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One Planet Only Forever at 05:12 AM on 29 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Nigelj,
I agree that legal penalties for spreading/repeating misunderstandings that could produce harmful results are not the best way to try to limit the harm done by the creation, promotion and sharing of misunderstanding. A better action is the preemptive education of everyone (like the inoculation approach promoted by SkS) to awaken everyone to the constantly improving understanding of what is harmful and how to be less harmful and more helpful ‘to Others’. The key part is the ‘to Others’ part.
It is essential to clarify that ‘Others, using reasoning and evidence, determine a common understanding of what is harmful’. The person believing and doing something based on their belief does not get to claim they are correct or not very harmful. Everyone’s actions add up. People aiding and abetting share the blame. Harmful actions like the actions encouraged by Alex Jones cannot be excused by Alex Jones claiming he did not believe what he was doing was going to produce harmful results, or claiming that restricting his ability to promote the misunderstandings that he repeatedly shared would be ‘harmful to people like him by limiting their freedom of expression of beliefs’.
Educating everyone to be more aware of harmful misunderstanding is also better than legal actions like suing, because legal consequences are ‘after the fact of harm done’. Legal systems have been built with systemic flaws that protect the interests of influential wealthy people. The example of what the GOP leadership has chosen to become (see my comment @78), and note that wealthy influential people also try to dominate the actions of the Democrat Party in the US, exposes that some among the ‘leadership class’, which includes all wealthy and influential people, appear to choose to develop interests that would motivate them to try to influence leadership and the legal system to protect their interests. It is very easy to severely penalize poorer and less influential people in the US (and many other nations), like the 3-strike nonsense in some US states where a person would be imprisoned 25 years for 3 cases like stealing a slice of pizza or being searched by police who discover a small amount of marijuana. And it is every difficult to prove the guilt of a wealthy influential person like Alex Jones and effectively penalize them.
My understanding is that Alex Jones had to be proven to have understood that he was sharing misunderstandings about the school shooting and its victims. And Alex Jones had to be proven to have motivated the harmful actions of people who aggressively threatened innocent people as a result of being influenced by the misunderstandings powerfully promoted by the very influential Alex Jones. And, in spite of being found guilty (not certain to have been the result of the legal action) Alex Jones may evade significant jail time (he certainly is not going to jail for 25 years) and he may be able to keep a substantial amount of his wealth.
That said, legal actions should be aggressively used as a last resort to limit the harmful influence of wealthy influential people. The ‘Leaders’, including all wealthy and influential people, are potentially the most helpful or most harmful members of the population. It is essential that that group be held responsible for/by peer-review that effectively limits the harmful influence of any members of the ‘Leadership class’.
Note that, though Alex Jones is facing some consequence for his promotion of misunderstanding, there appears to have been no consequences for the “Merchants of Doubt” (direct reference to the excellent 2010 research report by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway) for their far more harmful promotion of misunderstanding regarding climate science.
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Rob Honeycutt at 03:31 AM on 29 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Moved the conversation to a more relevant thread here.
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Rob Honeycutt at 03:30 AM on 29 December 2022Renewables can't provide baseload power
[moved conversation from different thread]
Doug... Note when you read the the LCOE reports they use the term "resource-constrained." All sources are intermittent. Wind and solars are merely not "dispatchable" in the same manner.
Once again, use of the term "intermittent" is a canard because it doesn't fully describe the situation.
I've read estimates are that renewables (wind, water, solar, geothermal) in conjunction with about 10% penetration of storage could supply all energy needs. You don't need 50% penetration for storage with integrated grids due to the fact other renewable resources are dispatachable (water, geothermal).
You say, "...cutting the storage cost of $124.84/Mwhr in half is not enough" but I would suggest that is a baseless assertion when already peaker plants functionally perform the same task and are a critical part of the energy mix at virtually the same levelized cost factor.
Moderator Response:[BL] The "different thread" is located here, if readers need more of the context..
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Rob Honeycutt at 02:53 AM on 29 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Doug... Note when you read the the LCOE reports they use the term "resource-constrained." All sources are intermittent. Wind and solars are merely not "dispatchable" in the same manner.
Once again, use of the term "intermittent" is a canard because it doesn't fully describe the situation.
I've read estimates are that renewables (wind, water, solar, geothermal) in conjunction with about 10% penetration of storage could supply all energy needs. You don't need 50% penetration for storage with integrated grids due to the fact other renewable resources are dispatachable (water, geothermal).
You say, "...cutting the storage cost of $124.84/Mwhr in half is not enough" but I would suggest that is a baseless assertion when already peaker plants functionally perform the same task and are a critical part of the energy mix at virtually the same levelized cost factor.
Moderator Response:[BL] Rob has duplicated this comment on the other thread he mentions in the next comment. Please make any follow-up comments on the other thread.
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Doug Cannon at 00:54 AM on 29 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Rob @ 377
Intermittency of renewables is not a "canard" (unfounded rumor or story), it's an absolute fact that has to be dealt with.
re "we are not replacing existing FF facilities until the end of their useful life. Once a facility is built it will continue operation until retirement"
I totally agree. And that's all we can do until the intermittancy issue is solved. But cutting the storage cost of $124.84/Mwhr in half is not enough.
I think another strategy worth considering is to forget the battery storage approach for now. Find the optimum mix of renewables that results in an effective capacity factor of 50% (wind and solar downtimes don't totally overlap). Then build renewables up to half our electricity and use FF for the other half. It will take decades to get to that point. By then the storage cost issue may be resolved.
You're right though. This this is probably an issue for another thread.
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BothoStr at 21:46 PM on 28 December 2022CO2 effect is saturated
I've just seen a discussion of this from post 587 onwards...
Moderator Response:[BL] Here is a direct link to comment 587 in this thread.
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BothoStr at 21:08 PM on 28 December 2022CO2 effect is saturated
Great post and discussion! Thank you
I'm rather new to this and have been struggling with finding a sound rebuttal to the reasonable sounding claims in this paper. As far as I understand it there is a weak saturation-claim to be found here:
Link to van Wijngaarden and Happer paper
thanks!
Moderator Response:[BL] Glad that you found the relevant discussion in the comments.
Created a link to the paper. The web software here does not automatically create links. You can do this when posting a comment by selecting the "insert" tab, selecting the text you want to use for the link, and clicking on the icon that looks like a chain link. Add the URL in the dialog box.
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nigelj at 16:01 PM on 28 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Regarding twitter. I think OPOF is right about twitter. If it was to devolve into a cess pool of mostly obnoxious people spreading hate or misinformation you would probably not want to be part of that. Even if you used twitter just to connect with sensible people, it may be a bad look to be part of the twitter system.
