The article, in The Washington Post, is "Airfare is dropping — and you can enjoy the trend through September." It's a gung-ho promotion of air travel. You should do it because it's cheap, and there's not one word of caution or opprobrium, nothing but encouragement to stomp down the biggest possible carbon footprint. If low prices were the "trend" for gas-guzzler cars, WaPo wouldn't publish a hey-kids-check-out-the-bargains article.
Another commenter says, "If you love your children/grandchildren stay on the ground!/A humble request from a Swede," and gets pushed back with "I will only do that when you have convinced me that we have done everything else" and "The biggest burden on the planet comes from having children and grand children. That's my humble request."
Yeah, that's another topic where mainstream media completely forgets about the issue of climate change. Having children.
Everybody who's activated about climate change still has some amnesia-inducing topics. I like confronting people about it, to see how they fight back. Probably not with, Oh, you're right, I really do need to apply the same standard across the board and not be a hypocrite.
ADDED: The ultimate amnesia topic has got to be air conditioning. As the heat goes up — which it does every summer, quite apart from the long-term global-warming phenomenon — people want their air conditioning. As it gets hotter, they're going to be more resistant to giving up air conditioning, and I predict there will be a decline in concern about global warming as it increases, because the desire for air conditioning — now — is going to create a mental block about believing in something that is happening slowly and subtly. But wait. Why am I so pessimistic? I stop and Google "zero carbon footprint air conditioning" and find "WHAT IF AIR CONDITIONERS COULD HELP SAVE THE PLANET INSTEAD OF DESTROYING IT?" (Wired):
Using technology currently in development, AC units in skyscrapers and even your home could get turned into machines that not only capture CO2, but transform the stuff into a fuel for powering vehicles that are difficult to electrify, like cargo ships. The concept, called crowd oil, is still theoretical and faces many challenges....
First of all, you’d need to incorporate a filter that would absorb CO2 and water from the air. You’d also need to include an electrolyzer to strip the oxygen molecule from H2O to get H2, which you’d then combine with CO2 to get hydrocarbon fuels. “Everyone can have their own oil well, basically,” [materials chemist Geoffrey] Ozin says.
For this process to be carbon neutral, though, all those souped-up air conditioners would need to be powered with renewables, because burning the synthetic fuel would also produce emissions. To address that problem, Dittmeyer proposes turning whole buildings into solar panels—placing them not just on rooftops but potentially coating facades and windows with ultrathin, largely transparent panels. “It's like a tree—the skyscraper or house you live in produces a chemical reaction,” Dittmeyer says. “It's like the glucose that a tree is producing.”...
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There are many people making good money from the Climate Change hoax.
It may take a mini-Ice Age to dissuade them and the sunspot cycle just might do that if it stays at zero for a few years.
Hey! I just solved Climate Change downthread and (scary!) I'm with the Enviro-mongers:
1) I'm not concerned about Climate Change because I'm not having children it might affect
2) If you're concerned about Climate Change, why are you having kids to add to it?
3) Choose not to have kids, like me, and Climate Change becomes irrelevant. 😜
Problem solved!
Only a few minutes ago, I posted a reply to a Twitter thread in which academics were grousing about the difficulties of passing through immigration when attending international conferences. My comment was: "At whatever point people actually get serious about AGW, maybe they’ll start to come up with alternatives to international conferences."
But I know that will be a long time coming. Getting university-paid travel to international conferences is one of the perks academics in many departments enjoy. You'll have to pry the airplane tickets out of their cold dead hands.
This comment is also golden. Let's take the kids to the glacier to really bring home the impact of our effect on the climate!
For me it's cruises. The glaciers are melting and cruise ships are packed with stupid people happy to see climate change, so they can tell everybody they saw it.
You can't win.
It’s when climate change doesn’t exist I’d start worrying.
This is what the earth does.
I fully support more people staying on the ground. That will only drive ticket prices lower which is great for me.
Watching the pain produced by the cognitive dissonance of virtuously signaling their caring about the world they leave for their hypothetical descendants while admonishing others to not have descendants is certainly entertaining. But I hold out hope that people are still capable of self awareness and learning. I wish people would be more careful and thoughtful rather than constantly trying to demonstrate how good they are and how wicked everyone else is.
I know a green couple who fly between Canada and the US, and to Europe and Mexico and Asia, and Seattle and Boston and ...
I'm trying to figure out how much people really care about climate change any more.
I feel my Facebook friends losing their oomph when it comes to complaining about things. I mean, there are general complaints about how awful Trump is and how awful white supremacy is, but there just. doesn't seem to be the relish behind all of the lefty causes right now. Maybe it's because it's summer, or maybe it's because the Dem primaries are starting up and everyone is awful.
But real people are going to have kids, and grand kids, and air conditioning, and travel. Who has the energy for all the things you have to do to be a good climate warrior right now?
Hypocrisy saves so many from self-destructive manias.
Just as corruption saves many societies from unsurvivable utopian policies.
but there just. doesn't seem to be the relish behind all of the lefty causes right now
I watched the press conference yesterday. There's so many grievances they needed four people to rattle them all off...
Here in the midwest, it's July. And we are having the first string of nice weather days (weeks) since last August. Nobody has the drive to complain about global warming right now. Give us our time with the sunny weather, and we'll get back to being angry when the rain and snow comes again.
Who can keep them all straight?
Getting university-paid travel to international conferences is one of the perks academics in many departments enjoy. You'll have to pry the airplane tickets out of their cold dead hands.
Yup. One of my favs, Pointman, wrote a good article spotlighting all that:
"There was a morbid feeling floating around Bonn that Paris might just be the last of the great massed climate conferences.
People at the top weren’t happy.
For bureaucrats who’ve made a twenty year career out of global warming and conferences in nice locations, all the distress rockets were being shot up into the night sky as the good ship Climatanic looked to be foundering.
Most of the habitual delegates had already gone native years ago... global warming was by now a career, but only for as long as it remained an open wound that hadn’t been sutured closed once and for all. Consciously or unconsciously, whether they know it or not, too many of the professional conference attendees are not actually invested in making any final binding agreement in Paris.
It seems to me it’s degenerated down to nothing more than a climate trade convention, a work’s outing, a jolly, an annual occasion to meet like-minded people and feel good at doing something noble, and best of all, someone else is picking up the tab for your trips to exotic places like Cancun, Durban, Doha, Warsaw, New York and now Paris."
Everybody who's activated about climate change still has some amnesia-inducing topics. I like confronting people about it, to see how they fight back.
Ever confront 'em with "How can we get India and China to stop burning coal so we can save the planet? 'Cause anything citizens of rich countries do is really just pissing in the wind compared to that."
I'm guessing "eyes glaze over, walks away" would be the response. Understandably. Telling not-so-rich people that they have to dial down the development and go back to stagnating in poverty would be such a drag, unlike the pleasant pastime of materially pointless but eminently ego-pleasing virtue-sginaling.
I'm a climate change skeptic.
My wife and I live in a 1,250 sq. ft. condo. We recycle. We've reduced energy consumption in our home. We have one car - a 15 year old Toyota - maintain it well and drive less than 100 miles per week, including commutes to our two offices.
I have a relative who lectures everyone he can see about the pending climate disaster.
He has multiple large homes and flies between them on a regular basis. Multiple cars that get replaced every few years. A daily commute that matches my weekly mileage and makes frequent trips around the world because Chinese food "tastes better" in Hong Kong.
My question: Whose life better reflects a concern for our planet?
Somehow - discussing over-population is a big no-no on the right. On the left too, to some extent. The left can only abide by abortion.
Don't want kids? I say sterilize anyone who wants it. No coercion. Not mandatory. But offer it For free! Free -the left's favorite concept. nah - what am I thinking. Places like India, China, South America.
have you seen the over-crowding? Do you really care about global climate change?
no matter. The killer-disease will more than likely thin us out at some point.
Climate Change is a gimmick. When will the elite climate-scare-mongers actually follow their own guild-lines and stop using dinosaur gas? Never. The pain is for someone else. The lowly deplorable. Pay up, suckas.
but there just. doesn't seem to be the relish behind all of the lefty causes right now
I think it's outrage fatigue.
I even find myself avoiding some news stories these days - yes, some mother got milkshaked for being the first to stop clapping. I know that if I click on it I will become angry, that if I keep up with the follow-on reporting the perp will get a wrist slap and nothing will be done.
Except I will become even more radicalized. At some point you say Enough. My bucket list is not full of places to visit or things to do, it's full of names. That's not healthy.
If you look past the words to the actions, it becomes clear that there aren’t 10 people in the world who believe humans are having a dangerous effect on the climate. And none of them are named Al Gore or work for a major news outlet.
A single person driving from LA to St. Louis emits less carbon than does a plane divided by the no of passengers? Cite?
My top three examples of virtue signaling are:
(1) No one should fly in an airplane (until I decide to sneak off on vacation).
(2) I have a little library box in my front yard (but I won't risk my life putting one up in a bad neighborhood where the natives will use it as a drug/money drop box).
(3) I am sacrificing to reduce global warming by avoiding plastic straws (but drive my car to the supermarket 5 times per week).
JRoberts said...My question: Whose life better reflects a concern for our planet?
One if the ironies of the climate “debate” is that skeptics have, on average, smaller carbon footprints than alarmists.
BTW, don’t play their game. There is no such thing as a climate change skeptic. You are a CAGW skeptic.
Immigration too, perhaps?
What happens to the carbon footprint of a rural campesino from Central America after relocating to the US?
747 seats 400 and burns 5 gallons fuel per mile. That is 1.25 gallons per 100 miles per passenger if my math is right. A big if.
Pro Tip: Evolve bigger tusks to sweep the snow away.
He has multiple large homes and flies between them on a regular basis. Multiple cars that get replaced every few years. A daily commute that matches my weekly mileage and makes frequent trips around the world because Chinese food "tastes better" in Hong Kong.
For him, championing Climate Change is like the old abuse of Catholic Indulgences:
By the late Middle Ages, the abuse of indulgences, mainly through commercialization, had become a serious problem which the Church recognized but was unable to restrain effectively. Indulgences were... a target of attacks by Martin Luther and all other Protestant theologians. Eventually the Catholic Counter-Reformation curbed the excesses, the reforms also greatly reduced the number of indulgences granted for visiting particular churches and other locations.
The abuse often took the form of an act which granted forgiveness for future sins, ie. I have spent great time and energy proselytizing and converting heathens to the Cult of Global Warming, thus accruing credit to offset any Carbon Sins I may choose to commit in the future.
My experience is a correlation exists between that those who proselytize and their wickedness. Like the stereotype of the evangelical christian who gives tiresome lectures of Righteousness to the congregation, only to later be caught skimming from the orphans fund and banging the pastor's wife. Not all, not every time, but it's a pattern.
I think people adopt Climate Change Theory for similar reasons of self-esteem: "So maybe I DID make a pass at the babysitter, but I believe in saving the planet so I can't be a total jackass, right?"
It's cheap virtue. And false. And why no amount of cooling will ever change their minds. They will simply switch from Global Warming back to Global Cooling. Or from Climate Change to Climate Stasis Theory. Because the goal is not about "fixing" climate, the goal is to be able to face their reflection in the mirror each morning.
I don't worship that religion, so I have no problem if they call me a sinner.
Everybody who's activated about climate change still has some amnesia-inducing topics. I like confronting people about it, to see how they fight back.
