By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
“What Evidence,” asks Ronald Bailey’s headline (www.reason.com, April 3, 2015), “Would Convince You That Man-Made Climate Change Is Real?”
The answer: a rational, scientific case rooted in established theory and data would convince me that manmade climate change is a problem. That it is real is not in doubt, for every creature that breathes out emits CO2 and thus affects the climate.
The true scientific question, then, is not the fatuous question whether “Man-Made Climate Change Is Real” but how much global warming our sins of emission may cause, and whether that warming might be more a bad thing than a good thing.
However, Mr Bailey advances no rational case. What, then, are the elements of a rational, scientific case that our influence on the climate will prove dangerous unless the West completes its current self-shutdown?
Here is the mountain the tax-gobbling classes who tend to favor profitable alarmism must climb before they can make out a rational, scientific case for doing anything about our greenhouse-gas emissions.
The tax-gobblers’ mighty mountain
| Step 10. Would the benefit outweigh the cost? |
| Step 9. Can we afford the cost of CO2 mitigation? |
| Step 8. Will any realistic measures avert the danger? |
| Step 7. Will warmer worldwide weather be dangerous? |
| Step 6. Will temperature feedbacks amplify that warming? |
| Step 5. Will greenhouse-gas emissions cause much warming? |
| Step 4. Are humankind raising CO2 concentration substantially? |
| Step 3. Are humankind increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration? |
| Step 2. Is a consensus among climate experts compatible with science? |
| Step 1. Has any climate warming beyond natural variability taken place? |
If the answer to the question at any Step from 1 to 10 on the stony path up the tax-gobblers’ mighty mountain is “No”, there is no rational, scientific basis for climbing any further. Unless one can legitimately reach the top by answering Yes to all ten questions, there is no credible justification for any investment of taxpayers’ funds in trying to make global warming go away.
The mountain that the tax-gobblers have to climb is tall, steep, and difficult. Every policy-maker must climb that mighty mountain, and none can justify shelling out a single red cent on thwarting Thermageddon until he shall have demonstrated, at each step, that there is rational, scientific justification for climbing above that step. Gird your loins, sharpen your crampons, and grip your cromach. Let us climb.
Step 1. Is global warming exceeding natural climate variability?
No.
Step 2. Is consensus among climate experts scientific?
No. And there isn’t one anyway. A recent paper by paid propagandists trying to prove that there was a consensus inadvertently proved that there was not. Cook et al. (2013) claimed that 97.1% of 11,944 papers on “global climate change” endorsed the consensus, which they defined in their introduction as the “scientific consensus” that “most current warming” is anthropogenic. However, setting aside the fact that there has been no “current warming” for getting on for two embarrassing decades, the authors’ own data file shows that they had marked only 64 papers out of 11,944, a dizzying 0.5%, as endorsing the “consensus”.
Step 3. Are we all guilty of increasing CO2 concentration?
No, not necessarily. True, our emissions of CO2 and its atmospheric concentration are rising, but anthropogenic CO2 represents only 3% of the total free CO2 in the Earth-atmosphere system. But in logic – it cannot be repeated often enough – mere correlation does not necessary imply causation.
Professor Murry Salby, late of Macquarie University, Australia, has established that it is the time-integral of temperature changes that causes changes in CO2 concentration, leaving little or no room for any detectable anthropogenic contribution. He is not alone in his findings. If he is right, there is no need to posit any role for CO2 or other anthropogenic influences. On that analysis, climate sensitivity may well be zero.
Cross-correlations by Professor Salby between CO2 change and temperature change. He has found by detailed inspection that the observed record shows CO2 concentration change lagging temperature change by about 8-10 months, approximately the lag that would be expected on the basis of an atmospheric residence time of about 5 years. It is a settled principle of logic that that which occurs second cannot have caused that which occurred first.
Step 4. Is CO2 concentration rising to dangerous new levels?
No. Mr Bailey says CO2 concentration is 30% higher than the 800,000-year peak. So what?
Step 5. Will greenhouse-gas emissions cause much warming?
No – and, on the evidence to date, certainly not as much as the IPCC predicted.
Near-term projections of warming at a rate equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] K/century, made with “substantial confidence” in IPCC (1990), for the 303 months January 1990 to March 2015 (orange region and red trend line), vs. observed anomalies (dark blue) and trend (bright blue) at less than 1.4 K/century equivalent, taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH satellite monthly mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
Step 6. Do temperature feedbacks amplify direct CO2 warming?
No. Measurements suggest feedbacks are negative, attenuating direct CO2 warming.
Furthermore, the range of mean global surface temperature change over the past 810,000 years was just 3.5 Cº either side of the long-run average – about the same as the range of temperatures permitted by an ordinary household thermostat. It is difficult to alter the Earth’s temperature, because the atmosphere is sandwiched between two vast heat-sinks: the oceans below and outer space above.
Global surface temperature change over the past 810,000 years, obtained by halving (to correct the result for polar amplification) the temperature anomalies inferred from atmospheric δ18O ratios in ice cores from Vostok station, Antarctica. Absolute global temperature has varied by little more than ±1%.
Step 7. Will warmer worldwide weather be dangerous?
No. A growing body of papers in the literature finds climate sensitivity low – about 1 Cº per CO2 doubling. That is not enough to be harmful.
Steps 8-10. Will any realistic measures avert the danger?
No. Whether mitigation measures should be attempted in any event is an economic question, answered by investment appraisal. The UK’s $8333-per-auto subsidy for electric cars will serve as an example. The two initial conditions for the appraisal are the fraction of global CO2 emissions a mitigation measure is intended to abate, and the cost of the measure.
Going nowhere slowly: The Chevrolet Volt
Typical gasoline-powered auto engines are approximately 27% efficient. Typical fossil-fueled generating stations are 50% efficient, transmission to end user is 67% efficient, battery charging is 90% efficient and the auto’s electric motor is 90% efficient, so that the fuel efficiency of an electric car is also 27%. However, the electric car requires 30% more power per mile traveled to move the mass of its batteries.
CO2 emissions from domestic transport account for 24% of UK CO2 emissions, and cars, vans, and taxis represent 90% of road transport (DfT, 2013). Assuming 80% of fuel use is by these autos, they account for 19.2% of UK CO2 emissions. Conversion to electric power, 61% of which is generated by fossil fuels in the UK, would abate 39% of 19.2% (i.e. 7.5%) of UK CO2 emissions.
However, the battery-weight penalty would be 30% of 19.2% of 61%: i.e. 3.5% of UK CO2 emissions. The net saving from converting all UK cars, vans, and taxis to electricity, therefore, would be 4% of UK CO2 emissions, which are 1.72% of global CO2 emissions, abating 0.07% of global CO2 emissions of 2 μatm yr–1, or 0.00138 μatm. From eqn. (2), assuming 400 μatm concentration at year end on business as usual, forcing abated by the subsidy for converting all UK cars to electricity would be 5.35 ln[400/(400-0.00138)], or 0.00002 W m–2, which, multiplied by the Planck parameter λ0, gives 0.000006 K warming abated by the subsidy.
The cost to the UK taxpayer of subsidizing the 30,000 electric cars, vans, and taxis bought in 2012 was a flat-rate subsidy of $8333 (£5000) for each vehicle and a further subsidy of about $350 (£210) per year in vehicle excise tax remitted, a total of $260.5 million. On that basis, the cost of subsidizing all 2,250,000 new autos sold each year (SMMT, 2013), would be $19.54 bn.
Though the longevity of electric autos is 50% greater than that of internal-combustion autos, the advantage is more than canceled by the very large cost of total battery replacement every few years. No allowance for this extra cost is made. Likewise, the considerable cost of using renewable energy to bring down the UK’s fossil-fueled generation fraction from the global mean 67% to 61% is not taken into account, though, strictly speaking, an appropriate share of the cost of “renewable” electricity generation should be assigned to electric vehicles.
Dividing the $19 bn annual cost by the warming abated gives a unit abatement cost of $3400 tn K–1. Abating the 0.013 K projected warming by global methods of equivalent unit cost would thus cost $45 tn, or approaching $6500 a year per head of global population, or almost two-thirds of $71 tn global GDP.
Stern (2006) wrote that the cost of allowing the then-projected 3 K warming to occur over the 21st century would be 0-3% of global GDP. IPCC (2013, WGII) puts the cost at 0.2-2% of GDP. Assuming that 1 K 20th-century global warming would cost as much as 0.5% of GDP (in fact so small a warming would cost nothing), global mitigation by methods of equivalent unit cost to the UK’s subsidy program for electric vehicles would be 128 times costlier than adaptation.
