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Tom Curtis at 15:29 PM on 13 December 2015Wind energy is a key climate change solution
denisaf @6:
1) The "weak energy source" you mention actually has a total energy resource equal to 100 times current total human energy use.
2) Intermittency can be tackled in several ways, including by tapered use, chemical storage, geographically dispersed turbines, and elevating the wind turbines (see video below). It follows that it is only an engineering problem, not a limit.
3) Electricity is unsuitable as a power source for large mobile units such as trucks and planes. It has already been demonstrated as usefull for personal transport, and for rail networks. It is certainly suitable for any stationay energy need. As such, wind power (which produces electricity) is potentially suitable for the majority of our energy needs (75% plus). That hardly represents a niche market.
I doubt, of course, that wind will provide all our energy needs. That will be some combination of wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, wave, hydro and nuclear power. Of those, wind may be the largest single component, and will certainly be in the top three. It is absurd, on that basis, to say wind has a "niche role" as, on the same basis you would need to say that solar, or nuclear, or for that matter, currently, coal has a "niche role".
So, to summarize, your argument dogmatic assertions are either entirely wrong, or simply based on the assumption that the technology of wind energy cannot significantly advance on what is currently commercially deployed, despite several advances approaching commercial deployment:
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saileshrao at 14:59 PM on 13 December 2015How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
Jim Eager@62:
As humans, we are all biased. I am an unabashed advocate of Ahimsa (nonviolence) and prefer that my biases stem from that position.
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saileshrao at 14:54 PM on 13 December 2015How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
OnceJolly @61:
The accumulated biomass of the animals is already accounted for in the block diagram. The net input is 7.27 Gt, the net output is 2.58 Gt leaving the rest as 4.69 Gt metabolized.
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bozzza at 12:53 PM on 13 December 2015Wind energy is a key climate change solution
You've certainly correctly pointed out that wind power can't do everything but to say it can't do anything is illogical and notably relies on unquantified argument.
It comes down to cost in the end: this is where the waters get very deep.
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Tom Dayton at 12:27 PM on 13 December 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50
Owen: Tamino just posted about that discrepancy, which has been increasing since about 2000. Dana N. has heard a rumor that a paper about satellite temperature measurement problems. Others have elaborated that rumor into Po-Chedley & Co. at U. Washington preparing a treatment of satellite measurement of TLT similar to what they did for TMT. Satellite measure of troposphere historically has lagged ENSO by three months or more. If this time instead troposphere fails to show large El Niño response, that will be further evidence of satellites gone awry around 2000.
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denisaf at 12:21 PM on 13 December 2015Wind energy is a key climate change solution
Wind power can only fill a niche role because it ineffectively use a weak energy source, winds, to supply only electrical energy. That is, it is an ecologically costly intermittent process with limited application. It cannot replace the concentrated energy in the liquid fuels needed for land, sea and air transport.
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Owen at 11:47 AM on 13 December 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50
Further on satellite data: the satellite data has in prior years responded to a greater positive extent to El Nino (and negatively to La Niña) than surface temps - doesn't seem to be the case with the current El Niño.
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Owen at 11:44 AM on 13 December 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50
Has anyone published (or posted here perhaps) on the difference between radiosonde (RATPAC) and satellite (UAH, RSS) data? The satellite measurements seem to have problems.
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mikeh1 at 09:50 AM on 13 December 2015Wind energy is a key climate change solution
@jpjmarti at 1.
Your own link appears to contradict your claims. p 46
"Wind turbine prices have dropped substantially in recent years, despite continued technological advancements that have yielded increases in hub heights and especially rotor diameters."
" project-level installed costs appear to have peaked in 2009/2010, with substantial declines since that time"
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vindor at 06:08 AM on 13 December 2015Climate's changed before
i didnt find any appropriate section where to post this, so i try my luck here.
i recently attended an speach on agronomy and soil death where the INRA ingenieur bourguignon claude mentioned the cooling effect of forest and the influence of roman deforestation on mediteranean climate. Intrigued i tried to find any studies on global warming impact of deforestation but almost everything is focusing on CO2. I managed to find something here : http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150325/ncomms7603/full/ncomms7603.html
but nothing on this website. So i guess my comment is how come there is almost no study on the possible role of the massive deforestation and the warming of the 20th century.