I usually propose nuclear as the solution.
Because that usually separates the Virtue Signalers from the Watermelon Marxists who won't accept any solution that does not involve redistribution of wealth via rations on energy production and consumption. And the latter is a serious threat to Western Civ. And Liberty.
I am always struck when someone blames Exxon and its greedy shareholders for climate change, particularly if they do it in the Washington Post or New York Times. I don't remember ever seeing an ad from Exxon or any other oil company urging you to use more gas (I used to see ads from one company touting their brand of gasoline over competitors', but I haven't seen even one of those in a while). Other companies, including some that are in most environmentalists' gunsights like car companies, do promote more use of petroleum. Among them are both the NYT and the WaPo, which normalize the idea that a complete life requires checking off 50 must-see places scattered around the globe in ad-laden (and I therefore assume profitable) Travel sections. And, unlike Exxon et al. many of whose shareholders are small investors' 401Ks, those corporations are owned entirely (the Post) or substantially (the Times) by billionaires. So, why again is Exxon the villain?
My point here is not that, because many of us who say they drastic action is needed to avoid a serious climate change threat, do not walk the walk, climate change alarmism is a hoax or at least drastically overstated. No, climate change is a serious threat and I am quite alarmed. People who share that view but do not act accordingly are hypocrites or weak willed. But we are not wrong in our beliefs.
The hypocrisy makes it tough to get action on climate change or to convert those opposed to action. In addition to the hypocrisy factor, there's the rationalization one sometimes sees: that my individual flight is too insubstantial on its own to affect things so I'll take it, but I will support vocally the only thing that can make a difference, action by everyone. The problems with this is that it makes plausible another bad excuse in the climate debate that is too similar in form and substance, viz., that unilateral action by the United States to reduce carbon won't solve the problem because other countries will not reduce, nay they will even increase, their use of carbon, so we should not incur the costs (I'll assume arguendo only that they're substantial) of reducing our own carbon spewing.
C'mon, these people aren't hypocrites. They're just living in the world.
Last time I was in Los Angeles I was in a restaurant and requested an iced tea. When the server brought my beverage I asked for a straw. The response from the server and the other customers within earshot was classic. My response? "I can't kill my quota of sea turtles if I don't receive a straw!"
If you like your ad income, you can keep your ad income (maybe).
747 seats 400 and burns 5 gallons fuel per mile. That is 1.25 gallons per 100 miles per passenger if my math is right. A big if.
I seem to recall going through something like this with someone a while back. Assuming the 747 is at maximum capacity and you're comparing it to a single person (no passengers) driving a relatively fuel efficient car the same distance, I recall that it works out that the plane technically emitts less per person.
Of course that sort of thing only holds true for the big jumbo jets. I think as you scale down the plane it starts to go in favor of a the automobile.
The author of that "Wired" piece has never seen the Gary Larson cartoon of the two professors at the blackboard covered with formulae but with a space between the two formulae with "A Miracle Happens" in between.
If you think having kids is worse for climate change, imagine what immigration does.
Immigrants from 3rd world countries increase their carbon footprint dramatically.
Let me know when they start being pro-nuclear. Until then, it's religious fruitcake time, nothing more
No, climate change is a serious threat and I am quite alarmed. People who share that view but do not act accordingly are hypocrites or weak willed. But we are not wrong in our beliefs.
I don't agree, my research says the computer models are bunk, but that aside I think I can relate to your other points.
I see homeless people living in despair and poverty on the streets. We should do something. But I'm not going to set up my spare bedroom for strangers to come and go, or stock my fridge with free food. Or sit with them for hours and hours and counsel them through their particular madness that's derailed their life. And I know that if I did, it would only encourage others to gather at my doorstep while my neighbors are instead enjoying a week in Cancun.
If it's Changing, it matters little in any time-frame I can envision, what the cause is, or what a "solution" might be.
My wife and I live a frugally comfy middleclass life that includes some travel, by air, to Europe (averaging one person/one round trip every three and one-half years including our first trip in 1978 and our planned trip this fall).
We have one 2013 small suv (new to us last year). We have always tried (and usually succeeded) in living within a short drive (10-15min) or good walk/bus combo (30-60min) of work; 12k miles a year on our car year is a lot for us.
One grown son, no grandkids.
We pay good money to stay cool in the summer, and warm in the winter, in a house that is really bigger than we need (making up for 30 years in too-small apartments and houses).
Narr
I like what I have and understand why other people would like to have it too
I'll believe that climate change is a danger when they ban private plane travel.
It would be worth it to see Leo DiCaprio in economy.
“Somehow - discussing over-population is a big no-no on the right. On the left too, to some extent. The left can only abide by abortion.”
I think because much of the world is facing demographic collapse through not having enough children. Most of Europe, Japan, now even China are below ZPG. We are barely above it, as is the case through much of the Americas and Asia. Parts of Africa and the Muslim Middle East are most of the exceptions.
Althouse: I stop and Google "zero carbon footprint air conditioning" and find -
And that's why the Marxists are wrong - Global Socialism will not solve Climate Change, it will only make it inevitable. If we actually have a human-induced climate problem, innovation is the key.
And the only thing Socialism does well is to stifle innovation and propose static solutions that cannot adapt.
There's some quip (from The West Wing?) that's very close to: "if the government had been put in charge of curing polio, in 50 years we would have a state of the art Iron Lung"
I heard the other day that Miley Cyrus' home in LA burned down and she accepted that as a natural disaster and I thought good for her. Then she added "the earth is angry at us and so she won't have kids until we address global warming". Now, she is a singer and her husband is a bigtime movie actor [I think]. Will they downsize their lives, travel, music and movie extravagandas to so the earth is less angry? No of course they won't.
This is anonymous who posted above (I wasn't sure how to sign in as I'm new at this, maybe this will end up anonymous too, but I'll try not). In response to a couple of points. Of course, since I worry about climate change, I'm fine with nuclear energy, which seems to be a better option that some of the other alternatives (not that I'd trust my own eye-balling of that tradeoff in a perfect world: a revenue-neutral carbon tax would let the market rather than me pick the best alternatives). I am a reluctant believer in the climate change threat. I would desperately like to be proven wrong, and I read with interest, but usually also disappointment, viewpoints or news that either suggest that the problem is overblown or (sometimes more promising) that there are relatively painless steps we can take to fight or mitigate. I'm not a religious believer in climate change.
And they call that a Science. It takes a strange supposedly educated people to deny any and all observed results and swallow whole the UN bunko of faked Temperature records and computers misprogrammed to predict a disaster in 12 years. All the while an observed real cycle of Global Cooling in existence now has accelerated and is freezing formerly temperate zones to crisis level that is sending very cold arctic air south forming jet stream dips that actually are causing intense snow and intense rain levels seldom seen. But the dreaded Heat from CO2 remains a myth they swallow whole.
My point here is not that, because many of us who say they drastic action is needed to avoid a serious climate change threat, do not walk the walk, climate change alarmism is a hoax or at least drastically overstated. No, climate change is a serious threat and I am quite alarmed. People who share that view but do not act accordingly are hypocrites or weak willed. But we are not wrong in our beliefs.
Wrong.
What you are saying is roughly equivalent to saying "yeah, i think rape is wrong, but I'm still going to give women roofies at the bar every Friday and Saturday night, because I'm weak willed."
If you truly believed that AGW was going to make the sea levels rise, and temperatures climb several degrees, you'd live in Wyoming / Montana / Idaho / the Dakotas / Western MN. Do you?
Or do you live near the coast, where those "rising sea levels" will destroy everything?
Does your power provider use carbon neutral nuclear / hydro? Or do they use coal and gas?
If it's a big problem, then orient your life around the "fact" that it's a big problem that you must deal with.
Until you've done that, FOAD, you have nothing of value to offer.
No "carbon offset" indulgences allowed. You want changes made that will force poorer people to give up nice things they otherwise could have had. Either you give up all those things, right now, or you're full of sh!t on the topic and have nothing of value to offer.
Wealthy celebrities lecturing normal people about climate change is like drunk driver lecturing people about road safety.
swallow whole the UN bunko of faked Temperature records and computers misprogrammed to predict a disaster in 12 years.
That's what boggles my mind.
The alien spaceship does not arrive on the predicted date.
The alien spaceship does not arrive on the revised predicted date.
The alien spaceship does not arrive on the now corrected predicted date.
The alien spaceship does not arrive on the adjusted predicted date.
At this point, even the Area 51 crowd has abandoned the landing site for a weekend in Vegas.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-7-3-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxiii
The scandal that I call “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the alteration of official world temperature data by a small number of government employees in the US and the UK. Uniformly, the alterations have the effect of lowering temperatures early in the record, and raising recent temperatures, in order to create and enhance a warming trend that does not exist in the data as originally reported. The purpose of the fraudulent data alteration is to support the continuation of the “global warming” climate scare. To read the prior 22 posts in this series, go to this link.
Dear lord, do they know how much energy it takes to break apart an H2O molecule? If they were any more moronic, they wouldn't be able to brush their own teeth!
Almost forgot
The alien spaceship has already come and gone, it's now too late.
But there is still time to prepare for it's arrival?
The scandal that I call “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the alteration of official world temperature data by a small number of government employees in the US and the UK.
And hasn't the original data been scrubbed? So that if we face a GENUINE climate emergency in the future, we won't have an accurate temp history to apply to the problem?
You should worry more about the planet cooling. Like it has the last three years. Remember, ice ages are When Bad Things Happen to Good Species.
Math is hard.
Climate change? Hasn't the climate been changing ever since the earth has had an atmosphere?
In Europe, they call environmentalists "watermelons":green on the outside, red on the inside.
Last year, governments were taken down (parliamentary) in Australia and Finland because the climate change policies got out of hand. The US has spent enough money in the last 20 years on climate change to have paid for most of the uninsured health care in the country. The world is greening. Fossil fuels have created the wealthiest and healthiest time in the history of the planet. I invite any non statistician or scientist to look up the definition of stochastic, because that is what climate is. We can't forecast properly more than about 2 weeks, how can any forecast of years and years have any value? For the folks in the New York metro area, just wait a few years when there is no natural gas to run your heater on a cold day because of this insanity.
For this process to be carbon neutral, though, all those souped-up air conditioners would need to be powered with renewables, because burning the synthetic fuel would also produce emissions. To address that problem, Dittmeyer proposes turning whole buildings into solar panels
For the solar panel manufacturing to be carbon neutral, I propose that they be made from the sand of abandoned baseball fields in factories powered by geothermal steam. To have enough geothermal steam we will pave Iceland. Paving Iceland will create climate refugees. We will give climate refugees new green jobs deforesting mountains for windmill construction. The windmills will be manufactured from hemp cellulose at what was formerly known as Yellowstone National Park. You can go visit the former park on the proposed Amtrak mostly gravity rail system powered by Manhattan Air Conditioner drippings.
It's the circle of life.
In my part of WI (western) we have been receiving an enormous amount of rain, and not just lately either. Sunday night, a huge storm came through, lost the internet, lost DirecTV, then the power went out. Yesterday, another huge rain filled storm came through, high winds, and now I see some trees are down. What is the cause of this? Could it be... the weather?
I'll believe they're serious about climate change when Barbra Streisand starts hanging her clothes out to dry. Not before.
https://nypost.com/2001/06/24/hypocrite-streisand-takes-the-heat/
WHAT IF AIR CONDITIONERS COULD HELP SAVE THE PLANET INSTEAD OF DESTROYING IT?
