After a slow publcation of October’s figure, HadCRUT is earlier than normal with November’s posting – an anomaly of +0.524ºC, which is a little lower again than October’s anomaly, and somewhat lower than the pre-October months. Nov 2016 becomes the ninth hottest November on record & the =99th warmest monthly anomaly. The fall in anomaly from pre-October levels is roughly mirrored in NOAA but not in GISS, perhaps a result of the extremely hot high-Arctic which is accounted more fully in GISS.
The average anomaly for 2016-to-date is running at +0.789ºC and still running above the average for the last calendar year (also presently the record calendar year) of +0.747ºC. Thus December’s anomaly would have to come in above +0.28ºC to gain the ‘warmest calendar year’ accolade. (The most recent month with December below +0.28ºC was as recent as 2012.)
A graphic of average surface & satellite anomalies & MEI (who are a bit late posting this month) comparing 1997/99 with 2015/16 (bar MEI) complete up to November is here (usually two clicks to ‘download your attachment’)
The anomalies for 2015/16 and their rankings within the full record are as follows:-
2015 …. 1 …. + 0.688 ºC … =22nd
2015 …. 2 …. + 0.660 ºC …. 30th
2015 …. 3 …. + 0.681 ºC …. 24th
2015 …. 4 …. + 0.656 ºC …. 32nd
2015 …. 5 …. + 0.696 ºC … =20th
2015 …. 6 …. + 0.730 ºC …. 14th
2015 …. 7 …. + 0.696 ºC … =20th
2015 …. 8 …. + 0.732 ºC …. 12th
2015 …. 9 …. + 0.784 ºC … … 9th
2015 .. 10 …. + 0.820 ºC … … 7th
2015 .. 11 …. + 0.810 ºC … … 8th
2015 .. 12 …. + 1.010 ºC … … 3rd
2016 …. 1 …. + 0.908 ºC … … 5th
2016 …. 2 …. + 1.061 ºC … … 2nd
2016 …. 3 …. + 1.063 ºC … … 1st
2016 …. 4 …. + 0.915 ºC … … 4th
2016 …. 5 …. + 0.688 ºC … =22nd
2016 …. 6 …. + 0.731 ºC …. 13th
2016 …. 7 …. + 0.728 ºC …. 15th
2016 …. 8 …. + 0.770 ºC …. 10th
2016 …. 9 …. + 0.710 ºC …. 16th
2016 .. 10 …. + 0.586 ºC …. 58th
2016 .. 11 …. + 0.524 ºC … =99th
nigeljsays
Barton Yoda, yes ok thanks for the clarification on the distant origins of socialism, but man it was long, and only has a tenuous connection to the article!
I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth on capitalism. I was just raising a point that seemed relevant for the benefit of anyone else reading this.
I agree on your point on what Americans on the right think. Some Americans would probably even see Thatcher as a socialist. Not right wing enough. She didn’t abolish the welfare state and bring back poor houses.
Jim Hunt,
The poetic discourse of the Guardian article “Mapping the changes to the extent of sea ice over the last 40 years … this year’s line drops down like a thin thread dangling into the void(ie. below the levels of previous years SEI)“: this is perhaps misplaced here on a scientific forum. And the Guardian article doesn’t make a stab at something more appropriate.
So perhaps the following would quantify the Arctic meltiness/unfreeziness of 2016.
2016 (to 21/12/16, JAXA SIE data) has shown less SIE than all previous years for 191 days (with ten days more to report). Previously 2012 managed 130 days over the full year but 47 of those have been bested by 2016. Comparing the exceptional 2012’s 130 days with the 2016-so-far 191 days, the level of “dangle” (ie. below previous record) in raw measure of sq km, the 2012’s 130 days accumulative average at 61M sq km pips 2016’s 58M sq km accumlative average. Yet if the 2016 deviation from the mean or the “dangle” beneath previous years relative to the variation within those previous years (eg standard deviation), 2016 ‘dangled’ by a average of 1.12SDs for 191 record-breaking days, 2012 ‘dangled’ by a average of 0.95SDs for 130 record-breaking days.
2012 was an exeptionally melty/unfreezy year. But not 2016. Even accounting for 2012, 2016 is more than exceptional, truly “off the scale” (although I’m at a loss as to which scientists the Guardian were quoting. Certainly Arctic Neven used the description “off the chart” to describe the “dangle”back in the Spring, the chart in question having been created by NSIDC’s Andrew Slater, but that isn’t the same quote & perhaps rather promotes Neven).
Thomassays
191 Phil Scadden says: “… on economics but surely the heart of the problem with FF is that price consumer pays does not reflect the cost to the environment and more complicatedly to future generations. A carbon tax can be seen as reflecting that.”
That’s the general “theory” yes. How about this: ‘surely the heart of the problem with FF’ is that we use it? And we shouldn’t because it’s harmful to everyone?
Price has nothing to do with whether using FF is a ‘good or bad thing’ to do. What’s the gestalt? What’s the logical rational intelligent thing to do?
Mr. Know It Allsays
In reply to comment #1 above on sea level rise:
How can anyone measure a 1 to 3 mm change in sea level? The sea is moving at all times, both locally and globally. The land next to and under the sea is moving constantly – some going up, some going down, some eroding, etc.
Thomassays
JC’s Xmas message to the alarmed scientist/advocates:
(That’s Judith Curry not Jesus Christ btw)
Get over it, your side lost. Changes of Presidential administrations occur every 4 or 8 years, often with changes in political parties.
Get busy and shore up your scientific arguments; I suspect that argument from consensus won’t sway many minds in the Trump administration.
Overt activism and climate policy advocacy by climate scientists will not help your ’cause’; leave such advocacy to the environmental groups.
Behave like a scientist, and don’t build elaborate conspiracy theories based on vague conflicting signals from the Trump administration. Stop embarrassing yourselves; wait for the evidence.
Be flexible; if funding priorities change, and you desire federal research funding, work on different problems. The days of needing to sell all research in terms of AGW are arguably over.
Open your minds to different perspectives and interpretations of scientific evidence.
If you are advocating for policies, do some serious homework about the policy process, economics, and unintended consequences of technologies and policies.
including JC’s Xmas reflections – The definition of ‘conspiracy theory’: A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy without warrant, generally one involving an illegal or harmful act carried out by government or other powerful actors.
‘Beauty’ is in the eye of the beholder. :-)
as Judith suggests: “Behave like a scientist, and don’t build elaborate conspiracy theories based on vague conflicting signals……”
I think she was talking to herself, again.
Thomassays
Arnold Schwarzenegger Message to reduce pollution
Published on 2 Nov 2016 – “Pollution kills more people every year than wars, car accidents, and homicides combined.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo84eoAI0Ak
What? Surely not Regulation being promoted by a Republican Politician and former California Governor.
He’s as mad and as wrong as Thomas is, obviously! :-)
There’s an immunotherapy for that: statistical education:
…
More Grumbine Science: How to decide climate trends
moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-to-decide-climate-trends.html
Dec 15, 2008 – But most tempests in blog teapots are about trends. … quantity (I’m thinking about defining a derivative) is considered not to exist at that point.
More Grumbine Science: Results on deciding trends
moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2009/01/results-on-deciding-trends.html
Jan 5, 2009 – You need 20-30 years of data to define a climate trend in global mean temperature; Forward and backward trends are markedly different
You can do the math, he handholds the reader through the arithmetic.
Thomassays
An Economist speaks: Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned Professor of Economics!!!
1) 2008 – The shortcomings of the existing Bretton Woods institutions, global environmental policies and international trading arrangements have been widely recognised for at least a generation. The current global crisis, and arrival of a new US president [Obama] in the midst of this unprecedented economic meltdown, may finally mark the moment when the world takes seriously the urgent global economic and environmental agenda that confronts us in this new millennium. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/21/globaleconomy-g8
2) 2014 – The report charts out the depth of energy transformation that will be required, and the major pillars of that transformation. Three are most important: zero-carbon and low-carbon electricity, electrification of vehicles and the heating and cooling of buildings, and great strides in energy efficiency.
In order to have these adopted at large scale, we will need three things: carbon pricing, to reflect the social cost of carbon; improved technologies through research, development, and demonstration projects; and clear national pathways giving REGULATORY and policy guidance to PRIVATE INVESTORS.
Currently the U.S. government [OBAMA] spends around $30 billion per year on biomedical research, but only around $3 billion on low-carbon energy. The world as a whole should increase the RD&D on low-carbon energy systems by roughly one-order of magnitude (that is, a factor of 10), to perhaps $100 billion per year, shared by the public and private sectors. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/five_questions_for_jeffrey_sachs_on_decarbonizing_the_economy/4194/
3) – 2015 is the Year We Take Action on Climate Change, Says Jeffrey Sachs
When asked about what the agreement from the 2015 Conference will look like, Sachs noted that while chances for an agreement are good, the chances for a good agreement are much lower. What will likely happen, he predicted, is that Obama will sign the agreement, the Senate will not ratify the treaty, and the final outcome of the agreement will HINGE on the results of the 2016 US elections. http://www.yaleeconomicreview.org/archives/article/2015-is-the-year-we-take-action-on-climate-change-says-jeffrey-sachs
4) Nov 2016 – We’re joined now by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. He served as an adviser to Bernie Sanders in his presidential campaign and continues to advise Bernie Sanders. https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/16/jeffrey_sachs_the_us_will_become
5) Nov 2016 Jeffrey Sachs Praises the Youth Activists Suing the U.S. Government & Fossil Fuel Industry
Bernie Sanders’ role? Well, he’s a political and a thought leader for tens of millions of Americans. And I think he’s speaking the truth to the public, and that’s why the public resonated. We also know that he would have beat Donald Trump handily had he been in the general elections versus Trump. So, he’s a very, very important figure in America. And when he speaks, people are listening, because he’s speaking the truth. https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/16/jeffrey_sachs_praises_the_youth_activists
7) 2015 – How to Forge a Grand Bargain on Energy
They are proxy wars—lobbying wars — over 21st-century energy sources: fossil fuels vs. renewables vs. nuclear energy. In fact, we will need all energy sources that meet three conditions: homegrown (for national security), low-cost (for competitiveness) and environmentally safe. With improved technologies, there is a place for fossil fuels, renewables and nuclear in the mix. http://jeffsachs.org/2015/12/jeffrey-d-sachs-on-how-to-forge-a-grand-bargain-on-energy/
8) November 22nd, 2016 – US must transition to low-carbon energy Energy is the lifeblood of the economy. Without ample, safe, and low-cost energy, it is impossible to secure the benefits of modern life. For two centuries, fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas — offered the key to America’s and the world’s growing energy needs. Now, because of global warming, we have to shift rapidly to a new low-carbon energy system. http://jeffsachs.org/2016/11/us-must-transition-to-low-carbon-energy/
fwiw fuel regulations implications, variations and lost opportunities to save money and pollute much less.
Comparing US and EU Approaches to Regulating Automotive Emissions and Fuel Economy – Thomas Klier and Joshua Linn
In 1998, the European Commission reached an agreement with vehicle manufacturers to reduce the emissions of CO2 by 25 percent by 2008, to 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer (or about 40 mpg, which is more stringent than the US CAFE standards at the time).
