In Andi Cockroft’s story yesterday Climate Science and Special Relativity he asked a prescient question:
For the general public that does not have an objective scientific bent, how do you tell virtual reality from the real thing?
Dr. Brown responded in comments, which was so well thought out, it benefits everyone by elevating it to full post status, and thus is presented below. Like The Skeptics Case, I highly recommend this one as a “must read”. – Anthony
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Guest post by Dr. Robert Brown, Duke University Physics Department
For the general public that does not have an objective scientific bent, how do you tell virtual reality from the real thing?
That’s a serious problem, actually. Hell, I have an objective scientific bent and I have plenty of trouble with it.
Ultimately, the stock answer is: We should believe the most what we can doubt the least, when we try to doubt very hard, using a mix of experience and consistent reason based on a network of experience-supported best (so far) beliefs.
That’s not very hopeful, but it is accurate. We believe Classical Non-Relativistic Mechanics after Newton invents it, not because it is true but because it works fairly consistently to describe Kepler’s purely observational laws, and (as it is tested) works damn well to describe a lot of quotidian experience as well on a scale less grand than planetary orbits. We encounter trouble with classical mechanics a few hundred years later when it fails to consistently describe blackbody radiation, the photoelectric effect (the one thing Einstein actually got the Nobel Prize for), the spectra of atoms, given Maxwell’s enormously successful addition to the equations of electricity and magnetism and the realization that light is an electromagnetic wave.
Planck, Lorentz, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and many others successively invent modifications that make space-time far more complex and interesting on the one hand — relativity theory — and mechanics itself far, far more complex than Newton could ever have dreamed. The changes were motivated, not by trying to be cool or win prizes, but by failures of the classical Euclidean theory to explain the data! Basically, Classical flat-space mechanics was doomed the day Maxwell first wrote out the correct-er equations of electrodynamics for the first time. We suddenly had the most amazing unified field theory, one that checked out empirically to phenomenal accuracy, and yet when we applied to cases where it almost had to work certain of its predictions failed spectacularly.
In fact, if Maxwell’s Equations and Newton’s Law were both true, the Universe itself should have existed for something far, far less than a second before collapsing in a massive heat death as stable atoms based on any sort of orbital model were impossible. Also, if Maxwell’s equations and flat spacetime with time an independent variable was correct, the laws of nature would not have had the invariance with respect to reference frame that Newtonian physics had up to that time enjoyed. In particular, moving a charged particle into a different inertial reference frame caused magnetic fields to appear, making it clear that the electric and magnetic fields were not actually vector forms! The entire geometry and tensor nature of space and time in Newtonian physics was all wrong.
This process continues today. Astronomer’s observe the rotational properties of distant galaxies to very high precision using the red shift and blue shift of the stars as they orbit the galactic center. The results don’t seem to agree with Newton’s Law of Gravitation (or for that matter, with Einstein’s equivalent theory of general relativity that views gravitation as curvature of spacetime. Careful studies of neutrinos lead to anomalies, places where theory isn’t consistent with observation. Precise measurements of the rates at which the Universe is expanding at very large length scales (and hence very long times ago, in succession as one looks farther away and back in time at distant galaxies) don’t quite add up to what the simplest theories predict and we expect. Quantum theory and general relativity are fundamentally inconsistent, but nobody knows quite how to make a theory that is “both” in the appropriate limits.
People then try to come up with bigger better theories, ones that explain everything that is well-explained with the old theories but that embrace the new observations and explain them as well. Ideally, the new theories predict new phenomena entirely and a careful search reveals it there where the theory predicts. And all along there are experiments — some of them fabulous and amazing — discovering high temperature superconductors, inventing lasers and masers, determining the properties of neutrinos (so elusive they are almost impossible to measure at all, yet a rather huge fraction of what is going on in the Universe). Some experiments yield results that are verified; others yield results — such as the several times that magnetic monopoles have been “observed” in experiments — that have not been reproducible and are probably spurious and incorrect. Neutrinos that might — even now — have gone faster than light, but again — probably not. A Higgs particle that seems to appear for a moment as a promising bump in an experimental curve and then fades away again, too elusive to be pinned down — so far. Dark matter and dark energy that might explain some of the unusual cosmological observations but a) are only one of several competing explanations; and b) that have yet to be directly observed. The “dark” bit basically means that they don’t interact at all with the electromagnetic field, making them nearly impossible to see — so far.
Physicists therefore usually know better than to believe the very stuff that they peddle. When I teach students introductory physics, I tell them up front — “Everything I’m going to teach you over the next two semesters is basically wrong — but it works, and works amazingly well, right up to where it doesn’t work and we have to find a better, broader explanation.” I also tell them not to believe anything I tell them because I’m telling them, and I’m the professor and therefore I know and its up to them to parrot me and believe it or else. I tell them quite the opposite. Believe me because what I teach you makes sense (is consistent), corresponds at least roughly with your own everyday experience, and because when you check it in the labs and by doing computations that can be compared to e.g. planetary observations, they seem to work. And believe me only with a grain of salt then — because further experiments and observations will eventually prove it all wrong.
That isn’t to say that we don’t believe some things very strongly. I’m a pretty firm believer in gravity, for example. Sure, it isn’t exactly right, or consistent with quantum theory at the smallest and perhaps largest of scales, but it works so very, very well in between and it is almost certainly at least approximately true, true enough in the right milieu. I’m very fond of Maxwell’s Equations and both classical and, in context, quantum theory, as they lead to this amazing description of things like atoms and molecules that is consistent and that works — up to a point — to describe nearly everything we see every day. And so on.
But if somebody were to argue that gravitation isn’t really a perfect 
Where does that leave one in the Great Climate Debate? Well, it damn well should leave you skeptical as all hell. I believe in the theory of relativity. Let me explain that — I really, really believe in the theory of relativity. I believe because it works; it explains all sorts of experimental stuff. I can run down a list of experimental observations that are explained by relativity that could scarcely be explained by anything else — factors of two in spin-orbit coupling constants, the tensor forms and invariants of electromagnetism, the observation of 
Yet I was — and continue to be — at least willing to entertain the possibility that I might have to chuck the whole damn thing, wrong from top to bottom — all because a silly neutrino in Europe seems to be moving faster than it should ever be aver to move. Violations of causality, messages from the future, who knows what carnage such an observation (verified) might wreak! I’m properly skeptical because what we have observed — so far — works so very consistently, and the result itself seems to be solidly excluded by supernova data already in hand, but you know, my beliefs don’t dictate reality — it is rather the other way around.
The sad thing about the Great Climate Debate is that so far, there hasn’t really been a debate. The result is presented, but no one ever takes questions from the podium and is capable of defending their answers against a knowledgeable and skeptical questioner.
I can do that for all of my beliefs in physics — or at least, most of them — explain particular experiments that seem to verify my beliefs (as I do above). I’m quite capable of demonstrating their consistency both theoretically (with other physical laws and beliefs) and with experiment. I’m up front about where those beliefs fail, where they break down, where we do not know how things really work. Good science admits its limits, and never claims to be “settled” even as it does lead to defensible practice and engineering where it seems to work — for now.
Good science accepts limits on experimental precision. Hell, in physics we have to accept a completely non-classical limitation on experimental precision, one so profound that it sounds like a violation of simple logic to the uninitiated when they first try to understand it. But quite aside from Heisenberg, all experimental apparatus and all measurements are of limited precision, and the most honest answer for many things we might try to measure is “damfino” (damned if I know).
The Great Climate Debate, however, is predicated from the beginning on one things. We know what the global average temperature has been like for the past N years, where N is nearly anything you like. A century. A thousand years. A hundred thousand years. A hundred million years. Four billion years.
We don’t, of course. Not even close. Thermometers have only been around in even moderately reliable form for a bit over 300 years — 250 would be a fairer number — and records of global temperatures measured with even the first, highly inaccurate devices are sparse indeed until maybe 200 years ago. Most of the records from over sixty or seventy years ago are accurate to no more than a degree or two F (a degree C), and some of them are far less accurate than that. As Anthony has explicitly demonstrated, one can confound even a digital electronic automatic recording weather station thermometer capable of at least 0.01 degree resolution by the simple act of setting it up in a stupid place, such as the southwest side of a house right above a concrete driveway where the afternoon sun turns its location into a large reflector oven. Or in the case of early sea temperatures, by virtue of measuring pails of water pulled up from over the side with crude instruments in a driving wind cooling the still wet bulb pulled out of the pail.
In truth, we have moderately accurate thermal records that aren’t really global, but are at least sample a lot of the globe’s surface exclusive of the bulk of the ocean for less than one century. We have accurate records — really accurate records — of the Earth’s surface temperatures on a truly global basis for less than forty years. We have accurate records that include for the first time a glimpse of the thermal profile, in depth, of the ocean, that is less than a decade old and counting, and is (as Willis is pointing out) still highly uncertain no matter what silly precision is being claimed by the early analysts of the data. Even the satellite data — precise as it is, global as it is — is far from free from controversy, as the instrumentation itself in the several satellites that are making the measurements do not agree on the measured temperatures terribly precisely.
In the end, nobody really knows the global average temperature of the Earth’s surface in 2011 within less than around 1K. If anybody claims to, they are full of shit. Perhaps — and a big perhaps it is — they know it more precisely than this relative to a scheme that is used to compute it from global data that is at least consistent and not crazy — but it isn’t even clear that we can define the global average temperature in a way that really makes sense and that different instruments will measure the same way. It is also absolutely incredibly unlikely that our current measurements would in any meaningful way correspond to what the instrumentation of the 18th and 19th century measured and that is turned into global average temperatures, not within more than a degree or two.
This complicates things, given that a degree or two (K) appears to be very close to the natural range of variation of the global average temperature when one does one’s best to compute it from proxy records. Things get more complicated still when all of the best proxy reconstructions in the world get turned over and turned out in favor of “tree ring reconstructions” based upon — if not biased by — a few species of tree from a tiny handful of sites around the world.
The argument there is that tree rings are accurate thermometers. Of course they aren’t — even people in the business have confessed (in climategate letters, IIRC) that if they go into their own back yards and cut down trees and try to reconstruct the temperature of their own back yard based on the rings, it doesn’t work. Trees grow one year because your dog fertilizes them, fail to grow another not because it is cold but because it is dry, grow poorly in a perfect year because a fungus attacks the leaves. If one actually plots tree ring thicknesses over hundreds of years, although there is a very weak signal that might be thermal in nature, there is a hell of a lot of noise — and many, many parts of the world simply don’t have trees that survived to be sampled. Such as the 70% of the Earth’s surface that is covered by the ocean…
But the complication isn’t done yet — the twentieth century perhaps was a period of global warming — at least the period from roughly 1975 to the present where we have reasonably accurate records appears to have warmed a bit — but there were lots of things that made the 20th century, especially the latter half, unique. Two world wars, the invention and widespread use and testing of nuclear bombs that scattered radioactive aerosols throughout the stratosphere, unprecedented deforestation and last but far from least a stretch where the sun appeared to be far more active than it had been at any point in the direct observational record, and (via various radiometric proxies) quite possibly for over 10,000 years. It isn’t clear what normal conditions are for the climate — something that historically appears to be nearly perpetually in a state of at least slow change, warming gradually or cooling gradually, punctuated with periods where the heating or cooling is more abrupt (to the extent the various proxy reconstructions can be trusted as representative of truly global temperature averages) — but it is very clear indeed that the latter 19th through the 20th centuries were far from normal by the standards of the previous ten or twenty centuries.
Yet on top of all of this confounding phenomena — with inaccurate and imprecise thermal records in the era of measurements, far less accurate extrapolations of the measurement era using proxies, with at most 30-40 years of actually accurate and somewhat reproducible global thermal measurements, most of it drawn from the period of a Grand Solar Maximum — climatologists have claimed to find a clear signal of anthropogenic global warming caused strictly by human-produced carbon dioxide. They are — it is claimed — certain that no other phenomena could be the proximate cause of the warming. They are certain when they predict that this warming will continue until a global catastrophe occurs that will kill billions of people unless we act in certain ways now to prevent it.
I’m not certain relativity is correct, but they are certain that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a true hypothesis with precise predictions and conclusions. I have learned to doubt numerical simulations that I myself have written that are doing simple, easily understandable things that directly capture certain parts of physics. They are doing far, far more complex numerical simulations — the correct theoretical answer, recall, is a solution to a set of coupled non-Markovian Navier-Stokes equation with a variable external driver and still unknown feedbacks in a chaotic regime with known important variability on multiple decadal or longer timescales — and yet they are certain that their results are correct, given the thirty plus years of accurate global thermal data (plus all of the longer timescale reconstructions or estimates they can produce from the common pool of old data, with all of its uncertainties).
Look, here’s how you can tell — to get back to your question. You compare the predictions of their “catastrophic” theory five, ten, twenty years back to the actual data. If there is good agreement, it is at least possible that they are correct. The greater the deviation between observed reality and their predictions, the more likely it is that their result is at least incorrect if not actual bullshit. That’s all. Accurately predicting the future isn’t proof that they are right, but failing to predict it is pretty strong evidence that they are wrong.
Such a comparison fails. It actually fails way back in the twentieth century, where it fails to predict or explain the cooling from 1945 to roughly 1965-1970. It fails to predict the little ice age. It fails to predict the medieval climate optimum, or the other periods in the last 10,000 years where the proxy record seems to indicate that the world was as warm or warmer than it is today. But even ignoring that — which we can, because those proxy reconstructions are just as doubtful in their own way as the tree-ring reconstructions, with or without a side-serving of confirmation bias to go with your fries — even ignoring that, it fails to explain the 33 or so years of the satellite record, the only arguably reliable measure of actual global temperatures humans have ever made. For the last third of that period, there has been no statistically significant increase in temperature, and it may even be that the temperature has decreased a bit from a 1998 peak. January of 2012 was nearly 0.1C below the 33 year baseline.
This behavior is explainable and understandable, but not in terms of their models, which predicted that the temperature would be considerably warmer, on average, than it appears to be, back when they were predicting the future we are now living. This is evidence that those models are probably wrong, that some of the variables that they have ignored in their theories are important, that some of the equations they have used have incorrect parameters, incorrect feedbacks. How wrong remains to be seen — if global temperatures actually decline for a few years (and stretch out the period with no increase still further in the process) — it could be that their entire model is fundamentally wrong, badly wrong. Or it could be that their models are partially right but had some of the parameters or physics wrong. Or it could even be that the models are completely correct, but neglected confounding things are temporarily masking the ongoing warming that will soon come roaring back with a catastrophic vengeance.
The latter is the story that is being widely told, to keep people from losing faith in a theory that isn’t working — so far — the way that it should. And I have only one objection to that. Keep your hands off of my money while the theory is still unproven and not in terribly good agreement with reality!
Well, I have other objections as well — open up the debate, acknowledge the uncertainties, welcome contradictory theories, stop believing in a set of theoretical results as if climate science is some sort of religion… but we can start with shit-canning the IPCC and the entire complex arrangement of “remedies” to a problem that may well be completely ignorable and utterly destined to take care of itself long before it ever becomes a real problem.
No matter what, we will be producing far less CO_2 in 30 years than we are today. Sheer economics and the advance of physics and technology and engineering will make fossil-fuel burning electrical generators as obsolete as steam trains. Long before we reach any sort of catastrophe — assuming that CAGW is correct — the supposed proximate cause of the catastrophe will be reversing itself without anyone doing anything special to bring it about but make sensible economic choices.
In the meantime, it would be so lovely if we could lose one single phrase in the “debate”. The CAGW theory is not “settled science”. I’m not even sure there is any such thing.
Septic Matthew/Matthew R Marler says:
March 3, 2012 at 11:25 am
Since the US Energy Information Agency provided the levelized figures (~22¢/kWh), and I can’t find your citation, I’m gonna go with the EIA figures for the time being. I’m sorry, but I think your numbers are based on incorrect assumptions. I don’t know which assumptions, but I doubt your numbers … hang on, let me see what I find …
OK, here’s the latest costs from Solarbuzz:
Residential c/kWh 29.00 (includes battery backup)
Commercial c/kWh 19.51
Industrial c/kWh 15.21
Note that these figures do not include the costs for land purchase, road access, or for the transmission lines that would be necessary for a serious system for supplying power tot he grid. They also don’t contain any maintenance costs.
Note also that they are in the same range as the figures I gave in my discussion of The Dark Future of Solar Energy … which is to say several times the cost of natural gas fired plants.
Finally, according to Solarbuzz, the cost of the solar modules is only 15% of the total cost …
So yeah, Matthew, I’d say your numbers are way low.
w.
PS—I also have been wanting to congratulate you on your decision to cease anonymity and to own your own words, so my hearty congratulations on that.
Dave Wendt says:
March 3, 2012 at 8:40 am
Truthseeker says:
March 3, 2012 at 5:30 am
Although I also don’t share Dr. Brown’s enthusiasm for Solar, you need to check your work before hitting the Post button. “18,000 square metres (hereafter 18 km2)”?
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Dave you are quite correct. (Note to self – do not do math after 11pm).
Let me try this a different way. Wikipedia says that electricity consumption in the US is 1363 watts per person. We know that on a sunny day in the tropics the surface gets 1364 watts while the sun is shining (say 12 hours). OK, this math I should be able to do.
From my original quote, 18000 square metres (sqm) produces enough power for 500 households (residential use). Now in Australia electricity consumption is 1127 watts per person which includes residential, commercial and industrial consumption. If a household is considered to have 4 people and to include commercial and industrial consumption you have to divide by 3, then that 18000 sqm produces power for (500 x 4)/3 = 666 people (all usage) in Australia. Now at 1364 W per sqm, 18000 sqm should receive 24.552 MW during the day which means 12.276 MW over a 24 hour period (for 24 hour power you have store half of it which doubles the amount of area required = halves the efficiency of the area you use). So for 666 people x 1127 W per person = 750.5 KW actual power produced. Efficiency is a little over 6% (750.5 KW / 12.276 MW).
OK, back to the US. Population 310 million people consuming 1363 watts each. At an efficiency of 6% of 1364 W per sqm, you are going to need about 16.5 sqm per person which is 5,115,000,000 sqm which I believe is 5,115 km2. I guess you can do without Delaware …
Mods;
I posted a comment several hours ago which hasn’t appeared could you check to see if it is lurking somewhere in one of the filters?
REPLY: don’t see it – A
Yep. The electric/magnetic field duality is something else. Sit still near a charge and you see an electric field. Start moving with respect to the charge and a magnetic field shows up – at right angles. Where did that come from?
Myrrh says
So, they claim the Sun’s actual heat doesn’t heat the Earth and the Sun’s light which isn’t actually capable of doing so, does. Visible light heating land and oceans! Nuts.
All completely and utterly bonkers.
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I had to smile when you said that.
So here is an experiment for you.
Put two black painted thermometers out in the sun. Before you start let them settle in the shade and record their temperatures.
Now set a piece of glass, which absorbs thermal IR, a small distance in front of one thermometer and let them sit until they reach maximum temperature.
What do you find? I predict the temperatures will be nearly identical. You predict I guess the thermometer behind the glass will not rise in temperature at all.
Then again anyone who has sat in a windowed room on a sunny day already knows Myrrh is wrong.
The thing is technically heat is the energy associated with the random motion of particles. But radiation is directed so it is not heat. The confusion arises because heat can be converted into radiation and vice versa.
Myrrh says on March 3, 2012 at 1:28 pm:
1) The heat direct from the Sun is the Sun’s thermal energy on the move, that is, the Sun’s heat on the move, the Sun radiates HEAT. It reaches us us at the speed of electromagnetic waves.. It is the invisible thermal infrared.
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Quite close to the truth Myrrh, but if the Sun radiates “heat” as opposed to “energy and light” then the “empty space” between the Sun and the Earth must be “The Perfect Insulator” and — furthermore – we would not be able to see anything because heat —– oh well, —- maybe you cannot see anything —-.
2) “The comic cartoon energy budget of KT97 and tweaks, says this heat doesn’t reach the Earth’s surface!”
Sorry Myrrh, I cannot comment on that particular comic cartoon, as to do so will take far too long, but I do like Donald, Mickey, Goofy, Elmer and many others. – But so what? It is all for amusement only!
3) “Wakey, wakey! The heat we feel from the Sun is the Sun’s heat, we’re at the surface!”
Very well observed Myrrh. — Do you have a “motor car, (automobile) or anything else that is “fuel – driven” i.e. an engine of any kind? – If you do – then you should be aware of the fact that the heat is not concentrated in the fuel tank —-.
4) “Heat is transferred by conduction, convection and radiation. You can create a different fisics if you want, but it won’t be real world physics which knows the difference between Heat and Light.”
I do not know what fisics is. – But I know I am not “trying to create anything”. – Can you separate the three – “conduction, convection and radiation”?
– I can put thermometers in a shaded area, – one” in the air” and one in the ground just below and observe. — Lo and behold – there is not a lot of difference in the two measurements. – If I do a similar thing, i.e. leave the thermometers where they are – but wait for the Sun to “come round to my place” I find that the thermometer “monitoring air temperature” shoots up – so to speak – while the one in the ground is moving, but it is doing so very – very slowly. I have made my own conclusions. –You make yours!
5) “The AGW comic cartoon energy budget says that shortwave, shortwave!, heats the Earth’s land and oceans.”
Once again, AGW comic cartoons are not my source of information, but I believe that shortwave radiation from the Sun heats the Earth’s land and oceans – and – plus a very small bit of heat conducted from the Earth’s core – and – possibly – an even smaller bit from all the stars surrounding the “Solar System”
6) “So, they claim the Sun’s actual heat doesn’t heat the Earth and the Sun’s light which isn’t actually capable of doing so, does. Visible light heating land and oceans! Nuts.”
This I must admit is “The Difficult One” (TDO) – as once it can be clearly explained how the “Sun’s heat” can be turned into EM waves for long distance transport, but the heat from my coffee in the Thermos or Vacuum Flask can not, I think “we shall have cracked it” and CAGW and AGW enthusiasts can, at long last, go back home.
7) “All completely and utterly bonkers.”
Yes, maybe so – as not so very long ago – we, or us humans, did not know that molecules consisted of atoms which consisted of a nu—– .
And the question became: “If an atom is like a tiny solar system, then is it not possible that it actually is a “tiny solar system”?
Wun wabbit, wun wabbit – wun – wun – wun.
LazyTeenager says on March 3, 2012 at 9:12 pm:
“The thing is technically heat is the energy associated with the random motion of particles. But radiation is directed so it is not heat. The confusion arises because heat can be converted into radiation and vice versa.”
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Now I am really interested, please explain – really slow and loud, in order that a “dummy” like me can understand:
“How exactly can heat be converted into radiation and vice versa.”?
Willis Eschenbach says:
March 3, 2012 at 10:23 am
Michel says:
March 3, 2012 at 3:55 am (Edit)
… see http://climate.mr-int.ch/LinkedDocuments/Two%20Layers%20Climate%20Model.pdf
Michel, that is an interesting analysis … but a single shell model like you have used cannot represent the earth. The problem is losses, both sensible and latent heat losses. These add up to about 100 W/m2. If you include those in your model, you’ll see that the greenhouse effect in a single shell model doesn’t concentrate enough energy to both allow for losses and still represent the earth’s temperature.
