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A data scientist’s case for ‘cautious optimism’ about climate change

William at 03:36 AM on 13 April, 2024

Can renewables provide baseload power?

No , because we do not have the battery storage capacity . the USA currently has 7 minutes of storage capacity . - they need at least 3 months. So we are not even remotely close.

Is renewable energy too expensive?

Yes - because of the above - Renewables are cheap in theory but not in practice - not in practice because they don’ t do the job required . It is the equivalent of buying an expensive electric car and still having to use petrol.
From source to the end user they are expensive - which is why the Germany despite having spent billions on subsidies for renewables have one of if not the highest energy costs in Europe. And why they had to rely on Putin's gas. You have to pay twice.

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

jimsteele at 02:05 AM on 4 April, 2024

I would also take issue with SkepticalScience claiming Polar bears are in danger of extinction as well as many other species.

polar bear population

Polar bears are believed to be affected by reduced sea ice because their main prey, the ringed seal, remains in the Arctic all year and they give birth to their pups on the ice where they are very vulnerable to the bears.

• There are 2 types of sea ice. Land-fast ice and pack-ice. Unlike fast-ice, pack ice is mobile. When winds cause pack ice to collide with the shore or other ice slabs, the pack ice thickens as ice slabs are pushed on top of each other. Thick pack ice doesn’t melt completely in the summer. However, shifting winds can blow thick pack ice out of the Arctic, as happened in the 1990s9.

• Ringed seals depend on fast-ice. Thin fast-ice naturally melts completely by July, and then re-forms starting in October.To breathe, ringed seals must create breathing holes by head-butting through any newly forming thin ice. Then gnawing and clawing at the ice as it thickens, keeps their breathing holes open throughout the winter. Multi-year pack ice is too thick for seals to create breathing holes.

• Ringed seals mostly give birth to their pups on land fast-ice in March and April. Pups remain on the ice while nursing and then molting in June. Land-fast ice is thickest during the seals reproduction cycle and remains until late June. Seals then abandon the ice to hunt in open water starting in July and only crawl out on ice unpredictably to bask in the sun for a few hours. Melting ice after July has no effect on how available the seal pups are to bears.

• Polar bears gain almost all of their body fat in the late spring and early summer from feeding on baby ringed seals. In contrast, all bears lose weight during the winter when there is the greatest amount of ice. Feasting on baby seals from March thru June determines if the bears will survive the winter. Unlike feasting on baby seals, any feeding on ice or land after June is purely opportunistic. Pregnant females enter hibernation just as ice begins to reform and emerge only as ringed seals are giving birth

• Ringed Seal are so abundant they are considered a Species of Least Concern, so Arctic climate change does not appear to have had a negative effect.

• More open water from July to September increases sunlight reaching phytoplankton, generating greater photosynthesis and a more productive Arctic Ocean.3 Increased photosynthesis improves the whole Arctic food chain, eventually increasing fish populations that ringed seals depend upon. More ringed seals provide more food for polar bears.

• Since hunting polar bears was restricted, polar bear populations have increased.

A data scientist’s case for ‘cautious optimism’ about climate change

lchinitz at 02:37 AM on 3 April, 2024

Hi all,

Thanks for the comments. Let me try to address a few, and refocus on the question I was asking.

First, I am definitely not advocating for a market-based solution to climate change. For all of the reasons that Bob Loblaw raised (and more), I consider the failure to address climate change a classic example of a market failure. We are heavily discounting the future, we are not considering externalities, and we are allowing ourselves to be caught in a Prisoner's Dilemma trap in which "common sense" says that it make more sense to continue to consume and hope that everyone else solves the problem. So climate change is, to me, a perfect example of a collective action problem. We have to work on it together, and government is the mechanism by which we make collective decisions and take collective action.

THAT BEING SAID, to address Bob Loblaw's question ("Do you (or others) have a reason to think that such costs are not part of the economic analysis?"), my answer is that based on my reading, they are not part of the economic analysis. I could be wrong, but look again at what Francis Collin's said in my post #13, above. "You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy..." So Collin's is basically saying that in their analysis of the right thing to do, they simply didn't consider those other "costs" at all. They attached zero value to them, which means they were not considered. There was no way for those effects to influence policy, since they had no value.

What I'm asking is, has anyone specifically attempted to look at those costs in the context of climate change? I guess I'm not convinced of Eclectic's opinion that the task would be "gargantuan". This is what economists do, right? Based on uncertain information attempt to align limited resources to best accomplish a set of goals?

So the question would be, suppose we implement a set of policies (from any of the policy documents). What would be the effect on, let's say, food, sanitation, health care, heat, cooling, transportation, etc? And would it be clear from that analysis that the effect on those things would not be so bad as to convince you not to implement the policies in the first place.

I am personally convinced that that is the case. That is, that no matter how you look at it, immediate action to address climate change is necessary. But my personal opinion isn't necessarily persuasive. There is obviously already a lot of solid data supporting my opinion. But it would be nice to have some data looking at the perspective I've tried to describe. At least, I think it would be nice.

A data scientist’s case for ‘cautious optimism’ about climate change

Bob Loblaw at 00:26 AM on 3 April, 2024

lchinitz:

Do you (or others) have a reason to think that such costs are not part of the economic analysis? Basic economics talks about "supply and demand", where consumption of a good will tend to decrease as prices rise. The rate of decrease in relation to the price increase is call "the elasticity of demand". A highly elastic demand (easy to avoid the purchase, or people just can’t afford it) results in a big drop, while a low elasticity (people buy anyway) results in a small decrease. (Maybe demand goes up if they increase prices, as far as I can tell with Apple.) Elasticity of demand on each product modelled would need to be specified as an input or constraint on the model.

(The supply side of "supply and demand" suggests that as prices rise, more people will be willing to produce and sell. The balancing point is when prices encourage enough producers to produce and sell to the number of people willing to buy at that price.)

Another common economic concept is "opportunity cost". Look! I got 3% this year by buying a GIC! Yes, but you lost 3% because you took the money out of another investment that would have produced 6%... There is a cost associated with the loss of opportunity that the 6% investment offered. This "which is better - mitigation or adaptation?" question appears to me to be essentially an "opportunity cost" question. Not a surprise to economists.

I don't know the internals of economic models, but I would expect that at least some (if not most) of the increased costs associated with climate action would cascade into negative impacts elsewhere, via implicit relationships such as supply and demand and opportunity costs. Even if there is not an explicit statement within the model or analysis, the concept is embedded as a result of other things explicitly included in the model.

A data scientist’s case for ‘cautious optimism’ about climate change

William at 22:36 PM on 2 April, 2024

Michael,
The £1.4trl ( likely an underestimate ) is amongst other things the cost of changing the grid.

As you also know ( without going into the whole thing ) renewables are intermittent you need fossil fuel or nuclear back up. So you pay twice.
Hopefully there will be a cheaper and cleaner alternative to fossil fuels , pretending renewables are - helps no one. They are part of the mix and a welcome one - but they are not a replacement

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

Doug Bostrom at 03:27 AM on 28 March, 2024

There's a lot of "inside baseball" language in play involved with meta-climate discussion, Two Dog.

"Climate change denial" seems to have become shorthand for "climate science denial" and "climate change denial." Both phenomena have rich factual basis.

There is still to this day a shrinking population of folks who don't believe Earth's climate and climate-mediated systems are changing at what current and paleoclimate data indicate are unusually rapid rates. This would be "climate change denial" as labeled on the tin.

Meanwhile another population are focused on what is still slightly more fertile ground, that of calling into question the scientific community's (geophysicists in this domain, specifically) competence of understanding the controlling processes of Earth's climate. This is "climate science denial.'

While often uttered in a context of emotional heat and frustration, "climate change denial" and "climate science denial" are not fundamentally emotive but rather are descriptive language attached to facts.

Both species of denial face what will prove an insurmountable common challenge: consilience. By example, biologists are observing phenonena that would demand answers from geophysicists focused on Earth's climate systems. As it happens, geophysicists already had substantially useful explanations for what biologists are seeing in the natural world. This is retail level consilience. One of the purposes of our weekly climate-related academic research listing is to help people to see consilience on anthropogenic climate change, understand the overall perspective of experts having connection to matters influenced by climate— which includes numerous disciplines not directly connected with geophysics.

if one follows climate research output and its present concerns, it's plain to see we're quite far past the "huge unknowns" stage with respect to the geophysics of climate. The accidental perception of "huge unknowns" in climate geophysics is a mark of the success of climate science deniers in the public square. It's a product of what we might clinically term "synthetic ignorance," a feeling of not knowing what we actually know perfectly well enough, thanks to calculated practice in public messaging.

Is every stripe on every graph we see 100% about us? No. Certainly the climate change we see today is influenced by "natural variation," on the time scale we're concerned with a matter of dithering around a mean. However, numerous and broad secular trends we're seeing not only in direct geophysical attributes of climate but myriad other features having climate as a major controlling variable find reliable explanation and predictive power in one naturally evolved feature of Earth, namely the planet's human population and culture— and how we've powered ourselves by liberation of energy from fossil fuels. We can hypothesize elaborate mechanisms for system-wide changes of the type we're seeing but scientific parsimony asks "why invent where no invention is necessary?" The dominant rationale for such invention seems to lie outsiide of scientific practice.

As to greening, greening enthusiasts should note that this phenomenon is accompanied by loss of albedo for a variety of reasons. Loss of albedo is not something we need at this juncture. It's also notable that for "climate change deniers" of all stripes, greening is a powerful contradiction of the basis of preferred beliefs.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 04:26 AM on 2 February, 2024

It is difficult to reply to a post filled with so many half-truths and mistakes. All your claims have been shown to be false upthread.

1) As you pointed out, Jacobson and hundreds of other researchers have shown that an all renewable energy system (primarily wind and solar) can support the entire economy. It will cost trillions of dollars less than fossil fuels and save millions of lives. Your mentioning a few days with low wind is simply fake news. Since you provide no links to support your wild claims I will not link any either. There are several countries that generate essentially all of their electricity using renewables, a technology that has only been installed widely for less than10 years. France had to purchase a boatload of expensive electricity from its neighbors during the electricity crisis because their reactors failed. I note that no energy researchers support using nuclear power as the primary energy to power the world. Few or no researchers support using even a small amount of new nuclear energy in the future.

2) Your claim that nuclear power "is already larger than wind and solar combined" is deliberately false. According to Our World in Data, in 2021 wind and solar produced 2900 TWH of electricity and in 2022 wind and solar produced 3422 TWH of power world wide. That will increase by at least 15% in 2023. In 2021 nuclear produced 2750 TWH of power and in 2022 nuclear power produced only 2632 TWH of power. The amount of power produced by nuclear has not increased significantly for over 20 years. It is unlikely that the amount of nuclear power will increase for at least 10 years and it is more likely to decrease substantially as old reactors are shut down.

3) Why would a sane person suggest pouring more public money into a failed technology like nuclear? The "new" modular reactor proposals are old designs that were rejected in the 1950's and 1960's as uneconomic or simply too difficlut ot build.

4) Projections of 2024 energy use are that renewable energy will be built at a fast enough rate to reduce world wide carbon dioxide emissions. After 70 years nuclear provides less than 4% of all energy in the world and has not helped reduce carbon emissions for over 20 years. I note that 70% of primary power produced by nuclear is wasted heating the surroundings versus essentially zero waste heat using renewables.

5) Your claim work on using renewables for "transport, steel and fertilisers has hardly even begun" is simply false. Nuclear has not done anything to address these technologies. I, and millions of other people, already drive an electric car. More electric cars are sold every year. Electric trains are widespread. Electric heavy trucks are being manufactured. It is easy to make ammonia fertilizer from renewable energy. Steel is being made with electric furnaces and using green hydrogen. As more and more renewable energy is built it will be used for those purposes since renewable energy is cheaper than fosil fuels. Since renewable energy has only been the cheapest energy for about 5 years there has not yet been time to build out a completely new power system yet. After 70 years nuclear cannot even keep up with its current production as old reactors are retired.

6) Nuclear power in France was down by 50% last year. At all times in a system with nuclear power they require at least enough spinning reserve to cover for the sudden shut down of the reactors because nuclear reactors are prone to unplanned shutdowns at any time. This is not needed for renewables since they do not shut down with no notice. Ways to control for down transmission lines are still required.

7) Nuclear is a failed technology. It is too expensive and takes way too long to build. Due to economies of scale, smaller, modular reactors will be more expensive than big reactors that are already too expensive to compete with renewable energy. Since reactors take so long to build, the entire electrical system will be renewable before new nuclear designs are ready to be widely built. I do not even need to mention that there is not enough uranium in the world to power more than 5% of all power, an insignificant amount.

Whenever I examine nuclear supporters claims closely I find that they are not supported by the data.

Nuclear is not economic, takes too long to build and there are not enough rare minerals.

SkS Analogy 26 - Earth's Beating Hearts

Evan at 23:52 PM on 10 November, 2023

Paul@4, that is an interesting observation for our current era: a relationship between the sun and the ice. But if the polar ice caps were to disappear, the sun crossing the equator twice per year would no longer have the same effect.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #41 2023

Doug Bostrom at 12:36 PM on 16 October, 2023

There is no "the answer." The concept is found as both an accidental and intentional cognitive short circuit, depending on circumstances.

Among the range of "it's not a simple question" there are answers that are ephemeral (fossil fuels, not useful for completing another 5,000 years of attempting to be civilized) and more decently reliable (the fortuitous nearby fusion reactor).

Meanwhile, let's not forget: "Climate change evangelists" = "people who accept physics as a means of predicting certain possible features of the future."

Personally, I'll enthusiastically evangelize that people not accidentally or intentionally hit themselves in the face with a hammer, or change the impedance of the atmosphere's impedance of certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation in a broadly harmful way. Both involve physics as a means of improving outcomes. With regard to the latter, what used to be an accident is now to some degree intentional, something that seems increasingly stupid the more people insist on persisting with that choice.

John F. Clauser: the latest climate science-denying physicist

Doug Bostrom at 03:04 AM on 6 September, 2023

"...one of the world’s greatest scientific bodies."

Name a functional equivalent that produces a more competently comprehensive synopsis of how Earth's climate functions and how we affect its functioning.

"It is composed of the world’s foremost climate scientists, who every 5 to 8 years devote tremendous amounts of time and effort to author reports summarizing the latest climate science research, without any remuneration whatsoever."

This is objectively correct.

"The IPCC reports are in fact the world’s best source of accurate and valuable climate science information."

Name reports on climate (or anything else) that are more comprehensive and also accurately reflect "here's the best we know at this point."

The IPCC exists, the first and most important virtue. It's a concrete feature, as opposed to wishful desire for a system for dealing with human nature that is divorced from human factors.

Meanwhile, haggling over the messaging, the messaging ending up acceptable to multiple countries with multiple often conflicting self-interests? Is this a defect? If one bothers to read its self-stated mission and purpose, one will learn that the IPCC specifically exists for the purpose of colliding geopolitics with science. To expect the IPCC to remain aloof from geopolitics is to doom it to have no connection with or influence over geopolitics and the behavior of individual states.

The IPCC has since its first report steadily produced warnings over our influence on climate that have over the course of the years increased in stridency and urgency, a surfeit of actionable advice. The parsimonious methods of the IPCC have yielded all the information we've needed to act on and attempt to check our climate disaster. But the IPCC does not operate governments, it informs them. There's plenty of information emerging from this sausage factory, only consumed very slowly because it's emerging into a world full of interactive, reverberating other problems of human nature.

There's a lot of inchoate frustration over human nature and Earth's climate floating about these days, looking for its proper home. Keep looking.

Meanwhile Skeptical Science will try to stay in the tank of reality, where feet wade through clay as best as they actually may.

Climate Confusion

Markp at 05:22 AM on 3 September, 2023

Hello

No, I'm not at all advocating that individuals adjusting their lifestyles are the answer, far from it (I'm surprised to hear this from you!), but it is something that must be done. Average people pushing the politicians and business leaders to act is necessary as well, because as we can see, without that they'll continue making targets and holding discussions that don't get us anywhere.

This is going to come down to us agreeing to disagree, I guess, for example regarding the IPCC and all the supposed "progress" we've made. I know that most people in climate science (scientists and others) think like you, that a lot has been done, etc. I just don't buy it. We've certainly managed to elevate the overall knowledge of GW among everyone - people from all walks of life (not with the honesty and clarity that is needed in my opinion, but...). But that has not translated into the kind of action we need by a LONG shot. It's politics and it's scientific reticence (i.e. David Spratt) and many other reasons, but it's there, staring us all in the face. Maybe I'm just speaking here to the optimists, 45-years of experience or not. I don't know. But if you think you shouldn't take me seriously because of my attitude towards models re "the end of temp rise" I'll just reiterate that it's not just me but people like James Hansen who have expressed those opinions. Just look at his latest tidbit: "Equilibrium Warming = Committed Warming?" where he writes in the 4th paragraph: "...climate science should be focused on data. That's the way science is supposed to work. However [the] IPCC is focused on models. Not just global climate models, but models that feed the models, eg. Integrated Assessment Models that provide scenarios for future GHG levels...sometimes the models contain hocus-pocus. As we mention in our current paper, they can assume, in effect, that 'a miracle will occur.'" And as you know, he's not the only one to criticise the overreliance on models. I'm assuming you are all familiar with Spratt and Dunlop's "What Lies Beneath."?

At the end of the day, scientists are no different from anyone else in this world where we all have to struggle for survival and protect our jobs and reputations and do things we have to do but may not believe in. Research isn't done for fun or for pure curiosity unless one bankrolls one's own laboratory, which few do. It's done to support the money, make a product, build a name for oneself, etc.

So people like (unnamed) set up for-profit companies as sidelines in addition to their responsibilities with their universities and, look what he just did: sold Carbon Engineering for over $1B. Nice. Ka-ching. You can't sell simple solutions for that kind of money, can you? And Climeworks, when are they going to have an IPO and cash-out, for worthless DAC? And this is all because the IPCC said "We MUST do this!"

An extremely important statement from the foreward of "What Lies Beneath" is from Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, professor of theoretical physics, etc., long list of credentials, when he said we are running out of time and so "...it is all the more important to listen to non-mainstream voices who do understand the issues and are less hesitant to cry wolf [than for example those scientists working with the IPCC]".

I work with those non-mainstream scientists because they are the ones who seem to be cutting through the BS towards real solutions that give us more than hopium.

Let me just ask you, and I am trying to be fair to the scientists in climate, generally speaking, because I imagine the vast majority are really doing their best. They aren't free to do what they might if they weren't trapped in the system we all are trapped in. (I know one who is a physicist but works with the IPCC on policy and he told me once "You have to trust your institutions, Mark"!!! Really. I trust the post office to deliver a letter. I don't trust politicians to solve global disasters that require those in power taking home less money.) But let me ask: if scientists really have been trying as hard as they could for decades now to come up with ways to stop rising heat and protect life on Earth as fast as possible, why has nobody else but a man who left his academic career at Harvard behind in order to found a nonprofit been able to come up with the solution staring us each in the face every morning when we brush our teeth, involving mirrors? Could it maybe have anything to do with the fact that it is just not very sexy? Honestly, I cannot understand or explain it any other way. And I've seen big-wig scientists in the climate sphere hear of this and say "where's your peer-reviewed research?" instead of just turning their brains on and thinking about the idea first. "Hey, makes sense, pretty obvious, actually...could be some complications, but overall, interesting idea..." (Kudos to Eclectic on this one) No, instead they just wanted research to back up the idea that ice will melt in a hot frying pan.

Well...would have been more fun over a beer. Take care.