A mandatory requirement, backed by fines for noncompliance, was implemented in 2009; it set a level of 130 g CO2/km to be met by 2015. Further tightening of regulations took place in 2012; they also included standards for light commercial vehicles.it is 147 g/km (equivalent to 43.3mpg) by 2020 (ICCT 2014; see Figure 2).
The new EEA report, ‘Monitoring CO2 emissions from passenger cars and vans in 2015’, provides a summary of carbon dioxide (CO2) emission levels of new passenger cars and vans in the European Union (EU) in 2015 based on laboratory tests following a standard European vehicle test protocol used for vehicle type-approval.
They show that new cars sold in the EU in 2015 had CO2 average emissions of 119.5 g CO2/km, which was 8.0 % below the 2015 target of 130 g CO2/km, and 27 % lower than in 2004.
Similarly, the average emissions from vans sold in 2015 were 168.3 g CO2/km, below the 2017 target of 175 g CO2/km. This represents a reduction of 6.5 % since monitoring commenced in 2012.
[USA 2015 CO2 emissions averaged 358 grams per mile (or 224 grams CO2/km) This is higher than “EU vans” achieved in 2015 of @168/g CO2/km]
In order to meet their respective future targets, i.e. 147 g CO2/km for vans by 2020 and 95 g CO2/km for cars by 2021, the average CO2 emissions need to continue decreasing at a similar pace.
The report also presents data on manufacturer’s individual performances. The majority of car and van makers met their CO2 specific emissions target in 2015. Two manufacturers, Aston Martin Lagonda and Ferrari, exceeded their specific emissions target by a small amount and therefore excess emission premiums will be imposed. http://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/co2-emissions-from-cars-and
EPA’s annual report shows model year (MY) 2015 fuel economy is at a record high and CO2 emissions are at a record low.
MY 2015 fuel economy averaged 24.8 mpg, and CO2 emissions averaged 358 grams per mile (224grams/klm)
Fuel economy has increased by 5.5 mpg, or 28%, since MY 2004 https://www.epa.gov/fuel-economy/trends-report
Apparently the EPA has to set new emissions/fuel economy standards out to 2025 next year in 2017.
(using rough figures) For the US to get close to the EU standards by 2020 America will need to be producing new passenger cars getting 50-60 mpg and commercial light/trucks 40-45 mpg. That’s way above (better than) the current USA Avg of 25 mpg in 2015.
Coincidentally in Australia it’s an issue now: we have the dirtiest worst petrol in the world – a lower avg fuel economy for light vehicles/trucks. And the car manufacturing industry here is all set to shut down completely, to reply 100% on imported vehicles.
Global – fuel economy potential and benefits
However, neither vehicle powertrain technology, nor
vehicle size, nor vehicle power are sufficient to fully
explain fuel economy differences among countries. It
is therefore necessary to look into more detail such
as engine displacement, the use of turbocharging and
transmission related differences to fully understand
the large bandwidth of fuel economy among
countries. https://www.globalfueleconomy.org/media/203446/gfei-state-of-the-world-report-2016.pdf
Russian workers and peasants were so unhappy with their government that they overthrew it by force in 1905. They set up a semi-democratic republic, though run very incompetently, which lasted twelve years.
The Communist Party overthrew that in 1917, in a coup d’etat in Moscow. This led to the 1917-1920 Russian Civil War, in which Reds (Communists) battled Whites (Royalists and Democrats), and both fought Greens (not environmentalists, but an anarchist party from the Ukraine).
After four years of vicious fighting, including an artificially induced famine which got out of hand and resulted in Russia having to accept food aid from the United States, the Reds won. The US sent troops to aid the Whites in 1919, but the Whites were so incompetently led (for example, they launched anti-semitic pogroms, thus alienating the Jews) that their cause turned out to be futile. Communism firmly controlled Russia, and many nearby countries, as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also called “the Soviet Union,” from 1921 to 1991.
The Communists tried to honestly implement a Marxist society. Since time is equally valuable to everyone, and in classic Marxism everybody should have the same income, they tried to pay everybody an equal amount. This was an abject failure from the start. Shortages and surpluses of different workers appeared everywhere. There’s no reason supply and demand for a given type of labor should all find the same equilibrium point. Every field where the wage was above the equilibrium point experienced a surplus of workers going into it, and every field where it was below equilibrium couldn’t find enough workers to take all the jobs. The Soviet economy nose-dived.
The Soviet leaders–Lenin, Trotsky and others–weren’t stupid. They saw the problem and corrected it as soon as they could. In a similar way, trying to run the military along democratic lines proved impossible during the Civil War, so Leon Trotsky, then in charge of the military, instituted a strict system of ranks. In short order the USSR ran very like any capitalist country. For most of the 1920s, it was a fairly decent place to be. Young people experimented with alternative lifestyles and held “naked marches” demanding an official change in sexual mores. Art and science flourished.
But it didn’t last. After a series of well planned assassinations, Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, pen name “Stalin,” gained absolute control of the country. By 1928 he ruled everything, and he implemented the way he thought the Soviet economy should run.
Stalin collectivized agriculture. Private ownership is a bad thing in Marxist terms, so the state declared that it owned all the land, and forced the peasants to live and work on “collective farms.” A crisis happened where the peasants weren’t being paid enough for their grain, and therefore withheld it from the market. Meanwhile the urban workers were short of bread. Stalin’s solution was to send troops into the rural areas–especially the Ukraine–to confiscate all the grain. Millions of peasants starved to death–the “Holodomor” in the Ukraine and surrounding areas, which killed 7 million people. Soviet agriculture never recovered. Between the mass killing of peasants and the inefficiency of the collective farms, Soviet agriculture consistently underperformed, and the Soviets frequently had to buy food from capitalist countries.
In economics, a series of “five-year plans” lasted until the break-up of the Soviet Union. These were top-down command-and-control plans for increasing production and integrating the different sectors. It was the kind of thing that would horrify any economist, brutally inefficient and riddled with shortages and surpluses.
But for a while it worked surprisingly well. Industry was a fairly new thing in the USSR, so bringing any industry at all on line created huge increases in production. For a long time it didn’t matter that the methods of production and distribution were inefficient. Inefficient production is better than no production at all.
Note that this also explains the double-digit growth of the Chinese economy in recent decades. The Chinese aren’t economic geniuses–they are simply using resources they weren’t using at all before. Their GDP growth will inevitably slow down. Remember you heard it here first.
In the political sphere, things went from bad to worse. Stalin suffered from paranoid personality disorder; he trusted no one and saw plots against his power everywhere. In the system his predecessor, V.I. Lenin, set up, and he refined, there were no checks and balances on the actions of the state. Stalin was the state, and he launched a series of purges of the Communist Party, engineers, scientists, the military… the list went on. People were arrested, drugged and beaten into confessing nonexistent crimes, and shot or sent to labor camps. According to Antonov-Ovseyenko (1982), who had access to the records of the USSR Central Statistical Administration, 18.84 million people were arrested by the secret police in the purges of the late ’20s and ’30s. “Nearly all of them died.” Mass executions were common, and quotas of arrests and executions were set for repressive operations. A famous telegram told the secret police in one area that it was necessary for 10,000 people to be executed. The secret police went out, arrested the first 10,000 people they came across, and shot them all.
Between the famine and the purges, the population of the Soviet Union actually fell. The 1937 census-takers recorded exactly how far it had fallen. The potential for embarrassing the state was immense, so Stalin had the census-takers arrested and shot. He then set up a new census which reported more pleasing figures.
One side-effect of the mass repression was that a system of “corrective labor camps” was set up. A bureaucracy called the GULAG (Glavnoyeh Upravlenie po-istravityel’no trudovikh-LAGerei, “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps”) ran it all. The GULAG became an important part of the Soviet economy. Toward the end of Stalin’s life, as many as 16 million people–one tenth of the population–were in the GULAG at any one time. So a lot of Soviet production came from slave labor. It still does in China, Viet Nam and North Korea.
A joke from the GULAG runs as follows:
1st Prisoner: How much did you get?
2nd Prisoner: Ten years.
1st Prisoner: What did you do?
2nd Prisoner: Nothing! I did nothing at all! I’m innocent!
1st Prisoner: Liar! If you’ve done nothing at all, they only give you five years!
In 1942, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR. The Soviets fought back heroically and with brutality to rival the Nazis. During the war, whole ethnic groups suspected of disloyalty were deported across the country–often in cattle cars, and with 9 million deaths resulting–and new “homelands” opened up for them. In areas of the Nazi empire overrun by the Soviet empire, Soviet troops became notorious for raping women.
When Stalin finally died of a stroke in 1953, the nightmare of Soviet life began to subside a little. His successor, Gyorgi Malenkov, tried to shift production from weapons to consumer goods. He only lasted a year before Nikita Khrushchev ousted him, but Krushchev continued the consumer-goods focus and began to release people from the GULAG. Life in the Soviet Union was never free and easy, but it got more so as the decades went on. After Stalin’s death, you could usually avoid the GULAG as long as you didn’t publicly say anything against the state. Genuine loyalty became a reliable way to escape state punishment.
As long as the USSR lasted, it ran its economy with five-year-plans, which filtered down to smaller regional and industrial plans. The Party could not allocate investment resources the way the west did, since that depended on interest rates, and interest rates were anathema to Marxists. But the Soviets introduced a “discount rate” which was kind of an inverted interest rate, and worked more or less the same way.
Because of the inefficiency of central planning, surpluses and shortages occurred everywhere. No consumer good or food item was ever guaranteed. People waited in long lines for hours to get whatever there was a surplus of. Many took time off from work to do this, and smart managers usually let them. If the average Soviet citizen saw a line, he or she would join it, without knowing what the product being sold was, just on the chance that it might be something useful. Living standards were low, public health a disgrace and alcoholism rampant. The anonymous sexual rendezvous was a national pastime, and anonymity was an important part of it. A woman might be very repulsed, and turn hostile, if the man she was having sex with asked her name.
Such was life in a dictatorship with a top-down, command economy. In general, it was a bad idea. Democracy and markets work better.
“Over the coming days, some parts of the Arctic are expected to get gusts of warm air that are more than 20C hotter than usual for this time of year, some of which will tip over the 0C melting temperature of water.”
The Guardian claim that “this event has at least a one-in-200-year return time”. What a load of rot! It is part of a trend, with 2012 having a similar return time. It will not only return next year, it will be even warmer. They continue “By the 2040s, the event is expected to occur every second year, on average.” However, it seems obvious to me that it will be exceeded every year from now on.
The reason is that with the winter ice struggling to reform, the American and Asian continents will cool faster than the Arctic Ocean. This will causes the polar vortex to split, and as it says in the article, the Arctic low pressure drags in warm air from the tropics over the North Atlantic Ocean. So record warm temperatures in the Arctic winter are assured from now on.
The long Arctic summer days, some six months long, will quickly melt the ice and warm the ocean surface during the summer to the extent that the winter ice will be unable to reform.
Alastair, #221–“However, it seems obvious to me that it will be exceeded every year from now on.”
It seems obvious to me that you are underestimating variability in general, and in the Arctic in particular. Shall we revisit this next Christmas, for starters?
On the other hand, it does seem like this is great preconditioning for record low extents in 2017–and doubly so for record low ice *volumes*.
Actually, it seems a reasonable speculation that what we are seeing is in part a reflection of decreased ice extent/area. With increased amounts of exposed water comes a not-insignificant increase in heat flux from ocean to atmosphere. There must be some contribution to mean surface temperatures as a result.
