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davidnewell at 03:29 AM on 7 November 2013Climate Science History - interactive style
@ One Planet Only Forever.
Right on; Agreed. The last 6 decades have seen the increasingly "effective" development of "anti-life" mechanisms, but the "seeds" were (IMHO) planted during the Renaissance, when the scientific deductive reasoning "skillset" was added to the "tools" of human development, along with an attitude towards "nature" that it was separate, and needed to have it's secrets ripped out by whatever means necessary.
I think this latter pont was explicitly state by Thomas Bacon in some diatribe or another.
Speculatively, in regard to your expression of the need for a "new age of enlightenment", I agree as well. There is at least a distant cause for hope that this may occur, since it rquires a "step back" into seeing the Creation as Holy (caps provided for clarity), combined with an appreciation that "this is all we got", and (most significantly) We are Part of It. Which your user name infers.
The fact that there are "early adopters" beginniing to express the same thing, constitutes a means for hope.
Regards..
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chriskoz at 00:44 AM on 7 November 2013Oceans heating up faster now than in the past 10,000 years, says new study
CBDunkerson & Dave123,
I concur. We cannot make a conclusion about the total OHC based on a study from a single ocean temp proxy, even if that proxy suggests the local water temperature fell by as much as 2degrees during Holocene. Local variability of water T may seem to be higher than global average but it shoul not be indicative of global conditions. Therefore, I would not suggest the "disconnect between ocean cooling pre-1950 and rising sea levels over the same period" as barry@1 did. Besides, SLR does not depend on water temp only - a study about SLR should take into account other factors, like melting/re-freezing of icesheets, postglacial isostatic rebound.
However the conclusion than present rate of T change is unprecedented can be concluded from one proxy as in this study; moreover the current rate (about 0.18degree per century) is global. So, this globaly averaged, therefore less varying change is higher than the change recorded at the subject proxy (2degree/10ka = 0.02/century).
Not only MWP has been denounced in recent research as misnomer (because the warming was likely not universal, therfore MCA would be better name), the same applies to LIA. For example, Mike Lockwood concluded that LIA, commonly thought to be caused by Maunder Minimum, was likely a local Arctic dipole phenomenon. Mike describes his study of LIA in this blog post, written in response to silly misinterpreting spinoffs.
So, there is growing evidence, that AGW in last century is unique to Holocene. Its uniqueness evidenced by unprecedented rate of change in all climate indicators. When we look at the rate of change, AGW stands out easily. Comparing the absolute values of said indicators (i.e. arguing if MWP was warmer) does make lesser sense because AWG will not stad out beyond the uncertainties.
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skymccain at 18:09 PM on 6 November 2013Climate Science History - interactive style
Very well done. Thanks for all the hard work.
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One Planet Only Forever at 14:39 PM on 6 November 2013Climate Science History - interactive style
nrgmahtahs,
I would suggest that a better basis for the discussion, and a book, would be a presentation of all the unsustainable aspects of "industrialization and mass consumption".
The last 6 decades or so of human history (the life's work of many), will be seen as a damaging moment in the history of humanity, a moment of stupendously damaging unsustainable excess by the most fortunate, and those desperately trying to be more like those most fortunate.
Hopefully, common sense, civility and decency will prevail. And sites like this are very helpful. They provide ways to help people better understand what is going on regarding one of the many important issues highlighting the unsustainbilty of the current global economy.
We are (need to be) on the brink of a "new age of enlightenment". The current popular attitudes and pursuits of pleasure and profit are not leading to a sustainable better future for all life on this one planet we have the potential to enjoy for a few billion years. A robust diversity of life, with all humans living sustainably as part of it, is the only sustainable future on this planet, and the only economy that can sustainably grow.
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Bernard J. at 11:08 AM on 6 November 2013How we discovered the 97% scientific consensus on man-made global warming
I'll apologise in advance if the reference to John Howard skirts too closely to the issue of being political, but today he's come out as a denier of the need to act ugently (and indeed at all, in all likelihood) in response to human-caused climate change:
It seems that the conservative arm of Australian politics is determined to go with the meme that the science is wrong, and just as determined to drag the country and the planet down a course of perpetual inaction based on this ideology.We have a profound problem in our country when even 100% agreement amongst professional scientists would be insufficient to sway the people who have their hands of the steering wheel of the nation. Something is profoundly broken in our government (whether current or recently-former) when an untrained lay person associated with vested interests would rather trust his ideologically-based "instinct" than experts who have a far better understanding of the subject.
