Don – Max’s response is too silly to entertain as anything of substance. The insult is self-inflicted.
Comment on Week in review by jim2
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Comment on Week in review by Rob Ellison
CE is a bit of a zoo – Judy likes it that way. It’s a sociological experiment. How does rational policy evolve from this mishmash of quite hopelessly misguided ideas of ‘the science’ – both sides – and muddled headed policy?
I am professionally involved in hydrological and water quality modelling. The science question I have been pursuing since the 1980’s was only accidentally climate related. It concerned an observation that stream forms had changed abruptly in the late 1970’s in eastern Australia. From high energy braided to low energy meandering. Rainfall regimes had changed – but why?
Staying close to data and inferring relationships in the best traditions of natural philosophy – it is ultimately explained by complexity science. Simple mechanism combining in ways in which behaviour emerges from complex interactions in surprising ways. The principle is that small changes in conditions drive the system past a threshold at which stage the components start to interact chaotically in multiple and changing negative and positive feedbacks – as tremendous energies cascade through powerful subsystems. Some of these changes have a regularity within broad limits and the planet responds with a broad regularity in changes of ice, cloud, Atlantic thermohaline circulation and ocean and atmospheric circulation.
It has to make sense in terms of fundamental – and conceptually simple – physical mechanisms.
Climate is wild as Wally Broecker famously said. ‘The new paradigm of an abruptly changing climatic system has been well established by research over the last decade, but this new thinking is little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of natural and social scientists and policy-makers.’ (NAS 2002) I doubt that the ‘new paradigm’ is much advanced as yet. It suggests little warming for decades from 2002 – and the shifts beyond that may be more or less extreme either on the warm or cool ends of the spectrum. This is quite a departure from the conventional forcing model and has immense policy significance as the planet fails to conform to the old thinking.
It is the most most modern concept of climate science. It says on the one hand that the sceptics may be right – the world may not be warming due to vigourour internal variability at decadal to longer scales. It says as well that a slowly changing climate may give way to transitional extremes of weather – dragon kings at thresholds – before settling into a new and unpredictable climate state in accord with complexity science.
Abrupt climate changes were especially common when the climate system was being forced to change most rapidly. Thus, greenhouse warming and other human alterations of the earth system may increase the possibility of large, abrupt, and unwelcome regional or global climatic events. The abrupt changes of the past are not fully explained yet, and climate models typically underestimate the size, speed, and extent of those changes. Hence, future abrupt changes cannot be predicted with confidence, and climate surprises are to be expected. http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=1
The precautionary principle suggests we should reduce the pressures on the system. Common sense – somewhat lacking frankly – suggests that it is not nearly as simple as taxing carbon dioxide. Solutions are multi-dimensional involving economic and social development, better land use practices, sustainable production systems, reduction of population pressures, technological innovation and ecological restoration.
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by Joseph
<blockquote> but I also know that some politicians and bureaucrats believe in whatever theory gives them an opportunity to take money from the energy sector and spend it themselves in the name of saving the planet.</blockquote>
Do these politicians really believe that those politicians who want to do something about climate change are not relying on the IPCC, the numerous scientific organizations, and vast majority of scientists who believe that climate change is a problem that need to be addressed? Who should should they rely on and why? Dr Curry? The NIPCC?
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by Mi Cro
This a chart of the derivative of surface station temp, where global minimum temp is made from large regional swings of temp, where maximum temps of the same station does not show any such change.
At the bottom of the url in my name are the same sort of graph for individual continents. They also show you when you calculate the slope of temp for both warming and cooling during the year.
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Comment on Week in review by Rob Ellison
Transition to low carbon energy sources is indeed possible. Key findings of the NREL energy futures study are,
1. Renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.
2. Increased electric system flexibility, needed to enable electricity supply and demand balance with high levels of renewable generation, can come from a portfolio of supply- and demand-side options, including flexible conventional generation, grid storage, new transmission, more responsive loads, and changes in power system operations.
3. The abundance and diversity of U.S. renewable energy resources can support multiple combinations of renewable technologies that result in deep reductions in electric sector greenhouse gas emissions and water use.
4. The direct incremental cost associated with high renewable generation is comparable to published cost estimates of other clean energy scenarios. Improvement in the cost and performance of renewable technologies is the most impactful lever for reducing this incremental cost. http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re_futures/
It does come at an economic cost – and this reveals the fundamental conceptual flaw in revenue neutral carbon taxes. If taxes were high enough to effect a transition – the revenue would dry up leaving consumers out of pocket with higher energy costs and lower economic productivity. The solution is to reduce the costs of low carbon sources.
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Comment on Week in review by John Smith (it's my real name)
Max
you can’t understand kim ’cause you’re ideology free
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by Curious George
Wrong.
