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Rob Honeycutt at 13:01 PM on 18 January 2013Accumulated Cyclone Energy Questions and Answers
Yes. It's called IKE. Integrated Kinetic Energy. With IKE they actually measure wind speeds in different quadrants and at different distances from the eye. -
macoles at 12:38 PM on 18 January 2013Accumulated Cyclone Energy Questions and Answers
Is there an alternative metric to ACE that accounts for both size and intensity? While a cyclone's size may be somewhat reflected by its duration (and therefore give higher ACE values than smaller ones of the same intensity), its energy content is just as much a square of its diameter as its velocity. It seams to me the media reported sizes of cyclones is getting bigger. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumulated_cyclone_energy -
littlerobbergirl at 10:08 AM on 18 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
Did I miss the bit were we found out how much of this greening is actually due to CO2? Rather than changes in land use eg tree planting in uk, Sahel, abandoned farmland in Russia (looking very green there - I hear chernobyl is really beautiful now) etc? And what about mycorrhiza? Increases in fungal networks through temp rises (until it gets too hot) surely lead to faster growth of their plants? And temp itself in cold places, longer growing season very evident here in uk. How do we unpick these? -
Tom Curtis at 08:48 AM on 18 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
jhoyland @22, the total carbon flux from the biosphere due to the direct activities of humans was estimated by Houghton 2005 (revised) as follows:"The estimated global total net flux of carbon from changes in land use increased from 500.6 Tg C (1 teragram = 1012 gram) in 1850 to a maximum of 1712.5 Tg C (or 1.7 Pg C, where 1 petagram = 1015 gram) in 1991, then declined to 1409.9 Tg C (1.4 Pg C) in 2000, and rose slightly to 1467.3 Tg C (or 1.46 Pg C) in 2005. The global net flux during the period 1850-2000 was 148.6 Pg C, about 55% of which was from the tropics. During the period 1990-2005, the greatest regional flux was from South and Central America (11.3 Pg C). The global total flux averaged 1.5 Pg C yr-1 during the 1980s and 1.56 Pg C yr-1 during the 1990s (but generally declining during that latter decade), dominated by fluxes from tropical deforestation. The global total flux averaged 1.47 Pg C yr-1 during the period from 2000-2005."
To put that into perspective, one Petagram (Pg = 10^15 grammes) is one billion metric ton, and the equivalent of 0.47 ppmv. As it happens, annual emissions from LUC do not drop below the (smoothed) annual atmospheric increase until the 1950s. In recent decades, however, studies in the difference between oxygen depletion and CO2 accumulation have shown that the biosphere is a net sink of carbon (See diagram below). That means total CO2 absorption be regrowth of forests in North America and the old world combined with increased agricultural activity, increased water supply and the CO2 fertilization effect have generated more biomass than deforestation in third world nations has depleted.
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bath_ed at 08:06 AM on 18 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
prestrud @ 15 - I agree, greening is not necessary a good thing as far as nature is concerned. At the risk of straying into the philosophical, we are not so much concerned with the optimum conditions for life in the most general sense as with the conditions that specific life forms have evolved to live in. For example, a desert is a much harsher environment for life in general than a rainforest, but "green" a desert to rainforest conditions and most of its unique plants and animals would surely perish. Would that be a good thing? I am reminded of many of the rarest plants of the British Isles that grow on nutrient-poor grasslands: apply artificial fertilisers and instead of flourishing, the rare wildflowers are rapidly out-competed by common, vigorous-growing plants usually thought of as weeds such as coarse grasses, nettles and thistles. -
Tom Curtis at 07:53 AM on 18 January 2013Ocean Heat Came Back to Haunt Australia
meher engineer @15, even supercell thunderstorms only dissipate about 17 Terrawatts, or about 0.25 Hiroshima bombs per second. Almost none of that energy escapes the Earth, so they do not represent a loss of energy at the surface, only an increase in entropy. -
Kevin C at 07:28 AM on 18 January 201316 ^ more years of global warming
Eon: I'll try and address a couple of questions - firstly whether we can attribute what is left after removing the solar, volcanic and El Nino effects, and secondly whether the method is applicable over other time periods. I've made a lot of use of the 2-box+ENSO model recently, based on Rypdal 2012 (see reference in the advanced rebuttal). My aim is to make this calculation available online, but it's not ready yet. However, the results are relevant. This trivial model empirically fits temperatures to forcing with no physics except causality and a parsimony requirement - and as such is largely independent of the traditional physics based models. (You can also write it in 20-30 lines of code.) Here is what you get if you fit the GISS forcings to the temperature data:
The forcings of course include the volcanic and solar effects, and the El Nino term has been added in as well. The explanatory power for the 130 year record is very good indeed, and the El Nino term, which is critical for the impact on the short term trend, takes on an almost identical value. The model also shows the slowdown in recent warming, for the same reason - the El Nino trend is masking recent warming.
