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More than 100 comments found. Only the most recent 100 have been displayed.

Increasing CO2 has little to no effect

scaddenp at 05:39 AM on 8 December, 2025

For direct measurement of greenhouse effect, try here:
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/02/25/co2-greenhouse-effect-increase/

and here for the Nature paper.

Increasing CO2 has little to no effect

TonyW at 08:37 AM on 7 December, 2025

There is also direct measurement of the effect. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26638729_First_direct_observation_of_the_atmospheric_CO2_year-to-year_increase_from_space_Atmos_Chem_Phys_74249-4256

CO2 increase is natural, not human-caused

Bob Loblaw at 01:47 AM on 3 December, 2025

sychodefender @ 39:

I am afraid that you start off with an incomplete statistic (% of total CO2 emissions that are man made), which leads you into incorrect conclusions about the role of CO2 emissions in the rise of CO2.

Atmospheric changes in CO2 are the result of net CO2 fluxes - both additions (emissions) and removals. Without human emissions, the natural system was in balance and atmospheric CO2 levels did not change much year to year. (There is a clear annual cycle, though.)

If your 5% argument was correct, then if human emissions stopped we'd continue to see CO2 rise at 95% of the current rate. If this were true, why was CO2 not rising at 95% of the current rate before humans started emitting CO2? Because nature was absorbing that CO2 - that's why. Humans are 100% responsible for the imbalance.

You can read a better explanation of this mass balance issue on this post that discusses other typcial (bad) arguments about CO2 rise. You can also find another discussion of the various clues that lead to the conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 is the cause of the increase in this post titled Climate Change Cluedo: Anthropogenic CO2.

Let's make a simple analogy:

You start with $1,000 in the bank.

Your regular income is $5,000 per month.

Your regular expenses are $5,000 per month.

After 5 years, you still have only $1,000 in the bank.

You win the lottery, and the prize is doled out at the rate of $250/month for 5 years.

You still get $5,000/month in income, and still spend $5,000/month.

After another five years, you now have $16,000 in the bank - an extra $15,000.

By your math, the lottery winnings are only 5% of your income, so only 5% ($750) of the extra money in the bank is from the lottery winnings. But clearly your regular income and expenses have not changed, and never led to any increase in your bank account (net zero). The extra $15,000 is 100% due to the extra lottery winnings, not 5%.

Let's say you decide to spend half your lottery winnings. You still have $5,000/month income and $250/month lottery winnings going into the bank, but now your spending is $5,125/month. After five years, you will have $8,500 in the bank - added savings compared to your pre-lottery days. (This is a closer analogy to atmospheric CO2, where half the human emissions are absorbed by natural processes.) That extra $7,500 is still 100% due to the lottery winnings.

The rest of your post follows from an incorrect initial assumption. It is wrong.

CO2 increase is natural, not human-caused

sychodefender at 22:35 PM on 2 December, 2025

Only 5% of global annual co2 emissions are man made. Thus 5% of the yearly rise in atmospheric co2 (2.4 ppm) is from human activities.
(2.4 ppm X 5% = 0.12 ppm pa)
Scientists argue about the existence and quantity of various positive feedbacks from the tiny amount of warming that 0.12 ppm produces, but generally they estimate that feedbacks add 300% to forcing.
(0.12 ppm X 300% = 0.36 ppm pa)
So the maximum reduction that we can achieve with net zero is 0.36 ppm pa and this is extremely unlikely to happen this century.
Some other process is occurring to make up the remaining 2.04 ppm pa that is being added to the atmosphere, does this suggest that feedback from the small temperature rise is much more powerful than previously thought?
Or is our belief that this coincidental co2 rise is the driver of significant warming erroneous?
Methane is calculated to be responsible for 30% of warming, 60% of global methane emissions are anthropological, hence theoretically by completely eliminating our methane emissions we could prevent 18% of its influence on temperature increase.
This would necessitate dramatic changes which in all honesty are massively unlikely, perhaps a 10% reduction might be possible this century.
It seems that the ability of these anthropological gases (and their associated feedbacks) to have any significant warming effect is very small indeed.
If we are certain that the measurements revealing an untypical rapid temperature rise are accurate we must search elsewhere for an explanation and hopefully a method of control that is potent, plausible and genuinely achievable on a global basis and timescale.

Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim

MA Rodger at 05:03 AM on 29 November, 2025

RegalNose@26,
In the context of Judd et al (2024)'s graph below (Fig4a in the OP above), Judd et al Fig2

you ask - Isn't the NASA graph (below)

NASA carbon graph

just pure scaremongring?

You ask "What am I missing? Why the panic and crisis mode?"

The OP above does not really answer your question of why CO2 should put us humans into a panic mode.
❶ The OP is firstly addressing the misuse of the Judd et al findings, being converted into total nonsense. It is, of course, difficult to nail down 'total nonsense'. ❷ Secondly, the OP chats about the threat of our CO2 to natural life on Earth rathert than the treat to humanity. ❸ That is not to say we humans should not be panicking.

❶ That first point, the OP presents an exemplar piece of 'total nonsense' which says "There's always this rise and fall." The context here implies it is the global temperatures they are saying "always ... rise and fall."
They continue:-

"This idea that the whole thing is based on carbon emissions from human beings is total bullshit. It's not true. Right. We might be having an effect, but we're having a small effect, a very small effect.”

This quote is 'total nonsense' as the findings of Judd et al, the evidence they are presumably presenting, says the exact opposite. Judd et al say it is CO2 on which the "whole thing is based". From their abstract:-

"There is a strong correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and GMST, identifying CO2 as the dominant control on variations in Phanerozoic global climate and suggesting an apparent Earth system sensitivity of ~8°C." [My bold]

And the present-day big actor driving the 'whole thing', the startling rise in CO2 NASA graph above, that is the 'human beings'. This 'whole thing' is not "very small".
Additionally, Judd et al finding "an apparent Earth system sensitivity of ~8°C" suggests the effect is far from "very small" in terms of global temperature.

❷ The threat to nature from to the CO2-rise being so rapid is a major part of the above OP. Perhaps to add a little colour, 56 million years ago the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was caused by CO2 rising from ~800ppm to ~2,000ppm. The climatic forcing would be the same if we today allow CO2 to rise to 690ppm (and no other GHG increases - accounting for other GHGs, the equivalent would be perhaps 520ppm).
The PETM was not a massive event in historical climate or ecology but it did have pretty big impacts. Consider horses - they shrank to the size of large dogs to cope with the heat. The PETM is often held up as the nearest example of what we are stoking with our man-made climate change. But there is one stark difference. The PETM warming took something like 25,000 years. Our warming is happening 100-times quicker. The sixth mass extinction event which humanity is already threatening with other activities will be a certainty if our warming gets anywhere close to rivalling the PETM's +6ºC.

❸ But we humans are an adaptable species. However the problems are this.
(1) We a very numerous species that relies on a lot of real-estate. Loss of big portions of that real-estate (or even just the projected loss of it) will have big big geo-political consequences. If we could all pull together and address the problems, that may not be so disastrous. But we won't. And I'd imagine climate-change-mitigation measures will not be such a high priority when the world economy collapses and wars of national survival break out.
(2) The climatology cannot tell us how long we can keep melting Greenland to prevent 20ft of sea level rise becoming inevitable, or when the AMOC will disappear plumging Europe into the deep freeze, or when the cloud feedbacks over the Pacific will add another +3ºC to the warming, etc. The +2ºC limit to the warming was dropped in favour of +1.5ºC because tipping-points such as these could potentially be triggered below +2ºC.

I hope that goes some way to explaining "the panic and crisis mode."

Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim

Philippe Chantreau at 04:06 AM on 28 November, 2025

The planet was lush and green very shortly after the end of the last ice age, when CO2 was less than 300ppm. In every region where the avilability of water made their existence possible, forests grew. They covered an immense area of the globe before humans started cutting them down and slashing/burning. Megafauna existed also and was in fact richer than now, even during the ice age: Mammoths, whooly rhinos, dire wolves, cave lions, megacerops, smilodon, cave bears, etc, etc.

Humans are an enormously powerful factor constraining the existence, abundance and diversity of life. Humans precipitated the disappearance of the megafauna of the late quaternary. Currently, life is subjected to all the "normal" natural stressors and all the human made ones as well. Without humans, it is very likely that after a few tens of thousands of years, life would be green and lush, rife with megafauna, under the future climatic conditions afforded by 500ppm of CO2. There is absolutely no chance of that happening with 8 to 10 billions of humans inhabiting the planet. None whatsoever.

Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim

RegalNose at 22:46 PM on 27 November, 2025

Hi all,

I am absolute green when it comes to topic of Climate research (which is obviously not my field) and trying to make sense of some information presented to general public. I am writing here as I'd like your help with navigating this as it seems to me a bit contradictive with presented "news of the day".

If you navigate to the https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/, there are two data points that are interesting to me:

1. current CO2 ppm = 430

2. increase of GMST of 1.5 degree C since pre-industry era.

What puzzles me, why is this so important to call for crisis mode?

When I look at the Judd's graph no. 2 I am reading that the planet was operating during The Mesozoic Era, which we know was lush, green and supported living of megafauna, on levels of CO2 between 500-2000ppm and with temperature s significantly higher comparing to current time. I am reading the graph as a path from local minimum and not as a path to glabal maximum, when it comes to GMST. I do understand the problem of how rapid is the incremental temperature increase, but don't see the issue of the increase itself.

In the context of Judd's graph, isn't the graphe used at https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/ just pure scaremongring?

If you take 800,000 years, the CO2 ppm looks like massive spike, in the graph. But when you take the context of millions of years as Judd does, this increase is well.. insignificant.

What am I missing? Why the panic and crisis mode?

Thanks!

Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer

Eclectic at 21:58 PM on 7 November, 2025

Nick Palmer :

A lengthy PART TWO of the religious component of Lindzen's climate science denialism.

While we see where the typical Denialist (e.g. to be found in the street or @WUWT website) harbors anger / selfishness / deficiency in empathy . . . . there is IMO an additional fundamentalist religious component in the Motivated Reasonings of some prominent Denialists. You yourself could name a few of those luminaries, I am sure.

IIRC, there was an interview with a very relaxed, laid-back Lindzen sitting in a chair in his garden, while being interviewed by a "sympathetic" interviewer. My perhaps-faulty memory was that the occasion was 2006 ~ but perhaps that date is wrong. My googling this week turned up youtube: "Interview with Professor Richard Lindzen" on the "Rathnakumar S" channel. I am unclear on its date ~ maybe 2014 or 2015. Hard to be sure, since youtubers tend to recycle and re-post stuff from years earlier from other sources. But the exact date is a trivial matter. And please do not bother to view the video, unless you are in a masochistic mood.

# The "Rathnakumar S" channel is new to me, and I have not viewed any of the rest of the playlist. But the playlist does include interviews (originals or re-posts?) of people such as :- W.Soon; W.Happer; H.Svensmark; M.Salby; P.Michaels; S.Baliunas; Bob Carter; et alia. And including that paragon of ethical public education, Marc Morano. Plus there appears to be a flirtation with anti-vax. Of course.

Video with approximate time-stamps :

Lindzen seems to favor a degree of Intelligent Design ~ the World is well-designed. 3:05 "Oh I think the case is pretty strong that it is in fact better designed, and there are strong negative feedbacks that will instead of amplifying, diminish the effect of man's emissions."

Lindzen keeps minimizing the Global Warming: "Only half a degree in a century ... [and] the temperature is always flopping around."

Lindzen opines that CO2 can have a warming effect, but most of it is not due to humans . . . though yes, water vapor and clouds "worsen what we do with CO2." [Note that Lindzen's "Iris Hypothesis" has been a dud.]

22:20 "We still don't know why we had these ice age cycles. We don't know why 50 million years ago we could have alligators in Spitzbergen."

27:00 "Ever since we invented the umbrella, we've known how to deal with climate, up to a point."

37:20 "Nothing in this [climate] field is terribly compelling. The data is weak. ..."CO2 will contribute some warming : not much. ..."It is then claimed that recent changes are due to man : I don't think that's true."

46:13 He returns to Intelligent Design : "A well-engineered device tries to compensate for anything that perturbs it."

So ~ not much particularly explicit denialisty statements . . . but a great deal of implicit statements. Including, throughout the video, a great deal of "Cornwall" wording.

Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer

One Planet Only Forever at 07:20 AM on 7 November, 2025

Nick Palmer @7,

Regarding Lindzen's 'alternative understanding of the impact of cloud changes as warming occurs due to increased CO2 levels'.

I may be mistaken. But nearly 1.5 C warming has happened with CO2 increasing from 280 ppm to 420 ppm (only a 50% increase of CO2). I appreciate that correlation does not prove causation. But that information would appear to fairly solidly establish that Lindzen's past belief, that he appears to powerfully resist changing his mind about in spite of updated information, has 'very little merit'.

CO2 is just a trace gas

Cedders at 09:53 AM on 5 November, 2025

I'm surprised that this argument is so low on the popularity list, 77 out of 200. Possibly it’s more common offline: meeting some contrarians at real-life events (stalls etc), it’s practically what opens the conversation when you are pegged as one of the climate-concerned. ‘I bet you can’t tell me the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.’

If you express an answer in parts per million, or perhaps as two million million tonnes, then they will want it converted to a percentage (even though most of the atmosphere is transparent to infra-red, and it’s the amount rather than proportion of greenhouse gases that determines the greenhouse effect). 0.043% sounds negligible somehow, perhaps because of common uses of percentages in polling or economics or pay rises. Without empirical knowledge of effects of a substance in a small proportion, people can fall back on what seems like a reasonable guess.

An underlying assumption by people stressing concentrations seems to be that if people knew CO₂ was ‘a trace gas’, they wouldn’t be concerned about climate change, and so the way most people can’t answer in percentage terms means that they are ignorant about the subject matter, or have been manipulated. (The conversation may then proceed to ‘life flourished in the Jurassic because of higher CO₂’ myth, about as accurate as One Million Years BC with Raquel Welch, or combine several misunderstandings into one sentence or question.)

So, supporting the large effects of trace substances argument, and as some people reject the ‘poison’ or ‘alcohol’ analogy as too indirect, I’d like to post this table. If comparisons across the electromagnetic spectrum are somehow valid, then 0.043% turns out to be a lot.

CO2 is just a trace gas

Cedders at 05:36 AM on 5 November, 2025

Bob Loblaw @60: "As for JJones idea that CO2 in trace amounts can't absorb enough radiation, there are commercial CO2 gas analyzers that are designed to measure CO2 by measuring the amount of IR radiation it absorbs, and they can do this on very small quantities of air."

Indeed I've bought an air quality meter for about $10 online, which uses non-dispersive infra-red (filters) to detect carbon dioxide, formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds. It takes a minute to literally warm up, and is of course nowhere near as accurate as the infra-red equipment scientists use to measure CO₂, but it will at least detect breath, poor ventilation and includes a hygrometer.

Whether actual hands-on experience of such things will help someone accept radiative physics is one question. And whether finding that kind of evidence against the most convenient rationalisation available changes wider world-view about who is responsible for climate change is a different one.

Scaddenp @61 : "I am interested in how people build up their mental models, and how we update these mental models as new information is presented."

(digression) So am I, although I often find it hard to persuade people to share their reasoning, particularly if they are quickly on the defensive. I think humans in general do some 'hill-climbing' in their professed beliefs, aiming at local maxima of practical, satisfactory narrative. New information may change the landscape, but people only move their position slightly, rather than doing the tiring cognitive work of re-evaluating the bigger picture. Hence why goalposts are moved and people rapidly move on to the next myth.

One thing I do find is quite common among contrarians in real life (besides an understandable but exaggerated distrust of authority that is a mirror image of acceptance of consensus) is a simplistic version of Popper's falsificationism. Here's apparent evidence why climate science is wrong, and that is enough to disprove it. (Some do then accrete other supporting arguments.) This mischaracterised epistemology is something to apply to any scientific 'hypothesis' that may have been painted as inconvenient or costing money or jeopardising worldview, but from my experience they use a more common-sense Bayesianism for everyday life.

To JJones @48, one could add that 'a significant amount of heat' is radiated from Sun to Earth and Earth to space. If the latter is mostly in the form of long-wave infra-red, and carbon dioxide absorbs long-wave infra-red, where does the 'heat energy' go? And then maybe explain emission layer displacement in simple terms.

It's the sun

kootzie at 04:32 AM on 4 November, 2025

I am semi-active on Research Gate and elsewhere and doing my bit to [snip]

swat and bitch-slap denialists as they emit their oral-methane emissions to contaminate the discussions and spread anti-science drivel

I notice that the likes of
D*n P*rn
H. D*s L*oot
J*k Br*n
and others regularly engage in denialist mis-information
I notice that none of them appear to be significant enough to
merit (or dis-merit) inclusion in your rogues gallery

Their latest drivel stream purports that not only does increased atmospheric CO2 concentration not contribute ANY increase in global average temperatures, that CO2 does not have any effect on GAT at all.

They claim that WV aka Water Vapour, is a far more potent GHG
(which is arguably a defensible proposition) but that WV is the ONLY
GHG which has ANY effect on temperature, and ipso-facto ergo QED
anthropogenic Global Warming does not exist - its all on the natch.

