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Comment on How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop by cerescokid

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JCH

If you want to pick a poster child, there might be better places than Miami Beach. NOAA shows a rise of only 2.33mm/yr and 2.39mm/yr for Key West and Miami Beach respectively, which are rates significantly below GMSL rise.

If you want to be taken seriously, you could always ring up Tiger on how to bring your A game. How does it feel to be a tool in the obvious full court press leading up to Paris?


Comment on How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop by ...and Then There's Physics

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The first paragraph in section 3 is simply wrong. You don’t simply integrate the CO2 forcing time series. You need to consider all external forcings and, to determine the temperature evolution, you need integrate the net flux and take into account the heat capacity of the system. Not only are you ignoring the uncertainties in that figure, you’re also ignoring that solar forcing was not constant.

Comment on How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop by Mike Flynn

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JCH,

When you have solved the problem of growing plants without CO2, the world will fall at your feet!

I’m sure it won’t take you long – right after you manage to stop the world from cooling, the climate from changing, and peace prevails throughout the Universe.

Get to it! Let not the forces of doubt and denial impede your progress! I wish you every success.

Cheers.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by aplanningengineer

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BB – I wish I knew more and will try to find out more. Stability and transfer limits in CA are greatly impacted by inertia levels which will be necessarily be limited as asynchronous renewables make up a larger part of the resource base.

The reaction from NERC (The entity charged with ensuring reliability by FERC – through development and enforcement of reliability standards) is that the Clean Power Plan is the law, no point in debating, challenging or pointing out the flaws, but rather NERC and the power providers need to work together to ensure reliability given the CPP mandated. (Note – While NERC is charged with reliability – they do not have any responsibility as far as cost and economics go.) To me it has the feel of good soldiers tasked to be the first wave on Normandy Coast.

I’m sure the planners in CA are doing the best with the task at hand and the limits imposed on them. I hope to learn from what they do.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by Rod Johnson

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That’s it, in a nutshell. What problem?

Comment on Week in review – science edition by ...and Then There's Physics

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Danny,

But we’re talking of increases of 1.5 to 2C depending.

Most people who work in this area now think that keeping warming below 2C is going to be virtually impossible (well, not without drastic emission reductions starting now, which seems unlikely). To be clear, I’m not suggesting we will warm sufficiently to get to wet bulb temperatures of 35C, but every degree of warming is likely to increase maximum wet bulb temperatures by about 0.7C. Also, my response was mainly to your comment about the range of temperatures that mammals experience during a day. They might be able to comfortably survive a large variation, but that doesn’t imply there aren’t temperatures that would have severe consequences for mammals.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by AK

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<blockquote>But the bigger problem I see is how to persuade the corporate, government, and military producers and consumers of carbon-based fuels to do likewise. Corporations in particular have a fiduciary duty to their investors that is in apparent conflict with that program.</blockquote>“[C]<i>arbon-based fuels</i>” don't have to involve dumping extra (fossil-sourced) carbon into the system. Although actual drillers, frackers, and diggers will ultimately lose out, the production, distribution, sale, and use of “<i>carbon-based fuels</i>” could all be switched to fossil-neutral sources. This could include gas/liquid fuel produced from electrolytic H2 and ambient CO2 both produced from solar energy, as well as sea-floor methane hydrate extracted through replacement of equal amounts (by carbon content) of CO2 extracted from ambient sources. Policies that incent investment in the necessary technology and production without impacting the cost of energy might be much more effective, and acceptable to everybody's bottom line.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by aplanningengineer

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A lot of the debate does seem to be tribal (and you’ll always have tribal elements in human behavior) but I think it’s exagerated for the skeptics. . From my viewpoint – those skeptical of the science are more diverse than the alarmist crowd. Recognizing that as far as politics go climate skepticism is identified as conservative, republican possibly libertarian issue. However, I feel many “skeptics” here do not identify that way and that we likely have a wide diversity of beliefs across other “political” subjects. The people I know banging the drum to solve the climate problem now – seem pretty much ideologically aligned on other issues as well. Many of the people I know who are climate alarmist tend and refer to deniers classify them as conservative religious know nothings.