In the big picture, of course, that also means increased Arctic heat flux to space, which is a negative feedback on temperature.
Moral: quantifying the various interactions and fluxes is crucial if one wishes to have a solid projection of what is likely to occur–even if the intuitive assessment is (and mine definitely is!) that all this is Not A Good Thing.
Al @204 – The Guardian editorial was referring to global sea ice area, where the “dangle” briefly reached 8 sigma.
The sea ice article linked to by the editorial stated:
Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said that Arctic sea ice extent dipped for a short time in mid-November, an “almost unprecedented” event. Sea ice shrank by around 50,000 sq km (19,300 sq miles) in this period, mainly in the Barents Sea.
Perhaps “off the scale” is just more churnalistic licence?
Alastair @221 – To put your Grauniad quote in context:
King and colleagues compared model simulations with and without the influence of human-caused greenhouse gas concentrations.
“The record November-December temperatures in the Arctic are not seen in the natural world simulations where human influences have been removed,” King wrote in a piece published in The Conversation.
“In comparison, in the current climate with human effects included, this event has at least a one-in-200-year return time.”
By the 2040s, the event is expected to occur every second year, on average.
Model simulations != The real world?
zebrasays
BPL, with respect to the Soviet Union…
What exactly changed from the historical feudal system? How was Stalin not a Tsar, and the Commissars not Dukes and Earls, and so on?
This is the problem with these discussions, and why I keep trying to pin down the terminology– there is a theoretical construct, and then there is the implementation. Labels are changed, but traditional structures at the national level have a great deal of inertia and persistence.
It isn’t fair to blame lots of what happened on “Communism”; you could even argue that, like feudalism, this was a form of State Capitalism.
Too late, perhaps, to make it through moderation in time, but happy holidays to all celebrating one or more of them, and best wishes to everyone else…
Chrstophersays
210 – Thomas on Economy
It is now possible for individuals, small community/church groups and independent investors to build communities that are near zero fossil fuels. Solar, wind, electric car and storage technologies are mature. As markets expand these technologies will continue to improve. First cost are low, risk are low, time value is near zero (a solar/wind installation generates an income stream in less than a year from first dollar spent, in stark comparison to nuclear power that still requires 20 years from first dollar to first KW as witnessed by current projects in Georgia and South Carolina).
A variety of low budget financing options are available to support these fossil fuel free projects. Projects are limited only by the organizational/management skills and vision of the individual and community. We are not obligated to wait for Universities to divest or fossil fuel companies to understand the gun they hold to their own heads.
Smart developments will include the following elements:
– financing can be either through traditional 30 year mortgage, private investment or crowd sourcing
– homes can now be built to extremely low energy consumption standards, as low as 1/10th the typical American home.
– where construction costs are $2-3-4-500 per square foot fossil free technologies can be covered by reducing total square footage by 5-10% (1000sqft home at $200/sqft costs $200k, reducing square footage to 900 frees up $20,000 to pay for PV, storage and energy conservation measures. At $500/sqft $50,000 could be transferred from sq footage to fossil free. $50,000 is more than adequate to build a fossil free home.)
– dual function roofing systems incorporating PV elements the cost of both roofing and PV panels mounted over roofing.
– communities can may include generator for those rare times when sun is not available for 3 or more days.
– aging power grid is now replaced by local community energy production that is robust and immune to the threat of cyber warfare
– PV panel life is proven to be in excess of 50 years.
– communities and clustered housing would include agricultural element eliminating fossil fuels (and water resources) wasted on green lawns
Individuals and small communities can now build fossil fuel free housing and end the strangle hold held by legacy fossil fuel interests.
BPL, a link to sources on that Russian history would be helpful. Sounds awful.
In today’s news:
… The Arctic is showing stunning winter warmth, and these scientists think they know why
… paradoxically, it could give momentum to climate change doubters, who will constantly be pointing to major snowstorms and cold temperatures where they live in order to cast doubt on the overall climate trend, even though it would be precisely that trend that is driving those select bouts of cold (even as the globe overall still shows a warming trend). Recently I checked in with one of the major skeptics of all of this — National Center for Atmospheric Research climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, who has debated Francis in the past, arguing that much of what she’s citing could be chalked up to natural climate variability and noting that climate change models don’t produce these effects.
…for now, these ideas aren’t accepted by all of the relevant scientists – but they definitely have a core group of supporters who are publishing, arguing, and citing recent events to advance their case. Scientists are gathering in Washington, D.C. in February to hash them out further – by which time, we’ll know more about just how much winter weather itself has given momentum to the conversation.
“We continue to see this Arctic behaving so bizarrely, I think we’re in for a very interesting winter,” said Francis.
Brian Dodge at 177: Thank you for that response. I understand it to say that total surface ice contribution to SLR has accelerated from near equilibrium in 2000(ish) to 56gt/yr2 +/-8gt and equal to roughly 0.17mm/yr2 in acceleration of SLR.
Taking the 20th century average rate of SLR at 1.87mm/yr and crudely calculating 0.17mm/yr2 acceleration for past 16 years yields 2.72mm total 21st century acceleration for a current total rate of SLR at 4.6mm/yr.
I believe that current rate of SLR is calculated at 3.4mm/yr. Including all the error bands, my back of the napkin, schoolboy arithmetic predicts 2-4feet of SLR by 2100 (using the 0.17mm/yr2 +/-0.05 value). Not inconsistent with your more sophisticated quadratic model prediction of 1 meter by 2100. I will dig deeper into the Grace/Jason data.
AMc at 221: “With the melt starting earlier last summer and the winter freeze being slower, … http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
… we have now passed a tipping point where the Arctic sea ice will rapidly disappear both in summer and in winter.
Will that cause the Arctic to release more methane as happened at the end of the Younger Dryas when the last abrupt warming happened?”
mike says:
I think there is little doubt that methane release will happen and I don’t see a way we put the warming ocean genie back in the bottle to avoid the methane release. The warmth that we have pushed into the ocean is in place and will be for a long time now. It is easy to observe the melting at the poles and recognize the trend and our situation. Professor Wadhams is looking like the winner in blue arctic ocean prediction contest. We are all losers in that situation, but the scientist losers who faulted Wadhams’ projections and methods will need to accept that their methodology and projections turned out to be badly flawed. All the models are wrong, some are useful, but if an important use of models was to communicate the urgency of our situation and help build support for meaningful action, then I think it is clear that the models that failed to suggest the current melt and breakdown of ice at the poles were not only wrong, they were useless and, at the end of the day, they were bad science.
I think we are already on very dangerous ground with a CO2 level of 405 and any trend/action that does not move that number down. If 405 means the loss of the Arctic ice cap, release of methanes from seabed and permafrost, then we have to move that number down and sooner is better than later. I don’t see the political will to make that happen around the globe. It’s not just Trump or a timid Obama administration, it’s brexit, nationalism, ideology, religious fervor of many flavors.
Dr. Mann was right in 2014 when he said we can’t let CO2 rise above 405. Well done, sir. Hammer on the message like there is no tomorrow. That is the ballgame.
in this case we felt it important to add our two cents — especially because a video clip from weather.com (La Niña in Pacific Affects Weather in New England) was prominently featured at the top of the Breitbart article. Breitbart had the legal right to use this clip as part of a content-sharing agreement with another company, but there should be no assumption that The Weather Company endorses the article associated with it.
The Breitbart article – a prime example of cherry picking, or pulling a single item out of context to build a misleading case – includes this statement: “The last three years may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare.”
In fact, thousands of researchers and scientific societies are in agreement that greenhouse gases produced by human activity are warming the planet’s climate and will keep doing so.
Along with its presence on the high-profile Breitbart site, the article drew even more attention after a link to it was retweeted by the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology….
nigeljsays
Thomas @205, you appear to suggest we should leave fossil fuels in the ground. This would be ideal, but would be hard to sell politically. A carbon tax is probably easier to sell politically, and although its an imposition on the market, its justifiable and is a scheme thats likely to work in a practical sense.
This whole thing is about “the art of the possible”
Thomassays
15 November 2016 From ABC Catalyst science program, with text Human impacts on the way our planet functions have now become so extreme many scientists are claiming the Earth has shifted out of the Holocene state and into a new geological epoch. They’re calling it ‘The Anthropocene’, the new age of humans, because millions of years after we are gone, the scar of our existence will be visible in the rocks of tomorrow. In this episode we look at how the last 60 years of socio economic growth has transformed the human race into a geological force to rival nature. http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4574615.htm
NARRATION
They charted the increasing use of water, fertiliser, paper and telecommunications. The graphs all started at 1750, just before the Industrial Revolution kicked off, and they all looked strikingly similar.
Prof Will Steffen
What absolutely shocked us when we looked at them was we…I expected to see a line pretty much going fairly evenly from 1750, maybe 1800 up to the present. Industrial revolution. What I saw was a very flat line from 1750, 1800, 1850, 1900. Then from about 1950 they all skyrocketed.
NARRATION
Although this post-war boom period was known to historians, what wasn’t known was the corresponding shift in Earth system function.
Prof Will Steffen
We had the famous greenhouse gases. And again they were creeping up from the Industrial Revolution, for sure. CO2 is the one that everyone knows but we also had methane, which is very important, and we had nitrous oxide, which people don’t think about. It’s very long-lived, associated with nitrogen fertilisers, with agriculture. The nitrogen cycle is hugely important – I would argue almost as important as the carbon cycle.
All of them were creeping up from 1750 but, again, you see a breakpoint around 1950, going up very sharply. We looked at global surface temperature – again, very wiggly. But then from about 1960 or 1970 we see a sharp increase. We looked at the marine fish capture and, again, we see a sweeping up after 1950, but interestingly we see a strong plateau from about 1995 to 2010. You can say, “Oh, we’ve gotten smaller. We’ve gotten sustainable.” The answer is no. The answer is we’ve just fished out the planet. We’ve fished out most of the large fishes and they are going down.
So these are extremely big changes in magnitude. And the systems around us that are used to geologically normal rates of change – the Barrier Reef, south-west Tasmania, oil forests in Canada and Russia – can’t cope with the rates of change that are occurring now. That’s why we’re seeing extensive bleaching, wildfires, insects in the north and so on.
NARRATION
So what’s the cause of this sudden and dramatic shift? It would be easy to look at the graphs and single out a rapidly rising population. But this would be a mistake.
Prof Will Steffen
What we found was the single biggest factor was actually consumption. And we found that 18% of the population was driving 74% of global consumption. So even though stuff was being increasingly made in China and India, it was being consumed in the OECD countries.
Barton Paul Levinson. I have always been sarcastic, but Im a nice person mostly.
I actually quite enjoyed your history of the Soviet Union immediately above this. One problem in analysing the USSR is what caused the problem, economics or politics? I mean clearly government ownership is destined to fail in a dictatorship, because the government will become lazy and entrenched, sort of like a huge monopoly.
But this leaves the economic question. Its fair to say the Soviet union is evidence massive state ownership is a suspect idea in a general economic sense. However State ownership of things like health and education has worked in several countries in the modern democratic western world. I think partly this is because governments are elected so have reasons to run them well, and partly because private ownership does have some problems with some specific things.
But markets and private ownership work well for many things like car manufacture. Evidence clearly shows this in britain where they have tried both car manufacture by the private sector and state.
