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.
PS
Sorry about those links, but something in them was setting off the spam filter. (Get rid of the asterisks and spaces)
But here are the titles:
Merck published fake journal
Phar-maceutical Companies Submit Ghostwritten Articles, Medical Journal Editors Say
McDonald’s UK looking to reduce to flatulence (bovine, that is):
“McDonald’s seeks to cut cows’ methane emissions
Three-year study by burger giant aims to reduce pollution from flatulent livestock
McDonald’s has long been the butt of jokes about what goes into its burgers, but now it is to spend thousands of pounds investigating what comes out of its beef cows.
The fast food chain, which uses beef from 350,000 cattle a year for its burger meat, is to conduct a three-year study into methane emissions from cattle on 350 farms across Britain. Gas produced by flatulent livestock accounts for 4% of the UK’s total carbon emissions. It is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse agent.”
More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/10/mcdonalds-methane-emissions-cattle
If we all included Beano in our diets…
Rod B, Re: #557,
There is no problem in attributing unusually warm weather events to Global Warming, overall that is what Global warming means. Cold weather events in the midst of global warming are somewhat intangible, the way to look at those events is how cold would it have been without global warming? The obvious answer is likely colder! The example where I live (in Australia,) more than thirty years ago, snow had fallen as late as Christmas day. Now, we are lucky to get snow in Winter!
To me the situation is exactly analogous to the change from Winter to Summer. Each warm day is a sign of the coming Summer. Does a cold day, week or even month disprove that the summer is coming?
# 737 is the way to proceed compare the costs of the two cases that are errors in some sort and decide which is the least cost option. Then we need the costs of the mitigation versus the costs of doing nothing to be made on common base economic assumptions to make a reasonable comparison. This is the limit of the insurance model where you ask what if you are wrong and evaluate the costs in each case, rather than than assuming each side is correct and evaluating the savings. The there is no AGW case but we act as if there is is like most peoples purchase of homeowners insurance, their house does not burn down during the year, but they were protected in case it did. That would apply in this case.
#743 Timothy Chase re: arctic ice
Thanks for the excellent overview and the links, and especially the update on multi-year ice.
“it looks to me like an we will see ice free Arctic Sea sooner rather than later.
Everything you’ve posted certainly leads to that conclusion.
A follow-up to 743 on Arctic Sea Ice…
The following has a chart produced by Maslowski (2009) which takes into account studies up to 2009 in projecting the near disappearance of summer arctic sea ice between 2012-16.
FreshNor: The freshwater budget of the Nordic seas
http://freshnor.dmi.dk/handout_freshnor.pdf
In other news, with usual hat tip to Kevin VE3EN:
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/f10.gif
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
I’ve seen some of the excellent articles on here relating to Antarctica. The SCAR report “Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment” dated November 2009 seems to be a great compendium of the latest findings and research papers.
http://www.scar.org/publications/occasionals/acce.html
What is the status of this report in regard to the most recent science (it includes a number of references “in press” so I assume it’s fairly up to date, within publication constraints). Is there any value in pulling together some particular insights from this report on realclimate?
I have not found a huge amount in the press about it. For example, the report discusses the ice cores records back to 800,000 years (previously 600,000 years as I understand it). Another example is the concern that sea levels might rise much more than previously expected.
I’m just reading the report now. It’s long and my science is rusty, so I’m taking my time and haven’t got far yet. But I have to say it’s very readable, even for me. (It may all been covered here already – I’m a relative newcomer to this site so apologies if this is out of order.)
Far from “returning to the mean” as Matthew puts it, the sea ice volume has continued to decline.
I ought to have written that the rate of summer Arctic ice melt had regressed “toward the mean” instead of “to the mean”. It’s clearly not “at” the mean, and it did not in fact regress all the way “to” the mean.
For more about NH cyclones go here:
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/
Nice, quick article in NY Times illuminating cold snap in various media-rich bits of the world:
“A bitter wind has been blowing over parts of North America, Europe and Asia. Some places have been colder than ever, like Melbourne, Fla., which dipped to 28 degrees last Thursday, a record low. Europe has been walloped by snowstorm after snowstorm.
What’s going on? Global cooling?
