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VictorVenema at 01:02 AM on 5 April 2013The Fool's Gold of Current Climate
The part about greening by CO2 and limitation on it due to lack of nutrients made me wonder whether we know anything about how nutritous plants are wenn grown in artificially high CO2 concentrations? Do we know anything about the micronutrients in the plants (vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, etc.)? Maybe from experiments in greenhouses comparing plants that were gassed with CO2 to normal ones.
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Dikran Marsupial at 00:01 AM on 5 April 2013The Scientific Method
ecgberht It seems to me that you actively want to have your posts deleted, presumably in order to be able to argue that SkS was not willing to engage in discussion of the science (which is what SkS is for). If you continually dare the morderators to delete your posts e.g. by writing "I hope some folks get to enjoy this post before it is removed.", they will delete your posts as whinges about moderation are by definition off-topic. As you were advised earlier, keep on topic, stick to the science, comply with the comments policy and none of your posts will be deleted. It is as simple as that.
If you make one more post where you challenge the moderators to delete your post, then you will have made it clear that you are just playing some sort of game and actually want them top delete your posts. It is your choice.
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Ray at 14:47 PM on 4 April 2013The Scientific Method
scaddenp I note and will act on your comments on my use of CAGW which I will no longer use. You ask "So are you looking for a good theory which accounts for climate - or an excuse to discount current theory because mitigation actions proposed so far are discordant with your politics?" I'm a molecular biologist not a climate scientist so I'm looking for debate on Climate Change conducted by those who have different views. Just reading the papers and blogs of those that support human the current hypotheses on the causes of Climate Change or confining oneself to papers and blogs who opposer theses hypotheses is self delusional. My political views are that I find it difficult to accept that the major western powers are trying to enforce, on countries which are much poorer than they are, actiions that will disadvantage the citizens of those countries in their efforts to attain the standards of living approaching those of the developed world.
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Philippe Chantreau at 14:41 PM on 4 April 2013The Scientific Method
ecgbehrt, why do you think that your post will be removed? Did you read the comment policy? If so, did you knowingly deviate from it? If yes, what did you expect? If you took care in following the comment policy, why then would you think that it will be removed? Since this thread is more about epistemiology than "hard" stuff, on-topic requirements are obviously less rigid. Although it is not exactly on-topic I do not see that your post deviates from the comment policy further than what will get you a possible warning, which the moderators of this site routinely do when veering too far off-thread. I expectthat it will stay. If it does and that surprises you, I would like to know why. If it is indeed removed (which would surprise me), I know that the mods will furnish an explanation, another thing they routinely do.
Being open minded does mean that one should fill his mind with useless junk. Catering to people who make absurd claims does not constitute open-mindedness. In matters of science, absurdity is not so subjective. A point of view about physical reality does not have validity only by virtue of its existence. Some points of view are worthless; they stem from ignorance, incomprehension, are ill-informed or any combination thereof. Others are dishonest, nonsensical, self contradictory or stupid. Making that clear does not constitute closed-mindedness. Such point of views do not even gain a modest foothold in science because they do not withstand even the earliest stages of application of the method. That is a good thing.
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curiousd at 11:38 AM on 4 April 2013New research from last week 23/2012
I think I have a partial answer, though I cannot get round the paywall for J. Geophys. Research, Solid Earth, 1996, vol 101 Etheridge, etal. Apparently, Law Dome is ideal for correcting for lock in effect....for one thing a relatively large amount of annual snowfall. Also in one publication they can use the carbon 14 spike because of nuclear testing in the 1950s as some kind of calibration.
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slcochran at 10:57 AM on 4 April 2013Do 500 scientists refute anthropogenic global warming?
Most interesting these "500 scientists." Sen. James Inhofe came up with a similiar list of "700 scientist opposing global warming." We chased down this list. Turns out there were just a little over 200, and a number of those were duplicative entries. Many were non-degreed weathermen (I appologize for not having numbers, but we did this a couple of years ago for fun). Some were from "private institutes," consisting of one man's living room or listed as being on the faculty of an institute not found in Google (doesn't mean they don't exist, but . . .). Many were retired. The vast majority were from unrelated fields. 25 or so worked directly for or in a research institute funded by the oil industry. We finally narrowed the list to just one person who had a PhD in climatology with an appointment in a legitimate university. They quote attributed to him turned out to be taken grossly out of context, with the paper clearly stating that he considered his findings supported anthropogenic global warming.
It would make an interesting study to put the list of "published papers" to a similiar examination. Did Singer/Avery actually publish the list?
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dana1981 at 10:15 AM on 4 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
Ger @10 - it's basically a double subsidy. The fossil fuels are subsidized directly to keep their prices down, and electricity is also subsidized to keep electricity rates down as well. Plus the climate subsidies, and the pollution subsidies, and the lost tax revenue - it's just amazing how many different subsides fossil fuels get.
And then everyone talks about how great they are because fossil fuels are cheap. Sure they're cheap if they're subsidized up the wazoo!
