2008/04 0.250 0.266 0.233 0.391 0.109 0.250 0.244 0.392 0.108 0.392 0.108

Paul Clarke’s graph now shows the GISS data, but not the HadCRUT yet.

John M Reynolds

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/last:12/offset:-0.146/plot/uah/last:12/plot/rss/last:12/plot/gistemp/last:12/offset:-0.238

Looking at that graph, I don’t see the new GISS data. I found the data at this link:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt

John M Reynolds

Here’s a little fun fact to serve as a reality check on just how much oil we (the world) are using:

Current world-wide consumption rate in 2006 was 86 million barrels of oil every day, or about 1000 barrels per second. If Lake Champlain (NY – VT border) were filled with oil rather than water, the world would consume it in 5 years and 2 months. For those on the west coast, the much deeper Lake Tahoe would be drained in 30 years and 3 months. That is assuming, of course, the rate of oil consumption does not increase.

The bottom line is that I think sweet oil is at peak. The other stuff isn’t. But the other stuff isn’t very attractive as a business because it is very expensive and complicated to turn it into a finished high grade product for general consumption at the gas pump. When I hear comments like, “All we have to do is drill in Alaska if we can just tie up the greenies”, I wonder whether or not people will always be so gullible.

British understatement?

The Club of Rome made the incredibly basic mistake to equate “proven reserves” with that which was actually left. Those Bozos had us running out of aluminum (6% of earth’s crust).

Nor did they account for substitutability, technology, and methods to do far more and better with far less, etc.

It takes a very hi-IQ type to make a mistake that idiotic. Peak Oil is the same basic (stupid) error, taken a level wider. Note that only very intelligent people are capable of a.) coming up with, or b.) subscribing to, such a mammoth fallacy.

(Fortunately, as I do not have a high IQ, I am not thus encumbered.)

We may never reach those limits. Not for thousands of years. If ever, should we eventually come up with a decent mass-conversion process. In a way that would almost be a pity, because it will remove much of the incentive from extraplanetary expansion.

Har! Har!

- we know the difference between a model and reality and we know reality trumps model every time
- We know non-linearities and feedbacks.

Anyone who has stringently storyboarded a wargame (i.e., can “demonstrate the war via the game” well enough to satisfy a historian. Is well aware of those problems in a logical, if not mathematical, sense.

Unfortunately very, very few wargames are up to this standard. And even if they are, it is very obvious that while they–might–be adequate models of the past, they are near-useless for predicting the future.

“The realclimate.org folks were wondering “why is it that electrical engineers seem to be AGW skeptics”. I didn’t have the heart to explain it to them.”

I made the double mistake of reading “The Limits to Growth” right after my EE Systems course and was duly impressed with the block diagram in the middle of the book. Then I read Brian Aldiss’ Greybeard, about a society dealing with an economic collapse. Left me depressed for weeks.

Of course, the Club of Rome missed their forecasts, and there are interesting things afoot in biotech and nanotech that may get us past the next obstacle. Whatever that winds up being.

Just as long as we get off the planet before we reach the real limits.

“Washington universities are doing studies on vineyard susceptibility to cold. … Think what the 2008 crop will be like.”

Washington State isn’t the only area with grape problems, the San Francisco Chronicle reported “Cold nights in North Coast are hitting vineyards hard” at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/04/23/state/n063523D87.DTL

“After a long string of unseasonably low nighttime temperatures, officials estimate as much as 10 to 15 percent of Sonoma County’s $400 million crop has been lost to frost damage.

The cold weather is also hurting vineyards in Mendocino and Lake counties, where damage to the crop is expected to be about 20 percent.

In Napa County, a spokesman for Napa Valley Vintners says there has been little damage because most growers have adequate frost protection.”

LOL. The realclimate.org folks were wondering “why is it that electrical engineers seem to be AGW skeptics”. I didnt have the heart to explain it to them.

My Answer:
- we know the difference between a model and reality and we know reality trumps model every time
- We know non-linearities and feedbacks.
- The climate models are like capacitors, resistors and inductors. We can intuitively understand what makes sense and what doesnt. massive positive feedback in a system that those same hockey-stick maker claim is resiliently stable prior to man’s showing up sets of our BS detectors. we know what an overdamped system would look like.

The case for huge AGW impact, contrary to data backing it up, doesnt impress an EE, and appeals to authority and ‘this is too complicated for you peons to figure out so trust us’ is laughable.

Pamela, I agree with you on most issues, but I disagree strongly with your pessimism.

Humans have changed hugely. We used to be creatures who had a 10% chance of reaching the age of 40. We are no longer that sort of creature. This has changed everything, including morals in general and willingness to go to war in particular.

Cold Max is not impossible (esp. around the edges), but it is unlikely to be the rule. I don’t predict any food wars.

We are still in a huge and rapid socioeconomic conversion process. A fairly bad cool (or warm) will slow it down, but I doubt it will stop it.

Unfortunately, humans haven’t changed much, just their toys. We quickly fall into wars around resources, faster than the resources dwindle. Do we hate muslims because of their religion, because they hate us, or because they have the lion’s share of high-grade sweet crude oil?

WHEN, not if, we enter into another severe cold minimum, agricultural expansion will shrivel up to nothing in one growing season and then will stay that way long after food stores are gone. What happens when Russia once again is unable to grow wheat? Or mid/far eastern countries are unable to grow enough rice to feed their population explosion? What happens when the world, including our allies have to get their oil from US?

The eastern oil countries will fall back into camels and tents, a life style still evident there. Tribal wars will once again be the normal day to day life within these countries. But Japan, China, Russia, England, France, Spain, etc are highly developed countries (some more than others) where horse and buggy, hitch and plow, and water buckets hauled up from the well are just not a major or even minor part of their lives. The population as a whole has been lulled into a technology-based, food importing culture where the most important thing to do in a day is get to your job in the city, not stay warm for the day and stoke the fire at night, or gather and hunt for the day’s food and then prepare it from scratch.

That kind of oil-less, everything you own you make, daily living is, in reality, only a drop in temperature away for far more people than you think.

And, by the way, although it is actually irrelevant to the current discussion, I am curious how you got your number of 9*10^-4 for the emissivity (/ absorptivity) of CO2. As you no doubt know, emissivity and absorptivity are wavelength-dependent…and in this case, strongly wavelength dependent since CO2 has specific absorption bands. Since skeptics have often argued that the bands are saturated already (as an excuse to rule out any significant effect of CO2 on radiative absorption without actually doing the calculations that show otherwise), it seems unlikely to me that the absorptivity is so low in these bands.