No, a cherry-picked analysis doesn’t demonstrate that we’re not in a climate crisis

Bob Loblaw at 23:38 PM on 28 August, 2023

Paul @ 22:

Good question. PubPeer can be a useful method of providing further review of a published article. It requires that someone start the discussion - you, for example, started one on an earlier Pat Frank paper, as you noted at ATTP's blog. Authors of the paper may not participate, though, and sometimes the discussions at PubPeer descend into flame wars that make a Boy Scout wiener roast look innocent (for the wiener).

[Note: I see you posted today at ATTP's that someone has started a PubPeer review.]

I debated starting one over the recent Pat Frank paper discussed here. but your experience with the earlier Pat Frank paper made me feel that it would likely be a waste of time.

There have been other "contrarian" papers that have been handled by either writing to the journal or submitting an official comment to the journal, but not all journals are interested in publishing comments.

Springer has retracted this paper, with only a short note as to why. We do not see the detailed nature of the complaints, what was said in post-publication review, or what the authors said in response. Just the opinion that "...the addendum was not suitable for publication and that the conclusions of the article were not supported by available evidence or data provided by the authors" and the conclusion that "...the Editors-in-Chief no longer have confidence in the results and conclusions reported in this article."

A lot of speculation can be read between the lines of the Springer retraction notice. Sometimes, such reviews can end up with papers being retracted, editors being removed, or even a publisher shutting down a journal (cf. Pattern Recognition in Physics).

Springer has not made the paper "disappear". It is still available on the web page, but marked as retracted. It's just that Springer has put a huge "caveat emptor" on the contents.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 23:32 PM on 15 August, 2023

Scaddenp:

My understanding is that it is much more difficult to ramp up/down a nuclear plant than a coal plant. Some of the reaction products poison the chain reaction. If you change the reaction conditions the balance between the chain reaction and poisoness elements in the waste also changes. It is difficult to keep everything under control. You cannot shut the reaction down and then start it up again immediately like a coal plant can. In the USA none of the reactors can load follow. In France some of the reactors can slowly ramp production (maybe 1-2% per minute). It is hard to find references that describe how France lowers their production.

Here David-acct claimed that nuclear plants ran 92% of the time at full power. France currently has installed nuclear nameplate of 61.4 GW. The highest capacity factor in the two days I looked at was 51.5% in the middle of the night. The lowest was was 41.6% during peak power.

The point is that claims that nuclear plants are "always on" are easily demonstrated to be false. Cold weather, hot weather, drought, flooding, nearby fires and other natural changes can all cause reactors to shut down on short or no notice.

In a renewable energy world stored power will be most valuable. Baseload power will not be valuable. Baseload power that shuts down during peak times is very low value. If the reactors in France were not owned by the government they would be bankirupt.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

Philippe Chantreau at 02:01 AM on 15 August, 2023

I would like participants here to clarify one thing: "shut down."

Growing up in France, I got to do school field trips to nuclear power plants. On these occasions, engineers would instruct us on basic elements of these plants' operation. A reactor is rarely "shut down" except for major maintenance or emergency/abnormal procedures. The reaction can be slowed, the reactor isolated from the rest of the system and/or generators taken offline, is that what we're talking about here? Otherwise it would imply taking the reactor below critical level and that is not practical if it is to be used again, especially on short notice.

Slowing down the reactor can be necessary when cooling is an issue, when the weaather is already hot and they want to avoid spilling too much warm water in the environment. This has become more of a concern as river water temperatures have been increasing. It could be why power output is higher at night in August. Unless of course, these dates are under European format, which would place them in October and May.

How big is the “carbon fertilization effect”?

daveburton at 08:56 AM on 13 July, 2023

Rob, in answer to your first question, Bob is correct: they use different units.

Both the graph and the "plug in suitable values" calculation (above) are for freshwater, but that hardly matters. CO2 is noticeably less soluble in saltwater, but the effect of temperature on CO2 solubility is nearly identical. Here's the same calculation with salinity 35 (typical seawater), for a 1° temperature increase (from 288K to 289K):

1 - ( (e^( -60.2409 + (93.4517*(100/289)) + (23.3585* ln(289/100)) + 35 * (0.023517 - (0.023656*(289/100)) + (0.0047036 * (289/100)^2)) )) / (e^( -60.2409 + (93.4517*(100/288)) + (23.3585* ln(288/100)) + 35 * (0.023517 - (0.023656*(288/100)) + (0.0047036 * (288/100)^2)) )) ) =

Bob is also correct that ocean chemistry is more complicated than that, in part because most of the dissolved CO2 immediately dissosiates into various ions. Here's a good resource on ocean chemistry:
http://www.molecularmodels.eu/cap11.pdf

What's more, in the oceans, biology generally trumps chemistry, and that is certainly true for CO2 uptake. Some people think that the capacity of the oceans to take up CO2 is limited to surface water by ocean stratification. But that's incorrect, beause the "biological carbon pump" rapidly moves CO2 from surface waters into the ocean depths, in the form of "marine snow."

The higher CO2 levels go, the faster that "pump" works. Here's a paper about it:
https://www.science.org/doi/reader/10.1126/science.aaa8026

Once carbon has migrated from the ocean surface to the depths, most of it remains sequestered for a very long time. Some of it settles on the ocean floor, but even dissolved carbon is sequestered for a long time. For instance, it is estimated that the AMOC takes about 1000 years to move carbon-rich water from high latitudes to the tropics, where it can reemerge. That is obviously far longer than the anthropogenic CO2 emission spike will last.

Due to the temperature dependence of Henry's Law, a 1°C increase in temperature slows CO2 uptake by the oceans by about 3%. That's a slight positive feedback: more CO2 in the air increases water temperatures, which slows ocean uptake of CO2. But it is very minor, because a 50% (140 ppmv) rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration accelerates CO2 uptake by the oceans by 50%, which obviously dwarfs 3%. That's the main reason that ocean uptake of CO2 continues to accelerate despite the temperature dependence of Hanry's Law.

Hansen predicted the West Side Highway would be underwater

daveburton at 07:21 AM on 7 July, 2023

Michael wrote, "the last time Carbon dioxide was over 400 ppm the sea level was more than 20 meters higher than current sea level."

Yes, many things were different 4.5 million years ago. They weren't all caused by CO2.

For example, the highest-quality Pacific sea-level measurement record is from Honolulu, on Oahu. But it would be difficult to say anything meaningful about how sea-level there has changed since CO2 levels were last this high, because Oahu (and the Big Island) didn't exist 4 million years ago!

Michael wrote, "Your sea level graphs are obviously flawed."

I guarantee that they are not flawed.

They are accurate plots of sea-level measurements at those two sites, which are the best long NOAA Atlantic sea-level measurement record (The Battery, NYC), and the best long NOAA Pacific sea-level measurement record (Honolulu, HI). The linear and quadratic regressions are accurately calculated from the most recent 100 years of data at each site, shown with deep blue traces. Earlier data (not included in the regressions) is shown in light blue.

If you click the links, you can adjust the measurement periods over which the regressions are calculated, and see the effect of those adjustments. You can also smooth the plots, and choose whether to plot linear and/or quadratic fits, as well as confidence and/or prediction intervals. At the top of each graph you'll also find links to the corresponding NOAA and PSMSL web pages for those sites. You can also do the same analyses for other NOAA measurement sites, and for over 1000 sites with data available from PSMSL (though the PSMSL data aren't as up-to-date as the NOAA data).

Michael wrote, "you have cherry picked two single locations to do your calculations without justifying your choice."

They aren't "cherry-picked," I told you why I chose them: they are "the best long U.S. Atlantic and Pacific sea-level measurement records, respectively."

The analysis period of 100 years is arbitrary, of course, but if you click the links which I provided you can easily change it:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=Battery&c_date=1923/6-2023/5
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=Honolulu&c_date=1923/6-2023/5

I also reported the conclusion of a comprehensive study: "Hogarth studied many long measurement records, and concluded, 'Sea level acceleration from extended tide gauge data converges on 0.01 mm/yr²'" (That's negligible, BTW.)

Beware of "global" sea-level analyses which use varying mixes of measurement locations. As you can see from the striking difference between Oahu and New York, sea-level trends vary considerably from one location to another. So if you use a different mix of measurement locations for the left and right ends of a plot, you can easily create the illusion of a sharp acceleration or deceleration which is not evident in the individual measurement records.

Also, beware of the fact that there are also regional effects, in some places. For example, ENSO causes changes in low-latitude easterly Pacific trade winds. During El Niños easterly Pacific equatorial trade winds diminish, so the Pacific ocean sloshes east, raising sea-level in the eastern Pacific, and lowering it in the western Pacific. This is very striking when you compare the sea-level measurement records of Kwajalein (in the western Pacific) and San Diego (in the eastern Pacific). They are almost perfect mirror images!
https://sealevel.info/1820000_Kwajalein_San_Diego_2016-04_vs_ENSO_annot4.png

Correlation of sea-level with ENSO at Kwajalein and San Diego

(One of the nice things about Honolulu is that it is near the ENSO "teeter-totter pivot point," so, unlike other long Pacific sea-level measurement records, Honolulu's is scarcely affected by ENSO.)

Another example of regional effects is the southeastern United States, where Gulf Stream variations are apparently the cause of well-known multi-decadal fluctuations in sea-level trends. For a discussion see Zervas (2009), NOAA Technical Report NOS CO-OPS 053, Sea Level Variations of the United States, 1854-2006. Here's a relevant excerpt:
Excerpt from NOAA Tech rpt 53 p.xiii

Hansen predicted the West Side Highway would be underwater

daveburton at 07:39 AM on 6 July, 2023

Rob wrote, "that greening is now turning into 'browning.'"

Well, here's what AR6 shows:

Some people point to that little orange box and say that greening has ceased. That reminds me of the folks who say that the it's not as warm as the 2015-16 El Nino, so warming has ceased.

Philippe wrote, "There is probably a better thread for this argument,"

I agree. I was just trying to address OnePlanet's remark about a "locked in" CO2 level.

Philippe wrote, "There is only one factor that truly controls how green any region can be: water availability."

That's a common misconception. Elevated CO2 levels greatly improve plants' water use efficiency (WUE) and drought resilience. That's why elevated CO2 is especially beneficial for crops when under drought stress. It has been heavily studied by agronomists. Here's a paper about wheat:

Fitzgerald GJ, et al. (2016) Elevated atmospheric [CO2] can dramatically increase wheat yields in semi-arid environments and buffer against heat waves. Glob Chang Biol. 22(6):2269-84. doi:10.1111/gcb.13263.

Philippe wrote, "The experiences that have shown a CO2 fertilization effect were done in very controlled conditions and involved extremely high concentrations (800 ppm and up)."

That's incorrect. All major crops have been studied, and all benefit from elevated CO2. It is true that the greatest benefits accrue at 1000 ppmv or higher, but even modest CO2 increases significantly improve crop yields.

This recent study quantifies the effect for several major crops. Their results are toward the high end, but their qualitative conclusion is consistent with many, many other studies. They reported, "We consistently find a large CO2 fertilization effect: a 1 ppm increase in CO2 equates to a 0.4%, 0.6%, 1% yield increase for corn, soybeans, and wheat, respectively."

This study evaluated pine trees:

Idso, S., & Kimball, B. (1994). Effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on biomass accumulation and distribution in Eldarica pine trees. Journal of Experimental Botany, 45, 1669-1672.
Pine trees grown at varying CO2 levels

As you noted, the effect is greatest with CO2 >800 ppmv, but, as you can see, even a much smaller CO2 increase has a substantial effect.

Rob wrote, "This entire paragraph is patently absurd and completely fabricated."

It is 100% factual, Rob. I'm surprised that you didn't already know it.

These figures are from that same AR6 Table 5.1 excerpt which I already showed you:

average CO2 removal rate in the 2010s = 2.7707 ppmv/yr
average CO2 removal rate in teh 2000s = 2.3481 ppmv/yr

These figures are from Mauna Loa:

average CO2 level in the 2010s = 399.91 ppmv
average CO2 level in the 2000s = 378.84 ppmv

(399.91-378.84) / (2.7707-2.3481) = 49.86

So a 50 ppmv increase in CO2 level accelerates the natural removal rate by about 1 ppmv/year.

49.86 / 2.1294 = 23.42 ppmv increase yields a +1 PgC removal rate increase.

I encourage you to do the calculations yourself for any other time period of your choice.

If you have the natural removal rate as a function of CO2 level (which we do), it is trivial to simulate the CO2 level decline if emissions were to suddenly cease. I wrote a little Perl program to do it; email me if you want a copy.

Rob wrote, "if true, the oceans would just continue to suck up all the atmospheric CO2 and we'd live on a frozen planet."

That's incorrect. The system progresses toward equilibrium, which is below 300 ppmv, but not zero.

Rob wrote, "rather that starting from a prior where all the published science is getting it wrong, and making stuff up... you don't have the requisite training to fully grasp the topic"

Rob, it's not necessary to resort to ad hominem attacks. I'm happy to document things that are surprising to you. You need but ask. Everything I've written is well-supported.

Rob wrote, "take some time to fully familiarize yourself with Henry's Law."

Due to the temperature dependence of Henry's Law, a 1°C increase in temperature slows CO2 uptake by the oceans by about 3%. But a 50% (140 ppmv) rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration accelerates CO2 uptake by the oceans by 50%. That's the main reason that ocean uptake of CO2 continues to accelerate.

Hansen predicted the West Side Highway would be underwater

michael sweet at 07:27 AM on 6 July, 2023

Dave Burton:

I note that the last time Carbon dioxide was over 400 ppm the sea level was more than 20 meters higher than current sea level.

Your sea level graphs are obviously flawed. A simple eye ball look at the data from the Battery in New York shows that at the start of the time period the data is above the fit line and at the end of the time period the data is way above the fit line. That means that the line does not fit the data and some sort of curved line is needed because the rate of sea level rise is increasing over the time period you chose.

In addition, you have cherry picked two single locations to do your calculations without justifying your choice.

Fortunately, Tamino did an analysis of sea level rise before he stopped posting analysis. (Tamino is a professional statistical data analyzer who has published on sea level rise). He analyized "the data for every tide gauge station in region 3 which had at least 360 months’ data (at least 30 years), at least 120 months of which (10 years of which) are since the year 2000 — after all, we do want to know what’s happening now. That leaves 10 stations". Since he used all the available data his data is not cherry picked like yours is.

Here is one of his graphs of the rate of sea level rise on the East coast of the Gulf of Mexico:

sea level rise

We see immediately that sea level rise does not follow a straight line but varies over the 100 year time from of analysis. Of particluar interest is the dramatic increase in sea level rise since 2010.

The dramatic increase in sea level rise observed since 2010 holds true for an analysis of the entire globe. Your analysis using a linear fit is simply incorrect and cherry picked.

I note that the rate of rise since 2010 is more than double all the previous rates.

We would expect that if the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere remains above 400 ppm that the sea level will rise 20 meters plus. The question is only how fast the sea will rise. We see the rise is rapidly increasing every year now. Your linear fit deliberately hides the observed rise.

I note that the change in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has rapidly increased over the past 50 years so one would expect the sea level change to rapidly increase over that time period. Including the data back to 1900 with a linear fit just hides the recent rapid increase in sea level rise.

Does anyone know how Tamino is doing?

Hansen predicted the West Side Highway would be underwater

daveburton at 03:51 AM on 6 July, 2023

Thanks for fixing those links, Rob. We were obviously typing simultaneously; you beat me to it by 7 minutes.

However, nothing I wrote was misleading. If you "follow the link to the actual IPCC page to read the full" table, you'll see that it shows exactly what I said it shows: as atmospheric CO2 levels have risen, the natural CO2 removal rate has sharply accelerated. (That's a strong negative/stabilizing climate feedback.)

The commonly heard claim that "the change in CO2 concentration will persist for centuries and millennia to come" is based on the "long tail" of a hypothetical CO2 concentration decay curve, for a scenario in which anthropogenic CO2 emissions go to zero, CO2 level drops toward 300 ppmv, and carbon begins slowly migrating back out of the deep oceans and terrestrial biosphere into the atmosphere. It's true in the sense that if CO2 emissions were to cease, it would be millenia before the CO2 level would drop below 300 ppmv. But the first half-life for the modeled CO2 level decay curve is only about 35 years, corresponding to an e-folding "adjustment time" of about fifty years. That's the "effective atmospheric lifetime" of our current CO2 emissions.

Moreover, it is not correct to say that "the ocean takes up about half of our emissions." Our emissions are currently around 11 PgC/year (per the GCP). The oceans remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a current rate of a little over 2.5 PgC/year, but they are not removing some fixed fraction of our emissions. If we halved our emission rate, natural CO2 removals would continue at their current rate.

Because human CO2 emissions are currently faster than natural CO2 removals, we've increased the atmospheric CO2 level by about 50% (140 ppmv), but we've increased the amount of carbon in the oceans by less than 0.5%, as you can see in AR5 WG1 Fig. 6-1. (It's not a problem for "sea dwelling creatures.")

In the oceans, biology generally trumps chemistry, and that is certainly true for CO2 uptake. Some people think that the capacity of the oceans to take up CO2 is limited to surface water by ocean stratification. But that's incorrect, beause the "biological carbon pump" rapidly moves CO2 from surface waters into the ocean depths, in the form of "marine snow."

The higher CO2 levels go, the faster that "pump" works. Here's a paper about it:
https://www.science.org/doi/reader/10.1126/science.aaa8026

2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory

Bob Loblaw at 11:19 AM on 13 June, 2023

Continuing to look at likeitwarm's links.

As Rob Honeycutt points out, looking at peaks is not good practice. The second link provided in comment 1550 actually provides linear trends for all three datasets they display, and all are within agreement of climate model predictions. The temperature series with the greatest amount of short-term variation is the UAH one - which is not surface temperature. It is satellite-derived tropospheric temperature.

Looking at the peaks and seeing "flat spots" is a classic error. So classic that Skeptical Science produced a graph call The Escalator. It has recently been updated. You can read about that update on this blog post.

For convenience, here is the graphic in that post (and you can always see it in the right margin of each web page here.) The Escalator

Antarctica is gaining ice

scaddenp at 07:41 AM on 25 May, 2023

Just for clarification for other readers, as I pointed out above, Bart's conjecture "reduced sea ice mean more snowfall" is not expected given very low sea surface temperatures. To demonstrate that, Bart would need to show that precipatation varies in sync with sea-ice (which has both increased and decreased in recent history). By contrast, there is evidence for variations being due to multiyear weather cycles.

As to ice loss (overwhelmingly calving since most of Antarctica is too cold for melt), while the SAM is positive then continued basal erosion of the ice shelves is expected from warm deep water (eg see "The circum-Antarctic ice-shelves respond to a more positive Southern Annular Mode with regionally varied melting" ) and a useful summary here.

Loss of ice shelves leads to increased calving (see here with its links to relevent papers) as does loss of sea ice. That is why my money is on continued ice loss despite some weather noise. Let's see what an El Nino will bring after three La Nina years.

Antarctica is gaining ice

scaddenp at 12:51 PM on 24 May, 2023

Before Bart was moderated, he made some speculative comments about the contribution from loss of sea ice. At first glance this doesnt sound like something that would have a big effect. The ocean surface temperatures are still very cold so not a lot of scope of increased evaporative water content, especially compared to incursions of moist air due to positive SAM. However, this seems a very testable hypothesis since different parts of Antarctica would have different response to changes in air circulation, whereas arctic seaice has varied a lot (up and down) over past 20 years and if it was a factor, then expect precipation to vary accordingly (and in the regions where change happens).