They regularly mis-interpret mis-comprehend mis-represent physics.
They fundamentally deny that CO2, a non-condensible GHG with a long lifespan drives global temps and insist that WV, a condensible GHG with a short lifespan is not merely a feedback / feedforward mechanism but the fundamental / ONLY driver.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/analyze-and-critique-vol-20-20-wis.z78fQn.WeNzqnj5Kkg#0
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/analyze-and-critique-the-error-7ZbX2nqyRgGc19k2y45u_Q#0
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/analyze-and-critique-paraphras-Lrr7UYOjQAitC93qUR10EA#1

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_can_environmental_protection_and_biodiversity_be_improved_by_using_current_ecological_technologies#view=6908dd880ea281189c0a137f/312/313/312

Is this the most embarrassing error in the DOE Climate Working Group Report?

Bob Loblaw at 04:35 AM on 17 October, 2025

History suggests that the authors of the DOE report are largely incapable of being embarrassed. Their determination to spread their message, in spite of numerous criticisms and corrections, is quite remarkable.

Charlie Brown @ 4:

That is an interest take: that they argue 3 W/m² is small compared to the total radiative flux. It seems that they are using the "it's a trace/small amount compared to [X]" template that has been used in a variety of poor contrarian arguments; vis a vis:

CO2 is a trace gas

Anthropogenic emissions are small compared to natural cycles

Are there any other arguments that fit this same template?

DenialDepot had a fun post (15 years ago!) on how to cook a graph by playing with the Y-axis. Of course, in its standard mocking of the contrarians, DenialDepot accuses Skeptical Science of cooking the graphs by not expanding the Y-axis to make the change look minuscule. (DD looked at sea ice.) DD shows the "proper" method should be to compare the lost sea ice area to the total area of the earth. In DD's words, "That's far more clear. Immediately I am having trouble seeing the sea ice. This is good. If you can't see it, it's not a problem."

It's like a defendant in court arguing "how can it be grand larceny? I only took $100,000. He has billions."

Koonin providing clarity on climate?

Evan at 06:31 AM on 28 September, 2025

Charlie Brown@3. Yes, I understand the Milankovitch cycles well. Yes, warming starts a very complicated feedback cycle, but CO2 is a magnifier. CO2 is a primary cause of the temperature fluctuations through complex feedback cycles.

But my point is that we live in an ecosystem that is very delicately balanced, and just 100 ppm of CO2 is enough to cause huge swings in sea level and temperature. This time around, regardless of the cause, we are pushing the system way beyond anything experienced during the ice age cycles.

Koonin providing clarity on climate?

Charlie_Brown at 05:09 AM on 28 September, 2025

Ken Rice is lenient with the authors of the DOE Climate Impacts report and with Secretary Chris Wright. Chris Wright states in the Foreword: “I chose them for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate. I believe it faithfully represents the state of climate science today.” I care more about substance than credentials. My public comments included: “The Foreword highlights that the purpose of the Critical Review is to challenge and counter mainstream science. It certainly does not represent the state of climate science today. Rather, it provides a rationalization for weakening current policies for combatting climate change. The authors are neither representative of the scientific community nor diverse.”

The science is not that complex. The report is full of misrepresentation, distraction, and obfuscation. It is not worthy of an undergraduate term paper let alone a critical review of science by PhDs. Many points have been thoroughly discussed and debunked here on the SkS website. My comments included:
1) “Section 2.1 is oversimplistic. CO2 is rarely the limiting nutrient. It discusses photosynthesis as a benefit but ignores adverse effects resulting from CO2 as the primary cause of climate change including drought, extreme temperatures, excess rain, and cropland relocation.”
2) “CO2 below 180 ppm is an irrelevant distraction to the discussion of modern global warming.”
3) “Changing ‘ocean acidification’ to ‘ocean neutralization’ is semantic posturing that does not change the effects. To say that pH reduction is not acidification until the pH drops below 7.0 it is not meaningful.”
4) “Implying that the IPCC uses data manipulation to satisfy preferences is baseless accusatory language. The change in radiative forcing due to the Earth’s orbit around the sun is negligible within the period of modern global warming. The change due to sunspot activity is measured and found to be negligible.”
5) “Comparing 3 W/m2 to 240 W/m2 is misleading and diminishes the significance of 3 W/m2. It is an example of science denialism by distraction, obfuscation, and omission. Straightforward, fundamental physics including conservation of energy and radiant energy calculations combined with atmospheric properties allow the effects of anthropogenic forcing to be isolated by calculation. The calculated spectra of energy loss to space is verified by satellite measurements (Hanel, et al.,1972) (Brindley & Bantges, 2015). 3 W/m2 is sufficient to cause and continue observed global warming. The anthropogenic forcing is not determined by difference of two large, measured numbers and does not rely on just satellite estimates of radiative energy flows. There is very little uncertainty about the effects of increasing gas concentrations.
The effect of clouds is the largest uncertainty in climate models. However, average cloud cover does not change without a driving force. Therefore, the effect of increasing GHG can be isolated by holding clouds constant. Specific humidity will rise with increasing surface temperature, resulting in positive water vapor feedback. This can affect clouds."

Others have submitted many more excellent comments, but I have made my point. The science can be explained and understood by most scientific-minded people who are interested in learning. One does not need a PhD in climate science to understand the flaws in the DOE report.

Disbanding the CWG may not be a sign of progress. It may be a way to avoid the lawsuit by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists that would restrict the use of the report.

Koonin providing clarity on climate?

Charlie_Brown at 01:43 AM on 28 September, 2025

Evan @ 1 100,000 year cycles are caused by the Milankovitch cycles of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. CO2 fluctuations were the result of ocean temperature changes. It is hypothesized that at the beginning of ice ages increased dissolution of CO2 in cold water, the result of the temprature dependence on Henry's Law, slows cooling by reducing CO2. Evolving CO2 from warm water at the end of an ice age enhances the rate of warming.

This time is different. This is the first time in the history of the planet that CO2 and other GHG concentrations are increasing rapidly due to emissions from human activities.

Everyone dies. That is natural. When someone causes someone else to die, that is immoral.

Climate change is accelerating, scientists find in ‘grim’ report

michael sweet at 03:25 AM on 23 September, 2025

Radman365:

You say "It does at least appear to me that there is an excessive degree of certainty with regards to "the truth" on both sides." There are two truths here to determine.

1) Is sea level rise accelerating? On one side we have a paper published in an obscure journal by authors who have produced erroneous analysis before on this topic and did not review their work with anyone with expertise in the subject. On the other we see hundreds of scientists who have discussed the data extensively with each other and reached a consensus that sea level rise is accelerating. The hundreds of scientists have identified multiple large errors in the obscure authors work.

In this case it is relatively simple to do the analysis and the results are very strongly indicating acceleration. I note that in addition to the tide guage data the hundreds of scientists have independant satalite data that reaches the same conclusion. The obscure scientists simply do not know what they are doing and have screwed up. Why did they ignore the satalite data that showed their analysis was incorrect?

The data is clear, sea level rise has accelerated over the past 50 years. Ignoring half of the data and assuming that sea level rise is independant at different locations in the world is simply an ignorant way to look at the data.

2) The important question is: will sea level continue to accelerate in the future? Data from the future is difficult to obtain. Scientists are debating what we should expect in the future. A few thnk it will not be too bad while others think it will be catastrophic. The fact that sea level rise is accelerating makes many of us very worried. The last time CO2 was over 400 ppm sea level was over 20 meters higher than today. I note that every time an IPCC report is released the projections of sea level rise increase.

You are welcome to think that sea level rise will not be too bad. That might be the case. Since sea level rise is accelerating, most of the readers here thinik we should be concerned about it. 20 meters of sea level rise would submerge most of the major cities in the entire world, although it will take a long time. Since the answwer to sea level rise is installing cheap renewable energy everywhere, why not try supporting renewable energy in your community?

Koonin providing clarity on climate?

Evan at 19:49 PM on 22 September, 2025

CO2 fluctuating 100 ppm over 100,000-year cycles is sufficient to cause sea-level to flluctuate 400 ft. This indicates just how delicate our ecosystem is to CO2 forcings.

CO2 is now increasing at a rate of 100 ppm every 40 years. Can we expect anything but difficulties from such a strong, upward, persistent push?

Climate change is accelerating, scientists find in ‘grim’ report

Evan at 19:58 PM on 19 September, 2025

MA Rodger@11, thank you very much for your detailed answer and for the explanation about AF.

Katharine Hayhoe has an analogy about driving on a dead-straight road in Texas and saying that "relying on past climate patterns is no longer a reliable guide for the future because of the speed of climate change." (this is the Google AI version of her quote). It is reassuring in a sense that AF has been steady for so long, but ...

Despite the data you showed, because we are pushing the climate so hard (CO2 rising on average 2.5 ppm/yr), I remain skeptical that we can really be sure that AF will remain constant into the future. But for the sake of harmony, can we figure out wording that we all agree on.

Do you agree that climate scientists use 2C warming as a guesstimate of the point at which we begin to lock in warming in the pipeline? In other words, even if we achieved Net-0 after crossing the 2C warming threshold, do climate scientist agree that at that point we would have locked in additional future warming?

A lot of this is semantics, because the socio-political inertia does not give me much hope that we will put on the brakes before we cross the 2C barrier, but I would like to arrive at a common understanding so that my posts here don't seem to be at odds with professional climate science.

Climate change is accelerating, scientists find in ‘grim’ report

MA Rodger at 09:08 AM on 19 September, 2025

Evan @8,
(Hopefully my reply here, your third to #7, isn't piling too much at you.)

Quantifying CO2 global emissions is reliant on the data reported and that data does suggest that emissions are still edging up. And these annoying still-rising emissions will result in accelerating increases in atmospheric CO2 levels and leaving net zero further away than ever.
The question of whether "the carbon cycle is not doing what we thought" revolves around Af, the Airborne Fraction which does wobble quite a bit year-to-year. Studies do show that there is no sign of an increasing Airborne Fraction (eg Bennett et al (2024) 'Quantification of the Airborne Fraction of Atmospheric CO2 Reveals Stability in Global Carbon Sinks Over the Past Six Decades', their Fig4 below). Of course, if there were an increasing Airborne Fraction, it would be a game-changer. But the major long-term sink we rely on is the ocean absorbtion which is a case of reasonably straightforward chemistry. Over a millennium the oceans will take up about 75% of our emissions.
A simplistic reassurance can be gleaned from the work of the Global Carbon Project whose annual data shows annual emissions and the annual atmospheric increase (both in GtCarbon) with no perceptible sign of increases in the Airborne Fraction. Bennett et al 2024 fig4

Climate change is accelerating, scientists find in ‘grim’ report

nigelj at 07:57 AM on 19 September, 2025

Evan @3 said: "My point is that as we warm the planet, it is likely that the natural emissions will increase, and it is equally likely that the sinks that have removed the natural emissions, will decrease. Hence, the imbalance caused by our 4% emissions will likely be added to by the combination of increased natural emissions and decreased natural sinks. We don't have to perturb the 96% too much to completely swamp our efforts to reduce GHG emissions."

My understanding is your scenario would only happen if we let warming get so high that we crossed certain tipping points, so that even if we froze emissions at that point in time, CO2 and methane release would continue at very substantial levels thus offsetting or swamping our efforts to then drastically cut emissions. We haven't reached that point, and my understanding is we wont provided we keep warming under 2 degrees. Bear in mind theres a fine line between a positive feedback which stops when the primary forcing stops, and crossing a tipping point where emissions become self sustaining. And Im not sure how self sustaining they would really be.

Climate change is accelerating, scientists find in ‘grim’ report

MA Rodger at 14:45 PM on 18 September, 2025

Evan @3,

You set out your "point" that, in your opinion, "the warming would likely continue due to how we have already affected the balance of natural GHG sources and sinks" even after every humanity has effectively disappeared.

The carbon cycle is understood enough (and has been understood for some time) to allow studies to conclude that the carbon sinks will continue to outweigh any natural sources and the resulting reduction in GHG will roughly balance the remaining unfulfilled warming from our emissions. Thus warming effectively stops once our emissions stop.

There has been work looking at the potential for large new sources of natural emissions or the stifling of sinks. These include the likes of methane emissions from melting permafrost or warming Arctic seas, the cascading collapse of econsystems like the Amazon rainforest or the capacity of oceans to absorb CO2 in a warmer world. (Your mention of "feedbacks" @5 - you may have specific examples in mind.) Some of this past work has sounded pretty worrying but such worrying findings have not survived full analysis.

Beyond 'net zero', there are also calls for 'net-negative emissions' that don't get discussed as much as they should. These are seen as globally necessary if our emissions are not cut quickly enough, a situation which seems pretty certain to happen. 'Net-negative' does not address future warming but works to reduce the time over which peak warming continues.

Climate Sensitivity

Leitwolf at 11:20 AM on 10 September, 2025

I would like to go back to an older post here on the tropospheric hot spot. I know the discussion, especially like Santer et al 2005. I do not really care if the hot spot is there or not. The interesting fact is that it should be there, and what jumps into my eyes when I see this graph..

trop. hot spot

Roughly speaking the graph suggests a 1.5K increase in Ts in the tropics, and about a 3K increase ot Tz, if you assume the average emission altitude to be in 450-400mb range in the tropics. I know, some emissions will occur from below, some from above, but the higher the more warming, so it should largely cancel out anyway.

This graph indirectly implies a very low climate sensitivity. If you assume Tz ~261K in the tropics and a Planck Feedback of 3.6W/m2 there, you can do some math. For Tz +3K, going from 261 to 264, we can calculate..

(264^4-261^4)*5.67e-8 = 12.3W/m2 delta OLR

Planck Feedback would only amount to 1.5 * 3.6 = 5.4W

So you would get a negative lapse rate feedback of 12.3 -5.4 = 6.9W/m2

Or normalized per K of warming of 6.9/1.5 = 4.6W/m2.

This figure is insanely large, way larger than all positive feedbacks combined. Eventhough I only used ballpark estimates, the fundamental problem is simply the huge increase in Tz. Of course one could say it is mainly a thing of the tropics, but the "hot spot" expands well beyond 30° latitude, and the tropics between 30° S and N account for 1/2 of the planet. Even if you just halve it, you are still left with 4.6/2 = 2.3W/m2 of negative lapse rate feedback.

Although the "hot spot" does not seem to materialize, the fact that it should in theory, and the logical consequences to it, is kind of a non-negligible detail when considering climate sensitivity.

Climate Sensitivity

Paul Pukite at 10:34 AM on 5 September, 2025

Bob: "It's amazing how contrarians often focus on one tail of the distribution and argue in favour of it, while pretending the other taill does not exist."

Indeed. Judith Curry'smuncertainty monster is a two-tailed beast. For every potential outsized gain in the left tail, there is a mirror-image risk of an outsized loss in the right tail. The contrarian pretends this right tail doesn't exist or is negligible. That's also related to the gambler's fallacy, where a blind eye is attached to losing.

Yet, we're screwed when it comes to removing the CO2 already in the atmosphere. It's 100% certain that it will go up in the future. No way it will go down, physically impossible due to the properties of CO2 and the fat right tail of time to sequestration.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 03:46 AM on 6 August, 2025

Responding to David-acct's off topic comment here:

Your claim that the data from your linked site does not support my statement that French nuclear power plants do not shut down is false on its face.

This data showed that reactors were shut down on the weekend:

date time Power MW
8/10 2:45 31645 Thursday 2023
8/10 13:45 30424
8/5 4:15 28489 Saturday 2023
8/5 16:15 25548

On Saturday at 16::15 6,097 MW less power was generated than on Thursday at 2:45. On 8/14/2023 I posed these questions to you:

"Several question about this raw data occured to me.

1) You state clearly that the data shows no nuclear power stations were shut down. Please explain why the power generated on the weekend is so much less than the power generated on Thursday. How does this show that no power stations were shut down over the weekend? It appears to me that about 6 of 31 power stations (20%) were turned off.

2) On both days they are generating more power at night when power is generated at a loss than they are generating during the day when the price of electricity is much higher. Can you explain why the "always on" nuclear plants generate less power during the most expensive part of the day than they do when electricity is cheapest?

This example proves beyond doubt that examining cherry picked factoids without any analysis is a complete waste of time. Please do not cite raw data any more. You need to cite analysis of data that filter out gross errors."

You refused to answer and stopped posting at SkS for several months. Please answer those questions now.

Looking at the French power link again I found this data for the weekend of August 2 (Saturday) and August 4 2025 (Monday).

date time Power MW

8/2 05:00 39717

8/2 14:15 25091

8/4 04:00 39722

8/4 13:45 24128

On this weekend reactors were shut off during the day. On 8/4 15 MW less power was being generated at 13:45 than at 04:00. Please explain why so many reactors were turned off. Other posters have suggested that they might shut down the reactors because there is not enough cooling water or because they cannot compete with cheaper solar power. In any case, the reactors are turned off since no one wants to purchase their power.

I note that since France has 63 GW of nuclear power the highest capacity factor last weekend was 63% and the lowest was 38%.

