Climate change and other predictions of Imminent Doom

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Typhoon
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Typhoon »

Typhoon wrote:Spiked | Greens, face it: we’re just not that into you
One of the endlessly recurring themes of the environmental narrative is – in the words of the man at the centre of the ‘Fakegate’ mess, water and climate researcher Peter Gleick – that an ‘anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated’ effort exists ‘to cast doubt on climate science’, and ‘muddy public understanding about climate science and policy’. According to this mythology, right-leaning think tanks are funded by big energy companies that are keen to protect their profits from environmental regulation.

There are two problems for environmentalists convinced by this mythology.

The first is that it has never been plausible. Large corporations do not suffer from regulation. They are simply able to pass costs on to the consumer. Moreover, regulation creates firm ground on which to base longer-term strategic decisions about capital investments. And finally, regulation creates opportunities for companies that are able to mobilise resources to enter new markets. Wind farms, for example, are not cottage industries. Regulation suits larger companies.

The second problem for environmentalists has been to demonstrate that the myth is anything more than a myth. An ongoing Greenpeace project launched in 2004, for instance, aimed to provide a ‘database of information on the corporate-funded anti-environmental movement’. However, the sums of money involved were paltry. According to Greenpeace, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the most vilified organisations, had received just $2million from Exxon between 1998 and 2005. Yet between 1994 and 2005, total donations to Greenpeace amounted to over $2 billion. According to the greens’ conspiratorial narrative, a handful of conservative think tanks with relatively small resources were seemingly able to undo the campaigning of a host of huge international environmental NGOs, national governments, international agencies, and yes, corporate interests, whose combined resources were many, many thousands of times greater.

The myth of the climate change denier exists in the heads of environmentalists, and seems to prevent them entering into conversation with anyone that dares to criticise environmentalism.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Hoosiernorm »

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/16/g ... imate-wtf/
Gravity is climate’ – 10 years of climate research satellites GRACE

How much ice is Greenland is really losing? – Movement in the Earth’s mantle? – Enough water for all?

For the first time, the melting of glaciers in Greenland could now be measured with high accuracy from space. Just in time for the tenth anniversary of the twin satellites GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) a sharp image has surface, which also renders the spatial distribution of the glacial melt more precisely. The Greenland ice shield had to cope with up to 240 gigatons of mass loss between 2002 and 2011. This corresponds to a sea level rise of about 0.7 mm per year.
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Bureaucratic Intrigues in the CC community in Japan & more..

Post by monster_gardener »

http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2012/03/new-jobs.html
So as you may have gathered, jules and I have got shiny spanking brand new jobs. From April Fool's Day we will be working in climate change research at an institute called RIGC, located in Yokohama. Conveniently, we will not have to move too far away from our current jobs in climate change research at RIGC in Yokohama. It must be emphasised, however, that any similarity with our current positions is entirely coincidental. Furthermore, our work on predicting climate change is merely a sideshow, a bolt-on optional extra, which is of minor significance to the core strategy of RIGC (founding motto: "Towards the prediction of global change"). It's important to be clear about all this, because under no circumstances should anyone (least of all us) suffer under the illusion that we've been employed for more than 10 years on core research that has been central to the mission of the institute right from its inception. Oh no. That might imply some expectation of continuous future employment, too, and that simply would not do. The core funding has to be reserved for the middle managers and an assorted bag of researchers whose work is sufficiently irrelevant and useless that they can't actually raise any focussed external funding for it. It is important to get the priorities right.