I'm not sure that anything could convince these people until the country and the planet are rendered essential ruined for habitation by Western human society - and even then it might be a Hy-Brazil scenario.
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Dave123 at 09:50 AM on 6 November 2013Oceans heating up faster now than in the past 10,000 years, says new study
Having read the full paper and seen an interview with authors, it's clear that you can't make a global statement about the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) from a single site. Various non-synchronous changes in weather patterns were observed over several hundred "Medeival years". The PAGES2K consortium, using many more proxies concludes that there was no synchronous warming of the globe during the extended period. For there to be warming at one spot in the Pacific during that period then isn't remarkable. The authors (as well as other climate scientists) do call for more studies, and are specific about the kinds of locations needed to gather the data.
Please remember that the politics of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) is that supposedly current warming happened before during Medieval times, so the present warming is unremarkable. Present warming is distinguished from the MCA because it is global and synchronous. While much may be learned from greater details about the MCA, including any relationship between that region of the pacific and European Climate, and may promote broader understanding it is not foundational for the existence of current warming being unique.
The politics of the MWP also have a lot to do with the inflammatory charge that there this was disappeared for nefarious reasons by some climate scientists. My examination of the research record hasn't shown me any paleoclimatological work suggesting prior to (Mann 1998) a global, synchronous MWP. None. People leaped to convenient conclusions based on local, Northern European data. There was no MWP to disappear.
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CBDunkerson at 05:18 AM on 6 November 2013Oceans heating up faster now than in the past 10,000 years, says new study
franklefkin, where exactly in that abstract do you see conclusions that the MWP & LIA were global in scope? Indeed, how would they even have arrived at such global conclusions based on their study of just a small portion of the western Pacific ocean?
As to why highlight the ocean warming rate rather than the total... the rate is more than an order of magnitude outside the range of natural variability over the past 10,000 years. That's a noteworthy finding which tells us something about what is going on. The conclusion that total OHC is currently lower than at other points in the past 10,000 years, combined with the unprecedentedly high rate of warming, would actually suggest that we will be seeing a great deal more ocean warming (and thus sea level rise) in the upcoming decades than had been projected to date.
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franklefkin at 05:00 AM on 6 November 2013Oceans heating up faster now than in the past 10,000 years, says new study
This is the title of the post
If the latest research is correct, our oceans are heating up much faster now than they have in the past 10,000 years.
Yet this is the abstract from the paper
Observed increases in ocean heat content (OHC) and temperature are robust indicators of global warming during the past several decades. We used high-resolution proxy records from sediment cores to extend these observations in the Pacific 10,000 years beyond the instrumental record. We show that water masses linked to North Pacific and Antarctic intermediate waters were warmer by 2.1 ± 0.4°C and 1.5 ± 0.4°C, respectively, during the middle Holocene Thermal Maximum than over the past century. Both water masses were ~0.9°C warmer during the Medieval Warm period than during the Little Ice Age and ~0.65° warmer than in recent decades. Although documented changes in global surface temperatures during the Holocene and Common era are relatively small, the concomitant changes in OHC are large.
I find it striking that one point of the paper, one that doesn't even make the abstract, becomes the focus of this post. This post does not even mention the conclusion that the MWP and LIA were global in scope.
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nrgmahtahs at 02:56 AM on 6 November 2013Climate Science History - interactive style
Dare we open history's scariest can of worms: human evolution, purposeful fire, real horsepower, big industry and big population layed out for endless discussion by liberal and libertarian alike? Could be fun if well managed. Go for it Paul and then write a book..
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jdixon1980 at 02:49 AM on 6 November 2013Oceans heating up faster now than in the past 10,000 years, says new study
On the subject of the warming oceans as an indicator that the apparent "pause" in global warming is a phenomenon limited to atmospheric surface temperatures over land, can anyone point me to a plot of recorded TOA average energy imbalance versus time, assuming there is such a thing? I find myself bringing up energy imbalance a lot in arguments with people who claim that global warming has stopped, because if there is more heat coming in than leaving, of course the Earth has to be warming as a whole, even if it is not warming uniformly.
I've been wondering why the primary focus of the discussion always seems to be on temperatures, when the global energy imbalance over time should relatively flat compared to temperature data over time, and thus simpler to interpret. Is a problem with that approach (other than the relatively short satellite record) that energy imbalance is harder to directly measure, so we don't have robust data for it? Do we not have enough satellites measuring incoming and outgoing radiation to cover enough geographic data points to extrapolate an average with a high degree of confidence? Maybe that would take so many satellites that it would be grossly impractical?