Antarctica is gaining ice

Bart Vreeken at 18:50 PM on 20 May, 2023

Antarctica Mass Balance After three months, there is another update of the gravitational measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet. The series now runs until February 13, which includes most of the Antarctic summer. Often in February there is a minimum in the amount of ice, but the pattern is not very tight.
We still see that Antarctica as a whole has a better period. Over the last three years, there has been no net decrease in land ice. The small amount of sea ice must play an important role in this. As a result, more snow falls. Apparently, that was enough to compensate for the increased melting and calving along the edge.
Changes to the floating ice shelves cannot be measured in this way.

At a glance - The greenhouse effect and the 2nd law of thermodynamics

Charlie_Brown at 03:30 AM on 9 May, 2023

My next attempt. I hope this is getting better. I changed the first part quite a bit to emphasize that the key problem with G&T, often overlooked, is their assumption that the input solar and output IR radiation are balanced (see Fig 32). I think these are worthwhile revisions. The structure seems fact-myth-fallacy-fact because I wanted to begin by separating the 1st & 2nd laws, but bring back the 1st law facts to seal the deal. Please feel free to edit and use the input as you deem suitable.

The 1st law of thermodynamics is conservation of energy. The 2nd law describes limitations on how energy can be used in forms of heat and work. It is difficult to express without introducing the concept of entropy - a state of disorder that is hard to understand. Instead, the 2nd law can be expressed practically in the form of statements and corollaries. One translation of the Clausius statement is: “It is impossible to operate a cyclic device in such a manner that the sole effect external to the device is the transfer of heat from one heat reservoir to another at a higher temperature” (Wark, Thermodynamics, 4th ed., 1983). A key phrase is “sole effect external to the device.” A cyclic device can be a heat engine and the classic example is a refrigerator that requires adding external energy, electricity, to make it work. Gerlich & Tscheuschner’s paper describes modern global warming theory as a perpetual heat engine that transfers heat from the cold stratosphere and the warm surface. That would violate the 2nd law, but that is an incorrect description of global warming. They assume that the radiant energy input from the sun is equal to the radiant heat loss to space and the system is “radiatively balanced”. That would be true for the greenhouse effect before the industrial revolution but increasing greenhouse gases (GHG) upsets the balance and causes global warming.
Some take the myth even further to claim that thermal radiation cannot transfer energy from a cold body to a warmer one. Gerlich & Tscheuschner steer the discussion into distraction by emphasizing the technical distinction between heat and energy. Consider two walls facing each other. All objects above absolute zero radiate energy. The warm wall radiates more energy toward the cold wall, but the cold wall still radiates some energy toward the warm wall. The debate amounts to whether it is energy or heat that moves towards the warm wall.

Conservation of energy for any defined system is:
Input = Output + Accumulation
The global system can be defined as from the Earth’s surface to the top of the atmosphere. The input to the global system is the sun. The surface temperature is regulated by balancing heat input from the sun with heat loss from the top of the atmosphere toward space. When balanced, accumulation is zero. There are three output energy pathways: 1) Infrared (IR) radiation from the surface at wavelengths that are transmitted directly to outer space (the transparent range). 2) IR radiation from GHG in the colder atmosphere at wavelengths that are emitted by GHG, and 3) solar energy reflected by clouds and the surface. As the concentration of CO2 increases, energy output to space (path 2) is reduced. This upsets the global energy balance. Energy accumulates and the surface temperature rises. As the surface temperature rises, energy output from the surface through the transparent range (path 1) increases until the balance is restored. This is how global warming works.

Arctic sea ice has recovered

Albert at 21:24 PM on 19 April, 2023

"The NASA presentation of Arctic Sea Ice Extent from 1851 to 2017 does not show an 80 year cycle. It shows a fairly significant recent decline of extent of sea ice."

there is an abundance of evidence from newspapers and other sources that Arctic ice extent in the 1940s was low. If i did provide the evidence I suspect that you would just ignore it.

But I will if you request it.

Arctic sea ice has recovered

One Planet Only Forever at 14:52 PM on 19 April, 2023

Albert @126,

What is the evidence for an 80 year cycle of warm waters being brought to the Arctic?

The NASA presentation of Arctic Sea Ice Extent from 1851 to 2017 does not show an 80 year cycle. It shows a fairly significant recent decline of extent of sea ice.

Veganism is the best way to reduce carbon emissions

Ron at 14:05 PM on 17 April, 2023

I'm not an expert, so I don't know for sure. I do know that our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees, are part-time carnivores too. I just wonder if it's not just a liking for eating meat, but through millions of years of evolution, has actually become a necessity of sorts as well?

They say we need protein for our larger brains. Are there other adaptations? I don't know. But the fact that we need to supplement with not readily available vegetarian foodstuffs (except with modern day markets), seems to indicate that it might be kind of necessity. Perhaps a generation or two can eat a vegan diet, but I wonder what the evolutionary implications will be to long term veganism?

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to not eat meat, but just vegetables tastes not great, especially if you're not a cook. But , then again, I think it's dishonest to only be concerned with mammalian life. If were doing it for ethical reasons, plants also want to be here. So it's a choice. But gotta eat to live.

https://www.bbcearth.com/news/plants-have-feelings-too

Veganism is the best way to reduce carbon emissions

Ron at 04:58 AM on 13 April, 2023

It always bugs me when Vegans (which seem to be more hateful and judgemental than Vegetarians) try to make people feel bad for being carnivores, or even drinking milk or having some butter.

It's not that I'm at all defending the meat industry, or the way in general animals are treated by them. And I hate the way some people in Asian countries are mistreating animals too. They're vicious and heartless (but I won't get into that right now). Also, about beef eating and the environment, I agree with Vegans. It is destructive and contributes to Climate Change, obviously, so should be phased out. And any fishing is overfishing these days, which is why I don't eat fish either.

But I think that Vegan's real issue is not about Climate Change. No, I suspect that their hostility and judgmentalism is actually about an enjoyment of telling people what to do! A hatred of people (there is reason to hate some people though).

Do Vegans eat plants? Of course. Yet, there's a whole field emerging that says that they, too, are sentient. Feel pain. Want to live. Use all kinds of tricks to foul up predators (like Vegans). What gives them the Right to take that life away just to feed their stomachs? Is it because plants can't say "STOP!" when they are eating them? Can't move out of the way to save themselves? Can't audibly scream? How arrogant of them! So thoughtless. But so human too. :/

Also, do Vegans have pet cats or dogs? Do they feed them plants? If so, they wont live long. I've seen it. Isn't it hypocritical of them not to call for us to stop owning them?

Are Vegans calling for only humans and their pets to stop eating meat? What about wild animals? Do they want the lion to lie down with the lamb? All meat eating to end, period? An environmental crash would soon follow. Some people eat insects now. Yech! But anyway, do they judge them too? Insects are animals as well. Want to live. Run when we come.

You know, they say whenever you point a finger at another person, four more are pointing back at you. Are Vegans perfect? They'd better be if they choose judge an otherwise good person. A great man once said not to judge others because with the measure you mete out to them, it will be meted out to you in return. A more modern way of saying that is that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. People can lay out their beliefs, and that's fine, but don't make it personal (except for real dicks) unless they themselves are utterly flawless. Are they? Only they know.

So I do eat poultry. You see, you gotta eat to live. That's just the way it works on this planet. But I try to find poultry that's raised humanely. Anyway plants, or animals, they ALL want to live as well. So you gotta make a choice. The alternative is to eat already dead things - or starve.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #11 2023

One Planet Only Forever at 06:35 AM on 23 March, 2023

Regarding the perspective piece “Why focusing on “climate change denial” is counterproductive” by Christian Better and Felix Schulz:

Initial impressions may be that this perspective and the resulting recommendations are helpful. But some of the recommendations appear likely to be harmful from the perspective of pursuing Sustainable Development today for the benefit of Others, especially for the future of humanity.

The required actions will be divisive in most of the currently developed societies because those societies did not develop to be governed by learning about harm and aspiring to limit harm done and help others.

The required action is not ‘making sure that everyone is happy about how the required protection of Others from harm and the development of sustainable improvements occurs’. What is required is effective governing of the actions of all people, especially people who are motivated to resist learning what is ‘unsustainable and harmful and needs to be stopped’ like human climate impacts do.

The climate impact issue is not a case of limiting the harmfulness of developing behaviour. A lot of unsustainable and harmful activity has already become popular, profitable, desired and aspired to. The requirement is the ending of harmful popular and profitable harmful human activity and the related ‘denial of understanding that it needs to happen, and that everybody needs to fairly participate in ending the harm and repairing harm done’. It is not a choice. Self-govern responsibly, or be governed to limit harmfulness. Not allowing a person to be harmful, or harmfully misled into believing harmful misunderstandings, is not 'a harmful restriction of freedom.'

A related ‘hard reality’ is that ‘developing sustainable improvement requires thoughtful restriction of freedom based on the diligent pursuit of learning what is harmful and aggressively limiting the harm done and rapidly achieving reconciliation, and ideally full repair, of harm done’.

The developed reality is that people who would personally prefer to more slowly reduce their harmfulness will need to be disappointed. And some of the most powerful people will need to be the ‘most disappointed’. Individuals who want to benefit from increased harmfulness, except the desperate who are living less than basic decent lives, need to be disappointed even if they are middle class or lower status. The problem is primarily due to people who over-consume and whose ‘needed consumption to live a basic decent life’ is more harmful than it needs to be. And a related part of the problem is less harmful people developing an interest in being more harmful.

Attempting to avoid divisiveness, especially attempting to not disappoint individualists, is almost certain to result in more harm done. In the realm of climate change impacts it is likely to push things to a higher climate impact RCP than could would happen if the most harmful are the most disappointed (which is what should happen). It is also a pathway that makes it harder to develop sustainable improvements because ‘more harm needs to be dealt with’.

In addition, appeasing individualists has already resulted in the near certainty that the harm done to future generations by the current generation will exceed the robustly established 1.5 C limit (that probably should be 1.0 C but we are already well past that point). Those who benefited most from more harm done need to be responsible for the rapid removal of all that excess CO2. And individualists with personal prosperity and status interests are very unlikely to ‘choose’ to fairly participate in that unprofitable, but required, collective action.

The problem is ‘the harmful unsustainable beliefs and actions that have developed due to a failure to effectively collectively govern and limit human activity based on the pursuit of learning about what is unsustainable and harmful’. And part of the developed problem is the ‘development and promotion of positive perceptions of benefit’ governing over the need to learn about and limit harm done and make amends for harm done.

Poorly governed competition for popularity and profit created the problem. Continued freedom for individuals to evade learning to be less harmful and evade helping to repair damage done will result in more damage done, all justified by ‘Positive Perceptions of Benefits Obtained and other harmful misunderstandings’.

The Big Picture

Bart Vreeken at 03:50 AM on 20 March, 2023

Rob Heneycutt, back to your original remark @74. There you say

"Hang on. Am I missing something or is Bart actually thinking that the gravitational mass of Greenland is going to pull sea level away from The Netherlands, when it's 3000km away, making their impacts of SLR nominal? Surely not."

Yes, I am actually thinking something like that. But it's a little different. At the moment the gravitational mass of the ice is attracting mass. 3000km is no problem, the influence goes much further. So, because of the ice mass the sea level here is higher then it should be without the ice. When the ice melts a part of this effect is gone, and because of that the sea level will drop here. On the other hand, there's the meltwater that distributes over the ocean. That aspect makes the sea level rise. The sum of these to is slightly positive.

And now you say:

"They're talking about fractions of a millimeter per year. So, at maximum, they're saying the effect around Greenland (deep blue) over the course of the next century would be on the scale of 5 cm, out of a potential of 1-2 meters of SLR."

Yes I do agree with most of that, so whats the point? The 2 m SLR is a bit to wild, KNMI talks about max 1.2 m in 2100.

The Big Picture

Gootmud at 01:05 AM on 20 March, 2023

Eclectic and John Mason @104

We do need models to predict whether it will keep on warming. As CO2's absorption spectrum saturates, it can't trap more heat. Negative feedback effects like clouds might nullify any warming. Temperatures might drop due to independent effects like magnetic field changes much more influential than the greenhouse effect. We might be at 600ppm, freezing, and looking for ways to warm the Earth and slow the advancing ice.

Without models that account for all these effects, we.know nothing about future temperatures. We don't know ranges of likely changes. We don't even know the sign. A model need not be perfect--no model is ever perfect--but it must be representative of all the relevant physics if we are to trust its output.

The Big Picture

Bart Vreeken at 04:22 AM on 19 March, 2023

Hi Bob Loblaw, I'm afraid you don't understand the figure well.

Above a) you see the mass loss of Greenland where the calculation is based on. It says -166 Gt/yr. This causes a global sea level rise of something like 0,46 mm/yr. Due to the gravitation effect there are places on earth where the sea level rise is less then that, and places where it's more then that. The border between these two area's is the green line on the map between Africa and South America and in the Pacific. So, the Netherlands are in the area with less then 0,46 mm/yr sea level from Greenland, but it's more then zero. Then there is an other line, between yellow en blue. In the blue area there is no sea level rise by Greenland at all. Instead there is a drop of the sea level.

The Big Picture

John Hartz at 02:17 AM on 19 March, 2023

Speaking of Greenland, what is described in the following news article does not bode well for the future of the Greenland ice sheet...

Greenland temperatures surge up to 50 degrees above normal, setting records by Ian Livingston & Kasha Patel, Weather, Washington Post, Mar 8, 2023

The lede for this article:

The record-breaking warmth is raising concerns about melting summer ice.

The Big Picture

Bart Vreeken at 22:30 PM on 18 March, 2023

MA Rodger @82 your quote is about the global sea level rise, not the local SLR.

This is how it works. The Greenland Ice Sheet has a lot of mass, so it attracts sea water. Due to that, the sea level in a large area around Greenland is higher then it should be without the mass of the ice. When the ice starts to melt a part of this effect disappears. So, around Greenland the sea level will drop, not rise. Netherlands are close enough to Greenland to take profit of this effect, but not enough to avoid sea level rise from Greenland completely.

The Big Picture

Bart Vreeken at 20:35 PM on 18 March, 2023

Bob Loblow @75 you said:

"Another clue for you: losing ice at lower altitudes around the perimeter of the ice sheet, and gaining ice at the higher altitude is Business As Usual for continental ice sheets. There is this thing called "glacial flow" that moves ice from the accumulation zone to the ablation zone"

Well, that's great. Do you really think I would write about Greenland when I didn't know how it works?

My turn then. The mass change of Greenland by year. Cherry-picking? Maybe, but I use all the available data of GRACE. Over a longer period (altimetry data) there is an increase of mass loss. Don't pay too much attention to the trendline, for the data have a lot of noice. But there is a similarity with Antarctica: more snowfall in the last years, caused by less sea ice.

Greenland Mass Change By Year

The Big Picture

Bob Loblaw at 11:28 AM on 18 March, 2023

Bart @ 62:

In addition to pointing out what Rob said to you at comment 64 about the error in using Surface Mass Balance, I note that you have also given a map of SMB for a single winter season. Do you not bother looking at the ful captions of the figures you pick up? This one does not need translation from Dutch - it is dated March 16, 2023, and states "Accumulated anomaly since Sep 1, 2022".

You're back to the same basic error that you made in your very first post here at SkS on March 9, regarding Antarctic ice. Treating a single year of data as if it represents a long term trend.

At least you honestly say "...how the Greenland Icesheet reshapes at the moment..." Now all you need to figure out is that "the moment" is not enough to make predictions about the future.

Another clue for you: losing ice at lower altitudes around the perimeter of the ice sheet, and gaining ice at the higher altitude is Business As Usual for continental ice sheets. There is this thing called "glacial flow" that moves ice from the accumulation zone to the ablation zone. You should read about it some time.

The Big Picture

Rob Honeycutt at 01:46 AM on 17 March, 2023

Jason @14... "That means pulling up above the canopy to a point of view where we can see the consensus faction and their beliefs alongside the other major factions and their beliefs."

The consensus is precisely an act of "pulling up above the canopy..."

The entire point of a scientific consensus is to measure the broad assessments of a wide range of experts. You know, people who have PhD's and study the subject matter every day of their working lives? Those people overwhelmingly accept that, it's real, it's us, it's bad, we need to act rapidly to fix it, and it's not "game over."

If you want to be inclusive of the minority position that this could all be wrong, that's fine. You know, the standard treatments for cancer could also be wrong and herbal medicine just might save Uncle Bob from an early grave. You can never fully eliminate that possibility.

There are definitely people out there who are going to vigorously try to convince your uncle to use herbs and not listen to his oncologist. They are non-experts in oncology. They have strong opinions on oncology. Bob is more that welcome to risk taking their advice. At the end of the day, the likelihood of the oncologist being wrong are substantially lower than the herbalist.

I peg you as the angry herbalist in this analogy.

Antarctica is gaining ice

Bart Vreeken at 02:41 AM on 10 March, 2023

Hi Bob @534

I don't see a clear rebound effect in my figure.

And of course the mass gain of last year shall be exceptional. But at least it's an interesting thing to notice. And maybe the increasing precipitation can offset the increasing discharge in the coming years as we can read in the article below. As you say, the average mass loss is now something like 114 Gt per year. That's much less then the 151 Gt we read about on the website of NASA (Vital Signs).

tc.copernicus.org/articles/16/4053/2022/tc-16-4053-2022.pdf

Antarctica is gaining ice

Bart Vreeken at 23:07 PM on 9 March, 2023

Antarctica Annual Rate of Change

It looks like the Antartican Ice Sheet had a very good year, as far as we can see. At least, the mass balance over the period november 2021 - november 2022 was far positive. This can be due to the very low extend of the sea ice. The Surface Mass Balance over the melting period of last year turned out very positive. I don't read much about this, the focus in de media is on the low extent of the sea ice. Any thoughts about this?

I did expect a new update of de GRACE data of December 2022, but it comes late again.

Which state is winning at renewable energy production?

David-acct at 10:55 AM on 9 March, 2023

to bob & Nigelj at 6 & 7

There is a lot of misunderstanding on tax credits and who benefits from those tax credits, Those misunderstandings persist simply because the general public has a poor grasp of the basics of micro economics and the supply and demand curves. Tax credits which buyer obtains a reduction of their income tax artificially shift the demand curve. The size of the shift is a function of both the size of the credit and the natural demand for the product without the tax credit. The shift of the demand curve effectively raises the market price of the product. The buyer is still paying at or near the natural market price ( which is the gross price less the tax credit or some portion thereof depending on the elasticity of the product). As such, most of the benefit of the buyers tax credit goes to the seller in the form of higher sales price. A reasonable estimate in the case of EV's and home renewable products is 70-90% of the benefit effectively goes to the seller.

Methane emissions from Siberian sinkholes

DennisHorne at 08:11 AM on 8 March, 2023

@scaddenp

https://uaf.edu/news/nova-episode-explores-arctic-methane-explosions.php

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201130-climate-change-the-mystery-of-siberias-explosive-craters

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx5mmq/the-ground-is-literally-exploding-due-to-climate-change-in-siberia-and-its-going-to-get-worse

https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/siberia-massive-craters-frozen-ground-permafrost-methane-gas-explosion-rrc/

CO2 limits will hurt the poor

PollutionMonster at 16:10 PM on 27 February, 2023

"The main point is that the land loss will include a great amount of fertile farming land, including the particularly productive river delta regions."

"And gradual worsening & lengthening of heat waves in India and the Middle East and Central Africa." Eclectic

Do you have a source for that? I wish to improve my arguments and I don't think linking to say BBC is the best choice. The part about losing fertile soil worries me because people still die of starvation in the world.

Mostly the deniers use the myth of climate change is overblown and climate change solutions are super expensive. Which to be fair, I was reading that some solutions are infeasible Weekly Roundup.

The denizens are mostly atheists, so that is some common ground we have that lets me tailor the message. I could also use some advice for keeping it all organized. I hate it when I loose track of a really good source or argument.

