World bank to focus future investment on clean energy
The World Bank will invest heavily in clean energy and only fund coal projects in “circumstances of extreme need” because climate change will undermine efforts to eliminate extreme poverty, says its president Jim Yong Kim.
Talking ahead of a UN climate summit in Peru next month, Kim said he was alarmed by World Bank-commissioned research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, which said that as a result of past greenhouse gas emissions the world is condemned to unprecedented weather events.
“The findings are alarming. As the planet warms further, heatwaves and other weather extremes, which today we call once-in-a-century events, would become the new climate normal, a frightening world of increased risk and instability. The consequences for development would be severe, as crop yields decline, water resources shift, communicable diseases move into new geographical ranges, and sea levels rise,” he said.
“We know that the dramatic weather extremes are already affecting millions of people, such as the five to six feet of snow that just fell on Buffalo, and can throw our lives into disarray or worse. Even with ambitious mitigation, warming close to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is locked in. And this means that climate change impact such as extreme heat events may now be simply unavoidable.”
Comment on Week in review by brent
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Comment on Week in review by Max_OK, Citizen Scientist
Barnes sez on November 24, 2014 at 4:47 am
“Not surprised by that response there max-ok. Indoctrinated, lobotomized fools like yourself are too invested in warmest scarism to face the reality that the benefits of using fossil fuels are multiple orders of magnitude greater than any downside risks…. ”
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At one time you could have said the same thing about horses and mules. But time doesn’t stand still.
As a mineral rights owner I benefit from the sale of two fossil fuels, natural gas and oil. As a consumer I benefit from the use of these fuels as well as coal. At present, renewable sources of energy (i.e., solar and wind) do not account for enough of the energy market to affect me one way or another. I would be a fool, however, if I did not see renewables gradually accounting for an increasing share of the energy market at the expense of fossil fuels in the long term. And for future generations, I think that will be a good thing.
As for your comment about Gambia, I would agree the Gambians would benefit from electric power, but I believe renewables would be a better long term solution to their needs.
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Comment on Week in review by Canman
I’ll try one more time:
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Comment on Week in review by brent
World Bank: ending poverty might become impossible because of climate change
Lifting the world’s poorest out of extreme poverty may become impossible because of climate change, according to the World Bank’s new Turn Down the Heat report.
World Bank: No Matter What Governments Do — Big Climate Change Is Coming
http://www.businessinsider.com/r-some-climate-change-impacts-unavoidable-world-bank-2014-11
Rwanda: World Bank Releases Damning Report On Climate Change
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Comment on Week in review by Max_OK, Citizen Scientist
Yes, Barnes I get your point. Your thinking is shaped by anti-government free-market ideology. IMO, your ideology is as rigid and impractical as communist ideology.
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Comment on Week in review by A fan of *MORE* discourse
Canman, what you’re looking for is evidence that (1) far-right/Randian economics fails, and (2) far-left/Marxist economics fails, and (3) hybrid economies prosper!
Good on `yah, Germany/Norway/Denmark/Netherlands/Switzerland/Sweden/Canada/New Zealand.!
A good start Jettison the stale-fail 20th century ideologies of Marx and Rand! Strengthen Obamacare and invest in public education!
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Comment on Week in review by Matthew R Marler
Pat Casson: Makes accounting for the 12% change in P x CAPE even easier.
Your comments are informative and challenging. Consider the whole process, what Romps et al estimate in it, and what Romps et al say about the response to a 1C increase in surface temperature.
1. Water evaporates, rises up into the troposphere, condenses, freezes, and then falls back to Earth as rain. Water mass is conserved, so over time the rainfall total closely equals the amount that evaporated. (slight transient disparities as cloud cover increases and decreases.)
2. That process transfers latent and sensible heat from the Earth surface to the upper troposphere, whence it is radiated to space. Mean Earth surface temperature changes little over time spans of a few years, so over each time span of a few years all the radiant energy that went into warming the surface water gets carried to the troposphere and radiated out. (There is a complication here because the water vapor itself radiates and absorbs energy as it is rising.)
3. Romps et al estimate a portion of the rate of energy transfer process over short time spans by computing (P x CAPE.) They have this quantity twice per day, over a year, for a portion of the US, from which they compute yearly total P x CAPE; they also have concomitant lighting flash rates measured near the sites where they have P x CAPE (actually, they have a lot of gridding going on, but that’s one reason for the wide confidence limits on the final estimate); from this series of paired data they estimate the proportionality constant between lightning flash rate and P x CAPE. Their estimated relationship explains 77% of the variance in the lightning flash rate. That makes eminent sense causally if
P x CAPE is at least proportional to an actual energy transfer rate.
4. Romps et al take the output from a set of GCMs as estimates of changing mean temp and changing rainfall, and from those estimates compute the resultant values of annual total P x CAPE, from which they get the claim that a 1C increase in regional mean temp produces a 12% increase in regional total lightning strikes.
5. Trenberth et al have a different estimate of the rate of transfer of heat from surface to upper troposphere by evapotranspiration, 80 W/m^2. That is a spatio-temporal average, not a day-to-day estimate such as Romps came up with, and surely is not directly comparable to the daily, or seasonal aggregates computable from the Romps et al result, but the annual total may be comparable to the annual total computed for P x CAPE, say annual variations maintain approximately the same proportion. This is the weakest assumption in my letter.
