Quantcast
Channel: Comments for Climate Etc.
Viewing all 147842 articles
Browse latest View live

Comment on Did human-caused climate change lead to war in Syria? by climatereason

0
0

David

Germane to this thread, there is an extraordinary report in Todays Sunday Times that Obama was told by the CIA two years ago of the likely rise of ISIL and the likely fall of Mosul and Ramada but ignored it. It claims he then l*ed about knowing , saying their rise was completely unexpected. Is this story going the rounds in the US?

Rather than ly*ing i would hope that, if true, he was badly advised and this raises the question as to whether he is similarly badly advised on such subjects as climate change.

tonyb


Comment on Week in review – policy and politics edition by Mike Flynn

0
0

genghis,

I saw something recently, about dams in Tibet, and earthquakes. Nepal has been suffering earthquakes for literally thousands of years. They could probably give us lessons on how to cope, and press on. I still can’t understood the logic behind building large hydro schemes in Nepal.

As with many things, the devil’s in the detail, and the maintenance will get you. With regard to Nepal hydro, I really have trouble deciding where to start. The future will tell, and I might be wrong. Maybe hydro will benefit Nepal in the long term, but I can’t see how, based on my experience to date.

Comment on Week in review – policy and politics edition by climatereason

0
0

Mike

The world bank will finance hydro dams as will Western countries through their aid programmes. Its probably got more to do with ideology than practicality

tonyb

Comment on Week in review – policy and politics edition by JCH

0
0

A simple solution would be to build them, but leave them empty. That way Western contractors can make their boat payments for the boats they never use.

Comment on Week in review – policy and politics edition by jim2

0
0

WTI has been very close to $60 for the last month. The contango has narrowed to a mere $3. The dollar climbed a bit in the latter part of May, this puts downward pressure on the price of oil.

I read the Saudis can increase production by another million bbl/day and also that drilling is active there.

Instead of cutting back on production, they are playing a fools game to grab market share. This is bad for them and everyone else. They can’t double their production from when oil was over $100, so they have to be losing money. It seems they want to hurt the US and Canada instead of produce in a businesslike manner.

There is a din of analyst voices calling for a return to the $40’s. We’ll see what develops.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by AK

0
0
Ya know, given the (expected) sensitivity around here to "dragon-king" events; very-low probability occurrences at the extreme tail of the PDF, as well as energy considerations, there might be some interest in a low-probability explanation for this: <a href="http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/science-nasty-1-wolf-rayet-star-02829.html" rel="nofollow">Nasty 1: Hubble Uncovers Surprising New Clues about Unique Wolf-Rayet Star</a><blockquote>Nasty 1 is also known as Wolf-Rayet 122 or WR 122. The star’s catalogue name, NaSt1, is derived from the first two letters of each of the two astronomers who discovered it in 1963, Jason Nassau and Charles Stephenson.</blockquote><blockquote>The star lies at a distance of about 3,000 light-years and is thought to be a Wolf-Rayet star – a massive, rapidly evolving star weighing well over 10 times the mass of our Sun. It is losing its hydrogen-filled outer layers quickly, exposing its super-hot and extremely bright helium-burning core.</blockquote><blockquote>But Nasty 1 doesn’t look like a typical Wolf-Rayet star. [...]</blockquote><blockquote>Instead, they revealed a pancake-shaped disk of gas encircling the star. The vast disk is nearly 2 trillion miles wide, and <b>may have formed</b> from an unseen companion star that snacked on the outer envelope of the newly formed Wolf-Rayet. [my bold]</blockquote>IOW, they don't really know how or why this object formed. Actual article: <a href="http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/450/3/2551.full.pdf+html" rel="nofollow">Multiwavelength observations of NaSt1 (WR 122): equatorial mass loss and X-rays from an interacting Wolf–Rayet binary</a>.<blockquote>NaSt1, aka WR 122, is an evolved massive star that has defied characterization. It was discovered by Nassau & Stephenson (1963), who proposed a WR classification based on the strong emission-line spectrum. It was later reclassified [...] then later proposed to be [...] Subsequently, more detailed multiwavelength investigation by Crowther & Smith (1999, hereafter CS99) showed that although NaSt1 is indeed a hot luminous object with [...], its emission-line spectrum is mostly of nebular origin, not stellar. Moreover, ground-based narrow-band imaging through an [N ii] filter centred near wavelength λ6584 Å revealed the presence of a compact circumstellar nebula with a diameter of ≈7 arcsec, [...]</blockquote><blockquote>[...] CS99 pointed out that the only other massive star known to be enshrouded in a nebula having a comparable level of nitrogen enrichment is the LBV+OB binary η Car and its Homunculus nebula ([ref's]). However, CS99 note that the chemical abundance ratios in the NaSt1 nebula are characteristic of a WR, and probably inconsistent with a red supergiant or H-rich LBV. Moreover, the derived ionization potential requires that the central ionizing source be T ≫ 30 kK, which suggests a spectral subtype earlier than WN6–7. The absence of the characteristic broad emission lines from a WR wind, however, implies that the stellar system is deeply embedded in an opaque nebula. High-resolution spectroscopy by CS99 revealed that the nebular lines have a double-peaked morphology, which suggests <b>complex geometry for the outflow.</b> [my bold]</blockquote> In summary, the object is totally unique, with a few similarities to other known objects, but also clear differences. All the "explanations" offered for it are completely speculative, suitable only because nothing better is on the table. Here's my thought: This object could well be a major power station, created by a life-form with human style intelligence and engineering ability. It's encircled by a disk roughly 10 times the size of the Earth's orbit, which is radiating a huge amount of energy into space. Although that disk is hot enough to be fully ionized, allowing all sorts of chaotic <b>or engineered</b> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_turbulence" rel="nofollow">magnetohydrodynamic (MHD)</a> turbulent structures, its temperature is very low compared to that of the stellar core, potentially allowing energy to be shipped from the core to the radiating disk with almost all of it extracted in useful form. (If the absolute temperature of the source is 10 times that of the radiating disk, the Carnot efficiency would be ~90%.) It's certainly plausible that our current technology, at the rate it's going, might be able to create such a stellar-sized power station (using, for instance, the double star <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri" rel="nofollow">Alpha Centauri</a>) through MHD engineering, within a century or two. I'm not sure what "we" would use all that energy <b>for</b>, but I'm sure something would come up. Perhaps an interstellar civilization with a population in the 1,000,000,000,000,000's. Given that, I don't see how we can rule out deliberate engineering by a life-form with human-style intelligence as an explanation for something like NaSt1/WR 122.

