We recently ran two articles that were quite critical of aspects of the Guardian’s coverage of the stolen emails. This is a response from Dr. James Randerson, the editor of the Guardian’s environmental website.
I edit the Guardian’s environment website and was part of the editorial team that produced the 12-part investigation by veteran science journalist Fred Pearce into the hacked East Anglia climate emails. I’m very grateful to RealClimate for giving us the opportunity to respond to the recent posts on the investigation: “The Guardian Disappoints” and “Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind”.
I should say first that we hold RealClimate in very high regard. The site is part of the Guardian Environment Network, a collection of more than 20 hand-picked websites including Grist and Nature’s Climate Feedback blog with whom we have a mutual content sharing agreement. Under the arrangement, the Guardian website republishes RealClimate blogs regularly. We take seriously your criticisms and are considering them carefully. The Guardian has a commitment to accuracy and correcting factual errors.
Such is the public interest in this story that ever since the emails were released in November, there has been a strong demand for an in-depth journalistic account of what they tell us about how climate scientists operate. As RealClimate rightly pointed out, the response from much of the media has been lazy to the point of “pathology”.
No other media organisation has come close to producing such a comprehensive and carefully researched attempt to get to the bottom of the emails affair. The investigation tries to reflect the complexity and historical context of the story, and runs to some 28,000 words – of which around half appeared in the printed newspaper.
Dr. Schmidt did not mince his words though when he said that Fred’s investigation falls, “well below the normal Guardian standards of reporting”, while Dr Ben Santer wrote, “I am taking this opportunity to correct Mr. Pearce’s omissions, to reply to the key allegations, and to supply links to more detailed responses.” Both have also criticised our experimental online exercise to harness the expertise of people with a special knowledge of the emails in order to create a “peer reviewed” account of what they tell us.
More on that later, but it is wrong to suggest that this is a lazy substitute for traditional journalistic standards and that key protagonists were not invited to respond prior to publication. On the contrary, the investigation was subject to rigorous editorial checking and Fred contacted numerous individuals in the course of his research. Many (particularly those at UEA) declined to comment.
The other side of the story
The RealClimate commentary reads like a distorted fairground mirror of the Guardian investigation – one that highlights the uncomfortable bits but blurs the rest. The posts did point out that “Some of the other pieces in this series are fine” but do not reflect the large amount of analysis in the investigation of the way the emails have been misused by those with a political agenda and the extensive context we included to indicate the pressure scientists writing those emails were under from time-consuming requests for data.
In part 2 (How the ‘climategate’ scandal is bogus and based on climate sceptics’ lies), for example, we detail how the “hide the decline” email has been misused by Sarah Palin, Senator James Inhofe and others to create, apparently deliberately, the impression that climate scientists had fiddled the figures.
Almost all the media and political discussion about the hacked climate emails has been based on soundbites publicised by professional sceptics and their blogs. In many cases, these have been taken out of context and twisted to mean something they were never intended to.
In part 1 (Battle over climate data turned into war between scientists and sceptics) and in a separate piece that appeared in the newspaper (Climate scientists have long been targets for sceptics) Fred outlines the tactics and motivations of some on the “sceptic” side of the debate.
All this happened against the backdrop of a long-term assault by politically motivated, and commercially funded, climate-change deniers against the activities of many of the key scientists featuring in the emails.
Similarly in Part 7 (Victory for openness as IPCC climate scientist opens up lab doors) Fred explains how the emails give a special insight into what being on the end of that assault was like.
In the leaked emails, [Ben Santer] is seen sharing those experiences with other victims of hectoring and abuse by the more rabid climate sceptics. Others had their own horror stories, including Mike Mann over his hockey stick graph, Kevin Trenberth over his analysis of hurricanes and warming in the aftermath of Katrina, and later Jones over his escalating data wars. In each case, they argue, legitimate debates about scientific analysis and access to researchers’ data have been turned into vindictive character assassination.
And in the concluding part of the investigation (Part 12: Climate science emails cannot destroy argument that world is warming, and humans are responsible), Fred lays out unequivocally that nothing in the emails casts doubt on the case for climate change being attributable to human actions.
Is the science of climate change fatally flawed by the climategate revelations? Absolutely not. Nothing uncovered in the emails destroys the argument that humans are warming the planet. None of the 1,073 emails plus 3,587 files containing documents, raw data and computer code upsets the 200-year-old science behind the “greenhouse effect” of gases such as carbon dioxide, which traps solar heat and warms the atmosphere. Nothing changes the fact that carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere thanks to human emissions from burning carbon-based fuels such as coal and oil. Nor the calculations by physicists that for every square metre of the Earth’s surface, 1.6 watts more energy enters the atmosphere than leaves it.
And we know the world is warming as a result. Thousands of thermometers in areas remote from any conceivable local urban influences tell us that. The oceans are warming too. The great majority of the world’s glaciers are retreating, Arctic sea ice is disappearing, sea levels are rising ever faster, trees are climbing up hillsides and permafrost is melting.
