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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

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Comments 75901 to 75950:

  1. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    Dave123 - there is a difference between short-term sensitivity, long-term fast feedback sensitivity, long-term sensitivity including slow feedbacks, etc. Maybe that's what you mean? James Wight had an excellent post discussing the various measures of sensitivity which I linked at the end of this post (click the "fast feedbacks" link in the last sentence). Chris G - I know, and I very much agree that people disrespect models way too much. No model is perfect, but there's almost always something we can learn from a model. One of the main points of this series is to see what we can learn from them. Learning from past model flaws is why models keep getting better and better. Badger - I'm not sure what assumptions they made about ozone depletion. Ozone plays a relatively minor role in the greenhouse effect though. But if you're interested, they probably talked about it in Chapter 6. You can download the whole SAR WGI report by clicking the first link in the post.
  2. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    What assumptions about the ozone hole in the atmosphere over Antarctica are embedded in the SAR model and forecasts?
  3. Tar Sands Impact on Climate Change
    Suggested reading: “Looking beyond TransCanada’s summer of discontent Why excluding opponents to resource development is unwise,” by Doug Mathews, Alberta Oil, Sep 1, 2001 To access this article, click here.
  4. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    Oh, thanks Dana; I missed that. Looking... Really though, I wasn't targeting you, but rather the people who say things roughly like, your model is off by 0.2 C; therefore, all models are worthless.
  5. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    Dana- Then A can't be constant with time, because feedbacks will be changing with time...albedo for example. The more ice we lose, the more land/ocean exposed, the more heat absorbed. Maybe I'm just confused on what is partioned into A and what into dF. My naive interpretation of dF has been the difference between solar irradiance and IR leaving the earth.
  6. Pete Dunkelberg at 08:24 AM on 2 September 2011
    CO2 is just a trace gas
    Ken, I don't understand the 95 percent figure but we do have an interesting greenhouse environment that depends on both CO2 and H2O. H2O by itself tends to turn from vapor to liquid to solid. When it does this it drops out of the atmosphere and provides no greenhouse warming at all. CO2 stays in the air and provides enough warming to keep H2O evaporating and precipitating out in a cycle. See CO2: The Thermostat that Controls Earth's Temperature. However, as long as water is kept warm enough to keep our familiar water cycle going, it is in the air in much greater quantity than CO2 and provides about half the total greenhouse warming. Since CO2 and H2O intercept some of the same wavelengths one must be careful in calculating how much greenhouse effect to attribute to each. See The attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect.
  7. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    Chris G -
    "To be fair, you should compare the accuracy of models predicting warming as CO2 increases with models that don't."
    Actually we've done that. Click the button at the top of the post to see all our entries thus far in the 'Lessons from Past Climate Predictions' series. Easterbrook's cooling prediction is probably the most relevant. We also compared his prediction to Wallace Broecker's 1975 warming prediction in the Broecker post in the series. The purpose of this series is to fairly examine each warming or cooling prediction we can find and see where each went wrong and what we can learn from them. I'm also writing a book/booklet on the same subject.
  8. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    My pleasure john. I also drafted up a post on the IPCC TAR which will be published in the near future. Matching the projections to observations yields a sensitivity of about 3.4°C for 2xCO2 there. Funny how we keep getting these same answers around 3°C, and yet the "skeptics" are certain sensitivity is somehow much lower than that. Either there's something very wrong with climate models, or something very wrong with Spencer and Lindzen et al.'s claims. Personally I'd put my money on the latter.
  9. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    Regarding linearity, I don't know of anything that is linear in the climate system, but, as any student of calculus knows, you can approximate any curve with line segments, and the shorter the segments, the less the error term. So, sure, I'd be very surprised if there were a constant (linear) relationship between CO2 and temperature over the range from slushball to ice-free states of the earth. However, given current orbital parameters and the positions, sizes, and shapes of the continents, and the current state of ice masses, it is possible to quantify a linear relationship that is good enough for the near future. WRT, "models are inaccurate", I think it was Gavin at RealClimate who pointed out that all you had to do to prove any model wrong was demand more accuracy out of it than the authors were able to code into it. That's the nature of models; all models are approximations. To be fair, you should compare the accuracy of models predicting warming as CO2 increases with models that don't. Shall we take a wild guess which set yields a better approximation of reality? Model factors are wrong, whatever. It's like a teacher (which in this case is history, not any of us) giving partial credit if the student shows their work on a long problem and the teacher is able to determine their answer world have been correct if they hadn't made a mistake at point X. If there are only one or two points, that somewhat validates the rest of the work. It's a little frustrating to see so many attacks on models because, AFAIK, all models with a halfway decent hindcasting ability predict continued warming under BAU. It doesn't really matter if we reach 4 degrees by 2100 or 2075; at some point we will cross a threshold beyond which the population can not be supported. It is going to continue to get warmer until we either switch to alternatives as our primary energy sources or society collapses.