In general, the cost of mitigation is 1-2 orders of magnitude greater than that of adaptation (Monckton of Brenchley, 2012). Affordable measures are ineffective: effective measures are unaffordable. Too little mitigation is achieved at far too great a cost. Since the premium is 10-100 times the cost of the risk insured, the precaution of insurance is not recommended.
Mr Bailey’s evidence
With that background, let us look at the evidence Mr Bailey adduces. He concedes that the warming rate since 1979 is 0.12-0.16 Cº decade (RSS and UAH respectively). But that is half of the rate predicted by the IPCC in 1990. He asks how we can be sure that the rise in greenhouse-gas concentration just happens to coincide with an entirely natural increase in mean temperature. But that is not what skeptics say. For it is possible that CO2 has contributed to the slight warming of the past 260 years, but it is not likely that CO2 is the major cause of the warming. Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation, and the mismatch between the fluctuations in CO2 concentration change and temperature change demonstrates absence of correlation and hence of causation, at least in respect of the fluctuations.
Mr Bailey asks, “What about converging daytime and night-time temperatures?” That indicates two things: first, that there has been some warming, which is not denied; secondly, that the likelihood of severe storms outside the tropics is diminished, for it is temperature differentials, not absolute temperatures, that drive the intensity of storms. Sure enough, the IPCC admits in its 2013 report that there has been no increase in extra-tropical storminess (and none in tropical storminess, either).
Next, Mr Bailey cherry-picks a couple of months of the year and says that in those months northern-hemisphere snow cover is less by about a tenth than it was in the 1970s. Well, we had no means of measuring snow cover reliably till right at the end of the 70s; and besides, in the rest of the year there has been little, if any, decline in snow cover. Northern-hemisphere snow cover shows little change in the satellite era.
Next, Mr Bailey – who has certainly picked up all the talking-points – talks about Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, but without noticing that neither the extent nor the trend of global sea ice has changed much in the entire 35-year satellite record.
Next talking-point: Greenland, where Mr Bailey excitedly tells us the ice mass has been melting at 215 billion tons a year. However, he somehow fails to point out that the summit of the Greenland ice sheet was 2.5 Cº warmer than today a few thousand years ago, and the ice did not melt; and that from 1992-2003 a vast study area on the Greenland ice-sheet showed the ice growing at a rate of 2 feet per decade; and that even if we could measure accurately how much Greenland is gaining or losing ice 215 billion tons a year would cause an annual increase in sea level 0f – wait for drum-roll – half a millimeter.
Next, Mr Bailey, still on message – just the wrong one – says “most of the world’s 130,000 mountain glaciers are also disappearing”. No, they’re not. Actually there are more than 160,000 of them and nearly all of them are in Antarctica, which has not warmed in the satellite era, so there is no particular reason for the glaciers to vanish, and they haven’t vanished. One of them is 40 miles wide and 250 miles long.
In those parts of the world where there has been some recession of mountain glaciers, such as the Alps, researchers are finding long-lost medieval forests, mountain passes and even an entire silver mine. Besides, the retreat of the mountain glaciers began in many places in 1880, long before we could have had any influence.
And there is evidence that all but the very highest peaks of the Cordillera de Merida in the Andes were ice-free thoughout most of the Holocene. They are not ice-free now.
Next, water vapor. Mr Bailey cites a couple of studies that say there has been some increase in column water vapor in the atmosphere since 1982. However, the ISCCP satellite data, probably the most accurate way of determining this tricky variable, do not show column water vapor increasing.
Mr Bailey has his science wrong here. He says, “As temperatures increase by 1 Celsius degree, global average water vapor in the atmosphere is expected to increase by around 7%. No, the carrying capacity of the space occupied by the atmosphere for water vapour is expected to increase by 7% per Celsius degree, in accordance with the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. Just because the atmosphere can carry more water vapor, that does not mean it will. The atmosphere is not 100% saturated.
Then we are told precipitation is increasing. Well, the IPCC did not quite say that in its latest assessment report. It said confidence was high that precipitation had increased over northern-Hemisphere land areas since 1901, but that confidence in rainfall gains or losses elsewhere was low.
So let us look at the longest northern-Hemisphere mid-latitude rainfall record we have, to get some idea of how much the change in precipitation has been. Here goes.
Less than two inches more rain per year after a quarter of a millennium. Not at all easy to distinguish that from natural variability.
Mr Bailey is no Pause Denier. He admits there has been little or no warming recently, and cites Roy Spencer’s analysis of 102 models that found they had all exaggerated the warming trend by a factor of 2-5. Yet he trots out the ClimComm talking-point about the “missing heat” having gone into hiding in the ocean.
So let us look at the rate of ocean warming, measured by the 3600+ ARGO automated bathythermograph buoys.
Much of Mr Bailey’s reasoning is based not on the observed data nor on theory but on predictions. For instance, he cites an article in Nature Climate Change, a less than reliable rent-seekers’ rag, predicting that the warming rate will rise to 0.25 Cº per decade by 2020. But the IPCC predicted short-term warming at 0.28 Cº per decade as far back as 1990, and the warming rate since then has been half what it predicted. Why should we now believe predictions that have proven exaggerated by double?
Mr Bailey says the main reason for his conversion to the Temple of Thermageddon is that some researchers think climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentration might be as high as 6 Celsius degrees. But the main reason for these high-sensitivity estimates was the belief that the Bode feedback-amplification equation would apply unmodified to the climate, and that in particular no homeostatic asymptote would bound the output temperature.
The graph of the Bode equation shows that if feedbacks are strongly net-positive the equation would lead us to expect rapidly increasing climate sensitivity. But it does not apply to the climate. Researchers had wandered into a field with which they were not familiar, and had made the huge mistake of assuming that an equation that represents the behavior of dynamical systems such as an electronic circuit is applicable unmodified and undamped to dynamical systems such as the climate. Well, it isn’t. And without it, high sensitivity vanishes.
Mr Bailey concludes by asking:
“If generally rising temperatures, decreasing diurnal temperature differences, melting glacial and sea ice, smaller snow extent, stronger rainstorms, and warming oceans are not enough to persuade you that man-made climate is occurring, what evidence would be?”
Well, if Mr Bailey does me the courtesy of reading the above, he will realize that temperatures are not rising by much, glacial ice-melt (if occurring) is on too small a scale to raise sea level by much, global sea ice extent shows little change in two generations, ditto northern-hemisphere snow cover, there has been little increase in rainfall and (according to the IPCC) little evidence for “stronger rainstorms”, and the ocean warming is so small that it falls within the considerable measurement error.
The evidence he adduces is questionable at best on every count. The Temple of Thermageddon will have to do better than that if it wants to convince us in the teeth of the evidence.
I have presented much of the evidence in the form of simple graphs. Do readers like the way the graphs are presented, many of them with a small “Post-It note” highlighting the main point?
Conclusion
Back we go, down the tax-gobblers’ mighty mountain to base camp. Our attempt to climb it has failed at every single step. Even with the aid of CO2-emitting helicopters to lift us and our equipment to each new step as we fail to climb the one below it, no rational scientific or economic case can be made for taking any action whatsoever today in a probably futile and certainly cost-ineffective attempt to make global warming that is not happening as predicted today go away the day after tomorrow.
The correct policy to address what is likely to prove a non-problem – and what, even if it were every bit as much of a problem as the tax-gobblers would wish, could not by even their most creative quantitative easing be cost-effectively solved by any attempt at mitigation – is to have the courage to do nothing now and adapt later if necessary.
The question is why, in the teeth of the scientific and economic evidence, nearly all of the global governing class were so easily taken in or bought out or both by the strange coalescence of powerful vested interests who have, until now, profited so monstrously by the biggest fraud in history at such crippling expense in lives and treasure to the rest of us, and at such mortal threat to the integrity and trustworthiness of science itself.
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“What Evidence,” asks Ronald Bailey’s headline (www.reason.com, April 3, 2015), “Would Convince You Unicorns are Real?”
The sad answer is no evidence at all If you told them unicorns were created by man and destroying the environment. just add a commercial by an American Indian whose last name is Gallo.
“What Evidence Would Convince You That Man-Made Climate Change Is Real?”
1. Well, not with well-massaged temperature data, or a desktop study discounting UHI vs. Anthony’s Surface Stations project.
2. Evidence that the prognosticated effects of AGW can ever trump the climatic madhouse of glacial inception which is what might be happening at this very moment. This is about as simple a signal to noise ratio problem as has ever been! Not one single prediction/estimate/prognostication/whatever gets anywhere near the astonishing climate changes that attended the ends of most of the post-MPT interglacials when they went unstable and fell off into the next ice age.