Moderator Response:[JH] If you enter the word "deforestation" into this site's search box and click "Go", you will find a plethora of articles that address deforestation in some manner.
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One Planet Only Forever at 09:02 AM on 12 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
Joel_Huberman @3
My intent was to address more than the redistribution of wealth within a nation.
As rustneversleeps mentioned the actions identified by the article (and actually required to advance humanity to a lasting better future) are more than redistributing wealth within a nation.
Wealthy nations with a perception of wealth due to their history of benefiting from fossil fuel burning owe compensation to other nations for CO2 impacts and assistance to developing nations so they can bypass the damaging step of fossil fuel burning as they advance (and the wealthy nations that should be financially compensating and assisting other nations includes nations like Saudi Arabia who continue to try to maintain a perception that they are a developing nation needing CO2 impact compensation and assistance).
The collection of the taxes to pay for the compensation of other nations is what I was addressing. And my main objective was to make sure that investors in pursuits of profit benefiting form the burning of fossil fuels wold not be able to avoid payment of taxes by having only end consumers pay (soem will say every cost will just be passed on to consumers, but that is not how markets work. In a market the attempts to pass on costs may price fossil fuel burning related businesses out of business compared to alternatives). So the measures you mentioned are appropriate proposals but a significant part if the funds collected through those measures would need to be dedicated to assistance of those in other nations most in need of assistance.
I understand that change of purpose of the measures may mean that those essential to develop measures have less than a snowball's chance in hell of ever appealing to many people in the US. I hope that the population of the US can collectively overcome the challenge of limiting the success of unacceptable pursuers of wealth and power. The future of humanity relies on that (in every nation), the sooner the better.
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william5331 at 07:03 AM on 12 December 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #47
Just recently the Prime Minister of New Zealand stated that he wouldn't consider a greater commitment to limiting carbon emissions until new technology made this possible. In our case, our major emissions are methane from animal burps. This is such a cop out and outside his pay grade. The job of legislators is to legislate and there is so much that they could do right now. They only have to go for the low hanging fruit. No need for subsidies. For instance:
Tip the playing field legislatively to be favourable to electric cars, solar panels small and large wind and hydro
Insititute Jim Hansen's Tax and Dividend but here I would make a tiny change. Give the money by electronic transfer to every registered tax payer. The data base already exists which would make the proceedure much less expensive to institute. You don't have to be paying tax, just be registered.
No need to go on. You will have lots of such ideas which could be done by politicians right now. However PPCT (who pays the piper calls the tune). If we don't get vested interests out of paying for elections, none of this will ever happen.
http://mtkass.blogspot.co.nz/2015/01/ppct.html
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bozzza at 05:06 AM on 12 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
@ 10, it is a conundrum for sure: this is the problem of Government intervention into the market place, aka 'picking winners'.
Fossil fuels were picked and economies were built around them meaning the extraction of that intervention is increasingly difficult to make as lives and jobs and personal wealth depend on them- you can't just end it and risk anarchy from the resulting billions of unemployed. The market forces that now exist all sit on the fossil fuel base hence blood for oil wars etc...
Global action sounds great but Australia still thinks it is too good for the world unfortunately. Yay, we can buy houses and call tradesmen to do stuff.
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bozzza at 04:50 AM on 12 December 2015Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money
@1, are you saying tools don't need adjusting?
Why aren't we all still driving model t's around??
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Tom Dayton at 03:38 AM on 12 December 2015Satellites show no warming in the troposphere
Even Roy Spencer now admits that satellite "measurements" of tropospheric temperature cannot and must not be used as proxies for surface temperature measurements, due to major unresolved issues in the assumptions used in the complex conversions of the microwave measurements into estimates of temperatures. (Spencer is one of the two main people responsible for the "UAH" satellite-based troposphere temperature estimations.)
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wili at 03:09 AM on 12 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
TomC wrote: "they would rather destroy the world than be fair"
Nicely put, and sadly, all too true.
