Guest smack-down by David Middleton
Funny thing… The writing of this post was disrupted by a preview of the Green New Deal in Dallas over the past 5 days… More on this later.
Losing Earth: A Recent History is a bad science fiction novel by Nathaniel Rich of The New York Times. It’s apparently an expanded version of a New York Times article he wrote. Last week, RealClearEnergy linked to an extract from this book on The Daily Maverick (whatever the frack that is).
Here’s an abbreviated version of the extract:
OUR BURNING PLANET: BOOK EXTRACT
What failure to reverse climate change could mean
By Nathaniel Rich• 27 May 2019By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change ― including how to stop it, according to the book, Losing Earth.
[…]
The Daily Maverick
It basically goes on like this:
- James Hansen good.
- IPCC good.
- Al Gore mega-superhero.
- Oil companies evil.
- Orange man bad.
- Green New Deal Cultural Revolution NOW!
- Global socialism now, or Earth fries in 12 years!!!
The above isn’t a list of actual quotes from the article. It’s my flippant impression of the article … And I’m being generous; this book extract doesn’t even deserve flippant.
First off, this is beyond moronic…
What failure to reverse climate change could mean…
Nathaniel Rich
It’s impossible to “reverse climate change” . “Climate change” is directionless.
If, by climate change, this “eloquent science history” (according to Barbara Kiser of Nature) means “global warming,” a reversal of the warming we have experienced since 1978 would mean a return to “The Ice Age Cometh“…
A return to That 70’s Climate Show doesn’t seem like a brilliant idea to me. If the serially wrong climate models were even close to correct, AGW saved us from The Ice Age Cometh…
If, by climate change, this “eloquent science history” is referring to the more significant warming Earth has experienced since the depths of the Little Ice Age, it would be far more catastrophic than any RCP8.5 nightmare.
Great Famine
Beginning in the spring of 1315, cold weather and torrential rains decimated crops and livestock across Europe. Class warfare and political strife destabilized formerly prosperous countries as millions of people starved, setting the stage for the crises of the Late Middle Ages. According to reports, some desperate Europeans resorted to cannibalism during the so-called Great Famine, which persisted until the early 1320s.
Black Death
History.com
Typically considered an outbreak of the bubonic plague, which is transmitted by rats and fleas, the Black Death wreaked havoc on Europe, North Africa and Central Asia in the mid-14th century. It killed an estimated 75 million people, including 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. Some experts have tied the outbreak to the food shortages of the Little Ice Age, which purportedly weakened human immune systems while allowing rats to flourish.
Iceland was one of the hardest hit areas. Sea ice, which today is far to the north, came down around Iceland. In some years, it was difficult to bring a ship ashore anywhere along the coast. Grain became impossible to grow and even hay crops failed. Volcanic eruptions made life even harder. Iceland lost half of its population during the Little Ice Age.
Tax records in Scandinavia show many farms were destroyed by advancing ice of glaciers and by melt water streams. Travellers in Scotland reported permanent snow cover over the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland at an altitude of about 1200 metres. In the Alps, the glaciers advanced and threatened to bulldozed towns. Ice-dammed lakes burst periodically, destroying hundreds of buildings and killing many people. As late as 1930 the French Government commissioned a report to investigate the threat of the glaciers. They could not have foreseen that human induced global warming was to deal more effective with this problem than any committee ever could.
Environmental History Resources
The Little Ice Age (LIA) was most likely the coldest climatic period of the Holocene Epoch. In Central Greenland it was roughly the same temperature as it was during the Bølling-Allerød glacial interstadial.
Just how much climate change do we need to reverse?
Back to the last Pleistocene glacial stage? Back to the Eemian interglacial? Or further back than that?
The modern ~1 °C rise since pre-industrial times doesn’t break out of the Quaternary Period noise level… another 1 °C rise still won’t even break out of the Quaternary Period noise level.
If we reverse climate change back before the Quaternary Period, I don’t think that would work out so well either…
Earth’s average surface temperature is only a few degrees C above the coldest climate of the entire Cenozoic Era, the Late Pleistocene glacial stages.
Maybe by “reverse climate change,” is Mr. Rich just referring to lowering the atmospheric CO2 level back down to some imaginary Goldilocks concentration?
What exactly is the Goldilocks CO2 concentration?
Maybe he answers these questions in the book? I’ll never know… because I wouldn’t even check it out of a public library much less purchase it. So, let’s move on…
As Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, recently put it:
“We’re increasingly shifting from a mode of predicting what’s going to happen to a mode of trying to explain what happened.”
Nathaniel Rich
Of course “we” are “increasingly shifting from a mode of predicting what’s going to happen to a mode of trying to explain what happened”… That’s the result of 30+ years of failed predictions.
And your predicitive skill is not improving.
So what happened? The common explanation today concerns the depredations of the fossil fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. Between 2000 and 2016, the industry spent more than $2-billion, or 10 times as much as was spent by environmental groups, to defeat climate change legislation.
Nathaniel Rich
I’m sorry… But $2 billion over 17 years (<$120 million/yr) isn’t even a tiny fraction of what environmental activist groups and government bureaucracies spend on efforts to destroy prosperity and individual liberty.
The Natural Resources Defense Council is totally dedicated to the destruction of prosperity and individual liberty in the USA and religiously devoted to the AGW myth. Their annual budget ($152 million) is more than the combined income of the American Enterprise Institute ($75 million), Cato Institute ($37 million), Heartland Institute ($5 million) and Competitive Enterprise Institute ($8 million).
The Federal government p!$$ed away $2 billion every 60 days promoting the Gorebal Warming scam as recently as 2017.
Furthermore, the “fossil fuel industry” (singular) not only doesn’t exist, but it didn’t cause this:
Global demand for plentiful, affordable energy caused it.
Oil & Gas and Coal are two very different industries… Both of which are essential to U.S. energy dominance, economic prosperity and individual liberty.
If the United States had endorsed the proposal broadly supported at the end of the Eighties — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees. A broad international consensus had agreed on a mechanism to achieve this: a binding global treaty.
Nathaniel Rich
“If the United States had endorsed the proposal broadly supported at the end of the Eighties — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 by 2005”… we would have committed economic suicide.
It has been said that regulating carbon dioxide emissions will make the United States the cleanest Third World country on Earth. And whoever controls carbon dioxide emissions will control the world.
Dr. Roy Spencer
And it would have had a Dean Wormer effect on the weather.
0.05°C is basically…
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change…
By 1979, we knew Jack Schist…
The atmosphere’s blanketing effect over the earth’s surface has been compared to the functioning of a greenhouse. Short-wave sunlight passes as easily through the glass of the greenhouse as through the atmosphere. Because glass is opaque to the long-wave radiation from the warm interior of the greenhouse, it hinders the escape of energy.
