This month’s open thread. Focus on climate science. Be kind.
Reader Interactions
179 Responses to "Unforced Variations: Feb 2020"
Killiansays
Re #29 Al Bundy said Killian: And, where did I post no alternatives were being discussed/tried? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
AB: Omission of available evidence is evidence of a lack of impartiality.
No, you’re lying and being argumentative and showing you do not understand logic. I made one point and one point only because that is what I chose to focus on. Others are free to expand that conversation and that does not require lying about what others have or have not said. That’s just assholery. I have said wind is unsustainable. I said wind is unsustainable above. These are two things that are facts: It has been as currently practiced and is as currently practiced. There is nothing to exclude on this point. There is nothing to refute this point. That people are *trying* to make it sustainable does not change the past nor the present.
You, however, continue to reveal yourself willing to lie and be a petty anklebiter just to score imagined points in some stupid game in your head when you say I excluded germane info when I did not, particularly after I have already stated these same points in response to your crap.
Your behavior is disgusting. These are time for serious people, not anklebiters.
Killiansays
Re #37 Polar Flyer said Re #20: Are you proposing that something is unsustainable if it generates any amount of waste at all
People who do regenerative design don’t think of waste in the way you and others posting here seem to. We acknowledge that there are myriad loops that make up a whole in any ecosystem. Short term, there is a lot of waste in nature. “Dog poop! Dog waste! OMG, dogs are unsustainable!” the unliterati here would have you believe is the claim. As one unliterati stated, well, the planet recycles itself as if that is relevant to human lifetimes, or even civilization. As Kevin has pointed out, sure, oil can be created again, just not meaningfully for humanity in the scales were dealing with.
So, is any waste unsustainable? Yes. Is any waste unsustainable? No. It very much depends on time frames. However, there is a huge but here: On short time frames, human time frames, rate of climate change time frames, very little humanity does is sustainable.
Did he *propose* something is unsustainable (over germane time frames) if it creates waste? No. It’s a fact, and not in any way debateable or in question except from people who are willfully blind, typically ideologically or out of personal fear of a loss of way of living. They paint both sustainability andunsustainability as evils to be avoided rather than facts to be dealt with.
The sun warms Earth. Giant wind generators are unsustainable. These two statements are equally correct and equally non-controversial. Anyone who disagrees with this is dealing with personal issues they sorely need to resolve.
and if it’s not sustainable, then it is worthless?
It’s a question, but it’s a Straw Man. How do you jump from unsustainable to worthless with nothing inbetween?
Wouldn’t it be more appropriate
And then you reinforce the Straw Man by treating it as fact without waiting for an answer.
to compare relative measures of sustainability as we try to make improvements
Why this is so hard for people is one of the biggest challenges we face. Fear of loss of comforts, fear of change, and blind allegiance to growth ideology. Please try to acceot this: Sustainability is a threshold, not a continuum. You can talk about parts of things being sustainable even if the whole is not, but the only thing that matters on long time frames is whether the whole is sustainable or not. If not, you don’t have a solution, you have something that continues to damage the planet in some way, shape, or form, and we must move past that. If want to frame wind generators as x% recycleable, as the source I cited does, you will have no argument from me. That’s accuracy. That’s truth. But when you say x% sustainable, you’re talking nonsense because when you reach the point that the materials for that object have been fully consumed, that object will cease to be made again. It’s binary: Sustainable/unsustainable.
To put a fine point on it, the simple shift in language to avoid constant knee-jerk foolishness WRT the issue of sustainable or not is to speak of recyclability, reusability when things are sub-sustainable.
say, the waste generation of traditional fuels vs. the waste generation of windmill technology? I think we should ask which technology is “better,” not which technology is “perfect.”
That’s nonsense on the face of it. We should never discuss sustainability? We should never seek sustainability? Without achieving sustainability, society collapses at some point, and may well go extinct, but let’s not seek that?
Good lord…
I am suspicious because a common technique of denialists is to hold a technology to an unreasonable standard, and then when it–naturally–fails to measure up to perfection, it gets dismissed as bad.
And a common technique of Capitalists and technocopians is to pretend sustainability and limits don’t matter, as you are.
After all, NO technology will EVER be perfectly “sustainable.”
Huh? False. I can have a garden indefinitely and make all my own tools out of fully sustainable tech. Many other things are the same. I must assume here you mean nothing hi-tech is truly sustainable? For the moment that is true, most likely. I doubt there is any widespread hi-tech gadgets that are sustainable. There might be something in a lab somewhere under development.
That shouldn’t stop us from striving for better sustainability.
But why should it stop us from talking about actual sustainability? If it were proven to be *necessary* to abandon all unsustainable activities to save the biosphere, and so humanity and likely most current biota, would you do it?
Or would you ride the wave into the rocks, simplicity be damned?
The information about windmill-related landfill waste is incomplete without comparing it to other technologies.
Bull. It is what it is. It’s bizarre to say an article cannot cover wind generators unless it covers issues you demand.
Goodness…
It is important for such articles to be written do end the sorts of delusions a vast majority still harbor. You can count on one hand the number of posters at this site who understand sustainable systems. Less than a hand, evern. No, this is an issue that must be understood or we will fail to effectively deal with climate, et al.: One cannot successfully design systems based on delusions and illusions.
Al Bundysays
BPL,
mrkia was surely just being a clown, but his point, that an inflection point was probably just passed, doesn’t rely on a robust trend. He’s saying, “This COULD be the start of a 30+ year decline and nyah, nyah, nyah you can’t prove me wrong. So there!” I addressed his “point” (parroting Kevin IIRC) by noting that there was no effective cooling, that an El Nino masked the underlying warming.
Yo mrkia! BPL’s sooo impatient, eh? Trump’s not even through with his first term. Everyone knows that he’s draining the swamp, which is cooling the planet. So everyone better vote for Trump so he can continue his valorous trade war, which is foiling the Chinese hex. (Hoaxes are ever so last season)
____
Killian,
TLDR (Too ludicrous, didn’t read)
You left out critical data that essentially inverts the tone of the article. I’d expect that from mrkia.
Killian says “I can have a garden indefinitely and make all my own tools out of fully sustainable tech.”
These need to be listed, especially given he has said in the past that any use of metals is unsustainable. I assume they must be tools completely made of timber.
nigeljsays
Not sure if my comment posted. Will try again. Killian says “I can have a garden indefinitely and make all my own tools out of fully sustainable tech.”
Can he please explain what these tools are made of. He’s said in the past that use of metals is not sustainable, so are they all made just of timber? Or what?
Doug Meyer @50,
If you read (or have a trawl through) Zelinka et al (2020) you will see that they are analysing the output of models from across the community and that includes the NCAR CESM2 model.
You ask for progress updates on this issue of high ECS emerging from CMIP6 models. The Science article you link-to quotes a number of active researchers whose contributions can be followed on Google Scholar (thus here and here and here) or Researchgate (thus here).
I repeat myself, but I think the watchword is still “early-days!”
Killiansays
Looks like higher ECS estimates are legit. Who coulda predicted that…?
Dunno if Killian will give a crisp answer or a tirade, but pretty much all pre-Columbian ag in the New World used stone and wood tools. It was pretty effective, too, if less labor-efficient than with more ‘modern’ implements.
The trouble is that pre-Columbian ag plus hunting & gathering supported a population of one hundred million or less. (How much less is controversial, but half that seems to be a more common estimate.) The current population of the Americas is just shy of a billion. And we now have a bunch of seriously degraded land and a deteriorating climate to deal with, too.
There’s a serious gap there; Killian is sanguine about covering it. I’m considerably less so.
Al Bundysays
Nigelj: I assume they must be tools completely made of timber.
AB: actually, Killian has talked about legacy metals. This works because he’s recently said that seven generations is close enough to forever to count.
And besides, the Stone Age didn’t end though lack of stones, but a lack of folks who care about sustainability.
_____
Killian: Looks like higher ECS estimates are legit. Who coulda predicted that…?
;-)
AB: perhaps 65% of RC’s regulars. But only one could have taken credit for being the one and only Stable Genius in the room.
Al Bundysays
Kevin M: The trouble is that pre-Columbian ag plus hunting & gathering supported a population of one hundred million or less. (How much less is controversial, but half that seems to be a more common estimate
AB: There’s plenty of land. Six billion acres gives a family of four around 25 acres. Cut by 80% just because and that’s 5 acres per homestead plus 20 acres of commons. And remember, we know lots of stuff that pre-Columbians couldn’t know. (The converse is also true)
And besides, the conversion will kill off so many folks that your 50 million “optimal” population might be quickly achieved.
” Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters
Sons of bankers, sons of lawyers
Turn around and say good morning to the night
For unless they see the sky
But they can’t and that is why
They know not if it’s dark outside or light” Bernie Taupin & Elton John
But the bankers’ gardeners will probably survive the transition.
Killiansays
Re #59 Kevin McKinney said There’s a serious gap there; Killian is sanguine about covering it. I’m considerably less so.
but you are not educated on the topic, not educated in creating regenerative food systems, so your lack of confidence is moot.
If you’ve got specific issues, ask, but all you need to know is one person can feed ten pretty easily.
