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william5331 at 07:22 AM on 18 June 2016Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
According to some reports, we didn't emit more Carbon dioxide in 2015 than in 2014. Perhaps our output has leveled off or may even decrease as more and more energy saving, renewable generation and a flat economy take hold. I find this frightening. If you look at the Mana Loa Carbon dioxide site for April, Carbon dioxide went up 4.16ppm despite this lack of increased carbon output. All things being equal one would have expected, possibly, a 2.5ppm increase. Apparently all things are not equal. Is this some effect of the strong El Nino we experienced or have one or more carbon sinks started to shut down. If this continues to the end of 2016 and into 2017, we just may be in a spot of bother. All things being equal, we would expect the line to revert to the long term increase and should see some quite small increases on into 2017.
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Mike Hillis at 07:20 AM on 18 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
And just to be clear on Tom Curtis @ 133:
"Given that, the idea that after 4.6 billion years there continues to be a net settling of the atmosphere that is needed to generate excess heat is absurd."
We are not talking about generating heat. We are talking about transferring heat, in this case, transferring it from every layer of the atmosphere to the surface. The heat comes from the sun, absorbed by the atmosphere so that only 10% of the light that falls on Venus ever reaches the surface. The bulk of the heat is transferred to the surface by the gravity heat pump mechanism I described.
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Mike Hillis at 06:11 AM on 18 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
2 and 3 and 4.5 I meant
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Mike Hillis at 06:10 AM on 18 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
HK @ 134 Venus is much hotter than Earth and radiates at shorter wavelengths, so we can pay more attention to the 2 and 3 4.5 micron bands and less to the 15 mike band. Take another look at the graph.
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Mike Hillis at 06:07 AM on 18 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
Tom @ 133 as I already said, as the air moves down it adds heat to the air it decends to. As it ascends, it takes heat from the air it ascends to. In BOTH directions, it transfers heat from higher to lower. Read again what I said.
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RedBaron at 03:27 AM on 18 June 2016Study: Most fossil fuels unburnable without carbon capture
There is somewhere between 35 and 40 Gt CO2 emissions yearly worldwide. To draw down CO2, (decrease the stocks in the atmosphere) we must adjust the flows into and out of the atmosphere until we achieve a net negative flux.
There are approximately 5 Giga Hectares of land in the world currently being used to produce food for human populations. (only ~1%+/- is in permaculture or other ecofriendly management) Agriculture has been proven to be capable of being an emissions source or a sequestration sink depending on the methods used. Currently right now agriculture is an emissions source. (99% being managed by either industrial or traditional subsistence methods)
Working backwards, for agriculture to offset emissions and achieve a net negative flux for atmospheric CO2 worldwide each hectare of agricultural land producing food would need to sequester long term into the soil over approximately 8t CO2/year. 8t CO2/ha/year X 5 Gha = 40Gt CO2/year
Can we do that? According to Dr. Christine Jones we certainly can.
Liquid carbon pathway unrecognised
The case studies mentioned by Dr. Christine Jones above show a range in results between 5 & 20 tonnes CO2e/ha/year increases in soil carbon by using permaculture pasture cropping methods. (direct seeding grain crops into perennial pasture and cell or pulse rotational grazing integrated together)
Why pasture cropping is such a big deal
In no way is this example alone or even out of the ordinary. There are multiple case studies on people getting similar results with other carbon farming practises.
So quite likely if done on enough land we could offset between 62% and 250% of all emissions worldwide. That is VERY conservative BTW, because it doesn't even include the oceans or the forests which already are removing about 1/2 of the ~35 to 40 Gt CO2 emissions yearly worldwide.
Makes me wonder why CCS technology is even being discussed? We know soil degradation is a very serious problem.
Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues
We also know renerating degraded soils includes restoring Soil Organic Carbon (SOC)
So no, CCS technologies is a fail from the start whether it works or not. We actually need that carbon... But we need it in the soils worldwide, not some CCS technology. It's a very bad idea and pulling resources away from where it needs to be...implementing the infrastructure required to change agricultural models of production to regenerative systems.
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HK at 00:02 AM on 18 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
Mike Hillis:
Did you check out KR’s link in @123? Look at figure 3c on page 4 (lower left). The red curve shows measurements by the Soviet Venera 15 probe of outgoing IR radiation from Venus.Do you have any idea of what that curve would look like if the extreme temperature on Venus was caused by gravitational compression – or any other heat source – rather than IR absorption in the atmosphere?
Hint: You would have to expand the y-axis a lot!
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Tom Curtis at 22:34 PM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
Mike Hillis @132, don't be a fool. Downward motion of air heats the air, but upward motion of air cools it. If the same amount moves up as down, there is no net heat generated, and hence no possibility that this mechanism will raise temperatures above what they would have been from solar input alone. As it happens, convective equilibrium is achieved within hours in the troposphere. Given that, the idea that after 4.6 billion years there continues to be a net settling of the atmosphere that is needed to generate excess heat is absurd.
