Climate change - the POLITICAL debate. Vol 4

[LongQ]

chris watton said:

LongQ said:

They get free training.

Most, perhaps all, of the Benefits Offices or whatever they are now called are staffed by people whose main objective, for one reason or another, is to make sure that they go through every possible source of claims that their "customers" might be able to make.

No need to bust a gut trying find information. Just walk in and have someone seek out everything for you. It's what they get paid for.

Ah, OK, I didn't know that. When I was younger, they were actually called Job-Centres, and the staff did everything they could to find the unemployed a job. I guess it's changed...

A Job Centre is a different thing.

The Benefits Offices are usually run by the local council in one form or another - or were.

So long as the money they dispense is coming from Central Funds, not local taxes, one can imagine that no matter what the current political affiliation of the council (though that probably makes little difference to the focus of the people who are employed to administer its services) there would be interest in ensuring that as much "new money" as possible is brought into their area of influence.

Think of it as wealth redistribution from the 1% who, allegedly, own the 99% - or whatever this week's numbers are.

[LongQ]

Gandahar said:

turbobloke said:

Mrr T said:

durbster said:

Which is not surprising because AGW is based on two quite fundamental scientific facts:
1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the effects of which have been studied for something like 200 years.
2. There are increasing levels of greenhouse gases - particularly CO2 - in the atmosphere, caused by burning fossil fuels.

I have highlighted the above because it’s clear you do not understand the current AGW hypnotises.

I am what you would term a sceptic but I agree with both the above statements.

So why I am I a sceptic? because we know CO2 is a very weak forcing agent so on its own CO2 will have minimal effect on the Climate.

To go from the above statements to a serious situation you have to add another.

Will increased heat in the climate from CO2 lead to an increase in water vapour (which is a strong forcing agent) so as to result in significant increases in temperature.

Only if this last statement is correct would we have a problem.

The fact is we have no idea about the last statement. Water vapour as a gas is a strong forcing agent however if it’s held as clouds then in may even cool the climate.

Since science know very little about how clouds behave on a global scale the models just guess.

Quite right about the now minuscule impact of additional carbon dioxide even within agw. Outside of agw there's no impact, given that carbon dioxide shifts always follow temperature shifts - demonstrated beyond experimental error on all relevant timescales - and that even so an insignificant transient delay in cooling is not the same as permanent dangerous warming.

As to feedbacks, we do know, both from historical data and from contemporary satellite data.

Overall feedback is negative, and water vapour feedback within it likewise. See snips below based on data not models and with my emphasis added to each for skim-readers with limited time.

Abstract 1
The upper-level negative trends in q are inconsistent with climate-model calculations and are largely (but not completely) inconsistent with satellite data. Water vapor feedback in climate models is positive mainly because of their roughly constant relative humidity (i.e., increasing q) in the mid-to-upper troposphere as the planet warms. trends in q as found in the NCEP data would imply that long-term water vapor feedback is negative - that it would reduce rather than amplify the response of the climate system to external forcing such as that from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Abstract 2
We explore the daily evolution of tropical intraseasonal oscillations in satelliteobserved tropospheric temperature, precipitation, radiative fluxes, and cloud properties. The warm/rainy phase of a composited average of fifteen oscillations is accompanied by a net reduction in radiative input into the oceanatmosphere system, with longwave heating anomalies transitioning to longwave cooling during the rainy phase. The increase in longwave cooling is traced to decreasing coverage by ice clouds potentially supporting Lindzen's “infrared iris” hypothesis of climate

Abstract 3
Direct evidence for negative water feedback is found in CRUTEM4 station data by comparing temperature anomalies for arid regions (deserts and polar regions) with those for humid regions (mainly saturated tropics). All 5600 weather stations were classified according to the Köppen-Geiger climatology. Two separate temperature anomaly series from 1900 to 2011 were calculated for each region. A clear difference in temperature response is observed. Assuming the difference is due to atmospheric water content, a water feedback value of -1.5 +/- 0.8 W/m2K-1 can be derived.

This is politics climate, not science, wrong thread

1. See the third post after the one you have quoted above.

2. I agree wholeheartedly with the gist of your observation and would rather see the Science Thread thriving than posts leaking over here (unless they overtly political observations based on overtly political politicians in Science.)

However there are a few posters who seem not to wish to attempt to observe that separation and invariably turn a political observation here into a series of replies that have little emphasis on political considerations.

It would, probably, be more disruptive to ignore those posts than to try to deal with them and seek some political content somewhere.

In a fully managed forum one might seek a moderator to move posts between threads ... but I doubt that will happen here except in very extreme situations.

So we have to live with it.

Thanks for your support for keeping the threads as distinct as possible.

[zygalski]

Eh?
'spam's been posting scientific data throughout this thread.

2 days ago....

turbobloke said:

Sorry LongQ but needs must.

Any forced agreements on outcomes between models and reality are weak and monodimensional arising from fiddlefactoring. Suboptimisation will help one variable and harm others. The whole lot should work and there should only be one model needed not dozens.

Further to the abstracts, here are key failures in pictures.

Modelled troposphere hotspot (brown blob in model gigo not seen in the three data plots) note also the error in the size of stratosphere cooling (blue-purple bar).


Models get feedback wrong, ERBE satellite data top left, model gigo in the other charts.


Vertical profile model gigo failures against data alongside, only near the surface - left hand axis - is there any agreement (see earlier comment about suboptimisation and ask why fiddlefactoring at the surface is happening) also see below for the trend over time for more model gigo at the surface.


Buy Damart and candles.

[PRTVR]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

Its what the industry, governments, Energy suppliers etc use.

Whats the issue with :
The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), also known as Levelized Energy Cost (LEC), is the net present value of the unit-cost of electricity over the lifetime of a generating asset. It is often taken as a proxy for the average price that the generating asset must receive in a market to break even over its lifetime. It is a first-order economic assessment of the cost competitiveness of an electricity-generating system that incorporates all costs over its lifetime: initial investment, operations and maintenance, cost of fuel, cost of capital.

Covers it all ? And is used as benchmark across the variety of sources.

The problem is that renewables do not fit into any normal production type, it's not base load or peak load, a few months ago we had a period of about 6 days when wind was producing under 2 gw sometimes under 1gw during that period something else had to produce the electricity, that secondary source has to be paid for and should be factored into the cost of the turbines, the more turbines we have the bigger the problem, the costs cannot be looked in isolation, but as part of a bigger system with its needs, do you think paying for turbines to shut down due no requirement for the electricity is a good efficient idea?

[PRTVR]

Turbines are not part of a balanced system, they exist only to appear to be doing something about climate change, a futile experiment on so many levels, we are aiming to close down our coal fired power stations, hurrah the greens cheer, totally missing the global part of climate change, ignoring the fact that the far East have a massive coal power station building programme,China has built a new one every month for the last few years, we are paying for an inefficient system to basically allow politicians to have bragging rights, great isn't it ?

[turbobloke]

PRTVR said:

Turbines are not part of a balanced system, they exist only to appear to be doing something about climate change, a futile experiment on so many levels, we are aiming to close down our coal fired power stations, hurrah the greens cheer, totally missing the global part of climate change, ignoring the fact that the far East have a massive coal power station building programme,China has built a new one every month for the last few years, we are paying for an inefficient system to basically allow politicians to have bragging rights, great isn't it ?

Exactly.

The only reason we've got thousands of costly part-time bird and bat mincing turbines (with more due) is because of emissions reduction targets set by deluded politicians who believe in climate fairytales. The actual reductions being achieved, if we're ever told, are going to be risible as the optimistic projections were already hilarious.

Just connecting these white elephants to the grid was costed in a parliamentary answer some years ago as over £10bn and it will be more than that due to government never getting estimates right i.e. big enough. This alone is a ridiculous waste of money on part-time devices that don't deliver plated capacity, enrich land owners at the expense of pensioners, and aren't needed anyway.

[Jinx]

Gandahar said:

Mr GrimNasty said:

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

Mr GrimNasty said:

Lev. costs and Social Costs of Carbon are otherwise known as fraudulent accounting.

What ?

Source of claim ?

Anyone with a brain.

This is just chitter chatter and not adding to the thread.

Social costs of carbon without social benefits of carbon is fraudulent accounting. Only ever assessing one side of the equation will never balance the books.

[turbobloke]

Jinx said:

Gandahar said:

Mr GrimNasty said:

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

Mr GrimNasty said:

Lev. costs and Social Costs of Carbon are otherwise known as fraudulent accounting.

What ?

Source of claim ?

Anyone with a brain.

This is just chitter chatter and not adding to the thread.

Social costs of carbon without social benefits of carbon is fraudulent accounting. Only ever assessing one side of the equation will never balance the books.

Quite right. Even the House of Lords picked up on that climate trick, years ago.

Back to wind power and decarbonisation fantasy as opposed to bit-parts: the wind power needed for the EU to hit 2050 targets would have to rise from the current 40,000+ turbines to 500,000. That nice chap Mr Paterson and his chums calculated that this would require an area equivalent to “wall-to-wall (turbine) carpeting Northern Ireland, Wales, Belgium, Holland and Portugal combined”.

According to International Energy Agency figures broken down into national components, target fulfilment would cost Britain £1.3 trillion. IIRC that's more than 80% of the size of the UK's national debt, which would then approximately double without taking into account other additions but allowing for not much paying down at all. Fruitloopy.

[XM5ER]

Today I am a happy man for I discovered that one of my absolute favourite TV Presenter/intellectuals and all round interesting person is a sceptic. Not necessarily a full blown AGW sceptic but a Bjorn Lomburg "meh" so-whatist type skeptic. James Burke I salute you.

If you are wondering where I discovered this, go listen to Dan Carlin's Common Sense podcast show 312 "Re-connections with James Burke".

[XM5ER]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

China is building offshore wind power faster than anyone currently (i.e. more than Europe put together)

I see this argument trotted out frequently as if it matters. Let's not forget, China built a number of large inland cities that nobody lives in because it seemed like a good idea at the time to some party member in Beijing (or the provinces). Whilst China is no longer a full on command economy, it still does dumb stuff.

[turbobloke]

In the last decade or two I can remember update posts on PH climate threads from Tafia (sorely missed!) in which China's coal fired power station building rate was about 2 per week, with money from UK taxpayers helping out. Eighteen months ago the 'permitted' number increased to 4 per week, then the number started to be cut (more recently). That's no sweat, with so much reliable power generation already in play, the windymills aren't particularly important except for political posturing points at COPs. China's foreign exchange reserves are more than $3trillion US, arising from the recent past accumulation of many years of positive BOPs. Their recent dip has taken reserves down from $4trillion to only $3.2trillion. Windymill costs, pah.

[Silver Smudger]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

PRTVR said:

... the far East have a massive coal power station building programme,China has built a new one every month for the last few years...

China is building offshore wind power faster than anyone currently (i.e. more than Europe put together)

Windmill building does not answer the above - Is PRTVR's statement correct or not?

[turbobloke]

Silver Smudger said:

Windmill building does not answer the above - Is PRTVR's statement correct or not?

Based on building rates in the recent past, I would say it's an under-estimate, so not incorrect in that sense. Information on China's coal fired power station building programme and the rates of completion are easy to find and that would include on PH if only the search function worked well...

IIRC the not-so-long-ago 4 per week number was also mentioned by Greenpeas.

[turbobloke]

Here's The Independent and Greenpeas on the 2-per-week number taken from my trusty files and no doubt searchable for any doubting Thomases.

Greenpeace said Chinese firms had been starting to build two coal power plants every week, despite the Government’s attempts to reduce the over-supply of electricity. The country currently can produce more than 900,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity from its coal power plants, but a slowdown in economic growth means up to 300,000MW is redundant, according to an analysis by Greenpeace.

That was recently, so all those part-time windymills are sorely needed in China

[turbobloke]

Hat-trick of posts but worth it with a blast from the past...here's Tafia when the rate was "only" one new coal-fired power station per week.

http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...

Tafia was on a roll on that page. Nine years ago ffs

[durbster]

Silver Smudger said:

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

PRTVR said:

... the far East have a massive coal power station building programme,China has built a new one every month for the last few years...

China is building offshore wind power faster than anyone currently (i.e. more than Europe put together)

Windmill building does not answer the above - Is PRTVR's statement correct or not?

LMGTFY

They've stopped their rapid coal building plans:

China Cancels 103 Coal Plants, Mindful of Smog and Wasted Capacity
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/world/asia/chin...

China suspends 104 planned coal power plants
http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2017/01/16/china-...

China to Halt Construction on Coal-Fired Power Plants in 15 Regions
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-t...

And although they're still building new ones, they are levelling out in favour of alternative sources according to this:


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-07...

[turbobloke]

durbster said:

They've stopped their rapid coal building plans

Do keep up at the back! That's been posted already.

Meanwhile at rates of one per week then two per week then four per week then stop, how much excess but reliable power generation does China have above and beyond the reliable generation it now needs?

Clue - the answer is also in a previous recent post.

How badly does China need unreliable windymills? The answer is they don't but they can afford the Brownie Points at COPs whereas we cannot, and our limited land area is already excessively blighted.

[Phud]

I wonder which silo their nuclear power plants are put under?

[hidetheelephants]

Phud said:

I wonder which silo their nuclear power plants are put under?

Rolled into the non-fossil column presumably, allowing morons to crow about the huge renewable sector in China, not realising a very large chunk of it comes from nuclear.

[LongQ]

zygalski said:

Eh?
'spam's been posting scientific data throughout this thread.

2 days ago....

Read the first line of the post you quoted and then work out what and who it was replying to.

After that perhaps you could explain the politically relevant point in your post?