those inherent problems and will really be faster and cheaper to build. Once the “fourth generation” technology actually exists, that is. In twenty years.
simon abingdonsays
#783 Spaceman Spiff
“Clouds of any type at any altitude on the night side of the Earth keep the Earth’s surface warmer than it otherwise would have been.”
They can’t cause any increase in temperature however. Everything cools at night (disregarding irrelevancies).
But I’m still surprised that cirrus clouds can cause an increase in temperature since their principal effect must be to “block” the sun’s radiation.
Maybe my problem is what words are understood to mean in the scientific community.
For me, “to warm” or “to cause warming” is “to raise the temperature of”, “to cool” or “to cause cooling” is to “lower the temperature of”.
If cirrus clouds “interfere” with the sun’s incoming radiation, how can they cause temperatures to be raised at the surface?
Ray Ladburysays
Simon Abingdon,
Constant temperature is a sign of a system at equilibrium–that is Energy_in=Energy_out. If the system is warming, it can mean that Energy_in is increasing or that Energy_out is decreasing. I hope that is sufficiently clear that you can comprehend.
Brian Brademeyersays
#777 simon abingdon
>>>> “…while the effect of night-time clouds reduces the effect of radiative cooling, it clearly doesn’t enable any warming as such since the sun has already set.”
So reduced cooling clearly doesn’t equate to warming! Nominated for 2009 Howler of the Year!
Ray Ladburysays
Critical Thinker, No. What makes you a troll is:
1)Your insistence on distorting what people say into a straw-man caricature and persisting in this despinte being called on it by more than one poster.
2)Your refusal to engage on substance or evidence.
3)Your insistence on anonymity and further the adoption of a nomme de Plume that is simply banal.
What makes you a concern troll is your insistence on criticising the views of others without having sufficient courage to share your own views. I hope that makes the taxonomy clearer.
Timothy Chasesays
Blair Dowden,
Towards the end of your comment, you state in 767:
I would expect such a dramatic challenge to not only the current consensus of the climate community, but also to a major geological theory, would appear in a submission to a peer reviewed journal, with plenty of time allowed for discussion in the scientific community, before it is presented as fact to the public.
I take it that you think we should play it safe. So does Hansen — although perhaps not in quite the same way.
But lets examine your argument. You state:
I would like to comment on James Hansen’s claim (in the 2008 Bjerknes Lecture referenced by #473) that a human induced runaway greenhouse effect (Venus Syndrome) is possible. He claims that a forcing of 10 to 20 watts per square meter (which I roughly translate into four doublings of CO2, or about 2000 ppm) would be sufficient. We had this situation during the Cretaceous, when the solar constant he cites was about 1% lower, and I do not see how slow feedbacks such as weathering have much affect on a runaway greenhouse.
More to the point, after citing the “snowball earth” events in the past, he failed to spell out how the Earth recovered from them. According to this paper, Ken Caldeira and Jim Kasting estimated that carbon dioxide reached 0.12 bar (120,000 ppm!), and calculations by Raymond Pierrehumbert suggesed that tropical sea-surface temperatures reached 50 degrees Celsius. While these extreme events are controversial, I have never seen them challenged on the basis they would cause a runaway greenhouse effect.
Snowball earth during the Cretaceous! I would say someone should… oh, wait a second, that wasn’t Hansen but your bringing up a 1% reduction in the solar constant during the Cretaceous with the 120,000 ppm of “snowball earth” — to show how absurd Hansen’s claims are. But the hypothetical snowball earth would have been much earlier than the Cretaceous — which was 206-144 million years ago.
In fact, according to the informal paper you cite:
Given that solar luminosity 600-700 million years ago was about six percent lower than today due to stellar evolution, Ken Caldeira and Jim Kasting at The Pennsylvania State University estimated that roughly 0.12 bar of carbon dioxide (about 350 times the present concentration) would have been required to overcome the albedo of a snowball Earth. Assuming current rates of volcanic carbon dioxide emissions, a Neoproterozoic “snowball” Earth would have lasted for millions to tens of million of years before the sea ice would begin to melt at the Equator. A “snowball” Earth would not only be the most severe glaciation conceivable, it would be the most prolonged.
… the hypothetical snowball earth would have been “600-700 million years ago.” Given this, the solar constant at the time would have been not one percent lower than today, but “six percent.” And according to the paper by Hansen that you cite a doubling of carbon dioxide is equivilent to a 2% increase in the solar constant, meaning that we would have an additional 3 doublings to reach 10-20 watts per square meter above current levels. Granting Hansen the benefit of a doubt, lets say that we are talking about an additional 20 watts per square meter above current levels. And following standard practice, rather than assuming that we are talking about current levels (where currently we have 375 ppm) we are talking about 20 watts above pre-industrial with its 275 ppm. This works to Hansen’s disadvantage, but it is the standard way of performing such calculations.
Now according to the paper by Hansen that you cite, each doubling of carbon dioxide results in an additional 4 watts per square meter. This implies 5 doublings to reach 20 watts per square meter. So at this point snowball earth would have had to have been 8 doublings above current level for it to achieve what would have been equivilent to 20 watts per square meter above pre-industrial. This translates into 128 times pre-industrial. And according to the passage quoted above in the non-technical paper by Hoffman and Schrag you cite, for us to escape snowball earth CO2 levels would have had to have been 350 times — I would presume — pre-industrial.
Suddenly it isn’t looking like Hansen’s views are such a challenge to snowball earth, is it? That is, since 350 divided by 128 is 2.73. Furthermore, our calculations have been assuming current climate sensitivity — whether we are speaking of watts per square meter per doubling of CO2 or degrees Celsius per doubling. Current climate sensitivity is due to (among other things) the current configuration of the continents.
No reason to think that continents and their configuration would have been anything comparable to what they are today at the time of the melting of snowball earth. And if climate sensitivity were different that throws pretty much all of the calculations I performed to the wind. Against that a factor of 2.73 really doesn’t seem all that significant.
Once melting began to take place one could begin to expect rain rather than snow, and with rain at an acidity much higher than current levels (given the extremely high levels of carbon dioxide) and newly-exposed rock we really should expect the process of weathering to greatly exceed current levels. More importantly, it isn’t simply the weathering of rocks which would have taken high levels of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but cold sea water becoming exposed to the atmosphere for the first time in millions of years. As such the partial pressure of sea water would have been much lower than its maximum and it would have drawn down the carbon dioxide levels much more quickly than weathering.
