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grindupBaker at 14:48 PM on 4 May 2013Guemas et al. Attribute Slowed Surface Warming to the Oceans
MA Rodger @16 "lot of energy" "dickens of a time" absolutely, that's my point. It was clear to me in the 1st few hours looking at this stuff (I started 8 weeks ago) why deep oceans stay colder than surface. It's because a wafer-thin veneer of warm water (on my 5,000,000 scale model in my mind) travels equatorial-pole, cools, sinks & returns without benefit of sun on return. You all need to stop saying the "global warming" semantics backwards vis-a-vis oceans. "slowed global surface warming" above is fine but bods in general gotta stop saying "the warming slowed recently because oceans took up heat" because "global warming" IS ocean heat increase. The land surface is only relevant because it transfers heat out and is trying to cool the ecosphere as best it can, it contains essentially no heat energy. Those temperature graphs are fine in some ways but they are only a proxy & a symptom of what's happening. If the surface warms, then the ocean below either warms or stays the same. Simple logic tells me it should warm. I'd need to see a really convincing paper by scientists saying how it could be that the surface warms but the ocean below stays at its previous temperature of the last few thousand years, sounds like magic.
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Mark Bahner at 14:01 PM on 4 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
One final note: even your quoted figures are way above the current emissions costs of CO2. If your $500 figure turns out to be right, would you support a $500/tonne carbon tax right now as a fair reflection of the true cost of emission in order to fund that extraction?
Of course not. I consider it profoundly immoral for the poor to sacrifice for the benefit of the rich and well-off. Don't you, too?The current world life expectancy at birth is about 70 years. I think in 2100 it will be 110+ years. Currently, it is estimated that over 700,000 people die of malaria each year. I am quite confident that the number of malaria deaths in the year 2100 will be exactly zero. (Regardless of what any malaria model developed to scare people regarding the effects of global warming might say.) I think the world per-capita GDP will be over $1,000,000 (PPP, adjusted to 2013 International dollars). In fact, I put all these predictions on my blog:
Predictions for the 21st century
I'm so interested to get your answers in all of the cells of the table, that I'll send you $20 if you go to my blog and put your own predictions in the comments section.
P.S. All my predictions assume no takevover by Terminators or global thermonuclear war. Yours should too. ;-)
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jyyh at 13:02 PM on 4 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
anyway a nice way to educate people of the research done (climate and other), assuming the participants actually read the abstracts, so thumb. -
jyyh at 12:58 PM on 4 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
one abstract didn't say methane was a ghg so my average evaluation was lower than the authors. there may be some people who'll judge all the neutral papers to be against AGW, just because many of these are not climate papers you claim them to be. are you measuring the polarization of thoughts of evaluators vs. authors or what? the results might be interesting anyway. -
jmsully at 11:52 AM on 4 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
I got an average of 2.9 with the papers rated at 2.7. I guess my reading comprehension is pretty good.
BTW, Willard Tony is not happy with this survey. Instead of posting the link to the survey you provided, he posted a link to this article. If you were hoping to look at differences in perception between septics and sane people, this will likely screw up your results.
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Trent1492 at 10:04 AM on 4 May 2013They changed the name from 'global warming' to 'climate change'
Getting a 404 on the link to the Frank Lutz memo,
Moderator Response:[DB] A copy can be found here.
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JasonB at 09:38 AM on 4 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
Mark,
And the people who made the estimate of as low as $100 per ton are actually building a pilot plant. What sort of experience do you have Jason, to make your estimate?
Sorry, I thought we were playing Make A Wish and couldn't tell from what you wrote that you actually had science on your side.
But then, looking at your own link, I found this comment from Dr Geoppert:
“There is a lot of speculation of how much it will actually cost,” he said, with estimates from $20 a ton to as much as $2,000. “We won’t know for sure until someone builds a pilot plant.”
And Dr Keith himself saying:
Dr. Keith says he thinks it may be possible to lower the cost of capture toward $100 a ton as the company grows. (Emphasis mine.)
So perhaps my initial impression wasn't so far off after all.
The other point, of course, is that they're talking about only half of the CCS equation, and I thought capturing CO2 (e.g. from coal-fired power-plants) was the easy part. The real cost is in the "S" part, which I is why that was the only part I mentioned in my comment 68 above:
Think about CCS, for example — it makes sense that we'd start sequestering in the sites that would cost us the least to use. But as those sites became full, we'd need to start searching further afield, and using sites that were previously rejected because they weren't as cheap. How much of the cost of CCS is technology-related and how much is unavoidable due to the laws of physics?
