Those that have been watching the IARC-JAXA Arctic sea ice plot, and noting the slope of gain, rather expected this to happen. Today it did.
Here’s the current IARC-JAXA Sea Ice Extent plot:
source: http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
And here is the plot magnified and annotated to show the crossing:
While 2009 minimum on 09/13 of 5,249, 844 was just 65, 312 sq km below 2005 in minimum extent, which occurred on 9/22/2005 with 5,315,156 sq km, it has now rebounded quickly and is higher by 38,438 sq km, just 2 days before the 9/22/05 minimum. On 9/22/2009 it may very well be close to 60-80,000 sq km higher than the minimum on the same date in 2005.
While by itself this event isn’t all that significant, it does illustrate the continued rebound for the second year. The fact that we only missed the 2005 minimum by 65, 312, which is about one days worth of melt during many days of the melt season is also noteworthy.
>>> “In 2 years the consumer will be able to both save money
>>>and not emit CO2 by buying an electric car!”
Further to other comments on this, I make the electric car slightly LESS efficient that a European diesel (my large turbo-diesel family saloon will do 55 mpg on a long run).
By my calculations the efficiences are as follows:
Diesel vehicle
Diesel transport to pumps 98% efficient
Diesel engine in car 38% efficient
Total for diesel car 37% energy efficiency
Electric vehicle
Electrical generation at power station 45% efficient
Electrical transmission 98% efficient
Electrical storage in lithium-ion battery 85% efficient
Electric motor 90% efficient
Total for electric car 34% energy efficiency
Thus diesel cars are more efficient than electric cars.
.
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As to more power stations:
Electrical energy in the UK is 9% of total energy.
Transport consumes 26% of total energy.
Thus to supply the majority of UK transport (less aviation and shipping) with electrical energy, we would have to double or treble the number of power stations. All electric cars do, is reduce the pollution in cities, and transfer it to the countryside instead.
That’s what the Greens will not tell you.
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>>> It will cost about $35 a month to charge, obviously depending
>>>on your local electricity price and how much you drive.
A comparison of price between diesel cars and electric cars means nothing, as the former energy source normally has a great wadge of tax included, whereas electricity often does not (and night electricity is often subsidised). Anyway, cheap night recharging will not be possible when 30% of drivers have electric cars.
Electric cars will only become useful and viable when:
a. We invent a decent battery.
b. We have 100% nuclear power electrical supplies
Then, they will make a great deal of sense, but not before.
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As to hybrid cars – well, it depends what you use them for.
The Prius will do 50mpg in town and 48mpg outside.
My large Citroen diesel will do 38mpg around town and 59mpg outside.
http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/specs.html
http://www.citroen.co.uk/new-cars/citroen-c5-saloon/in-more-detail/technical-specifications/
So in my normal driving mode, the Toyota Prius hybrid is MORE POLLUTING than my Lemon C5. Like everything in this AGW bandwagon/religion, the Prius is simply a badge of Greenness, it does absolutely nothing for the environment.
The whole AGW religion is sustained by smoke and mirrors.
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mudmucker (15:16:00) : Sorry, you are incorrect. You’re talking to a mechanical engineer here.
You may be able to engineer a fastener, but your economics are broken.
Electric vehicles are significantly more efficient than gasoline powered vehicles because the ICE is about 25% efficient (it runs suboptimally because it is directly linked to the wheels.) Central firing stations are much more efficient.
So use a Diesel ICE. 1/2 of Europe is. Almost all the trains, trucks, ships etc. of the world do. And present gasoline engines are closer to 35%.
THE most efficient engine in the world is a Diesel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine#Power_and_fuel_economy
The MAN S80ME-C7 low speed diesel engines use 155 gram fuel per kWh for an overall energy conversion efficiency of 54.4%, which is the highest conversion of fuel into power by any internal or external combustion engine.[1] Diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline (petrol) engines of the same power, resulting in lower fuel consumption. A common margin is 40% more miles per gallon for an efficient turbodiesel.