*
Now some of my argument regarding snowball earth simply aren’t applicable to the Cretaceous period. For example, regarding the temperature and consequent partial pressure of carbon dioxide in sea water. Other elements would be — for example, regarding the configuration of the continents and consequent climate sensitivity. As such the tension between Hansen’s claims and various mainstream positions isn’t nearly as severe as you make them out to be.
This isn’t to say that I think we have to worry about the Venus Syndrome. I don’t. I think it is much more likely that, even if we were to deliberately seek to bring it about by using up all our conventional and unconventional fossil fuel, the climate change that we would experience along the way would be enough to topple modern civilization long before we made the Venus Syndrome an inevitable consequence of our actions.
However, my views on this matter aren’t necessarily the same as Hansen’s. And I can understand if he wants to play it safe.
Ray Ladburysays
Matthew says, “The rate of warming from the late 70s through the late 90s has not been sustained since the late 90s.
WRONG!!!
> Simon Abington
> while the effect of night-time clouds reduces the effect of
> radiative cooling, it clearly doesn’t enable any warming as
> such since the sun has already set.
So try another thought experiment. You have a hot water bottle.
You leave it out in the sun all day, then put it under the covers at night.
What’s happening?
You have the same amount of water over you as nighttime clouds.
What’s happening?
No warming in either case, because the sun isn’t shining?
Edward Greischsays
752 Philippe Chantreau: How has France dealt with the protests so that a sufficient number of nuclear power plants have been built in France?
What you don’t seem to realize is that with your BS physics you are the snarky one, denigrating the actual science and those that represent it in its most reasonable context.
I don’t fully understand gravity, but like gravity and mass, snark attracts snark in measured response, or overwhelming lunacy. So, you come into a science blog and toss up a bunch of debunked arguments based on your limited (myopic) perspective, and you’re calling others snarky? Snark is as snark does.
You buy into Svensmarks argument because you don’t understand the science surrounding it in radiative forcing and the quantitative analysis on GHG’s.
So realistically, you should just take your well veiled snark talk and go somewhere else… he who denigrates intelligence to support argument from belief denigrates himself…
…unless of course you are now willing to learn, in which case most everyone here would be happy to help you.
Oh, I’m sorry, was I denigrating? You might like to think so.
The inner workings of the IPCC are no mystery. It’s merely an organization that has to deliver on collecting the science on the subject of climate change and issuing reports.
No an easy job though. There are lot’s of contributors and they have to verify the science and confidence levels as best as possible before specific report dates.
In other words, it’s an administrative organization to deliver reports in accord with specifications.
> Please confirm that you wish to make a serious and highly public
> accusation of scientific fraud against Professor Mann, in the
> knowledge that it will almost certainly be defamatory …
This sounds like “let’s you and him fight” — do you think there’s any way you can pursue a defamation claim for someone else, even if you provoke someone into doing something that could be called defamation?
What happens if you provoke someone into an act that could be defamation leaving the person defamed facing the choice of either suing over it, or accepting it without responding?
Are you trying to trigger a statute of limitation to force legal action?
Are you sure you’re doing the best thing here?
Edward, you are profoundly mistaken if you think that France does not have people protesting against nuclear power. You’re also mistaken if you think that safety standards are lower there, IMO.
#725 Greg Goodknight – Is that your real name?
Wow! You are one of those guys that reads stuff on the intertubes from a guy that by all reasoned accounts presented his ideas out of context of what is known about radiative forcing; and he convinces you that industrial based CO2, CH4, N2O and High GWP’s are not really the problem.
So you post in RC, talk about your MS EE which would be called MS CE nowadays and say followers of RC are buying dogma. A religious inference, what a surprise.
Well, forget about dogma and consider the evidence in context.
1. With all this verification you’re doing, did you notice that GCR”s don’t correlate with warming?
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/henrik-svensmark
Hey, how a bout that Laschamp event. No indicated warming??? I wonder why. Modern and paleo assessments indicate that GCR’s may have an effect but that it is much less than Svensmark thinks.
2. Luckily I’m not rabid right or rabid left.
http://www.uscentrist.org/
3. If the assertion for 2 W/m2 is correct then you also have to prove that the added GHG’s in the atmosphere from industrial sources are not adding to forcing. Add into your considerations that we know how much GHG’s we have added to the system.
Generally I don’t denigrate those that disagree with me, I ask them to substantiate what they are saying. I do denigrate mindless assertions that are based on fluff and mirrors though.
You simply can’t understand that GCR’s and temps don’t correlate, even though the GCR levels dropped and temps continued to rise. Hmmm, there’s a word for that.
But all of this is well quantified with GHG’s and aerosols. Hmmm…
You claim to want an open debate, but what you don’t realize is that it’s about evidence, not debate.
So feel free to prove industrial GHG’s do not trap infra red long wave radiation. You think it’s 2/3 natural 1/3 AGW. On what basis. We have tipped this system positive above thermal equilibrium. So even though the Co2 has only gone up about 1/3 in the atmosphere, the warming trend is virtually all human caused. We should be relatively stable within natural variability, we are not.
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/forcing-levels
Finally, you say Co2 is not a pollutant, but you failed to parse based on the definition of pollutant. I really think it’s funny that you assert that you are intelligent and others are lacking, when you use a word that you don’t even know the definition of.
Pollution:
1 : the action of polluting especially by environmental contamination with man-made waste; also : the condition of being polluted 2 : pollutant
Now, since you are so intelligent I will illustrate for you. Co2 from the natural system is not a pollutant. Co2 that is form industrial aka manmade waste, is a pollutant.
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/co2-is-not-a-pollutant
Arrogance veiled as intelligence is just rude.
#729 Hank Roberts
Good point.
#743 Ray Ladbury
I agree he has BS in physics.
#726 Bill DeMott
I know, but a guys gotta dream… especially when it’s as important as this.
All I can do is keep pushing and washing the egg off my face. In this case though, I think it is critical that we get the education level up before they sign a deal. There is a lot at stake here and I don’t think people realize how expensive cap & trade will be.