If they wasted the nuclear power by turning down the power output that counts as shut down. We cannot tell from the data if 15 reactors were shut off or if 30 reactors were run at half power.

I note that you said here "It would seem the cost of doing so would be prohibitive given the costs of restarts,"

I found this on Bloomburg French power slumps as surging renewables push out atomic plants which suggests that nuclear plants cannot compete with renewables even when they are owned by the government.

I do not care if you are not skilled enough to find resources that state France does not shut down reactors on the weekends. I linked a site that specifically stated that plants close on weekends and provided data (from your link) that showed without doubt that several reactors were closed on the weekend.

Apparently now they are shut down on sunny and/or windy days, in addition to weekends, because they cannot compete with cheaper renewables.

Have renewables decreased electricity prices: European edition

David-acct at 08:54 AM on 5 August, 2025

MIchael Sweet - My apologies, though my question on France's nuclear power is in response to your initial comment #4 in response to TDeR.

Thanks for the reminder on the french Eco2mix, my apologies for not responding earlier. However, real time data from the eco2mix doesnt support the contention that france shuts down their reactors on the weekends. the vast majority of weekends show little or no change in electric generation from nuclear. There are declines in production every 7-8 weeks, though those dont appear to be connected to any shut downs. There is a wikipedia mention of shut downs, though the footnote is from an article from 2009, which doesnt appear to be valid after 2009. I could not find any support via a google search of the topic

Update on Texas flooding

RedRoseAndy at 20:21 PM on 16 July, 2025

Offsetting CO2 Emissions with Fish

Professor Oswald Schmitz is quoted in ‘New Scientist’ as saying: “Fish have a “tremendous” impact on carbon storage. “Part of it is in just the sheer biomass of these animals,” he says. But bony fish also fix carbon into insoluble minerals in their intestines as part of their way of dealing with constantly ingesting seawater. “It’s a sort of rock-like substance that they poop out and that sinks to the ocean bottom really quickly.” Collectively, marine fish account for the storage of a whopping 5.5 gigatonnes of carbon each year.” (Man produces 37.41 gigatonnes of CO2 a year.) Scientists say that we used to have nine times as many fish as we do now, so there is plenty of room for a man-made increase in fish numbers by offsetting companies, if we got fish stocks up to historic levels our fish would store 49.5 gigatonnes a year, which is more than man produces in a year at the moment.

Using my method of preventing fish extinction can also, then, be a method for offsetting CO2 emissions, and even reversing global heating.

A Practical Solution To Fish Stock Depletion

Fish in the wild are being over exploited, and whole fish species face extinction. But there is an easy way of preventing these extinctions. An international law should be passed which ensures that the gonads of all fish caught are liquidized and put into water containers, the fish are usually gutted anyway so this would not be a great hardship for the fishermen. Once liquidized, artificial fertilization takes place, and after twenty four hours the fertilized fish eggs can be released into the sea. The bucket of young fish needs it’s temperature equal to the sea they are released into to prevent fry death, so standing for a length of time with the fry bucket in the sea needs a wet suit before release. When this is scaled up by offsetting organisations a less painful method will be used. Ensure that the water in your bucket is the temperature of the sea to avoid fish deaths. It does not matter where the eggs are put back because the fry of each species find their way back to the environment they originally come from.

In this way, the sea can be repopulated, and fishing can even become sustainable.

The Japanese were the first country to fish in this way, and had their Navy protect the massive shoal until the fish matured. I have only heard of it being done the once, though.

Perhaps using sonar in fishing can be banned in order to give our fish more of a chance in life.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

One Planet Only Forever at 03:46 AM on 2 July, 2025

My response to tder2012’s list of potential nuclear facility development is ‘revisit my comment @428’.

I will add the following regarding tder2012’s apparent interest in knowing what regions will have renewable energy developed to the current target of 100g CO2e per kW-hr. That is a known goal all regions will have to pass on their way to the ultimate requirement of ending human impacts that increase global warming.

Also, in the future, any energy system that is unsustainable will be unable to be continued. Unsustainable activities either use up non-renewable resources or produce accumulating harm. Nuclear power systems consume non-renewable resources and produce accumulating harm.

Therefore, no future energy system will include nuclear power generation. And since it is also a very costly way of generating electricity it should be unpopular.

However, humans have a tragic history of regionally developing popular support for harmful costly misunderstandings, as I implied in my comment @428.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 01:09 AM on 1 July, 2025

tder2012

You have simply not looked for renewable grids that have low CO2 emissions. You require me to do all of your homework. Your claim that no grids that are more than 30% wind and solar have low CO2 emissions can be easily checked at the website you linked.

I find that while Lithuania has too few people to meet your cherry picked standards (after you moved the goalposts twice), the regional grid of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia generate all of their electricity using wind and solar and have less than 100 g CO2/kWh. North-east Brazil generates about 80% wind and solar, 20% hydro. Uruguay generates about 50% of electricity with wind and solar, the remainder hydro. Central Brazil generates primarily with wind and solar, no hydro or nuclear, at 107 gCO2/kWh.

Searching your previous posts on SkS here (offtopic) you previously claimed the five grids of France, Ontario (not a country), Switzerland, Finland and Sweden as "nuclear sucesses". According to your website in 2024:

country	nuclear	renewable
France	67	29
Ontario	51	33
Switzerland	32	65
Finland	37	56
Sweden	31	69

I note that three of the five "nuclear successes" generate way more electricity using renewable power than nuclear and one is not a country. Canada as a whole generates only 14% nuclear and 61% renewable. Both Switzerland and Sweden generated less than 30% nuclear in May, 2025 and are disqualified by your 30% standard. I would count Finland, Sweden and Switzerland as renewable successes and not nuclear successes. None would meet the standard without renewables.

Meanwhile, I have named two grids that meet your standards using only wind and solar just 5-10 years after they became economic to install. In 20 years essentially the entire grid will be renewable since they are the cheapest electricity.

Since you keep changing the goal posts I will set them at over 75% of the successful generating strategy. By that standard my two grids using only wind and solar without hydro are successful and no grid worldwide is successful using nuclear. Adding hydro makes about 25 grids worldwide successful using only renewable sources of electricity. About 20 renewable grids are close to 100g/CO2-kWh and no nuclear grids.

After 70 years building out nuclear only one country in the entire world, France, generates enough nuclear power to claim success (unachievable without renewables) and they lose money on nuclear power.

Your claims about "nuclear success" while wind and solar fail are simply ignorant ranting.

All pro nuclear arguments are based on false claims and fall apart when they are carefully exmained.

I have already told you that it is a waste of my time lobbying against nuclear, these are all paper schemes that will fall apart on their own. I note that there has never been a nuclear plant built worldwide without enormous government subsidies.

You have still not provided any any data or references to support your wild claim that a renewables plus nuclear grid can be built out faster than a renewables only grid. As you demanded, I provided several peer reviewed papers to support my position. When you demand data you must provide data to back up your position.

Nuclear is too expensive, takes too long to build and there is not enough uranium to build a significant amount of nuclear power.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

tder2012 at 20:49 PM on 30 June, 2025

Of course QC is hydro, as is BC. I find it puzzling when people promote wind, solar and batteries and state they can decarbonize, give examples of how it can be done, but hydro is used as the example. Going forward, which region will hit the Paris climate target that has not hit that target yet using mostly hydro? Which region has meet the Paris climate target with most of their electricity generated by wind, solar and batteries (reminder: that is less than 100 grams of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour, averaged on an annual basis). Which region has hit the Paris climate target with the majority of their electricity generated by wind, solar and batteries?

Quebec flooded land the size of the Canadian province of PEI for hydro. Is the methane emitted from that rotted vegetation accounted for in GHG emissions of QC hydro?

Over 95% of Manitoba's electricity is geneated by hydro. The dams are about 1000kms from where most of the electricity is consumed. Manitobans paid $5.3 billion for a new long distance HVDC transmission line, completed 7 years ago, big money for 1.5 million people. Here is a list of the top seven HVDC transmission line distances in the world, from 1400 to 2500 kms, all hydro. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1305820/longest-power-transmission-lines-worldwide/ I do wonder if, for long distance HVDC transmission lines, the amount of concrete, steel, aluminium, etc and the amount of land that needs to be cleared are factored into lifecycle CO2 emissions, raw material requirements and cost estimates of hydro dams.

Also, since you dislike nuclear so much, shouldn't you spend time lobbying all those regions and companies I identified making commitments to nuclear? How much money is being committed to nuclear, don't you consider this a waste of money? One example Nuclear Dawn: Africa’s $105 Billion Energy Revolution

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 07:02 AM on 30 June, 2025

tder2012:

You are simply repeating the posts you previously made at SkS here. It is against the comments policy to regurgitate arguments that others have previously showed have no merit.

I note that after 70 years on your web site only France has over 50% nuclear and less than 100 g CO2 per kwh. And France generates 34% of power with renewables. Hardly a shining example of nuclear successs after 70 years.

I have already provided at least 10 countries that meet your requirements. Stop changing the goal posts every time I show that your claims are false. You have not given a single country that generates over 70% of power using nuclear.

It is a waste of my time to lobby against nuclear power. All I have to do is wait and nuclear will collapse under its own wieght again. For the past 50 years every 5-10 years nuclear supporters claim another renaissance is starting. They all fail. In 2006 modular reactor supporters and developers said they would have running reactors by 2020. They are about 20 years late and have not delevered any reactors to date.

Nuclear is too expensive, takes too long to build and there is not enough uranium to build a significant amount of nuclear power.

moderator: it is very time consuming for me to have to repeat answers to tder2012 when the answers have previously been posted to them on SkS. tder2012 has not added any new information or given a new argument in support of nuclear recently.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

Philippe Chantreau at 00:42 AM on 30 June, 2025

I always get a little suspicious of the sincerity of contributors asking others to provide them with information that they could easily find themselves. Quebec's population was counted at 8.5 million in the 2021 census.

This is from the Canada Energy Regulator site: "The greenhouse gas intensity of Quebec’s electricity grid, measured as the GHGs emitted in the generation of the province’s electric power, was 1.2 grams of CO2e per kilowatt-hour (g CO2e/kWh) in 2022. This is a 68% reduction from the province’s 2005 level of 3.8 g CO2e/kWh. The national average in 2022 was 100 g CO2e/kWh."

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

tder2012 at 06:33 AM on 29 June, 2025

Michael Sweet, could you please list a grid that serves at least 5 million people that will meet the Paris target of less than 100grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, averaged on an annual basis, that will be this target by having most of their electricity generated by hydro?

Have you considered lobbying all these regions and companies that I have listed to stop with their nuclear plans? Obviously they have not heard from you, otherwise I'm sure they would not be announcing these plans or would cancel them immediately.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

tder2012 at 03:59 AM on 29 June, 2025

Micheal Sweet,

"Apples and oranges: Comparing nuclear construction costs across nations, time periods, and technologies"

Could you please provide a link for a renewables grid that achieve a Paris climate target of less 100 grams of CO2 released per kilowatt-hour, averaged on an annual basis. I don't see any at the global electricitymaps site

It's too hard

tder2012 at 22:28 PM on 27 June, 2025

Since this article was written in 2010, we see minimal change in fossil fuel production, slight growth and minimal percentage change. This chart shows shows the years 2010 to 2023 on the horizontal axis and TWh of energy on the vertical axis, from ~153,000TWh in 2010 to ~183,000TWh in 2023.

This map from Our World in Data is "Energy Use per person, 2023". For example, Chad's 2021 number is 361kwh/person, India is 7,586, UK is 28,501, Canada is 100,000, Bolivia in 2021 was 7,062, Bangladesh 2,940, Germany 38,052. There are many people who use too much energy, but there are so many more that need additional energy. If all 8.2 billion of us lived a lifestyle of a typical European, we would need 4x as much energy as we consume today.

This chart "Remaining carbon budget" has on the vertical axis CO2 emissions per year in gigatons and the horizontal axis has years from 2000 to 2100. It shows our emission need to be at zero by 2036 to keep global warming to 1.5C, at zero by 2052 to keep global warming to 1.7C and at zero by 2077 to keep global warming to 2C. We can see that 1.5C is essentially impossible, 1.7C will be very difficult and 2C is doable if we all get on the same page and agree it must be done.

The reality is "it's too hard" is likely true, but we have no choice, we must do it. We no longer have the luxury of picking and choosing energy sources, we have to throw everything we got at it as fast as we can.

You can read two X threads by Ebba Busch (Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, Minister for Energy and the Minister for Business and Industry) about nuclear energy announcements on May 9 and June 13 . What is not included is "Nuclear Dawn: Africa’s $105 Billion Energy Revolution" and "Philippines Senate Passes Nuclear Bill"

Sabin 33 #32 - Is range restriction a problem for EVs?

nigelj at 06:29 AM on 17 June, 2025

tder2012

"As Gilboy pointed out, “Operating an F-150 Lightning may generate less than a third of the CO2 emissions of a gas F-150, but each one hoards 98 kWh of battery, most of which will be used only on the rare, prolonged drive. Meanwhile, an F-150 Powerboost hybrid battery is just 1.5 kWh. It doesn’t achieve nearly the emissions reduction the Lightning does, but Ford could make 65 of them with the batteries that go into a single Lightning.”

This is weak argument. Firstly having substantial energy capacity that is not often fully used is part of all technology with energy storage, for example EV cars, ICE cars, Hybrid cars (the big petrol tank) and battery operated appliances using recharble batteries. The spare capacity issue isnt really a big problem, and is better than having to constantly replenish a small storage system.

Secondly your preferred hybrid option just shifts the large capacity issue from a big battery to a large fuel tank and a small battery. You haven't SOLVED the capacity issue in any significant way.

"Gilboy noted, “That adds up, because if Ford sells one Lightning and 64 ICE F-150s, it’s cutting the on-road CO2 emissions of those trucks as a group by 370 g/mi. If it sold 65 hybrids—spreading the one Lightning’s battery supply across them all—it’d reduce aggregate emissions by 4,550 g/mi. Remember, this uses the same amount of batteries; the distribution is different.”"

This is a weak argument because it would be lower emissions overall to just build EVs and no ICE or Hybrid automobiles. Therefore its better to build EVs, and try to convince the public to buy them. The argument also takes no account of the fact hybrids still have very significant emissions, and are inefficient, because they have two complete motor systems and energy storage systems, with all the extra materials and servicing costs and complexities. They are at best a form of bridge technology.

Sabin 33 #32 - Is range restriction a problem for EVs?

tder2012 at 05:36 AM on 17 June, 2025

Should we be promoting hybrids, at least for the short term, as today's BEVs seem to use battery materials inefficiently?

Gilboy noted, “That adds up, because if Ford sells one Lightning and 64 ICE F-150s, it’s cutting the on-road CO2 emissions of those trucks as a group by 370 g/mi. If it sold 65 hybrids—spreading the one Lightning’s battery supply across them all—it’d reduce aggregate emissions by 4,550 g/mi. Remember, this uses the same amount of batteries; the distribution is different.”"

https://energymusings.substack.com/p/energy-musings-june-5-2025

Fact brief - Was 'global warming' changed to 'climate change' because Earth stopped warming?

Bob Loblaw at 01:36 AM on 5 June, 2025

Greenhouse effect, global warming, and climate change do indeed have different technical meanings, but common simplified usage does tend to add obfuscation - er, sorry, make things more confusing.

The Greenhouse Effect, as lynnvinc mentions, exists as a natural phenomenon. It relates to the atmospheric influence, as discussed by Charlie Brown, that leads to warmer surface temperatures than we would observe if there was no atmosphere.

It is a somewhat unfortunate term, as "the label "greenhouse" implies a similarity with actual greenhouses - and that was based on a misunderstanding of what keeps greenhouses warm. (Trapping air is more important than trapping IR radiation.)

At times, people have suggested using "the atmospheric effect" instead, but that has never caught on. At times, the human-cause changes in greenhouse gases have been referred to as "the enhanced greenhouse effect", but that is rather cumbersome and the "enhanced" part gets dropped.

As for "global warming" - that is the key easily-observed result of an enhanced greenhouse effect, but also can be caused by other factors. (CO2 dominates the current trends). On a global mean basis, surface temperatures will rise. It is not the only effect of an enhanced greenhouse effect, though. Precipitation changes are also critical. And many other weather phenomena. Seasonal changes and timing. Extreme weather events. Etc. Hence "climate change" is a much broader, more encompassing term. In the Venn diagram of climate, "Global warming " is a subset of "climate change", and "global warming" overlaps both the greenhouse effect and other causes of climate change.

On the myth of "they changed the name...", I took undergraduate climate science in the 1970s. The textbook we used was Sellers, W.D., 1965, Physical Climatology, U Chicago Press. Changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide are discussed in that book, along with other factors, under the chapter titled "Paleoclimatology and Theories of Climatic Change". My copy of the book is the one that I bought in 1978, so if "they changed the name..." then someone must have taken my copy off my bookshelf, altered the printing, and replaced it without me noticing.

