Sorry for the low rate of posts this summer. Lots of offline life going on. ;-)
Meantime, this paper by Hourdin et al on climate model tuning is very interesting and harks back to the FAQ we did on climate models a few years ago (Part I, Part II). Maybe it’s worth doing an update?
Some of you might also have seen some of the discussion of record temperatures in the first half of 2016. The model-observation comparison including the estimates for 2016 are below:
It seems like the hiatus hiatus will continue…
Steve Fish: So, the base load for my home and a fairly large region of the local grid depended on one’s expectations, willingness to adapt, and probably on the duration of an outage.
AJ: Total crap. Base load has NOTHING to do with the resourcefulness of folks who have been DENIED service. Base load is about folks going about their lives without interruption of services or restricted services, and the resulting minimum load. The whole “change demand” thing is about reducing PEAK loads. There has NEVER been a base load problem anywhere on the planet, other than something catastrophic that denies service completely.
I’ve been contemplating the built-in warming from GHGs released so far. From a calculation by Michael Mann, last year, we’re already at about 1.2C above pre-industrial (maybe a little more now). If aerosols were removed, that would add something like 0.5C-0.8C (very uncertain figure), so an estimated worst case is that we already have 2.0C built in. However, the warming for gases finding their way into our atmosphere over the last, say, 40 years, is still on-going. We’ve warmed 0.7C, roughly, in the last 40 years and so should expect a similar warming for already release GHGs (I’m not sure if we should factor in aerosols into this figure), in the future (going by 60% of warming in the first 40 years, but much of the carbon was released less than 40 years ago). That takes us to about 2.7C already built-in (if we remove aerosols, a side-effect of going all renewables).
What’s wrong with this back-of-an-envelope calculation?
If it’s right, doesn’t this suggest that climate sensitivity is well above the best guess of 3C?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Recent Federal Election finds new Climate Change Denying Conspiracy Personality Disordered Whacko elected to the Senate for 3 to 6 years.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/one-nation-senatorelect-malcolm-roberts-wrote-bizarre-sovereign-citizen-letter-to-julia-gillard-20160804-gqlesa.html
and with door stop video interview
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-04/final-senate-make-up-confirmed-with-11-crossbenchers/7689788
http://www.galileomovement.com.au/who_we_are.php
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Galileo_Movement
Rule #1: People are Stupid
Rule #2: People Vote
Rule #3: Maybe Prayer could help?
13 Roger Hallstead says:
“Industry hired firms to inundate the public with misleading and sometimes outright false information, with the goal of misleading, or confusing the public as they did with tobacco. The goal was just to make them doubt the science.”
Roger, when you can work out for yourself that the NRA is full to the brim with “Industry hired firms to inundate the public with misleading and sometimes outright false information, with the goal of misleading, or confusing the public” I might change my mind about the value of paying heed to any of your comments.
In the meantime the issues you raised about “writing” etc have been getting addressed in academic papers, by psychologists, cognitive science, in climate science fields, and public discussions for years now. The truth and the facts is already out there. It makes little to zero difference. Idiocracy rules the day on Planet Earth.
Clint Eastwood NRA promoter and now Donald Trump supporter speaks for itself. I too hope Trump wins in NOV. Why? No pain, no gain. Things need to get very very bad before they will ever get better. Climate Change Denial Ground Zero is the US of A. Everything is connected. Nothing exists in isolation. Try following that truth down the rabbit hole. :-)
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/opinion/sunday/embarrassing-photos-of-me-thanks-to-my-right-wing-stalkers.html — Bill McKibben and his family are being pursued and photographed
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/07/solar-cells-converts-co2-into.html
July 29, 2016
Solar Cells converts Co2 into hydrocarbon fuel
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.
The finding is reported in the July 29 issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed.
Unlike conventional solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, the new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such “artificial leaves” could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently.
“The new solar cell is not photovoltaic — it’s photosynthetic,” says Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC and senior author on the study.
[snip]
32 patrick: Strawman? Could you be more specific? I don’t know what you disunderstood.
27 Eric Swanson: Recall that the US battery would cost a quadrillion dollars. Energy storage is not a possibility.
Demand patterns are not going to change, except in your imagination.
Solar has the same problems as wind, such as sudden dropouts. The sun does not shine as steadily as it appears to.
The main point is: Wind power destroys things, like transmission lines and transformers. Nothing was gained by forcing the utility to use wind power. The net result was that the customer had to pay a higher price for the same service.
