Arguments
Recent Comments
Prev 2300 2301 2302 2303 2304 2305 2306 2307 2308 2309 2310 2311 2312 2313 2314 2315 Next
Comments 115351 to 115400:
-
MarkR at 03:00 AM on 14 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
I think maybe you missed a trick here John: several papers have used altimetry JUST of the interior and there has been good evidence of thickening in the interior (e.g. Johannesen iirc?). Altimeter data has regularly had problems at getting low elevation (e.g. coastal) ice. This is expected with increased snowfall from greater water vapour content - but it's confusing when you first hear about it and the likes of Monckton and WUWT prey on that. -
NewYorkJ at 02:58 AM on 14 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
Muoncounter (#13), That graph also appears to be just the raw data, lacking the homogeneity adjustment. Nuuk Most of Greenland was indeed on par with today temperature-wise, as was east of the Rockies in the CONUS. That's about the extent of it. Nearly everywhere else (Arctic included) it was consirably warmer. recent decade vs 1930's The double-whammy of greenhouse gases and black carbon is overwhelming a robust natural variation in the Arctic. -
JMurphy at 02:50 AM on 14 July 2010Medieval Warm Period was warmer
MrOTLChamp, firstly you can't use the temperature at one particular spot, in one particular period, to prove a global MWP - which is why you see a difference between the graph and the paper you mention. As for the Northern Hemisphere being warmer than the Southern Hemisphere, have a look at this NASA GISS graph to see the difference between Northern and Southern Hemisphere temperatures in recent times. I'm not directly comparing between now and then but it shows that there is/can be a difference (without the Earth necessarily tipping over too much), particularly due to the amounts of land and sea surfaces. KR has already given you the evidence for the extra reconstructions produced by others apart from Mann. Finally, can you give any other more representative examples as to why you 'don't have much faith in science lately' ? In the meantime, would you know whether the Geological Society of America (Climate Change statement) receives government funds ? If so, how much do they receive ? -
chris at 02:43 AM on 14 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
Ned at 01:18 AM on 14 July, 2010 Yes I noticed that Ned. Luckily we posted at more or less the same time, else everyone might have assumed I'd just copied you ;- } Berényi Péter at 01:58 AM on 14 July, 2010 I wonder whether one would need to decommission a wind farm Peter. I would have thought the turbines could simply be replaced/upgraded as required, and as new technologies came on line. It just requires a little bit of creative planning... ..it's not like we would run out of wind! I don't think we need to contemplate your unhappy vision of "broken windmills", "dropping parts" and (the horror!) "leaking oil"... -
Dave Springer at 02:29 AM on 14 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
Didn't mean to say sea level went steadily down. Meant to say the annual rate of sea level rise went steadily down. If rate of meltwater pouring into the ocean doubled one wouldn't reasonably expect that the rate the oceans are rising would decline during the same period. -
Dave Springer at 02:24 AM on 14 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
Sea level change doesn't appear to be reflecting the melt... http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/8536/sealevelchange.gif During the period of time (2002-2009) when GRACE gravitational anomalies implied a doubling of ice mass loss the global average sea level went steadily down. Can anyone here explain that? -
HumanityRules at 02:20 AM on 14 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
I take your point John but The WUWT article mainly focuses on the temperature record with a few spurious comments on mass balance while you seem to focus on mass balance. The WUWT temp stuff seems fairly accurate, there is plenty of science that suggests the 1940's and the recent period temperature records are not too dis-similar. I think figure 10 from this CRU paper is essentially showing what WUWT are arguing with regard to the Greenland temperatures. It peeves me that we don't have accurate mass balance data for 1930-1940. -
Albatross at 02:18 AM on 14 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
Some cheering news today on the success of renewable energy in Europe Whatever the doubts the contrarians may have (both legitimate and not)governments are moving forward. Nice to see that people discussing how we can limit our GHG emissions. -
Phila at 02:11 AM on 14 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
#15 Message garbled, please resend. I had to stop reading Arkadiusz some time ago, because the stylistic quirks and lack of formatting produce instant eyestrain. I'd prefer to read all the comments here, even the ones I almost invariably disagree with, so I hope Arkadiusz will make an effort to present his opinions in a format that's a little easier to decipher. -
Berényi Péter at 01:58 AM on 14 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