Regarding free speech and suing people. If people had the ability to sue other people in civil court just because they didnt like what someone said, or they felt it was misinformation or hateful speech, I fear this would have a destructive effect on discussion, because plenty of people would no longer participate in discussions out of fear of being sued. So such a proposition would be anti free speech.
I understand that Alex Jones was convicted for making false claims about a school schooting, but that was under a fairly narrowly focused existing law and that seems entirely appropriate to me. Hopefully it gets through to the totally obnoxious man that his conspiracy theory had no basis in fact and that he should reconsider his views. However sadly some people become stubbornly attached to their views and unable to move on.
Regarding hate speech. The New Zealand did consider hate speech law. The problem was the governmnet defining "hate" and defining which things should be included and gender, race, religion and disabled people were considered. There was a lot of public pushback that for example you would no longer be able to criticise religion or discuss gender issues even if done politely. So while I intensely dislike bigotry and so forth I lean towards free speech with just a few minimal and focused restrictions. Yes if you had strong censorship smart people can find a way of discussing whatever they want through careful language but I believe most people would just give up participating out of fear and this is to everyones detriment.
We have to be able to discuss things, fairly easily and openly and without fearing that just about anything we say could get us sued, convicted, fined or thrown off websites or comments deleted, so restrictions need to be fairly minimal.
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One Planet Only Forever at 14:17 PM on 28 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Reviewing the comment string, I hope it will be helpful to present examples, specifically regarding questions about total global population and bike riding, that clarify that presenting reasons and evidence that something is a misunderstanding and explaining how the misunderstandings can produce harmful results is not ‘labelling something a harmful misunderstanding’ (I also hope to adequately relate this comment to the question of the value of SkS activity on Twitter).
My comment @38 presents the reasons for the complete set of Climate Myths that are addressed by SkS under the ‘Arguments’ tab to be understood to be harmful misunderstandings that are more harmful the more they get repeated. And it includes the point that each person may consider their impacts to be small, but many harmful problems are due to everyone’s small harmful impacts adding up. And, in addition to a person’s actions contributing to harmful global warming and resulting climate change impacts, each person’s persistence in believing and sharing misunderstandings regarding climate science harmfully add up.
That totalling up of impacts relates to the question about increasing global population raised in peppers comment @45. An increased awareness and improved understanding regarding the ‘population problem’ is presented in my comment @4 on the SkS item “New reports spell out climate urgency, shortfalls, needed actions”. The quote in that comment is repeated below:
The "Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing Window – Climate Crisis Calls for Rapid Transformation of Societies by Juliane Berger et al." starts and ends part 2.3.2 "Consumption-based emissions are highly unequal between and within countries" with the following quotes (Bold is my emphasis):
"When national fossil CO2 emissions are estimated on a consumption-basis (i.e. where the supply-chain emissions are allocated to consumers) rather than on the territorial-basis considered so far, emissions tend to be higher in high-income countries such as the United States of America and European Union (by 6 per cent and 14 per cent respectively; Friedlingstein et al. [2020]). Conversely, they are lower in countries such as India and China (by 9 per cent and 10 per cent respectively), which are net exporters of goods ..."
"Consumption-based emissions also diverge starkly at a household level, in large part due to income and wealth disparities between and within countries (Capstick, Khosla and Wang 2020). When the emissions associated with both household consumption and public and private investments are allocated to households (see appendix A), and households are ranked by GHG emissions (excluding LULUCF), the bottom 50 per cent emit on average 1.6 tCO2e/capita and contribute 12 per cent of the global total, whereas the top 1 per cent emit on average 110 tCO2e/capita and contribute 17 per cent of the total (Chancel 2022; Chancel et al. 2022). Super-emitters in the top 0.1 per cent (average 467 tCO2e/capita) and the top 0.01 per cent (2,531 tCO2e/capita) have seen the fastest growth in personal carbon footprints since 1990. High-emitting households are present across all major economies, and large inequalities now exist both within and between countries (figure 2.3) (Chancel et al. 2022)."
An improved understanding of the population growth question is that the problem is the excessive harmful impacts of the highest impacting portion of the population, not the small amount of electricity used by poor people to recharge cell phones. A related problem is the incorrect development by poor people of a desire for a personal automobile or other harmful consumption examples set by the most harmful portion of the population.
Public transport or bike riding are less harmful ways to ‘travel’. And that leads to the example of peppers comment @40. Quoting peppers: “Im reminded of being in line at the beach for something and overhearing a bicyclist loudly lamenting and lambasting all these strollers and roller bladers and runners mucking up the brand new bike path the City just put in. Another bystander, a City worker, heard enough and promptly corrected the speaker that the mission statement for the path included walking, running, skate boarders, strollers and more, as well as bikes.”
The ‘bike path case’ is an example of misunderstandings producing potentially harmful results. The public arguing due to misunderstanding could have become more than just words (harmful bike path rage – like harmful road rage). It is also an example of how the risk of harm can be reduced by information and education effort that correct and limit misunderstanding. The city could have learned from other municipalities about the importance of public awareness campaigns and posted signs to make sure that users of the new path understood its intended, and therefore properly understood, use. The city worker would have been able to point to the signs to help correct the misunderstanding.
However, in the absence of signage regarding the proper use of the new path the path being referred to as a ‘new bike path’ raises the possibility that it was not to be used by strollers and walkers. Many cities are building new pathways and lanes for safer quicker commuting by bike or scooter. Walkers and strollers are not to be on these paths – for everyone’s safety. The point is that the city employee or the bike rider may have been correct. And the important thing is to have everyone, especially leadership, apply Bayes’ theorem to learn to minimize the harm that can be caused by misunderstandings.
If Twitter becomes increasingly populated by people who resist learning, people who resist having to change their mind by evading being awakened by increased awareness and improve understanding of what is harmful misunderstanding, then there clearly would be less point or value in SkS putting effort into Twitter.
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Eric (skeptic) at 13:01 PM on 28 December 2022What on Earth is a polar vortex? And what’s global warming got to do with it?
David-acct, thanks for that chart. I didn't know EIA published that. Here's the one I use for Germany: energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE. The EIA says in June 2022, the United States had 137.6 GW of wind capacity. With a 35% capacity factor (obviously more in winter, less in summer), that would be 48 GW on a perfectly average day.