And how much energy is required? Estimates for coal-fired power stations range from 20-40% of the energy generated by the plant being used to capture the CO2 from that plant, and I have to assume that it's cheaper to capture it at the plant because the concentrations are so much higher. Given the challenges faced with declining use of fossil fuels in the future, should we burden them with having to divert a significant portion of their energy generation capacity to cleaning up our mess?
One final note: even your quoted figures are way above the current emissions costs of CO2. If your $500 figure turns out to be right, would you support a $500/tonne carbon tax right now as a fair reflection of the true cost of emission in order to fund that extraction? That would certainly set the fox among the chickens...
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LarryM at 07:41 AM on 4 May 2013WMO Annual Climate Statement Confirms 2012 as Among Top Ten Warmest Years
cRR Kampen - I wonder if you would be happier with this graph? It classifies each year as La Nina, El Nino, or Neutral, and then shows that the global warming trend continues ever-upward for each category. The graph effectively removes the large internal variability of the ENSO cycle that can "hide" the global warming signal if one just cherry-picks short time periods like 1998-present.
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Rob Honeycutt at 07:14 AM on 4 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
Mark... You state that, "[T]he people who made the estimate of as low as $100 per ton are actually building a pilot plant."
This brings up my previous question. Do you think the people emitting all the carbon into the atmosphere are going to willing to foot the bill for pulling it back down?
If we really want the marketplace to work with regards to addressing climate change, then we need to have a level playing field. Fossil fuel companies can't expect to put carbon into the air today and expect that people a generation later should foot the bill for extracting it.
And then, if you regulate in a way that says the FF industry must set aside those costs now, then you have more of a level playing field but the cost of FF energy is going to skyrocket.
Once again, if you add in any appreciable cost of the externalities associated with burning fossil fuels, then already renewables win hands down. That means the better solution is just to not add carbon into the atmosphere in the first place.
My suspicion is that the FF industry doesn't want to pay those costs. They don't pay them now. They want to continue to put carbon into the air for free, and then when the time comes to pay the piper, they will want society at large to foot the bill.
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Andy Skuce at 06:54 AM on 4 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
I would welcome a CCS-led solution to the climate crisis and I think there is a reasonable chance that one day it could be employed in a marginal way and a faint chance that CCS could make a significant difference to reducing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere and oceans. I fully support the research being done by people like David Keith.
When we say that the damage we have done to the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans "cannot be undone", what we really mean is that is cannot be significantly undone using current technology and in the current economic environment. And, importantly, nor will the climate system itself clear up the damage done and restore itself to pre-industrial conditions over a reasonable human timeline, even if we could stop further emissions.
Mark's argument a bit like objecting to to a claim that we can't establish colonies on Mars. In the next decade or two we certainly couldn't and it is hard to imagine anybody doing it during the rest of this century. But of course we still could imagine a suitable technology and we could devise a scenario showing why people might be motivated to do it in the far future, and how they might be able to pay for it. And I hope that somebody, somewhere is thinking hard about how we might be able to do those things.
Climate change is real and it's getting worse in the here and now. It would be irresponsible to console ourselves that our inaction now is nothing to worry about, because we can dream of a day when carbon capture and storage becomes scalable and affordable and we will be able to twiddle the planetary thermostat to get the desired comfortable climate that everyone desires. That would be like driving recklessly beacuse you have had airbags fitted, or continuing to smoke because you have confidence in cancer research.
I'm happy to explore the potential of CCS here anytime. But I'm not going to waste any more time debating whether climate change is practically reversible or not, just because there is uncertainty about how big future economic growth may be or what marvellous advances in technology there will be in the far future. That's a distraction I don't need.
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cRR Kampen at 02:59 AM on 4 May 2013WMO Annual Climate Statement Confirms 2012 as Among Top Ten Warmest Years
I am not entirely (but almost) happy with the graph. It suggests 2012 was the only year that was only partly dominated by either Niña (the case) or Niño or neutral.
The message is of course quite clear. 2011 was the warmest Niña year. And even a year of neutral EN/SO could make an absolute record now.
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michael sweet at 02:20 AM on 4 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
Mark banner:
You say
What other costs do you think I have "not previously mentioned"?
