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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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Dumb Scientist at 20:59 PM on 2 November 2013US school infiltration attempt by Heartland’s IPCC Parody
Michael @33,
At the bottom of the first column of page 624 in chapter 8 of the IPCC AR4 WG1 report, the phrase “too to the west” appears, which is grammatically incorrect!
Also, the online figures 2.3-2.6 used to be broken, but when I emailed the IPCC they promptly fixed the links.
Other than that? Well, their sea level rise and Arctic sea ice extent projections are starting to look like errors. I'm sure that'll be the top story on WUWT any day now...
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michael sweet at 19:27 PM on 2 November 2013US school infiltration attempt by Heartland’s IPCC Parody
MA Rodgers,
When I went to your reference it shows one error in the WG2 report. This was related to a typographical error in one of the grey literature references in the WG2 report. There were no reported errors in the WG1 report. Does anyone know of any "errors" alleged in the WG1 report?
The problem is that the "Skeptics" are allowed any number of mistakes while scientists are required to have a 1,000 page report without any errors at all.
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MA Rodger at 18:27 PM on 2 November 2013US school infiltration attempt by Heartland’s IPCC Parody
Rob Nicholls @30.
It would be quite a chore to produce "a line-by-line expert analysis of an NIPCC report." The 2013 version (which surely superceded previous versions) is over 900 pages long. That makes it about the same length as AR4 WG1 which contained one error of no great substance within its 950-odd pages. My reading of the NIPCC 2013 Chapter 2 shows many mistakes per page, often of fundamental importance. The 30,000% more errors figure I used @20 will prove to be far too low.
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BillEverett at 17:31 PM on 2 November 2013How we discovered the 97% scientific consensus on man-made global warming
In my opinion, the "implicit endorsements" are the strongest endorsements. An explicit statement that "we find" or "we conclude" suggests that the question is open (at least to some extent) before the research was done and the results were examined. An implicit endorsement implies that the question is closed.
It might be interesting to obtain and plot the ratios of implicit endorsements to explicit endorsements of "Continuous Creation" and "Big Bang" in the cosmology/astrophysical literature as a function of time from the 1950s to the present. If this were done, then I suspect it would support my opinion about the relative strength of an implicit versus an explicit endorsement in a scientific field.
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grindupBaker at 16:30 PM on 2 November 2013The Sun Has Cooled, So Why Are The Deep Oceans Warming?
KR #13 I'm quite sure that I'm correct (or at the very least annoying) on this one because it's fundamental, requiring no special knowledge. There's no contradiction here. The SKS post I found on the topic says nothing about reduced ocean cooling causing reduced atmospheric warming just above the oceans and there's no reason why it would given that the reduced ocean cooling is not caused by ocean mixing in this case. The +LWR warms both. The skin layer temperature is increased, slowing the rate of heat leaving the oceans, but that same skin layer temperature increase must increase warming to the atmosphere.
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Doug Bostrom at 15:37 PM on 2 November 2013How we discovered the 97% scientific consensus on man-made global warming
We had a terrific discussion tonight over dinner thanks to this article. Fascinating. Short of having very favorable extenuating circumstances, Fergus' response was deemed too small to be of much use. Not to say there could be nothing there, just very unlikely to be worth publishing. Useful impressions but short of a finding, so to speak.
Tom's absolutely correct about the difficulty of avoiding bias both in the way elicitations are crafted and via self-selection. It's very hard. However, I understand that neither problem is necessarily fatal or an insurmountable obstacle to further learning. So much to learn about this.
The really interesting part of the conversation was about Google's sampling system. I think it's going to open a world of possibilities that were previously too expensive and too cumbersome to explore.
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Andy Skuce at 14:01 PM on 2 November 2013Hans Rosling:
200300 years of global change
Not only do we need "all of the above" carbon-free energy technologies, but we also need everyone who cares about climate change--and there are all too few of us--to work together and not break into factions over who has doubts or preferences about a given energy solution.
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Tom Curtis at 11:29 AM on 2 November 2013How we discovered the 97% scientific consensus on man-made global warming
doug @8, Cook et al (2013) surveyed 8,547 authors. Allowing that those surveyed were not all climate scientists, and that not all climate scientists were surveyed, this still suggests that there are around 10 thousand actively researching climate scientists world wide. Dummies.com have a simple formula for confidence intervals relative to sample size. Of the three surveys under discussion, there are 140 responses for Brown, Pielke and Annan; 373 for Bray and von Storch; and 1,189 for Cook et al. Using a population size of 10,000 and a 95% confidence interval, this yields margins of error of, respectively 1.95%, 1.92%, and1.84%. Hardly any difference at all, but this assumes that the sample is random, that the survey was not biased, and that it had a normal distribution. All three suppositions are false for all three surveys.
The sample is not random in all three cases because responses depend on factors which may biase the results. In particular, people with stronger opinions are more likely to respond. In addition, the method of selecting the sample population in Cook et al introduces biases. Further, knowing the name of the people conducting the survey may also bias responses.
The actual survey instrument for Brown et al was definitely biased as discussed above. So also was the question in Bray and von Storch most closely matching that in Cook et al, although not as much as that in Brown et al. The question in Cook et al is not biased, but definitely open to misinterpretation; although ,tellingly, most of the misinterpretations have come after the event, and after "skeptics" initially based their criticisms on a correct interpretation of the survey, which leads me to believe misinterpretation may not be such a large factor.
Finally, the distribution of the sample in Brown et al is tri-modal rather than normal, it is is at least plausible that the distributions of opinions in the population are not normal.
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rustneversleeps at 11:21 AM on 2 November 2013Hans Rosling:
200300 years of global change
I'm with quokka here, and somewhat bemused at the pushback on what seem to be fairly straightforward comments by him/her...
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quokka at 10:14 AM on 2 November 2013Hans Rosling:
200300 years of global change
#7 Phil
<blockquote>Surely, we've known this for some time: 15 "wedges"</blockquote>
I'm not sure who the "we" is. For example there is not a single "environmental NGO" in Australia that does not oppose nuclear power. I'd be delighted to be proved wrong, but I don't think I will be.
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