See: https://bravenewclimate.com/2015/03/17/reducing-emissions-goldberg-machines-are-not-meant-to-be-planning-advice/#more-6608
“Reducing emissions: Goldberg machines are not meant to be planning advice”
Rube Goldberg, that is, = wind + solar.
5 years ago in Arkansas I think the temperature actually reached 115 degrees in some places. Here’s the ‘official’ account of that day:
http://arkansasweather.blogspot.com/2016/08/5-years-ago-it-was-hotter-than.html
How do temperatures this high affect animals and plants? I’m pretty sure trees went into shock. I have no idea how animals would survive this but most did.
Arctic sea ice cover about to take a late summer plunge? Maybe break 2012 low extent record?
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Also wonder what’s happening over Greenland; lots of moulins and runoff, I suspect. Last update on the web appears to be 22nd June. Anyone got some up to date info?
Not looking good, is it.
could someone explain this to me. Why is it that the ocean temp in the area just below the arctic circle is anomalously high, esp. the Bering, Kara and Barents seas and the area within the arctic circle is slightly lower than average? Baffin bay on the west Greenland side is also very warm which is a concern. The demarcation is abrupt. Any ideas?
I saw the Dr Natalie Shakova interviews and to say she is worried about the state of the east Siberian sea is a huge understatement. Surely even Gavin would agree with her that if a outgassing of just 1% of the stored CH4 hydrates would be an immediate climate emergency. Checking on nullschool I see that the East Siberian sea temp is indeed higher than normal especially that hugging the coast.
Andrew: Climate scientists have been telling you for at least half a century, now. Your comment 5 looks like a sickening joke. There is nothing the climate scientists can do that they haven’t tried many times. Scientists have neither political power nor money to advertise. Please don’t be insulting or rude or any of that stuff.
More on climate science denial by new ‘One Nation’ Senator-Elect Malcolm Roberts
In his inaugural press conference, Roberts claimed that “[t]here’s not one piece of empirical evidence anywhere, anywhere, showing that humans cause, through CO₂ production, climate change”.
He also promoted conspiracy theories that the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology are corrupt accomplices in climate conspiracy driven by the United Nations.
The funniest (saddest?) thing was that he called himself a “scientist” because he claims he follows the ‘scientific method’ while all the conspiratorial do not.
the University of Queensland (home of John Cook of Skep.Sci site) is releasing a free online course this month examining the psychology and techniques of climate science denial.
https://theconversation.com/one-nations-malcolm-roberts-is-in-denial-about-the-facts-of-climate-change-63581
I thought I might add the obvious. Facts, better info, better writing, and the silencing of anti-AGW groups won’t make any difference when at the end of the day Climate Denial mainly comes from people with mental health & personality disorder issues.
“Psychosis is a set of symptoms that involve a person’s mind “playing tricks on him or … In fact, as a medical term, psychosis refers to a loss of contact with reality…”
https://www.sane.org/mental-health-and-illness/facts-and-guides/psychosis
Unfortunately, there is no ‘pre-testing’ done for those people seeking to be elected to public office. Trump or Roberts, not much of a difference there. Nixon was the classic example of being off with the faeries. Monckton and Watts being the most noted in the denial mode today… and then there’s the online world that includes people like Alex Jones too.
Facts are irrelevant to such people and those who follow their lead. Just saying, it’s waste of time believing anything will ever shift their views. Thus the focus and efforts must be directed elsewhere … starting at the ballot box and the Court house imo or forget it (iow every person for themselves where only the survivors will survive)
July CO2 average in:
July 2016: 404.39 ppm
July 2015: 401.31 ppm (3.08 ppm increase)
I think that’s where MAR said it would be. 0.91 ppm under the 405.3 that I was expecting, but 3.08 ppm is an awful annual increase number. We need to be dropping back in the 2 ppm increase range with a serious commitment to get to zero ppm increase soon to reduce speed and impact of the sixth great extinction.
I am on record with expectation of 404.1 for August 2016 and our annual low month in September at 402.8 I think no one alive on the planet today will see anything under 400 ppm now without a breakthrough in carbon sequestration.