Killiansays
Or, you can use simply, really simple, logic: Regenerative systems are at least as productive as chem ag, and more productive in drought, so where, exactly, is there room for doubt give we are wasting 1/3 of global supply and feeding 7.5 billion already?
Some things don’t require more than a couple minutes of really obvious logically constructed thoughts.
Killiansays
Re #60 Al Bundy said AB: perhaps 65% of RC’s regulars. But only one could have taken credit for being the one and only
Yes, child, the one and only to predict it more than ten years ago. I took David Rutledge to task for modelling coal with MAGICC using *only* 3C and no other runs at other sensitivities bc I already knew climate sensitivity would come in high, but also that it’s really crappy risk analysis to assume it won’t even if the evidence overall strongly supports that. Rutledge was being, imo, irresponsibe in doing so. He also did not consider TCR or ECS and even if Charney were to be exactly 3, the others, particularly ECS will not end up being as low as once thought. But, again, it’s about the risk assessment and presenting somewhat dishonest probabilities.
Pre-Columbian ag? Who the hell cares about that? Where have you seen anyone, anywhere suggest pre-Columbian for feeding the planet in the future?
siddsays
Hausfather on CMIP6:
“While a subset of new models are showing much more warming than their predecessors, most models are not”
” does not mean that we should dismiss these new higher sensitivity models; they show that there is a chance of some very-high-end warming outcomes that we should not ignore. At the same time, we should acknowledge that these new estimates remain outliers both among the 30 CMIP6 models available so far and among the wider set of climate sensitivity estimates in the scientific literature. ”
“. As more models have come in, however, the average sensitivity of CMIP6 models has fallen. ”
“Nine of the 30 CMIP6 models currently available have a climate sensitivity higher than any CMIP5 models. These extreme models have pulled up the average, despite the fact that nearly half (13) have a climate sensitivity lower than the 3.2C average of CMIP5. ”
“A number of the higher sensitivity models in CMIP6 have had trouble accurately “hindcasting” historical temperatures. Some show almost no warming over the 20th century ”
“High sensitivity models (in red) generally show more warming than observations over the last three decades, while those with a TCR of around 2.2C or less (in blue) tend to agree much better with observations. High ECS models tend to have high TCR”
“the mismatches between some high sensitivity models and observations are large enough and occur over long enough periods of time that they are unlikely to only be due to natural variability. ”
“Only a third of studies suggested that an ECS of 5C or above was within the uncertainty range, and only six of the 142 studies suggested that the most likely ECS value was 5C or above. More broadly, there are relatively few studies that do not rely on climate models — such as those using instrumental temperatures or paleoclimate proxies — that support estimates of ECS exceeding 5C.”
“These new 5C ECS models should remind us that large uncertainties (and long tails of risk) remain, but they do not by themselves overturn the long-term consensus that climate sensitivity is likely somewhere around 3C (+/- 1.5C) per doubling of CO2.”
Killian’s link to Killian: MAGICC is magic! If it’s good enough for the IPCC, it’s good enough for me! (Even though it’s essential assumption is wrong?) YUP! (So, why did you choose 3 instead of 6?) It’s MAGICC! (But the MAGICC website has this to say, “The… 90% confidence interval values for the climate sensitivity have been updated to… 1.5-6.0°C (previously 1.5-4.5°C).”. 90% seems pretty good to me, so why did you run it with 3C?)
AB: I wondered why you didn’t actually quote yourself. Now I know. Your concern was about some person’s choice to use 3C for sensitivity instead of a range. You talked about risk and catastrophic possibilities should James Hansen be shown correct. You did’t know diddly nor were you ahead of the majority of the regs here. MOST of us have been noting for well over a decade that when scientists are always saying, “It’s worse than we thought” the odds are that that same refrain will continue, that it’s still worse than the median scientist thinks now and it will continue to be worse than s)he’ll think tomorrow. And most of us would bet on James Hansen instead of the median scientist.
You have given no evidence that nobody else thought the nebulous pseudo-consensus was too optimistic, that we all thought our hero James Hansen was/is wrong. But you sure continue to give mountains of evidence that your self-aggrandizement and denigration of others brings you nothing but contempt. I notice that in your linked conversation the other participants were disgusted with you. And you bring that conversation up as evidence? Couldn’t you find a single conversation that doesn’t paint yourself unflatteringly?
zebrasays
Saviors Of The World,
So here we have people who are going to save the world, but who don’t have the mental/emotional discipline to keep a couple of blog threads organized.
And over on FR, where this fantasy about pre-Columbian Kumbaya belongs, Kevin is engaging in another pseudo-discussion of climate science, which belongs here.
A good example of why grandiose magic-solution solutions, whether high-tech nuclear or low-tech hippie, are a waste of internet electricity. Hu-mans have to do them, don’tcha know?
Andrewsays
Professor Michael Mann
“This week we learned that the critical Thwaites Glacier that holds in most of the West Antarctic ice sheet is close to irreversible melting. If it goes we get an additional 10 metres of sea level rise.”
As we all know the oceans heat content reached a record high in 2019 (see WMO report)and of course will continue to rise fast for the foreseeable future.
At this point multi-meter SLR over the coming centuries seems inevitable.
And besides, the conversion will kill off so many folks that your 50 million “optimal” population might be quickly achieved.
Hey, I never said anything about an “optimal” population! But yeah, I think the ‘conversion’ might indeed be pretty lethal. And honestly, I’m kind of squeamish about that.
I propose that this conversation move over to FV, where it is precisely on topic. But:
#62, Killian–
you are not educated on the topic, not educated in creating regenerative food systems, so your lack of confidence is moot.
Fair enough. But I’ve asked for entry points to education on this many times in the past. The sources I’ve been pointed to were–in my perception, at least–general and vague. Still interested to learn more, so pointers to substantial information are welcome.
Approaching my deficient education from another angle, what do you think of this article from 2012?
(Note to the interested: it’s longish and rather discursive at times, but covers a lot of points we’ve discussed here in one way or another. It also cites differing opinions and points of view among permaculturists (for instance, on the value and potential of urban life.)
Killian, #63:
Regenerative systems are at least as productive as chem ag, and more productive in drought, so where, exactly, is there room for doubt give we are wasting 1/3 of global supply and feeding 7.5 billion already?
That is claimed, and there is considerable anecdotal evidence that it *could* be true. For instance, Christopher Rhodes (cited above) gives the important example of a permaculture project in an arid area in Jordan which had, among other things, olive trees established within three years of work. The funding for the project lapsed after four years, but even ten years later beneficial effects were observable. If you can be productive in the Jordanian desert, you can probably be productive in a great many different environments (p. 164.)
But there’s also the question of “productive” with respect to which inputs, exactly? Obviously, the whole point is to quit using artificial fertilizers and pesticides, more or less completely. And that in itself would cut agricultural emissions a lot. But what of human labor inputs? Rhodes again:
Most of the skills attendant to farming without fossil fuels are forgotten: a good example of this is the television series, “Victorian Farm”, shown on BBC 2 recently. Here a team of three (two men and a woman) spent a year living and farming as Victorians would have done, and their roles are rather traditional. The woman attends to the cooking, the housework – it takes practically the full week to do all the washing and ironing – and the poultry, including killing the birds when they need to be eaten; while the two men learn to plough with a heavy horse, build a pig-sty, harvest the crops and hay, and between the three of them they do everything using, at best, hand-operated technology which was an innovation of Victorian engineering, hugely labour-saving than without them, but still all heavily manual.
I watched this series in wonder, but with the simmering sense of fear that we might have to return to this way of life, and if so, the question arises of how could we cope with relearning so many forgotten skills, and indeed all the hard manual work? It is work for young men, at best, and the average age of a British farmer is now 60.
True, Victorian agriculture was not permaculture. But per Rhodes, labor productivity will be much lower. For instance:
There are just 150,000 British farmers left now, and we will need around 11 – 12 million, i.e. every family will be involved, not merely those running a collection of industrial-scale farms… It seems probable that the dominant demographic trend of the 21st Century is going to be re-ruralisation (or de-industrialisation). That is not to say that the cities will disappear, but the proportion of people involved directly in food production will, of necessity, increase, in either rural or urban environments.
Since the population of the UK was around 64 million in 2012, when Rhodes was writing, that would imply that he expected one farmer to feed about 5 people–which I take to be reasonably in agreement with Killian’s comment (#62) that “one person can feed ten pretty easily.”
Of course, the flip side of needing more labor is providing more jobs. And what could be more intrinsically satisfying–provided the recompense is fair and you are not being exploited–than knowing that you are providing the biological basis for human life, improving the ecology and literally the soil, and contributing toward the solution of the climate crisis? But of course, those folks have to be able to do the job–they need to have the physical strength and stamina to do whatever needs doing, and the educational/practical background to understand what needs doing.
So, if you’re talking about the UK, you’re talking about training (in some form or fashion) 11-12 million people. The current UK labor force that is actually employed is about 33 million, so that’s a third or so of the total. I think that’s certainly doable, but it’s also very much a non-trivial task. It would be very useful and interesting to consider how that might be done with maximal rapidity and efficiency.
