There’s been some wild claims out there the past few days since BEST released their results in a media blitzkrieg on October 20th prior to peer review. But this one from Grist writer Jess Zimmerman has to rank up there as the most bizarre – ever.
She writes: (emphasis mine)
This raises the question: What will it take to convince deniers? What if they burned up in their shoes, would that do it? What if God came down and drew a hockey stick graph on the wall? What if Dumbledore explained it using his Pensieve? Look, if science doesn’t work, it’s going to have to be God, magic, or spontaneous combustion; that’s just a fact of nature.
Umm… news flash Jess. The BEST data shows that the world had been warming since 1800, long before we even had Tyndall and Arrhenius looking at CO2, long before the industrial revolution, and long before SUV’s, Exxon, modern living and the many other things attributed to causing warming appeared on the scene.
So far I have not seen any correlation with increased spontaneous human combustion.
Perhaps Jess missed the things that I agree with. I’m sure she’ll take the time to read my Agreements and Disagreements Essay and append her article.
Have a look at some of the other work from Jess by clicking on her Grist image, it’s a real eye opener. So is her “she writes” page.
h/t to Tom Nelson
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UPDATE: Reader Keith points out this blatant lie from Jess Zimmerman in another recent story:
Sorry Jess, I call bullshit on you: From NASA Earth Observatory:
In September 2011, sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean declined to the second-lowest extent on record. Satellite data from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) showed that the summertime ice cover narrowly avoided a new record low.
How do people like this get to be writers?
I’ve emailed Dr. Walt Meier at NSIDC to ask him to ask Grist to make a correction. We’ll see how interested either are in truth.
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UPDATE2: Within 15 minutes of emailing him, Dr. Walt Meier of NSIDC posted this on the Grist article:
The statement “The Arctic now has ice-free summers, 90 years in advance of predictions.” is most definitely flat-out wrong. The Arctic has not had less than 4 million square kilometers, in our data and any other source one cares to look at, even at the summer minimum.While extent and thickness are decreasing and ice-free summers are certainly possible, even probable, in much less than 90 years, we are not there yet. Not even close.
Walt Meier
Research Scientist
National Snow and Ice Data Center
University of Colorado
Good for him. Thank you Dr. Meier. Now we just need to alert the Grist editors, WUWT readers let ’em know please! http://www.grist.org/contact/contact-us
RobWansbeck @ur momisugly October 24, 2011 at 10:10 am
That Doctor should take up Climate Science. His conclusion is akin to “I can’t find any other explanation, so it must be CO2”. I’m guessing he hasn’t seen any documentaries demonstrating the effects of combustion of fat in a torso, which strongly indicate that SHC is a myth; there’s nothing “spontaneous” about it.
Anthony and R. Gates,
I saw an article last year or year before in Pseudo-Scientific American re ice core data going back 8000 – 12,000 years and more, that supposedly showed CO2 increasing about the time people crawled out of their caves during the current inter-glacial warming and began to irrigate and farm. Even showed decrease in CO2 during the two great plagues in cir 450 and 1350 AD. Even if this is so:
1. does not prove warming is due to CO2, maybe people and CO2 are due to warming, there is logic to such an argument,
2. even if it did prove AGW, it would simply prove that to reduce CO2 and global warming we need to get rid of a lot of people, or at least have them stop eating and heating their dwellings.
Those plagues wiped out 40-50% of the world population at those times if I remember the data in the article. How about that for a solution to AGW?
Jess Zimmerman has this pearler too:
“The Arctic now has ice-free summers, 90 years in advance of predictions”
Which Arctic might this be?
if science doesn’t work, it’s going to have to be God, magic, or spontaneous combustion; that’s just a fact of nature.
Did you ever consider that the scientists could be wrong! No then why not? If you accept everything you are told then you are in for a big shock!
Jess Zimmerman’s Friends (2) [ My bold ]
http://www.shewrites.com/friends/JessZimmerman
Could it be a “curse”?
Jim G says:
October 24, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Anthony and R. Gates,
“Those plagues wiped out 40-50% of the world population at those times if I remember the data in the article. How about that for a solution to AGW?”
____
Not being a believer in Catastrophic AGW…I’ll take my chances with higher CO2 rather than killing 3 or 4 billion people. 🙂
Maybe she meant spontaneously combusting pirates?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#Pirates_and_global_warming
juanita,
In addition to Dirk’s comments:
1) There are some issues with “distributed” generation concerning load balance. Since I’m not an electrical engineer, I can’t provide a good explaination, but as I understand the basics, demand (load) has to equal generation. This is a constant balancing act for a utility. Adding additional sources of generation to the system also adds complexity to your systems control. This is one of the issues Smart Grid technology is expected to address. The other big hurdle to “distributed” generation are zoning related. It is going to be very difficult for anyone to get such a facility permitted for. People don’t like having a substation in their neighborhood now. Imagine if someone wanted to place a fuel cell or micro gas turbine in their neighborhood. “Not next to my house!”