According to your source:
Dr. Keith says he thinks it may be possible to lower the cost of capture toward $100 a ton as the company grows. (my bold)
You claim that carbon sequestration would cost $100 per ton but your source only states the cost for carbon capture. You have not mentioned the cost of pumping the CO2 underground. This is another cost you have convienently forgotten. When you account for all the costs we can have this discussion again.
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MMM at 00:46 AM on 4 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
"The average rating of the 10 papers by the authors of the papers was 2.7."
Could you reword this sentence in your automatic form? I think it should read, "The average rating of the 10 papers by the authors of "Quantifying the consensus..." (ERL, 2013) was 2.7." (i.e., you did not get the authors of the 10 papers to provide ratings of their own papers)
FYI: I think I rated my batch at a 2.8, compared to an "author" rating of 2.5 or so. I think I was much more generous about my "implicitly accepting" rating than several of the commenters here...
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Dikran Marsupial at 23:22 PM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
Mark Bahner, in science you can generally find papers or statements from scientists supporting more or less any stance on any scientific subject. Picking the ones you agree with and ignoring the distribution of opinion (i.e. the scientific context) is cherry picking. Being able to point out that there are some that think that the cost is likely to be low doesn't mean that it actually is likely to be low. The majority of scientists (with relevant expertise) claiming it is likely to be low on the other hand would be good evidence that the cost is likely to be low.
So, to rephrase your question "what evidence do you have to suggest that the cost per ton is likely to be $500 (or less), and how does this compare with the evidence that it is likely to be more".
Note I am not making an argument for or against anything here, I am just trying to help you to make your case, a balanced survey supporting your argument is likely to be more successful than pointing out what are possibly a few outliers, so provide the context that shows they are not outliers. -
Mark Bahner at 23:08 PM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
1) Cutting the cost in half to $500/Gt of CO2,
Why stop there? I propose cutting the cost to $0/Gt of CO2!
The answer of course is, "What evidence do you have to justfify the cost per ton of $0?
There is plenty of evidence to justify a cost estimate of $500 per ton. Some folks think it will be $1000 per metric ton of CO2. Other's think it will be as low as $100 per ton.
And the people who made the estimate of as low as $100 per ton are actually building a pilot plant. What sort of experience do you have Jason, to make your estimate?
For example, David Keith has PhD in Experimental Physics from MIT and now teaches Environmental Science and Engineering at Harvard University. He was named a 2009 Time Magazine Hero of the Planet.
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GSR at 23:07 PM on 3 May 2013Roy Spencer's Catholic Online Climate Myths
nuccitelli-gets-a-bruising-by-the-factual-hand-of-monckton
Sometimes poetry is elevated to the realms of science. This is one of those occasions. The hand of Monkton has indeed been employed in a frequent and rapid manner.
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Jim Eager at 20:57 PM on 3 May 2013Roy Spencer's Catholic Online Climate Myths
Warren Hindmarsh wrote: "if you actually measured that you had not only stopped accelerating but actually stopped falling and then even maybe started to drift away from the earth."
If.But, you just broke the analogy beyond all resemblance to physical reality.
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Oriolus Traillii at 20:12 PM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
Sorry, my last post was cut short. Sorry, this one is longer.
@Sceptical wombat:
You wrote:
If you were asked whether a tradesman had contributed to the building of an office block would you require that he had worked on the foundations, the scafolding, the plumbing, the electrical work, the interior fitout etc?
No. But if you asked me whether he had built the whole thing himself, I would. That's how I understand the survey.
I agree with you that scientific opinion on the complete hypothesis only appears when you collect papers for each step in a review. Still, the complete hypothesis is what we want. Isn't a chain just as strong as its weakst link? To put it differently, if you were hanging of a cliff by a rope, would you be relaxed about several yards of it suddenly turning into thin air?
Is the AGW hypothesis linear, supporting its conclusion like a rope? Or is the conclusion supported --at every point-- by multiple different lines (or ropes) of reasoning? I'll take a look at The Big Picture on this site:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/big-picture.html
After reading this, my metaphor of choice for the AGW hypothesis is a rope of varying thickness, in some places consisting of multiple more or less strong fibers of evidence, sometimes of only a few. But formulated comprehensively, the bits "Humans are Increasing Atmospheric Greenhouse Gases" (very thick rope), and "Human Greenhouse Gases are Causing Global Warming" + "Warming will continue" (thick rope) and "The Net Result will be Bad" (thick rope) are vital. Take any of them away and the whole argument for reducing CO2 emissions collapses (unless you look at relatively unrelated(?) matters like ocean acidification).