Maybe by fiat land redistribution to recreate commons-based communities, which would have the legal/institutional stability needed to have folks ‘buy-in’ and really commit to learning? They could then be supported by consultant permaculturists who could be mentors to multiple communities, thus getting the maximum instructional value out of their expertise. It sounds a little like the Transition Town thing, from the relatively little I know of the latter, but with real institutional support from the dominant political structure.
(Of course, that may be an even bigger ‘ask’ than anything discussed above; I seem to gather from previous (Killian) comments that such a thing is not really expected by you, and that sustainable communities will in rather tend to arise, in your view, despite the extant polity or its heirs. Given the current dysfunctions of democracy across much of the ‘West’, that’s certainly a defensible position.)
NOAA are the first surface record to report for January 2020 and it’s another “scorchyissimo!!!” starter for 2020.
The NOAA global anomaly for January sits at +1.14ºC, an increase on Dec2019’s +1.05ºC; indeed warmer than any monthly anomaly for all of 2019 and the warmest January in the NOAA record. The roll of warmest-January behind 2020 runs 2016 (+1.12ºC), 2017 (+0.98ºC), 2019 (+0.94ºC), 2007 (+0.92ºC), 2015 (+0.84ºC), 2018 (+0.75ºC), 2010 (+0.74ºC) and 2003 (+0.72ºC).
Jan 2020 sits 4th in the NOAA all-month anomaly record behind Dec15, Feb16 & Mar2016, these three the peak of the months boosted by the big 2015/16 El Niño.
The last decade of monthly anomalies for the various temperature records is plotted out here (usually 2 clicks to ‘download your attachment’)
nigeljsays
Killian says “Yes, child, the one and only to predict it more than ten years ago’
On this website perhaps. I haven’t been reading it for 10 years so I will assume Killian is correct. But I’ve read comments from plenty of people on other websites who have thought climate sensitivity is high, and this is going back further than ten years, easily. They gave various reasons for this. Its not exactly a unique belief confined just to Killian.
nigeljsays
“Or, you can use simply, really simple, logic: Regenerative systems are at least as productive as chem ag, and more productive in drought,”
Citations please based on field trials. From published, peer reviewed journals, not permaculture weekly.
Killiansays
Mike, a Twitter feed you might find of interest re emissions.
Re #51: While I truly appreciate you responding, I feel like you answered my questions with a lot of figurative eye-rolling that didn’t really get at what I’m driving at. I’m not trying to debate whether sustainability is a threshold or a continuum, even if we clearly have different opinions on which it is. What I -am- trying to do, is understand the motivation and context behind your attack on wind power.
Maybe you hate fossil fuels, but think we need to do better than wind because wind doesn’t meet your definition of “sustainable.” That’s fine, but people like that seem rare (in the USA).
Maybe you are trying to find fault with wind power because your debate strategy is to cast doubt upon alternatives to fossil fuel energy. i.e. implicitly supporting fossil fuels by arguing for the futility of “renewable” alternatives. That’s not fine, but it is unfortunately all-to-common (in the USA). (“Well green energy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, so lets just stick with the advantages of oil, people!”)
So maybe you can simply confirm, please, in plain english: which is less bad– wind, or oil? Would you prefer a renewable-based energy grid (including wind) to a carbon-based energy grid given our current state of technology? Or on the other hand, just say so, if you think wind energy is so severely fundamentally flawed that you’d rather just stick with legacy energy sources like oil and coal until some other better technology comes around.
But I realize these aren’t the only binary options so if you take a third viewpoint, please explain it to folks because I’m not the only one who is struggling to understand you.
And yet another temperature record with a “scorchyissimo!!!” starter for 2020. RSS TLT has been posted for January at +0.88ºC, as per GISTEMP SAT (but not UAH TLT) a rise on Dec2019 and higher than any 2019 anomaly.
RSS’s January 2020 is just pipped to top-spot January by 2016 which managed +0.90ºC (It was equal-top in UAH & top in GISTEMP) but with the El-Niño-boost being amplified in these TLT records and without an El-Niño-boost this year, challenging Jan2016 for top-spot in TLT is surely “scorchyissimo!!!”
Behind top-2016 & 2nd-top-2020, the RSS January list runs 2010 (+0.74ºC), 2007 (+0.70ºC), 2019 (+0.69ºC), 2017 (+0.63ºC), 1998 & 2013 (both +0.62ºC), 2015 (+0.59ºC) and 2018 (+0.58ºC).
Jan 2020 sits 7th in the RSS TLT all-month record (=10th in UAH TLT, 4th in GISTEMP).
(The RSS browser tool shows the RSS Jan2020 warmth to be mainly driven by to Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes which saw its anomaly rise from Dec2019’s +0.92ºC to Jan2020’s +01.27ºC. Astute observers will note that the situation in UAH TLT is different.)
(Mention of the GISTEMP January anomaly upthread was not prescience [GISSTEMP had yet to post for January] but error caused by blind habit – usually GISTEMP report before NOAA.)
And GISTEMP are also now indeed reporting “scorchyissimo!!!” for January, with an anomaly of +1.18ºC, an increase on Dec2019’s +1.10ºC and the warmest January on record, ahead of Jan 2016 (+1.17ºC), 2007 & 2017 (both +1.02ºC), 2019 (+0.93ºC), 2015 (+0.85ºC), 2018 (+0.82ºC), 2002 (+0.78ºC), then 2014 and 2010 (both +0.76ºC).
GISTEMP’s Jan 2020 sits =3rd in the all-month anomaly record (in NOAA it was 4th).
“All transportation is electrifying. All transportation is moving to lower labor costs. All transportation is becoming more loosely coupled. All transportation is moving to lower carbon models.”
At MAR: I clicked twice and checked your graph on CO2. It looks like your projections and the measurements are diverging. Have you posted here about that with the Jan results? I haven’t seen it, but maybe I missed it.
And maybe this is not the forum to ask for comments on these strange “papers” that keep popping up.
I’m referring to such ones as the new Stallinga 2020 (Comprehensive Analytical Study of the Greenhouse Effect of the Atmosphere) and the various papers by Michael and/or Ronan Connolly on their own “peer review” site Open Peer Review Journal.
I could of course have links to them, but I’m a bit reluctant to do so.
And I’ve searched for comments about them here as well as on other scientific sites – but found none so far.
These papers keep popping up more and more often among the usual conspiracy laden denier posts here and there.
Well, I assume they can be totally ignored. But it would be interesting to get a comment or two about them from a more scientific viewpoint than I – as a layman – am capable of.
Sorry to ask someone to spend time on these papers. No need to if time is sparse.
I’m just looking for good assisting arguments against these papers – arguments I’m not entirely capable of formulating my self.
Killiansays
Re #77 Polar Flyer said Re #51: While I truly appreciate you responding
Save the bullshit for the bullshitters.
I feel like you answered my questions with a lot of figurative eye-rolling
I was quite specific. The deficit lies with you.
that didn’t really get at what I’m driving at. I’m not trying to debate whether sustainability is a threshold or a continuum
You can’t understand the discussion at all if you don’t understand that.
even if we clearly have different opinions on which it is.
You don’t get an opinion on facts.
What I -am- trying to do, is understand the motivation and context behind your attack on wind power.
Given there was no attack, you are lying about what you are attempting to do. You clearly have no intent but to use logical fallacies and other crap to discuss nothing at all. We already have AB and nigel for that.
Maybe you hate fossil fuels, but think we need to do better than wind because wind
My response was clear.
doesn’t meet your definition of “sustainable.”
I also don’t get an opinion on facts. Nice Straw Man.
Maybe you are trying to find fault with wind power because your debate strategy is to cast doubt upon alternatives to fossil fuel energy.
And maybe you’re a pig that flies.
So maybe you can simply confirm, please, in plain english: which is less bad– wind, or oil?
If you can’t tell if one is less-bad or more good than the other, I can’t help you. And I’ve been exceedingly clear already.
Would you prefer a renewable-based energy grid (including wind) to a carbon-based energy grid given our current state of technology?
Would you?
Or on the other hand, just say so, if you think wind energy is so severely fundamentally flawed that you’d rather just stick with legacy energy sources like oil and coal until some other better technology comes around.
Or, you could just pay attention. Some of us have posted for a decade or more on these boards. We don’t need to justify our comments to someone whose been here a minute. We’d spend all our time repeating our stances every single day.
But I realize these aren’t the only binary options so if you take a third viewpoint, please explain it to folks because I’m not the only one who is struggling to understand you.
Actually, you are. AB and nigel are just beeing twits.
Killiansays
Re #74 anklebiter moves the goal posts. Truly, there is zero reason to engage it. killian says “Yes, child, the one and only to predict it more than ten years ago’
On this website perhaps. I haven’t been reading it for 10 years so I will assume Killian is correct. But I’ve read comments from plenty of people on other websites
The topic was this site, these posters.
Its not exactly a unique belief confined just to Killian.
Straw Man. Not a claim that was part of this conversation, nor one I have ever made. You keep your dishonest streak alive.
Killiansays
Re #67 anklebiter2 said I can’t read!AB: I wondered why you didn’t actually quote yourself. Now I know. Your concern was about some person’s choice to use 3C for sensitivity instead of a range.