  10. CO2 is just a trace gas
    Ken @ #35 "How about some complete science here! What happened to water vapor on Table 1? Water vapor does represent 95% of the greenhouse gases and..." For completeness, 95% of what? It isn't 95% of the natural greenhouse effect as CO2 provided 20% of that (7oC of 35oC). Are we then back again to the 'biggest volume matters most' argument? If so, it's ironic because that is the exact opposite of what is up for discussion here.
  11. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    Thanks for this Dana, have been trying to work out how to put all this into an explanation of how comparing models with observations gives us more understanding of the 3DegC sensitivity, The model update 2010 at RC also shows 3.3DegC sensitivity. appreciated.
  12. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    Dave123 - not sure what you mean about the independent estimate of the climate sensitivity. To your second question though, feedbacks are built into that sensitivity parameter. That's what "a" tells you - for a given radiative forcing, how much the temperature will change, including feedbacks.
  13. Michaels Mischief #2: Opposing Climate Solutions
    This is quite a good article about Solyndras troubles: http://www.compoundsemiconductor.net/csc/news-details/id/19733965/name/No-surprise-with-CIGS-startup-Solyndra-shutdown.html It was an interesting idea and some other company may take the product on and develop it further. There will be a lot of companies created and disappearing in the solar PV business, because the technology is in its infancy (despite years of stagnation in innovation). There is so much research in this field now, that there will be a lot of changes over the years, making it difficult for companies to stay ahead for long.
  14. Michaels Mischief #2: Opposing Climate Solutions
    Badger@14 Solyndra produces a non-standard product. Their idea is/was to produce 'racks' of tubes with i think thin film solar sells stuck in the inside of the tubes. The tubes are open at the top and the idea was the sun could hit the cells inside at any angle. The racks didn't need to be fixed to the roof (primarily flat rooves) because the gaps between the tubes allowed air to pass through so that there was less resistance. The company web site is still up and running, so they aren't totally dead. But not all ideas and start ups succeed.
  15. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    Dana- For my own preparedness I'm not clear on two things- The independent estimate of "A" the climate sensitivity factor. and why is this a linear equation? Off hand, given feed backs from changes in albedo as ice melts etc, would be non-linear, and as ice disppears from a region you lose the heat of melting. Or is that all taken into account in the construction of the radiative forcing? All definitional stuff I know... but I think clarity on the origin of the radiative forcing factor in current models might hep Yvan.
  16. CO2 is just a trace gas
    Ken: With regards to your statement: I hope you do not think that analogies to poisons are scientific statements. I do not claim to speak for the author(s) of this article. However, I see the comparison to poisons as a rhetorical rebuttal to an unscientific, rhetorical attack on climate science: the argument from low CO2 concentration. Quite simply, the argument itself is a non sequitur, not an empirical argument. As such, all one is obliged to do to rebut it is to demonstrate that there exist in nature other cases where seemingly-insignificant (or even infinitesimally small) quantities can have effects entirely disproportionate to their concentrations (botulism toxin being a perfect example).
  17. CO2 is just a trace gas
    37, DSL, "You're not looking." How often does that need to be said, especially when it comes to how models are constructed? A favorite denial meme seems to be to insist that the models have failed to account for something any layman is aware of, as if climate scientists are literally that blinded by their love of CO2. Just amazing.
  18. Climate Sensitivity: Feedbacks Anyone?
    Hello, I am not a trained scientist, so I hope you guys can bear with me. I came upon a yahoo article, "New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism." The article referenced a study published in Remote Sensing in July of this year. The title of the study was "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance". Here is the link to the PDF of the study. I would be curious to see some of your feedback on this study. Is there any validity to the arguments made? Look forward to your comments.
