Heh, all megadeaths are not equal.
====
Comment on All megawatts are not equal by kim
↧
↧
Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by JamesG
As your only quali is in English lit it’s really appalling you can’t manage to read what is written…
1. The sat. corrections affect every result equally. No fiddling; just data-blind corrections that might affect cooling or warming equally – as noted in your list. Can you tell us the last Giss/Had adjustment that produced a net cooling to the overall trend? Of course not – they don’t exist! That alone makes the sat. data more trustworthy to people who have actually collected data!.
2. Your notion of ‘model’ for satellites is what other people call simple data postprocessing using a validated formula. Your obvious strawman argument is to use the catch-all word ‘model’ to discredit the satellite data by comparing this simple, validated sat. code to the monster, spaghetti, unvalidated code of GCM’s – which objective observers know are inadequate for policy. Many of my models are in fact 99% accurate: Because many complex things are still relatively easy to ‘model’, but global climate isn’t remotely in that category.
3. See 1. The corrections pan out to be half cooling, half-warming. That’s what you expect in normal science! Everyone should mistrust a warming bias in data corrections. Do you?
Bottom line. You have never collected data or done real science in your life. Go and do something useful and reconcile the quality satellite data, which is real data with perfect coverage and small errors – not sparsely sampled, improperly collected & improperly averaged readings taken in a typical Siberian winter through goggles or reproduced from buckets thrown over the side of ships or just not collected at all for vast swathes of the world. Sat. data has no bucket adjustments, no ‘guessed’ TOBS adjustments, no creating data from thin air, no dogmatic, policy-driven bias and it agrees with the independent sonde data. The other recons were originally just to complement the superior sat. data for years before 1979 – not to replace them!
↧
Comment on All megawatts are not equal by Climate Etc. – understanding the cost of renewables | Allegheny Treasures
[…] Please read the full analysis at this link – All megawatts are not equal […]
↧
Comment on All megawatts are not equal by Paul Matthews
“Great title”.
Might not
“Some megawatts are more equal than others”
have been a bit better?
↧
Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by Wagathon
“God Bless America”. No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that’s in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.” ~Jeremiah Wright
You’ll find that in wiki under, “Confusing God and Government.”
Would he and Barack and all of the haters of America in the UN have the guts to say that about Allah?
↧
↧
Comment on All megawatts are not equal by Planning Engineer
1) In a “typical” bell shaped load distribution curve, what is the approximate percentage break-downs in total generation requirements? i.e. — base load is about X%, intermediate is Y%, and peaking is Z% (total is 100%).
>Here’s some rough guestimates that must be close to true for some place at some time and not true for other places at other times. On a capacity basis (plus or minus 10% on each) maybe 45% Base, 35% intermediate and 20% peaking. Now the Base units will operate more and the peakers less so on an energy basis you might see 65-75% of the energy from baseload plants, 25 to 30%% from intermediate plants and only 2-5% from peakers. This is not an exact science and strict categories are somewhat fuzzy. Gas plants put in as intermediates are operating as baseload with the low prices. I don’t know whether to keep them as intermediates and showing intermediates operating more, or classify them now as baseload.
(2) In a black/white either/or World — If on an existing Utility grid where significant incremental growth was occurring primarily in peak demand, would a U.S. Utility generally: (A) Build a new nuclear power plant for this new incremental demand that would have a capacity factor of say 30%, (B) Install solar resources, (C) Or in prior base load planning decisions, overbuild a nuclear unit and just cycle up during 30% of the System’s generation requirements (as they reportedly do in France)?
>(D) None of the above, probably. (B) Possibly solar would work if the peak if the solar is coincident and dependable in relation to the peak growth. What would be needed is a balance between existing generation, the new generation and your load shape. (F) If the system were balanced before and now the peak is growing – you’d likely want to add a peaking resource like a combustion turbine. (C) If you could grow into the capability of the nuclear plant in a reasonable time, it may make sense to over build temporarily and dispatch the rest of your system less than might be otherwise optimal in order to serve the peaking load as reportedly France does. (A) I don’t think a nuke would work with a capacity factor of 30%. Unless the load was very seasonal and you could run it for weeks and then do without it for weeks. But cycling for a 30% load would not work. I
(3) Here in the U.S., could you discuss why “cycling down” large coal and nuclear base load power plants is so difficult. Please address what typically happens in efficiency (percentage wise) when a large coal unit is “cycled down”, and what happens to long term O&M costs when cycling up and down routinely happens.