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Paul D at 01:35 AM on 6 November 2013Climate Science History - interactive style
jdixon1980
Sounds like the timeline is doing what it was designed to do!
I think people often get centuries wrong because the 1800s are the 19th century and the 1900s are the 20th and so on. It took me a long time to get my head around that.
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Douglas Houck at 01:21 AM on 6 November 2013Hans Rosling:
200300 years of global change
I believe people are overestimating the importance of environmental groups, NGOs etc, on the building of future nuclear power plants. Here in the US, current federal policy is to encourage nuclear power through the Nuclear Power 2010 Program and the Energy Policy Act. I'm not aware of any proposed nuclear power plant being delayed and/or denied permits/licenses because of environmental groups, etc. It's solely ecomonics and that is with large federal loan guarentees that made the Vogtle nuclear power plant complex econmoically viable. The first US nuclear power plant to be licensed in over 30 years.
Laying the blame for nuclear energy's demise at the feet of the environmentalist is simply wrong. Here in GA, there is no incentive for solar (one of three states where solar is currently ecomonically viable ) as it would undercut the economics of the Vogtle plant, which got a sweetheart deal in allowing Georgia Power to raise electricy rates before the plant comes on-line.
I agree with #16 CBDunkerson that the take away from the article is there is an enomous amount of work and effort still to do with solar and wind so lets get going, and not that solar and wind will never amount to anything so lets do nuclear. Whatever role nuclear will have, will be based on nuclear energy's own merits, and little to do with what various groups think about it. It is costs and an entire country's desires, not some minority groups beliefs. that is going to set a country's energy policy.
So let's get going. -
jdixon1980 at 00:58 AM on 6 November 2013Climate Science History - interactive style
Oh never mind there he is - thought he was early 19th century for some reason.
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jdixon1980 at 00:57 AM on 6 November 2013Climate Science History - interactive style
Very cool! But where is Arrhenius?
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Paul D at 23:32 PM on 5 November 2013Climate Science History - interactive style
Note: you might find the timeline doesn't move left or right if your browser has its zoom feature set greater or lesser than the normal default setting. In Firefox you can use the zoom reset option, but you might also have to restart the browser.
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CBDunkerson at 23:25 PM on 5 November 2013Hans Rosling:
200300 years of global change
Andy, I just pulled figures from Wikipedia. Looks like the solar values came from British Petroleum and the wind power figures from BTM consult. As you noted, numbers can vary widely based on who is doing the analysis and how they look at it... but I don't think there is any equitable way of doing so which still yields total wind & solar contribution of less than 1%. If you are going to look at total energy consumption then solar hot water heating should be included. Even without that your figure from 2010 had the Wind/Solar/Biomass/Geothermal, which is really mostly just Wind, at 0.9%. Global solar electrical generation has more than tripled since then and wind generation is up more than 33%.
That said, yes Rosling's point about a lot being left to do is valid... but the 'less than 1%' creates the impression that all this talk about huge growth of wind and solar has amounted to nothing and they will never provide a significant contribution. Instead, we've gone from less than 0.1% of global electricity generation from these sources to over 3% in the past decade. It seems likely that by 2020 we'll be getting at least 20% of our electricity from wind and solar. If, as I expect, solar costs fall below fossil fuel costs for most of the planet (i.e. everything not near the poles) then we'll see a wholesale conversion. Hydro, wind, geothermal, and other options will be cheaper in some areas, but solar works nearly everywhere... once it is cost effective.
As to nuclear, I'm not against it per se. It just doesn't seem plausible to me. Renewable power is much larger, growing much faster, becoming cheaper as nuclear gets more expensive, and has a massive edge on perception. The letter you cite argues that we shouldn't ignore any low carbon option. That's reasonable, but may not be true if time and money spent pushing for nuclear could have instead resulted in solar and wind gains greater than would ever be possible from nuclear. The letter authors state, "While it may be theoretically possible to stabilize the climate without nuclear power, in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power", but provide no explanation of how they reach that conclusion. To me it looks as if 'in the real world' there is no chance of nuclear power playing a substantial role in climate stabilization. It is too expensive and takes too long to develop. Global nuclear power generation has grown at a snails pace for the last quarter century. At the current rate it would take hundreds of years to replace fossil fuels with nuclear. Even if you cut safety and permitting requirements the high costs would prevent rapid expansion... and the inevitable next disaster would shut the whole thing down.
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barry1487 at 22:57 PM on 5 November 2013Oceans heating up faster now than in the past 10,000 years, says new study
"What can we take away from this?"
It's a reminder that while the big picture may be clear, there are still large gaps in knowledge for the details. For the genuinely curious, the apparent disconnect between ocean cooling pre-1950 and rising sea levels over the same period is another fascinating dichotomy that must be addressed on the road to understanding. Those with more vested interests will probably interpret it according to their predilections.
On the assumption that the proxy data is completely accurate, it's fun to imagine the physics required to make the contradiction coherent. Slow feedbacks? Some processes that drew the heat away from the layer investigated specifically for that period? Or will we discover that the data is unreliable?
As a novice, one of the best experiences I have of science is at the cusp of wonder. Praise this internet thingy that brings the cutting edge to our monitors. Thanks to you for pointing out the paper.
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Doug Bostrom at 14:46 PM on 5 November 2013Hans Rosling:
200300 years of global change
Andy: ...neglected the role of solar water heating, especially in China...
Indeed! As of the end of last year, China has about 258km^2 of domestic collector surface area. Run the numbers and it's a lot of KwE.
Fortunately, unlike so many other places (USA, we're looking at you) China's solar hot water industry isn't run like a precious designer boutique. After all, it's just more plumbing, for cripe's sake.
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grindupBaker at 12:44 PM on 5 November 20132013 SkS Weekly Digest #44
You know, of course, that Dr. Frankenstein was an accomplished scientist and the "monster's" name was Bert (I'm sure it's "Bert" at the medium-low confidence level).
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Snnsx at 12:41 PM on 5 November 2013The Sun Has Cooled, So Why Are The Deep Oceans Warming?
The one factor missing in all this talk about the Skin Layer is that it is a System which contains a myriad of Life. It is known. for example, that lifeless ( distilled ) water and air transpires at a vastly decreased rate ( about 100x)
It seems very likely that the processes of long-wave radiation, surface mixing, etc will be fundamentally altered by the mix of organisms at the boundary, just as transpiration is.
These surface Lifeforms could, in turn, be affected by factors such as pH, the presence of pollutants such as Oil, and Plastic objects, and the status of Lifeforms slightly lower down (e.g. krill ).
Much to think about.
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Rob Nicholls at 08:34 AM on 5 November 2013US school infiltration attempt by Heartland’s IPCC Parody
MA Rodger @37. Thanks for the link. I do love the BBC's idea of balance. Perhaps I'm naive but I think a lot of the poor coverage and the false balance is because of utter cluelessness rather than a sinister agenda. (I've noticed a lurch to the right at the BBC under the current government, but I'm not sure whether the climate change coverage is any worse than before. The reporting of "climategate", before the change of government, was abysmal.) It saddens me because the IPCC pretty much hands any reporter a very solid primer in the science on a plate, and yet it appears that few journalists who feel qualified to report on climate change even bother to read the IPPC's reports.
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Andy Skuce at 06:11 AM on 5 November 2013Thawing Permafrost: The speed of coastal erosion in Eastern Siberia has nearly doubled
william: I wrote a four-part SkS series on this, starting here. Part two; Part three; Part four.
Indeed there are large deposits of methane clathrate formed from fossil methane under and within permafrost. However, those deposits are buried at a few hundred metres depth and it will take millennia before any anthropogenic surface heat penetrates to those depths. Rocks are good insulators. Any downward propagating heat is also absorbed by melting the ice in the thick permafrost that overlies the hydrates, which also slows the process.
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Andy Skuce at 05:56 AM on 5 November 2013Hans Rosling:
200300 years of global change
CBD: some references for those figures would be useful. Rosling was referring to energy not electricity generation. I think that a stronger criticism of his numbers would be that he neglected the role of solar water heating, especially in China, which would probably put the percentage of solar and wind comfortably over 1%. I am guessing that he was referring to wind plus solar electricity generation (PV and concentrated solar thermal) when he talked about solar+wind and did not include solar hot water. The figure below comes from the document Renewables 2012 Global Status Report.
It is for 2010, but shows less than 1% of final global energy consumption coming from wind, solar, geothermal and biomass electricity generation.
There are also problems in accounting for primary energy consumption that may in some cases underestimate the contribution of non combustible energy sources. There is an Appendix to Chapter 1 of this GEA report (starts on page 141) that discusses this difficulty. depending on the convention chosen, the contribution of nuclear, hydro and non-biofuel renewables may vary by a factor of three.
Note that the figures in the chart above are for 2005, "other renewables" share of the energy mix has grown since then.