The gas turbines, such as the record holder from GE, run out at 52%. To get more than that takes combined cycle where the heat is used. If you want to “go there” then we must also allow for the cabin heat and defroster heat used in ICE cars in their efficiency numbers…
Now you can put a highly efficient Diesel in a car directly, or you can use it to make electricity with generator losses, then take transformer losses, transmission losses, more transformer losses, charger losses, battery charge losses, standby self discharge losses of about 1% / day, inverter losses, then electric motor losses and subtract all them from the original Diesel efficiency. BTW, those original generation, transmission, and storage losses are about 1/2 the energy input (depending somewhat on battery technology used. Exotics can be 95% efficient, but most that are economical are about 70% or less efficient. You also lose about 5% in each major conversion appliance like chargers, inverters, etc.) Ask an E.E. about it…
So you can run 1 gallon of Diesel in the vehicle, or 2 gallons of Diesel equivalent in your electric generation and distribution system. Your choice. And that is why almost everything that moves in the world uses Diesel or jet turbines with a small part going to gasoline cars. (In Europe today, over 50% of new car sales are Diesel.)
AND there is no way around that. That Diesel IS the world record holder now for efficiency. Everything else is down hill.
We won’t need any new generation plants because electric cars are mostly charged at night when demand is low.
You do realize that gas turbines are used for peak demand and shut off at night due to the high cost of fuel and maintenance for long duration use? And that running them at night to charge cars will cost about twice to 4 times as much as base load power plants? And that no utility will do this for very long (due to the turbines wearing out in continuous use…)
But we are also shifting to more wind power which could concievably provide 30% or more of our power (with a continent-wide grid it wouldn’t matter if the wind is blowing in your particular location.)
I can tell I need to put together another posting on this to avoid endlessly retyping it… Sigh.
1) You get to BUILD that continent wide grid. Add 10 to 20 years and a few 100 billion dollars.
2) WInd destabilizes a grid at over about 20%
3) You can’t depend on wind to be there at all time (ie when folk plug in their cars that will typically be about 7pm as they get home from work and sit down to dinner… i.e. peak of the peak demand). So you MUST be able to meet that demand with other dispatchable generation plant (that means coal or gas turbine or some nuclear). IFF you don’t meet the demand, the grid collapses. There is not graceful load shedding built into the system; it is very ungraceful.
4) Continent wide transmission is not very efficient. Your transmission losses go way up, so your efficiency goes way down.
Also, when electric cars come out,
They are out now. Tesla dealership in Palo Alto (visited it a week or two ago) and another dealer who’s name I forget in Santa Cruz. More on the way. Oh, and you can get a PHEV kit to convert your Prius to plug in.
manufacturers will start covering the body work with solar panels,
They already do this. Don’t you keep up with this stuff? The Pious will run a tiny fan that turns over the cabin air cutting down on your heat load in summer. That’s about it. You can maybe get 1 kW PEAK out of these things if you are lucky. The reality is closer to 500 W peak. You get that for about 4 hours out of the day. That’s about 2 kW-hrs BEFORE LOSSES. That will run the typical e-Car about 2/30 of an hour. 4 minutes in summer in a sunny climate. Ought to get you out of the parking lot and past the first light or two. Or run the AC long enough to cool the car as you head for the parking lot exit.
which with today’s technology could give you 10 km a day
Either you are dreaming or you have never done the math for a real panel in real places. Remember that you get about 1 kW of sunshine per sq.meter IFF your car is parked in the Sahara at high noon and tilted to be perpendicular to the sun. Everything else is down hill from there.
future advancements in panel efficiency up to 50%,
Yup, dreaming all right. Even the concentrating exotic materials cells can’t get much beyond 30% and those cost enough to make your eyes bug out. For less than a cm2 of surface area.
“People don’t realize we use internal combustion vehicles precisely because they are more energy efficient than the alternatives.”
This is exactly correct.
No, we use them because they cost the consumer a lot of money.
Tesla: $80,000+
Kia: $14,000
Yup, those ICE cars sure do cost a lot /sarcoff>
No one is looking out for the interests of the consumer.