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Dissident at 10:04 AM on 4 April 2013The two epochs of Marcott and the Wheelchair
Not to worry Rob P, I didn't word it right anyway!
The intention of me posting this link is to show how the basic science is being misrepresented, basically the 'hockey stick', which has been extended to cover the whole of the Holocene has been deliberately cropped to remove the last 100 years of AGW, with what looks like a deliberate misquote of Bjorn Lomborg...
'3 weeks ago, a paper in Science showed the last 11,000 years of temperature. The claim, that went around the world was one of “an abrupt warming in the last 100 years”, as the New York Times put it.
Today, the researchers admit this claim was wrong. The last hundred years is not only below the resolution of the reconstruction, but also not representative:
“the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.”'You can find this on the link below.
http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2013/04/02/the-marcott-abrupt-warming-meme-dying-a-slow-death/
I personally find the evidence for AGW both consistent and compelling, and it's implications for the future of our civilisation disturbing. I am no scientist myself, however I do understand the difference between science and politics. Denial of the evidence is firmly in the latter category. I would appreciate to read further comments debunking what is posted in that link.
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CBDunkerson at 09:37 AM on 4 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
chriskoz, FIT almost certainly refers to a 'feed in tariff'. The Phillipines have had a FIT law for several years now, but haven't actually implemented it yet... thus making complaints about its non-existent cost somewhat difficult to fathom. They expect to approve the first FIT projects some time next year. Basically, how these work is that the government agress up front to pay a certain price for power over a relatively long contract period. This provides certainty of profit and thus makes it easier to attract investment. Power costs in the Phillipines are very high and thus the hope is that enacting a FIT system will help create a stronger renewable energy industry (though they already have very good geothermal development) for the country that will then bring prices down.
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JosHagelaars at 09:28 AM on 4 April 2013Klotzbach Revisited and John Christy's response, part 1
@Kevin C
All the trends were calculated using the published monthly temperature data. As you probably know all institutes that release temperature data present these data for land and ocean separately as well as the combined total monthly temperatures.
GISTEMP presents data with a rather complete coverage. Performing the same calculations as presented in figure 3, based on GISTEMP land/ocean, gives comparable results. It was not included in the post in order to keep my figure 3 comparable to the table 2 of Klotzbach et al.
First column global, second land, third ocean in °C/decade over 1979-2012:
GISS minus UAH: +0.02 / +0.09 / -0.03
GISS minus RSS: +0.02 / +0.08 /-0.02
(data as published in January 2013).
So I do not think that the difference in coverage has much influence. But it would be interesting if someone could repeat this calculation using the gridded data with the same landmask and coverage for the satellites/surface temperatures.The GISTEMP land/ocean data are not published on their main webpage but can be found here: http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/
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chriskoz at 09:15 AM on 4 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
Ger@10,
Can you explain what FiT and FiT-All means? And how it works in Philippines ? Without knowing anything about it, I cannot understand your last paragraph...Thanks.
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CBDunkerson at 09:11 AM on 4 April 2013Klotzbach Revisited and John Christy's response, part 1
At one point in their original paper they write: "If there is no warm bias in the surface temperature trends, then there should not be an increasing divergence with time between the tropospheric and surface temperature anomalies [Karl et al., 2006]."
Setting aside the bit in your writeup above showing that the divergence hasn't continued to increase, the thing which strikes me about this is how profoundly blind they are to the possibility that the problem is in the satellite data. In the quotation above they present a false dichotomy... either there is a warm bias in the surface temperature trends or there cannot be an increasing divergence. Any scientist still possessed of an ounce of objectivity should have taken one look at that sentence and rushed to rewrite it... because it is obviously false that those are the only possibilities. Contrary to what they say, there could indeed be both "no warm bias" and "increasing divergence"... if the problem were in the satellite temperature data.
It would be one thing if they considered this and decided it was unlikely, but rather the paper is written as if it were an impossibility. We see this kind of willful blindness in AGW 'skeptics' on the internet all the time, but it is shocking to see it so plainly presented in a 'scientific' paper as well. Their entire premise was plainly false, omitting another obvious possibility, but somehow they just couldn't see that.
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CBDunkerson at 08:52 AM on 4 April 2013Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
Ken, see here for why stopping AGW will not end life and liberty.
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Kevin C at 08:23 AM on 4 April 2013Klotzbach Revisited and John Christy's response, part 1
Interesting, thanks for your work on this. If you have time I have some questions:
In either the original analysis or your recalculation, were the trends calculated using the published monthly temperature figures, or was the calculation done by going back to the gridded data?
If it was done from the gridded data, then was the calculation done using all of the satellite data, or were the satellite data masked to reduce the coverage to match the limited coverage of the surface datasets?
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Gingerbaker at 07:19 AM on 4 April 2013Book review: Cold Cash, Cool Climate by Jonathan Koomey
"Perhaps you should read the current post on government subsidies on fossil fuels. Don't you think renewables should be treated the same?"
No, I don't.
