Image Credit: WoodForTrees.org
Guest Post By Werner Brozek, Edited By Just The Facts
RSS stands for Remote Sensing Systems, which is a satellite temperature data set similar to the University of Alabama – Huntsville (UAH) dataset that John Christy and Roy Spencer manage. Information about RSS can be found at here and the data set can be found here.
The plot of the number on the left column from November 1, 1996 to October 31, 2013 can be found in the graph at the head of his article and here. When the “Raw data” is clicked, we see that for 204 months, the slope is = -0.000122111 per year. I wish to make it perfectly clear that the focus is not on the magnitude of the negative number since this number is zero for all intents and purposes. The only thing that is noteworthy is that the slope is not positive.
And of course, 204 months is equal to 17 years. In the “Separating signal and noise in atmospheric temperature changes: The importance of timescale” Benjamin Santer et al. stated that:
“Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.”
I am sure that I will be corrected if I am wrong, but in plain English, my interpretation of this statement is as follows:
“There is a lot of noise in the climate system and it is quite possible that the noise can mask the effects of man-made carbon dioxide for a period of time. However if the slope is zero for 17 years, then we cannot blame noise any more but we have to face the facts that we humans do not affect the climate to any great extent.”
Is that reasonably accurate interpretation?
Richard Courtney offered a very interesting perspective in a comment previously:
“The Santer statement says that a period of at least 17 years is needed to see an anthropogenic effect. It is a political statement because “at least 17 years” could be any length of time longer than 17 years. It is not a scientific statement because it is not falsifiable.
However, if the Santer statement is claimed to be a scientific statement then any period longer than 17 years would indicate an anthropogenic effect. So, a 17-year period of no discernible global warming would indicate no anthropogenic global warming.
In my opinion, Santer made a political statement so it should be answered with a political response: i.e. it should be insisted that he said 17 years of no global warming means no anthropogenic global warming because any anthropogenic effect would have been observed.
Santer made his petard and he should be hoisted on it.”
Some may wonder why I am ignoring UAH. In response, I would just say that while UAH does not have a slope of 0 over the last 17 years, within the error bars of statistical significance, it is indeed possible for UAH to have a slope of 0 for this period of time. Nick Stokes’ Trend Viewer page shows: “CI from -0.384 to 2.353“. So while a larger trend cannot be ruled out, a slope of 0 is certainly possible according to climate science criteria for statistical significance.
You may be interested in how the other data sets compare over this same 17 year period. My recent post Statistical Significances – How Long Is “The Pause”? (Now Includes September Data) offers an in depth analysis and below is the plot for five other data sets. In addition to the RSS plot using all points for RSS and its slope line, I have just drawn the slope lines for the other five and offset them so they all start at the point where RSS starts in November 1996.
It is interesting to note that over this same 17 year period, the largest slope is that of UAH with 0.009/year or less than 1 degree C/century. That is certainly nothing to be alarmed about.
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I thought the 17 years was equivalent in round terms to one and a half solar cycles and the half was included to allow for the lag between the continued occurrence of weak sunspot activity and the general effect on global temperatures. Santer probably thought that cycle 23 was going to be like cycle 20 and would be followed by strong cycles like 21 and 22.
The problem with the AGW hypothesis is that the slight overall upward trend in temperatures in the last 160 years is but a blip in the multi-millennial trend of a cooling planet. If you look at the major warm periods of the last 8000 years you will see that each successive major warm period was cooler and was usually shorter than the previous major warm period. I am referring to the two Holocene warm periods, the Minoan warm period, the Roman warm period, the Medieval warm period and the current warm period, which if it doesn’t continue after the current grand minimum is over will be considered to be the shortest, coolest millennial warm period of the last 8000 years. This ought to be very concerning to those who take a much longer term view than the IPCC as it indicates that eventually, presumably in a few thousand years, there will be another full blown ice-age. When this happens the Geneva headquarters of the IPCC will probably once again be covered by a glacier!
Excellent job as usual Werner and JTF. Indisputable, and painful to some…..