As a planet, the earth is not warming or cooling appreciably on the average, because it loses as much radiant energy as it gains.
Kolenkow, Robert J., Reid A. Bryson, Douglas B. Carter, R. Keith Julian, Robert A. Muller, Theodore M. Oberlander, Robert P. Sharp & M. Gordon Wolman. Physical geography today : a portrait of a planet. Del Mar, Calif. : CRM Books, [1974]. p. 64.
FORECASTING THE FUTURE. We can now try to decide if we are now in an interglacial stage, with other glacials to follow, or if the world has finally emerged from the Cenozoic Ice Age. According to the Milankovitch theory, fluctuations of radiation of the type shown in Fig. 16-18 must continue and therefore future glacial stages will continue. According to the theory just described, as long as the North and South Poles retain their present thermally isolated locations, the polar latitudes will be frigid; and as the Arctic Ocean keeps oscillating between ice-free and ice-covered states, glacial-interglacial climates will continue.
Finally, regardless of which theory one subscribes to, as long as we see no fundamental change in the late Cenozoic climate trend, and the presence of ice on Greenland and Antarctica indicates that no change has occurred, we can expect that the fluctuations of the past million years will continue.
Donn, William L. Meteorology. 4th Edition. McGraw-Hill 1975. pp 463-464
Suggestion that changing carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could be a major factor in climate change dates from 1861, when it was proposed by British physicist John Tyndall.
[…]
Unfortunately we cannot estimate accurately changes of past CO2 content of either atmosphere or oceans, nor is there any firm quantitative basis for estimating the the magnitude of drop in carbon dioxide content necessary to trigger glaciation. Moreover the entire concept of an atmospheric greenhouse effect is controversial, for the rate of ocean-atmosphere equalization is uncertain.
Dott, Robert H. & Roger L. Batten. Evolution of the Earth. McGraw-Hill, Inc. Second Edition 1976. p. 441.
By 1982, we knew what we know today… The models were wrong…
If there actually is a need to rapidly reduce carbon emissions…
This could only be accomplished through “the depredations of the fossil fuel” industries and the unleashing of the nuclear power industry.
Real Clear Energy
If carbon emissions truly were an existential threat, almost as severe as the economic threat of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution, then we need to find a way to economically capture and sequester the maximum volume of carbon dioxide. And there is only one way to do this. Capture carbon emissions from coal and natural gas fired power plants and use it for enhanced recovery projects in old oil fields.
OCTOBER 31, 2017
Petra Nova is one of two carbon capture and sequestration power plants in the world
The Petra Nova facility, a coal-fired power plant located near Houston, Texas, is one of only two operating power plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the world, and it is the only such facility in the United States. The 110 megawatt (MW) Boundary Dam plant in Saskatchewan, Canada, near the border with North Dakota, is the other electric utility facility using a CCS system.[…]
Petra Nova’s post-combustion CO2 capture system began operations in January 2017. The 240-megawatt (MW) carbon capture system that was added to Unit 8 (654 MW capacity) of the existing W.A. Parish pulverized coal-fired generating plant receives about 37% of Unit 8’s emissions, which are diverted through a flue gas slipstream. Petra Nova’s carbon-capture system is designed to capture about 90% of the carbon dioxide ( CO2 ) emitted from the flue gas slipstream, or about 33% of the total emissions from Unit 8. The post-combustion process is energy intensive and requires a dedicated natural gas unit to accommodate the energy requirements of the carbon-capture process.
The carbon dioxide captured by Petra Nova’s system is then used in enhanced oil recovery at nearby oil fields. Enhanced oil recovery involves injecting water, chemicals, or gases (such as carbon dioxide) into oil reservoirs to increase the ability of oil to flow to a well.
By comparison, Kemper had been designed to capture about 65% of the plant’s CO2 using a pre-combustion system. The capital costs associated with the Kemper project were initially estimated at $2.4 billion, or about $4,100 per kilowatt (kW), but cost overruns led to construction costs in excess of $7.5 billion (nearly $13,000/kW). Petra Nova CCS retrofit costs were reported to be $1 billion, or $4,200/kW, and the project was completed on budget and on time.
Principal contributor: Kenneth Dubin
US EIA
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that 85 billion barrels of oil could be recovered from old oil fields through CO2 EOR. While, for most fields, CO2 EOR is uneconomic with oil prices below $85/bbl, if a drastic reduction of CO2 was really a matter of urgency, a little bit of taxpayer money spent on subsidizing carbon capture storage and utilization (CCSU) would have a much greater impact on carbon emissions than all of the taxpayers’ money p!$$ed away on wind and solar boondoggles.
My preview of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution
For the past three years, I have been commuting between Dallas and Houston. My wife and I and our 11 dogs live in Dallas and I have been working in Houston since March 2016. On Sunday, we went out for lunch at a nearby Tex-Mex restaurant before I headed back to Houston. We knew that thunderstorms were in the forecast, but we were not expecting this…
High Wind, Debris Causes Major Damage in Dallas
By Diana Zoga
Published Jun 9, 2019The high winds on Sunday afternoon blew out windows of skyscrapers and took down trees and traffic signals in downtown Dallas.
The city’s office of emergency management said there were no reports of injuries related to the broken windows or downed trees.
Repairing traffic signals would be one of the city’s first priorities, officials said at a Sunday night press conference. Repairs will be made first to lights that are completely inoperable, while lights that are flashing red will be next.
[…]
NBCDFW 5
The storm hit while we were eating and the power was quickly knocked out. The winds were so strong that it looked like footage of a hurricane through the restaurant windows. We had to wait for the winds to die down before we could rush home (less than 1/4 mile away). The drive was harrowing. There were trees down everywhere. We were worried sick about our “fur babies.” When we got home, we could only find 10 of the 11. Our 6-month old Corgi puppy was missing… But we found her hiding under a toilet. We had a few tiles blown off our roof, one of which hit the hood of my Jeep and everything on the patio had blown into the pool, including a glass table top (instead of shattering on the patio). A large piece of metal artwork blew off the wall, across the pool, and wedged into a tree right in between two windows. Miraculously, no windows were broken. Apart from a traumatized Corgi puppy, the family was unharmed.
The worst part of the storm was the power outage.
Oncor Expects Vast Majority of Customers to Have Power Wednesday Night
Dallas says residents without power who need refuge from the heat can find temporary relief at libraries and rec centers
Published Jun 9, 2019About 16,000 Oncor customers, most in Dallas County, are still without power in North Texas Wednesday. Power has been restored to more than 330,000 homes and businesses. An Oncor spokeswoman says they expect the vast moajority of power to be restored by tonight, but that could stretch until tomorrow in the hardest hit areas.