Nope. A mass of high pressure is sitting over Greenland like a rock in a river, deflecting the cold air of the jet stream farther to the south than usual.
This situation is caused by Arctic oscillation, in which opposing atmospheric pressure patterns at the top of the planet occasionally shift back and forth, affecting weather across much of the Northern Hemisphere.
What’s notable this year is that the pattern of high pressure over the Arctic is more pronounced than at any time since 1950. ”
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/weekinreview/10chang.html?hpw
So, a dilemma. Doubters must make hay with cold weather where they live, simultaneously talk away a 15 degree variance further north. Tally ho.
683, Jinchi: In fact, this is what scientists were saying immediately after Katrina:
there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such attribution is fundamentally impossible.
;
That was posted at RealClimate by Stefan Rahmstorf, Michael Mann, Rasmus Benestad, Gavin Schmidt, and William Connolley in September 2005. So Matthew was dead wrong on the first point.
Semi-True: I read quotes from some scientists, not web posts from different scientists.
Just hopped over to GISS to check out how the “climate isn’t warming” people are doing. They don’t have the J-D figures in yet, but the D-N figures are in and 2009 comes in at #3 behind 2005 and 2008.
The numbers look like this:
2005: .76
2008: .74
2009: .71
Yep, it’s warm out there. Data is here.
Regarding the miraculous recovery of Arctic sea ice, here’s a nice summary.:
http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/06/science-nsidc-warm-greenland-arctic-rotten-ice-multi-year-arctic-oscillation/#more-17125
Teaser: “…an unfortunate trick of Nature helped hide the decline…”
#707 Walter Manny
Walter, I think you need to assimilate the known and apparent premise from which Lindzen may operate. Consider the following:
#741 Timothy Chase
On Lindzen, my read of the situation is thus: Lindzen claims none of his ‘research’ is funded by anything other than the government.
It’s a classic red herring. If you are watching the right hand you may not notice the left hand.
His ‘consulting’ is not his ‘research’. So his phrase may be correct but appears to be a lie of omission if my assertion is correct. Personally I think my assertion is correct.
He was associated with Singer when they/he were apparently plotting to trash Revelle/Revelle’s work. I count him as dishonorable on many levels.
Matthew quotes Jinchi (683):
… then responds in 759:
Matthew, I believe Jinchi’s main point in the bit you quote is that in measuring the growth, decline or recovery of ice (or what you call “regression towards the mean”), one should not measure it in terms of sea ice area or extent, but volume. And as multi-year ice volume fell by 40% from the winter of 2007 to the winter of 2008, in terms of volume this would hardly be the sort of thing that one would regard as a regression “toward the mean.”
Besides, with regard to your 590:
… the only projection I know of based off of the decline from 2004 to 2007 was an informal statement by Mark Serreze giving us a conservative 2030. In contrast, Maslowski’s projection of 2013 made in 2008 was based off of a 40% volume of melt from 1997-2004.
Of course if you actually do know of a scientist who projected a sea ice free Arctic summer in 2015 based simply off of the melt from 2004 to 2007, I would be interested in finding out who it is. But it won’t make area or extent any better a measure of sea ice growth or decline. If sea ice volume is declining more or less linearly, then the Arctic Sea would seem to be “regressing” towards a summer sea ice free state.
Please see: 743, 756
Septic: “Semi-True: I read quotes from some scientists, not web posts from different scientists.”
So you don’t read quotes from scientists you don’t approve of.
Anything written down and viewed on the Internet Web Browser is a web post.
So what hurdle do scientists have to pass to be read by you?
Septic: “I ought to have written that the rate of summer Arctic ice melt had regressed “toward the mean” ”
Which means “Arctic ice is still disappearing”.
Which isn’t what you’ve been saying before, so does this change mean you agree that the sea ice is reducing now?
Or are you going to make another “I ought to have written…” post?
Because i am mostly interested in climate change risk analysis. I would like to know your opinion about the claim Swetnam, Bowman et al that the fire feedback risk has not been fully recognized in the IPCC reports….
“The scary bit is that, because of the feedbacks and other uncertainties, we could be way underestimating the role of fire in driving future climate change,” Swetnam said.