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wili at 03:05 AM on 12 December 2015Wind energy is a key climate change solution
Congratulations to Professor John Abraham for being nominated for teacher of the year at St. Thomas U.
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RedBaron at 02:08 AM on 12 December 2015How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
@scaddenp
You said, " I am intrigued. How does undergrazing lead to desert?"
You are right, it is a water thing, but once again you need to take that reductionism and put it back together as part of a whole. It is water, but water in the soil. Water infiltration rates and holding capacity of the soil is dependant on SOM and cover. The brush and scrub that succeeds after undergrazing in dry brittle environments leads to bare soil and losses of SOM, which starts a downward spiral of increased runoff and erosion, more rapid evaporation, ultimately to desertification just like overgrazing does.
The important part to this thread being SOM is carbon and we have far too much in the atmosphere and worldwide far too little in the soil.
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knaugle at 01:18 AM on 12 December 2015Wind energy is a key climate change solution
The problem with wind is that it is not a fixed entity. In California, I've seen plots of wind output, and it is very dirunal, particularly in the Summer:
https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/the-daily-cycle-of-wind-power-in-california/
This means that other base load plants where need to reduce power in the evening and ramp up during the day. I know that nuclear plants in this country were not designed with this king of daily cycle in mind. At a minimum California also needs large amounts of other renewables to even out the wind cycle. Solar might fit the bill because its output will be stronger in the middle of the day when the wind tapers off, but not every geographic location is the same in this respect.
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CBDunkerson at 23:04 PM on 11 December 2015Wind energy is a key climate change solution
From the linked report: "Wind PPA prices have reached all-time lows. After topping out at nearly $70/MWh for PPAs executed in 2009, the national average levelized price of wind PPAs that were signed in 2014 (and that are within the Berkeley Lab sample) fell to around $23.5/MWh nationwide—a new low..."
The brief increase in wind power costs from ~2001 to 2009 does not change the overall sharply downward trend of the past 40 years... or the fact that current costs are the lowest ever... and still dropping. Wind costs less today than it did 15 years ago. The technology is still improving. Your cited 'evidence' contradicts your position.
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Tom Curtis at 18:52 PM on 11 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
TonyW, see table 3 ("Current per capita CO2e emissions - consumption based"). As the current agreements being negotiated are based on inertia (again see above), the per capita emissions, whether consumption or production based, are not factored into the agreements. Further, the moving baseline (2005 rather than 1990) penalizes those nations that reduced emissions early (primarilly Europe). In essence, the western nations - and in particular the US and Australia - are only paying lip service to equity in the agreements in any event. Their position seems to be that they would rather destroy the world than be fair. Such niceties as the distinction between per capita consumption based and per capita production based emissions is so far from their concerns as to be practically irrelevant. At least for this round of negotiations.
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TonyW at 18:31 PM on 11 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
In a way, the notion of individual nations contributions should be related to all emissions caused by their individual economies, not just emissions coming from within their borders. China's growth, for example, is partly due to that country producing a vast array of products destined for other countries (it's difficult to buy anything, here in NZ, that wasn't made or packed in China). This would further complicate actions but demontrates, I think, that this is a global problem and requires a global strategy rather than a collection of individual nation strategies.
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denisaf at 15:20 PM on 11 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
This is an interesting anthropocentric discussion. The reality is that people only make decisions, good and bad, and it is the operation of the infrastructure that uses the fossil fuels. Changing the infrastructure to reduce the rate of usage of fossil fuels will be a slow, eco costly process in those circumstances where that is possible. There are no reasonable alternative liquid fuels for land, sea and air transportation needs. ironically, society is very dependent on the goods and services this infrastructure currently provides. Of course, they are also dependent on the impact of the climate on many of their actvities, including eating food and using water!
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Joel_Huberman at 13:33 PM on 11 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
rustneversleeps @4
I apologize. I unintentionally misled you. The goal of carbon fee & dividend is not to redistribute income but to increase the price of fossil fuels and their products, making alternate energy sources more attractive. The redistribution of income would be a consequence of the dividend component. The dividend component is provided for purposes of internal equity (so low users of fossil fuels would not be penalized) and for purposes of making the deal attractive to conservatives (no increase in the size of government; all income returned to the people).
