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Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by Latimer Alder (@latimeralder)

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@R Gates

‘This displays a complete lack of comprehension about both models and the nature of reality’

An Oracular pronouncement from our resident enigmatic guru.

Pray explain, O Great One, in words that mere mortals can understand without needing to play semantics.

I take as my example our model of celestial mechanics. It is good enough that we can successfully land a fridge on a comet after a journey of 500 million miles lasting 4000 days.

How well do our climate models compare with that achievement?

The world awaits your clarification…….


Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2

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R. Gates, “Adding GH gases will add net energy to the system. This is basic physics. Will we will see 3C rise within 50 years of 560 ppm of CO2.”

Nope. The basis physics is that adding GHg to the atmosphere will allow the atmosphere to retain more heat by about 3.7 Wm-2 per doubling. Then depending on what surface you use as a reference the “basic physics” implies a net warming of ~0.8 to 1.2 C per doubling.

The 3.0 C is not physics but the average of SWAGs. If you want to use the average of SWAGs, then the Annan and Hargreaves Bayesian approach would require using all the SWAGS. The current average of the SWAGs is in the 2.0 C range decreasing towards 1.6 C per doubling.

It might be nice for someone to develop a SWAG index widget for Climate Etc.

Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by Danny Thomas

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Max,

Goldilocks:
“this porridge is too hot”
“this porridge is too cold”
“this porridge is just right”

What’s “just right”?

Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by Lucifer

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Everyone knows too much human food is not good for a humans. What happens when plants get too much CO2 food?

I knew it – plant obesity!

There’s an answer, though – plant aerobics!

and 1, and 2, and 1, and 2 – reach for those toes, ladies.

Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by JamesG

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WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. “There is no standstill in global warming,”

So yet another pause denier! When the vast majority of scientists are wondering….why is this pause happening? Some overwhelming consensus this is – the error bars go from yes to no!

And if you are measuring from 1980 then satellite data are the only reliable datasets because they just cannot fiddle one year relative to another the way Giss/Had/CW do. Any other dataset that does not reconcile the satellite data is of no use whatsoever; ie Best:Worst.

Comment on Gravito-thermal discussion thread by Vaughan Pratt

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@cd: <i>the rough potential energy of the atmosphere should be around 3.2 E24</i> You had me worried for a moment that I'd misplaced the decimal point, cap'n. But let's check with round numbers. The atmosphere has mass m = 5E18 kg, surface gravity g = 10 m/s2, and the average height of a parcel of atmosphere (same thing as the scale height) is 8000 m. Hence mgh = 4E23 J. For more decimal places (namely 7.55E8*5.10E14 = 3.85E23) see <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/05/confidence-in-radiative-transfer-models/#comment-20196" rel="nofollow">my reply to Miskolczi</a> in this blog on Dec. 9, 2010. <i>which would put KE at 1.6 E24</i> Dividing your 1.6 yottajoules (a lot of joules!) by 5.1E18 kg (mass of the atmosphere) gives a mean energy per kg of 310 kJ. The constant-volume specific heat of air is cv = 0.716 kJ/kg/K, so your estimate of the atmosphere's KE makes its mean temperature 310/0.716 = 433 K, hot as hell! But fixing the decimal point brings it down to 1.6E23 for a mean temperature of 43.3K, colder than liquid nitrogen. So that can't be the only error. Looks like you're on Miskolczi's side. According to my reply to Miskolczi cited above, that would make your temperature estimate low by a factor of exactly 5. The mean temperature of the atmosphere should be more like 5*43.3 = 217 K, not unreasonable considering the lapse rate is somewhere between 6 and 10 degrees per km. (The reason for using cv instead of cp, constant-pressure specific heat, is that the latter includes the work done on the environment by expanding the volume while holding the pressure constant. We don't want to count that work as part of the internal energy of the gas. Holding the volume constant ensures that no work is done on the environment during the heating of the gas starting from 0 K.)

Comment on Gravito-thermal discussion thread by Vaughan Pratt

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Forget to give <a href="http://www.ohio.edu/mechanical/thermo/property_tables/air/air_Cp_Cv.html" rel="nofollow">my source for cv of air</a>.

Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by Max_OK, Citizen Scientist

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NCDC Releases November 2014 U.S. Climate Report

“November 2014 U.S. Divisional Average Temperature Ranks Map
During November, the average contiguous U.S. temperature was 39.3°F, 2.4°F below the 20th century average. This ranked as the 16th coldest November in the 1895-2014 record. This was the coldest November since 2000.”
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WHAT ! Give me a break. When are those guys at NCDC gonna start acting like true scientist and stop treating mole hills like mountains. True scientist would have just said temperatures in November 2014 were not a lot different than November temperatures in any other years. Better yet, since there was no difference worth mentioning, the scientist at NCDC should have just kept their mouths shut. I’m sure they would have received their paychecks anyway. Why do scientists think they always have to be saying something?


Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by Sven

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Here’s the question – is arctic sea ice decline the result of global warming?

