“Total planet’s land: 148 million
Antarctica land area: 14 million km
Southern temperate [mostly Australia]: 8 million
Tropics: 30 million
Northern temperate: 60
Northern arctic : 11 million [Russia Canada Greenland]

Hmm missing 25 million sq kilometers.”

I revised it using:
http://www.freemaptools.com/area-calculator.htm
I did southern temperate zone at:10 million square km
And southern tropical: 21.6 million km
Northern tropical:26.5 million
So 48.1 million for tropics instead of 30 million.
Giving close total of 143.1 million.
Which close enough. And 24% instead of 15% tropics
is land [leaving 76% ocean].
If 60 million somewhat correct, Northern temperate zone has just over half area ocean, Tropical has around 75%, and southern temperature has more than 90% ocean. And polar region have large percent of land.
“The area encompassed by the Arctic Circle is about 6 percent of the Earth’s surface area, according to the US government’s Energy Information Administration”
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/faq.html
6% is 30.6 million. Arctic 11 and Antarctic 14 million square km- so actually, Northern Temperate has slightly higher percentage than either polar region.

@louise

I think you need to think carefully about what you just wrote.

It is true that DECC publish estimates of our CO2 total emissions. And have done so for a very long time. No argument there.

But neither is it anything to do with what I said earlier. I explicitly said CO2 *reductions*. There is no actual measured data to say that ‘we put up ten windmills and we can show that by doing so we saved x thousand tonnes of CO2′. Or solar panels. Or tidal. Or any of their other schemes.

Since the whole thrust of policy is to reduce CO2, you’d kind of expect them to be able to prove that it was working. Especially when work in other countries is casting doubt upon whether there are actually any savings due to windmills or solar at all.

And from a UK taxpayer’s perspective, I’d hope that the DECC would have some empirical metrics that ranked the CO2 savings by source type and by value for money. It seems they don’t. They are all lumped into what Steve McIntyre calls ‘Acts of Petty Virtue’.

Peter Lang

You clearly have not the slightest idea what you are talking about when it cones to energy matters, do you?

Is this the 5 minute argument or the full half hour?

http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/sketch.htm

Till you attempt to give actual *reasons* I’m entitled to believe that you think that all my points are completely correct.

Steve: These apples are nice!
Peter: Clearly you are anti-orange.
Steve: No, just saying they’re particularly sweet. I was going to have an orange, but my oranges appear to have gone mouldy.
Peter: Oranges have a higher sweetness quotient and are much better for you in every way. Hey everybody, Steve is claiming that apples are the sweetest fruit in the world and that oranges are mouldy and disgusting. He has failed to mention that oranges have more vitamin C, and more fibre. This is evidence for his anti-orange agenda.
Steve: You are very pro-orange – you do accept don’t you that oranges don’t keep as well as apples.
Peter: You clearly havent the slightest idea when it comes to fruit matters. I have ten questions about the benefits of oranges that I insist you answer…

@steve milesworthy

Your ‘technical solution’ to the inherent unpredictability and unreliability of wind power is

‘build a bit more grid’.

Umm

Can you give just a wee tiny hintette of how you envisage this ‘solution’ working? It is not prima facie obvious how this fixes the problem.

“What should we do about the tonnes of deadly dangerous slag at Windscale? Is it acceptable that despite billions of investment we still have that problem? Could a less-well off country adequately deal with a situation? How many times is the Windscale experience repeated in the US and particularly in Russia, the former Soviet bloc countries and China?”

Windscale wasn’t powerplant to make electricity. It was designed to make nuclear bombs:
“In order for Britain to engage in a nuclear weapons treaty with the USA, it had to demonstrate that it was a technological equal. The Windscale facility was built to produce plutonium for the first British atom bomb. After the successful explosion of the atom bomb, the USA designed and exploded a thermonuclear bomb requiring tritium. Britain did not have any facility to produce tritium and decided to use the Windscale piles. Tritium can be produced in nuclear reactors by neutron activation of lithium-6. Higher neutron fluxes were needed for this than for producing plutonium and it was decided to reduce the size of the cooling fins (totalling approximately 500,000 individual fins) on the aluminium fuel cartridges, thereby reducing the absorption of neutrons by this aluminium. By pushing the first-generation design of the Windscale facility beyond its intended limits, tritium could be produced at the cost of a reduced safety factor. ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

So other countries shouldn’t make nuclear weapons, especially if they in a hurry and trying to save costs?