The report’s 22 authors call for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, to recognize the overarching role of fire in global climate change and to incorporate fire better into future models and reports about climate change.
David Bowman, a lead co-author, said, “We’re most concerned that fire has not been rigorously and adequately incorporated in the climate models. It’s remarkable that such an integral part of the landscape has been so sidelined.”
………….
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090423142332.htm
Rattus, I think you mean that 2007 is the second warmest… Doesn’t alter your point, though. We’ll still have the denialists saying “Pay no attention to the melting Arctic!!!”
Re 762,769
Rattus is reporting land based numbers.
Ray, yep. That’s what I get for posting past bedtime.
Re:752
“McDonald’s UK looking to reduce to flatulence (bovine, that is)”
It’s bovine eructations, not flatulence they’re trying to cut. Most of the methane emissions are derived from the front end of the cow.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/17/cadbury-dairy-milk-cows
BPL @ 619:
I love you. Will you marry me?
Land-Ocean:
2005: .62
2007: .59
1998: .57
2009: .56
Data is here. Note that Hansen says that uncertainty is around .01 so 2009 and 1998 are in a statistical tie. Still pretty warm out there.
J @ 621, CFU @ 648:
The (mistaken) claim keeps getting repeated the “Only (coal, nukes, the technology XYZ company makes) can solve our needs.” when contrasted against wind, solar, tidal, etc.
The claims that wind, solar, tidal, etc. can’t do it are, to a large extent, a thing of the past, and continue to become more of a thing of the past as the problem of large scale energy storage, combined with meeting regulatory needs, are being met.
There are two sets of problems (shape and color not being in there …) that must be solved:
1). Balancing energy — the minute fluctuations in supply versus demand that happen throughout the day and have to be evened out. A lot of that is “smart grid” related and is being met with “demand response” loads. “Demand response” is jargon for “making the demand go down when generation goes down”. Over the past year or so (I forget, I’m old — I’m allowed to forget) I’ve sent 20 or more patent applications to the PTO on “demand response” and “distributed renewable generation” problems — it’s a very, very active field.
2). Storage and dispatching — the ability to have power for a day when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. This is another fertile field and technologies such as thermal, compressed gasses, pumped hydro, gyroscopes, etc. are being deployed to address these needs.
Ironically, the =problems= with green power come with some pretty cool benefits — like, it’s possible for power to be free, or even have a negative cost. Why? Because what can’t be stored, and what can’t just be “turned off” has to be used. Figure out a way to use “surplus” power, and you’ve got a way to make money using electricity. Figure out a way to return power when there’s a deficit, another money maker.
But the other really cool benefit has to do with the fact that more generation has to be deployed than needed, and with fully realized costs much lower non-renewable technologies, the costs of all that extra power are going to be low, and it’s only going to keep getting lower as economies of scale continue to work into the market place. The $25K system I have could be installed tomorrow for about $19.5K, and it was intentionally over-built so I could write all those patent applications (which have covered more than half of the $25K cost :) ). Had I taken a more traditional approach, that system would be $16.8K, and I’d have paid it off with the money IBM paid me to write patent applications, plus the money I’ve made doing renewable energy consulting since IBM decided I was too old and gray to keep working there.
Lynn Vincentnathan @ 748:
Why? Because someone erects a magical heat transfer barrier?
I get that it’s warmer “up north” than it is “down south”. It’s just that there is a lot more “down south” than “up north”, at least on this side of the equator.
FWIW, it was 9F here the other morning. Texas broke a winter power record at 55,000 megawatts with the current cold spell.
Re #748, Lynn Vincentnathan:
Arctic warming happens mostly during autumn and winter (Oct-Jan). In summer, most heat goes into the melting of ice and into the ocean, and near-surface air temperatures stay close to 0 °C. Later in the year, some of the stored heat is released into the atmosphere. The trend for the last 20 years is about 2 K per decade for Oct-Jan north of the polar circle in NCEP reanalysis 2 and ERA-Interim, while the July trend doesn’t exceed the global mean. In GISTEMP the difference isn’t that extreme, but still very visible, see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
The cold anomalies in the Andes (and often New Zealand too) are an artifact of the NCEP reanalysis (both 1 and 2). Snow cover analysis in the southern hemisphere was mostly absent before 1999, and temperatures dropped markedly when it was introduced, because some grid points with no modelled snow before have all-year snow cover now. On the other hand, some of the warm anomalies in the Arctic last year may be caused by missing sea ice in the model. On some days in winter/spring, big parts of the Arctic were ice-free because a satellite instrument failed.