Im just saying the picture is not black and white. State ownership is not proven to be completely wrong by the Soviet Union example. It may also depend on the nature of the enterprise, and whether the state runs a company directly, or simply owns it as state owned enterprise such that it is managed by the appropriate people independently of the state.
Thomassays
232 nigelj says: “Thomas @205, you appear to suggest we should leave fossil fuels in the ground.”
Sooner then later yes. This seems to be the major take away message of several decades of climate science long term.
re: “but would be hard to sell politically.”
I think trying to sell a carbon tax / price has been ongoing since the 1990s with little to no progress ‘politically’ or practically.
I agree: This whole thing is about “the art of the possible” — while not forgetting the critical importance of effectiveness and timeliness.
It’s a waste of time doing the possible if it makes no difference over the long term. History has proved the impossibility to date of a price on carbon or a carbon tax in the USA and the majority of OECD nations and the largest future polluters in the world. Maybe there is an important lesson in that?
cheers
Thomassays
227 Chrstopher: all encouraging news and advances and new options on the table these days.
“the strangle hold held by legacy fossil fuel interests” – and by the strangle hold of society / inertia in general and an economic order with an entrenched systemic FF energy supply to the masses.
Non-hydro non-nuclear renewable energy is still only ~1% of total energy supply use today. The question is how soon would you like that be at 80%?
The second question is then how to best achieve that Goal in the time frame?
Remembering that today’s societies and economic realities are based upon a very long term ‘cheap energy supply’ and a manufacturing engineering and science based economy relying heavily on that cheap energy supply and mass distribution network continuing.
There is no part of the current social and global economic order that is not touched by the impact of a systemic cheap energy supply to the masses.
Think of a pack of kittens unraveling a box of wool all over your home. And compare the difference between the average suburban home built circa 1950s to the huge homes being built today. Much has changed including building codes/regulations.
Everything ‘normative’ is connected, or call it interconnected.
The difference was in the micromanagement of the economy. The Tsar was a dictator with a vicious intelligence service, the Okhrana, which operated very like the later Cheka in all its alphabet incarnations. But it was largely a free-market economy and those who stayed out of the Tsar’s way were usually safe–unless they were Jewish, in which case they need to cope with periodic pogroms.
Stalin had railroads, and at one point (1938) had about 10% of the population locked up in the GULAG. That was unprecedented in the history of the world.
The best overall source is Antonov-Ovseyenko’s 1982 book, “The Time of Stalin.” As I say, he lived in the USSR and had access to the records of the Central Statistical Administration. The many books on Soviet history by Robert Conquest are also very useful.
Thomassays
235 Thomas, 232 nigelj says: “Thomas @205, you appear to suggest we should leave fossil fuels in the ground.” Sooner than later yes. This seems to be the major take away message of several decades of climate science long term……….
The science? Please see the following examples:
NARRATION – Just to prevent temperatures rising more than two degrees, a target most countries have signed up to, requires a drastic change of tack.
Prof Will Steffen (Nov 2016) – We have to leave nearly 90% of existing coal reserves in the ground. We have to leave half of gas reserves in the ground. About 35% of oil reserves in the ground. So, no Galilee Basin, no new gas, no new oil. And that’s to have a 50/50 chance. http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4574615.htm
LINGO:
The UN climate negotiations have failed to deliver binding emissions cuts and CO2 emissions continue to rise. The proposed responses to the climate crisis are inadequate, unambitious, and in some cases counterproductive. False solutions are getting promoted, that do not reduce the problem overall, such as offsetting, CDM, carbon markets, agrofuels, big hydropower. Pledges to reduce emissions are voluntary and focused purely on the demand-side. In the absence of a global cap on emissions – which seems decades away – demand-side mitigation isn’t a guaranteed successful strategy.
Reducing emissions in limited parts of the world economy, while maintaining fossil extraction at the same level only manages to displace emissions.
The reality of mitigation is that to stay within the proposed 1.5°C or 2°C temperature rise, the taps must be turned off, and the better part of known reserves of fossil fuels must remain untouched in the ground (see the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report – https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/ ). http://leave-it-in-the-ground.org/why-lingo-2/
08. October 2013
What Does the New IPCC (AR5) Report Say About Climate Change?
8. To stay below 2°C of warming, most fossil fuels must stay buried in the ground.
We’ve never done that before. There is no political or economic system anywhere in the world currently that can persuade an energy company to leave a valuable fossil fuel resource untapped. There is no government in the world that has demonstrated the ability to forgo the economic wealth from natural resource extraction, for the good of the planet as a whole. We’re lacking both the political will and the political institutions to achieve this. Finding a way to achieve this presents us with a challenge far bigger than we ever imagined. http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2013/10/what-does-the-new-ipcc-report-say-about-climate-change/
Fossil fuel production in a 2°C world: The equity implications of a
diminishing carbon budget. Three premises underlie our analysis:
(i) countries will eventually take action to substantially curtail global CO
2 emissions,
(ii) carbon capture and storage will not obviate the need for significant constraints on fossil fuel exploitation, and thus
(iii) fossil fuel extraction will need to decrease substantially relative to business as usual (aka current supply). https://www.sei-international.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/Climate/SEI-DB-2016-Equity-fossil-fuel-production-rents.pdf
Warming caused by CO2 emissions is effectively irreversible over multi-century timescales unless measures are taken to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Ensuring CO2-induced warming remains likely less than 2°C requires cumulative CO2 emissions from all anthropogenic sources to remain below about 3650GtCO2 (1000 GtC), over half of which were already emitted by 2011. {WGI SPM E.8, WGI TS TFE.8, WGI 12.5.2, 12.5.3, 12.5.4}
“About 1900 [1650 to 2150] GtCO2 were emitted by 2011, leaving about 1000 GtCO2 to be consistent with this temperature goal. Estimated total fossil carbon reserves exceed this remaining amount by a factor of 4 to 7, with resources much larger still. {WGI SPM E.8, WGI 12.5.4, Figure 12.45; WGI TS TFE.8, Figure 1, TS.SM.10, WG III Tables SPM.1, 6.3 and 7.2}”
Mr. Know It Allsays
Since people will, under any plausible scenario, continue to burn fossil fuels for several decades, if keeping the CO2 concentration below 405 is important, should we focus more effort toward methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere rather than attempting to change world behavior which IS NOT going to change quickly?
n 234: Its fair to say the Soviet union is evidence massive state ownership is a suspect idea in a general economic sense. However State ownership of things like health and education has worked in several countries in the modern democratic western world.
BPL: Agreed. I’m not trying to say the Soviet Union demonstrates all socialism is bad. I’m using it as an extreme example of trying to run everything from the top down. It just plain doesn’t work, and to accomplish it at all, you need a totalitarian state. I like a mixed system myself–mostly free market, but with government stepping in to provide everything free markets don’t do well, including courts, army, police, roads, health care, health and safety regulation, and a social safety net.
Hank @228 – Santa’s grotto is just around the corner from us here in Great White Con Ivory Towers. One of his little helpers just popped in to ask me to apologise to anybody who received their presents late. Santa was too busy mopping up his basement to set off on his rounds on schedule.
Air temperature near the North Pole reached zero degrees Celsius on December 22nd. See the comments on our December 2016 Arctic Report Card
In related news the BBC reports that an expert in such matters:
“Was confident that [Santa’s] sled would cope with the conditions. Santa is most likely overdressed though. Maybe in the future we’ll see him in a light jacket or plastic mac.”
Hank @231 – Just in case anybody here fancies adding their two new pence worth, we are currently seeking contributions to our campaign to haul David Rose and the Mail on Sunday, the original source of the Breitbart misinformation referred to by Weather.com, in front of the Great British “Independent (sic!) Press Standards Organisation”:
Dr. Mann was right in 2014 when he said we can’t let CO2 rise above 405. Well done, sir. Hammer on the message like there is no tomorrow. That is the ballgame.
Daily CO2
December 23, 2016: 405.06 ppm
December 23, 2015: 402.65 ppm
nuff said
Mike
Vendicar Decariansays
206 – “How can anyone measure a 1 to 3 mm change in sea level?”
The same way that it is determined that people are getting taller. You compute an average.
In addition, all sensors provide an “average” reading of whatever it is they are measuring. Satellite altitude sensors for example may look down and see a distance to a patch of land/water that is several hundred meters in radius. The sensor will respond with some measure of the “average” taken over that area.
Additional averaging can be done over larger areas to get averages (generally more accurate), for larger geographical regions.
How much does the ocean change height in a patch that is several hundred meters in radius.
Please estimate how much and get back to us with your results.
Vendicar Decariansays
Denialism = The real world on Plane Kook.
““The record November-December temperatures in the Arctic are not seen in the natural world simulations where human influences have been removed,” King wrote in a piece published in The Conversation.
“In comparison, in the current climate with human effects included, this event has at least a one-in-200-year return time.”
By the 2040s, the event is expected to occur every second year, on average.
Model simulations != The real world?” – Jim Hunt
Vendicar Decariansays
242 – “I like a mixed system myself–mostly free market, but with government stepping in to provide everything free markets don’t do well, including courts, army, police, roads, health care, health and safety regulation, and a social safety net.”
Yes. It is obvious that essential services can not be run well by Corporations in a Free Market, for they will game the system to gouge the public, provide lower quality service and at a higher cost.
The free market can however be permitted to dabble in the inconsequential. Things like designer feminine hygiene products, the production of Children’s tamagotchi toys, and gravy boats for thanx giving dinner tables are a perfect match for free market production.
Vendicar Decariansays
241 – “we focus more effort toward methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere”
I have this plan for a chemical plant that burns coal to get the energy to force Carbon molecules together to make coal and oxygen.
I’m sure it can work once I figure out how to violate the laws of thermodynamics.
After a slow publcation of October’s figure, HadCRUT is earlier than normal with November’s posting – an anomaly of +0.524ºC, which is a little lower again than October’s anomaly, and somewhat lower than the pre-October months. Nov 2016 becomes the ninth hottest November on record & the =99th warmest monthly anomaly. The fall in anomaly from pre-October levels is roughly mirrored in NOAA but not in GISS, perhaps a result of the extremely hot high-Arctic which is accounted more fully in GISS.
The average anomaly for 2016-to-date is running at +0.789ºC and still running above the average for the last calendar year (also presently the record calendar year) of +0.747ºC. Thus December’s anomaly would have to come in above +0.28ºC to gain the ‘warmest calendar year’ accolade. (The most recent month with December below +0.28ºC was as recent as 2012.)
A graphic of average surface & satellite anomalies & MEI (who are a bit late posting this month) comparing 1997/99 with 2015/16 (bar MEI) complete up to November is here (usually two clicks to ‘download your attachment’)
The anomalies for 2015/16 and their rankings within the full record are as follows:-
2015 …. 1 …. + 0.688 ºC … =22nd
2015 …. 2 …. + 0.660 ºC …. 30th
2015 …. 3 …. + 0.681 ºC …. 24th
2015 …. 4 …. + 0.656 ºC …. 32nd
2015 …. 5 …. + 0.696 ºC … =20th
2015 …. 6 …. + 0.730 ºC …. 14th
2015 …. 7 …. + 0.696 ºC … =20th
2015 …. 8 …. + 0.732 ºC …. 12th
2015 …. 9 …. + 0.784 ºC … … 9th
2015 .. 10 …. + 0.820 ºC … … 7th
2015 .. 11 …. + 0.810 ºC … … 8th
2015 .. 12 …. + 1.010 ºC … … 3rd
2016 …. 1 …. + 0.908 ºC … … 5th
2016 …. 2 …. + 1.061 ºC … … 2nd
2016 …. 3 …. + 1.063 ºC … … 1st
2016 …. 4 …. + 0.915 ºC … … 4th
2016 …. 5 …. + 0.688 ºC … =22nd
2016 …. 6 …. + 0.731 ºC …. 13th
2016 …. 7 …. + 0.728 ºC …. 15th
2016 …. 8 …. + 0.770 ºC …. 10th
2016 …. 9 …. + 0.710 ºC …. 16th
2016 .. 10 …. + 0.586 ºC …. 58th
2016 .. 11 …. + 0.524 ºC … =99th
Barton Yoda, yes ok thanks for the clarification on the distant origins of socialism, but man it was long, and only has a tenuous connection to the article!
