Continuation of the open thread. Please use these threads to bring up things that are creating ‘buzz’ rather than having news items get buried in comment threads on more specific topics. We’ll promote the best responses to the head post.
Knorr (2009): Case in point, Knorr (GRL, 2009) is a study about how much of the human emissions are staying the atmosphere (around 40%) and whether that is detectably changing over time. It does not undermine the fact that CO2 is rising. The confusion in the denialosphere is based on a misunderstanding between ‘airborne fraction of CO2 emissions’ (not changing very much) and ‘CO2 fraction in the air’ (changing very rapidly), led in no small part by a misleading headline (subsequently fixed) on the ScienceDaily news item Update: MT/AH point out the headline came from an AGU press release (Sigh…). SkepticalScience has a good discussion of the details including some other recent work by Le Quéré and colleagues.
Update: Some comments on the John Coleman/KUSI/Joe D’Aleo/E. M. Smith accusations about the temperature records. Their claim is apparently that coastal station absolute temperatures are being used to estimate the current absolute temperatures in mountain regions and that the anomalies there are warm because the coast is warmer than the mountain. This is simply wrong. What is actually done is that temperature anomalies are calculated locally from local baselines, and these anomalies can be interpolated over quite large distances. This is perfectly fine and checkable by looking at the pairwise correlations at the monthly stations between different stations (London-Paris or New York-Cleveland or LA-San Francisco). The second thread in their ‘accusation’ is that the agencies are deleting records, but this just underscores their lack of understanding of where the GHCN data set actually comes from. This is thoroughly discussed in Peterson and Vose (1997) which indicates where the data came from and which data streams give real time updates. The principle one is the CLIMAT updates of monthly mean temperature via the WMO network of reports. These are distributed by the Nat. Met. Services who have decided which stations they choose to produce monthly mean data for (and how it is calculated) and is absolutely nothing to do with NCDC or NASA.
Further Update: NCDC has a good description of their procedures now available, and Zeke Hausfather has a very good explanation of the real issues on the Yale Forum.
This is in response to the claim that improving efficiency does not reduce demand. To the contrary, CAFE standards enacted in the mid 1970’s more than doubled the average fuel economy of the US automobile fleet by 1985. US oil consumption dropped significantly after 1980 (when highly efficient models were produced in large quantities) and remained below 1979 levels until 1997. Oil prices were quite low after 1983 and the economy boomed. Mandates for improved efficiency worked.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/ipsr/t46.xls
J: I don’t think you have a good enough handle on the counterfactual. We have economic growth, and therefore increased energy usage, resulting from a number of factors. One of the factors leading to growth is increased efficiency. But there are other factors leading to growth: showing that we have had simultaneously increased efficiency and increased energy usage does not prove that increased efficiency causes increased energy usage.
Where energy is a limiting factor in life, I might grant you that increasing efficiency would not reduce energy usage (and in some edge cases even increase energy use). But I don’t think we’ve seen that historically: our consumption of energy as a fraction of GDP has dropped precipitously over time, implying that savings from increased efficiency in energy use has actually been applied to all kinds of non-energy goods.
California is a good example: increased fridge efficiency lead to larger fridges for a while, but eventually the fridge was large enough – other, non-energy costs (space, for example) outweighed the fact that fridges had become very cheap to run. Energy use/capita and happiness also shows a plateau where increased energy use does not actually lead to increases in most indicators of well-being after a certain point. etc. etc.
>>#581: “In a world with a stable population size..”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but barring forced population control, I believe the only place population growth willingly declines is in developed nations.
And I do understand your concept of being personally “fully developed”. I’d have to assume you had only produced replacement children of course.
I can imagine a developed earth comprised of “fully developed” replacement only producing humans with a stable population. This is imagination only, likely for a great while if ever. Your imagination may vary.
I think to get there is as much a religious (in the broadest sense of the word) task as well as a technological one, which is off topic. If we deal as we must with the world we are given, Bottom line: I think it obvious that putting one’s hope on increased energy efficiency to significantly affect CO2 output, worldwide, within the time scale of the medium-alarmist AGW predictions is a fools errand.