Rosling's point about the popular miscoception about solar and wind's contribution was that: We think we have done more than we have done and we haven't understood how much we have to do. That point still stands and the massive task that lies ahead in decarbonizing our economy in the face of increasing energy demand suggests strongly to me that we cannot afford to abandon any option, no matter how expensive and unpopular they may be today. All of the low-carbon options are expensive and unpopular. I am sympathetic to the arguments in the recent letter written by Caldeira, Hansen, Emanuel and Wigley. But it is worth noting that they don't mention costs.
As for the relative costs of nuclear, biofuels, fossil fuels with CCS, wind and solar, I am suspicious of all claims made by the various lobby groups and I am searching for a balanced analysis.
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william5331 at 04:26 AM on 5 November 2013Thawing Permafrost: The speed of coastal erosion in Eastern Siberia has nearly doubled
Permafrost is likely to be impermeable to any methane seeping up from deep deposits of coal, oil and rotting vegetation. Any place where there is a crack in the permafrost, methane rising through the crack will meet moisture and form methane clathrate, sealing the crack. I wonder how much methane is sitting under this cap of permafrost all over the Arctic just waiting for it to disintegrate. Perhaps the methane bomb is a real possibility after all.
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Doug Bostrom at 03:32 AM on 5 November 2013Climate Science History - interactive style
Lovely!
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Doug Bostrom at 03:15 AM on 5 November 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #44C
John, I'm not sure how I'd turn all this into an article with a scientific perspective. It seems solidly in the province of policy and politics. Maybe better for Planet3.0?
Moderator Response:[JH] SkS has been know to publich scholarly articles on the policies and politics surrounding the issue of manmade climate change and what to so about it. You could draft such an article and see how it fares in the internal review process. As they say, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."
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Alexandre at 03:08 AM on 5 November 2013Climate Science History - interactive style
Great resource. SkS again providing new great tools for scientific litteracy. Keep up the good work!
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Doug Bostrom at 03:04 AM on 5 November 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #44C
Nice exploration, Chris.
Defanging the jobs fright appeal is needful work. Let alone that it's annoying to hear people who are dead set on employing the absolute minimum necessary pairs of hands trying to cast their activities as some kind of philanthropic effort, the jobs argument seems to shut off a lot of higher brain functions.
1,800 jobs in exchange for being allowed to empty a enormous sewer pipe into the future of a few years' hence? It's just not worth it, particularly when there are other investments that could made to employ the same number of people on a stable basis.
Pursuing the net effects of Kevin's Corner as viewed from the perspective of a responsible actor (Denmark), if we are prepared to accept that the benefits of 1,800 jobs are not worth destroying an entire nation's mitigation scheme, we're naturally led to ask why Denmark should sacrifice itself for the benefit of investors? I'm not sure of the equity arrangement of Kevin's Corner but it's going to fall along the lines of a few people making a whole lot of money, or a lot of people making a little money.
Closely held or publicly traded, Kevin's Corner at the end of the day is a scheme for enrichment that depends on causing the net effect of ruining the mitigation scheme of a whole country. Ignoring sanctimonious talk of jobs, Kevin's Corner is going to waste a tremendous amount of money, for the benefit of a tiny population.
There's a fundamental tension here that's quite dire.
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MA Rodger at 01:53 AM on 5 November 2013US school infiltration attempt by Heartland’s IPCC Parody
What was it I said @12?
"...these "experts" (Idso & Ball) do not know the difference between "forcing" and "feedback"..." It seems I am not the first to come to such a conclusion. Thirty-one years ago, somebody wrote - "Idso's interpretation of empirical radiation measurements confuses primary forcing and the amplifying feedbacks engendered by that forcing." p20. Carbon Dioxide - A second Assessment 1982. Report of the C02/Climate Review Panel to the Climate Research Committee of the Climate Board/Committee on Atmospheric Sciences and the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee of the Climate Board.
Moderator Response:[JH] Suggest that you draft an article on this matter.
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CBDunkerson at 00:30 AM on 5 November 2013Hans Rosling:
200300 years of global change
Actually, I doubt that 'all of the above' is going to be the eventual solution. Even if we ignore nuclear's massive perception problem, it is now the most expensive of the major power generation methods. Coal, natural gas, petroleum, hydro, wind, and solar are all cheaper than nuclear.
Global nuclear power hit a plateau after Chernobyl. Fukushima killed efforts at a revival. It seems inevitable that the falling cost of alternatives will now lead to declining nuclear power. Nuclear can't compete against cheaper, cleaner, less controversial alternatives. The only thing it has going for it at this point is steady output... but distributed generation, improved power grids, and energy storage are already starting to erase the supposed 'intermittency problem' of wind and solar.