Unfortunately the forcing data is annual and only runs to 2010, so I couldn't use this approach for the video, but it certainly looks as though the longer term data supports a similar conclusion to that of the video. Integrating the two calculations is one of my longer term aims, and will I believe produce a more robust result.
But we can draw some conclusions. The fact that the forcings + El Nino explain the temperature record so well means that the temperature record does not provide an intrinsic reason for introducing other factors.
Could such factors exist? Let's invent such a factor - we'll call it 'climate elves' - and introduce it into the model. In order to be plausible the climate elves would have to operate in such a way that the model still reproduces 20th century temperatures. That eliminates a lot of potential elves (e.g. solar), but not all of them. For example, once the model is online you will be able to see that you can obtain a similar fit with lower sensitivity by reducing the aerosol term. We also can't rule out a long term ocean oscillation.
However, this calculation does not exist in isolation. For example the physical models, the glacial cycles, and climate on deep time all have things to say on this question. Suppose we introduce aerosol elves to reduce the aerosol effect and so climate sensivity, then we have to first reconcile this with the physical models. More seriously it becomes harder to explain the glacial cycle or indeed other paleoclimate features. If we reduce sensitivity too much then we can't even explain the observed volcanic cooling events.
Therefore while I expect climate elves exist (most likely in the form of an error in the aerosol term which could go in either direction, and maybe a long term ocean oscillation), the impact is unlikely to be very large. (And even a climate sensitivity of 2C(x2 CO2) rather than the consensus 3C doesn't buy us very long.)
Thus, given that the consensus estimates of climate sensitivity are based on a wide range of different sources of information, and both the simple and physical models explain the 130 year record with similar sensitivities, there is significant evidence basis to support current estimates of anthropogenic forcing. The scale of the natural and anthropogenic forcings are linked through the temperature record and the response function, and thus I think the statement in the video that 'what is left is the human contribution' is a fair assessment of the current state of knowledge.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 07:09 AM on 18 January 2013Ocean Heat Came Back to Haunt Australia
JC @10 The use of the HB reference in the Science guide came about as a result of a suggestion I made to you John. However I certainly can't claim primary source, others have used the idea as well and actually coined the term Hiro as a unit of measure. I think Ben Sandiford may have used it (the Hiro) sometime ago. It's one of those ideas that probably originated many times indepenently. People looking for a way to express a number that makes other peoples eyes glaze over otherwise. And just asking themselves a question - 'How big is an Atom Bomb' - will lead to this. -
jhoyland at 07:05 AM on 18 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
A plant is eventually eaten by an animal where its carbon is metabolized to carbon dioxide or else it dies and rots producing methane and organic compounds which get moved into the next generation of plants. Presumably the only thing that really matters then for climate change is if the total global biomass changes since its only while the carbon is locked in living matter that it is out of the atmosphere. I can't imagine a hectare of grass contains more carbon than a hectare of rainforest and given the scale of deforestation and desertification over the same period we've been burning our way through our fossil fuels I would have thought that that huge biomass loss would far outstrip any changes in food crop yields. What is the research on total global biomass as relates to climate change? -
dana1981 at 05:13 AM on 18 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
ajki @13 - thanks. I think the 'greening' myth has been around for a while, probably since the Nemani (2003) NPP research. prestrud @15 - good point, greening isn't necessarily beneficial, depending on where it happens. Arctic greening will change that ecosystem, but will also add to overall global greening. As the post notes, it's just not nearly as simple as Ridley/Murdoch/Lomborg are trying to make it. -
Flakmeister at 05:00 AM on 18 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