3. And last but by no means least, I need to see the evidence that there is a third climate state, other than glacial and interglacial, which removal of GHGs to whatever concentrations would land us. At present, we know we are living at yet another probable end of an interglacial. In fact the lofting of the term Anthropocene carries with it the implication that the Holocene is over. In fact, it probably should be as it is now about half a precession cycle old as 7 of the last 8 were when they went kaput. Ruddiman says we would already be several thousand years into glacial inception were it not for anthropogenic emissions of GHGs. So, if I am not to consider anthroglowarmies totally insane, you need to convince me that by ending the Anthropocene we will not be tipped into an already overdue glacial. Because, as far as I know, that is the only climate state left after decay of an interglacial. And you would have to be certifiable to want to tip us into the next 100kyr ice age.
“Do readers like the way the graphs are presented, many of them with a small “Post-It note” highlighting the main point?”
Yes, love the graphs. They will be useful in the unlikely event my brother regains interest in Global Warming after realizing millions of Bangladeshis aren’t actually going to drown this year. Maybe in 500 years if they all stay where they are. But of course by then the delta will have grown and might be some isostatic rebound from all those missing glaciers in the Himalayas so there’s no telling.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley,
Good presentation. It will cause grief to the usual suspects.
Why do you always show the trends as straight line extrapolations? We know for certain that there are at least two major cyclic elements in the temperature graph. Surely we need to see the best fit curve put over the temperature graph and extrapolate this best fit curve.
Importantly we must first ask if the standard of the science is fit for purpose or have they allowed standards to slip thanks to in effect self certification by a group headed by people with things other than work as their priorities for selecting subordinates. A factor we now know even from information available in the public domain, let alone the not hacked but carelessly released information available for some time.
What would it take to make me believe in climate change?
For me it would be to make the climate scientist have to pass the quality control assessment that any engineering product would have to. Ideally to the standards of life critical applications, given that climate taxation causes at least a hundred deaths a year of old people for every one that Harold Shipman murdered and that made headlines here.
The projection of normal climate used by climate scientists is based on methods that became obsolete three hundred years ago.
The measuring stations make no attempt to get annual certification of both instrumentation and environment. Where reference quality data is available as in the USCRN this is not also compared with the equivalent data from the used network and the difference added to the uncertainty figures.The raw data is never displayed alongside the “adjusted “data and compared with best and worst predictions as would have been demanded by our QA team.
As to the computer model failings. What are the known factors affecting weather and are all of these present properly in climate modelling? If not then add this to the uncertainty.
Does the computer model include all natural CO2 both biological and geological in the model and does this model produce better than 95% correlation with “unadjusted” data until recently when claimed warming exists.
This article is a Gish Gallop. Is anyone keeping track of which points have been refuted so far? No need for anyone to duplicate effort.
harrytwinotter
You ask
Yes, I have.
Incidentally, none of the points in Lord Monckton’s article have been refuted so far.
The total of refutations is none, zero, zilch, nada. I hope that is as clear as the factual and accurate points made by Lord Monckton in his above article.
Richard
I have enough time to have a crack at a couple. I usually ignore Gish Gallops as they are too easy for someone to write, and take forever to rebut point by point – that is the point.
“Step 1. Is global warming exceeding natural climate variability?”
I suspect this is a poorly-framed question. But the chart is a cherry-pick that ignores the other global temperature datasets that show warming and no zero trend. That large el nino spike throws off the trend calculations. I can pick later years than 1998 and show a warming trend.
“Step 3. Are we all guilty of increasing CO2 concentration?”
Yes we are. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased 30-40% since pre-industrial.
“Step 4. Is CO2 concentration rising to dangerous new levels?”
Yes, the rise in CO2 is causing global warming. The chart shown is meaningless, very brave to compare 600 million years to the last 250 years. Also the chart does not take into account the fact that the sun has become hotter in the last 600 million years.
harrytwinotter
It is obvious that my attempt at clarity failed because you have not understood that there have been no refutations of any of the points made by Lord Monckton in the above article.
The lack of refutations is why you cite no refutations.
Indeed,you are so sure Lord Monckton’s for Point 1 is right that you try to discuss something else and use as an excuse for doing that your assertion
And you follow that with statistical nonsense.
Your response to Step 3 says in full
Such argument by assertion is also nonsense.
Nobody disputes that the atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen by the slight amount of from ~280 to ~400 ppm. At issue is the CAUSE of that rise.
I refer you to one of our 2005 papers
ref. Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’ E&E v16no2 (2005).
The study provides six models of carbon cycle behaviour with three of them assuming a significant anthropogenic (i.e. man-made) contribution to the cause and the other three assuming no significant anthropogenic contribution to the cause. Each of the models matches the available empirical data from Mauna Loa (http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ ) without use of any ‘fiddle-factor’ such as the ‘5-year smoothing’ the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses to get its model to agree with the empirical data.
So, if one of the six models of our paper is adopted then there is a 5:1 probability that the choice is wrong. And other models are probably also possible. And the six models each give a different indication of future atmospheric CO2 concentration for the same future anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide.
Data that fits all the possible causes is not evidence for the true cause. Data that only fits the true cause would be evidence of the true cause. But the above demonstrates that there is no data that only fits either an anthropogenic or a natural cause of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Hence, the only factual statements that can be made on the true cause are
(a) the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration may have an anthropogenic cause, or a natural cause, or some combination of anthropogenic and natural causes,
but
(b) there is no evidence that the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration has a mostly anthropogenic cause or a mostly natural cause.
Hence, it cannot be known what if any effect altering the anthropogenic emission of CO2 will have on the future atmospheric CO2 concentration.
It is perhaps interesting to note that the IPCC has also reported that it is not known what if any effect altering the anthropogenic emission of CO2 will have on the future atmospheric CO2 concentration. Chapter 2 from Working Group 3 in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (TAR) says; “no systematic analysis has published on the relationship between mitigation and baseline scenarios”.
And your response to Point 4 is plain daft. It says in total
The issue is “dangerous new levels”. There is nothing to suggest that the CO2 is reaching “dangerous new levels” because there were no known harmful effects when atmospheric CO2 was much higher than now.
The continuing increase to atmospheric CO2 concentration has NOT resulted in any global warming this century so it is NOT true that “CO2 is causing global warming” although it may have in the past (e.g. the last century).
It is not “brave” to “compare 600 million years to the last 250 years” when demonstrating the present CO2 level is very low compared to the known history of CO2 concentrations in the absence. The presentation is something called ‘evidence’ and you really need to discover what evidence is.
Your point about the Sun increasing its heating is true. Indeed, the solar radiance has increased by ~30% since the Earth obtained an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The oceans would have boiled to steam if radiative forcing had a direct result on the Earth’s climate temperature. You assert that the ~0.4% increase to radiative forcing from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would provide a “dangerous” effect while yourself raising the issue that a ~30% increase in radiative forcing from the Sun has had no discernible effects.
I conclude by giving you some advice.
Your copying talking points from warmunist web sites does not wash in an informed forum such as this. I strongly suggest you do some studying before again making a post because you have made a fool of yourself in this thread. A good starting place for your studies would be the WUWT information pages that provide source data.
Richard
richardscourtney,
“Nobody disputes that the atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen by the slight amount of from ~280 to ~400 ppm.”
It’s around a 43% increase – and you call that “slight”.
I conclude by giving you advice: don’t Gish Gallop in your responses. TL;DR
harrytwinotter:
Oh dear! I took the trouble to correct your errors and offered you some friendly and helpful advice.
You have ignored that advice and continued digging in violation of the First Rule Of Holes. You say
Yes, it is slight and it has been beneficial. The only reason this slight increase is not trivial is because it has been beneficial.
The rise has increased crop yields but has had no other observed effects.
Furthermore, stomata data indicate such rises have been common throughout the holocene (i.e. since the last glaciation). Ice cores don’t indicate such rises because they lack the temporal resolution.
harrytwinotter, your untrue soundbites from warmunist web sites don’t wash in an informed forum such as WUWT.
Richard
Doesn’t matter if we are right.
The Warmists dominate the media- so they dominate the politics and culture.
The culture is obviously Marxism inducing Guilt.
Monckton LOL, after the Dr, Pinker case? you will hardly convince anyone of anything, how is the alleged cure for MS and HIV going?
[Snip. Despicable ad-hom. ~mod.]
This is a good example of how not to persuade people.
Playing the man not the ball. There is no attempt to address the science – because he’s right, of course.
If Dr. Soon was irrelevant he would be ignored. But instead there are insults and scorn poured forth like torrents of fear-fuelled diuretics in the general direction of the man.
They know he’s right, of course.
