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Daniel Bailey at 03:36 AM on 30 July 2019Wind energy is a key climate change solution
Wind turbines kill orders of magnitudes fewer birds than do fossil fuel energy generation sources. Where's the outcry against those?
In reality, cars kill 2,800 birds for every 1 killed by a wind turbine.
And cars kill more pedestrians than windmills kill birds. Is it time to ban cars yet?
The leading causes of Raptor deaths in the Altamont study:
1. Shooting
2. Poison
3. CarsBut pretend-skeptics aren't interested in facts that disagree with their desired outcome.
Per Erickson 2005:
Table 2–Summary of predicted annual avian mortality.
Buildings_______________ 550 million
Power lines_____________ 130 million
Cats___________________ 100 million
Automobiles_____________ 80 million
Pesticides_______________ 67 million
Communications towers___ 4.5 million
Wind turbines___________ 28.5 thousand
Airplanes________________ 25 thousand
Cat's out of the proverbial bag. Per Loss et al 2013, feral cats kill most of the 87,000 times as many birds (in the US alone) than do all of the wind turbines in the world do, combined. That's 3.7 BILLION bird deaths per year, by cats alone...in the US. Or about 10 MILLION per day, as compared to about 2 per day per wind turbine.
Seems the bird holocaust is getting out of...paw. Meow. :)
"Why have these people forsaken nature's physical grandeur for an often ineffective power source?"
Grandeur like this?
As for the environmental impacts of wind power:
And
And
Both utility solar and wind are cheaper than gas:
Unsubsidised wind and solar are now the cheapest form of bulk energy:
"The unsubsidised cost of wind and solar now beats coal as the cheapest form of bulk generation in all major economies except Japan, according to the latest levellised cost of electricity analysis by leading energy analyst BloombergNEF.
The latest report says the biggest news comes in the two fastest growing energy markets, China and India, where it notes that “not so long ago coal was king”. Not any more.
“In India, best-in-class solar and wind plants are now half the cost of new coal plants,” the report says, and this is despite the recent imposition of import tariffs on solar cells and modules.
The China experience is also significant. While local authorities have put a brake on local installations, causing the domestic market to slump by one third in 2018, this has created a “global wave of cheap equipment” that has more than compensated for increased financing costs caused by rising interest rates.
The cost of battery storage is also falling – so much so that in countries like Australia and India, pairing unsubsidised wind and solar with four hours of battery storage can be cost competitive with new coal or gas plants."
Fancy that, renewables are already cheaper than 75% of the US coal fleet of power generation facilities.
Whodathunkit, the carbon benefits of wind and solar far outweigh their carbon footprints.
Harking back to that picture of that lovely tableau of the open pit coal mine:
To wrap this up and stick a wooden stake through the undead heart of this meme, fossil fuels are less efficient than earlier estimates and are essentially uneconomical, now.
This means that the levelized cost of electricity estimates put fossil fuels at even more of a disadvantage vs renewables than previously demonstrated.
Yes, without subisidies.
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Eclectic at 00:34 AM on 30 July 2019Models are unreliable
MA Rodger @1121 ,
thank you for the link to McKitrick & Christy 2018. The paper suffers from major logical non-sequitur in arguing from the status of the high altitude Upper Troposphere (which he elsewhere misrepresents as the lower troposphere "TLT" ) instead of examining the planetary surface temperature and (even more important) the ocean heat content. Severe cherry-picking . . . as well as poor logic.
Thank you also for the link to Dr Christy's talk at the GWPF (actually given in May 2019, not in June). Much of the earlier part, as well as the middle part, must have been as clear as mud to most of the audience !
The talk contained the same logical fault as the McK & C 2018 paper . . . and then expanded into a great deal of waffle. And then finalized with poor analysis of storms and Californian wildfires . . . and with much irrelevant but emotion-charged rhetoric (including how Christy's Californian land-holder neighbour had dishonestly moved Christy's property-boundary marker peg ~ ??possibly a metaphor for all those dishonest mainstream scientists at the IPCC?? )
Irrelevancies, poor science, and demagogic rhetoric ~ just another ordinary day at the GWPF.
Considering that Dr Christy makes similar misleading presentations at senate/congressional committee hearings . . . it comes as no surprise that he was "uninvited" to return to contributing to the IPCC.
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knaugle at 00:17 AM on 30 July 2019'No doubt left' about scientific consensus on global warming, say experts
Wow! I occasionally peruse Roy Spencer's blog, and he definitely is not on board with the consensus. His latest post is still beating the "urban heat island" and "it's always cold somewhere else" drums. I wonder if he and John Christy are all that remains of the "3%"? It's no surprise the political think tanks like CEI are pushing to not even mention this topic. As I recall it was one of their key talking points 20 years ago, that scientists are all over the map on AGW.
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MA Rodger at 22:05 PM on 29 July 2019Models are unreliable
rupisnark @1120,
We discuss the serious error in John Christy's June 2019 GWPF talk. I could start running through the points @1120 and setting the record straight but as #1120 was the outcome of a previous record-straightening exercise @1119, I don't think a further round of record-straightening would achieve anything more than add to the length of this comment thread.Perhaps then, rather than demonstrate the utter incomeptence engendered within the grand denialist presentation set out in John Christy's June 2019 GWPF talk (my original idea), perhaps it would be best to describe the nub of his theorising and why it is failing to establish itself. Note that this will be a little more technical than simple identification of gross error within his talk (error which was not of itself fundamental to Chrisity's argument).
