Happy New Year, and happy new open thread.
As per usual, nuclear energy is off-topic – it’s not that it’s uninteresting, but it ends up dominating conversation to the total exclusion of everything else and just becomes repetitive and dull. Recent excursions on this topic shows what happens when we relax the moderation, so back to being strict about this. If you want to discuss this, please go somewhere else.
Theo 87: OK guys, thanks for no real answers !
BPL: Doesn’t mean we have no real answers. Just means we don’t always want to respond to obvious trolls.
Richard Caldwell wrote: “SecularAnimist, please mention any statement I made which isn’t substantially correct.”
Not one statement you made about EVs is even remotely correct.
Look, the moderators have REPEATEDLY said that discussions of alternative energy are OFF-TOPIC, and have REPEATEDLY appealed to commenters to stick to what this site is about: CLIMATE SCIENCE.
I do my best to abide by their requests. However, others — including a few frequent and voluminous commenters — do not.
And unfortunately, most of those who ignore the moderators’ requests, and choose to opine at great length with derogatory and denigrating remarks about solar and wind energy, EVs, etc. are shockingly ill-informed about these subjects, and their comments are full of blatantly false statements that show profound ignorance of the actual state of those technologies in the real world today.
I have no desire to engage in long “arguments” with people who appear to be willfully ignorant, who respond to the informative links I provide with insults and sneers, ignoring the information and returning to rote repetition of their utterly false claims and talking points — especially given that the moderators have REPEATEDLY asked all of us to refrain from such discussions.
FWIW my free advice to the moderators would be to summarily delete any and all comments that have to do with energy technology and to strictly enforce the rule that ONLY climate science is an acceptable subject for discussion here.
Chuck Hughes,
A question and an observation.
It has been evident to me for some time, and there was a recent NYT article reinforcing the observation, that auto dealers and the companies themselves are actively resisting the sale of EV and PIH. Was this your experience? Do you think the offer of removing the identification was related to that mindset?
My observation is simply that as with the LED bulbs I mentioned, your actions as a consumer are only partly related to the CO2 issue– you are happy because you bought a good product with desirable features. The actual rational economic actor, in the flesh!
68 Richard Caldwell: The engineers at Volkswagen did not deceive their boss. The boss knew exactly what they were doing. The CEO knew exactly what they were doing. Why do you suppose the CEO resigned so quickly? The CEO ordered it. You must have misread what I said. If you think you can put one over on your boss, you have a very stupid boss or you are very arrogant.
Dancer and inventor: NO. Physicist and inventor: YES.
Myers–Briggs Type Indicator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A chart with descriptions of each Myers–Briggs personality type and the four dichotomies central to the theory
Carl Jung in 1910. Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs extrapolated their MBTI theory from Jung’s writings in his book Psychological Types.
The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire designed to indicate psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.[1][2][3]
Scientists, engineers, inventors and “Field Marshals” [whatever they are] form a tight group of similar people called “masterminds”.
I happen to fall in the crack between scientist and engineer. I am equally happy being a scientist, an engineer or an inventor.
I agree with 74 Eric S.
As Hank points out, EG neglected to note the most relevant parts of the Wikipedia article about the MBTI, from here down, particularly: Psychometric specialist Robert Hogan wrote that “Most personality psychologists regard the MBTI as little more than an elaborate Chinese fortune cookie.”
Yes, “Mastermind” Ed, you’ve definitely fallen in the crack!
So Roy Spencer is back in the right wing denialism machine claiming 2015 will not be the hottest year ever and will rank third. I’m not a scientist but I’m fairly certain satellite’s only record temps in the lower atmosphere whereas surface temperatures are indeed going to be a record. I’d like to be able to better argue this point (and gain a better understanding myself) in my tiny corner of the internet and any link to appropriate reading material or information provided here would be greatly appreciated.
Chuck @103, to risk commenting on the off-topic EV topic. Dealers don’t want to sell EV’s because they make most of their profits from service and repairs, and EVs don’t generate much service revenue. I don’t know if that generalizes to PIH, they tend to demand regular servicing just like ICE vehicles.
There are always lots of comments about renewable energy, electric cars and the like. However, it is my understanding that we need to get to a zero carbon economy within decades. Can someone explain how so-called renewables can be built, operated, maintained and decommissioned without carbon energy and how we build and maintain all kinds of infrastructure, housing, goods, vehicles, etc, without carbon based energy and materials?