Comment on Did human-caused climate change lead to war in Syria? by David Springer

0
0

Tony,

The only politics I follow anymore are local. I got elected to city council last year and am busier than a two-peckered billy goat getting things changed. The isolated waterfront community I’m in doesn’t talk about much going on outside our borders. Climate change, terrorists, world and national politics concerns are more or less non-existent.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by Bad Andrew

0
0

Mosher: “Unicorns are different from luck.”

So this is where modern Climate Science is. Telling us that unicorns are different from luck. Let spend a few billion more.

Andrew


Comment on Did human-caused climate change lead to war in Syria? by scotts4sf

0
0

Tonyb
At this time in the presidency much of the populace is jaded by Obama and Clinton lies and mis-directions. He blames Bush from 7 years ago for current problems and then mis directs to sea level rise to avoid facing realities in the world around. I expect we will have to wait for suicide bombers in subways to wake the low information voter. Easier to solve problems in 100 years than now.
Scott

Comment on Week in review – policy and politics edition by curryja

0
0

I’ve read it – Taleb doesn’t follow the logic of his own arguments. He has some good arguments, but his conclusion is wrong.

Comment on Week in review – policy and politics edition by David Springer

0
0

Utter dreck. Fertilization of the atmosphere and warming of higher latitudes at night and in the winter is a Godsend. Just as importantly rising standard of living around the globe is directly correlated with price and availability of energy.

Comment on Week in review – policy and politics edition by AK

0
0
From <a href="http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5787.pdf%C2%A0" rel="nofollow">The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)</a> by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Rupert Read, Raphael Douady, Joseph Norman, and Yaneer Bar-Yam:<blockquote>We believe that the PP should be evoked only in extreme situations: when the potential harm is systemic (rather than localized) and the consequences can involve total irreversible ruin, such as the extinction of human beings or all life on the planet.</blockquote>AFAIK nobody has plausibly suggested that the climate effects of fossil CO2 might include “<i>the extinction of human beings or all life on the planet.</i>” Challenges to our civilization (not the end of it) wouldn't fit this category, in fact such challenges would more likely improve it, by compelling greater attention to effective use of technology, and discouraging the use of social manipulation to gain power.

Comment on Did human-caused climate change lead to war in Syria? by ulriclyons

0
0

C.H.said:
“Although it’s likely that Ulrich will opine well before that and say I’ve got the whole thing totally arse about..”