Comment on Week in review – science edition by AK

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[… B]ut rather NERC and the power providers need to work together to ensure reliability given the CPP mandated. (Note – While NERC is charged with reliability – they do not have any responsibility as far as cost and economics go.)

If they were willing to question the exclusion of pumped hydro as a means of mandated energy storage, that might help. AFAIK there’s plenty of existing structure that could support additional turbines/generators/motors, which as I understand your posts could contribute to stability. (Especially if the generator/motors were running constantly.)

And if they use existing dams/reservoirs, the cost would probably be far lower than bleeding-edge battery technology. (I did a quick search a while back, but was too busy to save the links. However, AFAIK from that search there’s plenty of potential.)

Comment on Week in review – science edition by Vaughan Pratt

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@MM: I don’t think [there are adequate models], but I welcome good reports if you find any.

Whether predicting next week’s weather, next month’s flu season, or next century’s climate, three ingredients are needed for any reasonable degree of predictive skill.

1. A qualitative model of the relevant processes.

2. Historical data quantifying those processes.

3. Statistical reconciliation of the qualitative and the quantitative.

We can all quarrel about the incompleteness and imprecision of the data, and the lies and damned lies of the statisticians. But these pale into insignificance compared to today’s climate models.

If wading through the 50-odd chapters of WG1 and WG2, each summarizing the research of several hundred peer-reviewed publications, seems like a tall order, try reading the millions of lines of code of the thirty or more CMIP5 climate models that have grown like Topsy over several decades starting from very successful numerical weather prediction models.

In the division of labor needed to accomplish so much, is there even one person who has a clear picture of how these models bear on expected climate in 2100?

Ask yourself. Do you care whether your first great-great-great-granddaughter’s fifth birthday party in the nearest park to her house will be rained out? Or would you be satisfied with knowing the global mean surface temperature of the planet as averaged over the period 2070-2130?

Surely the former question would require a more complex model than the latter.

Which raises the question, how does the complexity of a climate model depend on the question it was designed to answer with an acceptable degree of predictive skill?

On the afternoon of December 17 I’ll be addressing that question at the annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The bottom line will be that the questions most often raised about climate in 2100 can be answered with a very high degree of predictive skill based on mind-bogglingly simpler models than those of the massive CMIP5 suite. Check in that time.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by Vaughan Pratt

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@MF: The fact that the Earth is more than 99% molten, or nearly so, is of course considered irrelevant by Warmists

Mike, I’m afraid you’ve been had, as they say, though it would be interesting to know by whom. The outer core is molten, as are portions of the lithosphere understood as lava. The remaining 95% of the planet is as solid as the glass in the windows of your house.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by ...and Then There's Physics

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Mike,
Your attempt at strawmanning is completely ridiculous. You aren’t interested in a serious discussion are you? That’s rhetorical, obviously.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by ...and Then There's Physics

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Mike,
You do realise that breathing is carbon neutral, don’t you?

Comment on Week in review – science edition by ...and Then There's Physics

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opluso,
You deserve a “didn’t bother to read or, if you did, think about it” badge. You could try not strawmanning what people say, but that appears to be the norm, so maybe it’s tought to break the mold.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by Vaughan Pratt

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On the question of moderation on Climate Etc, one benefit is less rubbish to wade through. Against this are (i) the burden it places on our very busy host, and (ii) the opportunity for the real pricks to stand up (no pun intended).


Comment on Week in review – science edition by jim2

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Now, a word from a science that can produce testable hypotheses. Or perhaps, it isn’t science if it can’t.
From the article:

While both the classical and quantum approach are extremely accurate in their respective regimes, what happens in the intersection of the two regimes is still unclear. We don’t have a rigorous theory combining our classical and quantum models. We also don’t have certain key observational evidence, particularly in the nexus of quantum theory and gravity. But as quantum experiments increasingly study more massive objects and gravity experiments become increasingly sensitive, we’re approaching the point where “quantum gravity” experiments could be made. That’s the goal of a recently proposed experiment.

Since there isn’t yet a unified theory of quantum gravity, folks have instead focused on approximate approaches. One such approach is to add gravity to quantum theory a little bit at a time. This perturbative approach quantizes objects and their gravitational fields, and it works well for weak gravitational fields. One of the predictions of this approach is the existence of gravitons as the field quanta of gravity, much like photons are the field quanta of electromagnetism. However with stronger gravitational fields the approach becomes problematic. Basically, perturbative gravity builds upon itself in a way that is unphysical, so the model breaks down.

Another approach is known as the semi-classical method. Here gravity is treated as a field of space and time just as Einstein proposed, but the objects in spacetime are treated as quantum objects. The most famous prediction of this model is the Hawking radiation of black holes. The semi-classical model is not without its problems, particularly with strong gravitational fields, but for weak gravitational fields it reduces to the Schrödinger–Newton equation, which describes quantum objects interacting through classical Newtonian gravity.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2015/10/16/a-new-experiment-may-determine-whether-gravity-is-quantized/

Comment on Week in review – science edition by matthewrmarler

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… and Then There’s Physics: Mammals cannot survive without technology (or without burrowing, maybe) in wet bulb temperatures above about 35C and there can be negative impacts at even lower values. The highest recorded is around 31C. It increases at about 0.7C per 1C of warming.

Exactly how does that support Jim D’s claim? Is there any evidence that warming since 1880 has been harmful to mammals? Is there any evidence to support the hypothesis that a further doubling of CO2 will be harmful to mammals?

Comment on Week in review – science edition by opluso

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aTTP:

You could try not strawmanning what people say…

Sorry we got crossed in postings since you did attempt to explain what you’d meant by the post I was responding to. Though you did not, in fact, dispute my reference to the original source of your wet bulb dreams.

Nonetheless, you do have a tendency to oscillate towards the “doomiest” of possibilities and I do not believe that is a random error on your part.

Comment on How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop by bobdroege

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Yeah AK, did you think I wasn’t comparing 20th smoothed to the last 20 centuries smoothed.

Your mistake.

Wagathon, you don’t understand the scientific method, one hypothesis is that CO2 causes warming and the null of that is that CO2 does not cause warming.

Your null that all warming can be explained by natural causes is also acceptable as a null, however the relevant natural causes are not up to the task during the last century. The sun hasn’t changed enough and other forcing are too weak. And the stadium wave as a cause really violates the first law of thermodynamics, and can’t be a source of more warming.

Mann still has a job because he does good science.

Coming Ice Age, really?

Tony, you know your met records are what they are, not representative of the globe as a whole. 0.04 % of the world doesn’t impress me as particularly useful, especially since your part of the world enjoys mild climate due to the gulf stream.

Timg56, well I haven’t jumped off of 10 story buildings, but I have jumped off of higher cliffs. And there are better sources than either the NYTs or the Rolling Stone for climate information, but you all won’t go there. Your opinion that Karl’s work is crap is not good enough, you need to actually do the work to refute it, but I believe that is above your weight class.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by davideisenstadt

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ATTP:
Breathing is most certainly not “neutral” at least not in the sense that most sentient people comprehend the term…we are creatures that oxidize things…that is, we create CO2 as a result of living…
By your metric everything is “carbon neutral”, because in the vast majority of reactions taking place on the planet, carbon is neither created or destroyed. Maybe if youre hanging out in Fordo, you might get to see some carbon destroyed by accident…or if you hang around some unstable isotope of carbon, you might indirectly witness its decomposition into another isotope, but really…this line of BS is beneath a thinking person. Im disappointed, but not surprised by your post
The idea that breathing doesn’t result in a net increase in CO2 is at best a misapprehension.
Ever take a biology course?

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