#155 Ned at 00:54 AM on 14 July, 2010 Want to compare the costs (economic and environmental) of decommissioning a wind farm to the costs of a dam, an oil field, or a nuclear power plant? Yes, that would be nice. To be fair projects with the same actual lifetime power output should be compared. -
MrOTLChamp at 01:55 AM on 14 July 2010Medieval Warm Period was warmer
"They quote the paper "The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period in the Sargasso Sea Lloyd D. Keigwin, Science, New Series, Vol. 274, No. 5292 (Nov. 29, 1996), pp. 1504-1508". I looked at it, and it seems that by using sediment cores he can give some evidence that at least locally, at the "Bermuda rise" in the Sargasso sea, the MWP was indeed 1 degree warmer." Looking at the temperature graph for the MWP, it shows that it wasn't 1 degree warmer. Infact it shows it's average. Which to me means that the graphs that relate to earlier times are not accurate at all. it doesn't make sense to me that just the northern hemisphere would be warmer than everywhere else. For that to happen it seems that the earth would have to tip over on it's axis pointing the northern hemiphere directly at the sun. And I sure wouldn't give Mann much credibility due to his "hockeystick graph" as a global temperature, which no other scientist was able to reconstruct. Needless to say, I don't have much faith in the science lately. There's too much money at stake for a bias not to be considered. Is there any science organizations that are not recieving government funds that have come to the conclusion that the warming of the planet is man-made? -
muoncounter at 01:44 AM on 14 July 2010What's in a trend?
#10: "I'm not exactly why you're picking on UAH for using single trend lines" Its not so much 'picking on', as it is citing UAH as a specific example. I saw the blogpost about this past June's temperatures, which mentioned UAH specifically and used their straight line trend as a standard. Prior to reading that, I've seen straight line fits all over, but mostly disregarded them. #11: "but you can't say much about the global climate trends looking at a few months or years." All too true. However, when you see a pattern that persists on a 15 year time scale abruptly change, you have to wonder whats going on. -
CBW at 01:20 AM on 14 July 2010What's in a trend?
It's SOP because climate scientists know that thirty years is about what is necessary to declare a climatic trend. People looking at shorter time intervals can find interesting phenomena (and a lot of scatter), but you can't say much about the global climate trends looking at a few months or years. -
ScaredAmoeba at 01:18 AM on 14 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
Arkadiusz @ 11 Message garbled, please resend. -
Ned at 01:18 AM on 14 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
Re: preceding two comments: Believe it or not, chris and I actually are different people..... :-) -
KR at 00:58 AM on 14 July 2010Sea level rise is exaggerated
daniel - or more, properly for those reading daniel's comments, since he's apparently missed the point: The data referred to comes from two different data sources measuring the same quantity. The first is recent tide gauge data (last 150 years), indicating a sea level rise (SLR) of 2.4 mm/yr. The second data set comes from a fairly sparsely but well distributed sampled set of paleo data, based on core sample species abundance, indicating sea levels at various points over the last 1000 years, with a statistically tight best fit of ~1 +/- 0.2 mm/year. The Donnelly paper (single paper) daniel has been discussing therefore concludes that SLR increased from ~1 to 2.4 mm/year starting ~150 years ago, a conclusion completely in agreement with all other data sets (which daniel does not discuss). Daniels argument appears to be that natural variation could account for the last 150 years of 2.4 mm/year SLR. In other words, the ocean isn't warming (contradicts the data), icecaps aren't melting (contradicts the data), it's variability, not global warming. Any similar 2.4 mm/year rise extending over 100+ years in the past would have greatly offset later paleo data points. It's barely statistically possible (but certainly not the statistically justified hypothesis!) that such a rise could have occurred, if a corresponding <1.0 or even negative SLR trend balanced it out, returning later paleo samples to the ~1 mm/year trend. If there was a situation of high variability, that would have to cycle +/- around the 1.0 mm/year level to still show that on the long term averages. This is exceedingly physically unlikely, however, as sea level is driven by steric expansion and icecap/glacial melt, rather low variability processes. In addition, no records, evidence, or data supports sufficient temperature drops or increased icecap/glaciation in the past 1000 years. Additional data sets for paleo sea level also fall on the ~1.0 mm/year slope, with a total sample spacing much closer than the 11 samples in the Donnelly paper, thus leaving no room for such high variability periods. Claiming extreme variability that is somehow missed in the paleo data for even this single paper under discussion is not justified by the evidence. And opening your view to additional data clearly eliminates such variability in the time period under discussion. Asserting that it somehow snuck in between the data points is simply wishful thinking, not science. -
HumanityRules at 00:58 AM on 14 July 2010What's in a trend?