Nuclear could have been a viable path, but its time has passed. In 50 years most electricity will be generated by wind, solar, and/or some 'new' technology which isn't currently viable.
BTW, Rosling's statistic seems out of date. In 2010 wind was 2.5% of global electricity generation and solar 0.14%. Those figures are now roughly 3.35% for wind and 0.55% for solar. Even if he was referring to total energy consumption (e.g. transportation fuel, burning wood for heat, et cetera), rather than electricity generation, Wind+Solar have still been over 1% for several years now.
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chriskoz at 21:46 PM on 4 November 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #44C
doug,
Further to your essey: will an extra 30TgC/yr emissions from the subject coal mine count as Australain emissions in the global budget? I bet it won't. It'll end up to be counted as China's budget where this coal is likely to be burned. And Greg Hunt (or alike successor) will be arguing Australia's own emissions are miniscule comparing to e.g. China's so any local mitigation efforts won't make any difference to GW. Obviously, that's wrong on at least two grounds: 1) Australian coal is the root cause; 2) Australia is likely to import lots of goods manufactured in China that will bear the heavy energy/carbon footprint. Only the usage and disposal footprint of those goods will count as Australian emissions, which mey be miniscule. However, we end up with the full benefit of consumption of cheap chinese, CTax-free products. Having recently learned about Greg Hunt's priorities and methods of scientific consultaton (by reading "convenient" fragments of wikipedia) I expect more projects like that to be aproved in the near future.
To remedy that situation, the C pollution tax should be aplied at the source (a mine) as Jim Hansen has been advocating for decades. With current Ctax/ETS schemes, things do not work as expected, because the biggest coal mine in the world can enjoy as profitable operation as ever with bypassing the taxes by exporting coal and then importing the resulting goods.
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Doug Bostrom at 17:25 PM on 4 November 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #44C
Thinking a little further about Denmark versus Kevin's Corner, it's a shame that Denmark's entire mult-decade plan to mitigate their own climate change impact should be nullified at a stroke.
Speaking a little bit tongue in cheek...
Considering that Australia's new mine will be entirely fatal to Denmark's climate change mitigation efforts, residents of Denmark should consider putting 1,800 people in Australia on the dole, with the proviso that Australia cancel the proposed mine. For that matter, why put them on the dole? The 1,800 could be employed doing something useful and less destructive. 1,800 extra specialized forestry firefighters would certainly come in handy, for instance.
The bribe to Australia to save their climate mitigation strategy could easily be justified by Denmark, considering that otherwise every krone spent on mitigation is about to be wasted by Australia.
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Doug Bostrom at 16:38 PM on 4 November 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #44C
Here's a thought-provoking newsy item:
Green groups explore legal action to halt massive Queensland coalmine
Carbon emissions from coal mined at Kevin’s Corner are estimated at 58m tonnes a year – more than the entire annual emissions of Denmark. Construction is set to start in 2015, with the first coal mined in 2018.
GVK said in a statement: “In a timely and considered decision, the minister finely balanced the protection of environment with the need for economic investment and job creation.”
More info at the link.
The thought provoked for me: how many jobs are created by adding the CO2 emissions of an entire country to the burden faced by the atmosphere? Boosters of the project say appromimately 1,800 workers will be needed in the initial phases of opening the mine.
Meanwhile, the population of Denmark is about 5.6 million.
So, promoters of the Kevin's Corner mine are asking us to accept that 1,800 jobs are worth duplicating the pollution footprint of 5.6 million people.
That's a big ask. The plan does not seem like a scalable way to earn economic prosperity. If the approximately 2,800,000 wage earners in Denmark were to be employed using the same scheme as in Kevin's Corner, would the impact still be worth it? A back of the envelope calculation suggests that the result would be to double the CO2 pollution load of the entire planet's human population.
It's a sad thing, when one country's good luck is everybody else's bad luck. Australia is fortunate to be sitting on rich deposits of coal, but that means bad luck for the rest of us. Bad luck for Australia, too, a little bit down the road, perhaps even before the coal's gone and the jobs with it. What's the plan then?
Moderator Response:[JH] It wouldn't take much for you to transform this comment into a log post article. Please take the time to do so.
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wili at 16:10 PM on 4 November 2013Thawing Permafrost: The speed of coastal erosion in Eastern Siberia has nearly doubled
Agnostic, is this some of what you were talking about going on in Alaska:
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AlaskaScienceForum/article/far-north-permafrost-cliff-one-kind
100 meter tall cliff of 50,000 year old Yedoma permafrost thawing.