RE:582
I’m still not convinced that more energy efficient homes and especially more energy efficient office buildings
don’t lower total energy use. One could be using the money for a toaster consuming more energy. Or one could
buy a better car, a solar water heater, more land to put a conservation easement on, a charitable gift or any of a plethora
of things to spend money on.
What’s at issue here is disposable income, not whether efficiency works or not. It works fine if one’s not just one of the army of lemmings using overconsumption to display an illusion of superiority.
@598
Has there been a similar global comparison of highs and lows performed? I would hate to use that one since I keep telling the skeptics and deniers its about global temps and not just a nation or region.
J says: 7 January 2010 at 5:31 PM
>>>>#592 Hank etc. It could be…
If you actually read any of the history, you’ll learn that it’s not a hypothetical. It’s happened each time there was a public need, and each time surprised the traditional economists.
Turns out people aren’t innately selfish — or a good many aren’t — and that people actually do get organized for their common good and mutual benefit.
Some would call it soc ia lism. Others call it civilization.
Re 549: Thanks Hank. I’d scanned a paper of theirs and found it a little hard to discern what they were saying about trends. I think the page you linked to says “We’re working on it” ?
49 Mike, thanks for the editorial. I don’t think the editor did the piece any good. The “Most egregious lie” section should have been called “Most egregious quote”. And what’s wrong with number 7, Patrick Michaels “lie”, “It has been known since 1872 that as we emit more and more carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, each increment results in less and less warming.”, which was responded to with, “(He apparently forgot about feedback loops.)”
Michaels was right. Feedback loops don’t matter as long as they’re not runaway. Unfortunately, the magnitude of the warming doesn’t decrease fast enough to help us much.
#593 Doug Bostrom
“Scientists projected the 2003-2007 decline in Arctic Ice as predicting an Arctic ice-free summer by 2015…”
Which ones? Any publications on that?
Predictions of ice-free Arctic by 2015 are easy to find in the media. Here are a couple that actually point to their scientific origins.
http://www.space.dtu.dk/English/News/News/Arkiv/Nuuk_koncerence_summery.aspx
http://arcticfocus.com/2008/12/08/arctic-summers-to-be-ice-free-by-2015/
“Scientists used Katrina …”
Which ones? Any publications on that?
Katrina imagery figured heavily in An Inconvenient Truth. From Wikipedia: “Gore cited Kerry Emanuel’s 2005 report in Nature on hurricane intensity increasing with the increase of global mean temperatures.”
Note that Emanuel has modified his views.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_Emanuel#cite_note-2
J wrote: ” … Since China and India are definitely not going to be onboard … And adamant in their refusal to decrease their output of CO2.”
With all due respect you are shockingly uninformed, to the point where it is a fair characterization to say that you really don’t know what you are talking about. Your statements about China and India are simply, flatly, false, which you would know if you bothered to find out what those governments’ policies actually are, rather than what your ideology tells you they must be.
J wrote: “Regardless, taxes and subsidies are artificial and along with the required centralized forced economies, they tend to have bad, often very bad, consequences. The home run, IMHO, is non-carbon based energy sources – that work and are close to the price of exploration and development of carbon-based ones. We only have one now, nuclear.”
With all due respect, that is just more ideologically-driven, ill-informed blather.
You say we have “only one” non-carbon based energy source — nuclear. Then please explain how it is that solar and wind are the fastest and second-fastest growing new sources of energy in the world, growing at record-breaking double-digit rates year after year, while nuclear power is barely maintaining its share of electricity generation? Why is it that vast amounts of private venture capital are pouring into wind and solar and efficiency and smart-grid technologies, while the nuclear industry is begging for a massive big-government bailout because private investors won’t touch it?
The “artificial” subsidies to nuclear power and fossil fuels dwarf those that have been extended to wind and solar.
