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dana1981 at 02:22 AM on 9 January 2013Temperatures Continue Up the Escalator
BWTrainer @7 - I did try to create a heat content escalator, but there's less noise in the heat content data, so it's hard to find any 'steps' longer than 3 years. Which is of course why denialists focus on the noisier surface temperature data. -
Rob Honeycutt at 02:17 AM on 9 January 2013Temperatures Continue Up the Escalator
I've long stated to climate "skeptics" on the internet that, they might have something if global temps started to fall below the 2-sigma range of the trend. If that were happening then there would be some hard work to do to figure out why rapidly increasing CO2 levels was not translating into increased warming. BUT... That's not the issue. We are not outside the 2-sigma range and therefore we are still within the bounds of what is expected for GHG driven warming. -
BWTrainer at 23:36 PM on 8 January 2013Temperatures Continue Up the Escalator
What Klapper fails to notice (one of several things, really) is that the Earth has continued to warm, and that warmth is going into the oceans. The Escalator is clearly labeled as "Global Surface Temperature Anomalies". Would it be possible to create an escalator that also took ocean heat content into account? Or could SkS always show the Escalator along with a graph of ocean heat so that we won't have to be subjected to comments along the lines of Klappers? -
bath_ed at 23:18 PM on 8 January 2013Temperatures Continue Up the Escalator
Given the fact that there will always be noise obscuring the warming signal, Klapper and his type could simply move onto the next 'step' of the escalator and argue in 2020 that there has been no warming since 2014 and so on. Using this 'logic' one could continue arguing 'no warming since x' till alligators bask in a palm fringed arctic. -
CBDunkerson at 21:55 PM on 8 January 2013Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Julesdingle, I usually go with; 'Without atmospheric CO2 all green plants would die. Without green plants nearly all animals would die. Trace? Yes. No effect? Don't be stupid.' The official SkS writeup for that myth (#76) is here. -
Harald Korneliussen at 21:02 PM on 8 January 2013Dark matter for Greenland melting
I wish the "crowdfunding" word would die, because it obscures what's really novel about approaches like Kickstarter - and this project misses it. Rather, it should be called "treshold pledge funding". The crucial fact of Kickstarter, which distinguishes it from fundraisers of the sort every charity has prior art on, is that pledges are taken, not money, and pledges are only upheld if the campaign reaches the goal. But people who want money don't like to think about failure. They tend to just want money now, and don't put the contributors interest first as they should. This project is an example: It is not a treshold pledge system! They take the money whether they raise enough to do the expedition or not. There is no good reason for them to do that. I don't care about charitable deductions (I don't get them anyway). A scientific expedition isn't charity. We should fund this because we get something out of it, because it matters to us. Charity is the wrong way to think about that, even if it pays tax-wise. If the meaningless neologism "crowdfunding", which just is a synonym of fundraising, would die and be replaced by "treshold pledge funding", then maybe these people would do things right next time. -
Dikran Marsupial at 19:38 PM on 8 January 2013Temperatures Continue Up the Escalator
Klapper perhaps you would care to wait until the last step has become sufficiently long that it provides statistically significant evidence of a discrepancy between the models and the observations, rather than fixate on periods to short to draw any useful conclusions? ... or even just statistically significant evidence that the underlying rate of warming has dropped? -
JasonB at 15:54 PM on 8 January 2013Temperatures Continue Up the Escalator
The main value of Klapper's contribution is as a perfect example of the utter failure to comprehend the point of the graph that Doug is talking about. I don't think there is a way of presenting the facts that can convince such people; they merely serve as an illustration of how blinded you need to be to hold "skeptical" beliefs for anyone who immediately understands what the graph means. Personally, I also quite like showing how the recent temperatures fit well within the expected range of the earlier trend, like Tamino's gif, and I think John Nielsen-Gammon's method is an incredibly powerful way of illustrating why "the last step is the longest step":
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Daniel Bailey at 15:09 PM on 8 January 2013Temperatures Continue Up the Escalator
1. AGW is referred to as "settled fact" by the US National Academy of Science (Pp. 44-45; free download after free registration). It is a robust theory, not an hypothesis. So try again. 2. It is your established wont to file a 1-off statement at odds with the science and/or the thread on which you place it. And to then not respond to the follow-up comments by others. Perhaps we should just ignore this current comment as the incipient ideological pap it purports to be, no? -
Klapper at 14:27 PM on 8 January 2013Temperatures Continue Up the Escalator
The problem for the movement to promote the hypothesis of catastrophic global warming is that the last step is the longest step. When will this last step break upward? -
Dave123 at 12:53 PM on 8 January 2013Dark matter for Greenland melting
I've also seen claims that this merely replicates work already done by Shindell, hence a junket. I don't know that Shindell has that kind of data...does anyone? My quick look at his work doesn't suggest he does, but I've not been reading all the full papers. -
julesdingle at 12:28 PM on 8 January 2013Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
A frequent ignorant comment is that CO2 makes such a tiny component of the atmosphere 'how can it change the climate?" Tiresome as it is I have tried various analogies but the final explanation that at least shuts them up is their acceptance of O3 as a UV shield and its low 8ppm, the other trump is their acceptance of volcanoes changing weather for years after huge eruptions of sulphur yet 20 million tonnes can bring years of poor summers. a tiny co2 link would be helpful to direct sceptics toModerator Response:[DB] Per SkS contributor Gary McGuigan, here is another interesting example of how trace concentrations can have a large effect:
The Brazilian Wandering Spider (Phoneutria) or banana spider appears in the Guinness Book of World Records 2007 for the most venomous spider and is the spider responsible for most human deaths. This spider is believed to have the most potent neurotoxic venom of any living spider. Only 0.006mg (0.00000021oz) is sufficient to kill a mouse.