6. Exactly how the rate computed by Trenberth et al responds to a 1C increase in Earth mean temp has not been calculated by anyone yet, to my knowledge, something I have been harping on for a few years now. Water vapor pressure increases by about 7% for a 1C increase in temp, in the usual temperature ranges found on Earth; Isaac Held on his blog finds a total vapor increase of about 7.5% per 1C increase over a range of temperature increases. So it is a reasonable inference that the rate of evaporative heat transfer from surface to upper troposphere increases about 7% per 1C increase, at the lower end of a direct extrapolation of the Romps et al P x CAPE result to the Trenberth et al energy flow result.
7. So the question is: can a 1C increase on the regional mean surface temp produce a 12% increase in the energy flow rate represented by P x CAPE without producing a 12% increase in the energy flow rate represented by the Trenberth et al evapotranspiration process with its flow rate mean of 80 W/m^2? By what possible mechanism can a 1C increase in the surface regional mean temperature increase one by 12% yet increase the other by a mere 2%? (Recall the complication I noted above that the water vapor acts as a greenhouse gas during its ascent; that should not affect the comparison of the two energy flow rate measurements, should it.)
You showed that the energy transferred to lighting is a small fraction of the energy available in the total energy flow. My question was: Given the proportionality asserted by Romps et al, how can the one indirect measure of the energy flow increase 12% due to a 1C increase in surface temperature without the other indirect measure of energy flow increasing about the same amount?
And my overarching question: Does a doubling of the CO2 concentration provide enough extra power for that much of an increase in the energy flow.
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Comment on Week in review by A fan of *MORE* discourse
WHAT SCIENTISTS THINK
ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
The case for climate-change action is not abstruse or technical; it’s something anyone can understand: much more CO2 implies much more trapped sunlight implies big disruptions to the kind of climate that humans have been used to for the last 10,000 years, and that our current civilization is built around.
And we know this because
(1) basic chemistry and physics predicts it, and
(2) we actually see it in the world right now, consistent with the basic physics and chemistry.At this level, computer models simply never enter the argument. The models are needed only if you want to try to answer more detailed questions—if, so to speak, as your car is racing toward a gas tanker, you want to know the exact sequence in which things will happen, which parts of the car will explode right away and which will last a few more seconds.
Building detailed computer models of the climate, and then improving them when they’re wrong, is exactly the right thing to do scientifically.
It’s only a mistake politically, to let anyone get the idea that the case for action on climate hinges on the outputs of these models.
Aye, Climate Etc lassies and laddies … the consensus view of scientists amounts to plain scientific, economic, and moral common-sense!
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Comment on Week in review by jim2
I, too, think BEST is a legitimate reconstruction, or whatever you want to call it, of surface temps.
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Comment on Week in review by Canman
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Comment on Week in review by timg56
I’m betting fan is a happy guy. Living in a fantasy world can do that for you.
fan, if you took a few minutes to peek into the real world you might be surprised to learn which economy is in the best shape around the world.
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Comment on Week in review by timg56
Jim D,
There is strong incentive for making both new and old technologies more efficient. It happens all the time.
There is also something called law of diminishing return. At some point the cost of achieving the next amount of efficient is greater than whatever savings you gain from it.
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Comment on Groups and herds: implications for the IPCC by Richard Drake
Or the razor cuts both ways, depending which way you swing it.
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Comment on Groups and herds: implications for the IPCC by Curious George
joshua called our attention yesterday to a post http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/23/people-starting-to-ask-about-motive-for-massive-ipcc-deception/. I second his call.
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Comment on Groups and herds: implications for the IPCC by nottawa rafter
The consensus provides numerous psychological, organizational an d financial disincentives to seek out what reasonable alternatives might be. The path of least resistance is to jump on board with research that has personal rewards. If the climate establishment had allocated resources toward true scientific inquiry over the last 30 years rather than research that rewards conformity, the skeptics might not be throwing all the spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks. The skeptics are simply filling a void.
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Comment on Groups and herds: implications for the IPCC by miker613
Michael, it is undeniable that pro-AGW people in the media are saying a lot of negative things about Dr. Curry; I see them whenever she is mentioned by one of them. I think it’s pretty obvious that they are saying those things because they don’t like what she has been saying. Since that’s what she said, I don’t understand what you want, unless it’s to advance some narrative of yours. In order for you not to comment on it, is Dr. Curry required not to notice negative comments?
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Comment on Groups and herds: implications for the IPCC by miker613
I’d add that the large amount of negativity I saw _has_ to be because of the message, not the quality of work, since most commenters are obviously not in a position to judge quality. The closest they get is some link they saw (but also can’t judge) which attacked the quality.
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Comment on Groups and herds: implications for the IPCC by omanuel
Antonio,
Silence was also the response of the US Congressional Space Science & Technology Committee to questions asked last year about changes in textbooks of nuclear physics and astronomy after WWII:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/WHY.pdf
The climate scandal arise from those changes.
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Comment on Groups and herds: implications for the IPCC by anthony thompson
Richard Feynman (Caltech 1974) on the Millikan experiment:
“One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of–this history–because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong–and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.”
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Comment on Groups and herds: implications for the IPCC by JCH
Whatever you do, don’t fool yourself.
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