In the chart you linked, the production goes from 22 GW on 12/20 to a peak of 80 GW on 12/22 as low pressure started intensifying in the midwest. The next 2 days wind production fluctuated between 36 to 46 GW with a brief dip to 33. That's below average but not way below average.
I believe it's likely you are correct in certain cases (e.g. the drop in wind for about a day in Feb 2021 in Texas), the drops and the rise to 80 GW during the intensification of the storm, will depend on weather patterns which vary. I think Arctic outbreaks will vary, and total wind production for the US will vary including in unaffected regions like California.
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David-acct at 12:29 PM on 28 December 2022What on Earth is a polar vortex? And what’s global warming got to do with it?
Sorry misposted the link
moderator - feel free to delete the bad link to the EIA in my post above.
Moderator Response:[BL] Done
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David-acct at 12:28 PM on 28 December 2022What on Earth is a polar vortex? And what’s global warming got to do with it?
interesting aspect of these polar vortex,
Typically for 2-4 days after the polar vortex hits, the wind drops significantly for those 2-4 days, Those days are also very cold.
I have attached links to the real time US Energy information association and the the germany real time electric generation by source. those real time data sources provide great information.
Also noted is the TVA went through some minor rolling blackouts during a relatively mild polar vortex. www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electricity-data/chart/power_generation/28.10.2022/28.12.2022/today/
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/electric_overview/US48/US48/GenerationByEnergySource-4/edit
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David-acct at 12:14 PM on 28 December 2022How to save on winter home heating costs
The article above highlights the advantages of tax subsidies for the purchase of energy efficient appliances, ev's etc. One of the most misunderstood facts regarding is that the real economic benefit goes to the seller of the product - contrary to popular perception.
Those tax subsidies artificially shift the demand curve, resulting in a higher sales price than the market drive point where the supply and demand curves naturally meet. The net price (gross sales price less the tax credit or subsidy) of the product reflects the natural equilibrium price without the tax subsidy. ( Slight caveat - depending on the elasticity of the product, the seller receives around 60-90% of the benefit).
any micro economics textbook will have good explanation of the effect of tax credits and subsidies on the supply and demand curves
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peppers at 12:02 PM on 28 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Rob, I mixed you w Bob again! So sorry. Thats two!
NIgelj,
If they open some ability for all to sue if false statements, liable or defamation is there, then the market will take care of this. That would be better than even more regs.
This site and folks do fine, and this is a hard place to manage. I have spoken of tolerance but Im not sure how I would hold up here, every time I mean.
I watch old Johnny Carson reruns and they were not allowed to say the name of a competing network if they needed to ID a show elsewhere. I am sure I will also evolve and there are more than several levels of censorship, some I agree with. Such as business competition. But not in other locates.
Best again, D
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Rob Honeycutt at 10:34 AM on 28 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Doug @376... This is starting to veer onto a new topic that might be better for a different thread, but what you're doing is promoting the canard about intermittency of wind and solar.
The fact is, we are not replacing existing FF facilities until the end of their useful life. Once a facility is built it will continue operation until retirement. New facilities are built to address increased energy needs and to replace retiring facilities. Because of the LCOE most new installed facilities are now wind and solar.
As the cost of grid level storage falls below the cost of peaker plants, those facilties will are become economically unviable to build. Existing peaker plants will continue to operate until their useful life expires and grid storage will replace them.
You say, "Remember to account for the battery storage when needed" but that is part of the canard about intermittency. Each of these are independent elements of the grid system. Each supply power when available (yes, even FF sources often unexpectedly go down as well).
With the falling cost of grid level storage what many new wind and solar facilities are looking at is co-location as opposed to grid level arbitrage. That storage cost could like fall to half of the current price in the coming decade, and once that happens there is no way for any mix of FF to compete in the market. It would just be a matter of allowing existing FF facilities to live out their useful lives to then be replaced with renewable sources.
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Doug Cannon at 09:57 AM on 28 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Rob #373, 374.
I apparently wasn't clear in my second paragraph. I'm referring to our current practice where there is always enough fossil or nuclear power available when solar or wind isn't available. This comes at no extra investment; it's sunk cost.
That scenario is the absolute best economic case for the use of renewables based on today's cost. We're eliminating the CO2 emmissions that would otherwise come from the replaced gas and it's costing us $7.61/Mwhr.
Try some other scenarios. I don't think you'll find any more favorable situation. Remember to account for the battery storage when needed.
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Eclectic at 09:47 AM on 28 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Not sure how it would enter the overall dollar calculation, but there may well be circumstances where there is value in a generation system that can give close-to-zero marginal cost (short or longer term). That would apply especially to solar installations, but slightly less so for wind.
There is that ~ and the difficulty of long-term LCOE estimations of "renewables" which are rapidly changing in technology & build costs.
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Rob Honeycutt at 09:03 AM on 28 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
In addition, capacity factor is irrelevant for LCOE and investment decisions since the grid buys power based on the lowest available price, not on when the power is available.
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Rob Honeycutt at 08:57 AM on 28 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Doug... Yes, what you're comparing is the "up front capital costs" which all new facilities incur. The up front capital costs for FF is lower, but then you're burdened with supplying that facility with fuel for the lifetime of its existence. Whereas, the up front cost of renewables are higher but they require no fuel for their lifetime. This is exactly what LCOE is.
Investors do not base their decisions only on up front capital costs but rather on the ROI they will see over the lifetime of the project. Renewables also generally have a shorter lifespan for any given installation, but in that span of time the investor reaps the entire return faster and moves on to a new project well before they can see their full return on a dollar-for-dollar investment for a FF based facility.
This is why renewables are now scaling exponentially.
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Bob Loblaw at 08:16 AM on 28 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Nigelj:
My comment @ 74 about people accusing SkS of deleting comments it does not agree with was not directed at you. Such accusations often appear in the final stages of a commenter breaking the moderation rules - and are typically deleted (usually shortly before a commenter's posting privileges are revoked). Regular readers would not see them.
My view of bias in web sites, news sources, etc. is more a case of "this is what it is" rather than support of the actions of those that do it. My father worked in the newspaper business for many years, and there was a time when all major news sources made a concerted effort to provide actual balance. Different papers had their leanings, but they also had principles and a conscience. Today, I see many "news" sources that just don't care whether what they print is true or not.
The biggest problem is that so many people cannot recognize horse pucky for what it is. That is not solved by "more people speaking louder". The long, slow process of learning a subject is lost in the fire hose of short, wrong, "anything that sells" crap that snake oil salesmen know will trigger people's worst emotions and separate them from their hard-earned dollars. It's easier to convince them that everything they don't agree with is "fake news" - even though the person saying "fake news" is the fakest of the lot.