Latimer, I suspect there’s no reduction at all, au contraire! The only reductions that work are economic/financial crises.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n1/full/nclimate1332.html
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n1/images_article/nclimate1332-f1.jpg

@Joshua

Just a thought. Governments do not their own money. Any money they spend comes either from taxpayers or from debt.

Whichever way it is the nuclear plants are eventually financed by the consumers (taxpayers) or the capital markets. Unless you’ve invented a magic money tree there ain’t anywhere else.

The government can act as a (supposedly) virtuous intermediary, between these and the eventual spending, but that is all. It cannot finance big projects independently.

Well either Scotland achieved 30% energy from renewables as Salmond says or it didn’t. If it did then the anti-wind folk here are out of date and wrong. If it didn’t then point us to the real numbers rather than just bloviating.

Scotland has ample hydro to store energy when the wind does not blow so it is not ridiculous to propose a higher percentage of renewables and most of the investment money is actually coming from industry. If Salmond is determined not to sideline fossil fuels but instead to use them as a bank for future plans then it does seem that he actually has a credible energy plan that doesn’t need nuclear subsidies; unlike UK.gov. In any event they have about another 20 years before needing new plant, also unlike the UK.gov.

Steve Milesworthy,

This is another great long rant about irrelevancies.

If you want to start again go back to here http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/15/9412/#comment-229549 and actually answer (not avoid and obfuscate) the questions I asked you.

Regarding your latest pile of silliness, answers follow:

What should we do about the tonnes of deadly dangerous slag at Windscale?

Please quantify “deadly dangerous”.

• How “deadly dangerous”?
• How many fatalities so far”
• How many fatalities per TWh of electricity supplied?
• Put this in perspective compared with other electricity generation technologies.
• Are there any major errors in the comparative figures provided here? http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-source-in-forbes.html

I’ve already answered you about the nuclear waste in a previous response. Re read it and, this time, read the links. Then show me that you’ve understood.

There’s no point in me wasting any more time writing answers for you. You don’t have the most basic understanding of the subject and clearly are not interested in learning (e.g. you won’t read reports posted on sites that are not CAGW Alarmist approved sites). Clearly your head is filled with Greenpeace anti-nuclear talking points and you won’t read anything else. That’s a true “Denier”

Should we force people to put up with living near a reactor that has popped its top because their fears of contamination are irrational?

Who ever suggested forcing people to stay near a reactor? More strawman tactics! More misrepresentation!. More dishonesty! More from the CAGW activists!

Try to get some perspective. There’s been three accidents in 56 years with 15,000 reactor-years of operation. Only one – Chernobyl – caused fatalities. Only 31 fatalities in the accident and about 27 since attributable to the accident (WHO). Projected 4000 latent fatalities (WHO) in 70 years in a population of about 200 million. If you are even semi-numerate even you should be able to recognise that this is not distinguishable from background. Furthermore, this projection is likely to be too high.

The mass evacuation was what caused most of the trauma, health effects and fatalities (WHO). The policy to evacuate has been developed and implemented because of the irrational fears of radiation. And that fear has been developed by people like you and is continued by people like you. It is your anti-nuclear activism and the many like you that are the reason we have global CO2 emissions 10% to 20% higher now than they would have been, and we are on a much slower trajectory to reduce emissions than they would have been if not for the people who share your ideology – the ideologically driven anti-progress “Progressives”.

If the risks of problems are backed by the tax payer, are the incentives to prevent problems going to be strong enough or will the profit motive outweigh it, as indicated by all the issues identified at Fukushima?

