Another open thread. OT comments from the Amazon drying thread have been moved over. As usual, substantive comments only please and no abuse.
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844 Responses to "Unforced variations 3"
Ray Ladburysays
Gary Thompson,
OK, so what is your point–that somehow the US is immune to global warming even though the rest of the planet isn’t? Somehow, I don’t think that will pass the straight face test. Warming does not happen uniformly. Are you really so desperate that you’ll keep looking at smaller and smaller areas until you find one that’s only warming a little bit?
RE: 122 JiminMpls says:
19 March 2010 at 11:18 PM
“The supply of oil isn’t as limited as you seem to think. Cheap oil, yes, but recoverable oil, no.
… At a $100/bbl, it would be economically recoverable. As prices go up, so will the supply. ”
This isn’t necessarily so. If it takes more energy to extract the oil than the oil provides it won’t be worth doing no matter what the price. If the energy returned is less than the energy invested you have a negative ERoEI.
Comment by Tim Jones — 23 March 2010 @ 5:24 AM
Jim needs to study more. Anyone conflating reserves with flow rates has no idea what the issue actually is. There are probably near 6 trillion barrels of oil/tar deposits held by the planet. However, we can typically only extract 30 – 40% of what we find. Also, because of receding horizons (costs are always increasing) and difficulty in extracting them, the energy returned on energy invested is constantly falling.
Was 100:1, now is between 11:1 and 30:1, depending on whom you ask. This trend will continue, guaranteed. The return on ethanol, for example, is in a range from negative to 3:1, depending on whom you ask.
Efficiency? The US increased energy efficiency 33% or so between 1980 and 2007 or so. Net effect? Around 5 million barrels/day increased consumption.
Factor in most of the rest of the planet aspiring to our standard of living?
Technology will not solve this problem. Not even close. This is why we are learning and teaching systemic approaches to solving these problems via permaculture design principles.
A Mar 2010 study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Oceanography on how the IPCC may be underestimating the next 100 years warming. Of course, one study is only one small piece of a huge puzzle going back to 1824 and it is written by an oceanographer.
> Gary Thompson
> US temperature anomaly yearly averages for the past 30 years
Talking about global temperature trends, then doing some kind of statistic with data from only one country for only the most recent 30 year period, is wrong. Whose blog are you getting this from?
Why do you consider that a reliable way to understand what’s happening?
Seriously, this is the kind of thing that Stat 101 can inoculate you against.
Otherwise people can fool you.
“… the combined effect of winter and summer wind forcing accounts for 50% of the variance of the change in September Arctic sea ice extent from one year to the next (ΔSIE) and it also explains roughly 1/3 of the downward linear trend of SIE over the past 31 years.”
And the other 2/3?
See: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/index.html
“… The pattern of winds associated with a strongly negative AO tends to reduce export of ice out of the Arctic through the Fram Strait. This helps keep more of the older, thicker ice within the Arctic. While little old ice remains, sequestering what is left may help keep the September extent from dropping as low as it did in the last few years. Much will depend on the weather patterns that set up this spring and summer.”
You might find this exchange interesting even though a bit dated:
Bruce Tabor says:
27 May 2007 at 6:17 AM
Thanks Rasmus,
I did not fully grasp the concept of skilful scale. Are you saying that GCMs do not reliably represent climate to a resolution of 1 grid point and that to achieve accurate representation you need to average over about 8 grid points? Hence the “skilful scale” is 8 grid points.
[Response:This is basically the point, yes. But there has not been much discussion about what the skilful scale has been lately, so I’m not sure if it is still true. -rasmus]
Do climate scientists expect any surprises as resolution increases? Were there “surprises” between the 1980s GISS models and the latest models? I note that in our region (Australia) your minimum scale map leaves out Bass Strait (between Australia and Tasmania) and Torres Strait (between Australia and PNG). These are significant water ways for local climate and ocean currents. They are also about 150 km wide – close to 200 km – so why would they be omitted?
[Response:One Japanese model does have a very high spatial resolution, but I don’t think there are any particular surprises. Perhaps an improved resolution may provide a better rpresentation of the MJO and the monsoon system as well as cyclones. The very high resolution model makes very realistic pictures of the cloud and storm systems, and the guys presenting the results are fond of showing animations which look very much like satellite pictures. Quite impressive. -rasmus]
Do GCMs capture coarse topographic features, eg the Tibetan Plateau?
[Response:apparently not well enough. -rasmus]
If you’re seriously interested in pursuing the latest (and have the time) try here:
In that article the unit of measurement is $$$$, but we must remember that costs are falling dramatically (electricity from PV fell 65% last year, IIRC, though there are transient spikes when the supply of refined silicon is challenged), so that overall growth in energy exceeds 50% per year, and in some places for some sources exceeds 100% per year for several years.
In the US, the growth in supply from renewables exceeds the growth in demand for energy.
Chevron Corporation is installing a solar farm in the Central Valley of CA to power its petroleum pumps. When they find it economically right to do so, they’ll produce fuel from sunlight instead of pumping it from the ground.
> Journal of Oceanography
Nitpicking, that’s not a study. It’s a “Science and Policy Feature”
> written by an oceanographer
Who?
> peer-reviewed
Reviewer Sarewitz is at the Breakthrough Institute; he and reviewer Bill Travis (a geographer) are at Colorado: http://128.138.136.233/about_us/annual_report2009.pdf Both are big in adaptation. The piece basically reads to me like a push for investing in geoengineering. Any ideas?
The Journal of Oceanography piece doesn’t disclose explicitly that the author from the Roda Group may have some financial interest in the subject, but you can look it up. This may help: http://www.rodagroup.com/news.html
I don’t have any objection to authors of feature articles who also have interests in businesses that would solve the problems they’re raising.
But one should dig at least slightly into references.
Otherwise mistakes like calling it “a study” in a “peer-reviewed journal” can propagate.
Once you know where the money’s going, investing in small brewery equipment to grow algae may look profitable.
I am still puzzled why this piece appears in an oceanography journal as a feature article, though. Any idea?
Thanks Hank for you well-intentioned response. Your attributions are quite wrong however.
RealClimate – Comments on FAQ on climate models Comment by simon abingdon — 11 November 2008 @ 1:28 PM
Here (#347) I ask gavin “Please explain how changes in the shape of the mountains are an issue”
RealClimate – Comments on The CRU hack
Comment by simon abingdon — 21 November 2009 @ 2:43 PM
Here (#572) I make complimentary remarks regarding gavin’s manifest integrity.
Just wanted to put the record straight. No need to apologize. simon
Brian Dodgesays
“If it takes more energy to extract the oil than the oil provides it won’t be worth doing no matter what the price.”
Nope. If I can dig up the energy equivalent of 5 barrels of oil worth of tar sand for 50 dollars, burn up 4 barrels worth to convert the remainder into 1 barrel of crude, and sell that for 100 dollars, I’m making a profit of 50 dollars on every barrel I sell, even though I’ve burned up 4 times as much as Ive sold.
Energy isn’t equal to dollar value; Osama bin Laden will pay a lot more for a joules worth of PETN than for a joules worth of goat dung.
Also bear in mind that the income to the Saudis isn’t linear with the amount they sell; depending on the worldwide demand & economy, more production may lower the price and total revenue(like the Laffer tax curve). Also, controlling their oil production and affecting the world price also has political as well as economic value – what do you think the supply/demand curve and price per barrel would be if bin Laden controlled the Saudi and Iraqi output?
Gillessays
Ray : “You clearly don’t talk to old people much.”
well you know my parents are around 70. I can’t say they are really obsessed by weather, and it would probably not be the first thing they would cite as the greatest change in their life since they were young. Concerning the impact of global economy… I had the feeling that the burst of oil prices in the recent years have raised more concern than the global temperature … that BTW have hardly changed in this period. I can’t see any correlation of the strong recent recessions with climatic events. Much more with restrictions in oil availability, of course.
CM : first thanks for your kind appreciations that contrast with other words I’ve read here ;).
“Or are you arguing that a transition to renewables will be bad for us, and therefore our best course of action is to postpone the inevitable for as long as possible?
”
No of course I have no problem with the development of renewables, as long as they are really harmless. I just say that their capacity is limited.
“I’m looking at the IEA statistics publication “CO2 emissions from fuel combustion: Highlights” (2009 edition, http://www.iea.org/co2highlights/) which has a table for CO2 emissions / GDP in exchange-rate terms.
It gives the CO2/GDP of the world economy in 2007 as 0.73 kg CO2 per dollar GDP, hence, in your terms, closer to 1.5 tons CO2 per $2,000 than to 1 ton as you stated. You may be using a different source.”
the last figure I see in the IEA excel worksheet is 0.47 kg /$ GDP ( 2000 $ PPP precisely). Depends on the dollar you use of course.
“Possibly. But what are the real considerations that define this upper bound?”
Well of course I can’t justify rigorously any upper bound. But there are real reasons to worry about possible future improvements :
a) much progress in carbon intensity has already been done, first by converting many oil power plants to less carbon intensive sources (gas and nuclear). But the development of coal counteracts this trend.
b) progresses in carbon efficiency of several industries like metallurgic ones are bounded by thermodynamics.
c) the more you exhaust conventional resources , the more you have to use non-conventional ones, which produce much more CO2 per unit energy.
the basic problem is the following. The rate of (relative) increase of GDP/capita is the sum of
increase of energy consumption
+ increase of energy efficiency
– increase of population (demographic growth).
The last 30 years, the first and the third term nearly cancelled, the growth in GDP/cap was only due to improvement in energy efficiency (for the total growth of GDP you have to add the demographic growth rate)
passing the fossil peak will invert the sign of energy consumption. The demographic growth will not stop until 2050 – in the best case. So you have to increase A LOT the energy efficiency to counterbalance the decrease of energy production – or develop very quickly the alternatives but with a decrease of oil production of – 1%/yr you should more than double the number of windmills in one year – and electricity is not lacking anyway. Typically you should increase it by 2 or 3 % each year. I don’t think that this rate has ever been reached in the past. So it’s justified to worry about it – at least as much as about global temperatures, in my opinion (actually much more in my REAL opinion).
Sure enough, wrong pointers on my part. My apology.
Should’ve pointed directly to Gavin’s replies to your questions throughout that thread, e.g.
“What system is the model modelling? What does “outside” mean?
[Response: It depends on the model. Whatever it is modelling, there are internal prognostic variables and then fixed elements that provide external boundary conditions. For a standard AGCM, the amount of CO2 is a fixed input, as is the sea surface temperature, the shape of the mountains etc. Changes in those external parameters are a forcing. For a coupled ocean-atmosphere model, the sea surface temperature is a prognostic variable and so no longer acts as a forcing. In climate-speak, people often talk about ‘forcings’ as a shorthand for the forcings in a standard coupled ocean-atmosphere model and refer mainly to their TOA radiative effect which is useful for comparing their effects. – gavin]
Comment by simon abingdon — 11 November 2008 @ 12:30 PM
and later where he says you’re overthinking this and it’s not all that complicated. You ask in many ways how one can say there’s a trend with all the noise. It’s both a very tough task, and a fairly simple concept.
Variation without a trend always happens; we’re trying to figure out how to tell the natural variation from a trend; statistics is the tool to figure out how much variation is happening over how long, then get an idea how many measurements over what time span will be needed to reject the assumption that it’s all noise with no trend.
Completely Fed Upsays
Brian, it’s “if it costs 6 barrels to extract and refine and sell 5 barrels of oil”.
Democracy Centersays
Here at the Democracy Center we are working hard to draw attention to the impact of climate change already happening in some of the most vulnerable parts of the world. We’ve recently produced:
Keep your eyes out for our coverage!
(www.democracyctr.org)
phil csays
254 The cloud experiment at CERN is unlikely to be definitive due to wall effects, according to Eli Rabett.
while I appreciate the link it looks like the opinion of a blogger. I would hope that CERN are aware of what they need to do before they do it. Anyway, without prejudging the outcome, it will be interesting to see the results and if they have any bearing on possible links to climate.
simon abingdonsays
#314 Hank
VS had you worried though. (OK, only briefly).
David B. Bensonsays
phil c (317) — I assure that Eli Rabett is far more than just a blogger. Here is one of his recent threads http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/03/simplest-explanation.html
and his essay on the pathways by which methane degrades was quite thorough. So his opinions on matters of atmospheric chemistry and physics are too be taken rather seriously.
“””> Journal of Oceanography
Nitpicking, that’s not a study. It’s a “Science and Policy Feature”
> written by an oceanographer
Who?”””
Thanks for bringing this up. I think the information in the article is resaonably legit (but maybe I am wrong)… (except for the relatively low ranking of the journal and his not listing connections).
…I find it interesting that the author lists peer review studies that show how the IPCC seems to understate warming projections in a peer reviewed journal..in a bit more accessible form than most articles (although admittedly it is published in a remote journal for discussing climate change). Secondly, admittedly, if his information was ground breaking, he probably would have gotten it into a more reputable journal.
“””
> Journal of Oceanography
> written by an oceanographer
Who?”””
His bio (author Charles H. Greene)
says:
“After receiving his PhD in Oceanography from the University of Washington in 1985, Greene began a postdoctoral fellowship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).”
> peer-reviewed
Reviewer Sarewitz is at the Breakthrough Institute; he and reviewer Bill Travis (a geographer) are at Colorado: http://128.138.136.233/about_us/annual_report2009.pdf Both are big in adaptation. The piece basically reads to me like a push for investing in geoengineering. Any ideas?”””
Perhaps there were also other reviewers since the publication is listed (perhaps falsely? as a peer-reviewed journal although it seems to be listed in Journal Citation Reports (Impact factor .731), Thomson Reuters; Eigenfactor, and http://www.journal-ranking.com)
I wonder if the author is really pushing for geoengineering itself and not just research into it like Crutzen and Wigley. (Crutzen Climatic Change, 2006. and Rasch,Crutzen, Coleman, Geophys. Res. Lett, 2008) and Wigley, Science, 2006.)
Greene: “their associated risks to the environment and socio-economic well-being …However investing in geoengineering research now will enable policymakers to make informed decisions based on science rather than uninformed decisions make out of desperation.”
He certainly is pushing for studies into it…as Crutzen and Wigley seem to be doing/did/are.
Personally (although the concept of geoengineering scares the hell out of me-published studies don’t seem too happy so far with possible unintended consequences of geoengineering-Trenberth, A Dai – Geophys. Res. Lett, 2007).
I think geoengineering is very likely going to be seriously raised by some desperate politician during a future emergency. If solid studies have been done, written down, analyzed thoroughly, maybe-just maybe the politician will have to think twice before using it(-maybe not with the disinformation campaigns by the pseudo-skeptics).
“””The Journal of Oceanography piece doesn’t disclose explicitly that the author from the Roda Group may have some financial interest in the subject, but you can look it up. This may help: http://www.rodagroup.com/news.html…
I don’t have any objection to authors of feature articles who also have interests in businesses that would solve the problems they’re raising.
But one should dig at least slightly into references.”””