Alex Jones may be learning a lesson on what is allowed. Or, it may be a case where he has already learned how to move his money to places where law suits can't reach it. Law suits only cover the most obscene cases, though. Canada has laws against "hate speech", but they are rarely used. The cases that hit the news are often associated with Holocaust denial. "Free Speech" is the usual defence (and usually fails).
Elon Musks's "free speech" position does not seem to include letting people mention alternatives to Twitter. (Links in comment 58.) His moderation policy seems to be "in flux" (to put it mildly). I tend to not trust people that say one thing while they are doing another.
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Doug Cannon at 08:10 AM on 28 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Rob Honeycutt #367
My numbers include all cost, not just installation. I didn't assume any MW/yr, or discount rate from which you could compute LCOE. With the same assumptions My numbers would agree with eia except they may be 2 years out of date.
You have to compare the total solar cost/ MWhr excluding taxpayer payments ($36.10/Mwhr) to just the variable cost avoided by not operating the combined cycle unit when solar is available: $37.05-8.56 =$28.49/Mwhr. That's basically what we're doing today.
What I was addressing was the the up front capital cost and the lower capacity factor show a major investment. Actually the 2022 eia report show this even more clearly
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nigelj at 05:51 AM on 28 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Bob Loblaw at 74
Thanks for the comments. I get where you are coming from.
One clarification. I didnt mean that this website specifically deletes comments and I wasn't being critical of them for doing that. I was just speaking generally.
This websites moderation policy actually seems generally quite well considered to me. Comments are deleted if they ramble off topic, make wild claims without reference to scientific literature or that just get repetitive. People only have to obey a few simple rules to get their opinion published. Some people just resist this then get all agitated. They are either arrogant or just not very bright.
The point is this website doesnt delete opinions just because it doesnt agree with them. People get a generally fair go. So the level of 'censorship' on this website is acceptable, but I would say its right at the upper limit of whats appropriate.
Yes Fox News is absolutely selective and biased. However this is not an excuse for us to do ever do the same. We should always strive to be objective. If there is a bias or adherence to some ideology it should be advertised: The economist.com does this nicely in its mission statement but I cant find thething now to copy and paste. It was something along the lines that they lean centre right economically and towards free trade but are not adverse to governments having some involvement in the economy. And that they lean liberal socially. So readers know their philosophical leaning
Yes we all get that there have to be some limits on free speech. Its entirely about where one draws the line in the sand. Governments impose some limits on free speech. I have no problem with that in principle and generally they are fairly minimal in western countries and that is to my preference.
The NZ governmnet goes slightly beyond some countries because it has laws against racist speech and this makes sense to me for reasons stated up thread. Its been considering hate speech law but has given up for now, because its so difficult to define hate speech and there has been a lot of push back against potentially suppressing discussion because almost anything could be labelled hate. This seems like a valid concern to me.
But its not only governments that can limit free speech. My main concern is what websites do and I lean towards fairly minimal moderation. You and Electic seem to lean towards quite strong censorship on websites. Six months ago my views were virtually identical to Electics on this. So similar its quite startling. Now I just wonder if strong censorship might do more harm than good. I think the trigger was our governmnets attempts to bring in hate speech laws. It just doesnt seem possible to define adequately or practically viable and is too likely to suppress opinion, and just too Orwellian for me.
I'm sure you and Eclectic would do a good fair minded job of moderation of such issues, but its other people I worry about.
So back to Twitter. It is not entirely clear what Musk is up to yet. However it appears he leans strongly towards libertarian values and free speech and against censorship, and it appears he is not going to be banning people or deleting comments unless they are inciting criminal activity or are just being extremely verbally abusive and bullying.
One problem is there isnt another website offering a similar service to Twitter to my knowledge. Given I have my doubts about hate speech laws, and the lack of alternatives to Twitter, I dont think this website should feel it has to abandon Twitter at this stage. FWIW.
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One Planet Only Forever at 05:05 AM on 28 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
This new NPR item "Why Republican elites backed Trump: power, belonging ... and voter pressure" is about one person's experience and personal learning journey through the harmful changes of the Republican Party, changes that predated Trump becoming the leader of the GOP.
There appear to be parallels to the SkS Twitter dilemma. To be helpful requires figuring out how to continue to be helpful when an organization you have developed an identity within drifts towards increased harmful misunderstanding, is pulled away from the pursuit of learning/teaching to be less harmful and more helpful to Others.
Ultimately, the harmful devolution of an organization may get to the point where efforts to help reduce harmful misunderstanding among the members becomes a waste of time. It is helpful to build a presence in alternative organizations. Those alternatives are then ready to be more fully moved to should the harmfully devolving organization and its members become increasingly resistant to Bayesian Learning.
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Rob Honeycutt at 03:52 AM on 28 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Peppers @75... "Staying open minded is a bother, a torment even, and thats where being tolerant comes in play."
As the saying goes, "It's good to keep an open mind, but not so much that your brain falls out."
In other words, an open mind is far from "a bother." It's fundamental to the scientific process. Here at SkS, what is expected is that you bring substantive points to the table and be able to defend your position with the backing of published research. Making up your own theories on the spot doesn't fly. Repeating unsubstantiated theories doesn't fly. You need to do your homework, do your research, and thoroughly think through what you're saying.
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Rob Honeycutt at 03:45 AM on 28 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
What is my "rot in hell" story, Peppers?
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peppers at 02:05 AM on 28 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Rob and all,
Each have a proper point and Rob is close to my premise. And Rob, I love your 'rot in hell' story!
I was relating to truth. This also means scientific truth, and explains why the scientific process never closes to new input, angles or ideas.
I perfectly understand that SS is hampered with a repeat of the same 3-4 dozen premises which are not bringing new in, AND that area comes under abuse by ill intending visitors.
Folks can limit speech, but at the cost of new input and at the cost of working ever further and less forward toward truth. Staying open minded is a bother, a torment even, and thats where being tolerant comes in play.
The educated minds here may like this Einsteinian favorite of mine. 2 boys, one on a train slowing moving and one on the ground. The train boy throws a ball straight out. The boy on the train sees it travel straight out and down. The boy on the ground sees the ball fall in a great barabolic curve overhead. The key to this universal example is that the experience of each boy, as different as they each were, are both perfectly, defendably and repeatably true. Each can argue til the end of days, but it was the same one event for both, and both are right.
I believe that I want input. I did not bring the topic up of death threats and obvious 'Imminent crime" exceptions to free speech, and those who have brought that up ( correctly but) have missed my point.