As a reward for her recent efforts in managing and organising a small but relatively successful research group(*), jules has been demoted and awarded a substantial pay cut. I have merely had a pay freeze, after a rather productive year that would normally have resulted in a moderate rise. But we can consider ourselves relatively lucky. Others were summarily sacked - this seems to be principally "pour encourager les autres", since there is plenty of money and in fact further recruitment is planned over the coming months. There is no hint that the sacked staff were actually substandard - they were even invited for interviews, only to find out with less than a month's notice that they would not get their contracts renewed. It is horribly reminiscent of a previous experience in the UK, when a newly-arrived lab director decided we all needed shaken up, which meant the contract staff would be rigorously evaluated (according to his newly-invented criteria, not the performance measures they had actually been operating under) and preferably fired. Jules happened to be first in the queue and was initially told she did not meet his new standards, at which point all the senior staff revolted, and in fact a reasonably sane system (3 year contract followed by tenure evaluation) was designed as a result. The director went on to lay waste to the institute in other ways before hopping off to his next rung on the career ladder and is still one of NERC's darlings. But I digress.
Also some interesting comments about Climate Change itself.........
James Annan said...

Regarding tipping points, the fundamental problem is that their mathematical origin in catastrophe theory is basically unrelated to the important questions we care about in climate change, which are (IMO) primarily concerning the magnitude and rate of climate change, rather than the existence and nature of particular equilibria. (Even the concept of cliatological equilibrium itself is dodgy enough.)

AIUI it all went badly downhill when Tim Lenton, on encountering this incompatibility between theory and relevance, decided to (re)define a tipping point as basically any change he didn't really like very much. Which, as far as I can see, makes it more of a politically convenient construct than a scientifically useful one.

Wikipedia politely starts with "A climate tipping point is a somewhat ill-defined concept" :-)
17/3/12 10:09 PM

Alastair said...

just because you can't define it doesn't mean it does not exist.

The rapid climate changes that happened at the start and end of the Younger Dryas (YD) happened! And the rapid climate change at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and the start of the Bolling-Allerod also happened!

In fact the rapid changes (in geological terms) that occured during all four of the most recent glacial terminations are also facts of life.

Surely enquiring why they occur is more interesting than calculating a new average rise in temperature for an increase in CO2?

And more important. All but one of these rapid events entailed a rapid rise in temperature, which is more likely to occur as a result of the anthropogenic rise in CO2 than the feared repeat of the cooling which occurred on entry to the YD.
18/3/12 2:27 AM
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

FINALLY......... a practical solution, don't screw with the planet, just change the blight that is humanity:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a ... ge/253981/
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Potato alcohol fueled cars & drunken pigs with hangovers....

Post by monster_gardener »

Yukon Cornelius wrote:
Nonc Hilaire wrote: Is ethanol really a bad concept?
...
I has to be, I can't figure how the thermodynamic inputs to outputs could possibly work. (compared to crude, and considering _all_ inputs, including soil depletion) It's not possible to put that much energy into production of the corn or sugar cane, only to end up with something that has to go through the same refining process. It's like looking at the sum total of what it takes to run/build/dispose a Toyota Pious: if you really wanted to save energy, you'd just buy a used car instead.

Like purely electric cars, it's a shell game that ignores the efficiencies of energy transformation. You end up trying to theoretically replace all the energy supplied by oil for American cars, with coal burnt in electric generation plants, and do it with a more inefficient process due to electrical power conversion and transmission losses. (Because electric cars are "green" -- I guess for no other reason than we wish they were.)
Thank you Very Much for your post, Yukon Cornelius.

FWIW I am remembering a book from the 1970s Oil Crisis era..... Pig/Potato farmer........... Grew potatoes and fermented them.......... Used a solar still to concentrate the alcohol to a usuable concentration........... fed the fermentation mash to his pigs.......... Wonder if the pigs got hang overs...... potato based alcohol tends to have more fusel oil........ more starch than sugar.........