Yes, I should have dug deeper into it and mentioned their connection- thanks for bringing it up.
However also, anyone is allowed to write peer review and offer possible solutions (even if obliquely)…as did Crutzen and Wigley. Hopefully, if Greene is spinning science, future published science would challenge it. Greene still quotes legit studies such as Hansen 2008, Schneider 2008, etc. and (to me) makes a case that the IPCC is possibly underestimating the future projected warming for scenarios.
“””Otherwise mistakes like calling it “a study” in a “peer-reviewed journal” can propagate.
Once you know where the money’s going, investing in small brewery equipment to grow algae may look profitable.”””
I am still puzzled why this piece appears in an oceanography journal as a feature article, though. Any idea?
I wonder if Greene:
1. Couldn’t get it into a better journal.
2. He wrote in a journal of his specialty because they know of him.
3. He wanted oceanographers to read/be exposed to the “IPCC-is-undetrestimating the projected warming”…and they might miss reading other journals.
4. It was easier to get it published in an Oceanography journal since it is his specialty.
Although Greene is obviously pushing for more research into geoengineering and might have nenfarious motives, he seems (except for pushing geoengineering and the relatively low ranking journal), to be reasonable in his assessment that the IPCC might be underestimating the future warming.
He, also, seems to not be alone in pushing for more research into geoengineering- (Crutzen and Wigley). However, yes, it is perhaps unusual that he is writing outside his specialty of oceanography…and did not list his connections.
However, if the information in his work stands up under future peer review…well, that’s science.
Patrick 027says
Re 253 Ric Merritt –
Thermodynamics (none of this really gets at EROEI):
The sun’s photosphere emits approximately as a blackbody at ~ 5780 K (I’m going from memory, but it’s definitely closer to 6000 than 5000); it diverges from this at various wavelengths, especially at the extremes of the spectrum.
But based on the second law applied to a Carnot heat engine, a conversion efficiency of near 95 % could be obtained (with a heat sink near 300 K).
But, the entropy of sunlight is increased by the atmosphere and thus reaches the surface with a lower brightness temperature. There is some absorption, and some scattering of radiation (the blue light of the sky (or grey/white in cloudy weather, pink, green, yellow, etc., is scattered out of the beam, and distributed over a much larger solid angle; both the direct beam and diffuse solar radiation are ‘cooler’ than solar radiation in space). (The relationship to entropy: The entropy is the energy divided by the temperature; in this case, the brightness temperature, and in this case, especially for diffuse solar radiation, it must be analyzed at each frequency.)
Also, there are other issues with the device that would be used to convert solar energy to work (or electricity).
For a simple CSP thermal – mechanical – electrical energy conversion with geometric optics using a blackbody at all wavelengths as the targe for focussed sunlight, only direct beam solar energy can be used, and in order for the blackbody to supply heat to a heat engine, it’s temperature must be lower than the brightness temperature of the solar radiation it is using so as to not emit the same amount of energy back out of the device. (With Ts being effective brightness temperature of direct beam solar radiation (setting variations over wavelength aside) and S being the solar power that is concentrated, with Th and Tc being the temperatures of the heat source and heat sink of a heat engine, the efficiency relative to S would be, assuming S takes the form of blackbody radiation (within the solid angle of the solar beam) at Ts (actual spectral distribution of S, which is affected by atmospheric absorption and scattering as well as solar characteristics, may allow for a different answer)
eff = (1-Tc/Th)*[1-(Th/Ts)^4],
which is maximized (as a function of Tc and Ts) at:
(see note on these calculations below; also I did this quickly and can’t guarantee every value Th and eff)
If Th is limited to smaller T, for example, 1000 K or less, then the efficiencies are:
373, 5055, 1000, 62.6
373, 5055, 600, 37.8
300, 5055, 1000, 69.9
300, 5055, 600, 50.0
For smaller Th, the Carnot efficiency is a good approximation to the full equation. The optimal Th values are less than half of Ts for all examples given, thus the eff as calculated is at least 15/16 of the Carnot efficiency for the sample Ts and Tc values.
——————
373 K = boiling point of water,
5780 K ~= Ts in space, full spectrum,
5345 K is an approximate brightness temperature (full spectrum) for direct insolation 1000 W/m2 (standard full sun under 1 atmosphere, although that may include diffuse radiation and so the temperature may be an overestimate of the brightness temperature;
5055 K is an approximate brightness temperature (full spectrum) for a direct insolation of 800 W/m2.
The last two brightness temperatures were calculated from distance to sun and solar radius here: http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/sun_worldbook.html, and with blackbody flux per unit area = sigma * T^4, with sigma = 5.67e-8 (** thus only three significant figures); where by ‘full spectrum’, I am refering to the temperature of a blackbody of the size of the sun, at the same distance from Earth, that would emit such a flux per unit area reaching Earth.
These are only effective brightness temperatures for the intensity of the direct beam over the whole spectrum, which is sufficient for the equation used, but in other cases the spectrum must be considered.
**For diffuse light, 1000 W/m2 and 800 W/m2 correspond to brightness temperatures of 364.4 K and 344.6 K, respectively; however, spectral considerations are very important for finding the actual brightness temperature of diffuse solar radiation for thermodynamic purposes (consider the temperature of an object required to emit visible radiation as intense as a clear or even cloudy sky!))
————————-
The optimal temperature Th can be higher if the target has lower emissivity at longer wavelengths and/or the optics are designed around the spectral properties of the incident solar radiation (Relative to solar radiation in space, at the surface, global (direct and indirect) solar radiation is depleted in UV and somewhat depleted in solar IR, especially in particular wavelength bands; direct radiation is farther depleted in shorter visible wavelengths).
Also, the formula assumes the target on which solar radiation is focussed is always at the same temperature. In the case of parabolic troughs heating a fluid flowing through a pipe, the fluid only reaches Th as it leaves the solar collectors; it is thus less than Th for some portion of the length and thus eff can be a little higher.
These are theoretical limits, of course.
—-
Regarding other solar energy devices, there are flat-plate collectors, which can use direct and diffuse light. Diffuse solar light still has somewhat high brightness temperatures (see note above), and thus can be converted to electricity and/or concentrated in a luminescent concentrator (see below).
Flat plate collectors can be solar cells (PV devices). They can also be luminescent concentrators, which concentrate solar radiation via absorption in a layer of fluorescent dye, which emits some portion of the incident radiation at a wavelength that is mostly trapped in a thin layer by total internal reflection, thus being concentrated onto the small area of the edges of the layer (which may be where solar cells are placed).
Both flat plate collectors and geometric concentrators (lenses, curved mirrors, mirror arrays) can be used only to produce solar heat. The flat plate collector would generally supply low temperature heat (for example, residential water heaters), although a technology employed in Israel uses flat collectors (ponds) with a sort of greenhouse effect to produce hot water to run a heat engine.
And Solar cells can also be used with geometric concentrators (CPV).
Cogeneration/hybrid systems:
Whether in CPV or flat plate form, Solar cells, like mechanical heat engines, or thermophotovoltaic or thermoelectric devices, or (photo/photoelectro/electro/thermo/etc.)chemical reactions …
(any of those could be used in some way with solar power; heat stored by a CSP device or otherwise produced could produce electricity through a thermophotovoltaic or thermoelectric device; as I understand it, a thermophotovoltaic device is a photovoltaic device that uses lower-energy photons, while a thermoelectric device works like a thermocouple)… can supply/produce work plus ‘waste heat’; that waste heat need not be wasted if the economics allow; for example, PV cells can be kept cool (typically increasing their efficiency) if their waste heat is transfered to water (I think this is called a hybrid system). Luminescent concentrators also produce some heat during the absorption and fluorescence process, which might be utilized.
From what I recall, I think the theoretical limits of solar cells’ photon to electric energy conversion, allowing multijunction or spectrum splitting (or hot carrier collection?), etc, is somewhere around 60 % for unconcentrated sunlight and around 80 % for concentrated sunlight (No commercial technology comes anywhere near such limits yet). (I think the difference might be explaine by considering concentrated sunlight, if fully concentrated, has the same intensity of the direct solar rays over a whole hemisphere, so that the solar flux per unit area is as it would be at the surface of the sun (except for atmospheric effects), so that the charge carriers and PV material can be ‘hotter’ while losing energy via emission as the same fraction of absorbed radiation, and the charge carriers can be that much ‘hotter’ than the PV material and lose more energy to the PV material while still retaining the same fraction of absorbed solar radiation – see below.)
I haven’t studied the thermodynamics of solar cells much but I know some basics of both thermodynamis and of solar cells and so can make some inferences. I think there may be somewhat analogous issues with the CSP efficiency limits discussed above; in this case, excited charge carriers (electrons and holes) must be produced by absorption of solar radiation; these charge carriers are ‘hotter’ than the material they are in, and thus they can lose energy via emissions of photons or heating of the material faster than energy would be gained from the material (and even if at equilibrium with the material, they will combined emit photons at any given frequency and direction and polarization just as easily as they would absorb them, relative to blackbody emission for the material temperature), so the maximum efficiency occurs when the current drains the electron and hole populations out of the photovoltaic material fast enough to reduce such losses while also not being too strong, to reduce resistance losses of voltage and the voltage within the photovolatic material required to drive the electrons and holes out different sides of the material (for a short circuit, their is no build up of charge within the photovoltaic material to support a voltage outside the material, so the current can’t do work outside the material; for an open circuit, the charge-carriers build up to such a density that they stop their net movements to different sides and do recombine at the same rate they are produced. The maximum power output is found with a current Imax less than the short circuit current Isc, and an output voltage Vmax less than the open circuit voltage Voc; the fill factor = Imax*Vmax / (Isc * Voc). I have read that higher fill factors can be attained with a greater photon flux absorption per unit volume – I’d guess because this can sustain a higher charge carrier density with the same recombination rate as a fraction of the electron-hole pair production rate.).
—-
If I recall correctly, the theoretical limit for conversion of fluid kinetic energy to work via a turbine in an ambi-ent unenclosed flow is 16/27, where this is the fraction of kinetic energy flux through an area that is the area swept by the turbine. It can’t be 100 % because in order for the fluid to transfer kinetic energy to the turbine, it must slow down; but it needs the same mass flow rate to ‘get out of the way’ of the next bit of fluid, so it can’t slow down to zero. Because the turbine puts up some resistance to the flow, as the air flows toward the turbine, it slows down, increases in pressure, and this redirects some flow to the side around the turbine. There will be a pressure drop across the turbine (the kinetic energy that is converted to pressure is not lost; kinetic energy works on a turbine via pressure (although for a Tesla turbine ? … well, that’s not really applicable to wind power so far as I know)). Assuming the pressure downwind of the turbine is the same as upwind (outside the region where the turbine causes a pressure rise in front), the air will have the same density and the same volume flow rate, so the area it flows through must expand in order for it to have reduced speed.
In an enclosed flow (as in a hydroelectric dam or a steam turbine), the intake can be directed through a narrow area and the outflow from the turbine can occur through a very large area, and all the flow can be directed through the turbine, so the limitations to a wind turbine (or analogous water turbine within an ambi-ent current) don’t apply. Note: Fluid has energy via pressure and motion (and potential energy); when energy is not extracted or otherwise lost, fluid going from higher to lower pressure will speed up (if it is not gaining some other potential energy, such as by flowing upward against gravity). Trying to get an ambi-ent fluid flow to go through an enclosed process when it is not already doing so (mountains, buildings), doesn’t have any benifit, because the device has to have a larger area than the intake area anyway, and the fluid is free to flow around the intake rather than through it as the pressure builds up in front.
Sou @262
Seems to me you’re standing a very slippery slope when you parcel out different temperatures and then average over regions. You don’t do that for CO2, you say that’s uniform. Same with the radiation energy balance.
John, I was responding to Gary Thompson’s query, where he was asking why one couldn’t look at a couple of years of lower temp over the (contiguous) USA to say that there is no anthropogenic global warming. I pointed out that there are other areas in the world where the temperature is rising, and that global means global (not just the contiguous USA).
I didn’t mention the uniformity of CO2. However yes, I agree that CO2 is rising fairly uniformly at every measuring point from Cape Grim in Tasmania to Hawaii and points in between, and I understand that it does spread well through the atmosphere, which isn’t a great surprise given the dynamics of gases and the atmosphere. It’s more like O2 and N2 in that regard, than like H20, because H20 goes in and out of the atmosphere much more quickly and doesn’t have time to ‘even out’, whereas CO2 hangs about for a very very long time.
I didn’t do any calculation of regional or global temperatures myself, I leave that to the experts. The professionals are the ones who analyse the raw data and do the gridding and work out the global temperature. Most amateurs would be bound to make lots of errors.
I don’t understand what you think is the slippery slope. It seems straightforward to me. The analysis of incoming and outgoing radiation supports the analysis of observations of temperature rise and CO2 increase. Again I don’t understand what you find problematic.
BTW, you have lots and lots of company whereas I’m pretty much alone ;-)
We’re all in the same boat, John – or should I say we’re all on the same earth, so no need to feel alone. We’re all experiencing the effects of a warming earth over time. Individually we react differently as the direct and immediate impacts on each of us differs :D
Andrew Hobbssays
#312 Brian Dodge
Wrong.
“If it takes more energy to extract the oil than the oil provides it won’t be worth doing no matter what the price.”
“Nope. If I can dig up the energy equivalent of 5 barrels of oil worth of tar sand for 50 dollars, burn up 4 barrels worth to convert the remainder into 1 barrel of crude, and sell that for 100 dollars, I’m making a profit of 50 dollars on every barrel I sell, even though I’ve burned up 4 times as much as Ive sold.”
In your example you have only used 80% of the energy in the extracted oil to actually extract it.
The original quote is saying that if it takes the energy of more than 5 barrels of oil to extract 5 barrels of oil then it isn’t worth doing.
Richard, thanks for looking further into that. I’m not complaining about the article, just wanted a better idea about what weight to give it. Scholar finds a _lot_ of interesting oceanography work by C.H. Greene — which says to me he’s the kind of scientist we’d really want watching the effects of geoengineering trials very carefully. Reassuring.
Patrick 027says
Re 323 Andrew Hobbs –
“The original quote is saying that if it takes the energy of more than 5 barrels of oil to extract 5 barrels of oil then it isn’t worth doing.”
Yes
… but …
And not to take away from the general point, but this won’t always be true; it could be worth getting the oil for certain special purposes, for the same reason it is worth expending some energy to produce some smaller amount of energy in the form of a battery, or for that matter, for the same reason energy is used to get copper or phosphorus or sulfur or titanium.
John Petersays
Sou@322
Thanks for the kind words. They are comforting.
The slope is slippery because the energy balances, at least all that I’ve seen, have all surfaces radiating at the same temperature in thermodynamic equilibrium. When different regions have different temperatures, how does one balance the radiation energy?
