From Roger Pielke Sr. – Guest Weblog By Syun Akasofu Of International Arctic Research Center At The University of Alaska Fairbanks
Dr. Syun Akasofu has provided us with a guest weblog based on a translation from Japanese of an article he wrote. I pleased to use my weblog to communicate viewpoints on climate science issues from credentialed climate scientists.
Recommendation to postpone the 2009 Copenhagen Conference:
The so-called “global warming” issue viewed in the context of politics and the economy of the world.
Syun Akasofu International Arctic Research Center
1. The US must have decided to drop the making of cars as their primary manufacturing activity and gave it to Japan. The Obama administration and the US public believe that enough has been done for the ailing car makers, and hope that they will be able to survive by making good electric (not fossil fuel powered) cars.
2. What does this mean? In the history of manufacturing, there has been a trend in which advanced countries lose their primary manufacturing capabilities one after another to developing countries. The textile industry in the UK was taken over by the US, then by Japan, then by China and others. The iron manufacturing industry in the UK was taken over by the US, then by Japan, and then China and other ‘catching-up’ countries. The car manufacturing industry in the UK was taken over by the US (mainly by GM), then Japan (Toyota and Honda), and some day perhaps China. This historical trend cannot be stopped. (The US tried to take over the world’s financing activities from the UK, which had lost interest in manufacturing altogether, but failed miserably in the recent days and caused the current economic recession.)
3. Then, the question is what kind of primary manufacturing industry is the US going to choose to work on in the future? It is likely that the Obama administration has chosen the construction of atomic power plants as the next great US manufacturing effort.
4. The reasons for choosing atomic power plants are obvious. First of all, the US has to secure future electric power because electricity is needed for everything, including future electric cars. The US wants to get away from its reliance on oil (and the unstable oil-producing countries), which will undoubtedly either diminish or become very expensive within the next 50 years. Reducing oil imports will reduce the great deficit. It should be noted that the primary purpose of changing from carbon power to atomic power is not necessarily to reduce the release of CO2 and global warming. It is an excuse. This will become clearer as we look into the related issues.
5. How is global warming related to atomic power? In order to understand this question, it is important to learn how the global warming issue was born. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, then the British Prime Minister, came to the conclusion that the UK needed atomic power energy for their future, but she faced strong objections by her people. It was also about the time when the first crude computer simulation of the greenhouse effect of CO2 was made, and it predicted a great disaster and catastrophe due to the expected temperature rise, unless the release of CO2 could be greatly reduced.
Margaret Thatcher must have taken this result into account in promoting atomic power, asking her people to choose either atomic power or global disaster/catastrophe, which would require a great sacrifice in their standard of living in order to avoid it. Without her strong endorsement, the IPCC would not have been established. She also established the Hadley Climate Research Center for further study of the effects of CO2. Until that time, climatology was a rather quiet science (not something dealt with in newspaper headlines), but Thatcher put a great spotlight on it for her political purposes. Therefore, although the CO2 hypothesis is appropriate as a hypothesis in science, the IPCC was related to atomic power from its birth and its destiny was to predict a great disaster/catastrophe. This, in spite of the criticism that the IPCC is predicting the end of the world, although we are not doing very well at even predicting the next day’s weather or the severity of the next winter. Science was used for political purposes. At the same time, the world news media was looking for something exciting to report on because the Cold War was ending. Global warming and reporting on imaginary disasters/catastrophes caused by CO2 has become one of their major headline topics.
6. How is the history of global warming and the IPCC related to the Obama administration’s interest in atomic power plants, making the construction of atomic power plants as the new primary manufacturing industry of the US? This is because if they proposed atomic power plants by singling the issue out, they will face fierce opposition of the people. Since the Three Mile Island plant accident, there has been no atomic plant built on US soil. Therefore, the Obama administration, like Thatcher, will ask the people to choose between atomic power plants (maintaining or improving their present standard of living) or a great disaster/catastrophe caused by CO2 (actually, reducing drastically the present living standard, including not being able to drive (electric) cars).
7. For these reasons, from the perspective of the Obama administration, the greater the disaster/catastrophe predicted due to CO2, the better it is for the purpose of promoting atomic energy. As a first step toward the goal of switching to atomic power, the Obama administration states that atomic energy is “green” (meaning no air pollution), that atomic energy is “non-carbon”, and even that CO2 is “unhealthy”. Note also that Obama uses the words “climate change”, not “global warming.”
The physics of CO2, absorbing and re-emitting infrared radiation is clear. On the other hand, geophysicists must find how much heating CO2 will cause when a given amount of it is released into the complex earth system. Thus, in this situation it is meaningless and useless for the real science of global warming/climate to face off against the political decisions and propaganda for the planning of atomic power plants.