If we can manage with a low carbon economy, is that enough, or not? If so, how low? Is everyone relying on sucking carbon out of the air, or planting a lot of trees, or geo-engineering?
There seems to be some disconnect between what is required to avoid catastrophe for many (for some, it can’t be avoided), unless I’m missing something, which I hope I am.
Edward,
The price of electricity is falling. That is why nuclear plants are closing. They are too expensive compared to wind power.
You also seem to ascribing some jurstictional agency to nature. For a science site, that seems a little too magical.
Tony at 86: yes, that should have been the 399 ppm number as of Jan 6 2014.
Thanks to others for providing links to the CH4 data sets, but I find these pretty hard to understand. In short, it appears there is no compilation (and dumb it down a bit for some of us) website for methane like there is for CO2: https://www.co2.earth/show-co2#
Still working on locating something as clear as the CO2 site. My intuition says that arctic and northern latitude methane and CO2 are rising in feedback loop due to the concentrated warming in those areas. Somebody can jump in their electric car and go for road trip if they want to check the terrain and take measurements. I see trouble ahead.
My observation is simply that as with the LED bulbs I mentioned, your actions as a consumer are only partly related to the CO2 issue– you are happy because you bought a good product with desirable features. The actual rational economic actor, in the flesh!
Comment by zebra — 6 Jan 2016
The dealership that I bought the car from had moved it BEHIND the main building. It had about 300 miles on it and they weren’t even trying to sell it. In fact they were making me ridiculous offers in order to get rid of it. There claim is that nobody was interested in the car and that they couldn’t sell it. So yeah, we got a really good deal.
My impression was that they thought I might be embarrassed to have VOLT on the sides of the car. I don’t know that for a fact but they assumed I didn’t want that on there. The dealer who sells a Volt has to have a qualified and specially trained mechanic available to work on the car. It came with specific instructions and guidelines as to the maintenance of the car so that it would perform as intended. Apparently the Volt sends out messages letting the dealership know when it needs to come in for maintenance or repair because I get regular monthly updates about the condition of my vehicle.
We love the car but it’s a complex piece of equipment. You have to keep it in good condition and stick to the maintenance schedule for the warranty to be valid.
And Chuck, you are definitely the most un-friendly on this site (see previous posts) and moderation doesn’t seem to temper that. As a final blast, to see me truly off the rails, enjoy my next paragraph. Theo
Well Theo, I’m no expert but I know that when someone continues to make ridiculous statements based on anecdotal information, they’re not serious. You’re not interested in learning anything. You’re just being annoying. I have trouble with annoying people. Try changing your attitude and be more receptive to those who take their time to explain things to you. If you’re here to learn, great! if you’re not you need to go elsewhere.
#10 Kevin McKinney about #6 1 Jan 2016 at 9:35 PM —
More on the Bloomberg data animation, “What’s Warming the World?” was in Gavin Schmidt’s talk and Q&A today at the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Winter Meeting Big Data conference (start 57:45):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk4yyGhJQwA
This is a fast presentation of Gavin’s 14-orders-of-magnitude Planetary Scale & Time Scale -vs- Data Scale climate modeling talk, plus current thoughts. The Bloomberg animation is near the end and comes up in the Q&A (40 mins with Q&A).
“In the beginning my talks were terrible.” –Gavin Schmidt
This is state of the art. Thank you ESIP. Thank you Gavin.
Kirsten Lehnert, Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA), Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (Columbia), on small data becoming big data was good too. Data volume, velocity, variety, value, curation, access, etc. She’s the previous speaker on the same video.
It looks like California is taking a beating right now. Have we arrived at a new level of bad? The media keeps on saying El Nino, El Nino like this isn’t anything out of the ordinary for an El Nino event.
I haven’t had time to read, but I will, and in order to not stay off topic, I will only respond to points I agree hurt my case. For now, three questions:
What better use for biofuel is there than non-linked transportation?
What worse use for electricity is there than non-linked transportation?
Should we encourage or discourage biofuel use at all?
97 Hank Roberts: So you are saying that Meyers-Briggs is social science, not hard science. That isn’t news. To quote one of the references you found:
“The best correlations between job performance and personality assessments is about .3”
“To begin, it is important to note that no test is “scientifically valid”.”