Are you sure this wasn't meant to be a parody article?
Blogger Bill Peschel said...
I'll believe that climate change is a danger when they ban private plane travel.
It would be worth it to see Leo DiCaprio in economy.
That would be beautiful!
Fen said...
"The alien spaceship has already come and gone, it's now too late."
Well, yeah, there is that. If you believe the "climate models", it has been too late for at least a decade. We're all gonna fry!
Climate change is used by believers of the faith who don't want to talk about the more troublesome topic of global warming be because those facts are truly inconvenient.
Covering the sides of a building with solar collectors is pointless is there's another building to its south. It's pretty much pointless regardless.
The UK is trying to figure out how to recoup loss of their huge petrol taxes from electric car drivers.
I am a reluctant believer in the climate change threat. I would desperately like to be proven wrong, and I read with interest, but usually also disappointment, viewpoints or news that either suggest that the problem is overblown or (sometimes more promising) that there are relatively painless steps we can take to fight or mitigate. I'm not a religious believer in climate change.
I hear ya, but I gave up trying to convince others about the flaws in AGW theory long ago. It's a trait I picked up from my wife - she discovered no matter what she advised me, I just had to go out and figure it out the hard way for myself ;)
I would point you to
1) evidence Climatologists have dishonestly edited historical temp data to make the past look cooler than it really was.
2) the refusal of Climatologists to allow audits of their computer modeling
3) the now observable differences between current temp data and the value the computer models predicted
4) the attempt to intimidate scrutiny and address valid critiques by likening skeptics to Holocaust Deniers (when all they really disagree with is the amount of warming that's occurred
5) the abandonment of the Scientific Method by Climatology
6) the 53 peer reviewed papers by _Climate Scientists_ each proposing a different theory as to where the 18 years of missing heat their computer models predicted went, why the planet did not warm as they forecasted. This was years after assuring us the science was "settled"
7) the inability of climate computer models to forecast backwards as a control test
8) the recent admissions (AOC's Chief of Staff) that the Green Deal is really about redistribution of wealth
9) The observable trend (real time satellite and ground data) that shows the planet is entering a cooling phase and the hyperbolic reaction of Climatology to those facts
10) The "last chance" benchmark dates that have come and gone and are continuously being reset when the "appointed day" passes without the predicted cataclysm.
11) The shift in Climatology from scientific inquiry to the punishment of heretics
There was a time when I would have debated this with someone like you to the point of being rude, unmerciful and cruel. But I don't really feel a need to go 11 rounds any more (and you have been more civil than anyone I've known who defended AGW theory, so...).
From my point of view, the war has been won and is over. And to me (no offense) you are that Japanese soldier still manning one of the interior islands after all communication has been cut off. I have no wish to fight you. So I listed some of the guideposts I know of to help you find your own way. I think, like me, hectoring you will do no good. You have to work through this on your own for it to take.
I wish you good fortune ;)
The abuse often took the form of an act which granted forgiveness for future sins, ie. I have spent great time and energy proselytizing and converting heathens to the Cult of Global Warming, thus accruing credit to offset any Carbon Sins I may choose to commit in the future.
Carbon taxes and credits are the way these indulgences are paid for today.
"He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry." -- Cyril Connolly
"my individual flight is too insubstantial on its own to affect things so I'll take it, but I will support vocally the only thing that can make a difference, action by everyone."
"My individual racist rant is too insubstantial on its own to affect things." It works for every progressive principle.
""The biggest burden on the planet comes from having children and grand children. That's my humble request.""
I think this is something we can all get behind: For believers that Global Warming is killing the planet, the root-problem is people--the more there are, the more consumption and energy use.
For those on the skeptical side, if the people who worry about the "problem" die-out, problem solved!
I am a reluctant believer in the climate change threat. I would desperately like to be proven wrong, and I read with interest, but usually also disappointment, viewpoints or news that either suggest that the problem is overblown
Civilization did not cause global warming. Global warming caused civilization.
1) The Earth is currently in an ice age called the Quarternary. It began 2.5 million years ago.
2) Modern man first appeared on the Earth about 300,000 years ago. For the first 290,000 years we wandered in small packs of hunter-gatherers.
3) About 12,000 years ago, the Earth entered a period of warming called an interglacial. It is called the Holocene, sand is still active today.
4) Around 10,000 years ago, man invented agriculture. Agriculture lead to surplus. Surplus lead to specialization. Specialization led to cities. Cities lead to civilization. Civilization developed history around 6,000 years ago.
5) For all of man's existence, the Earth has been in an ice age that continues to this day.
6) All of human civilization and history has occurred during an interglacial that continues to this day.
a 747 seats 400 and burns 5 gallons fuel per mile
What's a 747 ? Is that some sort of plane they had back when you guys were kids?
“Somehow - discussing over-population is a big no-no on the right. On the left too, to some extent. The left can only abide by abortion.”
1) Over population is a myth, just like AGW.
2) There are more people alive today than ever before. Those people have a higher standard of living than ever before. Hunger and poverty are at historical lows.
3) If people were willing to live as densely as they do in Hong Kong and Singapore, you could fit the population of the world in Texas.
4) The world's population is predicted to peak within 100 years, and then begin to decline.
"747 seats 400 and burns 5 gallons fuel per mile. That is 1.25 gallons per 100 miles per passenger if my math is right. A big if."
Plane travel in jumbo jets is definitely less carbon intensive per passenger calculated this way, but if you include everything into the calculation, it is probably close to wash overall. You have to remember- the car and the airplane itself also have to be manufactured, which impact the carbon footprint of each mode of travel. A rough estimate for the carbon intensity can be made by just comparing the costs to use bot. Since a person won't generally buy a private jumbo jet, the costs are reflected by the ticket itself- that captures the fuel, employee cost, and the capital costs. A passenger car, though, you either rent for the trip or buy and keep for 10+ years.
All in all, I think the plane will still come out fairly far ahead in carbon efficiency. However, you won't be driving to Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, London, or Sydney from the US.
. I am a reluctant believer in the climate change threat. I would desperately**** like to be proven wrong****, and I read with interest, but usually also disappointment, viewpoints or news that either suggest that the problem is overblown or (sometimes more promising) that there are relatively painless steps we can take to fight or mitigate. I'm not a religious believer in climate change.
***********************
There's yer problem, right there.
"Climate change" needs no proof, as it's been happening for as long as Earth has existed. Despite what the warmista bedwetters tell you, there is NO EVIDENCE that anything outside of normal and natural variation is taking place.
Every time you hear about the hottest year on record, you need to remember that we've only had global records of atmospheric and oceanic temps since 1979. Before that, vast areas of land and water never had temperatures measured at all, let alone according to standardized methods. Everything before 1979 is thus an estimate---and if you think anyone can estimate temps to a tenth of a freaking degree, you are crazy.
Human-induced climate change? That hypothesis CANNOT be falsified, as there is no way to conduct an experiment to test it. The atmosphere is a chaotic, non-linear multi-factorial system, that cannot be reproduced artifically. Computer models come freighted with varying assumptions baked in, and are thus NOT experiments, nor are their results "data". ALL the dozens of models reach different conclusions, which blows out of the water the canard that we are dealing with "settled science"
As Richard Feynman reminded us, if the hypothesis is not testable and faslfiable, it is not a "scientific" hypothesis.
It's nothing more than a belief system, no different than a religion.
So you should give up your hope of being proven wrong.
And no, there are no relatively painless steps that can be taken to mitigate climate change.
WHAT IF AIR CONDITIONERS COULD HELP SAVE THE PLANET INSTEAD OF DESTROYING IT?
When I first read this I thought they were offering a perpetual-motion machine, a device that would create more energy than it uses.
But then I realized all they're offering is a way to convert energy in the form of heat and electricity into chemical potential energy stored in hydrocarbon fuels.
So, it's somewhat less than a revelation that if you had plenty of electricity and a modicum of heat you could convert that into hydrocarbon fuels. Although (for some reason they don't discuss this) you'd lose a good deal of that energy in the conversion process. But, at least they're not promising to get more energy out of this than was put into it. So, maybe you should write another article when you find gigawatts of surplus electric power to use for this?
But then I realized why I'd stopped reading Wired magazine years ago: because a typical Wired magazine article is full of wild techno-enthusiasms which, on closer examination, evaporate into nothingness.
And one additional factor, Steve, is this- it would take you take you 5 days to drive to NYC from LA, so you could make one such trip in the time you could do the flight 20 times. In other words, sure the plane trips are more efficient, but the efficiency in time will mean you will fly quite a bit more than you would have driven anyway. So, it isn't really the case that the plane replaced the car, but that the existence of the plane made trips possible that otherwise you wouldn't have even taken in the first place.
steve uhr said...
747 seats 400 and burns 5 gallons fuel per mile. That is 1.25 gallons per 100 miles per passenger if my math is right. A big if.
For jet airliners, it's quite a bit more complicated than that. Jet airliners burn more fuel at low altitudes. They consume a hot of fuel taking off and climbing to altitude. Once there, they're amazingly efficient. I recall reading many years ago that a workhorse 737-800 could carry over 150 passengers from New York City to LA and burn an average of 40 gallons per passenger. You can't drive a Prius from NYC to LA on only 40 gallons of fuel. However, that same 737 flying a much shorter route, say from NYC to Denver, would probably use around 30 gallons per passenger. Newer jets like the 787 are even more efficient.
Jroberts said, "He has multiple large homes and flies between them on a regular basis. Multiple cars that get replaced every few years. A daily commute that matches my weekly mileage and makes frequent trips around the world because Chinese food "tastes better" in Hong Kong.
My question: Whose life better reflects a concern for our planet?"
Yours, obviously. But that's not the point.
He's living the dream of the climate change crowd. HE, concerned citizen of the world that he is, continues to live large--multiple houses, frequent flights between and around the world--while YOU, as a stand-in for the deplorables live a more modest lifestyle. The only fly in this ointment is that you're doing it by choice (I assume), while ideally you'd be FORCED to live a smaller, less lavish life while he gets to lord it over you.
I am a reluctant believer in the climate change threat. I would desperately like to be proven wrong, and I read with interest, but usually also disappointment, viewpoints or news that either suggest that the problem is overblown or (sometimes more promising) that there are relatively painless steps we can take to fight or mitigate.
Fen, that's me too. Some climate scientists are indeed dishonorable, the models do "run hot", etc. But as the old saying goes, even paranoids have real enemies. There's just too much evidence of substantial, long-term warming. And I don't see any good evidence that we're getting cooler recently. Now what to do about it ... I personally think there isn't much that can honorably be done until we have cheap carbon-neutral ways of generating energy.
Michael K, The Then a miracle occurs cartoon is by Sidney Harris, who used to do panels for Science magazine.
I'd be willing to bet air conditioning leads to fewer pregnancies which means lower birth rates. After all, when it is too hot to sleep, there is way more sex happening. At least that is my experience.
There's just too much evidence of substantial, long-term warming
True. The Earth has been warming for 12,000 years. That's the point. The Earth began to warm long before civilization let alone the industrial revolution.
I'm pretty sure you probably believe that the Bering land bridge existed once..right? What happened to it, and how long ago?
“Everything before 1979 is thus an estimate---and if you think anyone can estimate temps to a tenth of a freaking degree, you are crazy.”
Really crazy.