> Someone else is probably better than me to answer this question. Planners take numbers from the maintenance people and put them in our models-lol. There is less wear and tear on a system when you ramp it up and leave it there than starting and stopping. (With good driving city miles are harder on your auto than highway miles). Some plants are built to better stop and start others not so much. O&M costs go up with cycling due to wear and tear. With controlling nuclear reactions I can only begin to imagine the difficulties introduced by starting and stopping – I never even saw maintenance numbers on that – you just don’t go there.
(4) Could you discuss why Renewables could be a better Fit in places say like New England (with a fleet of new shinny natural gas combined cycle units) versus say a place like Mississippi (with a lot of older coal units).
>Should probably defer here as well. I’m not sure why the premise has New England as better than Mississippi. Wind will be better where there is wind. Same for geothermal and solar. The higher capacity values from renewables afforded in an area the better (though I fear they are dreadfully low most places). Other than that renewables will be better based on the incremental cost of the energy they will replace. In general places with higher energy costs will be better. Or maybe the answer is renewables will be a better fit where politically they are supported (actual performance be damned).
(5) Could you talk to us about fuel risks. Every U.S. Electric Utility CEO that’s advancing the need for base load nuclear talks about the critical need for generation fleet diversification given (A) the hand writing on the wall as to U.S. coal (e.g., mercury, smog); (B) the fear of becoming overly dependent on natural gas.
If having a diversified portfolio for fuel risk is important for base load requirements — is this diversified portfolio argument valid or invalid for peaking requirements (e.g., solar)?
>That’s a really good question. It is important to have a diversified portfolio. But at what cost? My take is you should be willing to pay a premium for diversity, but when the cost delta’s get too high maybe not. The world changes so you sometimes get diversity just because current conditions are giving different answers than the past so your new additions are different from you current ones. Without outside political/environmental pressures because of low actual and projected gas prices – all indications would be build more gas. To hedge against gas risk I’d happily pay 5% more for nuclear base load which would control the costs. I would not pay 100% more for nuclear just to reduce the fuel risk. Somewhere between 5% and 100% you get challenged.
The world changes – one of the risk mitigation strategies in case natural gas prices got too high was to convert them to gasified coal operation. The capital costs of such a conversion are huge and now the environmental hurdles would be impenetrable.
I’m less worried about diversity for peaking rather than for intermediate or baseload, but it is somewhat of a concern. See above peaking only provides a much smaller portion of energy than it does for capacity.
↧
Comment on Gravito-thermal discussion thread by Vaughan Pratt
@cd: <i>I believe you are agreeing with me in a disagreeable way.</i>
Let me try to dissuade you of some of your beliefs including this one in the least disagreeable way a tendency-to-bluntness Australian can manage.
<i>This thought experiment with an isolated isothermal atmosphere involves only conduction transferring heat throughout the ideal atmosphere.</i>
Agreed. (There is radiation from the surface but in this no-GHG case it won't impact the atmosphere.)
<i>Since the surface would warm to some average temperature, about 4C if the solid surface were an ideal black body in Earth’s case,</i>
I'd been assuming an albedo of 0.3 but agreeable me will happily adjust my numbers to agree with your assumption of zero albedo. :) 277 K it is.
<i>the atmosphere would by conduction acquire heat from the surface and then being isothermal and not radiative, retain all that heat.</i>
Agreed.
<i> I am saying this is an unlikely situation because gravity reduces the rate of outward diffusion</i>
Yes, but this is offset by the tendency of the hotter molecules to prefer to move to lower pressure, i.e. upwards. Essentially the same mechanism as air bubbles rising in water. According to Maxwell and Boltzmann the two effects cancel exactly.