The Problem with Percentages

Doug Bostrom at 06:36 AM on 20 February, 2023

Evan, to your particular needs and thinking in terms of "improve averages," hopefully you have solar DHW in the picture? I seem to remember we've discussed this elsewhere, maybe. Anyway, a new-build is a perfect opportunity for laying pipework suitable for a "drain back" system, which if at all possible should be first choice of implementation, it being the least complex and most reliable available. Can you get all your hot water from the roof? No, likely not. However, in the case of our home which is massively shade-challenged and at 47N in a famously cloudy location we derive about 50% of our water heat gain from our drain back system, which is 2 square meters in size, uses only two wearing parts (bog standard hydronic circulator pumps, cheap) and no glycol etc., and is at 12 years of age with zero service.

With regard to vehicle-to-grid, I'm thinking very much of "to grid" specifically, not "to home." Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) promises to replace the spinning mass advantages and overall rapid response capability of combustion thermal generation plant, with its capacity relatively easily scaled via voluntary subsidy of storage by vehicle owners, plant operators leaning farther into "make hay while the sun shines" with energy capture systems such as PV, wind.

V2G will not be as efficient in terms of loss and material input as centralized storage systems, but it carries the unique advantage of self-subsidy that is to some extent invisible in our economics.

(V2G is in fact an argument for continued subsidy of vehicle electrification, if public policy wants to put its thumb on the scale of an already advantageous emergence.)

Again, lest it be lost in the discussion, link to a paper penciling out where numbers on V2G may lead, quite swiftly. 2030? Probably not. 2040? Significant effects practically guaranteed, given the direction we're heading with vehicle electrification. This will result in retired combustion thermal plants, measurable retirement of the storage problem, leading to an accelerating process of improvement as depth of the resource grows, skill of use and confidence grows. Arguably it will help to bend the curves you've highlighted.

It's the sun

Eclectic at 07:56 AM on 12 February, 2023

MA Rodger @1310 , thank you for extracting some classic Curry.

I particularly liked :- "... huge amounts of [solar] variability ... a lot of issues related to UV and stratosphere and cosmic rays and magnetic fields and ... things that really aren't being factored in [to models] ..."

A quote so typical of Dr Curry. A bit of smoke & mirrors, vague handwaving, followed by more sciencey-sounding vagueness, plus the magic word Uncertainties uttered thrice. And at this point, every Denialist is nodding in agreement, with all critical abilities set in the OFF position. Her style is unique.

If Dr Curry were pressed on some of that nonsense, she would walk it back ~ by retreatiing into more vagueness. She outclasses Dr Peterson in that way ~ he at least can look slightly embarrassed when he is caught out in some of his own nonsenses (and he does, when caught, walk his mistakes back . . . temporarily).

Dr Curry's style of discourse reminds me somewhat of another speaker, but she has never actually suggested fixing solar problems by injecting bleach into the sun.

Checklist: How to take advantage of brand-new clean energy tax credits

nigelj at 06:15 AM on 2 February, 2023

Bob Loblow and others. New Zealand has an electricity market driven by a system of spot prices, and about 5 private sector competing generating companies and a state owned lines company.

For decades the provision of electricity was essentially a monopoly, and in the 1990s it was broken up into several generating companies in a competing market governed by complicated rules. This appeared to be driven by a neo liberal ideology that business competition is always best

I'm in favour of competition as a general rule with most products and services, but the provision of electricity looks to me like a "natural monopoly" and the attempts to break this up and create a market seems contrived and quite problematic in practice. Do you (and others) agree?

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #2

Evan at 12:50 PM on 25 January, 2023

Rob, rather than a long rebuttal, I refer you to a paper I published recently on this very subject titled "Climate Confusion." In it I deal with the very subject we're discussing, and reference the Hausfather paper.

There are only very special conditions where we don't have warming in the pipeline: all of humanity come together to do the right thing and nature plays nice. I will continue to point people to the Keeling Curve as the best assessment of how we're doing and what to expect. In the meantime, Hausfather's paper presents a result of a scientific modeling study, and is not an assessment of the likely trajectory of the Keeling Curve.

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #2

Evan at 04:38 AM on 25 January, 2023

Rob,

"Those are infinitely better challenges for humanity to face over a civilization ending 4°C+ planet."

Obviously I agree with this statement. But for the large voting population that still thinks climate scientists are being alarmists and feel that we can easily adapt, they will be more concerned about the supposed negative economic impact of taking action than they will be about the impact of a "small" amount of warming. I get this specific feedback from a lot of people whose opinions I respect.

I will change my view of the future when the upward acceleration of the Keeling Curve begins to slow. Not before.

Rob, you are making business analogies and projections which I respect, but businesses are usually selling things that people want. Getting to net zero requires an awful lot of negative emissions technologies that are effectively a tax, things that are likely to be strongly opposed.

My point is this. The more we sell to the not-very-well-informed people the idea that the future lies in our hands (i.e., future warming depends on future emissions and not past emissions), and the more we sell the idea that there is a renewable energy and EV revolution that will drastically cut our emissions, the more likely they will believe that all is well and no need to worry. We are effectively removing their impetus for revolutionary change and accepting evolutionary change as sufficient.

The Hausfather paper indicates that an immediate 70% reduction in emissions would get us to stabilizing atmopheric CO2 emissions, which effectively leaves warming in the pipeline (read here). That's 70% of emissions across the entire world and across every sector, including agriculture and deforestation. And that massive effort still leaves warming in the pipeline. Then year on year that 70% reduction has to grow to keep theatmospheric CO2 concentration from increasing.

Therefore, (repeating myself here) I continue to advise people to expect that the current atmospheric CO2 levels correspond to committed warming. If and when the upward accelerationg of the Keeling Curve begins to slow, I will modify that advice. Until then, I think it prudent advice.

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #1

gerontocrat at 00:22 AM on 9 January, 2023

The Antarctic sea ice area has behaved in a very different way in the last 10 years or so. You can see that from the 2022 annual average sea ice area graph which you can see at

https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,1759.msg355482.html#msg355482

How to save on winter home heating costs

David-acct at 11:05 AM on 31 December, 2022

Liberator - actually less complicated micro economics. In each of the cases/examples you mentioned, the tax credit and/or subsidy artificially shifts the demand curve upward. ie the consumer is willing to pay a higher price for the product due the tax credit or subsidy. The real result, is the seller obtains the benefit of the higher sales price.

We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.

Bob Loblaw at 05:48 AM on 27 December, 2022

Peppers @ 51: "Online is out in the street."

To begin, this is clearly wrong on several fronts.

The Internet is not publicly-operated. People pay their ISP to get access, or get it for "free" from commercial establishments that build the cost into the products they sell.

Most web sites, social media platforms, etc. are not publicly-operated. Each business or private entity that chooses to place information or a discussion forum on-line gets to choose what sort of open discussion they are willing to allow. They may choose to not allow any public commenting at all. They may choose varying moderation policies, such as "all comments will be moderated before being made visible". People may or may not have to register. SkS chooses a system where users must register, comments go live immediately, but are subject to moderation after the fact, as outlined in the Comments Policy.

No "online" resource is forced to allow anyone to say anything they want, whenever they want. It's closer to "freedom of the press" - a freedom granted to anyone that has the money to own a press. Try walking into your local paper with your manifesto and demanding that they print it for you in tomorrow's paper. Please take a video of them laughing their heads off and post it to Youtube where we can all get a laugh.

Even if "online" was like "out on the street", nobody has the freedom to walk around saying anything they like to anyone they like wherever they like. I"ve previously mentioned libel and slander laws. I will now mention "public nuisance" laws. If your behaviour (even just spoken word) significantly affects the enjoyment of public spaces by others, you will be subject to legal restrictions.

I live in Canada. The relevant statue is in the Criminal Code, Causing disturbance, indecent exhibition, loitering, etc. Quoting in part:

Every one who

(a) not being in a dwelling-house, causes a disturbance in or near a public place,

(i) by fighting, screaming, shouting, swearing, singing or using insulting or obscene language,

(ii) by being drunk, or

(iii) by impeding or molesting other persons,

(b) openly exposes or exhibits an indecent exhibition in a public place,

(c) loiters in a public place and in any way obstructs persons who are in that place, or

(d) disturbs the peace and quiet of the occupants of a dwelling-house by discharging firearms or by other disorderly conduct in a public place or who, not being an occupant of a dwelling-house comprised in a particular building or structure, disturbs the peace and quiet of the occupants of a dwelling-house comprised in the building or structure by discharging firearms or by other disorderly conduct in any part of a building or structure to which, at the time of such conduct, the occupants of two or more dwelling-houses comprised in the building or structure have access as of right or by invitation, express or implied,

is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

If Peppers truly believes that "free speech" gives people absolute freedom to speak, how would he react if he and his family went to a public park to have a picnic, and someone came up with a megaphone, started hurling insults and obscene taunts at him and his family, drowning out their attempts to have a nice family conversation, then followed them to the parking area as they tried to leave, followed them home, continued to hurl insults at them from public space in the street. etc?

To try to get back on-topic, the original post is about SkS considering its options with respect to participating in Twitter or not. Elon Musk paid $44B so that he could get to make the rules for his on-line social media site. Elon Musk has made claims about wanting a forum where "free speech" is allowed. What things has Elon done to make this so?

Banning journalists for questionable reasons, and then imposing conditions for their return.

Threatening to ban links to other social media sites.

It certainly sounds like Elon wants "free speech" for some, but not "free speech" for all. Well, it's his company, his rules. But Apple is not infringing on Elon's "free speech" rights if they decide they do not want to do business with him.

And it is perfectly reasonable for SkS to question whether they want to be part of Twitter.

It's a natural cycle

Bob Loblaw at 05:25 AM on 16 December, 2022

Long Knoll:

Note that the comment you refer to from MA Rodger was made 5 years ago.

Is this the figure you are referring to from the Carbon Brief article you mention? (I can only link to the image, not embed it here.)

https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Walsh-et-al.-2016-Fig8.png

Note that the values in that figure are for sea ice extent. That is not the same as sea ice area.

Sea ice area in the area that is actually ice.

Sea ice extent is the are of ocean that has at least 15% ice cover. Up to 85% of that area is water, not ice. 1 million km² of sea ice extent at 15% ice is only 150,000km² of sea ice area.

Further explanation is available here.

So, you should not be comparing area and extent numbers. The area number will be much smaller.

As for Heller: yes, he is simply combining two different things: full year vs. late summer.

Don’t get fooled: Electric vehicles really are better for the climate

Doug Bostrom at 10:21 AM on 18 November, 2022

Per Eddie's remarks, we have an EV that does the vast bulk of our mileage. It can handle dimensional items up to 118" (~3m) with the hatch closed and can comfortably do a 190 mile (305km) roundtrip I routinely need to cover, in winter, mostly at 70mph (112kph) and without the driver freezing, w/~40 miles (64km) reserve range on returning to driveway. And it's a delight to drive, makes me feel a little bit too much like I'm 16 years of age again. So lots of bullet points covered there.

For other needs we have a 1997 Ford Ranger. It goes through about 40 gallons of gas per year, at about 25MPG (10km/l) for above trip case. I've not done the math, but I suspect the current embodied carbon in replacing it with the most plausible EPU candidate (Ford F150 Lightning) may be problematic; the choice would not necessarily be a win over the geriatric Ranger.

There are two other problems.

For us, $40k is not a dealbreaker. But as a practical matter and in the context where a lot of PUs are used (think solo operators running a yard care concern, etc.) that's a huge lift, essentially impossible.

But here's another dealbreaker: none of the current EPUs will hold a 6' (1.8m) dimensional item in the bed with the gate closed, the lowest bar of legitimate PU cargo specs*. All of them are centered as designer accessories first, tool second. This is like having to use a tack hammer where one needs a framing hammer, or (given the toy-like nature of such an implementation) a kid's plastic hammer instead of the real deal. And that's a shame, because for the legitimate use case of many PUs, EPUs otherwise offer distinct advantages, and have range more than ample for a typical day's work.

Eventually this will get sorted and we'll probably even see -proper- EPU models with what used to be the correct treatment: an 8' (2.4m) bed. But right now, conflicted objectives, still catering to urban cowboys having PUs with no scratches or dirt in the bed. A lot of cost and a lot of dead weight are concentrated on useless appurtenances, things that are completely irrelevant to the original use case of PUs, hardware as psychological reassurance, ending up with the worst possible analogy to designer handbag.

All that said, the more EVs, the better for the planet, with the stipulation that fewer vehicle miles of all kinds are also going to be necessary. We're habituated to automobiles, but in truth if we can't feed or house ourselves with jumping into a car, our "convenience" item is substantially a prosthetic device, a very large and inefficient wheel chair.

*"just leave the gate open" isn't responsive to how that actually unpacks in practice. As usual, "just" is way too economical.

Don’t get fooled: Electric vehicles really are better for the climate

scaddenp at 06:31 AM on 16 November, 2022

Eddie, it is a pain that technology and price points arent moving faster but for some there can be reasonable compromises. If you need the capabilities of Ranger on daily basis (eg you are farmer or contractor), then you need it and not much choice. But you may be able to use alternatives when those capabilities not needed. eg have very small car or an electric as second "go-to-town" vehicle. Other people buy Rangers for towing boat or caravan and in those situations, it can be far cheaper to own a small vehicle for daily use and hire when needed, than to take on cost of ownership (wtih depreciation) of something like a Ranger.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #43 2022

One Planet Only Forever at 13:10 PM on 30 October, 2022

Doug Bostrom (and a bit for nigelj),

Regarding corrections to the use of GDP to measure ‘improvement’:

The Human Development Report 2020 does a pretty good job of presenting many of the ‘improvements’ to the currently obviously flawed GDP evaluations of improvement. The most glaring flaw is that GDP measurement does not subtract harmful unsustainable economic activity. As an example, when done simplistically, the costs of recovering and rebuilding from harmful climate events is a GDP Plus even though most of that Positive GDP only gets things back to where they were before. There is no improvement. The ability to improve was displaced by the need to recover.

Regarding the global population problem:

The following Lancet article “Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: ...” indicates that the peak population could potentially be less than 10.4 billion, especially if the Sustainable Development Goals are achieved and improved on more rapidly. The other benefit of achieving the SDGs is the reduction of the harm done by humans, especially by the most harmful consumers.
Harmful consumers are a more serious problem than total population.

Fewer harmfully over-consuming people (causing harmful lasting impacts including consuming renewable resources faster than they renew) allows the total sustainable population to be larger. Many studies indicate that if meat eating was reduced more food would be available for humans with less negative impact, or misery inflicted, on other life.

There are now many presentations regarding the merits of reduced consumption. An enlightening one is a study by sufficiency researcher Maren Ingrid Kropfeld mentioned in J. B. MacKinnon's book "The Day the World Stops Shopping". The study compared the amount of harmful impact of 4 different consumers:

Environmentally conscientious about their consumption (but not limiting it)

Frugal (seek out and buy bargains)

Tightwads (dislike spending)

Actively choose to consume less - pursuing limited consumption (only buying what is 'needed' and buying and repairing more durable things).

Consumers who 'Choose to consume less' and Tightwads had the lowest level of harmful impact. The Frugal and Environmentally conscientious had far more harmful impact because they did not limit their consumption.

A closing point about harmful actions:

Competition for status, with a lack of effective ‘constantly learning’ governing to limit harm done, can produce some very harmful and hard to correct results, including systemic injustice and inequity which includes the development of harmful laws (Florida officials ban the terms 'climate change' and 'global warming') and harmful enforcement of laws (The Supreme Court curbed EPA’s power to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. What comes next?)

Ibram X. Kendi, in his book “How to be an Antiracist” presents the understanding that Racism is unjustified excusing of harmful actions by making up and defending beliefs about undeniable harmful actions, inequity and injustice. It's useis recorded to have started centuries ago as European leaders tried to explain and excuse their harmful colonization and exploitation pursuits (the Doctrine of Discovery is a harmful part of it - ASSEMBLY OF FIRST NATIONS Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery January 2018). And making up beliefs and excuses for benefiting from harmful injustice and inequity applies to far more than visible differences among humans.

Permitting: America’s next big climate conundrum

michael sweet at 08:32 AM on 19 October, 2022

David-acct,

Linking to an anonymous blog post on Judith Curries' blog does not support your argument here. here, here and here are three summaries of peer reviewed papers that document that renewable energy will work. I note that you have linked the same blog post twice. The last link that I posted is the most recent. In that paper, the last group that supported using nuclear power in the future concluded that renewable energy was cheaper and the way to go. Nuclear is too expensive. The first two references are now old. Their conclusions have stood the test of time although the costs of renewable energy have declined much more rapidly than expected. That means it will be much cheaper than they estimate in these old papers. Jacobson now uses a lot of batteries for storage since the cost of batteries has declined so much. I note that Jacobson's papers on renewable energy have been cited thousands of times by other peer reviewed sources. Not really comparable to an anonympous blog post on a denier blog that no-one reads for content.

The first reason the anonymous poster at Curries' blog gives for not liking renewable energy is that "Wind and solar do not readily supply essential reliability services." The large battery installed in Australia several years ago has proven to deliver higher quality reliability services to the grid than conventional generation at a cheaper cost. All the storage batteries currently being built can provide these higher quality services at very low cost. The anonyumous complaint has no merit.

Once you see that "Planning Engineer"'s first issue has no merit it is a waste of time to discuss the rest of his anonymous post. What are his qualifications anyway? Almost all of his citations are to his own blog posts on Curries' blog. He also cited a 10 year old Forbes article!

Renewable energy is the way of the future. All the issues listed by "Planning Engineer" have been considered in the links I have cited and cost effective ways of resolving them have been found.

You have still not described the basic logical flaw you think Jacobson made.

Permitting: America’s next big climate conundrum

David-acct at 22:45 PM on 18 October, 2022

michael # 6

Your response is easily rebutted by simply understanding the raw data. I have previously linked to EIA which should dispel many of the misconceptions.

I have attached the link which shows the volitility of electric generation in the MISO grid. The claim that increased wind and solar penetration wont increase grid instability is made by renewable advocates who dont have an understanding of the volitility of renewables.

I have also attached a link to a chief engineer who has considerable years of experience and knowledge of actual experience,. Its a great column to help understand and dispel many myths.

Please take the time to read and understand

judithcurry.com/2022/10/03/the-penetration-problem-part-i-wind-and-solar-the-more-you-do-the-harder-it-gets/

thanks

Replacing conventional synchronous generating resources, which have been the foundation of the power system, with asynchronous intermittent resources will degrade the reliability of the grid and contribute to blackout risk. The power system is the largest, most complicated wonderful machine ever made. At any given time, it must deal with multiple problems and remain stable. No resources are perfect; in a large system you will regularly find numerous problems occurring across the system. Generally, a power system can handle multiple problems and continue to provide reliable service. However, when a system lacks supportive generation sources, it becomes much more likely it will not be able function reliably when problems occur.

From the eMail bag: A Review of a paper by Ellis and Palmer

MA Rodger at 00:49 AM on 9 October, 2022

One criticism of Ellis & Palmer (2016) that can be hurled with some confidence is that it has not exactly set the literature alight since it was published six long years ago. That tends to suggest it presents a badly failed hypothesis.

I note one of the citations listed by Google Scholar is for a later unpublished work co-authored by Ellis (evidently 2019 or later) which doen't make such a big thing about this CO2-dust mechanism, although it does continue to stress that CO2 was not the main driver of the ice-age cycles, which most would agree with.