I read the Manabe 1980 paper recently:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JC085iC10p05529/abstract

It’s the one people cite as the identification of ‘Arctic Amplification’. Remarkably, Manabe identified the shape of warming from Arctic sea ice loss:
maxima in autumn through spring, minima in summer.
This was because thin sea ice allowed for greater heat from the ocean.

You can see the effect in the trend since 1979 here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/cdrar/do_SCmap.cgi

But, and it’s a big butt, you can see the same pattern in the 1910-1945 warming:

So, there remains a possibility – rather than warming causing sea ice loss, sea ice loss is causing warming. I’m not claiming it is, but I’m not sure that’s been ruled out, either.

Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by Max_OK, Citizen Scientist

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Say “fibber.” It’s softer, less pejorative.

Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by ordvic

Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by Danny Thomas

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Outlier!
Outfibber!

Like John Smith says, “this is kinda fun”.

Comment on All megawatts are not equal by Peter Davies

Comment on All megawatts are not equal by AK

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<blockquote>Both solar and wind are very capital intensive when compared with, say, a gas turbine-generator. [...] Run the numbers (unsubsidized) and you will see just what economic dogs wind and solar really are, with solar being by far the worst.</blockquote>This <b>may</b> continue to be true for wind (but stay tuned), but probably won't for solar. ("Swanson's Law".) <blockquote>Use the best theoretical energy conversion efficiencies wind and solar could ever achieve, take a look at the inherent energy density limitations involved, and you will concluded that too much physical material is required to produce too little power output for these technologies to ever reach the Promised Land of economic survivability.</blockquote>Setting aside wind, the best plausible (at this time) conversion efficiency for solar is around 60-70% (with appropriate new technology). Using existing 40% efficiencies, and 2000x concentrating solar power, with thin-film silicon (made from sand), you're talking about around 8 KW/gram! It's totally ridiculous to claim that <i>"too much physical material is required to produce too little power output for these technologies to ever reach the Promised Land of economic survivability."</i>

Comment on All megawatts are not equal by Planning Engineer

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Joseph – Bill and Ragnaar bring up good points. I don’t know that we can ever incorporate “all” of the external costs. I don’t think it’s humanly possible to identify many of them, understand most of the them, let alone agree on a small subset of them.

That said – You can and we do incorporate some external costs within planning models. My opinion is that when you incorporate such external costs (i.e. high carbon penalties for example) at levels that most people could consider reasonable, wind and solar still do not “approach general competitiveness on a cost basis.” Of course if the penalties are ratched up high enough you can generate any results you want. However at extremely high penalty values, you have to ask if there are their better (more economic and efficient ways) to achieve carbon reduction. My opinion (non-expert) is at those high penalty levels there are better ways to reduce carbon. If there were not better options – I don’t think we would have seen carbon markets fail in the ways that they did.


Comment on All megawatts are not equal by Peter Lang

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I agree. And just in case others missed my earlier comment on this, I think it will be many decades before there is much call for nuclear to provide intermediate (and even further away) peaking capacity. It’s so far off it’s irrelevant.

But SMR’s will achieve the capability to load follow economically much earlier, and that capability will be needed earlier to move into smaller grids in less developed countries.

Comment on All megawatts are not equal by mosomoso

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He wouldn’t support Australia if it sat in his lap.

Comment on All megawatts are not equal by AndyL

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The EU did not subsidise Diesel
Some countries in the EU reduced tax on Diesel relative to Gasoline for a short while.

Comment on All megawatts are not equal by Planning Engineer

Comment on Gravito-thermal discussion thread by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2

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Vaughan Pratt, “1. No GHGs in the atmosphere. In this case all the heat radiated from the surface would be lost to space as there are no heat-trapping GHGs.”

I believe you are agreeing with me in a disagreeable way. This thought experiment with an isolated isothermal atmosphere involves only conduction transferring heat throughout the ideal atmosphere. Since the surface would warm to some average temperature, about 4C if the solid surface were an ideal black body in Earth’s case, the atmosphere would by conduction acquire heat from the surface and then being isothermal and not radiative, retain all that heat. I am saying this is an unlikely situation because gravity reduces the rate of outward diffusion and escape velocity limits the temperature and height of the atmosphere. At some point there would have to be an atmospheric lapse rate.

If limited to the “troposphere” only which is by definition the most convective and turbulent portion of an atmosphere, one would be mixing metaphors. the lowest portion of the isolated ideal atmosphere would be “effectively” isothermal with the highest portion having a lapse rate. So in most cases there would be a small gravito-thermal effect which would depend on temperature, gravity, rotational velocity and the composition of the atmosphere. For a rock planet, there would likely be a greater lapse rate and for a gas planet it would depend on what level is considered the “surface”.

If you try to simulate the G-T effect with a centrifuge, you would be reversing the rotational impact which would reduce the effect.

All in all I think the discussion is about as illuminating as, does a tree falling in the forest make a sound”.

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