You also wrote:
Would you see a paper coming up with a large negative estimate of the cloud feedback as contradicting Global Warming if it did not at the same time deal with all the other feedbacks and show that the total was not significant?
A single paper wouldn't put me in much doubt, but if there was a consensus for negative cloud feedbacks, then the bit of rope named "greenhouse gases are causing global warming of a given magnitude" would get considerably thinner. It wouldn't disappear, because I would agree with you that the picture isn't complete, until all the feedbacks are taken into account.
So I think one should consider doing another study.
1. It should formulate the AGW hypothesis as a logical argument with premises and conclusions.
2. It should split the argument into essential steps that are small enough to be adressed in at least a few dozen average scientific papers.
3. It should seek to establish which steps of the AGW hypothesis have which level of consensus.
The results might look something like this:
"X endorsements to Y neutrals and Z rejections for step 1 (2, 3, 4 ...)"
Scepticalscience is in an ideal position to do this, because it has already split the argument into steps and collected papers.
@chriskoz:
Interestingly, my sample included exactly the same "Agaves" ("Neutral") paper that Oriolus Traillii mentioned @5, how probable is it?
It depends on the number of papers that were pre-selected, doesn't it? (John, I'd be grateful, to know how that was done, by the way.) If there were 1000 papers and you chose 10, the likelyhood that I get one of them too, if I get 10 random picks, would be slightly more than 1/10, I think? Of course, we don't know how many papers there were or how many other people did and didn't get one of our papers, so I'm not sure there's any reason to worry.
Cheers and thanks for the Survey. I've learned a lot!
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Kevin C at 17:50 PM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
Of the 10 papers that you rated, your average rating was 3.8 (1 being endorsement of AGW, 7 being rejection of AGW and 4 being no position). The average rating of the 10 papers by the authors of the papers was 2.7.
Oh, I can see a possible misreading of this text. The parenthesis "(1 being endorsement of AGW, 7 being rejection of AGW and 4 being no position)" is not reporting back to you the ratings that you gave. It is defining the rating scale from 1 to 7.
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JasonB at 17:42 PM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
1) Cutting the cost in half to $500/Gt of CO2,
Why stop there? I propose cutting the cost to $0/Gt of CO2! Problem solved. Now that I've made eliminating CO2 free, is there anything anyone else needs me to sort out for them?
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JasonB at 17:35 PM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
Chemware,
"Implicitly endorses" gives a score of three, so your total score for 10 papers was 8 × 4 (no position) + 2 × 3 (implicitly endorse) = 38, and the average is 3.8.
The authors' total of 27 suggests they rated most of the papers as implicitly endorsing and a few as explicitly endorsing.
For my own survey I gave 3.3 and the authors' average was 2.8. (One explicit endorsement with quantification — that was easy!; four implicit endorsement; and five neutral.)
It's an interesting exercise, not least because it shows just how hard it is to categorise papers by looking at the abstracts alone.
I couldn't resist searching for every one of my papers to see whether the abstract was a good predictor or not. (I didn't allow that to affect my score, or course, because that would defeat the purpose and invalidate my results, and some I was unable to check due to paywalls.)
As has been suggested above, often the Introduction is enough to remove all doubt. I had a paper I rated as 4 (neutral) based on the abstract who's very first sentence explicitly stated how much temperature was due to rise globally over the coming century based on greenhouse gas emissions and cited the IPCC as the reference!
It's to be expected that most research papers are going to end up being categorised as Neutral because in their abstracts they're unlikely to say words to the effect that at least half of currently-observed warming is due to humans. Why would they? A lot of them are looking at the implications of global warming on some particular aspect of interest to them, but because they don't mention the human influence on the warming they end up being neutral on this scale.
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Dikran Marsupial at 16:51 PM on 3 May 2013Roy Spencer's Catholic Online Climate Myths
Warren it is a shame that whenever an analagy is used to make some point in a discussion on climate, you can almost guarantee that someone will over-extend it in such a way as to ignore the key point. The point was that we can only have observations of the past for any physical process, so Spencers comment was vacuous and misleading.