Subsidies, tax rebates, incentives etc have failed to encourage the 'free' market to produce a significant amount of renewable energy infrastructure fast enough. I think if we are going to spend tax monies to build infrastructure, let's skip the recalcitrant middleman, and use tax dollars directly on infrastructure projects.
What I would like to see is a Federal Renewable Energy Utility at best, and large-scale solar and wind projects at the least. Let's bypass the so-called free market and build the infrastructure we need for tomorrow - today.
Moderator Response:[DB] Fixed paragraph formatting.
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michael sweet at 05:58 AM on 4 April 2013Book review: Cold Cash, Cool Climate by Jonathan Koomey
Gingerbreaker,
Perhaps you should read the current post on government subsidies on fossil fuels. Don't you think renewables should be treated the same?
How were the railroads financed anyway? Oh yeah, they were financed by the government land give aways. I guess it just depends how you want your tax dollars spent.
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curiousd at 04:27 AM on 4 April 2013The Scientific Method
Hi,
I apologize for being so off topic here and wish a suggestion on where best to post this inquiry. There is a great new paper out in Science:
New article by Parennin, et al .
Science Magazinehttp://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6123/1060.abstract
This shows that if one corrects carefully enough for the "lock in" effect in ice core analysis you remove such a large inherent bias towards temperature apparently leading CO2 that for EPICA dome data you go from 800 years CO2 lags temperature with error of 600 years to CO2 and Temp in consilience within 100 year error bar.
I posted a technical question on the only thread that seems to get into the intricasies of dating ice cores, post 5 on SKS thread "New Research from Last Week 23/2002."
But I am nor sure where the best place to post this inquiry is, especially in a more upto date thread people are likely to read.. Any suggestions?
Best,
Curiousd
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Gingerbaker at 02:34 AM on 4 April 2013Book review: Cold Cash, Cool Climate by Jonathan Koomey
"...entrepreneurs are one of the keys to meaningful, timely climate action. Society needs to make drastic changes to avoid dangerous global warming. However, institutions such as the government and big business only change slowly and incrementally, except under exceptional circumstances."
Funny.
I view the nearly unquestioned universal paradigm that new renewable energy development should or must be developed or encouraged through the 'free' market system - a system dominated by carbon interests - to be the major reason that America's transition to a renewable energy future has been such a spectaculer failure to date. Solar makes up less than 1% of our energy generation. CO2 emissions are almost as high as ever.
The least expensive and most expeditious paradigm to deploy new renewables would be large-scale publicly funded installations. But I have yet to see a single blog post - anywhere - on the blogosphere devoted to this topic. Methinks the carbon fuel industry is very happy to keep the national discussion exactly where it has always been - on smale-scale rooftop solar and local wind farms, where the burden of financing crushes most implementation.
Strange is this newfangled aversion to using Federal monies to solve national predicaments, because large-scale Federal programs have been very successful in the past. The Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to millions of households in the twenties.
Hoover Dam was not financed by tax incentives to homeowners. The National Interstate Highway System was not constructed by offering low-interest short-term loans to driveway paving companies so they could lay asphalt in thirty-foot long projects. No, these projects were successful because they were ideally sited, had huge economies of scale, and the financing was borne not on the shoulders of individuals, but shared collectively. So, I feel, should be our national energy future.
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Dissident at 02:11 AM on 4 April 2013The two epochs of Marcott and the Wheelchair
Apologies for the typo in previous post, 'bebored' should be 'became'
Moderator Response:(Rob P) Sorry, but I deleted your previous comment by mistake. Would reinstate if I knew how. Feel free to repost.
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Joel_Huberman at 01:45 AM on 4 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
Thanks, Dana1981, for a very useful article. I'm an American, and although I did pay some attention to the interesting report of Marcott et al (2013) and its analysis at Skeptical Science, I'm also very interested in the topic of fossil fuel subsidies. After all, as shown in one of your illustrations, we're the world champions at subsidizing fossil fuels.
Although it's difficult to calculate the total cost of wars over fossil fuels, I think it would be fair to attribute America's two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to oil and gas (pipeline rights in Afghanistan's case). After all, if those wars were not for fossil fuels, what were they for? Could they have been completely irrational?
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Lanfear at 01:44 AM on 4 April 2013Most of the last 10,000 years were warmer
"I apologize for the delayed response."
No worries, as you may have noticed, I take this with a slow pace, what with the holidays and everything.
"I have had the good fortune of rediscovering a recent paper"
Ahemm.. And I noticed that that paper already was in my archives, so I should have been aware of it. Problem being that the archives seem to grow more than what I am able to digest, let alone recall.
"As to the question about GISP2 temperatures and the MWP, that is more complex."
Yes, I should have been more explicit in this case. The root of this is, of course, the denialist fallacy where he/she makes the mistake of a) taking a single point of (proxy) measurement and then generalizing that to the whole globe as such, and b) not consider the fact that the y-axis is between -32 and -28°C.
Thanks for your effort, and the reminder of Kobashi et al. 2011.