8. One problem in this particular discipline of science is that scientists who base their research on computer simulations have become too arrogant, saying that they can predict the temperature in 2100, although too much is still unknown about the earth system. Ignoring natural causes of climate change and even unknown aspects of cloud physics, they rely on computer work in predicting the temperature rise in 2100. However, a computer is like a robot. It can perform only what it is instructed to do by the programs produced by the human brain. If a computer program is incorrect or inaccurate, the output will also be incorrect or inaccurate. In science, incorrect programs or hypotheses (produced by one or a group of scientists) are criticized by other scientists and can thus be improved. That is the way science should progress. However, the IPCC regards those who criticize them as “skeptics”, or “deniers”, etc., and brought this newborn and immature science to the international stage. They stated in 2007 that scientists have done all they can and that the science is settled, and the rest of the task should be in the hands of policy makers. Such a statement is very irresponsible.
9. However, even if the US decides that its next primary manufacturing industry is the construction of atomic power plants, there will be fierce competition between the US group (US, Japan, Russia) and the French group, which has more experience than the US, at last in the safety of operation. (A further problem is that Toshiba owns much of the Westinghouse stock.) There will eventually be uranium wars in the future; energy securing wars will continue forever.
10. The Obama administration is promoting wind power and solar power. However, there is no way to supply more than 10% of the US power needs (Obama says that they should try for 20%, but has he estimated the cost involved?) It is only about 2.5% at present. In any case, 80-90% of future electric power has to be found.
11. The US has to rely on coal power plants (at present 40%), until a large number of atomic power plants can be built, perhaps about 15-20 years from now. Thus, there is no way for the US to agree on any international agreement on a near-future CO2 reduction at the present time. The US has been saying that unless China and India agree to a significant reduction of the release of CO2, any agreement is useless. On the other hand, the US has made China its factory, and furthermore the US owes a great debt to China. Unless China can remain healthy, politically and financially, and with sufficient energy, the US will have a serious problem. Therefore, the US cannot force China to reduce its CO2 emission. On the other hand, in spite of the fact that China is now “richer” than the US, it continues to claim that it is still one of the developing countries and that the developed countries should reduce their release of CO2 first. The US and China must surely understand each other, so that the above statements are only rhetorical. The IPCC chairman has stated recently that India will not agree to a “cap”. Further, global capitalism is such that the rest of the world relies on the US buying power (even if they are using credit cards), so that the US economy has to be healthy. EU officials have had a large number of conferences on the reduction of CO2, but they have not reached any conclusion they can agree on.
12. For the above reasons, is it useful to have any more conferences on global warming? How many international conferences with the heads of nations have been held in the past? There has been no substantive agreement on the amount of release of CO2 by individual countries, in spite of the fact that protecting the earth from the CO2-based disaster/catastrophe should be the most solemn duty of the heads of nations (although environmental destruction caused by global capitalism is conveniently forgotten). So far, all the past conferences ended with a “fight” between rich nations and poor nations. The latter trying to snatch money from the former using the so-called “cap and trade” as an excuse, and the former trying to protect themselves from such an assault, in spite of the fact that the “cap and trade” negotiations have no effect on reducing the overall release of CO2. It is suspected that the heads of nations do not really believe in the global disaster/catastrophe scenario caused by CO2. However, they stated they believe in the IPCC, so they cannot publicly say that they do not believe in the disaster scenario, because they and their countries would be called enemies of humanity, like George W. Bush.
13. It has been said that the only thing they agreed on at the past conferences is to decide on the time and place for the next meeting. Such conferences are useless, although they are better than a world war. It is suggested that they should postpone future meetings until the science of global warming will advance farther. It is not too late, as the proponents of global warming advocate, since there has been no predicted disaster/catastrophe after the release of CO2 increased rapidly in 1946. In the tropics and middle latitude, there has been no discernible disaster/catastrophe so far. This is why the world media flocks to the Arctic and reports on erroneous global warming effects. None of the phenomena and changes they reported are related even remotely to the CO2 effects. A good example is glacier calving at the terminus. Nevertheless, the world media reports that the changes are caused by the CO2 effect.
14. In Japan, they are overjoyed by the statements of President Obama, saying that he is quite serious about “global warming” (actually, he says “climate change” instead of global arming). They interpret his statements as a sign that the US has finally become serious about the release of CO2, and that Obama is different from George W. Bush.
15. It is very unfortunate that science is being used for political purposes. Global warming is an imaginary product used for promoting the atomic power industry. When the truth will eventually become apparent, the credibility of science will be seriously damaged, since so many scientists (not only climatologists, but also many scientists in general) blindly trusted the IPCC and accused their opponents as “skeptics” and “deniers”, etc.
16. Actually, judging by what has been described earlier, the IPCC is NOT a scientific research organization, although they skillfully mobilized 2500 “world experts in climatology”; they were used by the IPCC, some probably unwittingly. The IPCC skillfully created the impression of “consensus” among 2500 scientists. Their contribution, a large volume of publications, is conveniently used for the IPCC publication, “Summary for Policy Makers”, as an apparent back-up document, although the IPCC charter clearly states that they are not supposed to make recommendations to policy makers.