“like torrents of fear-fuelled diuretics in the general direction of the man.”
like claiming Scinetists are liars?`Climate modelers are teenagers playing on their XBox?
calling young people that are interested in AGW mitigation “Hitleryouth”?
or is it only playing the ball when your opposition does it?
man, not ball. 🙂
Daniel, Two wrongs don’t make a right. That said, there actually are young people being taught to be the equivalent of Hitler youths, and there are plenty of scientists who lie for money and status.
“[Snip. Despicable ad-hom. ~mod.]”
atleast we agree that it was Despicable of Monckton to say thsoe things.
thsoe ; scinetists ? Its confirmed
One way Mr. Bailey and others might strengthen their arguments is to try multiple independent lines of argument, not just the same argument (it’s got hotter) dressed up in multiple different ways. There is an obvious belief that finding different forms of evidence for the planet having become warmer over the past century is very convincing. It does not though provide evidence for CO2 being responsible. It’s actually possible to construct examples (theoretical) where multiple lines of closely related evidence in fact reduce the inductive probability for a theory being true. You need independent lines of argument for CO2 being the climate controller, not multiple, closely related, red herrings.
“. You need independent lines of argument for CO2 being the climate controller, not multiple, closely related, red herrings.”
has been provided. the evidence that the main cause for the observed warming since 1950 is the enhanced Greenhosue effect do to increased atmospheric CO2 concentration is overwhelming.
you know which line of evidence i talk about, right? what are your objections to those papers?
That they don’t exist.
The rate of warming in the first half of the 20th Century is the same as the second. But CO2 emissions have increased exponentially. Of course, the impact of extra CO2 declines exponentially too but… it’s one very big coincidence. What perfect balance, except in the middle of the 20th century when the temperature dropped a bit.
Far more logical is the null hypothesis: Two things are not related until they are proven to be so. The Pause provides support for the null hypothesis – so why reject it?
Just to clarify, I’m not saying that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas.
I’m just saying its impact is shown to be negligible compared with all the other forcings.
You have no clue what line of evidence and papers i talk about. Right?
Daniel
You ask of nobody in particular
Right, because you have not cited and/or referenced them.
I do know that those “lines of evidence and papers” are not in the IPCC documents.
The IPCC has not published any evidence – none, zilch, nada – of any kind that anthropgenic (i.e. man-made) global warming (AGW) exists to as discernible degree.
Personally, I think your assertion of “lines of evidence and papers” for AGW is ‘blowing smoke’. At least one Nobel Prize would be awarded to anybody who found any evidence for discernible AGW: no such evidence has been found by three decades of research conducted world-wide at a cost over US$5 billion per year. In the 1990s Ben Santer claimed to have found such evidence but that was soon shown to be a result of his having selected a part of a data set when the entire data set disproved his claim.
Richard
“I do know that those “lines of evidence and papers” are not in the IPCC documents.
The IPCC has not published any evidence – none, zilch, nada – of any kind that anthropgenic (i.e. man-made) global warming (AGW) exists to as discernible degree.”
lol. really?
actually the papers i talk about have been cited in the IPCC ARs.
i debate so often with people that reject AGW. and they never, not once are able to name me the evidence the scientific community has presented.
i don’t ask them to accept that line of evidence or the papers, just to cited what the scientific community presented as evidence…..
everytime the same.
even on WUWT, where they so often claim to accept AGW and are just Lukewarmers not deniers.
I see that Daniel asserts that the IPCC has shown that AGW exists.
Care to link to those papers? Keep in mind that models prove nothing. What we keep asking for are measurements that quantify the fraction of global warming attriutable to human CO2 emissions, out of total global warming from all sources.
So post your IPCC papers containing those empirical measurements. Betcha can’t.
“I see that Daniel asserts that the IPCC has shown that AGW exists.”
yes they have. you are not even aware of what the scientific community presented as evidence for AGW?
every time the same. one would expect that those that argue agaisnt a consensus position are atleast informed about what scientists presented as evidence.
but you are absolutely clueless?
amazing.
from someone arguing against the consensus position of AGW. i expect that he can list the papers that were provided as evidence and that you are able to point out exactly why you do not regard it as evidence.
but i have not met one that was able to do that. only after i cited the papers they will start moaning that it is not evidence at all, but are not able to explain why. or like in most cases, just disapear …..
Daniel says:
the evidence that the main cause for the observed warming since 1950 is the enhanced Greenhosue effect do to increased atmospheric CO2 concentration is overwhelming.
Your facts are as good as your spelling.
I challenge you to produce even one empirical, testable measurement quantifying man-made global warming. If you can, you’re right. If you can’t, you’re wrong. Simple as that.
Daniel:
I pointed out
You have responded saying
OK. That proves you know the IPCC has not not published any evidence – none, zilch, nada – of any kind that anthropgenic (i.e. man-made) global warming (AGW) exists to as discernible degree.
If you knew of any such evidence in the IPCC Reports then you would have cited it instead of arm waving about unspecified “papers” “cited in the IPCC ARs”.
Incidentally, I am very, very familiar with the contents of all the IPCC ARs and it is obvious that you have not read any of them.
Oh, and it is you – not me – who fails to “name … the evidence the scientific community has presented”. l cite papers all the time. Try this one
Kuo C, Lindberg C & Thomson DJ, ‘Coherence established between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature’, Nature 343, 709 – 714 (22 February 1990).
Its abstract says
Subsequent research has confirmed the finding that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide lag changes in temperature by months but the length of the lag varies with latitude.
Perhaps you can explain how a cause can follow its effect by months in the absence of a time machine. Surely, your “papers” “cited in the IPCC ARs” provide that explanation.
Richard
[Snip. No more ad hominem attacks. ~mod.]
Warren, if you have ever asserted an hypothesis and assembled evidence for it on here, I missed it.
I’m not saying you didn’t but, if you did, could you please cut and paste it in this current thread please ?
If you didn’t ever (on here) could you formulate one, and make it falsifiable per accepted scientific practice.
warrenbot:
Sonny, I will accept any and all empirical, testable, verifiable evidence that shows a measurement quantifying MMGW: the fraction of total global warming attributable to the fraction of global warming from human emissions.
No insults there. Simply produce a measurement of MMGW — IF you can. I’ve asked for such a measurement for years now. So far, you are long on assertions, but short on evidence. You have never provided a single measurement. You talk the talk, but you can’t walk the walk.
Finally, as a scientific skeptic I do not have to propose a hypothesis. I do not have to produce any evidence. The onus is 100.0% on YOU to produce those things. But as usual, you try to weasel out of it, for the simple reason that you are incapable of producing any measurements.
Thus, everything you assert is nothing more than a baseless conjecture.
Prove me wrong: post your measurements — if you can. Otherwise, you lose the debate. And we already know which side is winning this debate.
You can go home now. John Cook is waiting for you.
indeed. cast doubt is the only goal here.
“one empirical, testable measurement quantifying man-made global warming. If you can, you’re right. If you can’t, you’re wrong. Simple as that.”
you think complex system science is that easy?
no wonder you are so confused.
you will not learn that here.
In one sentence you demonstrate that you know nothing of the Scientific Method.
Skeptics have nothing to prove. But you keep trying to paint skeptics into that corner.
You are just not smart enough to do that.
Daniel,
With your last comment you forfeit the debate. This issue isn’t complicated at all. Well, maybe to you it is.
Science is all about measurements. If you have measurements quantifying something like the fraction of global warming due to human emissions, then everyone is satisfied. You will be the first to have produced those measurements, and on the short list for the next Nobel prize.
But without measurements, you are just speculating. Making baseless, unquantified assertions. Emitting opinions. Making unfalsifiable conjectures.
In other words, everything you’re doing is 100% unscientific. It is pseudo-science, with a thin veneer of sciencey-sounding assertions. That’s clown talk.
Without simple measurements, you fail. Big time. You are asking folks to believe that
unicornshuman emissions cause global warming. But you have zero measurements.You’re a noob; you really need to get up to speed on the Scientific Method.
Skeptics have nothing to prove. But you keep trying to paint skeptics into that corner. As I pointed out, you are not nearly smart enough to do that. And yes, I am a scientific skeptic — one who is solidly thrashing your pseudo-science.
If I propose a conjecture or a hypothesis, that becomes my onus to defend. But note that MMGW is your conjecture. See the difference? Probably not.
For open minded readers this explains it:
Ei incumbit probatio, qui dicit, non qui negat; cum per rerum naturam factum negantis probatio nulla sit. – The proof lies upon him who affirms, not upon him who denies; since, by the nature of things, he who denies a fact cannot produce any proof.
As to the hypothesis that CO2 produced by humans is causing “unprecedented” global warming: the onus lies on those who say so.
