[posted by autoscheduler] I’ll be offline most of today and tomorrow, but may check in via my cellphone. If you have story ideas, news, etc be sure to flag the comment for a moderator’s attention. – Thanks, Anthony
Keep it clean. Play nice.
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Nature defies warmists; dissident scientists say gulf stream is not slowing down; contrary to the predictions of R. Emmerich:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8589512.stm
KLA says:
September 3, 2010 at 4:01 pm
“[…]produce 3GW of power or 3 GWh per hour from that EU mandated project. Because even offshore wind only has a capacity factor (look up what that means) of about 33%,[…]”
German land-based wind reached 17 or 19% lately. Just as information.
Tim Huck @ur momisugly September 3, 2010 at 1:03 pm
Bjorn Lomborg has always been an AGWER; he is a leftist-greeny. He is disliked by his fellow-travellers because he has maintained some semblance of reason
http://reason.com/blog/2010/09/01/skeptical-environmentalist-sti
I am keen to press home the idea that modelling the climate with all its
interacting mechanisms is impossible. This seems to me to be the most
obvious flaw in the whole AGW scam and yet doesn’t seem to get much
attention. The general public just seems to be happy to believe that
‘climate scientists’ have accurate working models. I find this strange
because the public has had enough experience to know that economists and
weathermen are severely limited in how accurately they can predict the
future.
I would like to gather together a list of climate ‘mechanisms’, for want of
a better word, which are factors which affect climate. The reason I want to get this stuff together is to try and illustrate how difficult (impossible!) it would be to model climate.
I have approached this as if I was tasked with building ‘The Model’. This model which would be a large set of differential equations describing all aspects of the climate.
INTER-RELATED PARAMETERS
The list I would start with (in no particular order) would be as follows;
Sun shines on Earth
Cloud cover changes affect energy absorbed and reflected
Solar cosmic rays affect cloud formation
Solar radiation affects plant growth (land and sea)
Plants grow and decay thereby changing CO2
Plant life sinking in ocean sequesters CO2
Plant cover affects absorption of energy
CO2 is absorbed by cooling oceans
CO2 emitted by warming oceans
Ocean current changes cause warming and cooling of oceans
Water vapour increases greenhouse effect
water vapour (as function of temperature and altitude) affects cloud cover
Ice cap affects sea level
Ice cap and Glacier cover affect reflection of incident radiation
Ice cap affects ocean currents
CO2 increase affects temperature logarithmically
CO2, moisture, temperature affect plant growth rates
Glacier cover affected by temperature, moisture and air currents
…
In addition there are a number of different feedbacks possible (both positive and negative). Some possible examples;
FEEDBACK MECHANISMS
Reduced ice cap reduces reflectivity and allows more warming and loss of more ice cap. [feedback = Positive]
Lower global temperature reduces moisture uptake from oceans. Reduced moisture in atmosphere reduces high altitude glacier formation. This reduces reflection and causes planet to warm. [Negative]
Warming planet increases moisture and plant growth. Increased plant cover reduces solar effects on temperature and sequesters CO2. [Negative]
Warming oceans emit CO2 and increase warming of planet [Positive]
Cooling oceans absorb CO2 and reduce warming of planet [Positive]
A hot planet radiates more heat as a black body radiator. [Negative]
…
I imagine that there are many more possible feedback scenarios.
TIPPING POINTS
There are also a number of tipping points to consider.
When water vapour cools it forms clouds and become a reflector. When it cools a bit more it forms rain and drops out of the atmosphere.
When water cools below 0C it freezes and all its properties change again.
When CO2 drops below some threshold (200ppm?) plant life stops. Everything dies.
…
I am sure there is a lot that can be added to these three lists and probably some more categories to consider. (Non-linear and chaotic effects etc)
I would be grateful for any additions.
George E. Smith says:
September 3, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Well I think it would be a hard sell to blame climate change for whatever horseshoe crabs are doing….
I project that HS crabs will outlast humans.
____________________________________________________
Along with Cockroaches.
The horseshoe crab goes back 425 million years, the cockroach, oldest winged insect, first appears in fossil records 350 million years ago.