Competition does (as does the consumer). And competition is the one thing that an electric car still can not meet. I’d love to have one, but not as long as they cost 4x the competition, go 1/2 to 1/4 as far, need batteries replaced every few years, and using the AC kills your range. I love the Tesla, but you will not drive it from San Francisco to L.A. in 7 hours as I do in my Diesel. Nor can you do it on the little bit of fuel it takes in a Diesel.
And websites like WUWT make this situation worse because they turn consumers against themselves by spreading scientific misinformation.
You really have no clue who your host is, do you? IIRC Anthony HAS an electric car. I’d like to have one but don’t want to go the kit car route (helped a friend with his kit car) and don’t have $80,000 kicking around. I’ve attended a half dozen e-car meets and first saw the Tesla demonstrator at an E.E. meeting in Palo Alto a couple of years ago. BTW, I own stock in an e-car company (Fiskar vis QTWW) and do want them to make a profit.
But you must be realistic about the technology. It is NOT going to compete for the typical car driver in Texas. Not yet anyway.
BTW, per the “patent games” comment in another article. Electric cars have been around since before gasoline. There isn’t a lot of patent protection in them. Their major issue is just limited range and long recharge times. The Renault system going in in Israel might help that. We’ll see. IMHO they are ‘niche only’ for about 10 more years.
Alec, a.k.a. Daffy Duck (10:31:14) :
I’ve never understood why this argument is brought up.
If true, this means it would take less heat to melt the thinner ice. According to AGW, there is more heat in the planet, which would lead to the more rapid and extensive melting of the arctic ice; not only more heat, which would melt more ice even if it were not thinner plus the fact there is now thinner ice, vulnerable to the heat.
Yet, this supposedly thinner, vulnerable ice is not only holding its own, more is surviving, now for the third year in a row.
All else being equal, this would indicate less heat is finding its way North, a very strong indication AGW theory is flawed. No matter the origin of the heat, man-made or natural, there is less of it.
It would be wiser on the part of proponents to argue there has been a shift in wind patterns to explain away this surprising (to them) growth in both area and extent of the ice pack. But perhaps that is a two edged sword as the argument cuts both ways, when the ice pack was shrinking it could be argued this is do to shifting wind patterns.
Wind patterns are being used to explain away the absence of the warmer troposphere over the tropics predicted by AGW models and theory.
I don’t see the long term average and trends on that graph.
Mike86 (11:22:12) :
Source?
mudmucker (16:37:00) : Nissan will be releasing its EV next year and you will be able to buy one in 2011. It will cost $25 to $30,000. Cost will come down significantly thereafter as mass production is optimized.
Unfamiliar with marketing too, I see. That is an initial price while they gauge sales interest. If sales demand exceeds assembly line size, the price will go UP no matter what happens to assembly costs.
BTW, car mass production is already optimized. Henry Ford did it with the Model T. The particular engine stuffed in doesn’t matter much.
For now, yes, but if gasoline goes up much like last time (which is sure to happen as it’s becoming scarcer and demand is increasing)
So I take it you missed the CNBC show today about the world running out of oil tankers and tanks since everything that could float was full of oil trying to cope with the over production…
One More Time, Repeat After Me: “There is no energy shortage and their never will be.”
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
There are a couple of Trillion bbl of oil yet to use that we know of and there are new oil finds at depths that were theoretically impossible for oil per the prior theory. So all the globe that was “completely explored” is now unexplored at that shell of depth. BP, Chevron, PetroBras and others have all found oil in vast quantities (BILLION bbl scale) in the last couple of years at depth. Oh, and APA Apache found a pot load of nat gas too.
, and in 5 years when EV’s drop in price to $20,000, the economics will swing in favour of EV’s. That’s only 5 years away.
More fantasy future dreams. If it is 5 years away, then the design has to already be done with present technology. Have you forgotten all the required government safety tests? Manufacturer lead times for parts?
Regarding wind turbines, your economic analysis is obviously flawed because they are springing up all over the place;
That is the power of subsidy.