One of the factors working against the grand assertion of Ellis & Palmer (2016), that CO2 leads to reduced plant-growth and thus more dust & lower albedo; one factor is the switch of ice-age period from 40k to 100k. This switch is usually explained by the dust during the earlier 40k phase being diminished as the bare plantless lands close-by glaciated areas were being scoured clean of any dust-generating soils by prior glaciations, scoured back to the bedrock. If this dust is alternatively explained by reduced CO2 suppressing plant-growth, the 40k-100k transition requires a new explanation. And given this requirement the apparent silence by Ellis & Palmer (2016) on the matter is entirely wrong.

From the eMail bag: A Review of a paper by Ellis and Palmer

Bob Loblaw at 23:20 PM on 8 October, 2022

nigel:

You have to read the paper to try to follow the logic (as such) of their argument about CO₂ and temperature. It is rather convoluted.

Section 2 of their paper discusses the Milankovitch cycles, and introduces their "see - huge difference in input of energy on summer solstice at 65N" calculation. They use this to argue that albedo reductions due to dust on snow are the real feedback factor explaining how Milankovitch cycles can grow or melt a continental glacier.

In section 3, they do their bogus comparison between the dust-albedo feedback and CO₂ radiative effects.

In section 4, they expand on the dust albedo factors.

In section 5, they give their hypothesis how low CO₂ leads to reductions in vegetation cover, and how this is what leads to high dust concentrations that accumulate on the ice/snow of the glaciers. It's this last step that allows low albedo that allows the increased solar input (again, summer solstice at 65N) of the Milankovitch cycles to trigger deglaciation.

At the end of it all, they are basically saying that nothing else makes much difference as Milankovitch cycles go through their many wiggles, until vegetation gets so low and albedo of the snow and ice gets low enough so that a high in the 65N summer solstice Milankovitch cycle can finally melt a continent worth of ice.

It's all hanging together by a very thin thread, and their "analysis" is sadly lacking in any sort of model that actually incorporates anything of global/regional climate, the carbon cycle, and glacial dynamics and accumulation/melt.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

Bob Loblaw at 02:09 AM on 4 September, 2022

The difference between getting to net zero first versus minimizing the total emissions between now and reaching net zero is not a trivial distinction.

Look at the following figure. The red line reaches zero after 40 years. The blue line has not quite reached zero after 60 years. The total emissions under the red line are about 3x the total under the blue line. Waiting 30 years for "better technology" is not a good choice.

Getting to net zero

Cranky Uncle: a game building resilience against climate misinformation

One Planet Only Forever at 09:44 AM on 28 August, 2022

JasonChen,

Perhaps a clarification of the issue being discussed would help. Discourse is only possible when there is a common understanding of what is being discussed.

The issue is the need to help people be less tempted to believe misunderstandings regarding climate science.

There is undeniably a problem of successful efforts to selectively/misleadingly tempt people to want a product or service that they do not 'need'. There is even the hope that people will be so powerfully tempted that they will consider an 'unnecessary want' to be an 'essential need' which will keep them from investigating or recognising harm done. Those marketing efforts include deliberately failing to investigate and inform about, or misinforming about, harmful risks or results of the 'hoped to be popularly needed' product or service.

'Does it work' is therefore regarding how effective the 'game' is at helping a person be less likely to be misled into misunderstanding climate science matters. The objective is to reduce the popular support for unnecessarily harmful human activity.

So it is possible that your perception of the issue is 'a good distance', remote, from the common sense of what the issue is. The popularity of the 'game' is not the issue. Neither is the possibility that someone who is fond of misunderstanding climate science matters would feel 'manipulated' by the game.

If you believe there is a better tool to help limit the popularity of harmful misunderstanding offer it up. It could be helpful beyond the challenge of the popularity of harmful misunderstandings regarding climate science. But it is common sense that it would be wise to use any such 'better' tool in addition to, not instead of, other helpful tools.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2022

Bob Loblaw at 05:00 AM on 19 August, 2022

JasonChen:

You are either playing word games, or not understanding basic writing.

"Assessments" are not taking actions to address a problem. The IPCC reviews available scientific literature and summarizes it.

"Formulating strategies" is not taking actions to address a problem. It is giving advice. In the case of the IPCC, it is using the knowldege of the science it has assessed to indicate what the effect of various actions might be. Then policy makers can use that advice (or ignore it) when they choose to try to address climate change.

You know, don't you? That pesky "Summary for Policy Makers" that accompanies each report?

You are seeing monsters under every bed you see.

Geothermal heating and cooling: Renewable energy’s hidden gem

prove we are smart at 12:46 PM on 17 August, 2022

"Doing the right thing in a corporate setting", very unusual words coming from the corporate states of America!

Another positive, fossil fuel reducing fixit. Upon reading this last link given on this repost architecture2030.org/why-the-building-sector/ , that was an eye-openner! The amount of urban growth the globe will need by 2060 is "the equivalent of adding an entire New York City to the world, every month, for 40 years."

That certainly wont help our over-shoot problem and keep quiet about endless growth on a finite planet. Look, these renewable energy solutions are needed and good news, geo-thermal with heat-pumps are great and also proven to be a good solution to fossil fuel types but how long till these innovations are common place?-we are running out of time.

"In 2022, we predict this seasonal cycle to peak at a monthly mean value of 421.5 ± 0.5 ppm in May (Figure 1, Table 2). This will be the first time in the Keeling Curve record that monthly CO2 levels have exceeded 420 ppm, and from comparison with reconstructions of past CO2 levels from isotopes of carbon and boron in marine sediments, this will be the highest atmospheric CO2 concentration for over 2 million years." Taken from www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/seasonal-to-decadal/long-range/forecasts/co2-forecast

I appreciate these engineers helping to prove a transition away from fossil fuels in a real world improvement for our biosphere. But with some tipping points activated with no turning back, and probably worse to come-it's all too little,too late..

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2022

One Planet Only Forever at 02:36 AM on 13 August, 2022

The study “Estimating the environmental impacts of 57,000 food products” adds to awareness and understanding helping consumers make less harmful food choices. But it contains a couple of questionable points:

It is questionable to consider any water needed for food growing to be a problem. Water use is only a concern if it is artificial potentially unsustainable human caused water extraction or diversion such as irrigation, especially water extraction from aquifers. Food production that does not require artificial water use is not a problem. Almond growing without irrigation an be lower impact than growing food that requires very little water but is done by diverting natural water for the growing.

It is questionable to claim that the impacts of processing the processed foods are insignificant compared to the impacts of ‘growing, harvesting, and delivering basic food commodities to retail stores for sale’ (the following quote makes that questionable claim).

"The estimated environmental impacts account for the processing and transportation of commodities to retail stores, but do not incorporate postproduction processing, packaging, and transportation of, for example, converting sugar into a sugar-sweetened beverage or flour and butter into a croissant. This is unlikely to have a large influence on the estimated environmental impact scores as the large majority of food-related environmental impacts result from agricultural production (14), but it is important to note that this may affect the estimated scores for, for example, air-freighted produce or highly processed foods composed of agricultural commodities with low environmental impacts (19, 20).”

The authors should have stated that the full lifecycle impacts of postprocessing need to be included in the evaluation of the total impact of a consumer’s purchase choice. A personal bag of crisps (UK term for what N. Americans call potato chips), with ~1.5 oz (40 g) of potato in it, contains about 1/4 of a medium-sized potato. It seems very unlikely that the impacts of construction and operation of the processing, packaging, transportation of end products, and all related wastes of every part of the process are insignificant compared to the impacts of growing, harvesting, and delivering 1/4 of a potato to a retail display. Frying the bits of potato is not an insignificant impact, though it has to be off-set by the impacts of the home cooking method. And the transportation of the massive volume of completed ‘bags full of very little material’ would appear to produce a significant impacts per 100 g of product. Also, related important impact of a bag of crisps is the end disposal of the packaging of that little bit of edible product.

Taking the Temperature: a dispatch from the UK

Jim Hunt at 07:46 AM on 29 July, 2022

Thanks for the heads up John.

Ditto for the new record in Wales. The UKMO announcement:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2022/record-high-temperatures-verified

Taking the Temperature: a dispatch from the UK

One Planet Only Forever at 02:49 AM on 25 July, 2022

One more (last) poke at how hard it is to misunderstand what the HadCET dataset shows:

The following webpage "Met Office Hadley Centre observations datasets: HadCET", is the page linking to downloads of the dataset. The dominant feature on that page is a graphic presentation of each year's 'Mean Temperature difference from 1961-1990 average'. What it shows is hard to misunderstand.

The Wikipedia page for Central England Temperature has a section called "Trends revealed by the series" includes a graph of the 10-year and 30-year moving averages. That shows that prior to 1950 there was only a brief period (around 1735) when the 30-year average was close to being as warm as the coolest values since 1950. And since 1990 the 30-year average has consistently 'statistically significantly' increased. It also shows that the current 10-year averages are warmer than any 10-year averages before 1990. And it also shows that the annual data points cover a broader range than the 10-year average, which has a broader range of values than the 30-year average. That should lead to understanding that the monthly values would have a larger range than annual values, with daily values having an even larger range of values.

Taking the Temperature: a dispatch from the UK

MA Rodger at 09:44 AM on 23 July, 2022

Bob Loblaw @17,

The CET is described as "representative of a roughly triangular area of the United Kingdom enclosed by Lancashire, London and Bristol." That would give it a centre somewhere near Stratford-on-Avon and only the western edge of your red area sitting within that triangle which extends mostly to the south. One problem with using early daily data (or even monthly data) from CET is that it is not using standardised thermometer hosuings. The Met Office do give ranked regional, national and UK-wide monthly averaged data for max min & mean temperatures but only go back to the start of use of the Stevenson Screen in the 1860s. These at least would be "sticking with national averages" which as described by Fixitsan @2 indeed would be "a better guide to what is happening in terms of trends over a larger sample area," although advice apparently then ignored.

These UK-wide top-rankers come in:-

Max Temp - Jan 1916, Feb 2019, Mar 2012, Apr 2011, May 2018, Jun 1940, Jul 2006, Aug 1995, Sep 1895, Oct 1921, Nov 2011, Dec 2015, Winter 1989, Spring 1893, Summer 1976, Autumn 2006, Annual 2014.

Mean Temp - Jan 1916, Feb 1998, Mar 1938, Apr 2011, May 2008, Jun 1940, Jul 2006, Aug 1995, Sep 2006, Oct 2001, Nov 1994, Dec 2015, Winter 1989, Spring 2017, Summer 2018, Autumn 2006, Annual 2014.

But single months and even single years ar subject to a lot of noise so listing out these top-ranked months etc and reflecting on the length of time thay have maintained that top-rank is doing little more than examining randomness. Even for annual means, this UK-wide data provides a randomness spread of +/- 0.9ºC (2 sd) and the rankings will be latching on to even rarer events than 1-in-20.

So the argument set out up-thread by Fixitsan is baseless.

Added to that, the statement @2 that "most of the CO2 was produced before 1989" is wrong. In terms of FF emissions, more has now been emitted since 1989 and in terms of the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, 1989 sit at about halfway from pre-industrial, but not forgetting the poor old climate system does need a decade or more to get its reaction to climate forcing working significantly.

Taking the Temperature: a dispatch from the UK

John Mason at 01:16 AM on 23 July, 2022

UKMO have just posted this:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2022/july-heat-review

Antarctica is gaining ice

Andrew LB at 07:26 AM on 20 June, 2022

"Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent (high confidence) (see Figure SPM.3). (4.2-4.7)"

NASA Study in 2015 clearly states Mass Gains of Antarctic ice sheet are greater than losses. I'll quote it.

A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.

The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.

According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses

On a separate personal note, having lived less than a 2 minute walk from the pacific ocean for the past 40 years, i have yet to see any rise in sea level. One of the docks near my home has pole marked to indicate the current tide height and it's been there for at least 30 years, and a zero foot tide is still indicated spot on all these years later.

I think a lot of the people on this site are unaware of their own motivations and almost religious adherence the government mandated narraitive. It's usually a good idea to actually listen to the people in charge of international climate policy and you'll realize it's all a lie. United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer said the following just a couple years ago.

"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,"

And just a few years prior to that he said:

"the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world's resources will be negotiated."

And a bit more insight:

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,"

"This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history."

And my favorite is how they went on to say that in order to make this happen, they must plunge the world economy into a depression in order to force the end of capitolism.

Antarctica is gaining ice

Shalom Wulich at 22:11 PM on 18 June, 2022

Hi Philippe,

So following the fact that measured data wasnt aligend with the CMIP5 model, now there is new explantation - Good for science!
CMIP6 - you are king !

Were Policy makers aware that in 2014 IPCC CMIP5 got it wrong and now there is a correction with new explanation ? Are they being told of all the corrections ? if so where in the SPM ?

Additionally , if the models then were wrong and now fine tuned, how can we be sure that now they are ok ? what new findings might finetune future models ?

So while we rely on these models to drive policy it might be that in the future, due to these model coming out wrong, we might find ourselves regreting actions we took based on wrong predictions ?

If we go back to 2014 AR5 and review the SPM this is what I make of it:

IPCC - the model predicting Antarctic sea ice got it wrong, lets not include it in the report. If we do include it, it might raise concerns on the validity of the other models we used. Why raise this doubt to begin with ?

Policy makers understanding- Ice is decreasing dramatically all over. Measured data is aligend with models, we go to do something, IPCC is totally right !

Attaching the 2 links showing the Arctic and Antarctic trends measured vs. model and the CMIP5.

Actual Sea trends

The approval CMIP5 model got it wrong

The IPCC used models

and again qouting the key section from IPCC AR5 2014 report:

B.3 Cryosphere

"Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent (high confidence) (see Figure SPM.3). (4.2-4.7)"

Where is the other trend ? The Antarctic sea ice ???? Ohhhh. That. It's not relevant now.

Flying is worse for the climate than you think

Philippe Chantreau at 04:10 AM on 13 May, 2022

The video takes a rather drastic shortcut when it comes NOx emissions. The overall long term effect of NOx at altitude is likely to be a net negative radiative forcing because of the shortening of the methane residence time. The effect of contrail clouds is more difficult to ascertain and is likely a small net positive. Of course, the CO2 emissions remain the main concern, but presenting NOx emissions as making flying even worse is misleading. The whole picture is more complex.

There is very large uncertainty as to the total net forcing and how it compares to the CO2 forcing alone. It is pretty much admitted, however, that the total net forcing is higher than the CO2 forcing alone.

NOx is much more of a concern for low altitude operations and air quality around airports. Unfortunately, a similar trade-off exists to that of diesel engines for cars and reducing NOx involves higher CO2 emissions.

The truth remains that aviation is the most bang for the buck that burning hydrocarbons can deliver. That is where energy density really hits the spot. Unlike many other applications, there is currently no viable, or even prospective, alternative technology that comes close to the performance obtained with ICEs for propelling aircrafts. This holds true for both turbines and reciprocating, the latter being surprisingly more efficient in that role than is ususally believed. If we are to give attention to low hanging fruits, aviation certainly is not one of them (no pun intended).

The only electric aircraft I know of that is currently well engaged in the certification process is ALICE. When ready, it will carry 8-10 passengers over 5 to 600 miles at speeds around 220 to 240 knots. That is the level of performance of a King-Air 200, without the ability to refuel and be ready for flight again in less than 30 min.

Biofuels produced with clean energy are the best bet for a future carbon neutral aviation. However, if all electricity production and terrestrial transportation could be carbon free, aviation would not be a much of a factor, as only these 2 dwarf aviation emissions.

Wildfires are not caused by global warming

michael sweet at 11:18 AM on 10 April, 2022

A-train 1906

So no data to support your claims. Yuo claim that you have extensive experience working in the forrest service. Perhaps yo could use that experience tofind some acutal data to share with us. Your claim defies common sense. You need to provide data to support your wild calim that increasing temepratures do not incfluence the amount of fires.

The Climate Shell Game

One Planet Only Forever at 09:22 AM on 30 March, 2022

jan and others,

The following CBC News item seems to capture the main points about how EVs and grid generation get discussed.

With Nova Scotia's reliance on coal, are electric vehicles the greenest option?

The main points are that even the Nova Scotia grid with a fairly high fossil fuel percentage, and a significant amount of coal, makes EVs a good choice. And it highlights the added reason that the grid will get better quickly.

The following NPR News item ties back to the Shell Game problem, but more precisely to the harmful misleading marketing part of the Shell Game.

Misinformation is derailing renewable energy projects across the United States

The main point in the USA is the ways that harmful promoters of misinformation are delaying the improvement of the electricity generation, delaying he benefits of EVs.

A final point not in either article is that everybody who wants an EV in the next few years will be unable to get one because the production has to ramp up. However, in 10 years time there will be a massive percentage of EVs on the roads everywhere.

A final point is: I find it very disingenuous, almost harmfully biased, to claim that the problem is a developing nation like China (and potentially India would be named next, and maybe the entire continent of Africa) because of some 80-20 made-up rationalization. I agree with targeting the 20% causing 80% of the problem. That would be the 20% of the global population that is the highest personal impacting portion of the population. That would include some people in India and China (likely many among the richest). But it would include a higher percentage of the population of the more advanced nations, because many of the richer people in the more advanced nations failed to reduce how harmful their ways of living and profiting were through the past 30 years, while others were simply developing up to match their examples. The 'legacy harmful leaders by example' are the ones to be targeted for correction. Those legacy richer more harmful people deserve to be targeted ahead of the 'new rich harmful' people who followed the bad examples.

A closing comment. Fossil fuels are a dead-end technology. Future generations cannot continue using a non-renewable technology even if it was not producing other harmful impacts. The ultimate requirement is for policy to be developed and implemented 'everywhere' that will reduce the 'consumerism materialism madness'. The policy needs to be especially focused on correcting and stopping harmful developments even if they are 'cheaper or more profitable or more popular' than more sustainable alternatives. That harmful driving force has created the climate, biodiversity, and other Human Impact threats to the future of humanity. There is no future for that misleading marketing fuelled pursuit of personal desires or competition for impressions of superiority relative to Others.

The Climate Shell Game

jan at 01:53 AM on 29 March, 2022

@michael sweet #61

I will continue to use the facts only:

1. in my post #40 you can read:

Vehicles operation is not global but regional. It follows that we cannot use global emissions from cars as a tool to calculate emission reductions with the introduction of EVs, but strictly regional, per country. It will be mathematically correct (the global data approach), but you will not be able to put it into practice.

What was the purpose of my discussion regarding the largest producer of GHG emissions with the largest EVs market in this world (+50%) with +70% of Power production from fossil fuels (and it grows). I don't like Global Math Averages. In principle, the arithmetic mean is the least accurate indicator of reality. I presented you with the NREL study, which may not fit into your concept, but it cannot suit everyone. However, if the comprehensive study by The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is not enough for you, it is difficult to look for anything more accurate.

So we can check your mentioned study about the EVs better emissions for Global strategy:

2. Your study (Vliet et all, 2011) mentioned in #61 contains a different statement (page 7):

"We find that EVs charged using electricity from coal do not have significantly different GHG emissions from driving in regular cars."

and as you wrote here:

"We find that EVs charged using [100%] electricity from coal do not have significantly different GHG emissions from driving in regular cars."

the value [100%] was defined on the basis of your own interpretation?

link to the study to confirmation of the mentioned wording (page 7)

following the study you need to take into account:

- study is from 2010 (published)

- it is about the Netherland's specific conditions only, you can't take it as the holy grail for each country

- also specific conditions for Power production must be taken into account - the NGCC technology is more predominant in this country = lower emission factor than coal-fired plants (you can see the differences in Table 4.: Electricity generation capacity in the Netherlands)

- you will find there also an increase in the pulverised coal-fired plants for the 2015-2030 period (Table 4)

- and finally - Summary and conclusions (Page 11) ... read carefully:

WTW GHG emissions from electric driving depend most on the fuel type (coal or natural gas) used in the generation of electricity
for charging, and range between 0 g km−1 (using renewables) and 155gkm−1 (using electricity from an old coal-based plant). Based
on the generation capacity projected for the Netherlands in 2015, additional electricity for EV charging would largely be generated
using natural gas, emitting 35–77 g CO2eq km−1. In the Dutch context, emissions vary little with charging patterns, and are unlikely
to change much before 2030.