    Moderator Response: It is debunked in this Skeptical Science post.
  19. Tar Sands Impact on Climate Change
    Suggested reading: “Keystone XL Is Self-Destructive. Does the Obama Administration Need to Be Also?” Op-ed by Mark Bittman, NY Times, Aug 31, 2011 To access this thoughtful essay, click here.
  20. CO2 is just a trace gas
    Ken, what is the atmospheric residence time of water vapor? If you haven't seen it in any atmospheric model, you're not looking.
  21. Dikran Marsupial at 04:06 AM on 2 September 2011
    CO2 is just a trace gas
    Ken Water vapour is not a long-lived GHG, it has a residence time of about a week (for water vapour the residence and adjustment times are the same), thus it is irrelevant to a discussion of greenhouse forcing as it only acts as a feedback. The complete science leaves out water vapour from the table for that reason. N, O2 Argon etc are not GHGs, which explains why they are not in the table. Both of these facts are well known to those who have taken the effort to read the litterature, so yes lets get the dialog back on track by leaving discussion of water vapour to a more appropriate thread.
    Moderator Response: Ken, use the Search field at the top left of this page to search for water vapor.
  22. Michaels Mischief #2: Opposing Climate Solutions
    Veritas, many electric bicycles have a range of 20 miles and could easily be charged at work for next to nothing. You could leave the car at home and just use it for errands after work.
  23. Mythic Reasoning about Climate Uncertainty
    Muon: "An overstatement of uncertainty gets to the same point via a longer, more torturous path. If Curry's conclusion is 'we can't be sure' because IPCC language is too fuzzy or climate systems are too chaotic or whatever the reason du jour, then others will come down on the side of doing nothing based on her words. End result is the same." And she knows that.
  24. CO2 is just a trace gas
    How about some complete science here! What happened to water vapor on Table 1? Water vapor does represent 95% of the greenhouse gases and without it we would not be living here. Or am I missing something here and someone has determined that water vapor no longer transports energy around the globe through the heat of vaporization. I have yet to see this included in any atmospheric model or discussion. Also, what has happened to the percentages of N, O2, Argon and the other gases if CO2 has to be measured to the fifth decimal place. Atmospheric gases have never been shown to these accuracies in the CRC handbook as far back as my first copy in 1960. I hope you do not think that analogies to poisons are scientific statements. Newton and others warned about overstating your hypothesis before you have conclusive data. Lets get this dialog back on track.
  25. Mythic Reasoning about Climate Uncertainty
    trunk#57: "Nobody writing here is unconcerned" There are some who feel it's not happening or it's not bad or it's not our doing. Those each lead to lack of concern, apathy and eventually denial. An overstatement of uncertainty gets to the same point via a longer, more torturous path. If Curry's conclusion is 'we can't be sure' because IPCC language is too fuzzy or climate systems are too chaotic or whatever the reason du jour, then others will come down on the side of doing nothing based on her words. End result is the same.
  26. Dikran Marsupial at 02:29 AM on 2 September 2011
    Mythic Reasoning about Climate Uncertainty
    trunkmonkey wrote: "Skeptics are less positive that we can predict the outcome.". If that is what skeptics do, what do you call those who try and make a fuss about the models not being able to do something that nobody would claim they are able to do (such as not foundering when making decadal predictions)? There are those who are genuinely interested in communicating the uncertainty resulting from our current limited state of knowledge about climate physics, and there are others who merely want to disrupt the discussion with red-herrings (or indeed red, white and green flag shaped herrings).