What they did was take the high measured temp and low measured temp for the day (measured until recently to maybe 1 degree accuracy), and averaged the two of them. Then they averaged the daily averages over a year. Then they did this for several hundred points mostly by mid and large cities in First World countries, and guesstimated the global temperature for the rest of the world based on some secret, often changing, algorithms. They would be lucky to get +/- 10 degree accuracy for single points, and that is before they magically interpolate hundreds of them to generate the world temperature. And they are selling their results as within +/- 0.1 degrees.
For those without a statistical background (which appears to include many of the “climate scientists” pushing this nonsense), taking an arithmetic average to represent a sample only makes statistical sense if the underlying data is normally distributed - i.e. it looks like a Bell Curve. Very little of the data being aggregated fits a bell curve very well, starting with the daily temperatures of any set location. You can see this on the weather app on your smart phone. This is at least partially a result of different rates of daytime heating and nighttime cooling.
Roger Sweeny said...
Roger, the problem is as Fen brilliantly wrote, climate science is not science. Professionally I am a physician and we had a lot of science to get to and through medical school as well as a lot of statistics. Science is, simply, the application of the scientific method to any field of study.
Observe a phenomenon. Make a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. To the extent the outcome is that predicted, your hypothesis is strengthened. To the extent the outcome is not consistent with the predicted outcome, you must alter your hypothesis to fit the data. Normally the next step is to present your data and let everyone try to knock it down. When they can't you are acknowledged as being correct. If they do knock it down because you missed something you need to revise your hypothesis.
The problem is that these alarmist scientists do not use the scientific method. They have been caught many, many times revising data, old temperatures down and new temperatures up, to give the appearance of warning where there is none. They do not share their data. They do not allow others to review their raw work. Regardless of what comes - the weather is warmer or the weather is colder - that supports the hypothesis. That is, it is an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Unfalsifiable is another word for "it's religion, not science."
Until they follow the scientific method and until their work is transparent, there is no reason to believe them anymore than the nut on the corner with the sign saying "The world will end tomorrow."
Nonapod,
" I think as you scale down the plane it starts to go in favor of a the automobile."
Not really, as long as you're talking solo car vs full aircraft.
Heck, even the Cessna Caravan -- much smaller than most of the commuter aircraft cited in the table -- gets gets 33 seat-miles per gallon if fully loaded in US/FAA standard rating (9 pax), or 51.5 in absolute-max 14 pax configuration. (This is just a US regulatory thing; the aircraft can absolutely seat 15 adults no problem--1 pilot and 14 passengers--but US regs require twin engines for any commercial aircraft carrying more than 9 passengers.)
Roger: Fen, that's me too.
Well, I can point both of you to 2 sites I trust
https://wattsupwiththat.com/
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/
if you have specific questions. They should be courteous with you if you approach them in good faith. If a few of the commenters jump your shit, do not respond in kind, it will only cause more reasonable people who have been persecuted by AGW believers to dismiss you and join the fray, and then you won't get any leads to information you are interested in.
Remember, alot of these people where shunned, lost tenure, etc simply for questioning the computer models. So tread gently and you should be okay.
The second site is more about the politics surrounding it, than the science, but addresses many of the scandals the the MSM didn't put on the front page.
Hope that helps.
Keith: Regardless of what comes - the weather is warmer or the weather is colder - that supports the hypothesis. That is, it is an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Unfalsifiable is another word for "it's religion, not science."
I meant to cover that one. It's a critical point. Thanks for posting it.
Blogger Gahrie said...
"5) For all of man's existence, the Earth has been in an ice age that continues to this day.
6) All of human civilization and history has occurred during an interglacial that continues to this day."
All true, but some may find it a bit confusing. Climate historians use the term "Ice Age" for any period in which there is solid ice on the Earth's poles, as there is now. So, we are in an Ice Age, as Gahrie says, a long one. They use the term "Glacial Era" for those times when the polar ice expands to cover much more than the poles, which a lot of people mean by "Ice Age".
It appears that at present, the Earth is a bistable system, having two very different climate regimes, either one of which is stable for a long time, before ending in a very rapid transition. During the current Ice Age, there has been a lot more glacial than interglacial. The average length of an interglacial has been 12,000 years, which is how long the current one has been going on. There are a number of theories about what causes the transitions between these two relatively stable modes. None of those theories are any good.
For Pointman's site, go to the articles page:
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/articles/
Scroll to the bottom and work your way up through the AGW articles. He shifted from AGW discussion to battling censorship issues about 2 years ago, so his more recent stuff won't cover the material you are interested in.
WHAT IF AIR CONDITIONERS COULD HELP SAVE THE PLANET INSTEAD OF DESTROYING IT?
The article does not present this as perpetual motion machine proposition, since the works get a continual energy input from the sun.
This is is not the kind of thing I have a head for, but I still think the author, or the "scientist" who told him this tale, either intended the article as subtle satire, booby bait, or just lost track of his decimal point, or his pluses and minuses in one or more places along the line.
Good grief, Unknown, a "revenue-neutral carbon tax" is just about the farthest thing possible from "letting the market pick the best alternative".
Fen/Roger,
https://judithcurry.com/ is another very good site.
I just blew air from the basement floor through a 12" duct upstairs onto the computer desk, powered by a 12v DC fan running off a 50w solar panel in the back yard. That was back when it was in the 100s every day a decade ago. Nowadays it's only in the low 90s and a tiny fan alone does fine.
Also: climate change still exists.
Yep. As it has for the last 4.6 billion years.
Deal with it.
"I'd be willing to bet air conditioning leads to fewer pregnancies which means lower birth rates."
Well maybe not, but, refrigerators and freezers use the same technology as air conditioners.
So, when does the campaign against frozen foods begin?
The power company reports every month in the summer that I use 50% less electricty than the 20% most efficient homes in my area.
What if the United States enacts the Green New Deal and goes back into the Paris Agreement and we find out in 50 years that all this predictions were wrong? Do we get our money back? Do we get our oil jobs back? Do we get our manufacturing economy back?
Disease-ridden capsules is enough not to fly.
Gahrie,
The Earth warmed considerably at the end of the Younger Dryas (about 11,500 years ago) and has bounced around since then, e.g., Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age. But as far as I know, there has not been much of a trend since 9000 B.C.. The last century has seen a warming trend, with some cooler periods but now well above, say, 1900. Some places in the U.S. do have temperature records that long; I think Boston's oldest official temperature is from 1879.
Bruce Hayden,
Even if the methods for estimating average temperature are "crazy", as long as they are applied consistently, aren't they good enough to determine a trend--all measurements are lousy, but lousy in the same way?
Keith,
I completely agree that there are people in the climate change business who are not scientific. But there are others who are. Lots of people now admit that the models have been cranking out predictions that were too high. This has led to some attempts to change some models, though it has also led to some, "the models must be right; the missing heat must be hiding somewhere, maybe in the oceans." Which leads to potentially falsifiable predictions. But honest and dishonest, most everyone says there has been substantial warming.
The fact that some people in the business have been less than honest does not make the whole enterprise a lie. Any more than the fact that some white supremacists support Trump makes him a racist.
CAGW is a total scam.
Roger Sweeny said...
Hi. I disagree. The loudest voices and the leaders of the movement have all been shown to be fakes. They fake their data. Confidential emails were exposed (remember the "hide the decline"), models are reliably wrong, and data are commonly manipulated to show warming that does not exist in reality. Following the scientific method generally results in correct predictions. The ONLY reason scientists are afforded respect is not because they work with chemicals or particle accelerators. It is ONLY because their predictions are generally correct. And they are generally correct ONLY when they reliably follow the scientific method. A scientist who does not follow the scientific method is not a scientist. He is a priest. Documentation of this is commonplace. Additionally, it is a cult in the sense that someone who disagrees with the orthodoxy is banned, not debated. In REAL science, someone who disagrees with the orthodoxy is debated. If he wins the debate, what is orthodoxy changes. If he loses, his argument is debunked. In REAL science, those who disagree are not banned.
So what we see in global warming science is that they do not follow the scientific method, they alter their data to fit their hypothesis, the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, they do not release their data for others to evaluate, and they ban those who disagree with them.
There really is no reason any of us should take them seriously. Might they be right? Of course they might be. But there is no scientific reason to take their claims any more seriously than anyone else's claim, as they are not real scientists (for the reasons above).
Roger Sweeny said...
Also don't forget ... the same people (literally in some cases, figuratively in others) who want to take away our freedoms and turn our economy socialist because of global warming ...
In the 1960's said there was a population bomb, we would run out of food and other resources, and hundreds of millions would die horribly. The only solution was to give away our freedom and have the government make our decisions for us. But that never happened.
In the 1970's said because of manufacturing and general productivity there would be global cooling and hundreds of millions would die horribly. The only solution was to give away our freedom and have the government make our decisions for us. But that never happened.
In the 1980's said because of manufacturing and general productivity there would be acid rain and ... not alar ... some other disaster and hundreds of millions would die horribly. The only solution was to give away our freedom and have the government make our decisions for us. But that never happened.
In the 1990's said because of manufacturing and general productivity there would be global warming and hundreds of millions would die horribly. The only solution was to give away our freedom and have the government make our decisions for us. But that never happened.
Now because the temperatures have been lower than average at times and higher at times it is global climate emergency or whatever nonsense is the latest.
The point being for a half century they have been saying the world is about to end unless we give up our freedom and have elite governments make our decisions for us. Their predictions never come true so they come up with another alarming prediction. At some point only a fool would continue to listen to them.
Blogger Roger Sweeny said...
"The fact that some people in the business have been less than honest does not make the whole enterprise a lie. Any more than the fact that some white supremacists support Trump makes him a racist."
What exactly is a "white supremacist"? Could you name one, Trump supporter or no? The fact that you casually refer to such a ridiculous concept indicates that your brain has been marinating in an MSM sewer for a very long time.
The real source of carbon dioxide is immigration.
Let an immigrant family cross into the U.S. from Central America and you have just produced another group of rabid consumers. In just a couple of years, dad who would have been happy with a new burro wants an SUV. Mom who was happy to have one of the solar ovens supplied by the US kids on mission trips now wants a six-burner stainless steel stove. The kids each need their own iPad to watch videos.
And on and on it goes. Nothing wrong with any of that - unless you believe that CO2 is killing the planet. I do wonder why the left wants to grow the number of "American style" consumers, though.
First of all, you’d need to incorporate a filter that would absorb CO2 and water from the air. You’d also need to include an electrolyzer to strip the oxygen molecule from H2O to get H2, which you’d then combine with CO2 to get hydrocarbon fuels. “Everyone can have their own oil well, basically,” [materials chemist Geoffrey] Ozin says.
And where does the power come from for the electrolyzer? If I had $5 for every time some visionary proposed to violate the laws of thermodynamics, I'd be rich.
Using technology currently in development ...
Boy! Did that crack me up. Lots of technologies are “currently in development” and will stay there forever or until the last person willing to waste time working on them retires or dies.
“Even if the methods for estimating average temperature are "crazy", as long as they are applied consistently, aren't they good enough to determine a trend--all measurements are lousy, but lousy in the same way?”