Bob, my wife adds that folks do not act in person like online. Maybe some form of liability online may be coming, to inhibit people from acting badly. The ability to sue or something. Then they hide their identity... Not an easy problem.
Best all. D
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Doug Cannon at 02:04 AM on 28 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
To MA Rodger, re #369
Thanks for your input. That's about 40% less than my rough estimate of 200 million acres.
I think I can summarize the various replies to my query:
Yes, but it would be extremely difficult and we're too committed to renewables to focus elsewhere.
Signing off. Thanks to all.
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Eric (skeptic) at 01:39 AM on 28 December 2022What on Earth is a polar vortex? And what’s global warming got to do with it?
Thanks for that nicely balanced article. For the recent event the AO index went negative. Negative AO is not necessary for an Arctic outbreak but it's indication of a north-south tendency in the jet stream. Also if negative AO leads to an outbreak, that outbreak could be anywhere in the NH and may not make the U.S. centric news in the U.S.
So a logical question to ask is what is the trend of AO? No trend: www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/month_ao_index.shtml. The papers by Francis a few years ago referenced the AO starting late fall and winter. That makes sense because the anomalous heat release from refreezing open water is highest in the fall continuing into winter. Arctic tempeature deviations from normal are highest in winter: ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php. But consistently higher in the fall.
The CPC website provides a rendering of JFM AO: www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/JFM_season_ao_index.shtml. Perhaps a positive trend. One paper claiming a jet waviness trend used data ending in 2013. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/1/014005 That's not convincing anymore given the newer data with opposite trend.
To show a connection, someone will need to take an index like AO and the temperature data e.g. DMI and look for changes in the index corresponding to increases in fall warmth shown in the temperature data starting around day 250.
It seems likely that we would see some correlation in the winter data from negative AO to the many of the spikes of warming shown in DMI. That would be correlation but would not mean the temperature spikes caused negative AO. More likely the opposite and a careful analysis of timing might tease that out.
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Bob Loblaw at 23:53 PM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
nigelj @ 64 asks "But what about the website refusing to allow comments or opinions that they just dont like?"
SkS is often accused of that, but deletion of portions or entire comments usually starts after someone has posted the same thing several times and is not listening to answers.
...but in the web writ large, so what? Web sites can filter their material any way they want. Free speech suppressed? No. There are lots of other web sites someone can post to, and they can start their own web site if they want. "Free speech" does not entitle someone to force an unwilling audience to hear them.
News organizations are quite capable of being extremely selective in what they publish. Is Fox News "fair and balanced"? Is Tucker Carlson interested in presenting a balance discussion of topics? There are lot of examples of major "news" organizations with terrible bias on many issues.
Forty years ago, I worked overseas for several months, and I used shortwave radio to get news. Three sources were easy to pick up (strong signals), and I categorized them this way:
- Voice of America, with a message that communists were all going to rot in hell.
- Radio Moscow, with a message that capitalists were all going to rot in hell.
- Evangelical Christian stations, with a message that nearly everyone was going to rot in hell.
Bias in information sources on the Internet is a serious problem, but it is not new, and it is not a "Free Speech" issue.
All these commercial sources are selling something. Bums in the seats/eyes on the screen - grist for the advertisers.
Twitter will survive in some form as long as advertisers want to associate their products with the material that brings in readers that will buy products. As discussed in the OP, SkS needs to decide the pros and cons of continuing to participate in Twitter.
Limits to "Free Speech" come in when governments enact legislation to regulate content. As we have discussed, there have always been limits to "Free Speech" - libel and slander laws, creating a public disturbance, hate speech, etc. The Internet is a new beast - in part because it is international, in part because of its speed of spreading information, in part because individual users do not risk facing their "opponents" in the flesh world. If some people's behaviour in the real world matched their online behaviour, riots would ensue and people would end up in jail.
Not an easy problem.
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Bob Loblaw at 23:23 PM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Slumgullionridge @71:
Note that Skeptical Science is a volunteer-operated group. Resources are limited. Even our stock of "Myth Rebuttals" is hard to keep up-to-date.
We do publish a weekly "New Research" summary, but much of that content is automatically generated. As Eclectic notes, our strength is in our stock of rebuttals.
Comments are driven by whoever decides to comment, and yes it is often difficult to see detailed scientific discussion. Too often it is the same old, tired, uniformed myths being repeated by people that are not willing to read the material they are posting under (or the comments they get back).
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Bob Loblaw at 23:15 PM on 27 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
To see the annual uptake in the link in comment 366, you have to read past the first page/Introduction. Further down, they have a section titled "Annual Carbon Accumulation Rates". There, they give a figure of 2.0 tCha/yr.
They also refer to it as "the rate of carbon accumulation in aboveground biomass" [emphasis added]. As I noted above, soil carbon, leaf litter, and dead branches. etc. (usually called "detritus") can be important carbon storage reservoirs in many forests.
Forestry practices can have major consequences on soil carbon and detritus. For example, after clearing a section of boreal forest to harvest timber, the land becomes a strong carbon source as the soil carbon decomposes due to increases sunlight and warmer soil temperatures. This is a much larger loss of carbon than any gains from rapid young tree growth.
So Doug Cannon's "solution" is not the panacea he thinks it is.
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MA Rodger at 21:01 PM on 27 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
The source of the 77.5 t(CO2)/acre quoted @258 is shown in the link @366. It is not a figure for annual sequestration (which is evidently being expected @358 and which would be a few percentage points of this 77.5t figure) but total sequestration. And I think it is too low. It is derived from cocoa plantations so a figure which may not be representative of replanted global woodlands.
In numbers I am more familiar with, 77.5t(CO2)/acre is (as the link says) 191.6t(CO2)/ha or [x100/3.664=] 5,200t(C)/sq km.
Over the period 2010-19, there has been 53M ha of lost tropical forest (according to OurWorldInData). And since AD1850, the figure given is 1,400M ha. The Global Carbon Project give budgets showing estimated emissions from land-use-change (this mainly due to deforestation) as 13Gt(C) for 2010-19 and 203Gt(C) since AD1850. These numbers suggest a carbon sequestration intensity for natural woodland of 24,500t(C)/sq km or 14,500t(C)/sq km, the former figure tropical, the latter perhaps global. These numbers are far greater than that given in the #366 link.