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Mike Hillis at 21:51 PM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
Tom Curtis 131
The atmospheres of rocky planets, including Earth and Venus are very thin, and have reached quasi-equilibrium a long time ago. Ergo, no net conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy, and no overall warming of the atmosphere by gravitation. End of story. Your explanation is a non-starter, and shows all the accumen demonstrated by various inventors of perpetual motion machines (which it would allow, if valid).
Quasi equilibrium is not equilibrium. Small motion, even brownian motion, is enough. All small parcels of gas, even single molecules, generate heat on the way in and release it on the way out. Gas moves in, compresses, heats up, releases heat to the neighboring gas at lower elevation, moves back up, cools, absorbs heat from neaghboring gas at higher elevation, moves back down, etc. If you don't understand how vertical movement of gas generates heat and transfers it in a downward direction, then you probably don't understand why Death Valley is so hot, or why the San Gabriel and Santa Ana winds heat up as the elevation decrease, even at night. These are called katabatic winds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katabatic_wind and happen all over Antarctica. In the extreme, as on Venus and Jupiter, they explain everything. Taken to the extreme extreme, near the core of Jupiter, the temperature is 20,000 K. and the Kelvin Helmholtz theory isn't even necessary (that theory requires permanent compression....not needed).
Please no talk about perpetual motion machines. The solar system has been in motion for only 4.6 by, and that's a long time but not perpetual. Tidal forces and the friction it gererates will eventually stop the rotation of Venus, but until then, the motion, all motion, within its atmosphere, will continue to generate heat katabatically.
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Tom Curtis at 17:47 PM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
Returning to Mike Hillis @ 121:
1)
"The greenhouse effect doesn't explain why the dark and sunlit sides of Venus are the same temperature, and why the poles are as hot as the equator."
Actually, it has been predicted since Svante Arrhenius in 1896 that increasing the greenhouse effect will warm the poles more than the equator, in winter more than in summer, and it has also been shown that the greenhouse effect warms nights more than days. Carried to extremes, these features easilly explain why Venutian nights should be as warm as days, and polar regions as warm as tropical regions in the lower troposphere. In contrast, no presentation of the theory you appeal to purports to show the same thing.
2)
"This does"
The blog post for which you provide a link appeals to a paper showing temperature hotspots at high altitudes to prove that the adiabatic lapse rate applies throughout the entire atmosphere. That is, it appeals to a paper that falsifies its claim as proof of that claim. It further claims the existence of the adiabatic lapse rate (where it exists) is proof of their preferred theory (of which more in a later post) even though it is a well known feature, and an important feature of the standard greenhouse theory since Manabe and Wetherald (1967), and a well known feature of all atmospheres in regions dominated by convection long before that.
3)
"Venus is not like earth, in that its atmosphere directly absorbs sunlight on the way in, via the H2SO4 clouds."
In fact measured solar flux on the Venutian surface is between 35 and 40 W/m^2 at the surface (see figure 6). On the other hand, global mean net solar flux (accounting for differences in latitude, season and the day night cycle) in only about 8 W/m^2. Both of these are substantially smaller than is the case on Earth, due to the thick cloud, but they are more than sufficient to generate an adiabatic lapse rate in the Venutian troposphere (as is proven by its existence). If all solar heating was dissipated in the clouds, as you claim, the surface would be cooler than the clouds, just as the tropopause is cooler than the stratosphere due to the heating of ozone in the stratosphere by UV radiation on Earth. That is, if you were right about this point, the very precondition for validity of your preferred (in not understood) theory would be false.
4)
"The reason the temperature everywhere on Venus is the same is, gravity is the same all around Venus."
The only way gravity 'generates' energy, and hence raises temperatures, is the conversion of gravitational potential energy to kinetic energy by masses falling towards the surface. For an atmosphere in equilibrium, there is no net infall of material, and hence no net energy conversion from potential to kinetic forms. The atmospheres of rocky planets, including Earth and Venus are very thin, and have reached quasi-equilibrium a long time ago. Ergo, no net conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy, and no overall warming of the atmosphere by gravitation. End of story. Your explanation is a non-starter, and shows all the accumen demonstrated by various inventors of perpetual motion machines (which it would allow, if valid).
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Glenn Tamblyn at 15:54 PM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
Also Mike.
The forcing effect of CO2, at so much per doubling, isn't the same ratio all the way up to those very high concentrations. Additional wavelengths come into play at those higher concentrations, a process called Continuum Absorption comes into play, and the Lapse Rate of the atmosphere of Venus is more like 10.4 Deg C per km vs 6.5 here on Earth. Also there is SO2 present on venus that isn't present here on Earth. And since there is cloud covering the entire planet, not just part of it even though SO2 clouds aren'e as effective as emitters as water clouds, this still produces a bigger GH effect from clouds than here on Earth. Since the Bond Albedo of Venus is around 0.9 - 90% reflection, much from those clouds, the GH effect impact of those clouds would also be substantial.
You can't extrapolate simply from the current climate on Earth, you actually need to run the radiation modelling programs with venus's atmosphere to get the correct result.
From the post above "In the dense Venusian CO2 atmosphere, pressure broadening from collisions and the presence of a large number of absorption features unimportant on modern Earth can come into play (figure 1b), which means quick and dirty attempts by Goddard to extrapolate the logarithmic dependence between CO2 and radiative forcing make little sense."
A better way of thinking about it, is to use the radiation calculations to determine what the effective radiating height for the atmosphere is, the average altitude that radiation to space originates from. For the Earth that is around 5 km up, for Venus it is over 50 km up. The average temperature at that altitude will be at around the effective radiating temperature the planet needs to be at to be in energy balance. For the earth that is -18C. For Venus it is more like -80 - -90 C. So a lapse rate of 6.5, over a 5km altitude makes the surface of the Earth around 32.5C warmer than the effective emission level so around 14-15C.
For Venus, a lapse rate of 10.2 approximately and an effective emission height of over 50 km gives a surface temperature something of the order of 510-550 C warmer that the effective emission level, so the surface temperature should be something like 420-470C. -
Tom Dayton at 14:42 PM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
Mike Hillis, Skeptical Science is not intended to be an encyclopedia. You need to exert A little independent effort before posting your off topic diatribes.
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Mike Hillis at 13:56 PM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
How many times would we have to double Earth's CO2 to be the same as Venus, which is 96% CO2 and is 93 times denser than Earth's? The answer is 18. Starting at 400 and doubling:
800
1600
3200
6400
12800
25600
51200
100k
200k
400k
800k
1.6m
3.2m
6.4m
12.8m
25m
50m
100mWith a climate sensitivity of 2C per doubling, Earth would only be 2 x 18 or 32 C warmer than it is now, using the greenhouse effect of CO2
Moderator Response:[RH] Try using central estimates for CS of 3°C.
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Mike Hillis at 13:38 PM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
Lots of posturing, yet no explanation why the poles of Venus are as hot as the equator, why the night side is as hot as the day side, and why Jupiter, which has an atmosphere made of H2 and He which are not greenhouse gases, has a temperature of 260 F at a depth in the atmosphere where the P is 11 bars.
Moderator Response:[RH] Need I remind you that you are currently skating on thin ice with regards to your commenting privileges. Posting links to blog posts instead of published research and then calling published research "posturing" does not help you. Stick to the published research, if there is any, to support your position, please.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 12:44 PM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
It always amazes me how many people get the Ideal Gas Law wrong with the 'Pressure causes Temperature' idea. But explaining it never helps, they just don't get it.
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pjcarson2015 at 10:39 AM on 17 June 2016Climate scientists have warned us of coral bleaching for years. It's here
Currently there is anxiety about coral bleaching, affecting particularly the northern Great Barrier Reef. Valerie Taylor had a short informal interview in The Weekend Australian’s Magazine, May 14. You may recall she made many documentaries with her husband Ron about sharks. She’s now 80, and still dives. [Current researchers would/should have been aware of their well known documentaries.] She says of the GBR,
“In 1965 we went from one end of the reef to the other, over six months, and we found bleaching then. In the ‘70s we went back and you’d never know it happened. The coral had recovered; nature had taken care of it. I’ve seen reefs in PNG that were as white as snow and I’ve just come back from there and they’re terrific.”
She thus observes that bleaching is reversible. (Presumably spores from unaffected corals can flow in again to re-colonise affected areas once the cause has departed.)
Coral bleaching and repair occur independently of atmospheric CO2 levels.
As it is mainly the relatively untouched northern areas of the GBR affected, it is unlikely that run-off is the cause. The current bleaching decreases towards the south, flowing on the north-to-south counter-clockwise current from Vanuatu, and becoming depleted in the process. Upstream undersea volcanic activity around Vanuatu produces toxic H2S (Chapter 4a, Cyclone Pam), in time oxidising to sulphuric acid, which may also be a concern; Chapter 5 shows acidity produced by CO2 is not.
Other coral bleaching areas around the globe, eg Seychelles, Caribbean, Maldives, etc are downstream from undersea volcanic areas.
Moderator Response:[Rob P] Coral reefs are dying out at the rate of 1-2% per year, and it's very much 'settled science' that the mass coral bleaching and subsequent mortality that we are observing is as a result of sea surface temperatures rising above their normal summertime maximum. See Ove Hoegh-Guldberg's 1999 paper for a detailed rundown.
This why NOAA's Coral Reef Watch program can reliably predict bleaching events some months in advance. The bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, and elsewhere, was predicted 3-4 months before it happened, and their climate model-based projections anticipate extraordinary bleaching in the Coral Triangle later this year.
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Rolf Jander at 08:43 AM on 17 June 2016Development banks threaten to unleash an infrastructure tsunami on the environment
"Good Bye Mother Nature"
The Guess Who.
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MA Rodger at 08:27 AM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
KR @123.
The Nikolov and Zeller poster is not entirely make believe. Their initial modelling of a planet with zero GH-effect is correct but is so silly with its assumptions I wasn't bothered to look further into their arguments. So I cannot speak for how bad the rest of it is.
That initial model in 2.1A is for a planet with its day-side locked to always face the sun. The average temperature will thus be a little over half the black body temperature. And this should not be a great surprise; with its dark side permanently unheated, half the planet has a temperature effectively at absolute zero. Smith (2008) helpfully have done these sums & show the effects of rotation & thermal inertia.
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scaddenp at 07:32 AM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
Gee, I am surprised this rubbish keeps coming up, when it was laughed at even in "skeptic" circles. You might like to read what Roy Spencer has to say on the subject as I suspect you would trust that source rather than "warmistas" here or say physics textbooks. This has come up here before and even our friend Camburn wouldnt buy it. If you think this is plausible, then I think he has a bridge he would like to sell you.
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william5331 at 06:10 AM on 17 June 2016New study finds evidence for a 'fast' dinosaur extinction
Pretty convincing. The Iridium data from his site would be pretty well the clincher.
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knaugle at 05:53 AM on 17 June 2016Development banks threaten to unleash an infrastructure tsunami on the environment
Consider that there is some thought that Biscayne Bay area of Miami will be uninhabitable in 30 or 40 years because of rising sea levels and the rather porous substrate. Yet right NOW there is a building boom. Why? I've read that it's because developers calculate that it takes 20 years for them to turn a profit and they will be long gone before it's a problem.
So the question is. Did I get this right? Or am I making it up? -
Alexandre at 04:18 AM on 17 June 2016Development banks threaten to unleash an infrastructure tsunami on the environment
There's a hydroelectric dam here in Brazil that's been a long controversial issue. It's the Belo Monte Dam, that is on a flat land in the middle of the Amazon forest, and therefore needs a large flooded area for a relatively small amount of electricity generated.
Even before the present political crisis (president Rousseff is in the middle of an impeachment process), the environmental issues were quite low down the priority list: the minister who was responsible for the dam was one of the few overt climate denialists in Brazilian politics.
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KR at 03:02 AM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
That Nikolov and Zeller poster, not to mention the related Hockeyschtick blog post, could best be summarized as:
"We didn't like GHG physics, so we made up our own."
In short, utter nonsense. If you want actual physics, I would suggest reading the quite approachable Pierrehumbert 2001 article, "Infrared radiation and planetary temperature".
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MA Rodger at 02:46 AM on 17 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
Mike Hillis @121.
You are incorrect in presenting that link to a denialist webpage while proclaiming "The greenhouse effect doesn't explain why .... . This does:" The link you provide offers no explanation but rather presents unsubstantiated assertion spruced up with a couple of sweeps of Ockham's broom. The nonsense is explained however (as much as such things can be explained) by Nikolov and Zeller's 2011 conference poster.
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dvaytw at 00:40 AM on 17 June 2016Temp record is unreliable
Thanks guys. Scaddenp, I looked up the Monte Carlo method, but that stuff is way over my head. The main issue of the guy you suggested is being willfully-ignorant (I agree) is that he doesn't see how a single fact about the past can be expressed as a probability. He quoted the definition of probability to me:
A number expressing the likelihood of the occurrence of a given event, especially a fraction expressing how many times the event will happen in a given number of tests or experiments.
and asked how such an expression could fit the definition. I suggested to him that here, "probability" means something like, 'given similar amount and kinds of evidence plus measurement uncertainty, if we ran the calculation multiple times, what percentage of the time would the calculation be correct'. Is this basically right?
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Mike Hillis at 23:20 PM on 16 June 2016Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect
The greenhouse effect doesn't explain why the dark and sunlit sides of Venus are the same temperature, and why the poles are as hot as the equator. This does:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2016/06/new-paper-demonstrates-gravito-thermal.html
Venus is not like earth, in that its atmosphere directly absorbs sunlight on the way in, via the H2SO4 clouds. That heat absorced by H2SO4 is transferred to the surface via the gravity pump described here.
The reason the temperature everywhere on Venus is the same is, gravity is the same all around Venus.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 18:41 PM on 16 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
Just throwing in my two-penn'th worth.
Cap and Trade has one really good feature and one really bad feature.
Cap is good because it is directly targetting what we need to do - capping emissions. Carbon taxes in contrast don't actually target that. They put a price on emissions and basically hoe that will achieve the effect of a cap.
Trade, not so good. In the simplistic world of economists, trade, markets etc produce 'efficiency'. Often this efficiency doesn't actually translate to social utility. And there is one key problem. A lot of very smart people get up every day to strive as hard as they possibly can to subborn the market, twist it, break it to their advantage. Trade is probably just a huge 'employment opportunity' for financial engineers.
The idea of making any approach revenue neutral is sounc. Cap and Dividend, conceptually seems the right approach. Cap gives certainty and Dividen makes it revenue neutral.As to using regulation, there are good arguments for regulations, highly targetted, in very specific contexts. They actually need to be simple regulations, targetting key industry sectors. Two key ones:
- Electricity generation. We don't need masses of regulations, just some simple rules and clarity.
- Fuel Efficiency standards. By simply saying that vehicle efficiency standards need to rise steadily, ultimately they are saying a switch to non fossil fuels is needed. Petrol to Hybrid to Electric delivered via an indirect measure. Unleash the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to set standards for California, and that becomes the defacto standard for the US, which then becomes a defacto standard for the world. CARB has done this before.
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Tom Curtis at 10:19 AM on 16 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
CSM @16, with respect, the US does not have a significant debt crisis. The measure of whether or not your debt is unmanagable is your ability to pay of the interest, which is currently 223 billion US dollars (6% of the Federal budget). That is an affordable amount, and just paying of the interest will result in a 2-3% decrease in the debt/GDP ratio per annum on average based on economic growth. If most of the debt is in US dollars, inflation will decrease the real value of the debt even quicker.
The US is portrayed as having a debt crisis by comparing its national debt to its national income. However, for private corporations and individuals, the comparisons made are total debts to total assets (the later typically being ten times the value of income); or of repayments to income (where the former need only include interest repayments). The use of debt to GDP comparisons represents a double standard. If applied to industry, for example, it would require that businesses by wound up if their debt exceeds their income, which would be ridiculous.
The US does need to balance its budget, but it needs to do so in a way that will keep the budget balanced in the long term and over the course of the economic cycle. Temporary budget measures are not the way to achieve that, and certainly a measure which is designed to decrease its revenue to zero over time will not achieve that except temporarilly. Further, if it is revenue neutral, it will not accomplish that in any event.
What using such a measure to balance the budget would achieve, however, is to generate a long term structural need to decrease revenue or reimpose other taxes. As we can see the US Congress's inability to do either, it achieves a structural pressure generating future deficits.
If you want to pay down US government debt quickly, you would be far better of imposing a temporary Tobin tax, (or as a tobin tax is a good idea in any event, a temporary Tobin tax surcharge).
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scaddenp at 10:08 AM on 16 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
"This means balancing the budget on average; i.e., surpluses during boom years and balanced budgets on average years."
Here in NZ, this is called the Fiscal Responsibility Act 1994
I think a lot of nations should try it. *smug*. Cant help myself.
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CSM at 09:31 AM on 16 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
@Tom Curtis: I respectfully disagree. We have 19 TRILLION dollars in debt and the Baby Boomers are starting to retire! If a carbon tax produces a temporary surge in revenue, so be it. We need some temporary surpluses to offset 80+ years of crises. I would use some of the revenues as a citizen dividend just to keep a carbon tax from being too regressive.
And for the record I am a smaller government guy. I usually vote Libertarian. But I do believe in paying for the government we have, and the government we had. Even with a half trillion dollar cut in annual spending, we still could use some tax increases.
General environmental note: if you desire a future where progress means more leisure vs. more environmentally degrading stuff, you want an economy that doesn't require ongoing artificial stimulus. This means balancing the budget on average; i.e., surpluses during boom years and balanced budgets on average years.
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Tom Curtis at 09:07 AM on 16 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
knaugle @14, IMO the opposite is the case.
Carbon taxes should be imposed on the fee and dividend basis because, by their nature, they are intended to dry up over time. Ideally, within 34 years, a carbon tax will provide zero revenue to government because we will have zero net emissions. If the carbon tax is not distributed back to the populace on a fee and dividend basis, that means the service it funds will have had its revenue dry up. In a worst case scenario, the tax will have been used to widely replace income and/or sales taxes which would then of necessity need to be reimposed gradually over time to replace the diminishing return from the carbon tax, with the consequent political battles to do so, both in elections and in the legislature. The most likely outcome would be a dimishment of general revenue, and hence of government services.
Ergo, to keep government services well funded, carbon taxes should be revenue neutral on a fee and dividend basis, or at worst used for short term, non-ongoing measures that will accelerate ending carbon dependence in the economy. (Note that ongoing subsidies of renewables does not fall into this category, for the funding of such subsidies must be drawn from general revenue as the carbon tax dries up, again creating a potential budget crisis.)
