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Comments 36801 to 36850:
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michael sweet at 00:48 AM on 12 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Dhogaza,
Daniel provided links to a number of studies. One I looked at studied raptor fatalities in the Altamont area, which I have previously heard about as a center of raptor deaths. Daniel claims that a study showed that shooting, poison and cars killed more raptors than windmills. Can you provide data to support your claim that Daniels claim was incorrect? It seems to me that Daniel cares about raptors and has provided data to support his claim that they are not significantly affected.
Wind generator operators are still looking into this issue because they are trying to have a green image.
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IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
dhogaza - Do you have comparative mortality factors specifically for the lesser prairie chicken? Or other bird species of interest?
Given the four orders of magnitude higher bird kills by other factors, arguing that windmills pose an existential threat to specific species is going to take some solid data. It's good that the wind power industry is being prompted to mitigate windmill/bird kills, but the raw cross-species data doesn't inherently support the hypothesis of a significant threat.
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dhogaza at 23:43 PM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Daniel Bailey:
Comparing raw numbers of birds killed is useless. From a conservation perspective, the death of one starling is not equivalent to the death of one lesser prairie chicken. I could just as easily say we shoudn't be worried about gun deaths in the US because cars kill more oppossums in the US than guns kill people.
Concerns about windmills killing bird species of concern is legitimate. Fortunately the wind power industry itself (after governmental prodding) is taking the issue more seriously than people like you.
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chriskoz at 17:44 PM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
LCBozo@22,
Arizona's large Agua Caliente Solar Project generates electricity at a wholesale cost of about 22 cents per kilowatt hour whereas the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station is about 3 cents per kilowatt hour
Can you provide the source of your claim? And what does your figure of 3 cents per kWh at Palo Verde include? Does it include (besides fuel and operation cost) amortisation of construction, spent fuel disposal and decommissioning cost?
A simple check at Wikipedia reveals that your figure is unrealistic up to the point of defying logic. Most of the studies cited there estimate the nuke energy cost at $0.25-0.30 per kWh (i.e. ten times higher) and growing up in recent years. That cost growth may be dues to recent tightening of safety standards and stricter spent fuel management and decommissioning standards (virtually non-existent in nuke haydays). Ben Sovacool, the most known nuke economic expert, estimates here a new 1GWe nuke plant to cost 41.2 to 80.3 cents/kWh produced. That's very high cost. And the economics of such cost would explain why nuke industry is declining in recent decade. And with the costs proliferating and the shrinking suply of high quality U ore, it will continue to decline, regardless of your logic defying enthusiasm.
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One Planet Only Forever at 14:23 PM on 11 April 2014IPCC issue official rebuttal to more David Rose/Daily Mail nonsense
The Mail artcile tried in vain to discredit the connection between climate change and violent conflict. The truth is that "competition" to maximize potential benefits from fossil fuels has created massive amounts of violent and damaging conflicts. And that will only get worse as very undesrevingly wealthy and powerful people fight even more viciously for the most unsustainable opportunity to benefit they can get get away with.
Climate change due to excess CO2 is a clear problem. The success of attempts to get away with and prolong unsustainable and damaging pursuits makes the chances of the development of a sustainable better future for all, the only viable future for humanity, highly unlikely.
The socioeconomic system needs to be changed. And the ones benefiting the most from the current fatally flawed system know it. And they don't want to have to 'adapt' to a different circumstance. They don't want to participate in the development of the gift a better future for all. They only want benefit for themselves.
The resistance to the development of the best understanding of things through activities like climate science is easy to understand.
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Daniel Bailey at 13:55 PM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
In reality, cars kill 2,800 birds for every 1 killed by a wind turbine.
And cars kill more pedestrians than windmills kill birds. Is it time to ban cars yet?
The leading causes of Raptor deaths in the Altamont study:
1. Shooting
2. Poison
3. CarsBut climate deniers aren't interested in facts that disagree with their desired outcome.
Per Erickson 2005:
Table 2–Summary of predicted annual avian mortality.
Buildings_______________ 550 million
Power lines_____________ 130 million
Cats___________________ 100 million
Automobiles_____________ 80 million
Pesticides_______________ 67 million
Communications towers___ 4.5 million
Wind turbines___________ 28.5 thousand
Airplanes________________ 25 thousandCat's out of the proverbial bag. Per Loss et al 2013, feral cats kill most of the 87,000 times as many birds (in the US alone) than do all of the wind turbines in the world do, combined. That's 3.7 BILLION bird deaths per year, by cats alone...in the US. Or about 10 MILLION per day, as compared to about 2 per day per wind turbine.
Seems the bird holocaust is getting out of...paw. Meow.
This study from the EPA of Sweden documents siting strategies successful in alleviating most wind turbine bird mortalities:
To Debunk the Anti-Wind Myth of 14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines in California:
LINKAnd now dogs are being employed to assist in carcass searches:
A good resource:
Furthermore, the ongoing Exeter University Wind Turbine Bat Research Programme examined the Resilient Energy Great Dunkilns in order to understand the effects of wind turbines on bat populations.
The researchers used trained dogs to check for any dead bats. No dead bats were found and this correlates with Exeter's research on similar sized wind turbines where bat mortality rates have also been found to be low to non-existent.
Lastly, the Association of Australian Acoustical Consultants has rejected claims that the frequencies created by wind turbines can have adverse health issues, saying the infrasound generated is often less than a person’s heart-beat.
To sum: About 2 birds and 2 bats per day, per wind turbine.
Versus everything else, which are many orders of magnitude deadlier.
Let's move on to actual, substantive issues.
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Klapper at 12:56 PM on 11 April 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
@Tom Curtis #58:
NINO3.4 from Hadisst1 is a perfectly fine proxy for ENSO. By your comments, it shows the same pattern as SOI, it has full temporal coverage, and no trend over the last 100 years which is all I looked at. Anyway, it was handy and met my criteria so I used it. The more pertinent fact is that it is a direct forcing as I've noted before, unlike SOI which is indirect.
