Peak Oil Alarm, Energy Crisis, Renewable Hype: A 100 Year Old Scare
Most people today know Arrhenius as the ‘father of global warming’ due to his 1896 publication of On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground which became the cornerstone work for global warming theory today. Robert Rhode, who setup the Global Warming Art website (and also BEST), made the paper available online wrote of it:
Arrhenius’s paper is the first to quantify the contribution of carbon dioxide to the greenhouse effect (Sections I-IV) and to speculate about whether variations in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide have contributed to long-term variations in climate (Section V). Throughout this paper, Arrhenius refers to carbon dioxide as “carbonic acid” in accordance with the convention at the time he was writing.Contrary to some misunderstandings, Arrhenius does not explicitly suggest in this paper that the burning of fossil fuels will cause global warming, though it is clear that he is aware that fossil fuels are a potentially significant source of carbon dioxide (page 270), and he does explicitly suggest this outcome in later work.
It was surprising to encounter a book by Svante Arrhenius published in 1919 which contains many very current-sounding ideas on energy topics. Although Svante Arrhenius showed great foresight in many of his comments on energy, he was wrong in some of his most important predictions: America will run out of oil by 1953 at the latest. Coal reserves will be depleted in England within 50 years and in America within 150 years. –Charles G. Moseley, Journal of Chemical Education 55(3) 1978
That so great a scientist as Svante Arrhenius could badly overestimate the energy problems of his time suggests that we should perhaps place more emphasis on using technology to solve our energy problems and less emphasis on bemoaning the difficulty of the problem. –Charles G. Moseley, Journal of Chemical Education 55(3) 1978
Although Svante Arrhenius showed great foresight in many of his comments on energy in 1919, he was wrong in some of his most important predictions: America will run out of oil by 1953 at the latest. Coal reserves will be depleted in England within 50 years and in America within 150 years.
For most of us the concept of an energy crisis dates primarily from the oil embargo established by the Arab nations against many of the western nations in 1973. Who can forget the long lines at service stations and the increases in gasoline and chemical prices which soon resulted? Thus, it was surprising to the author to encounter a book by Svante Arrhenius (famous for his theory of ionization of acids, bases, and salts in water) published in 1919 (and in 1925 in English translation[1]) which contains many very current-sounding ideas on energy topics. He mentions the following energy-related problems:
* Some oil fields are already depleted, and known petroleum reserves will last only a short time.
* Known coal reserves will last longer but are certainly finite.
* Burning large amounts of fossil fuels will increase the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere and possibly cause adverse climate changes.
* No really adequate battery exists for use in electric vehicles or for storing energy derived from the sun, wind , or water.
The book also contains the following proposals to help solve the predicted energy crisis:
* Institute stringent conservation programs to reduce consumption of coal and oil.
* Replace all lights which utilize petroleum products with electric lights.
* Push development of water, wind, and solar energy sources.
* Develop more efficient fossil fuel powered engines.
* Utilize alcohol derived from plant sources as a fuel to replace oil and coal.
* Develop more efficient methods to transport coal and utilize its energy content.
* Study atomic energy for possible future use.
Although Arrhenius obviously showed great foresight in many of his comments on energy, he was far from correct in some of his most important predictions. Examples are: America will run out of oil by 1953 at the latest. Coal reserves will be depleted in England within 50 years and in America within 150 years.
There are at least two lessons which can be derived from this very interesting book. One is that our energy problems are not really new (although they may, of course, be more acute at some times than at others). Providing sufficient reasonably priced energy for our needs has always been a challenge and will likely continue to be so. Another lesson is that it is very easy to underestimate our ability to solve or at least alleviate our energy problems. That so great a scientist as Svante Arrhenius could badly overestimate the energy problems of his time suggests that we should perhaps place more emphasis on using technology to solve our energy problems and less emphasis on bemoaning the difficulty of the problem.
Footnote 1: Arrhenius, Svante A., and Leonard, Clifford S. (Translator), Chemistry in Modern Life, D. Van Nostrand Company, New York, 1925.
From: Charles G. Moseley, Journal of Chemical Education, 55(3) 1978
– See more at: http://www.thegwpf.com/svante-arrhenius-an-early-prophet-of-the-energy-crisis/#sthash.KAB4gnBe.dpuf
In addition to being wrong about energy predictions, it should also be noted that there is this entry in Wikipedia that highlights another great failing of Arrhenius:
Svante Arrhenius was one of several leading Swedish scientists actively engaged in the process leading to the creation in 1922 of The State Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala, Sweden, which had originally been proposed as a Nobel Institute. Arrhenius was a member of the institute’s board, as he had been in The Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene (Eugenics), founded in 1909.
Ouch – global warming, energy crisis, AND Eugenics?
Although Svante Arrhenius showed great foresight in many of his comments on energy in 1919, he was wrong in some of his most important predictions: America will run out of oil by 1953 at the latest. Coal reserves will be depleted in England within 50 years and in America within 150 years.
Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) was the first peak oil alarmist and the first scientist to calculate how changes in the levels of atmospheric CO2 could alter the surface temperature due to the greenhouse effect. Photo Wikipedia
For most of us the concept of an energy crisis dates primarily from the oil embargo established by the Arab nations against many of the western nations in 1973. Who can forget the long lines at service stations and the increases in gasoline and chemical prices which soon resulted? Thus, it was surprising to the author to encounter a book by Svante Arrhenius (famous for his theory of ionization of acids, bases, and salts in water) published in 1919 (and in 1925 in English translation[1]) which contains many very current-sounding ideas on energy topics. He mentions the following energy-related problems:
* Some oil fields are already depleted, and known petroleum reserves will last only a short time.
* Known coal reserves will last longer but are certainly finite.
* Burning large amounts of fossil fuels will increase the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere and possibly cause adverse climate changes.
* No really adequate battery exists for use in electric vehicles or for storing energy derived from the sun, wind , or water.
The book also contains the following proposals to help solve the predicted energy crisis:
* Institute stringent conservation programs to reduce consumption of coal and oil.
* Replace all lights which utilize petroleum products with electric lights.
* Push development of water, wind, and solar energy sources.
* Develop more efficient fossil fuel powered engines.
* Utilize alcohol derived from plant sources as a fuel to replace oil and coal.
* Develop more efficient methods to transport coal and utilize its energy content.
* Study atomic energy for possible future use.
Although Arrhenius obviously showed great foresight in many of his comments on energy, he was far from correct in some of his most important predictions. Examples are: America will run out of oil by 1953 at the latest. Coal reserves will be depleted in England within 50 years and in America within 150 years.
There are at least two lessons which can be derived from this very interesting book. One is that our energy problems are not really new (although they may, of course, be more acute at some times than at others). Providing sufficient reasonably priced energy for our needs has always been a challenge and will likely continue to be so. Another lesson is that it is very easy to underestimate our ability to solve or at least alleviate our energy problems. That so great a scientist as Svante Arrhenius could badly overestimate the energy problems of his time suggests that we should perhaps place more emphasis on using technology to solve our energy problems and less emphasis on bemoaning the difficulty of the problem.
Footnote 1: Arrhenius, Svante A., and Leonard, Clifford S. (Translator), Chemistry in Modern Life, D. Van Nostrand Company, New York, 1925.
From: Charles G. Moseley, Journal of Chemical Education, 55(3) 1978
– See more at: http://www.thegwpf.com/svante-arrhenius-an-early-prophet-of-the-energy-crisis/#sthash.KAB4gnBe.dpuf
Arrhenius also predicted that the rise in global temperature would be a positive thing, resulting in a more equable climate that would produce greater crop yields and help mitigate global hunger.
(Another wasted effort by a banned sockpuppet. Comment DELETED. -mod)
icouldnthelpit, the FAO reported that there was global record cereal production in 2014. Varous journals have reported the greening biosphere since the 1980s. Our climate today is better than the ones seen during various Holocene climate extremes. Now go eat your lunch.
I am surprised to see one of the things he got wrong not being mentioned in the article. It was the forcing CO2 would create. When his first paper was published, it was immediately replied to with the criticism that he got the math wrong. Warming was overestimated by a factor of ‘several’, shall I say.
Sound familiar?
And what was the outcome? He published a correction several years later, which no one talks about when pumping global warming alarm, agreeing that the earlier forcing value was incorrect. It was ‘there’, but much smaller than he first said.
In short, he would be the first to admit CAGW is the incorrect response to increasing CO2. If it is true that he believed it would be beneficial, he was right on two counts: CO2 is good for everyone, and it doesn’t have much forcing potential – just ‘some’. Maybe ‘alarmingly little’.
It is noteworthy that no one bothers to remember the name of the guy who corrected Arrhenius and who correctly calculated the forcing value of CO2. If the correct value has been known since before 1900, why are there still people foolish enough to believe that it can boil the oceans, melt all the glaciers, dry up the Mekong River and several hundred other things? Isn’t 115 years enough to learn what Arrhenius learned from the peer review process? Don’t alarmists believe in peer review any more? It worked then. Why not now?
@Crispin, the Global Warmists seem to have a very short and selective memory.
Even after establishing the correct value for experimental CO2 forcing, the Warmists continued making laughably wrong predictions. In 1965 they predicted that by the year 2000 CO2 would rise 25% (pretty accurate), which would raise global temperatures by 7 degrees and cause sea levels to rise 10 feet (OOOPS), putting NYC and DC underwater (if only…).
Today’s crop of warmists still cite the LONG HISTORY of the science as if that is a good thing. In fact it is a liability, because they can’t claim that Arrhenius or those following after had established a sure foundation for modern Global Warming science when they used that same information to completely whiff on predictions.
If anything, the long history has further demonstrated exactly why people should be highly skeptical of the predictions being made by today’s Warmists.
Icouldnthelpit
second not first your slipping, sleep at your computer?
But there is no empirical data that proves him correct in this. He was a good chemist but his physics not as much.