Re: 29 I hear ya.... I do tip my cap, SKS does an excellent and even handed job of moderation and it is a tough job... -
shoyemore at 03:49 AM on 18 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
Cugel #9, You are right. The most dangerous words ever spoken are "This time it's different". From a dot.com boom refugee. :) -
Flakmeister at 03:11 AM on 18 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
Re: Moderator response in 27: You do realize that noting the obvious edit is funnier and perhaps more effective at conveying the gist of the joke in the acronym than the original acronym... I do concur that WUWT is now unreadable (even for laughs) as it has descended to being a glorified echo-chamber... With this latest nonsense Tony Willard may have finally jumped the shark... One can only hope..Moderator Response: [RH] Rock and a hard place, I guess. -
vrooomie at 02:50 AM on 18 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
A quote, from The New Phytologist, addresses this: "Results for predictions of the effects of elevated [CO2] on primary production are more mixed, but are generally less than a 20% increase in NPP based on the β-factor approach. The results from FACE sites suggest that a single β is not feasible, at least for global predictive purposes, given differences among ecosystems types and differences in plant responses to elevated [CO2] in combination with other environmental parameters such as water and N availability." Google the title below, to find the article: many, *many* other FACE experiments support this finding. Functional responses of plants to elevated atmospheric CO2 - do photosynthetic and productivity data from FACE experiments support early predictions? -
vrooomie at 02:38 AM on 18 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
Alexandre@17, you are correct: Lomborg is as tricky and slippery as denialati (lukewarmistas??) come. Howard Friel's book, "The Lomborg Deception," deftly, if not simply, takes apart Lomborg's suppostions better than any other source I've found. -
Alexandre at 00:30 AM on 18 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
Lomborg is a more refined denier. He even denies that he denied anything. He does not say "global warming is a hoax". He says science is often right, progressing, but you know, CO2 is plant food, and sea level stopped rising, and poor countries rely on fossil fuels to develop themselves, and so on. An articulate obstructionist and public misinformer, this one. If you pay enough attention, you can spot the usual bottomline: whatever you do, don't touch the market of fossil fuels. -
Glenn Tamblyn at 00:19 AM on 18 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
LRG @7 " can I live on pure sugar?". Yep,no problem. How long were you planning on living? That's a bit harder. Moving on to C3 vs C4. Research programs to try and transpose the C4 gene complex into C3 plants is one of those Big Ideas out there. Big because it isn't about transferring a single gene. Rather an intricate complex of gene's neededto produce the entire architecture of C4. Not a small under-taking. RADICALLY not a small under-taking. But a huge pay-off if it can be done. Similarly efforts to transfer the capacity for Nitrogen Fixation into other plants. A Doddle surely. Just all the genes needed to provide/support a complete life-support system for a symbiotic organism. No Problemo So both really hard. But the pay-off is massive. -
meher engineer at 23:20 PM on 17 January 2013Ocean Heat Came Back to Haunt Australia
Bill@13 wrote "it's a great way to capture people's attention". True. To begin capturing it you could refer to a much more familiar natural beast, the thunderstorm: its average energy content equals that of 50 Hiroshima bombs! The assertion appears in an old (1952) issue of Popular Mechanics, where it is attributed to Dr. Roscoe Brabham,a Univ of Chicago meteorologist. Click Ref.3 in the Wikipedia article on Thunderstorms to get to the issue. The Wiki article is useful in other ways: it lists the average weight of the moisture that the making of a thunderstorm lifts up (500,000 tonnes),and their average diameters ( 24 kms.).Their tops, of course, can touch the tropopause. -
CBDunkerson at 23:03 PM on 17 January 2013CO2 limits will harm the economy
