Comment on Against ‘consensus’ messaging by Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #184 | Watts Up With That?
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by Ron Graf
Jim D,
You should be relieved to know that Pres. Obama is playing a father’s day golf marathon shrewdly negotiating with China as we speak about CO2 emissions.
TE is correct that the world is already becoming more efficient and at the same time improving alternative technologies. So on one hand the CO2 levels, if they are a problem, will get solved by humanity following a self-interested course. On the other hand there is certainly no historic evidence that nations would abide by negotiations made by predecessors that are deemed to hamper their economies. This not to say that they would not renegotiate on behalf of their successors. How do you catch cheaters?
The Holocene Optimum, if you are agreeing it was warmer than today then that would contradict those who claim our GMST is unprecedented. If you know that the Holocene Optimum was controlled by CO2 in any way you are ahead of any evidence I have yet seen. The 1.1 degree C per doubling of CO2 is accepted by most scientists and lukewarmers as sound theory. But even this has yet to be observed in the environmental record or with validated models. CO2 certainly did not cause the Holocene. I think we all agree on that.
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Comment on Deforestation in the UK by Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #184 | Watts Up With That?
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by Don Monfort
Steven, can you tell us about a precedent for the partnership between governments and a branch of science, like what we have been seeing for the last couple of decades?
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by RiHo08
MIKE FLYNN
440,000 does seem to be a big number. I wonder what or who are all caught up in this net cast upon the health care sea. If complications of cigarette smoking, being obese, etc are wrapped up in the preventable deaths group. We just received word that cholesterol does not cause most heart disease, rather it is inflammation. Do we throw out the 610,000 annual cardiovascular deaths from the preventable deaths groups because we don’t know what is causing the inflammation? Cancer, the 600,000 deaths per yer at least several have been linked to diet, previous exposures of estrogens, etc. Do these cancers fall under the category of preventable deaths (better screening). Suicide, 45,000. Are these preventable?
To me, the preventable death story is just that, a story worth keeping tract of. At this time, its hard to tell which deaths are presentable
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by beththeserf
Thought fer Terday’s Solstice.
‘Who so ever shall take upon him to choose and alter,
usurps the authority of judging, and should look well
about him and make it his business to discern clearly
the defect of what he would abolish and the virtue of
what he is about to introduce.’
Montaigne.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by Ron Graf
The Vatican accepts the extraterrestrial life hypothesis. i’m not sure where they are on origin of the universe. They’ve come a long way though since Galileo. And, I think now they are trying to anticipate the curve to stay hip with young Catholics. Religions that discount the young are uncovered by archaeologists from time to time.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by Jim D
I am not sure we have a reliable proxy for the global Holocene Optimum temperature, and also “skeptics” don’t “trust” paleo evidence anyway, so good luck convincing them of this. That period corresponded a warm part of the Milankovitch precessional cycle, so it should have been warmer than the LIA and now, for example, as we are now in a Milankovitch “cold” period, but many “skeptics” aren’t too keen on Milankovitch either, so this information is not going to be of much consequence to them. It is very hard to debate these issues when you can’t predict what they will take as solid and what not. It should be impressive that temperatures now rival the Optimum and are still rising because that is opposite to the precessional cycle’s expected trend at the moment. Obviously something else is happening, and it is known what that is. Furthermore, 2 C per doubling accounts for it well.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by jacksmith4tx
If 400 ppm CO2 has been so beneficial for plants it sure isn’t showing up in the amount of Oxygen in the global atmosphere. Look at the graph of O2 compared to CO2 over the last 60 years and they are a reverse mirror image of each other. While we are in no danger of depleting the Oxygen levels to the point that it might have major negative feedbacks, it’s pretty clear we are overwhelming the biosphere with way more CO2 than the natural balance of the carbon cycle has had to deal with in hundreds of thousands of years.