And here is a summary from the IEA report 2020:

In 2018, TPES came from natural gas (42%), oil (37%), coal (11%), biofuels and waste (5%), and small shares from nuclear, wind, solar, hydropower and geothermal. The Netherlands is still one of the largest gas producers in Europe; however, domestic gas supply and gas exports are rapidly declining as production from Groningen is being phased out. Domestic oil supply is small, especially in comparison to the large oil demand. All coal is imported and is used primarily for electricity generation and steel production. The electricity supply is also heavily reliant on fossil fuels. In 2018, electricity generation came primarily from gas (52%) and coal (27%).

link

it means that there was no such significant coal damping as the study mentioned for 2015 = 55%; it's actually less. And even worse for 2021:

The current energy mix in the Netherlands is natural gas (38%), oil (35%), coal (11%), biofuels and waste (5%), and 11% from nuclear, wind, solar, hydropower and geothermal.

link

Following reality, the mentioned study is out of a doable plan. I like data and I would like to listen more than personal attacks, rather more deep-dive information from my base education in Energy engineering. I'm the proud owner of a small PVe and Solar water heating, so you really don't have to swear at my fossil fuels lobby. I understand energy - from its production, distribution to consumption.

That's why I'm researching anything related to emissions. Not everyone will like this option - but I'm not a friend of extreme solutions or chaos.

Finally, I'm sending a link to one peer-reviewed study from The Nature - A plant-by-plant strategy for high-ambition coal power phaseout in China. link

If you will find at least 3 fatal mistakes that should not appear in The Nature or any peer-reviewed studies, you have passed the Energy engineering exam. Otherwise, we can no longer talk about Energy engineering from the position where you want to be a professor.

I judge people by what they write about and how they write. I don't care what their education is. And I don't care if the document was peer-reviewed because:
- Energy engineering is my native domain
- We have scientists like Ivar Giaever and similar creators here
- you can choose peer-review as a service from your defined contacts, even in reputable journals.

Each of my documents contains data only from scientific sources and/or national sources from which I drew (defined). I don't like bending data. I do not have time for this.

The Climate Shell Game

jan at 07:21 AM on 25 March, 2022

@michael sweet #50

The car's energy conversion efficiency is one thing; electricity consumption per 1km is the second point. You have to recharge the consumed energy somewhere. And 70 kWh of electricity will always be only 70kWh of electricity, no matter what source you use for recharging. This has nothing to do with energy conversion efficiency while driving in a car. This is the energy (not the capacity) you need to return to the battery. You need also calculate another big impact - batte charging is a Power factor and dirting of the power grid. When you don't understand this basic energy principle, then I'm here by mistake.
When you got the arguments and accused me of fossil fuels propaganda, neither of us understood anything. Nice.

The Climate Shell Game

michael sweet at 06:30 AM on 25 March, 2022

Jan,

I think you have the incorrect assumptions behind many of your calculations. This results in your conclusions being in error. In general, whenever I see someone relying on their own calculations instead of published calculations I figure their conclusions are incorrect. I see very little peer reviewed data in your posts.

For example, many published studies describe how to get 100% renewable energy. See this description of Connelly et al 2021 for a starter. I note that you have no problem with "baseload" power sources that require emergency back up power every day to provide peak power but you are concerned that renewable energy might have problems providing peak power. Why is it OK for "baseload" sources to require back up but not renewables? Most of the pumped hydro storage in the USA was built to store power from nuclear power plants at night to use for peak power during the day. Plans like Connelly et al describe how to provide 100% renewable energy. You are wrong to suggest it cannnot be done. Providing 80% renewable energy using existing fossil gas peaker plants as storage is easy and cheaper than fossil power.

Your anaylsis of EV cars seems to me to be completely off. Even if the grid is 100% coal there are benefits from EV. You do not consider that baseload coal power plants are about 40-45% efficient at generating electricity form the heat of the coal. Gas combined cycle plants are over 60% efficient. EV cars are about 90% efficient in using electricity. By contrast, internal combustion cars are only about 20% efficient at using the energy in the oil they burn. When you consider the comparable emissions of carbon dioxide, an EV with electricity from a 100% coal electrical system releases comparable carbon to internal combustion engines. Since the electricity for Evan is over 50% from wind, his EV releases much less CO2 than a comparable ICE car.

According to Our World in Data China gets about 30% of its electricity from renewable sources. It seems to me that when you consider the efficiency of EV cars compared to internal combustion cars the EV's release less CO2 than ICE. Since almost all coal systems use gas for peak power the release of CO2 is even less from EV cars than ICE cars. My brother has solar panels on his roof that recharge his EV car. How much CO2 does his car release?

This peer reviewed paper says that the best thing to do for the next ten years is to build out renewable energy sources as fast as possible and switch to EV's at the same time. If we wait on EV's until we have more renewable energy we will not be able to switch fast enough from ICE's. Your argument that we should wait for more renewable energy to be built is completely incorrect. Please cite a peer reviewed paper that suppports your wild claims. I think your calculations are incorrect as described above.

I note that the people engaging in this conversation are citing their own calculations and not peer reviewed documents. I see many claims that I think have been demonstrated as false in the peer reviewed papers I have read. It seems to me that many of the claims made here are simly fossil propaganda against renewable energy. I want to remind posters that this is supposed to be a science based site. You must support your claims with peer reviewed data.

The poor are building out renewable energy in many locations. Why build a coal generator when renewable energy is much cheaper? Why build out central facilities wheen distributed generation (like PV) is much cheaper? You guys need to read the literature and give up on the fossil fuel propaganda.

The Climate Shell Game

jan at 19:42 PM on 24 March, 2022

@nigelj #30

your opinion:

I disagree partly. You do actually have to start using some EVs even if the energy source is only about 10% renewables. You have to phase in EV's gradually. Otherwise we would have a situation where we get say 30 years down the road and the grid is say 75% renewables, then we have to start building EVs and everyone driving them which would probably be another 30 years because scaling them up is inevitably a slow process. By then the climate is totally cooked.

My note:
You read this sentence from my essay for masses: No More Good News on Global Warming; link

When you will read deeply my document: GHG [CO2] emissions problem in a dark box - 1st part of the Global warming series; link
you will get more answers to my point of view.

Step by step to your opinions:

“You do actually have to start using some EVs even if the energy source is only about 10% renewables.”

My point: YES

“You have to phase in EV's gradually.”

My point: YES

“Otherwise we would have a situation where we get say 30 years down the road and the grid is say 75% renewables, then we have to start building EVs and everyone driving them which would probably be another 30 years because scaling them up is inevitably a slow process.”

My point: YES – from the Global level only. But this is the wrong attitude. Reason:
Vehicles operation is not global but regional. It follows that we cannot use global emissions from cars as a tool to calculate emission reductions with the introduction of EVs, but strictly regional, per country. It will be mathematically correct (the global data approach), but you will not be able to put it into practice.

An example:
Slovakia - Electricity generation by source: almost 80% comes from Carbon Zero technologies (mostly from Nuclear, then Hydro, partially PVe) and just 20% from the fossil fuels (mainly Natural gas, partially from coal which will be terminated 2023 and thin part from oil and biofuels). Then according to the study from NREL (2016): Emissions Associated with Electric Vehicle Charging: Impact of Electricity Generation Mix, Charging Infrastructure Availability, and Vehicle Type; link

Slovakia has a Low carbon average Daily profile of electric grid carbon intensity. This will be changed from the autumn of 2022, as another 471MW reactor in the new NPP will be launched to operation, which will bring the next 3.7TWh to the grid. It will cover fully coal, oil and almost 50% of the natural gas power production in the country = ready to immediately switch off. Then Slovakia will achieve from the beginning of 2023 near to 90% of green electricity. So, not gradual, but the fastest possible strategy of exchanging combustion engines to EVs seems to be workable.

But then we have a country like China. Its share in the EVs market is 53% (car sales according to IEA.org). The Chinese government’s official target is for electric cars to reach a market share of 20% for the full year in 2025, and their performance in 2021 suggests they are well on track to do so. link
If China had up to 270M passenger cars in 2020 and in 2025 it expects the number of EVs to be 54M EVs (270M x 25%) and in 2035 it expects 100% EVs, then it will need to produce 618TWh of energy in its electric grid, which does not exist today. In the same year, 50% of fossil fuel energy sources from Todays near 5 PWh (2021) will have to be transformed. So China needs to build a capacity for 6PWh/annually power production infrastructure and also distribution grids upgrade by 2035 (you can't generate electricity at point A, which is thousands of miles away from point B consumption. It's inefficient.) What's hard to achieve because China by 2025 will rise with coal fire power plants construction. Plus, energy consumption is growing - no one expects it to freeze. When it puts into a comprehensive analysis – so, China will need a miracle or something to do.
You can find more in my analysis: GHG CO2 emissions - Part 01 China Power production, race to zero analysis;link

I like to talk about exact data, analysis. Opinions are one thing, but the data shows something else. When thinking about such complex things as energy production and distribution, we need to be purely pragmatic and not subject to immediate results, but to look for ways to long-term sustainable solutions.

Ready for a discussion. But especially here we need to use more facts than opinions.

The Climate Shell Game

anticorncob6 at 12:48 PM on 22 March, 2022

You made an excellent case for climate pessimism. I've also been a climate pessimist since 2015; it was the Vox articles "the awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit" and "7 reasons america will fail on climate change" that convinced me.

Like the author of 7 reasons (as well as ~99% of climate pessimists), I would be deeply grateful to anyone who could convince me I'm wrong. Non-pessimists have given me information that we're making progress, and I simply keep pointing out that emissions are still increasing, so what's happening isn't enough. This article does a great job of explaining why those statistics are highly misleading, so I can refer here when I need to without simply repeatedly pointing back to the same fact.

I agree with you on overpopulation, and am infuriated with people who think there's a low birth rate crisis and people need to have more kids. The simple fact is, fewer people means fewer emissions. We certainly could sustain 8 billion people if we chose to live more sustainably, but there's no sign of that happening, so not having children is the best choice. Plus, even if we do collectively wake up about this crisis and act, fewer people will help reach our goals.

Also, am I interpreting you correctly that if all carbon emissions ended right now, we'd still get to 1.7C? If so, where do you get that?

Addressing the Climate Crisis: ~~Evolution or~~ Revolution¹

nigelj at 09:08 AM on 10 March, 2022

OPOF @61

"I suggest that you learn about the SDGs before dismissing them as unachievable or harmful with a misinterpretation that they are just some form of perpetual and sustainable "green growth".

I never dismissed the UN development goals. Never even commented on them. You are absolutely twisting what I said. The UN SDGs are mostly desirable things, but are largely a separate issue from whether green economic growth is possible and sustainable longer term.

My comments were entirely on green growth in a general global sense. You haven't been able to demonstrate that it is plausible longer term. Some of the problems with perpetual green economic growth selected at random:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/green-growth-economic-activity-environment

www.vice.com/en/article/qj4z9p/green-economic-growth-is-a-myth

www.ft.com/content/47b0917c-f523-11e9-a79c-bc9acae3b654

(I dont neceasarily agree with everything in these links but they give the general idea. And I dont promote massive and rapid cuts to consumption because its just not a viable solution. )

And low income countries need to be allowed to grow short to medium term, as I previously stated.

"And Project Drawdown, and the related book Drawdown, provides many evidence-based corrections of 'expert opinion based' misunderstandings about 'modern' food production."

I'm sure it does but you don't indicate anything relevant to what I said. So again, traditional farming systems are less productive than industrial agriculture. This is not controversial or seriously contested. It means a shift to traditional farming would reduce output and levels of gdp growth, although such a shift is still desirable over time for the sake of the environment, and I'm sure ways will be found to deal with the yeilds issue as things are phased in.

"And I say the higher status people need to change their ways of living to be the examples of ways of living that others can aspire to develop towards without the total impacts being unsustainable. And those changed ways do not need to be reduced consumption..."

You appear to be moving the goalposts from high income people "reducing their consumption" to just "changing their consumption" and substituting low carbon products. Or perhaps your previous comment was just shorthand. But we ALL need to do the same regardless of incomes.

"Saying 'things will eventually work out' won't achieve an effective limitation and correction of the harm done."

I never said that. Never even commented on those sorts of issues related to people who over consume or make poor choices. My comments were entirely related to whether green economic growth is viable. However while I agree wealthy people should be leading by example its very difficult to see elected governmnets forcing them in some way.

Addressing the Climate Crisis: ~~Evolution or~~ Revolution¹

Evan at 05:15 AM on 9 March, 2022

OPOF you write, "I applaud your long term efforts regarding the lifestyle example you are trying to set."

I can't figure out how to live sustainably. Sure, within my family I am considered to have a green conscience, but nothing I do makes my life sustainable. Most of us are not producing "percentages" more GHG emissions than we should, but rather orders of magnitude more GHG emissions than we should. But I keep trying. The best I can come with is that a person should strive to do more good than harm, however they internalize that.

If we build our house, my goal is to show that we can consume less and live a meaningful, fulfilled life. But it means focusing on fewer activities. We wanted to install solar+geothermal HVAC, but with the high costs now, we can barely afford the house as it is, and so the solar will be delayed. My thought is that it is better to prioritize money on things that reduce energy consumption (such as geothermal HVAC) than things that produce energy.

I broadly agree with all your wrote OPOF, and would only add that I think we will make inroads if we prioritize items that have a dual purpose of reducing GHG emission while buiding resiliency. EVs are an easy sell today when gas has spiked. Solar panels are an easy sell in terms of energy independence, to some degree. But I am not hopeful messaging to wealthy people to reduce their lifestyle. Wealth is intoxicating, and there is likely a reason these people are wealthy in the first place. I have no desire to pursue wealth. Other people desire wealth, power, status, etc. It will be a hard sell to convince them to change.

Kind of like teaching a cat to not chase mice. :-)

Addressing the Climate Crisis: ~~Evolution or~~ Revolution¹

Eclectic at 09:35 AM on 7 March, 2022

Michael Sweet @20 : Quite right, the hydrocarbons are a wicked problem. The FF hydrocarbons have their 84% of total energy because they are cheap and very convenient (plus legacy low-technology).

As you say, crops grown specifically for biodiesel/gasoline are unjustifiable.

Yet there may be room for biological waste material to be fermented and/or hi-tech enzymatically converted into suitable fuels. I haven't followed the latest developments ~ last I heard, some pilot plants could produce "oil" at $200 per barrel. Even allowing for initial enthusiastic hype . . . how practical & economic would it be to scale up such processes? OTOH, hi-tech CO2 capture & conversion may have a place in the middling future, when the world is really awash in superfluous solar (PV) energy. We can hope !

As you know, the liquid hydrocarbon fuels are so very useful in many small areas, where their compactness, light weight, easy storage, and overall convenience give them a big tick of approval. And even in 50 years' time, the hydrocarbons will still be on target for "large niche" areas of aircraft and shipping and heavy machinery.

The (renewable) hydrocarbons will become a luxury fuel at a luxury price. At twice or more the current price, they will still be affordable when viewed against the overall costs of ships, jetplanes, etcetera.

The short-term political problem remains . . . e.g. my brother-in-law almost faints when gasoline goes up 10 cents. Quite irrational : but it's a widespread emotional response . . . and which affects votes.

2022 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #7

Eclectic at 16:47 PM on 27 February, 2022

Santalives @25 , I note that you still haven't played any valid card.

As for the energetic Rud Istvan, you are mistaken. He appears in many threads, often more than once, at WUWT. He doen't need to explain everything, every time over, to you. He often has something sensible to say (in contradistinction to perhaps 85% of the run-of-the-mill WUWT commenters).

True, he's not a scientist nor a climate scientist. He's more the case of an intelligent guy who's allowed himself to be torpedoed by his own emotions that are producing a bunch of motivated reasonings. Sad. But he's always worth reading, because he can come out with some useful information or some contrarian points worthy of consideration (if only briefly ! )

# Yes, Santalives, WUWT is not quite a complete wasteland of cranks, conspiracist nutters, and luny political extremists. It is possible to learn a bit at WUWT ~ but you have to start with a solid knowledge of science, so you can immediately spot the all the garbage and faulty logic and self-delusion which so many WUWT regulars keep recycling day after day and year after year. So, Santalives, it wouldn't be genuinely useful to you in the slightest. Sorry. The WUWT site is a disorganized mess, and a hopeless case for educating the novice.

For myself reading WUWT , I have a quick skim through the Leading Articles (which are mostly a lot of sour grapes, designed to generate clicks). Anything looking like it might be a bit scientific [though mostly these ones are recycled trash] . . . then I skim through the comments columns ~ trying not to read all the nauseating rubbish comments, and I look for the tiny number of regulars' names who might just be worth a consideration. So scanning through is usually only taking a brief time !

Santalives, if you want to educate yourself above the know-nothing level, then you'll need to do the bulk of the heavy lifting yourself. Start at your zero level (where you seem incapable of judging good from bad) and take one step at a time. You cannot expect me or Rud Istvan to spend umpteen hours spoonfeeding you. Especially when you are giving out a strong vibe that you are reluctant to learn . . . and reluctant to accept that anyone (scientist or denialist) knows more than you.

Good luck in improving yourself !

SkS Analogy 1 - Speed Kills: How fast can we slow down?

Evan at 21:42 PM on 20 February, 2022

Santalives you ask "... is there a problem here?"

Coming out of the last ice-age cycle temperature rose 5C, causing a sea-level rise of 400'. Temperatures have already risen 1.2C and there is enough carbon in the atmosphere, already, to take us to 1.7C. There is over 200' of sea-level rise locked up in the world's ice.

We know that ice melts when it gets warmer and scientists are witnessind destabilization of the big ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.

More carbon -> higher temperatures -> more ice melting -> higher sea-level rise -> problem

This is just one of many problems.

SkS Analogy 1 - Speed Kills: How fast can we slow down?

nigelj at 11:12 AM on 16 February, 2022

Thank's Evan. Imo those are very realistic, well grounded comments and good advice.

Mitigatating the climate problem is also made difficult by the issue discussed here: "Humans Wired to Respond to Short-Term Problems Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert argues that humans are exquisitely adapted to respond to immediate problems, such as terrorism, but not so good at more probable, but distant dangers, like global warming."

The ideas seem convincing to me. Not sure what the solution to that is, and sorry for being a bit doomy, but people will generally support things with cost advantages and multiple immediate advantages beyond just mitigating climate change, and solar power, wind power and improving affordability of EV's and PHEV's all have such characteristics. While we should solve the climate problem for noble reasons, the almighty $ seems to be the thing driving the most observable actual changes.

SkS Analogy 1 - Speed Kills: How fast is too fast?

One Planet Only Forever at 13:28 PM on 9 February, 2022

This comment includes some repetition, but here are my thoughts, as an ethical engineer, regarding the ‘speed’ of ‘sea level rise’.

I started reading Chapter 13 of the IPCC AR5 WG2 Report hoping to find a reasonable indication of the amount of sea level rise that is likely per degree C of global warming impact. There are many complications, not the least of which is how long the temperature remains warmer after human activity impacts stop causing increased GHG concentrations.