The onus is on you, pal. MMGW is your conjecture. You’re just whining because scientific skeptics like me have so thoroughly debunked it. You cannot mount a credible defense, so you attack me. No problem, I can easily handle a dozen of you. I have facts and evidence. But all you have is your eco-religion.
@philincalifornia.
Here you go:
My hypothesis is that of all peer-reviewed science — ‘Earth is warming, Man is the cause, and the net effects are likely to be strongly negative.’ Supported by overwhelming evidence as compiled in 10s of thousands of peer-reviewed research papers, summarized by the IPCC, and at climate.nasa.gov. Or you can go to the website of the NAS, the AAAS, or any of the World’s Science Academies. But I doubt you’ll do that, since in your prior posts you’ve indicated you reject all peer-reviewed science on AGW.
warrenlb April 10, 2015 at 2:44 pm
@philincalifornia.
Here you go:
My hypothesis is that of all peer-reviewed science — ‘Earth is warming, Man is the cause, and the net effects are likely to be strongly negative.’ Supported by overwhelming evidence as compiled in 10s of thousands of peer-reviewed research papers, summarized by the IPCC, and at climate.nasa.gov. Or you can go to the website of the NAS, the AAAS, or any of the World’s Science Academies. But I doubt you’ll do that, since in your prior posts you’ve indicated you reject all peer-reviewed science on AGW.
I think I managed to follow that gobbledegook somehow.
My falsifiable hypothesis is as follows:
In all of the literature described above by warrenlb, there does not exist a falsifiable hypothesis for AGW, CAGW, ACC, CACC, dangerous AGW or dangerous CC. Furthermore, in neither all of the literature described above by warrenlb nor in the entire body of science written in the entire history of humanity that he may have missed, does there exist unequivocal evidence that atmospheric CO2 increasing from 280 ppm to 400 ppm has caused any measurable change in any global climate parameter.
“This issue isn’t complicated at all. ”
it evidently is for you guys.
The first thing would be answering the question in reverse: what, if observed, would lead to the conclusion that the so-called theory of man-made climate change is false? Because until you can answer that, you aren’t making testable predictions. And until you’re making testable predictions you’re not doing science.
thewriter,
Get a grip. The job of skeptics is not to prove anything. The onus is entirely on the ones making the man-made global warming conjecture, to produce convincing evidence that it exists.
They have failed completely: there isn’t a single measurement quantifying MMGW. And skeptics have nothing to prove.
You assert this preposterous argument because you have nothing to SAY or CONCLUDE about the behavior of the atmosphere–so you get off the hook by saying ‘not my job’. You’d last less than 10 seconds in any half decent peer-review or thesis defense.
“Preposterous argument”?? That’s how it works, son. Someone makes a conjecture or a hypothesis, and the job of skeptics is to deconstruct it if they can. Whatever remains standing after the smoke clears is accepted as current theory. If we did things your way, by skeptics having to prove a negative, we would be back in witch doctor territory.
You are just whining because skeptics have done such an excellent job of debunking the runaway global warming scare. But we didn’t do it alone. We had help from Mother Earth. She stopped global warming many years ago, which confounds the alarmist cult to this day.
Warren, there is no evidence for any change in any global climate parameter as CO2 has gone from 280 ppm to 400 ppm that can be unequivocally attributed to said rise in CO2 levels. A scientist is not obliged to make things up in order to pass peer review or pass a thesis defense.
Not your son. You might be mine, although I’d not admit to it.
You’re been in Witch doctor territory for some time, Stealey.
warrenlb,
Ooh! You insulted me! WAH! I’m gonna demand that a moderator ban you! Bad boy!
See, it works both ways, son.
Warren, DB must find you attractive, since he seems to follow you around a lot.
In that case, Bird Dog, you must be flat out in love with me.
Of course, you are wrong as usual. Most of the time the warrenbot is also bird-dogging my comments — far more often than I respond to his. You could look it up.
So as usual, psychological ‘projection’ is the tactic of the alarmist clique: imputing your own faults onto others.
I remind you once again that you came out of nowhere a couple weeks ago, and started bird-dogging my posts in a most unfriendly manner. I tried several times to hold out an olive branch, because I saw no reason for your attacks.
But since you kept it up, you get it back doubled and squared:
Treat me good, I’ll treat you better. Treat me bad, I’ll treat you worse.
I was replying to Warren.
No, bud, you were being deliberately unfriendly again for no reason. You clicked on “In reply to dbstealey”. And you used my intitials: DB. You were replying to me, as usual. You follow me around the threads like a chihuahua.
You’re deliberately being a pain in the butt. You have accused people here, including our host of cheating to win the Weblog Awards, you never offer anything constructive, you ignore links posted to help answer your questions, you argue incessantly, you bird-dog my comments and accuse me of ‘following’ you around when that’s what you’ve done from the start, you run interference like any garden variety troll, you project all your own faults onto others, and no one but my adopted son agrees with you. I’d tell you to get a life, but I think this is your life. That’s pretty pathetic, no?
Any evidence that man-made climate change was real would convince me that man-made climate change was real.
The fact that there’s zero evidence after 40 years and after a longer-term increase of CO2 from 280 ppm to 400 ppm, is more than a teeny weeny problem, eh ?
Yeah right – vast clouds of immeasurable bullsh!t trump actual measurements.
…. only in lousy scientist-land. Thank you for raising your hand re. the lousy scientist issue.
warrenlb says:
He’s the premier example why metrology lab techs make lousy scientists
warrenbot ha sunk so low that he trashes an entire profession because he’s being out-argued every time he pops his head out.
Whack-A-Mole!
Your estimates of transmission conservation are way too low. High power transmission per electrical engineering friend is in the 90% range.
Efficiency of an electric vehicle is probably in the range of high 30% to low 40%, well above a gas engine.
My understanding though is that gas engines are becoming way more efficient and there are some papers working on attaining 50%.
The cost of electricity is 1/3 – 1/4 of gas per mile driven which contradicts the fuel cost calculation above. Electric utilities not only can be more efficient in generating power from oil but they can utilize other sources of evergy that are less costly. The result is the benefit from driving an electric car is increased substantially making them actually substantially cheaper than ICE cars/mile today even when you consider battery costs and assume a similar maintenance cost to ICEs which is unlikely to be the case.
I otherwise agree substantially with everything else the post has to say. The likely tcs in my opinion is likely to be less than 1C for a doubling of co2. It could even be 0C. We can’t place a lower bound until we understand more about oceans and clouds and interaction with the sun and earth mantle etc. however we can say that under very powerful stimulation essentially a 50% gain in co2 the climate system has moved since 1945 by at most 0.3C and this is likely to have been caused by a combination of factors that makes the contribution of co2 half or less the total temp rise. This means tcs is likely 0.3C or less. A 50% rise in co2 should have caused already 70% or more of the total rise we will get from a doubling of co2 because co2 operates logarithmically. We have already gotten most of the rise we should expect from a doubling. The amount of temp gain we can get from another 150ppm of co2 cannot be more than 0.3 and is more likely 0.1c or so.
Hello Logic,
First, I like the concept of electric cars, and have for a decade or more. I think they will be an economic success as battery technology continues to improve – I hope so.
Several years ago, I proposed that a distributed “super-battery”” might be practical by leaving electric cars programmed and plugged in during the day, and this super-battery could help to make renewables like grid-connected wind power economically competitive – which they are NOT at this time.
My problem with electricity may seem petty, but here it is:
In my Alberta location, it costs about 5 to 7 cents per kWh to produce electricity, typically from coal or natural gas generating systems.
However, my household electricity bill is tripled by various distribution and administrative charges. How much does your electricity cost per kWh, all-in at your location, and how do your above numbers work in this case?
I expect that, in the future, more and more companies and even individuals will opt off the grid and produce their own electricity from natural gas using new-tech generating systems.
Regards, Allan
If those new-tech generating systems can produce enough electricity with maximum efficiency, I’d be all for that. Even though I am NOT a big fan of electric cars. I don’t know how much it costs for the utility that serves my part of Texas pays to produce electricity; all I can tell you is that I pay a monthly average of anywhere from $0.10 – $0.12/kWh for my electricity right now, in large part because the Obama administration has not yet imposed its carbon dioxide regulations (which will, like in Europe, triple the cost of electricity for the average household in no small part because of all of the alternative energy subsidies that have been and will be given to the unproductive wind and solar power sectors) and because we have been fortunate to still have a market for natural gas that is abundant and relatively cheap. I suspect that the energy policies of the Canadian government have something to do with your high electric bill as well, but I won’t presume it – yet.