And as for solutions that “require centralized forced economies”, nuclear power is the poster child for that. Nuclear power has always and everywhere been a state-supported or state-run industry. Nowhere in the world has nuclear power ever succeeded economically on its own two feet. And the extremely dangerous nature of the nuclear fuel cycle absolutely requires a high-degree of “centralized forced” government control.
Where new nuclear power plants have been proposed in the USA recently, the industry has demanded that the taxpayers and the ratepayers put up all the money up front, and absorb all the costs and all the risks, including the risk of financial losses if the plants prove unprofitable when ultimately built. In some cases utility rate payers will be forced to pay increased electric bills to subsidize the new nukes before they have even been approved for construction! And this is the technology that your “libertarian” sensibilities prefer? Rather than solar technologies which allow small businesses, factories, farms, and households to generate their own electricity from free sunlight? Rather than giving tax cuts to individuals and businesses who install solar and wind energy systems? Give me a break.
#602 Marcus: “increased fridge efficiency lead to larger fridges for a while, but eventually the fridge was large enough – other, non-energy costs (space, for example) outweighed the fact that fridges had become very cheap to run.”
and #601 Jiminmpls: “…CAFE standards enacted in the mid 1970’s more than doubled the average fuel economy of the US automobile fleet by 1985…”
More important from a policy standpoint, most of the increase in energy efficiency of refrigerators and freezers was mandated, but the public bought them without any apparent qualms. “A typical new refrigerator with automatic defrost and a top-mounted freezer uses about half the energy used by a typical 1990 refrigerator.”(http://www.aceee.org/Consumerguide/refrigeration.htm).
When my grandfather went to buy a new Chrysler in the 1970’s, he was surprised to find his favorite model a foot shorter and with improved mpg. That wasn’t a factor in his decision to buy it, and he certainly didn’t drive more because of it.
It seems that CAFE standards have more direct and long-lasting impact on fuel economy than do prices. Wikipedia has a good overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy
J says 7 January 2010 at 5:44 PM:
Regarding a stable population, we’ll get there, all right. The exact nature of that stability may take a very ugly form, where it is “stable” only when viewed as a smoothed signal, with unbounded forces causing it to dither in a very unappealing way over shorter periods. Or, if developed nations are any example, we may hope for something more better and be encouraged because it seems possible to produce the desired result without too much needless suffering.
I don’t buy into magical thinking that affords a notion of ever-growing population, any more than I believe that any resource is infinite in scope. We’re likely not going to the stars, we’ve got one planet remotely suitable for colonization, most of us don’t want to live underground and in any case only a fraction of the interior of the Earth could be used for habitation.
So our population will reach a limit. We’ll want to pay attention to the manner and style of that limit. Improvements in efficiency of resource utilization will be a key part of any serious effort to optimize our way around our proclivity for procreation.
Don Shor says: 7 January 2010 at 6:33 PM
Thank you, you make my point: no scientific publications.
> http://seaice.apl.washington.edu/ARCSS-SAT/
Yep, sounds like they’re working on it. Dr. Bitz did a guest topic here some years back, I hope we’ll see more from her.
> efficiency
Like, replacing all the big utility transformers with the most energy-efficient models, for example. No way that’s going to increase use, unless you think the utilities will blow the money they save on snowmobiles and vodka or something.
But California and other states had to sue Bush’s Dep’t of Energy for mandating not the most efficient but the cheapest available replacement transformers– this for hardware that can stay in service for decades where huge longterm savings far exceeded the shortterm price difference.
Let’s see, it’s been a few years, is there news on that?
http://www.google.com/search?q=bush+DOE+California+energy+transformer+lawsuit
Yeah!
“… Distribution Transformers Get Energy Boost from U.S. DOE
Agency will review current standard and propose stronger ones by 2011
August 10, 2009
Electricity Distribution Transformer
Electricity distribution transformers can be made much more efficient.