If carbon fee & dividend were implemented in the USA, the increasing the price of fossil fuels and their products would have the effect of reducing their use, compared to fossil-fuel-independent energy sources and products. If Americans behave like the rational purchasers that economists tend to think they are, then they'll purchase less fossil-fuel-dependent stuff and more fossil-fuel-independent stuff. Thus Americans will move from generating much more CO2 than average to closer-to-average, and eventually to zero generation of CO2 (when the carbon fee becomes sufficiently high and alternative energy infrastructure is readily available).
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scaddenp at 11:50 AM on 11 December 2015How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
Um, 14% of beef is feedlot, not 95%.
"There are also large tracts undergrazed and slowly turning to desert because of this". I am intrigued. How does undergrazing lead to desert? I would have thought desert was a water thing. Fence anything off from grazing here and it rapidly turns into woodland, even in dry areas.
I agree about the false dichotomy. There is more than one way to fix most problems. You get the same thing from hard-line socialists. "AGW cant be solved without ending capitalism". Yeah, right. Or, the "we must go back horse and cart pre-industrial world". Vegans are a varied lot in my experience. Their evangelization efforts (those that do) often sound to me more like justifying to themselves their choices. Like many things we do, (including climate-change denial) the choice is often value-based with post-hoc rationalization. Making choices based on data is not a natural human activity even for scientists.
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Tom Curtis at 10:44 AM on 11 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
scaddenp @6, I suggest the most important part of the article to which you link is the final paragraph:
"Raghavan and Ma suggest that attempts to create more energy-efficient internet devices, while worth pursuing, will not do much to lower global energy consumption. Instead, they propose that we should think about how the internet can replace more energy-intensive activities. Their calculations show that a meeting that takes place by video-conference uses an average of one hundredth as much energy as one in which participants took a flight so that they could sit down together. Replacing just one in four of those meetings by a video call, they add, would save as much power as the entire internet consumes."
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RedBaron at 10:27 AM on 11 December 2015How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
@scaddenp #130,
You said,"I would also say that there is a big difference between what can be done and is being done."
Agreed 95% of beef in the US is feedlot and 50% of the grasslands are overgrazed. Very little of the rest is actually MIRG, although there is a big push by the USDA to change that, even a demonstration here in central OK last week. Very convincing I might add. There are also large tracts undergrazed and slowly turning to desert because of this. USA is a big country. even with all that, there are plenty of inovative farmers developing models for the next revolution in agriculture, leaps and bounds ahead of the rest.
The only reason I even started that line of discussion in the thread was to point out the false dichotomy logic flaw. You have an industry contributing to AGW. The false dichotomy being that the only choice to change that is end agriculture/animal husbandry or accept the climate impact. There is a third option of improving the production model. I actually know dozens of ways farmers have made improvements crop farmers, ranchers and integrated combination farms. I am developing one myself as of yet unproven. But all that specifics is off topic and only serves to aide AGW denialists by diverting the attention away from the real problems we have existing right now.
You do understand why AGW denialists are using that false dichotomy right? Since we have to eat, the false dichotomy becomes only 1 choice, ignore the whole thing. And the reason the Vegans like the false dichotomy is they change it to "convert the whole world to veganism or ignore AGW" and hope to gain recruits.
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scaddenp at 09:51 AM on 11 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
2% . Try here.
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Wol at 09:35 AM on 11 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
What is the estimate of the energy usage worldwide of all the servers, databases etc that the internet uses, as a ratio of total energy use?
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scaddenp at 08:07 AM on 11 December 2015How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
I would also say that there is a big difference between what can be done and is being done. Across whole of US, grazing is not net Co2e sink at the moment and nor can you blame feedlots only. It appears with appropriate management, you can make grazing a net sink. However, it would also seem possible that can make grain production a net sink as well. Other considerations come into this.
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MA Rodger at 07:07 AM on 11 December 2015Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money
Mark R @18.
UAH TLT v6.0 is flat 1998-to-date but has a positive trend 1999-to-date.