Chapter 13 includes the following: “For the period 2081–2100, compared to 1986–2005, global mean sea level rise is likely (medium confidence) to be in the 5 to 95% range of projections from process-based models, which give 0.26 to 0.55 m for RCP2.6”. And there would be additional sea level rise after 2100 in RCP2.6. Chapter 13 also provides the following low end estimate of future sea level rise: “The few available process-based models that go beyond 2100 indicate global mean sea level rise above the pre-industrial level to be less than 1 m by 2300 for greenhouse gas concentrations that peak and decline and remain below 500 ppm CO2-eq, as in scenario RCP2.6.”

That leads to understanding that there is a significant lack of certainty regarding the consequences of human climate change impacts. But the low end of possible impacts is significant, especially the uncertainty regarding the end magnitude of the climate change impacts. That means there is currently significant uncertainty regarding what the final changes that have to be adapted to will be when humans stop causing accumulating climate change impacts.

As an engineer I, and hopefully other engineers, would take the position that actions causing highly uncertain risk of harm should not be continued, and should be rapidly decreased, ideally being stopped immediately. Continuing or increasing the activities that are producing the understandably harmful accumulating impacts would not be allowed by responsibly engineers until the uncertainties are significantly reduced. That is the ethical position to take when faced with high uncertainty regarding the need to ensure that there is an acceptably low chance of harmful results.

From an responsible ethical engineer’s perspective, even if a structure is built and being used, as soon as the potential risk of a significant harmful result is identified the responsible thing to do is to stop using the structure until the risk of harm is reduced to an acceptable low level. A common safety level for structure design codes is to have less than a 2% chance of a harmful result.

Returning to the Chapter 13 point above, the sea level rise for 5% chance of harm is 0.55 m by 2100 in RCP2.6 with more rise occurring after 2100. Designing seafront developments, and revising existing ones, to have a 98% chance of adequate performance in 2100 would need to be based on more than 0.55 m rise in RCP2.6. And a higher sea level rise would be the required basis for features that are hoped to be sustainable past 2100. And even more sea level rise would need to be the basis if a scenario of higher impact than RCP2.6 occurs.

Going back to the ethical considerations, the beneficiaries of the harmful activities in the current generation have an ethical obligation to ensure that there is only a very small chance that Others, especially future generations, have to expend their effort adapting to climate change impacts they did not significantly benefit from the creation of. And the people benefiting cannot be trusted to do the evaluation of the risk and magnitude of harm done.

Given the significant uncertainties of the harm being done by climate change impacts, a significant amount of ‘corrective action’ is required from those who benefit(ed) most from the harm being done. And that corrective action includes rapidly reducing how much they benefit from the harmful activity. And ‘self interest’ would powerfully motivate the beneficiaries of the harmful action to incorrectly evaluate the risk and magnitude of harm done.

And, regarding the adaptations that current humans should be making to reduce the harmful need for future adaptation, the ethical understanding is that it is harmful for current day people to benefit from living in ways that future generations cannot continue, with the related ethical understanding that requiring future generations to adapt to future changes, which is a distraction from pursuing sustainable improvements, is harmful to them.

The development of sustainable improvements for the future of humanity requires a reasonable certainty of the maximum magnitude of climate change impacts, not just a slower rate of change. A massive amount of human development, especially things like food production in the Bangladesh delta region, is at risk of harmful impact from sea level rise. And some of it is already seriously harmed by the 0.3 m sea level rise that has occurred over the past 100 years.

Also, it is important to note that there are other harmful impacts of climate change that deserve consideration. The discussion of sea level rise should be clarified to be only one of many harmful impacts of climate change. Believing it is possible for future generations to ‘deal with’ 0.3 m sea level rise every 100 years is incorrect by itself. When all the other harmful impacts of climate change are considered, the acceptability of far lower rates of climate change being imposed on future generations can be understood to be unacceptable.
............
So, the concern about sea level rise is far more than a concern about the rate of change. Admittedly, if the rate of change due to human action was less than 0.3 m in 1000 years it could be argued that rebuilding or adapting human development could potentially be expected to ‘keep pace’. But even that ‘ability to adapt’ has to come with an admission that some things that could last for 1000 years or more would be ruined by the human caused sea level rise. It also has to be admitted that ‘accepting human imposed sea level rise, or other climate change impacts’ also requires the admission of the need for current day humans to rapidly transition to sustainable ways of living, including revision of things that have already been developed in order for them to be sustainable.

Without rapid transition to sustainable development, seaside developments would have to be rebuilt constantly, a major distraction from sustainable development efforts. That would be more than just replacing buildings. It would include completely relocating developed areas and features like sewage collection and treatment systems.

That understanding leads to an engineering solution I am fond of pointing out. If someone asks how they can build a resort area in the mountains to survive potential avalanches, the answer is to not develop anything in areas of the mountains that are prone to avalanches, or to restrict development in avalanche prone regions of the mountains to minor easily rebuilt stuff for short-term use, like day-use. And the related climate change issue is changes of avalanche potential due to climate change. The more rapid and more significant the climate change is likely to be the more restrictions there should be on development in mountain areas. When there is less certainty regarding changes of avalanche risk (uncertainty of the rate of change of risk, or a rapid rate of change, or uncertainty about the ultimate maximum magnitude of change of risk when the human induced climate change is stopped), or uncertainty regarding the actual changes of avalanche risk due to a certain amount of climate change impact, then human development needs to be kept out of larger areas of mountain regions. And already built human developments need to be removed from that larger area.

Considerations of human caused sea level rise leads to similar thinking, recommendations and restrictions for seafront development. Without certainty regarding the peak climate change impacts, seafront regions should be planned to be abandoned. Human development should be kept well back from seafronts and also be kept out of low lying regions that would be subject to future flooding by sea level rise. Those areas should be restricted to temporary development for short-term use. Restricting the seafronts to day-use only would also reduce the risk of storm harm to humans. There would be less need for mass evacuations on short notice. And Project Drawdown led by Paul Hawken and Amanda Joy Ravenhill, and other sources, mention other benefits of undeveloping and rewilding seafront regions.

But the more challenging aspect of the sea level rise or avalanche risk issues, more challenging than revisions of what humans build, is the impacts on more essential human development like food production in river delta regions. That is a ‘more essential’ use of a region that is at risk of being less able to be adapted to suit the regional climate change impacts. A critical understanding is the importance of the need to protect the sustainability of the ‘diversity of regional environments that humans essentially require’ from human climate change impacts. And it leads to the awareness that all harmful human impacts on the environment are a concern because humans can only be certain to survive if they are ‘part of the diversity of life on this amazing planet’. Technology can help. But the environment is essential. And the diversity of life needs a reasonably stable environment, an environment that is not rapidly or significantly changed by human activity.

The UNEP 2022: Emergency mode for the environment, published January 6, 2022, identifies the “... enduring crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste.” That is far more than climate change. And it all matters, not just climate change.

It is also essential to be aware that the climate change concern is not restricted to sea level rise. There are many different harmful impacts of climate change, not just sea level rise (or changes to avalanche risk).

In closing, developing a sustainable and improving future for humanity does not just mean reducing the rate of climate change impacts. It also requires more than ending climate change impacts. More than Net-Zero by 2050 is required. Limiting the magnitude of the peak impact is key. So ‘slowing down the rate of harm done as rapidly as possible’ is better than ‘going slower on the slowing down of harmful impacts in the unethical hope that more rapid slowing down will be done by Others in the future’. And it is even less ethical to believe and claim that future generations will be able to deal with whatever gets imposed on them.

Post closing: Drawing down CO2 levels to 350 ppm ‘even if drawing down CO2 levels is unpopular or not profitable’ would also be an ethical thing to do. And it is easier to do if the peak climate change impact is smaller.

SkS Analogy 1 - Speed Kills: How fast are we going?

One Planet Only Forever at 08:17 AM on 3 February, 2022

Evan @10

That presentation of thoughts is indeed aligned with my current thinking, which I openly admit is ‘not the norm’, and which is open to improvement.

The following may be more than needs to be presented as further clarification. It should not change your understanding. But it leads to other thoughts related to nigelj’s point @8 and your comment @9 about the magnitude of impacts that are presented in the newer version of the SkS Analogy 1. I plan to make comments about that there.

The basis for my thoughts is what I would call ‘idealized ethics’. My thinking is based on Professional Engineering Ethics which are fairly thoroughly presented in the APEGA Guideline for Ethical Practice, supplemented significantly by the more fundamental ethical considerations developed and shared by Derek Parfit in his effort to develop a secular understanding of ethics that he presented in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons (and lots of other ethics related reading – including the basis for the Sustainable Development Goals).

I would clarify ‘idealized ethics’ to be: An ideal governing objective for human thoughts and actions in order to develop sustainable improving conditions for the diversity of humanity and its diversity of civilizations living as sustainable parts of the robust diversity of life on this planet now and into the distant future. That understandably includes the correction of harmful developed systems and activity and making amends for the harm done.

And I would currently briefly express the best way to achieve that ‘ideal objective’ as: Pursuing increased awareness and improved understanding in order to constantly learn to: Do No Harm and Help Others, especially helping those who have been or are being harmed.

I consider the ‘current norm’ discussions of ethics and related ‘development and application of rule of law’ (and the history of ethics and rule of law discussion) to have been harmfully compromised by the developed systems or ‘games of pursuit of personal benefit and perceptions of superiority relative to Others’. That competition can lead people to evaluate the Greater Good for current living humans without proper consideration of future humans (refer to the ways that people like Lord Monckton tried to justify more harm being done to future generations by significantly discounting, and underestimating, the future harm), and with harm being done to portions of the current population (see the ways that many people try to argue against ‘the more fortunate being obliged to help the less fortunate’). And the harm being done is also poorly justified, including claims that the perceived benefits obtained by those who benefit outweigh the perceptions they have of the harm done. The people who benefit most from the harmful activity can also be seen to misleadingly claim that people who are harmed are also benefiting so it is All is for the Greater Good (from the perspective of the people who benefit the most).

A key Ethical understanding is that Do No Harm means that no Person is to be ‘net-harmed’ by an action. Medical ethics are a clear example of that understanding.

Also note that future humans, and many less fortunate current day humans, have little or no influence. They lack legal standing, cannot vote, and cannot effectively question or challenge what is being done that alters the conditions or environment that the people being harmed have to deal with.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

sekwisniewski at 07:19 AM on 19 December, 2021

michael sweet wrote @280:

The paper you linked is an attempt by the nuclear industry to get certified as green.

The report was authored by 16 scientists working for the Joint Research Centre (JRC), which is the European Commission's in-house science and knowledge service. It lists references at the end of each section. How did the nuclear industry manipulated the conclusions of this report?

It's albedo

blaisct at 05:08 AM on 15 December, 2021

Once again thanks for your comment (MA Rodger and the editor) and the additional papers on the subject. I will try to do better with the links.

The earlier data I was referring to was earthshine 10 years and CERES 10 years which showed that the data for the earths albedo was very noisy and flat. The flat part was what was expected for anthropogenic greenhouse gas , AGH, global warming. My initial understanding of AGH radiative forcing was that AGHs absorbed radiation (got hot) and that the higher the AGH concentration (at constant radiation) the more heat it could hold back thus the temperature would increase but the energy in vs out of the zone where this occurred would be the same (albedo would be flat). My understanding has been expanded to include: AGHs hotter temperature will reduce humidity and thus reduce cloud cover, expose more earth surface to the sun thus reduce earths albedo; therefor, albedo vs time for AGHs may not be flat.
The new (new to me) data I sited Earthshine 20 years showed a decrease albedo from both earthshine and CERES data – my only interest is this report was the agreement with earthshine an CERES data. The editor’s link CERES 20 years 1 and another link CERES 20 years 2 provided a lot more CERES data with different analyses. These three papers are the first time I have seen data showing a decrease in albedo (increase in TOA radiation) vs time. If all climate change was due to AGHs this graph would be flat. Using the CERES 20 years 2 graph for TOA radiation out. (of the three links I chose this one because it has the In Situ data (earth surface temperature)) one can see the good correlation between In Situ data and CERES data

Figure 1
“Comparison of overlapping one-year estimates at 6-month intervals of net top-of-the-atmosphere annual energy flux from the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System Energy Balanced and Filled Ed4.1 product (solid red line) and an in situ observational estimate of uptake of energy by Earth climate system (solid blue line). Dashed lines correspond to least squares linear regression fits to the data.”

. If there was any AGH global warming mixed In with the TOA (red) data it would have a slope lower than the In Situ data. The report CERES 20 years 1 did look for the AGH flat line signal and found it in the “Clear Sky” LW (long wave) data but nowhere else (1 of four graphs).
Two of these reports put a lot of emphasis on clouds decrease (new to me). (Decrease in cloud cover increased surface exposure to suns radiation and heats the earth more.) The report CERES 20 years 2 also found correlation to Water vapor, trace gases, surface albedo, as well as clouds. Both of these reports express doubts on the current understanding of climate change and make recommendation to further understand what is causing cloud cover to change.
While this new data is interesting and worth following up on it is still very noisy (low R^2) and another 20 years would be better.

I recognize that AGH global warming would promote other forcing including reduce clouds, reduced ice, reduced snow cover all exposing more surface to direct rays of the sun. Other man-made albedo changes can do the same thing. Here are two examples that may relate to the new papers.
Let’s start with the “heat island effect”, UHI. While the global warming from UHI’s lower albedo is small it does have observable effect on cloud formation, CERES 20 years 2.

“Figure 3
Attribution of Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System net top-of-atmosphere flux trends for 2002/09–2020/03. Shown are trends due to changes in (a) clouds, (b) surface, (c) temperature, (d) combined contributions from trace gases and solar irradiance (labeled as “Other”), (e) water vapor, and (f) aerosols. Positive trends correspond to heat gain and negative to loss. Stippled areas fall outside the 5%–95% confidence interval. Numbers in parentheses correspond to global trends and 5%–95% confidence intervals in W m−2 decade−1.”

When air rises from a UHI it is hotter than the incoming air without a source of moisture to saturate it; so, it leaves as dryer air. This air generally rises and moves to the east. Look at figure 3 (a) and see the lower cloud formation change off the coast of east USA, Tokyo, and downwind Europe. With time (1880-2021) the UHI does not get hotter but it gets bigger thus the volume of low moisture air gets bigger. I am not going to argue the significances of the albedo part of UHI other than to recognize it is lower than 1 W/m^2 but not zero. What UHI is not given credit for is what happens downwind to this hotter low humidity air. Does it cool the ocean, reduce the snow line, melt ice, or reduce the cloud cover down wind, since this hot dry air should rise the clouds should be the first target. I can also see a chain of events: Hot low moisture air (from AGHs, UHIs, or other land changes) rises and go downwind, reduces cloud cover, over water the sun heats the ocean, the hotter ocean currents circulate to the poles, and melt some ice.
I’ll leave the quantification of this observable (figure 3 (a)) new (to me) correlation to others. A new UHI contribution to GW will be the albedo effect + the lower cloud effect + any other.

Second, is land use changes such as forest to crop or pasture land or grass land to crop land. Albedo decrease in grass land to crop land change is documented in Grass to Crops. Forest to crop land change increase in albedo is documented in Forest to Crops. Over 205 years the paper Global albedo study calculates that all the pluses and minuses add up to little change in albedo from land use changes. It is assumed (by me) that decreased albedo of a parcel of land means an increase in temperature and vs/vs. The study Amazonia Forest to Crops shows that increasing albedo does not always mean cooler temps. This report shows that when rain forest was replaced with crop land that the temperature increased, the rain decreased, and the cloud cover decreased. The Figure 3 (e) above shows bright red spot for “water vapor” (I assume that is change to lower humidity) in Amazonia. This is not an uncommon effect from replacing forest with crop or pasture land. The report Forest study observes that forests vs crop/pasture conversion gets warmer as the conversion gets south of 35’N latitude.

This unintuitive (to me) observation that an increase in albedo does not always result in a decrease in temperature can be explained by moisture. The resulting temperature depends on a constant enthalpy (total heat in the air= gases + moisture). Enthalpy is usually determined by the albedo (higher albedo lower enthalpy vs/vs); therefore, land exposed to the same albedo (enthalpy) can have a wide range of temperatures depending on the moisture (relative humidity) of the albedo (enthalpy). This relationship has been captured in a psychrometric chart,

(Sorry for the poor quality of this chart)
Example of a rain forest conversion to crop land: Start out with a rain forest at 25’C (bottom scale) go straight up to 90% humidity curve; this is our hot humid rain forest. If we convert this rain forest to crop land with a higher albedo, we move to a lower enthalpy line (anyone will do). The constant enthalpy line run diagonal (upper left to lower right). If the moisture is maintained at 90% the temperature will drop as expected for the higher albedo. Following the same enthalpy line (same albedo) go to a lower humidity curve that may result (and does in Amazonia) and one will see the temperature will increase (even to above the starting rainforest temperature at very low humidity).
A concern is how NASA and the IPCC pair surface temperature data with relative humidity and albedo. The three all connected in enthalpy. A misunderstanding of climate change could occur if Amazonian (rain forest to crop land) high albedo, high temperature, lower humidity type data was included in correlations with Canadian (forest to crop land) lower albedo, cooler temperatures, high humidity, type data. Does anyone know if this has been looked at? The report CERES 20 years 1 has looked at ocean enthalpy correlations. I have not seen any land enthalpy data.

Solar and crop production research shows ‘multi-solving’ climate benefits

swampfoxh at 05:14 AM on 9 December, 2021

nigelj

The 5.6 grams of fat per 100g of "rabbit" is a value arrived at by the rabbit-raising industry. The location of the majority of this "fat" is the rabbit's brain, which is not likely to be served to humans as "food". Yes, I think it unlikely that First World countries would "do a lot of rabbit", but these critters are still "rodentia", and unlikely to gain any more market value than they ever have in First World countries. Still, the risk of protein poisoning from rabbit meat is a caution most nutritionists voice. This might mean rabbits are best left as the nuisance in nature, they and their relatives, the rats, have been since the dawn of civilization.

Since I don't have time, at present, to go out and look for the peer reviewed source you and SkepSci require for conducting dialog on this site, I withdraw my allegations as "un-evidenced".

Regards,

Swampy

It's the sun

HK at 06:44 AM on 10 November, 2021

My point in #1292 was that the 0.5 W/m² of forcing from clouds and snow/ice is small compared to the overall net forcing over the last 150 years or so and that the albedo change brought up by you is at least partly a direct consequence of the warming, i.e., one of the positive feedbacks.

However, I will admit that clouds and humidity are complex and can be influenced by other factors in addition to the direct result of man-made greenhouse gases. Desertification and deforestation in general and especially cutting down tropical rainforests can have a profound impact on the local hydrological cycle, changing humidity, cloud cover, rainfall and run-off and thus have an impact on the local temperature as well. So yes, man-made climate change isn't only about the greenhouse effect and the warming caused by it, but it's definitely the most important part of it on a global scale.
It's also worth noting that even if the relative humidity seems to have decreased somewhat for the reasons explained here, the absolute or specific humidity has in fact increased, just as expected in a warming world.

Specific humidity

Water has an impact on the temperature not only via its removal of latent heat through evaporation – which has a local cooling impact – but also through its warming impact via its strong greenhouse effect, which is the most important of all the positive (amplifying) feedbacks on a global scale.

The Keeling Curve: Part I

Taurus at 13:20 PM on 2 November, 2021

Well AGW advocates, I'm back! But don't worry, I'm not here to challenge the wisdom of the infallible "experts". I just want to let you know there is no way the USA can possibly come even close to meeting the financial commitment to the "climate change" cause that the Democratic Party has supported for over a decade. At the COP26 summit now in progress in Glasgow, Scotland, it seems that Joe Biden has lost much credibility among the AGW community for lack of action on certain items promised by Obama in the Paris Agreement. This is because most Americans know full-well what Biden is up to in his "infra-structure" package, and our Congress persons aren't falling for it. In fact, we knew what he stood for well before the election, which is why it took the most massive election fraud in history to put him in office.

