“Depending on the inertia of the system it can take several centuries”
Naughty boy Mosher. Why not just work out what the inertia of the system is? Does the system respond to a loss of sunlight by cooling. Yup, every night.
Does the system respond to axial tilt? Yup every year.
Does the system respond to increases in atmospheric dust? Yup, every large volcano.
Does the system respond to grounded aircraft? Yep, post-9/11.
‘several centuries”
Want to model that?
.
Bart, do you have an alter ego? Sometimes you actually make sense 
Yes, the same angry teenager who so often skins his shins.
This remarkable increase is very similar to the remarkable increase that has happened time and time again over the past ten thousand years. Warm, then Cool, Then Warm Then Cool, then Warm, then Cool, Climate Etc.
What I find interesting about CFLs and mercury is how many advocates of CFLs are also advocates of AGW, but when you point out to them that the government says that CFls are dangerous and need to be cleaned up carefully, these AGW advocates suddenly give plenty of reasons to discount the government.
CFLs aren’t really that dangerous. They hardly ever break. The government is just being overly cautious. And of course, if you are worried about CFLs breaking you’re probably an old incompetent rightwing jerkface (a loose but accurate paraphrase.)
FWIW, I’d love to have some nice cool LEDs, I live in a desert and would love to get rid of incandescents.
I adopted a few of the original blogs early on. I make it a habit to check This Week in Science every Saturday, written by DS
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/24/1076936/-This-week-in-science-angry-world-angry-universe#comments
I already knew about the carpet bombing of the poll, probably from last week’s edition.
‘Large, abrupt climate changes have affected hemispheric to global regions repeatedly, as shown by numerous paleoclimate records (Broecker, 1995, 1997). Changes of up to 16°C and a factor of 2 in precipitation have occurred in some places in periods as short as decades to years (Alley and Clark, 1999; Lang et al., 1999). However, before the 1990s, the dominant view of past climate change emphasized the slow, gradual swings of the ice ages tied to features of the earth’s orbit over tens of millennia or the 100-million-year changes occurring with continental drift. But unequivocal geologic evidence pieced together over the last few decades shows that climate can change abruptly, and this has forced a reexamination of climate instability and feedback processes (NRC, 1998). Just as occasional floods punctuate the peace of river towns and occasional earthquakes shake usually quiet regions near active faults, abrupt changes punctuate the sweep of climate history.’ http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=10
It would be remarkable if it didn’t change remarkably.
Since you’ve got me researching, I might as well share my pain.
Tonyb @ 24/3 4.55pm
re your sea rise record, eg the marker at Port Arthur, Tasmania showing 2.5cm rise since 1841 . Across Bass Strait on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsular, along a road cutting on Port Phillip Bay, my nephew detected the unmistakable remains of an ancient shoreline, sand, smooth pebbles and rocks, several metres above the present tide level. Don’t know that anyone else has noticed it. I’ll ask him if he can post it here as you might be interested in it for your records.
Putting risks of energy sources in perspective . . . .
DEATHS PER TERAWATT HOUR
Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro – world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)
Even taking into consideration the ~60 deaths from Chernobyl, nuclear power remains the safest energy source.
World average for coal is about 161 deaths per TWh.
In the USA about 30,000 deaths/year from coal pollution from 2000 TWh.
15 deaths per TWh.
In China about 500,000 deaths/year from coal pollution from 1800 TWh.
278 deaths per TWh.
Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Tonight it is time to draw the curtain on a social experiment that escaped detection for sixty four years [2009-1945 = 64 years] until first exposed by Climategate emails and documents in November 2009 and then confirmed as purposeful government deceit by official responses to them.
The great fact is just this: From 1945 until 2009, world society
1. Benefitted as nationalism diminished and world peace spread, but
2. Collapsed as public confidence dropped in world leaders who made
FEAR-based decisions secretly among themselves to Unite Nations against an imaginary common enemy, Global Climate Change, based on deep-seated, but ill-informed fears of
3. The man-made “nuclear fire” that consumed Hiroshima and ended WWII on 6 August 1945, and
4. Threatened mutual nuclear annihilation for the rest of the world in the Cuban Missile Crisis of late October 1962.
Indications of deceit in government science appeared in 1956 attempts to block publication of evidence of naturally occurring “nuclear fires” on Earth [P. K. Kuroda, “On the nuclear physical stability of the uranium minerals,” J. Chem. Physics 25, 781 (1956); “On the infinite multiplication constant and the age of the uranium minerals,” J. Chem. Physics 25, 1256 (1956)].
After confirmation by the French Atomic Energy Commission in 1972, the story was published in Naturwissenschaften 70, 536-539 (1983): http://www.springerlink.com/content/n556224311414604/
Official efforts to hide information on the reason “nuclear fires” ignite spontaneously in the cores of
a.) Heavy atoms (A > 150 amu)
b.) Fluid planets, like Jupiter
c.) Ordinary Sun-like stars
d.) Galaxies
Prevented the development of realistic energy polices to sustain Earth’s increasing population, and led to the production of Hg-filled Eco-lightbulbs
The rest of this sad story is here:
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
I have some LED lights that had reasonable prices.