And everybody doesn’t fit into only 16 categories. That isn’t the point either.
It is easy to change majors between hard science and engineering. The curriculums have a lot in common and there is even an Engineering and Science Core Curriculum, Engineering professors get a lot of patents.
It is hard to change between majoring in [engineering or science] and fine arts. The two are not related and have no courses in common, at least not in the 1960s where I went to college.
Take it a different way. When I was an undergrad, Bob Altemeyer was doing his PhD in the personalities of the different departments at school. We all took the MMPI twice as his data. There was nothing in common personality wise between the College of Engineering and Science and the College of Fine Arts. Within each college there was a lot of commonality. Physicists had thew most diverse personalities. Some physicists were a lot like engineers, some physicists were a lot like mathematicians and some physicists were a lot like philosophers. There are some universities that have a department called “Applied Physics,” which is separate from engineering.
You are now free to denigrate the MMPI.
If a dancer became an inventor, he was a very unhappy dancer or an accidental inventor only once. People are individuals and no 2 are alike. It is easy to see that from probability and knowing that there are something like 2 billion letters in the human genome. The differences amount to .1% of 2 billion.
[.001 times 2 billion] factorial is a truly huge number, many orders of magnitude larger than the human population.
An inventor/engineer/scientist is a very different person from any fine arts type. Where I went to college way back in the 1960s, there was a college of engineering and science and a separate college of fine arts. Walking from one to the other was a journey of enormous psychological distance. The 2 do not meet.
If you want to stop GW, you need the type of people with the proper education and experience to actually do the job. If you want to waste more time, anybody will do.
109 Chris Dudley: No magic. But you can’t violate the laws of Nature. That doesn’t make nature a person.
The price of electricity is “Falling?” Then why are Californians paying twice what I am and why are Germans paying 4 times what I am paying?
What is the correlation distance of wind? I have heard that there is literature on this. How many wind turbines do you have to have in a given area to not have interruptions? Last number I saw was you need 300 wind turbines to get steady power, but I lost the reference.
The N word is off topic and a wind enthusiast [109 Chris Dudley] mentioned it.
@106, freemike: I would argue as follows:
1. The lower troposphere temperature does respond more strongly to El Niño events than surface temperature, and with a somewhat longer time lag (5-6 months vs. about 4 months at the surface). The ongoing El Niño will mainly be reflected in the lower troposphere data of 2016. The LT response has only just started (in December, according to RSS data; UAH Dec data not yet available). Thus we will have to compare 2016 to the El Nino induced record values of 1998 and 2010 (following the Niños of 1997/98 and 2009/10 winters). 2015 will set a clear new record for non El Niño years (followed by 2014). We just have to wait for next year for a new record (except for the case of a big volcano outbreak during the next months).
2. On the other hand, the response to Arctic amplification in the lower troposphere is less than at surface, since the Arctic warming decreases with height. Therefore Arctic amplification has more impact on surface data, with the effect that at the surface the general long-term trend alone (together with internal variability), was already sufficient to surpass the record values of previous El Niño years (1998, 2005, 2010) in 2014 and 2015. The “El Niño year” at the surface will also be 2016, by the way.
Conclusion: Just wait for next year, and Roy will probably have to look for alternative arguments…
Dr. Hugh Hunt & Professor Kevin Anderson discussing Climate Change realities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svlU6p0gHgo
Not exactly what I would call optimistic.
>117 “What is the correlation distance of wind? I have heard that there is literature on this. How many wind turbines do you have to have in a given area to not have interruptions? Last number I saw was you need 300 wind turbines to get steady power, but I lost the reference.”
An infinite number. There were a couple of weeks earlier this year where there effectively was flat calm over northern Europe. See http://euanmearns.com/wind-blowing-nowhere-again/ for more details.
@114, Chuck: you are right that the media are quick to blame El Niño for any unusual weather phenomenon around the world. They are often more or less right – sometimes more, sometimes less (e.g. the global temperature record 2015, see my comment above) – since effects of El Niño events in fact can be seen almost worldwide. However, at many places El Niño effects are a statistical influence (there are other weather drivers including accidental variability in the circulation), and El Niño years therefore can look quite differently. This is also true for California (see a nice description at http://ggweather.com/enso/enso_myths.htm).