The IPCC has tried to emphasize that global warming began unexpectedly and abruptly after 1900 because of the enhanced release of CO2. However, global warming began as early as 1800-1850s at the same rate as the present (0.5°C/100 years), namely about 100 years earlier than the beginning of a rapid increase of CO2 release, as the earth began to recover from the Little Ice Age (1400-1800). The recovery from a cold period is warming. Actually, the warming until 2000 and the present cooling trend can reasonably be explained as natural changes. The IPCC has ignored natural changes as at least a partial cause of global warming, in order to promote their CO2 hypothesis.
17. The IPCC tried to ignore the fact that the earth experienced the Little Ice Age by using the co-called “hockey stick” figure, because it is not convenient to know that the global warming began in 1800-1850, and not as they claim in the 20th century. The recovery from the Little Ice Age (a cold period) is warming. How many of the 2500 scientists trust the hockey stick figure? Perhaps only very few. Is this then the “consensus” of 2,500 experts in climatology? Unfortunately, the IPCC and the world media have presented this hypothesis as a fact.
18. There is another reason for proposing the postponement of future global warming conferences. After 1998 or 2000, global temperature has stopped rising and shows a sign of cooling, in spite of the fact that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is still rapidly rising. This is an observed fact. Therefore, their temperature prediction for the year 2100 has already failed during the first 10 years. However, IPCC scientists have not recognized it, saying that it is just a temporal change; but 10 years of consistent change is considered climate change.
19. The world political leaders should be able to decide to postpone future conferences until scientists could find the causes for the present halting of global warming. Temporary or not, there must be unknown forces and causes to suppress the CO2 effect or even overcome it.
20. We should bring back the science of climate change to a basic science, avoiding interferences by policy makers and the world mass media. Only then can this particular science proceed in a scientifically healthy way. Only then can we discuss any global warming hypothesis as proponents and opponents (instead of as “believers” and “skeptics” or “deniers” in the religious sense), regardless of one side being in the majority or minority. In science, unlike in politics, a minority can be right.
Peter Taylor: Many thanks. I always try to stay out of the political side of WUWT for the reasons you state, but that was one of the sanest comments on these subjects I’ve seen here (or anywhere) for a long time.
I’ve always maintained that a move to a more efficient way of living and conserving resources would be a good thing in all sorts of ways, whether you’re worried about CO2, Peak Oil, pollution, food security, deforestation or soil loss (or all of them) or just have an engineer’s instinctive dislike for inefficiency. The danger, of course, is that if you focus entirely on one potential risk (CO2) you rush headlong into others (rainforest destruction for biofuels, iron pollution, nuclear).
But I do often wonder why any suggestion of reducing footprint (carbon or otherwise), or sometimes any kind of environmental concern at all, meets with such rabid reaction among some commenters here. I’m deliberately excluding Anthony himself from this because I know he actively supports energy efficiency in practice (again, it’s that engineer’s instinct, I think!)
Anyway, enough politics for me; back to the data…
REPLY: Quite, efficiency is part of nature’s way. I embrace efficiency and the technology that achieves it. As for the others, I think it is viewd as a threat to personal freedom. – Anthony
JamesG (02:07:20) wrote an interesting post comparing automobile manufacturing in the UK/US with France, Germany and Japan. In the case of France he notes “the Germans and the French with far more powerful unions than the UK or the US, still have viable car manufacturers. Those facts just don’t fit the union-bashing dogma. The real trouble with Anglo-Saxon engineering businesses is that too often they are run by bean-counters. ”
I’m not sure what to make of this hotch potch of incongruent ideas. Firstly, French manufacturing is highly automated – so much so that France had a secular unemployment rate of 8% even during the boom years. With such a high overhang of unemploment, the idea of militant unions run by Bolshei shop stewards is a myth.
Secondly, Japanese workers have an entirely different relationship with their employer than either the French, Germans or Americans. For them, the company is family and jobs were considered jobs for life. Loyalty is everything.
Thirdly, trade union activism was a real problem in UK manufacturing during the sixties and seventies. The closed shop led to high endemic unemployment while workers lucky enough to be employed enjoyed higher wages than would otherwise have been the case, with the consequence that the overhang of unemployment could not be cleared. Industry was further hamstrung by the idiotic restricted practice rules which scleroticised the work force since workers could not be deployed flexibly. When the country was virtually taken over by union activists in 1979 – the winter of discontent – the British public finally had enough and voted that lot out of office for good.
The reference to ‘bean counters’ is no more than a politicians sound bite. What is it supposed to mean? By ‘bean counters’ I presume you are refering to management accountants. For your information accountants do not run businesses nor do they make strategic decisions – these are made by the board. Management accountants provide a vital service in reporting to the board what the marginal cost of production is and tell them the best way to respond to any decisions the board undertake. For example, should the board purchase more plant and machinery to increase output or should they hire more labour? This is not a moot question because the wrong decision will raise the marginal cost of production while the correct one will lower it. I ask you, how are the board expected to make these decisions on their own?
You then state that French, German and Japanese industries are run by engineers. I am not sure what you mean by this. Are the CEO’s of these companies former engineers or are you saying that the boards of these companies consult engineers on micro economic matters? If the latter is the case I would call that foolhardy. In fact I doubt it is true. Maybe you are saying that the CEO’s have the vision of engineers. Perhaps so. But either way I think your criticism of accountants who are simply providing metrics is both unwarranted and naive. If there is a management problem here then it surely lies with the board not with the accounts.