No, for a couple reasons. First, let’s assume that you have 23 hours of 50 degrees and 1 hour of 60 degrees. The average of the high and low is 55 degrees. We get the same result with 1+hour at 50 degrees and 23 at 60 degrees. And at 12 hours of each. Different parts of the country heat and cool differently during day and night. For example, high humidity cools much more slowly at night than low humidity (as I quickly learned to my dismay in my first, unairconditioned, summer in DC). This all means that the first figure, the “average” daily temperature, has no statistical meaning whatsoever. And the yearly average of these average daily temperatures isn’t much better. It fails to distinguish between years that have extreme highs and lows, versus more normal ranges. Also, always keep in mind that for the most part, it is harder for high temperatures to go higher, than low temperatures go lower. (Which, BTW, is why the tropics are less affected by warming and cooling trends than the polar regions, and part of why global warming opens up more arable land than it destroys). All those uncertainties are compounded when you try to interpolate the relatively few measuring sites, predominantly located in the most industrialized portions of the Northern Hemisphere over the entire globe. (Even ignoring that the interpolation is secret, and changes over time). We don’t know what they are doing exactly, but do know that some of the interpolations use data points fairly close together, but some use data points many hundreds of miles apart (some of the problems there have been shown for the interior of Australia).
I guess my question would be the obvious, why would you assume that these statistical problems would cancel each other out around the world? Wishful thinking?
The other thing to keep in mind here is that for the most part, error terms are multiplicative. You don’t increase accuracy by averaging more inaccurate figures- you almost always decrease accuracy, or, alternatively, increase the possible error. We have measurements from hundreds of locations around the world, each with an accuracy of maybe +/- 1 degree, munched together many thousands of times, and we are supposed to believe that the result is accurate +/- 0.1 degree? The reality is that they would be lucky if their actual error term was 100x that of +/- 10 degrees.
GIGO - Garbage In/Garbage Out
The interesting aspect here is that with the usage of satellites, a relatively accurate year round surface temperature could now be calculated (assuming it had any statistical meaning, which it probably does not). So what did the Climate Scientists do? They adjust the satellite data to correspond to the calculated global temperatures. They primarily do it by calibrating the satellite data with the Hadley CRUT temperature database, the onetime from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, in the UK. The one exposed in ClimateGate as being unreproducable. The programs they utilized gave obviously incorrect answers at times, were mostly undocumented, and turned out to be impossible to rewrite. And they had lost much of their original data in a move.
“And where does the power come from for the electrolyzer? If I had $5 for every time some visionary proposed to violate the laws of thermodynamics, I'd be rich.”
Solar and wind power. Obviously.
Or maybe could come from burning oil from fracking?
Blogger Fen said...
Roger: Fen, that's me too.
Well, I can point both of you to 2 sites I trust
https://wattsupwiththat.com/
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/
These are great sites for those of you who want ideological purity, love confirmation bias and don't know real math and physics: conspiracy wise guys
A good site that is mostly science skeptical is
https://judithcurry.com/
A good site that is irrefutable science covers the whole picture and not "consensus" is
https://scienceofdoom.com/roadmap/
Even if the methods for estimating average temperature are "crazy", as long as they are applied consistently,
They have not all been applied consistently. For instance, would you remove cold outliers from your data set while allowing hot outliers to remain? Would you define that as consistent?
Worse, there have been "crazy" changes that WERE applied consistently, but no notation was entered to identify which sensors were adjusted and for what reason. Say you have Group A adjusted +2 because of X, and Group B adjusted +2 because of Y. Years later a new team discovers the X incident should have should have been a +3 adjustment. They have no way of correcting the error because they can't determine if X was applied to Group A or Group B.
Or, as with the CRU data leak, the original unmodified data had not been preserved. So as computer errors compounded ("a sum-of-squared variable is becoming very, very negative!") it became impossible to identify which data had been corrupted:
"We have here a stellar example of it in real life in the above example where a “squared” value (that theoretically can never become negative) goes negative due to poor programming practice."
Another problem was the justification for adjustments being so haphazard as to be "winging it". If you can find material on the reasons given to adjust temp data values, I think you will be astonished to find how inconsistently they were applied.
Still more, the original programing was in Fortran. As new computer language replaced it, some data did not translate precisely from it's original format. It was a mess.
So you wound up with all these external factors, layered upon each other, compounding variables into a tangled web of yarn. It wasn't like a poorly sampled poll were one factor could be isolated to determine that, while the results were wrong, they were all skewed in the same direction so the trend was a valid indicator.
If I had made these mistakes in Chem Lab I'd have blue fur and a prehensile tail :)
Over 100 comments and not one damn dirty joke about "crowd oil."
Howard: These are great sites for those of you who want ideological purity, love confirmation bias and don't know real math and physics: conspiracy wise guys
Oh, well that really instills confidence in your objectivity, Howard. Thank you.
CO2 capture and storage only works biologically and mechanically in the ocean and soil. This is basic 101 common sense because the concentration is too low, so you need hemispheric-scale processes. Freeman Dyson thinks we should build back carbon-rich humus into our soils. This would radically change agriculture. It's one of the concepts of organic agriculture, but instead, they focus on playing gottcha on the definition of synthetic chemicals banned, even if they are 100% food grade GRS 100% natural products. This is what limits growth of organic because they want it small exclusive with better margins. Someone is going to figure out a better kind of natural agriculture and side-step the organic label if that industry doesn't change it's focus. I'm pretty sure it's something that has Bill Gates attention now.
But I do appreciate the example. If you'll remain standing, I was about to point out why it's wise to suspect the reasoning of those who feel a need to prop up their assertions with insults. It's an admission the argument is so unsound that it needs some flair.
The temperature record is solid. A red skeptic team by Berkeley Physics professor and well know AGW skeptic, author of the climate-gate book, Steve Mosher verified the previous work. This is no longer considered a disputed. We are still waiting for Watts to submit his temperature paper he had to withdraw when Climate Audit fund fatal errors. I think it's been 5-years.
Why thank you for lesson #1 On How to Win Friends and Influence People.
If the temperature record was solid, NOAA would publish a list of every modification, and the reason for it
Got that list?
No?
Then the temperature record isn't solid.
Science isn't about "trust the experts" it's about "give me the data and let me judge for myself."
Berkeley Earf shows that the temperature record is so solid that 1000-stations and 20-stations give very similar results. There's plenty to bitch about the CAGW panic in carbon park, the temperature record is not one of them
Howard: The temperature record is solid. This is no longer considered a disputed.
Oh please wait, I'm making popcorn for this!
rhhardin: How many equivalent packs of cigarettes in radon do you respire with that getup? Most of Ohio is "red" whatever that means
Just 2 mins, hang on!
Like I said Fen, Math is Hard. Are you still dreaming of counting cooter @ Althouse blog?
No, I'm ready. Popcorn salted.
You were saying the temperature record is solid. Do go on...
Is there a ... consensus?
My face hurts. Hang on let me catch my breath.
Blogger Roger Sweeny said...
I am a reluctant believer in the climate change threat. I would desperately like to be proven wrong, and I read with interest, but usually also disappointment, viewpoints or news that either suggest that the problem is overblown or (sometimes more promising) that there are relatively painless steps we can take to fight or mitigate.
Fen, that's me too. Some climate scientists are indeed dishonorable, the models do "run hot", etc. But as the old saying goes, even paranoids have real enemies. There's just too much evidence of substantial, long-term warming. And I don't see any good evidence that we're getting cooler recently.
Back in the 90s I saw good evidence that we warmed a degree C from 1900 to 1950, and cooled .5 C from 1950 to 1970
Now, which of those year ranges had more CO2 in the atmosphere?
We warmed again from 1970 to 1998. Then we flatlined for 18 years.
Which climate models predicted that behavior? Answer? None of the "CO2 warming will kill us all!" models predicted that behavior.
If you walk outside during daytime, and look up, you'll often see this large ball of light that provides almost all the heat that keeps the Earth warm.
Now, if you're not desperate to "prove" that humanity is really powerful, you would look at that data and say "the planet warms and cools because of powers currently beyond our control."
Blogger Howard said...
Berkeley Earf shows that the temperature record is so solid that 1000-stations and 20-stations give very similar results. There's plenty to bitch about the CAGW panic in carbon park, the temperature record is not one of them
Really? How well does the record match the Satellite record? Links?
steve uhr said, "That is 1.25 gallons per 100 miles per passenger if my math is right. A big if. "
Climate science is about as settled as your confidence in your math is.
I don’t think they’ve completely mapped the volcanoes either. That’s newer science.
Some German scientists predicted global cooling to 2050, warming to 2130 then cooling to 2200.
"...I read with interest, but usually also disappointment, viewpoints or news that either suggest that the problem is overblown..."
What do you read? Here are few links from real climate scientists who are also skeptics on the question of the human contribution to climate change:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
https://judithcurry.com/
https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/ (blog is retired but has much useful material through 2012)
Also, check out Searching for the Catastrophe Signal by Bernie Levin. You can buy from Amazon using Althouse's portal (you're welcome, Althouse).
Bruce Hayden,
I am not assuming that all the problems in calculating average temperature cancel out. Quite the opposite. But if the problems are always the same, the average temperatures will always be wrong--but they will always be wrong in the same way. So they will correctly signal trends. No?
Keith,
I think we both agree that too many people will use anything to get more power and that climate alarmism is one of those things. But something can be exaggerated and used for bad purposes even when there is truth to it. There has been some substantial more-than-usual warming. I wish it weren't but there's just too much evidence of v Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at The University of Alabama in Huntsvillearious kinds.
Some of the people working in the field do act scientifically. For example, from Watts Up With That? UAH finds a warming error in satellite data, lowers "tropical hotspot" temperature trend, contradicts IPCC models.
UAH refers to the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville which maintains a record of satellite temperature measurements.
@Keith
You left out how we were all going to fry because of the hole in the Ozone Layer.
I wish the liberal arts majors would leave chemical engineering to the professionals.
When and if someone figures out how to make this work (a very big if), it won't take government involvement to make it happen.
As someone trained in chemical engineering, I can see huge problems with this idea, mostly from the perspective of thermodynamics.
It's just another guy looking for some grant money.
I do believe in climate change. The climate has changed for billions of years, along with the configurations of the land masses on the surface.
I don't believe that people are the cause. That is giving humanity too much credit and frankly a narcissistic ego trip.
At one time the Earth was a giant snowball. Another time it was without ice at all humid and very warm. For the last 20,000 years we have been emerging from the last glaciation and the earth's overall climate has changed.
What we do, other than Nuking the planet is peanuts in the big scheme of things. Sure, we can pollute on a small scale and obviously should not. Being an old person, I can remember when the air was horrible in LA. Almost as bad as China is now. We have made progress. BUT it never seems to be enough for the Global Warming/Climate Change Religion.
So. All this hectoring about climate change yada yada yada....goes in one ear and out the other. Until those who are nagging us, do something...lead by example, they can just STFU. They parrot the words. They don't mean it.
Here is something to think about too. Weather is what you wear when you go outside. Climate is what you have in your closet.
We live in a 40 ft. RV. We sold our house and bought the RV and travel the country. We also tow our car. I bet we don't have half of the carbon footprint the phony green energy, global warming idiots running all over the country in their private jets screaming about how bad we the deplorables are.
Look, the NYT is funny. They are all concerned about inequality and run special magazine sections about the glory of expensive watches.
Fen said...
Is there a ... consensus?
***************
Just look at this graph, and ask yourself: does THIS look like consensus?
Does THIS look like climate models reflecting reality??
https://tinyurl.com/yyfnlgol
(I know Fen agrees with this)
As someone trained in chemical engineering, I can see huge problems with this idea, mostly from the perspective of thermodynamics.