“Just right now the kind of restoration that we are having to do, it’s the most complex types of outages, because we are having to reconstruct a lot of these distribution equiptment. So instead of just you know showing up and tunring it on immediately, we are having to remove the trees, remove the damaged polls, re-dig holes for the polls, re-put in the polls and then restring the lines,” said Kerry Dunn of Oncor.
At it’s peak, as many as 350,000 customers lost power across the Metroplex Sunday — with Dallas County seeing the most outages, according to Oncor Electric. Oncor had warned the outage was expected to last for several days.
“This storm was really unique because we saw damage akin to something we’d see with a tropical storm or a tornado. But instead of a small area, we’re seeing a very large portion of Dallas County with major damage,” said Oncor spokesperson and meteorologist Jen Myers.
[…]
Crews from 11 states are working around the clock.
[…]
NBCDFW 5
I want to thank Alabama Power. We were without power from Sunday through Wednesday evening. On Sunday night, Oncor crews restored power to parts of our neighborhood. Then we saw no one until Tuesday afternoon, when an Alabama Power vehicle “scouted” our neighborhood. Yesterday, Alabama Power crews were in the alley, clearing debris from the power lines.
Four days of relying on the Sun and batteries for light and electricity seems like a pretty good preview of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution. On top of that, it forced me to take an unplanned week of vacation from exploring for oil & gas, to cut up tree limbs with a battery-powered electric chain saw. We still don’t have Internet service (the phone line caught on fire while they were fixing the power lines and AT&T can’t understand why that might be a problem). I’m using my smart phone as a hot spot… So I still can’t explore for oil & gas from home – the connection is too slow to remotely access my workstation. I can’t imagine a better demonstration of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution. On top of that, I wrote most of this post Sunday morning and scheduled it to be published Monday morning, figuring I would finish it up Sunday night in Houston. No electricity, no oil & gas exploration and a silenced AGW skeptic… We should call the Dallas wind storm, Superstorm Alexandria… 😉
Fortunately, it was unseasonably cool for June in Dallas over the past few days… And, oddly enough, the storm appears to have been driven by sudden cooling…
Dallas-Fort Worth faced its own sort of perfect storm Sunday.
“We had everything in place — a very unstable atmosphere, heat, humidity — then, of course, we had the cold front, which cooled us down quickly,” said Patricia Sanchez, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
Dallas-Fort Worth faced its own sort of perfect storm Sunday.
“We had everything in place — a very unstable atmosphere, heat, humidity — then, of course, we had the cold front, which cooled us down quickly,” said Patricia Sanchez, a National Weather Service meteorologist.[…]
The temperature at DFW International Airport reached 90 degrees before noon, and hovered there until about 2 p.m., according to the weather service.
Then, as the storm moved through the area accompanied by a cold front, the temperature dropped to 70 in less than an hour. As the dry air of the cold front collided with the warm, moist air already in the area, the humidity plunged from 90% at 1 p.m. to 58% by 3 p.m. It’s that mixing of two air masses that can spark violent storm activity.
The weather service had seen the possibility of strong storms Sunday morning, when Dallas-Fort Worth was warned of an enhanced risk for severe weather.
[…]
The storm’s silver lining is that lower temperatures carried by the cold front have made conditions more bearable for the tens of thousands of people without electricity.
Temperatures are expected to stay below normal in the 80s through at least the middle of the week, KXAS-TV (NBC5) meteorologist Grant Johnston said. Dallas-Fort Worth is also expected to stay dry through the work week.
Dallas Morning News
Conclusions
We are not “Losing Earth.” It’s actually physically impossible for us to lose Earth. On the other hand, at some point in the future, Earth will probably lose us.
Featured Image
References (will be expanded later)
Alley, R.B. 2000. “The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland”. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.
Alley, R.B.. 2004. “GISP2 Ice Core Temperature and Accumulation Data”.
IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series #2004-013. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.
Berner, R.A. and Z. Kothavala, 2001. “GEOCARB III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic Time”. American Journal of Science, v.301, pp.182-204. February 2001.
Pagani, M., J.C. Zachos, K.H. Freeman, B. Tipple, and S. Bohaty. 2005. “Marked Decline in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations During the Paleogene”. Science, Vol. 309, pp. 600-603, 22 July 2005.
Pearson, P. N. and Palmer, M. R.: Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 60 million years, Nature, 406, 695–699,https://doi.org/10.1038/35021000, 2000.
Royer, et al., 2001. Paleobotanical Evidence for Near Present-Day Levels of Atmospheric CO2 During Part of the Tertiary. Science 22 June 2001: 2310-2313. DOI:10.112
“The Ice Age Cometh?” Science News, The Society for Science & the Public , 1 Mar. 1975, www.sciencenews.org/sn-magazine/march-1-1975.
Tripati, A.K., C.D. Roberts, and R.A. Eagle. 2009. “Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years”. Science, Vol. 326, pp. 1394 1397, 4 December 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1178296
Ward, J.K., Harris, J.M., Cerling, T.E., Wiedenhoeft, A., Lott, M.J., Dearing, M.-D., Coltrain, J.B. and Ehleringer, J.R. 2005. “Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA102: 690-694.
Zachos, J. C., Pagani, M., Sloan, L. C., Thomas, E. & Billups, K. “Trends, rhythms, and aberrations in global climate 65 Ma to present”. Science 292, 686–-693 (2001).
“What exactly is the Goldilocks CO2 concentration?”
Easy: 1000 to 2000 ppm CO2 – not too hot, not too cold, just right!
350ppm/v apparently.
Way too low. Scarily close to plant starvation. 800 -1200 ppm sounds about right.
Well yes, I know that however, the Bill McKibbens of the world and supporters of 350.org don’t. People really are convinced ~410ppm/v CO2 is too much. I should have added a /sarc off tag.
Below is an excerpt from my soon-to-be-published paper:
15. Atmospheric CO2 is not alarmingly high, it is too low for optimal plant growth and alarmingly low for the survival of carbon-based terrestrial life. The real danger is not too much CO2 – it is CO2 starvation. Over geologic time, CO2 is ~permanently sequestered in carbonate rocks.
Plants evolved at atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 2000 ppm and greater, and many grow best at about 1200 ppm CO2 – about 3 times current levels. That is why greenhouse operators pump 1000-1200 ppm CO2 into their greenhouses.
Major food crops (except corn) use the C3 photosynthetic pathway, and die at about 150 ppm from CO2 starvation – that is just 30 ppm below the minimum levels during the last Ice Age, which ended just 10,000 years ago – “the blink of an eye” in geologic time. Earth came that close to a major extinction event.