Regarding the difference between v6.0 & v5.6, you can also include the difference between them & RSS and with surface measurements like HadCRUT4.
Although there has been a lot of talk of UAHv5.6 showing less warming that the surface measurements, if you ignore the first 5 years of UAHv5.6, the trend is indistinguishable - UAH 0.175ºC/decade against HadCRUT 0.178ºC/decade.
The difference in trend between UAH TLT v6.0 and v5.6 is large with RSS sitting in between. (See rolling-average graph two clicks down here) The profile of v6.0-RSS shows many of the same features as v5.6-v6.0 but with v5.6 the difference in trend greater plus and there is a big bulge centred on 1998. Given the ziggy-wobbles in HadCRUT-v6.0 appear concurrent with El Chichon & Pinatuba, plus the big bulge sort of makes sense with a similar timing, I do wonder if the effect resulting from that extra 1,000m of altitude between average v6.0 and average v5.6 could have a lot to do with aerosol/cloud.
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scaddenp at 06:45 AM on 11 December 2015How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
Redbaron. Thanks very much for that Conant et al reference. That is what I was looking for. That is truly impressive and also directly counter to NZ experience which means someone needs to figure out why. I have passed it to friends for comment.
In NZ, dairy farmers pour masses of industrial nitrogen onto grassland. I would gratified to hear that MIRG in US doesnt? I would also love to know what the stocking rate is. Do you know?
If I understand correctly, you believe the very best measured methane oxidation rates in grassland are also degraded and could be improved? Despite being same for unmanaged native grassland? Do have data to support the idea that MIRG increases methane oxidation rates?
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jpjmarti at 05:48 AM on 11 December 2015Wind energy is a key climate change solution
Publishing such uncritical marketing for a company does disservice to Skeptical Science. How about reading for example the Wind technologies Market report to check those "signifigant and sustained" cost reductions?Today wind costs about the same as 15 years ago. It is mature technology. https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-188167.pdf
Moderator Response:[PS] Fixed link.
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rustneversleeps at 05:26 AM on 11 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
Joel_Huberman @3
A carbon fee and per capita dividend is probably equitable within a national jurisdiction. I am dubious that it addresses the issues raised in this article.
For instance, as you point out, if that scheme were implemented in the U.S., it is forecast that 2/3 of the population would receive more back in the dividend than they would face in increased costs as the tax is passed through the economy. But, as Table 10 in Chancel and Piketty shows, 90% of that same population is currently producing more than the world average of CO2-eq emissions. So, domestically, you are effectively redistributing income from super-extremely-high-emitters to just-extremely-high-emitters viewed from a global perspective.
Not saying it isn't the way to go, but we need to honest about it if we are going to pretend it is addressing the equity question.
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RedBaron at 04:47 AM on 11 December 2015How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
@ wideEyedPupil #125
OGF was long thought to be carbon neutral, recent studies showing that rather it can sequester roughly 2 tonnes C / hectare / yr [1] possibly the reason for the discrepency being the higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Giving you the benefit of the doubt.
An improved grassland management system sequesters 0.11 to 3.04 tonnes C / hectare / yr and feeds a whole lot more human beings. [2] and that's on much dryer land, which is why it is grassland in the first place.
Obviously it is counter productive to cut down OGF to raise grains to supply feedlots. However, from the start everyone here on this thread has agreed. There is no debate. The debate is the myth 'animal agriculture and eating meat are the biggest causes of global warming.' and associated rebuttal.
The rebuttal is correct, it is a myth. and also in so much as animal husbandry does contribute slightly to AGW, it is only due to the models of production, not the cow itself, as explained on multiple posts above with multiple references. Most particularly:
Environmental impacts on the diversity of methane-cycling microbes and their resultant function
A feedlot uses grains. Those grains produced with haber process nitrogen. So look at what the study says about that. "In a temperate agricultural soil, long-term fertilization with ammonium nitrate reduced methanotroph abundance by >70%"
Now compare with a cow raised on a properly managed pasture fertilised by the cow's own waste. "In contrast, organic fertilizer addition can increase methanotroph abundance and associated rates of methane oxidation"
So you see? It has nothing to do with the cow, it is a flaw in the factory farming production model that needs fixed. You fix that by scrapping the flawed CAFO production model and replacing it with a different type of pasture based intensive system that doesn't have those same flaws. No cutting of OGF required. In fact that would be counter productive. Instead you would want to convert cropland to pasture and regenerate soil health.
