Climate Science Glossary

Term Lookup

Enter a term in the search box to find its definition.

Settings

Use the controls in the far right panel to increase or decrease the number of terms automatically displayed (or to completely turn that feature off).

Term Lookup

Settings

All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

Home Arguments Software Resources Comments The Consensus Project Translations About Support

Bluesky Facebook LinkedIn Mastodon MeWe

Twitter YouTube RSS Posts RSS Comments Email Subscribe


Climate's changed before
It's the sun
It's not bad
There is no consensus
It's cooling
Models are unreliable
Temp record is unreliable
Animals and plants can adapt
It hasn't warmed since 1998
Antarctica is gaining ice
View All Arguments...



Username
Password
New? Register here
Forgot your password?

Latest Posts

Archives

Recent Comments

Prev  812  813  814  815  816  817  818  819  820  821  822  823  824  825  826  827  Next

Comments 40951 to 41000:

  1. Book review - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars now Available in Paperback

    chriskoz, it's not baseless trolling: a few weeks ago, when Mann called a noted dendrochronologist (Rob Wilson) a "denier," just because Wilson critiqued Mann's tree ring work--academically, mind you--then Mann had to walk it back, is just one example.

    I admire Mann, and I understand he's been a target of unrelenting *real* baseless trolling, for years: however on this and a few other circumstances, Mann *reacts* badly to anyone who critiques his work. In this example, above, Mann came off as reacticve, thin-skinned, and it was generally acknowledged to be a bad move on Mann's part. That kind of 'own goal' does not serve well the job us realists are trying to do, to overturn the fake skeptics' muddying of the waters.

  2. Book review - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars now Available in Paperback

    hank_@7,

    Can you please give a specific example when Mike Mann "comes across very poorly"?

    If you don't, I declare your comment baseless trolling, because myself, having read HSCW and followed MM's FB, cannot find such example.

  3. Book review - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars now Available in Paperback

    I think Mike Mann could improve his image greatly and possibly lessen some of the "attacks" if he would just drop his Twitter account. He seems too petty in his responses to any dissent, even from fellow scientists, and comes across very poorly.  Just my humble opinion.

  4. Infographic: 97 out of 100 climate experts think humans are causing global warming

    Back in 2011, DB noted on a cruzn246 post that "For the newcomers, cruzn246's last 40 comments here dating back to September 26 have all consisted of comments just like this: a derivative denial of the topic of the post, followed by other commenters chiming in to help correct the errors in his/her comments. Despite numerous pointers and links to sources, you persist in your misbeliefs. That is your right. But it is clear to all the position you come from."

    Are you prepared to actually discuss and be prepared to back your assertions? If you are just criusing by making random uninformed statements, then I suggest you stop wasting peoples time. You could begin by telling which scientists have claimed to have it all figured out and what their ages are. (Experts are usually greybeards).

    Your opening remarks are answered in opening really of the AR4 and 5 WG1 reports.Why dont you read them so you know what it is you are trying to critique> Eg see here. (CO2 1.68W/m2 versus -0.15 for landuse change). Quantified enough for you? Modellers are also actually very clear on what they can or cannot predict. Checked to see what these are or are you content repeating a straw man argument from some denier site?

    Moderator Response:

    [JH] If cruzn426's future posts are like his last two, they will be promptly be deleted for violating the SkS Comment Policy. 

  5. Book review - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars now Available in Paperback

    At some risk of piling on, Harringay's fatuous comment that "When we *do* have genuine solution(s), there will suddenly be an absence of deniers" is disproved by the number of scientific findings that do not require solutions, but still attract their share of deniers.  The most obvious case is the denial of evolution by creationists, but we must not forget the denial of the curvature of the Earth, and the denial that the Sun is at the center of the solar system (both of which still attract adherents in small numbers).  Cases in which solutions already exist, and are being put into practise, but in which denial still persists are also easilly found.  Examples include HIV aids, CFCs, and of course, vaccination.

  6. Infographic: 97 out of 100 climate experts think humans are causing global warming

    97 of 100 is poppycock. It was 75 out of 77.

    Moderator Response:

    [JH] Any way you slice it, 97% equals 97 out of 100. 

  7. Infographic: 97 out of 100 climate experts think humans are causing global warming

    The question makes my head spin. It is loose enough for a goose. What it doesn't address is what is the specific cause and how much is man resonsible. Signicant is in the eye of the beholder. 0.1F would qualify for some.

    So...... what climate scientist would think we have zero impact? Very few. We have bulldozed and burned well over 50% of the forests over the last 300 years, among other things. Of course the study doesn't go into the how much CO2 imapcts because they don't want the debate to start. It does not fit the yes/no simplicity.

    I have seen quite a few of the 97%ers squirm a bit when asked how much, or whether they buy model projections. Many tend to take a "not sure how much" and "I'll wait before I endrose a model" type positions. That is what a real scientist would say. I remember seeing a few of them on a Weather Channel Special. Can you blame them? It's not warming now.

    The guys who think we have it all figured out seem to be too young to know better. Science aint that easy

    Moderator Response:

    [JH] Unsubstantiaed global assertions are akin to sloganeering which is prohibited by the SkS Comment Policy. Please read the Comment Policy and comply with it.