” RR Kampen (03:56:45) :
Re: Richard S Courtney (02:43:05)
The ‘acid rain scare’ was no ’scare’ but a real problem. People old enough to have lived consciously through the nineteeneighties will remember the haggard or even bald pine trees in European forests and I guess in American and Canadian forests as well.”
This is nonsense; the trees looked the same as today. The haggard or bold trees could only be seen in newspaper pictures.
A chemistry teacher went with his class to measure acidity of rain; he told me he got exactely pH 7.0.
Alexej Buergin (08:02:33) :
This is nonsense; the trees looked the same as today. The haggard or bold trees could only be seen in newspaper pictures.
A chemistry teacher went with his class to measure acidity of rain; he told me he got exactely pH 7.0.
—
Sorry mate, no nonsens. I will take your commentary on my own observations of Dutch and Scandinavian woods as a polite but uninformed comment.
You may google ‘acid rain China’ and find out about one of China’s worst disasters. Then, you may take a plane and go look for yourself.
Finally, you may report to me 🙂
Your chemistry teacher found a rather bizarre result. pH of normal rain is 5.6 to 5.7 (please check this before replying). Acid rain is typically about 5.2.
“RR Kampen:
As to the argument of global warming not exceeding the annual global temperature variation I would like to seemingly strengthen it by taking the annual variation in temperature in Holland. It used to be from 1.8° C in January to 16.3° C in July; as of about 1988 these averages have risen by close to two degrees. This has the simple consequence that skating on canals and lakes in wintertime is now possible once in four or five winters, used to be >90% of all winters. The Dutch saying ‘all Dutch are born with skates’ now reads ‘… are born with skeelers’.”
We all know and acknowledge the fortunate fact that climate has been warming for about 200 years (since the little ice age). The question is if the rise from 1970 to 1998 was due to human emission of CO2.
Dr. Akasofu: Thank you for this article. I had not known the connection to Thatcher…
You said:
“There will eventually be uranium wars in the future; energy securing wars will continue forever.”
I respectfully disagree. A clever Japanese scientist has shown how to extract Uranium from sea water at reasonable prices. There is a functionally unlimited quantity of U from the oceans available to us:
http://www.taka.jaea.go.jp/eimr_div/j637/theme3%20sea_e.html
After a critic here said it was not practical to put so much absorbent into the ocean, I made a ‘thought experiment’ or ‘demonstration design’ that shows a simple way (perhaps not the best, but workable enough to show practicality) that this could be done with little impact on the oceans:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/ulum-ultra-large-uranium-miner-ship/
In the end, there really is no shortage of energy. We just need to stop having wars over it and go build the facilities we need:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
WoodforTrees
I agree with your comments-whilst I disagree with the AGW hypotheses, that doesn’t mean that I therefore automatically agree with waste and profligacy.
I try to walk most places, cycle, buy local food in season and would like to install solar or wind units on my house if it was any sort of cost effective and practical soluition. It would be great to see an energy forum here where such things could be discussed.
Incidentally, thanks to WUWT I saw the UK’s coldest winter for ten years coming and upgraded the insulation on my house last October!
I think Anthony is right that some here view it as an attack on their personal freedom. One thing for sure is that we (in the UK) have a looming energy crisis and increasingly people here are starting to realise that the govts drive for renewables is not the answer to the problem, as they have many shortcomings as well as many virtues.
tonyb.
Alexej (08:25:14) – that question has been answered. Or rather, the CO2-signal that was already predicted sinds over half a century ago has risen above the normal variations as of about the eighties.
The rise continues since 1998 (the year in which a massive el Niño coincided with the calender year!), modulated as it is by events like La Niña/PDA, solar cycle and volcanoe activity.
2005 was as warm as 1998 and did that without El Niño.
2007 and 2008 suffered the effects of a very strong Niña, a dip in the solar cycle that is proving quite deep, and two volcanoes; these years should have ended in the lower fifth of years since 1880 but both came into the top ten warmest: because of CO2 and the associated overall global warming.
2009 now stands about 5th, but the effect of the new Niño is already so strong that temperatures have jumped to near record in July and record warm months may be expected for the coming one or two years. 2009 is going for a stab at 1998 and 2005, 2010 is probably going to bust those records.
The only clear explanation for this is the increase in CO2. It ain’t the sun. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t look for alternative explanations but I wonder when some people will finally give up searching for hyperesoteric, immeasurable sun effects and stuff like that…
By the way, the dip of the ‘Little Ice Age’ (which also sported some extremely HOT summers by the way) was about -0.3° C, which is less than the warming change since 1980.
CO2 started to rise, slowly at first, by 1800, from anthropogenic causes.
Except Obama and the donks have just closed down Yucca Mountain. That means they are very much AGAINST nuclear power.