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Ger at 01:24 AM on 4 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
"The bulk of these direct subsidies go to petroleum products ($212 billion, or 44%), electricity ($150 billion, 31%), and natural gas ($112 billion, 23%). Electricity subsidies are included because they increase the consumption of coal and natural gas."
and
"The bulk of direct + indirect subisides goes to petroleum products ($879 billion per year, or 46%), followed by coal ($539 billion, 28%), natural gas ($299 billion, 16%), and electricity ($179 billion, 9%)."
How come the indirect subsidy on electricty? Isn't that included in the coal/gas/petroleum already?And then to think of that renewable electricity doesn't get a dime: FiT tariff is charged as an extra on all electrical power directly to the consumer (in Philippines it is as the FiT-All).
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CBDunkerson at 23:54 PM on 3 April 2013Earth Encounters Giant Speed Bump on the Road to Higher Sea Level
Climate Bob, actually I suspect the uptick is due to the combination of flood waters (from the time of the dip) returning to the oceans and evaporated water from the severe droughts the past couple of years. Ice melt undoubtedly plays a part, but I don't think there has been a recent significant increase there. Basically, we have gone from having higher than average water on land (i.e. flooding) to lower than average (i.e. droughts).
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chriskoz at 22:26 PM on 3 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
Bernard@8,
I agree and have to add at this point that politics, especially election campaign aspect, have nothing to do with economy. If Tony Abbott win in September (he will be the silliest OZ PM ever) he and his party would start implementing the policies that have nothing to do with their current promisses. Needless to say those promisses have nothing substantial: no real program, just sloganeering.
I'm not writing this because I support the incumbent Labor Party. I'm writing to show the sad reality that the "easiest" political campaign based on negativity and prying on and profiting from human addction to fosil fuels I pointed above @6, is the effective tool to gain popularity in our electorate. It's unbelievable but the sicence, be it climate or economics, must be simply ignored by average electorate (if you believe the polls), people just want to follow the "easiest" path, just like doping is the easiest for an addicted drug user. The effort required to break the dependence on FF is nowhere to be seen in such environment. And politicians who are prying on such dependence are doing lots of damage.
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Philip Shehan at 18:18 PM on 3 April 2013The two epochs of Marcott and the Wheelchair
An update on my previous post. My second comment has been posted without further reply from Mr Watts.
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rockytom at 16:47 PM on 3 April 2013The Scientific Method
Thanks to all of the above for your comments regarding the scientific method post. I especially enjoyed the links provided by Tom Dayton and have read most of the statements in the links. In our textbook, Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis, we discuss the scientific method and attempt to distinguish hypotheses from theories although I'm not sure of the success of doing so. We illustrate the "scientific method" by giving examples of results; Darwin's "uncluttered mind" in formulating new hypotheses/theories (origin of atolls, the 'descent of man,' natural selection); T. C. Chamberland's 'multiple working hypotheses' and a few more.
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Bernard J. at 16:17 PM on 3 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
Dana, add me to the list of folk who are interested in the (sadly, bastardised) economics underpinning human fossil fuel use.
Without pointing too fine a point on it, and at the risk of wandering toward political territory, it's troubling that the conservative opposition parties in Australia pander to economic the <i>status quo</i>, and diligently submit to the industry memes about the apparent ruinous economic consequences of trying to reduce emissions. From the politicians it's a combination of "...great big new tax...", "we need the jobs", "it would cost too much to go to renewables", "working families have so many bills already", and "if we don't sell it someone else will", with additional protestations along the lines of "no stinking government is going to tell me how to spend my money" from the public peanut gallery.
Again, I am leary of commenting politically here, but in the run-up to the federal election later this year it would be more than interesting to see Tony Abbott squarely challenged to comprehensively detail the costings for his policy of effectively <i>not</i> pricing carbon, and in so costing to include an honest assessment of the pork-barrelling that fossil fuel interests enjoy in Australia. It would be even more instructive to have Abbott tie this policy response to a similarly detailed demonstration of his understanding of all aspects of the relevant science, and of the implications of this science for the future, and how this understanding informs his resultant carbon-pricing policy.I'd really like to see coming from both sides of the election a policy informed by a scientifically-based cost-benefit risk analsyis, but especially from the conservatives who are virtually certain to win come September. Time for everyone to dust off their Garnaut reports, update, and show that they actually know what they're talking about...
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Philip Shehan at 15:45 PM on 3 April 2013The two epochs of Marcott and the Wheelchair
An insight into how Anthony Watts regards discussion of this question in his latest installlment:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/31/quote-of-the-week-bad-eggs-in-the-marcott-et-al-omelete-recipe/#comment-1262484
Here is his response to a comment of mine:
Anthony Watts says:
April 1, 2013 at 11:22 pm
Ah jeez Shehan, give it up, the Marcott study is toast and your focus minutiae is a waste of everyone’s time . Stop defending the indefensible and get your head out of your posterior so you can see the mess they created. Start by reading Ross McKitrick’s essay on the main page.