muoncounter The asymmetry is there because of the GHG trend. Once this trend is removed from the arctic and antarctic the symmetry looks good. Have a look at the paper if you can get passed the paywall. I'm not exactly why you're picking on UAH for using single trend lines. it seems like SOP for climate science. -
chris at 00:58 AM on 14 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
Berényi Péter at 00:33 AM on 14 July, 2010 "My point was windfarms render huge areas uninhabitable (much larger than anyhing else). It's a valid one. What else do you need?" Do they Peter? Not if you put them in shallow coastal seas. Not if you put them on windy peat moors. Not if you put them on rough moors suitable only for sheep and goat grazing. None of these really take up much space at all and allow the original land use to be maintained (O.K. perhaps one wouldn't wish to go grouse shooting on a peat moor with wind turbines!). But what's wrong with a wind turbines on a sheep farm - a wind farm where sheep may safely graze ("Schafe können sicher weiden" as JS Bach might have put it if he was considering the delights of wind power). As for...."If you switch technology without improving regulations....", isn't there an obvious answer to that? I hope you're not suggesting we consider installing wind turbines without appropriate regulations for their maintenance and decommissioning. In any case I expect the latter might be a teeny bit more tractable that decommissioning coal plants, let alone nuclear power plants... I wonder whether you're being deliberately obtuse now (piling up fanciful objections!) -
Ned at 00:54 AM on 14 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
My point was windfarms render huge areas uninhabitable (much larger than anyhing else). It's a valid one. What else do you need? Stop exaggerating, please. Some windfarms are offshore. Some windfarms are in very sparsely populated regions. Some windfarms are in agricultural areas, where power companies rent space from farmers. In the latter case, normal economic activity (growing crops) generally proceeds more or less uninterrupted around the wind turbines. You tossed out a bunch of anecdotal Youtube videos and a vague implication that somebody in Vinalhaven, Maine is unhappy with wind turbines. I pointed out that one recent poll shows support for wind power in Maine running at about 90%. Who's got the stronger case here? This, however, is a valid point: If you switch technology without improving regulations, in a couple of decades you'll be left with broken windmills dotting the landscape, dropping parts, leaking oil and other chemicals, making it unsafe to even walk among them, not to mention farming. Then you'll have a choice to spend public money on decommissioning or abandon the place and move on. Of course, that applies to every power generating technology. Want to compare the costs (economic and environmental) of decommissioning a wind farm to the costs of a dam, an oil field, or a nuclear power plant? -
Jim Eager at 00:44 AM on 14 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
CoalGeologist, hence the very large number. -
daniel at 00:36 AM on 14 July 2010Sea level rise is exaggerated
Peter Hogarth at 02:45 AM on 13 July, 2010 The 1 sigma bounds are irrelevant Peter. I've already commented on this. Do you see the overlay of the tide gauge data on sample 1? That's right, it crosses the uncertainty box at the mean height and date range extreme. That is the most probable height of sample 1 has a date at the 2 sigma extreme in the date range, the least probable according to you. On this one Donnelly sees it my way since his linear fit does this also at samples 11, 10, 5 and 4 not to mention the extra paleo data used to constrain the C14 ranges. -
Berényi Péter at 00:33 AM on 14 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
#150 CBDunkerson at 23:40 PM on 13 July, 2010 In short, you are maintaining a belief in the inadequacy of wind power by closing your eyes to information to the contrary My point was windfarms render huge areas uninhabitable (much larger than anyhing else). It's a valid one. What else do you need? The sad image you've painted of an ill-managed coal region is striking. Especially because this, far from being unavoidable, is the consequence of insufficient local regulations. Proper recultivation is possible, but pricy. It should be enforced on coal mining companies. Soot and sulphur can be filtered out, scale as well with most of the radioactive materials in it. If you switch technology without improving regulations, in a couple of decades you'll be left with broken windmills dotting the landscape, dropping parts, leaking oil and other chemicals, making it unsafe to even walk among them, not to mention farming. Then you'll have a choice to spend public money on decommissioning or abandon the place and move on. -
