<em>Gasoline is going – alcohol is coming. It’s coming to stay, too, for it’s in unlimited supply. And we might as well get ready for it now. All the world is waiting for a substitute to gasoline. When that is gone, there will be no more gasoline, and long before that time, the price of gasoline will have risen to a point where it will be too expensive to burn as a motor fuel. The day is not far distant when, for every one of those barrels of gasoline, a barrel of alcohol must be substituted.</em> ~Henry Ford (1916)
Comment on The folly of corn ethanol by Wagathon
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Comment on The folly of corn ethanol by AK
@captdallas…
I was talking about using current coal-fired plants burning carbonized bio-waste, or a mix of carbonized bio-waste and coal. If you don’t count the carbon in the bio-waste as contributing to the emissions, which is perfectly fair since it came from the air in the first place, the net emissions (that do count) can be reduced as much as necessary according to the mixture.
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Comment on Uncertainty in SST measurements and data sets by captdallas 0.8 or less
Webster, since I have the link available,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Water_infrared_absorption_coefficient_large.gif
My pet peave has been the error in the K&T Earth Energy Budgets and where the major error was. The error has to be with mixed phase clouds. With mixed phase clouds the appropriate radiant spectrum should be the combination of all three of the H2O phase spectra. As you can see, that makes Clouds, an effectively saturated IR ground plane. While below the clouds, the surface experiences a “positive” feedback the effect from above the clouds is a net negative impact on the overall energy budget. That is why there is an ~18Wm-2 error in the K&T budget which I had always assumed was somewhat important. Silly me.
While the effect of mixed phase clouds is most obvious in the Arctic, it is not unlikely that the same effect to a small degree happens everywhere clouds are formed. That should make the Atmospheric Boundary Layer a better frame of reference for determining “net” impacts which since Stephens et al list the “surface” uncertainty at +/-17 Wm-2, I think perhaps they might agree. Also Troy Masters cloud study tends to more in line with reality than Andy “Balloons are Thermometers” Dessler. And while we are at it, the famous old dead guy Angstrom was probably right also with his “effectively” saturated comments in terms of the real surface of the Earth.
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Comment on The folly of corn ethanol by pokerguy
“doesn’t”
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Comment on The folly of corn ethanol by AK
@bill_c...
I was actually talking about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas" rel="nofollow">syngas</a>. According to my father, who was a chemist and chemical engineer (and therefore probably knew), a good deal of gas for heating and light was once <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_gas" rel="nofollow">water gas</a>, produced by <i>"passing steam over a red-hot carbon fuel such as coke"</i>. I guess I wasn't distinguishing between syngas and water gas.
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Comment on The folly of corn ethanol by captdallas 0.8 or less
AK sorry, that is kind of a weird situation. The UK is importing wood pellets to reduce the carbon footprint of their coal plants which is ridiculous in my opinion, but not using Municipal Solid Waste because the temperature of “normal” coal firing isn’t supposedly high enough to completely sanitize the bio-waste. Then the coal plant has to have very efficient scrubbers to compensate. There are quite a few smaller mixed fuel/biomass power plants mainly for steam, which fall under another regulatory category.
Total Mercury appears to be the current real limit which stops the use of mixed coal/biomass in the US since biomass Mercury levels can be just as high as coal. Oddly, dedicated biomass operations could end up putting out more Mercury per kW than coal, though on a much smaller scale. The whole thing is what I consider a cluster pluck.
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Comment on The folly of corn ethanol by Bob Ludwick
As near as I can figure, using farm land to produce ethanol for fuel is simply a very inefficient means of collecting solar energy. It may (according to reports here and elsewhere) even be a net energy loser, requiring more energy to produce than is returned by burning it.
It does have the ‘feature’ of generating votes from the subsidized constituency.
Incidentally, how would the net btu’s/acre achieved by ethanol production (if any) compare to the btu’s/acre that could be achieved by using solar cells to electrolyze water during sun hours, then burning the hydrogen and oxygen in a conventional steam plant 24/7 at a rate slightly less than the average rate of O2/H2 production? And yes, I DO understand that the above is almost certainly not the most efficient method of harvesting solar energy, but it would certainly produce SOME net energy/acre, wouldn’t it? And, since this is a real as opposed to rhetorical question, I understand that the answer may be ‘No!’.