Photo: F. Fish
San Francisco, CA — The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Friday set in motion a U.S. Department of Energy agreement to review the existing energy efficiency standards for electricity distribution transformers, the gray boxes mounted on utility poles, and propose changes to maximize future savings three years earlier than otherwise required. The agreement, which is part of a lawsuit settlement reached with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Earthjustice and several states, is expected to speed up efforts to increase the efficiency and the cost-saving potential of energy transmission in the United States….”
http://www.earthjustice.org/news/press/2009/distribution-transformers-get-energy-boost-from-u-s-doe.html
592, Doug Bostrom. Here is the arctic ice cover record:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/sea.ice.anomaly.timeseries.jpg
Uh, oh:
Breecker, D., Sharp, Z., & McFadden, L. (2009). Atmospheric CO2 concentrations during ancient greenhouse climates were similar to those predicted for A.D. 2100 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0902323106
Hat tip to:
http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2010/01/is_the_earth_even_more_sensiti.php
for the fun of it, here is a graph of sunspot number and earth temperature. It only goes up to 1980. If there is a message here (and the solar theories do have some lacunae and shortcomings of their own), then the current low solar activity is a worrisome sign for the future.
Don Shor: There’s a reason for US CAFE standards having a bigger impact than prices do: time. People are willing to spend a more or less fixed amount of time each day commuting. The amount of time required to travel to work is largely unaffected by the fuel efficiency of the vehicle they use. Because housing in outlying areas is cheaper than housing near jobs, few Americans’ commutes are cost-constrained. As a result, there are very few Americans who move, change jobs, or quit working entirely in response to modest fuel price increases.
We need not just to cut back on fossil fuels ourselves, but to put heavy carbon tariffs on any country that doesn’t–and get our allies to do the same.
WM,
Try here: http://bartonpaullevenson.com/30Years.html
>>>#610 SecularAnimist: “please explain how it is that solar and wind are the fastest and second-fastest growing new sources..”
I just have a minute, but the point is these can’t “work” in the sense of completely replacing the carbon-fueled electric power stations. Only nuclear technology, currently, can do this. Solar and wind provide power, but they are not technologically feasible to replace the energy sources for the nations power grids.
As to second and third fastest growing, more small percentage of power demand to them, but you have to plan and begin major power generation decades in advance, and that means using what is possible today. The only technology that fits that requirement is nuclear.
J — birth rates have been lowered very successfully in third world countries. This was done by using voluntary programs that enlisted the women. In Bangladesh, for example, the typical number of births per woman fell from 7 to 3. Making birth control cheap or free and pushing it locally, and to both sexes, works, and works very well. From 2001-2008, however, the US cut off most of its support from the organizations doing this, since many of them at least mentioned abortions. Just saying the word to a client could get your funding cut under Bush.
>>>#604 Tim Jones: “What’s at issue here is disposable income, not whether efficiency works or not. It works fine if one’s not just one of the army of lemmings using overconsumption to display an illusion of superiority.”
Few people, proportionately, have enough wealth for conspicuous consumption. While some on this thread are fortunate enough to have all they need or wish, most people have fairly normal human wants and very normal human needs that they’ve not yet accomplished. They want a better house (or just a house), another room added to have room for a child, another car for the wife to drive to work, a vacation this year, or they want to move to a larger office, hire another worker, grow their business, etc. etc.
For most of the world’s inhabitants the great majority many of these material needs and wants require power/energy. When an efficiency is gained in one energy-use, it is rapidly and gratefully applied to another – or more of the same one.
Predictions of ice-free Arctic by 2015 are easy to find in the media.
Here’s what the scientists are actually saying:
In other words, they aren’t predicting that the pole will be ice-free “by 2015 (more or less)”, they are predicting that the pole will be ice free as early as 2013 – you’ve picked their lower limit and decided it was their most likely point.
And of course, we are on a pretty obvious path to having an ice free arctic sometime within the next few decades.
J, I agree that increased energy isn’t a silver bullet. However, increased efficiency along with cap & trade or carbon taxation to make the price of fuel reflect its true cost is simply a way of ensuring market efficiency. The cheapest energy source is the energy you don’t use. It ought to be one thing everyone can agree on… well, except maybe Exx-Mob.
