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Tom Curtis at 16:44 PM on 1 April 2014There's no empirical evidence
GMoney @195, when NOAA anounced CO2 levels of 400 ppmv "for the first time in thousands of years", it was an example of understatement:
In fact, the last time CO2 levels rose to 400 ppmv or above was around 24 million years ago. That is nearly 80 times the age of the human species, and 2,400 times longer than the existence of any civilization on Earth.
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TonyW at 16:26 PM on 1 April 2014IPCC report warns of future climate change risks, but is spun by contrarians
The section on economic impacts seem to emphasise the uncertainty so it's disappointing that they include an estimate, which they admit is "incomplete" of a 0.2% to 2.0% cost to global income. This will immediately be leaped upon by contrarians to do nothing, even though those incomplete estimates are for 2C, with no cost estimates given for greater warming (even though it implies that there are some). I don't know if that estimate range could have been couched better to ensure that the "more likely thannot to be greater, rather than smaller" couldn't easily be left out of the quote that contrarians will use. -
scaddenp at 13:50 PM on 1 April 2014There's no empirical evidence
Gmoney, please see the Climates Changed Before (no 1 of on the myth list) and also In brief, there are many natural causes of climate change - just that they are not operating now. There are natural processes that gradually remove (over million year time scales) CO2 from atmosphere. We can tell that CO2 is the atmosphere from our emissions from two ways. One is mass-balance - add up our emissions and compare with concentration in the atmosphere. From this we learn that the oceans are still cleaning up nearly half our emissions (and pH is reducing as a consequence). At some point in the future as the ocean warms, this will stop and CO2 will be emitted instead.
The second method comes from looking at the isotopic composition in the atmosphere. Different carbon sources have different signatures, and the increased CO2 is consistant with a fossil fuel source.
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GMoney at 13:38 PM on 1 April 2014There's no empirical evidence
Hey all, I don't have any preconceived skeptical notions. Found myself on this site as I'm legitimately seeking scientific evidence so I can feel informed.
Can someone help me reconcile the following sentence from the article....
"In June 2013, the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Hawaii announced that, for the first time in thousands of years, the amount of CO2 in the air had gone up to 400ppm."
If CO2 has been at 400ppm levels thousands of years ago, doesn't that imply that humans might not be the only causal factor of high CO2 levels? There seems to be a gap in correlation/causality and I'm just legitimately curious. Thanks for any insight.
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chriskoz at 12:46 PM on 1 April 2014IPCC report warns of future climate change risks, but is spun by contrarians
ubrew12@3,
organic agriculture has [...] but it would have to be employed everywhere traditional agriculture is currently employed
You're confusing the nomenclature here. I deduce, by "traditional agriculture" you mean the industrial scale food production lead by copious use of herbicides and fertilizers/chemicals produced from FF. To me, such practices, developped by industrial society, have nothing to do with tradition in the typical sense of the term. Perhaps some younger generation does remember only the "tradition" (i.e. food from industrial processes) they've been raised in, but for me, since I like to see things in broad perspective, such "tradition" is a misnomer.
Your "organic agriculture" (as per your link) is de facto traditional argiculture (from pre-industrial), a concept that may or may not scale-up to today's society's needs and lifestyle, but that's a different topic.
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bruiser at 12:20 PM on 1 April 2014IPCC report warns of future climate change risks, but is spun by contrarians
(snip). Sloganeering removed.
Moderator Response:[PS] Please read the comment policy. Conformance is not optional. Do not make statements that you cannot support with references etc. It would seem you have not read the report you are making claims about. Please do so before making further comments. Use the search button top left to find already rebutted myths. eg IPCC overestimates warming If you find the debunk unconvincing, comment in the appropriate thread with supporting evidence.
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scaddenp at 06:13 AM on 1 April 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
MacKay seldom discusses cost - the other reason why he favoured CSP over PV is superior efficiency. His analysis remains very useful.
With 1/3 of electricity going to residential, then even you doubled the energy efficiency of all appliances, you only reduce energy consumption from 250kWh/d/p to 234. Useful, but not the answer to AGW (and fairly unachievably either). Because lighting isnt a big user, you can only gain about 1kWh/d/p by going to energy efficient bulbs. You need the MacKay-type analysis to know where significant saving can be made.
For NZ, it turned out that electricification of transport was probably the most significant place to make a change. NZer only use 7kWh/d/p for heating and cooling, while UK used 37 and I suspect US would use much more. This is probably an important area but reverse-engineering housing is expensive and probably a 100 year project. Without a breakdown of where energy is consumed, its hard to be sure.
It would also be very interesting to get a breakdown on where petroleum/gas is used. From a personal savings point of view, long distance air travel is a major energy use.
In short, while conserving energy is by far the cheapest option for AGW reduction, the large industrial useage (apparently) would suggest changing the source of energy is going to be more important for the US. Focussing on consumer energy use is putting effort in the wrong place.