<i> and escape velocity limits the temperature and height of the atmosphere.</i>
How? Here's what <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Exosphere" rel="nofollow">Wikipedia has to say about that.</a>
<i>The exosphere is the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere (i.e. the upper limit of the atmosphere). It extends from the exobase, which is located at the top of the thermosphere at an altitude of about 700 km above sea level, to about 10,000 km (6,200 mi; 33,000,000 ft). The exosphere merges with the emptiness of outer space, where there is no atmosphere.
This layer is mainly composed of extremely low densities of hydrogen, helium and several heavier molecules including nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide closer to the exobase. The atoms and molecules are so far apart that they can travel hundreds of kilometers without colliding with one another. Thus, the exosphere no longer behaves like a gas, and the particles constantly escape into space. These free-moving particles follow ballistic trajectories and may migrate in and out of the magnetosphere or the solar wind.</i>
Lower down (roughly from 80 to 700 km) is the thermosphere, about which the article says,
<i>The temperature of this layer can rise as high as 1500 °C (2700 °F), though the gas molecules are so far apart that its temperature in the usual sense is not very meaningful.</i>
The temperature in the upper atmosphere is therefore hardly a compelling argument for Loschmidt's gravito-thermal theory.
↧
Comment on All megawatts are not equal by beththeserf
:)
↧
Comment on All megawatts are not equal by Planning Engineer
I went back and forth between those two after eliminating “Not all Megawatts are created equal”. It was not self evident to me.
↧
↧
Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by curryja
I have a forthcoming post on this, next week
↧
Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by brent
Will look forward to that :)
cheers
brent
↧
Comment on All megawatts are not equal by Wagathon
<blockquote>The momentum of long-standing preferential conduct by the state will not easily be turned around as the recent European Commission's proposal to harmonize fuel excise duties has revealed, yet not only private customers' inertia is at stake. Small Member States' budgets accustomed to reap wind-fall profits from the so-called ‘fuel tourism’ could not easily give up preferential diesel fuel policies. It will have to be seen whether imbalances in the world's fuel markets and more competitive powertrain strategies of other global players might in the end show European carmakers the way forward</blockquote>
The above is from a study by Cames and Helmer in <em>Environmental Sciences Europe 2013</em>. Even as current as the paper is, these authors are amazingly unaware of DEF technology (i.e., a relatively inexpensive solution comprised of 32.5% high-purity urea and 67.5% deionized water that is injected into the exhaust to eliminate NOx emissions).
↧
Comment on Super Pollutants Act of 2014 by Bob Ludwick
@ Max_OK, Citizen Scientist
“Bob’s got hysterical thinking about how global warming alarmist want to “eliminate 90+ % of the human race.”
I got almost as hysterical as Bob thinking about how global warming deniers want to eliminate 100% of the human race.
I had an advantage here with the 100% vs Bob’s 90+%. but he is just better at being hysterical.”
Well Max, there is hysteria and there is hysteria.
MY hysteria was inspired by the fact that the folks at the pointy end of the environmental/climate change pyramid have stated, as explicit goals, the elimination of 90+ % of the human race and blocking any scientific/technical advance that promises worldwide availability of cheap, plentiful energy and the observation that they are the ones who are currently driving our energy and climate policies. I was even helpful enough to provide links to their public statement of those goals:
http://blog.nationmultimedia.com/print.php?id=13914
and this one (contains a couple duplications):
(which you apparently never bothered to read)
YOUR hysteria re the sceptic desire to wipe out 100% of the human race seems to be based entirely on the fact that you say, with NO supporting evidence, that that will be the result of the skeptic resistance to energy/climate change policies that you favor (and your enthusiastic adoption of Rule 5). Those policies have been and continue to be devised by folks who have a stated objective of eliminating most of humanity, reducing the availability of energy, and increasing the cost of the remaining supply. As your favored policies would appear to be designed specifically to achieve those objectives, based on the predictable consequences of their widespread adoption, I would consider the resistance by skeptics to be prudent rather than hysterical.
↧
↧
Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by Wagathon
Good point. America is not simply causing regional warming or even global warming. America is guilty of, <strong>Climate Change!</strong>
↧
Comment on Spinning the ‘warmest year’ by steven
2.6 to 4.8 C. At least now we know who the human subjects were for the LSD experiment.