If the Earth were cooling, you may have a point, but it isn't. The lack of a statistically significant warming trend in GMST does not mean that the planet isn't warming, firstly because GMST doesn't include the warming of the oceans (see many posts on ocean heat content) and secondly because a lack of a statistically significant warming trend doesn't mean that it isn't warming, just that it isn't warming at a sufficiently high rate to rule out the possibility of there being no warming over that period.
The snap shot of the falling skydiver does not show what factors will act on him, I didn't say that it did, but our prior knowledge of the physics tells us that the skydiver is almost certainly falling (although there are highly unlikely circumstances in which he might not be). Likewise we know enough climate physics to be confident that the planet is warming, without having access to observations from the future).
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sidd at 15:44 PM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
Irreversible is forever, in human terms. Once you destabilize permafrost, it ain't coming back in for millennia or more. Same with an icesheet, say GIS or WAIS. Same with the Amazon rainforest. There is hysteresis here.Sam with extinction. Nature will eventually reevolve a species to fill a niche, but only perhaps 1e6 yr after the niche reappears.In human terms, lets say I walk away from a field plowed for generations. No way it will go back to the way it was. Nature is perfectly happy with three hundred years of kudzu. Think before you kill. Please.sidd -
Mark Bahner at 15:43 PM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
Oops, that should have been: 1) Cutting the cost in half to $500/TONNE of CO2,
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Mark Bahner at 15:40 PM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
[DB] To retain any credibility, those points needing responding to can be found here.
I have already addressed this issue. Even if the amount required was double the 7.8 Gt CO2 per ppm could be addressed either by:
1) Cutting the cost in half to $500/Gt of CO2,
2) Increasing the GDP by a factor of two,
3) Running twice as long,
So even if the value is 138% more, that does not fundamentally change the issue. Solomon and Matthews are wrong, because they ignore the possiblity of human beings reducing the atmospheric CO2 concentration by capture and sequestering atmospheric CO2.
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Chemware at 15:38 PM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
I just did the survey, rated them 8 neutral, 2 implicitly endorse.
BUT
The response I got at the end was:
Survey Results Received
Your survey results have been successfully saved. Thank you for your participation. If you have indicated interest in receiving the results of this survey, you will be emailed the results as soon as they are available.
Of the 10 papers that you rated, your average rating was 3.8 (1 being endorsement of AGW, 7 being rejection of AGW and 4 being no position). The average rating of the 10 papers by the authors of the papers was 2.7.
WTF ???Moderator Response:chemware, see Kevn C's comment below. The 1/4/7 numbers refer to how the different ratings are given a numeric score, not what the actual ratings were that you assigned to your papers. The wording of the response was certainly unclear and John Cook has reworded the response to make the meaning clearer.
Thanks for taking part in the study and letting us know about this possible source of confusion. [GT]
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Mark Bahner at 13:13 PM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
Mark, perhaps you should try addressing the points made against your argument by Tom in particular.
I'd be happy to on my blog. You or he could point me to the particular comments y'all would like addressed.
Moderator Response:[DB] To retain any credibility, those points needing responding to can be found here.
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scaddenp at 12:53 PM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
Mark, perhaps you should try addressing the points made against your argument by Tom in particular.
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Warren Hindmarsh at 12:50 PM on 3 May 2013Roy Spencer's Catholic Online Climate Myths
#13DIkran to correct your rather weird analogy further, if you are a skydiver freefallling from 10,000 ft you first of all accelerate until you reach a terminal speed ie stop accelerating due to gravity but, what would you think if you actually measured that you had not only stopped accelerating but actually stopped falling and then even maybe started to drift away from the earth. Wouldn't you think other factors were in play other than gravity????
your snap shot of the falling sky diver does not show what factors will act on him.
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Sceptical Wombat at 12:15 PM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
Oriolus Traillii @5
The reason for the low endorsement percentage seems to be that most of my papers answered a narrow question and thus substantiated only one step in the AGW hypothesis without supporting the others. This --to my mind-- does not constitute an endorsement).
If you were asked whether a tradesman had contributed to the building of an office block would you require that he had worked on the foundations, the scafolding, the plumbing, the electrical work, the interior fitout etc?Obviously only review papers are going to cover all the steps of proving dangerous anthropogenic warming - any original research is only going to deal with one aspect.
To put it another way would you see a paper comming up with a large negative estimate of the cloud feedback as contradicting Global Warming if it did not at the same time deal with all the other feedbacks and show that the total was not significant? -
Mark Bahner at 12:07 PM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
(moderation kvetching snipped). Such a environment exists at my blog. I'd be especially happy to discuss this matter with Rob Honeycutt, KR, Andy Skuce, Jason B., and others.