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vrooomie at 14:00 PM on 4 November 2013US school infiltration attempt by Heartland’s IPCC Parody
"If one crank gets to speak, why not all of 'em? Why can't we hear about the "Electric Universe" when cosmology is discussed?"
Let's not leave out the phlogiston, and Jeans' ether of space. Fair is fair....:D
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Doug Bostrom at 05:08 AM on 4 November 2013US school infiltration attempt by Heartland’s IPCC Parody
As an object lesson perhaps it would be good to begin demanding that the BBC occasionally air viewpoints from HAARP enthusiasts during weather forecasts, or Erik von Daniken fans during segments on archaeology?
If one crank gets to speak, why not all of 'em? Why can't we hear about the "Electric Universe" when cosmology is discussed?
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wili at 03:22 AM on 4 November 2013Thawing Permafrost: The speed of coastal erosion in Eastern Siberia has nearly doubled
Thanks for the addition. Perhaps someone can help with maths and related info.
So 88 to 800 tons per kilometer per year. I eyeball about 3000 k of coast for East Siberia (though as Ag points out, this dynamic is happening all around the Arctic Ocean). 80% of the permafrost is ice. So lets say something a bit lower than that is the amount of carbon, 10-15% perhaps. So about 10-100 tons C/k/y times 3000 k of coast makes 30-300 thousand tons carbon per year now. Doubling every four years gives about 1- 10 millon tons of carbon per year within 20 years without any deceleration (or acceleration). Still quite a few orders of magnitude below the ~10 billion tons C released into the atmosphere currently through burning of ff and other activities. But every bit hurts. And of course it is likely not to stop there. But I may be off in some of my assumptions (or maths) above.
The last bit also seems to imply that the carbon will mostly stay in the water, hence contrbuting to local acidification. Is that accurate. Wouldn't considerable quantities be released into the atmosphere, too?
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John Hartz at 23:40 PM on 3 November 2013Thawing Permafrost: The speed of coastal erosion in Eastern Siberia has nearly doubled
Note: My initial posting of the OP inadvertently omitted the final two paragraphs of the news release. They have been added.
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MA Rodger at 21:29 PM on 3 November 2013US school infiltration attempt by Heartland’s IPCC Parody
Rob Nicholls @36.
It wouldn't be so bad if it were solely those "who is completely new to climate science." But it's not.
The BBC recently gave Bob Carter free reign on Radio 4's World At One programme. Complaints were made. One said that this is like "the equivalent of giving a stork the right to reply on every appearance by Prof Robert Winston." The BBC's Head of Programmes' reply was "I believe this completely misrerpresents our approach wich is to give airtime on occasion to sceptics." (Their stress.) The BBC is saying that because not one denier appeared earlier in the day on Radio 4, the likes of Bob Carter is allowed to run riot on the mid-day news.
The BBC said the interviewer "challenged him (Carter) about his credibility comparing the NIPCC's work" with the IPCC's work. Challenged? Here is the transcript (less the shorter following interview with Peter Stott who was asked by the interviewer to explain the IPCC's credibility and then challenged over the 'pause' and on Himilayan glaciers). And Peter Stott was unable to reply to Carter's nonsense because he wasn't allowed to know what Cater had said. (Due to "technical reasons", apparently.)
So demonstrating the complete lack of veracity of the NIPCC reports, perhaps by debunking some exemplar section, does look like a useful peoject. That is, unless you actually do believe storks leave babies under goosberry bushes.
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Rob Painting at 18:38 PM on 3 November 2013How we discovered the 97% scientific consensus on man-made global warming
I missed the original SkS forum discussion on this blog post. A very enjoyable read it was.
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wili at 14:07 PM on 3 November 2013Thawing Permafrost: The speed of coastal erosion in Eastern Siberia has nearly doubled
So, is this dynamic included in the models? Is burning of the permafrost, as has been seen recently in Alaska, included? Is warming of the area from tree growth included? How much can plant growth offset or dampen these other 'positive' feedbacks?
And why is the melt rate at the northern tip of that island so much higher than elsewhere?
The areas studies are near the Lena river basin, where permafrost can reach about a mile in depth. What happens when the sea waters start hitting those kinds of deep deposits?
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Riduna at 14:06 PM on 3 November 2013Thawing Permafrost: The speed of coastal erosion in Eastern Siberia has nearly doubled
Erosion on a similar scale has been reported from the North and North-West coasts of Alask, from similar causes, notably the loss of protective sea ice.
Which begs the questions: Is this thawing evident along the coastline east of the Laptev Sea and what is the likeliood of increased carbon emissions from this thawing?