Mal Adapted wrote: "However, the socialized external costs of fossil fuel use we're currently paying don't include things like the death of coral reefs from ocean acidification, the imminent extinction of the polar bear and the costs of weather disasters 50 years from now. These costs will be incurred even if all carbon emission ceases today. It's doubtful that a carbon tax could internalize them." And if we don't get carbon emissions under control then the costs of those future impacts will be even greater. Ergo, a carbon tax paid today to avoid those greater future impacts would indeed internalize some of the future cost. "It's about the costs that have been external to total gross global product until recently, but are now being socialized: groundwater overuse in the Great Plains; overfishing of all seafood stocks; growth of urban areas forcing agriculture onto less productive soils; the list goes on and on." The list goes on and on... and has nothing to do with global warming. You appear to be saying that solving every problem in the world would require vast political and economic changes... and therefor solving global warming would require vast political and economic changes. It is a non sequitur. Global warming can be solved without "radically reordering our economic and political systems". Read the article above for confirmation. -
cRR Kampen at 20:20 PM on 17 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
Anthony Watts is no meteorologist. Doesn't even know what a polar low is. -
Dikran Marsupial at 18:28 PM on 17 January 201316 ^ more years of global warming
eon I would have thought it obvious that the answer is "yes, you would expect to see a broadly flat trend plus some noise", as that is directly implied by the statement that there is little evidence to suggest that the "unknown unknowns" have a significant effect. However, one can't say that would apply to ALL time periods and it also leaves open the definition of "plus some noise". Do you agree that the video clearly demonstrates that the apparent hiatus in global mean surface temperatures is adequately explained by volcanic and solar forcing and ENSO, and that once these factors have been accounted for there is little evidence for a reduction in the rate of warming due to the enhanced greenhouse effect. Yes or no? -
citizenschallenge at 18:26 PM on 17 January 2013Ocean Heat Came Back to Haunt Australia
Nice job Rob! You folks really know how to explain the science. Perhaps that's why you're coming under such venomous attacks of late. In any event, I want to thank you for that generous sharing policy - My little blog is just my hobby, it's got to take backseat to all life's other demands. So I tell you, it's really nice to be able to reproduce a beautiful piece of journalism/science/education {whatever you want to call it} with graphics :-) and all, to support some point I'm trying to make. For instance this article makes for a perfect final 'chapter' to my most recent collection. Thank you all ! Peter Link to Peter's "chapter"Moderator Response: [PW] Hot-linked article -
prestrud8125 at 17:58 PM on 17 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
Why do you consider increased plant growth to be a positive outcome of global warming? That is a value judgement. Increased plant growth changes ecosystems. For example: According to the latest published results from the satellite based NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) instrument, the biomass of the tundra has increased by 20% over the last 30 years. If this continues, large parts of the tundra and alpine ecosystems, including their biodiversity as we know them today, will disappear in a few decades. -
bill4344 at 16:19 PM on 17 January 2013Ocean Heat Came Back to Haunt Australia
Daniel - Gareth thinks not. It would be interesting to determine the origins of this one, as it's certainly a great way to capture people's attention. -
JasonB at 15:59 PM on 17 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
Clyde: Response posted on a more appropriate thread. -
JasonB at 15:58 PM on 17 January 2013Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming
Response to Clyde: Why do you think we need to be able to say AGW caused a particular extreme weather event? That's like saying we shouldn't warn people of the dangers of smoking until science can prove that a particular lung cancer sufferer developed lung cancer because they smoked and not because of any other reason. As your own link states, "the emerging ability, arising from improvements in climate models, to calculate how anthropogenic global warming will change, or has changed" is being watched with interest by "lawyers, insurers and climate negotiators" because "nations, communities and individual citizens may begin to seek compensation for losses and damage arising from global warming", but:It is more difficult to make the case for ‘usefulness’. None of the industry and government experts at the workshop could think of any concrete example in which an attribution might inform business or political decision-making.