This is my blog post regarding the "irreversibility" (or lack thereof) of global warming.
In particular, it addresses Jason B's commment that, "Not ony that, but the total number of units that need sequestration will of course also increase under BAU..."
I'd also be interested in discussing discount rate with Andy Skuce, who might be able to fill in some of the estimates that Jason Pontin (at Technology Review magazine never did. See: "What is the morality of the less-well-off sacrificing for the better-off?
Moderator Response:[DB] Note that Moderation Complaints are always off-topic.
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Synapsid at 11:39 AM on 3 May 2013Leave It in the Ground, Climate Activists Demand
Correction:
U232 produces decay products which are intense gamma emitters.
Synapsid
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chriskoz at 11:25 AM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
My issue about this survey is similar to what Oriolus Traillii@5 has said.
It is that most papers focus on very narrow aspect of GW, and often the short abstracts don't specify anything that endorses AGW, therefore they must be classified as "Neutral". I think lots of those "Neutral" papers would be reclassified as endorsements if first few paragraphs of the body were reveiled (where the authors usually describe the context).
As this survey allows to read the abstracts only (which provides not enough information about authors' stance), therefore this survey is, as Matt Fitzpatrick said: "about the perception of consensus" rather than the consensus itself. Most papers will be classified as "Neutral", while most of the rest will be the participants' guesses and opinions.
In my case, it was 5 Neutrals, 4 implicits endorsements (my best guess) and only 1 explicit endorcement stated in the abstract. Interestingly, my sample included exactly the same "Agaves" ("Neutral") paper that Oriolus Traillii mentioned @5, how probable is it? John, please make sure that the survey selects truly random selection for all participants (i.e. check your random generator).
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Tom Curtis at 11:23 AM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
Andy Skuce @72, the most practical way to bury "CO2" is to allow some life form or another to convert it into a cellulose, proteins or lipids; and bury those. Doing so significantly increases the proportion of Carbon by mass in the product buried, and more significantly, turns it into a solid which escapes burial far less easilly than pressurized gases. Although research is still being conducted into it, I believe the direct sequestration of CO2 is a dead end.
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Synapsid at 11:22 AM on 3 May 2013Leave It in the Ground, Climate Activists Demand
Climate Change Extremist:
In the 12 December, 2012 issue of Nature an article by four British nuclear engineers describes the proliferation hazard of thorium reactors.
Neutron bombardment of Th232 starts decay chains that produce U233, which is fissile and can be used in reactors and for weapons, and U232 which is an emitter of intense gamma radiation. In the 1950s the US looked into U233 for a weapon and found that gamma radiation from U232, an impurity which is difficult to separate from U233, triggered premature ignition and reduced yield, so U233 was not followed out in weapons research. The article mentioned above describes the chemical removal (two separate schemes are laid out) of the precursor to U233, Pa233, which has a half life of about 27 days, from the already-formed U232. The separated Pa233 can be allowed to decay into very pure U233, which could be used in a properly-working bomb.
A power reactor or research reactor can be used to irradiate the Th232. Yes, thorium reactors represent a proliferation hazard, though they are widely declared not to.
Synapsid
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Andy Skuce at 11:08 AM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
I should add that if we try to rebury, in the form of carbon dioxide, the carbon that we have exhumed since the Industrial Revolution, the mass that we have to inter is about three times the mass that we have dug up and burned; because we have to bury two oxygen atoms along with every carbon atom. The hydrogen from fossil fuels is mostly already safely buried at sea.
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Matt Fitzpatrick at 10:35 AM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
Hmm, this could be of sociological interest as well. The results should reveal at least as much about the perception of consensus as about the existence of consensus.
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Tom Curtis at 09:37 AM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
Mark Bahner @70:
"In fact, the vast majority of CO2 that is absorbed is not absorbed as gaseous CO2 into the ocean."
Most CO2 dissolved into the ocean is converted into other forms, as described in Doug Mackie's Reservoir Dogs article -part 5 of the OA is not OK series (see side bar) which I recommend to everyone. In fact Mackie claims that less than 1% of CO2 absorbed in the ocean is not converted to carbonate or bicarbonate. That is, however, irrelevant for all forms of Dissolved Inorganic Carbon (DIC) maintain equilibrium with each other. Therefore, if dissolved CO2 outgasses, the reservoir of dissolved CO2 is replenished by drawing down the other forms of DIC. Consequently the full amount of excess CO2 initially dissolved into the ocean can be outgassed. As such, Bahner's bringing it up is a complete red herring.