The other “interesting” thing about California is its long-term drought. There are different attempts to explain that phenomenon. I am thinking about the following effect: As discussed in an earlier comment (no 40 above), Arctic amplification might lead to a kind of slow-down of rossby-wave activities. Or, looking from another view-point, since atmospheric circulation is mainly driven by the meridional temperature gradient (in combination with coriolis force), a decrease of that gradient will somehow weaken that driver. Since there is a tendency for circulation patterns to be kept or to be reproduced over weeks to months, lowering energy in the system might enhance this tendency (somewhat speculative on my side, without objective or modeling support until now). This effect would be even more important in regions, where the circulation pattern is influenced by land-ocean differences or orography. The latter is especially the case for California, where the Rocky Mountains induce a wave in the east-west jet stream (northward deviation of the flow over the Rockies). This wave does not exist permanently – it is disturbed sometimes by circulation dynamics – but it is common enough that California has a completely different climate than the U.S. east coast at the same latitude, being most of the time in the south-west flow of a ridge of the polar front (with dry warm weather), while the east coast more often is influenced by a trough (with cold wet weather). Now, if circulation dynamics decrease, this ridge pattern over the Rockies might get more persistent when there is less “energy” to push it out of its normal stage. Which would make the characteristics of Californian weather (warm, dry) more permanent. Just thinking…
@Omega Centauri 107,
That’s me you are responding to, not Chuck.
@Chuck, thanks for your response.
There are hybrids and there are hybrids. The degree to which the engine functions as part of the drivetrain falls on a spectrum– you could tow a small generator behind a Tesla, for example, to deal with range anxiety. The more the car functions like that, the fewer moving parts, the less maintenance on the car itself, the greater the lifetime, and so on. It’s going to happen, if there’s a free market– a true range-extending onboard generator that could be any technology, and swapped in and out easily.
But to repeat my point about market choices: The Tesla was rated the best car ever, or something like that. If they (and equivalent from other manufacturers) were readily available on car lots, and there were no range issue, and they were advertised and willingly sold, ICE would disappear from that market segment (price range) very quickly. This would be terrible news for the current auto companies, and all their dependents.
I believe Mr Musk has given up a bunch of patents. Someone is going to use them. Hence the anti-competitive rearguard action to prevent consumers from seeing the superior technology in their neighbor’s driveway. And that’s superior putting aside the problem of CO2.
Chuck,
Southern California receives greater rainfall during El Ninos events. The stronger the El Nino, the higher the rainfall anomaly. During very strong El Ninos, southern California has experienced 212% of normal precipitation.
http://ggweather.com/enso/enso_myths.htm
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/united-states-el-ni%C3%B1o-impacts-0
During the last very strong El Nino in 1998, California recorded its wettest February on record. Several locations recorded new monthly records, especially Santa Barbara which recorded 21.74 in. of rain.
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/techrpts/tr9802/tr9802.pdf
As they say in California, “it never rains, except when it does.”
HadCRUT4 has posted for November 2015 with the warmest November on record and the third warmest of any month on record at +0.804ºC. As with NOAA & GISS, November is a bit below October 2015 which thus retains second warmest spot at +0.811ºC behind top-spot January 2007 which sits at +0.832ºC.
All months since May have been warmest for their respective month with January to April either second or third warmest for their respective month.
The average anomaly for 2015 is +0.722ºC and 2015 is set to take warmest year on record when December’s numbers are published. (It would take a record negative anomaly for this not to happen.) If you can cast your mind back to those pre-scorchio days when 2014 was proclaimed as the new SCORCHIO! and warmest year on record, 2014 managed a chilly +0.568ºC.
The rankings of the last 12 months within the whole record are as follows:-
25th …… 2014 . 12 ….. +0.634ºC
13th …… 2015 . 1 ….. +0.688ºC
20th …… 2015 . 2 ….. +0.66ºC
14th …… 2015 . 3 ….. +0.681ºC
22th …… 2015 . 4 ….. +0.656ºC
=11th …. 2015 . 5 ….. +0.696ºC
7th ……. 2015 . 6 ….. +0.730ºC
=11th …. 2015 . 7 ….. +0.696ºC
6th ……. 2015 . 8 ….. +0.740ºC
4th ……. 2015 . 9 ….. +0.785ºC
2th ……. 2015 . 10 ….. +0.811ºC
3th ……… 2015 . 11 ….. +0.804ºC
120 Bill Bedford: Thank you. That is what I needed. ” The nine countries are Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Germany, Spain and the UK, which together cover a land area of 2.3 million square kilometers and extend over distances of 2,000 kilometers east-west and 4,000 kilometers north-south:”
Experienced no useable wind on Feb 8, 2013.