Happily, this will be on-topic for this thread as Christy does attempt to refute the reliability of climate models.
Climate models have developed in complexity through the dacades. They all (simple and complex) show the same basic result from AGW. This result is disputed by Christy using a rather narrow argument. Christy first dismisses the performance of these various models at reproducing the global average surface temperature (GAST) increase. He insists "models are often adjusted to broadly match its (GAST's) evolution over time." GAST is thus, according to Christy, not an independent measure and thus should not be used to test the models (McKitrick & Christy 2018).
This argument is repeated by Christy in his June 2019 GWPF talk:-"We cannot use the surface temperature, because the surface temperature record was used in the development of the model. That’s just as if I gave all the answers out to my students on Monday, I gave them the final on Friday, and they all did spectacularly well. Well, because I gave them the answers ahead of time! You cannot use surface temperature as a metric to test your model because that was used to tune the model, and you are not doing a legitimate scientific test."
(The actual abilities through the decades of the various models at projecting GAST is briefly reviewed by CarbonBrief.)
Instead of GAST, Christy uses specifically "the temperature of the atmosphere between 30,000 and 40,000 feet in the tropics, 20oN to 20oS." Given his insistence on not testing on 'Friday' what had been shown on 'Monday', Christy's choice is particulalry poor. His choice coincides with the long contentious "tropical hotspot" which has been argued over for decades. (So Christy is effectively testing on 'Friday' what had been shown on 'Monday'). And the "tropical hotspot" isn't a marker of AGW but of warming generally. I don't think Christy disputes that is happening. And as for measuring it to check whether it is there and to what extent, that introduces yet another layer of great uncertainty. (See this SkS post of 2009. And Christy in not addressing uncertainty plus other failings is considered by this 2016 post at RealClimate.)
So it is true that our present measurements suggest the "tropical hotspot" isn't as vigourous as expected, at its upper altitudes (although present at its lower altitudes).
Christy attempts to use the uncooperative "tropical hotspot" as some sort of essential failing of CMIP5 models and by implication as an essential failing of all models. As set out above, such attempts are poorly contrived and to-date even a corrected argument is far from unconvincing. -
nigelj at 15:55 PM on 29 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #30
"Earth Overshoot Day falling on July 29th means that humanity is currently using nature 1.75 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate."
To solve this very real problem would require quite large cuts to consumption of everything really. If you own a television, even an average sized home in a western country, a car, eat large meals, etc you are part of the problem but how many of us would give those things up? Hoping people will reduce their consumption significantly is a fantasy dream.
Recycling and better farming systems would help, but much of the solution will have to come from smaller global population. If anyone disagrees with me, I would be interested in how much you have cut your personal levels of consumption.
This is not an attempt to blame problems on high population countries like Africa. The consumption problem is mainly a western problem, but poor countries are also getting richer as well. Neither am I a huge consumer by western world standards. It is looking at the big picture, and facing reality, and making hard choices.
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Rob Honeycutt at 14:31 PM on 29 July 2019Wind energy is a key climate change solution
False Progress... Clearly, from your website, it seems you strongly object to the look of wind turbines, but what's your alternative? Personally, it seems to me wind turbines are infinitely more preferable to things like mountain top removal to get at coal seams.
Or tar sands extraction...
Or oil spills...
But if you have some alternative that beats all of these, by all means, everyone is very interested to hear about it.
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John Hartz at 14:10 PM on 29 July 2019Wind energy is a key climate change solution
Suggested supplemental reading:
Texas Now Gets More Power From Wind Than Coal by Joe McCarthy, Environment, Global Citizen, July 26, 2019
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Eclectic at 13:03 PM on 29 July 2019Wind energy is a key climate change solution
FalseProgress @16 , your assessment is false.
Smoucha et al., 2016 show that the "carbon" payback time for windturbines is around 2 - 12 months (for the larger to smaller turbines). SaskatchewanWind (saskwind.ca) corporation claims their large windturbines have a CO2 payback time around 6 months.
Even allowing for some disputation on the exact figures, it sounds like windturbines are very much a bargain !
Turbines as scenically unsightly . . . or (mentally reframed) as elegant technological decorations? Like you, I incline (at least partly ) to the "unsightly" . . . though definitely less unsightly than most houses/apartments. However, how much more unsightly will be the scenic visuals of landscape that will be degraded by the effects of global warming by a further 1 or 2 or 4 degrees Celsius? The turbines and occasional solar farms may well be a fair price to pay for preserving much of the natural environment, eh?
Turbines killing birds and bats? Best if you supply some reliable estimate of the figures. Then compare with birds dying from impact with ordinary buildings. Then compare with (presumably much larger) numbers of birds and bats that will die from the effects of unrestricted worldwide habitat damage from future global warming. Not pretty !