As a result, the simplest model that can represent the Earth has to have two physically separated shells … see my post on The Steel Greenhouse for the calculations.
w.
Willis,
____________________________________
A first shell is required to grossly represent an atmosphere, whatever would be its composition. In fact there are many superposed shells, each emitting to the next one, the last one emitting to the outer space, with some direct windows to consider in an overall energy balance.
Furthermore, convection adds a fantastic degree of complexity. In addition, a 840 mm water column is evaporated each year (average rainfalls) from the surface; this corresponds to approx. 65 W/m2. But don’t forget that this latent energy will be released back when condensing to form clouds. It is not “lost” but adds another level of complexity to any modeling.
So, I’m clear that the two layer model is a [over-]simplification.
But I don’t see why adding another shell (or more) will fundamentally change the approximation.
Nevertheless, some orders of magnitude are provided that are not too far away from observed values. And is also useful to see what sensitivity it may have to changes in albedo, cloudiness, or surface emissivity, for example:
– For each % increase of albedo α, T-Surface may decrease by 1 °C.
– For each % increase of cloudiness c, T-Surface may increase by 0.5 °C.
– For each % increase of surface emissivity ε, T-Surface may decrease by 0.8 °C.
It is also useful to THEN evaluate what GHG forcing may have as an impact on temperature, including feedback factors: this is another step to this zero order model.
The finding out of the two-layer-model-with-feedback is that anthropogenic impact on temperature is 4 to 7 times smaller than what IPCC is claiming.
It is not zero but it is highly likely that it this not catastrophically important.
This is the relevant heresy opposite to the gospel of GAGW.
It may be useful to somewhere summarize those things that are actually known and commonly accepted, those things that are interpretations (such as this model question, or the IPCC conclusions), and those things about which nobody has an answer (such as stochastic interactions within non-linear systems). Not to speak about the unknown unknowns (such as the future) …
I am going to keep this essay handy for the next time someone suggests to me that Freeman Dyson is just a fading contrarian. From this essay one certainly can understand the deep roots of Dyson’s thinking.
I liked it so much I printed it out and left it on the dining table, with instructions for the wife and kids to read and understand it. I also placed it on my facebook page.
Hilariously, speaking of the Amazon, did you note the recent discovery of immense “geoglyphs” lurking under the jungle? Seems that pre-Columbus, the Amazon was substantially cleared and cultivated. All good Greenies should be pressing to return to those Halcyon Days!
Dyson? When did he enter the room? Musta missed that.
Brian H says:March 4, 2012 at 4:49 am
Hilariously, speaking of the Amazon, did you note the recent discovery of immense “geoglyphs” lurking under the jungle?
I would be interested in reading about this, have a source? I remember Coba on the Yucatan when they had only cleared one pyramid, from the top of which you could look out over the jungle and see many structures beneath the jungle growth.
Steve Keohane says:
March 4, 2012 at 6:55 am
“I would be interested in reading about this, have a source?”
Did a quick web search and found this.
Dr. Brown mentions “global temperature” several times. I’d like to know what he thinks of this.
— the absolute difference between lower troposphere temperature and the “true global temperature” of the lower troposphere. The various satellites that contribute to temperature have (IIRC) a variance on this order so the data itself is probably not more accurate than that. The “precision” of the data is distinct — that’s a measure of how much variance there is in the data sources themselves, and is a quantity that can be systematically improved by more data, where accuracy, especially in a situation like this where one is indirectly inferring a quantity that is not exactly the same as what is being measured cannot be improved by more or more precise measurements, it can only be improved by figuring out the map between the data one is using and the actual quantity you are making claims about.
or the temperature you are going to assign to a particular point on the surface on the basis of a “corrected” or “uncorrected” thermometer with location biases that can easily exceed several degrees K compared to equally arbitrary definitions for what the thermometer “should” be reading for the unbiased temperature and how that temperature is supposed to relate to a “true” temperature for the location — a sea surface temperature SST to go with land surface temperature LST and then tries to take the actual data for both and turn them into a average global temperature, one has a final problem to overcome. One’s data is (with the possible exception of modern satellite derived data) sparse! Very sparse.
is what it is, is fairly precisely known, and is at least expected to be monotonically related to a “true average surface Global Temperature”. It is therefore good for determining actual trends in global temperature, not so good for making pronouncements about whether or not the temperature now is or is not the warmest that it has been in the Holocene.
will just keep on trucking, unfutzable, apples to apples to apples. The longer that record gets, the less one can bias an “interpretation” of the record.
Dr. Brown thinks that this is a very nice piece of work, and is precisely the reason that he said that anybody who claims to know the annualized average temperature of the Earth, or the Ocean, to 0.05 K is, as the saying goes, full of sh*t up to their eyebrows.
What I think one can define is an average “Global Temperature” — noting well the quotes — by following some fixed and consistent rule that goes from a set of data to a result. For example, the scheme that is used to go from satellite data to the UAH lower troposphere temperature. This scheme almost certainly does not return “the average Global Temperature of the Earth” in degrees absolute as something that reliably represents the coarse-grain averaged temperature of (say) the lowest 5 kilometers of the air column, especially not the air column as its height varies over an irregular terrain that is itself sometimes higher than 5 kilometers. It does, however, return something that is likely to be close to what this average would be if one could sample and compute it, and one at least hopes that the two would co-vary monotonically most of the time.
The accuracy of the measure is very likely not even 1K (IMO, others may disagree) where accuracy is
Things are not better for (land) surface measurements — they are worse. There the actual data is (again, in my opinion) hopelessly corrupted by confounding phenomena and the measurement errors are profound. Worse, the measurement errors tend to have a variable monotonic bias compared to the mythical “true average surface Global Temperature” one wishes to measure.
One is in trouble from the very beginning. The Moon has no atmosphere, so its “global average temperature” can be defined without worrying about measuring its temperature at all. When one wishes to speak of the surface temperature at a given point, what does one use as a definition? Is it the temperature an actual high precision thermometer would read (say) 1 cm below the surface at that point? 5 mm? 1 mm? 1 meter? All of these would almost certainly yield different results, results that depend on things like the albedo and emissivity of the point on the surface, the heat capacity and thermal conductivity of the surface matter, the latitude. Is it the “blackbody” temperature of the surface (the inferred temperature of the surface determined by measuring the outgoing full spectrum of radiated light)?
Even inferring the temperature from the latter — probably the one that is most relevant to an airless open system’s average state — is not trivial, because the surface albedo varies, the emissivity varies, and the outgoing radiation from any given point just isn’t a perfect blackbody curve as a result.
How much more difficult is it to measure the Earth’s comparable “surface temperature” at a single point on the surface? For one thing, we don’t do anything of the sort. We don’t place our thermometers 1 meter, 1 cm, 1 mm deep in — what, the soil? The grass or trees? What exactly is the “surface” of a planet largely covered with living plants? We place them in the air some distance above the surface. That distance varies. The surface itself is being heated directly by the sun part of the time, and is radiatively cooling directly to space (in at least some frequencies) all of the time. Its temperature varies by degrees K on a time scale of minutes to hours as clouds pass between the location and the sun, as the sun sets, as it starts to rain. It doesn’t just heat or cool from radiation — it is in tight thermal contact with a complex atmosphere that has a far greater influence on the local temperature than even local variations in insolation.
