Open Thread

Dave Dodd (21:57:45) :
Thank you Dave.

Robert van der Veeke (11:55:46) :
Ron de Haan (10:37:34) :
Will they push the Climate Bill through Senate?
With more and more GOP Senators selling out it looks if we are going to lose this major battle.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574447090218534138.html
“The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.” – Abraham Lincoln
“Obama will go into the history books as the most dissapointing president ever! Climate change is like his Nobel peace prize, its based on things that might or could happen in a alternate future accoording to some wishfull thinkers and their computermodels”.
Robert, you are right from a scientific view, but you are wrong from the political angle.
You only have to read the Lisbon Treaty to see where Europe is heading and the US will follow.
Chapter 21 of the United Nations will be implemented.
The consequences will be dire.
Europe is already going down the drain:
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/10/eu-circling-drain.html
This is the endgame:
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/15601
This is no joke.

Al Gore says : “We’re very close to that political tipping point,”
The tipping point is may be going in a way he doesn’t wish it too.
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“Never before in human history has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions.”
Al Gore can be a used car salesman when his global warming gig is done.
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‘He said he expects the Senate to pass a carbon emissions reduction bill before a December United Nations conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.’
I think the chances of me marrying Kelly Brook by December are higher. 😉
—-
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/article_dacf39c7-c2f8-5718-a5a0-d0cfb39f80bc.html

rbateman (11:09:22) :
Ron de Haan (10:54:17) :
“And I have to ask the question that America asks: Will they trick us or treat us?
C&T is lights out. 10’s of millions will be thrown out of house & home and cast adrift.
Driving back from the Bay Area, I saw lots of car dealerships, rest stops, roadside business with a lot of lights turned off. Bank owned and short sale signs all over San Jose. Is another wave set to hit our economy?”
rbateman,
They trick us.
It’s going to get worse.
Obama and his lot (including a bunch of GOP traitors) are not only bringing down the USA but the entire free world.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/ship_of_fools_obamas_intimates.html
Also read the canadafreepress article I’ve posted earlier.
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
http://green-agenda.com
The Lisbon Treaty (EU) and the concept of the Copenhagen Climate Treaty.
With CO2 control legalized there won’t be room for any economic growth.

Snowed out baseball game in Denver….
must be played tonight. It’s 28.2 °F, -2.11 °C, there right now (at 6:45pm California time). But it’s not snowing tonight.
link to current weather in Denver :
http://www.wunderground.com/US/CO/Denver.html

Here’s something to think about:
“11.1 Year Cycle in Solar System Dynamics”
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/VaughanPL2009_11.1aCycleSSD.htm
Is it as simple as 09/10/11?…

We are also experiencing record cold. My town of Pullman got down to 8F. What’s interesting to me is that quite a few of the previous record lows were set on this date in 2008. I don’t remember it but we must have had an early cold last year, too. Many more years like this and bitter cold will be the new normal.
http://www.wunderground.com/US/WA/033.html#REC
station new record old record year kept since
Bayview 21 22 2003 1947
Coeur D’Alene coop 23 26 1954 1895
Colville 14 21 1907 1899
Deer Park 18 21 2008 1999
Ephrata 22 26 1990 1948
Grand Coulee 21 29 2002 1934
Lewiston 21 28 2008 1881
Mazama 12 19 1969 1948
Moses Lake 17 26 2008 1947
Mullan Pass 6 19 2008 1938
Omak 10 24 1946 1931
plain 14 23 2008 1937
Pomeroy 12 24 2008 1891
Priest River 8 20 2008 1898
Pullman 8 20 1990 1940
Ritzville 21 22 1924 1899
Spokane Airport 20 24 2002 1881
Spokane felts 20 26 2008 2000
Spokane NWS office 19 26 1997 1995
Wenatchee 23 33 1990 1959
Wenatchee water plant 25 28 1931 1925
Winthrop 12 21 1990 1906

Oh ports in England have often retreated from the sea, such as Rye, or fallen into to it such as Dunwich.
There is nothing new here, a combination of post glacial rebound, tidal flows, most important because they sweep detritus here and there, and possibly a slight sea level rise account for it.
To deal with these problems we used to build dykes but apparently this is no longer politically correct, so many people are likely to lose their homes and lands to erosion which is easilyand cheaply prevented.
Something to do with being green I suppose.
Kindest Regards

Pamela Gray says:

What has been collected so far proves that when El Nino is present, water vapor increases. That isn’t new. Warmer is wetter. Colder is drier.