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knaugle at 08:06 AM on 16 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
Regarding #1
It's off topic, but "revenue neutral" is to me more a policy decision to appease those who prefer to avoid sound budgeting and oppose most taxes in general and on principle. Considering that sound budgeting takes into account how much the government needs to spend and where it gets the money, locking down the argument like this paints the government into a corner where it cannot really raise revenue, nor can it cut spending.
What is on topic is that carbon taxes and cap-&-trade have worked in other arenas (like Acid Rain) and it confounds me why suddenly these are so very off the table within USA conservative dogma.
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scaddenp at 08:04 AM on 16 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
CSM, those are all good points. I am actually in favour in carbon tax, and your argument further convinces me of its merit.
In my defense, I will say that NZ had a 10-year moritorium on building new thermal generation from 1998-2008, during which geothermal and wind generation capacity significantly expanded. Investment in new generation (of any kind) has slowed since it was removed but other factors are at play as well.
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william5331 at 06:37 AM on 16 June 2016Study: Most fossil fuels unburnable without carbon capture
It is pretty clear that Carbon capture is not on. I've seen estimates that you have to burn 30% more carbon to catch and store the Carbon dioxide. That is just silly. We would use all the renewable energy we have developed and then some to store the carbon from our coal fired power plants. Equally clearly, a huge step would be to transition to electric cars as fast as possible while balancing our grids with demand balancing rather then supply balancing. However, going out on a limb a bit here, we see that the Northern Hemisphere Atmospheric CO2 levels go up 8 and down 6 each year. Clearly, the natural systems have a huge ability to suck up carbon. We would be far better advised to facilitate all these systems including some we could tweak. For instance, we could burn all wood waste for energy only to the charcoal stage and incorporate all the charcoal into our soil. We could reforest, cutting down the trees at the appropriate stage to be built into long lasting buildings, furniture and so forth. We could adopt agricultural methods that increase the organic content in soils (which we have depleated over the years with chemical fertilizers) and we could rewild large areas both in the sea and on land and simply leave them alone. Oh, and we could insist on spreading the beaver throughout our catchments and leaving them to get on with saving our sorry selves from ourselves. We might even sink whaling ships (after removing the crews). Look at Monbiots TED talk to get an idea how much carbon they can remove from the atmosphere. At the very bottom of all this is one common problem. We have to get big vested interest money out of politics all over the world and especially in America. We could have had Bernie but that looks to be over now. We have blown our best chance and it may be too late. Have you seen the Carbon increase from April to April in the Mana Loa web site. 4.16ppm. We may have already passed the point of no return. Our carbon output didn't go up last year and yet we have this jump in atmospheric CO2.
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CSM at 00:55 AM on 16 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
scaddenp, your proposal is the sort of bad environmentalism that makes the economically literate go anti-green. What you propose will cause electric companies to hold on to old inefficient power plants and for people to hold onto old cars.
It is cheap and easy to build a car that cuts CO2 emissions by 70% right now. Look at the Elio Motors commuter vehicle as an example. Your proposal gives zero incentive for such quick and easy solutions. A carbon tax encourages both quick fixes now and research into better long term solutions.
We do not need to eliminate hydrocarbon fueled vehicles. We need to reduce the need for hydrocarbon fuels to the point that biofuels suffice. Economically, this is a HUGE difference. Diminishing returns and all that.
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José M. Sousa at 23:02 PM on 15 June 2016Study: Most fossil fuels unburnable without carbon capture
"Sustainable Gas Institute"? Well it seems they aren´t impartial here; they have a hard stake in the matter.
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dvaytw at 19:12 PM on 15 June 2016Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming
BOOM!!! Direct hit!!! THAT'S what I'm talking about, guys!!! Thanks!!!
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william5331 at 19:10 PM on 15 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
To be really effective, you want the tax to be returned in equal portion to every citizen. Since that may be difficult, send it to every registered tax payer instead but not by cheque. Send it by virtually free electronic transfer to the same account that you would send a tax rebate. Do not use it to reduce income tax. It is far more impressive to actually get a positive entry in your bank account.
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scaddenp at 12:58 PM on 15 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
Those are very good arguments Greg. Border adjustment is a bit of an administrative nightmare (and cost) but I agree that if USA did it, then it would force rest of world along that route as well.
If you want simple, administrative cost-free however, then two regulations would do it;
1/ No new CO2-emitting power plant to be built from now on.
2/ No new CO2-emitting vehicles to be allowed from 2030.
While free of an bureaucratic costs, they do not address the issue of imported emissions (and international competitiveness) so I still think you need the border adjustment.