Moderator Response: [DB] Added hyperlink to referenced link. -
ajki at 15:52 PM on 17 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
Great article! And it may help to understand a strange myth I recently read in a comment at "Klimalounge" [S. Rahmstorfs Blog] and which is not on the myth list. The myth goes like this: "Take that, warmistas! Sahara is getting greener!" and though not explained by the commenter ["Seifert"] it probably means: 1. poorer countries do profit from "good" CO2, 2. models do not predict that (so, models are wrong/bad/evil...). Rahmstorf itself did not pick that up in his explanations and rightly so, I think, because this must be something especially weird. Is this WSJ "greening" the root for myths like that? Is that something new within the denialsphere? -
dana1981 at 15:31 PM on 17 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
Clyde @11 - who are you talking to? -
johnrabbit at 15:08 PM on 17 January 2013Ocean Heat Came Back to Haunt Australia
Can anybody explain if the recent high temperatures of the Indian Ocean were linked to the La Nina in the Pacific? Did the warmer Pacific water flow east to the Indian Ocean? -
Clyde at 15:06 PM on 17 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
(-Off topic snipped-).Moderator Response: [DB] Your comment pertains to extreme weather events. As such, it was snipped as off-topic. Please follow up to JasonB's reply to you on the other, more appropriate thread. -
DSL at 15:02 PM on 17 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
We might also mention that plants' reproductive cycles are tuned to a stable or slowly changing climate. With rapidly warming conditions, plants' reproductive mechanisms may not be set in motion--or be set in motion at the wrong time, unable to take advantage of various pollination mechanisms. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/01/130116-spring-earlier-global-warming-plants-trees-blooming-science/ -
Cugel at 14:08 PM on 17 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
Regarding Ridley's selective vision and excuse to Parliament, it has for centuries been a financial maxim that to borrow short and lend long is a sure road to bankruptcy. It's not credible that nobody ever pointed this out to Ridley, but he either could not hear or he regaled them with the "new economic paradigm" which comes with every asset bubble, in which old unwelcome maxims no longer applied. What's more the bank was lending long on 125% mortgages, on the understanding that the asset value would inevitably rise (thanks to the new economic paradigm) to fill the gap. None of this was unprecented by a very long way. Ridley is a (-snip-), pure and simple.Moderator Response: [DB] Inflammatory snipped. -
Daniel Bailey at 13:40 PM on 17 January 2013Newcomers, Start Here
Tamino pretty much staked the heart of the "it's a random walk" meme in this recovered post here. Such flights of bad statistics he labeled "mathturbation". Tamino:"One final note: there’s an ever-growing number of “throw some complicated-looking math at the wall and see what sticks” attempts to refute global warming. It seems to me that a disproportionate fraction of them come from economists. Perhaps that’s because they fear the loss of corporate profit more than they fear danger to the health and welfare of humanity. Or perhaps it’s just a reflection of the rather poor track record of economists in general. When it comes to predicting the future, it’s well to compare the truly astounding successes of, say, physics, to, say, economics."
I note that Kärner gives props to McKitrick for his advice. An economist... -
Maggnum at 13:14 PM on 17 January 2013Newcomers, Start Here
Has anyone seen the paper by Olavi Kärner recently added to The Hockey Schtick wherein he claims the Sun controls climate & 'gives no support to theory of anthropogenic climate change'? Link to the paper is here: http://www.warwickhughes.com/climate/karner.pdf It's from 2002 and appears to have been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. I tried to review the paper, but it's outside of my knowledge box :). Anyone have any comments or debunking advice on this? -
Daniel Bailey at 11:33 AM on 17 January 2013Ocean Heat Came Back to Haunt Australia
Memory says Gareth from Hot-Topic. 'Course, memory lies like a rug somedays. -
John Cook at 11:24 AM on 17 January 2013Ocean Heat Came Back to Haunt Australia
Jake, I'm not sure where the Hiro comparison originated. I heard someone (not Hansen) express the energy imbalance in terms of Hiros per second so I checked those figures then used it in the Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism but that was back in 2009 - I don't recall who originated the idea. -
Steve Metzler at 10:45 AM on 17 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
