RSS Reaches Santer's 17 Years

WoodForTrees have periods with negative trends during other long periods.
1944-1978 as an example-over 30 years.

So, let’s recap the year in climate so far, shall we?
* The Nenana, Alaska “ice out” date breaks the old record.
* Arctic minimum sea ice extent rebounds sharply from 2012 lows.
* Antarctic maximum sea ice extent sets new records.
* Tornado activity to date is near record lows.
* The hurricane season in the Atlantic basin has been (and probably will end up being) a dud.
* We have now reached 17 years with zero trend in “global temperature”.
Others can add to the list…

Personally I’m waiting (hopefully) for the 20 year mark. Because then the 1980-2000 (roughly speaking) rise will be no longer than the 2000-2020 level/cooling period. I don’t think AGW will survive that. We’re nearly three quarters of the way there, as the years tick by the warmists will be getting more and more worried. I think post 2015 the cracks will really begin to show as more rats leave the sinking ship.

Ric Werme 7:00
Ok so what is the RSS reading for the period 1944-1978?
Climate has long time periodicity, something CO2 has not changed completely!

oppti says:
November 4, 2013 at 6:51 am
“WoodForTrees have periods with negative trends during other long periods.
1944-1978 as an example-over 30 years.”
So the rise of CO2 from 1960 to 1978 had no effect as well?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2
That’s great! We can dump the doubly falsified CO2AGW theory! Rejoyce! Thermageddon ain’t gonna happen! Dance in the streets, warmists! You’re saved!
As to us skeptics; we didn’t worry about it anyway so we’ll just continue working.

Does anyone know how many years of warming there had been by 1984 when Hansen started saying the world was going to burn up and the West Side Hwy in NYC would be under water? Had it been at least 17 years?

To oppti:
You wrote:

WoodForTrees have periods with negative trends during other long periods.
1944-1978 as an example-over 30 years.

However, the UN IPCC has put forth the statement that man-made greenhouse
gas emissions began to dominate the Earth’s climate beginning in 1976. So
the earlier periods of negative slope are less relevant.

Richard C., you really think you’re going to get a rational explanation???
The only one you’ll be getting is that made famous by Ring Lardner in his “Stories and Other Writings”, and I quote:
“‘Shut Up!’ he explained.”