@Chief “It would be remarkable if it didn’t change remarkably”
Sudden climate change is the only thing about climateology that concerns me, notwithstanding that “sudden” would be probably be spread over several decades in the context of Earth’s climate over millions of years.
There are definite external forcings at work that would appear to bring this about since normal climate cycles certainly shows strong negative feedback mechanisms at work that keeps temperature, wind and precipitation levels within quite narrow bands.
I am most interested in hydrology because I believe that observed climate over the centuries have been heavily influenced by hydrology, such as, for example, the insulation effects of oceans and lakes on the relatively small land mass of Earth and on its the evaporation/precipitation cycles.
Those capacitor guys sure know how to throw a party.
The “virtual water” content of oil, too, is increasing, and is a concern to everyone involved in Policy I know.
That Canada was able to lobby the EU to ignore this problem with tarsands is nothing short of a victory of diplomacy over commonsense. It’s not that tarsand oil is so dirty. It’s that it is so wet.
China has the same problem with fracking. Everyone who fracks does, and it will come to a head for them, because you can’t cheat at Physics forever.
The general solution to the problem of the commons is privatization, as a very sage Denizen pointed out in a recent thread. Economics is just a way of wording the problem. Can we learn from the physical world what its limits are, and match the shape of economic incentives to the shape of the underlying world?
Thank you for the references. My excuses for mental laziness are being removed one by one.
While Venice is sinking, it’s also well and rigorously studied, with recent and impressively supported data disentangling natural from anthropogenic sources of variability.
While there are places on coasts in the world rising, I think few of them rise a third so quickly as Venice naturally subsides; half of Venice’s change in depth is sea level rise, not subsidence.
All of us ought consider the impact on the present value of our long term investments in oceanfront of it turning from a perpetuity to an annuity with a fixed end date. Or find Snow Birds who don’t care or can’t do math.
The important figure in Sustainability equations is the denominator, the amount we must invest to obtain a return. Increasing the denominator will cost us more than proportionately we obtain.
A very long time ago, I was invited and prepared, and all arrangements were made, as a system analyst to consult with a farm cooperative in Nicaragua, with the objective of creating a network on the then little-known Internet, so the farmers could leverage their investments and logistics. It could have been a proof-of-concept for independently run mutually beneficial information exchange in agriculture.
The night before I was to fly out, my hosts took 40 American visitors to their region hostage in some short-term and silly dispute. All the hostages were before long released unharmed, but the network never happened. It took decades for the farmers to catch up with what they could have had, except for the ignorant and misguided disputatiousness of their hotheads.
Don’t let the core value of the idea be taken hostage by ancient grievance.
Tony B.,
If you believe (as I do) that clmate is not just a random walk, but there are real and multiple forcings, which added together along with their various positive and negative feedbacks, add up to cliimate, then certainly any climate period could resemble any other, even if due to different reasons. But “natural variability” is just a catch-all phrase really that definitely should NOT mean random walk, but hopefully means “a variety of natural forcings”. As Foster & Rahmstorf and other studies have shown, nearly all of “natural variability” can be broken down in to actual natural forcings such as ENSO, solar, and volcanic, which can be seen now as noise riding upon the underlying forcing caused by the 40% rise in CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) since the industrial revolution.
WHT, that looks good on the face of it. It confirms my opinion that the seasonal CO2 variation is caused by temperature, not by vegetation in NH (consensus).
R. Gates you write “The reverse of this, that is, dissecting out the individual components is exactly what Foster & Rahmstorf and others have done to see the overall underlying signal of anthropogenic warming that remains. ”
The method adopted by Foster and Rahmsdorf works, IF AND ONLY IF you have a complete knowledge of ALL the efffects which change global temperatures. If you dont know ALL of them, then the answer you get is, at best, the maximum possible value for climate sensitivity. And since we dont know all the variables which affect global temperatures, the technique used by F&R gives nothing more that a useless guess.
R. Gates I forgot to ask. Did F&R calculate the climate sensitivity of the GHGs? And if so, what value did they get?
Peter,
I don’t think it is disingenuous at all to talk about increasing greenhouse gases changing the overall probabilistic environment of any single weather event. And the increase in atmospheric and ocean temperatures are just one of the effects of increasing CO2 on the overall environment. It is one metric to meaure the effects on “weather”, but certainly there can be others…i.e. stronger and more frequent severe weather events.
The marble and metal sheet mind experiment is only to illustrate how probabilities must be considered in a wholistic way, and thus, when global climate models show a likely increase in extreme weather events, then it should be considered as well in a wholistic way as part of a new probabilistic environment Any single weather event exists as part of that environment, and thus, you can’t dissect it out. It has multiple causes, all interacting, all part of the whole, and some of those causes as part of that whole must, by fact, include increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.