These are not statistical artefacts or the result of scientists cherry-picking data.
Looking under every rock
There are few, if any newspapers in the world with a stronger commitment to action on climate change than the Guardian and our sister paper the Observer. We have a team of 6 full-time environment correspondents as well as three editors and a collection of bloggers and columnists.
It was the Guardian that orchestrated a global editorial carried by 56 newspapers in 45 countries on 7th December 2009 to call for action from world leaders at Copenhagen. [RC: Also at RealClimate]
And we have been instrumental in supporting the 10:10 climate change campaign which aims to inspire individuals, organisations and businesses to cut their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. The UK branch of 10:10 has signed up nearly 60,000 people and over 4000 businesses and organisations.
But only by looking thoroughly under every rock can those of us pressing for action on climate change maintain with confidence that the scientific case remains sound. Fred’s investigation shows that confidence is indeed well placed, but to claim that the emails do not throw up some troubling issues looks like the inward-looking mentality that is sometimes (perhaps understandably) expressed in the emails themselves.
The two posts published so far on RealClimate come to over 8500 words and it has been suggested that a line by line response to each of the points made would not be productive. I say again that we are totally unembarrassed about correcting genuine errors, but many of the points raised at RealClimate are differences of interpretation. There were implications that the investigation omitted some key information which in fact appeared in Fred’s pieces – for example that the data on Chinese weather station locations from the Phil Jones et al 1990 Nature data were eventually released publicly and that the two studies Jones had threatened to keep out of the IPCC AR4 report were in fact cited there.
However, I would like to make four points:
- Dr Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit at UEA has said in an interview with Nature that the handling of the records of the Chinese weather station data from his 1990 Nature paper (which Fred wrote about in part 5 of the investigation) was “not acceptable… [it’s] not best practice,” and he acknowledged that that stations “probably did move”. He added that he was considering a correction to Nature. To our knowledge, no other media organisation or blogger had used the emails to shed light on the controversy over the 1990 paper so a correction would not be on the table without the Pearce investigation.
- Dr. Schmidt states that we imply Dr Tom Wigley supported allegations of “fabrication” from climate sceptic Douglas Keenan. We do not make that assertion in the piece. Also, Dr Schmidt does not reproduce the most eye-catching quotes from a May 2009 email from Wigley to Jones in which he raises serious doubts about the quality of Jones’s scientific team and his handling of the Chinese weather station data.The hacked emails do not include a response from Jones if there was one.
- As Dr. Schmidt pointed out, we have made three small corrections to the piece “Controversy behind climate science’s ‘hockey stick’ graph” at the request of Dr Michael Mann, but none changed the main point the article was making, which was that in 1999, Mann’s hockey-stick reconstruction was the subject of intense academic debate amongst climate scientists.
- Neither of the RealClimate blogs dealt with Fred’s piece on FOI requests, but a statement from the UK’s deputy information commissioner Graham Smith has made clear that he believes that FOI legislation was not followed correctly. He wrote, “The emails which are now public reveal that [climate sceptic David] Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information.” This is a serious issue worthy of discussion and debate.
Peer-reviewed journalism
I mentioned above our attempt to create a definitive account of the emails by leveraging the expertise of people involved or with a special knowledge of the messages and the issues they discuss. This account will eventually be expanded into a book. In practice, this means us adding annotations from people to the online versions of the articles so that readers can watch a form of living peer-review in progress. Click on the yellow highlights in the pieces themselves to read the annotations.
This represents an extraordinary commitment to transparency that we believe is unique in journalism. What other news organisation would open itself to direct criticism in this way including, for example, annotations that read “this is absolutely false” and “this is really bad”? The respected Columbia Journalism Review has praised the approach. “Regardless of whether you agree with Pearce or Schmidt, the Guardian’s approach appropriately acknowledges that evidence leaves room for some degree of interpretation. It is this kind of detailed, intellectually honest (even technologically innovative) reporting that news outlets like The New York Times should be striving for,” it wrote.
In the same spirit we have showcased diverse critical opinions on the issues and our own coverage of them, including from Dr Myles Allen, Dr Vicky Pope, Dr Mike Hulme and the Guardian’s environment correspondent Dr David Adam. Again few newspapers would have reflected such diverse viewpoints.
The reaction from some to our online annotation exercise has been hostile though. On our letters pages Dr Myles Allen and Dr Ben Santer wrote last week:
Claiming to produce “the definitive” analysis now is a brazen attempt to pre-empt the inquiries’ conclusions…What is wrong with the old-fashioned approach of checking facts before publication? When the final version is published, you will no doubt make much of the fact that “everyone had a chance to comment”, implying that any statement that was not challenged must therefore be true.
Our intention is not to undermine or pre-empt the ongoing inquiries into the CRU emails. Each of those has a very specific remit and none is attempting to produce a detailed account that uses the emails to shed light on recent climate controversies. Nor is this an exercise in blackmailing scientists into fact-checking on the cheap – if it were then it would be a monumental false-economy.