And here are my responses (the second is yet to be posted):
Philip Shehan says:
April 2, 2013 at 2:33 pm
Mr Watts. Well pardon me for focussing on “minutae”. So much easier to make a general smear without examining the “minutae” The accusations against Marcott were based on the “minutae”, and I have examined them. That’s what scientists do. That’s what science is about. If you can’t hack having the claims in your articles examined, don’t put them up.
REPLY: Oh I can hack it, I just find your hacks tiresome and pointless- Anthony
Mr Watts, This section contains complaints by Pielke and commentators of some specific points Marcott’s thesis and the Science article he coauthored. These complaints and alleged inconsistencies are used to claim that Marcott and others are guilty of fraud, misconduct deceit lying etc etc.
I recognize that there are many commentators who think that comments should be confined to unexamined cheering agreement, mutual backslapping and rounds of “Boo Hiss Marcott Sucks and Shehan too LOL.”
I take the attitude that on what is billed as The World’s Best Science Blog”, there are actually some here who have the interest, scientific understanding and or intellectual ability to actually examine these claims in a scientific manner.
I know from experience that if I don’t go into “minutae” I have to keep coming back to correct misinterpretation or plain pigheaded stupidity and explain things in further detail.
For example. I pointed out that contrary to the rumour started by one of McIntyre’s readers and accepted without examination and repeated everywhere as established fact, Marcott’s thesis contains seven graphs with an uptick. I also pointed out that McIntyre’s puzzlement at the differences in the two graphs is in plain sight for anyone who wished to spend more than a few seconds looking at it.
I then get asked for a link. I provide it, but knowing people will still not read it before hitting the keyboard, nor after (ferd berple take note), I briefly quote from the thesis to explain what the graphs are showing. This is not pointless, but for those who are to stupid , lazy or ignorant to engage in a truly scientific debate and who do not want their prejudices challenged it may well be tiresome.
If people wish to critically examine my assessment of the evidence, they are welcome to do so with a clear reasoned argument with enough “minutae” to establish their case. Politely. That is how real scientific discussion is supposed to work
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Climate Bob at 15:34 PM on 3 April 2013Earth Encounters Giant Speed Bump on the Road to Higher Sea Level
The sudden uptick in sea level rise as indicated on the NASA website can be partialy explained by the flood water returning to the sea but the amount of increase now exceeds this. I find it difficult to believe that it is due to warming of the oceans as this tends to be slow and gradual. The events that can give a quick increase would be glaciersfrom four sources. Greenland, Antarctica, land based mountain glaciers and smaller coastal glaciers could all add to the total in a relatively short space of time but I have not heard of any reports to that effect. It would be a worrying trend if that were the case.
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chriskoz at 15:33 PM on 3 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
pansy@6,
Currently, those "mega rich people" you're "giving money" are fosil fuel industry. Not directly, but through the subsidies this article talks about. Are you feeling good about it?
You don't necessarily need to give that money to "carbon tax support and carbon trading" instead. That depends on the type of solution. E.g. Jim Hansen's "charge at the source and divident" scheme bypasses any carbon trading and distrubutes money back to your (citizen taxpayer) pocket with minimal administrative overhead. And you could use that extra money for e.g. buying solar panels and investing into other renewable energy sources. Would you not like it?
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chriskoz at 15:13 PM on 3 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
dana1981@1,
Your comment is OT ;) but I can add to it that I think most of the valuable commenter crowd was stolen by realclimate.org where they just posted the analysis of Marcott 2013 paper, which appears to be over-popular in US. Strangely, Marcott 2013 does not draw so much interest here in OZ (where SkS also belongs at least geographically)
But back to the topic, it's a shame that the economics of climate change do not draw as much attention as it deserves. Even climate scientists like Mike Mann & Gavin from RC are saying: "if you want to want to help Earth, don't look at the research in climate (whatever you do there won't change the problem humanity is facing), look at the engineering slutions and their economy".
Your reported internalising of CO2 polution at the level of $100 per tonne would bring the total cost to 4trillions of 6% of global GDP. To put this number into perspective, the World War II cost us 3% of GDP that that was somewhat signifficant effort, according to the stories from my parents. So, it seems unbelievable that nowadays, the FF subsidies take twice that effort. Still, at $25 per tonne (current tax in OZ where I live) we spend 1.9trillions or 3% of GDP, so the effort at the same level as WW II. It does not feel like. The humanity dependency on FF must be enormous if those numbers are justified.
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Bob Loblaw at 14:02 PM on 3 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
dana: my comment was entirely a personal one, in my current state of mind. I agree that posts on such topics are worthwhile...
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dana1981 at 13:51 PM on 3 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
michael @2 - no, military costs are not included. Just direct subsidies and indirect costs via pollution and climate change. It would be very difficult trying to quantify military costs associated with fossil fuel interests.
Bob @3 - no worries, economics posts on SkS are always less popular than science posts. I still think it's an important subject to cover though. Ultimately a lot of climate denial boils down to a misunderstanding of economics - the fear that transitioning away from fossil fuels will be too expensive. In reality the opposite is true, it's continuing to pay for our fossil fuel addiction where the real high costs lie.