Looking at your graph, I'm thinking that the pattern displayed is heavily influenced by the PDO. The peak ENSO "warm" trend looks to be a 30 year period ending in 1998. The error between CMIP5 and SAT in this period is 0.14 - .16C/decade = -0.02C/decade. However, the error now is much larger. The 30 year trend ending in 2014 is 0.17C/decade for SAT and 0.25C/decade, or +.08C/decade. I think you are implying that volcanic overcooling errors in the models account for the big difference in model error during the cool ENSO phase vs the warm ENSO phase.
I'm not sure what you mean by "models over estimate cooling from models"; I assume you mean volcanoes. You are right the models probably overcool during volcanic episodes, however since you don't quantify it's unclear whether the effect is large or small. We both agree on the sign of the bias for volcanoes, and the sign of the bias for ENSO over the last 30 years, but it seems we don't agree on the magnitude. With no numbers on the table perhaps we'll just wait a few more years and comment on the state of the divergence then.
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LCBozo at 10:09 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Rob Honeycutt: I certainly don't mean to imply that nuclear power is the only way to go. And, though I have a few problems with the overt alarmist nature of the climate change lobby, I'm more concerned about eliminating carbon based energy production, period, via free market venture capitalism (though I wonder where that is anymore).
Presently, nuclear power — third/fourth generation nuclear energy plant designs, are about the only way to quickly provide for massive 24/7 clean energy production.
If you count the total radioactive releases from all the nuclear plant accidents, it doesn't even come close to that continuously released from dirt burner chimneys.
I worked as a startup engineer, and maintenance programs planner (instrumentation) at PVNGS (Palo Verde Nuclear Generation Station)... I have some perspective. For one, we worked (I retired in 2012) for the plant, not any persons. Which is to say, we worked for the laws of physics, which underlie every aspect of nuclear power generation.
PVNGS has virtually a small private army protecting the plant. Guards walk around in full body armor, and carry handguns, as well as fully automatic weapons. About a fourth of the guys I worked with had, as a hobby, continuing formal tactical firearms training — handgun, rifle, shotgun. I dare say, any bad-guy morons trying to penetrate PVNGS would not make it through the security gate. If they did, they would quickly become, well, discorporate. Our first priority was public safety and nuclear safety. Second is worker (industrial) safety, after that was productivity.
In energy production one pound of nuclear fuel equals about 6,000 barrels of oil! Personally, I think burning carbon based fuels is primitive! I think the concept of small modular reactors which run a 5 year refuel cycle, vs. the 18 month refuel cycle of PW reactors (bubblers go about 2 years between refueling) is the way to go.
After utilities have invested ~$30 billion into a government sponsored waste disposal (which I call, future fuel) site — with nothing to show, APS built its own dry-cask storage facility. If the morons in D.C. had any technical knowledge, they would understand that waste is really future fuel, and dry-cask storage is the most effective way to provide for future nuclear fuel — if we went the breeder route.
Arizona's large Agua Caliente Solar Project generates electricity at a wholesale cost of about 22 cents per kilowatt hour whereas the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station is about 3 cents per kilowatt hour. Solar cells degrade at the rate of about 1 percent per year (though improving). Solar is great for rooftops, but covering the Sonoran Desert with hundreds of square miles of solar panels to eventually replace dirt burners and natural gas generators will not happen. Also, the subsidizing of these green energy sources is unsustainable, and an economic tipping point will occur long before they could replace conventional energy production. The only real long-term resolution for large scale energy production is fusion power. Geothermal is another viable technology that has minimal environmental impact.
The worst property of nuclear power plants is cost, but the investment is very long term, as major components can be replaced (PVNGS has new steam generators and heads — even got a bit more power efficiency). PVNGS generates massive scale electricity, and may well be operational for more than 100 years. It produces about 3 x 1,400 megawatts, with ~ 95% availability. If utilities would embrace liquid metal, and HTG nuclear plants, I bet the cost would drop per megawatt hour production, as the primary high pressure steam (NSSS) systems are responsible for much of the construction and maintenance costs. Breeders, with onsite fuel reprocessing would make so much sense!
Large-scale wind generators kill an estimated 1.4 million birds and bats every year. This will only increase as wind generation increases — not exactly a "green" side effect! Then we have both the solar and gas back-up generators which often supply quite a good percent of these "clean" energy sources electrical output.
It really boils down to: is there really a probability that AGW will push the earth environment to catastrophic levels, or is this just some weird political/science project? I personally would love to see more technical rigor in school curriculum, with emphasis on "we can do anything," rather than all the wrist wringing, "...but it isn't a perfect solution..." so do nothing attitude.
I helped send men to the moon, was in on the original HMG (carbon/graphite fiber) research, and helped startup half a dozen nuclear plants. I find it hard to accept this once great nation being so politically and technologically constipated. We can produce nuclear weapons when at war with other humans, but can't use available technology to bring about peace when presumably at war with our planet?
Yeah, I like nuclear energy produced electricity. Nuclear plants are the safest place I've ever worked.
One of nuclear powers biggest enemies has been the Oil and Coal industry! Try the movie, "Pandora's Promise."
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Tom Curtis at 08:36 AM on 11 April 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Klapper @57:
NINO 3.4:
1) Nino 3.4 is the SST in the region from 5 degrees North and 5 degrees south, and from 170 degrees West and 120 degrees West.
2) The full NINO 3.4 record (Jan 1870-Jan2014) shows a statistically significant warming trend of 0.014 +/- 0.008 C/decade (2 standard deviations confidence interval).