Electric vehicles have a net harmful effect on climate change

MA Rodger at 09:10 AM on 1 June, 2025

tder2012 @5 & Bob Loblaw @6,

Ah ha!!. That button "on the left side at the bottom" does allow you to see annual values. The 'All Years' option displays the seven annual values 2017-24 (and this 'All Years' option can be pre-set in the URL) with the 2024 value showing as 175g(CO2eq)/kWh. (And being a lucky smarty pants, I see 175 is what I reckoned it being @4.)

Electric vehicles have a net harmful effect on climate change

MA Rodger at 05:47 AM on 31 May, 2025

tder2012 @3,

First point to make is my use of g(C)/kWh which is a lot different to g(CO2)/kWh. To convert the former to the latter you need add the weight of the O2 by multiplying by 3.664. (My working in C rather than CO2 is a climatology thing.)

At that ElectricityMaps webpage, the 226 g(CO2eq)/kWh figure you quote I read as being the carbon intensity for Jan 2025 alone. I read the webpage data showing the individual months of 2024 running Jan-to-Dec 227, 180, 172, 135, 172, 145, 164, 124, 169, 189, 227, 176. I was thinking you shouldn't really average these as the electric use (they average 173) with the summer-use being a lot different from the chilly winter months, but GridWatch graphs UK electric use through 2024 and a back-of-fag-packet adjustment doesn't make that much difference (average 175g(CO2eq)/kWh = 48g(C)/kWh).

My number was taken from a CarbonBrief article which sports this graphic which shows the same as the article says 2024 =124g(CO2)/kWh = 34g(C)/kWh. UK electric carbon intensity

The NESO does a monthly analysis of GB monthly electric stats (Apr25 & links) and there does seem to be a discrepancy between the numbers from NESO and that ElectricityMaps webpage with NESO giving Apr25 at 133g(CO2)/kWh and ElectricityMaps 174g(CO2eq)/kWh.
Why the difference?
Speculating, perhaps the imported electric is seen as zero carbon due to it being emitted abroad. Perhaps something else.

Electric vehicles have a net harmful effect on climate change

tder2012 at 01:53 AM on 31 May, 2025

MA Rodger, I am curious what your source is for "In UK the carbon-intensity of electricity has dropped by 75% since 2010 (136g(C)/KWh to 32g(C)/kWh in 2024)". In the 12 month period January 2024 to January 2025, the UK emitted 226 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, averaged on an annual basis, according to app.electricitymaps.com. In 2012, according to this link, the lowest CO2 grams emitted per kilowatt-hour was about 440. Good reductions for UK, for sure. However, Paris climate targets call for electricity grids to emit less than 100 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, averaged on an annual basis.

Electric vehicles have a net harmful effect on climate change

MA Rodger at 02:25 AM on 30 May, 2025

Charlie_Brown @1,

The brave new world of net zero brings with it many transformations which people appear to find difficult to normalise and set out rationally.
Be warned!! This is a subject I can drone-on about for hours. But picking up on a couple of things you address....

Ⅰ Back in the day when I was still a car owner, I was rather vocal with the message on EVs - 'As the electric grid decarbonised, the emissions from an EV will diminish. For a petrol-engined vehicle it will be fixed until the day it is scrapped.'

And back then I was also vocal about the fuel-efficiency of petrol-engined vehicles which were (and are) continuing to spew that darned CO2 into the atmosphere. I reckoned efficiency (mpg) should be increasing far more quickly than was/is the case** yet nobody seemed to care. My last car (20 years ago - I'm now car-free) did 70mpg. Back then I was asking 'Where are the 100mpg cars? The 150mpg cars?" Such efficiencies are not beyond the wit of man***.

And the graphic comparison in the above OP (that seems to address your objections, "seems" because the links to sources cited by the OPs Ref4 are not working for me): the OPs graphic would be transformed by improving mpg. Given the numbers presented in the OPs graphic, the point where an efficient petrol-engined vehicle becomes less carbon-intensive than the compared EV is 85mpg. But importantly, and petrol-heads be warned, that assumes the carbon-intensity of the grid doesn't reduce, an assumption which is not the case. In UK the carbon-intensity of electricity has dropped by 75% since 2010 (136g(C)/KWh to 32g(C)/kWh in 2024).

(**Latest govt number (for 2020) show the UK's average new petrol car with 52.4mpg & diesel 56.1mpg. That was rising on average by a paltry 0.8mpg/yr back during in the 2000s. That annual increasing efficiency doubled 2010-15 but since then the growth of the SUV sees the average efficiency getting worse, hopefully a temperary phenomenon.)

(*** Apparently petrol or diesel car still doesn't do much more than 70mpg. A lot of the lost mpg is because many are aren't so small and today small cars require reinforcing so they don't get flattened by the bigly SUVs & 4x4s swarming around them.)

Ⅱ Your comment also reminds me of an enquiry I made about an EV a little more recently. I was trying to get the CO2/mile numbers (along with a lot more) from Nissan who were presenting their much-advertised & wondrous EV - the Leaf. It was evident they had no idea what I was on about. They could tell me how cheap it was to run (£/mile) but stuff like carbon intensity or energy intensity didn't register as something they understood.

Evidently, they just wanted to sell cars and for them the USP was the wonderful £/mile.

Electric vehicles have a net harmful effect on climate change

Charlie_Brown at 02:36 AM on 29 May, 2025

Unfortunately, a key phrase was dropped from the source reference footnote [4] which makes the sentence in the green box for “What the Science Says” misleading. The reference says “EVs convert over 77% of the electrical energy from the grid (underline added) to power at the wheels. Conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 12%–30% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels.” The source of power for EVs is not included in Eisenson, et al. “Electric vehicles have lower lifecycle emissions than traditional gasoline-powered cars because they are between 2.5 to 5.8 times more efficient.” Larson, et al., Final Report, p. 40, also compares units of electricity to units of gasoline. Furthermore, the articles do not define efficiency, whether it is g CO2/mile, g CO2(eq)/mile, or BTU/mi. Where coal is the power source for the grid, CO2 g/mi is about the same for EV and ICE. Where natural gas is the source, CO2(eq)/mi is close to the same after accounting for methane leakage from production and transport. Most simplified analyses use the source power mix from the regional grid. When the incremental power source to meet added demand for EVs (and other demands such as AI and growth), the situation is much more complex.

I am a strong supporter of EVs and I love my new car. To meet greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, transition to EVs is needed. The electric power grid also needs to reduce fossil fuel generation.

Sabin 33 #28 - How reliable is wind energy?

tder2012 at 11:03 AM on 17 May, 2025

I don't care how grids get decarbonized, just get it done NOW. France did it 40 years ago by accident, only because they wanted energy security and independence, no fossil fuels to extract in France. Australia wants to do it with wind, solar, batteries, synchronous condensors, etc. I say go for it, get 'er done! Here are a few sites you can watch AUS grid generation mix, import, export between states, prices, etc (you can find sites like this for many other countries, states, etc but I like electricitymaps best as I am very concerned about CO2 and ghg emissions and I find its the best for showing that data. Also, it is a "one stop shop"). https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem & https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed & https://www.nem-watch.info/widgets/RenewEconomy/

Clean energy hits many roadblocks, often people ideologically opposed to them, we see this with solar, wind and also with nuclear. The No Nukes in the USA in the 70's were successful at blocking the build of nuclear power plants, but look at this article from US Energy Information Administration and see how much coal was built after 1980, fortunately they haven't build much since 2013. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50658

We are only really talking about electricity here, which is 20-25 % of global energy production. Oil is barely a blip in global electricity production (mostly diesel generators in small remote communities and islands). New England in USA uses oil occasionally, they seem to encounter natural gas supply issues more than typical, this is an article on the New England Independent System Operator (NEISO) website. "Nuclear, oil, and coal generators are critical on the coldest winter days when natural gas supply is constrained (as shown below). Coal- and oil-fired resources also make valuable contributions on the hottest days of summer when demand is very high or major resources are unavailable".

Anyway, the point I want to make is that oil is barely a blip in global electricity generation, yet it is the number one source of energy generation in the world, as you can see on this Our World in Data website https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution?time=1970..latest Much decarbonization all over the world needs to be done in very short order.

Sabin 33 #28 - How reliable is wind energy?

One Planet Only Forever at 07:05 AM on 17 May, 2025

tder2012,

Reading this item and the comments I have learned and understand the following:

There is no reason to doubt the ability to have reliable electricity grid operation with totally sustainable renewable energy generation that includes a significant amount of wind generation.

There is reason to be concerned about the lack of progress by the supposedly most advanced nations towards reducing their electric system harmfulness to 100 grams of CO2 per kWh. Zero ghg emissions is the end objective for every nation. But getting down to 100 g per kWh is an important measure of advancement. Note: rich nations failing to reduce their harmfulness are incorrectly perceived to be more advanced/superior.

People should be very concerned about the likely magnitude of harmful climate change consequences due to continuing failure of the most harmful to reduce how harmful they are (impeding the building of wind generation). The poorest who are negatively affected by the increased climate change harm, and people who try to sustainably improve living conditions for the poorest, should be angry about misunderstandings that impede the building of wind generation even if their anger is perceived as unnecessary panicking.

Sabin 33 #28 - How reliable is wind energy?

tder2012 at 12:28 PM on 16 May, 2025

"Don't panic" good to know, I wasn't aware of anyone panicing, but spendid advice nonetheless. So also no need to panic about the Paris target for electricity grids to emit less than 100 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, averaged on an annual basis, correct? See all electricity grids here https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/12mo/monthly this link specifically highlights Germany at 344, China is at 489, India varies from 560 to 750, Indonesia is at 640.

Sabin 33 #28 - How reliable is wind energy?

tder2012 at 21:25 PM on 15 May, 2025

I watch to see how electricity grids are meeting the Paris target of less than 100 grams of CO2 emitted per kilowatt-hour, averaged on an annual basis. I don't care how this target is met, South Australia is close (160), but you see BESS is barely a blip there and the rest of Australia is so far away from this target. So hopefully Australia can deploy much clean energy extremely quickly. They'll need copious quantities of synchronous condensers, flywheels, grid forming inertia, synchronous converter application, etc in very short order. See SA grid, along with the other grids in Australia, showing grams CO2 emitted per kilowatt-hour, averaged on an annual basis and the sources of electricity generation here https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/AU-SA/12mo/monthly

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

tder2012 at 03:52 AM on 13 May, 2025

"The Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant prevents up to 22.4 million tons of carbon emissions every year, equivalent to removing 4.8 million cars from the roads". "Construction Program"

"In December 2023 at COP28 in Dubai, 22 countries and more than 120 companies pledged to triple global nuclear energy capacity by 2050".

I'm not familiar with any study in involving nuclear energy that is similar to Jacobson's The Solutions Project in which everyone will use much less energy by 2050, including those that live in extreme poverty today and have almost no access to energy.

The solar panels being installed in Bangladesh, how much CO2 emissions will it prevent every year? Will Bangladesh people now have access to stove, washer, dryer, microwave, air conditioning, computers, internet, running water, industry, manufacturing, careers and women will now have access to education?

At a glance - What is causing the increase in atmospheric CO2?

StanRH at 02:27 AM on 13 May, 2025

all this fuss about co 2 is comic farce;

every educated person knows co 2 can't affect climate

the reason is as follows;

"greenhouse" gases don't trap heat as they can't impede the circulation of warm air rising to subzero temps at altitude

if co 2 prevents radiant heat from leaving the atmosphere ,then it must also prevent the radiant heat from entering, by the same magical heat blocking process

it is the magnetosphere ,not co 2 that prevents the atmosphere from evaporating into the void of space

heat rises by convection regardless of mixture

by the time gases rise by convection to 25,000 ft the temp is down to - 40

besides which;

as a heat sink co 2 has nothing to do with atmospheric temperature regulation

only con artists still pretend co 2 can affect climate

Weight of atmospheric gases by volume at standard pressure and temperature

co 2 = 1.96 kg per stere x .04 percent =.000784 kg

o 2 =1.43 kg per stere x 21 percent = .303 kg

n =1.25 kg per stere x 78 percent= .975 kg

argon = 1.78 kg per stere x 1 percent = .0178 kg

Climate alarmists claim that the mass of .000784 kg of co2 governs the temp of the mass of 1.2958 kg of the other atmospheric gases

1652.806 times it's weight [mass]

visualize co 2 as 1 cup of water compared to other atmospheric gases as a 100 gallon [1600 cups] tank

that 1 cup at any temp u wish to chose dumped in the tank has negligible affect on the 100 gallons in the tank

couldn't be more evident ,could it?

Sabin 33 #13 - Is solar energy unreliable?

tder2012 at 21:36 PM on 9 May, 2025

At least nuclear has proven it can be a major contributor to meeting the Paris target of <100 grams of CO2 emitted / kWh on an annual basis. See France, Ontario, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden check here . Wind, solar and BESS (at least 30%) have never shown this. I don't include hydro because the planet is pretty much tapped out on convention hydro, besides it floods too much land and then think about all the concrete, steel, aluminium, etc and the forests that need to be hacked down for HVDC transmission lines. As for pumped hydro, it is at 142 GW of capacity globally and provides over 95% of global electricity generation from storage, but it is obviously geography dependent and when compared to global electricity production overall, pumped hydro is such a tiny contributor, it is hardly a blip. I could only find it in "global installed renewable energy capacity by technology" at Our World in Data.

Sabin 33 #13 - Is solar energy unreliable?

tder2012 at 12:19 PM on 9 May, 2025

Eclectic, put your sarcasm aside and tell us what you would really like to see. How about any grid <100grams of CO2 emitted/kWh, averaged on an annual basis and say what the top sources of electricity generation are. Michael Sweet and Philippe mentioned Luthuania, I responded. I say averaged on an annual basis because some like to point out when a grid hit a high % of a generation type for a few hours or days and don't mention other times when they don't. So keep it simple and include every hour of a 12 month period. So Eclectic, what would you like to see? Which do you prefer %RE or GHG emissions? I have made it clear I focus on GHG emissions as I have pointed out the Paris target of an electricity grid needing to be <100grams emitted of CO2/kWh, averaged on an annual basis. This site is excellent for grams CO2 emitted per kilowatt-hour. (Although it is unavailble at this specific time I'm writing this) https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Sabin 33 #13 - Is solar energy unreliable?

Eclectic at 11:50 AM on 9 May, 2025

Tder2012 @32 and prior :- You paint with too broad a brush.

Please put Lithuania aside, because a population of less than 3 million has no significance in any scenario whatsoever. Also, the Lithuanians speak a language so strange that even their neighboring countries can understand none of it.

Instead, we should keep it extremely simple, and consider only those national grids which generate >90 but <100 grams of CO2 emitted/kWh averaged on an annual or biennial basis. The grids should not include any nuclear or biomass-burning, nor hydro or geothermal or even tidal sources. Preferably also be 50-80% renewable.

If that does not advance the discussion in the right direction ~ then we should move the goalposts once again, into narrower territory.

Sabin 33 #13 - Is solar energy unreliable?

tder2012 at 09:47 AM on 9 May, 2025

You are correct, I didn't include Lithuania because I made a spelling mistake, apologies "Lithunania has a population of under three million and their CO2 emission are still above 100, averaged on an annual basis, so they shouldn't be on your list". How about we keep it extremely simple. Focus on any grid that meets the Paris climate target of <100grams of CO2 emitted/kWh, averaged on an annual basis that does not include any nuclear, at least 50% of electricity is generated by wind, solar, batteries on an annual basis and high emitting, high polluting, stinky biomass (IPCC says its lifecycle emissions range from 230 to 740 grams of CO2 emitted/kWh) and population is at least 2 million. I notice you don't discuss at all CO2 or GHG emissions, why?

Sabin 33 #13 - Is solar energy unreliable?

tder2012 at 04:51 AM on 9 May, 2025

I stated "Name one country that has 50-80% RE, other than hydro, averaged on an annual basis and has achieved the Paris target of <100gramsCO2emitted/kwh, averaved on an annual basis". Sorry I should have stated "other than hydro AND nuclear" and services at least 5 million people. Norway is mostly hydro, so they shouldn't be on your list. Sweden gets electricity from hydro and way too much nuclear for you liking, so they shouldn't be on your list. Finland is way too much nuclear, so they shouldn't be on your list. Denmark's CO2 emission are too high, so they shouldn't be on your list. England's emissions are way too high and they get too much from nuclear, so they shouldn't be on your list. Germany's emissions are way too high (345, instead of 100, grams of CO2 emitted / kwh), so they shouldn't be on your list. Spain gets way too much from nuclear and is still over 100, so they shouldn't be on your list. Lithunania has a population of under three million and their CO2 emission are still above 100, averaged on an annual basis, so they shouldn't be on your list. Maybe pay far less attention to %renewables (ideally none) and instead of focusing on GHG emissions. So all the countries you listed actually don't qualify, but you did say "I could go on and on but it's becoming clear that the numbers from Michael Sweet were not fantasy." So you should go on and on, that is, unless you care more about %RE than GHG emissions. And use a proper source. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/LT/12mo/monthly

Sabin 33 #13 - Is solar energy unreliable?

tder2012 at 07:28 AM on 8 May, 2025

"I was shocked when I've learned last week that most of the European countries have 50-80% of RE in the total generation mix." Name the countries that are 50-80% of RE in the total generation mix, averaged on an annual basis. The quote you used is out of context, it is only for the specific time period for a few days last week. Name one country that has 50-80% RE, other than hydro, averaged on an annual basis and has achieved the Paris target of <100gramsCO2emitted/kwh, averaved on an annual basis, point it out here.