I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth on capitalism. I was just raising a point that seemed relevant for the benefit of anyone else reading this.
I agree on your point on what Americans on the right think. Some Americans would probably even see Thatcher as a socialist. Not right wing enough. She didn’t abolish the welfare state and bring back poor houses.
Nigel,
Sarcastic you are.
Jim Hunt,
The poetic discourse of the Guardian article “Mapping the changes to the extent of sea ice over the last 40 years … this year’s line drops down like a thin thread dangling into the void (ie. below the levels of previous years SEI)“: this is perhaps misplaced here on a scientific forum. And the Guardian article doesn’t make a stab at something more appropriate.
So perhaps the following would quantify the Arctic meltiness/unfreeziness of 2016.
2016 (to 21/12/16, JAXA SIE data) has shown less SIE than all previous years for 191 days (with ten days more to report). Previously 2012 managed 130 days over the full year but 47 of those have been bested by 2016. Comparing the exceptional 2012’s 130 days with the 2016-so-far 191 days, the level of “dangle” (ie. below previous record) in raw measure of sq km, the 2012’s 130 days accumulative average at 61M sq km pips 2016’s 58M sq km accumlative average. Yet if the 2016 deviation from the mean or the “dangle” beneath previous years relative to the variation within those previous years (eg standard deviation), 2016 ‘dangled’ by a average of 1.12SDs for 191 record-breaking days, 2012 ‘dangled’ by a average of 0.95SDs for 130 record-breaking days.
2012 was an exeptionally melty/unfreezy year. But not 2016. Even accounting for 2012, 2016 is more than exceptional, truly “off the scale” (although I’m at a loss as to which scientists the Guardian were quoting. Certainly Arctic Neven used the description “off the chart” to describe the “dangle” back in the Spring, the chart in question having been created by NSIDC’s Andrew Slater, but that isn’t the same quote & perhaps rather promotes Neven).
191 Phil Scadden says: “… on economics but surely the heart of the problem with FF is that price consumer pays does not reflect the cost to the environment and more complicatedly to future generations. A carbon tax can be seen as reflecting that.”
That’s the general “theory” yes. How about this: ‘surely the heart of the problem with FF’ is that we use it? And we shouldn’t because it’s harmful to everyone?
Price has nothing to do with whether using FF is a ‘good or bad thing’ to do. What’s the gestalt? What’s the logical rational intelligent thing to do?
In reply to comment #1 above on sea level rise:
How can anyone measure a 1 to 3 mm change in sea level? The sea is moving at all times, both locally and globally. The land next to and under the sea is moving constantly – some going up, some going down, some eroding, etc.
JC’s Xmas message to the alarmed scientist/advocates:
(That’s Judith Curry not Jesus Christ btw)
Get over it, your side lost. Changes of Presidential administrations occur every 4 or 8 years, often with changes in political parties.
Get busy and shore up your scientific arguments; I suspect that argument from consensus won’t sway many minds in the Trump administration.
Overt activism and climate policy advocacy by climate scientists will not help your ’cause’; leave such advocacy to the environmental groups.
Behave like a scientist, and don’t build elaborate conspiracy theories based on vague conflicting signals from the Trump administration. Stop embarrassing yourselves; wait for the evidence.
Be flexible; if funding priorities change, and you desire federal research funding, work on different problems. The days of needing to sell all research in terms of AGW are arguably over.
Open your minds to different perspectives and interpretations of scientific evidence.
If you are advocating for policies, do some serious homework about the policy process, economics, and unintended consequences of technologies and policies.
Understand that climate policies are not the only, or even primary, driver for energy policy.
https://judithcurry.com/2016/12/15/the-latest-climate-conspiracy-theory
including JC’s Xmas reflections – The definition of ‘conspiracy theory’:
A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy without warrant, generally one involving an illegal or harmful act carried out by government or other powerful actors.
‘Beauty’ is in the eye of the beholder. :-)
as Judith suggests: “Behave like a scientist, and don’t build elaborate conspiracy theories based on vague conflicting signals……”
I think she was talking to herself, again.
Arnold Schwarzenegger Message to reduce pollution
Published on 2 Nov 2016 – “Pollution kills more people every year than wars, car accidents, and homicides combined.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo84eoAI0Ak
What? Surely not Regulation being promoted by a Republican Politician and former California Governor.
He’s as mad and as wrong as Thomas is, obviously! :-)
Pareidolia … a type of apophenia
There’s an immunotherapy for that: statistical education:
You can do the math, he handholds the reader through the arithmetic.
An Economist speaks: Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned Professor of Economics!!!
1) 2008 – The shortcomings of the existing Bretton Woods institutions, global environmental policies and international trading arrangements have been widely recognised for at least a generation. The current global crisis, and arrival of a new US president [Obama] in the midst of this unprecedented economic meltdown, may finally mark the moment when the world takes seriously the urgent global economic and environmental agenda that confronts us in this new millennium.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/21/globaleconomy-g8
2) 2014 – The report charts out the depth of energy transformation that will be required, and the major pillars of that transformation. Three are most important: zero-carbon and low-carbon electricity, electrification of vehicles and the heating and cooling of buildings, and great strides in energy efficiency.
In order to have these adopted at large scale, we will need three things: carbon pricing, to reflect the social cost of carbon; improved technologies through research, development, and demonstration projects; and clear national pathways giving REGULATORY and policy guidance to PRIVATE INVESTORS.
Currently the U.S. government [OBAMA] spends around $30 billion per year on biomedical research, but only around $3 billion on low-carbon energy. The world as a whole should increase the RD&D on low-carbon energy systems by roughly one-order of magnitude (that is, a factor of 10), to perhaps $100 billion per year, shared by the public and private sectors.
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/five_questions_for_jeffrey_sachs_on_decarbonizing_the_economy/4194/
3) – 2015 is the Year We Take Action on Climate Change, Says Jeffrey Sachs
When asked about what the agreement from the 2015 Conference will look like, Sachs noted that while chances for an agreement are good, the chances for a good agreement are much lower. What will likely happen, he predicted, is that Obama will sign the agreement, the Senate will not ratify the treaty, and the final outcome of the agreement will HINGE on the results of the 2016 US elections.
http://www.yaleeconomicreview.org/archives/article/2015-is-the-year-we-take-action-on-climate-change-says-jeffrey-sachs
4) Nov 2016 – We’re joined now by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. He served as an adviser to Bernie Sanders in his presidential campaign and continues to advise Bernie Sanders.
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/16/jeffrey_sachs_the_us_will_become
5) Nov 2016 Jeffrey Sachs Praises the Youth Activists Suing the U.S. Government & Fossil Fuel Industry
Bernie Sanders’ role? Well, he’s a political and a thought leader for tens of millions of Americans. And I think he’s speaking the truth to the public, and that’s why the public resonated. We also know that he would have beat Donald Trump handily had he been in the general elections versus Trump. So, he’s a very, very important figure in America. And when he speaks, people are listening, because he’s speaking the truth.
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/16/jeffrey_sachs_praises_the_youth_activists
6) March 2016 – A simple reality: Americans want more than a continuation of the same game that Bill Clinton played 25 years ago, and that Obama has continued in his presidency.
http://jeffsachs.org/2016/03/the-big-difference-between-clinton-and-sanders/
7) 2015 – How to Forge a Grand Bargain on Energy
They are proxy wars—lobbying wars — over 21st-century energy sources: fossil fuels vs. renewables vs. nuclear energy. In fact, we will need all energy sources that meet three conditions: homegrown (for national security), low-cost (for competitiveness) and environmentally safe. With improved technologies, there is a place for fossil fuels, renewables and nuclear in the mix.
http://jeffsachs.org/2015/12/jeffrey-d-sachs-on-how-to-forge-a-grand-bargain-on-energy/
8) November 22nd, 2016 – US must transition to low-carbon energy
Energy is the lifeblood of the economy. Without ample, safe, and low-cost energy, it is impossible to secure the benefits of modern life. For two centuries, fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas — offered the key to America’s and the world’s growing energy needs. Now, because of global warming, we have to shift rapidly to a new low-carbon energy system.
http://jeffsachs.org/2016/11/us-must-transition-to-low-carbon-energy/
http://jeffsachs.org/category/topics/climate-change-environment/
Has anyone else noticed this?
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/meanTarchive/meanT_2016.png
Apart from the Guardian that it is:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/22/ice-melting-temperatures-forecast-for-arctic-midwinter
fwiw fuel regulations implications, variations and lost opportunities to save money and pollute much less.
Comparing US and EU Approaches to Regulating Automotive Emissions and Fuel Economy – Thomas Klier and Joshua Linn
In 1998, the European Commission reached an agreement with vehicle manufacturers to reduce the emissions of CO2 by 25 percent by 2008, to 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer (or about 40 mpg, which is more stringent than the US CAFE standards at the time).
A mandatory requirement, backed by fines for noncompliance, was implemented in 2009; it set a level of 130 g CO2/km to be met by 2015. Further tightening of regulations took place in 2012; they also included standards for light commercial vehicles.it is 147 g/km (equivalent to 43.3mpg) by 2020 (ICCT 2014; see Figure 2).
Passenger cars need to meet a CO2 emissions target of 95 g/km (equivalent to 57.9 mpg) by 2021
[versus USA avg fuel economy for both combined was 24.8 mpg in 2015]
http://www.rff.org/files/document/file/RFF-PB-16-03.pdf
The new EEA report, ‘Monitoring CO2 emissions from passenger cars and vans in 2015’, provides a summary of carbon dioxide (CO2) emission levels of new passenger cars and vans in the European Union (EU) in 2015 based on laboratory tests following a standard European vehicle test protocol used for vehicle type-approval.
They show that new cars sold in the EU in 2015 had CO2 average emissions of 119.5 g CO2/km, which was 8.0 % below the 2015 target of 130 g CO2/km, and 27 % lower than in 2004.
Similarly, the average emissions from vans sold in 2015 were 168.3 g CO2/km, below the 2017 target of 175 g CO2/km. This represents a reduction of 6.5 % since monitoring commenced in 2012.
[USA 2015 CO2 emissions averaged 358 grams per mile (or 224 grams CO2/km) This is higher than “EU vans” achieved in 2015 of @168/g CO2/km]
In order to meet their respective future targets, i.e. 147 g CO2/km for vans by 2020 and 95 g CO2/km for cars by 2021, the average CO2 emissions need to continue decreasing at a similar pace.