  27. Republican Presidential Candidates vs. Climate Science
    Letters to the International Herald Tribune Politics and Science Paul Krugman’s “Republicans against science” (Views, Aug. 30) states that “odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively antiscience, indeed antiknowledge.” This line reminds me of the great H.L. Mencken’s words in the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people....On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” Woodrow Wilson was president at the time; to be followed by Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. We all know what happened next. Peter W. Gerrard, Kehlen, Luxembourg
  28. Mythic Reasoning about Climate Uncertainty
    trunkmoney The IPCC acknowledges uncertainty, too. Every scientist I know acknowledges uncertainty. That does not influence their opinion about whether humans are affecting climate. In fact, it generates even more concern, because we can constrain the upper bounds of possible change less than the lower bounds. As far as I can tell, skeptics are not arguing that there is uncertainty, they are arguing that there is bias. That is quite a distinct thing. As for Curry, taken to its logical conclusion her writing seems to suggest that 1) it is impossible to address complex multivariate phenomena without engaging in pattern-seeking "motivated reasoning" and 2) that scientists are somehow not aware of the pitfalls of confirmation bias in such cases. Those statements reflect both nihilism and naivete in turn. While her audience in accepting these arguments engages in their own form of confirmation bias or motivated reasoning, Curry conveniently fails to mention that there are well established ways to avoid the same problem - namely by making novel predictions that are open to test and by incoporating all relevent dependable information without prejudice. Climate scientists have, from I have seen, employed these methods repeatedly in their endeavors. I do not think the same can be said of Salby, Carter, Plimer etc...
  29. Mythic Reasoning about Climate Uncertainty
    Now I'm eating red beans and rice, so we'll see what that produces. The last bite is the one remembered: "We have seen the models founder at the decadal time scale . . ." Without anything else to go on, the comment appears to be a "hey, models fail" type of attack. More context necessary. I don't think Curry's response to the uncertainty is reasonable. Why? The little bits of evidence here and there suggest that she's not interested in forming a professional opinion. She's more interested in selling a position. The "Wow" comment is just the latest little bit. When was the last time Gavin Schmidt blogged that type of unstudied reaction to an ill-considered claim with no available methodology? The problem has always been uncertainty. Indeed, that is the only problem. Yet there is an attitude on Curry's blog--in the comment stream (a comment stream she is responsible for correcting from time to time)--that suggests that the ultimate goal is to prevent movement toward certainty. How many people in the comment streams on the denial blogs would like to see the climate scientists who support the theory of AGW fired? And what would then happen to climate science? That second question is never considered, and it leads me to believe that the main goal of those people is not progress toward certainty but the silencing of scientific progress. As far as I am concerned, the entire universe in all its dimensions is the irreducable phenomenon. Any part must be read within the context of the whole. Sounds daunting, but there are patterns and regulations that work with regularity in most conditions.
  30. Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
    Rosco, my admittedly rather snarky post #16 was in response to the following statement(s) of yours in post #11: Nothing else in the Universe accumulates heat without an energy input. Everything is perpetually cooling down and the hotter it is the faster the rate of cooling - at least I think that is what Newton said. I don't dispute that CO2 absorbs infrared energy and increases in temperature. But an equilibrium point is reached where input equals output and no further heating can take place without further energy input. So with no other energy source the maximum "blackbody" temperature of Venus with 2644 W/sq m input is about 465 K. If you are not putting the reply together in context with these statements, then I must wholeheartedly agree with Sphaerica & DSL and suggest that you get down to reading texts, papers & other posts on this site.
  31. Mythic Reasoning about Climate Uncertainty
    DSL You are correct that emergence was originally post structural. My comments were neither an attack nor advocating post modernism, which i agree quickly degenerates into a nihilistic ennui. I am interested in the possibility that some complex phenomena may be irreducable and that others might require models built at a size approaching the scale of the phenomena, ie clouds. This is not to argue that we throw up our hands and go home. We have non mathematical tools of inquiry far more valuable than collecting postage stamps. The issue is uncertainty. Nobody writing here is unconcerned. Judith Curry is concerned. Skeptics are less positive that we can predict the outcome.
  32. Mythic Reasoning about Climate Uncertainty
    critical mass - "The stasis in surface temperatures is more difficult to explain in terms of standard AGW theory which posits an increasing warming imbalance" Not at all. The mid 20th century saw cooling caused by man-made aerosols - following the rapid industrialization and growth after the 2nd World War. And it looks like the rapid growth in East Asia (especially China) may have caused the same during the 'noughties'. See these Sks Posts: Why Wasn't The Hottest Decade Hotter? & Michaels Mischief #1: Continued Warming and Aerosols We'll have further posts on the subject, but the relevant papers are still awaiting publication in the scientific literature.
  33. Republican Presidential Candidates vs. Climate Science
    Suggested reading: “God’s Response to Rick Perry” PlanetSave, Aug 31, 2011 It’s a hoot!