Scarlet Pumpernickel says:
September 3, 2010 at 4:16 pm
“http://www.theage.com.au/world/russian-tanker-conquers-arctic-passage-20100903-14ubk.html
Some boat made it through the arctic passage”
by Rowena Mason. Looks like she’s the Telegraph’s wannabe Monbiot:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/author/rowenamason/
Moderator–
An idea for a story is a follow-up to Monford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion.” The reviews are overwhelmingly positive, and a sampling is here:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/reviews
JAE says:
September 3, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Now, here’s a good idea!
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/green/Gym-Takes-Powerful-Stance-102104054.html
_____________________________________
I always figured schools should do the same. Cut out all the drugs and use treadmills and bikes to harness all that excess energy the kids have from eating all those candy bars and cokes they buy in the vending machines at school. Make the kids healthier and slimmer too.
Actually I have a friend who did this many years ago. He hooked up an exercise bike to the TV. If the kids wanted to watch they had to pedal, the kid pedaling got to choose the channel. Saved a lot of squabbling and headaches at his house.
DirkH says:
September 3, 2010 at 4:05 pm
Lomborg never disputed AGW, even in “Skeptical Environmentalist”.
Having interviewed him a while back, James Delingpole had a good article a few days back in the Telegraph:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100051954/but-lomborg-was-always-a-warmist/
You invest in wind power. What do you do when there is no wind?
You invest in solar power. What do you do in the night, or when it’s cloudy?
These are valid points, which have a valid answer. You need to update your electricity transmission infrastructure to accommodate the fluctuations in wind and sun. You need to add in your computer systems the facility to plan what the intake of renewable energy will be, by analyzing the weather reports.
This is something they do well in Spain. You can even get real-time view of the contribution of wind farms to the national grid and the percentage of the utilization of the wind farms.
KLA, you quote ROBERT BRYCE, who has a tiff against anything renewable.
News Item – Heads Up
While skimming a magazine in my library called Buildings I found an article I need to share here. All kinds of professions are joining together to set new green (sustainable) building codes. When I see the word sustainable I suspect the UN IPCC science is the basis of the proposals. The responsible organization (IGCC) “enters a comments period in 2010 and is subject to code change proposals and public hearings in 2011 in advance of the publication of the 2012 edition.” It seems we still have time to influence the nature of these regulations, which are listed near the end of this article.
http://www.buildings.com/Magazine/ArticleDetails/tabid/3413/ArticleID/9803/Default.aspx
“……….the launch of the IGCC “establishes a previously unimaginable regulatory framework for the construction of high-performance commercial buildings that are safe and sustainable … through a delivery infrastructure [that can] reach all 50 states and more than 22,000 local jurisdictions.”
Jim Barker says:
September 3, 2010 at 3:44 pm
I’m so envious – I used to summer on Folly Island as a teenager, and I loved it! I’ve not been back in 30 years but have many fond memories, and some not-so-fond memories of close encounters with nature inside the cottages my parents rented. I remember a few horseshoe crabs, but not the numbers you mention for this year, and certainly not alive. Perhaps the ones you have noticed are mating? However, judging from the information here – http://www.ceoe.udel.edu/horseshoecrab/history/reproduction.html – the season would seem to be wrong.
People have been quoting (without references) that CO2 contributes around 0.4% of the greenhouse effect of the planet, so any change (such as doubling) in CO2 would not make a difference.
Apparently, this figure is not ‘0.4%’ (who first said that?) but 20%.
Source: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi?id=sc05400j
If you have a comment on this, please substantiate it. I really do not want to hear comments such as rejecting the author for some conspiracy theory. If you do that, I’ll leave this website.
Thoughts and prayers are with you, Anthony. We hope all is going well for your family.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100902/sc_livescience/massextinctionthreatearthonvergeofhugeresetbutton
…A few go so far as to say we are entering a new geologic epoch, leaving the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch behind and entering the Anthropocene Epoch…
Putting the anthro- prefix on everything now a days. We even caused a new geological epoch! Take that nature! You pansy.
DirkH says:
September 3, 2010 at 4:05 pm
….The AGW crowd, vulnerable people as they are, will surely use every straw they can grasp to continue their misguided crusade so IMHO one should never give them one, and taking them seriously for a moment will only give them the feeling of being right, which they are not. So i think Lomborg made a mistake by doing this thought experiment, but it’s his decision.