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Bob Loblaw at 13:25 PM on 3 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
dana: sorry for the lack of comments, but I've been looking over my tax return stuff that needs to be filed before the end of April (Canada), and thinking about how much Steven Harper takes from me is depressing enough - it doesn't help to think too much about the amount he's passing on to rich gas and oil corporations...
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michael sweet at 10:57 AM on 3 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
Dana,
Does this price include the cost of wars like Iraq where the US unsuccessfully tried to gain control of Iraqs oil? Much of the world defense budget is aimed at protecting fossil fuels.
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dana1981 at 10:41 AM on 3 April 2013Trillions of Dollars are Pumped into our Fossil Fuel Addiction Every Year
I'm going to leave a comment to keep my poor lonely post company!
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curiousd at 09:59 AM on 3 April 2013New research from last week 23/2012
Question: Great new article by Parennin, et al . See in Science Magazine
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6123/1060.abstract
They do a careful correction for the effect in EPICA dome data in which one must correct for the following effect: Antarctic precipitation does not "lock in" an air bubble from having been connected by diffusion with the surface until the precipitation is so high above the bubble that solid ice has formedat the air bubble location . Since the oxygen 18/16 ratio is determined by the precipitation itself, this effect means that one observes an inherent lag of the CO2 level behind the temperature corresponding to a particular section of the ice core if one is not cognizant of the effect. Now from an apparent lag of CO2 behind temperature of 800 years with an error of 600 years, CO2 and temperature coincide to within the experimental error of 100 years in the EPICA dome data.
My question, then, is this: What is it about Law Dome data that makes this kind of error less important? Or is it less important? If we are saying, "Aha! CO2 started to increase about 1750, at the biginning of the industrial revolution, there better not be any 800 year errors in the dating of the CO2 there! (I have not been on SkS for some time, using the knowledge I gleaned here to good use...but needhelp again on this.)
Curiousd
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Glenn Tamblyn at 09:24 AM on 3 April 2013Earth Encounters Giant Speed Bump on the Road to Higher Sea Level
chriskoz
Wipneus at Arctic Penguis, a regular at Neven's blog has done regression fits to the trends from PIOMAS for each month of the year
The fits are an exponential fit since that gave a better fit than any other type of curve. September goes to zero in 2015. But even the fit for April, which is maximum volume, is looking like 2030 or so. Obviously a caveat about projecting that far into the future but.
It's hard to say what the physics of winter ice formation up there will be in a warmer world. Arctic ocean warmer but the air will still be cold and it will be dark for months. Hard to say which will win out.
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Rob Painting at 08:23 AM on 3 April 2013Earth Encounters Giant Speed Bump on the Road to Higher Sea Level
ianw01 - Yes, another commenter has pointed out the same thing, and it's something I've been looking in to for a while - moving heat into the deeper ocean will lower the rate of thermal expansion. This is a likely (partial) explanation for the sea level trend over the period of satellite-based observations, where sea level rise has been near-linear despite the acceleration in ocean heat content and land-ice contribution.
A candidate for a future SkS post for sure.
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John Hartz at 04:35 AM on 3 April 2013Making Sense of Sensitivity … and Keeping It in Perspective
Joe Romm extensively cites Dana's OP in his article, Making Sense of Climate Sensitivity: How The Economist And MSM Keep Getting It Wrong posted today (Apr 2) on Climate Progress.
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Chuck123 at 20:35 PM on 2 April 2013Earth Encounters Giant Speed Bump on the Road to Higher Sea Level
CraigD@21,
At the Arctic Sea Ice Forum there has been discussion of this, including a posting of this link http://www.pnas.org/content/106/1/28.short to an article that shows evidence that thermodynamically a seasonally ice-free Arctic is an unstable state that transitions easily to a year-around ice-free state.
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scaddenp at 13:10 PM on 2 April 2013To frack or not to frack?
Just for a look at some at myths (pro and anti) in fracking, I found this popular mechanics article useful. It annoyingly doesnt include links but I found it easy enough to use Mr Google to follow up on interesting stuff raised there. US context only. Vroomie, I think pipes with chemicals going through your aquifer are pretty minor risk but it would depend on your regulatory environemnt. Ie what are the rules about penetrating an aquifer (for any reason from fracking to putting in a bridge pile) and do regulators check the seal tests for each and every well.
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JasonB at 12:47 PM on 2 April 2013The Scientific Method
This has to be one of the weirdest myths out there — a belief that science is so "fragile" that if some people are doing it "wrong" they can somehow create thousands of independent lines of envidence that all converge on the same, wrong conclusion.
What is even more remarkable is that there are people out there claiming to be scientists who think climate scientists are doing it "wrong", thus exhibiting two breathtaking displays of ignorance — first, that the scientific endeavour depends on people doing it the "right" way and that the normal standards of publishing, replicating, and responding won't sort out the wheat from the chaff in this case; and second, that they have somehow failed to notice that the whole of climate science and associated fields is a demonstration of normal scientific practices anyway.