A true Progressive. No wonder the Prog’s and liberals love the Global Warming meme… it was started by another true believer in the oligarchy.
He found the link between equilibrium and the kinetics of a reaction.
Clever bloke.
He may not have got everything right but don’t doubt the genius.
M
I can’t get past the Eugenics thing. Good theory doesn’t equal good person I guess. Most good scientist are only right a small percentage of the time on the science anyway and like most people even less on the real life stuff.
I agree with you though just because he made bad predictions on this and a few other things doesn’t mean everything he did was wrong. The problem with the CAGW people today is not that they believe in what they believe its that they won’t tolerate any dissent and vilify those that disagree with them and that they are trying to use the power of the government to further agenda.
“Ouch – global warming, energy crisis, AND Eugenics?”
——————————————————–
I think that’s true for most of Obama’s administration.
Certainly Holdren.
+1
It’s a coin toss for the next US presidential election. We could get an even more hysterical “climate change” campaign or they might drop the subject entirely. This is politics, after all.
Or, as in the last presidential election, they may keep quiet about it till after they’ve won, then announce they have a clear mandate to deindustrialize the US.
Yes indeed he was a strong supporter of Eugenics. So too was Churchill and also supported Britains’ 1912 Feeble Minded Persons act, which fortunately, didn’t pass into law.
Eugenics was the crisis / global scientific consensus of its time. People who criticised the shoddy science behind Eugenics catastrophist theories were shouted down and called “reactionaries” (the old word for “denier”).
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/essay-stateoffear-whypoliticizedscienceisdangerous.html
As you can tell by the denizens of the Houses of Parliament
Racial biology-Why didnt he study DNA?
DNA wasn’t discovered until Watson and Crick in 1953
wrong. That was the _structure_ of DNA.
NA (nucleic acid) was known to Friedrich Miescher in 1869.
Ribose and Deoxyribose were discovered by Phoebus Levene by 1929. He knew the make-up of nucleotides but dismissed them as a code for heredity.
Funny how Paulings contribution is never mentioned. I think he predicted the Helix configuration.Watson and Crick used Paulings work to prove the double helix. Pauling first predicted a triple helix. His work made it possible. Up there with Einstein, actually beyond Einstein IMO. They were buddies
DNA was discovered long before those two. They were able to work out the structure of the molecule, thanks to the X-ray crystallography images of Rosalind Franklin, beating out Linus Pauling.
I think his model was a triple helix.
Course, they thought he was a commie, too.
There’s a lot of back-story to Watson and Crick, as with everything.
Watson and Crick basically sandbagged Franklin, used her work without permission, or at least without proper attribution. The additional insult to injury was that by the time the Nobel prize was awarded, she had died and you can’t (or couldn’t then) get the award posthumously.
Sometime ago, there was an article concerning rice. A scientist found a wild strain that was not previously known. This was inbreed for several generation to reduce it to a single strain. The pure strain was then cross-breed with other single strains to produce desirable characteristics. I was under the impression that this was standard practice long before DNA was known. So somehow plant and animal breeders knew about hybridization, while the eugenics people seem to concentrating on just inbreeding?
Not really inbreeding, just preventing undesirables from breeding.
Mark
the royal families of europe are the end product of inbreeding.
Now that we know there seems to be unlimited reserves of natural gas, thanks to Siluria Technologies, the cheap process of converting natural gas to ethylene, and then producing from ethylene a range of liquids such as gasoline and Jet A fuel, the world will not have to worry about future energy needs for centuries to come.
Researchers are working on bio-diesel / jet fuel from algae as well as pilot exploration and extraction of methane hydrates. I vaguely recall an old technology where you can get oil from coal.
Bio-diesel
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/algae-biodiesel.htm
http://www.oilgae.com/algae/oil/biod/biod.html
Methane hydrates
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/12/25/business/economy-business/methane-hydrate-extracted-sea-japan/
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8925cbb4-7157-11e3-8f92-00144feabdc0.html
They’ve been doing the oil from coal thing in South Africa since the 1950’s … SASOL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasol
The 100th anniversary of coal to hydrocarbons just passed us in 2013. Bergius process, developed in 1913.
CORRECTION:
“The 100th anniversary of coal to liquid hydrocarbons just passed us in 2013….”
“Ouch – global warming, energy crisis, AND Eugenics”
Of course: Before the Second World War Eugenics was simply a well accepted part of the scientific mainstream which is called currently “consensus” , as today CAGW…
I don’t think all three ever end, just take a pause now and then. It’s a big Q that I have a real problem. If your a sensitive person, pass over this comment.
http://youtu.be/xU4GdHLUHwU
$2.3 trillion was one third of our national debt the day Rumsfeld made this announcement. The very next day the accounting offices at the Pentagon were destroyed… and that subject, uhh nevermind
In his paper, Arrhenius mentions the average temperature of the Earth’s surface as 15 C. This was in 1896. One hundred nineteen years later the average is still right there. This tells us all we need to know about temperature records back then and now. He calculated over 3 C of warming for an increase of 50% in atmospheric “Carbonic Acid,” which increase has already occurred from 1896, but no increase in temperature is discernable with any degree of accuracy.
I repeat my request to those of you more sophisticated than I regarding radiative physics: if an increase in CO2 makes the TOA higher and thus colder, how can this radiating gas many miles above the surface heat the surface assuming that all the radiation is thermalized mid-troposphere? After all, energy in “the System” does not concern us, only surface temperatures.
“TOA higher and thus colder”? Rather, colder thus lower, noticeably reducing satellite drag at a given altitude. But cooling the atmosphere generally? Probably so, at least neutralizing surface radiation. –AGF
“…noticeably reducing satellite drag at a given altitude.”
How noticeable at what altitude?
How noticable for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit? (Radius of 42,164 km = 26,199 mi)
Michael, According to the Ideal Gas Law, warming the atmosphere, expands the atmosphere. This is where the lapse rate comes from. The bottom of the atmosphere gets warmer and the top gets colder. That should answer your question.
But that answer neglects evaporation, moist air is less dense than dry air. Evaporation expands and cools the atmosphere without warming it.
An atmosphere with water vapor is larger and colder than one without.
It is evaporation and water vapor that is the dominant variable in the atmosphere. CO2 effects are less than a rounding error.
“if an increase in CO2 makes the TOA higher and thus colder, how can this radiating gas many miles above the surface heat the surface assuming that all the radiation is thermalized mid-troposphere? After all, energy in “the System” does not concern us, only surface temperatures.”
C02 raises the height at which the earth radiates to space. This lowers the rate of loss to space.
The system compensates to maintain energy balance. ie the surface warms.
Magical thinking Mosher. Radiating gas many miles above the surface heats the surface? I suspect you do not know the meaning of the word “thermalization,” and you are merely quoting the words of others you find credible. I find no one credible unless the physics is clear. As Einstein said, “If you cannot explain what you are doing to a 12-year-old you do not know what you are doing.”
70% of the surface is water, which will be cooled by a slight increase in infrared which only excites the surface molecules enough for them to evaporate. And ocean surfaces will be cooled due to increase in evaporation caused by a warm wind that can carry more water vapor. So 70% of the surface will cool. Radiated latent heat of condensation and fusion does not follow S-B. The amount of latent heat radiated is independent of the ‘height’
Yet you simplistically say “the surface warms”?
I’m thinking you mean to say “CO2 raises the height at which the ATMOSPHERE radiates to space.”
Excuse me Mr. Einstein, if you cannot explain what you are doing to that 12 year old child, I suggest that you stop doing it.
Silly non-sense, if this was true there would be no pause in the warming as the energy would have to be trapped below this elevated layer and of necessity warm the lower atmosphere. As the height of the radiating layer would rise so would the surface area of the layer increasing its ability to radiate.
Mosh
If TOA is higher then The surface area of the atmospheric ‘sphere’ increases, thereby increasing radiation to space.
Michael Moon,
No. The Sun heats the surface, IR active species in the atmosphere reduce the rate of dissipation back out to space. No magic, just well-known and long-understood first principles of thermodynamic physics. Every time you put on a jacket when you feel cold, the result is a demonstration of the same principle.
Brandon;
so why don’t you just put on a bubble of CO2 instead of a jacket to stay warm in the winter?
Brandon;
Off course even you know the answer you’d be just as cold as if you had “air” on.
Brandon;
Oh ya and you’d be dead too from lack of oxygen.
Bob Boder,
Off course you’re off point and being silly. But it is an interesting question. I’m inclined to believe that a thin layer of 100% CO2 around my body would actually facilitate even more radiative cooling, but it might do something for sensible, convective and latent heat transfers out. I’ll stick with my second-law violating clothing on cool days, the placebo effect seems to work better.
Ian W,
Dew point temperature is a much reported non-constant in weather reports for good reason. Evaporation response to a change in energy flux at the surface of a body of water is highly dependent on temperature, pressure and specific humidity, rendering a simple and direct 1 to 1 relationship between absorbed IR flux and evaporation rate pretty much untenable.
See also: Most other 30% of the surface is covered with matter that is all but opaque to all of the relevant frequencies. I understand the points being made, but they need to be supported by calculation. References to basic meteorology and physics texts would not be unwelcome.
In the meantime, I can offer this as a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clausius%E2%80%93Clapeyron_relation
Michael Moon,
Had a bloke like this working with me once … wasn’t real smart but wrote down and memorized the “buzz words” we used and then would come into board meeting and spout off, until we set him up with phony words and cliches … made such an ass out of himself in that board meeting that he was quiet for months.
The system compensates to maintain energy balance. ie the surface warms.
============
that is only one way in which the system may compensate. for this to be the only way the system compensates, the earth climate system would need to be constrained to a single degree of freedom, which is a preposterous assumption.
the earths climate system likely has near infinite degrees of freedom, and is not constrained to only warming the surface to compensate. it might instead change the clouds or convection rate, or ocean circulation. It could even cool the average temperature while raising the outgoing energy, simply by changing the distribution of energy between the equator and poles. (because temp is linear and energy is a 4th power, you can get all sort of non-linear complexities.)