Seemed doable on that basis but not sure about the costs of raising the potatoes.......
For the love of G_d, consider you & I may be mistaken.
Orion Must Rise: Killer Space Rocks Coming Our way
The Best Laid Plans of Men, Monkeys & Pigs Oft Go Awry
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Typhoon
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Re: Potato alcohol fueled cars & drunken pigs with hangovers

Post by Typhoon »

monster_gardener wrote:
Yukon Cornelius wrote:
Nonc Hilaire wrote: Is ethanol really a bad concept?
...
I has to be, I can't figure how the thermodynamic inputs to outputs could possibly work. (compared to crude, and considering _all_ inputs, including soil depletion) It's not possible to put that much energy into production of the corn or sugar cane, only to end up with something that has to go through the same refining process. It's like looking at the sum total of what it takes to run/build/dispose a Toyota Pious: if you really wanted to save energy, you'd just buy a used car instead.

Like purely electric cars, it's a shell game that ignores the efficiencies of energy transformation. You end up trying to theoretically replace all the energy supplied by oil for American cars, with coal burnt in electric generation plants, and do it with a more inefficient process due to electrical power conversion and transmission losses. (Because electric cars are "green" -- I guess for no other reason than we wish they were.)
Thank you Very Much for your post, Yukon Cornelius.

FWIW I am remembering a book from the 1970s Oil Crisis era..... Pig/Potato farmer........... Grew potatoes and fermented them.......... Used a solar still to concentrate the alcohol to a usuable concentration........... fed the fermentation mash to his pigs.......... Wonder if the pigs got hang overs...... potato based alcohol tends to have more fusel oil........ more starch than sugar.........

Seemed doable on that basis but not sure about the costs of raising the potatoes.......


Although growing crops for biofuels is energetically a non-starter, I have to wonder why producing biogas from the mountains of organic waste produced by civilization is not more widespread. What are the technical difficulties preventing widespread adoption to date?

Offhand, it addresses two problems at once: treating organic waste [which can be resued as fertilizer, etc] and producing gas for fuel.
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Typhoon
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Typhoon »

Typhoon wrote:Image
The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever.
Happer | Global Warming Models Are Wrong Again
The observed response of the climate to more CO2 is not in good agreement with predictions.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Torchwood »

Typhoon wrote:Wired | How the clean [energy] tech boom went bust
Perhaps the biggest force working against not just Solyndra but clean energy in general is this: Because natural gas has gotten so cheap, there is no longer a financial incentive to go with renewables. Technical advances in natural gas extraction from shale—including the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—have opened up reserves so massive that the US has surpassed Russia as the world’s largest natural gas supplier.

The price of natural gas peaked at nearly $13 per thousand cubic feet in 2008. It now stands at around $3. A decade ago, shale gas accounted for less than 2 percent of America’s natural gas supply; it is now approaching one-third, and industry officials predict that the total reserves will last a century. Because 24 percent of electricity comes from power plants that run on natural gas, that has helped keep costs down to just 10 cents per kilowatt-hour—and from a source that creates only half the CO2 pollution of coal. Put all that together and you’ve undone some of the financial models that say it makes sense to shift to wind and solar. And in a time of economic uncertainty, the relatively modest carbon footprint of natural gas gets close enough on the environmental front for a lot of people to feel just fine turning up the air-conditioning.

A song dedicated to frackers:

qknDM3pcoD0
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Typhoon »

Ross McKitrick | Earth Hour 2012: A Dissent
I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.

Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.

Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water.

Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases.

Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.

The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity.

Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity.

People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.

Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply.

If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations.

No thanks.

I like visiting nature but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.

Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics
University of Guelph
Amen.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

Dr. McKitrick sounds like a typical misanthropic, right wing extremist, homophobic, racist who probably spends his leisure time clubbing baby seals to death.