During one of the next Ice Ages, unless there is massive human intervention, atmospheric CO2 will decline to below 150 ppm and that will be the next major extinction event – not just for a few species but for ~all complex terrestrial carbon-based life forms.
Reference: “(Plant) Food for Thought”
(first posted in January 2009 on wattsupwiththat.com, published on icecap.us in December 2014)
by Allan MacRae, Dec 18, 2014
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/new-and-cool/plant_food_for_thought2/
Reference: “Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?”
by Patrick Moore, October 15, 2015
https://www.thegwpf.org/patrick-moore-should-we-celebrate-carbon-dioxide/
And what will all the Greens eat once all the greens have died out?
Re: What will they eat?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/05/01/the-economist-adopts-teslas-ludicrous-mode/#comment-2693195
[excerpt]
CO2 is inexorably being sequestered in carbonate rocks since the dawn of life on Earth, and this is pretty much a one-way street. The very slow geologic processes that return some of that CO2 into the atmospheric via volcanic action are much slower than the processes that sequester CO2, so atmospheric CO2 will decline to below 150 ppm during one of the next ice ages, which occur every 100,000 years – the blink of an eye in geologic time.
That will be the extinction event for ~all complex terrestrial life, which relies primarily on photosynthesis of C3 plants to survive.
There are a few C4 and CAM (photosynthetic pathway) food plants, such as corn and sugar cane, but I doubt that terrestrial life can survive on Sugar Frosted Flakes, notwithstanding the rumour that “They’re Great!”
Good review DM.
That storm Sunday was rather bad, but, if I am following weather correctly, related to the upper Midwest being unusually cold, so there was enough of a temperature gradient to result in severe thunderstorms and wind. I was a bit north of you, west of Austin.
It was freaky.
Cold air always invites a fight in normally warm places. The models can’t seem to see it in the 6-10 day forecasts and beyond.
Where I live it’s like the summer of ’74 . The weather has been so cool and wet that crops are just now being planted and hay is scarce for those who counted on April cuttings. The river bottoms won’t be tillable this year, but will be highly productive when they are in the future.
We aren’t losing any Earth here in the boonies at the Illinois-Mississippi river junction.
Sorry to hear about the injuries your Jeep sustained. I feel your pain.
It’s a Jeep… it’ll recover…😎
Sad part is you pointing and laughing at this jumble of stupidity is giving it a bit of publicity. Still, good post.
Stupidity should be painful and public humiliation is a great, non-violent, way to inflict pain. Unfortunately I doubt many of those in dire need of public humiliation read WUWT.
I doubt many of those in dire need of public humiliation can be humiliated.
True that!
Over the years I have tried, and you are correct.
Nor can they be humiliated! They just stare back blankly and grunt “huh’.
Great post, Dave. Glad you and the pack made it through the climate change unscathed.
Time for another Corgi pool party!
My wife’s favorite video!
Sad part is you pointing and laughing at this jumble of stupidity is giving it a bit of publicity. Good post anyway.
Sorry for the double, internet connection was iffy this morning. 😉
Someone PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell that mopey dope-on-a-rope that the WARM periods over the last 600,000 years have consistently been SHORTER than the COLD periods, and this warm period began 18,000 +/-years ago.
It may be coming to an end. We don’t go to do NUFFIN’, folks. NUFFIN’! Mother Nature does it for us, and if we don’t work out, well, then Mother Nature will do what she did to Pelagornis sandersi: extinct after 3 million years. Big Bird probably couldn’t catch fish with that toothed beak because ICE!!!! got in its way down in Argentina. Try that on for size.
Those frequent panic attacks by the ecohippies/Greenbeaners/Warmians/Witless Wonders are ceasing to have their effect.
We have ZERO CONTROL over what this planet does and it can wipe us out in the blink of an eye. And when Erta Ale finally splits the Earth open in Ethiopia, everyone will want to leave the planet!! I guarantee it!
Oh, well, back to planet Bimballa where the megafauna include gigantic toothed birds and monotremes that faintly resemble six-legged horses.
Have a nice day, everyone.
“I want to thank Alabama Power. We were without power from Sunday through Wednesday evening.”
Multiply that by what the utilities from many states did in Harvey. They are real problem solvers, most impressive thing that you could see, although it did take a couple of weeks.
The “north” in northers has a meaning.
Centerpoint did a great job during Harvey and their crews participated in the repairs here in Dallas. I also saw crews from Mississippi and Tennessee. It took a couple of days to mobilize reinforcements; but things began to move quickly on Tuesday.
How about a book titled “Losing Our Minds”: How decades of hype, spin, and pure propaganda literally caused man to go crazy, reversing many decades of progress, and threatening the very foundations of economic security and Democracy itself.
Climate porn is just another way to make a living. Just like the real porn.
Most people lead boring meaningless lives. Joining a climate crusade, no matter how stupid or ill-advised, seems to give meaning to pathetic lives like Mr Rich. The bigger lies he tells, the more cheering he gets from the radical fringe.
I’ve joined the crusade back to sanity. I’m a scientist fed up with the climate lies being told that are destroying science. As also a retired military officer the threat to our nation’s national security and the destruction of public’s trust in science it by a bunch of carnival-barking, rent-seeking climate snake-oil sellers. The fight to keep humanity away from the cliff of self-imposed energy poverty delivered on insane doomsday climate proclamations due to a trace gas increase. Thius is also a fight to preserve individual liberties from being destroyed by a clearly genocidal Malthusian-green-socialism. We have now an “intellectual class” of rent-seeking charlatans that have set themselves up at academic institutions who are committed to genocidal socialism while enriching themselves with grants, highly paid “dean” and director positions, and lavishing each other with egotistical honoraria (Mann, Hayhoe, Dessler, Overpeck, et al).
The fight in on.
100%
You mention: “ Four days of relying on the Sun and batteries for light and electricity …”
Does that include refrigerator/freezer?
I hate to see ice cream get soft.
I keep ice in 2 L. soda bottles, and keep the freezers full of stuff.
We have never had an outage for 4 days (more like 4 hours), so how well our cold storage would last is unknown.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Unrelated comment.
I wonder if a few of the older climate alarmist scientists (Hansen, Schmidt, ?) have realized they are no longer relevant, insofar as a cult has developed with children in charge?
I’m waiting for the Children’s Climate Crusade to start. Not it hasn’t done that yet. March on Rome, etc., grab as many disaffected yutes as possible along the way, look for handouts everywhere they go, and in the end – A BIG NOTHING HAPPENS.
Sunday: Use Blue ice packs and ice from freezers.