“During this period the wind was clearly not blowing “somewhere else”, and there are other periods like it.”
Contrary to propaganda from the European Wind Energy Association, wind does not work. Scotland, which has the best wind in Europe energy is included as part of the UK.
Nope. You misread. That’s illustrating the problem, right there.
Meyers-Briggs is a good example of the fallacy of personal validation.
It’s similar to astrology. The statements are very general, and people accept them as accurate, regardless.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/abn/44/1/118/
When you look up what you believe to be true and find it’s not supported, what do you say?
The ESIP Big Data conference is now streaming. The chief data architect at NOAA was just on. Excellent. Previous speaker was the IBM chief data strategist. It all relates to climate and weather data. NASA Earth Observatory data system speaker is on now. Instruments, access, user experience, volume, variety, open standards, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa-UjfKA8Xc
Gavin’s talk is at 57:45 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk4yyGhJQwA
Focusing on climate …
128 Hank Roberts: High altitude of central Antarctica causes more radiation to space. That is interesting. Paywalled? You didn’t give a URL.
Edward Greisch wrote: “Contrary to propaganda from the European Wind Energy Association, wind does not work.”
More idiotic nonsense.
These comment pages have become a forum for arrogant, willfully ignorant cranks to attack renewable energy with nonsense and falsehoods — and to attack advocates of renewable energy with insults — taking advantage of the fact that the hosts of this site have neither the time nor the interest nor the relevant expertise to moderate discussions of non-fossil fueled energy sources.
It’s very sad, especially considering what these pages might be.
Re: #128. Dr. Steig, I hope you will post or comment on this sometime. Thank you.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL066749/full
We can conclude that the role of CO2 in the Antarctic climate is somewhat different to the rest of the planet: Increasing CO2 has a rather small direct effect on the Antarctic climate; it even tends to cool the Earth-atmosphere system of the Antarctic Plateau. The analysis carried out by Chapman and Walsh [2007] and Steig et al. [2009] did not result in any statistically significant surface temperature trend on the East Antarctic Plateau during the last decades. They even found a slight (but statistically not significant) cooling trend for the centre of Antarctica. Our findings cannot be understood as explanation of this phenomena but show remarkable similarities with the observations.
It is important to note that these results do not contradict the key statements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [Solomon et al., 2007; Ramaswamy et al., 2001; IPCC, 2013], namely, the well-known warming effect that CO2 has on the Earth’s climate. Yet we showed that for the cold Antarctic continent some care needs to be taken when discussing the direct warming effect of CO2.
#102 SecularAnimist: I agree with all your observations. But I think the thing to do about it is to break the circuit with your own comments that relate as directly as you please to climate science, as you see it.
I will add something I have said to myself more than once.This site can spoil you. Don’t let it.
EG: Contrary to propaganda from the European Wind Energy Association, wind does not work.
BPL: Wind works just fine. If there are days without wind, that’s why God made the sun. Wind + solar + biomass + geothermal + wave + tidal + hydro are all we need. Don’t need fossil fuels, don’t need nukes. Deal with it.
freemike @106.
Roy Spencer’s UAH TLT has been posted for December so it isn’t a matter of “will rank third”. The calendar year 2015 ‘does’ rank third. But in saying that, you have to ask the question as to why an annual value for TLT outside the influence of an El Nino (which is what 2015 is) would ever challenge an annual value that was boosted by El Nino (which is what 1998 and 2010 were and which we can expect also of 2016).
The data Roy is keen at popping out into the internet (v6.0) is actually still under development and just a beta version. It is a far different beast to v5.6. Yet, even though v6.0 is centred on 4,500m up in the sky and v5.6 is centred on 2,500m up in the sky, they are both similarly wobbly. (Shed of all its wobbles, v5.6 actually does a very good job of tracking HadCRUT4 for trend, would you believe. The higher v6.0 does not.)
The top warm years of UAH TLT v5.6 are as follows –
1st 1998 +0.420ºC,
2nd 2010 +0.400ºC,
3rd 2015 +0.356ºC,
4th 2014 +0.275ºC,
5th 2005 +0.262ºC,
6th 2013 +0.237ºC.