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Rob Honeycutt at 12:04 PM on 3 November 2013How we discovered the 97% scientific consensus on man-made global warming
Thumbs upped FB's comment. :-)
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Doug Bostrom at 11:57 AM on 3 November 2013How we discovered the 97% scientific consensus on man-made global warming
By happy chance, this month's AAPOR Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology is largely dedicated to some important problems brought up by Tom. The current issue is built around an extensive and fascinating "task force" report on non-probability sampling, followed by illuminating comments and then a rejoinder by members of the group producing the report.
Thanks to the necessary background information provided throughout the whole discussion, in sum the November issue of JSSM provides a rich cornucopia of references to both non-probability sampling methods as well as more traditional methods.
J Surv Stat Methodol (2013) 1 (2): 89.
doi: 10.1093/jssam/smt018 -
The Sun Has Cooled, So Why Are The Deep Oceans Warming?
grindupBaker - I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you, in particular with "...that same skin layer temperature increase must increase warming to the atmosphere". The 'skin layer' is less than a millimeter thick, almost no thermal mass to speak of. The ongoing warm/cooling of the oceans and atmosphere is determined by the rate of energy transfer, not the instantaneous temperature of any component. And the thermal gradient, the temperature difference top/bottom of the ocean surface has a direct bearing on that rate - if the gradient is decreased for any reason, whether higher exchanges with deep water or with a warm air mass (for that matter, cloud changes), the rate of energy flow from the ocean to the atmosphere decreases.
I think this exchange is getting bent around terminology and implied meanings - but I believe what I've said is correct.
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Tom Curtis at 06:31 AM on 3 November 2013How we discovered the 97% scientific consensus on man-made global warming
Fergus Brown @12, well spoken!
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Rob Nicholls at 03:07 AM on 3 November 2013US school infiltration attempt by Heartland’s IPCC Parody
MA Rodger @32 and @35; I agree a line-by-line analysis of an NIPCC report would be a very big task, and I'm sure it's not a realistic prospect. I think a good approach is to focus on one chapter or section, as you did in @20; the comparison with the error-rate in IPCC AR4 is illuminating. I wonder whether someone who is completely new to climate science would be able to spot the difference in quality between IPCC and NIPCC. I'm hoping they would, but perhaps this is a forlorn hope. The fossil fuel barons that invest in the NIPCC via the Heartland Institute must be getting something for their money.
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Fergus Brown at 02:40 AM on 3 November 2013How we discovered the 97% scientific consensus on man-made global warming
Thanks to all for their comments and observations about the original survey. I agree that there were many parts of it which were insufficiently rigorous, but in fairness we do point out in the paper that it is not being presented as any more than a preliminary study, and we also take pains to point out that it is not sufficiently robust for the results to meet the criteria of statistical significance.
It was always our intention really to present a 'first view' of opinion, post-Oreskes, and avoiding that particular methodology. At the time, we hoped to be able to follow up with something more scientific; unfortunately we couldn't, but others have.
The questions were worked hard on, but not with sufficient expertise to meet proper survey criteria; the other criticisms are also fair. But I will stick by the work we did, in that it was prepared, including the sample, with good intention, in search of a fair and representative sample, and no unreasonable claims were made on the back of the work.
The original point of mentioning it (apart from showing off :) ), was to point out the 'coincidence' of the result. That it has given some of you some entertainment is an added pleasure. Lastly, I'd say that anyone interested in doing a similar undertaking should recognise in advance that even a smallish and provisional survey requires a vast amount of work, so kudos to John and the team for their efforts.
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MA Rodger at 22:54 PM on 2 November 2013US school infiltration attempt by Heartland’s IPCC Parody
michael sweet @33.
My apologies. It (the outrageous Himalayan-glacier-gate scandal) is WG2. and not as I mistakenly believed WG1.
Dumb Scientist @34.
There were more than grammatical mistakes in WG1 but typos etc are hardily the same as misrepresenting the science. I have so far got through the first two paragraphs of NIPCC 2013 2.1 and there are at least four errors. I say 'at least as there are more if you account them differently because they all sort of fuzz into each other.
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Phil at 22:33 PM on 2 November 2013Hans Rosling:
200300 years of global change
quokka @9
I'm not sure who the "we" is.
I meant the readers of Skeptical Science. The article I linked to is dated 2010.There are some prominent environmentalists that are "pro" nuclear power: George Monbiot is one. And there is a spectrum of views within a pro Nuclear viewpoint from enthusiatic endorsement to its grudging acceptance as a temporary fix.
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