Monday: Hunt for stores with both electricity and ice.
Tuesday/Wednesday: Buy more ice.
Thursday/Friday: Throw away most of perishables in refrigerators/freezers.
Only about 1/3 of Dallas lost power. We had little trouble finding restaurants that were open. We went grocery shopping yesterday, stores are still trying to restock.
Should’ve just gone to Home Depot and bought a pull start Honda 3000 and ran an extension cord to your Refer
If I knew on Sunday that it would have been 4 days… I would have.
John: Without one of those evil fossil fuel fired generators, it’s almost impossible to keep a freezer going. I have a friend who lives off-grid, and if there’s wind and sun both, plus 10 batteries fully charged, she can keep a refrigerator going most of the time. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case and she ends up having to throw out food. Sometimes she just gives up and goes without refrigeration.
In my case, living in a trailer with a skirting rather than a foundation, I can put the frozen food in coolers, put it under the trailer, and it lasts for 3 or 4 days. I do have a fossil fuel generator. Most of the time, electricity here goes out in winter, making the problem of no freezer not a problem.
David and Sheri,
“evil fossil fuel fired generators”
We have a small one for the travel trailer. Bit of a pain to get it properly connected to things in the house.
We are 100% electric, but across 25 years have not had and outage lasting a day.
We have a modern catalytic wood stove for winter emergency heat. Lows are often below 0°F.
We ought to use it more to take the electric bill down, but we have one of the lowest rates in the US, so it isn’t a big deal.
Wood is free, except for cutting and splitting.
John says:
I keep ice in 2 L. soda bottles, and keep the freezers full of stuff.
Same here — frig/freezer is always packed w/food and/or water/ice bottles. Lots of thermal mass. Power went out once for 2 days and frozen dinners were just slightly thawed.
I wonder what goes on in a Warmist’s head that makes them think the world naturally warmed from 1650-1950 and then all warming after that was due to cow farts and SUVs. Wait, never mind, if I wanted to know that I could just stick my head into a bucket of ether.
Even if all of the warming since 1950 was anthropogenic, it saved us from this:
Given a large enough population of humans with normal variance, you will always have a few charismatic nut jobs who think the end-of-the-world is nigh, and so we all should go kill ourselves through drinking poisoned Kool-aid. At least they really believe…facts or not.
What I cannot fathom is how so many people have allowed themselves to be duped by the snake-oil salesmen making profits and grabbing power from this fiasco. It seems to indicate that most humans are more like sheep than thinkers.
” It seems to indicate that most humans are more like sheep than thinkers.” ?
No, only the left half…. ; )
They’re called “sheeple”
Just want to thank David for these interesting articles. I learn a lot from them.
The latest sci-fi television series produced are also pathetic. The quality of the culture has been deteriorating for many decades under the lefty-regressives.
After skimming through the 309 page book, I determined that I will likely never read the entire 309 pages of mindless blather, not even for a good laugh. It’s written like a cheap dime store novel, full of dull, witless details, most of which most likely are fictional. The book is a work of fiction. Early on in the book, I discovered a misstatement of fact regarding the concentration of CO2 on planets Venus, Earth and Mars, which led me to this page: No Special Greenhouse Gas Effect on Earth, Venus or Mars | PSI Intl
https://principia-scientific.org/no-greenhouse-gas-effect-earth-venus-mars/ just to fact check myself.
I do think, though, that we ought to start laughing our butts off at these comedians. Then maybe they will leave quietly to go home and worship the money they have already stolen through fraud from the people of the world.
Since I’m probably never going to read the book, what was his misstatement of fact, if you don’t mind my asking?
It just has to be all downhill after “Losing Earth”.
THX1138 – Thanks for the link, from that article:
… any supposed ‘greenhouse gas effect’ has no relation to the amount of atmospheric CO2.
…
In effect, Carson shows that the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is false.
…
Clearly, AGW is a long way wrong.
CONCLUSIONS:
1. The greenhouse effect (G) is proportional to an atmosphere’s total pressure.
2. G for each planet is therefore constant.
3. Vostok shows a planet’s geologically released internal heat, IntT varies with time.
4. G is unrelated to an atmosphere’s carbon dioxide density. AGW is wrong.
“Clearly, AGW is
a long waynot even wrong.Fify.
Principia is a poor reference, off with the fairies at times.
Climate porn is just another way to make a living. Just like the real porn.
The just like Professor Jonathan Overpeck writing an Op-Ed full of Big Climate Whoppers in Science Mag, Mr Rich here understands the bigger lies he tells, the more cheering he gets from the radical fringe of Leftist socialism-loving lunatics, the AOC-Bernie fan base.
I’ve joined the crusade back to sanity. I’m a scientist fed-up with the climate lies being told that are destroying the public’s view of science. As also a retired military officer I see the very real threat to our nation’s national security by a bunch of carnival-barking, socialistic, rent-seeking climate snake-oil sellers. I will fight to keep western civilization away from the cliff of self-imposed energy poverty delivered on insane doomsday climate proclamations due to a trace gas increase. This is also a fight to preserve individual liberties from being destroyed by a clearly genocidal Malthusian-green-socialism.
We have now an “intellectual class” of rent-seeking charlatans that have set themselves up at academic institutions who are committed to genocidal socialism while enriching themselves with grants, highly paid “dean” and director positions, and lavishing each other with egotistical honoraria (Mann, Hayhoe, Dessler, Overpeck, et al).
The fight in on. Today it is with the pen and blog. What will the Left do when Trump wins again in 2020 is anyone’s guess. They’ll reach a new level crazy though we can be sure of that.
David;
“Petra Nova is one of two carbon capture and sequestration power plants in the world”
For the sake of completeness I would draw your attention to what is happening at the UK’s infamous Drax biomass burner, Drax is our largest power station. You will be aware that you export your forests in pelletised form for them to be burned in what the EU adjudged to be a carbon neutral operation (by EU rules the carbon costs of felling/replanting, processing and rowing 3500+ miles across the Atlantic do not count as they are external).
A carbon capture unit has recently been attached in the flue gas line, the plant is now described as carbon negative. Figures are difficult to come by, but GBP400,000 is being invested with talk of upscaling by a factor of 10,000. I assume this means that currently 0.001% of emitted CO2 is being captured, to great plaudits in the media.
Our outgoing Prime Minister is lumbering the country with a GBPtrillion+ “carbon free by 2050” legacy (she learned from the example of your previous POTUS, obviously). I believe her ignorant advisors might have informed her that with the UK’s “world leading position in carbon capture research” we will very soon have 100+ countries beating a path to our door to purchase our expertise and systems.
Utterly delusional.