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Doug Hutcheson at 10:55 AM on 8 January 2013Temperatures Continue Up the Escalator
I have pointed numerous contrarians to the escalator, in other fora. Never do they seem to learn from it. The most common response has been a variation of "Skeptical Science is a warmist religious site, where argument is not allowed". Data know no religion, they just are what they are. The laws of physics are not Papal Bulls. Science is not faith: in fact, it is the opposite to faith. Sigh. This is faith that the high priests of denialism should ponder:Hosea 4:6 King James Version (KJV) 6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me
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YubeDude at 10:44 AM on 8 January 2013Dark matter for Greenland melting
Pete @1 "However, in warming periods in the distant past there would also have been an increase in wildfire and the fires could spread over much larger areas..." What do you consider the distant past? Why would there have been an increase in wildfires? Why would these fires spread over a larger area? What is the empirical basis for this claim? This sounds all rather "IMO"...IMHO. ------------- They are attempting to raise 150k for a research project that will involve, among other cost, chartering a plane for the duration of their stay. I have already seen postings to the YT thread talking about the "green gravy train" which deskepticons use as a form of ad hom argument to discount the science...a get rich quick fraud perpetrated so as to fatten the wallets of the research by fleecing the unknowing public coffers; well, at least that is what the are trying to spin this as. -
Doug Hutcheson at 10:33 AM on 8 January 2013Food Security: the first big hit from Climate Change will be to our pockets
villabolo @ 47, we are straying off topic a bit, but the mods have been lenient so far. To drag our conversation back to the topic of the OP, I agree education will be a major hurdle, but this will be largely because most of the available human energy will be dedicated to acquiring food. Food security, along with access to safe drinking water, will define the scope and limitations of the remnant populations. Foodstuffs will be valued much more highly than at present. Surpluses will be stored and preserved against future need, as there will be no supermarkets offering fruit and vegetables from the other side of the world in our off-seasons. Farmers and herders will be people of status, unlike the taken-for-granted primary producers of today. There is unlikely to be sufficient surplus food to sustain a population of non-food-producing service providers, such as politicians, computer programmers and telephone sanitisers (h/t Douglas Adams). People who can read and write will become scarce and teachers will be revered. Much that we know today will be forgotten. Intellectual pursuits like cosmology and quantum physics will be abandoned, as they do not contribute to our ability to grow, catch and kill our food. Abstract ideas, like religion and democracy, may be discarded because they have not helped humanity avoid its excesses: they have been part of the problem, not part of the solution. It will be of academic interest to see what group dynamics, spiritual distractions and political systems arise from the ashes of our greed. I hope the next wave of humanity is smart enough to learn from our mistakes. As an aside, remnant populations will not be able to support the medical and prosthetic industries we take for granted today. There will be no lens grinders making corrective spectacles for our vision, no chemotherapy for cancer, no psychiatric drugs to help the depressives and sufferers of conditions like bipolar disorder. Natural selection will operate to breed a healthier humanity. Medical interventions will be the domain of witch-doctors and herbalists. The weak, the frail, will have to find a way of contributing, or they will die earlier than similar people do at present. Charity is a luxury many may be unable to afford in a warmer world. -
Rob Honeycutt at 07:43 AM on 8 January 2013Lean Manufacturing: Addressing Climate Change Through Reductions In Waste
numerobis... The advantages are going to vary from industry to industry, but ultimately I think people put far too much emphasis on labor costs. I was able to compete with a high labor cost product (sewn shoulder bags) and still produce that product domestically and cost effectively. The other benefits, that aren't nearly as apparent, can tip the advantage toward domestic production. In my case one big factor was that I could produce product on demand. That meant I was never out of stock on any product. That meant no close outs and no stock-outs. Close outs and stock-outs can have a tremendous impact on the resulting profitability of a company. It also leads to a high level of uncertainty in the standard business model from season to season. Fundamentally, the success of a business can hang on how well they forecast. And at some point, regardless of how well anyone does their forecasting, they will get their forecast dramatically wrong. Regarding shipping to the east coast, what a business should endeavor to do is open production facilities close to their customers. That's hard for a small company, but for larger companies, if you can properly scale your operations to your regional markets, they should be managing multiple production facilities close to their markets. -