Even the excess carbon absorbed by the biosphere, to the extent that it is due to the CO2 fertilization effect, will be returned to the atmosphere if CO2 is returning to former levels. That means that for all intents and purposes, if we wish to return CO2 concentrations to preindustrial levels, we need to remove as much CO2 as we have emitted (give or take a small percentage). In the more likely event that we wish to only remove some of the excess CO2, natural reservoirs can be expected to retain some substantial fraction of the excess carbon, but we will need to draw down far more CO2 than the excess resident in the atmosphere.
Finally, the figure of 57% of CO2 emissions retained in the atmosphere commonly used, and reflected in Sabine and Feely's figures (55.6%) only account for industrial emissions. When emissions due to deforestation and land use change are included, only 42% of total emissions are retained in the atmosphere on average. That probably means Bahner's estimate was still of by 100%, and possibly more depending on the extent of the draw down as the airbourne fraction is 42% of total emissions, not 50%. In the scenario of a rapid draw down of CO2 concentrations to pre-industrial levels, he is of by 138%
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Michael Hauber at 07:13 AM on 3 May 2013Roy Spencer's Catholic Online Climate Myths
Most climate researchers simply assume recent warming is manmade, but human causation is only one possible explanation out of several
Many 'skeptics' seem to argue from an unwritten assumption that warming happened, climate scientists saw it, asked 'what caused this warming', discovered Co2 as a good candidate and the AGW theory was born. From this assumption it is not as unreasonable to point out that there are still things about solar and natural variability such as AMO that we don't understand, and perhaps these are viable alternative explanations for the warming we have seen.
However the reality was that AGW was predicted before the modern warming period even started, with multiple reports commissioned by the government around 1980 to investigateg climate change all finding Co2 likely to cause significant warming in the future. -
jdixon1980 at 06:28 AM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
I meant to say, "If on the other hand [the abstract indicates that] the article simply summarizes ~," since obviously the survey didn't involve reading the whole article.
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jdixon1980 at 06:25 AM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
OPatrick @2: Disclaimer - I am a patent attorney, not a climate scientist, but since you are asking for other readers' opinions I am chiming in.
For situation 1), did the abstract actually state that the model prediction accounts for anthropogenic greenhouse warming trend, or are you just assuming that because practically all models do?
So the abstract mentions a prediction of that model without defining a confidence interval within which the prediction falls? I'm curious, do you remember why the model prediction was mentioned? If the abstract indicated that the model prediction is used in the article as a basis for recommending a particular action (mitigation or adaptation) or drawing some further conclusion, I would say it's at least an implicit endorsement. But I doubt you would be wavering if it were that straightforward.
If on the other hand the article simply summarizes what the model predicts, and/or the assumptions on which the model is based, without adopting those assumptions, then probably I would have to say it is neutral.
For situation 2), it sounds like what you are describing literally fits the "endorsement without quantification" category, and that's how I think I would have classified it.
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jdixon1980 at 04:35 AM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
I got 6 neutrals, 3 explicitly endorse without quantifying, 1 implicitly endorse. From one of the explicitly endorsing w/o quantifying abstracts, it seemed highly likely that the article itself would have explicitly stated that human emissions account for more than half of the warming, since I believe the abstract stated that the article was going to quantify the projected impacts of a mitigation scheme that involved reduction of GHG emissions. But rules are rules, and I could only assess the abstract based on its text.
In light of which, it might be interesting to add a category of "explicitly endorses and suggests mitigation." I suppose one objection to that approach could be that there would be no counterpart category for the "rejects" side, which could lead to a topheavy categorization scheme with more "accepts" than "rejects" categories. To the extent that suggesting mitigation has a denier counterpart in the extreme view that we need to emit *more* GHG's, people who hold that view most likely explicitly accept (or at least do not reject) AGW, but assert that GW is a good thing - so that would also be categorized as an "accepts" position.