But, that is basically what the water vapor feedback is. It just says that if some either internal or external influence causes warming, then that warming causes the evaporation of water vapor and that causes a magnification of the effect. (Actually, the slightly subtle part is that the water vapor feedback depends mainly on water vapor in the upper troposphere for which the argument that warmer would lead to wetter was both more complicated to make and also harder to confirm empirically, although the satellite data now seem to be confirming it.)
You seem to think such a scenario is obvious for the case of these ENSO oscillations but that it somehow doesn’t manifest itself for warming caused by the radiative forcing of increased CO2. I’m not sure why.
Robert Austin says:

The Spenser Weart explanation of the qualitative physical effect of CO2 in changing the temperature profile the atmosphere seems to me to be correct. So why am I a skeptic and why is Weart a catastropist? It all comes down to the magnitude of the effect. I understand that the “consensus” of both sides is that that the magnitude of the effect is somewhere around 1Kelvin per doubling of CO2, a number that has no capacity to frighten or generate research funds. Hence the introduction of the H2O positive feedback factor based on vastly more simplistic and dubious physical principles.

Robert,
I’m glad to hear that you accept the basic physics of the greenhouse effect. (Are you a fellow physicist, by the way; your name corresponds to a fairly prominent physicist who I know of who is a skeptic?) Perhaps you could prevail upon your fellow skeptics to embrace it and, if they are going to argue about issues, at least choose ones where there is actually some room for legitimate scientific debate, like regarding what the climate sensitivity is? They don’t seem to listen to me but maybe if more skeptics started holding their fellow skeptics feet to the fire, we could actually get on to talking about issues that have not been settled for half a century!
I disagree with you, however, that the water vapor feedback is based on dubious principles. Sure, there are simplifications, but as the Dessler and Sherwood paper that I linked to discusses, there is now considerable empirical evidence that these simplifications are roughly correct (and also a better understanding of why they are likely to be).
It seems to me that the only thing that can save us from a moderately large climate sensitivity is a negative cloud feedback. And, that seems incompatible with most estimates of climate sensitivities based on past paleoclimate events (such as the Last Glacial Maximum) and the climate response to the eruption of Mt Pinatubo. (Also, nobody to my knowledge has demonstrated such a negative feedback in a climate model, especially a model that still does some sort of reasonable job of producing the basic climatology…Admittedly, this doesn’t prove that it isn’t possible but, along with the empirical evidence, I think it makes it somewhat unlikely.)
But, I do agree that if you want to argue about something, the thing to argue about is what the climate sensitivity is, rather than whether the CO2 bands are saturated, whether the greenhouse effect violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, whether the rise in CO2 since the Industrial Revolution is due to our emissions, whether several years of flat temperature trend constitutes a falsification of AGW, and all other sorts of false controversies.
It would be nice to see some skeptics come down clear and hard on that point. Perhaps you guys could contribute more to the real scientific issues if there wasn’t so much noise from that side drowning out the more reasonable voices.

There has always been a negative feedback mechanism. It is called the water cycle. The ocean surface warms from short and long wave radiation, evaporation occurs (evaporation itself is a cooling mechanism for the water), and leads to increased humidity. On shore air flow updrafts brings the humid air into contact with colder air over land, it condenses into droplets, and falls as precipitation, which is yet another cooling event. Water vapor can’t just build and build. It will set up the precipitation cycle. Sorry, but I still can’t see the anthropogenic signal buried in the noise of such a cycle. The trend seen in the last century can entirely be caused (modeled and confirmed by observations) by internal natural oceanic oscillations right up to today.

“It would be nice to see some skeptics come down clear and hard on that point. Perhaps you guys could contribute more to the real scientific issues if there wasn’t so much noise from that side drowning out the more reasonable voices.”
HUH. Could DEFINITELY say the same thing about the “believer” side.
And furthermore….for the skeptic side it is “science business as usual.”
The burden of proof is upon the party that sets forth a fantastic theory.
Prove it, Joel. Show forth the evidence.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA