I’m taking the weekend off, as I need to do some climate unrelated work, which is physical, and always good for the soul, and I need to spend time with my family, who often get neglected due to the amount of time I put into this blog.
Guest posters are welcome to post stories.
Feel free to discuss topics within site policy.
A call from the West Australian conservative Liberal Party for a Royal Commission into Climate change. Heads will explode! http://pindanpost.com/2013/10/20/a-royal-commission-into-climate-change-called-for/
It’s coming apart:
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“They have control because they sell something everyone has to buy.
“We have no choice about buying it.
“With that amount of power comes huge responsibility to serve society.
“It is not like some other sectors of business where people can walk away from you if they don’t want to buy your product and you are entitled to seek to maximise your profit.
“The social license to operate of the energy companies is something they have to take very, very seriously indeed.”
Mr Welby said he was concerned that fuel poverty was “a very severe issue… because real incomes are flat or declining and the cost of energy has gone up”.
“It ties in with the food banks and the debt,” he said.
“They are all part of the reality of life for many people today.”
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/archbishop-canterbury-says-energy-price-2472470
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He said: “Politicians don’t want to admit competition hasn’t worked. The public want price controls or renationalisation of energy firms.”
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/money-saving-expert-martin-lewis-2471463
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Speculation that npower and Scottish Power are to hike prices comes as figures show bills are rising THREE TIMES faster under Cameron
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/npower-scottishpower-next-increase-energy-2471619
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Archbishop damns energy price hikes
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2467854/Archbishop-Justin-Welby-damns-energy-price-hikes-controversial-attack-Firms-generosity–just-maximise-profits.html
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‘We put some wind farms in the wrong place’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2467726/Energy-Minister-Greg-Barker-We-wind-farms-wrong-place.html
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Man has been without electricity or gas for THREE YEARS
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2467376/Man-50-left-electricity-gas-THREE-YEARS-row-energy-firm-repairing-meter.html
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Unravelling: David Cameron left sweating as voters
hit out at ‘put a jumper on’ energy advice
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/cut-energy-bills-putting-jumper-2468049
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Miliband accuses Cameron of panic over energy prices
http://www.irishexaminer.com/world/miliband-accuses-cameron-of-panic-over-energy-prices-246837.html
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This latest patronising nonsense is little more than a cover for letting privatised energy giants fleece millions of families
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/knit-jumpers-leave-ministers-out-2468048
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The energy secretary, Ed Davey, called on electricity and gas suppliers to act rapidly to reveal their true profitability to customers and the energy regulator, as the government spent another day on the defensive over soaring bills.
But when British Gas announced a 10% price increase on Thursday, it put £40 of that rise down to ECO, a calculation not accepted by the Department of Energy & Climate Change.
…Davey told Newsnight he wore jumpers at home to keep bills down.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/oct/18/energy-consumer-affairs
DR says, “it’s only a matter of time” heh, we be waiting a long time I suspect. Bush forced regime change in Iraq to return their ‘invoicing’ of oil back to the dollar from the Euro. That was the only real reason. Now the US is using oil from this side of the world and producing ever more of it’s own. The Middle East is losing importance to us and China is their biggest customer so yes the dollar may lose importance over there with time. Is that so much a bad thing? What are we going to do, go to war over it again?
I give up on waiting for predicted collapses that show up on these open threads. Like I gave up on what Bush said in 2001 that there would be a $5.6 Trillion surplus in 10 years.
http://web.archive.org/web/20041018020541/http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy02/pdf/blueprnt.pdf
Holy gerrymandering, Batman, can’t Republicans just let Obamacare implode on its own? Without 144 voting to default our country to 87 not.
Mark Bofill says:
October 19, 2013 at 3:33 pm
Anybody bored and want to educate me on the paleo argument for high climate sensitivity? My understanding of the argument is that it goes like this: look at the paleo record. CO2 was high and temperature was high, so there. Is there more substance to the argument than that?
The main reasoning from alarmists like James Hansen is that solar forcing and the response from melting/freezing ice sheets is not sufficient to explain the increase/decrease of temperature over the glacial/interglacial transitions and back. Therefore one need a huge feedback from greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4, which follow the initial small temperature increase caused by the small changes in insolation over the NH (the Milankovich cycles), where most of the ice sheets are formed. That is nicely presented in James Hansen’s essay, fig. 3:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2003/2003_Hansen.pdf
But some recent research (don’t remember the reference) shows that cloud cover also changed over glacial-interglacial periods, dwarfing the effect of GHG’s…
Anyway, in all cases CO2 simply follows the temperature changes, but that is no proof that it has a huge influence on temperature. It may give a small positive feedback to the temperature increase, but that is far less that what the climate models implemented which all lead to too high estimates of the temperature in current times.
dbstealey says:
October 19, 2013 at 3:49 pm
Ferdinand, how many languages do you speak? Also, while you make a good case for anthro CO2, that is not the final part of the debate. The last step is answering the question: does CO2 matter?