SecularAnimist: “The USA, not France, generates more electricity from nuclear power than any other country in the world. So, obviously the suggestion that nuclear was “argued out of existence” in the USA is absurd.”
You are comparing a small country and a large one. And you know better. What if the US were at 80% of our electricity consumption were from nuclear, like France?
That 60% increase would be be 700M tons of CO2 per year LESS that we’d emit. That’s the equivalent of not driving 116M cars per year.
Sucks we didn’t do that in 1990, eh?
Keep on hoping. And in 20 years, when the status quo still shows big oil is in charge, you can pat yourself on the back. I met guys like you back in the 70’s and 80’s all over the place. Alt energy was “here and now!” back then too.
It does appear that old habits will die hard here. Picking one out of the target rich environment…
“As for your “2/3 natural” attribution–ever hear of analysis of variance, O you who claim to be a physicist?” – barton paul levinson
This is exactly the sort of snarkiness that has no place in science *or* serious politics. Perhaps it’s evidence that it’s easier for a scientist to move towards writing science fiction than for a science fiction author to become a scientist.
Correlation is not the same as causality. Sometimes the apparent correlation is strictly a matter of coincidence, or choice of endpoints. Try running the same series of C)2 vs temperature starting about 500 million years ago. Do it also for Carbon-14 vs temperature. Let us know what you find.
The title of this blog says “…….suggestions for potential future posts are welcome.”
How about “The Inner Workings of the IPCC” ?
Anne van der BOM: “I might be looking at the wrong thing, so feel free to support your case with evidence (not a sales brochure of a nuclear company”
I think the most accurate data you can look at is data that is created by a person standing there with money in their hand ready to buy the wind farm or nuclear plant. They have billions on the line, so you can bet they have paid a room full of very smart people to do the calcs.
If there was a clear winner, then various government agencies (including DOE) wouldn’t be showing world wide neck-and-neck growth for nuclear and alternate energy over the next 20-30 years. And nuclear wouldn’t still be knocking down the wins that it’s showing. And let’s not forget that today’s projections for nuclear in 2025 are 25% higher than 5 years ago. That’s from the International Energy Outlook 2009 from US Energy Information Administration. And that revision occurred during the most wind-friendly period we could ever imagine.
Keep in mind, too, that nuclear is artificially more expensive that it should be due to excessive regulation. And wind is artificially cheaper than it shoudl be due to subsidies. And if they are being built at about the same rate…that alone should convince you that operational costs of nuclear are indeed lower in an even comparison.
If someone lives in a place where their population is concentrated near areas that are very windy, then fantastic. Build wind power. But if your population lives 2000 miles from the windy spots, then I can promise you wind isn’t as cost effective. And so what do they do? Build wind anyway and have it cost a fortune and fail? Do nothing and stay on petroleum?
ZT,
There is now overwhelming evidence that water vapor increases warming in a positive feedback:
Brown, S., Desai, S., Keihm, S., and C. Ruf, 2007. “Ocean water vapor and cloud burden trends derived from the topex microwave radiometer.” Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium. Barcelona, Spain: IGARSS 2007, pp. 886-889.
Dessler AE, Zhang Z, Yang P 2008. “Water-Vapor Climate Feedback Inferred from Climate Variations.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L20704.
Held, I.M. and B. J. Soden, 2000. “Water vapor feedback and global warming.” Annu. Rev. Energy Environ., 25, 441–475.
Minschwaner, K., and A. E. Dessler, 2004. “Water vapor feedback in the tropical upper troposphere: Model results and observations.” J. Climate, 17, 1272–1282.
Oltmans, S.J. and D.J. Hoffman, “Increase in Lower-Stratospheric Water Vapor at Mid-Latitude Northern Hemisphere Site from 1981-1994,” Nature, 374 (1995): 146-149.
Philipona, R., B. Dürr, A. Ohmura, and C. Ruckstuhl 2005. “Anthropogenic greenhouse forcing and strong water vapor feedback increase temperature in Europe.” Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L19809.
Santer, B. D, C. Mears, F. J. Wentz, K. E. Taylor, P. J. Gleckler, T. M. L. Wigley, T. P. Barnett, J. S. Boyle, W. Bruggemann, N. P. Gillett, S. A. Klein, G. A. Meehl, T. Nozawa, D. W. Pierce, P. A. Stott, W. M. Washington, M. F. Wehner, 2007. “Identification of human-induced changes in atmospheric moisture content.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 104, 15248-15253.
Soden, B.J., D. L. Jackson, V. Ramaswamy, M. D. Schwarzkopf, and X. Huang, 2005. “The radiative signature of upper tropospheric moistening.” Science, 310, 841–844.
http://www.gfy.ku.dk/~kaas/forc&feedb2008/Articles/Soden.pdf
Personally my interest in climate change lies in its consequences only. The science is probably okay, although as any human activity it is probably not as pristine as eg RC make out. You could gain credibility by admitting a mistake every now and then.
Anyway my interest lies in the consequences to our lives, so maybe you could discuss topics such as
1- what should to be done
2- what cna be done
3- and how much does it cost??
or maybe that is out of your scope. Or maybe you already have.
What would constitute proof of agw, Ray Ladbury asks above?
Of at least as much importance, is : what would constitute falsification?
In simple terms, 20 years of no overall temperature increases in keeping with CO2 increases?
ZT,
As long as the water stays a vapor, it will increase the greenhouse effect. Once it condenses into clouds (no longer vapor), it will either
a)precipitate out fairly rapidly
b)cool things by reflecting sunlight
c)warm things by reflecting outgoing IR
The net effect of the clouds is uncertain, but current research indicates a slight net warming effect.
Greg Goodknight, in your case,
“putting my finger to the wind”
conjures more than the usual connotation.
John McCormick
@701 – Apparently anyone who questions Ray’s logic for a particular item phrased in blatantly unscientific terms is a troll. Nice neat state of affairs that is!
Do we get to take into account plate tectonics and solar physics or will you scream that it’s unfair to point out that no one claims that CO2 is the only thing that affects climate?
Joe #760, you haven’t been here long. There is so much information that you can glean from making RC one of your daily reads. Every one of you criticisms is completely wrong. RC has had to spend a lot of time dealing with people who have the least amount of information while at the same time they seem to possess the strongest convictions.