3) The 100 year record does not show a statistically significant warming trend because it start years fall conveniently on a cluster of El Nino years, while its end years fall on a cluster of La Nina years.
4) The underlying observations for HadISST1 do not properly correct for differences in methods of measurement of SST. That is the difference between HadSST3 and other SST products.
5) All of this is beside the point. Given that you are wedded to NINO 3.4 using HadISST1, here are the recent running 30 year trends for that record. As you can see, they show the same pattern as that from the SOI. The consequence is that, since November 2005, ENSO as measured by NINO 3.4 (HadISST1) causes observed temperature trends to fall further below modelled trends than would be the case without ENSO. With SOI annual values, since 2005 ENSO has the same effect. Perhaps next time you dispute a data source, you will show that your preffered data source actually make a difference to the point at hand, and is not simply a red herring as your introduction of NINO 3.4 (HadISST1) has been.
Trends:I have shown conclusively that if models over estimate cooling from models, then there will be a divergence in model and observed trends due to recent volcanism on top of any baseline discrepancy. That divergence would start around 2002. I have also shown conclusively that ENSO will cause a further divergence in the same direction since about 2005. Yet you base your argument for a large baseline discrepancy between models and observations on the increasing divergence since 2004? Seriously?
I assume the cherry pick was accidental, but even you must now recognize that estimate the baseline divergence based on a period over the whole of which it is known that extraneious factors exagerate the observed discrepancy is not sound. If persisted it, it is not honest.
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Mike3267 at 08:25 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC issue official rebuttal to more David Rose/Daily Mail nonsense
A very small point. Rose's Mail column, "PUBLISHED: 18:37 EST, 7 September 2013 | UPDATED: 13:45 EST, 28 September 2013", does not now contain any mention of a crisis meeting. It may have been changed. It now reads:
"The continuing furore caused by The Mail on Sunday’s revelations – which will now be amplified by the return of the Arctic ice sheet – has forced the UN’s climate change body to reconsider its position."
You, and others, quoted it as saying:
"The continuing furore caused by The Mail on Sunday’s revelations – which will now be amplified by the return of the Arctic ice sheet – has forced the UN’s climate change body to hold a crisis meeting."
The phrase "crisis meeting" does still appear in at least one comment on Rose's column.
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Tom Curtis at 07:40 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC issue official rebuttal to more David Rose/Daily Mail nonsense
WheelsOC @2, long before I began discussing climate change on the internet, I was heavilly involved in the evolution wars. I did so not out of religious conviction, or any particular enjoyment, but because I beleived that people who train themselves in poor reasoning in one area of their life will do so in others. Raise a child a creationist and you raise them to not recognize good science, and to be easilly fooled by pseudo-science, something I thought must inevitably be harmful to our civilization. Little did I know my fears were already being realized. In any event, one of the things that first struck me on encountering global warming deniers was the amazing similarity between the arguments of the creationists, and those of the deniers. It is as though the took creationist argument as a "how to" manual for pseudo-science.
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WheelsOC at 07:06 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC issue official rebuttal to more David Rose/Daily Mail nonsense
So there we have it. Distorted. Misleading. Misrepresentation. Selective quotation. All of that will come as no surprise to Skeptical Science regulars who have seen us, over the years, taking on individuals and organisations who tend to use such tactics to get their political agenda across. And it often seems that they never give up.
I seen much of the same for years by focusing on another group of denialists; the anti-evolutionists. Quote-mining and spin is such a major part of their toolbox that it's becoming one of their distinctive characteristics. A very incomplete but very representative sample can be found here, which might help reinforce one's ability to spot the practice in action. The easier it is to recognize, the more efficient it is to deal with the tactic regardless of the subject.
More on topic, I've seen someone use the exact same misrepresentation of WG2 Chapter 9, regarding human migration risks. They didn't cite the Daily Mail in doing so, but it did happen the Monday after that piece was published. The IPCC's summary of Tacoli (2009) was quoted out of context to make it seem as though the WG2 itself concluded that "current alarmist predictions [...] are not supported by past experiences of responses to droughts and extreme weather events and predictions for future migration flows are tentative at best," without any indication that this was a description of just one paper considered by the IPCC. Obviously, the real conclusion of the WG was very different from their summary of a single paper.
When dealing with people quoting the IPCC in ways that seem to contradict the IPCC, always be mindful of the potential for quote-mining. Check the source and put their statements in context. That's usually enough to rebut the whole argument. -
PluviAL at 06:20 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
One Planet OF: Granting that sustainablity is abolutely critical, there is room to appreciate the marvel of humanitie's achievements. That achievement is the purpose of life, and so the justification for all the marvels of the Universe. Not to be narsisitic, but this column and this conversation are as marvelous and worthwhile of the planet as the species we endanger.
That is to say, give civilization a break, and let us work this thing out. We have talked about how Pluvinergy, wether it works or not is not the question, is one concept which can make the planet verdant, and continue the ascent of civilization. If so, the question of mitigation and coping entail the conviction that we can do both. Therefore, civilization is not worthless; it is the universe's proudes achievement, as backards as we might, or might not be, in this ascention.
As far as profitability; it is as lovely as scinece, to those who espose it, and it is equally productive. The IPCC report is moving in the right direction, that it makes anti-climate change people happy is good too; we can start talking from common ground.
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John Hartz at 05:30 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
@dhogaza: Since it appears that Poster is now arguing with him/heself, we might as well let him/her stew in hs/her own juices.
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dhogaza at 05:05 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Poster:
"Dhogaza has stated my comment @ 6 above that sceptics are unconvinced that humans are the sole and root cause of climate change is a strawman mischaracterisation of climate science."
Climate science entails much more than the study of the last 250 years of the 4.5 billion years of the earth's history. I stand by my statement.