J says: 7 January 2010 at 8:03 PM
“The only technology that fits that requirement is (fill in blank)”
Monomaniacs are monotonous.
For instance, there are lots of places in the world where a grid would be handy or is even in place already but a reactor would not be a good idea. It’s sort of axiomatic that reactors need a particular environment in which to thrive, one with demonstrated societal stability likely to last for the lifetime of a reactor, where there’s an educated workforce, where there’s a place to dump rejected heat. That short, reasonable list of requirements eliminates reactors as a viable alternative for many localities. Fortunately there are other choices.
Septic Matthew says: 7 January 2010 at 7:24 PM
Oh, the old superficial gobstopper, visually impressive at first glance but reliable as a rotted ice bridge as a support for an argument. I’ve only been interested in the climate discussion for a couple of years but I’ve seen it paraded by at least 1/2 dozen times.
Did you notice the thick line running down the middle of the Y axis? That’s the droid you’re looking for, not the squiggly one.
Septic says “Scientists used Katrina as the harbinger of things to come…”
Cite???
“…and predicted even worse for subsequent years,…”
Cite???
“…but actual hurricane activity has declined,…”
Remember when I told you to learn the difference between climate and weather? YER DOIN’ IT WRONG!!!
“…and there has never been evidence of a century-long trend toward greater energy release in tropical storms.”
Huh? We haven’t even been keeping stats on hurricanes for a century. Oh, and Matthew, folks in the Philipines or Baja or China or Darwin or even Brazil might disagree that huricane activity has decreased. OK, we’ve got climate, meteorology, geography… Anything else you are clueless on?
J, see the cover story in the November 2009 Scientific American (and a companion interactive web feature that is free). It describes how to supply all power with wind, water, solar, and geothermal by 2030. Without nuclear. With a resulting electric cost less than that from other sources.
Here’s information on the hurricane energies of the last 30 years.
624, Doug Bostrom: Oh, the old superficial gobstopper, visually impressive at first glance but reliable as a rotted ice bridge as a support for an argument.
The solar theorists produce lots of graphs like that, each with a different summary statistic for solar activity. On the whole, I respect the solar theory more than I did 10 years ago. I think that they have too much to ignore and not enough to convince.
“Down the middle of the Y axis?” That would be a thick line in the middle of a thin line. I think you must mean something else.
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/f10.gif
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/sunspot.gif
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current_c2.mpg
(hat tip to Kevin VE3EN, solarcycle24.com)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2008.06.003
“A need of very long time-series for obtaining robust results becomes obvious. Here at least 50 years of data were used.”
624 Jinchi says:
Predictions of ice-free Arctic by 2015 are easy to find in the media.
Here’s what the scientists are actually saying:
Arctic could go ice-free within decades: Study… Averaged together, the models point to a nearly ice-free Arctic in 32 years, with some of the models suggesting it could be happen in just 11 years
I don’t know the date of your quote. Here is a direct quote from the article I linked, dated 12/8/08:
http://arcticfocus.com/2008/12/08/arctic-summers-to-be-ice-free-by-2015/
“David Barber, a University of Manitoba geoscientist, claims that the Arctic will see its first ice free summer in 2015, due to global warming. Mr. Barber was in charge of almost 300 scientists from 15 different countries who were all taking part in the Circumpolar Flaw Lead System Study. The CFL was a $40 million dollar Arctic research project that saw the scientist studying the Arctic for a nine month period, based out of the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, the Amundsen. Mr. Barber has previously claimed that the Arctic basin would see its first ice free summer between 2013 and 2030, but due to his recent findings he is now able to narrow it down even further, stating it will most likely be in 6 years.”
Doug Bostrom is absolutely right that these are not scientific publications. It is a quote in the media from a climate scientist. Oftentimes we are dealing with exaggerations in the media, misquotes, etc., on all sides of the climate change issue.