Steven dear, you want us to accept your superior opinion frequently, without any hint why. So you’ll have to trust me on this one. Happy New Year.
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by Curious George
The best estimate? You are an optimist. That’s not an estimate, it is a fake.
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Comment on Week in review by kim
Lard and lye, hey, it’s Saturday Night. No soap, church on radio only.
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Comment on Week in review by jacobress
About conservatives supporting a carbon tax: seems the liberals don’t have a monopoly on bad ideas…
I would gladly trade a carbon tax for the canceling of all wind and solar subsidies and mandates, as well as the ethanol mandate. Of course, this is not offered. What is contemplated is a carbon tax on top of all idiotic expenditures on things that don’t work.And’ like all taxes – it starts low (maybe 25-30 $ per ton), and advances each year… forever…
Then – about “revenue neutral” – this is not credible… once politicians grab some tax money, they won’t hurry to implement the “revenue neutrality” part.
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by Curious George
How high is the Top Of Atmosphere today, above your town? What is the temperature there? Is it by any chance increased by an absorption of an outbound IR radiation by CO2?
This logic is a fairy tale masquerading as a theory. But I may be wrong. Please give me a link to a radiative theory correctly predicting stratospheric temperatures.
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by PMHinSC
“HaroldW | January 3, 2015 at 11:13 am |
I am puzzled that you think…”
I am looking for science not “estimate the role of greenhouse gases such as CO2…I subscribe to the view…I see no reason to expect [or] …some believe.” The first data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 Mission was presented in Dec, there is no data showing man’s signature in the environment, the cart is clearly before the horse, and it is premature to declare the theory to be confirmed. Please note I have not expressed my opinion or stated that the theory is not true; just that there is insufficient science to declare it as confirmed. I am looking for science not premature declarations of “everybody agrees” quibbling over degree.
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by Steven Mosher
“Since we are talking about and comparing to a greenhouse, why don’t we do experiments within a greenhouse? Say that we are able to isolate the greenhouse from the earth’s atmosphere, so there is no interference. ”
another mistake.
1. you cant do a controlled experiment. there is no second earth to use as a control.
2. You cant use a controlled box to represent the atmosphere because
the box lacks what is most important, an ERL
Seeing the flaw in 2 is easy. Suppose I showed you a “greenhouse” effect in an enclosed structure. What would a good skeptic say? A good skeptic would say “Well, the atmosphere is different than a small enclosed box”.
As you said, you are not scientist.
Start with the history I pointed folks at.
Observational science is different from experimental science.
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by David in TX
You go, girl!
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Comment on Week in review by jacobress
“Renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity… ”
That is pure fantasy, refuted by the German experience.
“grid storage” – there ain’t such a thing…
The wind and solar energy is fully parasitic (dependent) on the carbon-powered supply. They are absolutely inadequate to supply regularly good quantities of energy. They absolutely useless. They don’t reduce emissions at all.
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by Curious George
I don’t argue with SkS. I don’t argue with my ex. In five minutes she can say things that I would need five days to prove wrong.
How about turning the tables? Can’t I consider SkS wrong until they prove themselves right – but my question never made it through moderation.
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by vukcevic
Hi
There are two fault lines, one on each side of the Adriatic. There is no excess CO2 on the Italian side, which is rising, while the Balkan’s side is sinking (error in my comment above), Roman built roads in some places are 2-3m below low tide.
“The primary source of carbon/CO2 is outgassing from the Earth’s interior at midocean ridges, hotspot volcanoes, and subduction-related volcanic arcs”
http://www.columbia.edu/~vjd1/carbon.htm Gavin’s stomping ground
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by David in TX
The salient question is why does less than half of manmade CO2 emission stick around in the atmosphere? Will the sink that’s lapping it up half as fast as we can dig it out of the ground continue drawing it down at same rate if we cut emission level?
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Comment on Georgia politicians cool to global warming by Steven Mosher
the atmosphere is not a box.
the experiment doesnt even test the hypothesis.
1. Adding C02 will raise the ERL
The box cant test this.
You need an actually atmosphere to test the theory
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Comment on Week in review by Rud Istvan
Rob, NREL gets billions annually to work on renewables, mainly PV solar. They have never produced anything of practical value, and all their solar technology spinoffs have failed (that last may be a bit of an overstatement, as some may not have yet been fully wound up. Any report they put out must be read skeptically, and any conclusions taken with a large dose of salt.
NREL has not solved the renewables intermittency problem. No one has. So the NREL conclusion you quote that renewables could supply 80% of US grid electricity by 2050 is wrong on its face– unless you also want to install an equal amount of redundant fossil fueled backup (inefficient gas peakers). Absurdly wrong from an investment and cost perspective. See Planning Engineer’s guest posts, or read essays Solar Sunset and California Dreaming in ebook Blowing Smoke.
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