Seventeen years is nothing, for in the eighties and the nineties there was a no-warming period of 18 years. The reason you don’t know about this earlier warming pause is IPCC’s criminal cover-up. What they did was to invent an imaginary warming they called “late twentieth century warming” for this time period. There was no natural explanation for it so they started to claim that this proved the existence of man-made warming. Doing research for my book “What Warming” I discovered that satellites do not show any warming there. That alleged warming was obviously a fake and I said so in the preface to my book when it came out in 2010. Nothing happened for two years but then suddenly the big three of global temperature, GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC, decided all in unison to stop showing this fake warming. They did this by secretly by aligning their data sets with satellites that don’t show warming. No reason was given for this. Such cooperation requires cross-ocean coordination so clearly they had to plan ahead for that. And now we have not just Santer’s 17 years but an uninterrupted 35 years of no-greenhouse warming time, Can anyone believe that any warming prior to this could have been greenhouse warming? I vote no on that. It follows that greenhouse warming is not warming up the world now and it never has done so. And that is exactly what the greenhouse theory of Ferenc Miskolczi tells us. He published that in 2007 in a peer reviewed journal but was disbelieved because the stupid warmists did not understand his math. By 2010 he had experimental proof, however. Using NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 he studied absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere. And discovered that absorption had been constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time went up by 21.6 percent. It follows that the addition of this substantial amount of carbon dioxide to air had no influence whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. And since IPCC was established to study man’s influence on climate which now has proven to be zero it is time to close down that organization because there is nothing more for it to do.
Here’s another mind-bender: the lack of storms is in fact characteristic of warming eras, as the range of global temperatures narrows (the tropics remain fairly constant, and the poles swing widely). So it’s not an argument against actual warming, only against the narrative of the warmist whackos. If storms do strengthen, it will be because cooling is a-comin’, exacerbating the clashes of air masses, and disproving the warmist memesters, whp will tout the storms as evidence of hidden warming (fools that they are).
Alice is having a good laugh. Or cry. Or both.
typo:
whpwhoArno Arrak says:
November 4, 2013 at 4:33 pm
Using NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 he studied absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere. And discovered that absorption had been constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time went up by 21.6 percent. It follows that the addition of this substantial amount of carbon dioxide to air had no influence whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere.
At the following, Dr. Roy Spencer has this to say:
“I would remind folks that the NASA AIRS instrument on the Aqua satellite has actually measured the small decrease in IR emission in the infrared bands affected by CO2 absorption, which they use to “retrieve” CO2 concentration from the data. Less energy leaving the climate system means warming under almost any scenario you can think of. Conservation of energy, folks. It’s the law.”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/10/the-danger-of-hanging-your-hat-on-no-future-warming/
However this does not necessarily mean a contradiction. It could be that extra CO2 causes some additional warming at certain bands, but less H2O negates that at other bands. The issue for most of us is not that there cannot be a minute amount of warming due to extra CO2, but that the amount of warming will never be catastrophic.
Mosher is wanting to be argumentative but in reality he is just refusing to accept the reality of the situation. It would seem that since he is saying no without justification, without cause, and simply by faith that that would equivocate to ‘denial’. Hmm….
We had the “seven fat years” long ago.
Now it’s the “17 flat years.”
@Karl Horrex and Jimbo and Others
This is a very sensitive and therefore difficult subject to discuss in this format, but there is so much anti-coal BS that has been generated for so long that it is hard to introduce light into the dark meme-plex that is the war on coal. So I will only write a little.
(from Karl) >Secondly, without extensive scrubbing, coal plants are unclean. That is an unarguable scientific fact. Cadmium, sulfur, lead, mercury, and other metals as well as significant particulates that cause respiratory distress are present in significant quantities in coal plant exhaust.
Unfortunately life the universe and coal are not than simple. It is like saying that all nuclear power is deadly and evil and therefore should never used, even though there are many different types of reactors and fuels and waste stream types and half-lives involved – and the fact that solar energy is nuclear. If you stand in its deadly rays a lot you will get cancer. Comments on coal are usually gross oversimplifications and it does not do any subject justice to use that as a way to ‘fight something’.
Coal content varies enormously. There are really toxic coals like in Western China. People from Berkeley are noted for cleverly asserting that because there is fluorine-contaminated coal (in fluorine contaminated watersheds) people should not burn coal – at all, anywhere in the world. It is alarmist BS like that which gets people killed by the cold.
The USA has really crap coal, most of it, with high sulfur and, by international standards, really high. That means having to have a (profitable) sulfuric acid plant attached to the power stations. That’s all.