As we live at the crossroads of countries, we need to learn several languages: Flemish/Dutch is where I live, French, English and some German are learned at school and as I am a traveller, I like to learn at least a few words of the local language where I am travelling to (except Thai and Japanese, too difficult to read!). Some Spanish was added when I was sailor (several trips to South America) and Norwegian, as that is my favorite destination: a marvelous country…
Does CO2 matter? While I am convinced that the increase of CO2 is mostly man-made, I am as sure that it has more beneficial effects than negative. The theoretical increase for 2xCO2 is ~0.9 K. Nothing to worry about. It is the positive feedbacks implemented in climate models which are the base of the panic, but the models are proven wrong…
Martin Rees makes a prediction:
“We can predict that the world in 2050 will be more crowded, and warmer.”
http://theconversation.com/astronomer-royal-on-science-environment-and-the-future-18162
I’m just a layman, myself. But I thought that such predictions about natural phenomena actually couldn’t be made! First off, any one of population catastrophes could occur…oh, and cooling could happen too.
Time was when the Royal Society and its emeritus professors practiced actual science.
DirkH says:
October 19, 2013 at 12:43 pm
Edohiguma says:
October 19, 2013 at 12:05 pm
“Heard today that Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to run for POTUS in 2016.”
Dis shall be de moment ven se ocean stopped to rise and se planet began to heal. Kome viz me if you vont to live.
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He veess toooo bees deturmined toooo steeck aha round.
Kenya’s not far enough?
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pochas says:
October 19, 2013 at 12:51 pm
Edohiguma says:
October 19, 2013 at 12:05 pm
“Heard today that Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to run for POTUS in 2016. He said he’s ready to start lobbying to change the Constitution”
GLORIOSKY!! Then we can elect idiots from the whole world!
OK, Geran, just what shape is an ‘ideal absorber’ that also has an albedo of 0.3?
If I were you I would pay more respect to what Isvalgaard says and stop digging an even deeper hole for yourself.
I have two topics for discussion.
1. If we could heat the atmosphere up by 1K uniformly and hold it there then what would be the long term effect on ocean temperatures at all depths?
Is there a natural ocean “lapse rate” down to a constant 4K at some depth where the densest waters reside, and if so would the depth at which 4K is reached become greater on account of the extra 1K at the surface? And how long might downwelling currents take to achieve this? And then, within this system in external equilibrium, how much internal change might be expected to occur merely from random fluctuations in ocean currents?
The reason for posing this thought experiment is that I am trying to get my head around the “honey, they hid the AGW below 700m in the ocean”.
2. Given the warm anomaly in the Atlantic to the west of the UK (see http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif ), can we expect a mild coming winter in the UK?
Thanks,
Rich.
Janice Moore says:
October 19, 2013 at 4:25 pm
Native Source of CO2 – 150 (96%) gigatons/yr — Human CO2 – 5 (4%) gtons/yr
[37:01] Native Sinks Approximately* Balance Native Sources – net CO2
*Approximately = even a small imbalance can overwhelm any human CO2
Except that the natural imbalance over the past 50 years is only halve the human emissions and that the increase in the atmosphere also is only halve the human emissions:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em2.jpg
The error Dr. Salby and many other skeptics make is by comparing the human emissions, which are one-way additional with the huge natural flows, which are only circulating through the atmosphere, but don’t add (even remove some) CO2 to the atmosphere…
To make a comparison: If you have a fountain where some 10,000 liter/min is pumped from a bassin over the fountain and flowing back into the bassin and someone opens the water supply, adding 10 liter/min to the bassin and forget about it, how long will it take before the fountain is flooding, even if the additional flow is only 0.1% of the main circulation?
“But interesting story anyway. Not only in Svalbard some plant debris from 1100 years ago – the warm Medieval Period – comes out from under the ice, but also from Svartisen (Norway mainland) and from under glaciers in Austria human artefacts are found that are 3000-6000 years old, proving that the glaciers were much shorter in these periods…”
And it wasn’t under 20 metres of sea water ?
Is my understanding correct?
1. Radiation travels between all objects regardless of their temperature.
2. .If an object, colder than a hot object and its surroundings, is placed near the hot object, it will reduce the radiation that the hot object was receiving from its surroundings in the direction of the cold object. The hot object will be cooler than it would otherwise have been.
3. If a hot object that is hotter than the surroundings is placed near a hotter object it will increase the radiation the hotter object is receiving which will slow the rate of cooling of the hotter object.
4. An absorption line means that no radiation is emitted at that frequency.
Bastardi’s Weekly with interesting observations: http://www.weatherbell.com/saturday-summary-october-19-2013
More on Australia’s fires New South Wales fires and global warming.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/18/nsw-bushfires-tony-abbott-says-canberra-will-pay-half-cost-of-rebuilding
geran says:
October 19, 2013 at 11:25 pm
My comment wording was: “If you have an “ideal” absorber….”
If the absorber is not spherical as the Earth, your comment has no relevance.