numerobis at 06:48 AM on 8 January 2013Lean Manufacturing: Addressing Climate Change Through Reductions In Waste
With regards to the tradeoff between resilience and efficiency, I agree the curve exists, but I rather suspect that most economic activity is well below the curve. That is, they could get more resilient and more efficient, both. Eventually you get to being forced to make tradeoffs. With regards to manufacturing in the US: why is that necessarily any better? You could build a PV-powered vertically-integrated plant in China or India or whatever, near a port. You'd get the cheap labour and the efficiency, and cheaper transport to consumers in all countries that aren't the US. It's probably comparable also to ship to the US East coast by boat across the Indian and Atlantic oceans than by rail or truck across the US. For transport cost, assess it either in dollars or CO2. -
Tom Curtis at 06:39 AM on 8 January 2013The Skeptical Science temperature trend calculator
Humanity Rules @44, while individual models have ENSO like variations, and include randomly placed volcanic events, because the timing of these events is random, they are filtered out in the multi-model mean. Further, forcing projections do not include variations in solar activity. Consequently the multi-model mean does not include ENSO, volcanic and solar variation after (approximately) 2000, although they will include solar and volcanic forcings prior to that. Consequently, your essential premise is just false; and a more accurate comparison is between ENSO, volcanic and solar adjusted temperatures and model projections. A still more accurate comparison is with the trend line of the adjusted temperature series, which excludes the residual variability in observations which also vanishes from the multi-model mean (againg, because the timing of the fluctuations varies between model runs). -
Tom Curtis at 06:29 AM on 8 January 2013Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Mathew L @239, plants have a low albedo, meaning that an increase in foliage will increase the albedo of of a region. For rough figures, the albedo of desert (land without plants) is 0.4; for grassland and tundra it is 0.25; for deciduous forest it is 0.15-0.18; and for coniferous forest it is 0.08-0.15. That means the presence of plants increases the absorption of solar radiation substantially. Most of the increase becomes waste heat at the point of absorption. The rule of thumb from ecology is that only 10% of incident solar radiation is converted to sugars by photosynthesis. Most of that energy, however, is returned to the environment as waste heat as the sugar is used to power chemical reactions in the plant, or in some animal that has eaten the plant. A vanishingly small amount is fossilized to become a future fossil fuel. Consequently, the presence of plants will overall increase surface temperatures, but will even out surface temperature differences by causing some of the waste heat to be released at night, or early evening or morning when received solar energy is low. It may also cause the waste heat to be distributed over a wider region geographically as animals transport the chemical energy and release it at other locations; but the percentage so carried is small. Climate models certainly account for the change in albedo with changes in vegetation. I am not sure whether, or to what extent they account for the change in timing of the release of energy. -
Rob Honeycutt at 06:28 AM on 8 January 2013Dark matter for Greenland melting
So, Jason, is the idea here that soot caused darkening of the ice is a previously understood, and an unaccounted for, positive feedback? Is that an accurate way to phrase what you're looking to research? -
Doug Bostrom at 05:43 AM on 8 January 2013Dark matter for Greenland melting
$55K+ raised already! -
william5331 at 05:03 AM on 8 January 2013Dark matter for Greenland melting
The NSIDC site has this paragraph up at present. November air temperatures at the 925 hPa level (approximately 3,000 feet) were above average over most of the Arctic Ocean. Notably, temperatures in the Barents and Kara seas were up to 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than average. This reflects in part the lingering open water in the regions, allowing strong upward transfers of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. Unusually strong winds from the south contributed to the warmth and also helped keep the region ice free. This looks very much like the first indication of a reversal of the flow of the Polar Hadley cell. If quite a bit of soot reaches Northern Hemisphere ice at present, imagine a year in the future when the Arctic ocean is ice free in, say, July and some serious heat is absorbed by the Arctic ocean. If this little bit of open water is sucking air from the south, what will a whole, warm Arctic ocean do. http://mtkass.blogspot.co.nz/2008/07/arctic-melting-no-problem.html -
sailrick at 04:28 AM on 8 January 2013Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive
Regarding farm equipment and their internal combustion engines. Farmers can grow their fuel for tractors, etc. They certainly have the raw materials for farm waste to methane conversion. This isn't 0 carbon, but is better than burning ancient fossil fuels. As far as nuclear energy, I share Doug H's skepticism about the ability to maintain proper safety in a rapidly expanding nuclear power world. Fukishima showed me, that the nuclear industry and regulatory agencies did not take the power of nature seriously enough, to make proper siting and other decisions. What I see is an industry that is overconfident and underestimates what can go wrong. For example, the 9+ magnitude earthquake that generated the huge tsunami in Japan is not really that rare. There have been 5 earthquakes that big since 1950, and they all generated dangerous tsunamis. Imagine if the shores of Sumatra, southern Thailand and southern India had been lined with nuclear power plants in 2004, when 225,000 people were killed by the tsunami. From what little I do know about nuclear energy, LFTRs (Liquid Floride Thorium Reactors) seems like the direction nuclear should go, because it is safer in a number of ways. Don't fast breeder reactors lend themselves to increased nuclear weapons proliferation dangers? LFTRs do not. And they too can use existing nuclear waste, which is touted as one of the advantages of fast breeders. If this path were taken, it would take a few decades to get up to scale in commercial development. So, in the meantime, build solar and wind as fast as possible, as we don't have decades to wait. LFTRs could contribute to the grid later. In that case, some money should be spent on R&D for LFTRs and pilot plants, while continuing to spend larger amounts in support of renewables development. -
Rob Honeycutt at 03:37 AM on 8 January 2013The Y-Axis of Evil
Boehm is excellent at showing people exactly how he's managed to convince himself that he's right. He's a wonderful example of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. -
Pete Dunkelberg at 02:24 AM on 8 January 2013Dark matter for Greenland melting
Soot is produced from both wildfires and human activities. However, in warming periods in the distant past there would also have been an increase in wildfire and the fires could spread over much larger areas, producing more soot. -
dana1981 at 02:01 AM on 8 January 2013Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive
showme @51 - all of the states in white in Figure 1 lacking renewable goals or standards are very politically conservative states, with the exception of Florida, which is moderate, but has had Republican governors and probably a Republican state legislature for quite a while. -
showme at 01:34 AM on 8 January 2013Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive
what is the reason(s) that the southeast U.S. region doesn't have renewable goals or standards? all those states seem to have something in common? What? -
The Skeptical Science temperature trend calculator
HumanityRules - See the discussion of Rahmstorf et al 2012 for roughly that approach, where the F&R 2011 variation corrected data is compared to projections without those variations, an exercise resulting in confirmation of the IPCC models:
Observed annual global temperature, unadjusted (pink) and adjusted for short-term variations due to solar variability, volcanoes and ENSO (red) as in Foster and Rahmstorf (2011). 12-month running averages are shown as well as linear trend lines, and compared to the scenarios of the IPCC (blue range and lines from the 2001 report, green from the 2007 report)...
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HumanityRules at 23:59 PM on 7 January 2013The Skeptical Science temperature trend calculator
"For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios. I think a reasonable range for "about" would 1.5C - 2.5C per decade." Rather than guess at what the IPCC mean by about 2oC it would actually be possible to download the model mean from the CMIP5 ensemble and use that as another data set in this tool. Then we could have a true apples to apples comparison. It's possible to get the data from KNMI climate explorer. As an example here's the model mean from the rcp45 experiment. Just as a word of warning I think comparing F&R2011 with the expected warming rates from the model means is somewhat flawed. F&R2011 have removed some of the forcings (solar and volcanic) from the observational data in order, in their words, to make the global warming signal evident. The model means still have these included, you can see the volcanic effects in graph I linked to as short, sharp periods of cooling. Again if you wanted to do a true apples to apples comparison of the expected trend with F&R then you would have to return the volcanic and solar forcing to the data. I think a comparison of the model mean with F&R2011 with volcanic and solar effects returned to the data and therefore just the short term variability of ENSO removed would be an interesting experiment. -
villabolo at 23:41 PM on 7 January 2013Food Security: the first big hit from Climate Change will be to our pockets
Doug H. @ 46, The major problem that I foresee would be a trans-generational illiteracy. Once you disrupt the education system we will get an entire generation of people with no reading skills. However, if even a small percentage of people (20%?) are literate then you could have a network of mini-civilizations spread throughout the most habitable regions (wherever that may be). 50,000 people would be sufficient for light industry and road repair (a minimum of roads for purposes of trade). A network of these 100 of these communities could scavenge whatever is left of this civilization. It would be a civilization with a mixture of 19th, 20th and even some 21st century technology. They may not be able to go to the moon but think of all the vehicles they could build.