Aside from the climate change issue, however, there is another "crisis" in progess for which Biden is spending trillions of dollars, and that is the COVID 19 "pandemic". With what is being spent on vaccines that are neither safe nor effective and making them mandatory for more and more people as a condition for holding their jobs, our economy is sinking already. I'm afraid this is one time the AGW community will need to find funding resources other than generous "Uncle Sam". Otherwise, I guess we all roast!

It's albedo

MA Rodger at 20:51 PM on 11 September, 2021

coolmaster & Bob Loblaw,

While we have been blathering about the efficacy of coolmaster's grand scheme, somebody has snuck in and done it!!! And not just 'done it' but done it twice, more than twice. And all since, what was it, 1900hrs yesterday?

Diverting 1,335 cu km water onto land? According to AQUASTAT, they have managed to divert over 300 cu km water into reservoir evaporation and a further 2,700 cu km water diverted onto farmland. And more impressive still - the farms will be also delivering much more produce because they have this water resource available.

So all we need to do now is sit back and watch the global temperatures tumble year-on-year. And if we have time, perhaps digging out the scarves and woolly hats would be an idea. According to coolmaster's calculation method, this cooling will be three-times faster than the warming of AGW :)

AQUASTAT annual global water withdrawal

Can Hydrogen Fuel Power the Planet?

Jan van Dalfsen 1 at 01:54 AM on 27 August, 2021

The engineer Rosie Barnes said they could burn H2 which could be useful for aircraft, but what about its use in fuel cells where electricity is produced without burning Hydrogen. Fuel cells simply reverse the electrolysis that produced the green hydrogen. Fuel cells produce electicity without wasting energy producing heat as well as electricity. I agree with the video that the best thing is to produce electricity as close as possible to where it is to be used. However, for industries with a high electricity appetite green hydrogen can be efficiently and safely transported as NH3 which doesn't take up anyway near as much space as H2. That would be useful for providing energy to factories requiring a higher concentration of energy than they can produce in the limited space they have at the factory. My first worry is that H2 is so small a molecule it could easily leak little by little. Eventually what effect is all that extra H2 going to have in the upper atmosphere? My second worry is that the distinction between blue hydrogen and green hydrogen might get blurred in practice. Thirdly, some natural gas miners like Twiggy Forrest promise to implement a plan to eventually transition to using green hydrogen in their natural gas facilities. They say that the facilities they are building for the natural gas they have rights to now so that these facilities can later be transitioned to using green hydrogen. Even with his marine ecology doctorate, if Twiggy Forrest is mining lots of natural gas, when does he switch to using his facilities for green hydrogen instead of using the natural gas, especially if he still has an abundant supply of natural gas? Is the promise of transitioning to green hydrogen a type of green washing of natural gas mining?

Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans

Daniel Bailey at 07:53 AM on 13 August, 2021

Here's what the peer-reviewed published literature shows, that humans produce 100x more CO2 than all Earth's volcanoes combined:

- Just two-one thousandths* of 1% of Earth's total carbon—about 43,500 gigatonnes (Gt)—is above surface in the oceans, on land, and in the atmosphere. The rest is subsurface, including the crust, mantle and core—an estimated 1.85 billion Gt in all.

- CO2 out-gassed to the atmosphere and oceans today from volcanoes and other magmatically active regions is estimated at 280 to 360 million tonnes (0.28 to 0.36 Gt) per year, including that released into the oceans from mid-ocean ridges.

- Humanity’s annual carbon emissions through the burning of fossil fuels and forests, etc., are 40 to 100 times greater than all volcanic emissions.

- Earth’s deep carbon cycle through deep time reveals balanced, long-term stability of atmospheric CO2, punctuated by large disturbances, including immense, catastrophic releases of magma that occurred at least five times in the past 500 million years. During these events, huge volumes of carbon were outgassed, leading to a warmer atmosphere, acidified oceans, and mass extinctions.

- Similarly, a giant meteor impact 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub bolide strike on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, released between 425 and 1,400 Gt of CO2, rapidly warmed the planet and coincided with the mass (>75%) extinction of plants and animals—including the dinosaurs. Over the past 100 years, emissions from anthropogenic activities such as burning fossil fuels have been 40 to 100 times greater than our planet’s geologic carbon emissions.

- A shift in the composition of volcanic gases from smelly (akin to burnt matches) sulphur dioxide (SO2) to a gas richer in odorless, colorless CO2 can be sniffed out by monitoring stations or drones to forewarn of an eruption—sometimes hours, sometimes months in advance. Eruption early warning systems with real-time monitoring are moving ahead to exploit the CO2 to SO2 ratio discovery, first recognized with certainty in 2014.

Regarding the release of CO2 from volcanoes:

"Earth’s total annual out-gassing of CO2 via volcanoes and through other geological processes such as the heating of limestone in mountain belts is newly estimated at roughly 300 to 400 million metric tonnes (0.3 to 0.4 Gt).

Volcanoes and volcanic regions alone outgas an estimated 280–360 million tonnes (0.28 to 0.36 Gt) of CO2 per year. This includes the CO2 contribution from active volcanic vents, from the diffuse, widespread release of CO2 through soils, faults, and fractures in volcanic regions, volcanic lakes, and from the mid-ocean ridge system."

https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-produce-100x-more-co2-than-all-volcanoes-combined
https://deepcarbon.net/scientists-quantify-global-volcanic-co2-venting-estimate-total-carbon-earth
http://elementsmagazine.org/past-issues/catastrophic-perturbations-deep-carbon-cycle/

Kelemen and Manning 2015 - Reevaluating carbon fluxes in subduction zones, what goes down, mostly comes up

de Moor et al 2016 - Short-period volcanic gas precursors to phreatic eruptions: Insights from Poás Volcano, Costa Rica

McCormick et al 2016 - Observing eruptions of gas-rich, compressible magmas from space

Johansson et al 2018 - The Interplay Between the Eruption and Weathering of Large Igneous Provinces and the Deep‐Time Carbon Cycle

Tamburello et al 2018 - Global-scale control of extensional tectonics on CO2 earth degassing

Lee et al 2019 - A Framework for Understanding Whole-Earth Carbon Cycling

Black and Gibson 2019 - Deep Carbon and the Life Cycle of Large Igneous Provinces

Kamber and Petrus 2019 - The Influence of Large Bolide Impacts on Earth’s Carbon Cycle

"pCO2 is a result of the balance between the rate of CO2 inputs through magmatic/metamorphic degassing and the rates of carbon removal via silicate weathering and organic carbon burial."

McKenzie and Hehe Jiang 2019 - Earth’s Outgassing and Climatic Transitions_The Slow Burn Towards Environmental Catastrophes

Mikhail and Furi 2019 - On the Origins and Evolution of Earth’s Carbon

Schobben et al 2019 - Interpreting the Carbon Isotope Record of Mass Extinctions

Suarez et al 2019 - Earth Catastrophes and Their Impact on the Carbon Cycle

Werner et al 2019 - Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Subaerial Volcanic Regions_Two Decades in Review

"All studies to date of global volcanic carbon dioxide emissions indicate that present-day subaerial and submarine volcanoes release less than a percent of the carbon dioxide released currently by human activities. "

https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp/gas_climate.html

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 02:38 AM on 5 August, 2021

Engineer Poet:

You are having trouble with the moderators. SkS wants to encourage people to discuss nuclear power. I have some suggestions for you to improve your relationship with the mods.

1) At 255 the moderator does not want exchanges of opinion. At Skeptical Science you have to provide references to support your position. You need references for every assertion you make.

2) At 261 there are several issues. The moderators do not want repetition. You have only linked two papers and you linked one of them twice. The conversation on LRNT is now completely repetitious. Once you and I have had our says move on to another topic.

3) Sloganeering is making assertions without supporting documents. You need to provide links to information supporting all your claims. You have made many claims with only two references, both about LRNT.

4) Your posting style is very hostile. Try not to be argumentative. Hostile posts invite hostile replies and make the conversation degrade. The forced variations thread at Real Climate has more posts insulting other posters than posts with real contributions. That is not allowed at SkS.

Your posts are long. That makes it more likely that you will say something that the mods don't like. Try to make your posts only two or three paragraphs long.

Keep each post to a single topic, like LRNT or power plant locations. Only discuss one or two topics at a time. After that topic is exhausted move on to the next topic. When too many topics are discussed at once none get resolved. My last post discusses 5 topics in reply to you. It is hard to read and no topic is covered in detail.

Upthread poster Ritchieb1234 and I had a long, thoughtful conversation. That shows it is possible to discuss nuclear power. He did not cite as many links as SkS likes, but his extraordinary experience made up for that. He posted on one topic at a time. Normal people like you and I have to cite sources.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

Engineer-Poet at 11:18 AM on 4 August, 2021

Michael Sweet @265:

You are wasting your time talking about radiation safety.

Oh, I don't know. Putting your intransigence out there for all to see has value.

My experience is that people who do not like nuclear recognize that the scientific consensus is LRNT.

How much of said "consensus" is from people in the "radiation protection" business—in other words, people with an interest in maintaining and ever-tightening the rules so they can make money from "minimization"? Meanwhile, health physics deals with the REAL world, and workers at university research reactors routinely take many times the dose allowed at commercial nuclear plants, yet suffer no ill effects. Why is this allowed? It's because research reactors are not competing with the fossil fuel industry; nuclear electric plants do. Evidence-based radiation standards would seriously reduce the operating and maintenance cost of nuclear electric plants, and applying the same radiation standards to fossil fuels would require things like the handling of radium-rich petroleum well pipe scale as radwaste with all the same protection standards as at nuclear plants. Such cost shifts might even get people to build more nuclear and use less fossil.

There is a LOT of uranium in the ground, and the decay chain of U-238 produces Ra-226 and Rn-222. A lot of this uranium chemically deposits in the same strata which host coal, oil and gas, which is why natural gas from the Marcellus shale is so high in radon. Gas stoves dump the radon straight into the air people breathe. I don't see any major "environmental" organizations demanding protection from that,do you?

People who are avid supporters of nuclear, like you, do not care how many people nuclear power kills

That's libelous. I used to spend 2 weeks a year mere miles from a Generation I nuclear power plant, and the rest of the year not too far from a university research reactor. Neither ever killed ANYONE. Both are gone now, with only the casks storing the used fuel showing the former was ever there (I don't know about the latter). I now live year-round mere miles from this "danger". Do I sound like I don't care about lives? It's MY life on the line here. I walk the walk.

Know what I'd love? I'd love a new nuclear plant on the site of the old one, causing people with radiophobia to stay away and not buy homes here. It would reduce my property value and thus my property taxes. Pay less money for the same or better quality of life (less crowding and cleaner air)? Sign me up!

and cherry pick their references to the few scientists who disagree with the consensus.

Science is not determined by consensus. It's determined by evidence, and anyone who will not look at the evidence has no business calling themselves a scientist. The evidence is on the side of Calibrese. Those opposed are not scientists, whatever degrees they hold or what they call themselves.

We are all familiar with the scientific deniers of climate change. Citing the few outliers of the LRNT consensus does not prove your point. The National Academy of Science strongly backs LRNT.

The acronym is "LNT", and the NAS shows every sign of having been captured by special interests. Fossil-fuel interests are notoriously wealthy.

As you pointed out, dissenters of the consensus were allowed on the committee.

But not allowed a voice. Calabrese has published many papers on radiation hormesis and the errors in LNT. None of those objections made it into the BEIR VII section on radiation hormesis, and yes I read it from end to end. What does this mean? (lemme try list tags here)

The BEIR VII report reflects a majority view, not a consensus view and certainly not a view of the actual range of opinion in the field.

The majority view is subject to capture by various interests, especially wealthy ones.

Those interests are overwhelmingly benefitted by fossil fuels.

You need to acknowledge this. (love it, list tags rock)

Reviewing this thread I notice that opponents of nuclear power have never raised the issue of low level exposure to radiation as a reason not to build out nuclear.

That's implicit in the use of LNT to oppose nuclear energy.

It is raised by nuclear supporters.

Because we see no detectable increase in morbidity or mortality due to small increases in radiation; on the contrary, the evidence supports hormesis (when you can extend the median lifespan of rats from 460 to 600 days by irradiating them with gamma rays, it very likely has the same effect in all mammals including humans). We do see increases in morbidity and mortality with increases of criteria air pollutants and things like PM 2.5, neither of which are produced by nuclear energy. So why are you raising these issues? It's enough to make anyone think you're doing it in bad faith.

1) Nuclear plants are not economic. They cost too much to build.

France proved otherwise; France has some of the cheapest and cleanest electric power in Europe, while "renewable" Germany has some of the most expensive and continues to burn lignite. The way you make nuclear power cheaply is the same way you make automobiles cheaply: series production of stanard units. That's what France did in the 80's. That is not what France is doing now, which is why Flamanville costs so much.

2) Nuclear plants take too long to build.

They didn't used to. Ever ponder what's different now?

The breeder reactors you support have not yet been designed. Once they have a design (at least 5 years from now), the approval of the design takes 3-5 years.

So you admit that the regulators are a big part of the problem.

3) There are not enough rare materials to build a significant number of nuclear plants.

Nonsense. Nuclear plants do not require rare materials; they've just been convenient for the way we've been doing things since the 1950's. We don't have to keep doing things that way, and there are a great many reasons not to. Many of the new reactor concepts use other physical mechanisms than e.g. control rods to control the rate of reaction, so they have no need for the elements which go into them.

You admit in your post 260 that there is not enough uranium for your plan.

No, I said there's not enough land-based uranium to start the required fleet of fast-neutron reactors. There's more than enough in the oceans, and the depleted uranium already on hand in the USA would suffice to run the entire world for about a century on fast reactors. Also, there's more than enough thorium available to do the job (3-4x as abundant as uranium and it's almost 100% convertible to energy with thermal neutrons).

4) Your responses to Abbott are grossly inadequate and uninformed. For examply you claim "pretty much ANY site that has ever hosted a coal plant is suitable for a nuclear plant." Only 10 miles from my house is the Big Bend power plant (it is switching from coal to gas). This plant is too close to a city to be converted to nuclear

It's "too close" for nuclear, but far more dangerous and polluting coal (with far more radioisotope emissions from the tramp actinides) was just fine? Ye gods, if it wasn't for double standards, anti-nukes wouldn't have any standards.

(Mods: there's a bug in the way the post editor JS handles closing bold and italic tags when switching from "Source" back to "Basic" after pasting in HTML; a trailing space is deleted even when it's explicitly in the source.)

Deciphering the rise and fall of Antarctic sea ice extent

Daniel Bailey at 04:10 AM on 8 July, 2021

Global sea ice, showing both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent changes over time in the satellite observational record:

Arctic sea ice extent continues its multidecadal decline and Antarctic sea ice extent is currently at normal, average values.

Source: NSIDC

Deciphering the rise and fall of Antarctic sea ice extent

MA Rodger at 23:07 PM on 7 July, 2021

gerontocrat @1/2,

For clarity, I have snatched your 'graphic of JAXA's VISHOP Antarctic SIE 1980-to-date' from Neven's Forum and installed it below.

Antarctic SIE 1980-2021

Deciphering the rise and fall of Antarctic sea ice extent

gerontocrat at 21:16 PM on 7 July, 2021

Whoops - address is

https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,1759.msg314913.html#msg314913

Deciphering the rise and fall of Antarctic sea ice extent

gerontocrat at 21:15 PM on 7 July, 2021

As of now, 365 day trailing average of sea ice extent is now above the (meaningless) linear trend by 60k km2. You can see the image here...

Arctic Sea Ice Forum - Antarctic Sea Ice

The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews

Nick Palmer at 02:41 AM on 22 June, 2021

Yet again there are too many, in my view flawed, responses to give answers to all. I still think none of you are fully getting what I am saying. Nigel J is closest to 'getting it', MAR is (waaay) furthest away (his comment #72 in particular is a mirror inage of the sort of toxic denialist misrepresentation of someone's position that we see too often when fighting said denialists).

I'll try and restate things later, if I get time, and will try to clarify the bits where peoples' defences are causing then to bounce off. In the meantime, remember that all this sponsoring of think tanks, who used denialist rhetoric as part of their lobbying for corporate clients, took place quite a long time ago when carbon capture and sequestration seemed a lot more promising than it has proved to be (until recently) a couple of decades later. Back then it was an entirely reasonable position for a corporation to take to assume technological progress would be delivering the CCS magic machines in time to do the job of nullifying emissions to atmosphere. The coal industry, for obvious reasons, were most hoping for this get-out-of-jail-free card. I think it was BP or Shell Oil that first had their accountants put a notional 'carbon price' into their financial reports, thus hedging their bets. Should CCS prove economic, any carbon sequestered would not be taxed; should it not, then their financial planning would already be taking a carbon price into account.

As it happens, just about the only thing preventing the uptake of existing CCS tech is money - the lack of a suitable global carbon price. The actual technology/chemistry, which is pretty simple, works just fine, and has done for some considerable time, it's only the economics of running it which have been dodgy. However, that's likely to change rapidly as Carbon Engineering's system of direct air capture https://carbonengineering.com/ is expected to come in at around $100 a tonne, which is waay better than other systems. This is tech is also about direct capture of CO2 from the ambient atmosphere. Obviously, point of generation 'smoke stack' capture would be even easier. Even doubling that figure means that just a moderate carbon price would be sufficient to justify sequestering carbon just on financial grounds.

Excerpt from their latest news:

"Project Dreamcatcher is a key step towards Storegga and CE’s ambitions to build a large-scale DAC plant in the UK within the next five years. The proposed large-scale DAC facility will capture between 500,000 and one million tonnes of atmospheric CO2 each year and then safely and permanently store it deep below the seabed in an offshore geological storage site. One of the locations being considered by the partnership for this facility is in North East Scotland, with access to the Acorn CCS and Hydrogen Project (Acorn).

Acorn is one of the most mature UK CCS and hydrogen projects and is positioned to be the most cost-effective and scalable CCS project in the UK. The Acorn project is currently in the detailed engineering and design phase of development and is planned to be operational by the mid 2020’s. DAC, CCS and hydrogen technologies are complementary solutions that provide key tools for the UK to meet its net zero targets."

However, this doesn't mean that I think that Big Fossil Fuel's original hope that CCS would enable them to indefinitely continue to run their industry at the scale it was will come to pass. I think the business risk they took twenty years ago will not pan out for them. I'm fairly sure that the fossil fuel industry will shrink in future as the price of new renewables continues to fall to below the price of new fossil fuel and the much improved 'failsafe' and modular designs of new generations of nucelar power stations are authorised. It may be that there will always be some remaining niche applications for them to fulfil in future which still need fossil fuels and so CCS can take care of that, whilst sucking out existing excess atmospheric CO2.

I think Scott's (Red Baron) system of carbon capture by sequestration of carbon into managed agricultural field systems has far more (read 'huge'...) potential than most realise. The arguments against it sound very close to the type of rhetoric that extreme environmentalists and left'ish anti-Big Industry types use to argue (fallaciously, in my opinion) against technological CCS inasmuch as I think it clear that they're antithetical to any solutions which promise to let our current technological civilisation continue as it is and so they jump through mental hoops to undermine them leaving, they hope, their favoured solutions as the only option.

Whilst I'm throwing cats amongst the pigeons, how about this? Assuming widespread adoption of CCS techniques enables us to start lowering atmospheric levels in future, I don't think we should try to get back to pre-industrial levels of 280ppm. I think 350 ppm would be a great place to stop as it keeps us just about in the 'goldilocks zone' where the long term benefits of moderate global warming are, on balance, neutral or positive and would have the very long term benefit of heading off the next glaciation...

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