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FalseProgress at 11:15 AM on 29 July 2019Wind energy is a key climate change solution
Many people are alarmed that "environmentalists" view the huge landscape (and seascape) blight of wind energy as something other than industrial sprawl. Why have these people forsaken nature's physical grandeur for an often ineffective power source? And what about all the bird and bat deaths it's causing?
There's no mention of that in this article. Just the usual dry commentary on cost effectiveness, as if open space is now useless without machines all over it.
Even if none of the physical intrusions were occurring, there's scant evidence that wind turbines can replace the very fossil fuels they're built with, or reduce net CO2 emissions. Germany is proof of that, with over 30,000 very large machines desecrating their countryside and north coast while their CO2 emissions continue to rise. Do some digging and you'll see that they've covered up a massive blunder. The density in Germany is the U.S. equivalent over over 800,000 wind turbines, and too much American scenery has been tarnished with around 58,000 so far.
To not mention any of that in an "environmental" article is a glaring oversight.
https://falseprogress.home.blog/2016/08/29/windturbineslandscapes/
Moderator Response:[PS] Welcome to Skeptical Science. Please note the comments policy on sloganeering. If you are going to make an assertion (eg. about bird deaths, lack of effectiveness etc), then must provide supporting evidence, preferrably from peer-reviewed sources. While I get that not everyone likes looking at wind turbines, you seem to be otherwise repeating long-debunked myths (eg put wind power myths into google).
eg Germany emissions. Pretty good when at same time they are shuttering nuclear power.
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JohnSeers at 07:10 AM on 28 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
Whoops, O3. Not a small screen - just bad eyesight!
Thanks for the explanations Eclectic, MA Rodger and Rob Honeycutt.
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nigelj at 06:45 AM on 28 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #30
The Brave or Naieve article links to the Australian refugees article.
Correct link to Brave of Naieve article here.
Moderator Response:[JH] Correct url has been inserted into the OP. Thank you for bringing this glitch to our attention.
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rupisnark at 05:51 AM on 28 July 2019Models are unreliable
MA Rodgers @1119
Re response to @1117
♣ ….You bat the"~750 Million Units" into the long grass but there is also the "6 trillion" which is part of the talk transcript While the 750M quantity could be considered as the rough total (that's total as in down to absolute zero) heat content of the atmosphere per sq metre of the planet, the 6T quantity would be 80 times more than the equivalent for the oceans (which are usually considered the largest thermal pool the climate has to cope with). So what the 6T quantity is supposed to be, I know not. I assume it is just meant to appear very very big.
->6trillion. As a guess, could the heat content of the Earth might be the figure he is referring to? The mass of the earth is more than 4*10^6 times bigger than the mass of the water on earth, so it is within a few orders of magnitude! I have no idea how much heat transfer is going on between the oceans and the rest of the Earth, there would obviously be different speed of change issues compared to atmosphere/ocean and atmosphere/Earth’s surface. Happy to be shot done on this one if my guess is unreasonable.♣ Slide 1 of Christy (2019) says it takes the values from AR5 Fig 2.11. It is Christy's comparison, not mine.
->I was not sure whether you did or didn’t agree with my previous summary of the point:-
The imbalance of 0.6W/m2 (0.18 units?), the statement that at the surface it is in balance, and the claim that 0.5 units is caused by extra CO2 whereas 100 units is caused by H20, clouds and aerosols (and not mentioned but presumably also existing CO2).
I understand you do disagree with the 6tr figure (and 750 units).
[I may appear to be slowly going through certain points, but I have learned from experience in many different fields, that this is an effective method of reaching a proper understanding, clarifying where difference of opinion lie and exposing falsehoods (which I believe is also one of the aims of this website).]Re response to @1118
♣ The non-denialist distortions would be a more interesting subject, if you know of any.
->I am making a list of them. I will then contact the people who appear to have distorted matters to enable them to respond (and if I have misunderstood, to enable me to correct my misunderstandings). I want to see who is distorting matters, not to add to the many distortions already floating around.
♣ Whether you have the time to cope with all the nonsense served up by Christy, or not. We haven't got very far with the content of this Christy talk in more than one iteration. And there is the question of whether I (or others) could be fussed to continue untangling the garbage of you into chunks you will understand.->We have not got far because your initial response only discussed one of the many points raised in the lecture. The more points you can answer the quicker I will understand. I have come to this forum with the aim of checking for myself some claims which have extraordinary consequences and if the claims made by your side of the debate were wrong could reduce GDP in 50 years time by well in excess of current world GDP. If true it could have the widely discussed consequences.
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/06/cutting-uk-emissions-net-zero-cost-1tn-philip-hammond…. I am taking a 1% reduction in global GDP pa to combat global warming… again estimates vary widely.]
If you do not wish to respond fully, I can understand that; but don’t then complain that the public are not willing to reduce their own and their children’s standard of living for a cause that have less than complete faith in.
♣ Note these Sea Surface temperatures (which C&M 2017 appears to say it uses to subtract ENSO from its TLT record) are not de-trended (as for instance the AMO is) so they do still have an AGW signal. Subtracting the NINO signals will thus also subtract some AGW signal
->I need to read further on this point. References welcome.