As to switching developing nations over to natural gas what we are talking about is LNG and if you do the calculation you will find that it’s takes around 20-25% of your NG feed stock to generate the energy just to do the compression and refrigeration to prepare it for transport. Add to all this it still costs billions to build the ships, receiving terminals, distribution pipeline network, gas fired power plants, electrical transmission system etc. and few of these third world countries have the money to afford it on their own. More often than not they default on the loans and the real winners turn out to be international corporations like Caterpillar, General Electric and KBR who tend to get their money up front or on a percent completion contract. At the end of this complex system of generating electricity with LNG the poor countries are even more dependent on foreign supplies and the whims of commodity prices set in New York and London.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by jim2
Ideally, government would fund fundamental science in an apolitical manner. That never happens, but would be a nice-to-have.
PNS, OTOH, attempts to dictate, for example, what sort of statistics a scientist should use depending on what relevance the experiment has to policy. A scientist should design the experiment in a manner that will best answer the science question, without regard to policy implications. JMO.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by Jim D
There is some work by Marcott that shows the warm Holocene Optimum well. This is generally being accepted now, even by some of the skeptics it appears. You can see the MWP and LIA in there too.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by patmcguinness
“Higher temperatures and longer heatwaves will push more of us beyond our tolerance limits, leading to a rise in the number of deaths from heat-related illnesses, scientists say.”
This is worse than non-persuasive, this is junk science, bordering on hoax science. The science in question is based on epidemiology studies that showed some (rather WEAK) correlation between extreme weather events (ie heat waves) and mortality (irrespective of cause of death). This conclusion is oblivious to the ‘correlation is not causation’ concern, and is based on multiple absurdities, one being that warmer weather means more ‘extreme heat’ rather than considering that when you raise an average, what defines ‘extreme’ changes, and the other is that no mitigation or adaptation takes place due to such changes. this is conterfactual, as in fact warmer abodes have more air conditioning, which mitigates the one risk that is legitimate, ie, extreme heat’s impact on those with health risks who lack air conditioning.
This is akin to saying greater rainfall will lead to thousands getting wet because nobody will have the sense to get out of the rain or buy an umbrella. Such counterfactual nonsense (leave aside the junk projections that posit RCP 8.5 type scenarios baked with ECS of 4C) is what passes for ‘justification’ of massive EPA regulations. Meanwhile, the maximum warming is during polar winter nights, and somehow this means more heat deaths in Chicago.
This junk is used by EPA to amp up ‘social costs’ for carbon. Despite its amplification through junk science, the EPA regulation cost/benefit is still absurd on its face. A cirtical comment from NERA:
“Moreover, when EPA attempts to quantify the benefits of its proposal, EPA significantly overstates the value of reducing emissions by using the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC). ACCCE submitted comments in February 2014 on the flawed approach taken by EPA, and other federal agencies, in attempting to estimate the SCC.215 One of the most significant errors in the SCC estimate is the use of global benefits instead of domestic benefits. Should EPA use a domestic SCC, the overall benefits would be 7 percent to 23 percent of the values used by EPA.216 For the CPP, the climate benefit estimated by EPA of $31 billion would be reduced to $2 billion to $7 billion, far below the $41 to $73 billion estimated annual cost projected by NERA.217″ (from ACCE response to EPA regulations, Dec 2014)
This misuse of science and cost-benefit analysis is blatant and corrupt.
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Comment on Science, uncertainty and advocacy by Willard
> Not in kind.
Indeed:
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Comment on Science, uncertainty and advocacy by Don Monfort
Poor willy. The alleged subsidies, which are basically imputed/wildly guesstimated costs of pollution, are going to the consumers of fossil fuels. The consumers are the varmints causing the alleged pollution, which causes the alleged monetary damages. Stop those evil consumers from using fossil fuels and the evil fossil fuel companies will go away. But you are going to have be way more effective than you have been.
You like links, willy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_companies_by_revenue
Do you know how many of those are state owned, willy?
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Comment on Driving in the dark by Ragnaar
“Do the populations of warmists and coolists fluctuate because coolists eat warmists?”