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localis at 00:41 AM on 1 April 2014IPCC report warns of future climate change risks, but is spun by contrarians
It might be a sign that we are getting somewhere when current C02 levels are a compulsory component of all weather forecasts.
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Tom Dayton at 00:05 AM on 1 April 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Matzdj, see also Dikran's comment on the same point as mine about the ensemble mean.
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ubrew12 at 23:44 PM on 31 March 2014IPCC report warns of future climate change risks, but is spun by contrarians
Whittemore@2: Here's my chance to promote something I read that can sequester large amounts of CO2: organic agriculture! google 'unctad: wake up before it's too late pdf' (or click this link) and check out page 25. According to that report, organic agriculture has the potential to bring CO2 levels down substantially, but it would have to be employed everywhere traditional agriculture is currently employed. Personally, I think it may be the only good news on the carbon sequestration front. I don't eat Organic food because I don't think its worth the price differential, but if this is true I'll definitely start eating it in the future. I hope Skeptical Science will look into this potential for Organic agriculture because it's potentially huge.
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CBDunkerson at 23:33 PM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Found a nice graph of German electricity generation over time. This shows that since 2000 renewable power generation has grown from %5 of the total to ~25%. Coal use dipped slightly and then rose again, but hasn't really changed very much in total. Instead, the increase in renewable generation has come at the expense of nuclear. This is likely due to both the high cost of nuclear and the government's decision to phase it out after Fukushima. They could be much further along towards emissions targets if they had kept nuclear and phased out coal, but these results clearly show that shifting to significant renewable generation is entirely possible even over short time-frames.
Moderator Response:[RH] Reduced image width.
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Michael Whittemore at 23:18 PM on 31 March 2014IPCC report warns of future climate change risks, but is spun by contrarians
It would be good if western governments could at least decide that they need to start developing processes to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. It would be a start!
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Klapper at 23:14 PM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
@Tom Curtis #31:
I'm off to work but a few quick points:
My comment is about the "goodness" of the models over 30 years. No where did I say the empirical data "falsify" the models. You make a point that in the case of the last 30, ENSO masks the true warming signal. I agree with the tail end of the trend, but not the beginning since the empirical data show a cold period from '85 to '87, possibly the delayed effect of El Chichon.
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CBDunkerson at 22:32 PM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
scaddenp wrote: "At time of writing, MacKay thought PV somewhat too expensive to consider"
I've never been able to take MacKay seriously because of his stance on solar PV. Even when it first came out his 'without the hot air' analysis of solar PV was clearly off, and now that a few years have passed it is just a bad joke (e.g. '20% efficient solar panels will never be affordable').
As to energy saving possibilities in the U.S.... virtually everything the rest of the world has done the past twenty years. The GOP is still fighting tooth and nail against energy efficient light bulbs. Better insulation. Energy efficient (i.e. higher up front cost) appliances. Efficient power transmission. Et cetera. We are way behind the curve on even the concept of trying to save energy. The good news is that means there is plenty of room for future decreases in energy use. The bad news is that a good portion of the country actively believes not using as much electricity as possible is all part of an evil commie plot.
On the other hand, some local GOP groups have been getting behind solar energy... to the utter horror of GOP politicians. It seems they actually believe all that 'self sufficient' stuff they spout when voting to kill social safety net programs and figure nothing is more self sufficient than generating your own electricity. Distributed solar PV and on-site battery storage is starting to catch on in Hawaii and the SW United States despite the costs, in part because there are tons of 'preppers' out there who don't trust the guvmint to keep providing electricity. It's kinda scary when the lunatic fringe are helping to drive the country towards sanity. There is some indication that battery costs are set to fall significantly (c.f. Tesla's battery megafactory)... in which case solar PV and battery storage could result in a lot of people going off the grid entirely.
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Stephen Ferguson at 22:09 PM on 31 March 2014IPCC report warns of future climate change risks, but is spun by contrarians
Am a tad dissapointed you failed to mention that Richard Tol is a member of the 'Academic Advisory Council' to Lord Lawson's denier thinktank the Global Warming Policy Foundation
The BBC and (even!) The Guardian both made this mistake when he dramatically removed his name as a lead author from this week's IPCC report.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_Tol
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Dikran Marsupial at 21:17 PM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Klapper, you do know, don't you, that the ensemble mean is not directly a predictor of the observed climate? It is an estimate of the forced response of the climate (i.e. the behaviour of the climate in response to a change in the forcings - including any feedback mechanisms). The other component is internal climate variablity (a.k.a. the unforced response or "weather noise"). The spread of the model runs is an estimate of the variation around the forced response that we could plausibly expect to see as a result of internal climate variability. This means we should only expect the observed climate to closely resemble the ensemble mean at times when the effects of internal variability are close to zero. Where we know that sources of internal variability (e.g. ENSO) have been very active, we should not expect the observations to lie close to the ensemble mean.
This is not exactly rocket science, but it is not completely straightforward either. The reasons the models are usually presented in terms of an ensemble mean and spread, is because that is the best way of portraying what the models actually project. There is no good reason to expect the observations to lie any closer to the ensemble mean than to lie within the spread of the model runs.