The conspiracy is attempting to keep economies of scale from bringing an affordable EV to market (via Chevron’s patent on the NiMH battery).
Now I know you are drinking the coolaid. There are Li-ion, Li-polymer, NiCd, and a host of other batteries out there. Even if Chevron was using a patent on NiMH in a way that restricts trade (and violates anti trust laws, btw) one could just swap battery type. The Lithiums are better batteries anyway (which is why Tesla uses them. (The Ovonics patent is only on one modification of the NiMH anyway, the original patents have expired, so anyone can make a generic NiMH, just not the Ovonics enhancement).
The NiMH is a particularly poor choice in many ways for an electric vehicle. From the wiki:
Self-discharge
The self-discharge is 5–10% on the first day and stabilizes around 0.5–1% per day at room temperature.[…]The rate is strongly affected by the temperature at which the batteries are stored with cooler storage temperatures leading to slower discharge rate and longer battery life. The highest capacity cells on the market (>8000 mAh) are reported to have the highest self-discharge rates.
Big batteries are hot after charging and tend to stay that way. Self discharge will be high.
So you are going to lose up to 10% on day one with largest cells being worst. Great… and a Google search also turns up that the charge discharge cycle can range from 65% to 90%; so you lose at a minimum another 10% and up to 35% (total so far just for the battery and sitting a day is 20% to 45% of your electricity wasted…) There are much more efficient batteries.
BTW, Tesla uses an AA size battery in a large pack so that heat is better dissipated and so that any bad cell is not a catastrophic failure (it automatically “patches” around dead cells). They also said it was cheaper since they could leverage off the mass produced laptop cells. Given that, the notion that Chevron can suppress ” EV-Ni-MH cars” via not making small lots of special purpose very large cells is just a little bit silly… (The Prius uses a “D” sized cell, so the strategy is not unique…)
Oh, and your statement that an ICE is less efficient due to direct mechanical coupling to the wheels is also specious. DIrect mechanical coupling is the most efficient kind. And guess what the Tesla does? Yup, a transmission and direct mechanical coupling to the wheels.
I’m joining the folks that doubt that you really have an M.E. degree. If you do, ask for your money back.
REPLY: And NONE of this has anything to do with sea-ice, which is the topic of this thread.
WUWT users, don’t feed the troll any longer for this off topic train wreck – A
Oops! Sorry… Note to self: Scan whole thread, then reply to early message.
Enduser (12:22:17) :
Here’s a little experiment for you.
Take a hair dryer and turn it on to full with the highest heat setting.
Direct the air onto a glass of water. See how long it takes the hair dryer to warm up the water. It will take a long time with a lot of hot air to warm up that glass of water.
Why?
Consider the contents of this table.
Look at the last column and compare the values between air and water.
Also, notice how much heat is contained in air with water vapor.
The oceans are much more important than the atmosphere when it comes to heat content. And water vapor is far more important than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.
A small side-topic response: hybrid diesel (or turbo-diesel) are not as interesting as hybrid gaz, because the efficiency curve of a diesel engine is not as horrendous as a gaz one: diesel have better peak efficiency than gaz engines, but also their peak efficency is not as sharp and the diesel retain acceptable (let’s say 20 %) efficiency on a much larger part of running condition (especially at low gaz, which is very the most common usage for powerful car engines).
So gaz hybrid gains enourmously by using a small gaz engine working close to it’s peak efficiency all the time, but the gain for a diesel engine are much less significant. Other tricks (regenerative brakings, less need for powerfull engine allowing for more efficient transmission, …) will compensate for the added weight…but the gain is modest, and, imho, not really worth it…except for pluggable hybrid, which would bypass gaz taxes that are very large in europe 😉
EM Smith–
You are dead wrong about wind destabilizing the Grid.
Stanford university released a study concerning wind farms, and baseload power.
Interestingly, the more wind farms that are interconnected, the more baseband power % you can reliably provide.