2) On fuel cells in general – A few years ago at my niece’s wedding, one of my brothers neighbors, who was an engineer working for DOE, was telling me that it was unlikely we would ever see fuel cell powered cars. This was soon after Pres. Bush had announced $1 billion in funding for them. The reason was what Dirk pointed out – it is very hard to contain H2. In order for fuel cell vehicles to replace gasoline ones, the nation’s entire fuel distribution infrastructure would have to be replaced. Even with that, there were serious questions over the practicality and viability of a H2 fuel infrastructure.
Or, you know, maybe three of four orders of magnitude less. What are a few zeros between friends?
Dave N says @ur momisugly 12:39 pm
“ That Doctor should take up Climate Science. “
The guy’s unlucky. In the UK coroners are frequently legal professionals. If this had been the case I would have predicted a prosperous future leading climate science inquiries.
To add to the Industrial Revolution discussion, I know this part of England really well and it is generally accepted there, and throughout the UK I think, that Ironbridge in Shropshire is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Not sure how the rest of the world views this.
It would seem from this article, that it sort of started in 1709, but didn’t get going, in that locale at least, until the latter part of the 18th Century:
http://www.timetravel-britain.com/articles/towns/ironbridge.shtml
I’ll be interested in seeing R. Gates’ response to Anthony on the ramp-up rate.
“REPLY:re industrial revolution – Show me how much manufacturing capacity and automobiles and oil use there was between 1800 and 1900 compared to 1900-2000 – Anthony”
REPLY: Still waiting for your to show me that data I requested – Anthony
UK coal production 1700-1900
1700 : 2.7 million tonnes
1750 : 4.7 million tonnes
1800 : 10 million tonnes
1850 : 50 million tonnes
1900 : 250 million tonnes
Started from a low base, as the modern world and everything in it had to be invented along the way.
First off, at the risk of sounding like an imperialist British patriot to you Colonial types, what we now call “the Industrial Revolution” started in Britain around the year 1750, generally taken to be a very rough date when the various technologies, engineering skills and political, economic and military power came together to make the investment in plant, coalmines, railways, factories worth the effort.
With a growing overseas empire to provide cheap raw materials and a vast captive market for finished goods, the wealthy of this country saw the possibility of limitless wealth, so invested the profits made from the Atlantic slave trade, the sugar and tobacco plantations of the West Indies and the American colonies in the new industries being established in the Midlands and North of England.
(Next time you are in the UK, go visit the cities of the Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire the North East and see the giant factory buildings which predate that little colonial skirmish of the late 18th century you Americans drone on and on about) 😉
This was around the time when it became possible to produce large quantities of cast iron (At the Coalbrookdale works of Abraham Darby) Of course, this didnt come about spontaneously but was the result of decades of work going back to 1678 by the Darby family in the Coalbrookdale area and centuries of small scale steel production before that. There is archeological evidence from the 8th century, that Saxon founders were producing carbon steel for weaponry.
By 1750, steam engines, made from cheap mass produced cast iron and steel were taking over from water power and driving newly invented machinery in the aforesaid giant Emglish factories
First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of factories sprang up all over the UK. All with tall stone bulit chimnies belching smoke from thousands of steam engines. Smoke from the millions of hearths in newly built houses for the workers, and of course coal smoke from the thousands of trains running on the tens of thousands of miles of UK railways laid in a frenzy up to the 1880s.
Up to WW2, UK industry, transport and home heating was coal based, since then coal has given way to oil, same as anywhere else, but we were the first to drag ourselves out of the Middle Ages and into the Modern World. (Of course, we had to invent it first!)
The thing that puzzles me about the Decadal Land Surface Temperature Graph above is how little warming is noted to the coal fired 1800-1940 period compared to post 1940 period when coal as a major industrial and transport fuel has been in rapid decline.
Perhaps it would more accurate to divide the Industrial Revolution into stages, one leading into the next and making the next stage possible:
The UK was well and truely industrialised by 1850 and memorys of an agricultural past was fading fast. Hence why England lost it’s folk tales and songs from the land. Most folk tales, songs etc in England only date as far back as Victorian times.
Apart from tales which had been written down long ago, such as Robin Hood and the King Arthur legends which could hardly be called folktales.
Didn’t South Park did an episode that indirectly “linked” ‘spon-com’ with global warming!!!?
I think I found another “Quote of the Week!” over at SkS. In a discussion on the BEST paper, a mod made the following ‘mod comment’ on one of my posts about the ‘tropical hotspot’:
“With the introduction of this well-known denialist meme Dale stands revealed. The “hot spot” mentioned is known to be a signal of any warming, not AGW-specific warming.”