Brandon
So your co2 bouble is going to keep you cool when its hot?
You quote silly non sense like its factual and beyond debate even when the impirical evidence is clearly against you. Keep spitting in the wind all you want the result is going to be the same.
Michael Moon, cooling goes along w/heating. The surface cools to space constantly day and night. If something slows down the cooling, the surface won’t cool as much. So the gases don’t “heat” the surface in the way you’re stating, they slow down cooling to space.
I wish people could get this right…..
bob boder,
Doubtful, unless — and only unless — the bubble didn’t interfere with evaporative cooling. Totally implausible system, but one could do some math and ignore the absurdities as a fun exercise if they were the natively curious sort.
lol. Do you not understand that the words “I’m inclined to believe” indicate that what followed were opinions containing a healthy measure of uncertainty? As in: not stated factually in a manner which is above reproach?
Do you not see that you’re the one declaring the mini-debate settled here? Very well, show me your empirical evidence demonstrating that a thin layer — call it 2 cm — of 100% CO2 at 1 bar pressure would not facilitate radiative cooling of my skin at, oh, room temperature … 20°C. Like I said, I do actually think it’s an interesting question.
What better way to cool of on a hot day?
Brandon;
You came up with the experiment you do it and report back your findings.
Bob Boder,
You asked the question first and then told me my answer ran against empirical evidence.
He retracted his earlier estimate. See my note above.
Yep: in 1906, in Vol. 1, No. 2 of the Journal of the Royal Nobel Institute, he recanted and divided his earlier climate-sensitivity estimate by three. He said:
“Likewise, I calculate that a halving or doubling of the CO2 concentration would be equivalent to changes of temperature of –1.5 Cº or +1.6 Cº respectively.”
We’ve all read it before. Here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/23/the-empire-of-the-viscount-strikes-back/#more-108010
Oh, and that probably makes him the last Climate Warmist to ever admit he/she was wrong.
“Likewise, I calculate that a halving or doubling of the CO2 concentration would be equivalent to changes of temperature of –1.5 Cº or +1.6 Cº respectively.”
==================
If one plots the IPCC climb downs on their estimate of CO2 sensitivity, that is about the number they are headed for. hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, simply because no one read the later text. or if they did, they ignored it because they didn’t like the answer.
Thanks Sceptical Sam
The link has a snip of the original paper in German. Great. Taking the missing ingredients into consideration, it seems that dividing Arrhenius’ last range by 2 is probably going to be where the final number settles.
I see the Wikipedia article on Arrhenius mentions his later range, but conveniently not in the main paragraph. It allows the miscalculation to sink in as a truth instead of immediately drawing attention to the error of it. I have crossed pens with a lot of self-directed explorers of climate who were taken in by the presentation.
How much heat does a molecule of CO2 trap?
so its kind of like a paddle bouncing a ping pong back down at the earth? how many ping pongs can one paddle bounce at a time?
I think the real question is; How much heat could a CO2 molecule trap IF a CO2 molecule could trap heat ???
No where in all of engineering do skilled professionals talk about “trapping heat”, it’s a fantasy, an illusion, a dream…. If I could “trap heat” I could be the wealthiest individual in history. Simply park my CO2 tanker truck next to a low cost heat source (like a volcano), trap gobs of heat and drive it over to where it would be useful (say Boston last month, for example). I could make a killing selling heat, heck it worked for Rockefeller…
Unfortunately it is (and always has been) impossible to trap heat. Slow down it’s velocity ? Sure, that’s what thermal insulation does. Delay it’s elapsed travel time through a gaseous system ? Sure, that’s what the “radiative greenhouse effect” does. But trap it ??? Not bloody likely.
Arrhenius, Callendar, Hansen, they have all proposed the same Hypotheses, now with more than a century under our “collective” belts it sure seems like this hypothesis has some “flaws”, like that trivial detail that none of the predictions match the observations when scrutinized with an unbiased eye. Of course if you “project” X will happen within an error margin of plus/minus 100% then your projection cannot fail; heads I win, tails you lose.
I have not personally seen a unicorn, but I still believe they exist, my dear departed grandmother told me so. I have a computer model that says so (simply calculate all of the possible variations of species and a unicorn is really quite common, I project that one out of every ten million species is a unicorn), it’s a valid hypothesis, and now somebody has to disprove it (oh wait, that’s not how the scientific method works is it ??).
Perhaps the radiative properties of a small portion of the gases in the atmosphere have no ability to change the average temperature ???
Cheers, KevinK.
you just killed my game I was playing thanks
Bob, sorry, I like to spank unicorns in my spare time, it’s an unusual fetish. I’m thinking of launching a new blog; “selfies with unicorns”. I bet I could get a million hits in no time….
Well you run with that, just watch out were they try to stick that horn after you spank em!
hope that didn’t put a damper on Your game?
Unicorns only tolerate maidens. They are vicious beasts to everyone else.
I have to check my old monsters and demons D and D manual from when I was in high school to verify that one.
Maybe I’ll look up CAGW in it too and see what it says.
Right. An Electrical Engineer would view CO2 as merely behaving like a time delay circuit.
None.
A molecule of CO2 either absorbs or sheds heat quickly (about 1 one-billionth of a second) becomes the same temperature as the surroundings. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/kinetic/frecol.html#c1
The warmists are fretting over whether the IR radiation of the sun is absorbed by the atmosphere in its way TO the ground, or penetrates all the way to the ground where it is absorbed to become a source of heat for the atmosphere at the very bottom.
Convection will guarantee that heat is constantly being redistributed throughout the atmosphere and the ‘greenhouse effect’, local heating of the air via the absorbtion of IR radiation is only a transient phenomenon in a dynamic atmosphere.
People who post on this site, without the vaguest understanding of Physics, bore me, such as you Mosher, Gates, and Genghis, just stop. I was asking a question to persons who know the fine details of the Radiative Physics of 15-Micron IR from the surface as it attempts to escape to space. Most here don’t including these three.
The question remains, how does the TOA radiating at temps around -70 -80 F ( by the way those are minus signs) heat the surface at 54 to 55 F? And once again, if you do not know the word “Thermalization” and its definition, please just wait until someone who does posts.
I have the BSE in ME from U of M, which involves successfully completing some quite difficult exams in Thermo I and II and labs, Heat Transfer, and Physics I and II and labs. Having done that does not mean that I have not subsequently lost my faculties, but my investors would contend that, not so much, “he seems pretty good to us.”
Mann talks about the “shoulders,” which involves the radiation at slightly more and slightly less than 15 microns, but he does not talk about the Absorption Height, which is probably about two meters and has not changed significantly for many decades.
All right, there is the quiz, discuss “thermalization,” “absorption height” and “shoulders,” maybe we will get somewhere.
No posers, and of course Dr. Brown is no poser…
Michael Moon,
A good place to start is G.S. Callendar, 1937: http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1002%2Fqj.49706427503
3. SKY RADIATION
The downward radiation from the sky, excluding the direct and scattered short wave radiation from the sun, is usually called the “sky radiation.” Valuable papers on this subject have been published by A . Angstrom (1918), W. H. Dines (1927), Simpson (1928), Brunt (1932), and others, and it is not proposed to refer to it at any length here. For normal conditions near the earth’s surface, with a clear sky the downward radiation varies between three and four fifths of that from the surface, the proportion being greatest when the air is warm and carries much water vapour.
That really ought to mean something to someone with graduate level physics — the implications are something I could have figured out from my high school physics course alone.
Thermalization refers to the process by which two bodies interact with each other and attempt to reach thermal equilibrium, thereby increasing entropy. Do I have your permission to speak again, sir?
I don’t believe that the “issue” here is your lack of education — far more that you’ve already decided what is true. I quote you from above:
In his paper, Arrhenius mentions the average temperature of the Earth’s surface as 15 C. This was in 1896. One hundred nineteen years later the average is still right there. This tells us all we need to know about temperature records back then and now. He calculated over 3 C of warming for an increase of 50% in atmospheric “Carbonic Acid,” which increase has already occurred from 1896, but no increase in temperature is discernable with any degree of accuracy.
No amount of theory, no matter how simply explained, will ever convince anyone who has already decided that they’ve been told “all there is to know”, no matter what their age — though I note that 12 year-olds can be especially intransigent. Even more so than folks whose favored reading is titles such as: The Cranky Engineer’s Guide to Debunking Gore-Bull Warming. Chapter 1 covers the “Bbbbut TOA is COLD” red herring in depth.
The question remains, how does the TOA radiating at temps around -70 -80 F ( by the way those are minus signs) heat the surface at 54 to 55 F? And once again, if you do not know the word “Thermalization” and its definition, please just wait until someone who does posts.
Since a 15µm photon emitted from the TOA is exactly the same as one emitted at a much higher temperature, say 350K, this is a bogus argument. Each photon will transfer ~1.3×10^-20 J to the surface, regardless of its source temperature.
Regarding credentials I have taught the courses you talk about to graduate level, and run a lab involving the application of lasers. You’ll find that I am the one here who frequently brings up the subjects of ‘thermalization’ and ‘spectral broadening’.
There is a flaw there. Empirically, CO2 is critical to productivity. Either earth was teetering on the very knife edge of a ecological crash due to low atmospheric CO2 levels (primary production ceases below about 190 ppm CO2), or possibly CO2 levels have not changed as much as “consensus” claims.
That great men (persons rather) can be so wrong about specific topics is nothing more than a cautionary note about the value of skepticism, and why research findings should be subjected to replication. Even the great Feynman made mistakes occasionally (there is a revised edition of his “Lectures” with the hundreds of mistakes corrected).