In truth, this is a serious-minded attempt to make sense of a large volume of new information about a complex and highly charged issue. No other newspaper has ever offered its journalism up for very public and exacting scrutiny in this way. We sincerely invite those involved who know the issues most thoroughly to contribute.
I’ll take that as a no.
What I meant was that the “trees IN LIMITED AREAS” (as you put it)comprised such a large proportion of all the trees used that they skewed the results.
By “they” I meant the divergent proxies.
Um… the tree proxy the data WAS skewed by their inclusion. So much that, as we know, it had to be hidden, at least for the purposes of a particular WMO report. The decline was that obvious.
The weather station issue is different; I haven’t followed the details closely, but my impression is that the results from China may have been significantly skewed by stations of dubious provenance, but apparently the ones from the US weren’t.
Doug (# 445),
Pearce and Monbiot aren’t bloggers. They’re professionals. Their editor is supposed to make them climb down. He’s paid very well for the job. But it seems the editor is not interested in giving the paper’s readers good information. Perhaps that’s because it’s not the readers who are paying the editor so well…
Brian Dodge (440), very interesting and apt post. But the conclusion is a bit off. The fact that an observation is inexplicable, seems to not materially alter the basic science, and that might be very difficult to assess could reasonably be excluded for further work if the overall resultant effect is clearly piddling. This is not the case with climate change and, as such, demands serious attention to figure out why. It still might be too daunting and objectively deemed (but impossible to be “determined”) unlikely be significant, and put on the back burner so to speak. The problem as I see it (and am interested in) is that the “curiosity” is discarded out of hand with very little or just superficial scientific thought. At the extreme many cover their eyes and proclaim “I can’t see you,” and deny the curious oscillations don’t exist, or define it out of existence with semantics (as in the arcane debate over “periodic.”) All of this because, as little potential significance that might be there, it counters the orthodoxy. And must die.
I think it deserves serious study.
(Though I do understand the political hazards of being truthful in these kinds of things: any little blemish, let alone chink, in the armour that scientifically properly deserves study has some probability of being unreasonably jumped on and pounded into the ground by some — a dilemma; but a natural hazard that none-the-less ought to be faced.)
@ 445 Doug Bostrom says:
Monbiot by his comments was effectively supporting the abuse of FoI regulations.
The intended primary purpose of FoI is to ensure transparency of government decisions, and to let people know what personal information is held about them by government agencies. It was never envisaged that it would be used by Canadians to frivously prevent important research paid for by UK taxpayers.
It will be interesting to see if he keeps his side of the bargain he made with Steve Easterbrook.
> Gerry Quinn
You’re just reposting talking points. If you’d read the science you’d realize this. The divergence problem is pretty well studied. It’s not what you think it is.
“What I meant was that the “trees IN LIMITED AREAS” (as you put it)comprised such a large proportion of all the trees used that they skewed the results.”
Nope, they didn’t. Where do you get the idea that they do? They didn’t use the data from a limited set of a regional set of tree ring proxies. Not all tree ring proxies were dropped and those proxies more southerly from the same species were still used.
“By “they” I meant the divergent proxies.”
Well if that’s rather a tautology isn’t it. Though I’m left wondering how a divergent proxy diverges from itself…
“Um… the tree proxy the data WAS skewed by their inclusion”
You mean the tree proxy that was the divergent proxy? Well, we’re back at that tautology again.
As for the other tree proxies and the southerly versions, they were not divergent, so they were left in.
“The weather station issue is different”
How? In that it was stated that some sites were bad proxies for volumetric temperature readings and so should be left out because they were promulgated as the source of the warming effect in the US? Isn’t that EXACTLY what you’re saying about the pine proxy temperature readings in the northern temperate latitudes?
Or is the difference in that they don’t prove your central need: to prove the temperature record fallible?
“but my impression is that the results from China”
Surfacestations weren’t concerned with results from China.
” Yes. Go to the literature that explains the divergence problem.
I’ll take that as a no.”
No, it’s a yes.
If you wish to take it as a “no” then it cannot be proved to YOU that the divergence problem is as you wish it to be, not as reality has it.
“We have 5000 years worth of fuel if we recycle and breed fuel.”
This doesn’t address the risks.
“Quit shilling for the coal industry. ”
So saying that nuclear isn’t the answer to power needs and the rapid change in CO2 production is shilling for the coal industry???
How do you work that one out?
Re: 305 “Lindzen’s disbelief in evidence that smoking causes cancer and heart disease …”
Is Lindzen actually on record as disavowing a link between smoking and cancer?
Len Conly
Gavin – Re: 342
When I click on the Reichler and Kim link, I am taken to a web page of the AMS with this message:
“No record found with DOI ‘10.1175/BAMS-89-3-303’ [production]”
[Response: Except that they are: Reichler and Kim (BAMS, 2008). – gavin]
Len Conly
459 & 460 Completely Fed Up: What risks? Be specific. There are none.