It gets slipperier. The warmer here, cooler somewhere else, while making intuitive, qualitative, sense to us, might not compute quantitatively by any of the models. At least that’s what Mike Mann seemed to say when interviewed last November about his study of regional temperatures over the past century, century and a half. He could figure out that the NH and SH were 180 out of phase, but he couldn’t get his two models to back cast that way. Mike claims it’s too non-intuitive. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/data/326/5957/1287-b/DC1/1
Greene’s article concludes with a wary view toward geoengineering:
“…society may ultimately decide that most of the proposed approaches cannot be implemented on a global scale because of their anticipated risks to the environment and our socio-economic well being.”
Greene seems to have been a lead author on a a peer-reviewed article related to human-caused climate change and others including one in Science:
Greene’s study concludes: “As we enter the 21st century and face the likelihood of climate changes unprecedented in human history (IPCC
2007), society must anticipate changes in the structure
and function of the ecosystems on which we have come
to depend.” http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/Greene.pdf
______________________________________________________________________
So it seems, Greene has the capability/talent/history of publishing in top journals, but chose not to in this case…maybe to try to clue in more oceanographers who might be reading only their own specialized journals (that would hardly be a surprise, from my experience at a climate place).
Patrick 027says
Gilles –
Re 158
“And nobody really asks to suppress cars – they just want electric ones ! well it seems to indicate at least that this kind of “drawbacks” are not always a good reason to renounce to the modern comfort. Have you an idea of which criterion should be used to know if this king of things is acceptable, or not ?”
Mixing two different issues. The argument for reducing fossil fuel usage (and/or sequestering C) (and reducing other greenhouse gas emissions) via alternatives – renewable energy (and maybe nuclear?), efficiency, etc, is not based on ALL problems of fossil fuels, it is based on the problems that alternatives would alleviate/avoid. The problem of traffic deaths is a different issue – how do we drive, how do we regulate driving, do we make cars differently – and these can affect energy efficiency, but to the extent they are done or not done for the purpose of energy efficiency is not supposed to be the same as what is done for all reasons.
Re 159
This recession was caused by more than expensive oil (it didn’t end when oil prices plummeted). It was caused by a form of dishonesty (and fear?) – people pretended that something was likely worth more than it was, and managed to convince themselves and others of that falsehood. (What appears puzzling is why, if the wealth wasn’t real, how was the economy was still working nicely up to the point that the truth was revealed? Two possibilities I can think of a priori to further research (which I won’t pretend to have done much) are 1. people may have been working harder and sacrificing more in anticipation of future benifit contingent on an illusion; thus motivation of productivity and sacrifice was reduced by the truth; 2. when it was revealed that something was thought to be worth more than it was, fear about illusory value of other things stopped economic processes from proceeding based on reality; uncertainty makes decisions harder, and the efficiency of the economy fell. Fluctuations also reduce economic efficiency.)
—
Gilles: 206
“Well I understand that the argument is often presented in this way, but I’m rather doubtful on what you mean exactly by “making the switch”. The point I’m raising is that it is absolutely not granted for me that the “switch” could power the same society as ours. And BTW, which one is it supposed to power? average global one? european one? american one? more? less? which growth? how long? up to which level ? why ?”
1.
In the approximation of a linear constant externality and ideal market, climate policy needn’t know these things; the externality will redirect the market towards something better, whatever that ends up being.
2.
Of course, in actuallity the externality and the cost of mitigation will both depend on the future trajectories of things, including population and technology.
3.
Given that, it’s a tough calculation to do, but the point is that qualitatively the proposal makes sense. Whatever we are able to get, we’ll get more with a good policy than with a bad policy.
Gilles 267:
“If renewable energies were much more productive than fossil fuels, why wouldn’t they have already replaced them?”
Including the externalities for all, if renewable energy is better it will eventually replace fossil fuels, faster than determined by scarcity of input resources alone, if the externality is taxed or otherwise managed properly. If the externality is not managed, then renewable energy will wait longer to dominate.
But there is an additional factor; renewable energy and some efficiency improvements involve long-term investment. They cost up front, but they pay back dividends. To the extent that some of the benifits are not realized for many decades, this might make up for some portion of a GDP drop, if there is one, at that time. Once there is a sufficient infrastructure established, the continuing investment can be payed for with returns from the infrastructure in place.
And the market isn’t perfect:
———
(some possibilities and other interesting points (which may or may not be framed as externalities themselves?, and may also overlap with each other or be examples of each other):
1. negative sum games (competitive fertility, theft and murder (public protection of rights is government involvement in the market),
2. mass market advantage and increasing returns and nonlinear supply-demand relationships (multiple equilibria),
3. consideration of the rational self interest of future people,
4. Negotiating power (is it used wisely, has it been earned?) (ie can cheap labor be farmed like a crop (West Virginia coal miners ?));
5. Nonlinearities of big actions (the effects of incremental decisions may individuals might be calculated with the approximation that nothing else changes (?), like linearized wave equations.)
6. self-fulfilling optimism and pessimism (smaller discounting of the future could encourage more investment so as to make the future better (consider how much fat and sugar you might eat if you only expected to live another year)) (monetary systems require trust), NOT to be confused with the idea that there are no physical limits (starvation verses metabolic disorder, the boundary depends on point of view, of course).
7. How much a choice is valued depends on other choices including choices made by others, and choices in the past, and choices expected in the future. (If only the most favorite meal is chosen each day, in the absence of anticipating future days, then many foods will not be enjoyed.) (The costs of mitigation and adaptation both depend on future population.)
8. Psychology: “Paradox of Choice”, limitations of ‘rational man’ and his/her ability to stay awake, delegate responsibilities to ‘rule of thumb man’, ‘habit man’, ‘experienced man’, and ‘instinct man’,
9. Dependence on how optimum is defined; time horizons affect the production possibilities curve – the profit landscape (analogous in some, but not all, ways to the fitness landscape concept in biological evolution) depends on time horizon, and government action that is truly optimal could be considered a reshaping of the profit landscape (most clear cut example is the public decision to drive on one side of the road, which decreases the profitability of driving on the other side of the road but increases the potential profitability of driving) but from a more ‘global’ perspective actually represents a different path along the profit landscape; a valley between two peaks that is too deep to bridge actually indicates that as a function of real trajectory (initial conditions), the optimal path not taken doesn’t exist as an optimal path for that reality as it requires going back in time and making different choices)but the tendency in the response to externality policy should generally be the same.)
10. Some value may be degraded by privatization of the commons; some public magagement and planning, etc, could boost overall economic profit (the aesthetic (and possibly, scientific) value of nature is affected by ownership; depending on technology, there is a cost to using toll roads; public consumer and worker protection may boost consumer confidence and worker enthusiam (?).)
(I’ll just mention also that it can be a bit silly to state that government doesn’t create wealth but only redistributes it. Any economic activity involves some redistribution or rearrangement (including sometimes at the atomic or subatomic level) which has the effect of creating wealth (or bringing wealth from potential to actual). At some point, decisions are not made ‘by the market’ with no conscious effort; somebody somewhere actually has to make a decision. It is more reasonable to say that a government action can’t create more wealth or perhaps even the same wealth relative to the alternative of no government action (for a particular government action). Of course this doesn’t seem true for protection of property and life rights, etc. (environmental protection is really in part a form of that); aside from that, there is a logic there, in that, if the market is not ideal, how could the government do any better, since both depend on imperfect people? And the government doesn’t have the same incentives to perform optimally. Okay, but different problem solving methods may be more or less immune or prone to error when applied to different problems. And the government does have to work for votes. Because everyone may have some potential to be productive differently than they are at any one time, a government that responds equally to each person might still benifit the economy (?). Voters of course are often not that bright – they are misled by propaganda, they are too busy or too lazy or too pessimistic to invest in their decision making abilities. The same could be said of consumers and maybe others. We have proof that the market is plenty capable of waste and inefficiency.)
When people continue to build and make things based on what they think people want, and people continue to buy things based on what’s available, the market is slow to change. We can get stuck in a rut. That’s why I do support some auxilliary measures (to the externality tax), for example, updating building codes, perhaps incorporated specific incentives or mandates for rooftop solar cells, water heaters, skylights (with some flexibility, for the mandate especially, that the requirements are contingent on local climate and solar resources, local and temporal economics, and landscaping – obviously solar cells shouldn’t be placed under the persistent shade of a tree, although a skylight could still be benificial in that case).
——
“If it is more expensive and less convenient, they would probably sustain only a lower consumption.”
It is more expensive now (if it even still is) because it is new; it is inconvenient because it has small market penetration. How inconvenient would it be to run a car on gasoline if we had a much smaller refinery capacity?
“Now remember that the consequences of GW have been estimated by N. Stern around 20 % of GDP, which is considered as unbearable. I don’t know if it is realistic or not, but I simply ask : why do you expect that the total replacement (on the long term , it WILL be total) of fossil fuels by energies that are more expensive, less convenient, and cannot even been produced at this price without fossil fuels, won’t cause a similar change in the economy ? I can’t find any reasonable argument for that – apart from that we would LIKE that it can do it.””
Well, GDP might shrink (relative to a business as usual trajectory with climate change magically not in the equation) by a much smaller amount, at first (See N. Stern’s work). But electrification of some sizable fraction of transportation, even with solar power, might grow the GDP.
(The necessary battery size of PEV’s can be shrunk if they are PHEV’s, which can use fuel when the batteries are depleted; this could be a good choice for someone who makes a lot of short trips and a few long ones.)
Re 268
“of course, but you should also remember that everybody”…”is only sensitive to regional temperature”…”live in his backyard”…”is much more sensitive to short term weather and doesn’t have a clear remembering of how it was 30 years ago – and doesn’t really care. For the supposed incapability of mankind to adapt to changes at a 30 years scale, well,look at the recent history, and remember that 30 years is just close to an average working time in your life, meaning that after this time you’re just replaced by young people who have no idea of how you were living 30 years ago – and care very little about it.”
In addition to Ray Ladbury 278,
The identification of a global trend is part of the scientific work (for identifying actual global warming). It will be easier to identify global trends before regional trends. This doesn’t mean there won’t be regional variations, with great importance.
Re 183,
– NUMBERS:
The U.S. spends roughly $ 1 trillion per year on energy, for an electrical equivalent of roughly 1 TWe. Solar cells cost somewhere between $4 and $1 per peak W (peak W refers to a standard insolation of 1000 W/m2), or maybe slightly less now. Multiply that by 5 for typical insolation in regions where solar cells would be widely used (200 W/m2 on a proper fixed-tilt flat panel, many residential/urban/local applications will get less, many centralized power plants will get more). $20 per average W to $5 per average W or less. IF the costs are trending towards the lower end, and other costs (inverters, maintanence, some storage capacity (note storage is not necessary for grid-connected applications until variable renewable power exceeds some significant fraction of the total), HVDC lines) don’t more than triple the cost, then let’s take $15 per average W. That’s per installed average W. The Wattage decays over time, perhaps 0.5 % each year. Allowing for an additional 0.5 % loss of installed capacity from storm damage, etc, a replacement rate of 1 % is required to maintain constant power. 1 TWe * $15/average We = $15 trillion. 1 % of $15 trillion is 15 % of present energy expenditures, roughly; a HUGE ECONOMIC SAVINGS (not including rising costs of fossil fuels)! But yes, that’s for a mature steady state power supply (and actually doesn’t take into account the difference between panel output and system output, EROEI (say about 1 year of energy output invested for 50 or more years of energy output, requiring perhaps a 2.0408… % larger power supply and thus a replacment rate of 1.02 % per year, although compared to EROEI for fossil fuels and maybe nuclear, that may actually reduce the power supply needed), and costs or benifits associated with replacing fuels with electricity or using electricity to create fuel or using direct solar heat to reduce fuel needs, although we’ve got another $850 billion/year to to buffer that); BUT ALSO, what about the ramp up? Well, I did some sample calculations earlier for a couple of other RC comments on other threads several months ago on an Excel spreedsheet…
(AND no, I’m not saying we must use only solar power. This is just an example.)
John Peter, you post a link to an interview with Mann and tell us what you say he said, but you don’t give a direct quote. Is this what you’re interpreting? You say “he couldn’t get his two models to back cast that way” but that seems exactly the opposite of the point he was making — which is we have paleo data saying how the climate works:
He says:
“… there was a net heating of the global climate, it was a relatively warm interval, and yet those same factors appear to have drove the climate not into the warm El Niño state of the tropical Pacific, but the cold La Niña state, a bit counterintuitive.”
And he goes on to say
” … There are only a relatively small subset of coupled climate models that exhibit this tropical thermostat response; most of the models do the opposite. …. However, the paleoclimate record of the past thousand years, in our analysis, suggests that at least with respect to the response that the climate has exhibited to natural factors, the response appears to be that thermostat response – it appears to be the opposite of what most of the IPCC projection models project….”
So — seems to me — this is not saying that his models or anyone’s models don’t or can’t work right. Not at all. He’s saying some models do match reality, as we learn more about reality, better than others, and that’s how models get improved (and added to the IPCC’s collection).
Dear RC experts. How good is the estimate that Greenland ice sheet may already collapse at 400 ppm? From article “The effect of more realistic forcings and boundary conditions on the modelled geometry and sensitivity of the Greenland ice-sheet,” in The Cryosphere, “An Interactive Open Access Journal of the European Geosciences Union” http://bit.ly/Grld400
The slope is slippery because the energy balances, at least all that I’ve seen, have all surfaces radiating at the same temperature in thermodynamic equilibrium. When different regions have different temperatures, how does one balance the radiation energy?
John, the thing is radiation can be measured at the outer perimeter of the atmosphere, so we’re talking different ‘surfaces’ – ie the surface of the outer atmosphere, not the land/water surface. The troposphere is where the weather happens, and it is separated from the stratosphere by the tropopause.
I’m no expert in this area, but as I understand it, most of the incoming radiation just shoots in right through all the layers and gets absorbed by the surface (land and water). Some of the outgoing radiation from the IR emitted back from the land/water surface get’s ‘trapped’ in the troposphere by greenhouse gases etc, some passes back through the different atmospheric layers, particularly the troposphere, and heads on out to space. (With rising CO2, more is being reflected back to earth, so the radiation is not in balance – more incoming than outgoing for now, until CO2 stabilises.)
That’s why you get different weather and temperature on the ‘inside’ (ie in the troposphere) while still being able to measure what goes back out to space – because the measurements of outgoing radiation are taken in layers above the ‘weather’. The outer layers are more consistent and don’t have the same turbulence as the troposphere. I’d expect those who do the measurements take into account any day / night effects and seasonal variations when calculating the net radiation over a period and any trends.
You might find it useful to look up the atmospheric layers and their properties, composition etc, and look at where the satellites are positioned, which measure radiation.
Now hopefully someone will correct me if I’m wrong with any of the above, or expand where I’ve oversimplified.