♣ Does C&M(1994) repeat the method of C&M(2017)? The implication is that it does (note that I have not access to C&M1994) but one difference is the UAH TLT v5.6 record was not used in 1994 as it didn't exist. The corrections to the UAH data set (mainly not the result of work by the UAH team) would have made significant changes to the 1994 result. So it is strange that C&M(2017) only finds a very small difference
->You seem to have a good point here… I will try to get hold of Christy at some point and challenge him on this and other matters. ( I have no idea if he will respond).
♣ Christy was one of six lead authors of Chapter 2 of IPOCC WG1 TAR (1990). Note the prmary finding of that chapter "The warming rate since 1976, 0.17°C/decade." This contradicts the primary finding of both C&M(1994) and C&M(2017).->He could agree with that conclusion and his 1994 and 2017 papers could still be valid, given for example that he is adjusting for Volcanic and El Nino effects and there may be other caveats in the paper; so I am not sure that it does contradict those findings.
♣ If Christy is happy to give the GWPF the time of day, he will get no respect from me!!!
->I have no idea what Christy’s views of the GWPF are. I don’t think Christy gets any respect from you anyway, given your previous comments. Again, I would rather that we just discuss issues, adding this type of comment is not helpful.
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Rob Honeycutt at 02:33 AM on 28 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
When you look at an O3 molecule you can see how it's going to have vibrational modes. I'm assuming that's what is necessary for absorption in IR frequencies.
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MA Rodger at 22:45 PM on 27 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
John Seers @39,
As Eclectic @40 says, the annotated IR absorption at 9 µm in the graphic @38 is ozone (O3) but there are still O2 absorption lines in the IR just short of the visible and so should be represented on that graphic. They are at 1.27 µm and 1.06 µm. However these would not make O2 an Earthly GHG as the IR emissions from planet Earth only span 70 µm to 5 µm.
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Eclectic at 22:21 PM on 27 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
JohnSeers @39 , perhaps you are looking at the diagram via a small screen.
Mine shows the Oxygen as O3 .
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JohnSeers at 21:35 PM on 27 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
@Rob Honeycutt 38
"A greenhouse gas is a gas that absorbs and emits radiant energy within the thermal infrared range."
"Oxygen and nitrogen are not greenhouse gases, because they are transparent to infrared light. "
Your diagram is indeed worth a thousand words.
I notice that O2 absorbs IR which was a bit of a surprise to me. Yet it is not a greenhouse gas. Can you, or anybody, explain? Thanks.
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icowrich at 17:40 PM on 27 July 2019Analysis: How Trump’s rollback of vehicle fuel standards would increase US emissions
California standards are critical, because no company will build a car that can't sell in California. Unless the White House can figure out a way to invalidate California emissions standards, these EPA regs won't matter.
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Rob Honeycutt at 04:23 AM on 27 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
A picture is worth a thousand words. The reason IR detection can pick up a single human from an aircraft is, specifically, because they know what frequency NOT to tune the device.
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JohnSeers at 20:04 PM on 26 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
36
Good answer MA Rodger. Thank you.
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MA Rodger at 19:08 PM on 26 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
billev @30 &33,
I would agree with fellow commenters that you are demonstrating ignorance but perhaps we can rectify that situation.
Your assertion @30 that you see "no correlation between the periods of pause in temperature rise and EL Nino activity" would be reasonable if you could find your way to making clear which "periods of pause in temperature rise" you are referring to. We know you will be using NOAA data (although that is not of any significance) and will be considering only post-1959 data. And pretty-much all of that period sees global temperature "pauses" resulting from ENSO or volcanic activity, as per the Foster & Rahmstorf (2011) adjustments described @32.
The remainder of you comment @30 and the entirety of that @33 concerns IR transmission through the atmosphere. Your questions @30 are rather poorly framed. The amount of IR emitted by the surface that is absorbed within five feet will depend on the wavelength. In the 15 µm band absorbed by CO2 (which is a significant portion of the whole) 100% would be absorbed but then quickly re-emitted. Again it would be re-absorbed after a short distance. This in itself would make no significant difference to the temperature measurements or indeed the temperature as the energy does not hang about, it being very quickly re-emitted another small distance (up, down or sideways) where it will again be absorbed/re-emitted and on and on. The impact on temperature is trivial. (You will perhaps note that this is not the nub of the AGW mechanism.)
@33 you reference the "U.S. weather service." @26 you also mentioned this was a source of data you were referring to but I fear you are probably mis-citing the US Standard Atmopsphere (presumably the 1976 version) which is the work of NOAA, NASA & USAF. Can you provide your reference as in the circumstance it is good to be clear exactly what you are talking about.
Your major point @33 is that the abilities of "aircraft equipped with IR detection equipment" somehow is not compatable with the existence of a a greenhouse effect. You may find the responses @34 &35 a bit too involved. Very simply put, IR 'thermography' uses shorter IR wavelengths than the 15 micron band that is absorbed by CO2 and gives us AGW, shorter wavelengths where the atmosphere is less opaque. (These wave bands are often called 'windows'.)
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Bob Loblaw at 13:18 PM on 26 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
scadednp has it right: billev's "questions" are getting tiresome.