My grandmother told me to listen politely to what others say, but watch carefully what they do. Russia, China and India appear to do nothing other than pay lip service and build power stations. What does that say about what they believe?
The climate religion reminds me of Scientology. Both products of bad science fiction and designed to fleece the ignorant.
You seem to love your graphs David, what do you make of this one?
Cool graph, needs 2σ bands…
So what?
Less sea ice over the course of an entire year = More heat lost from the Arctic Ocean to the “infinite blackness of space”.
But the Antarctic Sea ice has 1.7 times the reflective effect of Arctic sea ice, so total sea ice over the year is a meaningless, confusing number.
= More heat lost from the Arctic Ocean
Yeah I know, warming makes it colder.
RACookPE1978
You are wrong. Perhaps deliberately wrong, but wrong nevertheless.
Loss of sea (from the assumed “correct” sea ice 30 year average of 1980-2010) is “assumed” to mean much more heat is absorbed into the Arctic Ocean because the average albedo is reduced when sea ice melts away.
And that does happen. But only for 5 months of the year: From mid-April to mid-August, yes, more sea ice loss means (slightly) more heat energy is absorbed into the newly-exposed dark Arctic Ocean.
But Arctic sea ice loss is a year-long difference from those earlier years! The sea ice anomaly remain very nearly the same from December to February to April to June to September to October.
And, loss of sea ice for 7 months of the year means significantly MORE heat energy is LOST from the Arctic Ocean to the infinite darkness of space than is gained in 5 months of summer. To repeat: Over the course of an entire year, less Arctic sea ice means more heat loss to space from the Arctic Ocean.
Do think the Arctic is is on cooling trend?
On what time scale?
If humans hadn’t ended the Quaternary (or maybe even the Cenozoic) I would have said a (quasi) steady cooling trend since the optimum much like the trajectory of the other inter-glacials.
I am trying to get RACookPE1978 to come out and admit that he disbelieves the Artic is getting warmer. I understand the point he is trying to make: that less ice is going to allow more heat to escape = a negative feedback. But I think even that is incorrect. He says:
” more sea ice loss means (SLIGHTLY) more heat energy is absorbed into the newly-exposed dark Arctic Ocean” and I think therin lies his error. There is a massive difference in albedo between seaice and open water. More than enough to counter the extra emission.
From https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/processes/albedo.html
A typical ocean albedo is approximately 0.06, while bare sea ice varies from approximately 0.5 to 0.7. This means that the ocean reflects only 6 percent of the incoming solar radiation and absorbs the rest, while sea ice reflects 50 to 70 percent of the incoming energy.
Further, once the seaice has melted out and is no longer absorbing vast quatities of latent heat temperatures will spike even faster.
We haven’t even ended the Holocene. We are still in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period. “Anthropocene” is a fake word and the product of fake science. The current subepoch, the Meghalayan Age, began 4,250 yr b2k (2250 BC).
http://www.stratigraphy.org/index.php/ics-news-and-meetings/125-formal-subdivision-of-the-holocene-series-epoch
Direct comparisons of high resolution instrumental data and proxy-based paleo-estimates are fundamentally unscientific. Doing so without proper qualification (most climate “science” since 1988) is scientific malfeasance, if not fraudulent.
Loydo
Summertime. That time of year in the Arctic when the sun is strongly shining. Mid-summer temperature above the sea ice at 80 north latitude have not changed even 1/10 of one degree since the DMI began their forecast in the 1950’s. Look closely at every year for days 150 through 250 (1/3 of each year, middle of the summer!)
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php has all of the years individually.
More vividly, look at all of the summer days sequentially:
https://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/dmi-arctic-temperature-data-does-show-increasing-temperature-trend/.
Now, what about wintertime temperatures? That time of year when there is no sunshine? Winter Arctic temperatures are notably warmer – from an average of -31 C to today’s very variable (very high standard deviations!) -26 degrees C. yes, winter conditions in the Arctic are higher now than recorded earlier in nearly all databases: The Russian North Pole ice stations, the US submarine and ice stations, the DMI 80 north latitude daily forecasts.
Now, if “summer temperatures” remain the same, and “winter temperatures are 5 degrees warmer – but still far below freezing – the “yearly average” temperatures which are chosen do shown an increase.
So what? For now 1/3 of the yearly satellite-measured years, minimum Arctic sea ice has seen steady minimums: No significant decline in 12 years from 1979 (the first records) through a maximum in 1983-84 to 1991-1992; then a decline from 1992-2006-2007, then a steady period from 2007 through 2018-2019!
Yes, maximum Arctic sea ice area has a slow steady decrease through the satellite era. Minimum Arctic sea ice demonstrates a 66-68 year periodic cycle, now at its minimum and likely to continue a slow rise for another 12-15 years towards its maximum at the 1982-84 peak.
By the way, in 2014 – after 35 years of global alarmism (er, global warming), just the “excess” sea ice around Antarctica exceeded the entire area of Greenland.
Loydo
Over the entire year, the actual math calculating the actual energy absorbed every day from Jan to Dec 31 does not support your “logical” conclusion. The images you linked, for example, show the sunlight (and albedo) for sea ice at mid-summer. Just off of the coast of Virginia at Washington DC latitude. Not that of 78 north where the sea ice actually is.
To illustrate, please calculate how more solar energy is absorbed in the ocean and in the sea ice at 78 north latitude on August 12 of a typical 24 hour day above the sea ice. Your choice: cloudy day (90% chance) or bright sunny day (10% choice). Hint: Cloudy is easier, it makes your assumed albedoes “almost” correct.
“Mid-summer temperature above the sea ice at 80 north latitude have not changed even 1/10 of one degree since the DMI began their forecast in the 1950’s”
Thats because there is ice there. As long as there is ice there to melt the temperature will not rise much above zero because of the latent heat of fusion. Much like a pot of boiling water won’t get above 100C until it has boiled dry. An ice free period will see temperatures spike like crazy.
“winter temperatures are 5 degrees warmer – but still far below freezing… so what”
Which ice is going to be easier to melt in summer, ice frozen to -30C or to -25C?
“Minimum Arctic sea ice demonstrates a 66-68 year periodic cycle”
Evidence?
Loydo,
You said, “A typical ocean albedo is approximately 0.06, …” Albedo is only appropriate for diffuse reflectors! Please see the explanation at the following link:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/12/why-albedo-is-the-wrong-measure-of-reflectivity-for-modeling-climate/
I read that Clyde but I am sticking with NSIDC’s numbers.
A typical ocean albedo is approximately 0.06, while bare sea ice varies from approximately 0.5 to 0.7. This means that the ocean reflects only 6 percent of the incoming solar radiation and absorbs the rest, while sea ice reflects 50 to 70 percent of the incoming energy.