Papers get published; others respond with refutations or enhancements; new data is added to the mix, bolstering some and refuting others; science progresses.
Mann's hocky stick is a perfect example of science progressing while non-scientists are still going on about whether the methods used in the original paper, fourteen years ago, were good or bad. Mann himself stopped using those methods long ago, yet still manages to produce hocky sticks along with a whole host of other researchers using new and different techniques.
Climate models, too, keep having more and more details added to them as computing power and techniques allow in the ongoing attempt to make them more useful and capture as much behaviour of the real world as practical. Science progresses. Failures fall by the wayside.
One of the great ironies, of course, is that the darlings of the "skeptical" movement — some of whom were mentioned already in this thread — are the very same people who have a history of trying to construct theories to support their preconceived beliefs, and of repeatedly being shown to be wrong, and then of effortlessly moving on to the next contrarian theory ("anything but AGW") hoping that they'll get it right this time (or, in some cases, simply refusing to acknowledge that the data has disproved their theory or their logic was flawed). Most of us don't care if they are putting the cart before the horse and doing their science "wrong" because we know that they're unlikely to arrive at the truth that way and therefore their ideas will fall by the wayside, but those who seem to care most strongly about doing it "right" also seem to have a massive problem actually recognising those who are doing it "right" and those who are doing it completely "wrong".
It seems instead to be the last, desperate refuge of those unable or unwilling to accept what the science has to say; if you don't like the result, assert that those who established it didn't do so "correctly".
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ianw01 at 11:57 AM on 2 April 2013Earth Encounters Giant Speed Bump on the Road to Higher Sea Level
Could this anomaly in the rate of sea level rise be partially attributable to where heat is being added to the ocean?
To illustrate what I'm getting at, consider this: Based on fresh water having a negative thermal coefficient of expansion between 0C and 4C, someone might argue the drop in sea level is a sign that water between 0 and 4 C is warming. Obviously this is overly simplistic and is not the case for seawater. Figure 3.1 here shows that seawater does not have a negative coefficient. However, it does show that heating water in the 0C-10C range will result in much less expansion than heating water in the 10C-20C range.
So my layman's analysis says that we should not be too surprised that decreased rates of sea level rise coincide with a time when other evidence points to more heat going into the deep oceans.
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nealjking at 11:32 AM on 2 April 2013Making Sense of Sensitivity … and Keeping It in Perspective
As mentioned before: If there is a flat absorption coefficient across the spectrum, the discussion provided before gives the same result for zero-feedback temperature change as differentiating the S-B.
Not otherwise.
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scaddenp at 10:25 AM on 2 April 2013The Scientific Method
Ray - first, show me any science that uses the term CAGW. This is strawman material.
Continuing, the scientists mentioned are indeed climate scientists who have created true scientific discussion in the correct way - by publishing paper in which their methods etc. have been available for examination. The scientific method has kicked in and tested these ideas against experiement - and tossed them all out. "A" for effort, but still no other hypotheses in the air at the moment. I applaud the effort in one sense because, although motivated by ideology (eg see Spencer on what he thinks his role is) rather than the scientific quest, science depends vitally on a constant search for alternative hypotheses. This is doing it right.
Doing it wrong is saying one thing to your peers and another to the naive (public, congress); and pushing misrepresentations of science of political objectives (noting that environmentalists can be guilty of this too). In my opinion, doing it wrong it also trying make reality conform to your political prejudices but I think the scientific method and publication conventions are robust enough to filter out any poor science resulting from such an approach.
Hansen and the others change models as data and methods improve as indeed they must. Compare say Mann 98 with say Mann 2003. You want others? Idealogues dont change at all. All of your list fortunately agree on all the basic climate theory. They have however, all tried valiantly to find something else in the climate system that might give a low enough value for climate sensitivity so that action to mitigate isnt necessary. I wish they would put some of that energy into finding effective mitigation measures that is compatible with their political philosphy instead.
So are you looking for a good theory which accounts for climate - or an excuse to discount current theory because mitigation actions proposed so far are discordant with your politics? If the former, then perhaps take your specific questions about attribution of climate change to the appropriate topics here (use the search tool).
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Kevin C at 07:55 AM on 2 April 2013Book review: Cold Cash, Cool Climate by Jonathan Koomey
Kevin:
So the author wants us to trust the experts only. But Feynman says to trust the experiments, and that experts can be wrong.
Kevin C has pointed out that even peer reviewed papers can be wrong, and not withdrawn.
There are two pretty fundamental points here. Let's start with the last one and work back.
It is a common mistake of readers here, and sometimes even authors, to assume that because something is in the peer-reviewed literature it is right. That is clearly false. Just count the proportion of scientific papers (in any field) which are disagreeing with a previous paper and you can see that actually a significant proportion of peer-reviewed papers (in any field) must be wrong.
The distinctive feature of the peer-reviewed literature is that by publishing in the peer-reviewed literature you are taking part in a social interaction which has evolved to select good information from bad. Not primarily at the review stage (which is just an initial junk filter), but in the long term response to a paper, which is crudely measured by citations and more accurately by review papers and consensus. (Hence my arugment that we need sociology as well as philosophy of science.)