We can dodge calculating the annual uptake by considering how many sq km of forest would need to be planted to draw down today's annual CO2 emissions (which would be necessary to stabalise GHG forcing). That would be roughly 500,000 sq km or 0.3% of global land, or 0.5% of the 100M sq km global productive land, annually. Note that globally 38M sq km is currently forested, and a similar amount would be naturally scrub or grassland so also not very useful for sequestering our CO2. Thus the potential for land available to sequester our FF CO2 emissions would be somewhere near 25M sq km and such a level of replanting would provide sequestration for perhaps 50 years of our FF emissions at present levels of FF-use.
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Eclectic at 18:06 PM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Slumgullionridge @71 :
Fair enough. SkepticalScience was set up as an educational resource. With its long list of Most Used Climate Myths , it provides you (or anyone) a reasonably quick & efficient way to gain scientific knowledge about climate. You can wade through the Myths one after the other, in turn. Or if you already have moderately good background knowledge, then you can pick out those Myths which fill the gaps (and read the discussions of the peer-reviewed studies, to be found in the comments columns there). I must confess I have not found a better website for that educational purpose.
The problem then becomes: what do you do when you have achieved a high passing grade in the comprehension of climate science? I do not mean by that, the achievement of mastery & expertise in all the minutiae & technicalities, I mean, enough knowledge to see that the mainstream climate science is correct ~ and the skeptics/contrarians haven't a leg to stand on (despite their repetitious assertions).
I guess you then consider retiring to your cabin by the lake, and dismissing the climate problem from your mind. Or you consider spending some time on the subsequent aspect ~ what to actually do, in terms of political science, ethics, and so on. Plenty of room there for hot-headed conversations . . . most of which crop up in the ephemeral/daily topic threads (such as the one where you are now posting).
Some amount of rhetoric & pomposity is almost inescapable in discussing political matters. ~ Just the nature of the beast.
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slumgullionridge at 16:43 PM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
I have been with Skeptical Science for about 6 months. I joined on a recommendation of a colleague of mine, a climate science associate who is a peer review committeeperson serving as Editor for the authors of a new study to be published in spring. I'm struck by the plethora of social science commentary on this site, contrasted to my expectation to be exposed to peer-reviewed hard science. I wanted to see commentary on the progress of climate science, instead it seems like the comments belong in a compendium of social science...which I have a full library of, behind my desk in English 301. I do appreciate the expansive listing of peer-reviewed studies precedent to the "comments" rhetoric, but I was hoping to see commentary about the studies, not so much about political science, ethics, or philosophy.
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Rob Honeycutt at 16:38 PM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
I'm usually the perennial optimist, but when it comes to Twitter I genuinely believe it's a lost cause. The fundamental business model is predicated on the need for revenues, by way of the fact it is a centralized business with investors and a large base of employee/engineers. The way they generate revenue is to code algorithms so that interations between users generate maximum activity to generate the most revenue possible. That maximum activity is primarily going to be a function of users attacking each other. But the company has to keep a lid on the exchanges in order to maintain advertisers for revenue.
I think Twitter was (prior to Musk) doing it's best to thread that needle, and that meant no one was ever really happy with the situation. Elon Musk's version of the business model was merely to come in and take one side on all arguments without fully understanding what he was doing.
My personal opinion is that Twitter is a total loss. I think it will be out of business in the next 12 to 18 months.
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slumgullionridge at 15:55 PM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
I hope that Skeptical Science does not leave Twitter. I'm a mature, educated adult, an English Professor and am world travelled. I can tell the difference between types of speech and am not uncomfortable having to sift through such material to get to where I would like to go. I do have a neighborhood family that chooses to live in a home surrounded by "refuse" and the whiff of marijuana, but I can navigate around that without analyzing who's being "harmful" or "hateful" or "pompous" or "full of rhetoric"...and I'm hopeful all of you can navigate around your definitions of "odious" as well.
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Eclectic at 15:04 PM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Nigelj @67 :
Agreed. Woke is nowadays an ugly term. AFAICT it started as a somewhat light-hearted label, and then was seized by the non-woke and used as an all-purpose bludgeon in the identity-politics game. The word has now become almost meaningless, other than distinguishing "them" from "us the good people".
Sad when any meaningful word loses its meaning. For example, in the USA the word "socialist" has no actual meaning for 90% of the population. It is just a bludgeon used by many politicians. Impossible to have a genuine discussion using that word, because the hearer automatically short-circuits his brain into "evil enemy ... evil enemy ... Spawn of Satan ... etc." [Shades of "1984" language-shaping, eh!] And yet the same hearer is happy to accept his farm subsidy or his Social Security cheque or his Medicare-ized hospital treatment, etcetera.
Possibly, in time, the term Woke can be rehabilitated into something light-hearted and useful . . . by overusing the word and applying it to everything in sight (and especially to right-wing attitudes & activities). By making it so greasy that it can't be grasped as a weapon.
Back on topic ~ for Twitter etcetera I would prefer to be over-censored than under-censored. Much less harm done, that way. Those who wish to have an intelligent public conversation, can find indirect ways & allusions to discuss issues (by treading a tad carefully). And the truly anti-social citizens will always continue to use their echochambers & dark spaces ~ but they won't get condoned or "normalized" in the public gaze.
To some extent, laws follow public sentiment. But the converse also applies ~ and George Bernard Shaw points out how laws can shape public sentiment, over time. Useful, to start with good laws. (Think: the Anti-Slavery laws).
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Rob Honeycutt at 12:20 PM on 27 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Doug @363... "It would take little or no up front capital investment to continue with FF."
This is also incorrect. All forms of generation have a useful lifetime and eventually need to be decommissioned and replaced. What is happening is much of the new added generation as well as replacement generation is being filled with some form of renewables. Renewables are currently scaling exponentially.
Moreover, the cost of FF sources is rising as renewables continue to fall in cost. The previous link to the EIA LCOE report this year includes the cost of grid level storage since those cost are now starting to fall below the levelized cost of peaker plants.
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nigelj at 12:14 PM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Eclectic @66
The woke label annoys me as well, however these days Im quite happy to be labelled woke and I tend to respond that yes Im woke because I dont like bigotry and racism. Whats wrong with that? They grind their teeth about that.
I promoted the normally accepted minimal constraints on free speech, and Peppers did agree, but one gets the suspicion its with reluctance and a certain lack of commitment.
Thanks for your clear statements on the censorship issue. I have contemplated the same approach to things and I tend to agree it comes down to commonsense. However I just dont know if I trust some team at google or whatever organisation to use much commonsense. There is enormous possibility of over moderation, and of shutting down discussion and sending it onto the dark web to fester, or non moderated websites, and thus reinforcing tribalism and group think and of further alienating the conservative leaning section of society by shutting down their views. And you have people like Musk who clearly lean towards very free speech.