There goes Watts trying to directly compare temp anomalies that use different baseline periods *again*. This must be the fourth time he's been caught doing it, and you can't explain it to him. That's why he loves the satellite records vs. the land based ones - they have lower anomalies because they have more recent baseline periods. And to him, that means temps aren't increasing as much in the satellite records. Poor, deluded Tony. I used to read WUWT more regularly out of a sort of morbid curiosity to see what hijinks they were up to. But now I rarely bother because the cyber-bullying in the comments gets my blood pressure up. I mostly just read the Tamino takedowns of Tisdale et. al.Moderator Response: [RH] Adjusted unnecessary inflammatory acronym. -
Doug Hutcheson at 10:37 AM on 17 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
Their results showing the net change in NDVI from 1982 to 2008 are illustrated in Figure 2, with green representing a greening, and brown representing a browning
Oh, these science boffins! Why can't they make these graphics simpler for the rest of us to understand? [/sarc] -
littlerobbergirl at 10:25 AM on 17 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
With my serious veg grower head on I was going to comment on different response in C4/C3 plants, increased predation, weeds and nutrition, but I see you have indeed 'got it covered' in the 'gory details' with lots of other interesting stuff I didn't think of ;) So if co2 is plant food, can I live on pure sugar? I have tried... -
Doug Hutcheson at 10:20 AM on 17 January 2013Greenhouse Gas Concentrations Reach New Record
Tom Curtis @ 11, thanks for that clarification. I didn't think any fossil carbon ended up in fertiliser, as I couldn't work out what plant nutrient it would provide, but I didn't want to rely on the (non-existent) infallibility of my understanding "8-) scaddenp caused the penny to drop, by pointing out the carbon phase change from CO₂ to CH₄ (plant consumes CO₂, animal eats plant, animal emits CH₄), with CH₄ being a more potent greenhouse gas. So, I was right when I understood animal digestion is not adding carbon to the carbon cycle, but wrong when I followed this with the assumption that animal digestion is therefore not adding a forcing. -
JasonB at 09:45 AM on 17 January 201316 ^ more years of global warming
eon,If "no", then what's the point of the video? You can crunch some numbers for the last 30 years in one way, but the same crunch method isn't applicable for other time periods, then that doesn't sound very scientific.
Over the longer term the answer is "yes and no" because you've ignored known factors that are omitted in the video because they are known to not be factors now but have been in the past. The forcing associated with Milankovitch cycles is an obvious one — it has been decreasing for thousands of years, leading to slow, long-term cooling, but the change is too small to be a factor at the timescale of the video, and since it's more related to the distribution of insolation rather than the total insolation, it might not have been picked up as "solar activity". An asteroid impact would also have an effect. Long-term changes to albedo due to encroaching and retreating ice sheets or desertification are also omitted but important in the past. The reason I say "yes and no" is because the "same crunch method" would work for those other factors if they were a factor. If you want to use the same method to account for changes since the last glacial maximum, then simply add terms for the additional factors that come into play. There's nothing wrong with omitting knowns that we know aren't relevant to the period in question, however. If you really want to show the video is wrong, then rather than complain about unknown unknowns not being included, all you have to do is show that when adding a term for AGW that depends on net anthropogenic forcings, what is left is more than just "some wiggles due to weather". That is scientific. -
Tom Curtis at 09:21 AM on 17 January 2013Greenhouse Gas Concentrations Reach New Record
Doug Hutcheson @8, so far as I know, synthetic fertilizers are primarily manufactured using the Haber-Bosch process. That process reacts nitrogen with hydrogen gas to form ammonia, which is then used to manufacture fertilizers. Fossil fuels are used in the process both as a source of hydrogen gas, and to power the process. The key point is that no carbon from the fossil fuels ends up in the final product (the fertilizer). Consequently any fossil fuel carbon taken up, and emitted by cattle has come indirectly by first being absorbed by plants. They do not represent additional fossil fuel emissions. Of course, the fossil fuels used in the industrial process do release greenhouse gases, but are accounted for in budgeting CO2 emissions as industrial emissions. Scaddenp has already mentioned the production of methane by ruminants. -
Rob Honeycutt at 08:45 AM on 17 January 201316 ^ more years of global warming
In response to eon here: "Since no human contributions, no unknown contributions and all the significant factors have been subtracted/added, then by your arguments, we would see a flat graph (+some noise) ? " You would likely have a fairly flat graph, but with longer term variations. Here is the past 2000 years with solar and volcanoes. The MWP and LIA in this graph are attributable to both solar and volcanoes. So, I think without those you'd end up with a fairly flat graph with noise.