Yesterday it was unseasonably warm in NC, not because the GHE caused the local temperature to be higher by trapping additional heat but because the air that was flowing over the state came from the warm wet waters of the ocean to the south, so we had a relatively warm rain followed by a nighttime temperature that stayed warm (low overnight of maybe 46F) because the sky was cloudy. Today it is almost perfectly seasonal — high 50’s with a few scattered clouds, winds out of the WSW still carrying warm moisture from the Gulf and warm air from the south central US, but as the day progresses the wind is going to shift to the NW and it will go down to solidly freeze (30F) tonight. Tomorrow it will be seasonal but wet, but by tomorrow night the cooler air that has moved in from the north will make it go down to 25F overnight. The variation in local temperature is determined far more by what is going on somewhere else than it is by actual insolation and radiation here.
If a real cold front comes down from Canada (as they frequently do this time of year) we could have daytime highs in the 30’s or low 40’s and nighttime lows down in the the low 20s. OTOH, if the wind shifts to the right quarter, the temperature outside could reach the low 80s high and low 50s low. We can, and do, have both extremes within a single week.
Clearly surface temperatures are being driven as strongly by the air and moisture flowing over or onto them as they are by the “ideal” picture of radiative energy warming the surface and radiation cooling it. The warming of the surface at any given point isn’t solely responsible for the warming or cooling of the air above it, the temperature of the surface is equally dependent on the temperature of the air as determined by the warming of the surface somewhere else, as determined by the direct warming and cooling of the air itself via radiation, as determined by phase changes of water vapor in the air and on the surface, as determined by factor of ten modulations of insolation as clouds float around over surface and the lower atmosphere alike.
Know the true average surface Global Temperature to within 1K? I don’t even know how one would define a “true” average surface Global Temperature. It was difficult enough for the moon without an atmosphere, assuming one can agree on the particular temperature one is going to “average” and how one is going to perform the average. For the Earth with a complex, wet, atmosphere, there isn’t any possibility of agreeing on a temperature to average! One cannot even measure the air temperature in a way that is not sensitive to where the sun is and what it is doing relative to the measurement apparatus, and the air temperature can easily be in the 40s or 50s while there is snow covering the ground so that the actual surface temperature of the ground is presumably no higher than 32F — depending on the depth one is measuring.
And then oops — we forgot the Oceans, that cover 70% of the surface of the planet.
What do we count as the “temperature” of a piece of the ocean? There is the temperature of the air above the surface of the ocean. In general this temperature differs from the actual temperature of the water itself by order of 5-10K. The air temperature during the day is often warmer than the temperature of the water, in most places. The air temperature at night is often cooler than the temperature of the water.
Or is it? What exactly is “the temperature of the water”? Is it the temperature of the top 1 mm of the surface, where the temperature is dominated by chemical potential as water molecules are constantly being knocked off into the air, carrying away heat? Is it the temperature 1 cm deep? 10 cm? 1 m? 10 m? 50 m? 100m? 1 km?
Is it the average over a vertical column from the surface to the bottom (where the actual depth of the bottom varies by as much as 10 km)? This will bias the temperature way, way down for deep water and make the global average temperature of the ocean very nearly 4K very nearly everywhere, dropping the estimate of the Earth’s average Global Temperature by well over 10K. Yet if we do anything else, we introduce a completely arbitrary bias into our average. Every value we might use as a depth to average over has consequences that cause large variations in the final value of the average. As anyone who swims knows, it is quite easy for the top meter or so of water to be warm enough to be comfortable while the water underneath that is cold enough to take your breath away.
Even if one defines — arbitrarily, as arbitrary in its own way as the definition that one uses for
In particular, it is sparse compared to the known and observed granularity of surface temperature variations, for both LST and SST. Furthermore, it has obvious sampling biases. We have lots and lots of measurements where people live. We have very few measurements (per square kilometer of surface area) where people do not live. Surface temperatures can easily vary by 1K over a kilometer in lateral distance (e.g. at terrain features where one goes up a few hundred meters over a kilometer of grade). They can and do vary by 1 K over order of 5-10 kilometers variations routinely.
I can look at e.g. the Weather Underground’s weather map readings from weather stations scattered around Durham at a glance, for example. At the moment I’m typing this there is a 13 F variation from the coldest to the warmest station reading within a 15 km radius of where I’m sitting. Worse, nearly all of these weather station readings are between 50 and 55 F, but there are two outliers. One of them is 46.5 F (in a neighborhood in Chapel Hill), and the other is Durham itself, the “official” reading for Durham (probably downtown somewhere) which is 59.5 F!
Guess which one will end up being the temperature used to compute the average surface temperature for Durham today, and assigned to an entirely disproportionate area of the surface of the planet in a global average surface temperature reconstruction?
Incidentally, the temperature outside of my house at this particular moment is 52F. This is a digital electronic thermometer in the shade of the north side of the house, around a meter off of the ground. The air temperature on the other side of the house is almost certainly a few degrees warmer as the house sits on a southwest-facing hill with pavement and green grass absorbing the bright sunlight. The temperature back in the middle of the cypresses behind my house (dense shade all day long, but with decent airflow) would probably be no warmer than 50 F. The temperature a meter over the driveway itself (facing and angled square into the sun, and with the house itself reflecting additional heat and light like a little reflector oven) is probably close to 60 F. I’m guessing there is close to 10F variation between the air flowing over the southwest facing dark roof shingles and the northeast facing dark roof shingles, biased further by loss of heat from my (fairly well insulated) house.
I don’t even know how to compute an average surface temperature for the 1/2 acre plot of land my own house sits on, today, right now, from any single thermometer sampling any single location. It is 50F, 52 F, 58 F, 55F, 61 F, depending on just where my thermometer is located. My house is on a long hill (over a km long) that rises to an elevation perhaps 50-100 m higher than my house at the top — we’re in the piedmont in between Durham and Chapel Hill, where Chapel Hill really is up on a hill, or rather a series of hills that stretch past our house. I’d bet a nickel that it is a few degrees different at the top of the hill than it is where my house is today. Today it is windy, so the air is well mixed and the height is probably cooler. On a still night, the colder air tends to settle down in the hollows at the bottoms of hills, so last frost comes earlier up on hilltops or hillsides; Chapel Hill typically has spring a week or so before Durham does, in contradiction of the usual rule that higher locations are cooler.
This is why I am enormously cynical about Argo, SSTs, GISS, and so on as reliable estimates of average Global Temperature. They invariably claim impossible accuracy and impossible precision. Mere common sense suffices to reject their claim otherwise. If they disagree, they can come to my house and try to determine what the “correct” average temperature is for my humble half acre, and how it can be inferred from a single thermometer located on the actual property, let alone from a thermometer located in some weather station out in Duke Forest five kilometers away.
That is why I think that we have precisely 33 years of reasonably reliable global temperature data, not in terms of accuracy (which is unknown and perhaps unknowable) but in terms of statistical precision and as the result of a reasonably uniform sampling of the actual globe. The UAH
Hopefully the issues above make it just how absurd any such assertion truly is. We don’t know the actual temperature of the globe now, with modern instrumentation and computational methodology to an accuracy of 1 K in any way that can be compared apples-to-apples to any temperature reconstruction, instrument based or proxy based, from fifty, one hundred, one thousand, or ten thousand years ago. 1 K is the close order of all of the global warming supposedly observed since the invention of the thermometer itself (and hence the start of the direct instrumental record). We cannot compare even “anomalies” across such records — they simply don’t compare because of confounding variables, as the “Hide the Decline” and “Bristlecone Pine” problems clearly reveal in the hockey stick controversy. One cannot remove the effects of these confounding variables in any defensible way because one does not know what they are because things (e.g. annual rainfall and the details of local temperature and many other things) are not the same today as they were 100 years ago, and we lack the actual data needed to correct the proxies.
A year with a late frost, for example, can stunt the growth of a tree for a whole year by simply damaging its new leaves or can enhance it by killing off its fruit (leaving more energy for growth that otherwise would have gone into reproduction) completely independent of the actual average temperature for the year.