And why, arsehat, would I be asking them to use a higher range? If there was no concern for a higher sensitivity I would not have had to take him to task for using 3C only, now would I?
You’re stupidly argumentative. And, that’s a long thread that you did not read all of. Which was also stupid of you.
The ecosystem is crashing. Stop being stupid.
Killiansays
#72 Kevin McKinney said your lack of confidence is moot.
Fair enough. But I’ve asked for entry points to education on this many times in the past. The sources I’ve been pointed to were–in my perception, at least–general and vague.
You don’t seem to want to accept, or simply do not understand what it means when I have told you 1. effective design is always place-based (techinique and methods must suit the conditions in situ) and 2. principles are… principles. Make them too specific, they’re no longer principles. It’s going to seem vague until and unless you learn what those principles really mean and assimilate them into your thinking *and* go about applying them in situ.
It’s vague because you are not trying to solve a problem, you’re just asking a theoretical question that cannot be answered. Basically, you asking me the equivalent of, “How do you engineer?” “How do you make a guitar?” “How do you find a new theory?”
If you asked me, “How do I build a chicken coop?” what do you think my first question would be?
Still interested to learn more, so pointers to substantial information are welcome.
mike @85, The graph of my speculative CO2 projection (usually 2 cliocks to ‘download your attachment’) now additionally shows the 2020 Met Office CO2 forecast plus their prevous annual forecasts since 2017 and the 2020 Met Office forecast does diverge from my projection. I think it is a little premature to judge between them. My effort (set out here back in August) assumed a Global CO2 rise after May 2019 (May 2019 was the latest Global monthly value available at that time) to be a constant 2.5ppm/yr. Amending the calculation for actual Global CO2 values could shift the numbers significantly.
You ask if I posted an update comment for January and I did on the then-current UV thread.
Note with that comment – I thought I had nailed the calculation of ESLR’s monthly MLO CO2 value from the daily ones but obviously not. The tabulated value I’d calculated (2.44ppm/yr) was a long way off from the ESRL published value (2.57ppm/yr). The graph has now been updated accordingly.
sidd @66,
The Zak Hausfather article you link-to in turn references a pre-print paper Nijsse et al (2020) ‘An emergent constraint on Transient Climate Response from simulated historical warming in CMIP6 models’ which looks at TCR in CMIP6 moderls. The full Nijsse et al paper is available via Researchgate.
zebrasays
For Russel, From The FR Thread,
Russel, your question was:
“Could someone please help me understand whey only the past ~150 years are used to explain climate change?
But they are not using the last 150 years to “explain climate change” in any general sense; they are studying the effects of the increase in the energy of the climate system caused by human activity… primarily CO2 emissions, which have massively increased during that time period.
You have to understand that this is how science works; people specialize in their studies, and incorporate relevant information from other specialists.
So, people study specific paleoclimates and look at what might have caused some effect or other, but what they come up with may not be particularly useful for characterizing what is happening now.
I’m happy to explain further if you have a specific question… it really helps if you narrow things down when you are looking for information.
BTW, you are misreading that graph. It clearly shows the current temperature to be much higher than the dotted line. See where it says “2016”?
Al Bundysays
Kevin, yep, you didn’t say diddly about optimum population. I was grasping for a word and coming up empty yet hurried so I used scare-quotes. Yeah, lazy. I’m so ashamed.
______
Killian: If you’ve got specific issues, ask, but all you need to know is one person can feed ten pretty easily
AB: so a family of two grandparents, two parents, and two children can feed itself with a bit of excess IF bugs don’t eat the crop and kill off the family. IF drought doesn’t kill off the family. IF stupidity doesn’t kill off the family. Whoo. I ask you: if your cherished future happens how many of us, specifically us RC commenters, would survive for five years?
Killian: Or, you can use simply, really simple, logic: Regenerative systems
AB: are far above Killian’s physical capability. He’d die if his favored policies were enacted. Logic.
_________
Zebra: world, but who don’t have the mental/emotional discipline to keep a couple of blog threads organized.
AB: Yep. You’re our organizer. Thank the goddess that people don’t have to be the be-all and end-all all by themselves.
Which begs the question. You wanna help us help save the world or are you most soothed by noting that withholding your talent will help destroy the planet?
_________
Nigel: On this website perhaps. I haven’t been reading it for 10 years so I will assume Killian is correct.
AB: Nope. I predicted it at least 15 years ago on this site. I’ve crowed about how the science has consistently said that last year’s science was too optimistic. I’ve called for an analysis of how wrong scientists say they were yesterday and how that wrongness hasn’t budged for decades. I predicted a blue Arctic Ocean by 2025 20 years ago. Killian lags behind the curve and then crows about being the only one.
Killian is just Killian. Worthless but loud. Who cares?
And Killian, you ask what your first question would be. The answer is obvious. You would never ask a question. Sub-geniuses tend to be that way.
Al Bundysays
Killian: If you asked me, “How do I build a chicken coop?” what do you think my first question would be?
AB: “What’s a chicken?”
Al Bundysays
Killian; effective design is always place-based (techinique and methods must suit the conditions in situ)
AB: sure, if you’re a sub-genius. As everyone else knows, physics doesn’t give a damn about location. Effective design is universal but flexible so that teensy changes allow the same physics to operate regardless of the location.
Al Bundysays
And if you haven’t figured it out, Killian, your putridness has had its inevitable result: folks (like me) will do whatever mental gymnastics are required to flip a finger at you.
Grow some humanity or do us a favor by dying. Your best and highest purpose is fertilizer.
Chucksays
I would like for Gavin or one of the other experts here at realclimate to address the collapse of the insect population. How do we survive without bugs? Also, could this phenomenon happen rather suddenly? I know everyone is worried about sea level rise, drought, heat waves etc. but this seems to me to be way more urgent:
The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.
More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.
Martin Smithsays
This website shows the high temp for Marimba Base in Antarctica as 15C, but is was reported as 20C, a new record. Was the reporting wrong or is the website wrong?
Robert @86,
While I have met some of the nonsense writings of the Connollys before, I don’t remember seeing any Stallinga before. Mind Stallinga does run the same game as the Connolleys in that he writes big long waffley accounts of nonsense which makes nailing the crux of the errors/lies a bit time consuming.
“The effect of this gas [CO2] in the atmosphere itself was already determined as being of little importance based on empirical analysis.”
so it isn’t sensible to dig into the detail of the paper if it is based on such obvious error/lies.
This assertion of Stallinga’s that CO2 is not a driver of climate is allegedly derived from an eariler paper, Stallinga (2018) which thankfully is only 15 pages long although just as full of nonsense. The argument presented there is that CO2 waggles with temperature through the last 900,000 years with a linear correlation of 0.095ºC/ppm(CO2).
(The source of the data is not made plain but surely is ice core data so polar amplification would need to be considered if it were applied globally, although Stallinga doesn’t bother. Account should also be made of the CO2 levels being low during ice ages, the GHG effect of CO2 being logarithmic and not linear. And given CO2 is not the sole driver of climate through ice age cycles, calculating a correlation while ignoring those other drivers is somewhat pointless.)
Stallinga (2018) presents a number for his CO2:temperature correlation which he says would exist if CO2 were a GHG, the value bring 0.0014ºC/ppm(CO2), but he fails properly to derive this value. He does point to Lindsen & Choi (2009) as confirming his result. Yet Lindsen & Choi, although themselves a pair of denialists, contradict much of Stallinga’s waffle in that Lindsen & Choi only deny the accepted feedbacks involved with AGW – they are happy that CO2 is a GHG. By putting the feedbacks as negative, Lindsen & Choi find ECS=0.5ºC. Stallinga (2018) asserts that this is the same as his 0.0014ºC/ppm(CO2) and goes on to argue incoherently that for CO2 to be driving the ice-core-derived 0.095ºC/ppm(CO2), it would require impossible levels of climate feedback and thus the CO2 theory of climate change must be wrong. Thus Stallinga asserts that his alternative theory is correct:- CO2 levels are driven by ocean temperatures through ice age cycles and play no part in driving those ice age cycles.
Yet in Stallinga (2020) Table 2 there is a further value of this CO2:temperature correlation that is apparently derived from measurement of data from the last 60 years, the value given as 0.0102ºC/ppm(CO2). (Note that an ECS=3ºC would give a very similar value.)
This value in Table 2 is referenced to Stallinga & Khmelinskii (2018). The basis of the derivation is the mistaken belief that waggles in atmospheric CO2 seen associated with ENSO are due to ocean absorption/emission of said CO2 which is incorrect. So the value derived is nonsense.
Perhaps the utter incompetence of this Stallinga muppet is best summed up by his crazy view that it is “the total amount of carbon dioxide floating above” that determines the temperature of cities at the same latitude. Thus he calculates down at sea level, Seville had 99 mol/m2 of CO2 above it in pre-industrial times but today, 550m higher, Granada now has 140 mol/m2 of CO2 above it in 2019. Yet today Granada is still colder than Seville was back in pre-industrial days. The muppet thus says “This seriously undermines the idea that carbon dioxide is determining the temperature on our planet.”
Re #29 Al Bundy said Killian: And, where did I post no alternatives were being discussed/tried? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
AB: Omission of available evidence is evidence of a lack of impartiality.