Similarly, with the issue of increased hurricane intensity most of the media hype originated (I think) from Vice President Gore’s emphasis on Katrina in his movie. But it was based on scientific publications. Subsequent publications seem to have modified the conclusion that hurricane frequency and intensity will increase. But in support of Gore’s position, a recent publication from NOAA concludes “It is likely that greenhouse warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense on average and have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.”
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes
Septic Matthew says: 7 January 2010 at 8:43 PM
“Down the middle of the Y axis?” That would be a thick line in the middle of a thin line. I think you must mean something else.”
Let me put it another way and see if it works for you.
The ice signal starts at the left of the graph and can be seen generally floating above a line that has been superimposed midway up the y-axis and is parallel to the x-axis. The ice signal gradually descends in a herky-jerky fashion and eventually ends up at the far right (today) significantly below the line that is superimposed midway up the y-axis and is parallel to the x-axis.
The line superimposed halfway up the y-axis and parallel to the x-axis is called the “mean” and represents the central value of the overall ice signal. The relationship of the ice signal to this “mean” as we see it evolve over time tells us that the ice has been diminishing over time.
More, by scrutinizing the graph you so kindly provided, we can see that a prediction of improving health of the ice sheet based on the past two years of data is drastically premature. The hypothetical “reasonable man” would probably conclude there’s no reason to expect a sudden reversal of the signal.
I’m not really good at this sort of thing so apologies if its still not clear.
Don Shor says:7 January 2010 at 9:50 PM
Probably also helps with clarification to note that Kerry Emmanuel did not mention Katrina in his published work.
You know Tom Fuller (SF Examiner) has a great idea. He thinks it would be a good thing if you had outsiders come in and inspect the climate science work that you guys are doing. He has been pushing the idea for a few posts, and in his comments to this post:
http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2010m1d6-The-global-warming-smell-test
I thought I would pitch in and help get this going, so I suggested this:
(I wanted to give the GISS guys a heads up before the inspection team arrives.)
Tom Fuller:
Is this the kind of science inspection you envision?
Dr. Hansen:
Goddard Institute of Space Studies
Under the new Inhoff Science Inspection Act, our inspection team will be conducting the GISS inspection to ensure that your scientists have not made any errors or mistakes.
In our first inspection round, we will particularly focus on auditing your statistical analyses to identify calculation errors. This inspection will be led by our Climate Science Auditor, Steve McIntyre. Mr. McIntryre is here on guest worker visa, so the information gathering phase of his audit should take less than six months. Based on previous inspection work on the Hockey Stick, we anticipate that multiple followup inspections will be needed over the next ten years, until his discretionary final audit report is published in 2020. Please communicate to your staff, that additional statistical analyses should not be attempted, until Mr. Mcintyre and his team of internet bloggers have finished correcting the mistakes in the existing calculations.
Our lead climate theorist, The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley will be reviewing the purely theoretical equations used for calculating radiative forcing. The Viscount will also be interviewing each of your staff to ensure they understand the basic theories of climate science. He will conduct mandatory lectures each day from 9 AM to 9 PM Greenwich Mean Time, and to ensure that your staff doesn’t err in calculating the time zone differential, he will conduct these lectures in Greenwich, England. Until these interviews are concluded, please desist from using any equations being reviewed by Viscount Monckton. In particular, under no circumstances are computers to be used to conduct any calculations for any model runs. Henceforth, and until further notice, all model run calculations will be checked using an abacus, to prevent computer malfunctions from causing mistakes. In addition, all input data, will be adjusted to ensure that results don’t differ from Viscount Monckton’s expected results.
Our Lead Inspector of your temperature measurement systems will be Mr. Anthony Watts. Mr. Watts will begin his inspection with a slide show of every land based temperature measurement site in the world, with a oral commentary of the siting and installation mistakes of each station. Mr. Watts requests that your staff prepare the photos for this slide show, and present a comparison of the temperature measurements at each station, with data from the nearest measurement stations. Mr. Watts also wants measurement data from every urban heat source in the world, and expects your staff to compare this data to special important data that Mr. Watts will personally select from the temperature measurements.