From the abstract:
“It was found that an average of 33% and a maximum
of 47% of yearly averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric
power. Equally significant, interconnecting multiple wind farms to a common point and then connecting
that point to a far-away city can allow the long-distance portion of transmission capacity to be reduced, for
example, by 20% with only a 1.6% loss of energy. Although most parameters, such as intermittency,
improved less than linearly as the number of interconnected sites increased, no saturation of the benefits was found. Thus, the benefits of interconnection continue to increase with more and more interconnected
sites.”
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf
Denmark exceeds 20% wind produced electricity, and exceeds 24% consumption of wind electricity in Western Denmark, I guess the grid there is all dodgy.
“”” karl heuer (10:51:41) :
EM Smith–
You are dead wrong about wind destabilizing the Grid.
Stanford university released a study concerning wind farms, and baseload power.
Interestingly, the more wind farms that are interconnected, the more baseband power % you can reliably provide. “””
Well there’s that simple word; “interconnected.”
Somebody mentioned how much mechanical energy there was in the oceans just due to the swimming actions of trillions of krill. Each of them operates alone in generating its energy, though the may signalwise communicate with each other to stay out of each other’s way.
But what if you had to interconnect all those individual free clean green renewable energy producers to deliver their total energy to some grid somewhere.
Power grids are not unlike traffic light systems. Each traffic light acts locally to create whatever traffic mayhem it can in its local neighborhood.
But then they connect them into grids to jointly supervise their actions.
And now you have the problem that somebody in Bangladesh probably writes the AlGorythm that is going to make local traffic decisions based on some global appraisal of the traffic conditions.
It never works of course, and local traffic slowly grinds to a halt as decisions are made further and further from the data gathering points.
Most traffic light networks don’t have the brains of a two year old child; and the result is most light systems are mostly red most of the time, and most of the traffic is stopped most of the time.
If the AlGorythms were any good; most of the lights would be green most of the time.
How effective traffic lights are is demonstrated any time there is a power outage, and all the lights go out. Even with the silly “everybody stop” AlGorythm, that replaces the computer model; traffic moves far more efficiently with all the lights out than with them on.
If you let the drivers make the stop go decision too instead of an octagon; it can get betetr yet.
You would have to give people a driving test before you gave them a driving licence. Something along the lines of the requirements for piloting a plane would seem appropriate.
So the sparse distribution of solar energy in all its forms, leads to massive interconnection networks; which are both expensive and vulnerable.
All the wind fan farms I have seen are quite devoid of human beings; you couldn’t risk some farmer discing the ground, and discovering where they put that “interconnected” grid.
karl heuer:
It seems you have been misled concerning wind power and grid stability. Whatever the paper you cite says, the experience of windfarms in practice is very different from your assertions.
Firstly, in the real world it is simply untrue that:
“It was found that an average of 33% and a maximum of 47% of yearly averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric power.”
OK, they may have “found” that according to their model, but that “finding” is so wrong that it has to discredit everything else in their paper.
By definition, baseload power is continuous. So, wind power cannot provide any baseload electricity because wind power is intermittent. Indeed, the quotation you provided admits,
“Although most parameters, such as intermittency, improved less than linearly as the number of interconnected sites increased, no saturation of the benefits was found”.
So, they admit they could not solve – only improve – the problem of “intermittency”. Intrmittent power cannot be used as base load power.
Times of maximum power demand occcur when there are prolonged periods of exceptionally hot or exceptionally cold weather. And such periods occur when there is a stationary anticyclone over a region so there is no wind: i.e. no windpower. One such event happened over Western Europe only a few years ago and was touted as The Sign Of Things To Come by AGW propogandists. The power supply would fail at such times if wind were supplying the baseload
And you say:
“Denmark exceeds 20% wind produced electricity, and exceeds 24% consumption of wind electricity in Western Denmark, I guess the grid there is all dodgy.”
Your guess is correct. Denmark overcomes its grid stability problems by dumping electricity as a free gift to its neighbours when Denmark’s grid has unmanageable stability problems. On some occassions Denmark has payed adjacent countries to take electricity from Denmark to avoid the Danish grid from failing.
And Denmark is reducing its reliance on wind power.