To conclude, one of many, many problems with modern climate research is that the researchers seem to take their thermal reconstructions far too seriously and assign completely absurd measures of accuracy and precision, with a very few exceptions. In my opinion it is categorically impossible to “correct” for things like the UHI effect — it presupposes a knowledge of the uncorrected temperature that one simply cannot have or reliably infer from the data. The problem becomes greater and greater the further back in time one proceeds, with big jumps (in uncertainty) 250, 200, 100 and 40 odd years ago. The proxy-derived record from more than 250 years ago is uncertain in the extreme, with the thermal record of well over 70% of the Earth’s surface completely inaccessible and with an enormously sparse sampling of highly noisy and confounded proxies elsewhere. To claim accuracy greater than 2-3 K is almost certainly sheer piffle, given that we probably don’t know current “true” global average temperatures within 1 K, and 5K is more likely.
I’m certain that some paleoclimatologists would disagree with such a pessimistic range. Surely, they might say, if we sample Greenland or Antarctic ice cores we can obtain an accurate proxy of temperatures there 1000 or 2000 years ago. Why aren’t those comparable to the present?
The answer is because we cannot be certain that the Earth’s primary climate drivers distributed its heat the same way then as now. We can clearly see how important e.g. the decadal oscillations are in moving heat around and causing variations in global average temperature. ENSO causes spikes and seems responsible for discrete jumps in global average temperature over the recent (decently thermometric) past that are almost certainly jumps from one poincare’ attractor to another in a complex turbulence model. We don’t even know if there was an ENSO 1000 years ago, or if there was if it was at the same location and had precisely the same dependences on e.g. solar state. As a lovely paper Anthony posted this morning clearly shows, major oceanic currents jump around on millennial timescales that appear connected to millennial scale solar variability and almost certainly modulate the major oscillations themselves in nontrivial ways. It is quite possible for temperatures in the antarctic to anticorrelate with temperatures in the tropics for hundreds of years and then switch so that they correlate again. When an ocean current is diverted, it can change the way ocean average temperatures (however one might compute them, see above) vary over macroscopic fractions of the Earth’s surface all at once.
To some extent one can control for this by looking at lots of places, but “lots” is in practice highly restricted. Most places simply don’t have a good proxy at all, and the ones that do aren’t always easy to accurately reconstruct over very long time scales, or lose all sorts of information at shorter time scales to get the longer time scale averages one can get. I think 2-3 K is a generous statement of the probable real error in most reconstructions for global average temperature over 1000 years ago, again presuming one can define an apples-to-apples global average temperature to compare to which I doubt. Nor can one reliably compare anomalies over such time scales, because of the confounding variables and drift.
This is a hard problem, and calling it settled science is obviously a political statement, not a scientific one. A good scientist would, I truly believe, call this unsettled science, science that is understood far less than physics, chemistry, even biology. It is a place for utter honesty, not egregious claims of impossibly accurate knowledge. In my own utterly personal opinion, informed as well or as badly as chance and a fair bit of effort on my part have thus far informed it, we have 33 years of a reasonably precise and reliable statement of global average temperature, one which is probably not the true average temperature assuming any such thing could be defined in the first place but which is as good as any for the purposes of identifying global warming or cooling trends and mechanisms.
Prior to this we have a jump in uncertainty (in precision, not accuracy) compared to the ground-based thermometric record that is strictly apples-to-oranges compared to the satellite derived averages, with error bars that rapidly grow the further back one goes in the thermometric record. We then have a huge jump in uncertainty (in both precision and accuracy) as we necessarily mount the multiproxy train to still earlier times, where the comparison has unfortunately been between modern era apples, thermometric era oranges, and carefully picked cherries. Our knowledge of global average temperatures becomes largely anecdotal, with uncertainties that are far larger than the observed variation in the instrumental era and larger still than the reliable instrumental era (33 year baseline).
Personally, I think that this is an interesting problem and one well worth studying. It is important to humans in lots of ways; we have only benefitted from our studies of the weather and our ability to predict it is enormously valuable as of today in cash money and avoided loss of life and property. It is, however, high time to admit the uncertainties and get the damn politics out of the science. Global climate is not a “cause”! It is the object of scientific study. For the conclusions of that science to be worth anything at all, they have to be brutally honest — honest in a way that is utterly stripped of bias and that acknowledges to a fault our own ignorance and the difficulty of the problem. Pretending that we know and can measure global average temperatures from a sparse and short instrumental record where it would be daunting to assign an accurate, local average temperature to any given piece of ground based on a dense sampling of temperatures from different locations and environments on that piece of ground does nothing to actually help out the science — any time one claims impossible accuracy for a set of experimentally derived data one is openly inviting false conclusions to be drawn from the analysis. Pretending that we can model what is literally the most difficult problem in computational fluid dynamics we have ever attempted with a handful of relatively simple parametric differential forms and use the results over centennial and greater timescales does nothing for the science, especially when the models, when tested, often fail (and are failing, badly, over the mere 33 years of reliable instrumentation and a uniform definition of at least one of the global average temperatures).
It’s time to stop this, and just start over. And we will. Perhaps not this year, perhaps not next, but within the decade the science will finally start to catch up and put an end to the political foolishness. The problem is that no matter what one can do to proxy reconstructions, no matter how much you can adjust LSTs for UHI and other estimated corrections that somehow always leave things warmer than they arguably should be, no matter what egregious claims are initially made for SSTs based on Argo, the UAH
In the long run that record will satisfy all properly skeptical scientists, and the “warmist” and “denier” labels will end up being revealed as the pointless political cr@p that they are. In the long run we might actually start to understand some of the things that contribute to that record, not as hypotheses in models that often fail but in models that actually seem to work, that capture the essential longer time scale phenomena. But that long run might well be centennial in scale — long enough to detect and at least try to predict the millennial variations, something utterly impossible with a 33 year baseline.
rgb
[Language trimmed. “Futzable”, however misspelled, is permitted. 8<) Robt]
I may have a little niggle though. Your deforestation claim. During the last ice age 10,000 years or so ago, the Amazon Basin was grassland due to the cooling. There has been deforestation to clear land for palm oil plantations, a stupid waste of land especially when the oil is used as biofuel but that is another topic. But the biggest problem these plantations have is the forest growing back trying to take back the land. A good thing as far as I am concerned. Forests are far more resilient than alarmists claim even the high latitude evergreens.
Hilariously, speaking of the Amazon, did you note the recent discovery of immense “geoglyphs” lurking under the jungle? Seems that pre-Columbus, the Amazon was substantially cleared and cultivated. All good Greenies should be pressing to return to those Halcyon Days!
The point is that deforestation can have an impact on local temperatures of at least extended chunks of the Earth’s surface area, and that humans do have an impact on deforestation and other related land use climate drivers. So does e.g. irrigation. Global averages are out of many local averages constructed.
Truthfully, if I were going to look for human-mediated events that probably altered global climate, introducing herds of goats into North Africa would probably top the list. Perhaps the Sahara would have self-assembled without them, but goats eating the vegetation very likely at least accelerated the process.
Urban Heat Island (UHI) warming is also very clearly a corrupting and confounding element of the current “global average temperature” as computed from land surface records. There really isn’t any doubt that it exists, is there? So land use can indeed affect local temperatures, whether the variations in “use” are utterly natural or utterly human. To be honest, I think that land use is very likely a large chunk of the total “anthropogenic signal” in the thermal record. It could be larger than the GHE variation, especially given the UHI corruption of virtually the entire instrumental record. Not necessarily cutting down the rain forests — cutting down the forests on the East Coast of the US, building cities where the forests were, paving them, and then locating the “official” thermometers from which the thermal record was derived there, that is quite capable of producing a warming signal all by itself, is it not?
rgb
Truthseeker says:
March 3, 2012 at 5:10 pm
Dave Wendt says:
March 3, 2012 at 8:40 am
Truthseeker says:
March 3, 2012 at 5:30 am
Although I also don’t share Dr. Brown’s enthusiasm for Solar, you need to check your work before hitting the Post button. “18,000 square metres (hereafter 18 km2)”?