Our second science inspection team will be arriving immediately after the departure of the first wave team. We are fortunate to have energy industry experts on the second team, who are currently preparing their list of inspection demands. The team will be accompanied by the father and son Pielke team who will make up analyses on the spot, publish their impressions and conjectures, and then demand your staff provide analysis supporting their conclusions.
The third inspection team will be led by one of the self-declared brilliant people on the planet, Mr. Glenn Beck. He is assembling a particularly august group of similar climate experts such as Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Hannity and Dr. Plimer. Mr. Beck will be supported by a million Tea Party workers who will be happy to come in personally and help your team get the science done right (and we mean done RIGHT, and not left).
The entire inspection process will be monitored and reported by our Super Examiner Thomas Fuller, who has a spotless record when it comes to mis-reporting mistakes in climate science uncovered by the experts on our inspection team.
Love and Kisses,
Mr. Marc Morano
Climate Science Inspection Team Leader
So what do you think guys? A few more inspections can’t hurt if we want better quality science and help scientists advance our understanding? This is a good thing, right?
To the deafening silence on whether the 30-year climate standard (or 15 if we’re talking temperature only) has any particular physical basis to its definitive status:
Nobody needs to answer the question just because I’m curious, but somebody might want to counter the obvious [perhaps cynical] reaction to there being no such definitive standard, that being: “how convenient that climate has meaning only in a 15- or 30-year time frame given the flat temperatures over the last decade.” I note with great interest that decades count big-time in phrases such as “the hottest decade in recorded history” and not so much in those such as “negligible temperature change in the last decade.” I would hope that folks on either side of the debate (or non-debate, whatever you want to call the disagreement) would agree or at least hope that some day there will be an explanation for why there was no global rise in recent years, and that the explanation will be of a piece with the theory/model that predicted no such flat period at first but was eventually reconciled using a new understanding of some variable, sensitivity or feedback sign not in the earlier model. Until that time, the current view that it must and only be anthro-CO2 growth because models don’t work otherwise, and we have no better explanation, seems a bit shaky. Do we have a decade of inflection on our hands or a decadal maximum? We’ll see, or at least you young people will!
Well, they keep changing even my favourite site for monitoring the arctic sea ice anomaly (link at #615). The reference used to be 1979 – 2000, now it is computed over 1979 – 2008. Better of course, as it now conforms to the usual 30 year climate standard. But it also includes a clear trend over the reference period.
The main interest of this graph is elsewhere, however. It displays rather explicitly that a tipping-point may have been passed in 2007. A distinctive summer anomaly has appeared, a pattern quite different from anything seen earlier.
Too short a data set to be sure, but here is a logic to it. A declining long term trend (extent and thickness) leads to a situation where a spurious impulse (wind pattern in 2007) triggers a permanent step change in the process. Typical system behaviour.
An interesting development is also reported by the NYT. Some restricted data produced by the reconnaissance satellites is to become available for scientific research, particularly from the Arctic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/science/earth/05satellite.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Some U.S. Navy scientists have earlier mentioned very early dates for an ice-free Arctic ocean. They may (or may not) have had access to such restricted data already.
>>>>#625 RaY: “However, increased efficiency along with cap & trade or carbon taxation to make the price of fuel reflect its true cost is simply a way of ensuring market efficiency. The cheapest energy source is the energy you don’t use. It ought to be one thing everyone can agree on”
You’re on the right track, not on increased efficiency, but increasing price to affect use; however, ‘true cost” and “everyone can agree on” is, in reality, not there.
I’m sorry, it’s just not the same for an, as one poster put it a “fully developed” American and a freezing my ass off poor Siberian, or whatever.
We cannot assume the whole world, or even the US, is in energy satiation. So the true cost, or conversely, the true value is not something everyone can agree upon.
Long term we can dream of utopia. However, if you assume the mid worse case predictions of AGW, “consensus” is elusive; what works for the upper middle class in Oregon sucks for the poor in Texas, and sucks even more for the poor of Brazil.