This (17 years) is a non-event, just as 15 and 16 years were non-events. Non-events do not make headlines. Other non-events of the year are one of the fewest numbers of tornadoes (especially when corrected for under-reporting in the radar-free past) in at least the recent past of not the remote past, the lowest number of Atlantic hurricanes since I was 2 years old (I’m 58), the continuation of the longest stretch in recorded history without a category 3 or higher hurricane making landfall in the US (in fact, I don’t recall there being a category 3 hurricane in the North Atlantic this year, although one of the ones that spun out far from land might have gotten there for a few hours).
We (the world) didn’t have an unusual number of floods, we don’t seem to have any major droughts going on, total polar ice is unremarkable, arctic ice bottomed out well within the tolerances slowly being established by its absurdly short baseline, antarctic ice set a maximum record (but just barely, hardly newsworthy) in ITS absurdly short baseline, the LTT temperatures were downright boring, and in spite of the absurdly large spikes in GASTA in GISS vs HADCRUT4 on a so-called “temperature anomaly” relative to a GAST baseline nobody can measure to within a whole degree centigrade, neither one of them did more than bounce around in near-neutral, however much the “trend” in GISS is amplified every second or third month by its extra-high endpoint.
The US spent months of the summer setting cold temperature records, but still, aside from making the summer remarkably pleasant in an anecdotal sort of way (the kind you tell your grandchildren when they experience a more extreme weather, “Eh, sonny, I remember the summer of ’13, aye, that was a good one, gentle as a virgin’s kiss outdoors it was…”) it was unremarked on at the time.
Let’s face it. The climate has never been more boring. Even the weather blogs trying to toe the party line and promote public panic — I mean “awareness” — of global warming are reduced to reporting one of GISS’s excessive spikes as being “the fourth warmest September on record” while quietly neglecting the fact that in HADCRUT4, RSS and UAH it was nothing of the sort and while even more quietly neglecting the fact that if one goes back a few months the report might have been that June was the fourth coldest in 20 years. Reduced to reporting a carefully cherrypicked fourth warmest event? Ho hum.
So, good luck in getting any news agency to report reaching 17 years in any or all of the indices — this isn’t news, it is anti-news. It is olds. It is boring.
It is also irrelevant. If GASTA stubbornly refuses to rise for five more years, stretching the interval out to 20 to 22 years in a way that nobody can ignore, does this really disprove GW, AGW, or CAGW? It does not. The only thing that will disprove GW or CGW is reaching 2100 without a climate catastrophe and without significantly more warming or with net cooling. A demonstrated total climate sensitivity of zero beats all predictions or argument. The “A”(nthropogenic) part is actually easier to prove or disprove in a contingent sort of way, although it will probably take decades to do so. Contingent because of there is no observed GW at all, AGW seems difficult to prove. But since we are in the part of the periodic climate cycle observed over the last 150 years where the climate remains neutral to cools around an overall warming trend, we might well see neutral to very slow warming even if AGW is correct, if there is an anthropogenic component to the long term trend and oscillation that we can observe but not really explain over the last 150 years.
The one thing the 33 years of satellite measurements and increasingly precise surface temperature measurements have been able to prove is the one thing that the 17 year interval is truly relevant to. The GCMs used to predict CAGW suck. The GCMs in CIMP5 that contribute to the conclusions of AR5 are almost without exception terrible predictors of the Earth’s actual climate.
This conclusion is unavoidable. Even if they all cannot be rejected at the “95% confidence level”, almost none of them are close to predicting even GASTA alone, let alone RSS/UAH, global rainfall, frequency and violence of storms, etc. As we leave 2013’s hurricane season behind with almost no chance for an Atlantic storm this year, which GCM predicted the paucity of hurricanes and tornadoes over the last few years? Where are the droughts and floods? Which GCMs actually got the temperature distribution right (when they didn’t get the average or average anomaly right, the answer is almost certainly “none of them”)?
We are told “Catastrophic warming is coming, it is just around the corner”. We ask why and without exception we are told “Because the 30 or more GCMs we carefully built in the 1990’s in response to the CAGW threat and normalized with the warming data from the 70’s and 80’s (not to mention Hansen’s initial model report from the late 1980’s) all say so. We then quite reasonably ask what they predicted for the last 20 years, and of course we can see that they all did indeed predict shockingly rapid warming. We then compare this to what actually happened, which is almost no warming over the last 20 years — a single warming pulse associated with the 1997/1998 ENSO event and then neutral ever since. We note that the warmest of the models that are still included in the CIMP5 data because nobody ever rejects a model just because it doesn’t work are a whopping 0.5 to 0.6C warmer than reality — they are the models with a total sensitivity of 5 or 6 C by 2100, so they have to warm at 0.5C a decade to get there.
This really is shocking. Shockingly bad science, shockingly dishonest political manipulation of policy makers on the part of scientists who participated in the creation of AR5 and permitted their names to give the report its weight.
As I’ve pointed out once and will point out again, by failing to be honest in AR5, by removing words that expressed honest doubt from the earlier draft and redrawing the figure to obscure the GCM failure, the IPCC has now gone far out on a limb that will end the career of many scientists and politicians before AR6 if there is no significant warming by that time. Not only significant warming, but a resumption of some sort of regular upslope to GASTA. Even if there is another ENSO-related burst of warming (which I’m sure is what they are hoping for) if it is only 0.2 C — and it is difficult to imagine that it could be much more given evidence from the past — it will barely suffice to restore the warming trend to 0.1 C/decade give or take a hair, roughly half of the lowest estimates of climate sensitivity. And they run the very real risk of getting to 2020 with GASTA basically the same as it was in 2000.
At that time, the hottest GCMs are going to be almost a full degree C too hot compared to reality. The people who contribute to the IPCC reports aren’t fools — most of them know perfectly well that the high sensitivity models are trash at this point, and they know equally well that it will no longer be possible to conceal this fact even from ignorant politicians by 2000 if there is no statistically significant warming by that time. Because it is an open secret that there was a cover-up that deliberately concealed this, effectively lying to policy makers, there will be a public scandal. Heads will roll.
The only way the IPCC can possibly avoid this as it proceeds is to issue a correction to AR5. Go back in and eliminate the GCMs with absurdly high sensitivity, the ones that obviously fail a hypothesis test when compared to the actual climate record. Personally I would advise eliminating at a much more generous level than 95% — a complete idiot with experience in computational modeling could go into these models and figure out what is wrong, given an additional 16 years of data — simply retune the models until they can manage both the warming of the late 20th century AND the warming hiatus since. Models for which no tuning can reproduce the actual past go into the dustbin, period — ones that can manage it will all have a vastly lowered climate sensitivity and will produce a much larger fraction of warming from “natural” variability, and less from CO_2. Finally, insist that all models use common numbers for things like CO_2 and aerosol contributions instead of individually tuning the largely cancelling contributions to reproduce an interpolated temperature change.
I’m guessing that over half of the participating models will simply go away at this point. They can then reconstruct figure 1.4 in the SPM, note the good news that even though the remaining models will all still predict more warming than actually occurred the warming that they project by 2100 will be between 0.5 and 1.5 C, not 2.5 C or more. This is almost precisely in line with what was observed in the 19th and 20th century without CO_2, and will grant a far larger role to natural variability (and hence a smaller one to CO_2).
Why should they do this, even though it is near-suicide to do it at this point? Because it is sure thing suicide not to do it. Because it is the right thing to do. Because they have a queasy feeling in their tum-tums every time they look at figure 1.4 in the AR5 SPM and realize that the dent that they made in the car isn’t going to go away and Dad is going to be even more pissed when he finds out if they lie about it. After all, everybody knows that the worst models in CIMP5 are wrong at this point. The people that wrote the models and ran the models, they know that their models are broken at this point. It’s not like the failure of a model is difficult to detect or something.
If it were “just science”, all of this would have been happening in the literature for some time anyway. People would jump all over models that fail, because in the usual realm of science there is little money on the line and because trial and error and try try again is the normal order of business and what keeps you getting paid. Not so in climate science. Here it is all political. Hundreds of billions of dollars and the directed energy of the entire global civilization ride on the numbers. Here there is a real risk of congressional hearings where a flinty-eyed committee chair grills you by showing you GCM curves selected from figure 1.4 of the AR5 SPM and asks you “Sir, at what point was it obvious to you that this curve was not a good predictor of the future climate?” Because if the answer was “2012” — and given the REMOVED TEXT from the earlier draft of AR5 everybody knows that it was 2012 at the latest — that’s contempt of congress right there, given that AR5 directs billions of dollars in federal research money and hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies and misdirected governmental energy at all levels from federal to state to local to personal.
We pay, pay, and pay again in the form of taxes, higher energy prices, neglect of competing services and goals — and what we pay pales to nothing compared to the terrible price paid by the third world for the amelioration of hypothetical CAGW. Millions of people die every year from respiratory diseases alone brought about because they are still cooking on animal dung and charcoal because coal burning power plants are now “unclean” and have artificially inflated price tags at every level.
If CAGW is a true hypothesis, them maybe — just maybe — it is worth sacrificing all of these people, most of them children under five, on the altar to expiate our carbon sins. But given this sort of ongoing catastrophe, this ongoing moral price we pay on the basis of the “projections” of the GCMs, how great is the obligation of the scientists who wrote AR5 towards “mere honesty”, to put down not their own beliefs but to put down the objective support for their beliefs given the data?
For some time the data has been sufficient to prove that the tools that claim the biggest, scariest AGW are simply incorrect, broken, in error, failed. Yet their predictions are still included in AR5 because without them, the “catastrophe” disappears and we are forced to rebalance the cost of gradual accommodation of the warming while continuing to civilize and raise the standard of living of the third world against the ongoing catastrophe of adopting measures that everybody knows will not prevent the catastrophe anyway (if the extreme models are correct) at the cost of a hundred million or more lives and unspeakable poverty, disease, and human misery perpetuated for decades along the way.
rgb