********
I was a Chem. E. major.
“I am not assuming that all the problems in calculating average temperature cancel out. Quite the opposite. But if the problems are always the same, the average temperatures will always be wrong--but they will always be wrong in the same way. So they will correctly signal trends. No?”
Maybe, but probably not. They may be wrong one way one day, and wrong in the opposite direction the next. Or the next station consistently is measured too hot, and another too cold. Then the latter gets a new person reading the thermometer, and it flips. Point is that we have no knowledge whether any given set of measurements is too high or too low, or is consistently considered new way, or the other. We just don’t know. Remember, we are talking, esp in the case of historical data, the vagaries of many thousands of people taking measurements from thousands of thermometers many thousands of times. Moreover, in the introduction to my explanation, I showed that the average of the high and low for a day had almost zero meaning in terms of global temperature. For example, average temperature over a day might have some statistical significance, if the data points are close enough together. But two data points can match an infinite number of daily temperature curves. Esp when the curve being matched is somewhat dependent upon humidity, that isn’t being measured or correlated.
You still get down to the reality that you are basing assumptions on statistically invalid premises. You just cannot say, with any certainty whatsoever, that the errors are in one direction, or that they cancel each other out. And without any certainty that the results are always off in the same direction, all you have is GIGO, and make believe accuracy.
Howard said...
The temperature record is solid. A red skeptic team by Berkeley Physics professor and well know AGW skeptic, author of the climate-gate book, Steve Mosher verified the previous work. This is no longer considered a disputed. We are still waiting for Watts to submit his temperature paper he had to withdraw when Climate Audit fund fatal errors. I think it's been 5-years.
******************
Howard, you horse's ass.
The climate record has been dicked with again and again, always by lowering earlier temps and increasing the newer.
https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/300-scientists-blast-noaa-fudging-climate-change-data/
and as i said: There are NO records before 1979 that encompass the entire Earth on a regular, systematized and uniform basis. NONE.
I'm betting you have no technical background.
It shows.
LOL NEW PURITANISM
Climate Commies invented a new religion
Does the new God exist?
Who are the sinners and who are the saints?
Every article is a church sermon with the Worthy speaking in tongues
monkey brains never change
meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Just look at this graph, and ask yourself: does THIS look like consensus?
Does THIS look like climate models reflecting reality??
https://tinyurl.com/yyfnlgol
The graph is exactly what I have been saying. The models "run hot". They have overpredicted temperature increase. But THERE HAS BEEN temperature increase.
You can check out UAH's more recent data here.
“I wish the liberal arts majors would leave chemical engineering to the professionals.”
Hate to be cynical, but I have known people with significant education in the chemistry and physics of CO2 get lost in the weeds, failing to understand that the problem is far more complex than that. It mostly isn’t the first order energy absorption of CO2 that is significant, but rather it’s interaction with water, which is orders of magnitude more complex and more potent as a greenhouse gas, as well as being significantly more plentiful on this planet. Many of the models include expected positive feedback due to the interaction between the excess energy absorbed by CO2, and its affect on H2O. But for the most part, the complexity is mostly greatly underestimated, and not understood very well.
Part of why H2O is so poorly understood is that, despite its apparent simplicity, it interacts in very complex ways. For example, water can be in three different phases (gas, liquid, and solid) at temperatures that humans can easily survive at. Not the case with, for example, CO2, where solid phase CO2 is dry ice. And H2O changes phase back and forth at human habitable temperatures. The result of one of those phase changes is clouds, and clouds differ greatly depending on where they are, how high they are, how warm, etc. and that, of course, affects planet albedo. And, then, much of the water on the planet is in the oceans, forming a gigantic heat sink, which, of course, affects weather and clouds as the trapped heat moves around.
I have a very energy efficient dryer at my place in AZ. It's called a clothesline. I hang the clothes on it and the sun and wind do the rest. It works great!
Bruce Hayden,
My gut feeling is there is a sort of Central Limit Theorem in pulling trends from time series data, especially when the data series is long. To the extent that errors are random, the trend will be pretty truthful.
Of course, to the extent that the data have been fiddled with, that will not be true. Which is why I think that warming has occurred but has been exaggerated.
That, and all the other things, e.g., melting glaciers, that indicate warming.
Roger Sweeney -- You can't win. Everyone has a catalog of established arguments and no new evidence will make an impression, let alone a new frame of reference. It's like watching television reruns or 1990s professional wrestling. You know all the characters already and you already know the punchlines. Some of these PWNs are a decade old. Jimmy Superfly Snuka crashes to the mat once again.
I am not a climate change doubter, but I fall into the Judith Curry, Bjorn Lomberg, Freeman Dyson camp. The warmist, there-are-more-important-problems, we-can-solve-this-with-technology camp. Dyson was too smart for perpetual motion machines
I love mockturtle's comment. You want to save the world. Just slow down.
Bruce Hayden said...
“Even if the methods for estimating average temperature are "crazy", as long as they are applied consistently, aren't they good enough to determine a trend--all measurements are lousy, but lousy in the same way?”
And regarding the stations they monitor ... if they are in urban areas or if they were in rural areas that are more urban, there is obviously a heat sink (?) effect from human development (asphalt roads, eg) that alters the local temperatures as we see in Los Angeles every day. On hot days the heat continues essentially all through the night as the heat absorbed by the asphalt by day radiates back into the atmosphere by night. Obviously this is not seen in rural areas in fields or such. So if urbanization is occurring anywhere near the monitors, that will increase the measured temperatures much much more than any natural warming.
It's a long way of saying I think to someone else's point - GIGO. They are measuring extremely complex systems with extremely complex feedback mechanisms and simplifying it beyond anyone's ability to do so truthfully.
Blogger Fen said...
If I had made these mistakes in Chem Lab I'd have blue fur and a prehensile tail :)
Are you the Beast or Nightcrawler? I assumed Nightcrawler was always that way.
Blogger Howard said...
Berkeley Earf shows that the temperature record is so solid that 1000-stations and 20-stations give very similar results.
Is that before or after the raw temperatures have been statistically "normalized", "standardized", "adjusted", "tinkered with" or whatever we are calling it today?
How precise were the thermometers reading the temperatures? When I was taking ocean temperatures for the Navy, the thermometer read in 2 degree gradients.
How accurate were the thermometers? (That is not the same as precision)
Were they bi-metal, mercury in glass or alcohol in glass?
Did the person reading the thermometer know how to read them properly? (look up parallax) If they knew how to do it, did they read them properly? My ocean temperature readings were +/-4 degrees or so because it was just not that important. All we cared about was the delta across the main condenser.
When reading ocean temperatures, was the ocean rough or calm? Was the ship rolling, (small ship in moderate seas) or stable, aircraft carrier in heavy seas)
How hard was the ship running? Harder running means more cooling water flow which means more heat added by the pump which means higher temp.
How is the average calculated? Add daily high and low divide by 2? Hourly temps divided by 24? Continuous reading with integrated temperature average?
And a hundred other questions about how temperature data has been collected.
And don't get me started on satellite temperature measurement.
No, Howard, the temperature record is bullshit. I don't think I would trust any single station within +/-2 degrees. If they were perfectly random, you might, maybe, be able to talk about central tendencies etc. But they are not random and nobody knows how much they are off or which way.
And they are going to get hundredths of a degree per year differences out of those readings?
My ass.
John Henry
“That, and all the other things, e.g., melting glaciers, that indicate warming.”
Except that some glaciers melt, and others expand. And they reverse. The ice or parts of Antarctica havs increased significantly in the last several decades. We had a scare about the Arctic ice disappearing, but a couple years ago, tourists visiting there to see the last of Arctic ice had their ship iced in.
Besides, what’s wrong with warming anyway? (Just to throw some more red meat into the mix). Plants grow better. There is more arable land. Far more people die each year from too much cold, than from too much heat. Etc.
Blogger Greg P said...
Back in the 90s I saw good evidence that we warmed a degree C from 1900 to 1950, and cooled .5 C from 1950 to 1970
No you did not. You saw claims that temperatures did this or that. But because the temperature measurements, and the records based on them are shit, so are the claims.
We might, maybe, possible, if we squint real hard while jumping up and down on one foot, be able to detect a 5-10 degree change in average Earth temperature.
Maybe. I would still be skeptical. The records are shit and any conclusion that comes from them is shit.
John Henry
Here in Vegas it can get toasty in the summertime. The TV weather persons show the record highs for the date, and they usually occurred in the 1930's. To be fair, the temperatures are now measured in a different location than they were then. Also, mankind managed to fill the atmosphere with a lot of smoke and CO2 during the early 1940s. Too many variables to allow one to pontificate about What It All Means, let alone What We Should Do.
Blogger Roger Sweeny said...
But THERE HAS BEEN temperature increase.
How much of an increase? How many degrees over the past 120 years (or whatever similar period you like)
How many degrees over the past 20 years?
Or maybe I should be asking how many 100ths of a degree.
John Henry
John Henry said...
Is that before or after the raw temperatures have been statistically "normalized", "standardized", "adjusted", "tinkered with" or whatever we are calling it today?
http://berkeleyearth.org/about-data-set/
Whenever possible, we have used raw data rather than previously homogenized or edited data. After eliminating duplicate records, the current archive contains over 39,000 unique stations....
“Best value” time series were formed by averaging across multiple records when they existed at the same site. In addition, flagged values were dropped and previously manipulated GHCN-M and Hadley Centre data was ignored in favor of other data sources when possible
The whole point of Berkeley Earth was to take a skeptical look at all the previous assembled ground station data based on all the complaints of the skeptics.
Here's the data, if you want to go at it.
Bruce H said
For example, water can be in three different phases (gas, liquid, and solid) at temperatures that humans can easily survive at.
Even better, it can be in all 3 phases at the same time. a pond of water, covered with a skim of ice, with water vapor in the air above.
All 3 phases in contact with each other.
John Henry
Being connected to Judith Curry, Bjorn Lomberg, and Freeman Dyson is quite a compliment.
Even if you throw out all the temperature records, there are other things. There has been a substantial reduction in northern hemisphere glaciers. Some years up, some years down, but over the decades very noticeably down. The Arctic Ocean has noticeably less ice in summer.
And, as Bruce Hayden may he hinting, plants are growing further north than ever in Canada ("Besides, what’s wrong with warming anyway? ... Plants grow better. There is more arable land.")
Bird watchers can tell you. Habitats are moving North.
You would think that the threat of a rise in the oceans would have an effect on real estate prices in the Hamptons and Malibu. Or maybe there's a lot of denial going on.
Bird watchers can tell you. Habitats are moving North.
Good news for Canada. The Earth's getting greener too.
Even if you throw out all the temperature records, there are other things. There has been a substantial reduction in northern hemisphere glaciers. Some years up, some years down, but over the decades very noticeably down. The Arctic Ocean has noticeably less ice in summer.
This has been occurring for thousands of years. When did the Bering Land bridge disappear and why?
When did the mile high glacier on top of what is Chicago today disappear and why?
This is our 5th summer without an air conditioner. In Wisconsin, it's not that bad. Not great, but there are coping strategies.
Henry said...
John Henry said...