PS: Minimizing the weight of a vehicle by ten fold would reduce the required energy for it's construction by roughly an equal amount.
PPS: :-)
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CBDunkerson at 23:00 PM on 7 January 20132012 in Review - a Major Year for Climate Change
StElias, a ten year 'trend' is virtually meaningless when talking about climate... even local climate. As noted in the study, the Arctic has been warming more rapidly than the rest of the globe. In the early part of the 2000s a lot of that warming was over Alaska. The past few years it has been more focused over the Kara and Barnets sea area. That's likely just weather patterns. Give it another 20 years worth of data and we'll be able to start talking about a climate trend... but given that 1981-2010 show a clear warming trend for Alaska the odds are that 2000-2029 will too. Unless there has been some sort of fundamental change in global climate processes... which this study doesn't even suggest, and observations from the rest of the world clearly disprove. Basically, this study is like saying 'the Alaska temperature trend for 10 days in May showed cooling'... a bit unusual given the procession of the seasons, but in truth it happens all the time and it is certainly no reason to believe that the underlying climate realities (i.e. that temperatures rise in Spring/Summer or with AGW) have suddenly changed. -
Matthew L at 22:57 PM on 7 January 2013Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Science Question that I am struggling to find the answer to anywhere. About 50% of Humanity's output of CO2 is absorbed by carbon sinks, partly the biosphere. Obviously that photosynthetic activity uses solar energy to convert CO2 and H2O into carbonates, carbohydrates and (eventually) hydrocarbons. How much solar energy is absorbed in this process? Obviously that absorbed energy will not find its way out of the top of the atmosphere. Is that energy accounted for in the energy budgets and climate models? -
CBDunkerson at 22:37 PM on 7 January 2013Climate Show New Year podcast special: where it’s at and where it’s going
The truly sick thing with the IPCC 50 year estimate for the 'distinct possibility of seasonally ice-free' is that, if the observed trends continue, then there is a 'distinct possibility' that in 50 years the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free year round. If the PIOMAS data is charted by total volume rather than anomaly you get;
Note that the Winter maximum values have decreased from ~33 to ~22... almost as much as the ~17 to ~3 decrease in Summer minimum values. If we take that Winter maximum decline as a flat rate then it'd be about 65 more years before it hit zero... but the decline is visibly accelerating and thus 50 years is in the ballpark.
Of course, there have been arguments for a long time that the declines in the Summer minimum will level off (any time now)... and the whole 'months with no sunlight' thing would certainly argue for there being some kind of floor on how low the Winter maximum can go without a profound change in climate.
The large 'ice islands' which break off land ice areas will prevent a true zero sea-ice volume until Greenland has largely melted out, but we will almost certainly see a 'near zero' ice volume before 2020 if the PIOMAS results are accurate. After that we should start seeing just how warm Arctic waters get with no ice cover and be able to start making better projections for what is going to happen to the Winter maximums.
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Tom Curtis at 22:28 PM on 7 January 2013Greenhouse effect has been falsified
JasonB @99, he also fails to explain why temperatures fall with increasing pressure as you go deeper into the ocean. He tries to conceal this by asserting that:"PV=nRT ,Avagadro number and all that.Pressure is proportional to temperature. This also explains why temperatures fall(1 degree per 200 metres) with altitude and rise in the deep sub sea level areas of the earth."