So 2015 is ahead of the pack and not far behind the El Nino years of 1998 & 2020. When you consider the wobbles of v5.6 are +/-0.26ºC(2sd) about the linear trend, 2015 was a very hot year for a non-El Nino. As a comparison of 2015/16 with 1997/98, Dec 2015 is 0.33ºC warmer than Dec 1997. That is “scorchio!!!”
#130 SecularAnimist > It’s very sad, especially considering what these pages might be.
Very well observed. Exactly.
Ed Greisch: claptrap. I have yet to meet an engineer who understands both the problems and the solutions. Despite your exposure here to multivariate ways of thinking, you still insist the solutions lie in engineering when too much engineering is what got us here.
The answers do not lie in building things. (See Tainter on diminishing returns on complexity.) They lie in restructuring society. All the engineering knowledge needed already exists, along with most of the “stuff.” The knowledge needed now is how to apply it to meeting needs in harmony with natural systems. That ain’t you.
for EG: DOI: 10.1002/2015GL066749
Google that. It’s the permanent reference system (that Gavin long ago asked us to use)
for EG, further: Google this also: https://www.google.com/search?q=“why+use+DOI”
better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Digital_Object_Identifier#Why_use_DOI.3F
EG (r.e. the article Hank posted): Just put the DOI into your search engine of choice and voila. I done got me a PDF!
Thanks for your talk at ESIP Big Data. Keep up the good work ! Thanks to Patrick for pointing it out. Us here ( me included ) should show some respect and stick to the intended purpose of this website. I am obviously not qualified to participate, so goodbye to you all.
#98 Zach
That’s not a bad idea. It’s shock value mostly but I might be enough to get people talking.
102 SecularAnimist: “I have no desire to engage in long “arguments” with people who appear to be willfully ignorant,” Laughing Out Loud WHO is willfully ignorant? SecularAnimist
133 Barton Paul Levenson: “God made the sun.” Religion is super off topic. WHEN there are days without wind, they tend to be days that are also without sunshine because it is winter and it is snowing and foggy and we are far from the ocean and far from Niagara Falls. It happens in merry old places like northern Europe and my home town in western New York. Snow used to keep coming down for 8 or 9 months continuously, with no wind. We could be near Ithaca or Utica, or Olean New York.
Richard Caldwell & Hank Roberts:
So if you don’t like the MMPI either, let’s look at another example of how not being an engineer or a scientist injures the common customer. Dodge has been making pickups and putting medium duty Cummins engines in them. Cummins engines should go 400,000 miles in a pickup if it is installed right and if the oil is changed once every 10,000 miles. But Mercedes Benz bought Chrysler and offered more horsepower from the same engine. The customers were stupid enough to take the bait. They bought the high output engines and pretty soon they had it up to 330 horsepower. That engine is medium duty at 185 horsepower but light duty at 330 horsepower. At 330 horsepower, you need a new engine every 100,000 miles. [My book is available on the web but not on Amazon]
Dr. Z knew the customer would shoot himself in the foot. They do it every time. Why? Because the customer can’t do math, or engineering, or science and doesn’t have an imagination or the ambition to learn anything.
In the wider sense, most people think of themselves as wonderful engineers even though they have no degree in engineering or science, and even though they are allergic to math. They blame engineers for everything that does not go the way they wanted. They should blame themselves. The customers could force the manufacturers to make more durable stuff, if the customers knew how. It would help if the customer knew what he wanted.
What does this have to do with GW? We are dealing with the same customers. They are allergic to math and ignorant of science, engineering, math and mental discipline. They have been vaccinated against any knowledge that doesn’t come from some special leader who we are not.
EG, you again misread what people wrote and then argue at great length with what you imagined they meant.
“… Please stop. I’m bored. Please stop. I’m bored. Please stop. I’m bored….”
http://www.improbable.com/2009/11/29/please-stop-im-bored-mug/
Edward Greisch #143 – Might you be one of those who think the Space Elevator is a good idea? As one who has worked in the satellite industry, I submit that the Space Elevator is hopelessly flawed concept. Several years back, I posted killer comments about the idea, which I would share with you, except that this forum isn’t the place for such back-and-forth. And, my observations went beyond the fundamental structural problems…
Hank Roberts wrote: “EG, you again misread what people wrote and then argue at great length with what you imagined they meant.”