The report also presents data on manufacturer’s individual performances. The majority of car and van makers met their CO2 specific emissions target in 2015. Two manufacturers, Aston Martin Lagonda and Ferrari, exceeded their specific emissions target by a small amount and therefore excess emission premiums will be imposed.
http://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/co2-emissions-from-cars-and
EPA’s annual report shows model year (MY) 2015 fuel economy is at a record high and CO2 emissions are at a record low.
MY 2015 fuel economy averaged 24.8 mpg, and CO2 emissions averaged 358 grams per mile (224grams/klm)
Fuel economy has increased by 5.5 mpg, or 28%, since MY 2004
https://www.epa.gov/fuel-economy/trends-report
EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) jointly established a National Program consisting of standards for light-duty vehicles that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve fuel economy.
https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engines/greenhouse-gas-ghg-emission-standards-light-duty-vehicles
Apparently the EPA has to set new emissions/fuel economy standards out to 2025 next year in 2017.
(using rough figures) For the US to get close to the EU standards by 2020 America will need to be producing new passenger cars getting 50-60 mpg and commercial light/trucks 40-45 mpg. That’s way above (better than) the current USA Avg of 25 mpg in 2015.
Coincidentally in Australia it’s an issue now: we have the dirtiest worst petrol in the world – a lower avg fuel economy for light vehicles/trucks. And the car manufacturing industry here is all set to shut down completely, to reply 100% on imported vehicles.
This week, the Australian government announced plans that will ultimately require cars sold in Australia to match international fuel efficiency standards.
https://theconversation.com/fuel-efficiency-standards-could-help-curb-australias-persistently-growing-emissions-70741
https://infrastructure.gov.au/roads/environment/forum/files/Climate_Works_and_Future_Climate_Australia.pdf
Canada
http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/efficiency/transportation/cars-light-trucks/buying/7487
Global – fuel economy potential and benefits
However, neither vehicle powertrain technology, nor
vehicle size, nor vehicle power are sufficient to fully
explain fuel economy differences among countries. It
is therefore necessary to look into more detail such
as engine displacement, the use of turbocharging and
transmission related differences to fully understand
the large bandwidth of fuel economy among
countries.
https://www.globalfueleconomy.org/media/203446/gfei-state-of-the-world-report-2016.pdf
In a legal first, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that a climate science researcher can proceed with defamation claims against writers who made false allegations about his scientific work
http://mashable.com/2016/12/22/climate-scientist-defamation-lawsuit-mann/
The Soviet Union. 1. Origins.
Russian workers and peasants were so unhappy with their government that they overthrew it by force in 1905. They set up a semi-democratic republic, though run very incompetently, which lasted twelve years.
The Communist Party overthrew that in 1917, in a coup d’etat in Moscow. This led to the 1917-1920 Russian Civil War, in which Reds (Communists) battled Whites (Royalists and Democrats), and both fought Greens (not environmentalists, but an anarchist party from the Ukraine).
After four years of vicious fighting, including an artificially induced famine which got out of hand and resulted in Russia having to accept food aid from the United States, the Reds won. The US sent troops to aid the Whites in 1919, but the Whites were so incompetently led (for example, they launched anti-semitic pogroms, thus alienating the Jews) that their cause turned out to be futile. Communism firmly controlled Russia, and many nearby countries, as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also called “the Soviet Union,” from 1921 to 1991.
The Soviet Union. 2. Soviet economics.
The Communists tried to honestly implement a Marxist society. Since time is equally valuable to everyone, and in classic Marxism everybody should have the same income, they tried to pay everybody an equal amount. This was an abject failure from the start. Shortages and surpluses of different workers appeared everywhere. There’s no reason supply and demand for a given type of labor should all find the same equilibrium point. Every field where the wage was above the equilibrium point experienced a surplus of workers going into it, and every field where it was below equilibrium couldn’t find enough workers to take all the jobs. The Soviet economy nose-dived.
The Soviet leaders–Lenin, Trotsky and others–weren’t stupid. They saw the problem and corrected it as soon as they could. In a similar way, trying to run the military along democratic lines proved impossible during the Civil War, so Leon Trotsky, then in charge of the military, instituted a strict system of ranks. In short order the USSR ran very like any capitalist country. For most of the 1920s, it was a fairly decent place to be. Young people experimented with alternative lifestyles and held “naked marches” demanding an official change in sexual mores. Art and science flourished.
But it didn’t last. After a series of well planned assassinations, Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, pen name “Stalin,” gained absolute control of the country. By 1928 he ruled everything, and he implemented the way he thought the Soviet economy should run.
The Soviet Union. 3. Stalin.
Stalin collectivized agriculture. Private ownership is a bad thing in Marxist terms, so the state declared that it owned all the land, and forced the peasants to live and work on “collective farms.” A crisis happened where the peasants weren’t being paid enough for their grain, and therefore withheld it from the market. Meanwhile the urban workers were short of bread. Stalin’s solution was to send troops into the rural areas–especially the Ukraine–to confiscate all the grain. Millions of peasants starved to death–the “Holodomor” in the Ukraine and surrounding areas, which killed 7 million people. Soviet agriculture never recovered. Between the mass killing of peasants and the inefficiency of the collective farms, Soviet agriculture consistently underperformed, and the Soviets frequently had to buy food from capitalist countries.
In economics, a series of “five-year plans” lasted until the break-up of the Soviet Union. These were top-down command-and-control plans for increasing production and integrating the different sectors. It was the kind of thing that would horrify any economist, brutally inefficient and riddled with shortages and surpluses.
But for a while it worked surprisingly well. Industry was a fairly new thing in the USSR, so bringing any industry at all on line created huge increases in production. For a long time it didn’t matter that the methods of production and distribution were inefficient. Inefficient production is better than no production at all.
Note that this also explains the double-digit growth of the Chinese economy in recent decades. The Chinese aren’t economic geniuses–they are simply using resources they weren’t using at all before. Their GDP growth will inevitably slow down. Remember you heard it here first.
The Soviet Union. 4. Political repression.
In the political sphere, things went from bad to worse. Stalin suffered from paranoid personality disorder; he trusted no one and saw plots against his power everywhere. In the system his predecessor, V.I. Lenin, set up, and he refined, there were no checks and balances on the actions of the state. Stalin was the state, and he launched a series of purges of the Communist Party, engineers, scientists, the military… the list went on. People were arrested, drugged and beaten into confessing nonexistent crimes, and shot or sent to labor camps. According to Antonov-Ovseyenko (1982), who had access to the records of the USSR Central Statistical Administration, 18.84 million people were arrested by the secret police in the purges of the late ’20s and ’30s. “Nearly all of them died.” Mass executions were common, and quotas of arrests and executions were set for repressive operations. A famous telegram told the secret police in one area that it was necessary for 10,000 people to be executed. The secret police went out, arrested the first 10,000 people they came across, and shot them all.
Between the famine and the purges, the population of the Soviet Union actually fell. The 1937 census-takers recorded exactly how far it had fallen. The potential for embarrassing the state was immense, so Stalin had the census-takers arrested and shot. He then set up a new census which reported more pleasing figures.
The Soviet Union. 5. Forced labor.
One side-effect of the mass repression was that a system of “corrective labor camps” was set up. A bureaucracy called the GULAG (Glavnoyeh Upravlenie po-istravityel’no trudovikh-LAGerei, “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps”) ran it all. The GULAG became an important part of the Soviet economy. Toward the end of Stalin’s life, as many as 16 million people–one tenth of the population–were in the GULAG at any one time. So a lot of Soviet production came from slave labor. It still does in China, Viet Nam and North Korea.
A joke from the GULAG runs as follows:
1st Prisoner: How much did you get?
2nd Prisoner: Ten years.
1st Prisoner: What did you do?
2nd Prisoner: Nothing! I did nothing at all! I’m innocent!
1st Prisoner: Liar! If you’ve done nothing at all, they only give you five years!
In 1942, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR. The Soviets fought back heroically and with brutality to rival the Nazis. During the war, whole ethnic groups suspected of disloyalty were deported across the country–often in cattle cars, and with 9 million deaths resulting–and new “homelands” opened up for them. In areas of the Nazi empire overrun by the Soviet empire, Soviet troops became notorious for raping women.
The Soviet Union. 6. Post-Stalin recovery.
When Stalin finally died of a stroke in 1953, the nightmare of Soviet life began to subside a little. His successor, Gyorgi Malenkov, tried to shift production from weapons to consumer goods. He only lasted a year before Nikita Khrushchev ousted him, but Krushchev continued the consumer-goods focus and began to release people from the GULAG. Life in the Soviet Union was never free and easy, but it got more so as the decades went on. After Stalin’s death, you could usually avoid the GULAG as long as you didn’t publicly say anything against the state. Genuine loyalty became a reliable way to escape state punishment.
As long as the USSR lasted, it ran its economy with five-year-plans, which filtered down to smaller regional and industrial plans. The Party could not allocate investment resources the way the west did, since that depended on interest rates, and interest rates were anathema to Marxists. But the Soviets introduced a “discount rate” which was kind of an inverted interest rate, and worked more or less the same way.
Because of the inefficiency of central planning, surpluses and shortages occurred everywhere. No consumer good or food item was ever guaranteed. People waited in long lines for hours to get whatever there was a surplus of. Many took time off from work to do this, and smart managers usually let them. If the average Soviet citizen saw a line, he or she would join it, without knowing what the product being sold was, just on the chance that it might be something useful. Living standards were low, public health a disgrace and alcoholism rampant. The anonymous sexual rendezvous was a national pastime, and anonymity was an important part of it. A woman might be very repulsed, and turn hostile, if the man she was having sex with asked her name.
Such was life in a dictatorship with a top-down, command economy. In general, it was a bad idea. Democracy and markets work better.
An impacts study, examining the consequences of reaching (or not reaching) the 1.5 C goal:
CBC story based on PR:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/global-climate-goals-save-fisheries-1.3909494
Abstract and links:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6319/1591
Bottom line: 3 C would be a lot worse for global fisheries than 1.5 C. (I know, it’s a shocker.)
Re Jim Hunt @200.
Here is newer article from the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/22/ice-melting-temperatures-forecast-for-arctic-midwinter
“Over the coming days, some parts of the Arctic are expected to get gusts of warm air that are more than 20C hotter than usual for this time of year, some of which will tip over the 0C melting temperature of water.”
Daily mean temperature north of the 80th northern parallel, degrees C is updated daily here:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/meanTarchive/meanT_2016.png
The Guardian claim that “this event has at least a one-in-200-year return time”. What a load of rot! It is part of a trend, with 2012 having a similar return time. It will not only return next year, it will be even warmer. They continue “By the 2040s, the event is expected to occur every second year, on average.” However, it seems obvious to me that it will be exceeded every year from now on.
The reason is that with the winter ice struggling to reform, the American and Asian continents will cool faster than the Arctic Ocean. This will causes the polar vortex to split, and as it says in the article, the Arctic low pressure drags in warm air from the tropics over the North Atlantic Ocean. So record warm temperatures in the Arctic winter are assured from now on.
The long Arctic summer days, some six months long, will quickly melt the ice and warm the ocean surface during the summer to the extent that the winter ice will be unable to reform.
With the melt starting earlier last summer and the winter freeze being slower, …
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
… we have now passed a tipping point where the Arctic sea ice will rapidly disappear both in summer and in winter.
Will that cause the Arctic to release more methane as happened at the end of the Younger Dryas when the last abrupt warming happened?
Alastair, #221–“However, it seems obvious to me that it will be exceeded every year from now on.”
It seems obvious to me that you are underestimating variability in general, and in the Arctic in particular. Shall we revisit this next Christmas, for starters?
On the other hand, it does seem like this is great preconditioning for record low extents in 2017–and doubly so for record low ice *volumes*.
Oh, wait:
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2016/12/piomas-december-2016.html
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop/#/extent
So, record lows *now*.
Actually, it seems a reasonable speculation that what we are seeing is in part a reflection of decreased ice extent/area. With increased amounts of exposed water comes a not-insignificant increase in heat flux from ocean to atmosphere. There must be some contribution to mean surface temperatures as a result.
In the big picture, of course, that also means increased Arctic heat flux to space, which is a negative feedback on temperature.
Moral: quantifying the various interactions and fluxes is crucial if one wishes to have a solid projection of what is likely to occur–even if the intuitive assessment is (and mine definitely is!) that all this is Not A Good Thing.
Al @204 – The Guardian editorial was referring to global sea ice area, where the “dangle” briefly reached 8 sigma.
The sea ice article linked to by the editorial stated:
Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said that Arctic sea ice extent dipped for a short time in mid-November, an “almost unprecedented” event. Sea ice shrank by around 50,000 sq km (19,300 sq miles) in this period, mainly in the Barents Sea.
Perhaps “off the scale” is just more churnalistic licence?
Alastair @221 – To put your Grauniad quote in context:
King and colleagues compared model simulations with and without the influence of human-caused greenhouse gas concentrations.
“The record November-December temperatures in the Arctic are not seen in the natural world simulations where human influences have been removed,” King wrote in a piece published in The Conversation.
“In comparison, in the current climate with human effects included, this event has at least a one-in-200-year return time.”
By the 2040s, the event is expected to occur every second year, on average.
Model simulations != The real world?
BPL, with respect to the Soviet Union…
What exactly changed from the historical feudal system? How was Stalin not a Tsar, and the Commissars not Dukes and Earls, and so on?
This is the problem with these discussions, and why I keep trying to pin down the terminology– there is a theoretical construct, and then there is the implementation. Labels are changed, but traditional structures at the national level have a great deal of inertia and persistence.
It isn’t fair to blame lots of what happened on “Communism”; you could even argue that, like feudalism, this was a form of State Capitalism.
Too late, perhaps, to make it through moderation in time, but happy holidays to all celebrating one or more of them, and best wishes to everyone else…
210 – Thomas on Economy
It is now possible for individuals, small community/church groups and independent investors to build communities that are near zero fossil fuels. Solar, wind, electric car and storage technologies are mature. As markets expand these technologies will continue to improve. First cost are low, risk are low, time value is near zero (a solar/wind installation generates an income stream in less than a year from first dollar spent, in stark comparison to nuclear power that still requires 20 years from first dollar to first KW as witnessed by current projects in Georgia and South Carolina).
A variety of low budget financing options are available to support these fossil fuel free projects. Projects are limited only by the organizational/management skills and vision of the individual and community. We are not obligated to wait for Universities to divest or fossil fuel companies to understand the gun they hold to their own heads.
Smart developments will include the following elements:
– financing can be either through traditional 30 year mortgage, private investment or crowd sourcing
– homes can now be built to extremely low energy consumption standards, as low as 1/10th the typical American home.
– where construction costs are $2-3-4-500 per square foot fossil free technologies can be covered by reducing total square footage by 5-10% (1000sqft home at $200/sqft costs $200k, reducing square footage to 900 frees up $20,000 to pay for PV, storage and energy conservation measures. At $500/sqft $50,000 could be transferred from sq footage to fossil free. $50,000 is more than adequate to build a fossil free home.)
– dual function roofing systems incorporating PV elements the cost of both roofing and PV panels mounted over roofing.
– communities can may include generator for those rare times when sun is not available for 3 or more days.
– aging power grid is now replaced by local community energy production that is robust and immune to the threat of cyber warfare
– PV panel life is proven to be in excess of 50 years.
– communities and clustered housing would include agricultural element eliminating fossil fuels (and water resources) wasted on green lawns
Individuals and small communities can now build fossil fuel free housing and end the strangle hold held by legacy fossil fuel interests.
BPL, a link to sources on that Russian history would be helpful. Sounds awful.
In today’s news:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/23/the-arctic-is-behaving-so-bizarrely-and-these-scientists-think-they-know-why/
Brian Dodge at 177: Thank you for that response. I understand it to say that total surface ice contribution to SLR has accelerated from near equilibrium in 2000(ish) to 56gt/yr2 +/-8gt and equal to roughly 0.17mm/yr2 in acceleration of SLR.
Taking the 20th century average rate of SLR at 1.87mm/yr and crudely calculating 0.17mm/yr2 acceleration for past 16 years yields 2.72mm total 21st century acceleration for a current total rate of SLR at 4.6mm/yr.
I believe that current rate of SLR is calculated at 3.4mm/yr. Including all the error bands, my back of the napkin, schoolboy arithmetic predicts 2-4feet of SLR by 2100 (using the 0.17mm/yr2 +/-0.05 value). Not inconsistent with your more sophisticated quadratic model prediction of 1 meter by 2100. I will dig deeper into the Grace/Jason data.
Thanks Chrs
AMc at 221: “With the melt starting earlier last summer and the winter freeze being slower, …
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
… we have now passed a tipping point where the Arctic sea ice will rapidly disappear both in summer and in winter.
Will that cause the Arctic to release more methane as happened at the end of the Younger Dryas when the last abrupt warming happened?”
mike says:
I think there is little doubt that methane release will happen and I don’t see a way we put the warming ocean genie back in the bottle to avoid the methane release. The warmth that we have pushed into the ocean is in place and will be for a long time now. It is easy to observe the melting at the poles and recognize the trend and our situation. Professor Wadhams is looking like the winner in blue arctic ocean prediction contest. We are all losers in that situation, but the scientist losers who faulted Wadhams’ projections and methods will need to accept that their methodology and projections turned out to be badly flawed. All the models are wrong, some are useful, but if an important use of models was to communicate the urgency of our situation and help build support for meaningful action, then I think it is clear that the models that failed to suggest the current melt and breakdown of ice at the poles were not only wrong, they were useless and, at the end of the day, they were bad science.
Last Week
December 11 – 17, 2016 404.93 ppm
1 Year Ago
December 11 – 17, 2015 402.38 ppm
2.55 ppm increase in noisy number. The important number to take away is 405. Dr. Mann (correctly, imho) said in 2014 that we need to stay under 405. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-will-cross-the-climate-danger-threshold-by-2036/
I think we are already on very dangerous ground with a CO2 level of 405 and any trend/action that does not move that number down. If 405 means the loss of the Arctic ice cap, release of methanes from seabed and permafrost, then we have to move that number down and sooner is better than later. I don’t see the political will to make that happen around the globe. It’s not just Trump or a timid Obama administration, it’s brexit, nationalism, ideology, religious fervor of many flavors.
Dr. Mann was right in 2014 when he said we can’t let CO2 rise above 405. Well done, sir. Hammer on the message like there is no tomorrow. That is the ballgame.
Warm regards
Mike
https://weather.com/news/news/breitbart-misleads-americans-climate-change?cm_ven=T_WX_CD_120616_2
Thomas @205, you appear to suggest we should leave fossil fuels in the ground. This would be ideal, but would be hard to sell politically. A carbon tax is probably easier to sell politically, and although its an imposition on the market, its justifiable and is a scheme thats likely to work in a practical sense.
This whole thing is about “the art of the possible”
15 November 2016 From ABC Catalyst science program, with text
Human impacts on the way our planet functions have now become so extreme many scientists are claiming the Earth has shifted out of the Holocene state and into a new geological epoch. They’re calling it ‘The Anthropocene’, the new age of humans, because millions of years after we are gone, the scar of our existence will be visible in the rocks of tomorrow. In this episode we look at how the last 60 years of socio economic growth has transformed the human race into a geological force to rival nature.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4574615.htm
NARRATION
They charted the increasing use of water, fertiliser, paper and telecommunications. The graphs all started at 1750, just before the Industrial Revolution kicked off, and they all looked strikingly similar.
Prof Will Steffen
What absolutely shocked us when we looked at them was we…I expected to see a line pretty much going fairly evenly from 1750, maybe 1800 up to the present. Industrial revolution. What I saw was a very flat line from 1750, 1800, 1850, 1900. Then from about 1950 they all skyrocketed.
NARRATION
Although this post-war boom period was known to historians, what wasn’t known was the corresponding shift in Earth system function.
Prof Will Steffen
We had the famous greenhouse gases. And again they were creeping up from the Industrial Revolution, for sure. CO2 is the one that everyone knows but we also had methane, which is very important, and we had nitrous oxide, which people don’t think about. It’s very long-lived, associated with nitrogen fertilisers, with agriculture. The nitrogen cycle is hugely important – I would argue almost as important as the carbon cycle.
All of them were creeping up from 1750 but, again, you see a breakpoint around 1950, going up very sharply. We looked at global surface temperature – again, very wiggly. But then from about 1960 or 1970 we see a sharp increase. We looked at the marine fish capture and, again, we see a sweeping up after 1950, but interestingly we see a strong plateau from about 1995 to 2010. You can say, “Oh, we’ve gotten smaller. We’ve gotten sustainable.” The answer is no. The answer is we’ve just fished out the planet. We’ve fished out most of the large fishes and they are going down.
So these are extremely big changes in magnitude. And the systems around us that are used to geologically normal rates of change – the Barrier Reef, south-west Tasmania, oil forests in Canada and Russia – can’t cope with the rates of change that are occurring now. That’s why we’re seeing extensive bleaching, wildfires, insects in the north and so on.
NARRATION
So what’s the cause of this sudden and dramatic shift? It would be easy to look at the graphs and single out a rapidly rising population. But this would be a mistake.
Prof Will Steffen
What we found was the single biggest factor was actually consumption. And we found that 18% of the population was driving 74% of global consumption. So even though stuff was being increasingly made in China and India, it was being consumed in the OECD countries.
see more http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4574615.htm
Barton Paul Levinson. I have always been sarcastic, but Im a nice person mostly.
I actually quite enjoyed your history of the Soviet Union immediately above this. One problem in analysing the USSR is what caused the problem, economics or politics? I mean clearly government ownership is destined to fail in a dictatorship, because the government will become lazy and entrenched, sort of like a huge monopoly.
But this leaves the economic question. Its fair to say the Soviet union is evidence massive state ownership is a suspect idea in a general economic sense. However State ownership of things like health and education has worked in several countries in the modern democratic western world. I think partly this is because governments are elected so have reasons to run them well, and partly because private ownership does have some problems with some specific things.
But markets and private ownership work well for many things like car manufacture. Evidence clearly shows this in britain where they have tried both car manufacture by the private sector and state.
Im just saying the picture is not black and white. State ownership is not proven to be completely wrong by the Soviet Union example. It may also depend on the nature of the enterprise, and whether the state runs a company directly, or simply owns it as state owned enterprise such that it is managed by the appropriate people independently of the state.
232 nigelj says: “Thomas @205, you appear to suggest we should leave fossil fuels in the ground.”
Sooner then later yes. This seems to be the major take away message of several decades of climate science long term.
re: “but would be hard to sell politically.”
I think trying to sell a carbon tax / price has been ongoing since the 1990s with little to no progress ‘politically’ or practically.
I agree: This whole thing is about “the art of the possible” — while not forgetting the critical importance of effectiveness and timeliness.
It’s a waste of time doing the possible if it makes no difference over the long term. History has proved the impossibility to date of a price on carbon or a carbon tax in the USA and the majority of OECD nations and the largest future polluters in the world. Maybe there is an important lesson in that?
cheers
227 Chrstopher: all encouraging news and advances and new options on the table these days.
“the strangle hold held by legacy fossil fuel interests” – and by the strangle hold of society / inertia in general and an economic order with an entrenched systemic FF energy supply to the masses.
Non-hydro non-nuclear renewable energy is still only ~1% of total energy supply use today. The question is how soon would you like that be at 80%?
The second question is then how to best achieve that Goal in the time frame?
Remembering that today’s societies and economic realities are based upon a very long term ‘cheap energy supply’ and a manufacturing engineering and science based economy relying heavily on that cheap energy supply and mass distribution network continuing.
There is no part of the current social and global economic order that is not touched by the impact of a systemic cheap energy supply to the masses.
Think of a pack of kittens unraveling a box of wool all over your home. And compare the difference between the average suburban home built circa 1950s to the huge homes being built today. Much has changed including building codes/regulations.
Everything ‘normative’ is connected, or call it interconnected.
z 225,
The difference was in the micromanagement of the economy. The Tsar was a dictator with a vicious intelligence service, the Okhrana, which operated very like the later Cheka in all its alphabet incarnations. But it was largely a free-market economy and those who stayed out of the Tsar’s way were usually safe–unless they were Jewish, in which case they need to cope with periodic pogroms.
Stalin had railroads, and at one point (1938) had about 10% of the population locked up in the GULAG. That was unprecedented in the history of the world.
And to you, Kevin! Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, or Winter Solstice, or whatever you celebrate!
Hank 228,
The best overall source is Antonov-Ovseyenko’s 1982 book, “The Time of Stalin.” As I say, he lived in the USSR and had access to the records of the Central Statistical Administration. The many books on Soviet history by Robert Conquest are also very useful.
235 Thomas, 232 nigelj says: “Thomas @205, you appear to suggest we should leave fossil fuels in the ground.” Sooner than later yes. This seems to be the major take away message of several decades of climate science long term……….
The science? Please see the following examples:
NARRATION – Just to prevent temperatures rising more than two degrees, a target most countries have signed up to, requires a drastic change of tack.
Prof Will Steffen (Nov 2016) – We have to leave nearly 90% of existing coal reserves in the ground. We have to leave half of gas reserves in the ground. About 35% of oil reserves in the ground. So, no Galilee Basin, no new gas, no new oil. And that’s to have a 50/50 chance.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4574615.htm
October 18, 2016
http://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/2016/10/part-one-should-we-leave-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground-which-ones/
November 30, 2015
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-biggest-climate-challenge-leaving-carbon-in-the-ground/
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/keep-it-in-the-ground/
Take Action?
https://blocktrumpscabinet.com/?source=greenpeace
https://secure3.convio.net/gpeace/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=2003&s_src=actions
October 14, 2016
http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2016/10/14/leaving-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground-who-what-and-when/
Will Steffen 21.04.2015
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/unburnable-carbon-why-we-need-to-leave-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground
Bill McKibben posted Feb 15, 2016
Physics can impose a bracing clarity on the normally murky world of politics. It can make things simple. Not easy, but simple.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/life-after-oil/why-we-need-to-keep-80-percent-of-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground-20160215
Take Action?
It’s Time to Break Free from Fossil Fuels. Unwavering resistance. Fierce solidarity. Courage by the gigaton.
https://breakfree2016.org/
World Leaders: Freeze New Fossil Fuel Development
https://act.350.org/sign/freeze-fossil-fuel-development/
January 2015 – New research is first to identify which reserves must not be burned to keep global temperature rise under 2C, including over 90% of US and Australian coal and almost all Canadian tar sands.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/07/much-worlds-fossil-fuel-reserve-must-stay-buried-prevent-climate-change-study-says
November 3, 2014
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2014/11/03/ipcc-avoid-dangerous-climate-change-must-leave-fossil-fuels-ground/#.WF9NYn1rWFZ
LINGO:
The UN climate negotiations have failed to deliver binding emissions cuts and CO2 emissions continue to rise. The proposed responses to the climate crisis are inadequate, unambitious, and in some cases counterproductive. False solutions are getting promoted, that do not reduce the problem overall, such as offsetting, CDM, carbon markets, agrofuels, big hydropower. Pledges to reduce emissions are voluntary and focused purely on the demand-side. In the absence of a global cap on emissions – which seems decades away – demand-side mitigation isn’t a guaranteed successful strategy.
Reducing emissions in limited parts of the world economy, while maintaining fossil extraction at the same level only manages to displace emissions.
The reality of mitigation is that to stay within the proposed 1.5°C or 2°C temperature rise, the taps must be turned off, and the better part of known reserves of fossil fuels must remain untouched in the ground (see the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report – https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/ ).
http://leave-it-in-the-ground.org/why-lingo-2/
Reducing extraction drives up fossil energy prices all around the world and changes the game for the race between clean and dirty energy, everywhere.
http://leave-it-in-the-ground.org/extraction-at-the-unfccc/
08. October 2013
What Does the New IPCC (AR5) Report Say About Climate Change?
8. To stay below 2°C of warming, most fossil fuels must stay buried in the ground.
We’ve never done that before. There is no political or economic system anywhere in the world currently that can persuade an energy company to leave a valuable fossil fuel resource untapped. There is no government in the world that has demonstrated the ability to forgo the economic wealth from natural resource extraction, for the good of the planet as a whole. We’re lacking both the political will and the political institutions to achieve this. Finding a way to achieve this presents us with a challenge far bigger than we ever imagined.
http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2013/10/what-does-the-new-ipcc-report-say-about-climate-change/
Fossil fuel production in a 2°C world: The equity implications of a
diminishing carbon budget. Three premises underlie our analysis:
(i) countries will eventually take action to substantially curtail global CO
2 emissions,
(ii) carbon capture and storage will not obviate the need for significant constraints on fossil fuel exploitation, and thus
(iii) fossil fuel extraction will need to decrease substantially relative to business as usual (aka current supply).
https://www.sei-international.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/Climate/SEI-DB-2016-Equity-fossil-fuel-production-rents.pdf
Refs usually refer to the IPCC AR5-Synthesis Report 2014
eg pg 66-67
http://www.ekosofia.se/engelska_pdf/SYR_AR5_LONGERREPORT.pdf
or pg 63
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/SYR_AR5_FINAL_full.pdf
Warming caused by CO2 emissions is effectively irreversible over multi-century timescales unless measures are taken to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Ensuring CO2-induced warming remains likely less than 2°C requires cumulative CO2 emissions from all anthropogenic sources to remain below about 3650GtCO2 (1000 GtC), over half of which were already emitted by 2011. {WGI SPM E.8, WGI TS TFE.8, WGI 12.5.2, 12.5.3, 12.5.4}
“About 1900 [1650 to 2150] GtCO2 were emitted by 2011, leaving about 1000 GtCO2 to be consistent with this temperature goal. Estimated total fossil carbon reserves exceed this remaining amount by a factor of 4 to 7, with resources much larger still. {WGI SPM E.8, WGI 12.5.4, Figure 12.45; WGI TS TFE.8, Figure 1, TS.SM.10, WG III Tables SPM.1, 6.3 and 7.2}”
Since people will, under any plausible scenario, continue to burn fossil fuels for several decades, if keeping the CO2 concentration below 405 is important, should we focus more effort toward methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere rather than attempting to change world behavior which IS NOT going to change quickly?
n 234: Its fair to say the Soviet union is evidence massive state ownership is a suspect idea in a general economic sense. However State ownership of things like health and education has worked in several countries in the modern democratic western world.
BPL: Agreed. I’m not trying to say the Soviet Union demonstrates all socialism is bad. I’m using it as an extreme example of trying to run everything from the top down. It just plain doesn’t work, and to accomplish it at all, you need a totalitarian state. I like a mixed system myself–mostly free market, but with government stepping in to provide everything free markets don’t do well, including courts, army, police, roads, health care, health and safety regulation, and a social safety net.
Hank @228 – Santa’s grotto is just around the corner from us here in Great White Con Ivory Towers. One of his little helpers just popped in to ask me to apologise to anybody who received their presents late. Santa was too busy mopping up his basement to set off on his rounds on schedule.
Air temperature near the North Pole reached zero degrees Celsius on December 22nd. See the comments on our December 2016 Arctic Report Card
In related news the BBC reports that an expert in such matters:
“Was confident that [Santa’s] sled would cope with the conditions. Santa is most likely overdressed though. Maybe in the future we’ll see him in a light jacket or plastic mac.”
A very Merry Christmas (etc.) to one and all!
Merry Newtonmas, Everyone.
Hank @231 – Just in case anybody here fancies adding their two new pence worth, we are currently seeking contributions to our campaign to haul David Rose and the Mail on Sunday, the original source of the Breitbart misinformation referred to by Weather.com, in front of the Great British “Independent (sic!) Press Standards Organisation”:
http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2016/12/post-truth-global-and-arctic-temperatures/#comment-216713
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-will-cross-the-climate-danger-threshold-by-2036/
Dr. Mann was right in 2014 when he said we can’t let CO2 rise above 405. Well done, sir. Hammer on the message like there is no tomorrow. That is the ballgame.
Daily CO2
December 23, 2016: 405.06 ppm
December 23, 2015: 402.65 ppm
nuff said
Mike
206 – “How can anyone measure a 1 to 3 mm change in sea level?”
The same way that it is determined that people are getting taller. You compute an average.
In addition, all sensors provide an “average” reading of whatever it is they are measuring. Satellite altitude sensors for example may look down and see a distance to a patch of land/water that is several hundred meters in radius. The sensor will respond with some measure of the “average” taken over that area.
Additional averaging can be done over larger areas to get averages (generally more accurate), for larger geographical regions.
How much does the ocean change height in a patch that is several hundred meters in radius.
Please estimate how much and get back to us with your results.
Denialism = The real world on Plane Kook.
““The record November-December temperatures in the Arctic are not seen in the natural world simulations where human influences have been removed,” King wrote in a piece published in The Conversation.
“In comparison, in the current climate with human effects included, this event has at least a one-in-200-year return time.”
By the 2040s, the event is expected to occur every second year, on average.
Model simulations != The real world?” – Jim Hunt
242 – “I like a mixed system myself–mostly free market, but with government stepping in to provide everything free markets don’t do well, including courts, army, police, roads, health care, health and safety regulation, and a social safety net.”
Yes. It is obvious that essential services can not be run well by Corporations in a Free Market, for they will game the system to gouge the public, provide lower quality service and at a higher cost.
The free market can however be permitted to dabble in the inconsequential. Things like designer feminine hygiene products, the production of Children’s tamagotchi toys, and gravy boats for thanx giving dinner tables are a perfect match for free market production.
241 – “we focus more effort toward methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere”
I have this plan for a chemical plant that burns coal to get the energy to force Carbon molecules together to make coal and oxygen.
I’m sure it can work once I figure out how to violate the laws of thermodynamics.
Any ideas?