Warm regards
Mike
48 Piotr: You forgot to do the homework. All of those other kinds of batteries were intentionally left for the student to work out. Piotr can figure out how much mineable lithium, mercury, etcetera are available on Earth, and figure out the sum of all of those batteries. The professor assumed that you are smart enough to figure out what is your homework assignment. He showed you how to do the problem. Piotr is to finish it. The answer is so obvious that I am not going to do the homework for you.
Piotr didn’t bother to read this article
Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. – See more at: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
Pump Up the Storage

If we adopt solar and wind as major components of our energy infrastructure as we are weaned from fossil fuels, we have to solve the energy storage problem in a big way. An earlier post demonstrated that we do not likely possess enough materials in the world to simply build giant lead-acid (or nickel-based or lithium-based) batteries to do the job. Comments frequently pointed to pumped hydro storage as a far more sensible answer. Indeed, pumped storage is currently the dominant—and nearly only—grid-scale storage solution out there. Here, we will take a peek at pumped hydro and evaluate what it can do for us.
continued
Piotr: quit being obnoxious and do your homework.
Re: @~55 HR
More on the stalkers:
http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/08/06/how-america-rising-ties-gop-establishment-stalkers-harassing-bill-mckibben-and-tom-steyer
As per discussions of the psychology and methods of denial, I’d like to see some on the sociology of how thugs, punks and wise guys have gained a foothold in the way certain institutions and affiliated agencies ‘govern’ (including one of my pet peeves; talk radio).
Nick,
Why do you feel that Arctic sea ice cover will “take a late summer plunge”? Your link to the nsidc site seems to indicate that the current conditions will continue, and a “new record low September ice extent now appears to be unlikely.”
AJ 41 (in his usual charming style): You pontificate constantly with essentially zero knowledge, brains, or research.
BPL: Please don’t tell my peer reviewers I have zero knowledge, brains, or research. They might stop publishing my research articles.
T 43: Why are we so concerned about a rise of about .6 of a degree in 40 yrs?
BPL: Because a 1 degree change in mean global annual surface temperature is enough to move agricultural growing belts by hundreds of miles. Because the difference between now and a major ice age is only 5.5 K. Because a 1 K difference between now and, say, the Eemian is a sea-level rise of 3-4 meters.
Get it now?
T 54: I too hope Trump wins in NOV.
BPL: Are you 1) insane, 2) stupid, or 3) evil?
EG 58: Recall that the US battery would cost a quadrillion dollars.
BPL: Try to focus on the fact that “the US battery” is a bizarre straw-man. Nobody is saying we have to build a single battery to back up the entire United States power system. In fact, we do not.
To clarify where I am coming from. The science is of course critical. Public outreach as well is very helpful. Sites like RC are also helpful (to some). Yet it also gives people like Victor a place to go to rail against reason and common sense to express their disordered thinking.
John Cook is terrific as is Skeptical Science. But John’s field is Psychology, he is not a practicing climate scientist. To me that is not the problem either. The problem is that a no-body conspiracy theorist who hasn’t worked for 9 years spending his time on bs conspiracies instead has been elected to the Australian Senate – John Cook wasn’t. Who has the real power and the public stage? Roberts does. The day he was confirmed a pack of media turned up for a press conference.
The whole time that John Cook has been involved at Skeptical Science he hasn’t had one Press Conference nor major stories in the media about his work and what he knows.
For a US centric example. While Michael Mann (a founding member of RC) continues to write papers, the occasional newspaper opinion piece or give TV interviews on obscure venues like RT (that no one watches) Jim Inhofe still gets to Vote in the US Senate and run Committees. Who holds and wields the Real Power and corners the public outreach? Inhofe does! Who brings in whackos like Judith Curry to speak and twist the truth at senate inquiries and on Cspan.
It’s not Real Climate scientists and especially not RC nor climate science advocates who are running the show. Nor the IPCC or the UNFCCC.
What kind of difference would it make should John Cook be the new Australian Senator there for the next 6 years and what would happen if Michael Mann (or similar) was one of 100 Senators in the US taking it up to the likes of Inhofe 24/7/365 days a year and that being reported daily in the Press and on TV globally?
What James Hansen is doing with the Court case on behalf of future generations is actually how real change was effected during the Civil rights days in the 1960s. That was achieved in the Courts and in Congress as a direct result of the judgments laid down in the Federal Court, it wasn’t because of protests, newspaper op-eds, academic papers, street marches or the assassination of MLK and RFK.