On this page alone poster like Barton Paul Levenson, John Reismean, Hank Roberts and Ray Ladbury will give you a lot of insights as well as linking you to some very good articles and data not to mention the topics of disscussion written by gavin and the other scientists.
Know the truth and the truth will set you free.
I would like to comment on James Hansen’s claim (in the 2008 Bjerknes Lecturereferenced by #473) that a human induced runaway greenhouse effect (Venus Syndrome) is possible. He claims that a forcing of 10 to 20 watts per square meter (which I roughly translate into four doublings of CO2, or about 2000 ppm) would be sufficient. We had this situation during the Cretaceous, when the solar constant he cites was about 1% lower, and I do not see how slow feedbacks such as weathering have much affect on a runaway greenhouse.
More to the point, after citing the “snowball earth” events in the past, he failed to spell out how the Earth recovered from them. According to this paper, Ken Caldeira and Jim Kasting estimated that carbon dioxide reached 0.12 bar (120,000 ppm!), and calculations by Raymond Pierrehumbert suggesed that tropical sea-surface temperatures reached 50 degrees Celsius. While these extreme events are controversial, I have never seen them challenged on the basis they would cause a runaway greenhouse effect.
I would expect such a dramatic challenge to not only the current consensus of the climate community, but also to a major geological theory, would appear in a submission to a peer reviewed journal, with plenty of time allowed for discussion in the scientific community, before it is presented as fact to the public. I consider this to be an example of irresponsible alarmism that scientists who want to be taken seriously should avoid.
Here’s a topic — some of the (here) uncovered ideas in Hansen’s book.
For instance (and I feel a bit betrayed that I didn’t know this, as if it weren’t important enough to mention, even though I’ve brought up the possibility of climate hysteresis & runaway warming several times here & could have found this information enlightening) —
On page 46 (okay, I’m a slow reader), Hansen discusses climate sensitivity, and in the 4th paragraph brings up a caveat re climate sensitivity being a constant…..come to find out it’s actually a U curve (and we’re just in the huge climate range at the flat bottom). That is “if the planet becomes much colder or much warmer [as in going into climate hysteresis], climate sensitivity will increase; indeed we will meet [not really, bec we won’t be extant at that point] the ‘snowball Earth’ and ‘runaway greenhouse’ instabilities.”
A U curve, who’d have known….except all scientists here.
Ray, it is absolutely the case that I cannot find another, better model than what comprises the consensus model at the moment. Obviously, that does not mean the consensus model is correct, though it is of course enormously appealing to our chronocentric minds to believe otherwise. We theorized a crisis, we found the crisis, and we saved helpless future generations from the result of our potential folly. What could be more gratifying for a scientist to go to his grave thinking he has changed the world for the better?
Trenberth’s “travesty” lament gives you [and Trenbeth] no pause, no doubt, and you are convinced we are still anthropogenically warming even if our instrumentation is not quite what we want. I read stuff, as you know, and I am unable to share in your monotheism yet. I find any and all single-shooter theories to be logically unlikely, and I doubt I am the only [insert pejorative here] who shies away from: It’s The Sunspots, It’s The Cosmic Rays, Its The CO2, It’s The Aerosols; It’s The Excess Marshmallow Fluff. Surely it’s a mix of things, and even more surely, once we jettison the politics, we will find a better, more complex model that will make our current models look silly. Seems as though history could teach us something there, plus which the last time I looked to the skies, I could swear I saw some Brownian motion up there.
I find the whole consensus presentation to be grossly oversimplified and, more famously, oversold. As many of the EAU emails show, there is at least some anxiety about how rock-solid the whole thing is and great concern about how matters need to be presented to the credulous public. The debate about sensitivity seems to me almost comically unresolved, the ‘thirty year’ gold standard arbitrarily established, the ten-year pause obfuscated…
I especially love the conspiracy bit, that denialism is somehow an industry, that anyone who does not buy the RC line in is some stooge in thrall to the oil-funded scientists sitting around our homes. I’m sitting in my kitchen now, as an example, chatting with Dick and Will, who are helping me edit this note – hold on, the phone just rang – never mind, it was just Exxon calling again, apologizing for the delay in payment. Oh, hi, Steve, Senator, Roger & Roger [they just walked in]. Sorry, must run… time for more indoctrination.
A new topic: Science Integrity.
What is needed most today is the restoration of confidence in all science, particularly climate science.
This will only happen when the public concludes that scientists and their spokespersons are bending over backwards to be fair, objective and completely open in their efforts.
You guys got caught in a trap of thinking, expecting the mainstream media and politicians would unquestioningly support your work and this resulted in a lowering of scientific standards and a politicization of the scientific process.
Now it is time to be totally open. Let the cards fall where ever, discourage the rhetoric and false accusations ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ISSUE and stick just to the facts. Do not belittle, attack the speaker, feign arrogant superior knowledge and moral authority. Rather seek first to understand the positions of everyone and seek to inform and educate. Listen to the contrarians and answer every point thoughtfully. Caution anyone who shows emotional bias – BOTH SIDES – to adhere to the scientific principals of discovery, skepticism and change as new information becomes available.
[edit]
Why not add a skeptic to you site to allow both sides to be heard. Or team up with a skeptic site to share in some capacity. Many of us truly just seek the truth. Many of us truly believe we are not being told the truth. We are not deniers, we are skeptics and rightly so. It is your responsibility not to change us into believers, but to present the facts so that we can make informed decisions.
[Response: But you have already decided. And in fact you have already decided that scientists can’t be trusted. And if everything we say is suspect, how can there be communication? Where are these honest ‘sceptics’ who don’t actually agree with the basic consensus or the six reasons why CO2 emissions are a problem? Find someone who genuinely disagrees and who doesn’t subscribe to juvenile conspiracy theories or keep repeating long-debunked nonsense and perhaps we can talk. – gavin]
747, Ray Ladbury: A true skeptic must have a sufficient grasp of the subject matter to be able to offer an alternative interpretation of the evidence–all of the evidence.
A true skeptic is a person who believes that the case had been completely made, a person who gives weight to the omissions or lacunae in the scientific evidence. Einstein, for example, was skeptical of quantum mechanics, and physicists were skeptical of Wegener’s hypothesis without having an alternative explanation. Someone who believes that all the shortcomings of AGW theory will be resolved in favor of AGW is a “believer”, not a “student”.