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PluviAL at 04:52 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Rob H: We all propose the solution from what we know best, and our oun kids are alwyas the cutest too. That's human nature. LZBozo is right, and I don't think so LZ. Breeder technology is the necessary alternative to quadruple energy availablity for a growing world economy. In my consideration, growth, is increasing wealth, and can equal a more verdant world. It all depends on benign, verdant, energy.
Breeder technology does have the problem of plutonium proliferation, which in turn requires greater government vigilance, so that is a mixed bag. The only energy concept, besides nuclear-breeder, which is on scale of need, and which is nearly 100% benign is Pluvinergy. If it works is another question. It is many, many, orders of magnitude easier to develop than fusion. Fusion is pie in the sky; it allways has been, and alway will be avilable, 15 years in the future.
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Poster9662 at 04:48 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Dhogaza has stated my comment @ 6 above that sceptics are unconvinced that humans are the sole and root cause of climate change is a strawman mischaracterisation of climate science. I refer Dhogaza to an article published in the Guardian in July 2012 (http://tinyurl.com/nj34b2u). There are many commnets in this article commenting on the role of humans in climate change.
Comments such as "The Earth's land has warmed by 1.5C over the past 250 years and "humans are almost entirely the cause".
"Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases,"
There are other similar comments that don't gel too well with "strawman mischaracterisation of climate science".
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Hyperactive Hydrologist at 03:00 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
The problem with adaptation is that it is a reactive rather than proactive response. Given the broard range of uncertainty in climate models, at the regional scale, it is very difficult to design adaptaion measures which are appropriate. It's all well and good saying "we can adapt" but if we don't know what we are adapting to then we run the risk of making things worse or wasting resources. Saying we can adapt also gives people the excuse to put off mitigation for a few more years without considering the risks involved. Also the cost of long term adaptation measures never really seems to be taken into account. How much will it cost to protect all the worlds coastal cities from 0.5-1m of sea level rise?
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MA Rodger at 02:44 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC issue official rebuttal to more David Rose/Daily Mail nonsense
The errors within Richard Tol's work mentioned by the IPCC press release had already resulted in a spat between Tol & Bob Ward. The account Ward gives of Tol's behaviour does perhaps intimate some dark doings, with an initial less controversial version of Tol's WGII Chapter 10 "leaked to a blog for climate change ‘sceptics’" and then a section is quietly inserted into the final draft on "‘Aggregate impacts’ which was based almost entirely on Professor Tol’s 2013 paper", this being the source of the mentioned errors.
Of course, Tol is one of Nigel Lawson's GWPF so nothing would surprise me. In the Mail article, Tol says of the spat between him & Ward - "It’s all about taking away my credibility as an expert.” Well, I suppose, if he feels he can act like one of Lawson's Gentleman Who Prefers Fantasy, then his credibility will indeed be rather difficult to hold on to.
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P.T. Goodman at 02:32 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
@Poster
Because they were scientists.
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Klapper at 02:18 AM on 11 April 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
@Tom Curtis #56:
I checked the Hadisst1 dataset for the NINO3.4 region (165 to 120W, +5 to -5 North) instead of getting the NINO3.4 index directly from climate data explorer and got a very slightly different answer for the last 100 years (-0.0047C/decade), but still no warming trend is apparent. I think my point is this: the dataset I used has no gaps and also has no long term trend so I believe it to be a valid proxy for ENSO, although I could detrend HadSSTv3 detrend it and use that too except it's full of temporal holes.
As for your second point I'm not basing my hypothesis the models are running hot on a single trend. Before you had posted your rolling trend graph I had tried to do the same thing but when SKS said I had to "host" I didn't bother. I'm basing my hypothesis on approximately 120 trends since 2004 that show an increasing divergence between CMIP5 model projections and the empirical data. You are right I did my error calculations on only the last trend in this series however.
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Poster9662 at 01:43 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Dhogaza @10 There is nothing in my comment that indicates anything about my personal beliefs on global warming/climate change and to suggest there is is both michievous and unsubstantiated. With regard to your claim that "deniers" did not discover solar cycles or Milankovich cycles or plate techtonics etc is pure supposition.. When most of the things to which you refer were identified/described, the current divisions on climate change did not exist. How can you be certain that, for example, Milankovich or Schwabe, might not have been "deniers" today?
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P.T. Goodman at 01:39 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Human adaptation will be necessary in the short and medium time-frames. Mitigation is essential for the long-term. What can adapt or be adapted? I see no evidence that plants and animals as they now exist naturally stand much of a chance in adpating to a drastically altered global climate. Basically, they are toast without mitigation.
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One Planet Only Forever at 00:10 AM on 11 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Here is another way to make the point I presented in my earlier comment.
Humanity needs to be looking towards the hundreds of millions of years that this planet whould be the amazing home to life that it currently is. Consuming non-renewable resources of this planet is fundamentally unsustainable (absolutely complete recycling of such materials forever would be acceptable). And activity that damages the diversity and profusion of life is also clearly unacceptable.
Justification of the increased damage of current unsustainable and damaging activities and the increased risk of creating more rapid and more difficult adaptation challenges can only be by the creation today of absolutely certain benefits in the future that more than offset those future consequences.
An economic evaluation that pretends there will be economic growth into the future is not a valid justification. There would have to be absolute certainty of the benefit that will exist into the potentially more difficult future.
So the challenge to anyone claiming adaptation is the answer would be: The objective must be to provide a sustainable better future for all life on this amazing planet. Provide proof of the things being done right now with the benefit obtained by these unsustainable and damaging activities that will have real substantial value for future generations facing the resulting consequences. The evaluation must include significant costs for reduced access to non-renewable resources and reduced diversity and profusion of other life. And if there is any uncertainty about the evaluations the future costs must be magnified, and the evaluated future benefit must be reduced absolutely certain (no net-present-value calculation that pretends a future cost has less inherent value than a current day cost).