But, of course, temperatures do not rise in the ocean abyss except at the sites of volcanic vents. Even there, while the water emitted from the vent may be as warm as 400 C, within meters of the vent the ambient temperature is a frigid 2 degrees C. Worse for high treason, the ideal gas law alone is not sufficient to explain the temperature profile of the troposphere. You also need to employ the laws of thermodynamics, the universal theory of gravitation, and the assumption that convection is the main form of heat transfer within the troposphere. And worst of all for high treason, he forgets is earliest lessons in algebra. Taken together, basic physical law explain the approximate -6.5 C per kilometer altitude temperature profile of the troposphere; but that only gives you a line with a slope. Knowing only the slope, you cannot deduce the intersection with the x-axis, ie, the surface temperature. Not only has he got his high school science wrong - he can't even get his primary school maths right. -
JasonB at 21:09 PM on 7 January 2013Greenhouse effect has been falsified
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." High treason, your hypothesis fails to explain why the stratosphere warms with altitude. Perhaps more reading is in order? -
high treason at 21:01 PM on 7 January 2013Settled Science - Humans are Raising CO2 Levels
Humans are responsible for some of the rise in CO2 levels, but not all. Basic high school science- if water rises in temperature, gases are less soluble and thus released. (---snipped---)Moderator Response: (Rob P) Please familiarise yourself with the comments policy. This site does not exist for the purpose of hosting contrarian graffiti a.k.a sloganeering. Stick to one aspect of the science at a time so that others may respond, and also find an appropriate thread in which to paste that comment. If you use the search function, you'll find thousands of posts which cover most aspect of climate science. As for your un-snipped comment see the OA not OK series - ocean warming is too small to affect the seawater CO2 uptake in any significant way. -
mercpl at 20:51 PM on 7 January 2013Climate Show New Year podcast special: where it’s at and where it’s going
The PIOMAS volume graphs are quite scary. I actually took the last PIOMAS graph and gave it to a few friends and changed the x-y axes to represent some stupid made-up values like vampire movie gross ticket sales, they all predicted a zero of about 2015-2020. Then I showed them that they were really predicting Arctic sea-ice volume. http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/ -
high treason at 20:40 PM on 7 January 2013Greenhouse effect has been falsified
There is a very simple explanation for the 33 degrees extra temperature on planet earth and it is basic high school science from around 10th grade. PV=nRT ,Avagadro number and all that.Pressure is proportional to temperature. This also explains why temperatures fall(1 degree per 200 metres) with altitude and rise in the deep sub sea level areas of the earth. As for planet Venus, apart from being closer to the sun, pressures are 92 times that of Earth at the surface. As on Earth,temperatures fall with altitude. You would think that temperatures would be more even in the atmosphere of Venus if the "runaway greenhouse" were for real. The same effect I think occurs on Jupiter- the outer gas is cold, but deeper in the atmosphere as the pressure builds, it is considerably warmer. Think how refrigerators work- they compress the refrigerant gas, which get warm. The heat is radiated out, then when the pressure is released, the gas cools to allow us to have that icy cold beer on a stinking hot day. I lay down the gauntlet for some physicist out there with more brains than myself to check this simple hypothesis and gain immortality and cudos. -
JasonB at 19:22 PM on 7 January 2013Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive
Another point worth making about those EIA levelised costs is the regional variation. Solar PV is $152.7/MWh on average, but as little as $119.0/MWh in what are presumably the sunniest places in the US, and wind drops to $77.0/MWh in the windiest places. Wind and solar tend to have larger cost ranges due to location so including nonsensical locations when determining the average is probably a little unfair. Yet another point is the cost of CCS, especially for coal. Given the intrinsic problems with storage (in particular the sheer scale required and the long-term risks of containment failure) I don't think this is going to be a viable option and research into it seems to be more of a PR exercise to justify further expansion of fossil fuel usage. KJD: It appears subsidies are not included in those costs because it specifically mentions "Note: These results do not include targeted tax credits such as the production or investment tax credit available for some technologies, which could significantly affect the levelized cost estimate." -
Sapient Fridge at 18:57 PM on 7 January 2013Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive
The interesting thing about the EIA levelised costs of power generation is the speed that solar PV seems to be dropping at. In the 2012 estimates for 2017 installations solar has a cost of $152.7/megawatthour, but the previous year's 2011 estimate for 2016 quotes $210.7! -
Doug Hutcheson at 17:55 PM on 7 January 2013Food Security: the first big hit from Climate Change will be to our pockets
