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Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Curious George

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Rob – I quoted a text you have selected. But if you insist on quoting from the article: “An important aspect in the theory of synchronization between coupled nonlinear oscillators is coupling strength. It is vital to note that synchronization and coupling are not interchangeable.” So the climate is a system of coupled nonlinear oscillators? Prove it, then criticize.


Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Rud Istvan

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Barnes, hope you see this late edition. There are two main problems with wind, which obviously works technically. One is intermittency and the problems that causes fir grid stability. Planning engineers excellent post a coiplemof weeks ago covered this. The second is economics. There are two main issues. The intermittency has to be covered by backup generation elsewhere on the grid, and that cost is not in any of the wind estimates, nor borne by wind operators. See essay Tilting at Windmills in Blowing Smoke for details. And the machines are failing prematurely (usually bearing failures for various reasons) meaning their stand alone (ignoring the backup cost issue) levelized cost is significantly understated. Even nuclear is significantly cheaper.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Rob Ellison

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Then we might continue with something that seems almost equally unreasonable and pugnacious.

Prove that the atmosphere and oceanic indices are chaotic oscillating nodes on a network?

The two papers – here’s the other – http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL037022/full – go some way to showing that the Earth system behaves in certain ways consistent with the specific other systems.

The underlying observation that needs an explanation along these lines is the abrupt nature of climate change.

‘The climate system has jumped from one mode of operation to another in the past. We are trying to understand how the earth’s climate system is engineered, so we can understand what it takes to trigger mode switches. Until we do, we cannot make good predictions about future climate change… Over the last several hundred thousand years, climate change has come mainly in discrete jumps that appear to be related to changes in the mode of thermohaline circulation.’ Wally Broecker

It is blindingly obvious in any climate series.

Now the real question is – do you have a better paradigm for abrupt change in the Earth system? If you don’t – I might just go with what we have.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Pekka Pirilä

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Neither is the validity of an argument seriously contested by the inabillity of an individual to understand it.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by rls

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by AK

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<blockquote>There are two main problems with wind, [...]</blockquote>Actually, there's a third, which is the threat to global climate. Has anyone calculated the effect of 40-80 terawatts average extraction of wind energy from its bottom on the atmospheric boundary layer? Adding inelastic resistance at the bottom of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekman_spiral" rel="nofollow">Ekman spiral</a> tends to make it higher, with a consequently greater flow of air down the pressure slope. (As opposed to the flow <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostrophic_wind" rel="nofollow"><b>at right angles</b></a> above the top.) I don't know what the effects of that would be on climate, but intuitively I'd say they'd be an order of magnitude greater (at least) than the sort of change to the greenhouse effect caused by increased pCO2. Until we have much better models than the current generation, and unless they then predict no damage to the climate, the precautionary principle would dictate <b>very limited</b> use of wind power.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by oz4caster

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@JimD
Thanks for the nice graphs. I haven’t seen these two before but have seen some very similar graphs. My post is not about CO2, but simply about looking at temperature cycles over the last 500,000 years as a possible predictor for future climate. Obviously having only four complete cycles does not provide a lot of confidence as a predictor for the fifth and I am aware that the glacial cycles were spaced about every 40,000 years during the preceding million years before the last half million years.

The correlation of estimated CO2 and global temperatures is interesting, but as you know correlation does not prove causation. If you believe CO2 is the primary driver, you must explain how CO2 could suddenly rise during an intense glacial period and thus cause temperatures to rise dramatically for about 5,000 years. Your hypothesis must also explain how these glacial cycles ending with sudden CO2 increases have changed from 40,000 year periodicity to 100,000 year periodicity over the last million years.

Also I notice that these graphs do not depict many of the massive volcanic eruptions in the past nor do they show all of the major meteor impacts, both of which may have had substantial wild card effects on climate, as compared to more predictable orbital/mechanical effects and much more gradual continental drift effects.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Don Monfort

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I know what happened in 1862, Ragnaar. The same thing happens every year. Tribes of people fighting over land. Human history has been a cutthroat game of musical chairs. And none of the players are innocent.


Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2

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$pringer, Whether conduction restores a isothermal state depends on the model parameters and how much time you have on your hands. Say if you start with a very tall column open at the top and in such a state that virtually no molecules escape. If you put the lid back on you would probably end up with an inversion since energy is always transferred between molecules, but total energy is fixed now with the lid on. Add heat and it would become more isothermal more quickly. Remove heat and it would create a larger gradient. No matter what you do though, gravity is not going to continue heating the bottom, it is just going to tend to cause a greater number of molecules to stay near the bottom. It is an unrealistic problem since the real atmosphere is in more of a steady state than an equilibrium and you don’t have a column of air but a sphere that can expand and contract.

Now if the atmosphere were collapsing, then there would be gravitational potential energy producing surface heat. Last I checked though our atmosphere was pretty stable.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Jim D

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oz4caster, as we can see, CO2 rises typically 90 ppm in response to the warming of 8-10 C in the recovery periods. This is just expected from the warmer oceans and perhaps biosphere being less able to retain CO2, maybe 10-15 ppm per degree. This 50% increase in CO2 would have caused a couple of degrees of that warming by itself, but most of the warming was probably the positive albedo feedback from the glacier retreat. This outgassing still happens with warming today, but is small compared to the 100+ ppm CO2 added by man that has become the main driver. As for volcanoes, the diagram shows that CO2 outgassing was a main cause of the rise in the early Cenozoic. A similar volcanic period caused the rise of CO2 and warming in the early Mesozoic that got us out of the previous icy period in the Permian. These occur from plate tectonics, while mountain building has the opposite CO2 reduction effect leading to cooling as happened after the Eocene maximum. Therefore volcanoes and mountain building are extremely important links between continental drift and CO2 and consequently temperature.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Curious George

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Rob – thank you for a thoughtful reply. You show that in addition to minor transitions like ” the great climate shift of the 1970s” (which escaped my attention at the time) there are also shift on ice-age time scales. Undoubtedly true. Climate has always been changing. Not much of a paradigm.

Milankovitch cycles are an attempt to explain ice ages by a physical (astronomical) mechanism. I applaud that effort. But to blindly apply statistics to data on a hope to discover a set of nonlinear coupled oscillators without any idea of an underlying physical mechanism does not look promising to me. It is just a particular kind of model, bringing no insight at all.

No, I don’t have a better paradigm. And I don’t see a good paradigm anywhere. I see a work in progress; I don’t see any reason to ring an alarm bell based on that unfinished work.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Sparrow

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Here are the penalties for hiring illegal immigrants in Australia:
Penalty categories – amounts Categories – Maximum penalty

Illegal Worker – Warning Notice – No fine – administrative warning

Infringement – Fine – individual $3060, body corporate $15 300

Civil penalty – Fine – individual $15 300 – body corporate $76 500

Criminal offense – Fine – individual $20 400 (and/or two years imprisonment) – body corporate $102 000

Aggravated criminal offense – Fine – individual $51 000 (and/or five years imprisonment) – body corporate $255 000

Are you aware of any convictions since that law took effect in 2013?
When I looked at the proposed Republican immigration laws I didn’t see any penalties as strong as Australia.
Jack Smith

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by AK

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<a href="http://reason.com/archives/2014/10/03/unlimited-free-solar-power-soon" rel="nofollow">Unlimited Free Solar Power?</a> Ronald Bailey | October 3, 2014 <i>Reason.com</i> <blockquote>As recently as 2011, the EIA did not even bother trying to calculate levelized solar PV costs. In that year's report, the agency projected that the country would have an installed solar PV capacity of 8.9 gigawatts by 2035. As of the second quarter of <b>this year, the figure is already 15.9 gigawatts.</b></blockquote><blockquote> If Swanson's Law proves true, the levelized cost solar PV could be expected to fall to around <b>$24 per megawatt-hour in the next 10 years.</b> That would not be too cheap to meter, but it would cost far less than any of the forecasts for fossil fuel electric power generation technologies.</blockquote><blockquote>Of course, this rough projection does not take into account the intermittency issue (the sun doesn't always shine) that makes solar power problematic as a baseload source of electricity. On the other hand, disruptive new innovations could both greatly improve the efficiency of solar power and battery storage capacity. Will Wadhwa's prophecy come true? Perhaps not, but wagering against human ingenuity has always been a bad bet.</blockquote>All bolding mine.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Rob Ellison

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‘Recent scientific evidence shows that major and widespread climate changes have occurred with startling speed. For example, roughly half the north Atlantic warming since the last ice age was achieved in only a decade, and it was accompanied by significant climatic changes across most of the globe. Similar events, including local warmings as large as 16°C, occurred repeatedly during the slide into and climb out of the last ice age. Human civilizations arose after those extreme, global ice-age climate jumps. Severe droughts and other regional climate events during the current warm period have shown similar tendencies of abrupt onset and great persistence, often with adverse effects on societies.’ http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=1

Milankovich cycles set the conditions for ice and snow feedbacks that are initiated by changes in thermohaline circulation. The physical principles are feedbacks in a chaotic system.