  34. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    Yvan, see comment #6 and the conclusion of the post. Once again, I'm not saying the original model worked. I'm saying the original model would have worked with an equilibrium climate sensitivity of 3°C for 2xCO2. The SAR also ran models with sensitivities of 1.5°C and 4.5°C for 2xCO2 (though technically the sensitivities were 1.3°C and 3.8°C, for the reason discussed above). The former was much too low, and the latter was too high. Had they run a 3°C sensitivity model, it would have projected the correct amount of warming.
  35. It's not bad
    EtR. There is certainly a lot under debate in climate science, but the basics (Temp is increasing, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, CO2 is increasing, humans are responsible) are in fact "settled science." By that I mean that no one in the scientific community thinks these are interesting problems anymore. The evidence behind those propositions is just too compelling. It has been for decades now. Also, let's be honest. This forum does not constitute a true debate on the scientific matters. To be part of the real scientific debate, we would actually have to be doing original research and actively publishing that research in peer reviewed journals, not just posting to blogs on the web. To be part of the scientific debate requires that we be informed and capable enough to convince other well informed and capable people that we have something substantial to contribute. People feel annoyed by this state of affairs, I guess because they feel like decisions are being made that affect them without their having a say. Of course, they might feel more annoyed if they were actually forced to go through the training needed to allow them to participate in the scientific debate! More pertinently though, this resentment is misguided. The only decisions that are being within the scientific community are with respect to what the evidence says about how the world works and our place in it. What we actually do as a society will have to be a much more public decision because that involves taking values into account. Without scientfic evidence, you can't have rational decision making -- it becomes impossible to determine whether any action actually serves the values it is intended to serve.
  36. Mythic Reasoning about Climate Uncertainty
    muoncounter #49 "There may be differences in the numbers, but there is minimal uncertainty as to the mechanism and the cause. As Denning says, physics doesn't care what you believe. Arguing over the last decimal place is silly; it's real, it's happening. Stop denying that and do something about it." As a bit of a lukewarmer myself, I think that the differences between Drs Trenberth and Hansen are more than the odd decimal place. The stasis in surface temperatures is more difficult to explain in terms of standard AGW theory which posits an increasing warming imbalance. Dr Curry is certainly opaque in expression, but I see her position as an attempt to show that the uncertainties are more important than previously thought and 'motivated reasoning' is a nice term for exaggeration.
  37. Tar Sands Impact on Climate Change
    Suggested reading: “What You Need To Know About The Canadian Tar Sands,” TreeHugger, Aug 30, 2011 To access this informative article, click here.
  38. It's not bad
    Eric the Red @160, the only debate which matters for the science is that which occurs in the peer reviewed literature. You, just as much as any other denier, are quite welcome to put your arguments into publishable form. That you are unwilling or unable to do so is a clear indication that your view point is not worthy of consideration by working scientists, and therefore not worthy of attention on a website whose stated purpose is to expound the published science of climate change. That you choose to 'debate' on the web when you clearly disagree with much published science, IMO, shows that you are not trying to learn the truth. If you where you would be trying to become involved in the debate that matters. Rather you are trying to persuade those who are ill informed on the topic in the full knowledge that you will be unable to persuade those who are well informed.
  39. Sea level rise is decelerating
    Eric the Red @35, on the contrary, Jevrejeva et al, 2006 and Church and White 2006 (and 2011) both show that sea level rise as determined by gauges is within the error bars of that determined by satellite altimetry over concurrent periods. What is dissimilar is the current trend and those earlier in the twentieth century, which where lower. You evidently want it to be true that there is a mismatch, but neither you nor Steve Case have given us any reason to believe it.
  40. Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC SAR
    I think there is some circular reasoning here. Whatever model would gave a linear growth in temperature. Correcting those model for anything than actual CO2 curve compare to the real one is not a proof that the original model worked at all. For example, if the original model underestimated the temperature increase by a factor 2 and this could be traced back to a erroneous estimate of one constant, the model was wrong by a factor of two. That's it. Only correcting for CO2 curve make sense because this factor is unrelated to the physics of the model.Correcting for other factor that are directly related to the output of the model is another name for curve fitting, which will always work.