But coal’s metallic content has to be divided into metals that are in the ash and metals that are evaporated into the air, and secondarily, evaporated into the air at concentrations that are meaningfully dangerous. Our environment is full of mercury and uranium and lots of other things. Just because something is detectable does not make it dangerous – at all. It depends a lot of variables and waving hands wildly about ‘dangers’ that ‘could happen’ is no better than shouting about CAGW and seas that ‘could rise’.
To make a long and complicated story short, most of what comes out of a crummy old coal plant is not the result of combusting coal, but is the result of not combusting it and blowing the ash into the air, This is fundamental to understanding a) what the problem is and b) what to do about it. Scrubbers are there to capture (mostly) ash and sulfur. That CO2 has been lumped in with mercury and uranium (etc) should tell you that there is a lot of inordinate hype involved in the anti-coal brigade messages. And who is involved in that? Natural gas of course. ‘The low-carbon alternative’.
To repeat: “Cadmium, sulfur, lead, mercury, and other metals as well as significant particulates that cause respiratory distress”
These ingredients do not cause respiratory stress. You are thinking of dust, especially respirable PM4.0 and smaller particles which are from the ash, not the metals. The dust may or may not have heavy metals in it. It depends on the coal. The vast majority of the mass of dust particles is silica SiO2 and Al2O3. In other words, rock. Asthma is not caused by metals, it is caused by high dust levels just like you get walking behind a tractor. Maybe we should ban tractors, eh?
Coal combustion does produce small particles of organic and black carbon – and the amount varies widely with the quality of the burn. New plants are extremely clean compared with old ones. The cleaning up of Beijing involved replacing those power plant burners first.
>All one need do is look at the smog from Chinese coal fired powerplants.
Arrgh! Smog is caused by vehicles and sunlight, mostly but industry has a big role too. Coal fired Chinese power plants vary greatly in emissions of PM. That impacts the quality of the burn, not the content of the coal which is an independent variable. What on sees in Beijing, for example, is 50% from the farming areas around (fugitive dust) and 50% from vehicles and factory emissions and coal burning plants. The fogged-in Harbin pollution shown around the world a few days ago was caused not by the burning of coal but by the ignition of a large number of space heating appliances for apartment buildings and homes over the weekend during a cold inversion. That was the weekend from which heat is provided. That is how they do public heating in China. It is the ignition of these things that creates so much smoke from poor ignition, not the running of them.
This has also been shown in spades in Ulaanbaatar where the ignition of domestic stoves has been dramatically changed by modifying or replacing stoves to the point of decreasing smoke in the city by about 30% per year. The fuel is exactly the same – only the ignition and then the subsequent burning processes have been changed,
The coals in Ulaanbaatar are wet, high volatiles lignites – supposedly the worst polluters available. But they burn so clean in the correct devices that the fires are actually cleaning particles out of the air as it passes through the stoves. In other words the new coal burning stoves are scrubbing the air of particles emitted by other sources, while still burning supposedly wet lignite. That is how far reality is from the memes about coal.
Uranium in coal is often mentioned as a ‘danger’ by people who are standing at the time inside a concrete building that is made of radioactive granite aggregate. It is so dumb as to inspire ridicule. Walking into a concrete building raises your exposure to ‘radiation’ by 50% (compared with standing outside and receiving the deadly blast in interstellar cosmic debris. This is just radiation bunk. We evolved in a radioactive environment for heaven’s sake. We are surrounded by it. People go to Washington DC to see that red granite stature – it is seething with radiation. Why aren’t all the tourists dropping dead? If we could burn ignorance instead of coal we would have an unlimited supply of energy.
Being an environmentalist is a lot more than repeating ad nauseum every invective and meme you ever heard about the devil-du-jour. People burn coal and dung because they have to. In Northern China, if you don’t burn coal you die. Same in Tajikistan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Eastern India…
Because coal is often burned very badly, like animal dung, it is blamed for the inadequacies of the device burning it. How typical is it for an environmentalist to get it backwards? It is like blaming diesel because if you put it into a gasoline engine it makes a huge amount of smoke. Well…duh! No kidding.
Coal and animal dung both make a lot of particulate matter if burned badly or pushed with fans. So does diesel. So does kerosene. So does candle wax. So does wood. So does everything. Environmental protection is as much about efficiency (of combustion) as it is about reduce, reuse, recycle. Dung is an excellent biofuel and can be burned without smell or smoke – in the right devices, which do not include a bucket with a hole in the side.