Our aim should be low-cost energy, not striving for even greater safety. Nuclear is already 10 to 1000 times safer than coal and safer than all other electricity generation technologies. We accept the safety of coal. By requiring and striving for orders of magnitude greater safety for nuclear power than for any other technology, we’ve priced nuclear out of being competitive. That is of course the aim of the anti-nuclear zealots. So now we can’t have the benefits of something that is much safer than what we have now. How dumb is that? But that is what the so called ‘Progressives’ – like you – advocate.

Have you ever considered how many fatalities anti-nuclear advocacy has caused so far, and how many it will cause by 2050? I challenge you to have a go and let us know what figure you come up with.

Regarding your Fukushima comment, please remind me how many radiation induced fatalities resulted from Fukushima earthquake and tsunami so far? Please put that in perspective for me, including in perspective with fatalities in the other energy chains. Do you have any idea, or can you admit you don’t have the faintest clue?

Can that Yankee Rowe nuclear reactor truly be said to be decommissioned when the nuclear waste is still awaiting the US Federal government to come up with a scheme for disposing it?

Please put this in perspective for me. Where is the toxic waste from other electricity generation technologies held?

Clearly you haven’t read the links I provided last time I answered your questions about nuclear waste. Boring, repetitious, closed mind.

Your comments are just Greenpeace talking points. They’ve been discredited a thousand times all over the literature. Go read it if you are interested – Denier!

Can discussion of any of the rational points above be conducted without calling those who raise the issue “catastrophist” in order to avoid the issue?

Firstly, your questions are sensational and intended to be such, not ‘rational’. You avoided all the rational questions I asked you here: http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/15/9412/#comment-229549

Secondly, I see no indication from you that you have the slightest intention to have a rational or objective discussion. It is clear your mind is locked shut and you’re not prepared to read links that do not support your opinions. You’ve avoided the issue continually.

If you decide to answer the questions I posed sensibly – with genuine answers to the questions, not avoidance and diversion – then it may be worth continuing. However, if you do actually answer the questions you’ll know a lot more about the important issues, and have them in proper perspective. You’ll then be much better informed. But I doubt your commitment to ideological beliefs would allow you to do that.

Latimer is absolutely correct. There is no way to measure the emissions avoided by wind generation.

But it will come, eventually, if the world decides to go down the carbon pricing route.

And this will give you an idea of what the cost would be:
Lang (2012), The ultimate compliance cost for the ETS
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13578&page=0

Steve Milesworthy,

Till you attempt to give actual *reasons* I’m entitled to believe that you think that all my points are completely correct.

I’ve given you answers and reasons ad nausium. But you don’t like them and wont read what doesn’t support your beliefs.

So clearly, you will believe you are correct. That’s entirely your problem. An apt name for it is “Denial”.

As Salmold previously said on TV, the money spent on RBS was a small fraction of the taxes RBS had sent to the inland revenue; The real problem is that UK government spent all the tax and borrowed even more, thinking that the stellar GDP wasn’t based on debt at all and even if it was then debt didn’t matter; all the top economists said so didn’t they? Well house prices fell, free-market thinking was shown to be utter nonsense and they reverted to pseudo-Keynesianism and spent money they didn’t have.

A smart government would not have poured money down the RBS rathole or in any English bank either, as it was plainly a very stupid thing to do. Did it result in the bank lending money to small businesses as was the reason given for the largesse? Some of us here were clever enough to see this disaster looming and i believe Salmond was one of them and certainly Stiglitz, his new advisor, was another.

Virtually all the big banks are in huge debt but there are alternatives: they were not too big to fail. The UK is the only governement that has bought any banks outright afaik. What a great example of economic foresight that was! how much better Scotland would be with that kind of economic vision!

And you know sod all about the Darien. Read about why it happened; ie the role of the English in closing down Scotlands European trade routes to force Scotland into an unwanted union.

Philosophical reflections on climate model projections
Posted on August 12, 2012
by Judith Curry

Should probabilistic qualities be assigned to climate model projections?

Are the approaches used by the IPCC for assessing climate model projection quality – confidence building, subjective Bayesian, and likelihood – appropriate for climate models?