Abrupt climate change is real and based on observation – the theory provides an explanation for the data. That’s how science works traditionally.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Ragnaar

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Jim D:
“Because the 30-year average depends very much on the forcing, and not at all on the initial conditions, climate defined as a 30-year average is a boundary problem, and definitely not an initial value problem.”
Boundary values are easier. I’ll think of it as a long term average. So if we wish to say something, we shorten that length. Initial values requires a lot more, more than we have, we don’t have enough precise data for more than a few weeks of that. So the IPCC’s graph shows when we reach the point where we can use boundary values, but as he said, it’s an ad hoc number and he’d like to see the science behind them. After the 1 to 2 week period, call it divergence of the models.

When the models converge, that might indicate the new boundary values have been reached.


Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Ragnaar

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Don Monfort:
The Sioux uprising of 1862 was FUBAR as expected. Lincoln needed troops for the Civil War toot sweet. Sounds like he suggested that this be handled quickly so the soldiers could then fight for the Union before it collapsed. Their treaty relied on gold sent from the Federal government sent to the call them Indian agents. The agents held the need food until the gold arrived. The gold was late. The Sioux were starving. It’s been suggested that the operation of the treaties was a bit corrupt with the agents not hurting for compensation.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by Pat Cassen

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AK - <em>Has anyone calculated the effect of 40-80 terawatts average extraction of wind energy from its bottom on the atmospheric boundary layer?</em> There is an attempt to do something like that <a href="http://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Marvel_climate_windpower_2012.pdf" rel="nofollow">here</a>.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by oz4caster

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@JimD
What I don’t see in the graphs are the major meteor impacts producing a 100 km crater in Siberia about 35.7 mya and one producing an 82 km crater at Chesapeake Bay about 35.5 mya and the ensuing very active volcanic eruption period from 35 mya to 25 mya that includes eruptions of 6800 km3 in Yemen 29.5 mya and 5000 km3 at La Garita Colorado 27.8 mya. There was also a 52 km impact crater made about 25 mya in Tajikistan and a Yellowstone eruption of 2450 km3 about 2 mya just to mention a couple more. For comparison, the Mt Pinatubo eruption in 1991 was about 10 km3. I can imagine that each of these events had some substantial climate impacts, perhaps for hundreds or even thousands of years, but information on any climate impacts from these events seems to be very sparse.

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by jim2

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CNN anchor illustrates for the rest of us how to engage skeptics in a scientific manner.
From the article:

Sometimes, when people try to use the weather to argue that climate change isn’t happening, it can help to patiently explain to them the difference between weather and climate, and how global warming refers to long-term changes in the latter.

But sometimes, as in the case of this Fox Nation article aggregated from the uber-conservative Washington Times – which pretends to catch Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project in a “gotcha” moment for passing out ice cream on what turned out to be a chilly, rainy day in Denver — it’s hard to pretend that the deniers are actually interested in having a fact-based debate. In that moment, as CNN anchor Bill Weir brilliantly demonstrates, you’ve just got to acknowledge that the trolls should (and probably do) know better, and call them out for being … well, we’ll let him take it from here:

UPDATE: Weir later apologized for the vulgar language used in his tweet:

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/31/cnn_anchor_shuts_down_fox_climate_trolls_in_one_brilliant_tweet/

Comment on Open thread: Thanksgiving edition by AK

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@Pat Cassen…

Thanks. That is interesting. I’m highly skeptical of the models used, but the results are still very interesting. It’s hard to see how surface wind turbines would have a different effect than, say, replacing grassland with forest. But then, I’m suspicious of the effect of something like that (or vice versa) on climate as well.

Certainly, the possibility of putting wind turbines much higher in the atmosphere (above the Ekman spiral) deserves much more pursuit.

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