Gases all absorb at very specific wavelengths. It's a fundamental aspect of spectroscopy. In comment 30, I pointed to a vendor's page on gas analyzers. By choosing the appropraite wavelength, different gases can be measured because they absorb at different wavelengths. Gases emit at different wavelengths, too - and this is how looking at distant planets can tell us their atmospheric composition.
Whaever billev thinks his "questions" apply to, it's not reality.
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scaddenp at 12:16 PM on 26 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
This is getting tiresome. I find it astonishing that you continue to assert that you know more than scientists while at same time demonstrating your ignorance.
IR detection of mammals from planes etc is hugely limited by the atmosphere. This is basic. Windows of IR that dont interact with GHGs are fundamental to such detectors. Try here for the basics. Does it occur to you that attenuation of IR by atmosphere is easy to measure and we have been doing so for over 100 years? The codes used by climate science to calcualate the transmission of radiation through the atmosphere were developed by USAF. Surely you would suspect that they keen for result to be accurate?
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billev at 11:23 AM on 26 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
But it is a soup comprised of miniatures that doesn't appear to have a significant effect on air temperature if you consider the air temperature measurements of the U.S. weather service. As far as atmospheric CO2's effect on the passage of IR I point to the fact that aircraft equipped with IR detection equipment are able to pinpoint the location of even single humans based on their IR signature. That doesn't argue well for the the capability of atmospheric CO2 to significantly hinder the passage of IR. This applies to my earlier question about atmospheric CO2's capability to effect IR passage between the Earth's surface and the level of standardized air temperature measuring devices around the World.
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Bob Loblaw at 11:17 AM on 26 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
billev:
You can't see something you refuse to look at. For the effects of El Nino on global temperatures, look no further than this paper. Once effects of El Nino volcanic aerosols, and solar variability are removed, very little year-to-year variation is left.
For a readable summary of the Foster and Rahmstorf paper, try here. The key graphic is the following:
As for chasing the squirrel of IR radiation affecting near-surface air temperature measurements, you really are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Air temperature in the lower tens of metres is vastly controlled by ground (or ocean) surface temperature, which is heated by the sun. Air temperature measurements are taken inside radiation shields, such as the Stevenson Screen. This not only eliminates IR effects, it pretty much removes errors related to solar radiation heating, which is a far more important issue. We've only known about these sort of issues since the mid-1800s.
You're not catching up - you're falling even farther behind. Yesterday, it was 1964 information you were missing. Now it's 1864 information. As one of my colleagues says "he's so far behind he thinks he's in the lead".
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Eclectic at 10:00 AM on 26 July 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #29, 2019
Garb @2 ,
it would be good if you could check the paper in "opinione.it" [which does not sound much like a peer-reviewed scientific journal ~ where serious scientific is published!] and pull out for us, one or two or three scientifically-valid points of evidence negating the mainstream climate science the last 150 years or so.
A decade or two ago, a petition was raised by 31,000 American scientists [or at least, people having some sort of science degree] who asserted that the climate science was wrong. The petitioners ranged from "A" a biologist, to "Z" a wood engineer. Hardly any had specialist climate experience or did research in the climate field.
More importantly, the petitioners did never then, or up to today's date, produce any genuine evidence to back up their assertion. We can only think that their statement was an expression of crackpot ideation (sorry, I don't know the correct Italian translation of crackpot) or was an expression of their extremist political beliefs. [By definition, political beliefs must be extremist, if they disregard the scientific reality.]
It will be interesting to discover whether these 90 Italian scientists have anything to show. Unlikely, I would have thought ~ since there has been nothing published in the scientific literature to negate the "anthropogenic impact".
( Also interesting, that these 90 Italian scientists would be going against the Pope's own well-informed opinion on climate science . . . and against the Pope's council of senior scientists . . . and against all the leading august scientific bodies, worldwide. Perhaps they are 90 Galileos, who have been hiding themselves in a secret chamber for 30 years !!! ]
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Philippe Chantreau at 09:33 AM on 26 July 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #29, 2019
Meanwhile, there is this serious research coming up:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6451/369
It is Science Magazine, so under subscription, here is an excerpt from the abstract:
"The observed melt rates are up to two orders of magnitude greater than predicted by theory, challenging current simulations of ice loss from tidewater glaciers."
2 orders of magnitude. Will be interesting to see what further research shows...
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Philippe Chantreau at 09:27 AM on 26 July 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #29, 2019
It would probably not be interesting at all to take a look at it and there is usually little variation as to why these types of operations are launched.
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Garb at 09:17 AM on 26 July 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #29, 2019
Hi !
I was recently made aware about a petition that supposedly 90 italian scientists are supposed to have signed and sent to the Italian government to make them reject the "hysterical" claims that are made about climate change, and that they question the science behind the anthropogenic impact on the climate:
http://www.opinione.it/cultura/2019/06/19/redazione_riscaldamento-globale-antropico-clima-inquinamento-uberto-crescenti-antonino-zichichi/?altTemplate=Stampa&fbclid=IwAR1YAoqulAKKXJTY-uzRfSEaX-G6NRpVOckp3nVE7iiTAgOQu8DMHGUxRnE
Here it is in the paper:
http://www.opinione.it/cultura/2019/06/19/redazione_riscaldamento-globale-antropico-clima-inquinamento-uberto-crescenti-antonino-zichichi/
And are mentioned in some other kind of press:
https://www.policymakermag.it/italia/clima-petizione-controcorrente-firmata-dagli-scienziati-italiani/
It would be interesting if you would take a look at it, as I have seen multiple blogs copy and paste it (often direct from google translate). If a large number of Italian scientists are questioning the science in IPCC's reports, it would be nice to understand why.