By that method of evaluation the past 40 to 50 years of global development have been worse than worthless, though they are perceived to be popular and profitable because the ones measuring success have not had to properly consider the future. They haven’t even had to properly consider the current immediate impacts of what they want to benefit from doing. The success of that attitude to gain popularity and be supported by the methods of evaluating the creation of value (the profitability measurement method), is what needs to change, or it is certain that the future for humanity will continue to be worse, because current day activities are worse than worthless in the future.
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dhogaza at 23:38 PM on 10 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Poster:
"I don't think sceptics dismiss climate change as not happening I think it more that they remain unconvinced that human activity is the sole and root cause."
But apparently they (and you) do believe in this strawman mischaracterization of climate science, which does not clam, and never has claimed, that human activity is the sole and root cause of climate change. Denialists didn't discover Milankovich cycles, after all. Nor solar cycles. Solar dimming? The geological processes which which modulate CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere? Plate tectonics, which move the continents around causing very large climatic side-effects? Any of those discovered by denialists? Nope. All discovered (along with many, many things I'm not mentioning) by mainstream science, and their relationship with the earth's climate discovered by scientists as well.
What have denialists contributed? A lot of blog posts, for the most part.
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ZincKidd at 22:41 PM on 10 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
One big part of "adaptation" is going to have to be a willingness to accept refugees from island nations that have lost their fresh groundwater. Tuvalu comes to mind as one of the first, but I suspect we'll be seeing similar problems in a lot of other places before long, the Bahamas, much of Polynesia, etc. This is a tough problem-- as these people would no doubt like to keep their national identity.
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bjchip at 21:32 PM on 10 April 2014Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
What I have always found fascinating about the "conspiracy of scientists" theorists is the more likely conspiracy they ignore. Getting scientists to agree on things has a lot in common with herding cats, except that the cats are a lot easier to get moving in the same direction and probably better paid... whereas the financial wizards and CEOs funding entities like CEI and Heartland whence the lies about science emanate, the people who control the WSJ and Forbes where they are most commonly published... THOSE people have given us the LIBOR fraud, the FOREX scandal, the Global Economic Crisis, Billion Dollar Bailouts, "Too-Big-To-Jail", and a list of further scandal and corruption far far longer. They are the professional conspiracists and they pay themselves rather well. As someone pointed out, if scientists were in this to make money they're doing it wrong.
Yet that never quite touches their ideation, and that itself is a bit of a puzzle because as a conpiracy theory goes it has a lot more potential. So why doesn't it take off? Why isn't it a MORE common theory than the one that is espoused about climate scientists? ...or is it merely less vocal even though it is more widely held?There's a semi-relevant question in this because more than one conspiracy theory is available to consider. How is the conspiracy theory chosen by the theorist, why is one more "popular" than the another?
Not going to go into the debate with our visitors.
The difference between the consensus of the climate science and the consensus of the scientist's opinions, is an important one to make, and is missed by many. When one examines the papers to find 97% one is examining the consensus of the science, not the people. It makes the absense of contrary science far far more telling.
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CBDunkerson at 21:12 PM on 10 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
In my experience most 'skeptics' hold multiple beliefs: 'Global Warming isn't happening, but if it were happening it wouldn't be serious, and if it were serious it wouldn't be due to human activity'.
The 'Global Warming isn't happening' and 'Global Warming will not be serious' crowds have been in decline, but claiming that they don't exist is just nonsense. What's funny is that the science establishing human causation is even stronger than that showing that significant GW is happening. They've retreated to the least viable argument.
On adaptation, the problem is that AGW is now causing enough damage that adaptation is clearly needed... but the more effort we devote to adaptation the less severe the immediate consequences will be and thus the more likely we are to hold off mitigation and thereby produce eventual long term consequences that we won't be able to adapt to by any means short of massive population reduction.
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Earthling at 20:01 PM on 10 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Post #7 should read, only fools could believe.
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Earthling at 19:58 PM on 10 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Poster @ #6 You are correct, only fools believe could that sceptics claim climate change isn't happening.
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Poster9662 at 18:45 PM on 10 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Chris Snow @ #2 I don't think sceptics dismiss climate change as not happening I think it more that they remain unconvinced that human activity is the sole and root cause.
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ubrew12 at 17:42 PM on 10 April 2014Fox News climate change coverage is now 28% accurate, up from 7%
The U.S. Supreme Court recently reaffirmed its opinion that Money is Speech and thus subject to First Amendment protections against efforts to limit its influence in elections. If you look at those statistics for Fox News and CNN, it seems plain that, often, Money is the very opposite of Speech. Nobody wants to talk about one of the most important issues of our Age because, frankly, the money is directing them not to talk about it. Money isn't Speech. Money is a bullhorn or a muzzle, depending on how the donor wants it directed.
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One Planet Only Forever at 14:50 PM on 10 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
The real problem is that people claiming it is "best" if "we" just adapt, are people hoping to prolong their enjoyment of the undeserved benefits of creating the rapidly changing climate. And they are pretty certain they will not be the ones facing the consequences.
The warmer the callous disregard for the future consequneces force things to become, the more rapid and signficant and unpredictable the climate will change. And the local changes to be adapted to will become very difficult to predict in a manner that can successfully be adapted to.
Development of a sustainable better future for all life on this amazing planet is the only viable future for humanity. Rapid significant climate change, combined with all the other damaging consequences of the current massive unsustainable human consumption madness, make the future of humanity "less certain".
The current socioeconomic systems with their adoration of popular image creations and profitability clearly are not guaranteed to develop a better future. It seems quite certain that they never willingly lead to the collective effort of the entire population toward the develoment of anything but a series of failed unsustainable pursuits that only benefit a few in their moment.
And proponents of the "adaptation is better" approach know these are the most certain facts of the matter, and they obviously don't care, for the obvious reasons.