Since the ‘tropical hotspot’ hasn’t been found to exist through numerous studies via numerous methods, does this mean SkS is now advocating a position that ‘No global warming has occurred by any method, natural or human caused’? Hahaha.
[If the link is not acceptable, it can be removed]
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=90&&n=1071#66059
[SNIP: Tim, I’m not sure where that came from, but you’ll thank me for this. Really. -REP]
Seems you want to change the metric here? Didn’t know you were discussing types or quantities of manufacturing. Of course the revolution continued to accelerate after 1800, but it began well before. You always seem to want to aim for precision, and if there are any youngsters reading this site, we wouldn’t want them go away thinking the Industrial Revolution started after 1800, when in fact is started several decades before that.
REPLY: Still waiting for your to show me that data I requested – Anthony
_____
Anthony,
You asked: Show me how much manufacturing capacity and automobiles and oil use there was between 1800 and 1900 compared to 1900-2000 .
I don’t even know where to find such data, and not sure what it has to do with when the Industrial Revolution started anyway. If the point you want to make is one of relative levels of CO2 emitted by industrial activity (including automobiles), I will easily and readily concede the point that far more (exponentially more) CO2 was emitted in 1800-1900, and then again from 1900-2000, than prior to 1800. But on the basic historical point of WHEN the Industrial Revolution started, it was prior to 1800– which was the only point I was making. Most people have no idea, for example, that the first automobile (steam powered mind you) was made in about 1770, far earlier than our dear Henry Ford began the mass production of automobiles here in the U.S.
Archonix says:
October 24, 2011 at 12:23 pm
Gates, the industrial revolution started then, but the issue is one of quantity and timing. Are you seriously going to try and claim that the minuscule industrialisation of parts of the west in even the 1890s could emit as much CO2 as the mass-industry of the 1940s?
_____
I never made such a claim, nor would I. My only point was one of when the Industrial Revolution began– nothing more. Now some would like to see the years prior to 1800 as a kind of 1st stage of the Industrial Revolution, with the massive industrialization that occurred after as the next stages, when of course CO2 emissions rapidly increased, and then in the mid-20th century, when CO2 emissions abolutely went off the chart compared to the miniscule increases prior to 1800. I readily concede all of this. But if someone asks me about the beginnings of the industrial revolution, I will certainly direct them back prior to 1800, as all good history texts on the subject do.
But back to the 2nd point I made about the Holocene vs. the Anthropocene. People like William Ruddiman will argue that humans started altering the composition of the Holocene atmosphere in significant ways far far prior to the Industrial Revolution with mass agriculture uses.
Sorry, Anthony, but I have to say I’m disappointed to see you even suggest that Dr. Walter Meier might not be interested in the truth. I don’t think he agrees with us, but he’s willing to talk to us and answer our questions, clearly separating him from the rest of “that crowd”. I can state with absolute certainty that at least one reader appreciates his input!
Best,
Frank
REPLY: Yeah you are right, I’m pretty angry with being lied to and abused by Dr. Richard Muller. I shouldn’t let that affect my relationship with others. Dr. Meier has been very upfront and reasonable. – Anthony
To those arguing about the Industrial Revolution:
Did coal smoke cool the earth because of the massive blanket of aerosols? Or did coal warm the earth because of all the soot? Ignoring both to focus on CO2 is incorrect.
A remarkable word, “Anthropocene”. A logical “begs the question” position encapsulated entire in a single pseudo-scientific neologism!
Armagh Observatory says:
October 24, 2011 at 3:43 pm
“UK coal production 1700-1900
1700 : 2.7 million tonnes
1750 : 4.7 million tonnes
1800 : 10 million tonnes
1850 : 50 million tonnes
1900 : 250 million tonnes
Started from a low base, as the modern world and everything in it had to be invented along the way.”
Actually when it comes to coal, like oil, you have to think about what is not calculated, which is the historical use of coal to heat ordinary homes, especially during winter, and during all year round for cooking food.
Around 1750 there’s believed to have been between 6.5-8.5 million people in England, Wales and Scotland. You can check that with google easy enough and with the census place.
During that time there has been established that Britain shipped a lot of coal to the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world.
Now did the millions of people of England, Wales and Scotland use less than one pound of coal per year per person for heating and for cooking food during that time you think?
So what’s of interest is how much they actually used during that time, imported coal included, compared to how much it then lessened during the 20th century since the coal production today is way less then it was in 1905 and even the coal used is less. To quote decc.gov.uk: “UK coal producers believe that they can maintain their contribution to national energy needs at around 18 Million tonnes a year to at least 2020.”
Yet coal and coal production in UK is used to blame for crazy peoples alarmist imagination.
Aaaargh! We’re all going to burst into flames.
We’re doomed.
[snip. Read the site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]