The rate of warming from the late 70s through the late 90s has not been sustained since the late 90s. Within AGW there is not a good explanation for that. A skeptic need not have an explanation for that in order to note that it is a reason to doubt assertions by AGW proponents that the warming trend will resume imminently.
[Response: Your framing of this is all wrong. The issue is that decisions are being made right now that will strongly influence GHG levels in the future. Thus you are required to weight the potential for harm that increasing CO2 levels will have in any ethical decision. (I am assuming (hopefully without fear of contradiction) that the you think that decisions should be made ethically). If people are persuaded that there is substantial risk associated with increased CO2 in the future, then they should act on that. This does not make them ‘believers’ in the pejorative sense you imply. They might well continue to update their opinion in the light of new information. However, people who refuse to update their prior beliefs in the light of new information are rightly lambasted – and frankly that includes a lot of the so-called skeptics who have taken confirmation bias and made it into an art form. The fact that there is no coherent alternative explanation for is being observed weighs strongly in many people’s assessments of what is the most likely explanation of changes so far and thus what might be expected in the future. Informing decisions with the best available information is just common sense. – gavin]
#760, Hi Joe. RE:
This is where I have some useful knowledge…bec I’ve been doing it. (And if you’re religious, then praying for knowledge about what to do & praying for fortitude to do it really really helps….I even keep an image of a starving African madonna & child in my mind’s eye to inspire me to keep at it….Africa will be worst hit by AGW enhanced droughts & crop/livestock failure and famine).
There are the basic principles of energy/resource efficiency/conservation. Why “resource” — because the mining/drilling, processing, shipping, manufacturing, shopping, etc also entails lots of energy & GHG emissions. Water entails energy for pumping and heating. Industrial (tractor) agriculture entails lots of energy & water (which entails energy to pump). Also synthetic fertilizers entail other GHGs, as well as energy to extract raw materials & manufacture. There there is all the paperwork at all stages — that’s trees that absorb CO2.
So that main idea is to REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE, and of the 3 REDUCE is the most effective. So double think, “Do I really need this, or really desire it (or is the desire manufactured by others, by advertisers)?” “Will it really bring me greater health, comfort, and happiness?” That should cut our purchases down by 20 to 60%, depending on how frugal we were to start. And think how much money that will save us, and we won’t need ever-increaingly bigger houses to store all that junk we don’t really need or want — so lower electric bills, etc. Moving closer to work on your next move will save money & improve health (less time in fumy car, or walk or cycle to work).
REUSE is the next principle. Avoid throwaway plates, cups, napkins (we bought a bunch of cheap cotton ones with design to hide the stains for daily use, which we just throw in the laundry), hankies (to wipe hands in public restrooms; avoiding paper throwaways also reduces destroying trees, as does using the other side of paper (I get lots of quality paper at the library, reams of it, which still have one good side, and I hardly ever use new paper). Think how less your trash will be, how fewer times you have to lug it out to the curb, and if everyone did that, the garbage bills could be reduced (less taxes). A low-flow showerhead costing $6 (using 1/2 the heated water) has saved us about $100 in water & water heating bills per year (I actually measured the different with a bucket and stop watch), and that was 20 years ago, so we’ve saved $2000, AND we can’t tell the difference between the old and new showerhead! There are lots of energy/resource products that will help us reduce our bills. Also buy at garage sales; and sell your unwanted stuff there.
RECYCLE is the next principle — manufacturing from recycled materials saves energy and finite resources. Aluminum tops the list here — I think it is a 90% saving in energy, and we save the rainforests, bec that where bauxite to make aluminum comes from. Other materials have various energy savings from recycling as well. For businesses they can go on “closed-loop” systems, which save them money. I read about a plating company in Mass. in the early 90s that used a lot of water & dumped the polluted water into the river; they were trying to meet the upcoming EPA standards and finally hit upon such a system, recycling the water instead, taking out the pollutants (that were actually valuable resources); they figured they could pay for the closed loop system through water savings in a few years, but ended up paying for itself within a year — the city main broke shortly after they installed it, and they would have had to shut down operations for 3 days, but they were able to carry on, saving them $100,000.
You can also go on ALTERNATIVE ENERGY — for instance, we are on GreenMountain 100% wind-generated electricity, which is a bit cheaper that the other dirty electric companies in our area.
Now many of these have no cost or pay for themselves and go on to save money. Once you’ve saved enough and you’re on 100% wind energy, it might be time to think about your next car being an electric or a plug-in hybrid, and drive on the wind.
And that’s just for starters…..
Thank you to all the people who have suggested books for the local library I’ll follow this up after the holidays.
I’ve just got one more question for now. I’ve just watched a you tube video promoting an organisation called WeForest. Its aim is to reforest 20 million square kilometres, with the aim of slowing or preventing climate change. The film states that ‘currently global warming is adding 1.6 watts of heat per sq metre of land. If that sq metre is covered by a cloud 80 watts of heat is reflected back into space. A’2% increase in cloud cover could halt global warming in its tracks.’ I am sure there are many good reasons for reforestation but I find it difficult to believe the above statement, it seems far too simplistic. Could someone with more knowledge than I have comment please.
Frank Giger — 24 December 2009 @ 12:16 PM
“The NW passage opened in the 1940’s. A one off event? Possibly. When it opened briefly a few years back, however, it was once again pointed to as unprecedented proof of AGW.”
http://hnsa.org/ships/stroch.htm
RCMPV ST. ROCH
Length: 104 feet, 3 inches
Beam: 24 feet, 9 inches
Depth of Hold: 11 feet
Draft: 12 feet, 6 inches
Displacement: 323 tons
“St. Roch was also designed to serve when frozen-in for the winter as a floating detachment with its constables mounting dog sled patrols from the ship. …Between 1940 and 1942 St. Roch navigated the Northwest Passage, arriving in Halifax harbor on October 11, 1942.”
http://www.sailboatlistings.com/view/14986
Cloud Nine
Length 57′
Beam 14’7′
Draft 9′
http://www.startribune.com/local/11606756.html
“A Minnesota couple completed a 6,600-mile voyage by sailboat through the Northwest Passage.”