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chriskoz at 13:21 PM on 10 April 2014Watch Episode 1 of James Cameron's "Years of Living Dangerously"
My response to John Hartz@3 was deleted (i presume by accident - together with some unrelated driveby trolls - because it is on topic andinformative), so I'm reposting it:
Not just Heidi Cullen needs to be singled out here. I'm really excited to see someone like Tom Friedman involved in the production and speaking on Face the Nation. Tom's book "Hot Flat & Crowded" is simply a phenomenal peice of journalism about global warming & surrounding politics & FF industry. A must read, that I've already resommended elsewhere. If this series' narrative is similar to the Tom's book, then even though I haven't seen it yet, I can only concur with previous commenters: watch it!
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Tom Curtis at 13:07 PM on 10 April 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Klapper @55:
1) The HadISST1 (not HadSSTi) is an observational dataset with interpolation, not a reanalysis. It is currently based on the HadSST2 dataset, which has been superceded by the HadSST3 dataset, which I used. Dropping the default requirement from the KNMI explorer from 30% valid data points to 5% valid data points, I was able do download an almost continuous annual data series from 1914 onwards. It misses only the year 1946, but many years prior to 1949 have less than four months data, and many months have less than 30% valid data points. However, based on that I then calculated the trend from 1914-2013. It is 0.045 C per decade, with a standard deviation of the trend of 0.022 C per decade. That is, if you ignore the poor quality of the data prior to 1949, the trend is significant. Given that the interpolated data field based on an obsolete dataset does not even preserve the sign on that trend, I would say so much the worse for trusting the interpolation until they update the dataset used.
2) I don't need to quantify the overcooling. The point of this excercise it to determine by how much, if at all, climate models run warm with respect to observations for the underlying trend. I have quantified that by comparing a large number of thirty year trends over different periods so that positive and negative biases on the discrepancy due to ENSO and volcanism will have largely averaged out. The only thing I need to specifically point to the volcanism for is to demonstrate that estimates of the discrepancy based on a single 30 year trend are unreliable.
However, as you are basing your estimate of how warm the models are running based on a single trend, you do need to estimate the volanism induced discrepancy and the ENSO induced discrepancy, (and the differences in forcing induced disrepancy) to make that estimate. Instead you treat the naive estimate as if it were a reasonable indicater. I have shown it is not.
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chriskoz at 13:04 PM on 10 April 2014Watch Episode 1 of James Cameron's "Years of Living Dangerously"
John Hartz@9,
Thanks for pointing that. Indeed, I ignorantly assumed that the indonesian rainforest formation time is comparable to that of an average boreal forrest. But as I'm learning from this link:
The lowland peat swamps of Borneo are mostly geologically recent (<5000 years old), low lying coastal formations above marine muds and sands [10][11] but some of the lakeside peat forests of Kalimantan are up to 11,000 years old.
it is clearly not. Removal of peat swamps is not the ordinary forest removal. If most of the emmisions come from 20 m deep peat, then based on the above numbers, I have to increase my original restoration estimate at least 10 times to some 1Ky or even 100times to few Ky. That's still far shorter than FF restoration but it may change the conclusion of my original post, depending on the definition of "forever". That timespan can be called "essentially forever", on the human life timescale,
As a sidenote, I've learned from the link above, that the peat fires in 1997, could have been largely responsible for a huge spike of emmision rates in 1998, as seen on this NOAA picture, so their contribution of peat destruction is by no means negligible.
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Klapper at 12:08 PM on 10 April 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
@Tom Curtis #53:
The trend in NINO3.4 for the last 100 years (Oct 1914 to Sep. 2013) is -0.002C/decade. There is no long term warming trend in ENSO. The data I'm using are HadSSTi downloaded from KMNI data explorer. I see zero trend in NINO3.4 over the last century so if you are finding trends, then they are likely driven by the PDO, another cycle which the models cannot emulate. The downloaded data show no missing months in the 144 year period available.
You can argue that this must be "re-analysis" data and therefore subject to high error, but the underlying warming trend in the central east Pacific appears to be statistically indistinguisable from zero. Hence I can't agree with your claim that there is an underlying warming trend in the NINO3.4 dataset.
As for your claim my "thoughts don't matter" I would point out you have not quantified your claim the models overcool during major volcanic events so you're doing a lot of hand waving but you haven't backed that claim up. Mind you I actually agree, but until you quantify this overcooling, statements like "potentially by a large margin" have no backup.
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Rob Honeycutt at 08:39 AM on 10 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
LCBozo... I'm not sure I get how all the nuclear proponents always assume their solution is the only truly viable solution to the problem.
What I think you'll find is, most people who are concerned about AGW will say, we need all technologies being applied to the problem.
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LCBozo at 08:31 AM on 10 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Our evolutionary specialization is adapting the environment, not adapting to the environment. When considering the ability to modify the global environment, doesn't the question become: what kind of global environment is the most conducive for survival — especially for those organisms which need to literally adapt to the environment?
I worked in the construction completion and startup of the sodium cooled Fast Flux Test Facility in WA State, in the late 1970s. This stainless steel reactor was a jewel in the desert, and was to be the forerunner to the Clinch River breeder reactor - which was cancelled due to political hysteria. Since then, I've worked at about a dozen DOE and commercial nuclear facilities.
If people are really serious about greatly reducing greenhouse gasses in the environment, a healthy breeder reactor program is the only truly practical means of seriously reducing GH emissions. In fact, a breeder reactor is virtually a renewable energy source, and has the added benefit of converting nuclear warheads into clean energy (a sizable portion of present light water reactors is doing just that). This would represent a stop-gap measure until practical fusion reactors would provide that ultimate energy source.