This also shows that the vegan idea of eliminating animal husbandry is flawed as well. Because without animal waste you are stuck with haber process nitrogen fertiliser. And what does that do? Reduce methanotroph populations by over 70%. No solution there either.
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MarkR at 01:47 AM on 11 December 2015Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money
ryland @8,
I'd be surprised if UAH v6.0 shows a statistically significant decrease in trend although its best estimate is indeed lower. However, in order to get these "slowdown" trends you have to allow for magical "jumps" in termperature just before the proposed slowdown. This is a result of the long-term global warming trend and the Escalator shows the principle behind it. Tamino has also posted about this, showing that claims of a slowdown require magical non-physical temperature jumps just before your desired slowdown.
So even if you pick some of the data to make the trend look smaller, your period is going to be warmer than the previous one because you've still stepped up in temperatures.
Of course, this is not obvious in most presentations that claim a slowdown because the presenters typically choose to hide the earlier data.
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Joel_Huberman at 01:38 AM on 11 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
OPOF @2,
If I understand your comment correctly, then I think a simpler scheme, which might have slightly more than a snowball's chance in hell of getting passed by the legislature in my country (USA), would be double taxation as I shall describe.
First--a carbon fee & dividend scheme similar to the one proposed by Citizens' Climate Lobby, but with higher initial rate and higher annual increments (due to the need for very rapid decarbonization). All the income collected from the fees on fossil fuel production would be returned in equal per capita amounts to all legal residents to compensate for rising energy costs. Calculations show that about 2/3 of residents would receive more from the dividend than they would pay in higher energy costs. The generally increased cost of fossil fuels and of all products and services derived from them would provide a market-based incentive to switch to alternative energy sources.
Second--an airflight tax similar to the one proposed by Chancel and Pikkety (see original post), but higher due to the need for larger amounts than previously calculated to pay for the giant economic transformation needed by the poor countries of the world. As an occasional flyer myself, it seems to me that an increment averaging $100 per flight would not be overly burdensome.
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Kevin C at 01:20 AM on 11 December 2015Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money
I think it may be highly relevent. So a second line of attack would be to try removing the ENSO signal from the temperatures at the different pressure levels.
There are lots of pointers to there being interesting science to be done here. Unfortunately I can't take it on this time!
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Rob Honeycutt at 00:58 AM on 11 December 2015Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money
I don't know if this is relavent, Kevin, but isn't that 500-700mb altitude right around the base of where we should be detecting the tropospheric hotspot?
Would it make sense that that region of the atmosphere would be heavily influenced by the ENSO cycle, so that over a period dominated by la Nina we might actually expect to see less of a trend over the time frames being discussed?
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Kevin C at 00:31 AM on 11 December 2015Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money
Yes, the weighted averages are less different than the peaks.
What difference does it make? We can take a look at a reanalysis - in this case ERA-interim. Ideally we'd look at the weighted mean of the pressure levels, but for now I've just looked at the 700mb (3km) and 500mb (5.5km) levels. For the period 1998-2014 I get a trend of 0.08C/decade for the 700mb level and 0.04C/decade for the 500mb level (quick calculation without checks).
However the difference in trend between the two levels is reversed for the period before 1998. That's consistent with the behavour of the difference between UAH v6.0 and v5.6. I haven't looked at the magnitude of the difference, but it could be that most of the difference between v5.6 and v6.0 is explained by the difference in the height sampling profile.
That's an interesting project for someone to take on. -
MA Rodger at 23:37 PM on 10 December 2015Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money
From the graphs presented by Spencer in his write-up, the UAHv0.6beta sensitivity averages to an altitude of 4,500m while the UAHv5.6 averages to 3,400m. Using their version of such graphs, RSS averages to 4,200m.
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Eclectic at 21:49 PM on 10 December 2015There is no consensus
to Pfc.Parts @722 : you make a fair point, with your comment "It would be very nice if this site allowed comments to be edited."