In a manner of speaking. Wamist: CO2. Coolist: Clouds, increased circulations. We seem to see that the rise of Warmists, caused the rise of the coolists. I meant warming causes countering cooling effects. Recalling this plot:
If the warming factors could be isolated they’d behave somewhat chaotically as do the cooling factors. Both factors though chaotic are tightly linked to each other. One does not wander off for long from the other. What is we gave tons of CO2 (food) to the Hares? Would their population increase? The Lynx would flourish, and thank us if they could. Until they managed to eat most of the Hares. We’d blame the Lynx of course for that. So some are fearing being over run by Hares. We have the Lynx though.
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Comment on Science, uncertainty and advocacy by mosomoso
Just to clarify, the woman in the white top was a leader of the whistleactivists. I think their most successful stunt had been drowning out a Mayday speech by Helle Thorning-Schmidt , the Danish PM. The interviewer was turning the tables on the activist – who ended up having to do just what the activists had made the PM (also a woman) do.
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Comment on Science, uncertainty and advocacy by David L. Hagen
Rob Starkey
What Disaster? There is no question that converting forests to fields or to asphalt affects climate.
The $64 trillion question is HOW MUCH?! Thus the controlling issue of identifying and quantifying the very major uncertainties involved. Especially the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiPe1OiKQuk" rel="nofollow">Unknown Unknowns!</a>
The IPCC's "extremely likely" (>95% confidence) of >50% anthroprogenic warming since 1950 plain doesn't hold water because models are predicting temperatures > 200% of reality during the satellite era since 1979.
What disasters? What science?
Scientific evidence is that temperatures were warmer in <a href="http://bit.ly/1J0X1gx" rel="nofollow">the Medieval warm period, the Roman warm period, and the Minoan warm period</a> - all of which were more prosperous and productive than the Little Ice age etc.
So alarmists try to persuade us that warming is bad.
Yet more people move to Florida from New York than vice versa!
The major scientific evidence is that we have insufficient scientific evidence on natural variations to quantify and distinguish anthropogenic impacts - especially water vapor amplification.
So what quantitative scientific evidence of "disaster"?
Read the other side of the story. See <a href="http://climatechangereconsidered.com/" / rel="nofollow">ClimateChangeReconsidered.com</a> and <a href="http://therightclimatestuff.com/" / rel="nofollow">TheRightClimateStuff.com</a>
Show your evidence. To date, what I have seen is scientifically unconvincing and lacking adequate uncertainty.
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Comment on Science, uncertainty and advocacy by PA
We are measuring down dwelling radiation.
It is about 0.2 W/m2 for 22 PPM.
The rate of CO2 rise is 2.2 PPM per year and probably falling.
We should wait until 2020 before putting any money on mitigation.
If the CO2 level in 2020 is under 410 PPM and the forcing change is less than 0.4 W/m2 there doesn’t seem to be a case for mitigation. 0.4 W/m2 for 20 years is 2 W/m2 for 100 years.
A less than 1°C forcing change, 2 W/m2 by 2100 or 0.5°C, doesn’t need mitigation.
From the available facts it seems we do have plenty fossil fuel, But where the fuel is and who is using it, is going to make any increase in emissions over 10 GT/Y unlikely (at least due to coal).
So it is worth waiting to see who is right on atmospheric lifetime and forcing. If the atmospheric lifetime is short or environmental absorption is high the rise in the CO2 level is going to attenuate. If the warmers are right the CO2 increase in PPM/Y should rise to over 3 PPM by 2020.
Right now everything looks to be on the cool side of lukewarm.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by jim2
WTI crude oil still around $60. Price risk is probably weighted to the downside. The rig count shows signs of stabilizing.
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Comment on Against ‘consensus’ messaging by jim2
From the article:
…
In summary, as the air’s CO2 content continues to rise, wheat plants should display increasingly greater rates of photosynthesis and biomass production, which should lead to ever greater grain yields in this important cereal crop, even under conditions of low soil moisture or poor soil fertility.
…
http://www.co2science.org/subject/a/summaries/agriculturewheat.php
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