↧
Comment on All megawatts are not equal by cwon14
PE, here’s another example of why facts weigh so little with Green emotional reasoning in the room:
A tree can always grow to the sky in the renewable meme, if it doesn’t there is a conspiracy explaination usually to follow. So your figures and effort is instantly discounted. All the people in the link are “smart” and don’t care a darn for your observations. Better we focus on the why of that when facts are present. Again, I enjoyed your post and least a reprieve by the absence of our usual pinhead Gaia police squad found on most topics but curiously absent today.
↧
Comment on All megawatts are not equal by ordvic
Fernando, you may be on to something there. Warmistas are being instructed to use messages that are sticky (sticks to the memory).
Why use the 4 Hiroshimas per second metaphor: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, story. Made to stick! Hmm hockey stick anyone?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/4-hiroshima-bombs-worth-of-heat-per-second.html
Kim Jong-un or why North Korea learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Bombs per second keeps the climate in play. It is similar to Reagan’s reasoning of out spending the Soviets in defense thereby collapsing their economy. It’s Koreas version of SDI. This may be the stickier idea needed to counter-act Hiroshima and help us psuedo-scientists use propaganda to debunk R Gates. Oh the wonder of unintended irony as Joshua would say.
↧
↧
Comment on Gravito-thermal discussion thread by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2
Vaughan Pratt, “How? Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about that.”
Near escape velocity the molecule would not behave like an ideal particle in the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. It would be suspended to some degree by centrifugal force. Depending on the average velocity and rotational rate you can have neat features like rings, the particle could escape to a higher orbit, or just escape. At that point you are not only reducing the upward average velocity but the downward as well until gravity is significantly greater than the centrifugal force. Of course there is the chance that molecules excited opposite the rotational direction could *exactly* offset those excited in the direction of rotation, but I think the general relative velocity would make that a small probability.
Near the equator of our ideal planet the maximum temperature could be as high as 393K and at a latitude that gets 50% of the direct insolation about 330K degrees. So while the “average” is one thing, we can have some pretty energetic molecules which should have a say in whether or not the atmosphere loses mass to a higher orbit or space. If the rate of pole ward conductive/advective heat transport is slow, the maximum velocities would determine “normal” not the average.
The bad thing about “equilibrium” is that everything becomes significant on some time scale.
↧
Comment on All megawatts are not equal by cwon14
So oil drillers will be subjected to market forces while ivory tower renewables will whine and likely get more subside from the state and ultimately taxpayers. That inflation you mentioned is caused by government as well.
Major price changes, even if a commodity such as oil is greatly inflated by government excess, corruption and manipulations dating over 75 years will cause pain to many ordinary parties. Russia, Iran, Venezuela might also collapse if the strain is long enough on their corrupt cash flow cultures.
Low oil prices might well wipe out the filth of our Greenshirt renewable fraudster culture at the same time. So while I pity the overextended private sector worker who does a hard job there is plenty to be hopeful in traditional Keynesian malinvestment decline. None of this could ever have happened without free market curtailments and greed of government culture so obviously supported by so many here and in large part by the host herself.
↧
Comment on All megawatts are not equal by Planning Engineer
I feel terribly let down by science communicators like Neil Tyson DeGrasse, Bill Nye and other members of the “skeptical/science” community. A few times, mostly long ago, I tried to offer some “critical thinking” challenges related to the environment and energy on the skeptical blogs and in no instances did it feel like a rewarding experience. I love science, critical thinking and that they debunk a lot of hooey. But many in that community equate scientific literacy with an adoption of global alarmism and the promotion of aggressive measures to address it. In many sphere’s the “skeptic community” welcomes debate and is very careful to spell out use evidence to support their beliefs and address challenges. With climate they just seem to label dissent as deniers and reiterate bullet points.
I’m afraid that group got derailed years back and instead of rethinking doubled down. Perhaps Michael Crichton nailed it here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/commentaries/crichton_3.pdf
↧
More Pages to Explore .....