I think the nuclear energy industry went off on the wrong track by investing in huge light water reactors. Liquid metal or HTG is a more rational approach to reactor design. You could pull the plug on the FFTF while at full power — it would have simply shut down, with convection cooling.
We need not adapt the concept of adapting to. We are the earth's supreme tool makers — it shouldn't be necessary to adapt to an unhealthy mode of existence.
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Chris Snow at 06:55 AM on 10 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
So the skeptics think we need to adapt to something that they claim isn't happening?
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localis at 02:11 AM on 10 April 2014IPCC says adapt and mitigate to tackle climate risks
Adaptation will take place whatever happens for that is the very nature of human survival and has been so since we first appeared on the planet. Mitigation is the only sensible avenue that can be taken and the IPCC should remain steadfast in stressing just how dangerous it is to think otherwise.
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Rob Honeycutt at 01:12 AM on 10 April 2014CO2 is not the only driver of climate
roosaw... Here's the RF chart from IPCC AR5 that has them broken out...
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John Hartz at 00:54 AM on 10 April 2014Watch Episode 1 of James Cameron's "Years of Living Dangerously"
chriskoz:
Does your estimate of the length of time it would take to restore a rainforest in Indonesia take into account the full restoration of the peat foundation of the forest?
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roosaw at 23:34 PM on 9 April 2014CO2 is not the only driver of climate
In the rediative forcing graph it shows "well-mixed greenhouse gases". Is there a breakout of CO2, H2O, methane etc to show the relative importanct to the effect?
and a related question, when we burn a fuel we get CO2 and H2O in a 3:4 ratio (typical). Since H2O is a more potent green house gas why all the hupla on CO2 and not the incresed H2O?
Moderator Response:[TD] Water vapor's concentration in the atmosphere is limited by temperature. Putting more water vapor into the air than the air's temperature will support causes the excess water to drop out in about 10 days. Therefore water vapor is a feedback to temperature increase, not a forcing. See the rebuttal to the myth Water Vapor is the Most Powerful Greenhouse Gas.
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chriskoz at 23:31 PM on 9 April 2014Watch Episode 1 of James Cameron's "Years of Living Dangerously"
Having watched this episode, I have to single out one inaccuracy/exaggeration: Ford's reporting on Indonesia's forests cleared for oil palms. The report states that once the trees are removed/burned, the carbon sequestered in them espaces to the atmosphere and is "lost forever".
That's incorrect. There might be other environmental issues with clearing the forests and the local environmental loss may be big. But in terms of global CO2 balance, the indonesian forest removal will be balanced by increased carbon intake by the biosphere. Further, even the restoration of said forests, although hard, is possible in a timeframe of few 10s to 100 years which is much less than "forever". And certainly, those who believe we can mitigate by drawing down CO2, point to planting forests and harvesting their wood then preserving it in form of furniture as the realistic way to achieve it.
By contrast, the main source of emmisions - fossils fuels dug from thte ground - contains carbon 100s My old - and that's indeed "forever". And there are no knwon methods of reduce its most oxydised form (CO2) all the way back to the form it came from (FF), nor any method to put it back to the ground.
So the FF emmsions are litteraly milion times more serious than land clearing. I claim that undoing the damage of FF (properly, without side effects like ocean acidification) is also about the same million times harder than undoing land clearing.
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Tom Curtis at 22:41 PM on 9 April 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Klapper @53:
1) The data is not detrended, and nor has their been a lack of warming. Rather, the variation in SST in the NINO 3.4 region due to ENSO is very large relative to the warming due to global warming. The result is a large standard deviation of the values, and consequently the small trend due to global warming does not register as statistically significant. None-the-less, it is still there.
2) Re NINO 3.4 vs SOI, here is a direct comparison for the period over which we consistently have values for the SST in the NINO 3.4 region:
As a result of normalizing the values, it is easy to see that both are comparable as to ENSO values, and as to thirty year trends. It also allows a direct comparison of trends in units of standard deviations. Over the interval 1949-2012 inclusive (the period examined), the linear trend in NINO 3.4 is 30% larger than that for the SOI. That is consistent with a global warming trend being incorporated into the NINO 3.4 index (as it must be of necessity due to the nature of that index). Further, the consequences of including that trend are just as I predicted.
So, switching to NINO 3.4 does not significantly help your case; but it does have the disadvantage of incorporating a global warming signal in your ENSO index, thereby confusing the issue.
On a side note, from 1884 to 1949, blocks of up to six years data are missing from NINO 3.4. You may prefer NINO 3.4 for calculating the trend from 1916-1945, but that thirty year trend has ten years data missing from it, in two seperate blocks and is hardly reliable. This contrasts with the effectively complete record for the SOI.
3) Re volcanoes, the logic is very simple. Suppose you think models over state the temperature influence of volcanoes. From that supposition, it follows that the models will understate trends more relative to observations when it has a large number, or very large volcanoes in the last 15 years of the 30 year trend, and overstate them when the volcanoes are in the first 15 years of the 30 year trend. As the current thirty year trend has the influence of two large volcanoes in the first 15 years, that means if the models overstate volanic influence, then part of the discrepancy between models and observations is due to that problem rather than to the models running generally hot. It appears to me that you want to have your cake and eat it - it to state models overstate the influence of volcanoes, but also to interpret the full discrepancy between observed and modelled trends as due to models running hot.
For what it is worth, I am inclined to think that the models run slightly hot (about 15%), and that the models do overstate the cooling influence of volcanoes so that both factors are in play. However, regardless of what we think, you cannot assess how hot the models run in a period with trends significantly influenced by recent volcanism (such as the current period) without examining what effect the volcanoes have on the trend. You can, of course, take an average over periods when the volcanoes inflate model trends, and periods when they deflate the model trends to find the approximate average of how hot the models run with respect to the underlying trend, which brings us back to where we were eight days ago.