“Retired Minnesota hog farmer Roger Swanson and his wife, Gaynelle Templin…”
“Assisted by climate changes that have made the Northwest Passage ice-free into September, Swanson and his six-person crew completed the 6,600-mile journey through the Passage in 73 days, setting several firsts along the way.” on “Swanson’s 57-foot sailboat, Cloud Nine,”
No one can claim with any credibility that conditions in the 40s in the arctic are the same as today.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2008.jpg
#748 Edward Greisch
You may believe that the toll from Chernobyl is only 56 deaths, but the International Atomic Energy Agency seems to differ.
https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/chernobyl.pdf
They document at least 15 additional deaths related to progression of thyroid cancer in individuals who were children at the time of the incident. They also document a possible (observed though disputed) 5% increased rate of cancer deaths in the most highly contaminated group (61,000) of recovery workers, plus they have estimated that the incident could be responsible for up to 4000 additional future cancer deaths among the group of 600,000 recovery workers.
But aside from the deaths, have you included the 5000 or so cases of thyroid cancer which have a ‘favourable prognosis’. Note also that “the increase in thyroid cancer incidence from Chernobyl will continue for many more years, although the long term magnitude of risk is difficult to quantify”. One should also note the many health effects such as a greatly increased incidence of cataracts and circulatory diseases in exposed recovery workers (up to 600,000 of those in total).
The other Chernobyl reactors are operational but not by people who live there. They are housed in a separate village some 45 km away, outside of the 30km exclusion zone, and transported in each day. These workers are closely monitored for health effects and accumulation of radionuclides.
There are people who live within the exclusion zone, but these are mostly old people who have refused to leave their homes and have accepted the health consequences of doing so.
Greg Goodknight: How about answering some of the questions asked here instead of complaining how snarky everybody is, Mr. open debate? How much is your 1/3 man 2/3 nat estimate reliable? What if you are wrong?
#762 Ray Ladbury
“…clouds (no longer vapor) will either”
” a) precipitate out fairly rapidly”
This is irrelevant since clouds which have not yet precipitated are always replacing those that have. (And may I say again that at least 60% of the Earth’s surface is cloud covered at any time).
” b) cool things by reflecting sunlight”
Yes, clouds passing in front of the sun are cooling, as any fule kno.
” c) warm things by reflecting outgoing IR”
Obviously not more than b) during daylight hours, and while the effect of night-time clouds reduces the effect of radiative cooling, it clearly doesn’t enable any warming as such since the sun has already set.
“The net effect of the clouds is uncertain, but current research indicates a slight net warming effect.”
Perhaps this is more than a little surprising in the light of the foregoing, so perhaps you’d like to explain.
Thanks again for your time.
Walter Manny #769, the reason Exxon and friends aren’t paying you is, you aren’t smart enough. Lying successfully is hard work: I suggest you cheat on your wife and get a lover for training. Or study Marc Morano (seriously).
A successful liar is well familiar with, and understands, the truth he is misrepresenting. Folks like you are suckers, not liars.
But Exxon loves you anyway :-)
Re #282:
“Jim Hansen clearly refers to 4th generation nuclear power. He’s thinking of reactors that use thorium instead of uranium as the primary fuel. The process also burns up weapons grade fissionable elements and nuclear waste. It reduces the danger of storing nuclear waste from millennia to centuries.”
With all due respect Mr. Jones, I can only respond to your post thusly; with a quote from Wikipedia:
“Generation IV reactors (Gen IV) are a set of theoretical nuclear reactor designs currently being researched. Most of these designs are generally not expected to be available for commercial construction before 2030, with the exception of a version of the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) called the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP). The NGNP is to be completed by 2021.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
…and from Hansen’s newsletter, quoted in your first link:
“…If that were the end of the story, I would not have any enthusiasm for nuclear power. However, it is clear that 4th generation nuclear power can be ready in the medium-term, within about 20 years.”
Now it may be that these reactors could do the job that needs doing. Someday.
But forgive me – I really do believe that this is a job which needs doing *now*. You can – maybe – have *one* of these reactors online in twenty years. Or so. And then we get to de-bug the concept with practical experience.
Personally, I prefer the idea of solar. Especially solar PV. It’s ready now. And yes, the grid needs updating – but we’re planning on doing that anyway.
Sorry. Twenty years away is too late. I won’t even go into the depressingly familiar predictions of *fusion* power generation…
> Simon Abington
> while the effect of night-time clouds reduces the effect of
> radiative cooling, it clearly doesn’t enable any warming as
> such since the sun has already set.
So, say you’re sleeping on the beach. You don’t pull a blanket over you when the sun goes down, because that won’t enable any warming. Right?
#780 Hank Roberts
“So, say you’re sleeping on the beach. You don’t pull a blanket over you when the sun goes down, because that won’t enable any warming. Right?”
No, I think that’s quite wrong.
Because what could the source of any warming be? Only the heat of your body fuelled by internal metabolic processes. The blanket just limits the rate at which this leaks away.
Blankets aren’t a source of warming Hank.
#770, Hi Matthew. RE:
I’m a believer and student. I use Pascal’s wager (see Wiki – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager) as both, and as a stat teacher.
THE FALSE POSITIVE: If we believe AGW is happening when it is not happening, and we take measures to mitigate, we will save lots of money (see #772 above) and strengthen the economy, and mitigate many other problems — environmental ones such as local pollution (which causes “natural” abortions and birth defects among many other harms) & acid rain & ocean acidification, etc etc; and non-environmental ones, such as averting wars over oil and lives & taxes lost for those.
THE FALSE NEGATIVE: If we believe AGW is not happening, but it really is and we fail to mitigate, we will not only lose out on all those great money saving, life saving, economy strengthening actions, but will also push the world into a dying hell, and end up in a much hotter place than a globally warmed world….for all eternity no less.
So the choice is ours. As for me and my house we decide to mitigate.
simon abingdon@777
The role of clouds in Earth’s climate is complex. Clouds don’t just act as “reflectors” of visible light. They are black to much of the IR.
Clouds of any type at any altitude on the night side of the Earth keep the Earth’s surface warmer than it otherwise would have been. On the day side, high thin clouds are net “warmers”, while continuous thick low clouds (e.g., the stratus family) are net “coolers”. (Note the key word “net”.) The primary reason for the latter case is because the IR optical depth measured from low altitudes outward is already huge in clear skies, so the additional positive radiative forcing introduced by low-altitude clouds doesn’t add much to the total forcing. On the other hand, the thin clouds at high altitudes (e.g. the cirrus family) are well above much of the water vapor in the atmosphere, so their additional positive radiative forcing is a big deal.