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Dave you are quite correct. (Note to self – do not do math after 11pm).
Let me try this a different way. Wikipedia says that electricity consumption in the US is 1363 watts per person. We know that on a sunny day in the tropics the surface gets 1364 watts while the sun is shining (say 12 hours). OK, this math I should be able to do.
Or, you could look at some places where it has all been done for you. For example, look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_land_area.png
and note the dots. Those dots could supply 100% of the world’s current utilization of electricity, including the effects of variable insolation and 8% conversion efficiency. It does not include transmission losses or storage. On the other hand, neither is there any point in building all of the generation facilities in side the dots. A far more likely scenario is that we will build it one rooftop at a time, with grid-linked panels, and at much higher conversion efficiencies while continuing to use fuel-based plants for ever decreasing amounts of fuel-based time.
A place where solar is already starting to compete with fuel-based plants at the commercial scale is e.g. here:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/02/solar-pv-becoming-cheaper-than-gas-in-california
When one compares the construction and delivery of e.g. natural gas plants designed to switch on quickly to help buffer peak loads on top of base capacity, the relatively high cost of both construction and operation of the natural gas plants is starting to compare to the amortized costs of solar for the same purpose.
Personally, I think it is a mistake to compare the construction costs of large and midsized solar facilities now to what they will be in ten years, even aside from the cost per watt of the PV cells themselves. Large scale PV generation has, I’m pretty sure, all sorts of economies of scale waiting to be realized, all the way down to prefabrication plug-and-play installation on undeveloped (cheap) land. We’ve been building traditional generating plants for a century at this point, but have been building solar at any sort of scale for less than a decade, with most of the projects pilots that are of course going to be ten times more expensive than they should be.
But I expect solar to advance a rooftop at a time on one scale (really taking off when over the counter retail rooftop cells are $1/watt or less, installed, a little over a factor of 2 compared to today’s prices) and to become increasingly attractive as competition for natural gas peak generators in hot sunny places, and eventually as replacements for a lot of the daytime base load in those same places as construction costs come down.
But we will see. There are other non-PV solar technlogies out there as well, and some of them will very likely work at least in certain places.
One other very attractive feature of solar is predictability. You pay all of the costs up front, then get fairly predictable output. Fuel based generation facilities are at the mercy of market prices for fuel, and fuel gets more expensive almost without exception — note well that I said almost, I know natural gas has been an exception — over time.
In the end, I expect that we’ll have a mix of fuel-based generation and solar, at least unless/until fusion works out, with a gradually increasing fraction of solar. I actually completely agree with the poster who argued that we should be going heavily nuclear for the fuel based fraction in new plant construction. Nuclear should make “everybody” happy by being CO_2 free and yet suitable for use as either base/nighttime or peak power generation, and would if it weren’t for the fact that existing nuclear is almost entirely ancient plants that lack many of the safeguards we can now engineer based on our experience with failures. Oh, and the proliferation problem. But I have a lot of hope for thorium salt generation, after the Chinese work it out and start implementing it at a commercial scale.
Too bad we won’t get there first.
The Chinese will also get to large scale solar first, now that we aren’t helping out companies like the infamous Solyndra.
Personally, I think that what the US needs to do is fund Manhattan Project level development of large scale solar — really aggressive, aiming to bring down all of the scalable costs of the technology and quick-solve many of the engineering issues as well. If we had taken the public money we borrowed from the Chinese and then distributed to looters in the Gulf War and otherwise pissed away and had invested it in building solar power generation facilities only, dollar for dollar, leveraging the hell out of every public dollar, we would be generating multiple terawatts of solar power today — a couple of trillion dollars, leveraged, buys a lot of energy, especially over 20 to 40 years.
But even without it, IMO it is still quite inevitable that we’ll be up to TW of generation capability within 20-30 years, rising fast. Solar will only get cheaper and more efficient over time. Only hydroelectric (still the cheapest for exactly the same reason — it is fuel free) can ultimately compete. Fuel costs scale linearly for the lifetime of the unit; the longer you run it the more you pay, subject to market forces that impact fuel cost in a competitive world with rapidly growing energy demand. Fixed costs for solar work exactly the other way — your profitability grows the longer you run it.
But fusion is the real wild card. Nothing will compete with fusion. There’s an “infinite” supply of deuterium. The human species will evolve into something else before we run out of fusion based energy.
rgb
LazyTeenager says:
March 3, 2012 at 9:12 pm
Myrrh says
So, they claim the Sun’s actual heat doesn’t heat the Earth and the Sun’s light which isn’t actually capable of doing so, does. Visible light heating land and oceans! Nuts.
All completely and utterly bonkers.
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I had to smile when you said that.
So here is an experiment for you. …….
What do you find? I predict the temperatures will be nearly identical. You predict I guess the thermometer behind the glass will not rise in temperature at all.
Then again anyone who has sat in a windowed room on a sunny day already knows Myrrh is wrong.
Well, for a start I’m not the one claiming that thermal infrared is blocked by glass.. If you take a look around at the companies producing windows you find that they’re making money by not believing that either.. [The production of windows designed to block out as much thermal infrared as poss while trying to maximise the amount of visible light coming through, to keep out the heat that does warm up the room and let in light which doesn’t].
Besides that – we don’t have a layer of glass around our Earth! It’s totally and completely irrelevant.
The heat we feel direct from the Sun is thermal infrared, we’re on the surface of the Earth, the claim in the energy budget y’all use is that this heat direct from the Sun doesn’t reach us! You’ve put an imaginary glass all around the Earth and now pretend that’s somehow keeping the Sun’s direct heat out!
And then you claim that shortwave does the job of the Sun’s thermal energy! How can visible light heat land and oceans?! How?
Bonkers.
O H Dahlsveen says:
March 4, 2012 at 1:32 am
Myrrh says on March 3, 2012 at 1:28 pm:
1) The heat direct from the Sun is the Sun’s thermal energy on the move, that is, the Sun’s heat on the move, the Sun radiates HEAT. It reaches us us at the speed of electromagnetic waves.. It is the invisible thermal infrared.
============
Quite close to the truth Myrrh, but if the Sun radiates “heat” as opposed to “energy and light” then the “empty space” between the Sun and the Earth must be “The Perfect Insulator” and — furthermore – we would not be able to see anything because heat —– oh well, —- maybe you cannot see anything —-.
What’s this about “perfect insulator”? The Sun’s thermal energy leaves the Sun and reaches us at the speed of electomagnetism, 8 mins. It’s invisible. Don’t you know that thermal infrared is invisible??
When you stand in front of a fire the heat you feel radiating out from it is the invisible thermal infrared, it’s thermal energy, heat, radiating out in straight lines from the fire to you. That’s straight lines, direct from the fire, you can feel that it isn’t warming your back.. The Sun is a huge burning star – it’s heat takes only around eight minutes to reach us even at the great distance it is from us.
2) “The comic cartoon energy budget of KT97 and tweaks, says this heat doesn’t reach the Earth’s surface!”
Sorry Myrrh, I cannot comment on that particular comic cartoon, as to do so will take far too long, but I do like Donald, Mickey, Goofy, Elmer and many others. – But so what? It is all for amusement only!
Well, I certainly find it amusing, however it is the standard model of these arguments.
3) “Wakey, wakey! The heat we feel from the Sun is the Sun’s heat, we’re at the surface!”
Very well observed Myrrh. — Do you have a “motor car, (automobile) or anything else that is “fuel – driven” i.e. an engine of any kind? – If you do – then you should be aware of the fact that the heat is not concentrated in the fuel tank —-.