For an assessment of wind power in practice I suggest you read my paper at
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtney_2006_lecture.pdf
Richard
I don’t think that wind farmers either generate or diminish sea ice.
Perhaps some people do not understand that the purpose of wind farms is NOT to generate sea ice but rather electricity.
I have also failed to find any data / studies where wind farms were being used to blow sea ice out of the Arctic. Nor do I find any tests or studies attempting to use wind farms to change the earth’s orbit or change the position / altitude of clouds.
Lee Kington:
You say:
“I don’t think that wind farmers either generate or diminish sea ice. ”
True, but nobody commented on my posting at (00:56:39) which considered the albedo effect of polar sea ice. Indeed, since then there has only been one posting on the subject of sea ice.
So, I joined the discussion people were having. Perhaps that was wrong.
Richard
Wonder why the temps are up in the Arctic. It sure hasn’t hurt the continued build up of ice.
Wonder what the error bands are for the various ice regions of the Arctic. Do you suppose that some areas have much wider error bands than others? Maybe if we were to view the 2 standard deviation specific to each area we might get another clue as to which areas are more variable. I propose that these areas might also be more sensitive to weather pattern changes.
Is there a good reason why the vertical axis on the IARC-JAXA sea ice extent graph always starts at 2e6 rather than zero? This has the effect of making it look as though the summer minimum in 2007 were half what it had been in 2006, when it was in fact about two thirds. That is still a huge drop, to be sure, easily sufficient to make Al Gore soil his panties the organic way. But 2 is close enough to zero (for sufficiently small values of 2, yuk yuk!) that it couldn’t hurt to run the picture down a little further, no? It’s not like they conserve any ink that way.
Pamela Gray (20:18:55) :
“Wonder why the temps are up in the Arctic. It sure hasn’t hurt the continued build up of ice.”
I’ve wonder about this too. Perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that the temperature of the sea surface will tend to plateau at just below it’s freezing point, so air temperature will rebound. Could also be something to do with the Arctic vortex, which speeds up as temperatures fall. If you look through other years it’s not a rare event.
>>>Denmark exceeds 20% wind produced electricity, and
>>>exceeds 24% consumption of wind electricity in Western
>>>Denmark, I guess the grid there is all dodgy.
This is a great fallacy.
In actual fact, Denmark has NEVER used ANY of its wind electricity – it is too variable and unreliable. It sells it to Scandinavia instead.
http://www.thomastelford.com/journals/DocumentLibrary/CIEN.158.2.66.pdf
.
>>For an assessment of wind power in practice I suggest
>>you read my paper at
>> http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtn
Agree with every word.
Why have the grid operators not gone on TV (or the media) and said what their problems and concerns are? Are they being paid not to tell??
.
Toning down the propaganda.
“Arctic Ice to Last Decades Longer Than Thought?”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090921-arctic-sea-ice.html
Richard Heg (09:29:16) :
This summer Arctic sea ice shrank to only 1.97 square miles (5.1 million square kilometers). The 2009 drop is still the third largest on record, but it’s not as big as some scientists had feared. (Explore a vanishing sea-ice interactive.)
Arctic sea ice typically shrinks in the summer and grows in the winter. It typically reaches its lowest coverage around mid-September.
One-Year Reprieve
Meier cautions the new findings do not mean the Arctic is in recovery, or that global warming is slowing down.
“I look at it as a one-year reprieve,” he said. “I don’t expect that to continue.”
For one thing, this year’s ice is thinner than in the past, and thus more vulnerable to future melt.
“If we get another really warm summer,” Meier said, “we’ll probably be back to where we were in 2007.”
————————————–
….and there was silly old me thinking that Walt could stop bed-wetting this year.
Don’t you love the typo though ?? 1.97 square miles. That’s a pretty small area for the entire population of drowning polar bears to cling on to.
Oooops, that should be “Richard Heg’s link”. Sorry for almost saddling you with that snip Richard.
If the freeze rate matches last year, the 2009 curve will rise above all previous AMSR-E curves by mid-October. That has happened once before this year, during a three-week period around the first of May.