Keep in mind that the above is still a simplification, and while the effects of clouds continue to be one of the more important uncertainties in understanding Earth’s climate, there is much that is known about them.
BFJ asks “Of at least as much importance, is : what would constitute falsification? In simple terms, 20 years of no overall temperature increases in keeping with CO2 increases?”
Anthropogenic global climate change is a prediction of the consensus model of Earth’s climate–not a hypothesis. If we were to observe no warming for 20 years, it would certainly indicate that our theory was missing something. It would not, however, negate the known greenhouse properties of CO2 as a well mixed, long-lived greenhouse gas.
20 years? Well, we’ve already had a period of about 30 years where we saw very little if any warming, and what happened? Even at the time, several climate scientists speculated that the lack of warming might be due to aerosols from the combustion of fossil fuels. Some even speculated that this effect could become dominant and result in a mini-Ice Age–I’m sure you guys know about that one as you quote that great scientific journal Newsweek regularly. As it turned out, the reason the mini-ice-age idea was wrong was because the scientists involved thought CO2 forcing was lower than it really is. Subsequently, the effects of aerosols were modeled correctly validating the hypothesis of aerosol cooling from 1944-1974.
The net result: Our range for CO2 sensitivity narrowed and centered on 3 degrees per doubling. Far from doing away with concern about anthropogenic climate change, this episode showed it was more serious than many had thought.
If you want to make the spectre of climate change due to anthropogenic CO2 go away, your best strategy is to come up with an alterntive to the consensus theory of Earth’s climate. It it explains the data as well and if it has greater predictive power, climate scientists and the rest of the scientific community will jump at it. ‘Til then, there’s a small matter called “evidence” which we cannot ignore.
can anyone debunk this?
http://sbvor.blogspot.com/2009/10/climate-change-science-overview.html
And any site run by geologists should include a young earth creationist so both sides can be heard. Any site run by biologists should include a creationist so the anti-science side can be heard. NASA’s site should include at least one blogger who believes the moon landings were hoaxed.
Etc.
Good grief.
If this is true, can you explain why individual GCM runs show similar variability?
Are you *sure* you know what you’re talking about?
I wrote: “The USA, not France, generates more electricity from nuclear power than any other country in the world. So, obviously the suggestion that nuclear was ‘argued out of existence’ in the USA is absurd.”
MattInSeattle wrote: “You are comparing a small country and a large one. And you know better. What if the US were at 80% of our electricity consumption were from nuclear, like France?”
My whole point is that nuclear proponents are being disingenuous when they say that the USA should emulate France.
For France to generate 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear requires a little more than half as many reactors as the USA already operates. For the USA to generate 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear could easily require ten times as many reactors as France currently operates. There is no remotely plausible plan for building that many reactors in the USA, let alone fueling and operating them for decades.
Nor is there any need to build hundreds of new nuclear power plants, since the USA has vast commercially-exploitable wind and solar and geothermal energy resources, which are more than sufficient to provide more electricity than the entire country uses, with plenty left over to electrify ground transport — using today’s technology, which is already being rapidly deployed.
fabio:
Well, we know that millions of years ago conditions one earth were such that it was inhospitable to our agriculture-based economy that supports billions of humans today.
Is this supposed to comfort us as we create conditions on earth that in the near future might also be inhospitable to our agriculture-based economy, leading to increased pain, suffering and in some cases death among these billions of humans alive today, and in the next couple of generations?
I mean … let’s go all out here … go back far enough and EARTH DIDN’T EVEN EXIST! Therefore … nothing to worry about!
Note the “bait and switch” argument so often used by nuclear proponents:
First, the argument is that we need to replace all coal-fired power plants with nuclear power within seven years because nuclear power is the only “mature” technology that can do this economically in such a short time frame.
Then, when the facts show that today’s “mature” nuclear technology simply cannot be scaled up that quickly, because it is staggeringly expensive, and takes far too long to build, is constrained by limited resources, and is plagued by the same safety problems as ever, as demonstrated by the actual delays and actual cost overruns and actual safety problems of “new generation” nuclear power plants that are actually under construction —
Well then, suddenly the argument is all about “fourth generation” nuclear power plants, which don’t exist except as science fiction, and are not expected even by their proponents to be ready to feed a single kilowatt into the grid for at least 20 years.
And as to the gigantic cost overruns and lengthy construction delays for new nuclear power plants being caused by “protestors”, please show me the protestors who have caused the multi-billion dollar cost overruns and multi-year delays that are afflicting the French AREVA “new generation” reactors under construction in Finland and France. Show me the news reports of the massive Greenpeace protests and lawsuits that have caused those problems. You can’t, because they don’t exist. Those problems are inherent in the nuclear technology itself.
But of course, that’s the problem, the nuclear proponents will say. AREVA shouldn’t be building the “new generation” power plants that the nuclear industry has touted as cheaper and faster to build, they should be building “fourth generation” power plants that won’t have those inherent problems and will really be faster and cheaper to build. Once the “fourth generation” technology actually exists, that is. In twenty years.
#783 Spaceman Spiff
“Clouds of any type at any altitude on the night side of the Earth keep the Earth’s surface warmer than it otherwise would have been.”
They can’t cause any increase in temperature however. Everything cools at night (disregarding irrelevancies).
But I’m still surprised that cirrus clouds can cause an increase in temperature since their principal effect must be to “block” the sun’s radiation.
Maybe my problem is what words are understood to mean in the scientific community.
For me, “to warm” or “to cause warming” is “to raise the temperature of”, “to cool” or “to cause cooling” is to “lower the temperature of”.
If cirrus clouds “interfere” with the sun’s incoming radiation, how can they cause temperatures to be raised at the surface?
Simon Abingdon,
Constant temperature is a sign of a system at equilibrium–that is Energy_in=Energy_out. If the system is warming, it can mean that Energy_in is increasing or that Energy_out is decreasing. I hope that is sufficiently clear that you can comprehend.
#777 simon abingdon
>>>> “…while the effect of night-time clouds reduces the effect of radiative cooling, it clearly doesn’t enable any warming as such since the sun has already set.”