July CO2 average in:
July 2016: 404.39 ppm
July 2015: 401.31 ppm (3.08 ppm increase)
And if July 2017 is another 3.08 ppm increase? Then what? What changes in reality besides those ‘numbers’ alone?
I’ll tell you my prediction. Some one will publish a another climate science paper about circa 2020 … saying see, “we” told you so but our models were a bit “off”!
Given Gavin is a Brit I suppose he can’t run for President in 2020.
OT: congratulations to Gavin for his part in Canada’s victory over the US in volleyball!
Michael Mann of MIT lives in Massachusetts
Recent History of Massachusetts Senate Elections
2012
Total Votes 3,127,588
Warren 54 vs 46
2013
Markey 55 vs 45
2014
Total Votes 2,075,114
Markey 62 vs 38
Now, imagine a 2018 MA Senate campaign for ‘Michael Mann’ supported and financed nationally by a Pro-Climate Science AGW Action “Get out the Vote” movement.
Total Votes 2,500,000
Democrat 33.4%
Republican 33.0%
Michael Mann 33.6%
MANN WINS by 5000 VOTES!
I defy anyone who claims that is not possible, if done right.
Re: #64 Ed Greisch
“Your comment 5 looks like a sickening joke.” ?
There is not a trace of a joke in my comment #5. Also, what exactly is “sickening” in it?
“Please don’t be insulting or rude or any of that stuff.”
Indeed.
Re: #47 Bill Henderson
Many thanks Bill for all the links, in particular the Climate Code Red website which I had never visited and have to spend a few hours going through.
Re #33 Hank Roberts
I am not sure if I have understood your comment, but I am certainly not fixated on any word or expression, rather what worries me is a lack of immediate and significant concerted worldwide action in the fight against climate change, and the worry that perhaps a majority of climate scientists have not been communicating properly on the urgency of the present situation, and how this could be improved.
James Hansen is in my humble opinion one of the scientists that *has* been communicating vocally on the urgency of action against climate change, but he seems to have been somewhat marginalized.
The IPCC has been overly conservative as also observed by many climate scientists.
So the questions I asked last month remain unanswered: are we or not in a global climate emergency, as of 2016? If not, do we have to wait until we reach 2C above preindustrial for climate scientists to agree that we are in a climate emergency? Or some other symbolic event (450ppm CO2? or 550ppm CO2) or (unfortunately) a weather catastrophe of some sort? On the other hand, if we are already in a situation of global climate emergency, why doesn’t the IPCC bring up this issue in an extraordinary report for examination by the UN Security Council?
Doesn’t the latest global temperature data (as reported by NASA / NOAA) grant that the IPCC issue an “emergency report” of some sort?
55 Hank Roberts, thanks for sharing.
From the end of that article: The fossil-fuel industry may threaten us as a planet, as a nation, and as individuals, but when we rise up together we’ve got a fighting chance against the powers that be. And perhaps that realization is just a little bit scary for them.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/timeline/klansville-timeline/
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=fBQhe8jcXZEC&dq
Same bone, different horse, different decade, and different century.
The abuse of power is the abuse of power is the abuse of power – that never changes.
45 Victor says: signed: Victor, the Bad Boy of Climate Change. ;-)
Victor your narcissistic driven delusions of grandeur are showing. You are not the “bad boy of climate change” you are simply an immature unintelligent ‘child’ struggling to deal with your personality disorders in later life. You’re not special mate. In fact it’s quite common. Volunteering in a homeless shelter or some other charity may assist. You certainly have nothing of value to contribute here. Goodbye.
43 Titus says: Eyeballed the chart on the home page. Why are we so concerned about a rise of about .6 of a degree in 40 yrs? […] Aren’t we over reacting?
No not at all. The only problem I have these days is over-reacting to idiots showing their profound ignorance and stupidity on the internet whilst imaging they are oh so clever.
So please do go back to WUWT and Infowars or where ever you can enjoy the acceptance of like-minded souls. Here you are way out of your intellectual and maturity depth. Sorry, I can not help it as I’m Australian. It’s in my DNA to call a spade a spade.
Climate science literacy improving? It’s the “solution” to driving systemic change in the global political process to tackle AGW/CC?
I think not: Denial is a multi-headed hydra and the monster is growing.
CLEXIT
Backed by a blitzkrieg of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science, a rapidly convened new group called Clexit has been formed.