  41. Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
    Ok, Rosco, maybe a different strategy is necessary. I will re-post the contents of the link I gave you here in this comment stream, since you seem unwilling to read anything other than this comment stream. Will that work? In the meantime, radiation is the major energy transfer mechanism on Earth, because without it the Earth would heat just shy of infinitely. Any energy that convection and conduction move is necessarily a subset of energy already moved by radiation. And radiation is the overwhelmingly dominant (99.99%) way that energy leaves the Earth system. And here's a research question: why, over the last 30 years, would the stratosphere show a cooling trend and the troposphere show a warming trend? Can convection and conduction alone explain this phenomenon?
  42. Sea level rise is decelerating
    Steve Case @33, that is an interesting analogy. However, it is fairly obvious in that analogy that Church and White are the EPA, while you are the back shed mechanic gaping spark plugs with a ball-pein hammer. I wonder why you do not draw the obvious conclusion. Having said that: 1) The GIA may not effect the shape of the curve, but strong changes in the regional balance of your data will. What is more, failure to correct for barymetric pressure may also effect acceleration. Consider, for example, this chart of sea level rises by oceanic basin from Jevrejeva et al, 2006: The different basins to not rise or sink synchronously. The reason for this is that major weather patterns such as ENSO or the NAO shift pressure patterns over large areas of ocean, with a consequent change in sea level as water is pushed from one part of the ocean to another. If your data set shows a regional bias, and this phenomenon is uncorrected, that will result in a significant distortion of the result, a distortion that change the acceleration pattern. 2) The issue is the noise, in that a large part of your failure to reproduce Church and White consists of the fact that you have not successfully excluded noise, and indeed have decreased the signal to noise ratio with your reconstruction technique. 3) It appears you have never worked in a workshop, for if you had you would recognize that if your means of measurement significantly disagree, you have a major problem. We may not expect the micrometer and the steel rule to give us exactly the same measurement, but if they are not identical plus or minus 0.5 mm, then either at least one is faulty, or your measurement technique is error prone. 4) See you are the one who chose to attack the science on this point, it is hypocritical of you to then accuse us of "picking the fly specks out of the pepper". You add to that hypocrisy an egregious error. The current rate of sea level rise is between 2 and 3.2 mm per year, leading to an expected sea level rise of 200 to 320 mm per century if nothing changes. Even as a simple projection you 65mm is an obvious error. Such simple projections, are, however, significant underestimates both because they do not account for additional increases in temperature, nor for glacial melt water, which between them will push sea levels up by between 0.6 and 2 meters by the end of the century. Not the most serious implication of global warming, but not negligible either.
  43. SkS Weekly Digest #13
    I think the problem is that people may be led into thinking that the same license would apply to the toons. SkS might be accused of promoting copyright infringement. It might be a grey area as far as the law is concerned. The context in which they are used is important and conveys a message or an intent. In fact some image libraries insist that images from the same library can not be grouped together on a single page. Context, presentation and the impression given is all important.
  44. Michaels Mischief #2: Opposing Climate Solutions
    #12, #13: I used to get the same argument in Australia (and again here in South Africa). Brisbane allegedly has terminal urban sprawl making public transport non-viable, but public pressure (including the threat of a growing green vote) steadily improved things over the 9 years I lived there. There are many parts of Brisbane where it's hard to get by without a car, but it's a lot better than it used to be. Where I used to live, through much of the day trains to or from the city were at a frequency of every 10 minutes or better through much of the day. You wouldn't want to take a car into the city in that scenario. Putting on a few extra trains a day is vastly cheaper than building a new road. If electric cars have enough range for weekend use, one option is to park them at home (or somewhere on the grid) most of the time. A few hundred thousand high capacity batteries are a great resource for dealing with spikes in demand and smoothing out the kind of short-term capacity shortages that go with renewables. Look up vehicle-to-grid (V2G) for more.