No, you’re lying and being argumentative and showing you do not understand logic. I made one point and one point only because that is what I chose to focus on. Others are free to expand that conversation and that does not require lying about what others have or have not said. That’s just assholery. I have said wind is unsustainable. I said wind is unsustainable above. These are two things that are facts: It has been as currently practiced and is as currently practiced. There is nothing to exclude on this point. There is nothing to refute this point. That people are *trying* to make it sustainable does not change the past nor the present.
You, however, continue to reveal yourself willing to lie and be a petty anklebiter just to score imagined points in some stupid game in your head when you say I excluded germane info when I did not, particularly after I have already stated these same points in response to your crap.
Your behavior is disgusting. These are time for serious people, not anklebiters.
Re #37 Polar Flyer said Re #20: Are you proposing that something is unsustainable if it generates any amount of waste at all
People who do regenerative design don’t think of waste in the way you and others posting here seem to. We acknowledge that there are myriad loops that make up a whole in any ecosystem. Short term, there is a lot of waste in nature. “Dog poop! Dog waste! OMG, dogs are unsustainable!” the unliterati here would have you believe is the claim. As one unliterati stated, well, the planet recycles itself as if that is relevant to human lifetimes, or even civilization. As Kevin has pointed out, sure, oil can be created again, just not meaningfully for humanity in the scales were dealing with.
So, is any waste unsustainable? Yes. Is any waste unsustainable? No. It very much depends on time frames. However, there is a huge but here: On short time frames, human time frames, rate of climate change time frames, very little humanity does is sustainable.
Did he *propose* something is unsustainable (over germane time frames) if it creates waste? No. It’s a fact, and not in any way debateable or in question except from people who are willfully blind, typically ideologically or out of personal fear of a loss of way of living. They paint both sustainability andunsustainability as evils to be avoided rather than facts to be dealt with.
The sun warms Earth. Giant wind generators are unsustainable. These two statements are equally correct and equally non-controversial. Anyone who disagrees with this is dealing with personal issues they sorely need to resolve.
and if it’s not sustainable, then it is worthless?
It’s a question, but it’s a Straw Man. How do you jump from unsustainable to worthless with nothing inbetween?
Wouldn’t it be more appropriate
And then you reinforce the Straw Man by treating it as fact without waiting for an answer.
to compare relative measures of sustainability as we try to make improvements
Why this is so hard for people is one of the biggest challenges we face. Fear of loss of comforts, fear of change, and blind allegiance to growth ideology. Please try to acceot this: Sustainability is a threshold, not a continuum. You can talk about parts of things being sustainable even if the whole is not, but the only thing that matters on long time frames is whether the whole is sustainable or not. If not, you don’t have a solution, you have something that continues to damage the planet in some way, shape, or form, and we must move past that. If want to frame wind generators as x% recycleable, as the source I cited does, you will have no argument from me. That’s accuracy. That’s truth. But when you say x% sustainable, you’re talking nonsense because when you reach the point that the materials for that object have been fully consumed, that object will cease to be made again. It’s binary: Sustainable/unsustainable.
To put a fine point on it, the simple shift in language to avoid constant knee-jerk foolishness WRT the issue of sustainable or not is to speak of recyclability, reusability when things are sub-sustainable.
say, the waste generation of traditional fuels vs. the waste generation of windmill technology? I think we should ask which technology is “better,” not which technology is “perfect.”
That’s nonsense on the face of it. We should never discuss sustainability? We should never seek sustainability? Without achieving sustainability, society collapses at some point, and may well go extinct, but let’s not seek that?
Good lord…
I am suspicious because a common technique of denialists is to hold a technology to an unreasonable standard, and then when it–naturally–fails to measure up to perfection, it gets dismissed as bad.
And a common technique of Capitalists and technocopians is to pretend sustainability and limits don’t matter, as you are.
After all, NO technology will EVER be perfectly “sustainable.”
Huh? False. I can have a garden indefinitely and make all my own tools out of fully sustainable tech. Many other things are the same. I must assume here you mean nothing hi-tech is truly sustainable? For the moment that is true, most likely. I doubt there is any widespread hi-tech gadgets that are sustainable. There might be something in a lab somewhere under development.
That shouldn’t stop us from striving for better sustainability.
But why should it stop us from talking about actual sustainability? If it were proven to be *necessary* to abandon all unsustainable activities to save the biosphere, and so humanity and likely most current biota, would you do it?
Or would you ride the wave into the rocks, simplicity be damned?
The information about windmill-related landfill waste is incomplete without comparing it to other technologies.
Bull. It is what it is. It’s bizarre to say an article cannot cover wind generators unless it covers issues you demand.
Goodness…
It is important for such articles to be written do end the sorts of delusions a vast majority still harbor. You can count on one hand the number of posters at this site who understand sustainable systems. Less than a hand, evern. No, this is an issue that must be understood or we will fail to effectively deal with climate, et al.: One cannot successfully design systems based on delusions and illusions.
BPL,
mrkia was surely just being a clown, but his point, that an inflection point was probably just passed, doesn’t rely on a robust trend. He’s saying, “This COULD be the start of a 30+ year decline and nyah, nyah, nyah you can’t prove me wrong. So there!” I addressed his “point” (parroting Kevin IIRC) by noting that there was no effective cooling, that an El Nino masked the underlying warming.
Yo mrkia! BPL’s sooo impatient, eh? Trump’s not even through with his first term. Everyone knows that he’s draining the swamp, which is cooling the planet. So everyone better vote for Trump so he can continue his valorous trade war, which is foiling the Chinese hex. (Hoaxes are ever so last season)
____
Killian,
TLDR (Too ludicrous, didn’t read)
You left out critical data that essentially inverts the tone of the article. I’d expect that from mrkia.
Half-a-million insect species face extinction:
http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/159/climate-change-emergency?page=4#post-6241
Killian says “I can have a garden indefinitely and make all my own tools out of fully sustainable tech.”
These need to be listed, especially given he has said in the past that any use of metals is unsustainable. I assume they must be tools completely made of timber.
Not sure if my comment posted. Will try again. Killian says “I can have a garden indefinitely and make all my own tools out of fully sustainable tech.”
Can he please explain what these tools are made of. He’s said in the past that use of metals is not sustainable, so are they all made just of timber? Or what?
Doug Meyer @50,
If you read (or have a trawl through) Zelinka et al (2020) you will see that they are analysing the output of models from across the community and that includes the NCAR CESM2 model.
You ask for progress updates on this issue of high ECS emerging from CMIP6 models. The Science article you link-to quotes a number of active researchers whose contributions can be followed on Google Scholar (thus here and here and here) or Researchgate (thus here).
I repeat myself, but I think the watchword is still “early-days!”
Looks like higher ECS estimates are legit. Who coulda predicted that…?
;-)
https://twitter.com/PatrickTBrown31/status/1227272506240712705
#55/6, nigel–
Dunno if Killian will give a crisp answer or a tirade, but pretty much all pre-Columbian ag in the New World used stone and wood tools. It was pretty effective, too, if less labor-efficient than with more ‘modern’ implements.
The trouble is that pre-Columbian ag plus hunting & gathering supported a population of one hundred million or less. (How much less is controversial, but half that seems to be a more common estimate.) The current population of the Americas is just shy of a billion. And we now have a bunch of seriously degraded land and a deteriorating climate to deal with, too.
There’s a serious gap there; Killian is sanguine about covering it. I’m considerably less so.
Nigelj: I assume they must be tools completely made of timber.
AB: actually, Killian has talked about legacy metals. This works because he’s recently said that seven generations is close enough to forever to count.
And besides, the Stone Age didn’t end though lack of stones, but a lack of folks who care about sustainability.
_____
Killian: Looks like higher ECS estimates are legit. Who coulda predicted that…?
;-)
AB: perhaps 65% of RC’s regulars. But only one could have taken credit for being the one and only Stable Genius in the room.
Kevin M: The trouble is that pre-Columbian ag plus hunting & gathering supported a population of one hundred million or less. (How much less is controversial, but half that seems to be a more common estimate
AB: There’s plenty of land. Six billion acres gives a family of four around 25 acres. Cut by 80% just because and that’s 5 acres per homestead plus 20 acres of commons. And remember, we know lots of stuff that pre-Columbians couldn’t know. (The converse is also true)
And besides, the conversion will kill off so many folks that your 50 million “optimal” population might be quickly achieved.
” Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters
Sons of bankers, sons of lawyers
Turn around and say good morning to the night
For unless they see the sky
But they can’t and that is why
They know not if it’s dark outside or light” Bernie Taupin & Elton John
But the bankers’ gardeners will probably survive the transition.
Re #59 Kevin McKinney said There’s a serious gap there; Killian is sanguine about covering it. I’m considerably less so.
but you are not educated on the topic, not educated in creating regenerative food systems, so your lack of confidence is moot.
If you’ve got specific issues, ask, but all you need to know is one person can feed ten pretty easily.
Or, you can use simply, really simple, logic: Regenerative systems are at least as productive as chem ag, and more productive in drought, so where, exactly, is there room for doubt give we are wasting 1/3 of global supply and feeding 7.5 billion already?