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Mal Adapted at 08:29 AM on 17 January 2013CO2 limits will harm the economy
It appears I've given the impression I'm opposed to a carbon tax. For the record, I think a carbon tax is the most efficient way to internalize some of the external costs of fossil fuels and encourage their replacement with renewables, and the sooner a substantial carbon tax is in place the better. Some of our disagreement here is because we're focusing on different time scales. My argument is that (assuming the tax isn't rebated in the right way), average buying will decline while the carbon tax is in place, before the transition to renewable energy is complete. After that, once energy unit costs stabilize and once the socialized costs you enumerated are no longer being paid (and little or no carbon tax is being collected), it's reasonable to predict that average buying power will be about the same as today. However, the socialized external costs of fossil fuel use we're currently paying don't include things like the death of coral reefs from ocean acidification, the imminent extinction of the polar bear and the costs of weather disasters 50 years from now. These costs will be incurred even if all carbon emission ceases today. It's doubtful that a carbon tax could internalize them. The argument of Naomi Klein that I linked to, and that I think is ineluctable, is about more than systems of energy production. It's about the costs that have been external to total gross global product until recently, but are now being socialized: groundwater overuse in the Great Plains; overfishing of all seafood stocks; growth of urban areas forcing agriculture onto less productive soils; the list goes on and on. This is the liquidation of global natural capital I was referring to, and as long as any of it continues, global society will not be sustainable. I can't escape the conclusion that ending liquidation of all natural capital will require "radically reordering our economic and political systems", and neither can some of the more forward-looking deniers. They want to keep socializing the loss of natural capital while they continue converting it to private gain. That's the freedom they're afraid of losing, as well they should be. -
Rob Honeycutt at 08:22 AM on 17 January 201316 ^ more years of global warming
eon... Perhaps there should be an addendum video that also removes forcing from man-made greenhouse gases from the trend. -
eon at 08:05 AM on 17 January 201316 ^ more years of global warming
Sorry - i should of added: If "yes", then that gives "skeptics" an opportunity to prove them wrong (which is probably why people never answer yes/no questions with a straight yes or a no!) If "no", then what's the point of the video? You can crunch some numbers for the last 30 years in one way, but the same crunch method isn't applicable for other time periods, then that doesn't sound very scientific. -
Rob Honeycutt at 08:05 AM on 17 January 201316 ^ more years of global warming
eon... Once you remove those primary variables, what I usually get from skeptics is "we're just recovering from the LIA" or "this is just natural variability." Neither of which offers any actual mechanism for the trend. -
eon at 07:58 AM on 17 January 201316 ^ more years of global warming
@BaerbelW By comment #69 i was more responding to comments rather than the video. I did clarify further beyond an opening statement.... read "noise" and "not significant" in my comments as "some wiggles due to weather". I don't think anyone is bothered about the wiggles/weather - it is more the longer trend that is of relevance. @Rob I get the point of the video. I don't have a problem with the point of the video. I have a problem with the content of it -> specifically its methodology of working out the "human contributions". I have no issue with the point of the video. The videos point shouldn't have any bearing of if its calculation is correct or not. @Dikran At least 1/3 people tried to respond to a simple question! I take it that is a "I don't know" (fair enough). Yes, it can't be measured.... but that wasn't really the question. The question is what would you expect to see. It wasn't a rhetoric question. The purpose of the question is to see if people really believe that the method outlined in the video, to the extent that they believe it would work for ALL time periods. If yes, then that gives "skeptics" an opportunity to prove them wrong (which is probably why people never answer yes/no questions with a straight yes or a no!) -
Alexandre at 07:50 AM on 17 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
A correction about Bjorn Lomborg: He's not an economist. His own website says he majored and later a Ph.D. in Political Science. Sometimes he's described as a "statician". Not sure how accurate this is. -
Glenn Tamblyn at 07:37 AM on 17 January 2013Ridley, Murdoch, and Lomborg Attempt to Greenwash Global Warming
An important principle in Agricultural science is Liebig's 'Law of the Minimum'. Essentially that a plant's growth is limited by whichever resource is most restricted. So adding any resource (CO2, Potassium, whatever) may not do much if that resource isn't the limiting factor for that plant. So knowing how plants will react in the future is nowhere near as simple as the 'CO2 is Plant Food' meme suggests
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