The 100bn a year would come from the 1bn inhabitants of the developed world of course, IOW the working individuals like me would pay about 500 a year… so i wouldn’t be too happy about it. Half of it would immediately disappear in the pockets of Ban Ki-Moon, Rajendra K. Pachauri (Dr.) and the likes… so i’d rather finance military action against the UN if i had the choice.
______________________________________________________
I am with you on both accounts.
As far as where the money would actually go, all you have to do is look at the Danish text that “hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank”
Surprise, surprise, Maurice Strong ” actually was a senior advisor to James Wolfensohn when the latter was head of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005….
Maurice Strong is very good friends with:
Kofi Annan (UN head; advised by Strong),
Malloch Brown (works for Annan),
Al Gore (former US vice president; intermarried with the Schiff family; presidential campaign sponsored with $100,000 from Strong),
Tongsun Park (Koreagate; long history of bribing/blackmailing government officials; indicted in the Oil-For-Food scandal),
Louise Frechette (UN deputy secretary-general; accused of having ordered the shredding of incriminating Oil-For-Food documents; actually an investigator of the Oil-For-Food scandal; has spoken to the Pilgrims Society),
and James Wolfensohn (used to sit on the Rockefeller Foundation board; former business partner of Lord Jacob Rothschild; former president of the World Bank; the head of J. Rothschild Wolfensohn & Co. was Oil-For-Food investigator and Rockefeller-protege Paul Volcker).” http://www.isgp.eu/organisations/introduction/PEHI_Maurice_F_Strong_bio.htm
“The inquiry into the UN’s scandal-ridden oil-for-food program has found that Canadian businessman Maurice Strong accepted a personal cheque for nearly $1-million US from a controversial businessman who was working closely with the Iraqi regime. Korean-born Tongsun Park….” http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20050908/maurice_strong_oil_iraq_050908/
Yup, Yup, I really feel warm and fuzzy about these upstanding honorable gentleman handling all that money. Especially Strong who started the whole CAGW, NGO, mainstream Environmental Activism back in 1972 at the UN’s First Earth Summit.
Visitors to this board tend to be well informed and there is much discussion about future energy sources: and indeed how technology will develop them.
But it seems to me that in particular our green friends do not understand how and why technology developed to meet our needs and why: and therefore what its limitations are.
This leads to speculation about how technology might develop and especially about wondrous new sources of power: and indeed why our current ones are supposedly inadequate.
Yet technology, economics and wealth are inextricably intertwined which is something which seems to escape most politicians and scientists too. There are many lessons to be learned from history and the development of technology which are frequently ignored by those who should know better.
Although I have been extremely busy this year, which is why I have not written an article I promised Tom Fuller, which by now would be out of date so fast does news travel these days.
Yet I have been turning over in what I laughingly call my mind whether the readers of this blog might like an essay which tries to draw these threads together: if so then I will do it as best I can having a few days to spare as it were.
If people want that and A. Watts is agreeable I will write it. And then you can all have the pleasure of tearing it apart.
Kindest Regards
paulw says:
September 3, 2010 at 5:34 pm
“Apparently, this figure is not ’0.4%’ (who first said that?)”
Good question. Where did you get it from?
Lew Skannen says:
September 3, 2010 at 4:26 pm
I am keen to press home the idea that modelling the climate with all its
interacting mechanisms is impossible…..
___________________________________________________________–
Aside from asking here or scanning back posts try looking at the resources and reference tabs at the top of the page in the black banner.
There is also Poptech’s 800 peer reviewed papers:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
Happy hunting and do get back to us with the list.
Geez, whodathunk “go figger” would have generated such interest? 🙂
Moderators,
Here’s the rough draft of a prospective guest-post that should appeal to all of our resident CO2 fans. It may not meet your usual standards of excellence, but we’re in a slow-news period. (I had originally put this in Tips & Notes, but that thread is quite long now.) What do you think?
AT HIGH ALTITUDE, CO2 IS OUR FRIEND
How so? First some background. Ordinary breathing is regulated in a few different ways. One system involves our oxygen sensors. When the O2 concentration in the blood is too low, these sensors send a heads-up message to the brain, and we automatically breathe a bit more. However this system is sluggish at times. That’s why there have been fatal workplace accidents, in which people have walked into nitrogen-filled rooms and lost consciousness, without having enough time to become aware that something was amiss. (Ordinary air is 78% nitrogen; 21% O2; and 1% for all of the rest: argon, gas-phase H2O, carbon dioxide, etc.)