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One Planet Only Forever at 12:11 PM on 15 June 2016Study: Most fossil fuels unburnable without carbon capture
BHHY, A minor clarification of your view. The ones wanting personal reward from throwing gas on the house on fire are not going to bring their fire extinguisher. They expect someone else to develop the fix for the problem they want to enjoy making bigger.
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greg4green at 11:41 AM on 15 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
One of the best arguments I've ever heard for a carbon tax (and so many of its benefits*) is from Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil. He even calls it a "refundable GHG emissions fee."
* Benefits he covers:
► revenue-neutral; does not grow deficit
► transparency and predictablility are good for business (uncertainty is bad for business)
► simpler and more transparent (and thus more 'honest') than cap & trade
► refund protects low-income Americans
► border adjustment protects American industry (This also helps proliferate similar plans, which is CRUCIAL. Just remember, "America is not a Planet." Thx, little Marco!)
► small-government / reduces need for regulations
► zeroing-out subsidies will eliminate picking winners and losers (consistent w/conservative economic principles)
► much more efficient than complicated gov't regulation
► less expensive because it's more direct, eliminates transactional costs
I might be missing something but I think he pretty much covers the bases.Let me just put it another way. Anybody who supports the status-quo of big, top-down gov't regulations, subsidies (gov't picking winners & losers), and the complex game of tax incentives — Band-Aids to make up for a broken market, simply DOES NOT get to call himself/herself a PRINCIPLED CONSERVATIVE. What they are is a fair-weather socialist, perfectly fine with privatizing profits but socializing costs when it works in their favor. They're an unprincipled, dishonest, opportunist — a thief who is stealing from the future, selling in the present, and calling it GDP.
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BBHY at 11:33 AM on 15 June 2016Study: Most fossil fuels unburnable without carbon capture
The same folks who tell us renewables are too expensive keep pushing CCS. I would be very surprised if the cost of CCS isn't 10 to 20 times more expensive than simply using renewable energy instead.
The way I view this:: The house is on fire (global warming). The guys who keep pouring ever more gasoline on the fire, (the fossil fuel industries) are telling us to not worry because they have a small, handheld fire extinguisher, (CCS), and if we just allow them to keep pouring more gasoline on our burning house for a few more years, (or decades), they will eventually use their small, ineffective fire extinguisher to put out the fire (promise!).
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John Hartz at 04:19 AM on 15 June 2016Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming
dvaytw @85:
You may also want to recommend that your debating partner check out the recently released report, Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change, National Acadamies Press.
The report was authored by the Committee on Extreme Weather Events and Climate Change Attribution; Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate; Division on Earth and Life Studies; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Description
As climate has warmed over recent years, a new pattern of more frequent and more intense weather events has unfolded across the globe. Climate models simulate such changes in extreme events, and some of the reasons for the changes are well understood. Warming increases the likelihood of extremely hot days and nights, favors increased atmospheric moisture that may result in more frequent heavy rainfall and snowfall, and leads to evaporation that can exacerbate droughts.
Even with evidence of these broad trends, scientists cautioned in the past that individual weather events couldn't be attributed to climate change. Now, with advances in understanding the climate science behind extreme events and the science of extreme event attribution, such blanket statements may not be accurate. The relatively young science of extreme event attribution seeks to tease out the influence of human-cause climate change from other factors, such as natural sources of variability like El Niño, as contributors to individual extreme events.
Event attribution can answer questions about how much climate change influenced the probability or intensity of a specific type of weather event. As event attribution capabilities improve, they could help inform choices about assessing and managing risk, and in guiding climate adaptation strategies. This report examines the current state of science of extreme weather attribution, and identifies ways to move the science forward to improve attribution capabilities.
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CSM at 01:29 AM on 15 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
I've been trying to make the case for a carbon tax to conservatives and libertarians for a dozen years now. See here. It's an uphill battle. Groupthink has set in. Methinks it would take a new green-conservative party to open minds.
Given how the Republican Party is experiencing a hostile takeover from what was the Reform Party (and earlier, the American Party), a conservative realignment may well happen.
Some kind of greening of the political right needs to happen before the Too Old to Care Generation dies off. Single party government is not good.
By the way, the commentary about Exxon's endorsement of a carbon tax is the same type of argument I hear on the Right about government scientists and global warming: scientists get paid to stir up panic, so they do. Ignore evidence. It's all about class consciousness and incentives.
Be careful.
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Tom Curtis at 01:11 AM on 15 June 2016Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming
davytw @85, for precipitation, extreme events are typically defined in terms of the return interval for a certain amount of precipitation over a given time period. Consider the following examples of return intervals from four meteorological stations in South West Western Australia:
The charts show the one day rainfalls for various return intervals for data from 1930-1965 (black) and 1966-2001 (red). A return interval of 0.1 means, approximately, that you would average 10 such events a year. A return interval of 50 means that, on average you would experience only 1 such event every 50 years. You may not think of an event with a return interval of 0.1 years as an extreme event, but it means that the chance of experiencing such a rainfall event on any given day is 2.74%, ie, well within a 5% threshold, and almost within a 2.5% threshold. Of course, such events are not likely to cause anything more than local flooding if that - but they have the great virtue of being sufficiently frequent as to lend themselves to statistical analysis of changes in the return interval.