What are some other approaches that could be used?

“The basic theory of a climate model can be formulated using equations for the time derivatives of the model’s state vector variables, xi, i = 1, …, n, as is schematically represented by … Eqt. (1) . In Eqt. (1), t denotes time, the functions Gi represent external forcing factors and how these function together to change the state vector quantities, and the Fi represent the many physical, chemical and biological factors in the climate system and how these function together to change the state vector quantities.”

Moderation note: This is a technical thread and comment will be moderated for relevance.

Reading the terms and claims in this thread beginning it confused me in my understanding of philosophy, techniques, and software modeling of thermal physical processes in geometric structures.

Physical processes are described in equations using well defined elements and their dimensions. Equations showing the respect to the science of philosophy in that it is recognized that nothing can be true and untrue at the same time.

In the case of thermal physics this means that the physical process is described as a heat current floating from warm to cold, and is generated by a heat source in Watt. At each location in the circuit the temperature can be calculated depending from the impedances and thermal resistors and the moving fluids in the geometry as function of time, if there are changing elements as well changing heat powers over time.

In the case of modeling the heat current from a source to the Earth and further into the cold space this means that the model must be constructed from the real elements and the real geometry.

It is an old good tradition in physics to accept values of elements which are not known accurate, but it is not allowed to bias a model with belief functions of a magician or an authority. It’s not science.

It may be a genius work to describe the thermal physics of global heat in one equation, but this is not necessary, because other mathematical models using iteration steps and a comparison of the global temperatures over the past with the calculated temperatures over the past from the model. In such a model the model parameters have to change as long as the global temperatures over the past fit with the used model parameter to a minimum.

It is clear that in such a model with a lot of temperature frequencies there must be defined appropriate oscillators, which build the known reconstructed temperature spectra from the literature.

This was also done to make precise predictions of the tides:

“The IUGG (international union for geodesy and geophysics) called an international working group in the year 1965 from mathematicians to assistance, who had come however after 10 years work to no solution contently placing. Their mathematical models provided for example for the North pacific ebbs-tide ahead although floods were observed and turned around. In the year 1972 U.S. of satellite and/or rocket designs required a forecast of the Tide height on 10 cm exactly. After 6 years modeling time appeared the North pacific in the spring 1978 then in tidal situation true to nature. For this model moon and sun became mathematical because of their elliptical and inclined orbits by a row of fictitious moons and suns replaced. For an accuracy of 10 cm to reach, they needed 6 moons and 5 suns with 4 halve a day’s, 4 complete days and three longer periods (14 days, month, and halve a year). After further 6 years the model was then extended of the North pacific.”

It is out of question that the oscillation frequencies of the global temperature spectra have physical causes. But as long as the source of these oscillators are unknown a model can be build which make use of it. Dynamic impedance in the heat current as an effect of known volcano events van be added to the model as a function of time. The first step can be reached to simulate the global temperature precise as reconstructed from the proxies.

There are powerful FEM software tools, which can solve thermal processes and fluid processes in multitasking. An example I can show is the temperature in Kelvin of 3D geometry in that a heat is loaded in a volume and the heat is streaming in a colder floating fluid to the right:

http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/heat_flow.jpg

I think it is not out of the question that in a second step the nature of the used and needed oscillators and its strengths to simulate the reconstructed global temperatures can be found.

In general I think it is a method of science to find relations of physical processes, based on geometries and energies, and it is not an appropriate method in science to start with a mathematical equation of vectors and ‘factors’ without any physical dimensions, because it has no basis in physics and not in the very real thermal nature of the Earth temperature spectra with frequencies of decades of kiloyears^-1 to month^-1.

V.

@louise

Yet again you don’t have to believe me. But the US Senate agreed in 2008:

‘”The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations ‘may now be near historic highs,’”

Perhaps things have changed since, but you’ll have to show some more up to date numbers than these if you think their remarks are seriously wrong

So you didn’t read the link and you assume US politicians know better than scientists and aren’t influenced by lobbyists – you poor niave fool.