@rgbatduke
“The GCMs used to predict CAGW suck.”
…and here’s the prime example of BAD GCMs (but, perhaps, an outlier):
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/
And the message posted forever but NEVER updated…
“NOTE: we are updating the documentation – please excuse any out-of-date information. “
Total FAIL…

As the 17 year interval grows the realization that CO2 rise does not guarantee temperature rise will settle in. This will not be a knife-edge “Da-Da” moment. Eventually the greater question will arise. “What makes the temperature of the Earth go up and down like that?” We don’t know. But we like to make the unknown known, even if we’re wrong.
As David Stockwell wrote here a few days ago, the dominant paradigm is being stressed and uncertainty is settling in.

The goal of global warming climatology is not to provide a basis for communicating the global temperatures of the past but rather is to provide a basis for controlling the global temperatures of the future. There is an asymmetry between communications and control that is neglected by Dr. Santer’s argument regarding the anathropogenic signal and the associated noise. This is that the signal of communications propagates at a speed that is less than or equal to the speed of light. However, if there is a signal of control it must propagate at a speed that is greater than the speed of light. It follows from Einsteinian relativity that the latter “signal” does not exist.
While a signal cannot reach us from the future, Einsteinian relativity does not bar the possibility that information about the outcomes of events will reach us from the future. Currently, however, this is not a possibility for global warming climatology contains no such events. Contrary to Santer’s implict claim, then, global temperatures are currently uncontrollable.

@ richard
Sir, you are in error.
Mumbai India has 1 1000-2000MWe coal fired plant and 2 1000MWe> coal fired plants.
India also has a huge health burden from the dozens of other coal fired plants (over 100 total).
“In 2011-12, the emissions from coal-fired power plants, resulted in an estimated 80,000 to 115,000 premature deaths and more than 20.0 million asthma cases from exposure to total particulate pollution, which cost the public and the government an estimated 16,000 to 23,000 crores of Rupees (USD 3.2 to 4.6 billion). The largest impact of these emissions is felt over the states of Delhi, Haryana, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Indo-Gangetic plain, and most of central-east India.”
http://www.urbanemissions.info/india-power-plants

@richard
The coal plants you espoused are the cause of the miasma in the air in Mumbai — and India as a whole.