Gillessays
Patrick027 : I won’t comment your long post in all details, but I don’t think you have really addressed the main problem.It is that your “savings” have only the effect of leaving some fuel available either for other people who wouldn’t have accessed them if you hadn’t saved them : these people are either current poor people , and you have absolutely no reason for depriving them from their use, or your children or grand-children whom you have no reason – and no power – to deprive as well. I didn’t check your computation of solar power (you KNOW the problem of intermittency I presume?). I trust the FRench electricity company EDF will do the best choice by building cheap power plants and sell the electricity at the normal market price if it is possible; why wouldn’t they do it ? do you think that nuclear power is easy to master and is a pleasure to make accepted by populations? and France has been equipped for one century with hydroelectricity – I live actually in a small town where the first industrial application of the “white coal” (“houille blanche” ) has been done for a paper factory, by our local hero Aristide Berges. Renewable energy has been used from the beginning when it was interesting, cheap, and convenient. And I recall you that windmills, electric cars, biofuels, even hydrogen fuel cells already existed at this time (not solar panels, I admit). They all have been tested against fossil fuels – and not retained. There must be a reason?
Andreas Bjurströmsays
33 Ray Ladbury,
“Don’t you think it should bother you that your picture of science is utterly unrecognizable to anyone who actually does science?”
The irony is that the overall responses shows that many of the things I have said is more or less true. (and I don´t find your hard core view of scientic concensus very recognizable to working scientists. They usually work in cutting edge areas without concensus).
49 Gavin
Let us hope that is was an aberration that was not significant for the culture of the natural sciences in climare research.
ps
Time to say good bye to you all. It was interesting, valuable, constructive, frustrating, preasant and also unpleasant to discuss here.
ds
CMsays
Gilles (#313),
> 0.47 kg /$ GDP ( 2000 $ PPP precisely).
That explains it. I was looking at the other CO2/GDP table (Sheet 15), which uses exchange rates, not purchasing-power parity. I’m not sure which to prefer. But using PPP, the world economy reduced its CO2/GDP ratio by 41% from 1971-2007, which translates into an annual decarbonization rate of 1.5% per year. In that light, and using past experience as our guide, your concern that 1% a year might be the best we can do looks unduly pessimistic. However, past experience may not tell us much about life in a carbon-constrained 21st century world.
t_p_hamiltonsays
John Peter said:” The warmer here, cooler somewhere else, while making intuitive, qualitative, sense to us, might not compute quantitatively by any of the models. At least that’s what Mike Mann seemed to say…”
Now we are warming everywhere. However, it would be nice to know regional effects more precisely, a well publicized shortcoming of current modeling. Paleoclimate comparisons might help, they might not.
Ray Ladburysays
Andreas,
I hardly think you can characterize my view of consensus as extreme–I merely contend that it tends to work. There is a certain body of knowledge that virtually any researcher in a field must agree upon to be productive–that’s where the consensus lies. If you’d bothered to talk to any real scientists, you’d know that.
simon a. (282): So how can you make any meaningful statement at all about such “noise” and why should it have anything to do with dice rolls or mobile phones? On what grounds can you be sure that it might not accumulate, at least over millenial timescales?
BPL: If it accumulates, it’s not noise, it’s a trend. Please check out a book on time series analysis.
> @ #326 John Peter says: 23 March 2010 at 10:35 PM
> all surfaces radiating at the same temperature in thermodynamic
> equilibrium. When different regions have different temperatures,
> how does one balance the radiation energy?
I think our local expert on that is Rod (NO WAIT I was joking) –though Rod’s wrestled with this for years, this is the same place he gets hung up repeatedly. Part of the problem is it took the first big computers in the 1950s to do the math needed to understand this question, so giving an answer in a few words typed casually is never very satisfactory. You’ll find this asked and answered over and over here for years.
This is one good example where we need pointers not off the cuff answers.
I think Eli Rabett has one clear enough for his grandmother. Where is it?
I regressed NASA GISS temperature anomalies for the continental USA for 1880-2006 (N = 127). The trend was up 0.5312 K/century. The significance, at t = 5.055, was 1.495 x 10^-6. Lower-48 US temperatures are rising, and the increase is highly statistically significant.
John Peter (326): When different regions have different temperatures, how does one balance the radiation energy?
BPL: For a (reasonably large) given region, heat sources are:
* Sunlight
* Thermal IR back-radiation from the atmosphere
Heat losses are:
* Thermal IR radiation
* Conduction
* Convection
* Evapotranspiration
In addition, advection (side-to-side heating) can be either negative or positive depending on local conditions, mainly those having to do with winds and ocean currents. Overall, the latitudinal gradient of such transfer tends to run from the equator to the poles.
Gilles (332): windmills, electric cars, biofuels, even hydrogen fuel cells already existed at this time (not solar panels, I admit). They all have been tested against fossil fuels – and not retained. There must be a reason?
BPL: Well, I said I’d stop answering Gilles, but this was too stupid to resist.
They dropped renewables for fossil fuels because fossil fuels were cheaper at the time. Some renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels, and others are becoming so. And the costs of fossil fuels in terms of pollution and damage to peoples’ health wasn’t properly factored into their costs (and still isn’t).
The idea that there was once a grand test between coal/oil and solar/wind, and solar/wind lost for all time because it was somehow intrinsically inferior, is economically illiterate.
Okay, let me say something agreeing with several of the folks who’ve been posting here about fossil fuel use who’ve seemed rather intransigent about what we can do. I agree with them. But I think it’s clear we have choices.
“The central fact of our carbon-constrained future is that China – along with India and South Africa, Brazil and Mexico, and indeed the entire ’emerging’ world – stands at the edge of an impossible future. These countries are expected to constrain their carbon emissions while at the same time (here’s the punch line) pulling hundreds of millions of their citizens out of poverty. Yet the only model of modern prosperity that they have to work with is one based on huge per-capita emissions.”
(Eco-equity is one of the links in the right sidebar at RealClimate. Don’t miss these, all are worth looking at.)
We can _imagine_ a different model; we can point to baby steps being taken toward a different model; we can even point to models and scenarios showing that a different model is feasible; we even have investors funding some ideas.
But the only _established_historical_path_ out of poverty — the one we in the West are enjoying the fruits of — ate up all the big mammals and fish and most of the birds, cut almost all the trees, washed much of the topsoil into the oceans, and burned twice as much carbon as the planet could manage in real time, the rest going into the air and oceans.
Oops. Our bad — if we take responsibility for the path our grandparents all unknowingly followed, because it left us rich and the world destitute.
The historical path now leads to where it’s always led–biology crashes.
The people _on_ the path now look at us, fat and happy and rich, and ask how our grandparents got to use it and got rich, but they can’t.
The margins have been used and overused:
“Scientists have set thresholds for key environmental processes that, if crossed, could threaten Earth’s habitability. Ominously, three have already been exceeded….
“… nine environmental processes could disrupt the planet’s ability to support human life. We then set boundaries for these processes—limits within which humankind can operate safely. Seven of the processes have clear boundaries, scientifically defined by a single number (that of course carries some uncertainty). Three of those boundaries—for climate change, ocean acidification and stratospheric ozone depletion—represent tipping points, and the other four signify the onset of irreversible degradation….” http://wap.sciam.com/newscontent.do?channelId=ch19_20100321&contentId=ch19_headline1&page=0 (pp. 1-2)
So — a century ago, the resources for development were in the oceans and on the land, there to be harvested. Earth was rich.
Now — the resources for development are in the banks and the businesses and organizations, legal and otherwise, that still have the riches of the Earth.
People and corporations and organizations, legal and otherwise, are rich.
Where is the money? One answer is rather astonishing — look at where most of the liquidity to bail out the banks last year came from (more than any government bailout, which should make some ‘bertarians happy): http://www.google.com/search?q=drug+funds+saved+banks
Rich people have the money to fund the restoration of the Earth.
Will they do that? If not, what’s the next step?
336 Ray Ladbury,
I am also a real scientist, and I have listened to this rhetoric of yours about real scientists many times.
I am sorry but your viewpoint is dogmatic. That hinders our discussion to be productive.
Of cource there is a “certain body of knowledge that virtually any researcher in a field must agree upon to be productive”. However, this core body of knowledge change with time. Your “concensus is truth” viewpoint can neither explain why scientific knowledge change nor why some important truth can be true one day and false the next. If you bothered to pay closer attention to real science, and less to scientific ideology and wishful thinking, you’d know that.
re. 333 Andreas Bjurström says:
“”””The irony is that the overall responses shows that many of the things I have said is more or less true. (and I don´t find your hard core view of scientism consensus very recognizable to working scientists. They usually work in cutting edge areas without consensus).””””
There has been an undisputable scientific consensus on global warming since
1979 as described by the USA’s highest science body.
QUOTE: “A plethora of studies from diverse sources indicates a consensus that climate changes will result from mans’ combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land use.”
1979-National Academy of Sciences Archives, “An evaluation of the Evidence for CO2-induced Climate change, Assembly of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Climate Research Board, Study Group on Carbon Dioxide, 1979, Film label: CO2 and Climate Change: Ad Hoc: General.
_________________________________________________________________________
Second, this scientific consensus was repeated by governments of about 120 countries in 1995:
“The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human impact on global climate.”
Houghton et al., eds., Climate Change 1995, 5. It’s not hysterical, not catastrophic, …human fingerprint had become scientifically detectible. This was a scientific consensus.
Oreskes 2004: “The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)…But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change….In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members’ expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements.” Oreskes 2004, Journal of Science.
Study showed that scientists had a consensus that warming would happen since late 1970s…and it did:
_________________________________________________________________________
Why did so many people (nearly ½ Americans) have the impression of a raging debate?
Short answer: That is the impression that a small but powerful group of people, aided and abetted by well-funded think-tanks and a compliant mass media, wanted them to have.
-Peer reviewed Oreskes,- her scholarly book the Merchants of Doubt.
This is good enough for scientists whose work holds up over time in the peer reviewed literature…it should be good enough for you.
Jeffrey Davissays
What appears puzzling is why, if the wealth wasn’t real, how was the economy was still working nicely up to the point that the truth was revealed?
The money was “real” and was being used. In pension plans and as collateral. To name 2.
When the price dropped, building projects stopped in their tracks and industrial expansion became almost non-existent.
And retirement became chimerical for lots of people.
Septic Matthewsays
332, Gilles: And I recall you that windmills, electric cars, biofuels, even hydrogen fuel cells already existed at this time (not solar panels, I admit). They all have been tested against fossil fuels – and not retained. There must be a reason?
1. They were not the fuel cells, windmills and biofuels that have been developed recently;
2. It was not so clear that we might soon run out of petroleum;
3. It was not so clear that the pollutant effects of coal (soot, mercury, radiation) were dangerous;
4. It was not clear that there was a possible threat of warming due to CO2 (I am a skeptic, not a denier.)
5. Don’t forget to include nuclear in the list of solutions, i.e. sources of electricity. do you think that nuclear power is easy to master and is a pleasure to make accepted by populations? “easy”? “pleasure”? Remove the misleading/loaded words and think about what is happening: the U.S. has 104 nuclear power plants supplying about 90GW of power, and running at a high load capacity, especially in winter when solar is in reduced supply. More people die from the electricity (kitchen fires, etc.) than from handling the fuel. Modern designs use most of what up until now has been spent fuel (somewhat better than the SuperPhenix models in France). India and China are now building a few dozen new plants over the next decade, and the rest of the world will follow; the U.S. has about a dozen in various stages of planning/financing. Were you aware that people die from hydroelectricity? In the last year about 75 died when a transformer in a dam blew up in Russia — more than the number of people who contracted any problem from Three Mile Island (though Chernobyl was worse). Every technology that produces electricity kills people, and nuclear is far from the worst.
334, CM: But using PPP, the world economy reduced its CO2/GDP ratio by 41% from 1971-2007, which translates into an annual decarbonization rate of 1.5% per year. In that light, and using past experience as our guide, your concern that 1% a year might be the best we can do looks unduly pessimistic.
Even China and India are expanding their GDP faster than they are expanding CO2 production. On present plans and recently observed progress, they’ll probably be reducing CO2 production by about mid-century. Your modest and well-supported optimism is refreshing.
328, Patrick027
We definitely have to be committed to the long haul: a sustained effort of decades. Every 5 – 10 years we’ll be able to evaluate progress and allocate investments differently for the next 5 – 10, compared to the last 5 – 10. I think that at some point in the next 10 years solar power will become the cheapest source of electricity for making new PV cells, and I think that will change the economics. I am glad you included the short life-span of the panels. Current nuclear power plants operate at nearly full power (I think US capacity utilization is about 90%, but I need to read up) for nearly 60 years, and their life-span is increasing. All of the alternative technologies are improving. Cost is a factor: it is substantial, but not prohibitive (IMO), compared to the cost of petroleum.
Septic Matthewsays
342, Hank Roberts: Rich people have the money to fund the restoration of the Earth.
Will they do that?
I and some of my friends buy CO2 offsets. We are CO2-negative. Some of the money goes to wind and solar farms, some to Equatorial reforestation. Some people derisively refer to CO2 offsets as “Indulgences”, but there is a difference between the science of CO2 and its offsets (on the one hand) and the theology of Pergutory and Intercessory Prayers (on the other hand): there’s lots of evidence for the efficacy of CO2 offsets. If all AGW promoters bought their own CO2 offsets, that would make a measurable impact on the problems.
WUWT has a post up about Simon Lewis’ complaint about the Amazon issue coverage. It includes the laughable following (was he looking in a mirror as he typed it?)… emphasis mine:
Heh. This must be the first time Lewis has been interviewed by the press. From experience I can tell you that in matters of science, the message is often muddled by the time it gets to print. Sometimes this is intentional if the reporter has a specific agenda, but sometimes it simply is a combination of poor understanding of the subject
Didactylossays
“The idea that there was once a grand test between coal/oil and solar/wind, and solar/wind lost for all time because it was somehow intrinsically inferior, is economically illiterate.”
BPL talking good sense here.
I just wish he would apply the same thinking to nuclear power, too, without prejudice.
Gary Thompson,
OK, so what is your point–that somehow the US is immune to global warming even though the rest of the planet isn’t? Somehow, I don’t think that will pass the straight face test. Warming does not happen uniformly. Are you really so desperate that you’ll keep looking at smaller and smaller areas until you find one that’s only warming a little bit?
RE: 122 JiminMpls says:
19 March 2010 at 11:18 PM
“The supply of oil isn’t as limited as you seem to think. Cheap oil, yes, but recoverable oil, no.
… At a $100/bbl, it would be economically recoverable. As prices go up, so will the supply. ”
This isn’t necessarily so. If it takes more energy to extract the oil than the oil provides it won’t be worth doing no matter what the price. If the energy returned is less than the energy invested you have a negative ERoEI.
Comment by Tim Jones — 23 March 2010 @ 5:24 AM
Jim needs to study more. Anyone conflating reserves with flow rates has no idea what the issue actually is. There are probably near 6 trillion barrels of oil/tar deposits held by the planet. However, we can typically only extract 30 – 40% of what we find. Also, because of receding horizons (costs are always increasing) and difficulty in extracting them, the energy returned on energy invested is constantly falling.
Was 100:1, now is between 11:1 and 30:1, depending on whom you ask. This trend will continue, guaranteed. The return on ethanol, for example, is in a range from negative to 3:1, depending on whom you ask.