I dare say theplay on words will come into, well, play! He was correct in saying that coal/oil would be depleted, but that didn’t necessarily mean exhausted! This was some thing I pointed out to middle-grounder on Facebook yesterday whwn he said the oil & gas is running out, & I pointed out that technically it was true, sin as much as I fill my fuel tank with diesel & the moment I switch the engine on, technically, I am running out of fuel. I recall the BBC’s Panorama show saying back in the mid 70s that the oil will start to run out by the early 2000s & all gone by 2025!!! Oh how wrong could they have been!
The big problem with coal/oil reserves is that there always are only a few decades of known reserves, because the industries aren’t looking very hard for more. As the years pass, additional reserves are found and new technologies appear which improve extraction from existing and new locations. If we were going to run out in ten years, there would be great effort to find new sources.
There is probably an Iraq of oil off each coast of the USA where companies are not presently allowed to drill. There is probably 3 times that much under Haiti’s western waters. There is a huge amount under the Gulf of Mexico. Time, technology and demand will find ways to retrieve it safely.
We do things now under water that would have been considered impossible 60 years ago. What will have been invented by 2075?
Good good links:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/13/6995/
Arrhenius’ little known claim about the benefits of CO2
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/23/the-empire-of-the-viscount-strikes-back/
A few apologies for the missing context below, please follow the link:
[I wish more people would refer to differences between temperatures as Cº and not ºC.]
Ric,
Not questioning or trolling, just curious. I’ve got two copies of the Arrhenius 1896 paper (one a photocopy, one an OCR). I’ve seen this reference to Arrhenius and the 5-6 C° temp increase in several places, but have not been able to actually locate it in the paper. Granted, it’s a long paper with lots of tables and maybe I missed it, but I did a search of the OCR copy and couldn’t find it. Just for my information, could you (or anyone else familiar with the paper) indicate where in the paper this is found?
Ric,
My bad, skimmed again and found in Table VII (p. 266). Text of OCR copy is searchable, but tables are still photocopies. Nevermind…
Well, I don’t have a copy, but Wikipedia has a link to Rhode’s http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf and I see on journal page 268:
Note, this is after several pages considering albedo, clouds, snow, and some breathtaking assumptions.
Instead of reaching for a calculator, I recall that log(2) = 0.3010299957. (Once upon a time I thought it would be neat to memorize the logs of primes. If you’re younger than 60 you will not understand. I never got beyond log(2).)
Anyway, log(2.5)/log(2) = log(10/2/2)/log(2) or 0.4/0.3. So a doubling would be 3/4th of 8° to 9° C., or 6 to 6.75. (log(3) == 0.477? Call it 0.5, then 0.5/0.3 and hence 4.8 to 5.4 C. Close enough.)
My guess is that paper is the source, and if people didn’t do what I just did, they could have pulled numbers from Table VII which, for a doubling, has values from 4.9 to 6.1 C°.
Ric,
Thanks for the response. I’m younger than 60 (but not by much) and logs make my head spin. I did, however, find it in Table VII, after my first response.
Phil, if logarithms make your head spin, perhaps you might benefit from this (I think) spectacular little two page essay on the evolution of our number concept, and where logarithms fit in.
Maiming the Mind, by Antal Fekete
Ric Werme
It always scared the daylights out of me what my P.Eng father could do with logs and a slide rule. So the number you have for doubling is the ‘alarmist’ view supported by a paper contradicted by Arrhenius himself a few years later.
Have you found the other one (I recall something like 1915 or earlier) which had a much more modest value? And who corrected his first paper?
@Ric Werme
Having had a rather boring adolescence, at one time I had memorized pi to 50 decimal places. Likely my parents knew then I was doomed, er, destined to become an engineer.
Ric Werme,
That number should look familiar: http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Book_chapters/Rahmstorf_Zedillo_2008.pdf
Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 (which amounts to a forcing of 3.7 W/m^2) would result in 1°C global warming, which is easy to calculate and is undisputed. 14
Oh, they do kid sometimes don’t they. Anyway, just after Arrhenius wrote, ” … –1.5 Cº or +1.6 Cº respectively …”, we find the following text, which really should look familiar [1]: http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/Arrhenius%201906,%20final.pdf
In these calculations, I completely neglected the presence of water vapour emitted into the atmosphere. This acts in two ways: In part, the water vapour reduces the radiation in the same way as does the CO2, whereby the absorption of CO2 comprises a larger fraction of the earth’s radiation than if the water vapour would be removed from the atmosphere. In part, the temperature causes an increase in water vapour emit ted into the atmosphere, on account of an increase in the quantity of CO2, with the subsequent rise in temperature.
Much of which is discussed in the 1896 paper as well. He goes on:
For this disclosure, one could calculate that the corresponding secondary temperature change, on a 50% fluctuation of CO2 in the air, is approximately 1.8 degrees C, such that the total temperature change induced by a decrease in CO2 in the air by 50% is 3.9 degrees (rounded to 4 degrees C).
So he revised down from 6 to 4, not from 6 to 1.
Climate Liars love to quote his 5 to 6°C estimate for a doubling of CO2 in 1896, conveniently “forgetting” that he lowered it 10 years later to 1.6C. Of course, he was wrong about even that.
Some people know to read the whole paper.
Brandon
So you agree with his conclusions?
bob boder,
1.8 direct response is 80% hotter than the modern day estimate of 1.0 degrees per doubling. I don’t have enough information to dispute either figure with any confidence, but I believe that the lower modern figure is more likely on the basis of observation.
Got it, +1 degree K when we hit 800 PPM.
Thanks
bob boder,
1.8 degree direct effect, multiply by 4 to account for feedbacks, according to the 1906 paper:
For this disclosure, one could calculate that the corresponding secondary temperature change, on a 50% fluctuation of CO2 in the air, is approximately 1.8 degrees C, such that the total temperature change induced by a decrease in CO2 in the air by 50% is 3.9 degrees (rounded to 4 degrees C).
Both figures are in the high range of present estimates.
multiply by 4 to account for feedbacks
Dammit, multiply 1.8 by 2 to get to 4.
Brandon;
So its the feedbacks that worry you? I am guessing only the positive ones? Tell me (not someone else’s BS) what specific positive feedbacks are there from a doubling of CO2 and how much will each contribute to your +3.8 or as you say +4 K increase in global temperature?
I will remind you that RGB has said it in many different ways but essentially if the feedbacks were all positive why haven’t we had run away warming before?
Bob Boder,
You guess wrong.
The +4 K is not “my” estimate, they belong to Arrhenius. I don’t pretend to know what the “true” values of those figures are.
His logic on that point is unassailable.
Brandon;
I get it you aren’t saying anything.
If we were ONLY using our own oil and coal I’d agree with him.
Julian Simon has carefully explained why this ‘zero-sum’ view of resources is utterly wrong. He did it in the 1970s/80s. Why does no one read him? I really can’t understand why people still make these stupid predictions, and why they are surprised to find out that they are ALWAYS completely wrong…
Even if we do run out of fossil fuel, we can now see that we can probably run thorium reactors for thousands of years, and synthesize hydrocarbon fuel with “cheap enough” electricity. It will be more expensive than fossil fuel, but we won’t have to revert to everyone using trains.
If we’re running low on fissionables, we can restock from asteroids. By the time we run low on that, we might have to beam power down to those still living on Earth.
People often get easily panicked when they ignore human ingenuity, extrapolate trends onwards and make dire predictions. They have nearly always failed in their predictions.
——-
Some excellent, superb, astoundingly concise and complete articles on why we are not running out of stuff, or energy.
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/grains-and-why-food-will-stay-plentiful/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2014/12/21/unlimiting-resources-basalt-for-a-high-tech-stone-age/
JImbo, I think we are in deep doo-doo if we rely on human ingenuity going forward …
American Millennials are among the world’s least skilled
http://fortune.com/2015/03/10/american-millennials-are-among-the-worlds-least-skilled/
Streetcred, it’s best to think of the issue as the world. Even if Americans are the least skilled it may not matter – China, India, etc. will take up the slack – I hope.
The level of economic thinking among most people is on a par with the physics capability of most people. Not very good. Many things that seem intuitively reasonable, economically, are dead wrong. The zero-sum fallacy is dead wrong for instance, and resource substitution is a concept that makes most people simply frown. The worst is the inability of people to comprehend opportunity costs–that foregoing certain opportunities in favor of lesser ones makes one poorer and is equivalent to a loss.
Worries that increasing mechanization/automation causes unemployment have been a constant lament at least since the Luddites in 1820. There is no indication that people have learned anything at all on this point despite two centuries of being relentlessly wrong.
It is still very common to see “increasing productivity” labeled as “a serious problem”, when in fact increasing productivity is the only thing that explains our current incomes, now at 100 to 200 times subsistence level.
Hear here!
I have read much of Simon’s work. I would suggest that Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist is a broad introduction into the same are of thought and it is written for a lay audience.
there is very little gold on earth, but we never run out of it. what we run out of is cheap gold. expensive gold we have plenty of.
The other weird thing is that a “false prophet ” appears in the New York Times. Just goes to show “The Grey Lady” has always been crazy.
“America will run out of oil by 1953 at the latest. Coal reserves will be depleted in England within 50 years and in America within 150 years.” is there three times. Is that really necessary?
And now it’s 4 times 🙂
I suspect the 3rd instance was a copy & paste that should have been a cut & paste.
“The world is running out of…” seems to be an anxiety common to the human psyche. Perhaps it was evolutionarily advantageous for early humans to note with alarm that supplies of X, Y or Z were depleting rapidly.