Anthony/TonyB: Yes, I do understand the point about personal freedom, and to some extent I share it, although my preference is always to do stuff rather than shout about it 🙂
Maybe it’s precisely because the focus is on top-down targets and Big Government/Industry solutions that it gets up people’s noses, when a gentler, more practical, ground-up approach might appeal precisely to that independent spirit that so values their freedom.
On discussing alternative local power: I used to be very into this – I lived on a boat off-grid for 3 years – and the Usenet group sci.energy used to be very interesting, although (like the rest of Usenet) it was prone to occasional flamage. I’ve no idea if it’s still active, though – this was 15 years ago! I’d also love to see occasional articles around this area here; I trust Anthony implicitly to find interesting material…
The key thing I remember from my off-grid days was this – and this goes somewhat to the “lights out in the UK” discussion above: do everything you can to avoid electrical heating or cooling loads, and it can be made to work. Passive solar design, good insulation and local heat sources (wood, methane, CHP) can deal with the heat (in either direction) in most scenarios.
Best wishes, Paul
Flanagan (22:51:30) : Errr… US car industry going to Japan?
Check the sales statistics on the “Cash for Clunkers” program. Of the top 5 models sold, 4 were Japanese (only the Ford Focus made it to the top 5 list, and not at the top…)
Moving a headquarters name plate is not the important part of moving an industry… So look where all those Honda and Toyota parts are made. That is where the U.S. industry is going / has gone.
I didn’t know Fiat and Magna were Japanese companies…
I didn’t know Fiat was a car company 😎
So far, nobody has been able to make Chrysler work. Fiat is likely to “break their teeth” on it too.
The argument that “temperatures stopped increasing while CO2 was rising” is somewhat surprising coming from an educated guy. Especially since one simply has to take a look at the 1980-2000 period to see that such “slowing downs” appeared several times.
You really want to use the non-correlation of CO2 increase with climate cyclicality as an argument FOR CO2 as causal? Really? Amazing…
While you are at it, you can explain why there is no warming in August, but lots in January. CO2, it seems, is rather magical stuff. Takes the summer off, sometimes takes decades off at a time, but still, somehow is the cause of it all. Sure it is…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/co2-takes-summers-off/
I think you will find it has more to do with The March of the Thermometers south and Airport growth than CO2.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/thermometer-years-by-latitude-warm-globe/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/agw-gistemp-measure-jet-age-airport-growth/
And don’t waste your breath on a claim that Zones and Anomaly grids will save you from this. The 6 zones used by GIStemp are not enough. He lumps too much together to account for the drift of thermometers south. Also, I’m “in the anomaly code” now, and what I find in it is not good:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/gistemp-a-slice-of-pisa/
Oh, and GIStemp uses large commercial sized airports as “pristine rural” stations for it’s “correction” of UHI in the anomaly steps. Not exactly a good idea. Somehow THE major Marine Air Station at Quantico and the Italian base at Aviano do not impress me as ‘rural’…
Jerry Lee Davis (23:30:29) :
Uranium wars seem unlikely. Either fusion or thorium based fission will probably work out eventually (see recent Scientific American article regarding the latter).
THPW is the stock ticker for Thorium Power Ltd. I own a few thousand shares as a ‘toy’ (it is presently a 28 CENT penny stock…). They have fuel bundles in burn-up in Russian style reactors right now for NRC acceptance certification. Thorium based fission is real.
Here is a link to their “technology” page:
http://www.thoriumpower.com/default2.asp?nav=technology_solutions
which cites papers published in the field in one of the links.
Oh, and google “Thorium India”. They have more Thorium than anything else and have largely made it an industry. They are basically “ready to go” if Uranium prices rise too much.
Flanagan (02:45:36) : The fact that GCMs including greenhouse-based feedback can reproduce the observed variations is a sign that it plays a role.
No, it does not. Not at all. Not even a tiny bit. Nothing. Nada. ZIP. 0.
All it shows is that CO2 either has a correlation to something else or has a completely random coincidence and moves in such a way as to produce the model results entirely by accident. Accidents do happen.
You could just as easily stick in “economic growth” or “airport growth” and get the same results. (Why? Because these 3 things are all correlated, that’s why. You build a factory, put in an airport, and start consuming fuel…)
You could just as easily stick in population growth, or vehicles per capita, or tons of swiss cheese eaten per year. They, too, correlate with growth.
I could go on and list hundreds more. ANY ONE OF WHICH put into the GCMs would produce substantially the same result, because they all go together when they go. (Heck, even ‘artificial joints per capita’ ought to work… and in fact, it would be amusing to compare ‘increase in years with increase in warming’ since economic growth correlates with the passage of time. Maybe it’s just the passage of time that causes warming. Don’t like that idea? Then read the next sentence…).
It is simply not possible to attribute CAUSALITY from CORRELATION. Ever.
This is one of the key things that “warmers” constantly blow past in their desire for human guilt tripping.