We have a long way to go but the fog is clearing.
@James Hatem
I too think the point where the period of no warming exceeds the period of warming may be a watershed moment since it’ll be really hard to argue a correlation exists where the period of no correlation exceeds the period of correlation, however you are wrong to think this is a fixed term. If the expected cooling comes about because of the poor solar cycle, then the period of no warming will extend back beyond 1997, and the period of warming will become shorter as the period of cooling becomes longer.
For example should cooling bring us back to the temp of 1970, then you can either characterise that as a period of warming followed by a cooling or no temperature change from 1970 with the average temperature being the temperature in say 1985 – I always thought 1985 might be a socialist nexus.
The point at which the period of cooling exceeds the period of warming therefore might come a little earlier than 2020, perhaps as early as 2017 if we experience significant cooling through the low point of the solar cycle pulling the 11 year filtered average lower.
Meantime the pause plays havoc with the demonstrated climate sensitivity from 1850 which was when I first calculated it was 1.41 degrees per doubling, but now because CO2 has risen so much with no temperature rise has a demonstrated upper limit inclusive of all feedbacks of 1.35 degrees per doubling, and a likely value of half that if half the warming since the LIA was natural. It seems to be forgotten that the longer the pause goes with CO2 rising , the lower the climate sensitivity to CO2 must be. This is really Santers basic premise, that if the sensitivity is as forecast then CO2 warming must be statistically distinguishable from natural variation after 17 years of rising CO2. Since its not ( NOT EVEN CLOSE TO DISTINGUISHABLE) then the sensitivity must be lower, extending the time needed for the CO2 warming to emerge from the noise. Fact is that 17 years of no warming is much much worse than a statistically indistinguishable warming. If that amount of warming is say 0.5 degrees, then how many more years will be needed to gain enough rise to be statistically certain that warming is due to CO2, even if temperature resumed rising would it be statistically significant. I would think after a 17 year pause we’d need some extraordinary years to show any statistically significant rise any time in the near future.
Natural variability could also be higher, but the corollary of that is that a smaller fraction of the warming from the LIA to now can be attributed to C02 implying lower lower sensitivty anyway.
Let me apologise in advance for any typos, I’m composing this on my tablet and text editing in Firefox on android sucks plenty.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
November 4, 2013 at 9:54 pm
Good comments.
The coal plant I worked at had just gotten to where better precipitators pretty much eliminated any visible ash emissions at the stack. Then, they pretty much closed it down (and the little town around it). What a waste of a profitable 340 MW generating plant & all the hard work/money put in to modernize it. Closed due to EPA-sponsored scaremongering.
@ur momisugly Crispin
Umm – no the term originated in 1905 as a portmanteau of smoke and fog — maily in reference to pea-soup fogs caused by coal burning fires.
particulants and sulfur compounds much more prevalent in coal plant emissions than auto exhaust
Chinese smog from Coal Plants
“Visibility in the northeastern city of more than 10 million people reportedly was reduced in places to less than 65 feet (20 meters) as coal-fired heating systems ramped up for the winter months. Officials also pointed to farmers burning crop stubble and low winds as additional causes for the pollution crisis.”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/10/131022-harbin-ice-city-smog-crisis-china-coal/
Historically
“Coal fires, used to heat individual buildings or in a power-producing plant, can emit significant clouds of smoke that contributes to smog. Air pollution from this source has been report in England since the Middle Ages.[3] London, in particular, was notorious up through the mid-20th century for its coal-caused smogs, which were nicknamed ‘pea-soupers.’ Air pollution of this type is still a problem in areas that generate significant smoke from burning coal, as witnessed by the 2013 smog wave in Harbin, China, which closed roads, schools, and the airport.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smog
Pittsburg PA has a similar problem — due to the coal used in steel production
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/06/what-pittsburgh-looked-when-it-decided-it-had-pollution-problem/2185/
Pittsburgh, PA had a similar problem – typo
One word of reply — since wordpress once again ate 10,000 or so words of pure poetry on my part that I do not have the time or energy to reproduce again (grrr):