>>>#629 Tom Dayton: “It describes how to supply all power with wind, water, solar, and geothermal by 2030. Without nuclear. With a resulting electric cost less than that from other sources.”
I eagerly await its implementation.
#552 Rod B
I understand your angle here Rod, but in the 80’s and 90’s I spent a lot of time hanging out with scientific types. I don’t know any good scientist that would have a problem altering their perspective in the face of evidence.
In other words, your proposition as far as I can tell is in our mind. There may be some scientists that would fit your description so you may not be entirely wrong. However, I would not consider them good scientists. Maybe some examples might be those like Lindzen, or Svensmark and the like. Scientists that are stuck in confirmation bias for whatever reasons, be it some form of compensation of a lack of scientific integrity or just plain naivete or ignorance.
I’m just saying I don’t know any scientists that have that sort of integrity problem.
#555 Rod B
Rod, for the umpteenth time… CONTEXT IS KEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Forgive me if this has been raised before, but I am interested in any comments on Pielke Snr take on forcings. He compares the mean forcing calculated from ocean heat content at 0.85 W/m2 with the IPCC mean GHG forcing of 1.6 W/m2. Pielke’s take on this is that the feedbacks are over-estimated. Note that I also am aware of the spread of values in those numbers, but from on average he seems to have a point.
[Response: Not sure how this follows. The feedbacks control the temperature response to forcings. But whatever the magnitude of the initial forcings, you expect the imbalance to be less (since there has been some reaction in temperatures). The magnitude of the imbalance is related to the thermal interia in the system (the time need to warm the ocean). But you can’t estimate the feedbacks without thinking about the temperature changes. But maybe I’ve missed the point… do you have a link? – gavin]
Walter, the deafening silenc arises because you’ve had the question answered before–many, many, many, many times. I would think that you would be as tired of writing it as we are of answering it.
The one difference was Gavin’s introduction–I think that Gavin was saying you only need 15 years of data to reliably determine CO2 trends–as in concentration, not temperature. It’s 30 years to determine the trend, as is shown quite clearly in Tamino’s “How Long” post. Please, Please, go read it.
637: http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F1520-0477%281989%29070%3C0602%3ASDOC%3E2.0.CO%3B2
WM: To the deafening silence on whether the 30-year climate standard (or 15 if we’re talking temperature only) has any particular physical basis to its definitive status:
BPL: Here it is for you the second time. Read it this time!
http://BartonPaulLevenson.com/30Years.html
JPR: “#555 Rod B
Rod, for the umpteenth time… CONTEXT IS KEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Rod B’s context is “Government is always wrong” and everything has to be seen in that context.
Manny: “To the deafening silence on whether the 30-year climate standard (or 15 if we’re talking temperature only) has any particular physical basis to its definitive status:”
If you’re sticking your fingers in your ears, then of COURSE you’ll hear nothing.
That pony has been ridden to death.
Go look it up.
J says “I just have a minute, but the point is these can’t “work” in the sense of completely replacing the carbon-fueled electric power stations.”
Why?
“Solar and wind provide power, but they are not technologically feasible to replace the energy sources for the nations power grids.”
Are the electrons the wrong shape?
“but you have to plan and begin major power generation decades in advance, and that means using what is possible today.”
How long does it take to build a nuclear reactor?
And if you build lots, how long does it take to up the reprocessing capacity?
These are hardly doable “today”.
This would take DECADES.
How many renewable sites could be built in that time?
Lots and lots.
Don “Predictions of ice-free Arctic by 2015 are easy to find in the media.”
How easy are they to find in the science papers?
PS note it’s easy to find reports of Jesus Christ appearing in someone’s butter dish in the media.
Doesn’t make it authoritative.
What’s your take on this? How likely is it that it is just random fluctuation and how likely that it is a portent of the future?
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/1/6/822520/-Freak-Current-Takes-Gulf-Stream-to-Greenland1