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michael sweet at 20:01 PM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Andy,
Certainly how the grid is paid for is the argument that the utilities make. Different people will interpret the arguments differently. Hawaii is a trial run for the USA as solar is currently the cheapest form of electricity there. It will be interesting to learn what type of upgrades are required for neighborhoods to send electricity over existing wires back to the utility. The utility currently claims it cannot be done. The technicalities are complex for people who do not work in the industry.
In my local paper today a report states that the Florida state legislators are in the back pocket of the utilities. That surprises no one in the USA. Perhaps if Australia shows that electricity is much cheaper when people make their own, the US will be dragged along.
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Tom Curtis at 19:29 PM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Sorry, minimum trend for 1984-2013 was 0.114 C/decade, not 0.011 as stated.
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Tom Curtis at 19:26 PM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
klapper @21, 28, & 30, I have downloaded the RCP 4.5 data for all 42 ensemble members from January 1961 to December 2050 from the KNMI Climate Explorer. For the 30 year trend ending December, 2013, the ensemble shows a mean trend of 0.254 C/decade, with a Standard Deviation of 0.059 C/decade. That means any trend lying between 0.136 and 0.372 C/decade lies within the prediction interval of the ensemble. All three major temperature indices plus Cowtan and Way lie within that interval, the trends being:
HadCRUT4: 0.17 +/- 0.053 C/decade (7.1%)
NOAA: 0.162 +/- 0.052 C/decade (4.6%)
GISS: 0.172 +/- 0.056 C/decade (7.6%)
Cowtan and Way (HadCRUT4 Hybrid): 0.193 +/-0.06 C/decade (12.8%)
The numbers in brackets are the percent rank of the indices among the ensemble.
For the record, the Minimum trend in the ensemble is 0.011 C/ decade, and the Median trend is 0.249 C/decade.
Clearly neither ensemble mean prediction, nor the ensemble distribution justify claim that the models are falsified by the temperature record. That is particularly the case as there are several independent reasons to expect the ensemble to over predict the trend from 1984-2013 inclusive. First, for HadCRUT4 and NOA, neither includes the entire globe and consequently both will under predict trends due to failure to represent polar amplification.
More importantly, 1984 is still close enough to the El Chichon volcanoe of 1982 for temperatures to be negatively impacted. In real life, the impact of that volcanoe was largely nullified by the strongest El Nino on record, as measured by the SOI. More generally, that El Nino represents a peak in SOI influence on temperature, which has shown a strong negative trend since then. That has culminated, in 2011 with the strongest La Nina on record:
This strong trend in SOI conditions results in a strong negative trend in temperatures not represented by any forcing, and therefore not a feature of the ensemble mean. This couples with the lower than projected forcings to strongly bias observations relative to the ensemble.
This bias can be removed for practical purposes by comparing all thirty year trends over a period or reasonably constant increases in forcing, such as that from 1961-2050, or if you prefer largely historical values, from 1961-2013. The ensemble mean trends over those periods are, respectively, 0.222 +/- 0.076 C/decade and 0.187 +/- 0.078 C/decade. All four temperature series above lie very comfortably within the prediction interval in both cases, particularly the historical interval. For the historical period, they lie in the 41st, 36th, 42nd, and 56th percentiles respectively in order of appearance on the table above.
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Ari Jokimäki at 15:26 PM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Andy: Ari commented in his piece that natural gas replacing coal increases warming in the short ter because of the reduction in aerosols from coal. This observation applies equally to renewables that replace coal, as well.
Of course, except that biomass burning also releases aerosols, but this doesn't take away the fact that this feature is also present when switching from coal to natural gas. The situation of natural gas is somewhat different than the situation with solar or wind energy, because solar and wind energy at least really reduce GHG emissions, so even with aerosol effect, there is a possibility to reduce the warming effect overall. In natural gas case it just amplifies already bad situation.
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Andy Skuce at 14:25 PM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Michael @ 39: I would say that it's not just a question of utility profits, but how the grid is paid for and by whom. I would suspect that the solution for this would have to be some kind of fixed grid connection charge independent of the usage, plus some time-variable charges for the electricity. It is probably not that hard to figure out how to do this, but the politics for the regulators are probably very difficult.
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Andy Skuce at 14:17 PM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
According to Wiki about one-third of US electricity consumption is residential.
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scaddenp at 13:04 PM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Actually, MacKay has an interesting 2-pager (and thought-provoking map) on energy options for the US here. Note that the solar options considered are CSP and biomass, not PV. (At time of writing, MacKay thought PV somewhat too expensive to consider). It does give you a feeling for the size of the problem. It would be interesting for someone familiar with the US energy use to comment on options for energy saving. There are anomolies that I cant explain. US electricity consumption alone is around 100 kWh/d/p - more than NZ total energy consumption of 88kWh/d/p. Oil/gas consumption is around 150kWh/d/p - more than 3x NZ usage. Hmm. How much is domestic energy use, how much is industrial use? I can see US consumer being more electricity demanding than a NZer, and that home heating/cooling needs are higher, but surely not by that much. US industrial use would by much higher and if this is where most energy goes, then it's likely to be harder to make energy conservation measures. Because it affects the bottom-line, industries tend to be far more focussed on energy efficiency than a domestic consumers. Anyone done a MacKay type analysis on where the US spends its energy?