Globally, indoor air pollution from biomass fuel use is responsible for 1.6 milliondeaths due to pneumonia, chronic respiratory disease and lung cancer. Biomass fuelsaccounts for 2.9 % of all deaths per year worldwide, and 3.7% of the overall diseaseburden in developing countries. In India, 400,000 to 2 million premature deathsoccur per year due to indoor air pollution with a majority of deaths occurring inchildren under five due to acute respiratory infections (pneumonia; Awasthi et al.,1996; Mishra et al., 1997; Smith, 1999; Bruce et al., 2000). There is also strongevidence of impact on women, up to 34,000 deaths resulting from chronicobstructive disorders (Smith, 2000). In contrast, mortality due to outdoor airpollution is 200,000 to 570,000 representing about 0.4 to 1.1 % of total annualdeaths (WHO, 2002). In fact, indoor smoke from biomass burning is the mostimportant health hazard after malnutrition and lack of safe water and sanitation (Fig.6)
from:
http://www.academia.edu/1071891/Health_effects_of_chronic_exposure_to_smoke_from_Biomass_Fuel_burning_in_rural_areas
Coal burning plants, even dirty ones, reduce mortality and morbidity, and never more than when they are situated so that they displace biofuels. You cite China and its decision to build massive numbers of coal burning plants as if they are doing something wrong. Are you mad? In China, unlike in the US, they can actually do the math. Every coal burning plant they build, by providing comparatively clean and inexpensive electrical power to displace inefficient biomass fuels, saves lives. It was the advent of coal-based electricity that cleaned up the cities of the first world, that prior to electricity burned the coal or even less efficient and far dirtier wood one household at a time to produce heat or cook. My first house was a century old and had a coal chute into its basement. Whenever I worked on replacing its antique asbestos-insulated electrical wiring in the attic, I came down liberally coated with coal dust.
Please understand — today, over 1000 people will die in India because they use biomass of various sorts to cook. Well over half of the deaths will be of small children. Worldwide, between 4000 and 5000, with easily ten to a hundred times that number suffering from chronic diseases and morbidity in various degrees that will supply tomorrow’s 4000 deaths. This does not even include the even greater number of deaths that will occur because of a lack of access to clean water and sewage treatment — both of which require ample, inexpensive electricity to provide, or the deaths due to simple exposure due to a lack of heat when it is cold, or the deaths due to all of the other failures of civilization when one is forced by circumstance to live a life almost unchanged from the 15th century.
Here’s the trade off. Imagine just for one moment how many of these utterly needless deaths could be prevented if we invested the hundreds of billions of dollars currently being extorted and embezzled to line the pockets of the entrepreneurs who are perfectly happy to supply a need whose sole support is the assertion of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming with horrific consequences well in the future (since one has to resort to statistical bullshit to “discover” the slightest real impact now) in saving the lives of the world’s poorest people by building even dirty coal burning plants to displace the even dirtier use of animal dung and wood by the two billion poorest people in the world that will cook their dinner tonight on a smoky open fire.
If CAGW is a true hypothesis, perhaps — and even there it is at best perhaps, because the cost of amelioration is so horrific — perhaps it is worth it to sacrifice a few thousand people a day to line the pockets of the many first-world investors who hope(d) to get rich selling amelioration while not altering their own carbon-rich lifestyle in the slightest (think, Al Gore here). If it proves to be false in a single letter — not catastrophic, not anthropogenic — then do you really think that there will not be a reckoning? Not for forming the hypothesis, that is simple science and ethically neutral , but for deliberately concealing uncertainties in e.g. AR5’s SPM, for removing the words of doubt in an earlier draft that might have caused policy makers to consider the trade-offs, to weigh — as China has — the calculated risk of future disaster against the undeniable and unspeakable human cost today.
If there is no warming for four more years, or if warming resumes but is anemic, nowhere near the feverish pace of the models, or if the science improves and models are built that can hindcast the last 17 years (at the expense of most of their prediction of future warming) and the catastrophic bit alone disappears from the hypothesis, then CAGW will have indirectly contributed to the deaths of more human beings than Adolph Hitler. A number of climate scientists and environmental activists are finally coming to realize this and are starting to push for nuclear power as the lesser of the three evils. But China has done the math. Coal now, thorium later. The lives saved now are real lives, not subject to any uncertainty at all. Lives saved in the future are “expectation value” — subject to a dizzying tower of probabilities and assumptions, the most important of which is CAGW is a true hypothesis.
One that is currently not particularly well supported by the actual data, however fervently the theories and computations seem to predict it, or project it, or whatever you want to call it when people make certain assertions about the future based on a hypothesis that isn’t in terribly good agreement with the data. Prophecy it.