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Eclectic at 09:10 AM on 26 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
Billev @30 ,
the whole lower troposphere is a soup of continually absorbed/radiated IR photonic energy. Doesn't matter if you are talking about five feet, five thousand feet, or five inches altitude.
Is there a point behind your question? As a reader, I find it hard to distinguish whether you are trying to make some (obscure) point, or whether you are just completely failing to understand the the physics of the Greenhouse Effect. Please, please explain what you are on about !
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billev at 08:08 AM on 26 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
I see no correlation between the periods of pause in temperature rise and EL Nino activity. What percent of IR radiated from the Earth' surface is absorbed within five feet of the Earth's surface? How much does this effect temperature measurements made from four to five feet from the Earth's surface?
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nigelj at 07:40 AM on 26 July 2019Analysis: How Trump’s rollback of vehicle fuel standards would increase US emissions
Bozzza, Trump undoubtably has several motivations because such is the nature of life. One would be that Trump and his cronies clearly don't like Obama very much, have a read of this: How Trump is rolling back Obama’s legacy. Anyone who doesn't see racism, ego and pure spite in this has their head in the sand as far as I'm concerned.
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Estoma at 01:13 AM on 26 July 2019Analysis: How Trump’s rollback of vehicle fuel standards would increase US emissions
should be "less affordable."
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Estoma at 01:12 AM on 26 July 2019Analysis: How Trump’s rollback of vehicle fuel standards would increase US emissions
Back in the 90's, when the Clinton Administration made a feeble attempt to increase CAFE standards, congress gave the auto industry a pass. The industry lobbiests told the legislators that the market knew what was best and the market was saying that Americans wanted to drive gas gobbeling Yank tanks.
During the years preceeding the gasoline shock of 2007, foreign manufactures continued to develop more efficient cars. When the Great Financil Collapse of 2008 occured no one wanted the American gas gobbeling cars and trucks. As a result, the industry lay comatose of the floor needing the American government to revive it.
Ironically Trump could actually help provide more fuel (pun intended) for the electric car market by making electric vehicles even more affordable due to the lax standards for the internal combusion engine.
Anyway I read where Elizabeth Warren was predicting another financail meltdown, possibly in the next couple of years.
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michael sweet at 22:35 PM on 25 July 2019Analysis: How Trump’s rollback of vehicle fuel standards would increase US emissions
Bozzza,
Oil companies make more money with lower standards since more gas is burned. The auto manufactures do not care much about this change.
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bozzza at 19:16 PM on 25 July 2019Analysis: How Trump’s rollback of vehicle fuel standards would increase US emissions
What are his reasons for rolling back emission standards?
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Bob Loblaw at 11:42 AM on 25 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
billev:
Your "argument", to use term loosely, consists only of a series of vague "I don't believe it" positions, interspersed with "look! Squirrel!" diversions to another topic. If you could a ctually put togther a coherent statement of specifically what you expect to see as evidence, we might get somewhere.
To start, if you don't belive that CO2 affects IR radiation at all, perhaps you should tell the people at Licor, which is one of many companies that use the known optical properties of CO2 to make IR-radiation-based instruments to measure CO2 concentrations in air. Commercial companies, making money by selling off-the-shelf instrumentation capable of making measurements because CO2 absorbs IR, even over very small path lengths of air. The same principles are used to measure water vapour, ozone, and many other gases.
https://www.licor.com/env/products/gas_analysis/
The physics of IR absoprtion of CO2 don't change just because they are used in climate models. There are people that can actually do the calculations. In Comment #20, I refer to an old comment that includes a direct reference to a paper published in 1964. Please try to catch up.
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Daniel Bailey at 08:40 AM on 25 July 201997% consensus study hits one million downloads!
From a science perspective, the most-important sound-bite of that Guardian article is this:
“This paper should finally stop climate change deniers claiming that the recent observed coherent global warming is part of a natural climate cycle. This paper shows the truly stark difference between regional and localised changes in climate of the past and the truly global effect of anthropogenic greenhouse emissions,” said Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College London.
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John Hartz at 07:34 AM on 25 July 201997% consensus study hits one million downloads!
In this Guardian article posted today, Jonathan Watts extensively quotes John Cook about the consensus in a light of three new peer-reviewed papers published in Nature. The article:
No doubt left’ about scientific consensus on global warming, say experts by Jonathan Watts, Environment, Guardian, July 24, 2019
Two relevant paragraphs from the article:
A 2013 study in Environmental Research Letters found 97% of climate scientists agreed with this link in 12,000 academic papers that contained the words “global warming” or “global climate change” from 1991 to 2011. Last week, that paper hit 1m downloads, making it the most accessed paper ever among the 80+ journals published by the Institute of Physics, according to the authors.
