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Dave
Mountain climber
the ANTI-fresno
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Nov 26, 2009 - 02:52pm PT
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"Nuclear Coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, geothermal, wind and solar are not answer.
We are all looking outward for the solution.
We ourselves and every individual on the planet are the problem.
The transformation starts with us."
OK.... Now can we be realistic? Or do you really want everyone to stop, change their behavior, live in a teepee, and not bother pursuing energy efficiency and solutions such as nukes, gas, wind, solar, etc.? I'm not at all disagreeing the quotes such as the following:
"The London Times once asked several emminent people to say what they thought was wrong with the world. Most of them pointed to such evils as the threat of nuclear war, poverty, and such. The shortest response came from G.K. Chesterton:
Me"
But a lot of good people are putting a lot of energy and brainpower into changing the energy makeup up this country, climate change or not ... ClimateGate or not, so that ya'll can keep posting on the Taco and driving to Yosemite every weekend. We could all live in smaller houses, drive less, buy less crap, but it is absolutely hypocritical to post BS like "The transformation starts with us" and "nuclear Coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, geothermal, wind and solar are not answer" without recognizing this. Get off the computer and go live in a tent.... Oh wait, well get off the computer anyway...
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Nov 29, 2009 - 07:20pm PT
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from the timesonline:
"SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation. "
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Nov 30, 2009 - 03:51am PT
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Interesting tidbit about where some of the CO2 is coming from.
Humans and our machines -about 24 Gigatons CO2 a year
Termites(a type of bug) -about 50 Gigatons CO2 a year.
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Eric Beck
Sport climber
Bishop, California
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Nov 30, 2009 - 11:30am PT
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A recent conjecture (not mine): "Daylight time is the cause of global warming. It's that extra hour of sunlight."
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Nov 30, 2009 - 01:35pm PT
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ok, skeptical scientists were indiscriminately and unswervingly derided and denounced as being motivated by greed, as toadies for various industries...while the agw/acc scientists were glorified as being interested only in saving the planet
now, several of the most outspoken and lauded scientists working for institutions that formed the most critical components of the ipcc reporting base have been proven to be frauds and guilty of hiding their reseach, destroying data, intimidating and actively seeking to discredit scientists who opposed them, and manipulating the "peer-review" process that is supposed to be the cornerstone of legitimate research
so what do you claim was their motivation, now? were they motivated to save the planet from a threat their very own research showed was nonexistent?
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gazela
Boulder climber
Albuquerque, NM
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Nov 30, 2009 - 04:37pm PT
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As one pundit put it, the science is indeed settled--at the bottom of the CRU's dumpster. The whole climate "peer review" process reminds me of a criminal trial in which the defendant gets to pick his twelve best friends as jurors. I mean, is the verdict ever really in doubt? No matter what the climatological evidence shows (warming, cooling, whatever), herd science's conclusions are always (a) that mankind is destroying the planet, (b) that we're already at the "tipping point" past which no remedy exists, and (c) that immediate, massive regulation and taxation are the only things that will save us from ourselves. It's time everyone recognized that science, when driven by politics, isn't science at all.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Nov 30, 2009 - 06:18pm PT
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Whatever else, would it not be consistent with important American values such as thrift, prudence and self-reliance to reduce consumption of energy, and resources generally? It would almost certainly be good for the environment and atmosphere, and there's little chance it would harm the environment.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Nov 30, 2009 - 07:12pm PT
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Anders, I'm reluctant to answer a rhetorical question, but it isn't always wise to reduce energy consumption. The question is what else must we reduce, and what else must we use more, to accomplish that reduction?
I think the reason for the skepticism on anthropogenic climate change comes in part for this reason: many of its most vocal proponents were economic reactionaries who wanted to undo the industrial revolution and capitalism, and return to an 18th century sort of localized economy and a neo-mercantilism. The idea that burning fossil fuels damages the climate seemed like too convenient a fit with their preconceptions about what sort of society they wanted.
While I remain skeptical of some of the proposed actions in response to this, I found the material in the references Chiloe and others have provided too compelling to ignore.
John
Edit: Eric, I think your source must be on to something!
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Nov 30, 2009 - 07:27pm PT
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Mighty
Reducing energy consumption from sources that produce CO2 while increasing
overall Gigawatts consumed is fine by me. Time to go nuclear!
The old soviets have thousands of useless bombs that we and the world are
buying the cores out of to fuel the existing N power plants. Can't
hurt to use them up now rather than later in new power plants.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Nov 30, 2009 - 08:03pm PT
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John, you're quite correct. Using less resources may have other social, environmental or economic effects, which can't always be foreseen. Bearing in mind that if citizens voluntarily choose to reduce their consumption, out of principle, then no amount of goverment policy, commercial sales or promotions, or other tactics can change that. Also that most of us could significantly reduce our consumption without significant effect on our quantity or quality of life.