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[The mods regret your lost time, and our lost opportunity to read your thoughts, and our readers lost ability to keep them visible. ]
**** I am NOT an AGW believer, nor am I anti-CO2. I am, however, pragmatic, and opposed to the generation of radioactive and toxic waste streams. I am also opposed to technologies that leave the US reliant on foreign commodities, namely Uranium and Oil. We came out on the short stick for Uranium, and even with all the new exploration, our US oil is running out.
Dear Karl,
I too am a pragmatist, and agree with most of what you say. The US is sitting on cone-head quantities of thorium, however, and we could burn Thorium alone for well over 10,000 years at 100% of our total energy consumption using domestic sources. NC alone has large thorium resources (mixed as usual with equally valuable rare-earths) and it is far from being the best resource nationally. India is actively developing thorium, as is China, because both countries have large thorium resources. In China it is being produced and stockpiled as a side effect of their rare-earth mining; in the US we are NOT mining our OWN rare earths because thorium is viewed as toxic waste instead of a potential fuel.
Fusion, too is a potential future energy resource that would simply end all of the discussion. Humanity will evolve into something else before the available fusion energy is even partially depleted. Sadly, nobody sane is holding their breath waiting for it at this point, but still, a breakthrough could happen tomorrow, or in ten years, or in twenty years. There is a finite probability that in fifty years basically all of the world’s energy is produced by fusion as older resources age out and are not cost-effective to replace any other way.
As a pragmatist, you should agree with Crispin of Waterloo that the bulk of the “problem” associated with burning coal comes not from the burning of coal per se but from burning it badly. You should also be able to understand China’s motivations in all of this — even cheap coal-burning electrical plants that burn the coal comparatively badly, by displacing the even more inefficient burning of coal in open bucket stoves, the burning of wood, charcoal (as “preburned wood”), or other biomass fuels such as dung or crop waste, actually reduces mortality and morbidity. I provided a document that reviews the direct evidence for this assertion, and I trust that you now agree that it is true.
Of course, it is not that much more expensive to equip coal burning plants so that they do not pollute so much, as long as one does not count carbon dioxide itself as “pollution”. This is the fundamental issue connecting coal burning plants with CAGW. If the CAGW hypothesis is true, then CO_2 is a pollutant in the sense that it has a potentially significant, although very long time displaced, impact on public heath. If it is not true it changes everything regarding the utility of building new coal burning plants clean or dirty or continuing to operate and burn coal in old coal burning plants worldwide.
Regulating pollution per se is clearly desirable, although it is always going to be a cost-benefit problem and not one where a monolithic solution is optimal. Regulating pollution at the expense of eliminating civilization is not optimal, and applying that sort of an axiom thoughtlessly leads one to conclude that e.g. genocide is desirable because humans produce pollution on a per capita basis. Yes, this is an extreme case, but there are indeed extreme environmentalists who secretly wish for a plague that wipes out 2/3 of the human species (but not, of course, themselves).
I trust that — whether or not you agree with the findings of WHO and the researchers that are referenced in the review of the mortality and morbidity associated with biomass burning presented above and by others, where easily 1/3 of the 7 billion people alive today use biofuels with all of their risks and inefficiencies daily where they could be using kerosene (in well adjusted stoves), natural gas, or electricity generated even in dirty coal plants at a lower overall impact in mortality and morbidity even before adding in additional energy poverty related deaths and morbidity — you agree that the point I made in the top article was not indefensible or false, but rather is what is supported by the mainstream epidemiology of biomass energy use among the 1/3 of the world’s poorest people, precisely as I asserted it. I could be wrong, in other words, but I’m not making stuff up, and for me to be wrong you really need to be challenging a large body of published research.
For the record, I lived in the midst of this sort of energy poverty while growing up, and I’ve revisited it within the last fifteen years, and if anything things have gotten worse with growing populations. It is quite reasonable to insist on building coal burning plants that are as clean as possible ignoring CO_2 as a “pollutant”, but because of efficiencies, it quite possibly reduces net CO_2 production when one displaces the use of biofuels and coal burned in every household in open grates, open clay buckets, simple ground fires built in pits, in fireplaces, in open brickwork stoves, and all of the other ways humans burn stuff to cook food or heat their homes when electricity, LPG, natural gas, kerosene (in a well-adjusted stove), or other comparatively smokeless forms of domestic energy are not available.