villabolo @ 45, I concur that a 4°C warmer world may not see the extinction of our species, but I wonder about the goods and services that would be available in an isolated population of even 50,000. Ancient civilisations had relatively low populations by today's standards, but they also had numerous robust civilisations in the same neigbourhood, with which they could trade. A group that specialised in metallurgy could trade its goods with another group that specialised in shipbuilding, who in turn traded with groups based on intensive farming, and so on. In the future I fear we are headed for, survivor pockets of humanity may be separated by long and inhospitable distances, making trade less possible. A remnant population of 50,000 is not going to be manufacturing flat screen TVs, or transmitting podcasts, or making mobile phones, or delivering any of the other gadgets and services we now consider benchmarks of our civilisation. Remember, all the easily accessible resources have already been extracted from our environment. Without the machines we rely upon today, nobody is going to be able to smelt aluminium, steel, zinc, or titanium, even if the group had sufficient surplus food to enable them to dedicate some of their people to extracting the ores. On the contrary, I expect 'incompatible with organised human society' to mean smaller, mobile extended-family groups will develop into hunter-gatherer or simple agrarian communities, whose concentration will be on acquiring adequate food, shelter and clothing to sustain life, whilst defending their territory against hostile invaders. That's why I made the comment about an Old Testament future being wishful thinking. On the other hand, a cure for our dirty habits with carbon may magically appear and make predictions like mine ludicrous. Nothing would make me happier than to find I am making a fool of myself over a mere 4, 5, or 6°C. While hoping for the best, I am preparing for the worst. I have moved my family from a coastal city to a country town 433m (1421ft) above sea level; I am growing veges, fruit and nuts; we have a chook run; we do not fly anywhere and drive only when public transport or Shanks' pony can't get us to where we need to be; we have the ability to live off-grid. Not that any of our preparations will help our personal security when the brown stuff hits the revolving cooling device. Alarmist? I am certainly alarmed at where the smart people are saying we are headed. I would be extremely happy if trustworthy people could show me why my gloomy, worst-case prognostications are wildly inaccurate. (Note: denialist attempts to cheer me up by overturning the laws of physics are bound to fail, so please don't try.) -
JasonB at 17:29 PM on 7 January 2013The Y-Axis of Evil
The strangest thing about Boehm/Smokey's contorted graphs is that they still show acceleration despite his protestations otherwise. The earliest HadCRUT data lies above the magenta line, the middle section dips down to the blue line, and the end part breaks through the magenta line again. It's easier to see (Ha! What a concept...) if we look at the residuals after removing the trend, and even clearer if we use the non-obsolete HadCRUT4. (The figures of 0.741546672 and 0.7562876736 come from finding the linear trend for the period and multiplying it by the number of years in that period; the green line is both to help visualise the residuals as well as prove the detrend figure is correct by showing the result is horizontal.) If you try fitting a polynomial to those residuals then a quadratic does a nice job of showing what's left after the linear trend has been removed. Who to believe? Boehm/Smokey or the data? The good thing about his claims is that they have to be one of the easiest to debunk. :-) -
desertphile at 15:46 PM on 7 January 2013Climate Show New Year podcast special: where it’s at and where it’s going
I am not a math wizard, but just fitting a simple curve function on the observed data it looks closer to seasonally free of sea ice closer to year 2022, conservatively. William M. Connolley might yet lose his wager. -
KJD at 14:48 PM on 7 January 2013Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive
The central claim that the Heartland Institute is making is that "renewable" energy is more expensive than "conventional" energy. There are inevitable ambiguities in such a statement, but the normal method to compare generic costs of different types of generation plant is levelised cost of electricity (LCOE), which converts capital and running costs into a single metric. See EIA data for US here. This suggests that gas combined cycle is typically the cheapest plant, with wind , hydro and geothermal comparable to coal, but solar power somewhat dearer. The data is 2017 forecast; historically coal would have been cheaper than wind. I haven't checked the methodology in detail, but subsidies and externalities such as CO2 emissions are usually excluded unless specifically stated. Actual costs will vary from this due to site-specific factors as well as fuel contracts and the cost of capital. Hydro and geothermal are only available in very specific locations, and new large-scale hydro is often strongly resisted due to its local environmental impact. So under renewable mandates, wind is often predominant. But wind, along with solar has the drawback that it is not dispatchable, i.e. you can't bring it on when you want to. High penetration of such technologies will inevitably require large-scale (or widespread smaller-scale) storage, and maybe investment in grid management to deal with more intermittent supply. Another factor is whether the renewable mandate in practice is meeting some or all of a demand increase or whether it is cannibalising existing production (if demand is flat/falling due to energy efficiency and/or economic downturn). If the latter, which is certainly the case in some electricity systems outside the US, then the mandate forces new investment that would otherwise not be required at all. On balance, on currently available costings, mandated renewable energy will be incrementally more costly than no mandate under most circumstances. Frankly, as has already been pointed out, if it wasn't, then there would be no need for the mandate; utilities would choose renewable power as a matter of course. How this additional resource cost manifests itself in retail prices - which is the focus