It’s very clearly deliberate — it’s not a matter of “misreading” but of misrepresenting what others wrote, and then “arguing” with that misrepresentation, the “argument” taking the form of rote repetition of many-times-over debunked talking points.
Which is the definitive behavior of a troll.
EG 143: 133 Barton Paul Levenson: “God made the sun.” Religion is super off topic.
BPL: It’s an expression.
EG: WHEN there are days without wind, they tend to be days that are also without sunshine because it is winter and it is snowing and foggy and we are far from the ocean and far from Niagara Falls. It happens in merry old places like northern Europe and my home town in western New York. Snow used to keep coming down for 8 or 9 months continuously, with no wind. We could be near Ithaca or Utica, or Olean New York.
BPL: I think you’ll find that there is plenty of diffuse light even on a dark winter day. Try checking with a photometer if you don’t believe me.
Why it’s always me that ends up reading Ed’s sources to find out that they don’t, in fact, say what he claims, I’m not sure. Perhaps it has something to do with the ‘sucker’ tat on my forehead.
But be that as it may, yet again the source doesn’t support Ed’s take.
Let’s A-B them:
Ed, #1: “[9 countries] Experienced no useable wind on Feb 8, 2013.”
Source, #1, paraphrased: ‘During a few hours around 5 AM on February 8, wind output in a swathe of Europe extending from Spain to Finland ranged from 0-9% of capacity, with output of ~15% in the UK and ~20% in Ireland. This is the only time this happened during 2013.’
Me: Doesn’t include Portugal for some reason, though that nation produced a quarter of its energy consumption from wind in 2013. Curious how they did on Feb. 8, but couldn’t find the data with a quick search. Also doesn’t include Italian data, even though Italy had more wind capacity in 2013 than France. Maybe they just couldn’t get the data, or–just maybe!–there’s a cherry pick in play. The only data I found for Feb. 8 for a contiguous country–again, in a fairly quick search–was for Austria. By eyeball that nation logged between 15-25% on the date in question.
https://www.apg.at/en/market/generation/wind-energy
This also raises the question of the metrics being used. Mr. Mearns says that:
“To level the playing field I normalized the data by setting maximum 2013 wind generation to 100% and the minimum to 0% in each country, so that Germany, for example, scores 100% with 26,000MW output and 50% with 13,000MW while Finland scores 100% with only 222MW and 50% with only 111MW. Expressing generation as a percentage of maximum output gives us a reasonably good proxy for wind speed.”
Did you catch that? “Minimum” values for the year were set to 0. If that really means what it seems to be saying, then the ‘no wind’ result was very much by the blogger’s design. Looking at the values in his (un-normalized) Figure 7, it appears that the actual output of the nine countries he looked at was about 2.5-3 GW, as against a 2013 maximum of around 33 GW, for 7.5-9% of the annual peak generation–by an ‘un-normalized’ calculation, that is.
Ed, #2: “Wind doesn’t work.”
Source, #2: “Twenty percent wind penetration looks as if it might be achievable; forty percent doesn’t.”
Me: Nobody is talking about an all-wind grid. And while some are talking about an all-renewable grid, nobody seriously expects that that is what we are going to get any time soon. So arguing against one is basically just more bashing of a straw man. More productive would be reasoned, skeptical inquiry into what the most feasible and low-cost approaches to decarbonization would be. That hasn’t been what we’ve been getting, which is why even an information glutton like Hank is getting so darn bored.
Here’s the direct link, if anyone wants to refer back to it:
http://euanmearns.com/wind-blowing-nowhere/
My bottom line: it looks to me as if the blog post is pretty questionable; the data is grossly incomplete, making it impossible to rule out a cherry-picked result, and the processing of the data appears to be designed to minimize the apparent output on the hours in question. And then Ed takes the result and cranks it up another notch. Thus, 2.5-3 GW of actual reported output over ‘a few hours’–looks like maybe 12 to me–becomes “no useable wind on February 8”.
I’m not claiming that the variability we see in the 2013 is negligible, or that it poses no problems. But inaccurate and inflated (or should I say ‘deflated’?) spin about it doesn’t help us to get an accurate picture of what is really going on, or what we should be doing.