During Arrenhius’ time the nitrate crisis was averted through the inventiveness and persistence of Fritz Haber and the engineering prowess of Carl Bosch. Before they were able to develop the (very energy intensive) process for fixing nitrogen from air, there were widespread predictions of famine from the depletion of natural sources of fertilizer. Wars were fought over the guano-rich islands off Peru and Argentina, and fast sailing ships were designed to carry the nitrates around the Cape to Europe. Haber and Bosch won a Nobel prize for their process and were responsible for reliable crop yields that have sustained humans to this point. A wonderful book, “The Alchemy of Air” on their struggle to develop the Haber-Bosch process was written a few years ago by Thomas Hager:
http://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Air-Jewish-Scientific-Discovery-ebook/dp/B001EUGCTS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426086330&sr=1-1&keywords=alchemy+of+air
Hager points out that any new technology also has its dark side: He posits that the Haber-Bosch process allowed Germany to remain in WWI longer than it might have otherwise (nitrates are also important for munitions). He speculates that Hitler’s rise to power might not have happened. It’s a fascinating look at the period, the nature of science and engineering in those years, and the effects of new technology on the human condition.
It’s not widely known that production of fertilizer continues to rely on the Haber-Bosch process, or that it consumes 1-2% of world wide energy production, mostly as natural gas.
Another author who might be of interest on the topic of common and frequent predictions of the depletion of oil and gas reserves is Daniel Yergin. His book, “The Prize” is a thorough chronicle of oil and gas discovery and production through the 20th century, and shows how frequent predictions of “the world is running out…” merely lead to innovations in the industry:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Prize-Quest-Money-Power/dp/0671502484/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1426087633&sr=1-6
Of course mineral or rock oil was initially developed in response to the depleting supplies of whale oil, and from the very beginning, it was widely thought that there wasn’t much to be found. The book doubles as a history of the 20th century, since production of inexpensive energy has been central to most major world events while radically altering so many human lives.
I apologize for the big images–I didn’t expect the links to do that!
“Hager points out that any new technology also has its dark side: He posits that the Haber-Bosch process allowed Germany to remain in WWI longer than it might have otherwise (nitrates are also important for munitions). He speculates that Hitler’s rise to power might not have happened.”
Not only the Haber-Bosch process itself has its dark side, Prof. Fritz Haber himself had an even darker side: He was the “Father of poison gas warfare”. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber#World_War_I
True. Hager goes into that chapter of Haber’s life as well.
Yet more great books to read. Thanks for the tip off.
There is more to the GHE than Arrhenius. No one seems to reference Callendar’s theory probably because it doesn’t support climate change hysteria. It’s all about the climate’s sensitivity to CO2/GHGs. IPCC admits uncertainty in AR5 TS.6 and the pause proves the sensitivity is not as strong as many assume. IPCC AR5 TS.6 also admits they do not understand the water vapor cycle, clouds, precipitation, etc. See “Climate change in 12 minutes.” Plus as I have proposed in my writerblog post as well as Miatello, Miskolczi, and others it is water vapor that controls the climate, CO2/GHGs influence is trivial in comparison.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Stewart_Callendar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
Guy Callendar is well known by those following the history of climate research, wuwt had a story in 2014
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/13/guy-stewart-callendar/
Climate audit and others show the 1938 Callendar papar as the starting point of attempts to quantify and model CO2 additions to the atmosphere. Followed by the 1957 paper of Revelle and Suess.
Actually, Arrhenius wasn’t bad in his 1896 predictions. He was thinking, of course, conventional oil and gas. His coal wasn’t so bad either. Pundits over half a century later were still predicting peak oil pretty much the same dates. He even, without development of nuclear energy was proposing it and the electric light bulb had just been invented. All in all, not bad at all. What strikes me more is that the clime syndicate pretty much borrowed all Arrhenius’s climate stuff including wind and solar “solutions, the average temp of the earth, etc” and he did this free!
Indeed, reading this ancient material tells me that IPCC and its scientists have added absolutely nothing new at a cost of several trillions! What is new? We still have SA’s 1896 estimate of global temp, solutions to the “crisis”. The clime syndicate realized that waiting for the end of coal and oil and gas needed a shortcut: it’s evil so close it down. No wonder the stuff seems antediluvian. No wonder such as the Ship of Fools and other climate adventures go awry. No wonder they make so few and oblique references to SA’s work: they are using his recipe and that wouldn’t look good.
He mistook surface radiant emittance for a real energy flux, when it’s a potential flux in a vacuum to a sink at absolute zero. Mean net real IR flux = (396 W/m^2 – 333 W/m^2) = 63 W/m^2, measured experimentally. The Climate Alchemists add 333 W/m^2 ‘back radiation’ out of ignorance then have to create an imaginary negative 238.5 W/m^2 to offset most of it.
They do this by inventing a discrete OLR emission zone in the upper atmosphere, a travesty of IR physics, emitting Up and Down. The energy balance is then 238.5 + 333 – 238.5 = 333 W/m^2. The extra 94.5 W/m^2 is imaginary. 94% is supposed to go into the oceans, What’s left over, 5.7 W/m^2, is the imaginary warming flux, ~3.5 x net increase in CO2 partial atmospheric emittance since the beginning of the industrial age.
The ‘positive feedback’ is a clever fraud; the use as a hind-casting parameter of ~1/3rd more low level cloud albedo than reality. Because cloud cover is ~2/3rds, this makes it twice as warm in sunlit modelled ocean air as it is cooler under clouds. The extra evaporation from exponential evaporation kinetics creates the imaginary positive feedback yet average temperature is correct. I take my hat off to whoever created that part of the fraud.
The answer is within part 3 of the analysis by Dietze
http://www.john-daly.com/forcing/moderr.htm
The models must use “layers” of atmosphere to manage vertical resolution of IR calcs, but most of the atmosphere thermal energy transfer is bulk convection. They also don’t like to acknowledge that CO2 acts as a net coolant at some altitude. The stratosphere is certainly cooling.
The Dietze page is a good read.
“I take my hat off to whoever created that part of the fraud.”
Hansen ?
“That so great a scientist as Svante Arrhenius”
By what definition? I see a crackpot.
His Acid/Base definition is still somewhat useful in beginner courses of Chemistry before going further to the wider definition by Bronsted. He also discovered the principle of “Activation Energy” for chemical reactions and made some good suggestions regarding the Chemistry of ions. In later years he had a great and broad interest in Geology, Medicine and Astronomy. So, all in all, he was not a bad scientist, but of course, was also influenced by the typical “zeitgeist” ideas of his time, as his keen interest in Eugenics shows…
And aroind the same time urban planners were concerned that by 1950 every major city would have a layer of literal horse shit so thick in the streets, ground floors would become basements.
The prophecies of doom have a tendency to evaporate, or circumstances change, long before they come to pass.
We should have been buried in horse dung, run out of oil & coal, suffered mass starvation, been plunged into ice ages, flooded, drought stricken and burned to a crisp several times over.
When will the doomsday fetishism in science end?
He was also a believer in panspermia. The alien DNA brought life to earth.
Anyone that talks about the absorption and emission of IR radiation without resorting to the Quantum Mechanical equations will by definition get the problem and answer wrong.
There is absolutely no way that Arrhenius understood the energy mechanism enough to make a definitive statement.
That’s why he was able to change his estimate by a factor of three.
His first calculation was based on measurements which included many of the water absorption lines, the second was for CO2 only.
So, do you think he got it right?
Theoretically he was not far off: the absorption from 2xCO2 is good for a warming of ~1°C, but that is before any (positive or negative) feedbacks. That is all and quite benign. Current climate models include a lot of mainly positive feedbacks, which are nowhere observed (water vapor, clouds), while clouds are probably mainly negative feedbacks… Thus the 1°C for 2xCO2 probably is right or a maximum influence…
Ferdinand,
That is exactly how I see it. CO2 has some effect. Most of that effect has already happened. It would require doubling of CO2 from here to raise global T even 1ºC. But that is not likely to happen for several reasons, not the least of which is advancing technology.
Furthermore, a 1º rise would be just about entirely beneficial. More farmland would be opened for cultivation. Less Arctic ice, saving transit fuel. The biosphere would love the added CO2. And warmth is good; cold kills.
That should be enough to end the debate. But when religious folks debate, there’s no changing their minds. They don’t want to go to eco-hell.
DB
Funny but Brandon Gates agrees with you about half way up the page.
lol, no. Looks like you have the same reading comprehension “problem” as DB does.
Brandon;
No that was sarc, I still know your clueless.
Bob Boder,
Because I know the difference between 1 and 4?
Brandon;
No because you don’t say anything you hide behind everyone else and never actually put yourself on the record. There is always a qualification or an outright dodge. I frankly don’t think you know the difference between 1 and 4, because you won’t make the case for either.
Bob Boder says:
Funny but Brandon Gates agrees with you about half way up the page.
No way in hell that Gates would agree with that, whether it’s true or not.
I’d like to know why Gates argues incessantly. Is it his insecurity? Maybe. Is it his narcissism? No doubt. But whatever the reason, he is wrong and skeptics are right. Planet Earth is making that crystal clear. The carbon scare is a hoax.
Mr. Gates has an overwhelming need to argue, to nitpick, to split hairs, and to explain to everyone exactly why he doesn’t agree with scientific skeptics — who are the only honest kind of scientists. For every statement skeptics put forth, there is a “yes, but” response from Gates.
Why does a guy like that waste so much of his limited time on Earth posting on various blogs around the internet, trying to convince people they’re wrong, when as you say there is a lot of agreement? I’ve never changed my view, and it is spelled out above. It is the mainstream view. But Gates cannot admit that. He cannot abide being merely close to agreement. He must nit-pick and argue incessantly. What motivates a guy like that? He is clearly driven. But I notice that he never makes any converts.
My personal objection to the bogus carbon scare is the fact that the country is being milked by shysters in white coats. They have discovered a way to frighten the populace, and thus cash in. There is no scientific truth in their alarmist narrative. None. They argue for one [or a combination of] reasons:
They argue to be self-serving. Those are crooked scientists like Michael Mann, who jumped on the man-made global warming bandwagon and who found that it provides the things they never dreamed of in school: instead of being unsociable nerds, they are now famous. They are constantly sent on vacations to expense-paid holiday venues, where they party hearty. Their pronouncements are carried in the media. And they are cashing in financially at taxpayers’ expense. But it is based on the hoax of man-made global warming and imminent climate catastrophe, not on honest science.