What I want to know is this, has Dr. Phil Jones been worried over the last 2 years?

Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009
‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’

Many climate scientists have expressed puzzlement about the standstill since over the years. Here are many temperature standstill quotes from 2005 right up to this summer. Among them are Jones, Hansen, Latif, Von Storch, the Met Office etc. Even the Warm economist Lord Stern has said “I note this last decade or so has been fairly flat,” (27 May 2013).
Q) How many more years of a temperature standstill do we have to wait before Warmist climate scientists hold a conference to declare the failure of the climate models used by the IPCC? Twenty? Twenty five? Thirty? It seems to me they will keep pushing the goalposts. They already did from 15 to 17 years. Expect a paper out soon pushing this ponzi scheme out to 2030.

Excellent post justthefactswuwt and rgbatduke.
I have no reason to doubt that any time period of “no warming” was simply a number to put off into the future any discussion of no warming and was never meant to be a measurement. That’s why the goalpost shifted. This is not science and has never really been science. How else could the failed predictions (Ehrlich’s ice age predictions, Hansen’s by 1988 prediction, ice free Arctic in 5 years predictions, etc) not result in any changes in thought by the elite climate scientists? It’s simply political science cloaked in the trappings of real science.
Undeterred by any facts or data, the dear leader is taking charge of all US climate policy with political groups. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11/01/obama-creates-climate-change-task-force/
Neither facts, data nor time periods really matter, I’m afraid.

The usual hit and run from Mosher.
Doesn’t do much for his credibility.

@Karl – Not necessarily true because WHO says so, but definitely eye opening..
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/

@richard
Apologies for the post — the post cited to you in error regarding Mumbai was Frank K
the earlier cite to you in error was rgbatduke
Please accept my apologies for citing you incorrectly as the poster.

Karl says:
November 4, 2013 at 8:24 am …………..
Here is what the WHO has to say about indoor air pollution in the developing world.

September 2011 – Fact sheet N°292
Indoor air pollution and health
Key facts
• Around 3 billion people cook and heat their homes using open fires and leaky stoves burning biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) and coal.
• Nearly 2 million people die prematurely from illness attributable to indoor air pollution from household solid fuel use.
• Nearly 50% of pneumonia deaths among children under five are due to particulate matter inhaled from indoor air pollution.
• More than 1 million people a year die from chronic obstructive respiratory disease (COPD) that develop due to exposure to such indoor air pollution.
• Both women and men exposed to heavy indoor smoke are 2-3 times more likely to develop COPD.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/

You see, if they are not allowed to burn coal in a power station they burn it anyway. Have you considered deforestation? Have you see the aerial map of Haiti and its neighbour? One side is greener that the other over the border. Think about it. If you want to accelerate deforestation then hold back on energy. The results are occurring NOW.

Karl says:
November 4, 2013 at 8:52 am
@ richard
Sir, you are in error.
Mumbai India has 1 1000-2000MWe coal fired plant and 2 1000MWe> coal fired plants.
India also has a huge health burden from the dozens of other coal fired plants (over 100 total).
“In 2011-12, the emissions from coal-fired power plants, resulted in an estimated 80,000 to 115,000 premature deaths and more than 20.0 million asthma cases…

And how many lives were saved by providing hospitals etc. with electricity? I bet you this is a price they are willing to pay to get electricity anyway. Cost benefit kinda thing. Think about it.

richardscourtney says:
November 4, 2013 at 10:15 am
Frank K. and Jimbo:
Thankyou.
—
No problem – I was simply relating my own (brief) personal experience in Mumbai. One has to see it for themselves to believe it…