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Klapper at 12:26 PM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
@scandenp #29:
Best is only land is it not? Note that my calculation on the error in the model trend above uses HadCRUT4 Hybrid with a trend of 0.19C/decade over the last 30 years, which is actually higher than GISS at .172C/decade, which is only slightly higher than HadCRUT4 at .169C/decade. I don't think it will make a lot of difference but I can plot up the rolling trend for all three (NOAA, HadCRUT4 and GISS) against the rolling CMIP5. Or maybe it's best to average the anomalies for all three Global SAT datasets.
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michael sweet at 10:41 AM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Ranyl,
What type of power do you support? I see you do not like solar or coal, can you suggest alternatives?
Andy,
The utilities make much of their profits on the peak load period from about 12:00-6:00PM every day. Solar cuts directly into this peak and causes a disproportionate dip in utility profits. In Hawaii this might be 5% of peak power, since solar produces no energy at night. It is difficult for those (like me) who are not professionals to understand all the ins and outs. The bottom line is that utilities do not like wind and solar competing with them during peak profit hours. They did not say much about it until the past year or so because solar and wind were not economic. Now that home solar and xommercial wind are economic the arguments are starting. In progressive areas (like Germany) solar is adopted more quickly. In backwards areas (like Florida, where I live) solar still struggles.
The grid in Hawaii might be able to support more solar, but the utility profits cannot. We will have to wait for several analysis to be done.
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scaddenp at 09:59 AM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Klapper, given recent papers on issues on HadCrut4, why choose that rather than BEST or GISS?
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scaddenp at 09:55 AM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Ranyl, I would be extremely interested then in your opinions on McKay's "Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air". I struggle to figure out how US citizens can use 250kWh/d/p, so I do agree that conservation will make an important role, but looking at his numbers, it is also clear that making meaningful reductions by conservation is going to be tough. I ran the analysis for NZ and figured you could realistically get 25kWh/d/p, with 10 of that from electric vehicles.
If you are going to replace the energy generated from coal, (the main problem), then you really need solar (either PV or CSP, and realistically both) or nuclear. If you think you can do it another way, then please show us your arithmetic.
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One Planet Only Forever at 09:49 AM on 31 March 2014The Carbon Bubble - Unburnable Fossil Fuels - Seminar and Discussion
Andy @3
I view CCS as likely being used as an unsustainable excuse to continue an unsustainable activity that creates far more harm than the production of excess CO2. CSS should be a required added expense for any attempt to continue burning fossil fuels, but only be used for a short transition period, even shorter than the possible life of a new fossil fuel burning facility. The already fortunate people on this planet, particularly the most fortunate, need to be motivated to develop and follow truly sustainable ways of living as rapidly as possible.
The only viable future for humanity is progress to truly sustainable activity by all humans, as part of a robust and diverse web of life on this amazing planet. I have read many things and thought many thoughts, but I have not come up with any plausible way for the consumption of non-renewable resources to have any legitimate role in that sustainable future. In fact, I consider located, but otherwise untouched, fossil fuels to be a potentially critical emergency resource at some point in that future.
If you believe there is a viable way for humanity to enjoy the hundreds of millions of years that it should be possible to enjoy on this amazing planet while consuming non-renewable resources I would love to hear the details of it.
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Stephen Baines at 09:23 AM on 31 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #13A
Previous post was addressed to Tom Curtis.
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Klapper at 09:20 AM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
@Tom Dayton #25:
"In this case we are concerned with the projections over periods of 30 years or more (the definition of "climate")."
To expand on my comparison of the CMIP5 mean to empirical data, I downloaded six model runs to compare to the last 30 year global SAT warming trend. Keep in mind these models use actuals up until 2000, so the model is not guessing CO2 output or any other input for the first 1/2 of the analysis period. I used rcp45 after looking at some of the emissions projections. Rcp45 has the highest sulphur emissions which given the rapid increase in emissions from China, also seems the most realistic. In any case all rcp scenarios use the same CO2 up until 2005. If there was more than one run (true for most chosen models), I used run 0 since I'm guessing that was the baseline run. The models used were CSIRO-Mk3, GISS-E2-R, GFDL-CM3, GFDL-ESM2M, HadGEM2-ES,and MPI-ESM-LR.
The results show a fairly wide range of projected trends, from a minimum of 0.22C/decade to a maximum of 0.38C/decade, with an average of 0.28C/decade, slightly higher than the CMIP5 ensemble mean of 0.26C/decade. Even using the HadCRUT4 "Hybrid" trend for the last 30 years to compare (0.19C/decade) the average of the model runs looks to have a warming rate that is too high by 40 to 50%, depending on whether you use my selection of 6, or the CMIP5 ensemble.