of the analysis in the original post - depends on a number of other factors. Generation costs are only a part of the total cost of supplying electricity to end users. Renewable energy policies may include subsidies that do not get funded through retail prices. Electricity markets are highly regulated, in some cases with a price cap that may have limited sensitivity to changes in underlying costs. Even where market pricing prevails, the supply and demand dynamics may mean that a small increase in the underlying cost mix of generation does not immediately result in higher prices. If the market is working efficiently, though, you will see the price effect over the longer term. There is obviously one large gap in the above analysis. It does not include the cost of the externalities. you can make a case for various externalities for all sorts of generation, but greenhouse gas emissions are the most significant. any valuation of these is inevitably highly contestable and so for purposes of analysis it is better to consider it separately. It does mean however that you cannot say with certainty that renewable energy mandates are economically inefficient. Conventional economic wisdom would however suggest that pricing the externality is the most economically efficient way to deal with it. -
JasonB at 14:12 PM on 7 January 2013Climate Show New Year podcast special: where it’s at and where it’s going
Agnostic: One of the sad things about this "debate" is how "conservative" is taken to mean "assume things won't be bad unless proven otherwise", or "err on the side of optimism despite evidence to the contrary" — the opposite approach to that normally taken in risk management. A doctor notices something suspicious. Which is the more conservative stance? 1. "Let's get some tests done to make sure it's nothing serious." 2. "Let's assume it's OK until you start showing signs of serious illness." Given the almost ludicrous extent to which the IPCC underestimated the rate of Arctic sea ice loss in the last report,
it's appalling that they have apparently been bullied into updating it to the meek claim that "A seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean within the next 50 years is a very distinct possibility".
Here we have a doctor looking at someone already showing signs of serious illness and still thinking "conservative" means "Let's not break the bad news because they might still get better"...
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villabolo at 13:38 PM on 7 January 2013Food Security: the first big hit from Climate Change will be to our pockets
Doug H. @ 44, I personally believe that we'll have pockets of civilization here and there. You can have a civilization with as little as 50,000 persons. -
Doug Hutcheson at 10:55 AM on 7 January 2013Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive
CBDunkerson @ 45Further, since the carbon being emitted here comes from plants... which took the carbon out of the air in order to grow... there is no ongoing accumulation of atmospheric carbon as a result.
Doh! Thanks for pulling me up on this. Stupid mistake for me to make, considering I have pointed this out to others in the past. The only methane I need to worry about is that currently sequestered in frozen form, as tundra or clathrates, because it is not currently taking part in the carbon cycle. You also saidmethane in the atmosphere quickly breaks down into CO2 and water
I knew it broke down eventually, but did not characterise that conversion as happening quickly. I have read that CO2 stays in the atmosphere for many years (a century?), but thought methane stayed in the atmosphere as methane for a smaller, but still significant, number of years. So, I did a bit of googling and found the IPCC list of greenhouse gasses, which includes both an indication of their persistence and their global warming potential. The link is here, for any who are interested. Thanks for making me do my own homework - it is the best way for me to learn. -
bibasir at 10:36 AM on 7 January 2013Climate Show New Year podcast special: where it’s at and where it’s going
How about "where it is and where it's going." -
Riduna at 10:15 AM on 7 January 2013Climate Show New Year podcast special: where it’s at and where it’s going
Interesting comment about IPCC authors of the soon to be published 5AR – that they would prefer to be conservative in their reporting, findings and conclusions rather than accurate. Probably explains why they conclude that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by the end of the century. The problem of course is that such seemingly wrong assertions on Arctic sea ice cast doubt on other conclusions reported by the IPCC. -
StElias at 09:16 AM on 7 January 20132012 in Review - a Major Year for Climate Change
Does anybody have any insights on this latest bit of Alaska weather research? "The overwhelming majority of Alaska is getting colder and has been since 2000, according to a study by researchers with the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks." Having lived in Alaska all my life (73 years) this doesn't come as a great surprise, since, other than north of the Brooks, the last three years have been somewhat more overcast and cooler, particularly in South Central. However, it seems to me that the winters, although still long and cold, have not been as harsh. Fairbanks shows a significant cooling trend over the last 10 years according to this study, yet you never see interior weather get down to those -80F shots anymore or experience long 8-12 week stretches of -35 to -45. Per the study, it is another story though on the slope, Barrow does show significant warming which we all are aware of up here. When Umiat has the warmest day temperature in the state, like 74 last summer, then something is strange. http://www.adn.com/2013/01/05/2743379/study-shows-alaska-got-colder.html
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