On balance though, that would not be a good idea ~ and I am sure you can picture the chaos and non-sequiturs which would occur as posters go back and modify their posts, even with innocent intent (let alone the malicious intent). Nope: to be fair to all, a non-self-modified posting system is definitely far better.
Mind you, it could be reasonable to allow a poster to later insert a very obvious "corrigendum" paragraph at the end, to deal with clumsy bloopers / typos / or poorly-expressed phrasing . . . and this would help the flow of understanding in the commentary [rather than having such corrections appear later and quite possibly be half-buried by other intervening posts]. Such corrigendum would require clear demarcation and date/time label.
But . . . there would probably need to be a 24 or 48-hour cut-off for such "grafted-on" corrections. And even there, I am sure you can picture how some posters would try to play games and thoroughly abuse such a system. So, overall, it's simpler to keep this as they are : and it also makes for a simpler and less vulnerable control of the comments column.
[apologies for this off-topic excursion]
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ryland at 19:44 PM on 10 December 2015Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money
@2, 4, 9, 12 Thanks Kevin C and scaddenp for the time taken and the civil and informative responses to a couple of my questions. Such responses here are both rare and a pleasant surprise.
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denisaf at 19:27 PM on 10 December 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #49
Mechanisms to capture industrial emissions have to be made of irreplaceable materials and have limited lifetimes. They may reduce the rate of emissions slightly for a while. As there is an existing commitment for infrastructure to use fossil fuels at a high rate, the concentration level in the atmosphere and ocean will continue to rise even if remedial policies are implemented.
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Kevin C at 17:43 PM on 10 December 2015Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money
Spencer's write-up on UAH6.0beta notes that the peak sensitivity of 6.0 is at about 4km altitude, compared to about 2km for 5.6.
I've done a little analysis of v6.0 from the perspective of using it to infill surface temperatures. My (so far unpublished) results show that, as you would probably expect, UAH6.0beta shows both lower spatial correlation and slightly less temporal correlation with surface temperature than v5.6. That's not to say v6.0 is wrong - it may be a better measure of temperature in the mid troposphere. However it is, both in theory and practice, less useful than v5.6 as a proxy for surface temperature.
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RedBaron at 16:48 PM on 10 December 2015How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
addition and clarification to the above post
I am comparing a ~70%+ reduction of methanotrophs (other soil biota too) with a 20% atmospheric increase in animal husbandry CO2e over the same time period. With agriculture now ~40% of the terrestrial surface, it is no wonder that methane oxidation is relatively insignificant to ruminant emissions now. Not to mention all the other sources of methane. It is no wonder the rest of the terrestrial biosphere is incapable of keeping up and methane is rising.
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RedBaron at 16:27 PM on 10 December 2015How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
@"As to methanotrophs, I have already given you references to fact that methane oxidation is relatively insignificant to ruminant emissions, but by all means include it." and several related points and posts
What you are missing is when that observation was measured, before or after ~70%+ of the methanotrophs were exterpated from agricultural soils. I actually agree 100% that biotic methane oxidation is relatively insignificant to ruminant emissions NOW. That's the whole point. It is disgraceful. I am stunned you proposal would actually fight against restoring that lost ecosystem function, by blaming the tool that can best restore biotic communities in the soil when managed properly, the ruminant herbivore.
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One Planet Only Forever at 16:02 PM on 10 December 2015The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
I think there is a further step required to 'equitably' identify who should face what level of the total consequences of the now more challenging rapid reduction of burning of fossil fuels.
Every wealthy powerful person today has very little ability to claim that they were unaware that it was unacceptable to try to get personal benefit from burning fossil fuels. In fact, for many decades every wealthy powerful person has only been able to try to hide or excuse or attempt to gather popular support for their understood to be unacceptable pursuits of benefit from the activity (and many other unacceptable activities).
General taxation of entire national populations to gather 'corrective compensation' is not appropriate. Taxation focused on activities directly trying to benefit from the burning of fossil fuels should be the sole source of such tax revenue. That would mean a very high Carbon Tax plus Taxation of any business income (not on profit - tax on gross income) from the sale of fossil fuels (with a rebate of the tax if there is proof that the fossil fuels were not burned).