Coincidence, Correlation, Causality. At each step up that chain, the requirements for “proof” become more stringent. The AGW Thesis has not even effectively gotten their act together enough to leave step 1 – Coincidence. And a much better correlation is with thermometer placement and longevity of the record:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/gistemp-quartiles-of-age-bolus-of-heat/
We are in “rebound” from the LIA on a 1470 year Bond Event cycle (and there are other cycles inside that). We may simply be “measuring” a coincidental growth of economic prosperity as that natural cycle matures. This correlation would match for he Roman Warm period and the growth of the Roman Economy. Would you assert that increases in Roman fuel consumption (to warm their baths, among other things) caused the Roman Warm Period? It correlates as well as CO2 does for us…
And oh, btw, there are not sufficient temperature data to ever answer that question. Not a lot of thermometers around in 535 A.D. when we left the Roman Warm Period and fell into the Dark Ages (that really were cold and dark) nor in the Medieval Warm Period that followed, nor in the LIA that followed,… It’s all based on “proxies”.
So we started to “instrument” just as the cycle turned again. Can you say “Coincidence”? Try real hard? Just once. If you don’t try, you can never learn to do it, so come on, just a little try? OK then, well come back to this tomorrow after nap time…
” RR Kampen (08:56:44) :
2005 was as warm as 1998 and did that without El Niño.”
The last time I looked at the MET-numbers, the anomaly (global, annual) was:
1998 0.52
2005 0,47
2006 0,42
2007 0,40
2008 0,32
But maybe they changed the numbers, just as GISS does?
” RR Kampen (08:22:24) :
‘Alexej Buergin (08:02:33) :
This is nonsense; the trees looked the same as today. The haggard or bold trees could only be seen in newspaper pictures.’
Sorry mate, no nonsens. I will take your commentary on my own observations of Dutch and Scandinavian woods as a polite but uninformed comment.”
So maybe “Waldsterben” existed in Holland and Skandinavia, but not in the rest of central Europe? I did not observe what you did (and still ran around in forests almost daily at that time). I just remember how they calculated the percentage of dying trees: If you had a young, healthy tree of diameter 10 cm and an old tree (who was losing his “leaves” like old (male) people do, too) of diameter 50 cm, the percentage of dying trees was 96% (proportional to the area of the trunks). On “Waldsterben” the standard remark today is: But it did help clean up the air.
” E.M.Smith (09:35:16) :
I didn’t know Fiat was a car company 😎
So far, nobody has been able to make Chrysler work. Fiat is likely to “break their teeth” on it too.”
I own 2 Chrysler minivans and am very satisfied with them, but you are probably right.
But although Fiat used to be known for rusty little cars, they are doing a good job with these red things with the jumping horse.
Ron de Haan (05:22:33) :
Dr. Syun Akasofu only covers a part of the story.
But he did it so very well!
We will need 50% more agricultural output to feed the world, and we need 30% more energy.
And we can easily provide it with present methods and technologies. No Problem. Not doing it will be entirely a political act.
Instead of building new power plants the West is talking about replacing existing coal fired plants by natural gas plants, a kind of cash for clunkers for energy plants instead of cars.
This is utter madness because it has taken us many years to build the current energy infra structure which could serve us for decades to come and we could spend all that wasted money for other purposes.
The good news is that any coal plant worth it’s salt can be retrofitted with gas nozzles and kept in service. If they choose not to do this, it is driven by some other agenda (maximizing government subsidy “rent seeking” or…)
thus concluding that they will NOT prepare for an increase in population and go the way of a population reduction (by starvation).
It does look like we are headed that way, even though there is no need for it at all. Politics is a very strange business that does not seem to ever really care about people.
80% of the people believe we are with too many people on this planet.
http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/151?source=most_commented
And they are wrong…
For Fascists and Marxists, there are always too many people and a small group of of these wacko’s believe this planet is better off without any people.
I’ve never really understood why, but it does seem to be the case. Somehow the two “mind sets” seem to be fellow travelers on the road to destruction. They seem to completely miss the road to prosperity that comes from simply building and expanding understanding and wealth.
Cheap energy is the basis for any industry, including steel and cars.
Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but affordable energy is a great start. You also need to add a technological stock (i.e. all those Engineers who give us the wealth of modernity) and some labor (all the rest of us) along with a bit of capital stock to use it (what the loony left seems bound and determined to destroy).
They tried for decades to destroy capital (and we saw the results in the old USSR and old communist China) but failed in the USA. So they have moved onto attacking energy supply too. There has also been a propaganda job done on “technology” to try to paint it as evil (amusing metaphor, given that substantially all paint today is a high tech polymer product 😎 so now a lot of the R&D is gone to Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, India, … Look at who produces the most Engineering degrees in the world now. Even a lot of the ones minted in the USA are foreign nationals who often head home.
Oddly enough, China has gone to the capitalist side (in form, if not in name) just in time for the US capital stock to up roots and move to China and run away from the loonies here. Capital will survive if at all possible, it does not need a U.S, U.K., or E.U. address to do so.
So bit by bit “The West” is being stripped of capital stock, technical skill leadership, and now cheap energy is on the chopping block. What will that leave? Labor.