Sabin 33 #13 - Is solar energy unreliable?

michael sweet at 05:02 AM on 8 May, 2025

I have been in this game for about 20 years. Over that time nuclear supporters like you have generated many false claims. For example when a paper was published with a single 1 MW wind turbine connected to a gas generator. It was then argued that more CO2 was emitted from the wind turbine. No-one has a grid with a single wind turbine. Experience in using wind turbines has shown that that analysis was completely false.

Your citation calculates the cost of a solar and battery system without using any hydro or wind. And they only use a very small grid (Texas and Germany). These are gross mistakes. The literature shows that it is much cheaper to have a larger grid than a smaller one. Most realistic analysis use all of North America as a grid.

Why analyze Germany alone when they currently are in a grid with the rest of Europe? Because you know in advance that it will be more expensive.

The analysis you linked is ignored for a reason. It is obviously junk science. A grossly too small grid and no existing hydro or wind. Texas will have to connect with the rest of the USA if they want cheap electricity. (Texans already pay a premium because of their small grid).

Just look at Europe: most of the countries have 50-80% renewables and they save money on their electric bills!

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

tder2012 at 03:38 AM on 8 May, 2025

Like I stated previously, I don't read Jacobson and haven't for years, no point. He gets debunked and stops with the scientific debate and then takes it to court and loses that as well. https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/15/stanford-prof-who-sued-critics-loses-appeal-against-500000-in-legal-fees/ Bryer works closely with Jacobson, so I don't bother with him either.

UNIPCC states nuclear is 14 grams CO2 emitted lifetime, UNECE states 6 and Jacobson states 171 because of emissions from burning caused by nuclear war. These differences are indeed significant, considering the Paris climate targets are for electricity grids to be <100grams CO2 emitted/kwh, averaged on an annual basis.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

tder2012 at 01:50 AM on 8 May, 2025

Are we short of uranium? "Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years". Fast breeder reactors are in production in China, India, Japan and Russia. One of the ones in Russia came on line in 1980. Lifecycle CO2 emissions, according to the UNIPCC are 14 grams CO2 per kilowatt-hour. UNECE states they are about 6. Jacobson states they are 171, he includes "the emissions from the burning of cities resulting from nuclear weapons explosions” and some say Nate Hagens is a pessimist.

Sabin 33 #13 - Is solar energy unreliable?

tder2012 at 01:41 AM on 8 May, 2025

I don't read Jacobson. He gets debunked and stops with the scientific debate and then takes it to court and loses that as well. https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/15/stanford-prof-who-sued-critics-loses-appeal-against-500000-in-legal-fees/ Bryer works closely with Jacobson, so I don't bother with him either. I have read their material over the years, for example, here is one on my blog from 2016 that my friend wrote https://tditpinawa.wordpress.com/2016/09/17/tim-maloneys-analysis-and-critique-of-100-wws-for-usa/. I believe science debates should stick to science debates. There are nine grids today that have achieved <100 grams of CO2 emitted per kilowatt hour, averaged on an annual basis that service at least 5 million people. They are Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and then there is Norway, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, France and Brazil. They have achieved this with either mostly hydro, mostly nuclear or mostly a combination of the two. "Your post claiming high cost of LFSCOE (made on another thread) is simply fossil fuel propaganda. It has been known for years that the last 10-20% of renewable energy will be the most expensive." You can state your opinions about propaganda all you like, how about showing the evidence in the real world, not just in Jacobson's spreadsheets, about the last 10-20% being the most expensive. Lazard didn't make changes, instead they are open about their limitations, as I quoted in a previous comment. Will Lazard scrap their limitations and instead do a complete study, as opposed to just points in time. I don't care so much about % of renewable energy, I care about CO2 emissions. Once Texas and Spain have achieved <100grams/CO2 emitted per kilowatt-hour, averaged on an annual basis, then we'll talk. Texas is 292 and Spain is close at 112, but they are planning to shut down nuclear so their emissions are likely to rise, just like everywhere else that shuts down nuclear. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/12mo/monthly Jacobson is a big proponent of Germany, but 345 for the last 12 months, their energy system is really struggling and due to high prices, their industrial and manufacturing are slowing down. "Let’s dive into one of the most ambitious (and chaotic) energy transitions in the world" Amory Lovins was awarded the German Order of Merit in 2016 for his influence on the German "Energiewende", maybe they jumped the gun a bit with this award.

2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #16

One Planet Only Forever at 05:45 AM on 24 April, 2025

RedRoseAndy,

Your proposal would help achieve the required corrections of developed unsustainable fishing activity. It would be a little more work and would reduce the profitability of the currently developed fishing. But, as you correctly implied, the easier and more profitable fishing methods that have developed have no real future (and benefiting from burning non-renewable fossil fuels also has no future, even if it wasn’t causing harmful climate change impacts).

The assisted fertilization of eggs from ‘caught fish’ would be part of the actions to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, specifically SDG 14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.

You should investigate the potential for your suggestion to be part of the SDG 14 related UN Event - Ocean Action Panel 10 : Enhancing the conservation and sustainable use of oceans and their resources by implementing international law as reflected in the UNCLOS

However, I would like to know more about ‘how’ (considering all of the aspects in a holistic evaluation) an increased amount of fish will produce a reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere (more going on than carbon in fish poop falling into the depths). It seems intuitive that, like trees, more fish would result in reduced CO2 levels. If increasing the amount of fish in the seas will sustainably reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, then any actions that sustainably increase fish populations would help.

Regardless of the question about increased fish stocks reducing CO2, it would be helpful to increase fish stocks.

Hopefully all reasonable helpful actions will be pursued by leaders, in business and politics, to limit the harm done by human activities. Unfortunately, the focus will likely be on the easier, more profitable, and more easily popular actions rather than pursuing actually possible actions (not ‘hoped to be developed’ technological solutions) that are more helpful but are harder, more expensive, or less likely to be popular.

2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #16

RedRoseAndy at 18:04 PM on 22 April, 2025

Offsetting CO2 Emissions with Fish

Professor Oswald Schmitz is quoted in ‘New Scientist’ as saying: “Fish have a “tremendous” impact on carbon storage. “Part of it is in just the sheer biomass of these animals,” he says. But bony fish also fix carbon into insoluble minerals in their intestines as part of their way of dealing with constantly ingesting seawater. “It’s a sort of rock-like substance that they poop out and that sinks to the ocean bottom really quickly.” Collectively, marine fish account for the storage of a whopping 5.5 gigatonnes of carbon each year.” (Man produces 37.41 gigatonnes of CO2 a year.)
Using my method of preventing fish extinction can also, then, be a method for offsetting CO2 emissions.

A Practical Solution To Fish Stock Depletion

Fish in the wild are being over exploited, and whole fish species face extinction. But there is an easy way of preventing these extinctions. An international law should be passed which ensures that the gonads of all fish caught are liquidized and put into water containers, the fish are usually gutted anyway so this would not be a great hardship for the fishermen. Once liquidized, artificial fertilization takes place, and after twenty four hours the fertilized fish eggs can be released into the sea. Ensure that the water in your bucket is the temperature of the sea to avoid fish deaths. It does not matter where the eggs are put back because the fry of each species find their way back to the environment they originally come from.
In this way, the sea can be repopulated, and fishing can even become sustainable.
The Japanese were the first country to fish in this way, and had their Navy protect the massive shoal until the fish matured. I have only heard of it being done the once, though.

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

One Planet Only Forever at 02:46 AM on 8 April, 2025

Reed Coray,

In your response @213 to my ‘new questions’ @211 you state

My thermos bottle experiment didn't compare the cavity's being filled with 'CO2 vs Air (a Nitrogen Oxygen blend), or (Air with 280 ppm CO2) vs (Air with 560 ppm CO2)' because when discussing global warming those gases are seldom mentioned.

Are you seriously trying to 'use such a lame claim' to argue that in the context of the effect of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere it is more valid to compare CO2 to a vacuum than to compare ‘a greenhouse gas’ to ‘non-greenhouse gases’ (or to compare different amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere)?

You established the context for all the discussion that has followed your comment @180 where you made the following questionable declaration:

...(“the Earth's surface is warmed by-heat-trapping greenhouse gases”) is invalid because heat cannot be trapped—i.e., an adiabatic wall does not exist in nature. If heat can’t be trapped, any and all claims that rely on the existence of heat-trapping material or trapped heat constitute misinformation.

I believe the phrases "trapped heat" and "heat trapping" are used to incorrectly explain a physical process in a way that will resonate with the general public.

The discussion that has developed is in the context of whether it is ‘misleading’ to say ‘greenhouse gases trap heat’ in a public ‘plain language’ presentation of the scientific understanding of greenhouse gases.

In your response to my question @181 you conclude with the following:

If your theoretical estimate of Earth surface warming requires the existence of 'trapped heat' (i.e., your theoretical argument is that Earth surface warming will occur because some gases 'trap heat' within the lower troposphere), then your theoretical argument is nonsense because heat can't be trapped.

As I said, I'm not sure an 'easily understood term' exists for Earth surface temperature change.

In spite of being provided with a diversity of reasoned justifications for the validity of saying that “the Earth's surface is warmed by heat-trapping greenhouse gases” you persist in the belief that “...the phrases "trapped heat" and "heat trapping" are used to incorrectly explain a physical process...”

Responding to my new questions @211 the way you did @213 is just another tragic result of ‘desperately trying to maintain an invalid belief’ about the validity of saying that “the Earth's surface is warmed by heat-trapping greenhouse gases”.

In closing I will note that by comparing CO2 to a vacuum in the thermos bottle experiment you are implying that the global average surface temperature of the Earth would be warmer (more of the incoming energy would be trapped at the surface) without an atmosphere containing greenhouse gases. Claiming that a vacuum would keep more energy at the surface would appear to be a clear case of ‘incorrectly explaining an understood physical process’ (in the context that you established for this discussion).

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

Reed Coray at 06:51 AM on 7 April, 2025

Question: "Why doesn’t your thermos experiment compare the cavities being filled with CO2 vs Air (a Nitrogen Oxygen blend), or (Air with 280 ppm CO2) vs (Air with 560 ppm CO2)?"

Answer: My thermos bottle experiment didn't compare the cavity's being filled with 'CO2 vs Air (a Nitrogen Oxygen blend), or (Air with 280 ppm CO2) vs (Air with 560 ppm CO2)' because when discussing global warming those gases are seldom mentioned. I picked the gas (CO2) that most people argue is the primary cause of harmful global warming.

Question: "Do you agree that those comparisons would be more valid than CO2 vs vacuum?"

Answer: More valid for what— Earth surface warming, the behavior of thermos bottles, etc? I was responding to Dikran Marsupial's statement: "I am open to rational argument, such as a good answer to my question about blankets and thermos flasks "trapping heat", and willing to change my mind." He mentioned blankets and thermos flasks. I chose thermos flasks.

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

scaddenp at 06:44 AM on 7 April, 2025

I am struggling to see what it is gained by these sematic arguments. The real language of the GHE is the hard cold language of physics and maths, especially the Radiative Transfer Equations. No matter how these are interpretated in layman's language, increasing CO2 in the atmosphere warms the earth surface. The equations predict things like the amount of radiation received at the surface or at the top of the atmosphere and the spectrum of that radiation with exquisite accuracy. Also, see this paper for direct observation of CO2 increasing the greenhouse effect at the earth surface. Suggesting this is not real based on misunderstanding greenhouse theory is futile. You are fooling only yourself.

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

One Planet Only Forever at 03:00 AM on 7 April, 2025

Reed Coray @208,

New questions:

Why doesn’t your thermos experiment compare the cavities being filled with CO2 vs Air (a Nitrogen Oxygen blend), or (Air with 280 ppm CO2) vs (Air with 560 ppm CO2)?

Do you agree that those comparisons would be more valid than CO2 vs vacuum?

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

Dikran Marsupial at 02:14 AM on 7 April, 2025

Reed Coray, you have not addressed my question, just evaded it with a thought experiment of your own. My question was whether it was reasonable in a discussion with a lay-person to say that a blanket keeps you warm by "trapping heat" or whether a thermos flask keeps tea warm by "trapping heat". How about a greenhouse (is the Cambridge dictionary that uses it as an example usage of "trap" incorrect?).

I have seen this time and time again in discussions with "contrarians", which is that I am happy to give very straight answers to direct questions, but they are not. The reason is that they know that their argument collapses if they give a straight answer.

So are you going to give a straight answer to my question, or are you going to continue with the evasion.

"In the vacuum thermos bottle, a vacuum surrounds the thermos bottle's chamber. In the CO2 thermos bottle, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas (CO2) surrounds the thermos bottle's chamber."

You appear not to understand the basic mechanism of the greenhouse effect if that thought experiment was intended to be relevant to that question.

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

Eclectic at 17:22 PM on 6 April, 2025

Reed Corey @208 :

You have use multiple paragraphs of words to point to an "experiment" where a vacuum (plus silvered surfaces) does a better job of trapping heat than does silvered surfaces plus CO2 gas.

Which really does nothing to support your argument (such as it is).

Your argument being: that words are important and realities are not.

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

Reed Coray at 15:15 PM on 6 April, 2025

Dikran Marsupial at 19:53 PM on 3 April 2025 wrote: "I am open to rational argument, such as a good answer to my question about blankets and thermos flasks 'trapping heat', and willing to change my mind."

Okay try this. Take two vacuum thermos bottles as nearly identical as possible. The vacuum region of each thermos bottle surrounds its chamber. Punch a small hole in one of the thermos bottles (letting gas into the vacuum region of that thermos bottle), and choose for that gas CO2 (a heat-trapping, greenhouse gas). Reseal the hole so that the CO2 gas can't leave the insulation region." Call the thermos bottle without CO2 gas the vacuum thermos bottle. Call the thermos bottle with CO2 gas the CO2 thermos bottle.

In the vacuum thermos bottle, a vacuum surrounds the thermos bottle's chamber. In the CO2 thermos bottle, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas (CO2) surrounds the thermos bottle's chamber.

Place equal amounts of coffee heated to the same temperature in each thermos bottle chamber. Place both thermos bottles side-by-side in an external envirornment whose temperature is lower than the temperature of the heated coffee. Eventually the temperature of the coffee in both thermos will reach and stablize at the temperature of the external environment; but the CO2 thermos bottle will reach that temperature much more rapidly than the vacuum thermos bottle. If CO2 gas traps heat, how is this possible?

When describing to a lay person what is happening, wouldn't it be more appropriate to say "a greenhouse gas (CO2) is freeing heat" to say "a greenhouse gas (CO2) is trapping heat?"

The above experiment is a comparison of "rates of heat loss," not a comparison of temperatures. But the experiment can easily to modified to be a comparison of temperatures. Simply place equal or nearly equal constant-rate heat sources in the chambers along with the coffee. As long as the heat source is outputing heat at a constant rate, the temperatures of the coffee in both thermos bottles will reach a stable temperature higher than the environment's temperature, but the stable temperature of the vacuum thermos bottle will be higher than the stable temperature of the CO2 thermos bottle. As with the "rate of heat loss" comparison, for the temperature comparison it is more correct to say the CO2 gas "frees heat" than it is to say the CO2 gas "traps heat."

hus, in thermos bottles CO2 gas doesn't "trap heat" it "frees heat."

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

One Planet Only Forever at 03:59 AM on 4 April, 2025

Reed Coray,

Indeed, some people will try to argue that this matter of increased levels of ghgs causing an increase of the surface temperature is just a matter of opinion ... meaning there are no reasons why anyone would ‘have to’ change their belief.

That is an unscientific way to think about this matter which has a well-developed evidence-based understanding that is open to well-reasoned evidence-based improvements.

In addition to the comments by Others, especially Charlie Brown @201, I will specifically address your use of: may and unsure. I will also comment regarding 'permanent trapping' of heat energy.

Increased levels of ghgs ‘will’ (not may) increase the surface temperature. The current understanding is a range of potential magnitude of warming for a doubling of CO2 from 280 ppm to 560 ppm. But the low end of that ‘range’ is a significant increase. The only thing that is ‘unsure’ is how much worse than the very bad ‘best case’ the warming due to increasing CO2 levels ‘will’ be.

Note that the understood low end of the range of warming due to a doubling of CO2 levels is increasing, being (has been) updated ‘up’, because the current 50% increase of CO2, to 420 ppm from 280 ppm, has produced significantly more than a 1.0 C increase of surface temperature.

Building on the point of my comment @186, the increased ‘amount of trapped energy’ due to increased amounts of ghgs and the resulting increased average surface temperature is ‘essentially permanent’. It will last as long as the increased level of ghgs occurs. And increased CO2 levels will last a very long time, unless humans implement actions to effectively ‘essentially permanently remove’ CO2 from the atmosphere.

Hopefully, you were being hyperbolic when you declared that your mind was ‘permanently made-up regarding this matter’. The ability to learn is a critical thinking ability that enables humans to sustainably, permanently, improve things.