As a thought-experiment, disabling all televisions and video game systems would likely lead to people (especially children) getting more exercise, and perhaps spending more time with family and learning. All socially valuable things. It might not do much good for the significant percentage of the economy that relates to entertainment.
A conundrum is that governments and countries depend on reasonably stable economies and populations. But more than half of the economies of developed countries is based on want rather than need. So if everybody suddenly buys less stuff, the economy goes to hell, and so everything else. One of the interesting aspects of the current recession is demographics - an aging population buys less stuff, and they may never revert to buying as much as many formerly did. Another is that world capacity to produce many things may now exceed the world's capacity to consume them, or at least to consume and pay an acceptable price for them.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Nov 30, 2009 - 08:38pm PT
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Anybody post this yet?
from
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8387137.stm
"Sea levels are likely to rise by about 1.4m (4ft 6in) globally by 2100 as polar ice melts, according to a major review of climate change in Antarctica.
Conducted by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), it says that warming seas are accelerating melting in the west of the continent.
Ozone loss has cooled the region, it says, shielding it from global warming.
Rising temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula are making life suitable for invasive species on land and sea.
The report - Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment - was written using contributions from 100 leading scientists in various disciplines, and reviewed by a further 200.
SCAR's executive director Dr Colin Summerhayes said it painted a picture of "the creeping global catastrophe that we face".
"The temperature of the air is increasing, the temperature of the ocean is increasing, sea levels are rising - and the Sun appears to have very little influence on what we see," he said."
"The Antarctic Peninsula - the strip of land that points towards the southern tip of South America - has warmed by about 3C over the last 50 years, the fastest rise seen anywhere in the southern hemisphere, according to the report.
But the rest of the continent has remained largely immune from the global trend of rising temperatures.
More and more tourists are visiting the exotic Antarctica shores each year
Indeed, the continent's largest portion, East Antarctica, appears to have cooled, bringing a 10% increase in the sea ice extent since 1980.
This report backs the theory that it has bucked the global trend largely because of ozone depletion - the chemical havoc wrought over 30 years by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other agents in the stratosphere above the polar region.
"We used to have a big blanket of ozone, and when we took it away we saw a cooling," said Professor Turner.
"The Antarctic has been shielded from the impacts of global warming."
But, the report concludes, that will not last forever.
The ozone hole is expected to repair itself in about 50 years, now that the Montreal Protocol has curbed the use of ozone-destroying substances.
As it does so, the SCAR team predicts that greenhouse warming will come to dominate the temperature change across Antarctica, as in other parts of the planet.
Doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere would warm the continent by 3-4C, it says."
CFCs and the depleted Ozone layer. Isn't that another issue that the GOP and corporations refused to believe in. Ironically, now we have to worry about the OZone layer COMING BACK! and warming the south pole further
PEace
Karl
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Nov 30, 2009 - 09:08pm PT
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Stay clear of the chicken little zone there Karl. To think humans
can't adapt to 3-4C rise or lowering of the temp is to do
our race serious disrespect. 1C is more realistic anyway.
The Medieval Warm Period was great from all accounts and we
have not reached those temps yet. Nothing to worry about except the
IPCC, cap and trade grifters pulling the biggest con in history.
Luckily they've been exposed for what they are. Hoaxers.
Global Whiner is their new label.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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CC writes that we'll be just fine, that he knows the future climate and that humans will adapt.
but from the Article...
""Sea levels are likely to rise by about 1.4m (4ft 6in) globally by 2100 as polar ice melts, according to a major review of climate change in Antarctica."
Isn't that going to create a very serious need for adaptation in our coastal cities? Mega-trillions of dollars worth? How about the whole country of Bangladesh.
Hundreds of Millions of people displaced. Untold killed.
Easy to brush that aside when Rush is crying foul.
Thing is, real data is consistently showing the sea is rising faster than what scientists have been predicting, and many right wingers called them extremists even when their predictions were more conservative.
Don't you guys worry that you'll be naked when the world decides that making up the science you want to believe is transparent in hindsight?
Peace
Karl
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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"Isn't that going to create a very serious need for adaptation in our coastal cities? Mega-trillions of dollars worth? How about the whole country of Bangladesh.
Hundreds of Millions of people displaced. Untold killed."
and what is the projected death toll (from starvation, disease, and war) if the global economy collapses?
and when are predictions of environmental disaster "conservative?
i haven't read anyone on this site say we should do nothing to protect the environment; only that we should be careful to balance those efforts with the needs of society...can we create energy without doing any damage to the environment? NO...even solar panels take up a huge amount of space and windmills certainly don't blend in with the landscape
technology has made drilling safer and cleaner, and better that we do it here where concerned citizens can closely monitor the process than to leave it to third world countries that don't have and don't care about environmental protection
nuclear power has its drawbacks, but the navy has been using nuke power for decades without serious problems...and europe is doing well, too
of course, when the wh continues to insist that "there's no scientist basis for this dispute", karl's question about hindsight becomes especially relevant
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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"But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way [hiding/destroying data, blackballing dissenters, rejecting foia requests, and corrupting the peer-review process] to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them."
here's the whole article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574566124250205490.html
i especially like the comparison to religion, which seems even more valid now as so many of the faithful blindly reject the facts
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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ahhh, debate is so refreshing:
The Climate Science Isn't Settled
Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted.
By RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.
Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.
The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%.
The defining characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun but can absorb portions of thermal radiation. In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming.
That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth's atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let's refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called "climate forcing."
There is general agreement on the above findings. At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern.
The IPCC's Scientific Assessments generally consist of about 1,000 pages of text. The Summary for Policymakers is 20 pages. It is, of course, impossible to accurately summarize the 1,000-page assessment in just 20 pages; at the very least, nuances and caveats have to be omitted. However, it has been my experience that even the summary is hardly ever looked at. Rather, the whole report tends to be characterized by a single iconic claim.
The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively.
But even if the IPCC's iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.
Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible.
There is some evidence of a positive feedback effect for water vapor in cloud-free regions, but a major part of any water-vapor feedback would have to acknowledge that cloud-free areas are always changing, and this remains an unknown. At this point, few scientists would argue that the science is settled. In particular, the question remains as to whether water vapor and clouds have positive or negative feedbacks.
The notion that the earth's climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth's climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today's. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the "Early Faint Sun Paradox."
For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2.
There are quite a few papers in the literature that also point to the absence of positive feedbacks. The implied low sensitivity is entirely compatible with the small warming that has been observed. So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.
What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.
The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.
Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.
Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.
Mr. Lindzen is professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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I think Dingus and worm have jumped to some conclusions.
I didn't site a sensationalist study but a serious one reported by the BBC, not fox news.
Worm writes
"and what is the projected death toll (from starvation, disease, and war) if the global economy collapses?
and when are predictions of environmental disaster "conservative?"
Such predictions in the past have turned out to be conservative when the actual change is later measured to be happening faster. You assume that millions might die because the world might to bust straining to clean up it's act but it's just that sort of producing change that stimulate economies and creates jobs. We don't make jack squat in this country anymore but if we geared up for change and focused on being the technology provider for new energy, we'd be back in business.
Conservative handwringers fret about money spent on saving the damn world from a real threat while never suggesting we spend less than the whole world combined on our military when there is virtually NO chance of our homeland being invaded EVER.
Wake up, The sea is slated to invade our land and it bothers you not.
Now Dingus, the sea level rise is plain science (however inexact but the sea is rising dammit) and that doesn't demand cap and trade necessarily or borrowing extra money from China. It's just reality that we can respond to in any number of ways.
But first, we have to call BS on the BS of "Tobacco isn't addictive" science being tossed in by the right wing
PEace
Karl
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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from ed morrissey:
"This has long been one of the credibility issues with the AGW movement from the beginning, although one built into government grants for research in general. Government grants create a market for research, which universities and other institutions create supply to meet, as Stephens rightfully notes. That gives government a great deal of power to distort academic markets, if you think of them in those terms — and a massive incentive for the providers to endorse the reasoning behind the supply. After all, concluding that an issue is negligible or nonexistent means the end of such grants.
But researchers have ethics and a sense of responsibility as scientists, some will argue in return. That may be true in many or even most fields, but the e-mails exposed at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit — one of the premier institutions pushing the anthropogenic global-warming theory — show that the AGW field was not among them. The e-mails repeatedly discuss ways to hide bad and contradictory data and ways to attack other scientists arguing against their conclusions. The charitable conclusion to draw from this is that they believe in AGW so much that they became high priests instead of researchers; the less charitable conclusion was that they didn’t want the gravy train to end. Either or both, they stopped doing science a long time ago.
With the discarding of the raw data by East Anglia CRU, the pretense at science has ended. The cash incentives for reaching those conclusions should end as well. If AGW is real, then let the scientists build a transparent and complete data set for all to review openly that proves it, instead of only publishing subsets of “adjustments” and destroying the raw data. Science welcomes critical review; corrupted advocates shrink from it and conspire to block it. While some may argue over the benefits and problems with government funding of the former, no one can argue that the latter deserves a red cent of public money to encourage it. Hopefully, Stephens’ optimistic assessment of the end of the AGW bubble will be borne out, but that will take a discipline with public money that this administration and Congress have yet to demonstrate on any level."
my response to karl is that national defense extends beyond our borders (as clinton showed when he bombed kosovo)...we also have an obligation to allies who have supported us and are closer to threats...and 9/11 proved that an army is not necessary to "invade" our homeland and endanger our people...and how many real jobs are created (not "saved") by the 'military industrial complex' versus the "green industry"?
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Maybe we have our priorities wrong BW
The Climate change threat is far more real than a military invasion and we could argue that our wars have just made them hate us more and killed thousands more americans in the process. If we dumped more research and money into green than bombs, it would create jobs and the money wouldn't be going to waste
PEace
Karl
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