Some things don’t require more than a couple minutes of really obvious logically constructed thoughts.
Re #60 Al Bundy said AB: perhaps 65% of RC’s regulars. But only one could have taken credit for being the one and only
Yes, child, the one and only to predict it more than ten years ago. I took David Rutledge to task for modelling coal with MAGICC using *only* 3C and no other runs at other sensitivities bc I already knew climate sensitivity would come in high, but also that it’s really crappy risk analysis to assume it won’t even if the evidence overall strongly supports that. Rutledge was being, imo, irresponsibe in doing so. He also did not consider TCR or ECS and even if Charney were to be exactly 3, the others, particularly ECS will not end up being as low as once thought. But, again, it’s about the risk assessment and presenting somewhat dishonest probabilities.
http://theoildrum.com/node/5084
ccpo, am I.
E-P was hanging out there, too.
Sorry, missed this:
Pre-Columbian ag? Who the hell cares about that? Where have you seen anyone, anywhere suggest pre-Columbian for feeding the planet in the future?
Hausfather on CMIP6:
“While a subset of new models are showing much more warming than their predecessors, most models are not”
” does not mean that we should dismiss these new higher sensitivity models; they show that there is a chance of some very-high-end warming outcomes that we should not ignore. At the same time, we should acknowledge that these new estimates remain outliers both among the 30 CMIP6 models available so far and among the wider set of climate sensitivity estimates in the scientific literature. ”
“. As more models have come in, however, the average sensitivity of CMIP6 models has fallen. ”
“Nine of the 30 CMIP6 models currently available have a climate sensitivity higher than any CMIP5 models. These extreme models have pulled up the average, despite the fact that nearly half (13) have a climate sensitivity lower than the 3.2C average of CMIP5. ”
“A number of the higher sensitivity models in CMIP6 have had trouble accurately “hindcasting” historical temperatures. Some show almost no warming over the 20th century ”
“High sensitivity models (in red) generally show more warming than observations over the last three decades, while those with a TCR of around 2.2C or less (in blue) tend to agree much better with observations. High ECS models tend to have high TCR”
“the mismatches between some high sensitivity models and observations are large enough and occur over long enough periods of time that they are unlikely to only be due to natural variability. ”
“Only a third of studies suggested that an ECS of 5C or above was within the uncertainty range, and only six of the 142 studies suggested that the most likely ECS value was 5C or above. More broadly, there are relatively few studies that do not rely on climate models — such as those using instrumental temperatures or paleoclimate proxies — that support estimates of ECS exceeding 5C.”
“These new 5C ECS models should remind us that large uncertainties (and long tails of risk) remain, but they do not by themselves overturn the long-term consensus that climate sensitivity is likely somewhere around 3C (+/- 1.5C) per doubling of CO2.”
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/cold-water-hot-models
sidd
Killian: Yes, child, the one and only
Killian’s link to Killian: MAGICC is magic! If it’s good enough for the IPCC, it’s good enough for me! (Even though it’s essential assumption is wrong?) YUP! (So, why did you choose 3 instead of 6?) It’s MAGICC! (But the MAGICC website has this to say, “The… 90% confidence interval values for the climate sensitivity have been updated to… 1.5-6.0°C (previously 1.5-4.5°C).”. 90% seems pretty good to me, so why did you run it with 3C?)
AB: I wondered why you didn’t actually quote yourself. Now I know. Your concern was about some person’s choice to use 3C for sensitivity instead of a range. You talked about risk and catastrophic possibilities should James Hansen be shown correct. You did’t know diddly nor were you ahead of the majority of the regs here. MOST of us have been noting for well over a decade that when scientists are always saying, “It’s worse than we thought” the odds are that that same refrain will continue, that it’s still worse than the median scientist thinks now and it will continue to be worse than s)he’ll think tomorrow. And most of us would bet on James Hansen instead of the median scientist.
You have given no evidence that nobody else thought the nebulous pseudo-consensus was too optimistic, that we all thought our hero James Hansen was/is wrong. But you sure continue to give mountains of evidence that your self-aggrandizement and denigration of others brings you nothing but contempt. I notice that in your linked conversation the other participants were disgusted with you. And you bring that conversation up as evidence? Couldn’t you find a single conversation that doesn’t paint yourself unflatteringly?
Saviors Of The World,
So here we have people who are going to save the world, but who don’t have the mental/emotional discipline to keep a couple of blog threads organized.
And over on FR, where this fantasy about pre-Columbian Kumbaya belongs, Kevin is engaging in another pseudo-discussion of climate science, which belongs here.
A good example of why grandiose magic-solution solutions, whether high-tech nuclear or low-tech hippie, are a waste of internet electricity. Hu-mans have to do them, don’tcha know?
Professor Michael Mann
“This week we learned that the critical Thwaites Glacier that holds in most of the West Antarctic ice sheet is close to irreversible melting. If it goes we get an additional 10 metres of sea level rise.”
This is because scientists have recently managed to measure the temperature of the ocean **at the grounding line** and it is way too high.
See: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/305718-rising-seas-water-thwaites-glacier-grounding-line-above-freezing
As we all know the oceans heat content reached a record high in 2019 (see WMO report)and of course will continue to rise fast for the foreseeable future.
At this point multi-meter SLR over the coming centuries seems inevitable.
AB, #61–
Hey, I never said anything about an “optimal” population! But yeah, I think the ‘conversion’ might indeed be pretty lethal. And honestly, I’m kind of squeamish about that.
#54 David B. Benson
There is no doubt that insects are facing a major extinction event.
See for example: “Climate change driving ‘rapid and widespread’ decline of bumblebees”
https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-driving-rapid-and-widespread-decline-of-bumblebees
I propose that this conversation move over to FV, where it is precisely on topic. But:
#62, Killian–
Fair enough. But I’ve asked for entry points to education on this many times in the past. The sources I’ve been pointed to were–in my perception, at least–general and vague. Still interested to learn more, so pointers to substantial information are welcome.
Approaching my deficient education from another angle, what do you think of this article from 2012?
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Rhodes/publication/235884102_Feeding_and_healing_the_world_Through_regenerative_agriculture_and_permaculture/links/56ed2e1208aea35d5b98d151/Feeding-and-healing-the-world-Through-regenerative-agriculture-and-permaculture.pdf
On point, or not?
(Note to the interested: it’s longish and rather discursive at times, but covers a lot of points we’ve discussed here in one way or another. It also cites differing opinions and points of view among permaculturists (for instance, on the value and potential of urban life.)
Killian, #63:
That is claimed, and there is considerable anecdotal evidence that it *could* be true. For instance, Christopher Rhodes (cited above) gives the important example of a permaculture project in an arid area in Jordan which had, among other things, olive trees established within three years of work. The funding for the project lapsed after four years, but even ten years later beneficial effects were observable. If you can be productive in the Jordanian desert, you can probably be productive in a great many different environments (p. 164.)
But there’s also the question of “productive” with respect to which inputs, exactly? Obviously, the whole point is to quit using artificial fertilizers and pesticides, more or less completely. And that in itself would cut agricultural emissions a lot. But what of human labor inputs? Rhodes again:
True, Victorian agriculture was not permaculture. But per Rhodes, labor productivity will be much lower. For instance:
Since the population of the UK was around 64 million in 2012, when Rhodes was writing, that would imply that he expected one farmer to feed about 5 people–which I take to be reasonably in agreement with Killian’s comment (#62) that “one person can feed ten pretty easily.”
Of course, the flip side of needing more labor is providing more jobs. And what could be more intrinsically satisfying–provided the recompense is fair and you are not being exploited–than knowing that you are providing the biological basis for human life, improving the ecology and literally the soil, and contributing toward the solution of the climate crisis? But of course, those folks have to be able to do the job–they need to have the physical strength and stamina to do whatever needs doing, and the educational/practical background to understand what needs doing.
So, if you’re talking about the UK, you’re talking about training (in some form or fashion) 11-12 million people. The current UK labor force that is actually employed is about 33 million, so that’s a third or so of the total. I think that’s certainly doable, but it’s also very much a non-trivial task. It would be very useful and interesting to consider how that might be done with maximal rapidity and efficiency.
Maybe by fiat land redistribution to recreate commons-based communities, which would have the legal/institutional stability needed to have folks ‘buy-in’ and really commit to learning? They could then be supported by consultant permaculturists who could be mentors to multiple communities, thus getting the maximum instructional value out of their expertise. It sounds a little like the Transition Town thing, from the relatively little I know of the latter, but with real institutional support from the dominant political structure.
(Of course, that may be an even bigger ‘ask’ than anything discussed above; I seem to gather from previous (Killian) comments that such a thing is not really expected by you, and that sustainable communities will in rather tend to arise, in your view, despite the extant polity or its heirs. Given the current dysfunctions of democracy across much of the ‘West’, that’s certainly a defensible position.)
NOAA are the first surface record to report for January 2020 and it’s another “scorchyissimo!!!” starter for 2020.