However, I think the models correlate well with global SAT if you end the 30 year trend analysis period in 2000. The next step is to plot a rolling 30 year trend comparison CMIP5 ensemble vs HadCRUT4 and look for bias in the models relative to major volcanic episodes, ENSO etc.
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jimlj at 09:20 AM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Andy, also look at http://kauai.coopwebbuilder.com/ a different Hawaiian utility.
It plans to generate 50 to 60% of electricity from renewable sources by 2025. Also, from http://kauai.coopwebbuilder.com/content/fuel-mix-information they've reduced fossil fuel generation by 6.5% from 2008 to 2012. In addition, the end of 2012 they brought on line a solar array that will supply 3% of the island's power, and in 2013 began construction of an array twice as big, with a third array planned.
Where they are is less important than how fast they are moving, and with Kauai that's pretty fast.
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Stephen Baines at 09:14 AM on 31 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #13A
Basically, I agree on both points. I try to use the term "established knowledge" to indicate statements that the community has adjuged can be treated as true based on the evidence. Individual scientists often use these statements as starting points in generating hypotheses or defining questions. They are open to question if enough evidence challenges them - but it has to be A LOT of evidence, as there is already a lot of evidence in support of them. I gave some examples that I think would be very hard to challenge given the current evidence.
In the article that Poster referred to, the basic tenets of AGW were accepted as given. To then imply that, by addressing a set of new questions premised by established knowledge, scientists necessarily undercut the premises upon which the new questions were based is tantamount to saying one cannot do science of any sort. It's extremely sloppy thinking, but I think it is not uncommon thinking.
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ranyl at 09:13 AM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
"All_ energy sources, coal, solar, nuclear, etc, have side effects - it's a matter of deciding which effects are more problematic. I would strongly argue in the comparison of solar and coal that the advantages of no carbon emissions _hugely_ gives the balance to solar, and I consider your solar objections more quibbling than anything else."
Hmm I never said use coal yet all I get is coal comparisons, and I have said coal isn't not good at all and I would wish we could stop using it all together tomorrow.
And how are electronics and PV recycled, what processes are involved, energy intensive and using multiple chemical processes and etching processes, and where do all the acids come from?
LINK
As for quibbling well no these are real concerns and there are choices to be made, power down as much as possible (quick, effective, easy), wind, hydro, marine or solar. At present solar needs gas to make or another heat source, make that electric and energy use goes up I suspect.
So take coal out of the equation and where does solar PV stack up and very worrying how little weight is put on toxic waste in LCA and the like and most by far published in renewable energy favorable journals by renewable energy research groups, and the Energy return vary from 0.8yr to 12year depending on energy mix and how you mix the figures up mainly, and so little accounting for carbon fluxes due to ecosystem disturbances from mining, toxic waste bits etc....Almost Like it doesn't matter and ignores how ecosystem disruptions tend to lead to carbon releases like shading soil?? (down respiration rates as cooler, but little plant growth so can only respire soil carbon so releases?? all very tricky to know and needs investigating further)
"You are ranting and sloganeering. Provide more citations that support your wild claims and less assertions from ignorance."
Yet I do reference everything I written and in the reference to Hawaii power it states Hawaii Island uses 22% Geothermal which seems a reasonable amount.
I also gave the Nature Climate Change reference about the non displacement of fossil fuels by renewables, I didn't make it up, and due to backup reserve increases when things aren't generating, balancing issues (York hypothesized) and yes when people think they are getting good green electricity they tend to sue more of it cos it good isn't it, so does tend to discourage power down as all feel good no problems electricity. Indeed it is even widely stated it improves the environment. And that is of course false how can a process requiring a multitude of manufacturing processes, lots of toxic substances to make (and they have to be manufactured and sourced also), and lots of heat (supplied by gas mainly at present) improve the environment?
Well only if compared to coal, but again to reiterate I think we shouldn't use coal at all.
"You appear to claim that all energy use must be curtailed. That will never happen. You must provide an alternate scenario for people to live."
Well I never said that, I said to get anywhere near the targets needed to prevent serious global warming a significant power down would be the cheapest, quickest, easiest and totally non environmentally harming way to do it. However that isn't to zero power, but trying to replace all power with renewable is going to costs lots of carbon and create lots of waste in the case of PV.
Is our power addiction worth this risk, I'd rather power down more than use PV and create a waste mountain or energy legacy (to recycle them needs lots of energy) to deal with and it could be a huge waste mountain.
And I wonder how many times they'll be able to be recycled, they only get 95% of the stuff out at present, mainly the glass (by crushing or milling and then heat), silicon by heat of chemical agents)m the toxic waste bits, hard to say what happens to them, but about 5% of something goes to landfill (http://www.pvcycle.org.uk/).
EVA (ethylene vinyl acetate) I wonder what will happen to that? And the other plastics in the PV's and what do they use to clean them in manufacture and what are the various retardants etc made from I wonder?