Here here, Lord Monckton! Bailey has had it coming for a long time, and Reason should reconsider having a token climate warming, change, disruption propagandist on their staff.
Well, many climate skeptics cannot be convinced that they are wrong just because they were already paid by the extracting industry to combat any development of the renewable energy sector,
Sadly, even the governments of some of the developed countries (Australia), have chosen to use coal as the main energy source in the future.
Dave claims
Dead wrong. A direct lie.
However, ALL Big-Government-paid Government “scientists” ARE PAID 100% of their salaries, lab budgets, travel, research budgets, and energy budgets to promote Big Government’s, Big Academic, and Big Finance’s need for 30 trillion in carbon futures trading and 1.3 trillion in new carbon taxes!
Lie is a big word.
Misinformed might work better.
Unless you are looking for a duel.
Misstatement of fact works well.
u.k.(us) and lee:
Yes, “lie is a big word” but its use by RACookPE1978 was true and accurate.
Why be ‘mealy-mouthed’ when confronted with such outrageous and deliberate falsehood as was posted by Dave?
Richard
@Dave.
Note that the only recourse these individuals (the sk**s) have is to accuse all the World’s Institutions of Science (which conclude AGW) of being corrupt or in a conspiracy to defraud the public. That’s IT. They have nothing else. It’s a pretty sad bunch.
I don’t know if they are corrupt, but certainly they are incompetent. Every single prediction they have made has turned out wrong, for well over 30 years. And that’s all that I am concerned about.
Show me one model that has successfully predicted the Global temperature over any length of time and then we can have a discussion about science. And if you can’t, then the theory is wrong. That’s how science and the scientific method work.
Actually false. Show me one prediction made by the IPCC that DIDN’T turn out to be understated. What you’ve posted is a MYTH, repeated so often on this forum that no one remembers its completely false.
Actually true, warrenbot:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-90-models-global-Tsfc-vs-obs-thru-2013.png
Almost every prediction has been OVERSTATED. And your batting average remains at .000; you have been wrong about everything else, too. You’re either lying, or deluded. Maybe both, son.
db
There are actually two model projections that are close. I’m curious as to what those are.
Repeating a phony chart, which you know to be bogus, Stealey.
Instead, go the IPCC 4th Assessment -there you’ll find plenty of analysis on the point, which shows the projections to be slightly understated. Or, if, as I suspect, you refuse to read the IPCC assessments, try this while you’re fuming: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-are-wrong/.
warrenboi,
Just because you assert something, means nothing. You’re always making baseless assertions.
warrenlb:
I am offended that you demand others read the IPCC Assessments when it is very clear that you have not read them your self.
Please desist from this until you have read them yourself because the need to correct your untrue assertions of IPCC statements is becoming tedious.
Richard
@RicahrdSSCoutnry.
You can correct your problem of being offended by simply reading the 4th Assessment discussion of the models, or read the link I posted to WiIliam Nordhaus’s essay on model accuracy. You might clear offending cobwebs by reading these two sources.. And once you think you’ve found something in those two sources that you disagree with, post it for discussion. I agree with the information in both, but you apparently do not. So cite what you disagree with
wearrenlb
You say to me
As I explained to you on another thread here,
The AR4 was one of the Reports for which I provided expert peer review.
When you have read the AR4 then, and only then, will I discuss your untrue assertions about its contents.
You don’t want to correct your ignorance of model performance but those who want to know about it can read my assessment
(ref. Courtney RS An assessment of validation experiments conducted on computer models of global climate using the general circulation model of the UK’s Hadley Centre Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 5, pp. 491-502, September 1999)
and that of Kiehl which finds the same as my analysis but assessed 9 GCMs and two energy balance models.
(ref. Kiehl JT,Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity. GRL vol.. 34, L22710, doi:10.1029/2007GL031383, 2007).
Please stop wasting space on WUWT threads with your untrue assertions that you cannot substantiate when called on them.
Richard
Which IPCC report predicted the 18 year pause?
I would be grateful if you can provide a link. The burden of proof is on you not me. That’s how science works.
But to prove you wrong here you go:
https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_full_report.pdf
Figure 9 on page xxiu
Figure 9: Simulations of the increase in global mean temperature from 1850-1990 due to observed increases in greenhouse gases, and
predictions of the rise between 1990 and 2100 resulting from the IPCC Scenario B,C and D emissions, with the Busmess-as Usual case
for comparison.
The “Best As Usual Scenario” which we have exceeded in terms of CO2 emissions, predicted as rise in temperature of over 1 C for the time period 1989 to 2015. There has been no increase in temperature during that period.
Reg Nelson says “Which IPCC report predicted the 18 year pause?”
It is a matter of curiosity only; what wasn’t known THEN was which one was correct. In retrospect it is easy to pick one that is “less wrong” but whether it will continue to be “less wrong” seems uncertain.
One of my favorite magic tricks has a guy hiding money under many things in a room. He then asks a volunteer to choose something in the room and he’s going to mentally suggest to the volunteer what to pick, it has money under it.
Upon choosing something, the magician picks it up and behold, there’s the money! Good guessing! That there’s also money under everything else in the room isn’t explored.
Michael 2:
In addition to your magic trick I draw your attention to a trick used by scammers.
A set of, say 4, different investment plans is devised.
Each investment plan is sent to, say 4000, random people.
At a later date one (or more) of the plans has provided a very good return.
Those who were sent the ‘successful’ plan are now sent a report of its ‘success’ together with another investment plan. These new investment plans are another 4 different investment plans so 4 groups each of 1000 people each obtains one of these second plans.
Again, at a later date one (or more) of the second plans has provided a very good return.
Those who were sent the ‘successful’ second plan are now sent a report of its ‘success’ together with a third investment plan. These new investment plans are another 4 different investment plans so 4 groups each of 250 people each obtain one of them.
Yet again, at a later date one (or more) of the third plans has provided a very good return.
Those who were sent the ‘successful’ third plan are now sent a report of its ‘success’ together with an offer to invest $10,000 in the next investment plan which uses the astonishingly accurate prediction method that has apparently been successful three times without fail.
If 100 of the 250 targeted people invests then the scammers gain an income of $1,000,000.
This is, in fact, the same ploy as is used when the ‘best’ climate modes are selected after the event.
Richard
Ooops! In my post that is waiting in the bin I wrote
“This is, in fact, the same ploy as is used when the ‘best’ climate modes are selected after the event.”
Of course I intended to write
“This is, in fact, the same ploy as is used when the ‘best’ climate models are selected after the event.”
Sorry. I was not writing about fashion models.
Richard
On Greenland ice, readers will enjoy the story of the missing squadron, here:
http://donaitkin.com/melting-the-greenland-icecap/
donaitkin
The unexplained issue is: If Greenland’s icecap is losing so million billions and billions of tons of ice every year, how did these very, very light aircraft with very wide flat wings (that allow the plane to “float on” (not sink into!) ice), get covered by over 250 feet of “new”: ice in only 50 years?
“If Greenland’s icecap is loosing so million billions and billions of tons of ice every year, how did these very, very light aircraft with very wide flat wings (that allow the plane to “float on” (not sink into!) ice), get covered by over 250 feet of “new”: ice in only 50 years?”
Obviously the ice is melting from the *bottom* while new ice is forming at the top.
Michael 2
Conceivably true for a small, very heavy dense object with very, very high heat conductivity (an anvil for example) set on top of an icefield; but invalid for an empty, very light object with almost no wing loading such as an out-of-fuel, unarmed WWII fighter.
Lord M,
Hope you get down this far, whenever claims like this are made you need to check causality.
1. By my calculation, melting of 215E14 kg of ice over 2.1 million square km requires 1.13 Watts per square meter 24 hours a day 365 days a year, even when the atmosphere is below freezing. If we assume that melting can only occur over say 33 % of the year when the air temperature is above zero accounting for night time below zero temps and winter then the power requirement when it IS melting is 3 times that at 3.42 Watts per square meter Since the forcing is only 0.6W, the melting is non causal, that is it does not satisfy the law of conservation of energy. Beside if ice is absorbing all the 0.6W there can be no energy accumulating in the atmosphere for warming, how then can melting be happening, one must also consider that snow and ice refects radiant energy so some portion of the CO2 emission toward the ground gets reflected back into space and the melting is not 100% energy efficient.