Therefore, if someone cites the existance a peer-reviewed paper on either side of the argument as settling an issue, you are right to call them on it. So papers on their own don't settle issues. However, Feynman is no help either, because most of the systems we are interested in are sufficiently complex than any experimental result requires interpretation within the framework of thousands of other results, which are usually more conveniently summarised in terms of theories. To work from experiments alone requires you to rediscover modern science from scratch.
So either you need to study the literature sufficiently to be able to form a clear picture of the shape of the field, the areas where multiple lines of evidence agree and those where they disagree, the robustness of different observations, the potential confounding factors, and the diversity of opinion and its evolution over time. Something which in my own field took me (I guess) a decade of full time effort, although the process has continued since.
In other words, the development of expertise. So either you need to become an expert, or trust an expert. Now of course anyone can claim to be an expert without putting in the effort to obtain that expertise. So how are we to tell a real expert from a fake one? The most effective method to have evolved so far is on the basis of contribution to the field.
This is the same for every field of science. Journals are edited by and grants are awarded by panels recuited from the most prominent contributors to a field. This works because scientists tend to think rather highly of their own ability, are mostly in pretty rigorous competition with one another, and are therefore more than willing to demolish one-anothers work if it has weaknesses. Again, this is true in every field. If you want evidence that the same is true in climate science, read the climategate emails.
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Chris Colose at 07:19 AM on 2 April 2013Making Sense of Sensitivity … and Keeping It in Perspective
Since I was e-mailed about this, I'll chime in...
It doesn't matter what you define as the "no feedback climate sensitivity." Obviously, dT = dF/(4 σT^3) ...(or dF = 4σT^3 dT) is a natural reference system derived directly from the Planck law, and because there's very little uncertaintly in how to calculate it, it has traditionally been used as a reference system by which other feedbacks are evaluated against. In a climate model, this would be derived by perturbing the atmospheric temperature by, say, 1 K, and holding other variables constant (water vapor, etc) and then asking how much the infrared emission to space has increased (see e.g., Table 1 in Soden et al., 2006, "An Assessment of Climate Feedbacks in Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere Models"). The results are very close to the back-of-envelope calculation shown above.
In the real world of course, water vapor makes the infrared emission increase more slowly than the Stefan-Boltzmann law, so a greater temperature rise is required to accomodate the need to balance energy at the top of the atmosphere. If the system were dominated by negative feedbacks, then the flux adjustment would be more efficient than T^4, and you wouldn't need much temperature rise to balance the incoming sunlight.
If you wanted, you could just as well call your reference system one in which relative humidity stayed the same. This would make the "no feedback climate sensitivity" appear much larger, but then reduce the magnitude of feedbacks, since the water vapor feedback would now only consist of a small residual that resulted from any departures in the relative humidity field. In the same way, the Stefan-Boltzmann law is not an adequte description of radiative transfer in a real atmosphere, yet still provides a convenient baseline which allows us to talk about 'feedbacks' in a meaningful way. It doesn't hurt the calculation too much that you have absorption to worry about, since "T" is evaluated at the top of the atmosphere and you need to eventually balance the fluxes regardless of what wavelength region they occur in. -
jgkoomey at 06:34 AM on 2 April 2013Book review: Cold Cash, Cool Climate by Jonathan Koomey
@Kevin: @shoyemore has given an excellent response, but I wanted to describe my own views on this. I'm the last person to unquestioningly adhere to the statements of any authority, and I'm all for questioning conclusions of all types, if that questioning is done in an informed manner. The technique I describe is meant to get people to think about why they think questioning climate science is OK when they don't know the first thing about the topic. I vividly recall a video in which a questioner in Australia tried to lecture my friend Stephen Schneider about how climate forcings were logarithmic and that this somehow invalidated the whole of climate science (wrong on multiple levels, and Stephen put the questioner in her place). The questioner would never have done this for a physicist lecturing on gravity, and I want to get people to think about why they think climate change is any different. From the perspective of a lay person, it isn't much different--there is extensive peer review, and errors are uncovered and corrected over time, just like for all other science. The incentives are the same as for other areas of science as well, so if they trust that science and related engineering (and they largely should, since it allows technological devices and systems to operate correctly) then they should trust the climate science also.
Of course, nothing will get in the way of a hard core denier believing what they want to believe, but we all need to find new and different ways to get the people who are "reachable" to rethink their beliefs. This technique has worked well for me in my lectures, but something different might work better for you. No one approach will work for all audiences, of course.
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KenD at 05:31 AM on 2 April 2013It's not bad
Thanks, Bob and Bernard. Bob, I looked through some of the Arrhenius article, but I confess I'm not technical enough to home in on the best example of a prediction he made that has since come true. Bernard, if you were to place a bet on the minimum volume of Artic sea ice by 2023 (assuming C02 levels remain at or above current levels), what value you would bet on, assuming you want to keep your money safe?
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