muoncounter at 00:30 AM on 14 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
Kudos to John for wading into the fray. #11:""Cherry picking" is different - simply: incomplete information." More than incomplete, this pejorative suggests that one has actively selected only those data that agrees with his/her POV, as in only those cherries that are ripe. Here is one of the graphs posted as a counter-example:
The author doesn't appear to notice what happened from the early 80's onwards: approx 4 deg in 30ish years, or a resounding 1.3 deg/decade! Alarming trend, no?
But the surface temperature data are suspect, the gravity data are immaterial, the satellite temperatures are cooked. And the Greenlanders farming where their grandfathers couldn't are clearly drinking the vodka they can make from their own crops:
" ... pulled 20 tons of potatoes from the earth last summer, and his harvests have been growing larger each year. "It's already staying warm until November now, ..." says Egede. And if this is what faraway scientists call the greenhouse effect, it's certainly a welcome phenomenon ...."
Who knows, maybe they'll be planting cherries in Greenland one of these days?
-
Jeff T at 00:29 AM on 14 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
Wikipedia says that Greenland contains 2,850,000 cubic kilometers of ice. Since one cubic kilometer of ice is nearly 1 gigaton, the current loss rate is 0.05%/year. It doesn't seem like a lot. The acceleration apparent in Figure 2 ought to be a concern, however. @Arkadiusz, I'd like to understand what you are saying, but the abbreviations and hyphenations make it difficult.Response: It's not just the acceleration in ice loss that gives us cause for concern. The various lines of evidence that show Greenland is highly sensitive to temperature and expected to contribute significant sea level rise in future decades/centuries are examined in why Greenland's ice loss matters. -
Arkadiusz Semczyszak at 23:55 PM on 13 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
"Cherry picking" is different - simply: incomplete information. To post J.C. was full - not "cherry picking" - like now - I am please let me know: whether the whole area of the Greenland ice mass is decreasing? If not, why? Perhaps the close vicinity of the mass of Greenland's glaciers are growing somewhere? Is solely responsible for changing our warming, or as we wanted in 1978 Stone (always quoted when it comes to oceanic transport of energy) - are the most important cyclical changes in Earth's rotation and ocean circulation? I advise you also read "whole" last SG - there is much more "one knows why" the arguments skipped by JC (for example, Greenland ice in 1920 -30 years). -
CBDunkerson at 23:54 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
BTW, some less one-sided stories on Vinalhaven can be found here and here. Vastly reduced power bills, no pollution, only a few people complaining, and the company working on noise reduction options for those few. Doesn't really sound so bad. -
CoalGeologist at 23:54 PM on 13 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
@Jim Eager #7 Bill Keller, former Managing Editor of the New York Times, observed that a substantial proportion of the [American] public does not look to the [news] media to provide them with a factual accounting of the news, but rather to confirm the beliefs they already hold. WUWT fulfills this function quite well for many of its readership. When you consider some of the things that people choose to believe, the present example is not particularly surprising. -
chris at 23:54 PM on 13 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
Ed Davies at 23:29 PM on 13 July, 2010 Thanks for that Ed. In fact if you look on page 156 of the paper I linked too above (click on "the science indicates" in third paragraph of my post), it discusses the positive contribution to sea level rise from aquifer and ground water depletion and the negative contribution from building dams and impounding water. Over the last several decades these apparently account for around +0.5 mm per year and -0.5 mm.yr-1, respectively, and so the net anthropogenic effect from these is near zero. I expect that the negative contribution from dam buildng has or will start to diminish since much of the potentially dammable rivers have been dammed by now, whereas groundwater depletion may continue apace... -
DarkSkywise at 23:53 PM on 13 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
Icarus at 22:43 PM on 13 July, 2010: Well, they don't need ice mass data, since ice mass has nothing to do with anything, not even ice mass itself! According to eyewitnessesses, McIntyre has recently acquired a cow, which had tripped and fallen into the water, causing sea levels to rise. Esiwyks and Krad (2010) do not agree with this, since average single cow volume doesn't match any recent sea or ice volume increase or decrease, although Hennub (2010) couldn't rule out the possibility completely, because the cow was rather large. Golly wiz, them there science guy persons would claim anything these days. :P -
Ken Lambert at 23:53 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
M Sweet #103, Chris #105, JMurphy #106 Perhaps I should quote my height as 1.85m +/-1.85m. I could be a midget or a giant. Steric SLR components with measurements where the signal is equal to the noise viz. 0.5 +/-0.5mm etc are as useful as suggestions that a La Nina can cause a 'global' flattening of temperatures and OHC over 4-5 years. 'Global' warming requires external forcing (ie a TOA imbalance) - not redistribution of existing heat stored in the oceans which can feasibly cause regional or possibly hemispheric effects. With little storage capacity in the atmosphere and land, and relatively tiny amounts of heat energy accounted by ice melt, the only feasible store for the energy is the oceans. Measuring OHC is the major issue - not a small part of the 'multiple lines of evidence' so often touted in these blogs. With 1 drifting Argo buoy every 110,000 sq.km we still have a way to go to accurately measure the upper 900m, and Von Schukmann's bumpy 2000m OHC chart was seriously holed below the waterline elsewhere by our good friend BP. As a very prominent climate scientist expressed to me a few months ago: "It's time the oceanographers got their act together". -
chris at 23:43 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
To update my post just above, I believe that a scaled down version of the Isle of Lewis wind farm has eventually been approved, after modification to accommodate the environmental and scenic objections. An offshore windfarm in the Minch just to the East of the Isle of Lewis is also going ahead I believe. -
CBDunkerson at 23:40 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
BP #145, you do realize that you've basically just conceded my point, right? Rather than facing and responding to the inaccuracy of your statistic on the land area needed for wind power your 'rebuttal' was to introduce a completely unrelated issue on complaints about noise from wind power. In short, you are maintaining a belief in the inadequacy of wind power by closing your eyes to information to the contrary. -
KR at 23:34 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
Here's another reality check, Berényi. There haven't been complaints in my area regarding noise or ice shedding, but you may have a point there - the population density on those ridgelines is fairly low. However. The only other alternative in my region would be a coal fired power plant. Soot. Acid rain and the damage to the woods. More released radioactive materials than nuclear power (radon alone!). More soot. And the associated strip mining for fuel - I've seen the landscape around my hometown irrevocably change in my lifetime, with new hills of strip tailings appearing, other hills disappearing as the mountain-tops are shredded, and dumped into what were neighboring valleys. The runoff from the tailings, regardless of laws intended to repair the damage, will poison the watershed for thousands of years. It will be hundreds of years at least before there's enough soil on the new terrain to support anything but short weeds. I grew up with our water sometimes turning orange, stinking of rotten eggs, and repeated hikes in property taxes to pay for yet another water system cleaning or upgrade. Or just being told "Don't worry - it can't hurt you. Really..." You know what? I'll take the windmills. -
Jim Eager at 23:34 PM on 13 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
How many times does Goddard have to be shown to be just plain wrong by physical reality for the WUWT gang to realise he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about? Probably a very large number. -
Ed Davies at 23:29 PM on 13 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
chris at 21:11pm - there's one other source of extra water in the oceans worth mentioning: emptying of underground reservoirs. As I, somewhat unreliably, remember it it's a measurable contribution but not huge. -
chris at 23:29 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
Berényi Péter at 22:26 PM on 13 July, 2010 That's not terribly logical Peter (a bit like your "Homeopathy" journal example in a post above where you hunt out bad examples with which to attempt to flay entire fields). There's no question that energy production has unintended and sometimes highly damaging consequences. Your examples might be considered rather trivial in relation to the rather regular massive outpourings of crude oil from broken pipes and foundering tankers, the (thankfully rare) example of nuclear reactor failure and release of radioactive "clouds" and the 1000's of deaths from coal mining accidents worldwide each year. Most of the annoyances in your You-Tubish examples could be alleviated by a little more sympathetic consideration of wind turbine siting. Here in the UK we have abundant possibilites for very largescale siting of wind turbines in the shallow seas around the coasts. Otherwise the few wind turbines in my immediate locale are sited in an industrial complex by the sea where "shadow flicker" and noise are of little consequence. The worlds largest wind farm to have been located on the Isle of Lewis off the Scottish West Coast was welcomed by many that wished to see a surge economic regenration and opposed by many for environmental reasons. The latter won the day. There will always be these tensions between economic and personal/environmental sides, and these tensions (so long as they are fairly and honestly pursued) will tend to benefit everyone; i.e. they will tend to promote sympathetic siting of wind turbines. Berényi Péter at 22:59 PM on 13 July, 2010 your response to CBDunkerson is illogical too Peter. What some of the residents of Vinalhaven Maine think about their wind turbines doesn't negate CBDunkerson's point about your misuse of the numbers that he pointed out. And if the wind turbines of Vinalhaven Maine turn out to be unwelcome then that's surely another argument to make a more sympathetic assessment of turbine siting. On the other hand many of the Vinalhaven residents seem to be very happy with their turbines and apparently the local people played a strong part in getting the project moving forward. -
Berényi Péter at 23:28 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
#101 Ned at 23:04 PM on 12 July, 2010 In any case, it is completely wrong to suggest either that the GHCN data are "tampered with" or that the difference in adjustments between USHCN and GHCN is "not documented" (his emphasis) Is it?
Documentation: v2.temperature.readme
The versions of these data sets that have data which we adjusted to account for various non-climatic inhomogeneities are:
v2.mean.adj
v2.max.adj
v2.min.adj
-
robert way at 23:27 PM on 13 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
I think an upcoming post on glaciology should help with some of this stuff. -
Ned at 23:25 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
I don't know what people's anecdotal opinions are in Vinalhaven. However, I have friends and relatives in Maine and there is no shortage of support for wind power in the state, though many people may have perfectly understandable reservations about siting turbines in environmentally sensitive areas. From the Natural Resources Council of Maine: A recent poll conducted by Portland-based Critical Insights shows that 90% of Maine people support the development of wind power as a source of electricity. Nearly nine in ten Mainers agree that wind power can improve energy security and reduce Maine’s dependence on fossil fuels, and eight in ten agree that wind power will produce jobs and other forms of economic benefits. [...] The level of support for wind power in Maine appears to have increased as Maine has become a leader in New England in wind power generation. [...] The poll also reveals that 77% of Maine people want Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to support federal climate and clean energy legislation. Only 13% believe that Maine’s two senators should vote against the legislation, and 10% remain undecided. A clear majority in every demographic subgroup supports passage of legislation “aimed at both reducing the threat of climate change and promoting clean energy development,” with 57% of Republicans in support. “The message from this poll is clear: Mainers in every region of the state, young and old, of all income levels and political affiliations want Senator Snowe and Senator Collins to vote ‘yes’ on legislation to address climate change and promote clean energy, including wind power,” said Didisheim. -
Berényi Péter at 22:59 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
#140 CBDunkerson at 21:31 PM on 13 July, 2010 Resorting to the citation of blatantly false/misleading statistics does not help your case. Rather it shows that you are pursuing a belief which can only be sustained via dishonesty. You know what? Pay a visit to Vinalhaven, Maine, call up a townhall meeting and tell those people they are pursuing a belief which can only be sustained via dishonesty. See what you get. -
CBDunkerson at 22:50 PM on 13 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
Doesn't it ever bother 'skeptics' to discover that the 'leading lights' of their movement are lying to them? I mean, you'd think that would be a clue. -
Icarus at 22:43 PM on 13 July 2010Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data
I submit that WUWT didn't mention actual ice mass data because it didn't give them the right answer. -
muoncounter at 22:40 PM on 13 July 2010What's in a trend?