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Comment on Uncertainty in SST measurements and data sets by WebHubTelescope (@whut)
Ignore what Cappy says and look at the data. Nick Stokes has a recent post at http://moyhu.blogspot.com which duplicates the work of C&W by using a simpler infilling technique.
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by WebHubTelescope (@whut)
See how the lil Cappy’s start running to the big heat capacity when things are not looking their way.
It’s like watching a soccer game composed of 5-year-olds– they all run towards the ball.
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by Kip Hansen
The pragmatist in me says that this is all a lot of tempest about angels on the heads of pins. While it is of great interest to those actively engaged in the mock battle concerning numbers that would be called, if they were
foods and not numbers and graphs, highly over-processed.
Any new analysis of the imaginary (derived, calculated, shaken but not stirred, and certainly not measured) number representing Global Average Surface Temperature or its anomalies from various set points should produce new answers. It is when they produce the same answer using different data and different methods that make me very suspicious. (reference the BEST results).
The infinitesimal difference found by Cowtan and Way, over a ~ 30 year time period, does little to inform us about climatic conditions of the planet.
For a clear view of what the fuss is about, see this image in the Cowtan/Way web site ==> http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~kdc3/papers/coverage2013/media_summary.png
Look at the graph itself. The C/W graph is essentially identical except in the last few years (since ~ 2005, which would be curious if there is in fact an ongoing, long-term bias in other temp records).
The fuss is about the two red lines. C/W want us to be shocked by the heavy red line, and its difference from the thin red line.
This is just a lesson in “How to Fool Yourself With Artificially Applied Trend Lines.”
I’m with Dr. Curry on this: “So I don’t think Cowtan and Way’s analysis adds anything to our understanding of the global surface temperature field and the ‘pause.’”
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by Schrodinger's Cat
I can’t make up my mind whether this is off or on topic because it applies to all debates on this site (and many others). I refer to the almost pantomime polarisation of climate science.
“These results confirm that the pause didn’t happen!”.
“Oh yes it did!”
“Oh no it didn’t”
Etc.
I apologise if panto is alien to American audiences. You can Google it if curious. Pantomime is a theatrical play with fairy tale goodies and baddies popular with children in the run up to Christmas.
It seems that the climate version is popular with scientists all the year round.
Why is that? One would think that science as, the search for truth, (so I was told as a boy), would eventually arrive at the truth through a process involving measured data, logic, reasoned argument and honesty.
I wonder which of these has been corrupted to prevent us from reaching any conclusion after about 25 years of debate?
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by Bob Tisdale
Thanks for the kind words and the link, Judith.
Regards
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by DocMartyn
Web, you cannot just, post-hoc, change historical data to get a better fit to your model.
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by kim
There is inadequate data, and logic and reasoned argument have been perverted by dishonesty and advocacy.
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by kim
Web is challenged to work to correct the fact that measurements are not always in synch with the models.
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by Harold
Mann does.
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by catweazle666
FOMBS, you’re funny!
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by jeremyp99
What does “RCP” stand for?
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by R. Gates, Skeptical Warmist
Tony said:
“No, it was RGates who attributed the last ‘cold’ winter to lack of arctic ice.”
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Uh…no, that’s not at all what I was talking about if you are referring to my discussion of SSW events and the break down or disruption of the Arctic Vortex that can result from the larger of these events. It is the disruption of the vortex that can allow massive cold outbreaks at lower latitudes, as we saw in 2009 and 2012 for example.
The relationship between the long-term decline of Arctic Sea ice and apparent increase in more significant SSW’s may be one of correlation and not causation– that is, they are both related to the advection of greater amounts of energy from equator to the pole, both in the atmosphere and in the ocean seems to be the common factor.
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Comment on The 2.8% effect by Latimer Alder
I stand corrected.
Maybe it was the year before that Vicky Pope from the Met Office appeared on one of the breakfast TV shows and – with the hauteur only an entitled climo can manage – treated us all to her wisdom that no matter what common sense might tell us we should listen to the experts and that the very cold weather was due to global warming.
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