The global temperature trend for the last 20 years is higher in both NCEP reanalyses (0.24 K per decade, GISTEMP and RSS have 0.19, HADCRUT3 and NCDC 0.18, UAH 0.17, ERA-Interim 0.16), so the anomalies on the linked PSD maps may be too high, but on the other hand the climatology period is 1968-1996 with warmer ‘normal’ temperatures than GISTEMP’s 1951-1980.
Re #762/#774, Rattus Norvegicus:
I posted preliminary GISTEMP LOTI data (including SST) for 2009 in #548.
re (720): [Response: Please note this is not the place to start discussing all these issues…. – gavin]
Aaawwhh. My response was so good, too!
FurryCatHerder (773), since I was a bit counter to BPL’s statement I suppose I’m out of the running… ;-)
Just now we have had a flurry of comments in several newspapers about something Jason Lowe APPARENTLY (there is no actual interview link) said about Rahmstorf’s work from 2007… maybe. Some quote the Holgate comments but none of course, contain Rahmstorf’s reply to those.
I wonder if you could arrange a head-to-head or commentary by either or both… I am actually extremely interested to see Lowe’s comments in context as I suspect strongly that the media is doing its usual beat-up on the story.
respectfully
BJ
Did anyone see this?
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/ghcn-gistemp-interactions-the-bolivia-effect/#comment-2405
“One Small Problem with the anomally map. There has not been any thermometer data for Bolivia in GHCN since 1990.
None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Nothing. Empty Set.
So just how can it be so Hot Hot Hot! in Bolivia if there is NO data from the last 20 years?
Easy. GIStemp “makes it up” from “nearby” thermometers up to 1200 km away. So what is within 1200 km of Bolivia? The beaches of Chili, Peru and the Amazon Jungle.”
[Response: This guy is completely clueless, both about the source of the data in the GHCN (it is not chosen by NASA or NOAA), and about the concept of using temperature anomalies. If Bolivia does not choose to submit CLIMAT summaries, there is nothing NOAA or NASA can do about it. I’ve suggested before that a citizen science project that uses the more widely available SYNOP and METAR reports to produce coherent anomaly maps would be more constructive than indulging in juvenile rants about the perfidy of GISS. – gavin]
Now, I don’t know if this is true or not, but I DO know that the Bolivian glaciers are melting at an alarming rate. If anything, the warmth in Bolivia is probably underestimated by interpolations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6496429.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8394324.stm
#747
CFU.
Many thanks for the link. Its bigger still in that version of the story. i.e this project will provide “33% of Britain’s energy needs” as against Radio 4’s first version of 25% and Tim Harford’s (from
‘More or Less’) 4%. I am not sure how much of this will be set in concrete before the next government takes over.
Gavin – I don’t know how I stumbled across that little bit of idiocy, but I did. I don’t know who E.M Smith is, but apparently he’s going to be featured in a TV special of some sort. The comments on the site are really quite special.
Jiminmpls @ 781: ChiefIO is a fairly smart guy, who has said kind things about ClearClimateCode, and I think he may have a point in that post, to wit: some of the holes in the GHCN instrumental record are pretty bad. But his discussion of temperatures is either clueless or shameless, and I can’t figure out which.
He contrasts tropical beaches and rainforests – places his audience intuit are hot – with high Andean mountains – cold – to imply that using the former to estimate temperatures for the latter will generate a false warming signal. But GISTEMP is all about anomalies, not temperatures. His post strongly suggests that he either (a) doesn’t understand this, one of the most basic facts about the GISTEMP method and dataset, or (b) does understand it, but is hoping his audience does not.
Hansen and Lebedeff 1987 argues for a 1200km anomaly correlation radius, which has been used in GISTEMP ever since. Maybe the radius is wrong, but nobody seems to be arguing that from evidence. Some people, such as ChiefIO, are arguing it by innuendo. Note that these people have datasets at their fingertips which could be used as strong evidence against a 1200km radius, if such evidence exists.