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

Reed Coray at 11:42 AM on 2 April, 2025

Bob when I googled "Adiabatic wall" I got the following. I think the text came from Wikipedia (not that Wikipedia is a great source only that it didn't come from WUWT and/or Jo Nova. see https://www.bing.com/search?q=adiabatic+wall&qs=AS&pq=adiabatic+wall&sc=10-14&cvid=78B3DD64803943E6B6458C617BB3F7EE&FORM=CHRDEF&sp=1&lq=0

An adiabatic wall is a boundary that does not allow heat transfer between two thermodynamic systems. This means that there is no heat or mass transfer across the wall, making it a theoretical concept often considered as a perfect thermal insulator. In essence, any energy exchange occurring across an adiabatic wall is strictly in the form of work.

So an Adiabatic Wall is "something that prevents the transfer of heat between two thermodynamic systems as in (1) the transfer of heat between the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system and (2) space. Isn't this precisely what is meant by the phrase "trapping heat within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system?" So the claim that the relationship between "Adiabatic" and "can't trap heat" may be garbled in Reed Coray's mind, doesn't hold water."

Your guess that "Reed Coray does not accept that human emissions of CO2 are leading to increased global surface temperatures" is wrong. Those emissions may very well lead to increased global surface temperature. One thing I'm unsure about is "how big is the increase?"

In any event, the quality of my arguments is independent of where they came from. The only thing that matters is their validity, not their source. If one technique of "denial of science" is appeal to authority, then implying that authorities are not good authorities is a form of appealing to a bad authority.

Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim

One Planet Only Forever at 08:12 AM on 2 April, 2025

nigelj,

I agree that we substantially agree. One question I have is what would be the ways to transition from what has developed – nearly 9 billion with a very inequitable distribution of harmfulness and wealth plus total impacts that are well beyond being sustainable - to 2 billion living as you see being a sustainable future?

I will also clarify my perspective. (As an engineer with an MBA this is like the way I deal with an engineering/business challenge):

What is the desired objective? All of humanity equitably (not equally) living Sustainably (into the very far future).

What is the starting point? Really important to understand that the current developed reality is very unsustainable, grossly inequitable, and in many ways getting worse (global warming and climate change impacts are getting worse until ghg levels, not just CO2, stop increasing)

What are the ways to help achieve the urgently required transition from the current developed very harmful unsustainable reality to humanity collectively equitably living sustainably for the millions of years this amazing planet could be lived on? (A related understanding: Humanity should not spread beyond this planet until this is figured out).

Specifically regarding a Sustainable Global Population:

Any ‘total global population’ up to 9.5 billion can be sustainable. It is simply a matter of keeping the sum of everybody’s impacts below the sustainable limits (the planetary boundaries and regional impact limits).

There can be a diversity of ways to live within that total equitable sustainable population.

People who are more fortunate should be required to set the examples of ways to live less harmfully and more helpfully (live more sustainably) for Others to aspire to develop towards. Everyone less fortunate should be able to develop to the more fortunate ways of living without compromising the sustainable total impact.

Regarding the corrections required related to global warming and climate change impacts:

It is unacceptable for there to be significant differences of the amount of harm that people benefit from.

Peer pressure will be required to ensure that all of the most fortunate compete to be ‘least harmful and most helpful to Others’ (having the evidence rationally prove things – Do not just accept proclamations that a person’s actions are less harmful and more helpful – No more Carbon Offset scams).

Without effective evidence-based peer pressure it is unlikely that sustainable living will develop as rapidly as is required to responsibly limit the harm done by currently developed unsustainable activities like fossil fuel use.

That perspective allows, and should encourage, improvements through scientific investigation and development of technological improvements ‘governed by learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others’.

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

Bob Loblaw at 05:14 AM on 2 April, 2025

MAR @ 192:

Unless Reed Caray returns to the discussion to clarify his position, we can only guess as to what he really means by any of that verbiage. As it is, it is mostly word salad.

Adiabatic processes in the atmosphere relate to air rising or descending, where pressure changes lead to temperature changes without the addition or removal of heat. The temperature change is the result of doing work (rising air parcel expands in volume, pushing other air out of the way to do so), or having work done on it (descending air is surrounded by air at higher pressure, which compresses it).

"Adiabatic" and "can't trap heat" may be garbled in Reed Coray's mind.

Googling for "adiabatic wall" finds the term in use in situations of high velocity aerodynamics, but that has nothing to do with earth/atmosphere dynamics.

Googling for "adiabatic wall Reed Coray" finds hits at WUWT and JoNova's web site, including comments that resemble his comments here. (I won't provide links - if you want to see them, ask Da Google.)

My guess is that Reed Coray does not accept that human emissions of CO2 are leading to increased global surface temperatures. My guess is that his arguments only make sense to the regular denizens of places such as WUWT and JoNova.

Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim

Evan at 20:28 PM on 31 March, 2025

Eric@15, agree that climate response is not constant and that we need to consider long-term effects. However, my understanding from James Hansen is that the long-term climate sensitivity is higher than the commonly accepted value of 3, not lower (read here). An ECS value of 3 is bad enough. Higher values associated with longer-term feedbacks don't improve the picture.

But my point is this. Through the effect of Milankovitch cycles, the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter trigger complex feedback processes that cause CO2 to vary about 100 ppm over 100,000-year cycles (i.e., ice-age cycles). This results in sea level changes of 400 ft. This suggests that our biosphere is in a very delicate balance. Given that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been 300 ppm or lower for 100's of thousands of years, given that CO2 is currently at 420 ppm and increasing at a rate of 2.5 ppm/year suggests we are in deep trouble. All of this discussion of proxies and whether we should use TCS or ECS seems to me to be a distraction from the central point that we are actively pushing nature way, way out of balance.

And we keep pushing.

Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim

Eric (skeptic) at 13:26 PM on 31 March, 2025

Thanks Evan for #11, I see your point. However my understanding is that climate sensitivity is not constant. This paper dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/358482/1.pdf?sequence=1 shows most of the factors affecting climate sensitivity in fig 1. The pertinent ones are decade time frames since we are comparing decades of human-created CO2 to past natural rises in CO2. Also we need to consider TCR rather than ECS with all the long term feedbacks: www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog_held/3-transient-vs-equilibrium-climate-responses/ In short, variations in dust, vegetation and carbon cycle between the current time and the Eemian could result in a different transient or equilibrium climate sensivity.

That may make it difficult to compare the current rise in CO2 and Eemian (and prior) rates of rise in CO2 as proxies for rates of temperature rise. However getting back to nigelj #5, reiterated in #12, the rise from the LGM to the present (the chart linked by OPOF) that makes the present magnitude and rate unique in 24k years.

Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim

Evan at 05:57 AM on 31 March, 2025

nigel@12, I won't argue your points except to note the following.

My view of why we keep focusing on temperature reconstructions is to convince non-scientists that the current rate of warming really is unprecendented over a period of time we care about, and really is something we should be worried about.

But for anybody who appreciates climate science and the link between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the coming climate "attractions", CO2 increasing at 2.5 ppm/year is about 200 times higher than it was coming out of the last deglaciation, when rates were more like 1 ppm/100 years. So let's round it off and just say that currently CO2 concentrations are increasing about 100 times faster than they were during the last deglaciation.

The ice-core data shows that over the last 400,000 years or more, CO2 has stayed within the range of 180 to 300 ppm. That we have increased CO2 by 100 ppm since the start of the Keeling Curve measurements, the fact that we are now at 420 ppm, and the fact that CO2 is currently increasing, on average, by 2.5 ppm/yr, should be all that anybody needs to know to understand that we are in deep doodoo. At least anybody who respects what climate science tells us about the link between CO2 concentrations and warming.

Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim

Evan at 04:33 AM on 31 March, 2025

Eric@10, yes, the ice cores give temperatures at just a single location. However, because CO2 is a long-lived greenhouse gas, we can use the CO2 record from a single ice core to reasonably represent the global CO2 concentration at any given time. Link the measured CO2 concentration to the science that relates atmospheric CO2 concentration to atmospheric temperature (i.e., the climate sensitivity), and we can use a single ice core to infer global temperatures. Because we have multiple ice cores dating back 400,000 years or so, we know with reasonably high confidence the temperature profile quite a ways back.

But the real point is that at a current rate of warming of 0.2C/decade, we are warming so much faster than any of the ice-core data sets record, that we are clearly warming at an unprecendented rate compared to the warming over the last 400,000 years or so. And unprecendented does not mean a factor of 2 or 3, but more like a factor of 100 or so. In short, we are warming so much faster than Earth has in the recent past, that it really is not productive to argue about semantics.

We are in deep trouble, and we have plenty of data sets with which to compare to support that claim. No, I have not provided links, but you seem very well informed about the history and science of ice cores (that is meant as a compliment), so that I assume you understand what I mean by CO2 being a long-lived greenhouse gas that distributes itself uniformly over the Earth.

If you contest the science that links CO2 to warming, then I will rest, because it is science that provides the critical link between what we can measure very well (i.e., CO2 concentrations from ice cores) and global temperatures.

CO2 limits will harm the economy

Bob Loblaw at 00:28 AM on 20 March, 2025

charles125 @ 126:

The moderator has pointed out your lack of sources for data, and some inconsistencies in your brief comment. I'll point out a few more.

Your economic argument appears to make the "one cause and only one cause" error. CO2 emission are not affected only by carbon taxes - many factors come into it. For your argument (that carbon taxes had no effect on emissions) to make sense, because changes happened without them, you need to pretend that nothing else matters. To make a successful argument, you would have to show that actual emissions remained the same as they would have if there had been no carbon tax (all other factors remaining in effect). That requires a level of economic analysis that you have not provided (or given a reference to).

You also have logical inconsistencies in your short argument. At the end, you say "...they knew the economic impact carbon taxes would have." Which is it: no impact (no emission changes), or impact? You can't have it both ways.

...and you are misrepresenting the reason BC cut taxes when they introduced their carbon tax. They did so in order to make the carbon tax revenue-neutral. Their policy was to keep collecting the same total $ in taxes, but switch the means of collecting some of those dollars from income etc. to fossil fuel use. That provides an incentive to move away from fossil fuels - you only pay the carbon tax if you use fossil fuels, but everyone sees the other tax reductions (whether they use fossil fuels or not). The people that move away from fossil fuels see more money in their pockets, while the profligate fossil fuel user ends up with less in their pocket. This is exactly the sort of market-driven process that economists think is an efficient method of incentivizing innovation and individual choice in reducing fossil fuel use.

The Canadian carbon pricing scheme was also designed to be revenue-neutral. A fee was charged on fossil fuels, but taxpayers received quarterly rebates. In January, my household received $210. The rebates were set at a level so that total rebate $ were close to total carbon fee $ - but again, the family with below-average fossil fuel use still got the same rebate as everyone else, so they had more $ in their pockets. It was the high-fossil-fuel users that paid more in carbon fees than they got back. A disincentive to use fossil fuels - the invisible hand of the market at work.

Unfortunately, certain political elements beat the drum of "carbon taxes bad!". Those politicians never emphasized "we're going to axe your carbon rebates!" (many people were unaware that they even existed), and people drank the koolaid so now the political trend is to eliminate those carbon fees.

And you also show a lack of knowledge of the history of carbon pricing in Ontario. Ontario used to have a cap-and-trade system in place. Not strictly a "carbon tax", but still a cost on fossil fuel use. A change in government eliminated that program. Ontario's reductions in CO2 emissions under the previous government were also partly the result of a policy to eliminate coal-powered electricity production. More than one policy. More than one factor involved in reducing CO2 emissions.

Climate's changed before

Brainscientist at 07:12 AM on 18 March, 2025

All of the fear mongering about Humans changing the climate never discuss the fact the the climate changed dramatically in the last 880ka.

The Younger Dyras Impact event was AFTER the climate had warmer dramatically.

Every scientist FUNDED talks about the oceans rising 300 feet when in the past there has NEVER been an ocean level above 20m from present and most are less than 8m.

There have been 16 cataclysms that could have easily destroyed advanced civilizations, we have also had a pair of "nuclear Winters" in the last 250 years.

We might be able to track asteroids but Younger Dryas appears to be a comet impact.

The earth has had higher levels of CO2 before are we so omniscient to know Our CO2 is the end of mankind. <yes, I have heard this bit of fear mongering from scientists).

I would like to knwo WHY the temperatures changed so dramatically on what appears to be a fairly regular but NOT in sync with any astronomical- earth wobble et al.

The impact event appears to have killed the large fauna in NA, spread a layer of ash, ended Clovis, and we do have all this troubling evidence of advanced and large populations in SA.

Fossil Fuels are made from life forms that used to be on the surface.

Exactly why should they not be brought up and put back into the mix?

I am a major skeptic of what is looking like fear-mongering science.

Is CO2 plant food? Why are we still talking about this?

Bob Loblaw at 06:47 AM on 1 March, 2025

plincoln24 @ 2:

I see the "myth" as being the implication of the "CO2 is plant food" statement as if it is proof that there are no bad effects. It's not the statement itself, it's the unspoken dog-whistle that deserves myth-busting.

Is CO2 plant food? Why are we still talking about this?

Evan at 22:19 PM on 27 February, 2025

People have many roles. A person may be a father, a brother, a son, an employee, a hunter, the list goes on and on. Nobody has just a single role.

It is likely that your boss cares more about your role as an employee than your role as a brother. The role that matters is situational.

CO2 is plant food, carbonator of drinks, key component of CO2 lasers, dry ice, greenhouse gas, the list goes on. The role we care about is situational. CO2 does not have a single role.

Electric vehicle adoption is stumbling, but still growing amid geopolitical clashes

One Planet Only Forever at 05:08 AM on 25 February, 2025

Evan,

Carbon pricing, massively resisted in the USA, would help.

I will get to carbon pricing. But I will start by commenting on the popular misunderstanding that “Most people are concerned more about meeting their own needs than those of others.”

A better understanding is: Many people have developed to be more concerned with misleading marketing induced ‘wants – incorrectly perceived as needs’ than they are about learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others.

The root of the problem is ‘the developed marketplace competition’. And a relate problem is the marketplace failure to identify, limit, and make amends for harms done.

Marketplace competition for popularity and profit drives the pursuit of perceptions of superiority relative to others, the ‘keeping up with the Jones-es’ nonsense, harmfully amplified by misunderstandings popularized by the science of misleading marketing. That creates ‘misunderstandings and unjustified perceptions of needs that overpower learning to be less harmful and more helpful’.

The competition not being governed by learning to be less harmful and more helpful has produced massively harmful results. The poorly governed free-for-all marketplace has developed:

massively harmful developed ways of living, particularly climate change impacts

massive aspirations to be more like the ‘more harmful perceived winners’

massive resistance to the understandable need to massively and rapidly correct (transition away from) what has developed.

A massive part of that resistance is opposition to carbon pricing on fossil fuels.

The marketplace operation could help protect against the climate change harm being done if the harm of carbon emissions from fossil fuel use was properly priced (it would be a very high price per tonne of CO2e – likely more than $200 USD).

France’s leadership made a massive mistake by introducing a fairly low carbon price without clearly providing adequate additional assistance to the poor. The result was increased popularity of anti-learning populist politicians who paired the opposition to ‘climate science and the understandable need for carbon pricing’ with other harmful anti-learning actions like intolerance for immigrants (those Others).

In Germany the populist AfD opposes climate science and immigration, along with promoting other harmful misunderstandings (see my comment on a previous SkS item here).

Canada’s carbon pricing and rebate program (currently only $80 CAN - $55 USD per tonne of CO2e) benefited the poorest by providing more rebate than the carbon pricing costs they faced. Even our household in the top 10% income bracket got more rebate than we paid because of the choices we made to reduce fossil fuel use. However, the anti-learning populist political players were able to misleadingly market so successfully that all major Canadian political parties have declared they no longer support the carbon pricing program.

January sets an unexpected temperature record

nigelj at 05:24 AM on 7 February, 2025

PericoDelosPalotes @8

You claimed @ 5 that global spending on climate mitigation was $20 trillion since the 1990s. None of the information you have provided in your comment @ 8 substantiates that.

You now claim that global spending on climate mitigation is about 2 trillion per year and global military spending per year is 2 trillion. This does not demonstrate that globally government spending on climate mitigation is strong. Many people would claim that what countries spend on the military is too weak. Its all subjective.

You have to measure the strength of the government climate response against the required goals and the required spending as I outlined previously. By that measure governments response to the climate problem is weak. Sorry if you cant see that.

Your claims about EVs not being a solution to the climate problem and that hybrids are better (paraphrasing) are simply assertions with no hard evidence or links provided.

You said @7 "Cars are getting heavier, while an EU study years ago proved that the CO2 reduction goals in transport set for 2050, could be achieved TODAY, by just reducing each vehicle weight 10%. But vehicles are getting heaver and heavier. This is a trend of more than 30 years."

No link provided. I googled this information and the only reference that came up is your own comment on this website. People wont believe the study exists unless you can provide a link. And we need to see the study for full information and context of exactly what they are assuming and measuring.