4) What your thoughts are do not matter. You have not provided evidence or reasoning to justify those thoughts. Indeed, your current position seems to be no different from that nine days ago when you though models ran 40-50% to hot based only on the most recent 30 year trend, and without regard to the influence of ENSO and volcanoes on that trend. Since then we have seen that:
1) Averaged accross many thirty year trends, models are on average 13-18% to hot;
2) ENSO has a substantial influence on thirty year trends, which is not reflected in the models;
3) Volcanism has a substantial influence on thirty year trends, which may differ between models and observations; and
4) If models overstate the cooling effect of volcanoes, then both ENSO and volcanic influences on the most recent thirty year trend tend to exagerate the discrepancy between models and observations - potentially by a large margin.
And you still show no willingness to revise down your estimate of how hot models run relative to observations!
Is there any point in continuing at this stage?
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Klapper at 18:56 PM on 9 April 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
@Tom Curtis #52:
There is no significant long term trend in the NINO3.4 data so either the data have been detrended by the originater or there is no warming in the east central Pacific over the last 100 years. Either way, it seems it's an OK metric to use as a proxy for ENSO. I do agree the pre-satellite era Nino3.4 data are suspect since they no doubt rely on Re-analysis to fill what are probably large holes in the data.
As for the disruption volcanoes pose to the CMIP5 vs SAT trend analysis, I'm having hard time discerning your logic. Do you think the CMIP5 models do a good or poor job of emulating the radiative forcing from large volcanoes? If you believe the former, then volcanoes can't be a significant reason for the CMIP5 to SAT 30 year trend error.
I can agree the recent 30 year trend in SAT has been suppressed by an ENSO bias, which the CMIP5 models don't emulate, but I'm surprised that you think volcanoes are also part of the discrepancy. In theory the models and empirical data are both influenced by these major volcanic events equally.
Summarizing my thoughts, the current discrepancy between model and empirical data 30 year trends is partially due to the models inability to emulate ENSO, and possibly some problems with the emulation of volcanic forcing, but most of the problem is that the models run too hot, that is they have some error in the feedbacks to GHG forcing, in addition to whatever problems they have with ENSO or volcanic aerosol forcing.
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Russell at 16:31 PM on 9 April 2014Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
The 'skeptics' have subscribed to, and serially rejected, so many alternative explanations of global warming that their rejection of the flat earth hypothesis ranks as a statistical outlier.
It is unfortunate that Frontier did not conduct enough legal diligence to realize the wannabe plaintiffs would be laughed out of court.
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Tom Curtis at 13:43 PM on 9 April 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Klapper @51, IMO Nino 3.4 is clearly inferior to SOI as an ENSO index because it incorporates any global warming signal as a positive ENSO signal. That is, over time it will progressively inflate El Nino values and deflate La Nina values simply because the central Pacific SST are increasing in temperature due to global warming. If you are going to use a temperature based index, you should at least use the ratio of NINO 3.4 to the average of all tropical Pacific SST from + to - 15 degrees Latitude, and from the west coast of the Americas to the West tip of Sumatra so that any uniform warming across the Pacific is eliminated from the signal. Failure to do so renders any argument about the relative effect of ENSO and an underlying global warming trend futile in that you have incorporated the underlying trend in your ENSO signal. You will also have incorporated some part of the volcanic signal in your ENSO signal - again rendering discussion of relative influences futile.
I am not wedded to the SOI per se. An index based directly on the strength of the Walker circulation, or even better on relative Sea Levels in the Western and Eastern Pacific would also be good indices. However, we do not have accurate indices of those values extending back in time, wheras we do for the SOI.
Further, the volcanic trends are relevant to this discussion because:
a) It is quite possible that the model mean does not capture the actual temperature response to volcanoes; and certainly the observed temperature does not because there are confounding factors that cannot be eliminated (primarilly, but not exclusively, ENSO).
b) The large difference in thirty year trends between AR4 and AR5 are at least in part a simple consequence of the impact of volcanoes on the trend. As the impact of one of those volcanoes, and the one having the most influence on the trend for the last few years in the models, was scrubbed out by a concurrent El Nino in the observed record, any simplistic comparison between observed and model mean trends which does not factor in the effects of ENSO and volcanoes will come to mistaken conclusions.
c) Failure to recognize the impact of volcanism on the model mean trends will lead you to project any current inaccuracy into the future. However, that inaccuracy may be due to inadequate handling of volcanoes, but a correct determination of the underlying trend. In the later case, the underlying trend shown for the rest of the century will still be accurate.
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Klapper at 12:19 PM on 9 April 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
@Tom Curtis #50:
I use NINO3.4 as my proxy for ENSO, not inverted SOI. Certainly this is a better metric in the satellite era since the SSTs are a direct forcing as opposed to SOI which is indirect. The Nino3.4 trend is in fact close to zero for the period 1916 to 1946 (my spreadsheets do use 30 year trends, i.e. Jan. 1917 to Dec. 1946, not 31, but I use the years only for shorthand). Anyway, I don't think I've made a mistake; the period in question is ENSO neutral by the NINO3.4 metric.
As for your ongoing comments about volcanoes; if you are saying they are some part of the reason for the discrepancy between CMIP5 and SAT, I can agree, but not the way you would like. Volcanoes are in fact modeled by CMIP5 so if you want to claim the models do a good job of modelling the volcanoes, then they are not part of this argument. Unlike ENSO, vulcanism affects both the models and the empirical data, supposedly equally, so they don't belong in this discussion. Either the major volcanoes are modeled well, meaning they are not part of the CMIP5/SAT discrepancy, or they are not modeled well in which case I would agree.
As for the 1969 to 1998 trend, the differences are modest compared to the current discrepancy which you accrue to ENSO error. Look at your own graph. The error just keeps getting bigger but the trend in NINO3.4 now is less in magnitude than 1998.
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