A second mechanism involves carbon dioxide sensors. Example: When the CO2 concentration in the blood is too low, the CO2 sensors tell the brain that we need to decrease our respiratory rate. The CO2 mechanism is faster-acting than the O2 mechanism.
Most of the time, both systems function normally. But when we drive up to a moderately high altitude for a day-hike, it’s a different story. For example, at 5000 feet (1500 meters) the atmospheric pressure is 15% less than at sea level, which translates into 15% less oxygen. The brain gradually becomes aware of a minor O2 shortage. It compensates by automatically increasing the respiratory rate.
Problem: Now that we’re breathing more, we’re losing more CO2 than we did at sea level. And our CO2 sensor are not happy about that. They send a message to the brain, telling it to slow down the respiratory rate. The net result is an unstable equilibrium, in which our O2 sensors and CO2 sensors are pulling in opposite directions. At higher altitudes, we may even experience Cheyne-Stokes respiration, in which we alternate between fairly rapid breathing, and short pauses of not breathing at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyne-Stokes_respiration
If atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to increase, mountain hiking will become slightly less taxing. In the meantime, we must make do with suboptimal atmospheric CO2 levels. Fortunately, there are ways to compensate for the atmospheric CO2 deficit while we’re hiking at altitude.
First, there’s Larry’s Nature Trick. It involves the common bandana, which we wear bandito-style. How does it work? After exhaling, the CO2 concentration between one’s mouth and the bandana is higher than in the surrounding air. Then when we breathe in again, we recycle part of the exhaled CO2, inhaling a larger quantity of CO2 than we would otherwise. Our O2 sensors are happy, as are our CO2 sensors; so we don’t feel the altitude as much.
Caveat. Wearing a bandana also helps us to retain more body heat on cool days. In fact, a bandana placed over one’s nose and mouth has a higher warmth-to-weight ratio than wearing any article of ordinary clothing. However on warm days, a bandana’s heat-retention efficiency can be a disadvantage.
Fortunately, there’s a breathing technique that accomplishes the same goal as Larry’s Nature Trick, but without the heat-retention effect of wearing a bandana. However it does require considerable practice before it becomes second nature. I could give a detailed description, but that would make it appear to be more difficult than it really is.
Gentle Reader, even if you’re a non-hiker, I hope that you have gained a greater appreciation for the multifaceted nature of our friend, Carbon Dioxide.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/Whitney_Trail_Switchbacks.jpg/450px-Whitney_Trail_Switchbacks.jpg
Trail to the summit of Mt Whitney, the highest point in the Lower 48. Photo by Justin Johnsen, from the Wikipedia article.
Anyone heard whether any action is being taken to move the Clipper Adventurer off the rock in the Arctic?
@ur momisugly Gail Combs
There’s a editorial on Progressive Farmer today about NAIS being dead, but that whatever replaces the idea will likely look about the same. http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/common/link.do;jsessionid=B5AF00AC822ED0CAE0DC5C0C079EA00E.agfreejvm2?symbolicName=/ag/blogs/template1&blogHandle=editorsnotebook&blogEntryId=8a82c0bc2a8c8730012ad7516ede03b8&showCommentsOverride=false
Lorne says:
September 3, 2010 at 3:05 pm
I hadn’t heard of them. See their web site at
http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/
http://interacademycouncil.net/
The InterAcademy Council (IAC) produces reports on scientific, technological, and health issues related to the great global challenges of our time, providing knowledge and advice to national governments and international organizations.
The eighteen-member InterAcademy Council Board is composed of presidents of fifteen academies of science and equivalent organizations – representing Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus the African Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) – and representatives of the IAP: the global network of scientific academies, the International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences (CAETS), and the InterAcademy Medical Panel (IAMP) of medical academies.
The IAC Secretariat is hosted by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
paulw says:
September 3, 2010 at 5:34 pm:
Oh, goody. The author is Gavin Schmidt. He’s Hansen’s Mr Fixit.
Goodbye!