The group claims to have “60 well-informed science, business and economic leaders from 16 countries” signing on to a founding statement that is chock-full of long-debunked climate change myths, together with attacks on renewable energy and the United Nations.
In a not unambitious founding statement, Clexit says: “The world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade. Man does not and cannot control the climate.”
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2016/brexit-climate-science-denialists-form-new-group-call-clexit-59807
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/clexit-the-new-heights-of-climate-science-denial,9328
Both Science and Reason has been crying out for decades that AGW/CC is in fact a POLITICAL / SOCIAL issue and not a Scientific one.
Piotr: Your comment at 48 doesn’t count as having done your homework.
This is for Alfred Jones at 51, but anyone else can answer.
People keep talking about how important baseload is, and saying it justifies one argument or another, but can’t seem to offer a clear quantitative explanation of the concept. For some of us science and engineering types, that would go a long way towards convincing us of the merits of your case. Let’s do a simple exercise:
Let the only electrical devices be 1KW portable heaters.
Let there only be 10 houses connected to a grid, each with 10 heaters.
We know that the maximum load applied by an individual house is 10KW, and the maximum load on the grid is 100KW.
The minimum load is zero of course.
Now, if I understand you so far, baseload is some number other than the max or zero. Could you please show how to determine it? Please give the value with appropriate units of course. (The method should work for either one house or the aggregate, as far as I can tell, hence my earlier question.)
@ Victor #45,
I think you are confusing a single tree with the forest.
Different parts of a policy to reduce CO2 would have different effects; it is the total result that matters.
But to address your specific case, with respect to corn ethanol, perhaps raising the price of high fructose corn syrup has saved many lives by reducing the incidence of metabolic syndrome. And perhaps if US farmers don’t produce corn for food, farmers in other parts of the world will not be put out of business by the competition from our lower prices. That would increase local employment so people can buy the somewhat higher-priced food. And so on.
It is the aggregate effect that we are concerned with, both for the specific policy and overall.
73 Barton Levenson: Cherry-picking, ignoring context .. you know like the rest of the words in the complete post is disingenuous and intellectually dishonest and really, not that smart either. You have done it before to my comments, I suggest you stop it. The adhom is not going to fly, and your pattern of smarty-pants misrepresentations will not stick.
People can read it for themselves without you playing “6 O’Clock News” with 1 second outtakes. Please find someone else or somewhere else to big note yourself. Seriously. Been through this before with you, am not doing it again and will not ignore it either. Have a happy life.
@75 Thomas says:”whackos like Judith Curry to speak and twist the truth at senate inquiries and on Cspan.”
While I agree with your assessment of Inhofe. I must ask how you obtained that view of Judith Curry. I seldom watch Cspan, but I do read Week in review – science, technology, policy research by Judith Curry
I haven’t seen anything that would qualify her as a “wacko” there. She certainly is not a denialist like Inhofe.
Oh and BTW I happen to live in Oklahoma and I do vote. No way Inhofe gets my vote. Never. Now if there is a wacko, certainly he fits the bill. That snowball incident on the senate floor was downright embarrassing. However, Judith has never done anything remotely like that as far as I know.
So, the August open thread begins right off with yet another contrafactual, nonsensical rant attacking renewable energy from Edward Greisch, who displays his usual abject ignorance of what is actually happening in the real world today with renewable electricity generation and storage technology, along with his trademark argument-by-name-calling belligerence.
And then follows two pages of discussion which almost entirely ignores the moderators’ very interesting post on model-observation comparisons as well as the moderators’ repeated admonitions that discussion of non-fossil fuel electricity generation is off-topic here, instead focusing on Mr. Greisch’s nonsense.
This does not portend well for the August Unforced Variations thread.
Re: Comment by Alfred Jones — 4 Aug 2016 @ 8:45 PM, ~#51
Base load for the grid is frequently defined as the amount needed for minimum demand. Demand is a human defined quantity that can be quite variable based on expectations and a willingness to adapt and I provided some personal, real world examples to support this. You responded: “Total Crap,” a very clever conversational gambit. You concluded your subsequent confusing statements with: “There has NEVER been a base load problem anywhere on the planet … ,” a non sequitur.
Steve
No long-term correlation between CO2 levels and drought: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015EA000100/full
No long-term correlation between CO2 levels and flooding: http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci-discuss.net/11/10157/2014/hessd-11-10157-2014-print.pdf
No long-term correlation between CO2 levels and precipitation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Precipitation
No long-term correlation between CO2 levels and heat waves: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/high-and-low-temperatures
No long-term correlation between CO2 levels and hurricanes: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/landsea-eos-may012007.pdf
No long-term correlation between CO2 levels and wildfires: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160524144921.htm
No long-term correlation between CO2 levels and global warming: https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/clip_image006_thumb2.jpg?w=1212&h=897
So yes, you’ve been right all along: weather is NOT the same as climate.
The issue of GHG emissions is now more urgent than ever and even the IPCC requires the use of yet to be invented negative emissions technology.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/scientists-see-urgency-for-negative-emissions-20588
So its a matter of urgency now for this technology to be invented on a scale than can deal with hundreds of billions of tonnes of airborne GHG emissions which is very worrying considering that the technology does not exist a yet on the scale required.
However, more to the point is the issue of denial and more precisely political and economic denial. For 40 years and for all of the global meetings regarding ACC/AGW the issue has been buried and the public left as if it is not an issue and now we are getting hung out to dry. Too much fossil fuel money has denied and obfuscated for too long and for all of the science and for all of the good intentions little has been done and even though Paris broke new ground the issue is still a big one and now a different take on dealing with it is needed and the only option is negative emissions which means that the fossil fuel companies can in principle emit so long as we draw down more than we emit.
Strange world of how vested interests always trump reality.
“BPL: Try to focus on the fact that “the US battery” is a bizarre straw-man. Nobody is saying we have to build a single battery to back up the entire United States power system. In fact, we do not.”
No, we do not, indeed. I think everyone should read Dr. Murphy on the difficulty of building energy storage, because I think that a a realistic grasp of our situation is important.
However, ‘everyone’ should also distinguish clearly between a top-down ‘spherical cow’ illustrative analysis, and an operational one. Dr. Murphy’s are of the former type, as he himself implies in the conclusion of his ‘Nation-sized battery’ post, when he names strategies to address the difficulties he dramatizes:
That is what our friend Ed forgets, when he reifies the ‘nation-sized battery’ as a necessity.
Let’s see how Dr. Murphy derives his criteria of a week’s worth of energy storage:
Let’s note first that this does not account for the fact that a “distributed grid helps.” It’s entirely based on a “rule of thumb for [individual] remote solar installations”. Then let’s note that it bumps up the margin by a factor of 133%. Then note that whereas the rule of thumb addressed “solar installations”, the national grid is not and never will be only solar; its renewable portion consists now (and in the future), of solar, wind, and hydro, with some contributions from other renewable technologies such as geothermal power and biomass–all of which implies, again, greater consistency of output.
What is actually necessary? Well, according to NREL:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/52409-ES.pdf
That’s an analysis that really has ‘done the math’. It’s worth a look, for those who are interested in what reality looks like–as opposed to ‘spherical cows.’
#70 – Dan H.
Hi Dan. Apologies, I was just speculating, really, so not very scientific. I was not saying for certain that I think the Arctic ice cover will set a new minimum this year, hence posing this as a question. That said, my musing was based on looking at the interactive chart, here:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
The 2012 minimum was early-mid Sept., whereas other minima have been a bit earlier or later in Sept. The nearest analogues to this year might be, say, 2007, 2011 and 2015, but 2011 and 2015 both appear to have bottomed out a bit earlier than 2012, whereas 2007 looks as if it was a bit later than 2012. So even if this year is not a new minimum, matching or going lower than in 2007 would be something to note. It has certainly been warm over Greenland this year, here just two examples from many comments on the subject:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/08/08/greenland-ice-sheet-summit-plunged-to-record-low-july-temperature-so-what/
http://www.adn.com/arctic/2016/07/15/deep-blue-ponds-and-streams-highlight-melting-on-greenland-ice-sheet/
There are also various severe heat alerts e.g Texas and Toronto, so if something allows that heat to leak out of the mid latitudes and get transferred into the Arctic, the melting would accelerate a bit. It would not need ridiculous temperatures or anything, just a slight rise. Maybe we’ll have to wait for the Atlantic hurricane season really to get going, see if that starts pushing more warmth northwards. In that respect, I think there’s not much activity predicted now until the last week of August, but comments suggest it could be very active once things kick off.
Zebra, for your hypothetical, baseload would be zero in warm weather
unless you’re controlling humidity to keep the house from getting mildew.
and more in cold weather, assuming you don’t want pipes to freeze.
And more if someone needs a CPAP machine overmight.
https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Abaseload+electric+power+demand
Ed Greisch: 64 and 83: “Piotr: Your comment at 48 doesn’t count as having done your homework. […] You forgot to do the homework […] The professor assumed that you are smart enough to [yada-yada]. He showed you how to do the problem. Piotr is to finish it. The answer is so obvious that I am not going to do the homework for you.”
and on and on in the same pretentious tone. You are not some glorious professor, and I am not your lowly student, so get over yourself – the onus of proof of your claims is on you, not on me. Remember,
it is you who ridiculed Sidd:
“Do you, Sidd, have an advanced degree in electrical engineering specializing in power distribution? Do you have years of experience in this field? If not, caution is more than in order. Like being run out of town with tar and feathers?”
and it was you who called on the report by Charles River Associates
http://www.uwig.or/CRA_SPP_WITF_Wind_Integration_Study_Final_Report.pdf
as the SUFFICIENT proof for your attitude toward Sidd.
Eric Swanson, 27, and me,48, pointed out that this report is not as convincing as you needed it to be, because of its very restricting assumptions: they assume unchanged volume and timing of energy demand, give no consideration to hydrostorage and other forms of power storage, don’t consider benefits of reducing the shortcoming of renewables by combining different sources of energy that have different patterns of availability (wind, solar, hydro). As a result of these limitations, the report does not provide the unequivocal proof you needed to justify your paternalistic tone toward Sidd.
And now in two separate followups to my one post, you have offered nothing to defend your original source (the report by Charles River Associates), but instead mumble on how you are like a professor and the readers like his students, and make bizarre demands on me, e.g.:
“Piotr didn’t bother to read this article Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.”
– why read some COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ARTICLES, when my comments were on your claims
based on the report by Charles River Associates?
Given all that – your paternalistic: “Piotr, quit being obnoxious and do your homework” says much more about you than it says about me.
Cheers,
=
Piotr
74 Barton Levenson: Of course the “US battery” doesn’t have to be a single energy storage device. It can be distributed around the country. So what? If my estimate of the price is within orders of magnitude of being right, it isn’t going to get built. If it isn’t built, then “wind and solar only” leads to a day without power.
A day without power: Steel mills are destroyed by the unexpected shutdown. Same for other industries. The whole country shuts down. The loss of factories leads to a depression. The loss of power for heating and cooling results in a general strike or a revolution. Chaos ensues. Civil order collapses.
“A day without power: Steel mills are destroyed by the unexpected shutdown.”
To avert that does not require the complete supply of “baseline” power levels, it requires sufficient supply to keep processes that would suffer irreversible harm at a minimum operating level. MOL is a lot lower than current baseline usage. It is reasonable to inconvenience other users in the once a decade scenario. Local residents already have that sort of disruptive risk built in, for example a regional icestorm can take down the grid for a week or two at any given location. We’ve learned to live with this slightly less than 100% availability.
As for the cost of the renewables wind and solar, these industries have excellent learning curves. As total world capacity has doubled, cost of a unit of new wind has declined by fourteen percent. For solar the corresponding figure is twenty-one percent. As long as these scaling laws hold, the key to cheap wind and solar is simply to aggressively build it out.
#85 Hi Zebra. Thanks. And yes, I get your point about raising the price of high fructose corn syrup. I hate that stuff too. But the main function of corn is to feed livestock and an increase in the price of corn raises the cost of meat. Well, I suppose if you’re a vegetarian maybe you don’t care. Regardless, the net affect of the ethanol disaster has been a general increase in the price of all sorts of food products. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_effect
My point was not limited to ethanol alone, but the whole issue of unintended consequences, which needs to be address with great care before we start turning off the fossil fuel spigot.
92 Kevin McKinney, good work summarising the key issues there. thanks
About #96 and similar (Ed Greisch)
If it isn’t built, then “wind and solar only” leads to a day without power.
Then on that day we fire up the old fossil-fuel plants. And there are other renewable sources of energy to compensate (hydro, geothermal, wave etc), as well as nuclear.
What is your point, exactly, or what is the one you are rebutting? That wind and solar can completely replace all other forms of energy? That enough batteries to ensure this is affordable?
Would it be sufficient to reduce GHG emissions by 85% (assuming the ‘one day’ is out of a week)? It’s the rate of change of climate change that matters most, isn’t it?