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/processes/albedo.html
NSIDC’s “numbers” are that Arctic is still covered with ice, just look at the images at the top of their page. Rather inconvenient.
Shocking!
This is what a “Climate Crisis” looks like:
This is what “The Ice Age Cometh” looked like:
It is, I know! Was all ready to buy my beach front condo on Ellesmere. So bummed out, dude. Was gonna catch some gnarly waves!
Seriously, though, how did you get the image to post in thread? All I ever get is the link to their page, would love to be able to send that image direct to a lot of people.
As a regular guest author, I have editing privileges, which enables me to post images in comments.
Ahhh, got it. NSIDC site used to let people copy the images, then after an “update” you can’t. I have tried different methods and only ever got a link to the page. Oh, well, at least those images are at the top of their page. Perhaps I should not point that out!
Their data archive has jpeg’s… although I have to figure out how to access it every time I want something… it’s not intuitive.
For an organization whose mission statement includes “the open and accessible” access to information they make it rather hard to do, other than just linking to the entire website. I have had FB actually block NSIDC link on their platform, and gave no reason, just a window with “This content not currently available” and no side link. Funny how that works. WordPress sometimes blocks them and other government connected links, too.
Those graphs do not reveal the state of the ice. Is 5m or 10cm?
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2019/05/Figure4real-350×468.png
They’re maps, not graphs; and albedo doesn’t give a rat’s @$$ about the thickness of the ice. Just like a typical social justice warrior, albedo only cares about color.
So Nov 2016 looks like about 4 or 5σ and 2019 is weirding. What are the odds?
It really is interesting how the trolls get all excited about ice being low at one part of the year, but completely ignore it when the ice is high during another part of the year.
I guess when you get as good at picking cherries as Loydo is, ignoring half the year is easy.
Meaningless.
It’s a lot of squiggly lines .. did I miss something?
What you’re looking at is a chaotic system fluttering towards a new strange attractor. Now look up 5σ.
5 sigma is a measure of how confident scientists feel their results are. If experiments show results to a 5 sigma confidence level, that means if the results were due to chance and the experiment was repeated 3.5 million times then it would be expected to see the strength of conclusion in the result no more than once.
Great News.
The Arctic is making some small recovery from the extreme levels of the late 1970s.
Still nowhere near down to the levels MWP, or most of the Holocene, is it.
Still way above “normal”
Yep.
The image below is of a Late Quaternary sea ice reconstruction for the western Yermak Plateau from Belt, et al., 2016
Generally speaking, the PIP25 index correlates to sea ice extent as follows:
>0.7 = Perennial (year-round) ice cover
0.5-0.7 = Seasonal ice cover
0.1-0.3 = Reduced ice cover
<0.1 = Ice-free year-round
Most of the Arctic has had seasonal sea ice cover over the past 30 years, with a relatively small area of perennial sea ice. Perennial sea ice is roughly equivalent to the recent minima. Seasonal sea ice is more or less the difference between the maxima and minima.
So... How does this compare to the rest of the Holocene?
Kinnard et al., 2008 estimated Arctic sea ice extent minima and maxima back to about 1880 from a variety of methods. A comparison of this with a PIP25 reconstruction of the North Icelandic Shelf sea ice extent suggests that modern sea ice extent is somewhere between that of the Little Ice Age (LIA) and Medieval Warm Period (MWP), probably closer to the MWP.
Stein et al., 2017 compared sea ice extent reconstructions using PIP25 indices from four cores around the current area of perennial sea ice.
Prior to the onset of Neoglaciation, Arctic sea ice ranged from nearly ice-free to reduced. Since the onset of Neoglaciation, it has ranged from seasonal to perennial. While it is clear that Arctic sea ice extent has diminished since 1979, it’s also important to note that this reduction must be viewed in the context of the overall Holocene. Holocene Arctic sea ice extent reached its Holocene maximum between 1600 and 1850 AD.
So any reductions are from the maximum values of this geologic epoch. The LIA was clearly the coldest phase of the Holocene and modern sea ice conditions are much closer to the LIA than they are to the pre-Neoglaciation period.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/08/206154/
Looking at some of that data it seems the last time the Arctic flash melted (went from perenial cover to blue ocean) was before the Holocene optimum. Since then there has been a quasi-steady cooling, until now.
And quasi-steady cooling trends are bad… almost as bad as secular cooling trends.
“And quasi-steady cooling trends are bad”
I’m glad we can agree on something. Now about that abrupt and accelerating reversal and how NH rainfall patterns and hence a billion people in already marginal south Asia are going to be affected by no northern summer, latent heat sink and a new temperate, humid ocean dominating its centre. Good luck.
There’s no evidence that anything is accelerating and model-derived predictions about the future are as worthless as mammary glands on bulls.
“Cool graph, needs 2σ bands…”
It has 2σ bands, but it needs 6 or 8σ bands.
Didn’t see it under all of the spaghetti or notice that it was global, making it less than worthless. The Arctic and Antarctic exhibit opposing trends.
2σ is natural variability. In a ~40-yr record, only about 3 years fall significantly below 2σ, primarily in the Arctic maxima. So what?
1978 wasn’t much warmer than the nadir of the Little Ice Age, the coldest period of the Holocene. Current sea ice conditions are much closer to the Holocene maximum than the minimum.
“only about 3 years fall significantly below 2σ”
Four actually – the four most recent.
“Arctic and Antarctic exhibit opposing trends”
Mmm, they’re just like the mirror image of each other…
Were going to miss the Quaternary.
And yet, the Arctic is still covered with ice. Funny how that works. javascript://
Splicing instrumental data onto ice core data is 100% fraudulent.
Here’s 800,000 years of ice core data, ignoring resolution differences…
Here’s the 800,000 years at a common resolution…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/03/28/breaking-hockey-sticks-antarctic-ice-core-edition/
Apart from Law Dome DE08, no Antarctic ice core could resolve the modern instrumental record. DE08 only goes back about 2,000 years.
That much bad science, lies, evident corruption, vested interests, communist ideology and they get away with it ? Well, dear friends, this recalls how nazim started.
They held meetings, delivered Bravo-Sierra speeches, had ideas on how and why the economy should perform. Spread fears, hatred. No one took them seriously.
Meanwhile, two world wide wars later… You have the memories, we have that plus the stigmates.
And it doesn’t feel all that good. Like the 10’000th joke, “Oh, you guys don’t fly Stuckas anymore?”.
So yep, looks like a new very similar spin is in the making. And only few care to look backward for potential consequences.