“How do you work that one out?” Very simple:
Every time you dis nuclear, you are working for the coal industry and shooting yourself in the foot. What the coal companies know that most people don’t:
As long as you keep messing around with wind, solar, geothermal and wave power, the coal industry is safe. There is no way wind, solar, geothermal and wave power can replace coal, and they know it. Hydrogen fusion could, if it worked. Hydrogen fusion has been “hopeful” for half a century so far. I don’t expect that to change any time soon.
If you quit being afraid of nuclear, the coal industry is doomed. Every time you argue in favor of wind, solar, geothermal and wave power, or against nuclear, King Coal is happy. ONLY nuclear power can put coal out of business. Nuclear power HAS put coal out of business in France. France uses 30 year old American technology. So here is the deal: Keep being afraid of all things nuclear and die either when [not if] civilization collapses or when H2S comes out of the ocean and Homo “Sapiens” goes extinct. OR: Get over your paranoia and kick the coal habit and live. Which do you choose? I put quotation marks around “Sapiens” because it is not clear that most “people” have enough brains to avoid extinction when it is clearly predicted and the safe path has been pointed out. Nuclear is the safe path and we have factory built nuclear power plants now. A nuclear power plant can be installed in weeks. See:
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com
Pretend the year is 1850 and your doctor has just given you a choice: Amputate your leg or you die tomorrow. Anesthetics have not been invented. Will you have your leg off sir?
Your psychological pain is imaginary, not real. Get over it and live. Don’t get over it and your grandchildren die.
Nuclear power ends global warming and the human race lives.
No nuclear power causes the coal industry cash flow to continue to be $100 Billion per year in the US and Homo Sap goes extinct. The choice is yours, unfortunately.
You are reciting coal industry propaganda. You may be paid by the coal industry, or your emotions have been hijacked by the coal industry propaganda over the past half century. Coal has killed over two hundred thousand Americans and is still doing so. Nuclear power has killed ZERO Americans. Power reactors do NOT make Plutonium239 that is needed for bombs. Power reactors make Plutonium240. It takes a very special reactor to make Pu239.
Why a Nuclear Powerplant CAN NOT Explode like a Nuclear Bomb:
Bombs are completely different from reactors. There is nothing similar about them except that they both need fissile materials. But they need DIFFERENT fissile materials and they use them very differently.
A nuclear bomb “compresses” pure or nearly pure fissile material into a small space. The fissile material is either the uranium isotope 235 or plutonium. They are the reduced bright shiny metals, not metal oxide. If it is uranium, it is at least 90% uranium 235 and 10% or less uranium 238. These fissile materials are metals and very difficult to compress. Because they are difficult to compress, a high explosive [high speed explosive] is required to compress them. Pieces of the fissile material have to slam into each other hard for the nuclear reactions to take place.
A nuclear reactor, such as the ones used for power generation, does not have any pure fissile material. The fuel may be 0.7% to 8% uranium oxide 235 mixed with uranium 238 oxide [uranium rust]. A mixture of 0.7% to 8% uranium 235 rust mixed with uranium 238 rust cannot be made to explode no matter how hard you try. A small amount of plutonium oxide mixed in with the uranium oxide can not change this. Reactor fuel still cannot be made to explode like a nuclear bomb no matter how hard you try. There has never been a nuclear explosion in a reactor and there never will be. [Pure reduced metallic uranium and plutonium are flammable, but a fire isn’t an explosion.] The fuel is further diluted by being divided and sealed into many small steel capsules. The capsules are usually contained in steel tubes. The fuel is further diluted by the need for coolant to flow around the capsules and through the core so that heat can be transported to a place where heat energy can be converted to electrical energy. A reactor does not contain any high speed [or any other speed] chemical explosive as a bomb must have. A reactor does not have any explosive materials at all.
As is obvious from the above descriptions, there is no possible way that a reactor could ever explode like a nuclear bomb. Reactors and bombs are very different. Reactors and bombs are really not even related to each other.
Reccomendation: Nuclear power is the safest kind and it just got safer. Convert all coal-fired power plants to nuclear ASAP. See the December 2005 issue of Scientific American article on a new type of nuclear reactor that consumes the nuclear “waste” as fuel.
Rod (454): any little blemish, let alone chink, in the armour that scientifically properly deserves study has some probability of being unreasonably jumped on and pounded into the ground by some — a dilemma; but a natural hazard that none-the-less ought to be faced.
BPL: Rod, that’s how science is SUPPOSED TO WORK! EVERY idea gets jumped on, as hard as possible! The ones that survive make it into the consensus. Go read “Asimov’s Corollary” or “My Built-In Doubter”
#464 Barton, good comment. Since you seem so interested in open discussion, maybe you could shed some light on the subject. Enclosed are two additional graphs, using the same method described above (#426). These include averaged anomalies from records before 1850 and 1900. The records from 1850 and before now include U.S. data (i.e. Ft. Snelling), while the records from 1900 and before cover the globe to a certain extent.
http://www.imagenerd.com/uploads/lt-temp-1850-2008-27a-UtBGD.gif
http://www.imagenerd.com/uploads/lt-temp-1900-2008-50a-PhLn0.gif
The more recent filtered curves from 1850 on, still contain the ~50 year cycles, the curves using data from 50 stations before 1900 start to resemble the Hadcet shape. So here we have a progression of long term station reports, that to me anyway would indicate the old records may not be that far off, by a interesting oscillation, or pattern, they seem to have.