  45. GHG emission mitigation solutions - a challenge for the Right?
    Some facts about "Green" Arlington, VA: the $4200 in per capita spending is proportional to energy waste. Taxes statewide are $4300 meaning that Arlington's waste is being paid for by the rest of Virginia. Parking is between $10 and $20 / day, the roads are in poor condition, traffic is pretty bad, yet the Arlington bus system is poorly utilized. Statewide education is $1600 per capita, Arlington is $2100 (almost $20k per pupil) which is bad enough, but the other $2100 per capita spending contains lots of waste meaning energy waste. On the plus side, they try very hard: http://www.arlingtonva.us/departments/environmentalservices/EnvironmentalServicesMain.aspx Some of what they do is exemplary such as promoting (passive and active) solar homes. They have a long way to go however if they expect anything like a 200 to 60 drop in kWH/p/d
  46. Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
    21, Rosco,
    What you have totally failed to explain...
    You have been given link after link to web pages that do explain this. I have no obligation to spend my time personally explaining it to you. Modern climate science is based on the logic and truth of the greenhouse effect. It's been observed, tested and proven. It's not my personal, pet theory. It's existing science, founded on hundreds of years of research and other science. I have unfortunately spent my time responding to the anecdotal examples you've given about various mechanisms (conduction, convection, latent heat). As I have told you several times, the fact that other mechanisms exist and apply in other situations (pistons, radiators, whatever) says nothing about what is going on in the atmosphere. If you want to continue this discussion, please (a) follow the links that have been provided to you, so that you can raise your level of discussion and (b) find an appropriate thread for whatever issue you find troublesome. As I said, if you demonstrate a willingness to learn, I can help you overcome whatever aspects of the science are confusing you. If you do not make a personal effort to learn, however, and simply want to stay stalled on the idea that only convection and conduction are meaningful because you've visibly encountered them in everyday life, then there's really no where for this conversation to go. Please follow the links and learn more about climate science and how things work.
  47. GHG emission mitigation solutions - a challenge for the Right?
    Scaddenp, HOA's are not all that common here either, and there are better and worse ones. But I mainly wanted a concrete example of lower costs meaning lower energy usage. Reading my previous comment, economic "armageddon" is over the top. The crux of the economic problem is that frictional unemployment is usually resolved in our country at least by personal transportation (along with moving outright, we are a very mobile country). I think that the immediate unemployment from the economic changes would be very large, but take a lot longer to resolve without the personal transportation options we now enjoy. I think there are a fair number of comments of mine on other threads here that show my skepticism to be scientific, not for protection of coal interests specifically or property rights in general. But taking your hypothetical as true, I would not only ban coal power plants, but would tax the coal based purely on CO2 released (as compared to natural gas which I would tax at roughly 50% and oil somewhere in between). I would use the Hansen 100% rebate system so people could pay their electric bills. Apart from electricity, my ideas above still apply which boils down to the fact that people are going to have to step up and exert local control to obtain the necessary efficiencies. The politics to pursuade people to do that is not completely clear, but reducing the central government would be a good start. A big reason I chose to live in a rural HOA is the control and efficiency. We have right-of-way access to all properties where central services make sense, but don't apply it where it doesn't. Contrast that to where I work in Arlington VA, countless examples of stupid stuff from the "solar-powered" trash can in the shade in front of my building to the street being dug up yet again to lay fiber to synchronize traffic lights (wireless seems to be a mystery to them), with the ulterior motive of connecting surveillance systems.
  48. Scott Denning: Reaching Across the Abyss
    What a great talk. As he says, its pointless to worry about details. Its a big problem, and needs solutions. Interestingly lacking from his talk was typical "green" thinking. Not everything was doom and gloom. This is refreshing. Insisting that every effect of increased CO2 will be harmful will make your "opponents" dismiss you out of hand. If there are good effects from extra CO2, you can acknowledge them - even though on balance the effects will be negative.
  49. SkS Weekly Digest #13
    @Paul D, Thanks but that really doesn't seem to have any bearing on their use on this site. They are used now as per above. The use I was proposing seems little different with respect to any licensing issues. If you think it DOES make a difference would you please explain how?
  50. Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
    Sphaerica [inflamatory snipped] You have stated that radiation is the major energy transfer mechanism on Earth or anywhere for that matter. What you have totally failed to explain how radiation is capable of producing any of the effects you claim as the bulk of the atmosphere is transparent to it. Do you believe radiation heats the air in a car's engine driving the piston down ? How ? [inflamatory snipped]
    Moderator Response: [Dikran Marsupial] Please read the comments policy; keep the discussion calm and impersonal, regardless of the perceived provocation. This applies to everybody.

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