Efficiency? The US increased energy efficiency 33% or so between 1980 and 2007 or so. Net effect? Around 5 million barrels/day increased consumption.
Factor in most of the rest of the planet aspiring to our standard of living?
Technology will not solve this problem. Not even close. This is why we are learning and teaching systemic approaches to solving these problems via permaculture design principles.
Cheers
A Mar 2010 study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Oceanography on how the IPCC may be underestimating the next 100 years warming. Of course, one study is only one small piece of a huge puzzle going back to 1824 and it is written by an oceanographer.
http://www.tos.org/oceanography/issues/issue_archive/issue_pdfs/23_1/23-1_greene.pdf
> Gary Thompson
> US temperature anomaly yearly averages for the past 30 years
Talking about global temperature trends, then doing some kind of statistic with data from only one country for only the most recent 30 year period, is wrong. Whose blog are you getting this from?
Why do you consider that a reliable way to understand what’s happening?
Seriously, this is the kind of thing that Stat 101 can inoculate you against.
Otherwise people can fool you.
> http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frsgc/research/d2/masayo.ogi/2009GL042356-pip.pdf
“… the combined effect of winter and summer wind forcing accounts for 50% of the variance of the change in September Arctic sea ice extent from one year to the next (ΔSIE) and it also explains roughly 1/3 of the downward linear trend of SIE over the past 31 years.”
And the other 2/3?
See: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/index.html
“… The pattern of winds associated with a strongly negative AO tends to reduce export of ice out of the Arctic through the Fram Strait. This helps keep more of the older, thicker ice within the Arctic. While little old ice remains, sequestering what is left may help keep the September extent from dropping as low as it did in the last few years. Much will depend on the weather patterns that set up this spring and summer.”
and
http://wotsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/the-guardian-sees-the-light-on-wind-driven-arctic-ice-loss/
Gary Thompson@294
You might find this exchange interesting even though a bit dated:
Bruce Tabor says:
27 May 2007 at 6:17 AM
Thanks Rasmus,
I did not fully grasp the concept of skilful scale. Are you saying that GCMs do not reliably represent climate to a resolution of 1 grid point and that to achieve accurate representation you need to average over about 8 grid points? Hence the “skilful scale” is 8 grid points.
[Response:This is basically the point, yes. But there has not been much discussion about what the skilful scale has been lately, so I’m not sure if it is still true. -rasmus]
Do climate scientists expect any surprises as resolution increases? Were there “surprises” between the 1980s GISS models and the latest models? I note that in our region (Australia) your minimum scale map leaves out Bass Strait (between Australia and Tasmania) and Torres Strait (between Australia and PNG). These are significant water ways for local climate and ocean currents. They are also about 150 km wide – close to 200 km – so why would they be omitted?
[Response:One Japanese model does have a very high spatial resolution, but I don’t think there are any particular surprises. Perhaps an improved resolution may provide a better rpresentation of the MJO and the monsoon system as well as cyclones. The very high resolution model makes very realistic pictures of the cloud and storm systems, and the guys presenting the results are fond of showing animations which look very much like satellite pictures. Quite impressive. -rasmus]
Do GCMs capture coarse topographic features, eg the Tibetan Plateau?
[Response:apparently not well enough. -rasmus]
If you’re seriously interested in pursuing the latest (and have the time) try here:
http://edgcm.columbia.edu/spotlight-o/edgcm-project-overview/
Here is a note on total investments in renewable energies:
http://cleantechnica.com/2010/03/21/renewable-energy-investment-could-hit-200-billion-in-2010/
In that article the unit of measurement is $$$$, but we must remember that costs are falling dramatically (electricity from PV fell 65% last year, IIRC, though there are transient spikes when the supply of refined silicon is challenged), so that overall growth in energy exceeds 50% per year, and in some places for some sources exceeds 100% per year for several years.
In the US, the growth in supply from renewables exceeds the growth in demand for energy.
Chevron Corporation is installing a solar farm in the Central Valley of CA to power its petroleum pumps. When they find it economically right to do so, they’ll produce fuel from sunlight instead of pumping it from the ground.
> Journal of Oceanography
Nitpicking, that’s not a study. It’s a “Science and Policy Feature”
> written by an oceanographer
Who?
> peer-reviewed
Reviewer Sarewitz is at the Breakthrough Institute; he and reviewer Bill Travis (a geographer) are at Colorado: http://128.138.136.233/about_us/annual_report2009.pdf Both are big in adaptation. The piece basically reads to me like a push for investing in geoengineering. Any ideas?
The Journal of Oceanography piece doesn’t disclose explicitly that the author from the Roda Group may have some financial interest in the subject, but you can look it up. This may help: http://www.rodagroup.com/news.html
I don’t have any objection to authors of feature articles who also have interests in businesses that would solve the problems they’re raising.
But one should dig at least slightly into references.
Otherwise mistakes like calling it “a study” in a “peer-reviewed journal” can propagate.
Once you know where the money’s going, investing in small brewery equipment to grow algae may look profitable.
I am still puzzled why this piece appears in an oceanography journal as a feature article, though. Any idea?
Watch for a new wave of amateur charting
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/climateindices/caveats.html
Here, decada by decade, is the GISTEMP global temperature anomaly (GTA) followed the the difference in ln(CO2) from the previous decade (diffs).
decade GTA diffs
1880s -0.275 0.014
1890s -0.254 0.007
1900s -0.259 0.009
1910s -0.276 0.013
1920s -0.175 0.012
1930s -0.043 0.014
1940s +0.035 0.004
1950s -0.020 0.009
1960s -0.014 0.022
1970s -0.001 0.033
1980s +0.176 0.043
1990s +0.313 0.042
2000s +0.513 0.050
For a prediction of the GTA for the 2010s, see
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/whatevergate/comment-page-23/#comment-164509
#288 Hank Roberts
Thanks Hank for you well-intentioned response. Your attributions are quite wrong however.
RealClimate – Comments on FAQ on climate models Comment by simon abingdon — 11 November 2008 @ 1:28 PM
Here (#347) I ask gavin “Please explain how changes in the shape of the mountains are an issue”
RealClimate – Comments on The CRU hack
Comment by simon abingdon — 21 November 2009 @ 2:43 PM
Here (#572) I make complimentary remarks regarding gavin’s manifest integrity.
Just wanted to put the record straight. No need to apologize. simon
“If it takes more energy to extract the oil than the oil provides it won’t be worth doing no matter what the price.”
Nope. If I can dig up the energy equivalent of 5 barrels of oil worth of tar sand for 50 dollars, burn up 4 barrels worth to convert the remainder into 1 barrel of crude, and sell that for 100 dollars, I’m making a profit of 50 dollars on every barrel I sell, even though I’ve burned up 4 times as much as Ive sold.
Energy isn’t equal to dollar value; Osama bin Laden will pay a lot more for a joules worth of PETN than for a joules worth of goat dung.
Also bear in mind that the income to the Saudis isn’t linear with the amount they sell; depending on the worldwide demand & economy, more production may lower the price and total revenue(like the Laffer tax curve). Also, controlling their oil production and affecting the world price also has political as well as economic value – what do you think the supply/demand curve and price per barrel would be if bin Laden controlled the Saudi and Iraqi output?
Ray : “You clearly don’t talk to old people much.”
well you know my parents are around 70. I can’t say they are really obsessed by weather, and it would probably not be the first thing they would cite as the greatest change in their life since they were young. Concerning the impact of global economy… I had the feeling that the burst of oil prices in the recent years have raised more concern than the global temperature … that BTW have hardly changed in this period. I can’t see any correlation of the strong recent recessions with climatic events. Much more with restrictions in oil availability, of course.
CM : first thanks for your kind appreciations that contrast with other words I’ve read here ;).
“Or are you arguing that a transition to renewables will be bad for us, and therefore our best course of action is to postpone the inevitable for as long as possible?
”
No of course I have no problem with the development of renewables, as long as they are really harmless. I just say that their capacity is limited.
“I’m looking at the IEA statistics publication “CO2 emissions from fuel combustion: Highlights” (2009 edition, http://www.iea.org/co2highlights/) which has a table for CO2 emissions / GDP in exchange-rate terms.
It gives the CO2/GDP of the world economy in 2007 as 0.73 kg CO2 per dollar GDP, hence, in your terms, closer to 1.5 tons CO2 per $2,000 than to 1 ton as you stated. You may be using a different source.”
the last figure I see in the IEA excel worksheet is 0.47 kg /$ GDP ( 2000 $ PPP precisely). Depends on the dollar you use of course.
“Possibly. But what are the real considerations that define this upper bound?”
Well of course I can’t justify rigorously any upper bound. But there are real reasons to worry about possible future improvements :
a) much progress in carbon intensity has already been done, first by converting many oil power plants to less carbon intensive sources (gas and nuclear). But the development of coal counteracts this trend.
b) progresses in carbon efficiency of several industries like metallurgic ones are bounded by thermodynamics.
c) the more you exhaust conventional resources , the more you have to use non-conventional ones, which produce much more CO2 per unit energy.
the basic problem is the following. The rate of (relative) increase of GDP/capita is the sum of
increase of energy consumption
+ increase of energy efficiency
– increase of population (demographic growth).
The last 30 years, the first and the third term nearly cancelled, the growth in GDP/cap was only due to improvement in energy efficiency (for the total growth of GDP you have to add the demographic growth rate)
passing the fossil peak will invert the sign of energy consumption. The demographic growth will not stop until 2050 – in the best case. So you have to increase A LOT the energy efficiency to counterbalance the decrease of energy production – or develop very quickly the alternatives but with a decrease of oil production of – 1%/yr you should more than double the number of windmills in one year – and electricity is not lacking anyway. Typically you should increase it by 2 or 3 % each year. I don’t think that this rate has ever been reached in the past. So it’s justified to worry about it – at least as much as about global temperatures, in my opinion (actually much more in my REAL opinion).
Sure enough, wrong pointers on my part. My apology.
Should’ve pointed directly to Gavin’s replies to your questions throughout that thread, e.g.
“What system is the model modelling? What does “outside” mean?
[Response: It depends on the model. Whatever it is modelling, there are internal prognostic variables and then fixed elements that provide external boundary conditions. For a standard AGCM, the amount of CO2 is a fixed input, as is the sea surface temperature, the shape of the mountains etc. Changes in those external parameters are a forcing. For a coupled ocean-atmosphere model, the sea surface temperature is a prognostic variable and so no longer acts as a forcing. In climate-speak, people often talk about ‘forcings’ as a shorthand for the forcings in a standard coupled ocean-atmosphere model and refer mainly to their TOA radiative effect which is useful for comparing their effects. – gavin]
Comment by simon abingdon — 11 November 2008 @ 12:30 PM
and later where he says you’re overthinking this and it’s not all that complicated. You ask in many ways how one can say there’s a trend with all the noise. It’s both a very tough task, and a fairly simple concept.
Variation without a trend always happens; we’re trying to figure out how to tell the natural variation from a trend; statistics is the tool to figure out how much variation is happening over how long, then get an idea how many measurements over what time span will be needed to reject the assumption that it’s all noise with no trend.
Brian, it’s “if it costs 6 barrels to extract and refine and sell 5 barrels of oil”.
Here at the Democracy Center we are working hard to draw attention to the impact of climate change already happening in some of the most vulnerable parts of the world. We’ve recently produced:
A a video on Bolivia’s melting glaciers (http://democracyctr.org/blog/2009/12/visit-to-cemetery-of-glaciers.html)
A new article in Yes! Magazine (http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/as-glaciers-melt-bolivia-fights-for-the-good-life).
We are also getting ready to report on the upcoming World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (http://democracyctr.org/blog/2010/03/global-climate-change-conference-coming.html), an alternative response to failures of Copenhagen.
Keep your eyes out for our coverage!
(www.democracyctr.org)
254
The cloud experiment at CERN is unlikely to be definitive due to wall effects, according to Eli Rabett.
while I appreciate the link it looks like the opinion of a blogger. I would hope that CERN are aware of what they need to do before they do it. Anyway, without prejudging the outcome, it will be interesting to see the results and if they have any bearing on possible links to climate.
#314 Hank
VS had you worried though. (OK, only briefly).
phil c (317) — I assure that Eli Rabett is far more than just a blogger. Here is one of his recent threads
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/03/simplest-explanation.html
and his essay on the pathways by which methane degrades was quite thorough. So his opinions on matters of atmospheric chemistry and physics are too be taken rather seriously.
“””> Journal of Oceanography
Nitpicking, that’s not a study. It’s a “Science and Policy Feature”
> written by an oceanographer
Who?”””
Thanks for bringing this up. I think the information in the article is resaonably legit (but maybe I am wrong)… (except for the relatively low ranking of the journal and his not listing connections).
…I find it interesting that the author lists peer review studies that show how the IPCC seems to understate warming projections in a peer reviewed journal..in a bit more accessible form than most articles (although admittedly it is published in a remote journal for discussing climate change). Secondly, admittedly, if his information was ground breaking, he probably would have gotten it into a more reputable journal.
“””
> Journal of Oceanography
> written by an oceanographer
Who?”””
His bio (author Charles H. Greene)
says:
“After receiving his PhD in Oceanography from the University of Washington in 1985, Greene began a postdoctoral fellowship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).”
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/geology/faculty/Greene.html
> peer-reviewed
Reviewer Sarewitz is at the Breakthrough Institute; he and reviewer Bill Travis (a geographer) are at Colorado: http://128.138.136.233/about_us/annual_report2009.pdf Both are big in adaptation. The piece basically reads to me like a push for investing in geoengineering. Any ideas?”””
The Journal of Oceanography=The Oceanographic Society of Japan?
http://www.terrapub.co.jp/journals/JO/index.html
“”The editorial board of the Journal decides the acceptance of the manuscript on the basis of peer-reviews and is responsible for its final editing.”” http://www.terrapub.co.jp/journals/JO/contrbts.html
Perhaps there were also other reviewers since the publication is listed (perhaps falsely? as a peer-reviewed journal although it seems to be listed in Journal Citation Reports (Impact factor .731), Thomson Reuters; Eigenfactor, and http://www.journal-ranking.com)
http://www.journal-ranking.com http://www.journal-ranking.com/ranking/listCommonRanking.html?citingStartYear=1901&externalCitationWeight=1&journalListId=387&selfCitationWeight=1
Eigenfactor http://www.eigenfactor.org/results.php?fulljournalname1=JOURNAL+OF+OCEANOGRAPHY&rosvcat=%25&year=2008&resultsperpage=100&issnnumber=&ordering=perarticle&grping=%25&nam=names&Submit=Search
I wonder if the author is really pushing for geoengineering itself and not just research into it like Crutzen and Wigley. (Crutzen Climatic Change, 2006. and Rasch,Crutzen, Coleman, Geophys. Res. Lett, 2008) and Wigley, Science, 2006.)
Greene: “their associated risks to the environment and socio-economic well-being …However investing in geoengineering research now will enable policymakers to make informed decisions based on science rather than uninformed decisions make out of desperation.”