  8. It's not happening

    I think this answer ought to be updated with the more detailed graphic over here:
    http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=8

  9. Oceans heating up faster now than in the past 10,000 years, says new study

    Chris-

    I had this from CO2 Science reposted on WUWT that thrown at me yesterday:

    "Was there a Medieval Warm Period somewhere in the world in addition to the area surrounding the North Atlantic Ocean, where its occurrence is uncontested?"

    So you see the reframing game was begun a while ago- a deniers conned into thinking their claim was not "the MWP was just like now, only warmer" but instead "the MWP wasn't only in the area surrounding the north atlantic, so we wiiiiiin".  Moving goal posts...the usual "if mainstream climate science isn't 100%  right it's 100% wrong, while denier memes if 1% right are 100% right" double standard. 

  10. Book review - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars now Available in Paperback

    Harraygay - Perhaps you can tell us what you mean by a "genuine" solution? A genuine solution is stop using fossil fuels. However, that obviously creates the new problem of where do we get our energy from?

    There are some "genuine" solutions to this problem too, including nuclear power or using less energy.

    It would appear (but please correct me if wrong) that you mean a solution that doesnt involve paying more your energy or using less energy  or accepting greater risks (though that will still mean fossil fuel providers and investing continuing to deny).
    What if there is no such solution? The universe is not necessarily configured to supply us with unlimited energy. Are you happy to go on warming and watch people how didnt create the problem bear the brunt of the damage?

  11. Book review - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars now Available in Paperback

    Harrangay@1

    I'll grant you half of your thesis--that deniers argue or think or believe "there is no problem," but I disagree with your characterization the other side or those you call "greenies." It is especially annoying to see you employ the stale denier ploy of claiming that we need to conduct more reseach and do some more research before we can "jump to a solution." That sounds to me like a denier excuse for inaction, and I'd add that no one who grasps the severity of the problem confronting us thinks we will ever be able to "jump to a solution." It is going to be a long, hard slog.


    To use another old saw, advocating for inaction where global warming is concerned strikes me as being decidedly akin to strumming a lyre while your city burns down around you because you aren't quite sure if it was Mrs. O'Leary's cow that started the fire, or a bunch of disreputable Christians.

  12. 2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #45A


    Regarding "Crazy climate"... The link to the NBC website is now broken. People should instead use:

    'Crazy' climate re-engineering could reduce vital rains, study says by John Roach, NBC News, Nov 1, 2013
    http://www.nbcnews.com/science/crazy-climate-re-engineering-could-reduce-vital-rains-study-says-8C11511636

    Moderator Response:

    [JH] Thank you for the updated link.

  13. Book review - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars now Available in Paperback

    Harringray, as you imply solutions are separate from requirements. By and large, deniers are strenuously denying requirements.  

    "The vessel is sinking. What can we do to fix it?"

    "The vessel isn't sinking. The water in the hull is part of a natural tidal cycle."

    Etc.

  14. Book review - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars now Available in Paperback

    I am told that if you order direct from Columbia University Press and use the promo code HOCMAN then you will get a special 30% discount.

    This offer is exclusively for readers of SkS and the Internet.

  15. Book review - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars now Available in Paperback

    Deniers: there is no problem

    Greenies: we have the solution

    Both are false -- there *is* a problem, but, as with all problems, but we can't jump to a solution without more thinking and research.  When we *do* have genuine solution(s), there will suddenly be an absence of deniers

  16. Climate 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..

  17. Oceans 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.

  18. Climate Science History - interactive style

    Very well done.  Thanks for all the hard work.

  19. One Planet Only Forever at 14:39 PM on 6 November 2013
    Climate 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.

  20. How 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:

    http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/the-claims-are-exaggerated-john-howard-rejects-predictions-of-global-warming-catastrophe-20131106-2wzza.html


    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.

  21. Oceans 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.

     

  22. Oceans 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.

  23. Oceans 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.

     

  24. Climate 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..

  25. Oceans 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?  

     

  26. Climate 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.

  27. Hans Rosling: 200 300 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.

     

  28. Climate Science History - interactive style

    Oh never mind there he is - thought he was early 19th century for some reason.  

  29. Climate Science History - interactive style

    Very cool!  But where is Arrhenius?

  30. Climate 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.

  31. Hans Rosling: 200 300 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.

  32. Oceans 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.

  33. Hans Rosling: 200 300 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. 

  34. 2013 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).

  35. The 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.

  36. US 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.

  37. Thawing 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.

  38. Hans Rosling: 200 300 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.


  39. Thawing 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.

  40. Climate Science History - interactive style

    Lovely!

  41. 2013 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."

  42. Climate Science History - interactive style

    Great resource. SkS again providing new great tools for scientific litteracy. Keep up the good work!

  43. 2013 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. 

  44. US 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. 

  45. Hans Rosling: 200 300 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.

  46. 2013 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.

  47. 2013 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. 

  48. 2013 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. 

  49. Thawing 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.

  50. US 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

Prev  812  813  814  815  816  817  818  819  820  821  822  823  824  825  826  827  Next


The Consensus Project Website

THE ESCALATOR

(free to republish)


© Copyright 2024 John Cook
Home | Translations | About Us | Privacy | Contact Us