You can see that above. For return interval below 0.5-1 (depending on the station), there are statistically significant changes in the return interval for a given quantity of rainfall. Above that, even though the rainfall events become more extreme, because they become rarer the change ceases to be statistically significant, at least for individual values.
These charts show a decline in return interval, ie, a lower frequency of extreme rainfall events and hence likely a lower frequency of local or more extreme flooding. As this is for South West Western Australia, climate models predict such a reduction as a result of global warming (with a consequent increased frequency of drought); although the paper from which this analysis comes attributes it to other causes.
A similar calculation could be done for Sydney, and would be done by the same methods. Problems do arise. The return interval for very high rainfall events (>100 years) are predicted from best fit curves such as shown on those graphs. They are, however, unreliable.
The Brisbane region, for example, has experienced at least 4 extreme rainfall events with a purported return interval >500 years in the last 150 years, most recently in the 2011 flood. Two of those events were in the 1890s, and it is possible that two such events occurred within weeks of each other in the 1890s. Clearly the best fit curve is not a reliable predictor at the top of the range. The 2011 flood was unique among these events on a number of grounds, including that it occurred at the time of the greatest flooding of Queensland by arial extent on record, it occurred in the run down from an El Nino (with the second greatest flooding of Queensland by extent occurring earlier the previous year in El Nino conditions). All, or nearly all other major floods in Brisbane have been associated with La Ninas. Further, it occurred without the involvement of any cyclone, unlike the others among the 4 or 5 rainfall events with >500 year notional return intervals, which all occurred when a cyclone, or the remnants of a cyclone tracked along the South East Queensland coast (either just off shore as in 1974) or in the Brisbane valley as in other occasions. Naturally, these unique features suggest global warming was a significant factor in the size of the flood; but because of the low return intervals (notional or actual), that cannot be shown statistically. That is why studies of extremes in precipitation concentrate on the much lower impact, higher return rate events.
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dana1981 at 00:38 AM on 15 June 2016The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax
This was just a blanket anti-carbon tax Resolution. I think many have long suspected that Exxon's carbon tax support is just lip service while they work against the policy behind the scenes.
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Tom Curtis at 00:35 AM on 15 June 2016Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming
John Hartz @86, I find the IPCC glossaries sufficiently exact and easy to access. In the case of "extreme weather event", so also did meteoterm:
"extreme weather event
SOURCE:
IPCC 4th Assessment Report, WG 1 Glossary
RELIABILITY:
Verified
DEFINITION:
An extreme weather event is an event that is rare at a particular place and time of year. Definitions of rare vary, but an extreme weather event would normally be as rare as or rarer than the 10th or 90th percentile of the observed probability density function. By definition, the characteristics of what is called extreme weather may vary from place to place in an absolute sense. Single extreme events cannot be simply and directly attributed to anthropogenic climate change, as there is always a finite chance the event in question might have occurred naturally. When a pattern of extreme weather persists for some time, such as a season, it may be classed as an extreme climate event, especially if it yields an average or total that is itself extreme (e.g., drought or heavy rainfall over a season).
DEFINITION SOURCE:
IPCC 4th Assessment Report, WG 1 Glossary" -
John Hartz at 00:30 AM on 15 June 2016Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming
dvaytw @85:
In my opinion, the World Meterological Organization (WMO) sets the "gold standard" with respect to meterological terms. You can access the definition of "extreme weather" and other terms by going to the WMO's Metroterm* webpage.
*METEOTERM is WMO terminology database. It contains specialized terminology in six languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. It includes the International Meteorological Vocabulary, the International Glossary of Hydrology and terms from related sciences that appear in WMO documents.
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dvaytw at 22:57 PM on 14 June 2016Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming
Thanks, Tom. I appreciate the immense patience you folks have with my endless queeries. Your answer is very informative, but can you help me with a specific point? The guy has this inane idea that extremes are defined nowhere in the literature. He asks,
"So, what is the threshold variable for extreme rain events in Sydney? How would that be calculated?"
Can you answer this, or at least point me to a definition of "extreme rain" in an individual study? It sounds ridiculous, but he seems to think this is all just smoke and mirrors. I want to point him to something very concrete and graspable. -
denisaf at 20:37 PM on 14 June 2016Climate scientists have warned us of coral bleaching for years. It's here
Many Australians are now resisting the establishment of a coal mine in Queensland that will export coal to India as this acivity will add to the problems harming the Great Barrier Reef.
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