BPL (464), you’re right, of course, but I was referring to the despised group, scientists or not, that’s taking the statements out of context and running wild with them.
“Every time you dis nuclear, you are working for the coal industry and shooting yourself in the foot.”
Nope, I’m pretty certain I’m not.
Nuclear power has 10 year lag and MUST run for 20 years.
Renewables generally have a ROI of less than 10 and can start within a year or two.
In what way is ignoring Nuclear a problem?
Your assertion doesn’t fit with reality, just with what you hope for.
Oh, and crashing an A380 into a wind farm has much less of a problem than whanging one into a nuke plant. Neither is there a problem with people sneaking out germanium deposits as opposed to uranium ones…
> Len Conly
http://www.google.com/search?q=Lindzen+lung+cancer+cigarette+smoking
> Nukees
aieeeee…..
> RodB
> … scientists or not
Again the notion some scientist somewhere may be ‘running wild’
But it’s only a hypothesis, right? Not something you actually know about.
Edward Greisch
Why a Nuclear Powerplant CAN NOT Explode like a Nuclear Bomb…
Not that anybody said they were at risk of so doing, so why you’re presenting a detailed description of how reactors cannot explode is an unsolved mystery.
As to the rest of your remarks on nuclear power, overweening affection for one technology or another is counterproductive. Glossing over the issues attendant to any particular power technology while exaggerating disadvantages of another invites poor policy decisions.
I’m not particularly opposed to nuclear plants being operated in those relatively few suitable places and relatively small possible numbers dictated by reality. But, as you well know, the more vociferous opponents of the technology are concerned not with explosions but instead with the uniquely durable and difficult to handle mess reactors create when they malfunction in a serious way. Consider for a moment the statistical picture presented to us by the relatively tiny numbers of reactors so far deployed by actors that could not be more supportive of the demanding requirements of safe reactor operation. We can be quite certain based on past experience that if these machines were deployed by the many thousands willy-nilly without regard to operational context– a requirement for them to substitute for present day generation capacity, let alone future demands– we’d end up with some serious mitigation problems on our hands. Extrapolating the French experience to other parts of the world is popular among nuclear aficionados but is not really helpful to policymakers faced with a more complicated picture in other parts of the world.
By the way, last time I checked there is only a single air-cooled commercial nuclear generation plant in operation. That suggests a significant economic problem with air cooling, but perhaps I’m wrong.
Check the Wall Street Journal, 2/22/2010 -Energy Report – The Long Road to an Alternative-Energy Future.
“Not that anybody said they were at risk of so doing, so why you’re presenting a detailed description of how reactors cannot explode is an unsolved mystery.”
I think I can solve it for you:
Ed NEEDS Nuclear to be on the table. Therefore those AGAINST nukes must be thrown out of the discussion. Therefore run a strawman and then accuse them of making things worse.
Re: ‘Completely Fed Up’ #457 and #458
Just saying “look at the science” doesn’t point to any proof. I’ve acknowledged that some evidence has been found to support the theory that the recent divergence may be unique. However, I have not seen anything that comes near proof of it. If you can point at some specific such proof, please do so – otherwise, I feel safe assuming you know of none. As I said, such proof would be difficult to find, given the nature of proxies.
With regard to the divergent tree ring proxies not skewing the reconstructions, I am not sure I know what you are saying, and I am not even sure that you know.
“Power reactors do NOT make Plutonium239 that is needed for bombs.” Edward Greisch — 3 April 2010 @ 1:49 AM
They CAN produce weapons grade Pu239 simply by manipulating the fuel cycle, and it would be fairly simple to design a power reactor for hot refueling(Chernobyl was built for hot refueling, although it was not the same design as US power reactors.)