He certainly is pushing for studies into it…as Crutzen and Wigley seem to be doing/did/are.
Personally (although the concept of geoengineering scares the hell out of me-published studies don’t seem too happy so far with possible unintended consequences of geoengineering-Trenberth, A Dai – Geophys. Res. Lett, 2007).
I think geoengineering is very likely going to be seriously raised by some desperate politician during a future emergency. If solid studies have been done, written down, analyzed thoroughly, maybe-just maybe the politician will have to think twice before using it(-maybe not with the disinformation campaigns by the pseudo-skeptics).
http://www.tos.org/oceanography/issues/issue_archive/issue_pdfs/23_1/23-1_greene.pdf
“””The Journal of Oceanography piece doesn’t disclose explicitly that the author from the Roda Group may have some financial interest in the subject, but you can look it up. This may help: http://www.rodagroup.com/news.html…
I don’t have any objection to authors of feature articles who also have interests in businesses that would solve the problems they’re raising.
But one should dig at least slightly into references.”””
Yes, I should have dug deeper into it and mentioned their connection- thanks for bringing it up.
However also, anyone is allowed to write peer review and offer possible solutions (even if obliquely)…as did Crutzen and Wigley. Hopefully, if Greene is spinning science, future published science would challenge it. Greene still quotes legit studies such as Hansen 2008, Schneider 2008, etc. and (to me) makes a case that the IPCC is possibly underestimating the future projected warming for scenarios.
“””Otherwise mistakes like calling it “a study” in a “peer-reviewed journal” can propagate.
Once you know where the money’s going, investing in small brewery equipment to grow algae may look profitable.”””
I am still puzzled why this piece appears in an oceanography journal as a feature article, though. Any idea?
I wonder if Greene:
1. Couldn’t get it into a better journal.
2. He wrote in a journal of his specialty because they know of him.
3. He wanted oceanographers to read/be exposed to the “IPCC-is-undetrestimating the projected warming”…and they might miss reading other journals.
4. It was easier to get it published in an Oceanography journal since it is his specialty.
Although Greene is obviously pushing for more research into geoengineering and might have nenfarious motives, he seems (except for pushing geoengineering and the relatively low ranking journal), to be reasonable in his assessment that the IPCC might be underestimating the future warming.
He, also, seems to not be alone in pushing for more research into geoengineering- (Crutzen and Wigley). However, yes, it is perhaps unusual that he is writing outside his specialty of oceanography…and did not list his connections.
However, if the information in his work stands up under future peer review…well, that’s science.
Re 253 Ric Merritt –
Thermodynamics (none of this really gets at EROEI):
The sun’s photosphere emits approximately as a blackbody at ~ 5780 K (I’m going from memory, but it’s definitely closer to 6000 than 5000); it diverges from this at various wavelengths, especially at the extremes of the spectrum.
But based on the second law applied to a Carnot heat engine, a conversion efficiency of near 95 % could be obtained (with a heat sink near 300 K).
But, the entropy of sunlight is increased by the atmosphere and thus reaches the surface with a lower brightness temperature. There is some absorption, and some scattering of radiation (the blue light of the sky (or grey/white in cloudy weather, pink, green, yellow, etc., is scattered out of the beam, and distributed over a much larger solid angle; both the direct beam and diffuse solar radiation are ‘cooler’ than solar radiation in space). (The relationship to entropy: The entropy is the energy divided by the temperature; in this case, the brightness temperature, and in this case, especially for diffuse solar radiation, it must be analyzed at each frequency.)
Also, there are other issues with the device that would be used to convert solar energy to work (or electricity).
For a simple CSP thermal – mechanical – electrical energy conversion with geometric optics using a blackbody at all wavelengths as the targe for focussed sunlight, only direct beam solar energy can be used, and in order for the blackbody to supply heat to a heat engine, it’s temperature must be lower than the brightness temperature of the solar radiation it is using so as to not emit the same amount of energy back out of the device. (With Ts being effective brightness temperature of direct beam solar radiation (setting variations over wavelength aside) and S being the solar power that is concentrated, with Th and Tc being the temperatures of the heat source and heat sink of a heat engine, the efficiency relative to S would be, assuming S takes the form of blackbody radiation (within the solid angle of the solar beam) at Ts (actual spectral distribution of S, which is affected by atmospheric absorption and scattering as well as solar characteristics, may allow for a different answer)
eff = (1-Tc/Th)*[1-(Th/Ts)^4],
which is maximized (as a function of Tc and Ts) at:
(see note on these calculations below; also I did this quickly and can’t guarantee every value Th and eff)
Tc (K), Ts (K), Th (K), eff (%)
373, 5780, 2591, 82.1
373, 5345, 2437, 81.0
300, 5345, 2324, 84.0
373, 5055, 2333, 80.2
300, 5055, 2224, 83.3
If Th is limited to smaller T, for example, 1000 K or less, then the efficiencies are:
373, 5055, 1000, 62.6
373, 5055, 600, 37.8
300, 5055, 1000, 69.9
300, 5055, 600, 50.0
For smaller Th, the Carnot efficiency is a good approximation to the full equation. The optimal Th values are less than half of Ts for all examples given, thus the eff as calculated is at least 15/16 of the Carnot efficiency for the sample Ts and Tc values.
——————
373 K = boiling point of water,
5780 K ~= Ts in space, full spectrum,
5345 K is an approximate brightness temperature (full spectrum) for direct insolation 1000 W/m2 (standard full sun under 1 atmosphere, although that may include diffuse radiation and so the temperature may be an overestimate of the brightness temperature;
5055 K is an approximate brightness temperature (full spectrum) for a direct insolation of 800 W/m2.
The last two brightness temperatures were calculated from distance to sun and solar radius here:
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/sun_worldbook.html, and with blackbody flux per unit area = sigma * T^4, with sigma = 5.67e-8 (** thus only three significant figures); where by ‘full spectrum’, I am refering to the temperature of a blackbody of the size of the sun, at the same distance from Earth, that would emit such a flux per unit area reaching Earth.
These are only effective brightness temperatures for the intensity of the direct beam over the whole spectrum, which is sufficient for the equation used, but in other cases the spectrum must be considered.
**For diffuse light, 1000 W/m2 and 800 W/m2 correspond to brightness temperatures of 364.4 K and 344.6 K, respectively; however, spectral considerations are very important for finding the actual brightness temperature of diffuse solar radiation for thermodynamic purposes (consider the temperature of an object required to emit visible radiation as intense as a clear or even cloudy sky!))
————————-
The optimal temperature Th can be higher if the target has lower emissivity at longer wavelengths and/or the optics are designed around the spectral properties of the incident solar radiation (Relative to solar radiation in space, at the surface, global (direct and indirect) solar radiation is depleted in UV and somewhat depleted in solar IR, especially in particular wavelength bands; direct radiation is farther depleted in shorter visible wavelengths).
Also, the formula assumes the target on which solar radiation is focussed is always at the same temperature. In the case of parabolic troughs heating a fluid flowing through a pipe, the fluid only reaches Th as it leaves the solar collectors; it is thus less than Th for some portion of the length and thus eff can be a little higher.
These are theoretical limits, of course.
—-
Regarding other solar energy devices, there are flat-plate collectors, which can use direct and diffuse light. Diffuse solar light still has somewhat high brightness temperatures (see note above), and thus can be converted to electricity and/or concentrated in a luminescent concentrator (see below).
Flat plate collectors can be solar cells (PV devices). They can also be luminescent concentrators, which concentrate solar radiation via absorption in a layer of fluorescent dye, which emits some portion of the incident radiation at a wavelength that is mostly trapped in a thin layer by total internal reflection, thus being concentrated onto the small area of the edges of the layer (which may be where solar cells are placed).
Both flat plate collectors and geometric concentrators (lenses, curved mirrors, mirror arrays) can be used only to produce solar heat. The flat plate collector would generally supply low temperature heat (for example, residential water heaters), although a technology employed in Israel uses flat collectors (ponds) with a sort of greenhouse effect to produce hot water to run a heat engine.
And Solar cells can also be used with geometric concentrators (CPV).
Cogeneration/hybrid systems:
Whether in CPV or flat plate form, Solar cells, like mechanical heat engines, or thermophotovoltaic or thermoelectric devices, or (photo/photoelectro/electro/thermo/etc.)chemical reactions …
(any of those could be used in some way with solar power; heat stored by a CSP device or otherwise produced could produce electricity through a thermophotovoltaic or thermoelectric device; as I understand it, a thermophotovoltaic device is a photovoltaic device that uses lower-energy photons, while a thermoelectric device works like a thermocouple)… can supply/produce work plus ‘waste heat’; that waste heat need not be wasted if the economics allow; for example, PV cells can be kept cool (typically increasing their efficiency) if their waste heat is transfered to water (I think this is called a hybrid system). Luminescent concentrators also produce some heat during the absorption and fluorescence process, which might be utilized.
From what I recall, I think the theoretical limits of solar cells’ photon to electric energy conversion, allowing multijunction or spectrum splitting (or hot carrier collection?), etc, is somewhere around 60 % for unconcentrated sunlight and around 80 % for concentrated sunlight (No commercial technology comes anywhere near such limits yet). (I think the difference might be explaine by considering concentrated sunlight, if fully concentrated, has the same intensity of the direct solar rays over a whole hemisphere, so that the solar flux per unit area is as it would be at the surface of the sun (except for atmospheric effects), so that the charge carriers and PV material can be ‘hotter’ while losing energy via emission as the same fraction of absorbed radiation, and the charge carriers can be that much ‘hotter’ than the PV material and lose more energy to the PV material while still retaining the same fraction of absorbed solar radiation – see below.)
I haven’t studied the thermodynamics of solar cells much but I know some basics of both thermodynamis and of solar cells and so can make some inferences. I think there may be somewhat analogous issues with the CSP efficiency limits discussed above; in this case, excited charge carriers (electrons and holes) must be produced by absorption of solar radiation; these charge carriers are ‘hotter’ than the material they are in, and thus they can lose energy via emissions of photons or heating of the material faster than energy would be gained from the material (and even if at equilibrium with the material, they will combined emit photons at any given frequency and direction and polarization just as easily as they would absorb them, relative to blackbody emission for the material temperature), so the maximum efficiency occurs when the current drains the electron and hole populations out of the photovoltaic material fast enough to reduce such losses while also not being too strong, to reduce resistance losses of voltage and the voltage within the photovolatic material required to drive the electrons and holes out different sides of the material (for a short circuit, their is no build up of charge within the photovoltaic material to support a voltage outside the material, so the current can’t do work outside the material; for an open circuit, the charge-carriers build up to such a density that they stop their net movements to different sides and do recombine at the same rate they are produced. The maximum power output is found with a current Imax less than the short circuit current Isc, and an output voltage Vmax less than the open circuit voltage Voc; the fill factor = Imax*Vmax / (Isc * Voc). I have read that higher fill factors can be attained with a greater photon flux absorption per unit volume – I’d guess because this can sustain a higher charge carrier density with the same recombination rate as a fraction of the electron-hole pair production rate.).
—-
If I recall correctly, the theoretical limit for conversion of fluid kinetic energy to work via a turbine in an ambi-ent unenclosed flow is 16/27, where this is the fraction of kinetic energy flux through an area that is the area swept by the turbine. It can’t be 100 % because in order for the fluid to transfer kinetic energy to the turbine, it must slow down; but it needs the same mass flow rate to ‘get out of the way’ of the next bit of fluid, so it can’t slow down to zero. Because the turbine puts up some resistance to the flow, as the air flows toward the turbine, it slows down, increases in pressure, and this redirects some flow to the side around the turbine. There will be a pressure drop across the turbine (the kinetic energy that is converted to pressure is not lost; kinetic energy works on a turbine via pressure (although for a Tesla turbine ? … well, that’s not really applicable to wind power so far as I know)). Assuming the pressure downwind of the turbine is the same as upwind (outside the region where the turbine causes a pressure rise in front), the air will have the same density and the same volume flow rate, so the area it flows through must expand in order for it to have reduced speed.
In an enclosed flow (as in a hydroelectric dam or a steam turbine), the intake can be directed through a narrow area and the outflow from the turbine can occur through a very large area, and all the flow can be directed through the turbine, so the limitations to a wind turbine (or analogous water turbine within an ambi-ent current) don’t apply. Note: Fluid has energy via pressure and motion (and potential energy); when energy is not extracted or otherwise lost, fluid going from higher to lower pressure will speed up (if it is not gaining some other potential energy, such as by flowing upward against gravity). Trying to get an ambi-ent fluid flow to go through an enclosed process when it is not already doing so (mountains, buildings), doesn’t have any benifit, because the device has to have a larger area than the intake area anyway, and the fluid is free to flow around the intake rather than through it as the pressure builds up in front.
289John Peter says: 23 March 2010 at 10:17 AM
John, I was responding to Gary Thompson’s query, where he was asking why one couldn’t look at a couple of years of lower temp over the (contiguous) USA to say that there is no anthropogenic global warming. I pointed out that there are other areas in the world where the temperature is rising, and that global means global (not just the contiguous USA).
I didn’t mention the uniformity of CO2. However yes, I agree that CO2 is rising fairly uniformly at every measuring point from Cape Grim in Tasmania to Hawaii and points in between, and I understand that it does spread well through the atmosphere, which isn’t a great surprise given the dynamics of gases and the atmosphere. It’s more like O2 and N2 in that regard, than like H20, because H20 goes in and out of the atmosphere much more quickly and doesn’t have time to ‘even out’, whereas CO2 hangs about for a very very long time.
I didn’t do any calculation of regional or global temperatures myself, I leave that to the experts. The professionals are the ones who analyse the raw data and do the gridding and work out the global temperature. Most amateurs would be bound to make lots of errors.
I don’t understand what you think is the slippery slope. It seems straightforward to me. The analysis of incoming and outgoing radiation supports the analysis of observations of temperature rise and CO2 increase. Again I don’t understand what you find problematic.
We’re all in the same boat, John – or should I say we’re all on the same earth, so no need to feel alone. We’re all experiencing the effects of a warming earth over time. Individually we react differently as the direct and immediate impacts on each of us differs :D
#312 Brian Dodge
Wrong.
“If it takes more energy to extract the oil than the oil provides it won’t be worth doing no matter what the price.”
“Nope. If I can dig up the energy equivalent of 5 barrels of oil worth of tar sand for 50 dollars, burn up 4 barrels worth to convert the remainder into 1 barrel of crude, and sell that for 100 dollars, I’m making a profit of 50 dollars on every barrel I sell, even though I’ve burned up 4 times as much as Ive sold.”
In your example you have only used 80% of the energy in the extracted oil to actually extract it.
The original quote is saying that if it takes the energy of more than 5 barrels of oil to extract 5 barrels of oil then it isn’t worth doing.
Richard, thanks for looking further into that. I’m not complaining about the article, just wanted a better idea about what weight to give it. Scholar finds a _lot_ of interesting oceanography work by C.H. Greene — which says to me he’s the kind of scientist we’d really want watching the effects of geoengineering trials very carefully. Reassuring.