Regarding your comments on the weight of ICE cars. Reducing the weight of ICE cars by 10% might help a bit but it only reduces emissions about 10% so something better is needed such as EVs. They are zero emissions (after about 50,000 kms to allow for manufacturing emissions). Hybrids are better than ICE vehicles but they are definitely not zero emissions no matter how sophisticated the technology. And sophisticated hybrid technology costs a lot of money. So your anti EV rhetoric and promotion of hybrids as a better solution is not that persuasive to me.

January sets an unexpected temperature record

Evan at 02:05 AM on 7 February, 2025

PericoDelosPalotes&8

Thanks for providing more supporting information.

However, I am still not sure what you are trying to say. Are you saying that you don't think there is a climate emergency? Please give a clear indication of your position and a concise reason for your position. Here is the evidence that I point to indicating that we are in a climate emergency.

Currently atmospheric CO2 concentrations are increasing, on average, about 2.5 ppm/year. There are many sites that report this, such as the NOAA site.

CO2 increasing at this rate indicates a climate emergency. You don't need to look any further than this statistic.

January sets an unexpected temperature record

nigelj at 08:52 AM on 6 February, 2025

PericoDelosPalotes @6

Some of your comments seem interesting and valid, but some sound wrong and some are unsupported assertions, and some are off topic. I dont have time to address them all. I will only respond to those points that were directly in response to my previous comment:

You said "Saying governments are captured by lobbies it is a really huge implication. We are talking industry, research, universities, education, investors, enterpreneurs, doctors, engineers...are they all captured by the fossil fuel lobby?"

Investors and entrepreneurs and doctors for example are not really part of government, or at least not significantly, so they dont seem relevant to my point. The government does run a public education system and fossil fuels lobby has attempted to influence public education. One example of many:

"Miseducation”: How Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Push Climate Denialism to Kids in U.S. Schools"

www.democracynow.org/2021/11/19/katie_worth_climate_education_investigative_reporting

You said: "Saying "weak government polices" it is a bit unnacurate. Since the 90s ( although the bulk came from 2010 onwards), worldwide, we can conservative estimate around 20trillion USD has been invested in green policies. Then on top of that, Industry, in any kind of field, has invested more than that figure in developing technology of any kind..precisely in the opposite direction. That is 40 years of development in the wrong direction, and the cost of opportunity is HUGE. SMOG in many large cities can be traced already to the 80s."

I reiterate that government response to the climate problem in America and most other countries has been weak. Your figure of $20 trillion looks too high and you have provided no calculations or links to back up your assertion or numbers as a reference point. However lets assume $20 trillion correct for the sake of argument. Its estimated that mitigating climate change properly would cost 3% of global gdp each year (Stern Report for example) and global gdp has been about $85 trillion on average in recent decades which is mitigation of about $2.5 trillion per year. $20 trillion spent over the last 30 years is about 0.6 trillion per year well below what is required and is mostly driven by government policies, therefore it is weak. It is certainly weaker than is required.

We also know governments climate policies have been weak because emissions are still growing robustly and atmospheric CO2 has not slowed or levelled off or fallen. This is the ultimate and undeniable reference point.

Global gdp data:

www.statista.com/statistics/268750/global-gross-domestic-product-gdp/

You say: "Saying "weak government polices" it is a bit unnacurate (implying government has taken strong actions), " followed later by saying that "You can measure reality not by words but by actions, and after 40 years of words that doesnt match actions...maybe...just maybe... something is off" which is all completely contradictory. You cant claim government is strong on climate change, and also effectively claim that government action has been weak. But thank's for your comments.

January sets an unexpected temperature record

PericoDelosPalotes at 18:57 PM on 5 February, 2025

Morning,

Saying governments are captured by lobbies it is a really huge implication. We are talking industry, research, universities, education, investors, enterpreneurs, doctors, engineers...are they all captured by the fossil fuel lobby?

Saying "weak government polices" it is a bit unnacurate. Since the 90s ( although the bulk came from 2010 onwards), worldwide, we can conservative estimate around 20trillion USD has been invested in green policies. Then on top of that, Industry, in any kind of field, has invested more than that figure in developing technology of any kind..precisely in the opposite direction. That is 40 years of development in the wrong direction, and the cost of opportunity is HUGE. SMOG in many large cities can be traced already to the 80s.

Stating the patient does nothing out of doctor advices, doesnt seems like a good example.

Transport:

Cars are getting heavier, while an EU study years ago proved that the CO2 reduction goals in transport set for 2050, could be achieved TODAY, by just reducing each vehicle weight 10%. But vehicles are getting heaver and heavier. This is a trend of more than 30 years.

Hybrid cars should have been of the serial-hybrid architecture since the 90s, rather than:

a) pushing for EVs ( poor decision)
b) developing micro-hybrid useless (absolute trash)
c) developing parallel hybrid (even a prius who is an example of durability has level of complexities never seen, like having 3 electric motors)

A series-hybrid would have allowed for a very small combustion engine, ultra efficient, ultra easy to repair, same engine across many many cars and platforms, with way less moving parts, way easy on emmisions, fine tuned like a race car engine. An Idling engine just sitting there like a power generator. All without the need even for the coming of Lithium batteries. The implications (differences) are HUGE. This is no joke, we are talking a decission that could have changed where we are today massively.

Electricity generation: pushing for Solar, wind etc as if they could ever be just no more than marginal actors in most of the cases. While banning and jeopardizing Nuclear power development. We could have developed for the last 40 years thorium or simialr nuclear plants. Instead we have stick with old submarine technology from the 50s while at the same time promoting an agenda of closing them off. Now we have AI technology so electrical power hungry that they are now requiring mini nuclear plants. Its ridicolous. We just shoot ourselfes in the foot over and over and over.

Logistics: We trade everyithing, produce everything from Low income countries, that they use slave labour, children, concentration camps labour...the list can go on and on and on. Rather than local manufacturing. I watched a documentary about a lorry driver that has to deliver doughnouts from up in Scotland in the UK to Koln in Germany. REALLY?? nobody in Koln can make "doughnouts". We are not talking about 4nanometer microchips... just flour with suggar.

Ukraine war result? rather than cheap gas from Russia, so we can have energy in Europe, to develop new technologies, hopefully greener. Now we have the same gas from Russia but through many more intermediaries, through longer, more expensive and more polluting routes than just receiving them through a pipeline. And more expensive. Or even worse, being broguth cross Atlantic from the USA. That is SUPER GREEN.

Recylcing policies? another joke, but a joke that has costed 40 years of effort. Its got its opportunity cost lost.

And I can keep listing for hours wrong decisions, policies and the likes.

None of them points out to any short of sense of urgency. Even worse, is not that the patient doesnt take doctors advice, the patient has done A LOT, A LOT. All in the wrong direction.

You cannot be wrong in all, all the time, in all aspects for that long.

You can measure reality not by words but by actions, and after 40 years of words that doesnt match actions...maybe...just maybe... something is off.

January sets an unexpected temperature record

Evan at 06:49 AM on 5 February, 2025

As a shoutout to nigelj's comment

"Even losing a few votes can be significant."

Isn't it interesting that political systems are often just as delicately balanced as the biosphere. Whether in politics, personal finance, or the biosphere, success or failure is often determined by seemingly small margins.

Average annual rates of increase of CO2 are 2.5 ppm/year. That is an absolutely massive push on our delicately-balanced biosphere.

How could global warming accelerate if CO2 is 'logarithmic'?

akb at 06:45 AM on 3 February, 2025

We can learn a lot from geological history. Supplementing info from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record), we see that the earth today is relatively cool compared the past 500 million years even though recent ice ages were cooler. From plot of temperatures and CO2 levels over history determined by a variety of means, one sees that the temperaure rise is not linear with CO2 concentrations due Beer's law (it gradually flattens but does not turnover and drop). If we have reached peak fossil-fuel use and phase it out over the same time frame (about a century) we used to reach the peak, we will reach about 550 ppm CO2, which the geologic record says corresponds to about a 3 deg C temperature increase. For comparison, dinosaurs lived at about 1500 ppm CO2 and at temperatures 5-9 deg C higher. Creation of the Devonian black shales and Carboniferous coals dropped CO2 from 4000 ppm to something close to present, with a corresponding drop of about 10-12 deg C. One does not need a supercomputer to know approximately where we are headed.

Fact brief - Can CO2 be ignored because it’s just a trace gas?

One Planet Only Forever at 12:41 PM on 2 February, 2025

nigelj @10,

I have reasons to disagree regarding greed and self-interest being ‘ human nature that is unlikely to change’.

I will start by presenting an important perspective on economic development (aligned with the understanding presented in the 2012 book “Why Nations Fail”).

A competitive marketplace (of products, services, ideas, science, politics...) can develop amazing improvements. That is the positive-sum game (vs. zero-sum game) potential of marketplace competition. And the ways it happens include creative disruption or creative destruction of the developed status-quo (links are to Wikipedia. Note that “Why Nations Fail” is mentioened in the creative destruction Wikipedia item). However, competition for personal benefit and perceptions of superiority relative to others can produce negative-sum disruptive-destructive results.

When creative disruption-destruction is not responsibly governed by learning to be less harmful and more helpful to others the collective result can be worse than it needed to be. If people in the competition can get away with winning by being more harmful and less helpful to others then ‘greed and selfishness are encouraged to develop’ rather than being ‘human nature’.

The winners in the negative-sum game may be worse off than they would have been in the positive-sum alternative. But they pursue ‘their interest’ which is ‘increasing their perceived status relative to others’. They would think that others benefiting reduces ‘their’ potential ‘relative’ superiority.

The sensitivity of the climate on this amazing planet to human impacts on seemingly minor aspects of what is going on, like the trace amount of CO2, is tragically affected by the sensitivity of people to temptations to misunderstand matters in ways that make them like being greedier and more selfish.

Today’s situation is worse than it needed to be. The fossil fuel collective has successfully misled resistance to the creative disruption of developed energy systems. As a result there is more damage done and increasing need for creative disruption-destruction. The feedback response to increased need for rapid creative disruption-destruction is ‘increased resistance to change’.

What is required is getting people to change their mind about understandably unsustainable and harmful actions they have developed a liking for and related misunderstandings that promote and excuse those actions. And the manitude and speed of the required changes is continuing to increase.

Misinformation is a serious problem, especially, but not only, regarding climate change. This NPR article “The Doomsday Clock has never been closer to metaphorical midnight. What does it mean?” includes the following:

This year, it cited continuing trends in multiple "global existential threats" including nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, infectious diseases and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. It also pointed to the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories as a "potent threat multiplier" that undermines public discourse in general and about these very issues.

While these threats are not new, the scientists said that "despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course."

They are particularly concerned about the U.S., China and Russia, countries they say have the "collective power to destroy civilization" and the "prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink."

At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?

Bob Loblaw at 03:05 AM on 1 February, 2025

sychodefender @ 34:

For feedbacks, they start as soon as any system change occurs. When CO2 rises, it take a bit of time for temperature to rise, and then once temperature rises, atmospheric water vapour will rise, which will have a greenhouse gas heating effect (after a bit of time...), etc.

...but I have left "a bit of time" undefined for the moment. There are many different factors that take varying amounts of time to respond to changes. MA Rodger's response @ 35 touches on several of these factors.

Obviously, day-to-day weather causes changes in temperature, which will cause day-to-day feedback effects, etc. When we talk in terms of climate, though, we are more interested in the persistent changes, and how factors relate over longer periods of time. We also often talk about averages over large areas, not local effects such as your back yard.

Taking MA Rodgers statement about "increased evaporation adds 7% H2O capacity for every +1ºC", we are talking about longer term effects - e.g. decades. You won't see this simple a relationship when discussing day-to-day local weather. This relationship is looking at global trends over decades.

We can't instantaneously double atmospheric CO2 in the real world (thankfully!), but we can in a climate model. Back in 1981, Hansen et al published a well-known paper on CO2 and climate that included an interesting diagram.

Hansen, J., Johnson, D., Lacis, A., Lebedeff, S., Lee, P., Rind, D., & Russell, G. (1981). Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Science, 213(4511), 957-966

They ran a computer model where they instantaneously doubled atmospheric CO2, and their figure 4 shows how energy fluxes changed over time.

Hansen et al (1981) fig 4

This is a somewhat complex diagram, so bear with me a bit.

The first panel shows the immediate response. We see a very slight increase in atmospheric absorption of solar radiation, a larger reduction of IR loss to space, and some changes in the radiation, thermal, and evaporation fluxes between the surface and atmosphere.

A lot of things are now "out of balance", so changes will occur.

Notice that the change in IR loss to space (ΔF) is -2.4 W/m². Combined with the change in solar (ΔS = 0.1), we get a net change of +2.5. This is the "climate forcing" that MA Rodger refers to. This is what drives the overall warming of the earth-atmosphere system.

The atmosphere is the fastest to respond to these energy changes, because it does not require a lot of heat to warm up air. Land will heat up more slowly, and oceans even slower than land.

In the middle panel, we see what is happening "a few months later". The atmosphere has restored its local balance, but the surface has not - so the whole system is still out of balance. Surface temperature (T_s) is still the same as it was at the start.

The net climate forcing is now +3.9 (similar to the 3.7 number MA Rodger states in comment 35. Different models will vary slightly on what this number should be.)

The atmosphere has now had a chance to warm - and get more humid. So now, we see the effects that include the feedback.

With water vapour feedback now active, the net global imbalance has increased from +2.5 to +3.9. Roughly 50% larger than if there was no feedback.

The last panel is "many years later". The entire system has balanced again.

The atmosphere has a net balance of zero.

The surface has a net balance of zero.

The whole system has a net balance of zero.

...but note that many of the internal energy fluxes are different from what they were before CO2 was doubled.

Absorbed solar has change for both the atmosphere and surface. Total net solar (ΔS) has only increased by 0.1, but where it is absorbed is different - more in the atmosphere and less at the surface.

IR loss rates to space have changed. Net change (ΔF) is only 0.1 (to balance the change in ΔS), but again we see that contributions from the surface and atmosphere have changed.

IR exchanges between the surface and atmosphere have changed. The climate is warmer, so IR fluxes have increased in both directions.

Convective fluxes (thermal and evaporation) between the surface and atmosphere have changed slightly.

...and surface temperature is now 2.8C warmer... (Global warming!)

...so we are living in a different climate, with many changes. A new equilibrium, but one that looks quite different from what we are used to.

Hopefully this is not too hard to follow. As stated before, climate is a complex system. It gets quite difficult to to isolate changes in one part from another. Looking at one part can help understanding - but you do need to be careful about over-emphasizing what you see in that one part (and missing another important part). Much of what you can call "contrarian" positions involves over-simplifying the system, to the peril of leaving out parts that do matter. You're doing the right thing by asking questions.

At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?

MA Rodger at 19:47 PM on 31 January, 2025

sychodefender @34,
So if there were a doubling of CO2, this would imposed a climate forcing of +3.7Wm^-2 on the planet. And this would begin to warm the planet with some +1.25ºC warming arriving in a decade (and the remainder taking far longer having to warm up deep oceans and melt ice caps).
This warming will act to restore the planet's temperature equilibrium but the warming is being amplified due to the water content of the atmosphere. Physics tells us that increased evaporation adds 7% H2O capacity for every +1ºC and measurement shows this is happening.
Being itself a greenhouse gas and with the altitude of cloud formation in a warmer atmosphere, this extra H2O adds to the required warming to reach equilibrium. It's roughly three steps forward, two steps back.
So after that decade, assuming constant CO2 since the doubling, the remaining imbalance would be about +2.3Wm^-2. The warming so far will have seen the imbalance drop, +1.4Wm-2 due to CO2 and +2.8Wm^-2 from the H2O.
Note that the H2O feedback works very quickly. As soon as there is a temperature rise, the water will be evapourating from the oceans with the march towards equilibrium being thus that three steps forward, two back.
Thats the basic version. It gets much more complicated in the detail.

At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?

sychodefender at 11:50 AM on 31 January, 2025

Hi MA Rodger, thanks for your reply.

Please can you just clarify one thing from your paragraph below, are you saying that the temperature rise attributable to anthropological co2 at 800ppm would be insufficient to trigger a significant H2O feedback, or am I misinterpreting?

"As you say, the climate forcing from mankind's CO2 emissions does cause feedbacks, these most evident in the water cycle, humidity, cloud cover, cloud height (this last the least understood). But there is no "self-sustaining loop" or even any significant CO2 emissions consequent from mankind's emissions as a feedback. There is thus no need for a natural mechanism to prevent run-away global warming"

At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?

michael sweet at 03:42 AM on 29 January, 2025

Sychodefender:

It would be helpful if we know how old your daughter is. The answers appropriate for a 10 year old are different from an 18 year old.

The Earth currently cannot reach equilibrium because humans continue to release CO2. When we stop polluting most effects will reach equilibrium in 50 years or so. Some slow effects like melting Greenland and Antarctia might take several thousand years to reach equilibrium. Actions we take today will affect peoples lives in 5,000 years!

It is not clear when the sea and land sinks will reach saturation. Each has multiple components which will react differently to CO2 pollution. For example increased atmospheric CO2 increases the concentration of CO2 in cold water but increased temperature decreases the concentration in warm water. Pray that the sinks keep working in the future.