No “h” on the end of my name thanks. It is largely correct that La Nina would increase precipitation in Australia, India, parts of Africa but not the Sahel, and definitely not good for California. What you definitely have backwards is the idea that La Nina will dominate for the next couple of centuries, watch what happens through the next decade for example. And I don’t find UK rainfall to be very random, it is mostly wetter when cooler than normal in summer, and drier when colder than normal in winter. With the short scale temperature deviations being solar driven by its effects on the NAO, and by regional SST’s effecting the jet stream track.
Ragnaar’s wild guess that Mediterranean rainfall leads global temperatures by decades has no physical basis.

Comment on Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 by Ferdinand Engelbeen

0
0

AK,

I have repeatedly listed to several of Dr. Salby’s speeches, in Australia, Hamburg, was personally in London’s parliament last year for his speech (where he avoided a direct answer to few pertinent questions I had afterwards) and listed/commented on his recent speech again in London.
If I don’t agree with somebody, I want to be pretty sure that what he/she said was really what I thought what was said.

In the case of ice cores, Dr. Salby had two separate objections against the CO2 levels found in ice cores: the short time variability which is leveled off during the time the snow is accumulating and the pores still are open (everybody agrees on that) and the peak shaving due to migration: a peak of 1000 ppmv is noticed as a peak of 100 ppmv only during an interglacial.
Here is what he said in his speech in Hamburg, from 27 minutes on in the film (thanks to Janice):
A peak of 40 ppmv would be seen as a 20 ppmv peak after 10,000 years, 1000 ppmv would be noticed as a peak of 100 ppmv in the ice core after 100,000 years.
Not literally, but listen to it for yourself.

Which is physically impossible: CO2 levels in ice cores don’t level off over time and if they did, that implies a factor 4 higher peak every interglacial back in time to obtain about the same CO2 level and negative values during glacial times…
Salby’s math is quite difficult to follow and need a lot of knowledge and probably computer power if you want to work that out in real figures. As good as with Bart’s, Salby’s reasoning may be superb and mathematically 100% right, but the result violates all observations, thus is 100% wrong and even a back on an envelope calculation can show that…

His theoretical calculations start a few minutes before the above where he shows that the lower the frequency, the more the signal is attenuated (!). That is where my internal alarms started to ring…

Comment on Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 by Ferdinand Engelbeen

0
0

AK,

It really doesn’t make much difference:
If we assume that C3 plants discriminate down to -24 per mil δ13C and C4 plants to -10 per mil. in both cases more CO2 uptake would leave more 13CO2 behind in the atmosphere and ocean surface: +24 per mil for C3 plants and +10 per mil for C4 plants.

Even if all C3 plants were replaced by C4 plants, more uptake of CO2 than release by decay/feed/food still would increase the δ13C level of the atmosphere and ocean surface. What is observed is a firm decline in both, thus not caused by the biosphere…


Comment on Week in review – policy and politics edition by Chief Hydrologist

0
0

Joseph Norman, Rupert Rose, Yaneer Bar-Yam contend that the climate debate is about the accuracy or otherwise of climate models. Those who believe in climate models argue for ‘specific’ – unspecified – policy. Those who don‘t – say that there is no harm shown to warrant action. As a chain of reasoning it falls at the very first hurdle. Models are known without a doubt to be inaccurate. It is called ‘irreducible imprecision’ and it has been known about since Edward Lorenz plied his convection models in the 1960’s. Models many feasible – slightly different – starting points as a result of uncertainty in inputs. Many solutions are thus possible – for a single model – that diverge exponentially over the calculation period. The problem is shown in the diagram from a paper by Julia Slingo – head of the British Met Office – and Tim Palmer – head of the European Centre for Mid-Range Weather Forecasting.


Source: Julia Slingo and Tim Palmer 2011

It is quite demonstrable math but mention this on any global warming blog and the inhabitants will exhibit severe agitation, fear and loathing as cognitive dissonance kicks in. However – it is not quite right either to claim that models are inaccurate because they fail to reproduce the lack of more recent global temperature rise. Instead what they have done is arbitrarily pick one of the possible solutions – and discard all the others – based on expectations of how climate will evolve. The choices are too hot – what a surprise.

The policy from global warming progressives involves the collapse of western civilisation and capitalism leading to less growth, less material consumption, less CO2 emissions, less habitat destruction and a last late chance to stay within the safe limits of global ecosystems. And this is just in the ‘scholarly’ journals.