Then there are some alarmists who argue to fill a religious hole that they cannot fill with the organized religions they reject. It is crystal clear to unbiased observers that environmentalism is no different from any other religion. It gives their empty lives meaning. They believe there was a Paradise before humans ruined it with technology [the Fall from grace]. They believe they are sinners, but they can be saved. That’s how Greenpeace and others are able to collect hundreds of millions of their dues dollars every year; those dollars are their indulgences.
Those members are buying their salvation, and their forgiveness. Is there any doubt? It is so obvious to outsiders that we don’t question it. Nor do the religious True Believers question their motives and actions. They don’t question it when their Directors are caught using 1st-class air travel to commute, when they could just as easily take the train. They continue to pay their dues, because it is their salvation. The difference between us is that skeptics are the live-and-let-live types. But eco-alarmists are proselytes, who will convert us by force if necessary. They’re not kidding, either.
Then there are those like Gates, who crave appearing knowledgeable. They have taught their friends and acquaintences the same narrative/belief for so long, that it has become a part of them. They cannot admit that they were ever wrong. They cannot admit that Planet Earth is contradicting their narrative. If they admitted the planet was correct and they were wrong, they would feel foolish and embarrassed. There is no way that they could ever be scientific skeptics, because skeptics change their minds if and when necessary. People like Gates try to appear superior, and he can only do that by disagreeing, and by endlessly nitpicking random points, in order to instruct readers how they must think: they must think like Gates. But of course, he’s nothing special. And as the planet is making clearer every day, he is simply wrong. He just cannot admit it.
The situation is just as Ferdinand explains it above. There is nothing unusual happening with “the climate”. There is no reason at all to be alarmed; we have truly been living in a “Goldilocks” temperature range, which has flutuated within only ≈0.7ºC over a century and a half. That is NOTHING! Just prior to our current Holocene, temperatures varied by TENS of degrees both up and down, within only a decade or two — and without any human interference or emissions.
After more than fifty years of serious investigation, nothing out of the ordinary has been discovered. There is still not one single measurement quantifying AGW. Global temperatures are completely normal; better than ‘normal’: they are as perfect as they have ever been in recorded history. And if temperatures were to rise by a fraction of a degree, so what? That would be entirely beneficial. There is no downside. And every last scary prediction from the alarmist crowd has failed miserably. When someone is always wrong, rational people should disregard thier opinions. Why are the climate alarmists exempt?
The people arguing against the tiny trace gas CO2 are exactly the same kind of people who will not allow their children to be vaccinated. There is no difference, except in their own particular religious belief — which has nothing to do with the Scientific Method in either case. They are demonizing a minuscule trace gas that is essential to all life on earth, and which has been up to twenty times higher in the past, while causing no problems, and with no downside.
The ‘carbon’ scare is completely baseless. Yet we continue to pay tens of $Billions every year, trying to mitigate a non-problem. That major misallocation of resources affects everyone. It is a giant Broken Window fallacy. It hurts the country, and everyone in it.
If any other scam of that magnitude was taking place, the perpetrators would be rightfully sent to the penitentiary for committing fraud. They are looting the country to line their own pockets, and they are doing it by lying. Notice that none of them will even debate any more. Instead, they use alarmist proxies like Gates and the handful of people here promoting the UN’s hoax, while people like Mann hide out in their ivory towers, slinging abuse at scientific skeptics via their Twitter accounts.
With even the UN and the President of the U.S. in on the scam now, the best we can do is fight back using the only weapon we have: the truth. Because that is the one thing the alarmist crowd does not have.
Bob Boder,
I’ve often noticed that people who ask loaded questions and argue by assertion also mistake over-confidence for veracity …
… and qualifiers for evasion. By the way, do you remember writing this?
You quote silly non sense like its factual and beyond debate even when the impirical evidence is clearly against you.
There’s just no pleasing some people, is there.
Wowwwwowwww, is that ever a muddled confused mess of a non sequitur. I can’t recognize the difference between two numerals — which represent two DIFFERENT THINGS in this context — because I won’t “make the case for either”.
The “1” here is 1.6 degrees C per doubling of CO2 acting in isolation of any net feedbacks [1]:
Likewise, I calculate that a halving or doubling of the CO2 concentration would be equivalent to changes of temperature of –1.5 Cº or +1.6 Cº respectively.
The “4” here is 3.9 degrees C per doubling of CO2 after net feedbacks are taken into consideration:
For this disclosure, one could calculate that the corresponding secondary temperature change, on a 50% fluctuation of CO2 in the air, is approximately 1.8 degrees C, such that the total temperature change induced by a decrease in CO2 in the air by 50% is 3.9 degrees (rounded to 4 degrees C).
I don’t have to “pick” one of those or the other — they don’t represent the same parameter.
——————
[1] I should point out — to my complete chagrin, I used 1.8 in a previous post when I should have written 1.6: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/11/father-of-global-warming-svante-arrhenius-an-early-false-prophet-of-the-energy-crisis/#comment-1881412
Brandon;
You prove my point. I said “you “QUOTE” silly non sense”.
Not your non sense everyone else’s non sense, the rest of your reply is just more proof, as I have said before you actually don’t say anything, you just blather on hoping someone will notice.
Bob Boder,
Really. Tell me, is it universally true that quoting someone always renders it nonsense, or just when I do it?
You may wish to take it upon yourself to look up the definition of “circular reasoning” … which I’d otherwise be all too happy to supply, but that would just further “prove” your “point”, so I shan’t.
Brandon;
circular reasoning
Why would I look it up? I have you as the perfect teacher.
Bob Boder,
Having trouble answering the question? Here it is again: Tell me, is it universally true that quoting someone always renders it nonsense, or just when I do it?
Mentioned above by nickreality65 is the work of Callendar.
The title of his article, published in 1938 was “The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature”
He did relied on the work of Arrhenius and quoted him, but I think this is the “Father” when it comes to integrating all the elements with the combustion of fossil fuels.
What is of interest is that the “peer review” with the names of the reviewers is attached in the Discussion section of the article, with the response by Callendar.
Fascinating work, all done by hand and I will let you read his conclusions.
This paper is a classic and has been made available for free here:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.49706427503/pdf
Yet another bashing of scientists and science by WUWT, continuing in its tradition of anti-science nit picking, data distortion, and failure to understand the research. Why would anyone want to listen to them?
Warren:
It is the Carbonari Mafia who are anti-scientist, indeed gleefully destroying the reputation of science through their corrupt trashing of the scientific method.
Skeptics are pro-science.
Yet another call to uncritically accept anything said by any so called climate scientist. You must be telling us that you fully accept and are supportive of Arrhenius’ ideas on racial biology.
Why would anyone want to listen to you?
warrenlb,
I was just over at my favourite moon-landing-hoax, 9-11-inside-job, kem-trayl site and there was no sign of you. If you waste your time here, you’re not going to be able to set everyone straight. I think you’ve done what you can.
Why would you keep coming back to troll?
he’s a paid shill of the Green Blob … his job is to disrupt, mislead, and generally create confusion which is what he does to himself.
is there a problem with nit-picking anti-science?
I would have preferred commentary based on the idea that the science has gotten better than 1896, and there are some references noting Arrhenius’s estimates were pretty good, all things considered.
OTOH, I have no trouble criticizing people who hold up Arrhenius as a god among climatologists, but for the most part I have better things to do….
warrenlb, et al wants sceptics to IGNORE failed predictions just like the failed predictions of climastrology. What’s the point of doing that? When Einstein made predictions people rightfully wanted to test / observe them. What’s wrong with that?
Maybe we should start referring to those failed predictions as “Warmoscopes?”
Warren:
You are so FOS your eyes are brown.
Warren;
does the name Willy Soon mean anything to you? I think I read a couple of posts you wrote about him if I am not mistaken, or was that a different TROLL?
A guy committing fraud is your hero? Sounds right.
warrenlb,
So you know about Michael Mann, eh?
Warren
The only fraud here is you. Every other post you make is self contradicting. I don’t know why someone would waist their timing paying you to Troll you stink at it.
And just to be clear Warren, you are my hero.
As a Darwinian I’m not at all embarrassed to admit that Darwinian science led to the Holocaust. While Charles would have nothing to do with eugenics his son Leonard certainly did: https://huxwelliantimes.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/major-leonard-darwins-forgotten-role-in-the-eugenic-revolution/
That Russell Wallace, Darwin’s fellow traveler, was antisemitic has little bearing on the question since age old antisemitism (of Christian or whatever provenance) per se, was largely irrelevant–antisemitism was more pronounced in France than in Germany, and like poverty, is always with us.
Modern junk historians like to blame the Shoah on Christian antisemitism, e.g., http://www.menorahreview.org/article.aspx?id=1
but holding up Chrysostom as a type is like taking G B Shaw’s advocacy of eugenic gas chambers literally.
Ellis Rivkin set the standard a half century ago, showing that Jewish persecution invariably coincided with economic stress or political turmoil, arguing that developing capitalism was the only effective emancipator of Jewry. Accordingly any successful radical environmental antagonism toward free enterprise would be expected to encourage antisemitism, and we may be already witnessing such a prospect (oy vey). Carbon credits? Romany beware.
At any rate, the universal acceptance of militant eugenics early in the 20th century is probably the closest analog to modern climate hysteria. 97% of the intellectual elite (no poll available) were dupes and propagators of junk science. –AGF
Many scientist and leftist are still elitist and still think the same, they just want to exterminate billions by destroying all the great achievements of the modern free market societies to save mother earth from the evil human scourge. Of course they them selves would be saved as the good stewards who are the only ones that really care about mother earth.