I don't think diminishing CO2 absorbtion of IR will help us much but another negative feedback might.

The most important thing is to reduce CO2 pollution as much as possible as fast as possible to limit the damage done. Hopng for good luck is not as good a strategy as reducing the damage done.

At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?

MA Rodger at 02:42 AM on 29 January, 2025

sychodefender @30,

Another take on answering you questioning....

As you say, the climate forcing from mankind's CO2 emissions does cause feedbacks, these most evident in the water cycle, humidity, cloud cover, cloud height (this last the least understood). But there is no "self-sustaining loop" or even any significant CO2 emissions consequent from mankind's emissions as a feedback. There is thus no need for a natural mechanism to prevent run-away global warming.

You mention CO2 in this "natural mechanism" and CO2 has operated naturally as the major control knob for the climate through the eons. (Calling CO2 the 'control knob' should not be in any way controiversial.) The ancient Earth's climate is a bit of a mystery as the sun was less energetic in the early solar system (and from its weak beginning will continue to strengthen) and with no means of knowing the ancient atmospheric composition the 'faint sun paradox' remains unexplained. More recently, over the last 500 million years the temperature record is reasonably well known. (Through that time the sun has brightened by about 5% which is a climate forcing equivalent to roughly a quadrupling of CO2.) 500My Earth temperature

There are a few very-long-term mechanisms at work altering the carbon available for the carbon cycle (in the atmosphere, bliosphere and ocean waters, these being in equilibrium for multi-millenial periods).
Taking CO2 from the atmosphere into rocks as coal was a major process in warm climates for early parts of this 500My period as back then fungi were not well developed enough to decompose plants which could thus be buried and turned to coal. Modern fungi prevents such significant coal formation.
A second mechanism is the water-weathering of mountain rocks which allows the formation of carboniferous rock in sea water. When the 700Gt(C) humanity has emitted so far has reachen equilibrium between biosphere, ocean and atmosphere (which takes abut a millenium), the remaining 25% of our emissions in the atmosphere (assuming only natural processes) will require rock-weathering to be extracted, this taking tens of millenia to complete. At a similar rate of action, the formation of the Himalayas and associated increase in rock-weathering has seen the atmospheric CO2 content drop over the last 50 million years and with it the cooling of the planet.
Once this deposit of carbon into the geology occurs, it is volcanism that works to return it to the carbon cycle. Thus when the planet is so cold that there is no rain to weather rocks and no significant biosphere at work, the volcanic activity will slowly pump CO2 back into the atmosphere restoring the level of greenhouse effect. The emissions are very small relative to mankind's emissions (perhaps about 1%).

You mention Milankovitch cycles which have been waggling the planet's temperature for the past 3 million years (initially as a 40ky cycle, then 100ky).
The Milankovitch cycles are not so strong in themselves but are amplified by positive feedbacks. Within these cycles, CO2 is part of that positive feedback (increasing the size of the wobbles) with carbon being locked away under frozen land and in cooling oceans under increased sea ice. However the big driver of recent ice ages is albedo not CO2.

You mention the logarithmic relationship between CO2 levels and climate forcing. This is an empirical relationship for concentrations in the range 150ppm to 1300ppm. As Zhong & Haig (2013) fig 6 shows, beyond 1300ppm the forcings increase faster than logarithmic. By then, of course, an increase in the CO2 consentrations would need to be four-times an increase to add the same extra forcing. But we don't want to be creating a world with 1300ppm. It would have already been under a forcing of 8.4Wm^-2 from the extra CO2, perhaps global warming of +7ºC.

At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?

Bob Loblaw at 01:39 AM on 29 January, 2025

sychodefender @ 30:

The ultimate limiting factor for warming induced by greenhouse gas increases is the infrared radiation emitted to space from the upper part of the atmosphere. As the earth-atmosphere system heats up (primary a surface effect in the case of greenhouse gases) more IR is emitted to space, and (hopefully) eventually balances again. Think of it in stages:

Earth is in a stable climate, with a stable (over years or decades) temperature. Energy absorbed from the sun is balanced by IR losses to space.

Something causes that equilibrium to go out of balance. In the case of greenhouse gases, the direct factor is a reduction in the IR loss to space.

Now, absorbed solar exceeds IR losses, so we are adding energy to the earth-atmosphere system.

The net energy increases causes some part of the system to warm up. That energy cascades through the system in a variety of forms (radiation, thermal energy, evaporation/condensation).

After a while (many years), the system evolves to a point where IR losses to space increase enough so that we reach a new balance with absorbed solar.

Once a new balance is achieved, we have a (new) stable climate again. In the case of doubling CO2, this new stable climate will be a surface temperature that is a few degrees warmer than it was before.

So, ultimately, the ability to regain equilibrium requires that the system respond to a point where IR loss to space - from the upper part of the atmosphere (you'll often see "TOA" to indicate "Top of Atmosphere") can rebalance the energy absorbed from the sun. In a stable climate, you can have short-term shifts away from equilibrium, but this "energy balance with space" will keep pulling the climate back to its stable position - kind of like a marble rolling around in the bottom of a round bowl.

So, next let's think about feedbacks, such as the "CO2 warming increases water vapour, increases warming, increases water vapour" go-on-forever loop. SkS does have a lengthy discussion of that topic, on this thread here, but let's take a quick look at it now.

In climate science terms, the water vapour effect you describe is called a positive feedback. A system change in one factor causes a change in another factor that adds to the initial change.

If the initial change is an increase, a positive feedback will cause more increase.

...but if the initial change is a decrease, a positive feeback will cause more decrease.

Positive feedbacks do not necessarily lead to values that increase forever. As long as the feedback multiplier is small enough, a new equilibrium will still be reached.

"Small enough" is anything less than 1.

If the initial change is 1, and the feedback adds another 0.5, then the next time through the sycle we'll only add 0.5*0.5 = 0.25, and the next time will only add 0.25*0.5 = 0.125, etc.

This will stop increasing once it reaches a total change of 2.

Let's look at this graphically. The following image shows 10 time steps with eight different feedback multipliers.

For all curves the initial change from time 0 to time 1 is a system change of 1 (you can think of it as temperature, but the math doesn't care what it represents.)

For time 1 to time 2, we add another change of 1*feedback multiplier.

an increase of 0.1 for a multiplier of 0.1.

an increase of 0.2 for a multiplier of 0.2.

etc.

The figure shows feedback multipliers ranging from -0.5 to 2.

Feedback ratios

Note some key features in the figure:

For a multiplier of 0, there are no further changes after time step 1. The system change has already reached a new equilibrium and remains constant forever.

For a multiplier of 1, we see a continuous linear increase. We add another 1 at each time step.

For a multiplier of 2, we see an accelerating, exponential increase over time. Not a good place to live.

For all multipliers between 0 and 1, we can see that the rate of increase tapers off and a new equilibrium is reached after 10 time steps.

...but that new equilibrium is higher for higher feedback multipliers.

For multiplier 0.5, note that the final result is an increase of 2.

This one is closest to our known climate system feedbacks - the direct effect of CO2 is roughly doubled by feedbacks such as water vapour and snow/ice.

Note that I threw in a multiplier of -0.5, too. This is a negative feedback, opposing the initial change. The final change is 0.67, not 1.0.

In a real world, the negative feedback would not wait until the initial change of 1.0 happens - all feedbacks kick in as soon as any change occurs. You'd see smooth curves, not the jumps we see in the figure. The -0.5 curve would just gradually increase from 0 to 0.67 in the first few time steps.

Also, note that you can find out more about these issues by using the search box on the SkS web page (upper left), or by looking at the Most Used Myths list (linked below the search box and social media emblems).

At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?

sychodefender at 15:16 PM on 28 January, 2025

Thanks Bob I'm learning a lot, here's one more question.

We know that increased temperature evaporates more H2O from seas and lakes, this water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas being responsible for over 50% of warming. Co2 is also emitted, both impede rising infrared and the surface gets warmer, causing even more evaporation in a self sustaining loop.

Thankfully the earth possesses a natural mechanism to stop this run away heating so we don't burn up.

This process has been in operation for millennia, keeping the planets energy equilibrium whenever temperature began to rise. The reasons for it rising might be volcanic emissions including co2, tectonic, milankovitch cycles, higher sun radiance etc all raising temperature in a completely natural way and as a consequence more co2 was emitted, loop begins.

My question is if the planet could adjust and regain it equilibrium in the past, why can't it do it now?

The seas and land sinks will not reach co2 saturation for another century.

Is it possible that the limited remaining and slowly diminishing ability of co2 to absorb infrared acts as a natural safety valve preventing excessive warming?

All these enquiries originate from my daughter who is working on a project for school.

Thanks again for your patience.????

At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?

sychodefender at 09:56 AM on 27 January, 2025

Hi Bob, interested to hear your comments on this paper regarding co2. Isotopes.

https://www.mdpi.com/2413-4155/6/1/17#:~:text=The%20stable%20carbon%20isotopes%2012,an%20established%20standard%20reference%20material

Fact brief - Can CO2 be ignored because it’s just a trace gas?

One Planet Only Forever at 05:00 AM on 27 January, 2025

Evan @6,

Your make a good point about the sensitivity of our amazing planet’s global climate conditions. It has prompted the following thoughts regarding attempts to ignore or dismiss CO2 impacts ...

The warming impact of increased levels of CO2 have been understood for more than 125 years. And the natural causes of glaciation and inter-glacial periods, like the Milankovitch cycles, have been reasonably understood for more than 80 years.

A challenging understanding, an inconvenient truth, is that human CO2 impacts causing global warming may be helpful in the future but are not helpful now. Those distant future actions could make the next natural glaciation event more ‘livable’.

The next glaciation is expected to naturally happen about 50,000 years from now. But studies, like the one reported in the Carbon Brief in 2016: Human emissions will delay next ice age by 50,000 years, indicate that the human caused increased CO2 levels have likely delayed the next glaciation by 50,000 years. That is nothing to be proud of. It was Too Much Too Soon.

It would be ‘great’ if lots of easy to access fossil fuels were still available for future humans to use to limit the negative impacts of future glaciations.

Fossil fuels are undeniably non-renewable. Future generations cannot benefit from burning them as much as current generations do. Rapidly ending fossil fuel use would leave more ‘limited resources’ for the benefit of future generations and reduce the climate change harm done to people today and to future generations. However, the ‘competitive marketplace’ fails to ‘naturally’ develop towards those understandably ‘great’ objectives. In fact, there is ample evidence that the marketplace developed, and continues to develop, misinformation efforts against the development of such ’helpful external influences on the marketplace’.

The undeniable marketplace efforts against learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others clarifies what competitive free market activity can be expected to accomplish. The fundamental market function is managing the distribution and benefits from the use of scarce resources. It develops replacement alternatives as resources become scarcer. However, the marketplace will only seriously develop replacements that are less expensive than the increased cost of the activities that rely on scarcer resources (note political efforts to reduce the costs of fossil fuels).

More importantly, the market is unlikely to care to reduce harm or ensure that harm done is repaired. Limiting harm done, and avoiding the challenge of getting the beneficiaries of harm done to repair the damage done, requires external influence to make the more harmful ways less popular, more difficult, and more expensive.

Hopefully efforts to limit the success of misinformation, not just regarding climate science, will result in more helpful and less harmful political action. It is common sense that political actions need to be less likely to cycle in ways that are significantly negative for the future of humanity. However, limiting the sensitivity of political actions to harmful misunderstandings is likely less certain than improving the understanding of the sensitivity of the climate on this amazing planet to the impacts of human activity.

Scientific understanding is certain to be constantly improving the ability to develop sustainable improvements and limit harm done - The politics of popularity of beliefs is not certain to develop sustainable improvements or limit harm done.

Moving away from high-end emissions scenarios

MA Rodger at 00:02 AM on 25 January, 2025

To put some other numbers into this interchange.

Regarding rates of emissions:-
The Global Carbon Project give data for the various fossil fuel types going way back. Their budgets back to1959 also show numbers for Land Use Change emissions (as well as the ocean absorption and the land absorption).
The 1980 wobble in emissions resulted from the 1970s oil crisis driving efficiency measures but the high 1970s oil price led to over-production and what was called the "1980s oil glut" thus ending the wobble. I'm not so sure about talk in that link of a slow-down in economic growth also being a factor as use of gas and coal doesn't seem to have shown any signs of this oil-use wobble and continued apace (as this OurWorldInData graph shows). OurWorldInData FF use

Regarding atmospheric levels:-
The Land Use Change emissions are a significant part of global emissions and when added to FF emissions allow the calculation of the Atmospheric Fraction (Af) which is the annual ration (Atmospheric increase)/(Man-made emissions). This has remained pretty constant since the 1960s altough there is no underlying reason for it**.
The land-based absorption provides the lion's share of the wobbles in the Af with El Niño the primary wobble-driver.

(**If an emissions-free world had a single emissions event, the annual absorption in Year 1 would be about 3% and through following non-emissions years the annual absorption would slowly decrease to zero over a millenium. How much atmospheric CO2 then remained would depend on the size of the emission - so roughly 25% remaining if the emission event was 600Gt(C), this the very rough size of our cumulative emissions to date.)

Sabin 33 #12 - Do solar panels work in cold or cloudy climates?

One Planet Only Forever at 09:28 AM on 24 January, 2025

Evan,

To try to stay ‘close to topic’, but respond to your interest in the most beneficial ways to install home solar panels, I will start by saying that incorrect claims like the Myth that this Rebuttal addresses are attempts to unjustifiably discourage people from:

supporting solar panel systems as part of the required correction of developed Grid generation systems

considering the helpful installation of home solar systems.

A very important consideration is that the governing objective is to minimize CO2, or other lasting or significant global warming impacts, produced by electricity generation.

Grid electricity generation needs to be transitioned to be truly net-zero ghg. And grid, as well as home, solar panels can be part of that transition. Even a rapid correction of a grid system to responsibly limit the harm done can take many years. And ‘natural gas peaker plants’ are likely to be the last parts removed from regular operations (natural gas peaker plants may exist long-term as an ‘emergency-emergency back-up’ that is very rarely needed).

Based on that understanding, people can help more rapidly reduce the harm of electricity generation by installing home solar systems. And they should design home solar installation to maximize the total annual generated electricity, appreciating what affects the amount of electricity generated. They should not be discouraged by the reality that many factors affect the amount and timing of electricity generated. And they certainly should ignore misleading claims like “Solar panels don’t work in cold or cloudy climate.”, or when covered by snow.

Bob Loblaw, and others, have provided plenty of very helpful information, including information about how cold and cloud affect solar panel performance.

Moving a little further from the topic to add some more considerations for home solar installations...

Variation of pricing should guide the use of electricity. However, a focus on the ‘variation of grid pricing’ may result in choices that do not minimize the overall amount of CO2 emissions.

If CO2 per Grid-generated MW-hr does not vary with time of day then minimizing the ‘net demand for grid energy’ should minimize CO2 from grid energy production. That means maximizing the total annual home solar generation with unused home generated electricity stored for later use or delivered to the grid to reduce grid generation. Building home solar for maximum generation during ‘peak price times’ would likely reduce the total annual home generated electricity and result in more CO2 generation than building to maximize total annual generation.

However, if CO2 per MW-hr is significantly higher during peak price times, because of things like the use of natural gas peaker plants to meet peak demands, then designing the home system to reduce the ‘home grid demand’ during the peak ‘CO2 per MW-hr’ times may be more helpful. However, as the grid system is improved to reduce CO2 generation the home system built to maximize generation during those current peak CO2 times becomes less helpful than a home system designed to maximize total annual generation.

The story changes if home generated electricity cannot be delivered to the grid or will not be stored for later use. Minimizing the grid energy needed would still be the objective. But maximizing the home solar generation during times of peak home electricity use becomes a significant, but complex, consideration. This could lead to potential benefits from maximizing generation during peak use times. However, that would also lead to understanding the benefits of charging the EV during peak home solar generation times.

All of the above considered may result in the conclusion that the best thing to do is build the home solar system to maximize the annual total generation and then adjust the home electricity use to minimize CO2 emissions impact of grid energy needed.

Final points regarding panel orientation:

Being able to manually adjust the angle from horizontal could allow seasonal adjustment that increases the total annual electricity generation.

The extra cost of an automated tracking system that seeks the orientation that maximizes generation may be more beneficial than a system that tracks the sun. But automation does not always work as well in reality as it does in conceptual planning.

Moving away from high-end emissions scenarios

Evan at 06:09 AM on 24 January, 2025

Nigelj@11

I also recall that during the 1990's the UK was making a large-scale shift from using coal to using natural gas in their "Dash for Gas". Also, France made a large-scale shift towards nuclear power in the 1980's and 1990's. Then Mt. Pinatubo blew in 1991, and from what I understand, the temporary cooling caused a drop in atmospheric CO2 concentrations due a variety of factors, such as increased uptake by cooler oceans. All of this was a temporary bump, and there were likely other factors that you pointed out, which together caused a temporary slowdown in the buildup of atmospheric CO2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_for_Gas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

Immediate and long-lasting effects of Mt. Pinatubo eruption

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