Not my point, I was addressing this to those who use this standard model of the energy budget – the claim is that thermal infrared, heat, direct from the Sun does not reach the Earth’s surface and plays no part in heating the Earth’s land and oceans. That’s why I call it a comic cartoon, it’s fantasy. Characters in it can do things out of the norm – here we have the real heat from the Sun not warming the Earth, and visible light which can’t do this being given the superpowers of thermal infrared! Of course it’s a comic cartoon.
4) “Heat is transferred by conduction, convection and radiation. You can create a different fisics if you want, but it won’t be real world physics which knows the difference between Heat and Light.”
I do not know what fisics is. – But I know I am not “trying to create anything”. – Can you separate the three – “conduction, convection and radiation”?
– I can put thermometers in a shaded area, – one” in the air” and one in the ground just below and observe. — Lo and behold – there is not a lot of difference in the two measurements. – If I do a similar thing, i.e. leave the thermometers where they are – but wait for the Sun to “come round to my place” I find that the thermometer “monitoring air temperature” shoots up – so to speak – while the one in the ground is moving, but it is doing so very – very slowly. I have made my own conclusions. –You make yours!
My point is that in creating these comic characters, visible light heating the Earth’s land and oceans, you have created a different fisics.
5) “The AGW comic cartoon energy budget says that shortwave, shortwave!, heats the Earth’s land and oceans.”
Once again, AGW comic cartoons are not my source of information, but I believe that shortwave radiation from the Sun heats the Earth’s land and oceans – and – plus a very small bit of heat conducted from the Earth’s core – and – possibly – an even smaller bit from all the stars surrounding the “Solar System”
See! You do use the comic cartoon energy budget! … 🙂
You have superpower visible light in your cartoon world, it can’t do this in the real world, for example, water is a transparent medium for visible light in the real world.
6) “So, they claim the Sun’s actual heat doesn’t heat the Earth and the Sun’s light which isn’t actually capable of doing so, does. Visible light heating land and oceans! Nuts.”
This I must admit is “The Difficult One” (TDO) – as once it can be clearly explained how the “Sun’s heat” can be turned into EM waves for long distance transport, but the heat from my coffee in the Thermos or Vacuum Flask can not, I think “we shall have cracked it” and CAGW and AGW enthusiasts can, at long last, go back home.
Again, what?
7) “All completely and utterly bonkers.”
Yes, maybe so – as not so very long ago – we, or us humans, did not know that molecules consisted of atoms which consisted of a nu—– .
And the question became: “If an atom is like a tiny solar system, then is it not possible that it actually is a “tiny solar system”?
Maybe it is maybe it isn’t – but what we do know in the real world, tried and tested and used in countless applications, that heat and light are not the same, that they have different properties and processes, act in ways specific to them on meeting matter. We know, in the real world, that the Sun’s thermal energy radiating out to us, heat, is the invisible thermal infrared, and it is distinctly different from visible light. Just as gamma rays are distinctly different from radio waves. They all travel at the speed of electromagnetism. The Sun’s heat reaches us in around 8 minutes. We can feel that because it warms us up, visible light can’t warm us up. Your cartoon world is a joke.
Wun wabbit, wun wabbit – wun – wun – wun.
Robert Brown says:
March 4, 2012 at 12:25 pm
I had seen that, and I think it’s total BS. They don’t provide a scrap of evidence for their claims. They say:
If you actually believe that, Robert, you lose your secret skeptic’s decoder ring for displaying excess credulity in public.
If we are to believe them, these solar system builders are all claiming that they can produce power at a levelized cost of less than 10¢ per kilowatt hour … riiiiight, pull the other leg now.
One thing to note? They will never, ever be asked to verify their predicted costs. They will simply go online and start selling power to SCE … and if you think that they have agreed to actually sell power for less than the MPR comparison plant sells power for, you will get a very ugly surprise. That’s not what they said, and it’s definitely not what they will do.
I guess you truly don’t get it. They are only asked to SAY, not physically demonstrate but SAY, that their production costs will beat the MPR of 10¢ per kilowatt. So Robert … what do you think they will SAY when asked the question? (I note in passing that the California PUC is the only group that thinks that natural gas plants have a levelized cost of 10¢/kWh, everyone else puts it at about 7¢ per kWh
In addition, Robert, you mention above that:
“Solar for the same purpose” as a natural gas peaking plant to buffer peak loads?
Solar for peaking power???
Hie thee to a nunnery, or go back to Google, Robert, solar is NEVER used as peaking power.
What part of ‘when you add solar capacity you must add backup peaking power capacity’ is unclear to you? If you put in the solar plant, you also have to put in the peaking plant for when the solar is unavailable. Do you think that extra peaking power is free?
Finally, somehow you seem to have overlooked the subsidies to the builders … no cookies. At a minimum they are all getting the renewable energy “Production Tax Credit (“PTC”) and the “Investment Tax Credit” (“ITC”). The first one is worth 2.2¢ per kWh. The second is much larger, it is 30% of the total capital costs … and since for solar the capital costs are huge, with no fuel costs, this means that they are getting a 30% advantage out of the gate.
Next, California has something called “Trackable Renewable Energy Credits” (TRECs), which are like cap and trade for electricity. Since solar gets them, and they can be bought and sold on the open market, there’s a whole other value stream for solar.
So if their solar is coming in at one mill under the MPR of 10¢/kWh, we have to add 2.2¢ per kWh for the subsidy and then divide that by 0.7 for the tax credit … which puts the real cost back up at the ~17¢ per kWh level … and remember, that’s just their CLAIM. They don’t have to prove it, just provide some spreadsheet that has that number in it somewhere. It also doesn’t include any other subsidies they might have gotten, nor does it include the subsidy in the TRECs …
And of course, none of this comes for free, so there is a hidden subsidy.
To collect that $135 megabucks per year from the suckers to pay for some greenie’s renewable energy wet dream, the utilities have to raise their rates … which in turn increases the amount they can pay to solar and other useless technologies. Which makes people think that they are actually competitive when they’re not. Robert, to date the RESIA has propped up inadequate technologies to the tune of $1.35 billion dollars … and you want to convince me that they are competitive? Get real, if they were they wouldn’t need billions of dollars in subsidies.
Sometimes, I’m astounded by how much people want to believe, and how that dulls their usual skepticism … Robert, you need to learn to read the fine print, learn about the subsidies, inquire into what is actually being claimed, look deeply into what they are actually saying, and watch the pea under the thimble.
Because right now, you are in the position of the mark from Peoria playing three-card-monte on the streets of New York … the wide boys are playing you for a fool.
w.
Bart says:
March 4, 2012 at 10:56 am
Steve Keohane says:
March 4, 2012 at 6:55 am
“I would be interested in reading about this, have a source?”
Did a quick web search and found this. http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/strange-geoglyphs-discovered-beneath-clearcut-amazon.html
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That is the strangest article I’ve read in a long time – they’re puzzling why these “geoglyphs” were “sculpted”? Are there really archeologists who can’t see these are buildings? They should watch a bit of Time Team…
“In the long run that record will satisfy all properly skeptical scientists, and the “warmist” and “denier” labels will end up being revealed as the pointless political cr@p that they are. ”
I think — “one casket at a time.”
Excellent complement to this and your guest post here:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/03/01/what-can-we-learn-from-climate-models-part-ii/
Follow-up to her Oct. ’10 Part I. This one is much ‘advanced’ beyond the first.
Correction: Oct ’10!! One and a third yrs. of the blog gauntlet …
Willis Eschenbach says:
March 4, 2012 at 2:22 pm
Indeed! When it comes to solar contributions to the grid, it doesn’t seem to be possible to be paranoid enough. The Poles may be getting close; they barred German solar output from entering their grid. (Even for almost free.) The costs (and damage) from accommodating the spikes and cutoffs greatly exceeded any possible “utility”. They’re actually installing circuit breakers at the border! 😉
The Germans are panicking; what to do with all that useless randomly varying power?? I predict they’ll have to ground it.