2. Let’s look at that rainfall claim of an average of 2″ a year or 50mm, that is an increase of 50kg per square meter which would require extra evaporation of 2250e3 x 50 = 1.12e8 joules per square meter per annum, if we divide by the 31566926 seconds in a year we get the power requirement in joules per second (ie: watts) = 3.56 watts per square meter which is about 6 x the imbalance energy attributed to CO2 therefore this rainfall estimate is also violating energy conservation. Once again, if all the warming energy is absorbed in evaporating water there can be no warming of the atmosphere to evaporate the water so the energy requirement is even higher than that, also evaporation doesn’t happen over the entire earth, as you constrain the area evaporation is sourced from then the kg per square meter to get the additional average rainfall must rise ( for example if the evaporation were sourced from 75% of the earths surface then the evaporation must be 66kg per square meter to deliver that 2″ average rainfall increase over the full surface). The energy also can’t be in two places at once, indeed if evaporation (rainfall) has increased by 50mm per square meter then the extra evaporation MUST be cooling the earth by -3 odd Watts per square meter minimum.
Let’s combine the claims, the implication here is that the snow is meting AND there is 50 kg or more of evaporation per square meter over greenland, so the power requirement is 3.42 + 3.56 = 6.98 call it 7 watts per square meter; thats twice ALL the backradiation from CO2 let alone just the difference between backradiation from 270PPM and backradiation from 400PPM which must be some fraction of that (Hansen says 0.6W). The power requirement of these claims is MORE THAN TEN TIMES the power claimed to be causing it.
Your arguments while excellent are unnecessary, this garbage can just be put down by checking their energy requirement.
Three months ago, Christopher as lead author, together with co-authors Dr. Willie W-H. Soon and David R. Legates and William M. Briggs had their paper published by “Springer” (springer.com and also scibull.com) the Chinese Science Bulletin.
For the benefit of those who have not yet seen it I attach here the relevant, thirty-six (36) minute part, of the interview given by Christopher on that day, to Alex Jones of the digital broadcasting channel “InfoWars” of 12th. January in Texas, U. S. A..
I should point out that Christopher was the one who ALSO warned us about “biodiversity” (a new word which seems only to be employed by governments and tax-gobbling “quangos” for spending other people’s money) and yes, you can see the vast waste of our money by reading the Final Report of July 2010 to eaga Charitable Trust written by Ian Preston and Vicki White of the so-called Centre for Sustainable Energy (Bristol) and also Pedro Guertler of the so-called Association for the Conservation of Energy (London) in the report headed “Distributional Impacts of UK Climate Change Policies”. You will be amazed and mistyfied by it all … then, after all that, and when you read the very last two paragraphs of the eighty-nine (89) page report you will be screaming at their highly pontificated arrogance. (Oh yes and … I wonder who paid for it all ?) Hmmmm and that’s only the tip of the …………
Of course manmade climate change is real. No not joking. If I stand outside and light a match I have changed the climate. Yes, the change is so infinitesimally small that it cannot be measured, but change it did. So the question is really what is the magnitude and consequences of manmade climate change. And in the answer is where all the ambiguity and uncertainty of the climate change disagreement occurs.
Typical gasoline-powered auto engines are approximately 27% efficient. Typical fossil-fueled generating stations are 50% efficient, transmission to end user is 67% efficient, battery charging is 90% efficient and the auto’s electric motor is 90% efficient, so that the fuel efficiency of an electric car is also 27%. However, the electric car requires 30% more power per mile traveled to move the mass of its batteries.
Um, not even close. Sorry.
1. Most gasoline engines run at a thermal efficiency of 20-22%, not 27%. From time to time, you’ll see higher claims, but the average is what I stated.
2. The average U.S. thermal efficiency in electricity generation is 43%. Coal and uranium generate 58% of our electricity at 33% efficiency. Another 2-1/2% comes from petroleum and burning of municipal waste and wood, also at 33% efficiency. Natural gas is 28% of the generating mix, at 41% efficiency. Wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal comprise the remaining 11-1/2%, at 100% efficiency (“thermal efficiency” is a tough concept for the renewables — I use 100% because these methods don’t use any fuel input)
3. Electricity transmission loss is 6.5%, not 33%. We don’t know how much energy is used to ship gasoline from refineries to gas stations. When I consider the issue, I set them equal and therefore cancel out this factor.
4. An electric car converts 75%-80% of the energy at the plug to power to the wheels. Thus 43% (x) 77.5% = 33% thermal efficiency. This makes an EV 1.57 times as thermally efficxient as a gas car
5. Now, here’s the kicker: An EV will go 3-1/2 times as far as a gas car will on the same amount of energy. I have directly observed this with my own EV. This makes an EV about 5-1/2 times as efficient as a gas car.
CO2 emissions from domestic transport account for 24% of UK CO2 emissions, and cars, vans, and taxis represent 90% of road transport (DfT, 2013). Assuming 80% of fuel use is by these autos, they account for 19.2% of UK CO2 emissions. Conversion to electric power, 61% of which is generated by fossil fuels in the UK, would abate 39% of 19.2% (i.e. 7.5%) of UK CO2 emissions. (etc.)
I don’t accept the AGW hypothesis, because I think the data has invalidated the models. So I don’t especially care about CO2 emissions. I don’t have U.K. numbers, but I have looked up similar U.S. numbers. At the national average electric fuel mix, an EV will emit about 40% less CO2 than a gas vehicle will. If the whole vehicle fleet went electric, we’d need about 20% more electricity generation.
Though the longevity of electric autos is 50% greater than that of internal-combustion autos, the advantage is more than canceled by the very large cost of total battery replacement every few years.
The jury’s still out on the durability of EV batteries. The current rule of thumb is 2,000 charge cycles until you degrade 30%, the typical standard for replacement. In the real world, if that 2,000 cycles is true, then a 24 kWh LEAF battery should last about 120,000 miles. The reality for LEAF batteries seems to be about half that, i.e., 1,000 cycles. But this might be a Nissan-only issue, and it also might be that Nissan’s EVs are mainly leased, which gives owners no incentive to follow the most prudent recharging techniques.
The average EV in the U.S. is driven 8,000 miles a year, which would make replacement a 7-1/2 to 15 year affair. Myself, I’m expecting 100,000 miles, which would entail battery replacement at about the 20-year mark.
I’m not an “EVangelist.” In fact, I regularly get in pissing matches with the EVangelists, because I insist on being truthful and factual about every aspect of them. (Side note: I own an EV not to save the planet, but because I’m a typical car nut. I was curious, and when one became available cheap I snapped it up.) I think there are definite problems that must be solved if EVs are ever to become mainstream. In particular, batteries are far, far too expensive, and not nearly energy-dense enough.
That said, I do think that vehicles will eventually be battery powered — all of them. It’ll take a long longer than the EVangelists think it will — at least 50 years, I think — but I do think it will happen, because I think there will be lots of returns to battery research. And it will be a very welcome development. Not because of the CO2 nonsense, but because extraction of oil causes other environmental harm. And burning it in gas engines is wasteful. Even more radically, I also think that, at least in the United States, we’re going to see a revolution in alternative energy, starting in the ’20s. The catalyst will be the cheap, utility-scale molten metal battery that now appears to be in its finishing stages. This will make wind and solar become dispatchable, and that will make all the difference.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29284934
I have mixed feelings about what I see just over the horizon, especially as it regards wind. The turbines are ugly and noisy, but they are also quite cheap. And we’re going to have a few million of them.
Jake – you said:
“……5. Now, here’s the kicker: An EV will go 3-1/2 times as far as a gas car will on the same amount of energy. I have directly observed this with my own EV. …”
Sounds very unlikely! Trick question – like you only drive your EV downhill? Since you were going into details to explain most everything else you said, I was expecting some explanation. Do you know or suspect the reason – if this IS true.
Sounds very unlikely! Trick question – like you only drive your EV downhill? Since you were going into details to explain most everything else you said, I was expecting some explanation. Do you know or suspect the reason – if this IS true.
No, I don’t only drive my EV downhill. And I am death on people who make up numbers, which is why ax-grinders of all kinds tend to get pissed off at me pretty fast. Anyway, it is always a challenge to know how much detail to go into, especially when I’m late to a comment thread and don’t know whether anyone will even read it. But you asked, so I will answer.
The EPA does fuel economy estimates for all cars. Early on, they were rightly criticized for overly optimistic numbers. That’s no longer the case. Their numbers are pretty good these days. If you go to the site, you can do comparisons. Example: Smart gas car, 32 mpg. Smart EV, 107 mpg-e. (MPG-e is a conversion, based on about 33-34 kWh = 1 gallon of gas.) That’s 3.3x the efficiency for the same car, electric vs. gas. It’s quite typical, and it matches my own experience with the EV that I own.
The reason? Well, I’m not an engineer, but it seems pretty obvious that a gas car sends a lot of energy out the tailpipe and in the forms of noise and vibration, while an EV sends very little outside. This is why EVs do so much worse in winter: They need to run the heater off the battery, and it reduces fuel economy. Depending on how cold it is, the results can be dramatic.