Really no one should be too surprised by the eugenics/social darwinist connection. The Club of Rome was not born in an intellectual vacuum. Wells, Orwell and Huxley all prove that the salons of Europe were alive with “scientific” prediction of the ghastly prospects for humanity. Truly the sad thing is that modern environmentalists generally have no clue that the intellectual progenitors of their world view usually understood clearly the moral and social consequences of “zero growth” and that a sometimes not so friendly dictatorship is really the only practical solution to the resistance to these ideas.
flooding first world countries with 3rd world immigrants doesn’t help the green agenda
Straight edge forecasting of oil depletion gets them every time. The most it shows is the low price for bad predictions, then and now.
Re: WUWT Arrhenius, 3/11/2015
He who controls the vocabulary wins the argument. The public dialog is about Anthropogenic Global Warming, Anthropogenic CO2, and Anthropogenic Greenhouse Effect. To mislead, confuse, and obfuscate, the proponents of the AGW movement abbreviate the phrases to the unarguable and ambiguous forms of global warming, atmospheric CO2, and the misnomer greenhouse effect. We have heat trapped, and equilibrium confused with thermodynamic equilibrium. IPCC converts cloud effects into the greenhouse effect of clouds, leaving cloud albedo on the cutting room floor.
If we don’t use the correct terminology, the attributions among causes and effects, and to honored scientists, are meaningless. According to the original terminology, Guy Callendar is the father of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Before politics ruled the science, climatologists called the greenhouse effect the Callendar Effect.
This problem from imprecise terminology distorts our perspective of Arrhenius on energy. Compare
For most of us the concept of an energy crisis dates primarily from the oil embargo established by the Arab nations against many of the western nations in 1973. Who can forget the long lines at service stations and the increases in gasoline and chemical prices which soon resulted?
with
Providing sufficient reasonably priced energy for our needs has always been a challenge and will likely continue to be so.
The long lines at the service stations were caused by the US running out of 39¢-a-gallon gasoline. Instead of embargoing Opec exports to maintain revenue-neutral trade with the cartel, Richard Nixon foolishly put controls on domestic prices. Later Clinton would compound the problem by approving equally foolish rules for low-sulfur gasoline that could be easily met with existing refineries by raising import standards to a lighter, sweeter, and far more expensive crude, and passing the costs on to consumers.
It’s economic ignorance. Governments burn confiscated ivory and street drugs, driving prices up and encouraging traders to take ever more risk. Instead, governments should cleanse these products, and put them back on the market at cost to destroy the trade they want stopped.
Arrhenius made predictions about the availability of energy at least ignoring, and maybe ignorant of, the trade-offs between price, benefits, and availability. In 1896, crude was $1.18 per 42-gallon barrel. We would have run out by 1953 as he predicted if prices hadn’t risen 1.53%/yr to $2.80 (nominal) a barrel. We’d have run out again long before 2008 if it hadn’t risen 8%/yr to $134 (nominal) a barrel by 2008, a bubble that burst along with the criminal bond-rating bubble. Inflated energy prices had the two-pronged effect of making shale oil and fracking technology practical, cutting prices to about $50 (nominal), and turning the US from an importer to a major supplier of crude (and the world’s leading source of natural gas).
From A Basic History of Acid—From Aristotle to Arnold:
This story and comments about concerns of shortages of energy by brilliant people who could not see a way out of the dilemma reminds me of the story about wheels on luggage. Just think of all the brilliant engineers, physicist ,and inventors that traveled to important meetings for hundreds of years where they rode in wheeled vehicles to discuss world crisis problems. They shurely had aching hand, arms and shoulders. None of them thought of putting wheels on their luggage. No new material technology, no new technology at all was required. Early attempts with small wheels on conventional luggage were not good. The problem was tough but finally Robert Plath, an airline pilot, in 1987 got it right.
Robert Plath: because Roller Blades?
“Hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature’s laboratory!”
–advertisement for “Kier’s Rock Oil,” 1855
“. . . the United States [has] enough petroleum to keep its kerosene lamps burning for only four years . . . ”
–Pennsylvania State Geologist Wrigley, 1874
“. . . although an estimated two-thirds of our reserve is still in the ground, . . . the peak of [U.S.] production will soon be
passed–possibly within three years.”
–David White, Chief Geologist, USGS, 1919
” . . . it is unsafe to rest in the assurance that plenty of petroleum will be found in the future merely because it has been in the past.”
–L. Snider and B. Brooks, AAPG Bulletin, 1936
Rob Dawg,
We should add that if it were not for fossil fuels like petroleum, the world’s whale population wouldn’t merely be decimated. It would be destroyed more thoroughly than the American Bison was. Most whale species would be extict.
And of course the great horse manure crisis was solved — again by fossil fuels.
The misguided people who want to demonize ‘carbon’ have no idea of how much that same CO2-emitting fuel has improved everyone’s life. They are truly know-nothings, who have no idea about the real world, or cost/benefit analysis.
Probably I drift off-topic. I knew a guy who was really so much brighter than me and a lot brighter than anybody I knew. He was able to put a person at ease immediately by a choice of words, everybody wanted to be his friend and he was successful in all his enterprises. He’s gone now. He made me wonder; ” Does there exist in this world humans that are so bright that they are able effortlessly to charm, that can comprehend everything and foresee economic, political and social changes even to manipulate global events ?”
and then I look at for example the behavior of the UK government and I think ” These people do not have a clue what they are doing “
I’m back.
You’re the UK government?????
🙂
My theory is that the UK government is largely staffed with descendents of WWI soldiers who were gassed with mutagenic substances by the Germans.
That DOES explain a lot ! Applicable to the politicians as well.
you knew Bill Buckley?
Not sure why this is suddenly news… I have posted extensively about the fact that global warming is just a modern day version of eugenics. Eugenics has been around far longer then the codified version that was put in place in the 1860-1930s. It can be easily traced back to plato’s time and even before with some effort. Eugenics is a branch of socialism that all socialists believe in, the goal of eugenics has always been the same…. how to fix the problem of humans and thus in turn make socialism successful. By creating “better” humans the utopia of socialism can be achieved.
Eugenics is being used by the UN currently to “control” “population growth”, “resource management” and so forth…. aka the excuse of doom(in this case global warming the popular doom of the day) is used to justify imposing eugenics and socialism. You’ll note the fix for every doom is massive government that restricts freedom aka socialism. The problems are always the same and the “fixes” are always the same…. and the “fixes” have never worked… yet they kept being put forward.
Like all socialists ideas it fixes everything we just need to all embrace it….sure that means some people have to embrace an oven or dirt in a mass grave but think of the children!!!!
“Although [Svante] Arrhenius [obviously] showed great foresight in many of his comments on energy…” = repeated paragraph, with edits.
For those looking for the 1906 Arrhenius paper where he corrected some of his assumptions of his 1896 manuscript, both the original German and a recent English translation can be found at the Friends of Science web site.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/Arrhenius1906.pdf
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/Arrhenius%201906,%20final.pdf
Another Fred from Cannuckistan
Given that in his life Svante August Arrhenius (1859–1927) calculated that increases in atmospheric CO2 from burning fossil fuels would / should cause global warming, it is reasonable to ask what has happened in the Earth Atmospheric System (EAS).
There is a reasonable case for the period of the last ~165 yrs (starting ~1850) that the absolute temperature of the EAS has not unambiguously changed outside of the range of variations seen in absolute EAS temperature for the period prior to ~1850.
It looks to me as reasonable to say that Arrhenius may arguably be correct in identifying a valid component of the EAS behavior, but it also looks reasonable to me that the increase in temps he predicted are not effectively / unambiguously realized by corroborated objective observations of the EAS. Therefore there does not look to be a reasonable case for significant risk of GW from CO2 by burning fossil fuel.
John
Is this some sort of joke by GWPF?
He said “Study atomic energy for possible future use.” in 1926? Nuclear fission wasn’t discovered until the 1930s using cyclotrons. Practical fission developed in the early 40s.
Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity was published in 1905, the General Theory of Relativity in 1915.
John
Eugenics is alive and well it’s just been rebranded. However no matter what genetic manipulation we do to unborn foetuses it’s all for nothing once we make them autistic.
What’s wrong with eugenics, again? Is there anyone here who wants to die of heart disease at 35 or have hemophilia?
That raises the question “Who wants to live to be 347 years old?”
Also, should we incorporate cheetah genes into our off-spring so they can run really fast and break records? You know how excited we get about breaking records.
With chicken genes, we could eat our own omelettes. Sorry!
Usually, we don’t find out what’s wrong with an idea until we try it.
Thanks. Breeding matters. Unfortunately, the time for grownup discussions has not arrived.
tabnumlock asks:
What’s wrong with eugenics, again?
The problem is, as always, government. Can you think of any governments that have used eugenics as a political weapon? I mean, other than Germany, Japan, China, Russia, etc., etc?
In theory it may be OK. But in practice, we need to remember Niccolo Machiavelli’s dictum:
Men are evil unless compelled to be good.
Who is going to compel the U.S. government? Or the UN? Or Russia? Or China?
They are run by men, and the most evil ones seem to always get hold of the levers of power. Do you recall the serious suggestions of politicians and others that the world’s population must be reduced to 500 million? But none of them ever volunteer to lead the way. That leaves you and me. Do you really want to give them that power?
Tab
yes I would rather die at 35 then in utero.
Eric Gisin –
could this be explain the mention of “atomic energy” ?
PDF: SVANTE AR R H E N I U S: Development of the theory of electrolytic dissociation*
Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1903
I have now described how theories of electrical dissociation have developed from our old ideas about atoms and molecules. We sometimes hear the objection raised, that this viewpoint is perhaps not correct, but only a useful, substituting working hypothesis.