Apologies for the large amount of cut and paste but you can take a horse to water (provide a link)…

“Steven Amstrup, who led the USGS research on the current status of polar bears, emailed me from the field: “How many bears were around then, we don’t really know because the only studies of bears at that time were in their very early stages — people were just beginning to figure out how we might study animals scattered over the whole Arctic in difficult logistical situations. Some estimated that world population might have been as small as 5000 bears, but this was nothing more than a WAG. The scientific ability to estimate the sizes of polar bear populations has increased dramatically in recent years.”

(Editor’s note: “WAG” is scientific jargon for “Wild-Ass Guess.”)

Andrew Derocher of the University of Alberta added, “I have seen the figure of 5,000 in the 1960/70s but it is impossible to give it any scientific credibility. No estimation of any population was attempted until the early 1970s and even then, this was done very crudely for perhaps 10% of the global population and the estimates were highly questionable.”

Thor Larsen of Norway’s University of Life Sciences was actively involved in bear research back then. He recalls “Most data on numbers from the late 1960s and early 1970s were indeed anecdotal, simply because proper research was lacking. As far as I can remember, we did stick to a world-wide ‘guestimate’ of 20-25,000 bears in these years.”

Another veteran bear researcher, Ian Stirling, emailed me, “Any number given as an estimate of the total population at that time would simply have been a guess and, in all likelihood, 5,000 was almost certainly much too low.”

These and other scientists agree that polar bear populations have, in all likelihood, increased in the past several decades, but not five-fold, and for reasons that have nothing to do with global warming. The Soviets, despite their horrendous environmental legacy on many issues, banned most polar bear hunting in 1956. Canada and the U.S. followed suit in the early 1970s — with limited exceptions for some native hunting, and permitted, high-priced trophy hunts. And a curtailment of some commercial seal hunting has sparked a seal population explosion — angering fishermen, but providing populations in eastern Canada and Greenland with plenty of polar bear chow, leading in turn to localized polar bear population growth in spite of the ice decline.

The scientists also caution that we still don’t have a firm count on these mobile, remote, supremely camouflaged beasts.”

Devolution happened 14 years ago.

Faustino
@ August 18, 2012 at 4:00 am

A lot of debate on CAGW revolves around appropriate responses. Many proponents of CAGW are wedded to centralised, state-directed, responses. Many, like me, argue for more flexible and decentralised policies which enhance our capacity to respond positively to whatever befalls in an uncertain world.

I agree.

I agree for many reasons, but here is one example.

Many people call for more regulation of nuclear energy to make it even safer than it is now (It is already far safer than any other electricity generation technology – Ref ‘Deaths by energy source’ http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-source-in-forbes.html ). I’d argue we need to reduce regulation, not increase it. I’d also argue to remove the shackles and allow competition to do what it does. I said this on the previous thread:

We need to construct the same design over and over. But you don’t need to restrict it to a few designs. Many is better. I’d like to see companies in the manufacturing countries – USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Russia, China. Korea, Japan – building small modular nuclear power plants on production lines like aircraft. Small is essential for several reasons:

a. only small power plants can fit easily into most electricity grids around the world
b. small units can be ordered ‘just in time’, only once demand is assured
c. small can be constructed and installed quickly, thus reducing investor risks
d. small can be built in factories, shipped to site, returned to factory for refuelling
e. small can be manufactured on production lines like aircraft, turned out rapidly and with good quality control
f. small leads to faster rate of improvement because more are manufactured and lessons learned are built into the next model more quickly.
g. More competition between more manufacturers leads to faster rate of improvement

Embarrassing propaganda, that polar bears international site. It’s stuff like that’s making people skeptical.

@louise

OK . Even if we don’t agree on the 5-fold increase and you wish to ignore the independent scientists who work for the Fish and Wildlife Commission it is still notable that – according to your own cut and paste -

‘These and other scientists agree that polar bear populations have, in all likelihood, increased in the past several decades’.

How does this increase square with the predictions of polar bear wipeout by such as Al Gore? How does a population threatened with terminal declining because of AGW manage to increase instead? Please explain.