Know what happens to labor when capital stock is gone, and technology is lagging? Take a look at the falling real wage rates and rising unemployment rates. Direct consequence. Take a look at the $40 Billion deficit in California government. Direct consequence. They drove out capital and screwed around with the electricity supply. Business left. Tax revenue left. Unemployment rises. SPLAT!
Coming soon to a State or Country near you; California Socialism Disorder:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/csd-california-socialism-disorder/
And there is no scientific or economic reason why it could not be available.
We have plenty of it for years to come.
Exactly right.
A while I ago I made a posting about how little of the earth is “used” by people. In it I “did the math” of what it would take to put everyone in a modern London style city environment or give everyone on the planet an ocean view condo. It is a bit enlightening.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
Everyone on the planet could live at the same density of London in roughly 6 patches about the size of the UK with the rest of the planet being completely empty of people. Last time I looked London was an OK lifestyle… and even six patches the size of the U.K. would disappear in the vastness of the world. (Heck, I think I could fit everyone into the space taken by Texas and maybe Oklahoma at the same density!) But what if you don’t like the view in West Texas?
Want an ocean view? Last time I did the calculation, everyone could have an ocean view condo with no structure higher than about 4 to 6 stories (though it’s a bit hard to figure out due to the coastline being fractal and of indeterminant length) using ONLY the North American continent and with no structure more than a hundred feet deep. (i.e. a single building facing the ocean with no buildings behind it…) The rest of the world, again, being empty of people.
The simple fact is that we have a planet that is mostly empty and we choose to live together in places like New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Buenos Aires because we like that life style; not because we are running out of land. And we choose to grow crops in a way that makes the most profit with the least capital stock and labor, not the maximum product per acre. It’s a choice, not a limit.
How the Radical Greens and loony left can get it so exactly wrong so often baffles me, but they do. Why the Radical Right want’s to go along with them this time also baffles me. I guess it’s harder to hold onto a stable centered tidy mind middle ground position that I thought…
I think the author is completely of his tracks where Obama is concerned. Obama has done absolutely nothing that I can see consistent with promoting nuclear energy. Taxing the pants off carbon is simply a way to suck financial resources from every citizen in the country in order to finance ambitious social plans and control redistribution of those tax revenues. Cap-and-trade is a monstrous scheme to convert significant individual discretionary funds into government funds on the theory that government will spend those funds more wisely. “Going green” is a convenient diversion on its face because the economics simply does not work.
Would any proponent of nuclear have killed, by presidential decree, the only nuclear waste repository (Yucca Mountain) in the U.S. that had any chance of eliminating the biggest impediment to nuclear power expansion?
CH
“RR Kampen (08:22:24) :
Your chemistry teacher found a rather bizarre result. pH of normal rain is 5.6 to 5.7 (please check this before replying). Acid rain is typically about 5.2.”
You are right, and I am sorry to have abused a long dead friend. He must have said: “PFFF; absolutly normal”. But normal it was.
Peter Taylor (09:39:41) : Can someone please explain how socialist/commie/green Obama seeks to destroy the US (and world) economy by giving £700 billion to Wall Street? He surely is advised that Wall Street will invest this money in the regions of the world where capitalist ‘growth’ is still happening
Well, while I’m not sure I completely agree with the thesis, the mechanism is supposed to be:
First off, the money was not “given” and it wasn’t to “Wall Street”. The money was flushed into a lot of banks (often NOT “Wall Street” players) and it came with CONTROL strings attached.
Second, the money was not invested anywhere (and will not be). It was put on the books of the banks to sit there and raise their capital ratios to above the mandated minimums. (The alternative being a declaration of bankruptcy). This had more to do with the bogus requirements of “Mark to Market Accounting” that forget the market aphorism “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”, so BY LAW the banks were forced into insolvency due to an accounting change a few years back. Rather than simply reverse a broken law, the Fed pumped cash onto the banks books. To sit there and look nice.
So where are we know?
The US Government is a major stock holder in most of the nations banks.
The US Government has a “Pay Czar” taking the old proctoscope to all the bank management.
The US Government is going to determine the value of any of the managements stock holdings, warrants, bonuses, and pay package.
The US Government determines the rules under which the bank lives, or dies.
Now, exactly what banker is going to say “NO” to any plan from the US Government?
So the bankers are now beholden to and rent seekers from the Obama administration. He can now do whatever he wants with the money system and the bankers will say nothing. If they do, the US Government takes back their money, the bank folds, that manager is out of a job, and a more “understanding” banker is put in charge, then the US Government provides “new capital” to ensure “solvency” and takes a larger share of the “ownership” (thus stealing the wealth of the original share holders – as they have already done a couple of times)
So you get to steal the capital of the original share holders.
You gain control and compliance of the banks and all bank management.
You have complete control of the money supply.
You set wage and compensation by fiat.
You dictate the terms of lending and economic activity.