Is that before or after the raw temperatures have been statistically "normalized", "standardized", "adjusted", "tinkered with" or whatever we are calling it today?
http://berkeleyearth.org/about-data-set/
A big problem - and one reason a lot of people consider these "scientists" to be hacks and liars, is that they do not reliable mark when they altered the data, do not reliably record what data has been altered, and do not share the raw data. So that set from Berkeley could mean something ... or if they are using data that was previously manipulated and not marked as such, it could mean nothing. The data are so dirty now that we simply cannot trust it.
The confusion and confounding is about velocity vs. acceleration.
Blogger Roger Sweeny said...
Being connected to Judith Curry, Bjorn Lomberg, and Freeman Dyson is quite a compliment.
Even if you throw out all the temperature records, there are other things. There has been a substantial reduction in northern hemisphere glaciers. Some years up, some years down, but over the decades very noticeably down. The Arctic Ocean has noticeably less ice in summer.
And, as Bruce Hayden may he hinting, plants are growing further north than ever in Canada ("Besides, what’s wrong with warming anyway? ... Plants grow better. There is more arable land.")
---
True. But as the arctic glaciers have been losing ice, the antarctic has been gaining ice. Is that global warming? Global cooling? Do we need more CO2? Less? The answer is: No matter what phenomenon you describe, it is global warming. You need to stop driving cars, using air conditioning, and using fossil fuels. You need to give your money to third world countries.
The AGW theory is unfalsifiable. When there are more hurricanes it is global warming. When there are less hurricanes that is global warming. No matter what phenomenon, it always supports the theory. Unfalsifiable is another word for not science.
Keith, if you're curious about Berkeley Earth, the methodology and the data set are public.
At a certain point, you're saying "I don't trust math or people who use it."
Lomberg made valuable critiques of some statistics flaws in global warming models two decades ago.
Steve McIntyre has spend many years successfully pushing for public disclosure of climate change data. He now generally falls into the Judith Curry warmist camp. He is happy to push back on bad data, but he is happy to audit and give a pass to good data.
Henry said...
Keith, if you're curious about Berkeley Earth, the methodology and the data set are public.
At a certain point, you're saying "I don't trust math or people who use it."
----
No it's not "I don't trust math." It's that multiple collectors of data have adjusted the data and not marked what is adjusted and what is not. For several centers, THERE IS NO RAW DATA. This is unconscionable. No scientist would ever do that. One foundation of science is transparency. If others cannot review your work, your work is literally without value. It is nothing. When it is known that you made stuff up and then cannot or will not show others exactly what was made up and what was not, you may as well throw out the data set. It is worthless.
I would trust satellite data that cannot be altered. But anything out of England and anything from Michael Mann simply cannot be trusted.
I assumed Nightcrawler was always that way.
Yes, Nightcrawler was born this way.
Gagrie,
That's beneath you. You are an enlightened person. You know that Beringia and the mile of glacier over Chicago both disappeared near the end of the last Ice Age. They were gone by 14,000 years ago.
Of course, if you were an environmental idiot who thought that there was some primeval climate that was destroyed by humanity via Columbus or the Industrial Revolution, that would be news.
I would trust satellite data that cannot be altered. But anything out of England and anything from Michael Mann simply cannot be trusted.
Alas for science, that may well be a justified opinion.
University of Alabama at Huntsville has satellite data, including a pretty graph :) And they update it every month.
Someone failed physics. And chemistry.
The temperature recordings are not really relevant to discussing climate change. They cover at most the last 250 years or so, since the Royal Navy started requiring their captains to make weather observations and log them, which is much too short to even determine exactly where we are on the approximately 1,000 year cycle, though we know we are at or near the peak warmth and it should be getting cooler. But there are smaller cycles that may mask that for a while.
You would think that the threat of a rise in the oceans would have an effect on real estate prices in the Hamptons and Malibu. Or maybe there's a lot of denial going on.
According to this article in the April 18, 2018 Fortune Climate Change Is Already Depressing the Price of Flood-Prone Real Estate.
Let's say that the Berkeley data perfectly reflects the original raw temperature readings.
Let us say that the 65 degrees F that I wrote down as the main seasuction inlet temperature at 0200 on 4/17/70 appears in the Berkley data set as 65 degrees F. and the date and time are correct. Let's assume also that they figured out exactly where in the Atlantic ocean the ship was when I wrote it down at 0200 4/17/70.
It is still a bogus number
1) The thermometer was not particularly precise. It had a big dial reading in 2 degree increments. That means that, even if perfectly accurate, any reading will be no more precise than +/- 2 degrees.
2) I have no idea how accurate it was. As far as I know, it was never calibrated in the 2 years I served on the ship. That type of bimetal thermometer typically has an accuracy of +/- 1 to 2 degrees. Don't know about this particular one.
3) I didn't care too much about doing a perfect reading. We were mainly interested in whether it was warm or cold. The only reason I wrote it down at all was because that is what the messenger of the watch did and the chief would have my ass if I didn't.
4) I may not have checked it at all. If I had gotten a bit behind because of BS'ing with the throttleman or running an errand for the chief, I might have just written 65 because that is what it was at 0100 and it is not something that changes much from hour to hour.
5) Insert a bunch of other reasons why the water temperature might have been more or less than 65 by a degree or two.
Repeat this 24 times a day for the 5-600 ships the Navy had at the time.
All those numbers went to Berkley and are part of their ocean temperature record.
The US Navy is the (a?) main source for ocean temperature data because it is so scrupulous (koff,koff) about recording it every hour without fail.
Why would I trust the sea temp data to within +/- 3-5 degrees?
Why would you?
A similar process happened with most of the land temperature records taken in the US except that there were a lot more variables in how the thermometers were read and temps written down.
And that is the raw data before it is, in scientific statistical lingo "Tinkered with"
John Henry
Here in Vegas it can get toasty in the summertime. The TV weather persons show the record highs for the date, and they usually occurred in the 1930's.
1940: Population of Las Vegas is 8,422 (Clark County, 16,414)
Jul 09, 2019 · The Las Vegas metropolitan area has a population of over 2 million
Increase in population has apparently caused a drop in temperature.
That's beneath you. You are an enlightened person. You know that Beringia and the mile of glacier over Chicago both disappeared near the end of the last Ice Age. They were gone by 14,000 years ago.
No, they weren't.
The Bering land bridge disappeared under the waves 11,000 years ago. The glaciers last retreated from the area around Chicago 11,000 years ago too. That's why it's called an interglacial.
That's beneath you. You are an enlightened person. You know that Beringia and the mile of glacier over Chicago both disappeared near the end of the last Ice Age
The "last Ice Age" hasn't ended. We're in an ice age right now that started 2.5 million years ago.
We put solar panels on our house two years ago this month. Since then, my electric bill has been $3 to $5 a month except for last December when, due to climate change, or maybe winter, we received a fair amount of snow and clouds. It was then $60. So let’s say that I pay $120 a year for electric vs the $2300 I was paying. The cost of the system, after tax credits (thank you all who have paid taxes) was $17,000. The payback period is around 8 years, and the simple, raw rate of return is 12 to 13%. Public Service Co of NM announced they will cease coal powered generation in the next five years or so, so I expect rates to go up.
That is how I go green.
One problem that seems to be ignored is that there is a distinct difference between GW, AGW, and CAGW. Or rephrased:
1) Is the climate warming (GW)?
2) If it is warming, is it human caused (Anthropomorphic)?
3) If there is man caused warming, is it Catastrophic?
We have mostly here today talked about #1. We have now 40 years of satellite data, and during that 40 years, my reading is that there was a little warming. Enough to get the “climate scientists” to switch from GC to GW. Then a little cooling, enough to get them to switch to Climate Change. But from another point of view, these are small tweaks up and down, when viewed in longer time frames. There seem to be cycles of differing lengths. We appear to be still coming out of the Little Ice Age, that pushed the Vikings out of Vinland, and may have contributed to the Black Death in Europe. It was warmer back in the Viking era, and maybe the Roman era a millennium earlier. And then we have longer cycles. A bit over 10k or so years ago, the glaciers, that had locked up so much water in ice, that the land bridge from Siberia was exposed, retreated enough that the land bridge disappeared, then a bit more and a passage opened up from Alaska into the center of the continent. There may also be 500k cycles. At several points in the past, we had much higher global temps, and a lot more CO2. Everything complicated, of course, because the continents and parts of continents have been motoring around the world with some abandon, resulting in mountain ranges being thrust up, as they collide, which are then ultimately eroded. In that scheme of things, the satellite record of the last four decades is less than a blip. Rather, it is essentially insignificant in its size and length.
#2 has its own problems. Multivariate correlation analysis does not really show that CO2 increases in the atmosphere are driving global temperature changes. Instead, the changes we have seen in temperatures recorded at fixed locations (to eliminate the biases inherent in interpolating point sources into a world temperature) appear to be better explained, statistically, by a combination of, for example quantity of solar radiation (based on sun spot activity), wobble of the poles, distance from the sun, the Earth’s albedo, El Niño/La Niña ocean currents, etc. My understanding is that after considering the known primary drivers of global temperature changes, the amount left over to be explained by rising CO2 levels is really probably in the noise.
This is where all those models come in. It is obvious that there is no statistical correlation between global temperatures and CO2 levels, since the later has risen significantly over the last century or so, but the global temperature (to the limited extent that it can be measured accurately from more than the 40 years of satellite data) has gone up and down a bit. They are trying to work the other way, trying to predict predict temperature trends based on CO2 levels, trying to model the climate based on assumptions about how CO2 interacts with H2O around the world. Unfortunately, from my point of view, they still have the problem of essentially ignoring the major known drivers of global temperatures over time, as I discussed above.
I have addressed #3 above. Even if man caused CO2 were driving a slow increase in global temperatures, so what? Plants grow better with both more heat and more CO2, and arable land increases both as a result of the shape of our continents, and that warming affects the polar regions much more than the tropics. The reasonably projected rises in the oceans (which don’t appear to be happening) are far below what can be easily be accommodated through normal building obsolescence. Humans, originally evolved in the tropics, also seem to do better.
So, again, why beggar the world economy to try to prevent a possible rise in global temperatures, when, if it is indeed happening, it is probably mostly a natural occurrence, and seems, more likely than not, to be better, not worse, for humanity?
Oh, I forgot. You also have to factor in such things as volcanoes, partially caused by those continental plates motoring around the surface of the earth colliding.
“That is how I go green.”
Fine. But keep in mind that going green through solar panels is a luxury. I was surprised at the number of people here in rural NW MT who use solar power as their principal energy source, typically augmenting it in winter with propane and firewood. This allows them to live comfortably off the grid. It is expensive outside towns to put electricity into properties. For one friend, running electricity in to his house from the nearest power source would have cost him several times as much as the subsidized solar panels he purchased instead. And he is only sitting on 80 acres. Interestingly, it was dirt cheap to put in a telephone line (and, thus Internet), since that is heavily subsidized by every other land line telephone subscriber in the country, added to their bills as an automatic surcharge. Put in a well and septic, and you are ready to go. For many, it isn’t really about being off the grid, as much as being the most economic way to live on a property big enough that you don’t usually have to worry about neighbors. Can setup your own gun range. Etc. Convenience, not necessity. Thus, there too, a luxury.