Our government has actually made racist speech illegal. This all well intended and I loathe racist views, but as a result some of our websites wont allow the public to post comments on articles discussing racial issues, and also issues connected to gender, presumably because they are afraid of transgressing the law by letting a bad comment slip through their moderation, or getting a lot of complaints. This is a serious unintended consequence of censorship. Some racial issues should be discussed and debated, sensitively of course.
So yeah I totally get where you are coming from, but censorship needs a light touch and a lot of commonsense.
Existing long standing laws against inciting criminal activity can be used to shut down the worst of the hate speech. Sometimes we already have the tools, and generally accepted tools but just dont use them well enough.
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Rob Honeycutt at 12:09 PM on 27 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Doug, your numbers on renewables are incorrect, I think because you're only looking at installation costs rather than levelized costs.
You can read the 2022 EIA LCOE Report here.
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Eclectic at 10:45 AM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Nigelj @63 ,
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year ! . . . or should I more wokely say "Happy Holidays" ?
Judging by his earlier comments, "he" is clearly very much opposed to any limitations/restrictions in the public sphere [includes privately-owned media platforms]. In trying to untangle later comments of his, it still seems to me that he is emotionally attached to the idea "Four Legs Good; Censorship Bad". Outright. And, he completely steered away from debating any of my instances of the desirability of censorshipping.
Putting all that aside, I return to the ideas that:
(A) since censorship is essential in a functioning society, the real question is where the (fuzzy?) line is drawn. A difficult matter. IMO, the practical criterion/standard must be common sense. Of which there is not enough in the world. Yet a sort of committee of respectable Google employees is an example of a good start [Musk-free]. Not perfect ~ but like "democracy" it is perhaps the best we can do. ~And disagreements should be devolved to the Lowest Common Denominator level (so to speak).
and (B) there is a strong reason for censorship in the public sphere (and it is reinforced by the range and flash-fire speed of modern electronic communications). It is not that our delicate ears may be offended by statements which are unsuited to genteel Drawing Room conversations. But it is that multiplier effect which I mentioned earlier. The madness of crowds, the amplification of the more evil tendencies in human nature.
~ Whether by open statements, or by dog-whistles : the Overton Window of thoughts & actions can shift rapidly in an evil direction. (Witness recent hate crimes and recent political events.)
In other words, there should not be vastly different censorship thresholds in the various large & small social settings (public or private). Sadly, it is human nature ~ but minimal censorship produces minimal health in society. Mr Alex Jones is just one tip of a nasty & dangerous iceberg.
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nigelj at 10:12 AM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Bob Loblow @64,
"Shouting "my free speech was censored/suppressed/violated" if a web service refuses to allow it is not my idea of "free speech"."
I agree with you if you mean the website is refusing to allow people to post any comments at all, or refusing to allow abusive, or off topic comments. Websites are as you say privately owned and totally entitled to do that, and it doesnt suppress opinion which is the essence of what matters.
But what about the website refusing to allow comments or opinions that they just dont like, for example climate denialist comments, warmist comments, comments that promote creationism or that criticise evolution, or that express hatred, or are are factually innacurate, (eg the world is flat or covid has only killed 20,000 people globally) ? They are entitled to do that if they want, but to me that is suppressing free speech. Its intruding a long way into what opinions are allowed, and is censorship that goes right against the liberal world view. Although I might make an exception for the covid claim on grounds that blatant lies like that can fool some gullable people and end up killing lots of people.
I'm trying to get some sense of where you think the line in the sand should be drawn on moderation of what people post. I confess I'm having some trouble deciding just how far websites should go with that form of moderation, although I did try to express what I think above thread and it leans towards minimal moderation. Yes its their business if they are privately owned, but to me that is not the point.
"Shouting "my free speech was censored/suppressed/violated" when someone else says something against what you said is also not my idea of "free speech"."
Agree totally. See this all the time, unfortunately. I constantly challenge these people and point out they are confusing things and their claim is illogical.
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Doug Cannon at 09:39 AM on 27 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
https://www.tma.earth/2021/06/18/how-we-calculate-carbon-sequestration-rates/
Moderator Response:[RH] Note there's a policy against link only posts.
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Bob Loblaw at 09:05 AM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
nigelj @ 63.
...but web sites are not "public spaces". Web sites are more like publications, such as newspapers. Publicly visible for reading, but not necessarily publicly accessible for writing.
Newspapers usually invite Letters to the Editor, but very few are actually published. They may accept unsolicited opinion pieces, but few of those will make it into print. Newspapers with online material may or may not allow comments, and these may or may not be moderated. It's up to them.
"Free speech" means that someone can set up their own web page. It does not mean that any web page needs to allow any material from anyone. "Free speech" does not mean that anyone has to listen to you or pay attention to you.
Shouting "my free speech was censored/suppressed/violated" if a web service refuses to allow it is not my idea of "free speech".
Shouting "my free speech was censored/suppressed/violated" when someone else says something against what you said is also not my idea of "free speech".
Far too often, it seems that the people shouting "my free speech was censored/suppressed/violated" are really wanting to speak unopposed - they want their "free speech", but they don't want others to have the same right (whatever that "right" is). Do as I say, not as I do.
You can argue whether Twitter is a service that must accept all and everything - I raised the issue of a "common carrier" in comment #11. Web services need to be careful with what they allow and support, as they may become legally liable for material they publish. I'm not sure Alex Jones is the "free speech" model we want to follow.
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Bob Loblaw at 08:42 AM on 27 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Doug @ 363:
If we accept the original premise above,
It's not a premise. It's based on measurements.
the earth is a net absorber of 17 Gigatons annually. The land having 11 Gigatons of net absorption.
So far, so good.
So more land vegetation should provide more net absorption.
In a very general sense, yes, but it depends entirely on what this "new vegetation" is replacing. Are you thinking of planting something on land that has no current vegetation, and no current soil carbon? Exactly where is this "new vegetation" supposed to appear?
The .5% is the proportion (200 million acres) of total land required to absorb the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels.
This is where you lose me. As you stated in comment 356, you determine that 15.64Gt is 3.5% of the total land uptake (450 Gt/yr in figure 1 of the OP). Your total land required still appears to be based on your 77.5 tons/acres value you provided in comment 358.