Therefore lets not compare to coal, as we all agree coal is so bad we shouldn't use it at all.
Then PV is a energy provision technology that requires very high temperatures, rare earth elements, plastics, treated films and membranes, storage technologies, lots of area, mining, lots of strong chemicals to etch and scribe, and then wiring, Inverters and several other aspects all associated with waste, no wonder the UK classified under the electronic waste this year, as PV are now WEEE, and people say there is no waste associated them.
So here are in a real and current environmentally emergency in terms of global warming and biodiversity losses, both of which are direct threats to human existence in themselves and rather than power down and put as little additional GHG into atmosphere and toxic waste into the environment as I would suggest is best approach, I am told to risk lots of additional GHG and create additional toxic waste issues.Moderator Response:[RH] Hot-linked URL. Please try to learn how to embed links instead of posting long URL's (second tab at the top of the comments box). Those long URL's break the page formatting of this website.
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Andy Skuce at 08:34 AM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Thanks,Michael. That was very helpful.
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michael sweet at 08:16 AM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Andy,
The link Ranyl provided shows electricity generated by the utility. Much solar power is generated by individuals with solar panels on their roofs. This shows up as reduced demand to the utility, not as power generated. According to this Scientific American article, about 2.6% of electricity in Hawaii is generated by solar systems. The utilities have stopped all current instalations of new solar claiming the grid cannot handle the load. They do not allow neighborhoods to return power to the grid during the day, only to shift electricity to nearby houses. The utilities do not want to be put out of business by cheaper power from individuals. There will undoubtedly be arguments about how the grid can be adjusted to accept electricity from individuals. There will likely be arguments for a long time. If solar becomes cheap enough, it will eventually win out.
Hawaii also has issues caused by the very small size of its electricity grids. Each island is a separate grid. This causes balancing issues in the event of a very large cloud coming over a single island.
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Tom Dayton at 07:39 AM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Matzdj, perhaps you think that we expect the actual temperature to fall exactly on the "ensemble mean" hindcast and forecast. But we don't, because that mean has far too little variability. In fact, we expect the temperature to have wild ups and downs as you see exemplified by the orange and blue skinny lines in Figure 2, because we expect there to be El Ninos and La Ninas, variation in solar radiation, volcanic eruptions, changes in human-produced aerosols due to varying economic activity, and a slew of random and semi-random factors. It would be downright shocking if actual temperature followed the ensemble mean, because that would mean all those variations in forcings and feedbacks were far less variable than we have observed so far. So we judge the match of the real temperature to the projected temperature by whether the real temperature falls within the range of the entire set of individual model runs. Even so, we expect the real temperature to fall within that range only most of the time, not all of the time. The range you see drawn as a shaded area around the ensemble mean usually is the 90% or 95% range, meaning the set of individual model runs falls within that shaded range 90% or 95% of the time. That means, by definition, we fully expect the real temperature to fall outside that range 10% or 5% of the time. So occasional excursions of the real temperature outside that range in no way invalidate the models, when "occasional" means 10% or 5% of the time.
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Tom Dayton at 07:26 AM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Matzdj, understandably you might misunderstand what a "hindcast" is. It is produced in the same way as a forecast: The model is started very long ago--far earlier than the first year you are trying to hindcast. The model results gyrate wildly for a while as the simulated years tick by, then settle down. Eventually the model gets around to the first year you are trying to hindcast. The model continues through the years until getting to the year in which the model is being run. As the model continues spitting out results year by year in exactly the same process it has been following since it was started up, the "hindcasts" become "forecasts" only because the years that the models are simulating switch from being earlier than this year to being in the future from this year. For example, if climatologists start running their model on their computer in the year 1998 (I'm guessing that's where the vertical green dashed line in Figure 2 falls), then the model's outputs for each of the simulated years 1960 through 1997 are labeled "hindcasts" and the outputs for the simulated years 1998 and later are labeled "forecasts." Other than that labeling, there are no differences in how the model outputs are produced or reported. There are no adjustments to the model to tune it to actual climate.
What is done on the basis of analyses of model versus past reality is, as Kevin C explained, "improvement" of the fundamental physics of the model. I put "improvement" in quotes, because the modelers try to improve the physics but do not always succeed. They base any such adjustments on fundamental physical evidence, not by simply reducing the influence of an effect because they think it will make the projections better match observations. For example, if the modelers change the modeled reflectivity of clouds, they do so based on empirical and theoretical evidence specifically about cloud reflectivity, rather than simply making clouds more reflective because the model overall showed more heating than happened in reality. The reason that Kevin C wrote that sometimes those adjustments help the overall model output's fit and sometimes they don't, is precisely because those adjustments are not merely tunings to force the model to fit the past-observed reality.