The NOAA global anomaly for January sits at +1.14ºC, an increase on Dec2019’s +1.05ºC; indeed warmer than any monthly anomaly for all of 2019 and the warmest January in the NOAA record. The roll of warmest-January behind 2020 runs 2016 (+1.12ºC), 2017 (+0.98ºC), 2019 (+0.94ºC), 2007 (+0.92ºC), 2015 (+0.84ºC), 2018 (+0.75ºC), 2010 (+0.74ºC) and 2003 (+0.72ºC).
Jan 2020 sits 4th in the NOAA all-month anomaly record behind Dec15, Feb16 & Mar2016, these three the peak of the months boosted by the big 2015/16 El Niño.
The last decade of monthly anomalies for the various temperature records is plotted out here (usually 2 clicks to ‘download your attachment’)
Killian says “Yes, child, the one and only to predict it more than ten years ago’
On this website perhaps. I haven’t been reading it for 10 years so I will assume Killian is correct. But I’ve read comments from plenty of people on other websites who have thought climate sensitivity is high, and this is going back further than ten years, easily. They gave various reasons for this. Its not exactly a unique belief confined just to Killian.
“Or, you can use simply, really simple, logic: Regenerative systems are at least as productive as chem ag, and more productive in drought,”
Citations please based on field trials. From published, peer reviewed journals, not permaculture weekly.
Mike, a Twitter feed you might find of interest re emissions.
Check out Christopher Cartwright (@chriscartw83): https://twitter.com/chriscartw83?s=09
Re #51: While I truly appreciate you responding, I feel like you answered my questions with a lot of figurative eye-rolling that didn’t really get at what I’m driving at. I’m not trying to debate whether sustainability is a threshold or a continuum, even if we clearly have different opinions on which it is. What I -am- trying to do, is understand the motivation and context behind your attack on wind power.
Maybe you hate fossil fuels, but think we need to do better than wind because wind doesn’t meet your definition of “sustainable.” That’s fine, but people like that seem rare (in the USA).
Maybe you are trying to find fault with wind power because your debate strategy is to cast doubt upon alternatives to fossil fuel energy. i.e. implicitly supporting fossil fuels by arguing for the futility of “renewable” alternatives. That’s not fine, but it is unfortunately all-to-common (in the USA). (“Well green energy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, so lets just stick with the advantages of oil, people!”)
So maybe you can simply confirm, please, in plain english: which is less bad– wind, or oil? Would you prefer a renewable-based energy grid (including wind) to a carbon-based energy grid given our current state of technology? Or on the other hand, just say so, if you think wind energy is so severely fundamentally flawed that you’d rather just stick with legacy energy sources like oil and coal until some other better technology comes around.
But I realize these aren’t the only binary options so if you take a third viewpoint, please explain it to folks because I’m not the only one who is struggling to understand you.
And yet another temperature record with a “scorchyissimo!!!” starter for 2020.
RSS TLT has been posted for January at +0.88ºC, as per GISTEMP SAT (but not UAH TLT) a rise on Dec2019 and higher than any 2019 anomaly.
RSS’s January 2020 is just pipped to top-spot January by 2016 which managed +0.90ºC (It was equal-top in UAH & top in GISTEMP) but with the El-Niño-boost being amplified in these TLT records and without an El-Niño-boost this year, challenging Jan2016 for top-spot in TLT is surely “scorchyissimo!!!”
Behind top-2016 & 2nd-top-2020, the RSS January list runs 2010 (+0.74ºC), 2007 (+0.70ºC), 2019 (+0.69ºC), 2017 (+0.63ºC), 1998 & 2013 (both +0.62ºC), 2015 (+0.59ºC) and 2018 (+0.58ºC).
Jan 2020 sits 7th in the RSS TLT all-month record (=10th in UAH TLT, 4th in GISTEMP).
(The RSS browser tool shows the RSS Jan2020 warmth to be mainly driven by to Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes which saw its anomaly rise from Dec2019’s +0.92ºC to Jan2020’s +01.27ºC. Astute observers will note that the situation in UAH TLT is different.)
In the span of 141 years of climate records, there has never been a warmer January than last month. Of course note one of the few regional exceptions is Alaska so naturally the resident climate change deniers latch on to that cherry-picked area.
https://www.noaa.gov/news/january-2020-was-earth-s-hottest-january-on-record
https://twitter.com/NOAASatellitePA/status/1227989406675423233/photo/1
(Mention of the GISTEMP January anomaly upthread was not prescience [GISSTEMP had yet to post for January] but error caused by blind habit – usually GISTEMP report before NOAA.)
And GISTEMP are also now indeed reporting “scorchyissimo!!!” for January, with an anomaly of +1.18ºC, an increase on Dec2019’s +1.10ºC and the warmest January on record, ahead of Jan 2016 (+1.17ºC), 2007 & 2017 (both +1.02ºC), 2019 (+0.93ºC), 2015 (+0.85ºC), 2018 (+0.82ºC), 2002 (+0.78ºC), then 2014 and 2010 (both +0.76ºC).
GISTEMP’s Jan 2020 sits =3rd in the all-month anomaly record (in NOAA it was 4th).
x
This is thought provoking;
https://news.trust.org/item/20200215072446-pl7ap/
“ANALYSIS-Climate change opens up ‘frontier’ farmland, but at what cost to the planet?…”
A “strategist” considers the future of rail vs. electric trucking:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/16/tesla-semis-are-cheaper-than-rail-enough-of-the-time-to-reshape-ground-freight/
“All transportation is electrifying. All transportation is moving to lower labor costs. All transportation is becoming more loosely coupled. All transportation is moving to lower carbon models.”
Sorry, that last was meant for FV… :-(
At MAR: I clicked twice and checked your graph on CO2. It looks like your projections and the measurements are diverging. Have you posted here about that with the Jan results? I haven’t seen it, but maybe I missed it.
January 2020
NOAA-ESRL
SCRIPPS UCSD
Jan. 2020 413.40 ppm 413.37 ppm
Jan. 2019 410.83 ppm 410.92 ppm
Jan. 2018 407.96 ppm 408.05 ppm
Out of the blue comment…
And maybe this is not the forum to ask for comments on these strange “papers” that keep popping up.
I’m referring to such ones as the new Stallinga 2020 (Comprehensive Analytical Study of the Greenhouse Effect of the Atmosphere) and the various papers by Michael and/or Ronan Connolly on their own “peer review” site Open Peer Review Journal.
I could of course have links to them, but I’m a bit reluctant to do so.
And I’ve searched for comments about them here as well as on other scientific sites – but found none so far.
These papers keep popping up more and more often among the usual conspiracy laden denier posts here and there.
Well, I assume they can be totally ignored. But it would be interesting to get a comment or two about them from a more scientific viewpoint than I – as a layman – am capable of.
Sorry to ask someone to spend time on these papers. No need to if time is sparse.
I’m just looking for good assisting arguments against these papers – arguments I’m not entirely capable of formulating my self.
Re #77 Polar Flyer said Re #51: While I truly appreciate you responding
Save the bullshit for the bullshitters.
I feel like you answered my questions with a lot of figurative eye-rolling
I was quite specific. The deficit lies with you.
that didn’t really get at what I’m driving at. I’m not trying to debate whether sustainability is a threshold or a continuum
You can’t understand the discussion at all if you don’t understand that.
even if we clearly have different opinions on which it is.
You don’t get an opinion on facts.
What I -am- trying to do, is understand the motivation and context behind your attack on wind power.
Given there was no attack, you are lying about what you are attempting to do. You clearly have no intent but to use logical fallacies and other crap to discuss nothing at all. We already have AB and nigel for that.
Maybe you hate fossil fuels, but think we need to do better than wind because wind
My response was clear.
doesn’t meet your definition of “sustainable.”
I also don’t get an opinion on facts. Nice Straw Man.
Maybe you are trying to find fault with wind power because your debate strategy is to cast doubt upon alternatives to fossil fuel energy.
And maybe you’re a pig that flies.
So maybe you can simply confirm, please, in plain english: which is less bad– wind, or oil?
If you can’t tell if one is less-bad or more good than the other, I can’t help you. And I’ve been exceedingly clear already.
Would you prefer a renewable-based energy grid (including wind) to a carbon-based energy grid given our current state of technology?
Would you?
Or on the other hand, just say so, if you think wind energy is so severely fundamentally flawed that you’d rather just stick with legacy energy sources like oil and coal until some other better technology comes around.
Or, you could just pay attention. Some of us have posted for a decade or more on these boards. We don’t need to justify our comments to someone whose been here a minute. We’d spend all our time repeating our stances every single day.
But I realize these aren’t the only binary options so if you take a third viewpoint, please explain it to folks because I’m not the only one who is struggling to understand you.
Actually, you are. AB and nigel are just beeing twits.
Re #74 anklebiter moves the goal posts. Truly, there is zero reason to engage it. killian says “Yes, child, the one and only to predict it more than ten years ago’
On this website perhaps. I haven’t been reading it for 10 years so I will assume Killian is correct. But I’ve read comments from plenty of people on other websites
The topic was this site, these posters.
Its not exactly a unique belief confined just to Killian.
Straw Man. Not a claim that was part of this conversation, nor one I have ever made. You keep your dishonest streak alive.
Re #67 anklebiter2 said I can’t read!AB: I wondered why you didn’t actually quote yourself. Now I know. Your concern was about some person’s choice to use 3C for sensitivity instead of a range.