“To achieve the high percentages of Pu-239 required for weapon grade plutonium, it must be produced specifically for this purpose. The uranium must spend only several weeks in the reactor core and then be removed. For this to be carried out in a LWR – the prevalent reactor design for electricity generation – the reactor would have to be shut down completely for such an operation; this is easily detectable.” http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/plutonium.htm
“After 3 years in a reactor, a fuel rod assembly containing 264 rods weighing 1,450 lbs would contain 12.9 pounds of plutonium, 5.07 pounds of fission products, and 1,367 pounds of U-238”
“The fuel extracted from power reactors where fuel rods remain for extended periods of time contains concentrations of Pu-240, which makes the plutonium unsuitable for use in a weapon. The plutonium produced in reactors which are refueled frequently contains lower concentrations of Pu-240 and is suitable for use in weapons.” http://www.chemcases.com/nuclear/nc-08.html
I’m not opposed to nuclear power, especially the development of something like lead cooled actinide burning metal fuel thorium breeder reactors. The problems are that no one has built the first Gen IV prototype yet (Soviet subs use(d?) lead cooling, but very highly enriched fuel and high power densities), and simply replacing the existing coal fired electrical generation capacity in the US(313 GW) with current generation reactors would consume ALL the worlds production capacity(80% one company – Japan Steel Works, recently expanded from 4 to 12 forgings/yr) for reactor containment forgings for the next 20+ years. We could spend the gigabucks necessary to expand capacity($864 million for the 8 per year increase at JSW): that will increase the cost while decreasing the lead time for nuclear deployment, and faster deployment will cost more money per unit deployed. The Chernobyl and Three Mile Island incidents have put us 30 years too late politically and economically. We really need to start doing many things about global warming, peak oil/coal/uranium, N/P limits on agriculture, and a whole host of population, development, and resource issues, and we need to start in 1980; unfortunately, it’s 2010.
> Gerry Quinn
> … doesn’t point to any proof….
> … not seen anything that comes near proof
> … point at some specific such proof …
> … I feel safe assuming you know of none.
You’re at least looking in the right places; if you found a claim of proof, you’d be way outside the scientific work. That’s good news.
This will help you understand why this is so:
http://www.google.com/search?q=proof+in+science%3F
> I am not sure I know what you are saying
Ask for pointers to the actual papers and discussion by science.
Otherwise, even here, you get people like me who aren’t practicing scientists writing down what they think they remember, and aside from the value of recreational typing, all you get is more opinion.
Once someone points you to the real science, you have a good start, and you can ask questions based on your own reading.
Beware other people’s summaries and opinions about what the science says, until you have some time reading in the particular field.
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/48/20348.full
Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) at 3 sites in western North America near the upper elevation limit of tree growth showed ring growth in the second half of the 20th century that was greater than during any other 50-year period in the last 3,700 years. The accelerated growth is suggestive of an environmental change unprecedented in millennia. The high growth is not overestimated because of standardization techniques, and it is unlikely that it is a result of a change in tree growth form or that it is predominantly caused by CO2 fertilization. The growth surge has occurred only in a limited elevational band within ≈150 m of upper treeline, regardless of treeline elevation. Both an independent proxy record of temperature and high-elevation meteorological temperature data are positively and significantly correlated with upper-treeline ring width both before and during the high-growth interval. Increasing temperature at high elevations is likely a prominent factor in the modern unprecedented level of growth for Pinus longaeva at these sites.
468 Completely Fed Up: “crashing an A380 into a nuke plant” Did you notice that they did NOT do that on 9/11? Ever wonder why? It is because the A380 could NOT cause a radiation leak. The containment building is 39 inches thick of the best concrete and HEAVILY REINFORCED. The A380 would do little more than scratch the paint. If it DID put a hole in the containment building, SO WHAT? The core is still inside a 5 inch thick stainless steel container inside the containment building. NO RADIATION WOULD BE RELEASED.
“Neither is there a problem with people sneaking out germanium deposits as opposed to uranium ones”
OK, there was a recycling plant at a company named NUMEC near Pittsburgh PA [Apollo PA.] where spent fuel somehow found its way to Israel. [I almost got a job at NUMEC designing nuclear batteries for heart pacemakers.]
The CEO paid a $900,000 fine and Israel fueled up a reactor with the spent fuel. Israel pirated fuel from French ships on the high seas as well. Israeli bombs are, strangely, identical copies of American bombs.
But the solution to the problem is to do the recycling in Government Owned Government Operated [GOGO] facilities. This is one case where private enterprise cannot be trusted.
472: “Ed NEEDS Nuclear to be on the table.” No I don’t. What I NEED is a survivable climate. If you can figure out another way to do it RIGHT NOW, Great! But you can’t. Wind is a pipe dream and solar is pie in the sky. So invest Your money in them.
470 Doug Bostrom: Of course I had to make some assumption as to what Completely Fed Up’s Gish Gallop was all about. Did I guess wrong? NO. There are so many lies to tell it is hard to cover them all.
“Glossing over the issues attendant to any particular power technology while exaggerating disadvantages of another invites poor policy decisions.”
WE ARE DISCUSSING CLIMATE CHANGE in case you hadn’t noticed. COAL ACCOUNTS FOR 40% OF OUR CO2 PRODUCTION. There is only one technology that is currently mature that can provide BASE LOAD [24 hours per day every day] power that is NOT coal and it is NUCLEAR. We want to replace coal. The only one available is nuclear. There is no other policy decision available. Wind never works on calm days and solar never works at night, in case you hadn’t noticed. And batteries are orders of magnitude too expensive. Geothermal only works for producing electricity in certain places.
So here it is: DO you want to solve GW or don’t you?