The progressives are right in one respect. Economies are fragile – movements on markets can be fierce – recovery glacially slow sometimes. There are economic problems – but the problems are not intrinsic to capitalism. They were created by poor judgement. We blundered into it through stupidity. It is not difficult – however – to imagine scenarios in which markets are deliberately destabilised to hasten the end of capitalism. Creeping tax takes, overspending by government, printing money, keeping interest rates too low for too long, or too high for too long, taxing primary inputs, implementing market distorting subsidies – the scope is endless. These are suspiciously the objectives of global warming progressives – but let’s not call it a conspiracy.

The rational management of economies requires interest rates to be managed through the overnight cash market to restrain inflation to a 2 to 3% target. Markets need fair, transparent and accessible laws. Including on open and fair markets. Optimal tax take is some 23% of GDP – and budgets are balanced. Markets operate best in a robust democracy. These nuts and bolts of market management – mainstream market theory and practice pioneered by F. A. Hayek – keep economies on a modest and stable growth trajectory as much as is possible.

Economic growth provides resources for solving problems – restoring organic carbon in agricultural soils, conserving and restoring ecosystems, better sanitation and safer water, better health and education, updating the diesel fleet and other productive assets to emit less black carbon, developing better and cheaper ways of producing electricity, replacing cooking fires with better ways of preparing food, etc. We can sequester carbon in agricultural soils and in conserved and restored ecosystems, reduce nitrous oxide and harmful tropospheric ozone, burn methane to produce low cost electricity, reduce the strong climate effects of black carbon and the millions of premature deaths that result from cooking over open fires at the same time. We can develop low cost alternatives to the fossil fuels we know are increasing in scarcity and increasing in cost. We are not married to coal. While it is true that we do have only one planet – our concern for it extends well beyond CO2. Population, development, technical innovation, multiple gases and aerosols across sectors, land use change and the environment are the broader context.

I would be the last one to suggest that there isn’t more uncertainty is a system with the internal dynamics of the Earth’s climate – and much more scope for severe and rapid change than even the modellers contemplate. However – the solution to the multiple problems of people in the world are both simpler and more complex than overthrowing democracy and capitalism. The energy solution are technological – primarily a gas to advanced nuclear strategy if nothing better comes along. Communities on a growth path can look after themselves. Management of the global commons is a messy and complex human problem requiring the most modern theories and models of human behaviour. Environmental management involves the strategic deployment of methods and technologies across landscapes, industries and infrastructure – and for implementation requires a different approach than top down government regulation that is failing both business and the environment.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by Chief Hydrologist

0
0

The origins of ENSO are in upwelling in the eastern Pacific.

It is related to wind an wave which in that part of the world are driven by SAM the climate dog.

The paper I quoted suggests the same link of La Nina to low solar activity for hundreds of years leading up the the El Nino high point in the 20th century. They suggest that this is the solar amplification mechanism.

Comment on Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 by Mike Flynn

0
0

Ferdinand,

If natural sinks outweigh natural sources, we have a problem.

What action do we need to take to ensure that CO2 levels remain above the critical level to maintain C3 plant life?

If levels fall below this, do we start on the death spiral, so beloved of Alarmists?

Seriously, I would much rather enjoy a level of 450 ppm rather than take a chance on the extermination of the human race at levels of 100 ppm. Doesn’t the precautionary principle demand we make sure co2 levels don’t drop too far?

Comment on Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 by Mike Flynn

0
0

Sorry. Fat finger again.

Anyway, what level do you think is the minimum, plus a reasonable margin for error, (after all, the continuation of the species is at stake), for atmospheric CO2? How do you think we should make sure we don’t fall below it?

Thanks.

Comment on Did human-caused climate change lead to war in Syria? by Chief Hydrologist

0
0

The Sahel is one of the most studied links to ENSO – from the days of Sir Gilbert Walker.

http://www.climatesnack.com/2014/11/13/the-effect-of-enso-on-sahelian-sudan-rainfall/

The Holocene ENSO proxy I keep showing – shows a shift from La Nina dominance to El Nino at the time when the Sahel landscape changed.

La Nina is likely to dominate for another decade or so – and may shift to yet cooler conditions then.

The millennial ENSO proxy I keep showing shows an El Nino peak last century and a La Nina dominance from early in the millenium. The question is – is it associated with low solar activity? And will it change. The Holocene proxy shows substantial variation over approximately 2000 year intervals. It is really a matter of looking at data rather than making things up.

Rainfall – how much and where it falls – has a large component that is so complex it may as well be random. Hydrology is a science of stochastic probabilities.

Viewing all 147842 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images