One interesting aspect of watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) environmentalists is that they push very hard for everyone to live in densely packed cities. They don’t have the problems that some of my more rural neighbors have getting in power to their homes. But they also cannot generate anywhere near enough power using solar panels on their roofs, etc. Instead, they have to generate their power, raise their food, etc., at some distance, and then import it into their densely packed cities. It is great when it works. But we saw last weekend, in NYC, how fragile it is, when an important chunk of Manhattan suddenly went dark. I think that it is highly likely that the highest death tolls, per capital, if we ever faced any sort of regional, national, or even planetary catastrophe, would be the inner cities.
The air conditioning thing betrays both ignorance and inexperience. As one who lived in four Canadian provinces, including the Arctic (where I was an official climate observer) it requires much more energy to stay warm than to stay cool.
Assume 72 F as ideal. When the temperature is 102, as it will be here in Kansas today, there's a 30-degree differential to overcome for comfort. In the other direction, the equal-energy differential temperature is 42 F. My heat-pump electric bills clearly demonstrate that effect if you compare July to January: January is typically 3x July.
Because as alleged, "global warming" has greater influence at higher (=colder) latitudes, if warming actually occurs it wil REDUCE comfort-energy demands, not increase them.
The cost of the system, after tax credits (thank you all who have paid taxes) was $17,000. The payback period is around 8 years, and the simple, raw rate of return is 12 to 13%. Public Service Co of NM announced they will cease coal powered generation in the next five years or so, so I expect rates to go up.
As solar panels degrade (or break) they leech toxic chemicals like lead, chromium, and cadmium into the ground, or into your home if they are on the roof.
Do you have plans to test for those chemicals annually? Have you figured in the cost of disposing of those solar panels? The cost of toxic waste cleanup if they begin leaking or are heavily damaged in a weather event?
If you are relying on warranties and service contracts, what happens if your solar company goes bankrupt and ceases to exist, as many have done. Are there other solar companies that will step in and take over that role?
Gahrie,
According to Wikipedia, you are right that Beringia went below the waves 11,000 years ago, not 14,000. According to The Encylopedia of Chicago, the 'Wisconsin-episode glacier, melted back into the Lake Michigan basin about 16,000 years ago."
We both know that these were events that occurred as part of entering the present interglacial. You are absolutely correct that in the terminology of glaciology, we are in an interglacial of an Ice Age that began 2.5 million years ago.
"An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth is currently in the Quaternary glaciation, known in popular terminology as the Ice Age.[1] Individual pulses of cold climate are termed "glacial periods" (or, alternatively, "glacials", "glaciations", "glacial stages", "stadials", "stades", or colloquially, "ice ages"), and intermittent warm periods are called "interglacials" or "interstadials" with both climatic pulses part of the Quaternary or other periods in Earth's history.[2]
"In the terminology of glaciology, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in both northern and southern hemispheres.[3] By this definition, we are in an interglacial period—the Holocene."
I thought more people would understand if I used the more common terminology, where Ice Age is limited to the times when it is significantly colder and glaciers have advanced into areas that they do not cover in the interglacial periods. Most people think, "the Ice Age ended 11,500 years ago." They don't think, "11,500 years ago the Earth entered an interglacial of an Ice Age that has not ended".
Bruce Hayden,
We have mostly here today talked about #1. We have now 40 years of satellite data, and during that 40 years, my reading is that there was a little warming. Enough to get the “climate scientists” to switch from GC to GW. Then a little cooling, enough to get them to switch to Climate Change. But from another point of view, these are small tweaks up and down, when viewed in longer time frames.
If you look at the graph of satellite temperatures, there hasn't been much of cooling any time in the last 40 years. Plenty of bouncing around but a pretty steady upward trend. Which would just be a small tweak if there hadn't been similar warming over the last century plus. It's adding up to more than a tweak.
It's true that temperature records more than 40 years old are uncertain. But we also have figures that can't be fiddled. How late the last frost is in the spring. How early the first frost is in the fall. Both those indicate substantially longer growing seasons.
As you suggest, this may be a good thing. People who believe in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming forget that warming will have both good and bad effects.
"Fine. But keep in mind that going green through solar panels is a luxury."
Indeed it is.
I understand the hazards of the panels. My hope is by the time the panels reach there end of life, disposal will be more regulated and mainstream. I also hope by that time we will have moved on - I'm thinking the panels have a longer lifespan than me. As far as the present, time will tell regarding the risk of the leaching.
Plenty of bouncing around but a pretty steady upward trend.
How many degrees, Roger?
John Henry
John Henry,
Eyeballing, I'd guess a least square line would increase somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6 degrees Celsius (0.7 to 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit) from late 1978 to early 2019.
You can see what you think.
if fully loaded
I liked the comparison of a Cessna FULL OF AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN FIT IN, to a car; With ONE Person
Here's a fun fact;
motorcycles get about 50 mpg
Which uses more gas, four people (2 couples) on 2 bikes; or those four in one car?
Want to save gas? carpool
How does a 'fully loaded' jet plane compare to a 'fully loaded' 7 passenger suv?
Blogger Roger Sweeny said...
Eyeballing, I'd guess a least square line would increase somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6 degrees Celsius (0.7 to 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit) from late 1978 to early 2019.
Some "eyeball", Roger. Some "guess".
The official claim, from the UN's IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) latest report of 2-3 years ago is in the hundredths of a degree for that period (1998-present.
They had to really torture the data to even get it to say there was that much warming.
Total warming claims, IPCC again, for the past 120 or so years is 0.8 deg C NOAA/NASA puts it closer to 0.4-0.5 deg
As I said earlier about the sea temperatures, the data, as originally collected, is so imprecise and so unevenly collected that any claim of less than +/- 4to five degrees is bullshit.
Inaccurate/imprecise thermometers, inconsistent reading times, inconsistent locations, untrained people taking the readings and a hundred other problems.
And that assumes that they are using the original temperatures as recorded and not some "adjusted" value.
John Henry
John Henry,
This is not manually collected data. It is from satellites. It is not bullshit. The Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville is not the British Meteorological Office. Do you agree or do you think it is also bullshit?
The planet used to be a lot warmer than it is now. Life generally does better when the planet is warmer. Life changes the planet. Toxic oxygen was blown into the atmosphere a few billion years ago by some beavering bacteria. Other lifeforms evolved to take advantage of that toxic, corrosive oxygen.
All the carbon that is now in fossil fuels used to be in the atmosphere. Photosynthesis has taken a heck of a lot of carbon out of the air. Oxidizing that carbon in our powerplants and autos puts it back where it came from, for better or worse.
Of course, when Yellowstone blows this is all going to be academic.
Blogger Roger Sweeny said...
Just look at this graph, and ask yourself: does THIS look like consensus?
Does THIS look like climate models reflecting reality??
https://tinyurl.com/yyfnlgol
The graph is exactly what I have been saying. The models "run hot". They have overpredicted temperature increase. But THERE HAS BEEN temperature increase.
Why yes, there has been a temperature increase since the 1970s.
And there was a temperature drop from the 50s to the 70s.
But the increase from the 70s is not in any way consistent with AGW, "CO2 caused the warming". The decrease from the 50s to the 70s, which followed a sharp increase from 1900 to 1960, is also not consistent with the AGW hypothesis.
"The world is warming slightly because we're still coming out of the Little Ice Age" is not justification / grounds / excuse for making the generation of energy more expensive. It's not a justification for carbon taxes. It's not a justification for in any way, shape, or form increasing the gov't's power over the economy.
It's simply an awareness that nothing in the natural world is static
Greg P,
That makes me wonder. What if the global warming snce 1900 is completely natural and what if it continues until it becomes a real problem, e.g., rising sea level, very hot summers. Should people attempt to counter-act it, or should we be tree huggers and say "we have no right to interfere with nature."?
“That makes me wonder. What if the global warming snce 1900 is completely natural and what if it continues until it becomes a real problem, e.g., rising sea level, very hot summers. Should people attempt to counter-act it, or should we be tree huggers and say "we have no right to interfere with nature."?”
I think that I explained much of this above. First and foremost, the amount of heating we have seen so far over the last century or so isn’t really enough to cause the oceans to rise noticeably. We are talking fractions of an inch so far. Maybe. Hard to calculate because the land doesn’t stay exactly level everywhere. Instead, some places it is rising, and some it is sinking. But building obsolescence is typically a half century or so. Double that, and that still eans that most buildings close enough to the shore to be threatened by a rising ocean are going to be replaced several times before that is even really plausible, and that means just building a bit higher maybe even a couple inches, every time the building is replaced through obsolescence. Yes, maybe in this country, the French Quarter in NOLA is threatened. Move it. Subways in NYC? Not our problems. And that is about it. AlGore lied. There is no eminent threat of flooding, and he knew it, when he bought an ocean side house from the proceeds rom his movie.
When the climate warms, the warming isn’t uniform around the world. The tropics don’t get noticeable hotter. Rather the warming is experienced most in the polar regions, and less and less as you go towards the tropics. One often ignored corollary of this is that severe weather would probably decrease a bit, due to a decreased temperature differential between different regions. Don’t worry though, and fill in your tornado cellar - we are talking centuries from now.
One thing to notice about the current placement of land around this planet is that the bulk of it is in the northern hemisphere, and a large part of that is currently the wide open stretches of the two largest countries on the planet: Russia and Canada. The two countries together, in their northern halves, probably cover over half the globe at those latitudes. And much of it only supports a subsistence existence, because the ground is frozen year round and cannot be farmed. My crude estimate, several years ago, was that a hundred mile retreat of the freeze line would ultimately open up millions of acres of farmland.
And plants do better with more heat and more CO2. We had dangerously low levels of CO2 in our atmosphere as a result of the ice age that we are currently, maybe exiting. That may be partially a result of the problems that animals (a primary source for CO2) have surviving in colder climates. Humans, in particular, despite living everywhere on this planet, except on the very highest peaks, evolved in the tropics, and probably do best there. In any case, cold kills many more people every year than heat, and historically plagues have been much worse in colder times. Possibly because we live indoors more, making us more susceptible to disease transfer.
So, I ask again, why are we panicking about global warming? More food. More room to live. And less disease. Why is that bad?
Getting back into the farming aspect. One of the horror scenarios often postulated is Bangladesh becoming unable to feed its millions. Unlikely, of course. Their country isn't going to flood noticeably due to rising sea levels, if, for no other reason, than you need precision instruments to detect rising sea levels. And rice will still grow there as well, if not better, with more CO2 and a degree or so of warmth. But the thing that is often ignored is that both people and plants migrate, and have been doing so pretty much since the end of the last ice age, roughly a decamillennium (10k years) ago. It used to be that our plants would migrate at a fairly slow, but inexorable, speed east and west, but could easily keep up with any north/south climate change. Now, with our help, plants can easily move thousands of miles a year. What that means here is that there no longer needs to be a slight time lag, while our domesticated crops migrate to compensate for changes in the climate, but, rather, we could rapidly adopt our farming to massive climatic changes, even though such is extremely unlikely.
Blogger Roger Sweeny said...
That makes me wonder. What if the global warming snce 1900 is completely natural and what if it continues until it becomes a real problem, e.g., rising sea level, very hot summers. Should people attempt to counter-act it, or should we be tree huggers and say "we have no right to interfere with nature."?
If the temperature rise isn't being caused by the CO2 change, then it's not going to be stopped by lowering CO2 emissions.
So, if you want to talk bioengineering, we can talk.
But if you're going to say "hey, look, this thing that has nothing to do with the problem is what we should 'address' in order to solve it!"? Then I'll just point and laugh.
So, if you want to talk geoengineering, we can talk.
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