Enlightened people would never say anything like that.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Yukon Cornelius »

Anyone post this yet? Finding more signs of human activity in the path of retreating glaciers.
Other finds in the same area, an old camp and hunting ground, included containers that may have been used as bags/purses, a wooden spade, horseshoes arrows and arrowheads.
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West Antarctic ice shelves starting to tear from land

Post by Carbizene »

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Simple Minded

Re: West Antarctic ice shelves starting to tear from land

Post by Simple Minded »

I hate it when that happens....
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Re: West Antarctic ice shelves starting to tear from land

Post by Carbizene »

.. yeah...stuffs up the weekend.
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Re: West Antarctic ice shelves starting to tear from land

Post by Typhoon »

Driven by methane bubbles, of course.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Carbizene »

The Chutchki Methane effect hasn't even started yet
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Carbizene »

Yukon Cornelius wrote:Anyone post this yet? Finding more signs of human activity in the path of retreating glaciers.
Other finds in the same area, an old camp and hunting ground, included containers that may have been used as bags/purses, a wooden spade, horseshoes arrows and arrowheads.
Such finds were first posted about 5 years ago.

No doubt it would be a peculiar feeling to come across domestic items still lying where they were dropped a thousand years ago.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Carbizene »

I don't get why this graph is posted, people do realise the red line is spending more time above 0 anomaly over time.

the curved black line is spurious and misleading as it suggests anomaly prior 78 was greater which is incorrect.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Carbizene wrote:I don't get why this graph is posted, people do realise the red line is spending more time above 0 anomaly over time.
:?:
Carbizene wrote:the curved black line is spurious and misleading as it suggests anomaly prior 78 was greater which is incorrect.
The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever.
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Carbizene
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Carbizene »

Typhoon wrote:
Carbizene wrote:I don't get why this graph is posted, people do realise the red line is spending more time above 0 anomaly over time.
:?:
A predominately positive Anomaly over the period means that the per annum average over the period is increasing.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Ammianus »

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/csi/events ... ation.html
Nature's exuberant smashing of daily high temperature records in recent weeks can only be described as "Meteorological March Madness". Conditions more fitting of June than March prevailed east of the Rocky Mountains since the start of the month. The numbers are stunning. Take, for example, the nine consecutive record high temperatures in Chicago from 14-22 March, eight of which saw the mercury eclipse 80°F. For those unfamiliar with the area's climatology, high temperatures do not normally begin exceeding 80°F until after commencement of the Summer solstice. NOAA's National Climate Data Center reported that over 7000 daily record high temperatures were broken over the U.S. from 1 March thru 27 March. With beachgoers flocking to the balmy shores of Hampton Beach, New Hamsphire this week, one wonders if a new normal is emerging for the preferred destination of Spring-break revelers.
Yawn
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Typhoon »

Carbizene wrote:
Typhoon wrote:
Carbizene wrote:I don't get why this graph is posted, people do realise the red line is spending more time above 0 anomaly over time.
:?:
A predominately positive Anomaly over the period means that the per annum average over the period is increasing.
Two words: statistical significance
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Ammianus wrote:http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/csi/events ... ation.html
Nature's exuberant smashing of daily high temperature records in recent weeks can only be described as "Meteorological March Madness". Conditions more fitting of June than March prevailed east of the Rocky Mountains since the start of the month. The numbers are stunning. Take, for example, the nine consecutive record high temperatures in Chicago from 14-22 March, eight of which saw the mercury eclipse 80°F. For those unfamiliar with the area's climatology, high temperatures do not normally begin exceeding 80°F until after commencement of the Summer solstice. NOAA's National Climate Data Center reported that over 7000 daily record high temperatures were broken over the U.S. from 1 March thru 27 March. With beachgoers flocking to the balmy shores of Hampton Beach, New Hamsphire this week, one wonders if a new normal is emerging for the preferred destination of Spring-break revelers.
Yawn
"Weather is not climate" unless, of course, we happen to have a warm spell.

2012 European cold wave

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Expert: Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past [2000 A.D.]
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.

The effects of snow-free winter in Britain are already becoming apparent. This year, for the first time ever, Hamleys, Britain's biggest toyshop, had no sledges on display in its Regent Street store. "It was a bit of a first," a spokesperson said.
Snore.
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