So reduced cooling clearly doesn’t equate to warming! Nominated for 2009 Howler of the Year!
Critical Thinker, No. What makes you a troll is:
1)Your insistence on distorting what people say into a straw-man caricature and persisting in this despinte being called on it by more than one poster.
2)Your refusal to engage on substance or evidence.
3)Your insistence on anonymity and further the adoption of a nomme de Plume that is simply banal.
What makes you a concern troll is your insistence on criticising the views of others without having sufficient courage to share your own views. I hope that makes the taxonomy clearer.
Blair Dowden,
Towards the end of your comment, you state in 767:
I take it that you think we should play it safe. So does Hansen — although perhaps not in quite the same way.
But lets examine your argument. You state:
Snowball earth during the Cretaceous! I would say someone should… oh, wait a second, that wasn’t Hansen but your bringing up a 1% reduction in the solar constant during the Cretaceous with the 120,000 ppm of “snowball earth” — to show how absurd Hansen’s claims are. But the hypothetical snowball earth would have been much earlier than the Cretaceous — which was 206-144 million years ago.
In fact, according to the informal paper you cite:
… the hypothetical snowball earth would have been “600-700 million years ago.” Given this, the solar constant at the time would have been not one percent lower than today, but “six percent.” And according to the paper by Hansen that you cite a doubling of carbon dioxide is equivilent to a 2% increase in the solar constant, meaning that we would have an additional 3 doublings to reach 10-20 watts per square meter above current levels. Granting Hansen the benefit of a doubt, lets say that we are talking about an additional 20 watts per square meter above current levels. And following standard practice, rather than assuming that we are talking about current levels (where currently we have 375 ppm) we are talking about 20 watts above pre-industrial with its 275 ppm. This works to Hansen’s disadvantage, but it is the standard way of performing such calculations.
Now according to the paper by Hansen that you cite, each doubling of carbon dioxide results in an additional 4 watts per square meter. This implies 5 doublings to reach 20 watts per square meter. So at this point snowball earth would have had to have been 8 doublings above current level for it to achieve what would have been equivilent to 20 watts per square meter above pre-industrial. This translates into 128 times pre-industrial. And according to the passage quoted above in the non-technical paper by Hoffman and Schrag you cite, for us to escape snowball earth CO2 levels would have had to have been 350 times — I would presume — pre-industrial.
Suddenly it isn’t looking like Hansen’s views are such a challenge to snowball earth, is it? That is, since 350 divided by 128 is 2.73. Furthermore, our calculations have been assuming current climate sensitivity — whether we are speaking of watts per square meter per doubling of CO2 or degrees Celsius per doubling. Current climate sensitivity is due to (among other things) the current configuration of the continents.
No reason to think that continents and their configuration would have been anything comparable to what they are today at the time of the melting of snowball earth. And if climate sensitivity were different that throws pretty much all of the calculations I performed to the wind. Against that a factor of 2.73 really doesn’t seem all that significant.
Once melting began to take place one could begin to expect rain rather than snow, and with rain at an acidity much higher than current levels (given the extremely high levels of carbon dioxide) and newly-exposed rock we really should expect the process of weathering to greatly exceed current levels. More importantly, it isn’t simply the weathering of rocks which would have taken high levels of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but cold sea water becoming exposed to the atmosphere for the first time in millions of years. As such the partial pressure of sea water would have been much lower than its maximum and it would have drawn down the carbon dioxide levels much more quickly than weathering.
*
Now some of my argument regarding snowball earth simply aren’t applicable to the Cretaceous period. For example, regarding the temperature and consequent partial pressure of carbon dioxide in sea water. Other elements would be — for example, regarding the configuration of the continents and consequent climate sensitivity. As such the tension between Hansen’s claims and various mainstream positions isn’t nearly as severe as you make them out to be.
This isn’t to say that I think we have to worry about the Venus Syndrome. I don’t. I think it is much more likely that, even if we were to deliberately seek to bring it about by using up all our conventional and unconventional fossil fuel, the climate change that we would experience along the way would be enough to topple modern civilization long before we made the Venus Syndrome an inevitable consequence of our actions.
However, my views on this matter aren’t necessarily the same as Hansen’s. And I can understand if he wants to play it safe.
Matthew says, “The rate of warming from the late 70s through the late 90s has not been sustained since the late 90s.
WRONG!!!
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/riddle-me-this/
Matthew continues: “Within AGW there is not a good explanation for that.”
WRONG!!!
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/what-the-ipcc-models-really-say/
A skeptic has to have the foggiest notion of his subject. Like so many who would assume that mantle, you don’t have the chops to claim it.
> Simon Abington
> while the effect of night-time clouds reduces the effect of
> radiative cooling, it clearly doesn’t enable any warming as
> such since the sun has already set.
So try another thought experiment. You have a hot water bottle.
You leave it out in the sun all day, then put it under the covers at night.
What’s happening?
You have the same amount of water over you as nighttime clouds.
What’s happening?
No warming in either case, because the sun isn’t shining?
752 Philippe Chantreau: How has France dealt with the protests so that a sufficient number of nuclear power plants have been built in France?
#756 Greg Goodknight
What you don’t seem to realize is that with your BS physics you are the snarky one, denigrating the actual science and those that represent it in its most reasonable context.
I don’t fully understand gravity, but like gravity and mass, snark attracts snark in measured response, or overwhelming lunacy. So, you come into a science blog and toss up a bunch of debunked arguments based on your limited (myopic) perspective, and you’re calling others snarky? Snark is as snark does.
You buy into Svensmarks argument because you don’t understand the science surrounding it in radiative forcing and the quantitative analysis on GHG’s.
So realistically, you should just take your well veiled snark talk and go somewhere else… he who denigrates intelligence to support argument from belief denigrates himself…
…unless of course you are now willing to learn, in which case most everyone here would be happy to help you.
Oh, I’m sorry, was I denigrating? You might like to think so.
#757 BFJ
The inner workings of the IPCC are no mystery. It’s merely an organization that has to deliver on collecting the science on the subject of climate change and issuing reports.
No an easy job though. There are lot’s of contributors and they have to verify the science and confidence levels as best as possible before specific report dates.
In other words, it’s an administrative organization to deliver reports in accord with specifications.