So it all comes down to CAGW. If it is a true hypothesis, then CO_2 is indeed a catastrophic pollutant. If not, then it is insufficient cause to eschew the use of coal to generate electricity and thereby displace the less efficient use of coal and biomass to generate energy. It is comparatively cheap to clean up coal generated electricity and almost impossible to clean up biomass-consuming energy sources (although yes, distributing efficient stoves one at a time to every household can have some impact).
Regarding the other trade-offs a pragmatist should look over, e.g. the cost-benefit of photovoltaics — in general I agree with your analysis as to the long term. In the short term, photovoltaics and alternative resources such as wind suffer heavily from technological weaknesses, some of which are quite fundamental and not “just engineering”. For example, our inability to store it (and hence our absolute requirement to run fossil fuel resources in parallel with them, limiting their utility if one takes CO_2 off of the table as a nonlinear future cost). Questions about the practical lifetime of solar cells — up until recently I would have said that this wasn’t an issue, but in actual fact solar cells built in China and sold at low cost have proven to be of low quality and prematurely fail at an alarming rate. And first and foremost, the simple fact that they are still absolutely marginal investments when compared to existing well-proven energy resources. In most of the US, they are barely break even to win a bit, and then only if the cells last 20+ years at 90%+ capacity as they are supposed to. Only in e.g. the Southwest are they solidly profitable. Electricity is not particularly transportable over very long distances (technology again) so we cannot just turn Arizona into the power supply of the entire US and Canada, not without new technology that I as a physicist am quite unaware of.
Pragmatically then, trying to force a subsidized conversion over to PV solar (for example) is premature. The technology is close to being ready, close enough to be marginally profitable in some locations, but it is sadly lacking in many dimensions from being capable of actually replacing fossil fuels or significantly ameliorating their use, and they aren’t a good investment at this time without the extra “benefit” associated with displacing CO_2. If there is no benefit to displacing CO_2 per se, we would be better off waiting a decade or two for the cost of PV cells to drop by another factor of 2 to 4 and make the cost-benefit of PV electricity a no brainer, to give time for truly efficient and cost effective large-scale energy storage technologies to be developed and prototyped.
I personally think that is precisely why we shouldn’t worry about CAGW even if CO_2 is a threat. In thirty years I think that we’ll be converting to solar worldwide not to save the world, but to save money. So why should we spend money converting at a loss right now, especially when we’re spending human lives as well?
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I agree that to provide cheap plentiful energy to the poor is desirable.
However, you seem to be ignoring many things
Water. Thermal power stations require vast amounts of water. (see Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory, Power Plant-Water R&D Program)
Water Consumption Gallons/Megawatt hour electric produced
Nuclear 720
Subcritical Pulverized Coal 520
Supercritical Pulverized Coal 450
Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle 310
Natural Gas Combined Cycle 190
You therefore site them on the coast or river. Coast means long distribution = large cost. The discharge in the river in some cases may reach unacceptable temperatures necessitating switch off. (happened in France and US).
The above problems are true of any thermal station a local personal nuclear reactor of any design is still going to produce vast amounts of waste heat to disburse.
Infrastructure: For economy thermal stations are large and so supply many distant communities. Who pays for the wiring. They require a good transport system to source of coal/gas/radioactives. This sort of infrastructure will not usually be available where the stations are required.
Waste: thermal stations (not gas obviously) produce waste. In the long term this needs addressing where will you store spent radioactives? where will the spoil heaps (mining and ash)for coal go?
Cost: Cooking requires vast amounts of energy – 2kWH per meal(?) this will cost at least £0.07 This is a lot to find on a daily basis. Refrigeration in hot climates would be a great improvement allowing food to be preserved. But who will pay for the ‘fridges?
safety: Who will mind your decommissioned power station for 50years as they cool off. Who will prevent illegal access to the distribution network? Who will repair ailing stations?
Security of network: Who will fund the multiple redundancy of the power grids like those in western countries?