@14, Edward Greisch,
You don’t seem to appreciate my approval owing to the suggestion that I am a politician. While I ran for the North Carolina district 23 senate seat in 2002 I did not win so I am at best a failed politician.
Before my failure in the political arena I helped to build the world’s brightest gamma ray source:
http://www.tunl.duke/edu/web.tunl.2011a.howhigsworks.php
So while I am a failed politician I am a successful physicist and engineer. Although I am 78 years old I still teach electro-optics, albeit on a part-time basis:
http://www.bdidatalynk.com/PeterMorcombe.html
My main interest is in K-12 education:
http://www.gallopingcamel.info/free.html
When time permits I comment on issues relating to energy policy:
https://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2014/12/16/countering-consensus-calculations/
I am also interested in the surface temperature of celestial bodies:
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2014/04/18/a-new-lunar-thermal-model-based-on-finite-element-analysis-of-regolith-physical-properties/
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/extending-a-new-lunar-thermal-model-part-ii-modelling-an-airless-earth/
https://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/robinson-and-catling-model-closely-matches-data-for-titans-atmosphere/
Please feel free to comment on my public email address
136 Killian: “The answers do not lie in building things.”? The answer lies in a population crash. Because Nature has a sure-fire answer. Once the human population gets back to thousands rather than billions, the survivors, if any, can all live in the stone age. That is what you are asking for.
“All the engineering knowledge needed already exists” False if you want to use renewables. False anyway. A technological civilization dies if there are no engineers. Applying what we already know requires engineers. If you don’t need engineers, you must really hate scientists. The job of science is to invent new branches of engineering. Everything you touch indoors has been acted upon by engineers. Everything made by man has had engineers involved in it.
Tainter on diminishing returns on complexity: “Sustainability of complex societies” paywall
Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221042241000002X
Volume 1, Issue 1, June 2011, Pages 89–95
Energy, complexity, and sustainability: A historical perspective by Joseph A. Tainter paywall
Goldonomic international wealth management
http://www.goldonomic.com/tainter.htm
Joseph A. Tainter “COMPLEXITY, PROBLEM SOLVING, AND SUSTAINABLE SOCIETIES,” Read a long time ago. There is nothing in Tainter that says anything bad about engineering or engineers. Tainter seems to not like science, but that would be nonsense. It is true that science cannot solve the overpopulation problem. There will still be a population crash, even if we solve GW.
” energy per capita will be a constraining factor” Tainter requires much more energy per capita. Ain’t going to happen without engineers. Tainter is in favor of scientists and engineers solving the big problems.
“Goldonomic international wealth management” Why would Tainter publish there?
Dragnet Ecology―“Just the Facts, Ma’am”: The Privilege of Science in a Postmodern World by Tainter Read. I disagree. It is not science that needs to move to the next higher level of organization. Science already did that. It is society that needs to move to the next higher level of organization, and should have done so about 2 centuries ago. We still have an agrarian [pre-industrial] social organization. [Kuhn, 1962, is nonsense. Kuhn got degrees in physics, but Kuhn didn’t get it.] Tainter doesn’t say what the next social order will be. If we do not want to return permanently to the stone age and go extinct when Earth dies, the new order must include space colonization.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615
Ecological Economics Volume 101, May 2014, Pages 90–102
“Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies.” by Safa Motesharreia,, Jorge Rivasb, Eugenia Kalnayc Societies that have stratification in wealth are unstable and will collapse. Our civilization would last longer if everybody had equal income and wealth.
Joseph Tainter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Joseph A. Tainter)
Tainter studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1975.[1] As of 2012 he holds a professorship in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University. His previous positions include Project Leader of Cultural Heritage Research, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Albuquerque, New Mexico and Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.
Tainter has written or edited many articles and monographs. His arguably best-known work, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), examines the collapse of Maya and Chacoan civilizations,[2] and of the Western Roman Empire, in terms of network theory, energy economics and complexity theory. Tainter argues that sustainability or collapse of societies follow from the success or failure of problem-solving institutions[3] and that societies collapse when their investments in social complexity and their “energy subsidies” reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. He recognizes collapse when a society involuntarily sheds a significant portion of its complexity.
I find no support in Tainter for Killian’s opinion.
I think I see a lot of people assuming that “opinion” X is caused by membership in political group Y. Such an assumption is a very bad one. I find no political party that I agree with.