That “Incredibly Normal” stuff again…

@ andrewmharding
**** I am NOT an AGW believer, nor am I anti-CO2. I am, however, pragmatic, and opposed to the generation of radioactive and toxic waste streams. I am also opposed to technologies that leave the US reliant on foreign commodities, namely Uranium and Oil. We came out on the short stick for Uranium, and even with all the new exploration, our US oil is running out.
Next-
1. Nobody that is normally lucid argues to only use solar, to the exclusion of other energy sources.
2. I’m all for clean (really, truly , CLEAN ) coal. However, the issue of waste ash must be dealt with; as well as the heavy metals (giant ocean mercury deposit off the Carolinas from coal fired plants) – and this http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/toxic-coal-sludge-pollutes-kentucky-town-10-years-later
3. Regardless of assertions to the contrary, wind can be used as baseload power. Search ” wind baseload power stanford” — read the study.
4. Distributed (read home and community based) power generation is inevitable. It is inherently more redundant and resilient to both intentional and unintentional damage/failure.
5. 192,000 square miles is .1% of the surface area of the earth. That = 5.0 E+14 Joule/sec at 1000w/square meter incident power (500,000km^2 * 1000m*1000m*1000w/m^2). At a conservative 6 hours/day and 365 days for the year that gives us 3.875E+21 Joules — 3600 QUADS. Use 15% efficiency for panels thats 540 QUADS, now lets get crazy and cut it by half for weather and half again for conversion/inversion — that gets us to 135 QUADS (540*.5*.5). More than all the energy usage on the planet. Not even taking into account the drastic decrease in energy usage when converting from IC engines to electric motors.
— where can you find such land ?? the empty quarter(250,000 square miles by itself), on rooftops, in the outback, in the desert southwest, — and offshore isn’t just for wind farms — there are places (near shore) that are sunny all the time.

Frank K. says:
November 4, 2013 at 12:13 pm
richardscourtney says:
November 4, 2013 at 10:15 am
Frank K. and Jimbo:
Thankyou.
–
No problem – I was simply relating my own (brief) personal experience in Mumbai. One has to see it for themselves to believe it…

This is the problem I find with many Warmists. They have had comfortable lives in the West and have only spent time on nice holidays overseas. Many have have not ventured and seen poverty up close. What poor people care about is not the harmless, trace gas co2 but food, energy, education and a general better standard of living, even if that means burning coal to achieve it. If you prevent them then they will burn shit if necessary.

I thought the 17 years was equivalent in round terms to one and a half solar cycles and the half was included to allow for the lag between the continued occurrence of weak sunspot activity and the general effect on global temperatures. Santer probably thought that cycle 23 was going to be like cycle 20 and would be followed by strong cycles like 21 and 22.
The problem with the AGW hypothesis is that the slight overall upward trend in temperatures in the last 160 years is but a blip in the multi-millennial trend of a cooling planet. If you look at the major warm periods of the last 8000 years you will see that each successive major warm period was cooler and was usually shorter than the previous major warm period. I am referring to the two Holocene warm periods, the Minoan warm period, the Roman warm period, the Medieval warm period and the current warm period, which if it doesn’t continue after the current grand minimum is over will be considered to be the shortest, coolest millennial warm period of the last 8000 years. This ought to be very concerning to those who take a much longer term view than the IPCC as it indicates that eventually, presumably in a few thousand years, there will be another full blown ice-age. When this happens the Geneva headquarters of the IPCC will probably once again be covered by a glacier!

Seventeen years is nothing, for in the eighties and the nineties there was a no-warming period of 18 years. The reason you don’t know about this earlier warming pause is IPCC’s criminal cover-up. What they did was to invent an imaginary warming they called “late twentieth century warming” for this time period. There was no natural explanation for it so they started to claim that this proved the existence of man-made warming. Doing research for my book “What Warming” I discovered that satellites do not show any warming there. That alleged warming was obviously a fake and I said so in the preface to my book when it came out in 2010. Nothing happened for two years but then suddenly the big three of global temperature, GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC, decided all in unison to stop showing this fake warming. They did this by secretly by aligning their data sets with satellites that don’t show warming. No reason was given for this. Such cooperation requires cross-ocean coordination so clearly they had to plan ahead for that. And now we have not just Santer’s 17 years but an uninterrupted 35 years of no-greenhouse warming time, Can anyone believe that any warming prior to this could have been greenhouse warming? I vote no on that. It follows that greenhouse warming is not warming up the world now and it never has done so. And that is exactly what the greenhouse theory of Ferenc Miskolczi tells us. He published that in 2007 in a peer reviewed journal but was disbelieved because the stupid warmists did not understand his math. By 2010 he had experimental proof, however. Using NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 he studied absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere. And discovered that absorption had been constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time went up by 21.6 percent. It follows that the addition of this substantial amount of carbon dioxide to air had no influence whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. And since IPCC was established to study man’s influence on climate which now has proven to be zero it is time to close down that organization because there is nothing more for it to do.

typo: whp who

Mosher is wanting to be argumentative but in reality he is just refusing to accept the reality of the situation. It would seem that since he is saying no without justification, without cause, and simply by faith that that would equivocate to ‘denial’. Hmm….