Sounds more like a “Command and Control” economy than a “Capitalist” economy to me…
But what do I know, I’m only an Economist by education…
Re: shutting down coal fired plants and building natural gas plants, analogous to cash for clunkers:
In Texas, a rather large electrical market with coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, nuclear (two plants with 4 reactors), wind, and a bit of solar, the result is somewhat different. Natural gas predominates in new plants built, but coal is not being shut down. Natural gas power plants are far superior with the long-term abundance of fuel, very low cost of fuel (under $3 per million Btu), very high thermal efficiencies (57 percent for combined cycle designs), excellent load-following capability, very low emissions, zero radioactive or toxic wastes left behind for future generations, low capital cost, and fast, dependable construction times. Given all the positives of gas-fired power plants, why would anyone ever want to build a nuclear plant or coal plant?
MW completed since 1995 (through 1Q 2009):
Natural Gas ………..34,178
Coal ………………………227
Nuclear ………………….200
Wind …………………..8,403
Retired since 2002/Mothballed:
Natural Gas…………..9,606
Coal…………………………..0
Nuclear………………………0
Wind………………………….7
source: http://www.puc.state.tx.us/electric/maps/index.cfm
There are some amazingly insightful comments here, Richard S Courtney, Vincent, Peter Taylor to name a few. They deserve a thoughtful read and comments which I shall do sometime.
Richard (17:59:57) :
Never attribute to intelligence that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I hereby declare this to be “Richard’s Razor” and will name it such when I quote it! 😎
Gene Nemetz (21:47:02) : , is just sitting there and could be removed so much easier than this “”giant” oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, drilled to a total depth of 35,055 feet”.
I agree with you about Alaska. But what makes the BP find truly spectacular is that this is the SECOND find at “theoretically impossible” depths. Prior theory said that at that depth, oil would be destroyed, so don’t bother looking. We now have a whole new “shell” of depth to explore over the entire surface of the planet. There is no telling at this point how much oil there really is on this rock.
JamesG (02:07:20) :
I’ve heard this hoary old line about the unions causing the end of car manufacturing in the UK and the US for a long while. It doesn’t explain how the Japanese then went to both countries, built factories there, used the same workers, sold those cars and made good profits
Well, at least in the US, they did it by opening those plants without unions and with much lower labor costs.
As did the German makers.
woodfortrees (Paul Clark) (07:42:41) :
I’ve always maintained that a move to a more efficient way of living and conserving resources would be a good thing in all sorts of ways […]or just have an engineer’s instinctive dislike for inefficiency.
Me too. Inefficiency and waste are a sin.
But I do often wonder why any suggestion of reducing footprint (carbon or otherwise), or sometimes any kind of environmental concern at all, meets with such rabid reaction among some commenters here.
Well, for me, I’m sort of like the French (“The French don’t really care what you do so long as you pronounce it properly.”) in that I get rankled when the “reduction” is driven by the wrong “cause”. An error or lie is still an error or lie, even if the result is good.
So tell me we ought to use more efficient cars because we can, it will reduce fuel costs, and pollution will drop. I’m 100% on your side. Tell me we need to do it because we are “running out of oil” or “need to save the planet” and those are ‘fighting words’ because they are based on falsehoods. Tell me we ought to do it “because of CO2, and even if CO2 isn’t the cause it is still a good idea” and I’m sharpening my logic axe…
Now if you said “We ought to reduce or CO2 footprint to reduce the cost of our electric bills” I’m 100% on your side… (Oh, BTW, one of my major gripes about the AGW agenda is that it drives the REAL conservation issues off the agenda. We need to stop deforestation and the loss of species. Now. A rounding error in the AGW waste would fund that.)
Alexej Buergin (11:24:19) :
” E.M.Smith (09:35:16) :
I didn’t know Fiat was a car company 😎
So far, nobody has been able to make Chrysler work. Fiat is likely to “break their teeth” on it too.”
I own 2 Chrysler minivans and am very satisfied with them, but you are probably right.
It was a joke!
BTW, the cars they made were often great. One can make good product and fail as a company. I have drooled over many a Cummins Diesel powered Dodge truck; but never could afford to buy one…
But although Fiat used to be known for rusty little cars, they are doing a good job with these red things with the jumping horse.
I have a great fondness for the Fiat 600 of about 1970 vintage… but that story is not for here… IIRC Fiat also own Alfa Romeo? Oddly, I have an italian made radiator in my 1981? Mercedes SLC sports car. They made the best replacement part (and my fan decided to go to pieces and mate with the prior radiator…)
I do hope Fiat manages to make a go of it with Chrysler. I’m still hoping that some day I can get that Cummins Diesel Dodge Truck…
And a buddy once made a memorable cross country trip in an old Spider… we both would love to see a modern equal on the Dodge lot…
Gene Nemetz (21:47:02) : , is just sitting there and could be removed so much easier than this “”giant” oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, drilled to a total depth of 35,055 feet”.
Only now have I been struck with the actual depth of this reserve. I don’t know exactly how much water was there, but if we say 5,000 ft that still leaves 30,000 ft of rock – nearly 6 miles. Now I’m no geologist but I’m trying to work out how long ago this depth of rock was layed down. It is complicated by whatever foldings have happened in the past, but by any simple calculation this would be billions of years. That is, way before oil was supposed to have formed from dead organisms.
Could this be evidence for the abiogenic hypothesis?