My EV’s best performance in 2-1/2 years was last August 30, at 140 mpg-e. The worst was January 27, 2013, at 66 mpg-e. And that’s in Seattle, where a winter day is cold if it’s much below freezing. Drive one of these things in Chicago, Minneapolis, Montreal, or Fargo, and it’ll be much worse. The one thing I will say is that, at least with my EV, the heater is great. Much quicker than the heater in a gas car, and operates at a lower % of the highest setting after it’s warmed up.
If you have other questions, I’m glad to answer them. By the way, I own two other vehicles at the moment. One is a gigantic diesel one-ton pickup (do a lookup on a 2013 RAM 3500 Laredo), and the other is a 2004 Volkswagen Phaeton with the 12-cylinder engine. I say this not to brag about the vehicles, although they are pretty awesome, but rather to try to establish my credentials as not being some sort of “EVs will save the earth” moron. Trust me, I don’t do cults.
I had another thought. A casual reader might say I double counted EV efficiencies by using the gas car comparison twice. But I didn’t double count, and here’s why.
If the thermal efficiency of U.S. electricity production is approximately 43%, and translates to 33% in an EV due to losses between the plug and the wheels, and this is 1.57x the thermal efficiency of a gas vehicle, something is easy to overlook and hard for a non-specialist like me to explain because I lack the engineering vocabulary.
When you produce electricity at a thermal efficiency of 43%, you are left with energy that can be used for all the things we do with electricity. Those things have efficiencies of their own. An EV, as a system, is about 78% efficient. Once you’ve used it, then there’s no more energy to use in the car. It was converted to other energy that’s no longer available to you.
Comparing this to a gas car, once you’ve driven the car, you’re done, energy wise. You used 21% of it to drive the car, and the other 79% is in the atmosphere. Frankly, I probably should’ve incorporated the thermal efficiency of an oil refinery (90%) and deducted that from the car’s efficiency, and started at 90% (x) 21%, and compared a gas car system — including the manufacture of the fuel it uses — at 18% to an EV’s thermal efficiency of 33%. This would make the EV with fuel 1.83x as thermally efficient as the gas car.
At that point, you then compare how far the energy that the two vehicles carry onboard will carry the vehicles, and throw it into the total mix. The EV will carry people 3.3x to 3.5x as far (there have been some incremental improvements in some of the EVs, so some of them have gotten a little more fuel efficient). Take mid-point estimates, and do some rounding: 1.8 (x) 3.4 = 6.12, which translates into an EV having six times the fuel economy as the equivalent gas car.
Either way — 5 times, 5-1/2 times, 6 times — it’s a big gap. Leaving politics and this bogus AGW hypothesis aside, I really don’t think you’d find many people who’d defend using gasoline as an energy source if something else was as practical. The real advantage of gasoline is its energy density, and that’s it’s still pretty cheap. Take either of those advantages away, and it’s done.
I do believe that hybrid vehicles are triumphs of technology, and all-electric vehicles make sense in an urban environment. I am just against subsidizing them, and providing power to them by “renewables” which are not as environmentally friendly as portrayed, and could not, themselves, compete without subsidies.
Anyway, the problem I have with the statement, “An EV will go 3-1/2 times as far as a gas car will on the same amount of energy”, has more to do with its imprecision. I.e., which gas car? Because, I have driven hybrid vehicles as rentals and was frankly underwhelmed by the acceleration. In my opinion, an apples-to-apples comparison would be with a very weakly powered ICE.
Jake – thanks
I was particularly concerned that you tacked that 3.5 on after the 1.57.
If this is the same weight/speed/etc. than that is interesting.
Oh – it’s certainly not the sound. Almost no energy there.
You quoted: “(MPG-e is a conversion, based on about 33-34 kWh = 1 gallon of gas.) ” I’m not sure that means that if you have a gallon of gas, you can charge 33-34 kWh into a battery?
I was particularly concerned that you tacked that 3.5 on after the 1.57.
I have struggled with this myself. It’s not the numbers that are hard, but the concepts are unfamiliar so it’s easy for an honest inquirer to still get it wrong. Yeah, I know, it’s the Internet, and we’re never wrong!
You quoted: “(MPG-e is a conversion, based on about 33-34 kWh = 1 gallon of gas.) ” I’m not sure that means that if you have a gallon of gas, you can charge 33-34 kWh into a battery?
The mpg-e conversion expresses the amount of energy contained in a gallon to kWh of electricity. Individuals can’t somehow physically convert one to the other. It’s a theoretical number useful for rendering all this stuff in terms that are familiar to us, and (in particularly) enabling fuel economy comparisons between gas and electric vehicles. I quoted a range of 33-34 kWh because I’ve seen different numbers out there.
A year or two ago, I constructed my own conversion number — 34.8 kWh to the gallon of gas.The reason “my” number is higher is that I did a laborious research project aiming to determine the truth of a claim by EVangelists that it takes 5 to 6 kWh of electricity to refine a gallon of gas. I really pored over the Energy Department numbers in a big way. The result was 0.78 kWh of electricity used to make each gallon of gasoline. This is electricity coming from the power grid, or in the form of steam and natural gas external to the crude oil being refined, and then burned to run turbines in a refinery.
I added that to a 34.02 kWh per gallon number that I had obtained at the same time, to get a total of 34.8 kWh = 1 gallon of gasoline. I believe the EPA uses a slightly lower number (33.x), which makes their mpg-e numbers a bit lower than mine. But that’s classic “false precision.” Whether the EV gets 107 mpg-e or 111 mpg-e is, to cite an accounting principle, not material to the analysis. It was worthwhile to get the numbers for the purpose of checking the one claim I mentioned — but whether I use 34.8 kWh to the gallon or 33.x kWh to the gallon is a detail that I mention mainly to illustrate how far I pursued this.
Again, the only ax I have to grind is to say what I honestly think is factual and true. “First you’ve got to get the facts, and then you have to face the facts.”
If this is the same weight/speed/etc. than that is interesting.
I’m glad you mentioned that. I absolutely insist on comparing likes to likes. It’s why, in a previous comment here, I looked up a gas-powered Smart and an electric-powered Smart. On EVaneglist sites, I’ve had people make outrageous gas savings claims, only to learn that they were comparing their brand new EV to their 20-year-old 1-ton Ford truck. When I told the guy he was making a false comparison, I became the heretic. One more reason not to bother with Reddit (sigh).
Thanks again Jake –
I am only here because I was part of the feedback discussion above, and happened upon your comment down at the bottom. So I appreciate your humoring me, but suspect this is extensively discussed elsewhere prior to you and I. Here is my concern.
(1) Suppose I have a gallon of gas and put it in my car, and lets suppose that gets me out 32 miles. I walk back.
(2) I take a second gallon and put it in my most efficient generator and charge up (from zero) my most efficient equivalent EV. I drive out at the same speed until the battery is exhausted. I then walk home again. I wager the second walk is shorter! Isn’t this so?
Now, mpg is a fine way to compare gas vehicles. Miles/kWhr would be a good way to compare EVs. But – How do we compare gas to EVs? With GREAT difficulty! I think mpg-e is nonsense. How about a common energy unit of miles-per-jelly-donut for both. Seriously, Phil Morrison used jelly-donuts as a unit of energy on an old Nova program. Since you can’t power a gas or and EV from a jelly-donut, you have to eat the donut, get out, and push. Both cars get the same distance (not far!). Level starting comparison. Go from there.
Again, we’re at the tag end of a comment thread here, so I face the issue of how much to write. I accept the mpg-e formula, because it’s based on the energy content of gas and electricity, measured in joules. It makes for useful comparisons, but if someone can make a detailed argument to the contrary, my mind is always and forever open to facts and logic.
Interesting about a generator. I’ve actually wondered something similar in a different context. What if I bought a natural gas-powered generator and used to it produce electricity for my house, given that I have natural gas service where I live? I suspect (but don’t know) that a small generator for my house wouldn’t be anywhere close to as efficient as what the utilities use, and that the combination of relative inefficiency and the mechanical wear and tear would make it a horrendously uneconomical option.
If I powered the house generator [with] gasoline, my lizard brain strongly suggests I’d be really screwed
But I’ve never looked at ether set of numbers. As a general idea, I think there are big economies of scale in the utility business, at least as it pertains to the use of extracted fuel to generate power.
Oops, I messed up a tag above. I really wish this site had an edit capability.
Jake – Thanks for your time – will look for you on later threads. -Bernie
What evidence would make me believe (or at least make me take more seriously) the arguments of climate alarmists?
Simple…if the models were accurate in their predictions that would be tough to refute. But, as we know, that hasn’t happened, has it?