@Karl and Jimbo and Others
This is a very sensitive and therefore difficult subject to discuss in this format, but there is so much anti-coal BS that has been generated for so long that it is hard to introduce light into the dark meme-plex that is the war on coal. So I will only write a little.
(from Karl) >Secondly, without extensive scrubbing, coal plants are unclean. That is an unarguable scientific fact. Cadmium, sulfur, lead, mercury, and other metals as well as significant particulates that cause respiratory distress are present in significant quantities in coal plant exhaust.
Unfortunately life the universe and coal are not than simple. It is like saying that all nuclear power is deadly and evil and therefore should never used, even though there are many different types of reactors and fuels and waste stream types and half-lives involved – and the fact that solar energy is nuclear. If you stand in its deadly rays a lot you will get cancer. Comments on coal are usually gross oversimplifications and it does not do any subject justice to use that as a way to ‘fight something’.
Coal content varies enormously. There are really toxic coals like in Western China. People from Berkeley are noted for cleverly asserting that because there is fluorine-contaminated coal (in fluorine contaminated watersheds) people should not burn coal – at all, anywhere in the world. It is alarmist BS like that which gets people killed by the cold.
The USA has really crap coal, most of it, with high sulfur and, by international standards, really high. That means having to have a (profitable) sulfuric acid plant attached to the power stations. That’s all.
But coal’s metallic content has to be divided into metals that are in the ash and metals that are evaporated into the air, and secondarily, evaporated into the air at concentrations that are meaningfully dangerous. Our environment is full of mercury and uranium and lots of other things. Just because something is detectable does not make it dangerous – at all. It depends a lot of variables and waving hands wildly about ‘dangers’ that ‘could happen’ is no better than shouting about CAGW and seas that ‘could rise’.
To make a long and complicated story short, most of what comes out of a crummy old coal plant is not the result of combusting coal, but is the result of not combusting it and blowing the ash into the air, This is fundamental to understanding a) what the problem is and b) what to do about it. Scrubbers are there to capture (mostly) ash and sulfur. That CO2 has been lumped in with mercury and uranium (etc) should tell you that there is a lot of inordinate hype involved in the anti-coal brigade messages. And who is involved in that? Natural gas of course. ‘The low-carbon alternative’.
To repeat: “Cadmium, sulfur, lead, mercury, and other metals as well as significant particulates that cause respiratory distress”
These ingredients do not cause respiratory stress. You are thinking of dust, especially respirable PM4.0 and smaller particles which are from the ash, not the metals. The dust may or may not have heavy metals in it. It depends on the coal. The vast majority of the mass of dust particles is silica SiO2 and Al2O3. In other words, rock. Asthma is not caused by metals, it is caused by high dust levels just like you get walking behind a tractor. Maybe we should ban tractors, eh?
Coal combustion does produce small particles of organic and black carbon – and the amount varies widely with the quality of the burn. New plants are extremely clean compared with old ones. The cleaning up of Beijing involved replacing those power plant burners first.
>All one need do is look at the smog from Chinese coal fired powerplants.
Arrgh! Smog is caused by vehicles and sunlight, mostly but industry has a big role too. Coal fired Chinese power plants vary greatly in emissions of PM. That impacts the quality of the burn, not the content of the coal which is an independent variable. What on sees in Beijing, for example, is 50% from the farming areas around (fugitive dust) and 50% from vehicles and factory emissions and coal burning plants. The fogged-in Harbin pollution shown around the world a few days ago was caused not by the burning of coal but by the ignition of a large number of space heating appliances for apartment buildings and homes over the weekend during a cold inversion. That was the weekend from which heat is provided. That is how they do public heating in China. It is the ignition of these things that creates so much smoke from poor ignition, not the running of them.
This has also been shown in spades in Ulaanbaatar where the ignition of domestic stoves has been dramatically changed by modifying or replacing stoves to the point of decreasing smoke in the city by about 30% per year. The fuel is exactly the same – only the ignition and then the subsequent burning processes have been changed,
The coals in Ulaanbaatar are wet, high volatiles lignites – supposedly the worst polluters available. But they burn so clean in the correct devices that the fires are actually cleaning particles out of the air as it passes through the stoves. In other words the new coal burning stoves are scrubbing the air of particles emitted by other sources, while still burning supposedly wet lignite. That is how far reality is from the memes about coal.
Uranium in coal is often mentioned as a ‘danger’ by people who are standing at the time inside a concrete building that is made of radioactive granite aggregate. It is so dumb as to inspire ridicule. Walking into a concrete building raises your exposure to ‘radiation’ by 50% (compared with standing outside and receiving the deadly blast in interstellar cosmic debris. This is just radiation bunk. We evolved in a radioactive environment for heaven’s sake. We are surrounded by it. People go to Washington DC to see that red granite stature – it is seething with radiation. Why aren’t all the tourists dropping dead? If we could burn ignorance instead of coal we would have an unlimited supply of energy.
Being an environmentalist is a lot more than repeating ad nauseum every invective and meme you ever heard about the devil-du-jour. People burn coal and dung because they have to. In Northern China, if you don’t burn coal you die. Same in Tajikistan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Eastern India…
Because coal is often burned very badly, like animal dung, it is blamed for the inadequacies of the device burning it. How typical is it for an environmentalist to get it backwards? It is like blaming diesel because if you put it into a gasoline engine it makes a huge amount of smoke. Well…duh! No kidding.
Coal and animal dung both make a lot of particulate matter if burned badly or pushed with fans. So does diesel. So does kerosene. So does candle wax. So does wood. So does everything. Environmental protection is as much about efficiency (of combustion) as it is about reduce, reuse, recycle. Dung is an excellent biofuel and can be burned without smell or smoke – in the right devices, which do not include a bucket with a hole in the side.
We have a long way to go but the fog is clearing.