Even if the modelers do succeed in improving the model's realism in some particular, narrow way, the effect on the model's overall, ultimate projection of temperature might be worse. For example, suppose cloud reflectivity had been modeled as too low, but that incorrect bias toward too much warming was counteracting a bias toward too much cooling in the modeling of volcanic aerosols. If the modelers genuinely improve the modeling of cloud reflectivity but do not realize the too-cool bias in the modeling of volcanic aerosols, then by reducing the warming from clouds they reduce its counterbalance of the overcooling from volcanoes, and the model's overall projection of temperature from all factors becomes worse in the too-cool direction.
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Andy Skuce at 07:26 AM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Ranyl provided a link to a site from a Hawaiian power company that has an interesting and somewhat depressing table. About 88% of the electricity on the islands is generated by fossil fuels, mostly diesel, which is a very expensive way to generate electricity. Yet, only 0.1% of the electricity is solar-generated. You would think that with reports that say that PV electricity is becoming as cheap as coal or gas fired electricity in the continental US and Germany, solar electricity in sunny Hawaii, where it displaces expensive diesel electricity, would be a no-brainer. Hawaiian residential electricity prices are $0.37 kW/hr, right up there with the more expensive European prices and three times what they are in the rest of the USA. Why hasn't there been a massive rush to install PV in Hawaii?
These issues are usually more complex than they appear from a quick Googling, so if anybody has any insights into this, I would like to hear them.
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Andy Skuce at 07:08 AM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Ari commented in his piece that natural gas replacing coal increases warming in the short ter because of the reduction in aerosols from coal. This observation applies equally to renewables that replace coal, as well. Particulates are a huge health risk, indoors and out, killing millions every year. They will surely be, or should be, reduced regardless of any short-term effect they have on the climate. And coal is not the only villain: the OECD reckons that there are 40,000 deaths per year in France from diesel fumes alone. It's not quite fair to link the climate effects of particulate emissions reductions with natural gas usage.
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Tom Dayton at 05:55 AM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Matzdj, you wrote "Do any of the models actually fit the data or are we just saying that if we look at all the models their dispersion sort of covers a range wide enough that the real data fall within?"
Your question is ill-formed, because you have not specified what "actually" means. No prediction in any branch of science ever is perfect; it is valid (accurate and precise--those terms mean different things) only to some degree. Deciding whether a prediction ("projection" in our case) is sufficiently valid depends on combined probabilities and consequences of the various types of correct and incorrect actions that you could take based on your interpretation of the sufficiency of the prediction/projection.
In this case we are concerned with the projections over periods of 30 years or more (the definition of "climate"). We know that projections over shorter periods are going to be poor, especially when you get down to periods as short as ten years. But we also know that the range of those short-term projections is bound by physics ("boundary conditions"), thereby demarcating the most probable longer term (climate) range of short-term projections. Those squiggly thin orange lines in Figure 2 above are individual runs of models. The models differ from each other by design, most having been built by different people. Usually each model also is run multiple times, varying some factors as a way of sampling the range of their possible behaviors since we are confident only in a particular range of those behaviors. It's similar to running an experiment multiple times to prevent being misled by one particular random set of circumstances. The high and low extents of those squiggly orange lines represent a reasonable estimate of the bounds of the temperature.
Perhaps you are being misled by a belief that if we cannot predict short term temperature we cannot predict long term temperature. That is a common but incorrect belief. See the post "The Difference Between Weather and Climate," and Steve Easterbrook's balloon analogy on his Serendipity site.
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Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Matzdj - Climate models predict what the climate will do over the long haul given a particular set of forcings.
Climate models do not predict economic activity (or the GHGs and industrial aerosols produced), they do not predict volcanic eruptions, they do not predict the strength of the solar cycle, and while many of them include ENSO-like variations, they do not predict _when_ those El Nino or La Nina conditions will actually occur.
Various projections (what-if scenarios) have been run for the IPCC reports with reasonable estimates of those forcings variations, but it is entirely noteworthy that the CMIP3 and CMIP5 runs did not include the _particular_ set of variations over the last few years as actually occurred - that would have required precognition. And as per the opening post, when those _actual_ variations are taken into account rather than the before-hand projections, the climate models do indeed give a good reproduction of real climate behavior.
Which means that those models continue to be reasonably accurate representations of the Earths climate, and have not been invalidated in any way whatsoever.
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Tom Dayton at 02:46 AM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Matzdj, climate models are not intended for predicting the forcings (greenhouse gas emissions volcanic emissions, solar energy hitting the Earth, etc.), nor does anyone use them for that. Instead, climate models are intended for, and used for, "predicting" the climate response to one particular "scenario" of forcings. I put "predicting" in quotes, because the model run is not a genuine claim that that climate will come to pass, because there is no claim that that scenario of forcings will come to pass. Instead, the term "projecting" often is used instead of "predicting," to indicate that that climate is predicted to come to pass only if that particular scenario of forcings comes to pass. Those scenarios of forcings are the model "inputs" that other commenters have mentioned in their replies to you.