Re 323 Andrew Hobbs –
“The original quote is saying that if it takes the energy of more than 5 barrels of oil to extract 5 barrels of oil then it isn’t worth doing.”
Yes
… but …
And not to take away from the general point, but this won’t always be true; it could be worth getting the oil for certain special purposes, for the same reason it is worth expending some energy to produce some smaller amount of energy in the form of a battery, or for that matter, for the same reason energy is used to get copper or phosphorus or sulfur or titanium.
Sou@322
Thanks for the kind words. They are comforting.
The slope is slippery because the energy balances, at least all that I’ve seen, have all surfaces radiating at the same temperature in thermodynamic equilibrium. When different regions have different temperatures, how does one balance the radiation energy?
It gets slipperier. The warmer here, cooler somewhere else, while making intuitive, qualitative, sense to us, might not compute quantitatively by any of the models. At least that’s what Mike Mann seemed to say when interviewed last November about his study of regional temperatures over the past century, century and a half. He could figure out that the NH and SH were 180 out of phase, but he couldn’t get his two models to back cast that way. Mike claims it’s too non-intuitive. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/data/326/5957/1287-b/DC1/1
Hang in there and thanks for the help.
“…wanted a better idea about what weight to give it.”
Thanks Hank for keeping track of all these articles.
http://www.tos.org/oceanography/issues/issue_archive/issue_pdfs/23_1/23-1_greene.pdf
Greene’s article concludes with a wary view toward geoengineering:
“…society may ultimately decide that most of the proposed approaches cannot be implemented on a global scale because of their anticipated risks to the environment and our socio-economic well being.”
Greene seems to have been a lead author on a a peer-reviewed article related to human-caused climate change and others including one in Science:
Greene,Pershing; Science, 2007
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/315/5815/1084
——————————————————————–
ARCTIC CLIMATE CHANGE AND ITS IMPACTS ON THE ECOLOGY
OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC, Ecology, 2008, Ecological Society of America,
Greene’s study concludes: “As we enter the 21st century and face the likelihood of climate changes unprecedented in human history (IPCC
2007), society must anticipate changes in the structure
and function of the ecosystems on which we have come
to depend.”
http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/Greene.pdf
______________________________________________________________________
So it seems, Greene has the capability/talent/history of publishing in top journals, but chose not to in this case…maybe to try to clue in more oceanographers who might be reading only their own specialized journals (that would hardly be a surprise, from my experience at a climate place).
Gilles –
Re 158
“And nobody really asks to suppress cars – they just want electric ones ! well it seems to indicate at least that this kind of “drawbacks” are not always a good reason to renounce to the modern comfort. Have you an idea of which criterion should be used to know if this king of things is acceptable, or not ?”
Mixing two different issues. The argument for reducing fossil fuel usage (and/or sequestering C) (and reducing other greenhouse gas emissions) via alternatives – renewable energy (and maybe nuclear?), efficiency, etc, is not based on ALL problems of fossil fuels, it is based on the problems that alternatives would alleviate/avoid. The problem of traffic deaths is a different issue – how do we drive, how do we regulate driving, do we make cars differently – and these can affect energy efficiency, but to the extent they are done or not done for the purpose of energy efficiency is not supposed to be the same as what is done for all reasons.
Re 159
This recession was caused by more than expensive oil (it didn’t end when oil prices plummeted). It was caused by a form of dishonesty (and fear?) – people pretended that something was likely worth more than it was, and managed to convince themselves and others of that falsehood. (What appears puzzling is why, if the wealth wasn’t real, how was the economy was still working nicely up to the point that the truth was revealed? Two possibilities I can think of a priori to further research (which I won’t pretend to have done much) are 1. people may have been working harder and sacrificing more in anticipation of future benifit contingent on an illusion; thus motivation of productivity and sacrifice was reduced by the truth; 2. when it was revealed that something was thought to be worth more than it was, fear about illusory value of other things stopped economic processes from proceeding based on reality; uncertainty makes decisions harder, and the efficiency of the economy fell. Fluctuations also reduce economic efficiency.)
—
Gilles: 206
“Well I understand that the argument is often presented in this way, but I’m rather doubtful on what you mean exactly by “making the switch”. The point I’m raising is that it is absolutely not granted for me that the “switch” could power the same society as ours. And BTW, which one is it supposed to power? average global one? european one? american one? more? less? which growth? how long? up to which level ? why ?”
1.
In the approximation of a linear constant externality and ideal market, climate policy needn’t know these things; the externality will redirect the market towards something better, whatever that ends up being.
2.
Of course, in actuallity the externality and the cost of mitigation will both depend on the future trajectories of things, including population and technology.
3.
Given that, it’s a tough calculation to do, but the point is that qualitatively the proposal makes sense. Whatever we are able to get, we’ll get more with a good policy than with a bad policy.
Gilles 267:
“If renewable energies were much more productive than fossil fuels, why wouldn’t they have already replaced them?”
Including the externalities for all, if renewable energy is better it will eventually replace fossil fuels, faster than determined by scarcity of input resources alone, if the externality is taxed or otherwise managed properly. If the externality is not managed, then renewable energy will wait longer to dominate.
But there is an additional factor; renewable energy and some efficiency improvements involve long-term investment. They cost up front, but they pay back dividends. To the extent that some of the benifits are not realized for many decades, this might make up for some portion of a GDP drop, if there is one, at that time. Once there is a sufficient infrastructure established, the continuing investment can be payed for with returns from the infrastructure in place.
And the market isn’t perfect:
———
(some possibilities and other interesting points (which may or may not be framed as externalities themselves?, and may also overlap with each other or be examples of each other):
1. negative sum games (competitive fertility, theft and murder (public protection of rights is government involvement in the market),
2. mass market advantage and increasing returns and nonlinear supply-demand relationships (multiple equilibria),
3. consideration of the rational self interest of future people,
4. Negotiating power (is it used wisely, has it been earned?) (ie can cheap labor be farmed like a crop (West Virginia coal miners ?));
5. Nonlinearities of big actions (the effects of incremental decisions may individuals might be calculated with the approximation that nothing else changes (?), like linearized wave equations.)
6. self-fulfilling optimism and pessimism (smaller discounting of the future could encourage more investment so as to make the future better (consider how much fat and sugar you might eat if you only expected to live another year)) (monetary systems require trust), NOT to be confused with the idea that there are no physical limits (starvation verses metabolic disorder, the boundary depends on point of view, of course).
7. How much a choice is valued depends on other choices including choices made by others, and choices in the past, and choices expected in the future. (If only the most favorite meal is chosen each day, in the absence of anticipating future days, then many foods will not be enjoyed.) (The costs of mitigation and adaptation both depend on future population.)
8. Psychology: “Paradox of Choice”, limitations of ‘rational man’ and his/her ability to stay awake, delegate responsibilities to ‘rule of thumb man’, ‘habit man’, ‘experienced man’, and ‘instinct man’,
9. Dependence on how optimum is defined; time horizons affect the production possibilities curve – the profit landscape (analogous in some, but not all, ways to the fitness landscape concept in biological evolution) depends on time horizon, and government action that is truly optimal could be considered a reshaping of the profit landscape (most clear cut example is the public decision to drive on one side of the road, which decreases the profitability of driving on the other side of the road but increases the potential profitability of driving) but from a more ‘global’ perspective actually represents a different path along the profit landscape; a valley between two peaks that is too deep to bridge actually indicates that as a function of real trajectory (initial conditions), the optimal path not taken doesn’t exist as an optimal path for that reality as it requires going back in time and making different choices)but the tendency in the response to externality policy should generally be the same.)
10. Some value may be degraded by privatization of the commons; some public magagement and planning, etc, could boost overall economic profit (the aesthetic (and possibly, scientific) value of nature is affected by ownership; depending on technology, there is a cost to using toll roads; public consumer and worker protection may boost consumer confidence and worker enthusiam (?).)
(I’ll just mention also that it can be a bit silly to state that government doesn’t create wealth but only redistributes it. Any economic activity involves some redistribution or rearrangement (including sometimes at the atomic or subatomic level) which has the effect of creating wealth (or bringing wealth from potential to actual). At some point, decisions are not made ‘by the market’ with no conscious effort; somebody somewhere actually has to make a decision. It is more reasonable to say that a government action can’t create more wealth or perhaps even the same wealth relative to the alternative of no government action (for a particular government action). Of course this doesn’t seem true for protection of property and life rights, etc. (environmental protection is really in part a form of that); aside from that, there is a logic there, in that, if the market is not ideal, how could the government do any better, since both depend on imperfect people? And the government doesn’t have the same incentives to perform optimally. Okay, but different problem solving methods may be more or less immune or prone to error when applied to different problems. And the government does have to work for votes. Because everyone may have some potential to be productive differently than they are at any one time, a government that responds equally to each person might still benifit the economy (?). Voters of course are often not that bright – they are misled by propaganda, they are too busy or too lazy or too pessimistic to invest in their decision making abilities. The same could be said of consumers and maybe others. We have proof that the market is plenty capable of waste and inefficiency.)
When people continue to build and make things based on what they think people want, and people continue to buy things based on what’s available, the market is slow to change. We can get stuck in a rut. That’s why I do support some auxilliary measures (to the externality tax), for example, updating building codes, perhaps incorporated specific incentives or mandates for rooftop solar cells, water heaters, skylights (with some flexibility, for the mandate especially, that the requirements are contingent on local climate and solar resources, local and temporal economics, and landscaping – obviously solar cells shouldn’t be placed under the persistent shade of a tree, although a skylight could still be benificial in that case).
——
“If it is more expensive and less convenient, they would probably sustain only a lower consumption.”
It is more expensive now (if it even still is) because it is new; it is inconvenient because it has small market penetration. How inconvenient would it be to run a car on gasoline if we had a much smaller refinery capacity?
“Now remember that the consequences of GW have been estimated by N. Stern around 20 % of GDP, which is considered as unbearable. I don’t know if it is realistic or not, but I simply ask : why do you expect that the total replacement (on the long term , it WILL be total) of fossil fuels by energies that are more expensive, less convenient, and cannot even been produced at this price without fossil fuels, won’t cause a similar change in the economy ? I can’t find any reasonable argument for that – apart from that we would LIKE that it can do it.””
Well, GDP might shrink (relative to a business as usual trajectory with climate change magically not in the equation) by a much smaller amount, at first (See N. Stern’s work). But electrification of some sizable fraction of transportation, even with solar power, might grow the GDP.
(The necessary battery size of PEV’s can be shrunk if they are PHEV’s, which can use fuel when the batteries are depleted; this could be a good choice for someone who makes a lot of short trips and a few long ones.)
Re 268
“of course, but you should also remember that everybody”…”is only sensitive to regional temperature”…”live in his backyard”…”is much more sensitive to short term weather and doesn’t have a clear remembering of how it was 30 years ago – and doesn’t really care. For the supposed incapability of mankind to adapt to changes at a 30 years scale, well,look at the recent history, and remember that 30 years is just close to an average working time in your life, meaning that after this time you’re just replaced by young people who have no idea of how you were living 30 years ago – and care very little about it.”
In addition to Ray Ladbury 278,
The identification of a global trend is part of the scientific work (for identifying actual global warming). It will be easier to identify global trends before regional trends. This doesn’t mean there won’t be regional variations, with great importance.
Re 183,
– NUMBERS:
The U.S. spends roughly $ 1 trillion per year on energy, for an electrical equivalent of roughly 1 TWe. Solar cells cost somewhere between $4 and $1 per peak W (peak W refers to a standard insolation of 1000 W/m2), or maybe slightly less now. Multiply that by 5 for typical insolation in regions where solar cells would be widely used (200 W/m2 on a proper fixed-tilt flat panel, many residential/urban/local applications will get less, many centralized power plants will get more). $20 per average W to $5 per average W or less. IF the costs are trending towards the lower end, and other costs (inverters, maintanence, some storage capacity (note storage is not necessary for grid-connected applications until variable renewable power exceeds some significant fraction of the total), HVDC lines) don’t more than triple the cost, then let’s take $15 per average W. That’s per installed average W. The Wattage decays over time, perhaps 0.5 % each year. Allowing for an additional 0.5 % loss of installed capacity from storm damage, etc, a replacement rate of 1 % is required to maintain constant power. 1 TWe * $15/average We = $15 trillion. 1 % of $15 trillion is 15 % of present energy expenditures, roughly; a HUGE ECONOMIC SAVINGS (not including rising costs of fossil fuels)! But yes, that’s for a mature steady state power supply (and actually doesn’t take into account the difference between panel output and system output, EROEI (say about 1 year of energy output invested for 50 or more years of energy output, requiring perhaps a 2.0408… % larger power supply and thus a replacment rate of 1.02 % per year, although compared to EROEI for fossil fuels and maybe nuclear, that may actually reduce the power supply needed), and costs or benifits associated with replacing fuels with electricity or using electricity to create fuel or using direct solar heat to reduce fuel needs, although we’ve got another $850 billion/year to to buffer that); BUT ALSO, what about the ramp up? Well, I did some sample calculations earlier for a couple of other RC comments on other threads several months ago on an Excel spreedsheet…
(AND no, I’m not saying we must use only solar power. This is just an example.)
John Peter, you post a link to an interview with Mann and tell us what you say he said, but you don’t give a direct quote. Is this what you’re interpreting? You say “he couldn’t get his two models to back cast that way” but that seems exactly the opposite of the point he was making — which is we have paleo data saying how the climate works:
He says:
“… there was a net heating of the global climate, it was a relatively warm interval, and yet those same factors appear to have drove the climate not into the warm El Niño state of the tropical Pacific, but the cold La Niña state, a bit counterintuitive.”
And he goes on to say
” … There are only a relatively small subset of coupled climate models that exhibit this tropical thermostat response; most of the models do the opposite. …. However, the paleoclimate record of the past thousand years, in our analysis, suggests that at least with respect to the response that the climate has exhibited to natural factors, the response appears to be that thermostat response – it appears to be the opposite of what most of the IPCC projection models project….”
So — seems to me — this is not saying that his models or anyone’s models don’t or can’t work right. Not at all. He’s saying some models do match reality, as we learn more about reality, better than others, and that’s how models get improved (and added to the IPCC’s collection).
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22All+models+are+wrong.+Some+models+are+useful.%22
Dear RC experts. How good is the estimate that Greenland ice sheet may already collapse at 400 ppm? From article “The effect of more realistic forcings and boundary conditions on the modelled geometry and sensitivity of the Greenland ice-sheet,” in The Cryosphere, “An Interactive Open Access Journal of the European Geosciences Union”
http://bit.ly/Grld400
@ #326 John Peter says: 23 March 2010 at 10:35 PM
John, the thing is radiation can be measured at the outer perimeter of the atmosphere, so we’re talking different ‘surfaces’ – ie the surface of the outer atmosphere, not the land/water surface. The troposphere is where the weather happens, and it is separated from the stratosphere by the tropopause.