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Dikran Marsupial at 04:13 AM on 3 May 2013Roy Spencer's Catholic Online Climate Myths
Ray yes Spencer and Monckton are using pedantry to allow them to say something that is technically true (we can only look at observed temperatures in the rear view mirror) to make a claim that isn't true "we don't know whether it is warming or cooling". This is part of Monckton's trick of counting the true statements in Spencers interview, just because they are pedantically true, doesn't mean they actually support the argument presented (counting irrelevant statements such as Dr Spencers qualifications is another example of inflating the count).
Sadly the climate debate is full of this kind of rhetorical device, and is generally an indication that the science doesn't actually support the argument - if it did, they would stick to the science. Likewise Monckton's personalisation of the issue.
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silence at 03:24 AM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
In my case, a lot of the neutrals were paleoclimate papers, which I wouldn't expect to say anything at all about what is happening now.
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Composer99 at 03:15 AM on 3 May 2013Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research
Not just Skeptical Science readers - I'm emailing an invitation to 58 of the most highly trafficked climate blogs (half of them skeptic), asking them to post a link to the survey.
Based on the brouhaha over Lewandowsky's paper, I wonder how many of the self-styled skeptic bloggers will eventually claim they received no such email? Not to say they're being dishonest: I get dozens, sometimes over 100 emails a day every weekday - it's ridiculously easy to overlook (and then forget about) one or two, especially if you don't do something about it straight away. It wouldn't surprise me if that (a) is what happened with the solicitation to climate "skeptics" to participate in the Lewandowsky et al (2012) survey and (b) could very well happen with this invitation.
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Composer99 at 03:08 AM on 3 May 2013Roy Spencer's Catholic Online Climate Myths
Reading & addressing anything Monckton writes is a waste of time. He's been shown to be consistently wrong so often on so many aspects of climate science that at this point if he claimed that the Sun rises in the east each morning, I would video-record dawn each day for a week to verify before agreeing with him.
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Mark Bahner at 02:48 AM on 3 May 2013Global Warming: Not Reversible, But Stoppable
I have made one comment and you have conceded that your original estimate is off by at least 100%.
That is completely false. I made no such concession. I merely stated:
Regarding outgassing...approximately 50% of emissions have remained in the atmosphere for the last 3-5 decades. So even if all the CO2 that was previously absorbed gets re-emitted, the amount needing to be removed would simply double.
This in no way concedes that such a situation is even possible. In fact, the vast majority of CO2 that is absorbed is not absorbed as gaseous CO2 into the ocean. Sabine and Feely, 2007 provide the following best estimates for carbon emissions and sinks for the 1980-1999 period:
Emisions (fossil fuel and cement) = 117 PgC
Atmospheric Increase = 65 PgC (note that this is 56 percent, not 50 percent)
Ocean Inventory = -37 PgC
Net terrestrial = -15 PgC.
And even of the 37 PgC absorbed by the ocean, not all of it is absorbed CO2 gas. (As far as I know, much less than half of it is absorbed CO2 gas.)
Since you know your original proposal is off by at least 100%,
...once again, that is completely false.
"...why should I consider it until you include all the other costs you previously have not mentioned?"
What other costs do you think I have "not previously mentioned"? Also, why do you think I should be advising you on what you should consider? Do you have some power to either beneficially or negatively affect me of which I'm not aware?
Moderator Response:[JH] Please loose the snarky tone.
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dana1981 at 02:42 AM on 3 May 2013Roy Spencer's Catholic Online Climate Myths
Not much to say in response to Monckton's content. Most of it is just plain wrong and wholly unsupported with any evidence whatsoever. It's also mostly based on equating surface air warming with global warming, even though only about 2% of global warming goes into heating the atmosphere. Overall, just a waste of time to read that tripe.
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Tom Dayton at 02:31 AM on 3 May 2013Roy Spencer's Catholic Online Climate Myths
Jim, Spencer would disagree even with that. Roy Spencer is driving a Corvette. On flat land. Pedal to the metal. Speedometer is racing up steadily, 30, 31, 32, ..... When it hits 80, his passenger freaks out, "Take your foot off the accelerator!" Roy calmy replies "We don't know if we are accelerating right now! We were a second ago.... And a second ago.... But maybe we are decelerating at this moment. God would not have given me this Corvette if he had designed it to allow me to kill us in it."
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dana1981 at 02:27 AM on 3 May 2013Roy Spencer's Catholic Online Climate Myths
It's hard to even get past the title of that WUWT post. The words "factual" and "Monckton" do not belong in the same sentence. Once I got past the headline, I was barraged by ad hominems. Very professional.
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