For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Bolivian Andes have a huge warming signal (e.g.: all those melting glaciers might well reduce the thermal inertia of the area by reduced latent heat capacity). Presumably there’s data, outside GHCN; anyone want to dig it up?
Nick Barnes says: 10 January 2010 at 7:48 PM
“For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Bolivian Andes have a huge warming signal (e.g.: all those melting glaciers might well reduce the thermal inertia of the area by reduced latent heat capacity). Presumably there’s data, outside GHCN; anyone want to dig it up?”
Here’s an example.
The airport serving La Paz is El Alto (SLLP), located 4058 meters above sea level and as such a nicely weird location for gathering temperature data. As Gavin suggests, temperature data for this location could be extracted from METAR reports, found at:
http://adds.aviationweather.gov/metars/index.php
The NOAA aviation site only provides UI access to data extending back 36 hours (pilots are usually future looking) but presumably it’s archived somewhere? Surely?
Doubtless all sorts of criticisms could be leveled at whatever instrumentation is in use at airports, but the effects in question are becoming pretty large at this point.
Huh. Quick scrutiny of historical records at SLLP seems to indicate that all record temperatures at that location have been established within the past 15 years. So that location at least is useless. (?)
Rod B @ 779:
I really wanted to just say “No, my heart already belongs to BPL” or something pointless like that.
But I think that BPL’s comment is something that we really need to start looking at, because it’s become very clear to me that Ex/Im-Port isn’t fully costing much of anything these days. How much landfill space is occupied by imported garbage? And I don’t mean low-quality products, I mean the packaging that’s left over, regardless of the quality of the product. I recently purchased a USB WiFi adapter. The adapter itself is the standard pen-drive size gadget. A couple page “How To Use This” booklet, 5 1/4″ CD-ROM, and then several times more, by volume and weight, packaging. What a waste. Tax-payers are the ones who have to pass the bond resolutions for yet another public landfill (though a lot of them are now private) for all that trash.
Likewise, we can pass all the Clean Air and Clean Water legislation in this country we want, but if we’re “importing” dirty air and dirty water from foreign countries, along with the products that are produced in those countries, we really need to look at fully-costing those imports.
And the reason is that we can’t seem to figure out WHO needs to be paying. There was a piece on the Clark Howard show about a small-time seamstress who is now having to test her products for lead content because the Chinese can’t seem to keep lead out of everything they make. So now the cost of keeping the lead out is being born by tax payers in various countries WITH stricter lead standards. Likewise if Country XYZ has no clean air policy, and Country ABC is trying to reduce CO2 emissions, Country ABC is going to have a harder go of it, because they have to work harder to overcome the impacts of Country XYZ.
The beautiful thing about BPL’s suggestion is that it gets rid of the need for Cap And Trade. Country XYZ can keep it’s polluting ways, and stop being an exporter. I bet they change their ways, if they want to become an exporter again. Or Company PDQ can demonstrate that they are more CO2-free in their processes and have an export advantage over Company TUV.
767, Completely Fed Up: Which isn’t what you’ve been saying before, so does this change mean you agree that the sea ice is reducing now?
No. It means I think we can’t now tell the degree to which Arctic Sea Ice is recovering to its former average or if it is “reducing now”. The appropriate time scales are decades. Whether Arctic sea ice has or has not returned to its pre-2003 average thickness has not been determined yet (the Humboldt University team has made informal statements to the press, but has not published in peer-reviewed journals yet, as far as I am aware.)
“There was a piece on the Clark Howard show about a small-time seamstress who is now having to test her products for lead content because the Chinese can’t seem to keep lead out of everything they make.”
They’ve since moved on to cadmium. Neurological damage -plus- cancer! Who says there’s no such thing as progress? Anyway, the rules don’t specifically say “don’t use this specific acutely toxic metal” so apparently it’s ok, according to Walmart et al. Each toxic metal must apparently be spelled out.