And why, arsehat, would I be asking them to use a higher range? If there was no concern for a higher sensitivity I would not have had to take him to task for using 3C only, now would I?
You’re stupidly argumentative. And, that’s a long thread that you did not read all of. Which was also stupid of you.
The ecosystem is crashing. Stop being stupid.
#72 Kevin McKinney said your lack of confidence is moot.
Fair enough. But I’ve asked for entry points to education on this many times in the past. The sources I’ve been pointed to were–in my perception, at least–general and vague.
You don’t seem to want to accept, or simply do not understand what it means when I have told you 1. effective design is always place-based (techinique and methods must suit the conditions in situ) and 2. principles are… principles. Make them too specific, they’re no longer principles. It’s going to seem vague until and unless you learn what those principles really mean and assimilate them into your thinking *and* go about applying them in situ.
It’s vague because you are not trying to solve a problem, you’re just asking a theoretical question that cannot be answered. Basically, you asking me the equivalent of, “How do you engineer?” “How do you make a guitar?” “How do you find a new theory?”
If you asked me, “How do I build a chicken coop?” what do you think my first question would be?
Still interested to learn more, so pointers to substantial information are welcome.
mike @85,
The graph of my speculative CO2 projection (usually 2 cliocks to ‘download your attachment’) now additionally shows the 2020 Met Office CO2 forecast plus their prevous annual forecasts since 2017 and the 2020 Met Office forecast does diverge from my projection. I think it is a little premature to judge between them. My effort (set out here back in August) assumed a Global CO2 rise after May 2019 (May 2019 was the latest Global monthly value available at that time) to be a constant 2.5ppm/yr. Amending the calculation for actual Global CO2 values could shift the numbers significantly.
You ask if I posted an update comment for January and I did on the then-current UV thread.
Note with that comment – I thought I had nailed the calculation of ESLR’s monthly MLO CO2 value from the daily ones but obviously not. The tabulated value I’d calculated (2.44ppm/yr) was a long way off from the ESRL published value (2.57ppm/yr). The graph has now been updated accordingly.
sidd @66,
The Zak Hausfather article you link-to in turn references a pre-print paper Nijsse et al (2020) ‘An emergent constraint on Transient Climate Response from simulated historical warming in CMIP6 models’ which looks at TCR in CMIP6 moderls. The full Nijsse et al paper is available via Researchgate.
For Russel, From The FR Thread,
Russel, your question was:
“Could someone please help me understand whey only the past ~150 years are used to explain climate change?
But they are not using the last 150 years to “explain climate change” in any general sense; they are studying the effects of the increase in the energy of the climate system caused by human activity… primarily CO2 emissions, which have massively increased during that time period.
You have to understand that this is how science works; people specialize in their studies, and incorporate relevant information from other specialists.
So, people study specific paleoclimates and look at what might have caused some effect or other, but what they come up with may not be particularly useful for characterizing what is happening now.
I’m happy to explain further if you have a specific question… it really helps if you narrow things down when you are looking for information.
BTW, you are misreading that graph. It clearly shows the current temperature to be much higher than the dotted line. See where it says “2016”?
Kevin, yep, you didn’t say diddly about optimum population. I was grasping for a word and coming up empty yet hurried so I used scare-quotes. Yeah, lazy. I’m so ashamed.
______
Killian: If you’ve got specific issues, ask, but all you need to know is one person can feed ten pretty easily
AB: so a family of two grandparents, two parents, and two children can feed itself with a bit of excess IF bugs don’t eat the crop and kill off the family. IF drought doesn’t kill off the family. IF stupidity doesn’t kill off the family. Whoo. I ask you: if your cherished future happens how many of us, specifically us RC commenters, would survive for five years?
Killian: Or, you can use simply, really simple, logic: Regenerative systems
AB: are far above Killian’s physical capability. He’d die if his favored policies were enacted. Logic.
_________
Zebra: world, but who don’t have the mental/emotional discipline to keep a couple of blog threads organized.
AB: Yep. You’re our organizer. Thank the goddess that people don’t have to be the be-all and end-all all by themselves.
Which begs the question. You wanna help us help save the world or are you most soothed by noting that withholding your talent will help destroy the planet?
_________
Nigel: On this website perhaps. I haven’t been reading it for 10 years so I will assume Killian is correct.
AB: Nope. I predicted it at least 15 years ago on this site. I’ve crowed about how the science has consistently said that last year’s science was too optimistic. I’ve called for an analysis of how wrong scientists say they were yesterday and how that wrongness hasn’t budged for decades. I predicted a blue Arctic Ocean by 2025 20 years ago. Killian lags behind the curve and then crows about being the only one.
Killian is just Killian. Worthless but loud. Who cares?
And Killian, you ask what your first question would be. The answer is obvious. You would never ask a question. Sub-geniuses tend to be that way.
Killian: If you asked me, “How do I build a chicken coop?” what do you think my first question would be?
AB: “What’s a chicken?”
Killian; effective design is always place-based (techinique and methods must suit the conditions in situ)
AB: sure, if you’re a sub-genius. As everyone else knows, physics doesn’t give a damn about location. Effective design is universal but flexible so that teensy changes allow the same physics to operate regardless of the location.
And if you haven’t figured it out, Killian, your putridness has had its inevitable result: folks (like me) will do whatever mental gymnastics are required to flip a finger at you.
Grow some humanity or do us a favor by dying. Your best and highest purpose is fertilizer.
I would like for Gavin or one of the other experts here at realclimate to address the collapse of the insect population. How do we survive without bugs? Also, could this phenomenon happen rather suddenly? I know everyone is worried about sea level rise, drought, heat waves etc. but this seems to me to be way more urgent:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature
The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.
More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.
This website shows the high temp for Marimba Base in Antarctica as 15C, but is was reported as 20C, a new record. Was the reporting wrong or is the website wrong?
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/antarctica/marambio-base/historic
Robert @86,
While I have met some of the nonsense writings of the Connollys before, I don’t remember seeing any Stallinga before. Mind Stallinga does run the same game as the Connolleys in that he writes big long waffley accounts of nonsense which makes nailing the crux of the errors/lies a bit time consuming.
You ask about a specific Stallinga paper – Stallinga (2020) ‘Comprehensive Analytical Study of the Greenhouse Effect of the Atmosphere’ which runs to 41 pages. It appears to dismiss CO2 as a driver of climate change from the very start:-
so it isn’t sensible to dig into the detail of the paper if it is based on such obvious error/lies.
This assertion of Stallinga’s that CO2 is not a driver of climate is allegedly derived from an eariler paper, Stallinga (2018) which thankfully is only 15 pages long although just as full of nonsense. The argument presented there is that CO2 waggles with temperature through the last 900,000 years with a linear correlation of 0.095ºC/ppm(CO2).
(The source of the data is not made plain but surely is ice core data so polar amplification would need to be considered if it were applied globally, although Stallinga doesn’t bother. Account should also be made of the CO2 levels being low during ice ages, the GHG effect of CO2 being logarithmic and not linear. And given CO2 is not the sole driver of climate through ice age cycles, calculating a correlation while ignoring those other drivers is somewhat pointless.)
Stallinga (2018) presents a number for his CO2:temperature correlation which he says would exist if CO2 were a GHG, the value bring 0.0014ºC/ppm(CO2), but he fails properly to derive this value. He does point to Lindsen & Choi (2009) as confirming his result. Yet Lindsen & Choi, although themselves a pair of denialists, contradict much of Stallinga’s waffle in that Lindsen & Choi only deny the accepted feedbacks involved with AGW – they are happy that CO2 is a GHG. By putting the feedbacks as negative, Lindsen & Choi find ECS=0.5ºC. Stallinga (2018) asserts that this is the same as his 0.0014ºC/ppm(CO2) and goes on to argue incoherently that for CO2 to be driving the ice-core-derived 0.095ºC/ppm(CO2), it would require impossible levels of climate feedback and thus the CO2 theory of climate change must be wrong. Thus Stallinga asserts that his alternative theory is correct:- CO2 levels are driven by ocean temperatures through ice age cycles and play no part in driving those ice age cycles.
Yet in Stallinga (2020) Table 2 there is a further value of this CO2:temperature correlation that is apparently derived from measurement of data from the last 60 years, the value given as 0.0102ºC/ppm(CO2). (Note that an ECS=3ºC would give a very similar value.)
This value in Table 2 is referenced to Stallinga & Khmelinskii (2018). The basis of the derivation is the mistaken belief that waggles in atmospheric CO2 seen associated with ENSO are due to ocean absorption/emission of said CO2 which is incorrect. So the value derived is nonsense.
Perhaps the utter incompetence of this Stallinga muppet is best summed up by his crazy view that it is “the total amount of carbon dioxide floating above” that determines the temperature of cities at the same latitude. Thus he calculates down at sea level, Seville had 99 mol/m2 of CO2 above it in pre-industrial times but today, 550m higher, Granada now has 140 mol/m2 of CO2 above it in 2019. Yet today Granada is still colder than Seville was back in pre-industrial days. The muppet thus says “This seriously undermines the idea that carbon dioxide is determining the temperature on our planet.”