#7 should have readAs for "
but apparently the text interpreter thought it is! -
muoncounter at 22:32 PM on 13 July 2010What's in a trend?
#6, CBD: "a massive block which endured year after year and served as a 'plug' forcing most of the younger / thinner ice to remain in the arctic basin each year. Warming got severe enough to break up the plug" Non-geologists don't seem to realize that ice events are discontinuous. Ice dams form and hold ice or water back until a semi-catastrophic break occurs. The regime after that break may be totally different from what it was beforehand. Yet another reason why a single 'trend' isn't just misleading, its incorrect. -
Berényi Péter at 22:26 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
#137 KR at 15:27 PM on 13 July, 2010 There's a row of 1.4 MW windmills just outside my home town. No noise issue, and even in the US snow belt (several 1 meter snowfalls per year over the last couple years) they don't ice up and throw chunks. And if I'm not on a ladder sticking my head in the blades, the speed of the blade tips is completely irrelevant OK, let's go for a reality check. Wind Turbine noise at 1600 feet Wind Turbine Ice Throw Wind Turbine Shadow Flicker and Noise, Byron Wisconsin Windmill/turbine going wild and finally break Wind turbines and health problems Wind Turbine Shadow Flicker Impact Lawsuit over wind turbine noise Does an industrial scale wind turbine sound like a refrigerator to you? Wind Turbine Fire Danish wind turbine explosion slowed down Voices of Vinalhaven Part 1: wind turbine noise Voices of Vinalhaven Part 2: wind turbine noise I understand you would not like your property value to go down. In case you live more than 2 km away from the windfarm, you may be safe. But that's what I am talking about. This thing overconsumes valuable land area. -
muoncounter at 22:23 PM on 13 July 2010What's in a trend?
#1: "a big physical shift occurred in Arctic Ocean sea ice right at that time (1989), with a large "flush" of old thick ice" Exactly the type of thing I was looking for! Thanks. #2, #3: I don't like removing months here and there. Rather, the ninos/ninas appear as short term events, which (IMO) need to get filtered out to see long term behavior. One thing I did, but did not include here, is a graph of the global data with the straight line trend subtracted out. There is a very distinctive sawtooth pattern with a 4-6 year period and that annoying spike in '98. But these are removed by the curve fit, which is not unlike a moving average. #4: See the last graph. Tweaked or not, UAH and GISS show the same overall pattern for the last 30 years. Or is that what you mean by 'tweaked'? #5: I looked at UAH's South polar record; it's basically flat (with even a slight downward look). Nowhere else but in the Arctic does one see such numbers as the Official Trend (0.47) or the Alarming Trend (0.9). HR, the Antarctic down/Arctic up is highly asymmetric. Must be more to it than a 180 phase shift. Are you suggesting some sort of heat flow from south pole to north pole, which seems anti-thermodynamic? As for <CYNICISM></CYNICISM> (why isn't that an HTML tag?), sure. It seems to be a human tendency to see lines in everything, even when they may or not be there. I once had to explain to an oil company executive why straight lines on a map were not really straight over long distances because, err, the earth isn't flat. Have you ever shown anyone a 'right triangle' on a globe, consisting of 2 longitudes and a latitude? Easy picture to draw, but what about those 2 90 degree angles? But the UAH data are posted by a science group at a university; why can't they assume their audience is college educated and can handle the mathematical equivalent of 'big words'? By providing a single 'trend', are they not creating a false impression? Especially among the "Details? We don't need any stinking details!" crowd. -
CBDunkerson at 21:57 PM on 13 July 2010What's in a trend?