Crispin in Waterloo says:
November 4, 2013 at 9:54 pm
Good comments.
The coal plant I worked at had just gotten to where better precipitators pretty much eliminated any visible ash emissions at the stack. Then, they pretty much closed it down (and the little town around it). What a waste of a profitable 340 MW generating plant & all the hard work/money put in to modernize it. Closed due to EPA-sponsored scaremongering.

Pittsburgh, PA had a similar problem – typo

**** I am NOT an AGW believer, nor am I anti-CO2. I am, however, pragmatic, and opposed to the generation of radioactive and toxic waste streams. I am also opposed to technologies that leave the US reliant on foreign commodities, namely Uranium and Oil. We came out on the short stick for Uranium, and even with all the new exploration, our US oil is running out.
Dear Karl,
I too am a pragmatist, and agree with most of what you say. The US is sitting on cone-head quantities of thorium, however, and we could burn Thorium alone for well over 10,000 years at 100% of our total energy consumption using domestic sources. NC alone has large thorium resources (mixed as usual with equally valuable rare-earths) and it is far from being the best resource nationally. India is actively developing thorium, as is China, because both countries have large thorium resources. In China it is being produced and stockpiled as a side effect of their rare-earth mining; in the US we are NOT mining our OWN rare earths because thorium is viewed as toxic waste instead of a potential fuel.
Fusion, too is a potential future energy resource that would simply end all of the discussion. Humanity will evolve into something else before the available fusion energy is even partially depleted. Sadly, nobody sane is holding their breath waiting for it at this point, but still, a breakthrough could happen tomorrow, or in ten years, or in twenty years. There is a finite probability that in fifty years basically all of the world’s energy is produced by fusion as older resources age out and are not cost-effective to replace any other way.
As a pragmatist, you should agree with Crispin of Waterloo that the bulk of the “problem” associated with burning coal comes not from the burning of coal per se but from burning it badly. You should also be able to understand China’s motivations in all of this — even cheap coal-burning electrical plants that burn the coal comparatively badly, by displacing the even more inefficient burning of coal in open bucket stoves, the burning of wood, charcoal (as “preburned wood”), or other biomass fuels such as dung or crop waste, actually reduces mortality and morbidity. I provided a document that reviews the direct evidence for this assertion, and I trust that you now agree that it is true.
Of course, it is not that much more expensive to equip coal burning plants so that they do not pollute so much, as long as one does not count carbon dioxide itself as “pollution”. This is the fundamental issue connecting coal burning plants with CAGW. If the CAGW hypothesis is true, then CO_2 is a pollutant in the sense that it has a potentially significant, although very long time displaced, impact on public heath. If it is not true it changes everything regarding the utility of building new coal burning plants clean or dirty or continuing to operate and burn coal in old coal burning plants worldwide.
Regulating pollution per se is clearly desirable, although it is always going to be a cost-benefit problem and not one where a monolithic solution is optimal. Regulating pollution at the expense of eliminating civilization is not optimal, and applying that sort of an axiom thoughtlessly leads one to conclude that e.g. genocide is desirable because humans produce pollution on a per capita basis. Yes, this is an extreme case, but there are indeed extreme environmentalists who secretly wish for a plague that wipes out 2/3 of the human species (but not, of course, themselves).
I trust that — whether or not you agree with the findings of WHO and the researchers that are referenced in the review of the mortality and morbidity associated with biomass burning presented above and by others, where easily 1/3 of the 7 billion people alive today use biofuels with all of their risks and inefficiencies daily where they could be using kerosene (in well adjusted stoves), natural gas, or electricity generated even in dirty coal plants at a lower overall impact in mortality and morbidity even before adding in additional energy poverty related deaths and morbidity — you agree that the point I made in the top article was not indefensible or false, but rather is what is supported by the mainstream epidemiology of biomass energy use among the 1/3 of the world’s poorest people, precisely as I asserted it. I could be wrong, in other words, but I’m not making stuff up, and for me to be wrong you really need to be challenging a large body of published research.
For the record, I lived in the midst of this sort of energy poverty while growing up, and I’ve revisited it within the last fifteen years, and if anything things have gotten worse with growing populations. It is quite reasonable to insist on building coal burning plants that are as clean as possible ignoring CO_2 as a “pollutant”, but because of efficiencies, it quite possibly reduces net CO_2 production when one displaces the use of biofuels and coal burned in every household in open grates, open clay buckets, simple ground fires built in pits, in fireplaces, in open brickwork stoves, and all of the other ways humans burn stuff to cook food or heat their homes when electricity, LPG, natural gas, kerosene (in a well-adjusted stove), or other comparatively smokeless forms of domestic energy are not available.
So it all comes down to CAGW. If it is a true hypothesis, then CO_2 is indeed a catastrophic pollutant. If not, then it is insufficient cause to eschew the use of coal to generate electricity and thereby displace the less efficient use of coal and biomass to generate energy. It is comparatively cheap to clean up coal generated electricity and almost impossible to clean up biomass-consuming energy sources (although yes, distributing efficient stoves one at a time to every household can have some impact).
Regarding the other trade-offs a pragmatist should look over, e.g. the cost-benefit of photovoltaics — in general I agree with your analysis as to the long term. In the short term, photovoltaics and alternative resources such as wind suffer heavily from technological weaknesses, some of which are quite fundamental and not “just engineering”. For example, our inability to store it (and hence our absolute requirement to run fossil fuel resources in parallel with them, limiting their utility if one takes CO_2 off of the table as a nonlinear future cost). Questions about the practical lifetime of solar cells — up until recently I would have said that this wasn’t an issue, but in actual fact solar cells built in China and sold at low cost have proven to be of low quality and prematurely fail at an alarming rate. And first and foremost, the simple fact that they are still absolutely marginal investments when compared to existing well-proven energy resources. In most of the US, they are barely break even to win a bit, and then only if the cells last 20+ years at 90%+ capacity as they are supposed to. Only in e.g. the Southwest are they solidly profitable. Electricity is not particularly transportable over very long distances (technology again) so we cannot just turn Arizona into the power supply of the entire US and Canada, not without new technology that I as a physicist am quite unaware of.
Pragmatically then, trying to force a subsidized conversion over to PV solar (for example) is premature. The technology is close to being ready, close enough to be marginally profitable in some locations, but it is sadly lacking in many dimensions from being capable of actually replacing fossil fuels or significantly ameliorating their use, and they aren’t a good investment at this time without the extra “benefit” associated with displacing CO_2. If there is no benefit to displacing CO_2 per se, we would be better off waiting a decade or two for the cost of PV cells to drop by another factor of 2 to 4 and make the cost-benefit of PV electricity a no brainer, to give time for truly efficient and cost effective large-scale energy storage technologies to be developed and prototyped.
I personally think that is precisely why we shouldn’t worry about CAGW even if CO_2 is a threat. In thirty years I think that we’ll be converting to solar worldwide not to save the world, but to save money. So why should we spend money converting at a loss right now, especially when we’re spending human lives as well?
rgb

“Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.”
I am sure that I will be corrected if I am wrong, but in plain English, my interpretation of this statement is as follows:
“There is a lot of noise in the climate system and it is quite possible that the noise can mask the effects of man-made carbon dioxide for a period of time. However if the slope is zero for 17 years, then we cannot blame noise any more but we have to face the facts that we humans do not affect the climate to any great extent.”
Is that reasonably accurate interpretation?

Absolutely not. It is a preferred point of view sticky-taped on a much more cautious statement.
“At least” is conditional. So do they give a more positive estimate? Yes, in the last line of the conclusions.

The clear message from our signal‐to‐noise analysis is that multi‐decadal records are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temperature.

17 years is a minimum, but not definitive. 20 – 30+ years is “required”.
One sentence from a study energises such a narrow focus? Actually ‘skeptical’ analysis of the paper woud be preferable to wildly over-interpreting this cherry-picked sentence. Hello talking point. Goodbye reading for comprehension.

barry says:
November 7, 2013 at 9:27 am
“Is that reasonably accurate interpretation?
Absolutely not. It is a preferred point of view sticky-taped on a much more cautious statement.”
I must say I did not like the wording either since it made little sense to me as stated. Note Brian’s comment above at the following which I really liked:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/04/rss-reaches-santers-17-years/#comment-1465713
NOAA made a certain statement with regards to 15 years with some conditions. For me, the only valid interpretation of Santer’s statement was that he extended NOAA’s time from 15 years to 17 years. But if the other interpretation of Santer’s is correct, that it takes at least 17 years to identify human effects, then NOAA’s condition can not possibly be met. At least that is how I see it.