For each scenario of forcings that someone thinks might come to pass, that person can use those forcings as inputs to climate models to predict the resulting climate. To cover a range of possible scenarios, people run the climate models for each scenario to see the resulting range of possible climates. You can see that, for example, in Figure 4 in the post about Hansen's projections from 1981. You can also see it in the post about Hansen's projections from 1988. To learn about the forcings scenarios being used in the most recent IPCC reports, see the three-post series on the AR5 Representative Concentration Pathways.
To judge how well the climate models predict climate, we must input to those models the actual forcings for a given time period, so that we can then compare the models' predictions to the climate that actually happened in the real world where those particular forcings actually came to pass. That is the topic of the original post at the top of this whole comment stream.
To judge whether climate models will predict the climate in the future whose forcings we do not yet know, we must guess at what the forcing will be. We do that for a range of forcing scenarios. The bottom line is that every single remotely probable scenario of forcings yields predictions of dangerous warming.
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Honey, I mitigated climate change
CBDunkerson - Actually, space based dynamic generation (mirrors, boilers, and generators) has something of a mass advantage over PV, as the mirrors could be exceedingly light mylar or similar materials. It's been less frequently proposed mostly due to the need for maintaining moving parts - you can't just jump in a utility van and apply the wrench. Space based PV might benefit in mass from concentrator mirrors too, depending on whether any need for increased radiator mass would outweigh the reduction in panels.
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CBDunkerson at 02:14 AM on 31 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Michael Whittemore, either mirrors or PV panels could be directed to multiple ground based sites... though it would be much easier with PV panels because only the microwave emitter would need to be re-aligned rather than all of the mirrors. Also note that mirrors would effectively be creating a giant 'heat ray' from space focused on a small point on the ground, which could be a problem for birds and aircraft. Meanwhile, PV could be transmitted down harmlessly as microwaves over a wider area. Finally, the atmosphere (and clouds) block sunlight much more effectively than they do microwaves... so solar PV panels in space would actually produce more electricity than the same panels on the surface. The mirror approach could gain similar benefits by putting the steam turbines in orbit too, but getting that amount of mass (not to mention the water) into space would be prohibitively expensive.
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Kevin C at 01:07 AM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
But that's the wrong uncertainty. The uncertainty in the trend arises from the derivation of the temperature series from linearity. The uncertainty we need for that comparison is the uncertainty due to internal variability, which will generally be larger because it also includes differences in trend. There is also doubt as to whether model spread is a good measure of this.
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Honey, I mitigated climate change
Michael Whittemore - I believe that most space-based solar power proposals include using laser or microwave wireless power transmission to Earth; extension cords are sadly not practical with todays technology :) Power density would be considerably higher, given the lack of atmosphere, clouds, or night.
I suspect that using satellites as mirror concentrators would be less cost effective than just larger collection areas on the surface.
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Klapper at 00:03 AM on 31 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
@scaddenp #19:
"The models are good at predicting what 30 year trends will be however."
The current HadCRUT4 SAT trend for the last 30 years is 0.17C/decade +/- .05. The CMIP5 ensemble SAT trend for the same period (1984 to 2013 inclusive) is 0.26C/decade, which is outside the 2 sigma range of the empirical data. I checked the CMIP5 ensemble for both 80 to -90 and 90 to -90 (pole to pole) to see if the leaving the very high arctic out would improve, but it makes essentially no difference (0.26 compared to 0.25).
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Michael Whittemore at 23:34 PM on 30 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
CBDunkerson my understanding is that it would take a large amount of panels to be put in space to generate enough energy but with mirrors they could focus on different power plants around the world and not just solar but the land based mirror ones too that generate steam.
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Honey, I mitigated climate change
Ranyl - PV, like any piece of electronics, does have manufacturing waste which must be managed, appropriately recycled, etc. As in the electronics industry, proper monitoring and regulation is necessary. As to coal - damage to watersheds and water supplies, the CO2 and greenhouse effects thereof that are at the center of the climate change discussion, and the particulate and even radioactive release of radon and other elements (with emissions being a continuous output, not just a one time manufacturing cost).
_All_ energy sources, coal, solar, nuclear, etc, have side effects - it's a matter of deciding which effects are more problematic. I would strongly argue in the comparison of solar and coal that the advantages of no carbon emissions _hugely_ gives the balance to solar, and I consider your solar objections more quibbling than anything else.
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michael sweet at 21:47 PM on 30 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Ranyl,
I quoted from your sources to show that solar did not have the problems you claimed. You respond with more unsupported wild claims You have provided exactly zero quotes to support your wild claims. Your assertions about solar are false. Your claim that Hawaii uses extensive geothermal must be supported by a cite. I have seen extensive data supporting the claim that Hawaii has reduced its fossil fuel use with solar. What do you thnk happens to fossiil fuel use when wind generates more energy? Do consumers use more power? Be serious, of course fossil fuel use goes down. You appear to claim that all energy use must be curtailed. That will never happen. You must provide an alternate scenerio for people to live.
You are ranting and sloganeering. Provide more citations that support your wild claims and less assertions from ignorance.
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