Solar or wind are local to use – no grid no wires. waste generation in use is negligible. when they break they can be allowed to rot without risk to life. In use, correctly sited they are safe.
solar is guaranteed for a few hours every day, wind may be intermittent, so cook when the sun shines, or the wind blows. If you have a fridge then intermittent can work! If you have a laptop intermittent can work! Lights at night can be provided by rechargeable batteries. A 11 watt led bulb now produces the equivalent of 75 watts of incandescent (1000 lumens)
So rural poor may not have a continuous power supply but at least some of the smoke can be limited. The WHO also has designs in place for efficient, less smoky fuel burners for cooking (in the doc you referenced)
@rgb
I agree that to provide cheap plentiful energy to the poor is desirable.
However, you seem to be ignoring many things
Water. Thermal power stations require vast amounts of water. (see Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory, Power Plant-Water R&D Program)
Water Consumption Gallons/Megawatt hour electric produced
Nuclear 720
Subcritical Pulverized Coal 520
Supercritical Pulverized Coal 450
Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle 310
Natural Gas Combined Cycle 190
You therefore site them on the coast or river. Coast means long distribution = large cost. The discharge in the river in some cases may reach unacceptable temperatures necessitating switch off. (happened in France and US).
The above problems are true of any thermal station a local personal nuclear reactor of any design is still going to produce vast amounts of waste heat to disburse.
Infrastructure: For economy thermal stations are large and so supply many distant communities. Who pays for the wiring. They require a good transport system to source of coal/gas/radioactives. This sort of infrastructure will not usually be available where the stations are required.
Waste: thermal stations (not gas obviously) produce waste. In the long term this needs addressing where will you store spent radioactives? where will the spoil heaps (mining and ash)for coal go?
Cost: Cooking requires vast amounts of energy – 2kWH per meal(?) this will cost at least £0.07 This is a lot to find on a daily basis. Refrigeration in hot climates would be a great improvement allowing food to be preserved. But who will pay for the ‘fridges?
safety: Who will mind your decommissioned power station for 50years as they cool off. Who will prevent illegal access to the distribution network? Who will repair ailing stations?
Security of network: Who will fund the multiple redundancy of the power grids like those in western countries?
Solar or wind are local to use – no grid no wires. waste generation in use is negligible. when they break they can be allowed to rot without risk to life. In use, correctly sited they are safe.
solar is guaranteed for a few hours every day, wind may be intermittent, so cook when the sun shines, or the wind blows. If you have a fridge then intermittent can work! If you have a laptop intermittent can work! Lights at night can be provided by rechargeable batteries. A 11 watt led bulb now produces the equivalent of 75 watts of incandescent (1000 lumens)
So rural poor may not have a continuous power supply but at least some of the smoke can be limited. The WHO also has designs in place for efficient, less smoky fuel burners for cooking (in the doc you referenced)
Absolutely not. It is a preferred point of view sticky-taped on a much more cautious statement.
“At least” is conditional. So do they give a more positive estimate? Yes, in the last line of the conclusions.
17 years is a minimum, but not definitive. 20 – 30+ years is “required”.
One sentence from a study energises such a narrow focus? Actually ‘skeptical’ analysis of the paper woud be preferable to wildly over-interpreting this cherry-picked sentence. Hello talking point. Goodbye reading for comprehension.
So rural poor may not have a continuous power supply but at least some of the smoke can be limited. The WHO also has designs in place for efficient, less smoky fuel burners for cooking (in the doc you referenced)
No arguments, but this is a short term band-aid, not a long term solution. I don’t even have any objection to PV solar for a lot of the rural poor — in some places (the very places where there are water issues, often) it may be the best possible solution. It’s just that solving the real, immediate problem of world poverty and solving the problem of hypothetical, future CAGW are without question in conflict — resources and policies devoted to the latter often come at the expense of the former or often make it far worse.
Until there is better agreement between GCMs and reality, I think we have the priorities of human civilization precisely backwards.
rgb
barry says:
November 7, 2013 at 9:27 am
“Is that reasonably accurate interpretation?
Absolutely not. It is a preferred point of view sticky-taped on a much more cautious statement.”
I must say I did not like the wording either since it made little sense to me as stated. Note Brian’s comment above at the following which I really liked:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/04/rss-reaches-santers-17-years/#comment-1465713
NOAA made a certain statement with regards to 15 years with some conditions. For me, the only valid interpretation of Santer’s statement was that he extended NOAA’s time from 15 years to 17 years. But if the other interpretation of Santer’s is correct, that it takes at least 17 years to identify human effects, then NOAA’s condition can not possibly be met. At least that is how I see it.