That may appear to be 'double taxation', but it is just an attempt to more equitably share the consequences of the need to penalize the unacceptable pursuers of benefit from the burning of fossil fuels (between consumers and pursuers of profit). It would only 'double tax' an investor in the extraction and trade of fossil fuels who also chooses to personally burn a lot of fossil fuels.
Another important consideration is the global change of 'directing economic activity' that could be developed to maximize the useable energy obtained from burning fossil fuels within the global cap on emissions. The old ways of 'competition to get away with benefiting the most that can be gotten away with' have inappropiately developed and prolonged economies (particularly through the past 25 years) and will clearly not be effective ways to address this challenge.
A new way of globally working together could actually significantly increase the total energy obtained from fossil fuel burning by most rapidly shutting down the highest impacting activities per unit of final user obtained energy (including all impacts, not just the production of excess CO2). But that is not likely to happen because of the inertia of the inappropriately developed wealth on the planet.
Many developed perceptions of prosperity and wealth are not fully deserved. Properly correcting those unsustainable perceptions (getting global acceptance of the need to correct those perceptions) will be a huge challenge, but overcoming it is essential to the future of humanity.
People who think they are winners do not like becoming losers (even if they know they cheated and even if after their loss they will still actually be living better lives than most other people will ever be able to live).
Science leading to better understanding continues to be the key mover of humanity towards a lasting better future for all (and the key target of those whose interests are negatively impacted by developing better understanding).
The advancement of humanity has clearly been stalled and even set back whenever the pursuits of personal benefit can trump the better understanding of what is required to develop a lasting better future for all.
Hopefully, this issue will lead to the type of change of global human awareness and understanding that can develop a lasting constantly improving future for all of humanity (Let the games end, and understanding rule).
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ryland at 15:40 PM on 10 December 2015Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money
I don' t comment on any other website so anything you see elsewhere under ryland is not from me. And as for you not seeing "the slightest evidence" it may be that you don't always/refuse to recognise what you are seeing.
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wideEyedPupil at 15:39 PM on 10 December 2015How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
I'm concerned with the presentation of this page and the more recent version.
The Zero Carbon Australia Land Use Report found that a proper and full accounting of GHG emissions pegs Land Use at 55% of emissions using 20 year GWP. As you'd be aware 20 yr GWP is significant, given the perilous state of many climatic system and stocks of ice etc. Even using 100 year GWP which tends to obscure the effects in near term on climate systems of methane and black carbon it will soon be at 50% of national emissions.
The major contributing factors were found to be land clearing (often cyclical), savannah burning (repeated) and centric fermentation. This would make it likely that GHG emissions in North and South America might be in that vicinity given the large amount of Amazonian and other old growth forest clearing going on to grow cattle and soy crops to feed north american cattle.
90% of that 55% of national emissions using 20yr GWP is associated with livestock ruminants, mostly the large extended zone pastural operations in northern Australia, mostly for cattle.
By presenting this argument using standard UNFCCC accounting which majorly obscures, re-assigns and ignores emissions and removal of sequestration sources associate with Land Use Sector you are in fact perpetuating a myth not debunking one.
To my best knowledge the ZCA Land Use Report was peer reviewed and supervised within MSSI (University of Melbourne) and has not be refuted in the literature. Nor has it's conclusion that 55% of Australia's national GHG emissions using 20 yr PWG are from the Land Use Sector. I'd ask the you rename these pages to be less pejorative and more in line with the science and debate if you want to call it that.
Given that much of the old growth forest clearing going on in the world to produce more ruminnent grazing pasture and crops to feed ruminents and animals in general, and that this OGF is the greatest CO2 sequester known to man, and that it's impossible to regain the sequestration levels once OGFs are logged, even after a century, it's doubly important that land use sector emissions be seen as the major problem, perhaps the greatest problem in the short term for GHGs reduction (ignoring the politics of livestock lobby vs ff lobby), then renaming this Page and the old version is required.
Alastair Leith
Climate Activist and Campaigner
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