This objection is in fact not an objection at all, for we can never be certain that we have found the ultimate truth. Theories of molecules and atoms are sometimes attacked on philosophic grounds. Until a better and more satisfactory theory appears, chemists can continue to use the atomic theory with complete confidence. The position is exactly the same as regards electrolytic dissociation.
This theory has also shown us that atoms or groups of atoms charged with electricity play a highly significant part in the world of chemistry…
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1903/arrhenius-lecture.pdf
Thank goodness he got it wrong lest all your mummys turn to black ooze-
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/if_only_we_still_had_a_carbon_tax/
Another one to add to Swindler’s List-
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming2.html
Bob Boder
Interesting question. Not certain I have the answer, but that’s not the point. CO2 doesn’t really hold energy.
As I understand it: LWIR (long wave infrared radiation) rises from the surface (land & water) which has been warmed by visible and SWIR (short wave) from the sun. CO2 molecules absorb this LWIR energy which shakes/rattles/rotates those molecules and knocks electrons out of orbits. That takes energy.
The molecules re-emit a lower energy: incoming LWIR minus the molecule’s work function = the re-emitted lower energy (back radiation) possibly in the microwave range. (Albert’s Nobel prize photo electric effect.) CO2 can’t re-emit LWIR because that would mean a 100% energy conversion which is not possible.
The climate $cienti$t$ theory is that CO2 molecules are back-radiating LWIR (They can’t re-emit LWIR and have to heat up H20 w/ microwaves) to the surface (lots of contentious discussion about how/whether it really works like this). So with more CO2 there is more energy back radiating, less reaching the ToA (top of atmosphere) upsetting the balance, more heat stays at the earth’s surface/in the atmosphere raising the global temperature, melting sea ice/sheets/caps, raising sea levels, ……..
Well, the pause kind of put a big crimp in that theory.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/25/almost-30-years-after-hansens-1988-alarm-on-global-warming-a-claim-of-confirmation-on-co2-forcing/
“Both series showed the same trend: atmospheric CO2 emitted an increasing amount of infrared energy, to the tune of !!0.2 Watts per square meter per decade!!. This increase is about !! ten percent !! of the trend from all sources of infrared energy such as !!clouds and water vapor.!!” Annotations by me.
0.2 W/m-2 per decade! That’s ten years. One of the most popular global heat balance diagrams has ToA incoming solar energy at 342 W/m-2 per year!!! That’s 3,420 W/m-2 per decade!!! Kind of makes CO2 look like a bee fart in a hurricane. 0.00585% Whoeeee!
http://www.writerbeat.com/articles/3713-CO2-Feedback-Loop
Nick,
They really measured LWIR from the CO2 band and they measured LWIR from water vapor and clouds. CO2 was 10% of the trend, water vapor and clouds were 90% of the trend… The LWIR from CO2 is in a distinct band where water vapor is not active. The absorbed and emitted IR has exactly the same amount of energy, as there is no loss of energy within a molecule.
If there are collisions between CO2 and other molecules in the atmosphere before CO2 loses its extra energy via a photon, the energy may be transferred as an increased vibration/”temperature” of the other molecules. The opposite may happen too: collisions of other molecules with CO2 which excites the CO2 molecule that then emits a photon…
Arrhenius did get a well deserved Nobel prize in chemistry, well deserved Kudos.
But, the medical “doctor” that “perfected” the lobotomy “operation” also won a Nobel prize in “medicine”.
I guess you could call shoving a screwdriver up someones eye socket, swiping it back and forth rapidly to sever delicate nerve connections an “operation”, if you are a sadist….
Just cause somebody got a “prize” does not make them “correct”.
Time will tell who is correct, and who is not.
Cheers, KevinK.
***a dynasty of sorts:
Nov 2010: UK Register: Andrew Orlowski: Music biz vows to end CD scandal
Go digital, save a polar bear’s toenail
Each year UK record labels send out 25,000 promo CDs. In new research
released today it is estimated that the manufacturing, packaging and
transportation of these deadly items creates 1,686 tonnes of carbon
dioxide…
Switching all promos to digital delivery would save 240 tonnes.
Just to put that in perspective, underground wildfires in China produce up
to 450 million tonnes of CO2 a year. The amount of CO2 produced by new build
coal power stations around the world, which help millions of people out of
poverty, is around 500 megatonnes a year. Total CO2 emissions from coal are
5,814 billion tonnes of CO2 , rising to 6,820 in 2035. In other words, we
could turn all the world’s coal power stations off for about
twelve milliseconds…
***The research was carried out by Alison Tickell for her music business
environmentalist group Julie’s Bicycle. Tickell is a member of a global
warming dynasty. Her brother Oliver earns royalties from carbon offsetting,
while her father, the former diplomat Sir Crispin Charles Cervantes Tickell,
is credited with convincing British PM Margaret Thatcher of the hypothesis
of catastrophic man-made global warming in the late 1980s. By 2003, Thatcher
appears to have recanted – and in her memoir Statecraft doubted the warnings
of politically-motivated “doomsters” and described their
anti-industrialisation policies as “costly and futile”.
***Tickell Snr is a patron of the Optimal Population Trust and made an ominous
prediction to an interviewer last year: “It’s one animal species out of
control,” he said – meaning us, “and the awful thing is that if we don’t
control it then Mother Nature will do it for us.”…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2010/11/01/music_business_promo_discs_cause_global_warming/
on Alison Tickell’s FB page on the recent, poorly-attended “Time to Act” on climate change protest in London & an event at the Whitworth Art Gallery organised by Alison Tickell/Julie’s Bicycle, featuring John Holdren, Paul Ehrlich’s co-author of “Abortion and Morality” & “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions”:
Julie’s Bicycle Facebook: March with us on Sat for #TimetoAct2015.
We’ll be in the #FossilFree bloc
Read John Holden’s ‘The Ecology of Culture’ and come see him
speak at the @Whitworth…
Jan 2010: Guardian: Don’t let the carbon market die by Oliver Tickell
Some people have good reason to be shocked that banks have pulled out of the carbon market, not least recent economics graduates whose dissertations on carbon finance now qualify them only for unemployment. And JP Morgan, which paid a jaw-splitting $204m for carbon trader Ecosecurities last September, must be feeling a little sore. Perhaps it relied on the GHG Emissions Credit Trading report (yours for a mere $397), which predicts a $4.5 trillion carbon market by 2020…
No less chagrined must be Gordon Brown, who sees the carbon market as key to the global response to climate change, and to the economic fortunes of the City of London…
Over time the carbon tax should rise – or, better still, be replaced with a more sophisticated economic mechanism based on the auction of carbon permits, subject to a reserve price, as set out in my “Kyoto2” framework. But a simple, modest carbon tax is surely the best first step we can take towards getting there. As well as raising much-needed funds to finance climate solutions, it would also send an important signal to companies and investors – that long-term investments in clean energy, energy efficiency and a low carbon future will be rewarded: something that today’s boom-and-bust carbon markets have failed to achieve.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jan/25/carbon-market-copenhagen-climate
from a Kyoto2 Book Review page:
Kyoto2 – The Book
How to Manage the Global Greenhouse by Oliver Tickell
Reviews:
Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers, concluding “Words of warming” in The Guardian, Saturday 9 August 2008:
Tickell’s discussion of market mechanisms is densely technical, yet much of it reads as common sense. His emphasis on the urgent need for government regulation is also cogent and refreshing, for he recognises that carbon trading is necessary, but not sufficient to solve the problem. He calls clearly for governments to regulate so as to increase efficiency of energy use, to protect forests and to mandate approaches such as clean coal technologies, as well as discussing the need to limit population.
such a lovable bunch!
Well it’s more like soccer balls at ToA, ping pong balls up from the surface, and BBs out of the CO2 molecules.
Settled science, according to the American Meteorological Society’s 1951 Compendium of Meteorology:
“Carbon dioxide absorbs long-wave radiation and so helps to maintain the temperature of the earth’s surface above that at which it would otherwise be in equilibrium with solar radiation. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere must have varied greatly during geological time, being depleted by the formation of limestones (carbonates) and coal measures, and replenished by volcanic action. Ordinarily the variation was slow, because a great reserve of CO2 is dissolved in the oceans. Arrhenius and Chamberlin saw in this a cause of climatic changes, but the theory was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation absorbed by CO2 is also absorbed by water vapour.“
Here is a Papers past on him. Note what the Co2 level is at the time.
http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NOT19100416.2.32.24&srpos=1&e=——-100–1—-0arrhenius+carbon
The very brightest of lights always have the darkest shadows.
Jeez, he looks a dour as Malthus.
As a physical chemist, Arrhenius was a genius. As a prognosticator, he was far less. He incidentally suggested the inherent failing of all soothsayers when he mentioned “known petroleum reserves” and “known coal reserves”.
Humans are constantly learning new things, and what may seems obvious today may become ridiculous tomorrow, as we learn then what we don’t know now.
Dante’s “Divine Comedy” had little respect for soothsayers.
Arrhenius was a superb physical chemist, but as a prognosticator – well, not so much. He hinted at the problem when he used the phrases “known petroleum reserves” and “known coal reserves”.
Human beings are constantly learning. What is thought to be certain knowledge today may become ridiculous tomorrow as we learn something new.
Dante’s Divine Comedy (about 700 years ago) had little respect for those who presumed to foretell the future.
I’m curious why some of these comments are out of chronological order? Makes following the conversation thread a bit confusing.
Bill makes a point with his post, Ted makes the next post, but didn’t respond to Bill. Alice comes along 3 hrs later and responds to Bill, using the reply to Bill button, putting her comment ahead of Ted, who is off on his next excellent adventure.
Alan Robinson,
Perfect explanation. Thanks.
Their out of order, your out of order, this whole damn place is out of order!!!!
Ouch – global warming, energy crisis, AND Eugenics?
Ouch — Hitler AND the Autobahn?