In reference to the ‘Jesus Green’ post above, concerning the ‘Fake Peer Reviewed Paper’,
here Is a link to the original.
http://scicomm.scimagdev.org/
It makes me wonder how many Academic papers are ‘Science’ or ‘Science Fiction’,
maybe they should be ‘Blog’ reviewed rather than ‘Peer’ reviewed, before being published.
John Spencer says:
October 20, 2013 at 12:33 am
Health Warning. The Mirror is a virulently Left-wing rag that makes HuffPo look positively impartial. Any paper which would describe the leader of the global Anglican church as a ,”Mr”, has a serious problem.
Kelvin Vaughan says:
October 20, 2013 at 3:06 am
Completely right on all four points…
I have made a simple Excel sheet for temperature/radiation balances of inserting a second sheet where you can tune about everything: initial temperatures of both sheets and the surroundings, energy supply, etc.:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/slayers.xlsx
It gives the evolution of the energy balance, the radiation fluxes and the temperatures in graph form and as table.
See first the “readme” page for the details…
MikeB says:
October 20, 2013 at 2:30 am
OK, Geran, just what shape is an ‘ideal absorber’ that also has an albedo of 0.3?
If I were you I would pay more respect to what Isvalgaard says and stop digging an even deeper hole for yourself.
>>>>>>>>>
Ok, Mike, an ideal absorber is a hypothetical flat surface with NO albedo! The Earth’s albedo was used to adjust the TSI so that the ideal absorber received the same power as the Earth.
I know Dr S has some sycophants on here. If I were you I would pay more attention to what TRUTH is, rather than groveling even deeper into your hole.
lsvalgaard says:
October 20, 2013 at 3:55 am
geran says:
October 19, 2013 at 11:25 pm
My comment wording was: “If you have an “ideal” absorber….”
If the absorber is not spherical as the Earth, your comment has no relevance.
>>>>>>
And, once again, when you are clearly WRONG, you just declare it a non-issue. You only fool the sycophants. Oh, as to “relevance”, which you think you have the power to determine, this is an OPEN thread, duh….
Kelvin Vaughan October 20, 2013 at 3:06 am
Points 1,2 and 3 are correct.
Point 4 needs some clarification. Blackbodies emit over a continuous spectrum, so it is not strictly true to say that no radiation has been emitted. Absorption lines in the spectrum indicate that some intervening ‘cooler gas’ has selectively absorbed radiation at a specific frequency. The absorption lines provide a ’fingerprint’ of what elements are in the intervening gas.
http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/middle-east-north-africa/329447-report-larry-summers-turned-down-bank-of-israel-job
I submit this as Summers has an ownership stake in First Wind (UPC Group) who is involved in the wind sector in the MENA region.
Richard D:
Your post at October 19, 2013 at 11:11 pm says it is easy to falsify the climate null hypothesis then uses the IPCC assertion of ECS (i.e. a claim of the degree to which a change in atmospheric CO2 will affect climate) to calculate how much anthropogenic warming has happened over the last 15 years.
That is a circular argument: an assertion cannot prove itself. Simply, you argument only asserts, “because the IPCC says so”.
Please explain why you think your argument is a falsification of the climate null hypothesis.
Richard
Janice Moore shows her ignorance in assuming that anthropogenic CO2 as a flow has to be a additional component. Its clear that photosynthesis is a negative feedback on C02. If we simply maintained a constant level of CO2 then withn a few years the bioproductivity and ocean absorption would balance that CO2 and CO2 rise would stop, but then so would increased yields due to higher CO2.
The accumulation is occuring not because CO2 is higher, but because total CO2 emission rate from all sources is increasing. Plant and ocean responses to the CO2 are lagged, and the lagged response causes CO2 to overshoot the equilibrium level. While we continue to increase the rate of emission all the little overshoots will continue to add and CO2 will rise. All humanity really needs to do is reduce the rate of increase a bit so the plants can keep up with sucking it out. That naturally will have to happen someday because we can’t sustain an increasing use of fossil fuels indefinitely, and at some point the oceans will increase absoption due to cold and CO2 will fall back to the point at which absorbtion = emission, this is classic negative feedback.
So the issue of what percentage of emission is human is irrelevant, but rather what sources have increased their rate and which haven’t. Clearly warming since the LIA is one source of rate change ( reduced ocean uptake), human emissions is another, now given that we have NO IDEA what the natural changes in rate of emission are, it also stands to reason that we have NO IDEA what percentage of that CO2 rise was human induced.
Richard said;
‘2. Given the warm anomaly in the Atlantic to the west of the UK (see http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif ), can we expect a mild coming winter in the UK?’
Interesting. If the winds come from a southerly direction as they are doing at the moment you may be right. However, I guess those waters around Greenland will cool off over the next few weeks so I suppose any cold periods will then depend on whether the winds shift to a Northerly direction.
Ultimately that may all come down to the position of the Jet stream and what air flow it introduces.
In other words….I don’t know!
tonyb