In reference to Andy Revkin's point about ice export circa 1990... in short, a 'tipping point' was passed. The large block of decades old ice along the northern edge of the Canadian archipelago and Greenland broke up and started to drift out of the arctic. Prior to that this had been a massive block which endured year after year and served as a 'plug' forcing most of the younger / thinner ice to remain in the arctic basin each year. Warming got severe enough to break up the plug and now we're seeing accelerated ice loss. Even without further warming we'd see the arctic continue to decline because that solid plug is gone and won't come back until temperatures drop below where they were circa 1990 and stay there. -
Ned at 21:56 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
Zeph writes: However, with these posts (109 & 118) you [BP] strayed into territory where I have more knowledge, and your lack of objectivity becomes glaringly apparent to me. This causes me to give less weight to your pronoucements where you (appear to believe you) have more expertise than I have, like OHC. For what it's worth, BP's comments in this thread about the GHCN surface station data and the surface temperature record were similarly wrongheaded. -
Ned at 21:48 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
CBDunkerson's point here is a really good one. I don't know how things work elsewhere, but in the US Upper Midwest wind turbines generally are built on private farmland, with the power company "renting" the space for the turbine's footprint. It's a good deal for everybody -- almost all the land is still farmed; the payments from the power company provide an additional source of income; and (IMHO) the turbines themselves add some interest to what's otherwise a fairly ... dull ... landscape. If BP's figure of 2.9 W/m2 is for all the land area within the vicinity of the wind farm, then yes, that's extremely misleading, since other economic activities continue within that same area. -
Ned at 21:42 PM on 13 July 2010Hotties vs Frosties?
I see lots of people in this thread arguing for wind, solar, nuclear, or whatever. Not many people arguing in favor of coal, at least. Could I make a modest suggestion? We don't actually need to decide a priori that the electrical grid of 2050 will be powered by x% wind, y% solar, z% hydro, nuclear, geothermal, tidal power, biomass, etc. That's really not an efficient way to proceed. If we implemented a substantial (and increasing) price for fossil carbon-based energy -- a carbon tax, cap-and-trade, whatever -- the market will then decide what mix of power sources is most cost effective in a given region. Such a pricing system can be made revenue-neutral (e.g., refunding all proceeds from a carbon tax on a per-capita basis -- in which case the average cost of energy usage doesn't change, but there's an incentive to move from fossil-fuel-based to non-fossil energy sources). It's pretty easy to imagine that in 2050 we might have a lot more solar in the US southwest and Australia, wind in northern Europe and the US/Canadian Great Plains, tidal power in Maine and the Maritimes, etc., with nuclear and (limited) fossil fuels filling in the gaps. By 2100 there are lots of different possible scenarios ranging from space-based solar to nuclear fusion to ... something else. But the point is that we don't have to have the answers worked out in 2010. Of course, there are also issues of path dependence and inertia. Actions we take today will influence the future mix of energy sources, transportation methods, etc. While a pricing penalty for carbon-based energy will benefit all the non-carbon alternatives, it's probably worth continuing to invest substantially more in research on all the major alternatives, so the market can have better information in advance on their likely future costs and capacities.
Prev 2300 2301 2302 2303 2304 2305 2306 2307 2308 2309 2310 2311 2312 2313 2314 2315 Next