The pushback has been political rather than scientific. In the US, the rightwing thinktank the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CPI) is reportedly putting pressure on Nasa to remove a reference to the 97% study from its webpage. The CPI has received event funding from the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and Charles Koch Institute, which have much to lose from a transition to a low-carbon economy.
On one hand, that the Competitive Resource Institute and its powerful conservative backers are pressuring NASA to remove its page on consensus messaging from its website is indeed disturbing. On the other hand, this effort reveals how powerful the consensu messaging is because the climate science denier community is working hard to suppress it.
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scaddenp at 07:23 AM on 25 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
billev - I can only assume that you havent bothered to read any of the references that people have provided to you. I provided direct measurement of the increase in irradiation from the increase in CO2. The change in irraditation is measured in instruments on the surface at stations all over the world. (eg see here). I cannot see how you can deny what is measured. Since GHGs block outgoing radiation, the change in irradiation can also be measured by satellites. Eg see Chen 2007. Furthermore, the change in radiation measured, matches the calculated result of the change GHG is extraordinary degree. These measurements directly support the claims made.
You seem to struggle with idea that 400ppm could have an effect. Perhaps you should consider how far a photon would travel on average (mean free path) through an atmosphere with 400ppm of CO2 before it hit a CO2 molecule? Write down your intuition, and then calculate it. I suspect the answer will surprize you.
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Daniel Bailey at 07:08 AM on 25 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
Ah, yes, the Black Knight defense.
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billev at 06:28 AM on 25 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
I have based my submissions on the measurement of atmospheric CO2 level by the reporting station at Muana Loa, temperature at altitude measurement by the U.S. Weather Service and global annual air temperature meaurement and computation by NOAA. All of the replies to my submissions contain no reference to any measurement to support their stated or implied claims for the role of atmospheric CO2 in the rise of global air temperature.
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Daniel Bailey at 02:47 AM on 25 July 2019Michaels Misrepresents Nordhaus and Scientific Evidence in General
"At what degree does the Arctic lose it's ice during the summer months?
Fortunately, scientists have looked into the effects of an ice-free Arctic.
Pistone et al 2019 - Radiative Heating of an Ice‐free Arctic Ocean
"Here we use satellite observations to estimate the amount of solar energy that would be added in the worstcase scenario of a complete disappearance of Arctic sea ice throughout the sunlit part of the year. Assuming constant cloudiness, we calculate a global radiative heating of 0.71 W/m2 relative to the 1979 baseline state. This is equivalent to the effect of one trillion tons of CO2 emissions. These results suggest that the additional heating due to complete Arctic sea ice loss would hasten global warming by an estimated 25 years."
Takeaways:
1. "Of the 0.71 W/m2 of globally-averaged heating, 0.21 W/m2 is estimated to have already occurred between 1979 and 2016. Approximately half (0.11 W/m2) of this realized heating occurred during the CERES observational record (2000-2016), with the other half occurring between 1979 and 1999 as estimated based on the observed relationship between satellite-derived sea ice concentration and albedo."
2. "we cannot exclude the extreme possibility that the Arctic could become annually ice-free during the coming decades"
3. "even in the presence of an extreme negative cloud feedback, the global heating due to the complete disappearance of the Arctic sea ice would still be nearly double the already-observed heating due to the current level of ice loss"
4. "The present study focuses on the additional radiative heating from the complete loss of Arctic sea ice, but it does not estimate the amount of global warming that would be associated with this level of ice loss"
5. "even under conditions in which the Arctic Ocean becomes ice-free only in September, the additional radiative heating may likely be driven largely by the associated midsummer sea ice loss"
6. Arctic sea ice will continue to re-form in Arctic winter for the foreseeable future even after the loss of summer sea ice (the sun-lit portion of the year the paper primarily deals with)
Money section:
"This heating of 0.71 W/m2 is approximately equivalent to emitting one trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. As of 2016, an estimated 2.4 trillion tons of CO2 have been emitted since the preindustrial period due to both fossil fuel combustion (1.54 trillion tons) and land use changes (0.82 trillion tons), with an additional 40 billion tons of CO2 per year emitted from these sources during 2007-2016 (Le Quere et al., 2018). Thus, the additional warming due to the complete loss of Arctic sea ice would be equivalent to 25 years of global CO2 emissions at the current rate.
This implies that if the Arctic sea ice were to disappear much more rapidly than in current climate model projections, it would drastically shorten the time available to adapt to climate changes and the time for achieving carbon neutrality."
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michael sweet at 22:17 PM on 24 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
Billev,
At 21 you ask about " the periods of pause in temperature rise". In the upper right of the page on every page on SkS is the graph of the Escalator. The Escalator shows that there are natural periods of lower rise interspersed in the overall rise in temperature. (I do not know how to attach the graph here).
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MA Rodger at 19:23 PM on 24 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
billev @21,
You have up-thread set out your arguments for CO2 not being able to operate as a GHG (@7 - CO2 concentrations of 0.04% are too small to have any effect. @10 - Air does not insulate hot water pipes well enough. @13 - The atmosphere gets colder with altitude suggesting some form of heat loss with altitude.) and none of these have been accepted as valid here with reasons properly given in-thread for that lack of validity. As you fail to present counter arguments, it suggests you are happy with that lack of validity.This then must constitute what you refer to as being "what you all are saying," so in direct answer to your question @21 I would say that none of it "applies" or is relevant to the "periods of pause in temperature rise shown in the graphs of the history of air temperature change since 1880."