As long as you keep messing around with wind, solar, geothermal and wave power, the coal industry is safe. There is no way wind, solar, geothermal and wave power can replace coal, and they know it. Hydrogen fusion could, if it worked. Hydrogen fusion has been “hopeful” for half a century so far. I don’t expect that to change any time soon.
If you quit being afraid of nuclear, the coal industry is doomed. Every time you argue in favor of wind, solar, geothermal and wave power, or against nuclear, King Coal is happy. ONLY nuclear power can put coal out of business. Nuclear power HAS put coal out of business in France. France uses 30 year old American technology. So here is the deal: Keep being afraid of all things nuclear and die either when [not if] civilization collapses or when H2S comes out of the ocean and Homo “Sapiens” goes extinct. OR: Get over your paranoia and kick the coal habit and live. Which do you choose? I put quotation marks around “Sapiens” because it is not clear that most “people” have enough brains to avoid extinction when it is clearly predicted and the safe path has been pointed out. Nuclear is the safe path and we have factory built nuclear power plants now. A nuclear power plant can be installed in weeks. See:
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com
No dispute with 474 Brian Dodge, except to say that 32 countries have nuclear power plants, only 9 have the bomb, including North Korea. 23 countries are making no attempt to shorten the fuel cycle to make Pu239.
“Just saying “look at the science” doesn’t point to any proof. ”
So what sort of proof is there, then?
The Bible?
Tealeaves?
Fox News?
The proof is in the reports from scientists.
Read it.
EG 463: There is no way wind, solar, geothermal and wave power can replace coal, and they know it.
BPL: Sure there is. There are many ways: Wind turbines, solar thermal plants, photovoltaics, site geothermal, hot dry rock geothermal. Wave is a minor source, but it can certainly help. And the best way of all would be to combine all renewable sources in wide-area smart grids.
A lot of good wind turbines do on a -20 still Jan. night in the northern plains.
> J Bob
And when you’re on the northern plains, you can eat buffalo so ocean pH change doesn’t hurt you. No man is an island, when he lives free and independent like a cowboy on the plains. Say, where’s your dental floss made?
“Many ways”–I think that’s the essence. It may be the case that wind is still more per kwh if you figure in capacity factor, line losses, etc. However, discussions such as the following lead me to question how nuclear could possibly be scaled up adequately to carry the load alone:
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/447/
Where will the waste go? Where will the financial incentives come from? What about the politics?
Maybe most critically, perhaps, where will the trained personnel to build and operate all the new plants proposed come from?
Wind, on the other hand, is currently being built at pretty startling rates. We know we can add it, because it is happening in front of our eyes. But it’s true that baseload is valuable.
My guess is that we are going to need a whole variety of technologies, as Barton’s post implies. And we need integrated planning, not turf wars among proponents of this or that technology.
“A lot of good wind turbines do on a -20 still Jan. night in the northern plains.”
Comment by J. Bob
unless you have a complete system of course ;)
Re ‘Completely Fed Up”, #478:
In my previous post I said: “If you can point at some specific such proof, please do so – otherwise, I feel safe assuming you know of none.”
You replied “The proof is in the reports from scientists. Read it.”
You gave no reference whatsoever to the location of “it”.
I rest my case.
Re Hank Roberts, #476:
From the paper:
“Above the transition elevation (≈3,320 m to 3,470 m in the White Mountains), ring width is strongly positively associated with temperature and also is weakly positively associated with precipitation. Below the transition elevation, ring width is strongly negatively associated with temperature and also is strongly positively associated with precipitation.”
So, yet another form of divergence in tree-ring temperature proxies? And this form, it appears, goes back centuries…
Seems like there’s a lot of research to be done still before we can have great trust in tree-ring proxies!
“A lot of good wind turbines do on a -20 still Jan. night in the northern plains.”
Why? You didn’t mention that it was becalmed.
All the wind turbines need is wind.
PS A lot of good nuclear power stations do when you don’t have any fissiles to play with…
“There is no way wind, solar, geothermal and wave power can replace coal, and they know it.”
No, Eddie, that’s what YOU “know”.
This is not what *I* know.
And so far reality seems to disagree with you.
Edward, calm down, deactivate caps lock, and once you’ve taken a deep breath how addressing the issues I brought up?
Make a case; show how you’d staff and protect a nuclear plant in– for instance– Bosnia during the civil war there.
How about Iraq, after the invasion? Fossil fuel generation plants can be turned off and left unattended, so can most other systems. Would you please explain how a similar scenario will work with nuclear reactors? How about when restart is needed?
Will human nature end as nuclear reactors spread across the planet?
There are places where the end of civil society is inconceivable, others where it’s imminent. Reactors don’t fit in all contexts, that’s my point. Don’t get angry about it, instead describe how you can make reactors work without leaving big messes, in the face of persistent human nature.
Once you’ve done that, we can turn to sloth, complacency and even good intentions (Chernobyl?) and sort out those problems.