These morons completely fail to appreciate what a colossal waste and disaster the misallocation of limited resources really and truly is. They use stupid as their superpower to the detriment of all mankind. We are obligated to fight back with everything in our arsenal including ridicule. Well argued David.
“remove the damaged polls, re-dig holes for the polls, re-put in the polls and then restring the lines,” said Kerry Dunn of Oncor.”
Speech to text issues? Or did they really do a vote?
Good stuff. For additional reading, here’s my truth bomb on the whole CO2 theory and the explanation of what really causes climate to change:
http://ibdst.blogspot.com/2019/04/fact-check-truth-about-global-warming.html
David, maybe you want to find out (whatever the frack that [ The Daily Maverick ] is).
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Maverick
The “Daily Maverick” is a South African political commentary blog, that USED to be fairly incisive. About 18 months ago, they removed the comment facility that kept its writers fairly honest. These days, it seems to be a ‘progressive’ echo-chamber, and has gone from a daily ‘must read’ to an “Oh no, it’s that bunch again”.
And for the true believers there is always —
He gets ’em every time.
Is peak oil real? When will peak oil arrive? what will it look like if and when it gets here? What does the oil and gas industry itself think about when and how peak oil will occur?
Several months ago, I listened to a talk given by an energy policy analyst who speculated on the future of oil and gas in the United States. One of the topics he covered is how the oil and gas industry itself views its own future. Not what the industry says about itself publicly, but what its own actions say about what the industry thinks the future actually holds.
Concerning what the industry thinks about the renewables, wind and solar, the policy analyst remarked that strategic planners in oil and gas understand full well it is impossible to go much beyond 30% penetration by the renewables without experiencing sharp increases in the price of electricity. As penetration levels begin to go beyond 30%, price increases begin to go exponential.
These planners also know that as things stand today, gas-fired generation offers the most cost effective means for load following of wind and solar’s highly variable power output. At the prices people are willing to pay for electricity, buffered energy storage schemes such as utility-scale batteries and pumped hydro will never be practical at the scales required to properly support the renewables.
It is his opinion that by 2050, natural gas will supply three quarters or more of our power generation capacity, the renewables possibly one-quarter. By 2050, coal-fired generation will be entirely gone from America’s power generation mix, and nuclear will be mostly gone. Summarizing this analyst’s opinions, his assessment is that the oil and gas industry now has good reasons for believing it will control America’s production and consumption of energy some number of decades into the future.
My general counterpoint to his opinion, as I stated it during his talk, was my own long-held belief that although peak oil has probably been delayed by at least three decades, possibly more, it will certainly arrive within the next fifty years. His response was that at current rates of consumption, the world has enough oil and gas to last roughly another three-hundred years at a price most people will be willing to pay for the convenience of having it.
It’s my observation that this energy analyst’s three hundred year figure isn’t the product of a nominally rigorous, highly detailed, formalized analysis on his part. Rather, the figure represents his informed opinion based upon looking at a number of different papers and articles concerning the future economics of oil and gas production.
As it concerns peak oil, in examining all of these papers and articles, the analyst has built a partially subjective picture of the topic in his own mind and has then developed an opinion which reflects how that overall picture looks to him.
This raises another question.
Is a partially subjective opinion more reliable as a policy guide than is a highly detailed technical analysis which purports to supply a solid basis for policy decision making? Or should an informed opinion carry just as much informational value as a guide for making public policy?
At any rate, suppose for purposes of argument the world does have another three-hundred years of oil and gas at today’s rates of consumption and at prices people will be willing to pay for it. Certainly, such a prediction must assume that the price people are willing to pay for liquid carbon fuels and for natural gas is highly inelastic.
If this is the case, and if public policy decision makers adopt President Obama’s 80% by 2050 GHG reduction goal, then the only reliable means for getting from here to there is placing strict controls on the production and consumption of all fossil fuels. If it happens at all, it only happens through government imposed, strictly enforced fossil fuel rationing.
Yes.
We won’t know until it’s in the rearview mirror.
See previous answer.
We mostly don’t think or care about it.
It occurs to me we may well hit peak wind and peak solar long before we’ll reach peak oil. May have already achieved peak hydro given the current political climate. And in the bigger scheme, those relatively insignificant energy production milestones will only serve to delay the technological innovation peak oil doomsayers claim necessary to ensure our very survival. Imagine that.
“By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change.”
The irony is rich in this one. Climate physicists knew little then, and continue to know little today.
Thirty years of climate modeling mania has done more to destroy research into the physics of climate than the complete withdrawal of all government funding could have done.
Consensus climatologists have surpassed even the Bourbons. They have learned nothing and forgotten everything.
The arrogance and incompetence of climate modelers is insupportable. They have destroyed climatology as a branch of science.
Thank you for running that Science News cover in your main post. I’m so tired of seeing that Newsweek story that most [other] people use. [Hey, you used it in a comment….] The full article is at https://www.sciencenews.org/sites/default/files/8983
That Science News article made a substantial impression on me, it or a later one claimed that all it would take to start a glaciation was for snow in Canada to not melt one summer. I remember talking about it with my father and wondering what the progression the climate and snow cover would make.
I think a couple months later I had to fly across the country and looked with great interest at the snow covered Rockies. And the dark conifers that stood above the snow. And realized it would take a lot of snow to cover those trees and that they had to be covered if there was any chance snow couldn’t melt completely some summer.
Then we had events in New England like several inches of snow in May 1977 – https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/08/40-years-ago-massachusetts-snags-a-memorable-snowfall-in-may-storm/ and the New England Blizzard of ’78 – http://wermenh.com/blizz78.html . (There was an equally historic blizzard in the upper midwest a couple weeks earlier.)
After that came the big warming and the Mass. coast stopped getting flooded, and life got boring for a few decades.
We here in northern Illinois are getting snow, up to several inches, in April now, on a recurring basis. I get photos of them, this last bout being three separate storms in April that left, each time, a couple of inches of the white stuff.
The average temps in May and Junes used to be in the low 70s. Now they’re in the mid to upper 60s. That makes the insect population (bird food) slower in emerging, and I’m still feeding groups of birds because the bugs aren’t as plentiful now in June as they should be. (It could also mean those birds are a bit lazy.)
I’m tracking the weather, which is showing a long, slow trend toward a chillier CLIMATE where I am. But the geraniums on my front steps look good, And if the weather weren’t chilly, then the linnaria – a cool weather plant – would NOT still be in blossom. It is thriving and full of flowers.
Those are the things I look at, well ahead of thermometers and hysterical climate twaddle from money-grubbing political mopes.
Here on the Northern California coast the camellias, azaleas and rhododendrons blossomed almost three months later than normal. An Ice Age cometh.