Rather, the GHG effect resulting from atmospheric CO2 levels, which have been increasing over the period in question (1880-to-date), is the driving force behind the rise in temperature over the period. The pauses within the temperature record you ask about have other causes (as decribed @22 & @23).Is there any particular part of the 1880-to-date temperature record that you feel requires more specific consideration?
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scaddenp at 08:06 AM on 24 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
I would add two things.
1/ The actual surface temperature year to year is strongly affected by internal variation. ie heat sloshing around in a wet, unevenly heated planet. ENSO is the dominant component of this. For this reason, climate is defined as 30 year average. Arguably, Ocean Heat Content is a better metric than surface because most of the heat goes into the ocean and the total energy varies less (the little wobbles are ocean/atmosphere exchange). However, we have only been able to measure this with confidence relatively recently.
2/ Climate changes in response to net forcing. Changes GHGs are only one element (though the dominant one in recent history), but aerosols either man made or from volcanoes are also important (especially mid 20th century, and after really big tropical volcano eruptions). Changes in solar input and albedo are the other important inputs into calculation of forcings.
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Brentkn at 07:18 AM on 24 July 2019Michaels Misrepresents Nordhaus and Scientific Evidence in General
At what degree does the Arctic lose it's ice during the summer months?
Because I can assure you that once that happens, there will be no stopping Global Warming.
Does it happen at 2°C or less?
Think you can stop the Arctic from melting?
I don't and neither do many US oceanographers.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/16/warming-of-oceans-due-to-climate-change-is-unstoppable-say-us-scientists
There is a severe flaw in the logic here.
Care to explain it?Moderator Response:[PS] Fixed link. Please learn how to do this yourself with the link button in the comments editor.
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Rob Honeycutt at 06:59 AM on 24 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
billev... Well, there are lots of reasons for the variations in global temperature. The most dominant one would the El Nino Southern Occilation (ENSO). Most of the accumulated heat is going into the world's oceans, and that heat goes through phases of gaining and releasing that energy into the atmosphere, and that affects the annual global temperature.
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billev at 06:41 AM on 24 July 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
And what you all are saying applies how to the periods of pause in temperature rise shown in the graphs of the history of air temperature change since 1880?
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Daniel Bailey at 02:47 AM on 24 July 2019Climate's changed before
I'll address a portion of that, now that scaddenp and MA Rodger already weighed in on the rest.
"The irrefutable scientific evidence also shows that in all 8 recorded Inter-Glacial Periods, the sea levels rose 3 meters to as much as 14 meters, even when CO2 levels were 260 ppm to 280 ppm CO2."
Again, saying that there is irrefutable evidence pretty much ensures that he's making that claim up. If he had such "irrefutable scientific evidence", he'd have cited it.
Part of the fallacy on display here is the presumption that interglacials are interchangeable and equal. They are not. They are the confluence of orbital factors and the "memory" of the climate over time (climate memory has been demonstrated to extend some 800,000 years or more, depending upon the metric in question). A consilience of studies point out that the best analogue for the modern Holocene Interglacial is MIS (Marine Isotope Stage) 19 (per Giaccio et al 2015, Yin and Berger 2015, Vavrus et al 2018, etc).
Looking at the 5 most recent interglacials, we see that sea levels are not identical (from Grant et al 2014, Figure 2):
From Dutton et al 2015, Figure 1, we see that sea levels from previous interglacials are tightly tied to temperatures...and we know from innumerable studies that global temperatures are tightly intercorrelated with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels:
However, emerging evidence (from Grant 2019) for that Mid-Pliocene sea level on the very right-side of Dutton 15, Figure 1 above is that sea levels associated with an atmospheric composition of carbon dioxide like today saw a contribution of about 20 meters just from the Antarctic Ice Sheet by itself. I believe Rob DeConto is coming out with a similar paper soon on that subject.
Figure 6.10 The Whanganui RSL record on the left with the precession-paced MPWP and obliquity-paced late Pliocene sections highlighted with different GIS, AIS and NHIS configurations and SLE illustrated for interglacial and glacial extreme conditions relative to present-day Antarctica (0 m; central figure). The anti-phased 15 m amplitudes of the MPWP are interpreted as 5 m from GIS offset by ~20 m from AIS present day to peak interglacial. Higher amplitudes would then include larger-than-present AIS (nearing LGM; Clarke and Tarasov, 2014). While the late Pliocene amplitudes include increasing NHIS contributions and smaller interglacial configurations.
To sum for this portion, previous interglacials are as unique as are your fingerprints, but contain similarities constrained by physics, with sea levels of the time correlated with global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
At present, the human burning of fossil fuels is driving an atmospheric composition and temperature associated with a time when sea levels were over 20 meters higher than at present, imperiling coastal port cities around the world and threatening areas where over 2 billion people currently live.
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Synapsid at 02:13 AM on 24 July 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #29, 2019
Clicking on two links I wanted to read just returned the whole page. Neither opened.
Moderator Response:Thank you for pointing that out, Synapsid. The links should now be working.
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