I’m no expert in this area, but as I understand it, most of the incoming radiation just shoots in right through all the layers and gets absorbed by the surface (land and water). Some of the outgoing radiation from the IR emitted back from the land/water surface get’s ‘trapped’ in the troposphere by greenhouse gases etc, some passes back through the different atmospheric layers, particularly the troposphere, and heads on out to space. (With rising CO2, more is being reflected back to earth, so the radiation is not in balance – more incoming than outgoing for now, until CO2 stabilises.)
That’s why you get different weather and temperature on the ‘inside’ (ie in the troposphere) while still being able to measure what goes back out to space – because the measurements of outgoing radiation are taken in layers above the ‘weather’. The outer layers are more consistent and don’t have the same turbulence as the troposphere. I’d expect those who do the measurements take into account any day / night effects and seasonal variations when calculating the net radiation over a period and any trends.
You might find it useful to look up the atmospheric layers and their properties, composition etc, and look at where the satellites are positioned, which measure radiation.
Now hopefully someone will correct me if I’m wrong with any of the above, or expand where I’ve oversimplified.
Patrick027 : I won’t comment your long post in all details, but I don’t think you have really addressed the main problem.It is that your “savings” have only the effect of leaving some fuel available either for other people who wouldn’t have accessed them if you hadn’t saved them : these people are either current poor people , and you have absolutely no reason for depriving them from their use, or your children or grand-children whom you have no reason – and no power – to deprive as well. I didn’t check your computation of solar power (you KNOW the problem of intermittency I presume?). I trust the FRench electricity company EDF will do the best choice by building cheap power plants and sell the electricity at the normal market price if it is possible; why wouldn’t they do it ? do you think that nuclear power is easy to master and is a pleasure to make accepted by populations? and France has been equipped for one century with hydroelectricity – I live actually in a small town where the first industrial application of the “white coal” (“houille blanche” ) has been done for a paper factory, by our local hero Aristide Berges. Renewable energy has been used from the beginning when it was interesting, cheap, and convenient. And I recall you that windmills, electric cars, biofuels, even hydrogen fuel cells already existed at this time (not solar panels, I admit). They all have been tested against fossil fuels – and not retained. There must be a reason?
33 Ray Ladbury,
“Don’t you think it should bother you that your picture of science is utterly unrecognizable to anyone who actually does science?”
The irony is that the overall responses shows that many of the things I have said is more or less true. (and I don´t find your hard core view of scientic concensus very recognizable to working scientists. They usually work in cutting edge areas without concensus).
49 Gavin
Let us hope that is was an aberration that was not significant for the culture of the natural sciences in climare research.
ps
Time to say good bye to you all. It was interesting, valuable, constructive, frustrating, preasant and also unpleasant to discuss here.
ds
Gilles (#313),
> 0.47 kg /$ GDP ( 2000 $ PPP precisely).
That explains it. I was looking at the other CO2/GDP table (Sheet 15), which uses exchange rates, not purchasing-power parity. I’m not sure which to prefer. But using PPP, the world economy reduced its CO2/GDP ratio by 41% from 1971-2007, which translates into an annual decarbonization rate of 1.5% per year. In that light, and using past experience as our guide, your concern that 1% a year might be the best we can do looks unduly pessimistic. However, past experience may not tell us much about life in a carbon-constrained 21st century world.
John Peter said:” The warmer here, cooler somewhere else, while making intuitive, qualitative, sense to us, might not compute quantitatively by any of the models. At least that’s what Mike Mann seemed to say…”
Now we are warming everywhere. However, it would be nice to know regional effects more precisely, a well publicized shortcoming of current modeling. Paleoclimate comparisons might help, they might not.
Andreas,
I hardly think you can characterize my view of consensus as extreme–I merely contend that it tends to work. There is a certain body of knowledge that virtually any researcher in a field must agree upon to be productive–that’s where the consensus lies. If you’d bothered to talk to any real scientists, you’d know that.
simon a. (282): So how can you make any meaningful statement at all about such “noise” and why should it have anything to do with dice rolls or mobile phones? On what grounds can you be sure that it might not accumulate, at least over millenial timescales?
BPL: If it accumulates, it’s not noise, it’s a trend. Please check out a book on time series analysis.
> @ #326 John Peter says: 23 March 2010 at 10:35 PM
> all surfaces radiating at the same temperature in thermodynamic
> equilibrium. When different regions have different temperatures,
> how does one balance the radiation energy?
I think our local expert on that is Rod (NO WAIT I was joking) –though Rod’s wrestled with this for years, this is the same place he gets hung up repeatedly. Part of the problem is it took the first big computers in the 1950s to do the math needed to understand this question, so giving an answer in a few words typed casually is never very satisfactory. You’ll find this asked and answered over and over here for years.
This is one good example where we need pointers not off the cuff answers.
I think Eli Rabett has one clear enough for his grandmother. Where is it?
gary thompson (294),
I regressed NASA GISS temperature anomalies for the continental USA for 1880-2006 (N = 127). The trend was up 0.5312 K/century. The significance, at t = 5.055, was 1.495 x 10^-6. Lower-48 US temperatures are rising, and the increase is highly statistically significant.
John Peter (326): When different regions have different temperatures, how does one balance the radiation energy?
BPL: For a (reasonably large) given region, heat sources are:
* Sunlight
* Thermal IR back-radiation from the atmosphere
Heat losses are:
* Thermal IR radiation
* Conduction
* Convection
* Evapotranspiration
In addition, advection (side-to-side heating) can be either negative or positive depending on local conditions, mainly those having to do with winds and ocean currents. Overall, the latitudinal gradient of such transfer tends to run from the equator to the poles.
Gilles (332): windmills, electric cars, biofuels, even hydrogen fuel cells already existed at this time (not solar panels, I admit). They all have been tested against fossil fuels – and not retained. There must be a reason?
BPL: Well, I said I’d stop answering Gilles, but this was too stupid to resist.
They dropped renewables for fossil fuels because fossil fuels were cheaper at the time. Some renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels, and others are becoming so. And the costs of fossil fuels in terms of pollution and damage to peoples’ health wasn’t properly factored into their costs (and still isn’t).
The idea that there was once a grand test between coal/oil and solar/wind, and solar/wind lost for all time because it was somehow intrinsically inferior, is economically illiterate.
Okay, let me say something agreeing with several of the folks who’ve been posting here about fossil fuel use who’ve seemed rather intransigent about what we can do. I agree with them. But I think it’s clear we have choices.
My text is from:
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/copenhagen/
“The central fact of our carbon-constrained future is that China – along with India and South Africa, Brazil and Mexico, and indeed the entire ’emerging’ world – stands at the edge of an impossible future. These countries are expected to constrain their carbon emissions while at the same time (here’s the punch line) pulling hundreds of millions of their citizens out of poverty. Yet the only model of modern prosperity that they have to work with is one based on huge per-capita emissions.”
That’s real. That’s from Tom Athanasiou. See the more verbose version, with charts, here: http://www.ecoequity.org/2010/01/after-copenhagen/
(Eco-equity is one of the links in the right sidebar at RealClimate. Don’t miss these, all are worth looking at.)
We can _imagine_ a different model; we can point to baby steps being taken toward a different model; we can even point to models and scenarios showing that a different model is feasible; we even have investors funding some ideas.
But the only _established_historical_path_ out of poverty — the one we in the West are enjoying the fruits of — ate up all the big mammals and fish and most of the birds, cut almost all the trees, washed much of the topsoil into the oceans, and burned twice as much carbon as the planet could manage in real time, the rest going into the air and oceans.
Oops. Our bad — if we take responsibility for the path our grandparents all unknowingly followed, because it left us rich and the world destitute.
The historical path now leads to where it’s always led–biology crashes.
The people _on_ the path now look at us, fat and happy and rich, and ask how our grandparents got to use it and got rich, but they can’t.
The margins have been used and overused:
“Scientists have set thresholds for key environmental processes that, if crossed, could threaten Earth’s habitability. Ominously, three have already been exceeded….
“… nine environmental processes could disrupt the planet’s ability to support human life. We then set boundaries for these processes—limits within which humankind can operate safely. Seven of the processes have clear boundaries, scientifically defined by a single number (that of course carries some uncertainty). Three of those boundaries—for climate change, ocean acidification and stratospheric ozone depletion—represent tipping points, and the other four signify the onset of irreversible degradation….”
http://wap.sciam.com/newscontent.do?channelId=ch19_20100321&contentId=ch19_headline1&page=0 (pp. 1-2)
So — a century ago, the resources for development were in the oceans and on the land, there to be harvested. Earth was rich.
Now — the resources for development are in the banks and the businesses and organizations, legal and otherwise, that still have the riches of the Earth.
People and corporations and organizations, legal and otherwise, are rich.
Where is the money? One answer is rather astonishing — look at where most of the liquidity to bail out the banks last year came from (more than any government bailout, which should make some ‘bertarians happy):
http://www.google.com/search?q=drug+funds+saved+banks
Rich people have the money to fund the restoration of the Earth.
Will they do that? If not, what’s the next step?
PS, from Tom Athanasiou’s article
http://www.ecoequity.org/2010/01/after-copenhagen/
here’s the point.
Note the little downtick in carbon burned the last few years? That’s the financial crash.
http://www.ecoequity.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/figure1.jpg
336 Ray Ladbury,
I am also a real scientist, and I have listened to this rhetoric of yours about real scientists many times.
I am sorry but your viewpoint is dogmatic. That hinders our discussion to be productive.
Of cource there is a “certain body of knowledge that virtually any researcher in a field must agree upon to be productive”. However, this core body of knowledge change with time. Your “concensus is truth” viewpoint can neither explain why scientific knowledge change nor why some important truth can be true one day and false the next. If you bothered to pay closer attention to real science, and less to scientific ideology and wishful thinking, you’d know that.
re. 333 Andreas Bjurström says:
“”””The irony is that the overall responses shows that many of the things I have said is more or less true. (and I don´t find your hard core view of scientism consensus very recognizable to working scientists. They usually work in cutting edge areas without consensus).””””
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
CONSENSUS
There has been an undisputable scientific consensus on global warming since
1979 as described by the USA’s highest science body.
QUOTE: “A plethora of studies from diverse sources indicates a consensus that climate changes will result from mans’ combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land use.”
1979-National Academy of Sciences Archives, “An evaluation of the Evidence for CO2-induced Climate change, Assembly of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Climate Research Board, Study Group on Carbon Dioxide, 1979, Film label: CO2 and Climate Change: Ad Hoc: General.
_________________________________________________________________________
Second, this scientific consensus was repeated by governments of about 120 countries in 1995:
“The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human impact on global climate.”
Houghton et al., eds., Climate Change 1995, 5. It’s not hysterical, not catastrophic, …human fingerprint had become scientifically detectible. This was a scientific consensus.
Oreskes 2004: “The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)…But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change….In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members’ expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements.” Oreskes 2004, Journal of Science.
Study showed that scientists had a consensus that warming would happen since late 1970s…and it did:
_________________________________________________________________________
Why did so many people (nearly ½ Americans) have the impression of a raging debate?
Short answer: That is the impression that a small but powerful group of people, aided and abetted by well-funded think-tanks and a compliant mass media, wanted them to have.
-Peer reviewed Oreskes,- her scholarly book the Merchants of Doubt.
This is good enough for scientists whose work holds up over time in the peer reviewed literature…it should be good enough for you.
What appears puzzling is why, if the wealth wasn’t real, how was the economy was still working nicely up to the point that the truth was revealed?
The money was “real” and was being used. In pension plans and as collateral. To name 2.
When the price dropped, building projects stopped in their tracks and industrial expansion became almost non-existent.
And retirement became chimerical for lots of people.
332, Gilles: And I recall you that windmills, electric cars, biofuels, even hydrogen fuel cells already existed at this time (not solar panels, I admit). They all have been tested against fossil fuels – and not retained. There must be a reason?
1. They were not the fuel cells, windmills and biofuels that have been developed recently;
2. It was not so clear that we might soon run out of petroleum;
3. It was not so clear that the pollutant effects of coal (soot, mercury, radiation) were dangerous;
4. It was not clear that there was a possible threat of warming due to CO2 (I am a skeptic, not a denier.)
5. Don’t forget to include nuclear in the list of solutions, i.e. sources of electricity. do you think that nuclear power is easy to master and is a pleasure to make accepted by populations? “easy”? “pleasure”? Remove the misleading/loaded words and think about what is happening: the U.S. has 104 nuclear power plants supplying about 90GW of power, and running at a high load capacity, especially in winter when solar is in reduced supply. More people die from the electricity (kitchen fires, etc.) than from handling the fuel. Modern designs use most of what up until now has been spent fuel (somewhat better than the SuperPhenix models in France). India and China are now building a few dozen new plants over the next decade, and the rest of the world will follow; the U.S. has about a dozen in various stages of planning/financing. Were you aware that people die from hydroelectricity? In the last year about 75 died when a transformer in a dam blew up in Russia — more than the number of people who contracted any problem from Three Mile Island (though Chernobyl was worse). Every technology that produces electricity kills people, and nuclear is far from the worst.
334, CM: But using PPP, the world economy reduced its CO2/GDP ratio by 41% from 1971-2007, which translates into an annual decarbonization rate of 1.5% per year. In that light, and using past experience as our guide, your concern that 1% a year might be the best we can do looks unduly pessimistic.
Even China and India are expanding their GDP faster than they are expanding CO2 production. On present plans and recently observed progress, they’ll probably be reducing CO2 production by about mid-century. Your modest and well-supported optimism is refreshing.
328, Patrick027
We definitely have to be committed to the long haul: a sustained effort of decades. Every 5 – 10 years we’ll be able to evaluate progress and allocate investments differently for the next 5 – 10, compared to the last 5 – 10. I think that at some point in the next 10 years solar power will become the cheapest source of electricity for making new PV cells, and I think that will change the economics. I am glad you included the short life-span of the panels. Current nuclear power plants operate at nearly full power (I think US capacity utilization is about 90%, but I need to read up) for nearly 60 years, and their life-span is increasing. All of the alternative technologies are improving. Cost is a factor: it is substantial, but not prohibitive (IMO), compared to the cost of petroleum.
342, Hank Roberts: Rich people have the money to fund the restoration of the Earth.
Will they do that?
I and some of my friends buy CO2 offsets. We are CO2-negative. Some of the money goes to wind and solar farms, some to Equatorial reforestation. Some people derisively refer to CO2 offsets as “Indulgences”, but there is a difference between the science of CO2 and its offsets (on the one hand) and the theology of Pergutory and Intercessory Prayers (on the other hand): there’s lots of evidence for the efficacy of CO2 offsets. If all AGW promoters bought their own CO2 offsets, that would make a measurable impact on the problems.
WUWT has a post up about Simon Lewis’ complaint about the Amazon issue coverage. It includes the laughable following (was he looking in a mirror as he typed it?)… emphasis mine:
“The idea that there was once a grand test between coal/oil and solar/wind, and solar/wind lost for all time because it was somehow intrinsically inferior, is economically illiterate.”
BPL talking good sense here.
I just wish he would apply the same thinking to nuclear power, too, without prejudice.