“Barred from using lead in children’s jewelry because of its toxicity, some Chinese manufacturers have been substituting the more dangerous heavy metal cadmium in sparkling charm bracelets and shiny pendants being sold throughout the United States, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The most contaminated piece analyzed in lab testing performed for the AP contained a startling 91 percent cadmium by weight. The cadmium content of other contaminated trinkets, all purchased at national and regional chains or franchises, tested at 89 percent, 86 percent and 84 percent by weight. ”
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/10/us/AP-US-Cadmium-Jewelry.html?scp=1&sq=cadmium&st=cse
Septic Matthew says: 10 January 2010 at 11:37 PM
“The appropriate time scales are decades.”
So you agree from the observed data that Arctic sea ice is reducing. Good.
“No. It means I think we can’t now tell the degree to which Arctic Sea Ice is recovering to its former average or if it is “reducing now”.”
Well there’s an answer to that quesiton, septic:
statistical analysis and trend projection.
Or, alternatively, you can come up with a scientific physical process that would make your purported recovery a recovery to the mean.
“Whether Arctic sea ice has or has not returned to its pre-2003 average thickness has not been determined yet”
So what process has changed from decades before 2003 and has returned now to, decades later, produce a recovery of ice extent?
Geoff: “Many thanks for the link. Its bigger still in that version of the story. i.e this project will provide “33% of Britain’s energy needs”
No worries, but you missed (and continue to miss) this bit:
“The UK has been estimated to have more than 33% of the total European potential offshore wind resource, which is enough to power the country nearly three times over”
The contracts do not say that they are exploiting 100% of the ***potential*** supply of energy.
This is not a problem.
After all, you don’t conclude your house is impossible to build because they’ve only cleared and dug the foundations.
Matthew, Given that ice thickness requires years to build up, I think you can take it as given that ice extent that melted away completely in 2007 is substantially thinner now than it was. Just because YOU don’t understand something doesn’t mean the pros don’t.
PS the change from 33 to 4 to 25 could be based on what they MEANT.
After all, the amount of wind is a predicted variable, not a known value and you also have the problem of how often will downtime reduce your capability (much like I’ve never read anywhere how many power stations are kept idle or producing and venting power and therefore not giving the headline power rate).
@788–
Matthew, I think your hopes for Arctic sea ice recovery are totally delusionary. Extent (per IJIS) is tracking at near-record low levels and the data on thickness we do have is completely at odds with your perspective.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/icesat-20090707.html
(This is from a story on Kwok et al., 2009.)
“The most contaminated piece analyzed in lab testing performed for the AP contained a startling 91 percent cadmium by weight.”
This is “contaminated” in the same way that the sea is contaminated with water.
#792 and #794 CFU
You are quite right. The ‘energy’ area is much less certain, than the climate in my opinion and being ambiguous does not help. In order to get hold of some magnitudes for which the definitions are given, I have just gone to David McKay’s book on line book ‘Sustainable Energy’, p.109; which states :
Energy needs for UK people = 125 kw hrs/day /person (David M’s units).
Deep offshore wind ~ 32 kw hrs./d/p
Shallow offshore wind ~16 kw hrs/d/p
Inshore wind ~ 20 kw hrs /d/p
The last three entries do not refer to the new announcement, but might perhaps be compared to the THREE in your first comment. Three times UK’s energy needs would be 375 kw hrs/d/p. In addition the value given above for UK energy needs is too low because it takes no account of imports of manufactured goods from e.g China.
Re #795
The disturbing part of Kwok’s work is the drop in MY ice in winter to 40% of its former value in about 5 years, the implication of the graph is an almost total absence of MY ice in a couple of years time (so far this year the extent data is in line with Kwok’s data for previous year’s decay).
I don’t know if this has been covered here already but “Bishop Hill” is about to launch a book, The Hockey Stick Illusion
Given his previous disgusting track record, I expect this book to be libellous in the extreme. I think that any scientists libelled should consider their legal options.
> cadmium
It takes damned little cadmium in a fire to produce a plume that will slowly poison both firefighters and people exposed downwind.
It’s a waste metal from zinc and lead refining, though it now has an industrial use in cadmium telluride solar cells, so it’s being looked at hard because of the risks of spreading it around widely. Bad, bad news.
http://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/htdocs/Chem_Background/ExSumPdf/CdTe.pdf.
“What do you think of intelligent life on Earth?”
“It would be a good idea.”