The entire land ecosystem as it stands is only capable of an additional 11 Gt/yr uptake (over and above the 439 Gt/yr it is releasing). If we created a duplicate land system covering the same area that all our current vegetation covers, it will both absorb and release CO2 just like the existing one. What is it about this new land cover that you are proposing that is different from the current one, that makes you think that we only need a much smaller area than the current vegetation covers?
New vegetation on bare soil does not have carbon uptake rates anywhere near the numbers you seem to think it does. (You have not yet provided the source of your 77.5 tons/acre number in comment 358.)
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Doug Cannon at 08:06 AM on 27 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
refer my 362.
$17/Mwhr, not $1700.
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Doug Cannon at 08:00 AM on 27 December 2022Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
RE: Rob Honeycutt 360
Here's my reference for known fossil fuel reserves
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-reserves-left
Estimates on lithium range from 20 years to 200 years. Would be interestedto know if you have some more definitive information.
Re: Rob Honeycutt 359
If we accept the original premise above, the earth is a net absorber of 17 Gigatons annually. The land having 11 Gigatons of net absorption. So more land vegetation should provide more net absorption. The .5% is the proportion (200 million acres) of total land required to absorb the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels. I would be interested in a better analysis of this if you have one. That was the original question I presented.
Regarding your staement "it will cost less to transition to renewables than it would be to continue using FF's." That may be true for developing countries who have growing needs for power and no access to natural gas. But you shouldn't misunderstand staements that say renewables are cheaper than FF.
In the U.S. for example there is little need for added electrical power.
It would take little or no up front capital investment to continue with FF. Theoretically to totally replace The terrawatts of U.S. energy with solar and battery backup would require a $1.7trillion investment. That is no doubt not the way to proceed, but it's the cheapest renewable route.
Here's a link to eia 2020 cost of electric utilities.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capital_cost_AEO2020.pdf
For large wind turbines: base cost $1265/kw plus 35.14/kw each year
For solar PV : base cost $1313/kw plus $15.25/kw each year
For combined cycle gas: base cost $958 plus $12.20/kw each year Plus $1700/Mwhr (my estimate).
It gets complicated when you have to take into account if solar and wind have a capcity factor of 25% and 35%. So as long as we continue to use renewables with fossil backup you can just amortize the cost of renewables over 30 years and compare to FF it replaces when they're operating. If you want to completely eliminate the FF backup you have to multiply the costs of renewables by 3 or 4 and add cost of battery backup.
I don't think we should argue the economics to justify renewables. We need to argue for the benefits.
I
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nigelj at 07:49 AM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Eclectic @60, I largely agree with you, but my comment was restricted to peppers views on censoring of free speech, and he clearly does accept some limits. So its not black and white for him.
I've expalined my views on free speech in my previous comment, and that limits should be fairly minimal in public doman places like websites. Would be interested in your feedback on that even if you violently disagree. If you have a spare moment. I'm wrestling a bit with the issue because free speech is important, but the internet has turbo charged the spread of misinformation and this is very bad news. Reconciling the two is not looking easy.
Bob Loblaw @61
Yes. Like I said his views are rather opaque!
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Charlie_Brown at 07:45 AM on 27 December 2022From the eMail Bag: the Beer-Lambert Law and CO2 Concentrations
Scruffy @29
Bob’s example illustrates the concept of a diminishing effect of increasing CO2, but as I challenged in @1 and Bob agreed in @2, it is insufficient to fully explain the complexity of the saturation effect. I prefer using the figure that Bob @7 reproduced from SpectralCalc.com for me to explain the saturation effect not as cylinders or cells in series, but as absorption lines (absorptance = 1 – transmittance) in parallel where strong lines reach an absorptance of 1.0 at low CO2 concentrations while weak absorption lines contribute to increasing absorptance with increasing concentration.It is much better to interpret the Beer-Lambert Law by looking down at the atmosphere from space than it is to look up from the surface. The common view of Beer’s Law considers attenuation of the energy emitted from a surface. For example, measure the energy emitted from a source, travels through gas such as CO2, and reaches the end of a cell. The NIST spectrum provides the results for the specified set of conditions using this approach. However, the energy that reaches the end of the cell from the original source does not include re-radiated energy. That is because IR absorbed by CO2 in the cell is re-radiated in all directions, mostly to the cell walls where it is absorbed by the cell walls. The geometry of the measurement cell, unlike the open atmosphere, precludes re-radiated energy.
You say “NO energy will be radiated into space in the CO2 absorption spectra - that atmosphere is completely opaque at those frequencies.” This should be clarified to say that none of the original source energy (photons) from the surface will be radiated into space because it will be absorbed and re-radiated along the path length toward space. However, all molecules above absolute zero vibrate and radiate energy. CO2 at all levels of the atmosphere will radiate energy. At the uppermost atmospheric layer containing sufficient CO2 molecules, energy radiated by CO2 will radiate to space in the CO2 absorption band, precisely because absorption lines have a value great than 0. Kirchhoff’s Law provides that absorptance = emittance (with the caveat of being at thermal equilibrium, which allows for energy transfer between molecules by collision or conduction in addition to radiation.)
Bob’s experiment in the original post demonstrates why it is better to view the effect of Beer’s Law on radiant energy escape to space by looking down from space. The atmosphere in the tropopause at an altitude of about 10-20 km is thin and cold. There is a lot of distance between CO2 molecules. The key is that there is a very long path length available, sufficient to bring many of the absorptance lines in the CO2 band to 1.0. With increasing CO2 concentration, even the absorptance of very weak lines becomes significant.
Your description of the overall global heat balance is incorrect. Increasing CO2 will cause more heat to be absorbed closer to the surface, and this will lower the temperature of the tropopause. This is part of a special and complicated signature of global warming by CO2. It actually reduces emittance to space, aggravating the greenhouse effect rather than offsetting it. The greenhouse effect is driven by the temperature profile of the upper atmosphere. What happens in the troposphere below the tropopause, including convection, conduction evaporation, and condensation, just moves heat around within the troposphere. You mention the effect of water vapor, which also exacerbates global warming as a positive feedback effect. The role of clouds is complicated. High, cold cirrus clouds can increase warming while low, warm, thick clouds can reflect solar energy. All of this is discussed in detail elsewhere, and is beyond the scope of a single rebuttal. But if you have any more specific questions that are stumbling blocks for your understanding, I will try to address them as succinctly as possible.
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nigelj at 07:32 AM on 27 December 2022We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.
Clarification to my commet @59. By "public domain" I meant the street and also websites, twitter, facebook and the like as opposed to peoples private homes. I'm just using the popular definition of "public domain" here, as opposed to the technical definition. Obviously websites are privately owned.