Loath though I am to fuel yet more discussion here about power liberation/capture technologies, it’s an ironically amusing fact that the petroleum industry has advanced our drilling techniques to the point where it is conceivable we may be able to routinely and safely dispose of high level waste in deep boreholes.
For more information, here’s an abstract to provide search terms:
Deep Borehole Disposal of High-Level Radioacitve Waste
> Gerry Quinn
No, you didn’t read even the abstract before you posted your misstatement.
Please, we need real skeptics here, not baloney.
#481 Ah, the intelligentsia have spoken. If you can’t answer a question, try a less then intelligent remark.
#483 fixible, have you ever been in a grid control room and observed what it takes to get various parts on or off line under the best of conditions? As Han Solo said “It ain’t like dusting crops”, ( or quoting a general topic article ). I remember reading a IEEE report on the Great NY Power outage. When you are moving that much power, strange and unexpected things happen. Not only to the local station, but the ripples through the whole grid and associated grids. As the grid complexity increases, the problems increase, and can propagate, in a highly non-linear, and unpredictable manner.
#486 CFU. Still (adj) 1)being without movement, 2)motionless – Webster’s. OK?
JBob, you’re right — wind power doesn’t work when the wind doesn’t blow.
Also, your solar cells don’t work when it’s dark.
Your hydro, coal, or fission plant don’t work when the river’s too low, or too warm, for cooling water.
And none of them work very long without highways and railroads.
Electrification — it’s the grid that makes it work for everyone.
If you want a separate, isolated system, these days, you have to ask yourself why bother — because so much else you also want requires interconnection with the surrounding areas.
Unless you’re making your own dental floss, you’re connected.
No single answer is _the_ answer, for the high plains or anywhere else.
PS, J. Bob — are you thinking of this article?
http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-9/iss-5/p8.html
“In the four years between the issuance of Order 888 and its full implementation, engineers began to warn that the new rules ignored the physics of the grid…. the key error in the new rules was to view electricity as a commodity rather than as an essential service.
…
… The solution advocated by deregulation critics would revise the rules to put them back into accord with the grid physics. “The system is not outdated, it is just misused,” says Casazza. “We should look hard at the new rules, see what is good for the system as a whole, and throw out the rest.”
Many proposals to completely rebuild the electric grid want it overbuilt and kept deregulated — so they can use the electric grid like they do the financial system: making secret trades, big gambles, and big profits.
Doing that requires pushing any hugely interconnected single machine to its limits. And it will crash if it’s fought over instead of collaboratively run.
Or, you can run it as an essential service, a single machine, a use that is consistent with the physics.
We are as engineers.
We ought to get good at it.
The CRU comments on Mr. Pearce, and also his misleading account of Tom Wigley’s Email. Mr. Randerson, might take a look.
493 Hank, no I wasn’t thinking of your ref. to order 888. What I am thinking of is the physics involved in distribution and reliability of delivering electrical power. Not weather electrical power is a commodity or not. My personal view is to treat it as a essential utility.
What I do find interesting is the idea of General Atomics’ medium scale reactors. At this point, they may facilitate air cooling of the rector. With the proper configuration, it could act as a modified breeder, “burning” nuclear waste from the larger plants, reducing the waste problem. You might consider a grid using smaller plants, as similar to the internet. If one IMP, or node goes down, it would effect the local area, but minimize the disruption over the greater grid. This was one of the rules in the design of the original ARPA net.
“What I am thinking of is the physics involved in distribution and reliability of delivering electrical power. ”
Ever heard of a “brown out”?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownout_(electricity)
This is with coal and nuclear.
You beg the question as to whether these will be a new thing when we stop using fossil fuels.
They won’t.
“If you can’t answer a question, try a less then intelligent remark.”
Don’t be so hard on yourself, JP.
Try making an intelligent remark instead.
“You gave no reference whatsoever to the location of “it”.”
You have given no evidence of what “it” is.
Hank has given you one:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/the-guardian-responds/comment-page-10/#comment-169257
And you’ve shown no sign you’ve read it.
You’ve shown every sign of NOT reading the papers that show the phenomena you are specifically complaining about. You are merely parroting what you’ve heard elsewhere, uncritically. Yet are unwilling to read of what you’re critical of.
When you don’t know what you don’t believe, how do you know it’s wrong?
Because you DENY it.
“If you quit being afraid of nuclear, the coal industry is doomed”
Coal is doomed even if you’re not “afraid” of nuclear.
It is YOU who equate nuclear with the ONLY answer to coal.
And that axiom colours all your perception to the extent of blinding you. And, to make your blindness acceptable, you proffer that blindness on to others, painting them as blind as you, so that there may be no one-eyed man to be king.
“#486 CFU. Still (adj) 1)being without movement, 2)motionless ”
Still not seeing the point.
Why the -20? Please record for me a time when the entire North Plains were becalmed.
And please tell me how a nuclear power plant works without nuclear fuel. If you can’t, I guess that nuclear power is worthless too. Begging the question, how does a coal power station work without coal? I guess there’s no such thing as an electric power station, then, yes..?