Climate Change - The Scientific Debate

[hairykrishna]

rovermorris999 said:

Is it me or have climate central ramped up the PR lately? Both on here and the BBC it seems to have been quiet up until just recently.

Seems much the same as it's been for a while on here. Nobody posts for ages because it's boring and pointless for us to have the same old arguments. Then either someone posts a news story that kicks off a bit of debate or a newbie who's not encountered the thread before wanders in and starts up the loop.

[robinessex]

The PROBLEM is, no one knows the answers, let alone the question. I seem to remember reading some while ago, that if all variables were included in a 'climate model', there would be 2^500 of them !!!! The most powerful computer on the planet would take longer to calculate ONE loop of that lot than planet earth has existed. Which is 4.5 billion years. So back to the calculators guys.

[hairykrishna]

There are only something like 10^80 atoms in the observable universe. Does each of them need ~3x10^70 variables associated with it?

You misread it, or it was written by an idiot or both.

[robinessex]

Remembered wrong. It's 10^34 years. Not that it matters.

Harvard climatologist Dr Sallie Baliunas has stated that current computer climate models are not reliable as tools for explaining past climate or making projections for future trends.

• To generate a full model of the climate system covering all spatial scales, and then use it to run a projection into the future involving less than half the 100 year timescale of some IPCC 'storylines', would take more than 10 to the power of 34 years of supercomputer time, according to Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. This timescale is 10 to the power 24 times longer than the current age of the universe.

[LongQ]

hairykrishna said:

Converting Drax to run on wood pellets seems bonkers.

It made commercial sense at one time when the political pressure to "de-carbonise" was leading them into penalty charges and the subsideis for "going green" provided some healthy profits.

The Drax management may have felt they had won a lottery and avoided going to jail. All based on politics rather than Science of course.

Then the politicians changed the subsidies .... and the science still does not stack up.

Such fun for all involved. So expensive for the plebs.

[hidetheelephants]

Toaster said:

CO2 stuff

If reducing CO2 output was the objective we should have been building nuclear power stations by the dozen; nuclear power is expensive(but still not that expensive) because we haven't built any for 25 years and because of excessive regulation and because of screechy hysteria-fueled luddism. Windmills and solar panels are a poor power source, as is burning wood unless it's already waste and available where you want to burn it. Geothermal(unless you're Iceland) and hydro are fine but make nuclear look cheap; tidal power and wave power are undeveloped and even when they are the hardware will be eyewateringly expensive.

Toaster said:

So if you mean Science is giving one path to stop air pollution and climate change I think is a yes and no, we know enough to say stop polluting the air and ground start helping ourselves if not the planet by living a more sustainable eco environment and their are multiple views on how we should go about it.

If every household in the UK went the Tesla Power wall route or a hydrogen power plant at home what do you think would happen to the Gas Coal and oil industry and the net effect for the air quality and do you think this may help the climate change revert to its natural cycle?

If everyone had a battery on the wall it would have no effect on anything except making the national grid's job a little easier and raising the commodity price of lithium.

Edit for quote fail.

Edited by hidetheelephants on Wednesday 6th May 19:41

[Toaster]

hairykrishna said:

I was asking PRTVR about his numbers for more energy being used to gather wood than produced by burning it.

Hmmm its public forum...

[Toaster]

hidetheelephants said:

If everyone had a battery on the wall it would have no effect on anything except making the national grid's job a little easier and raising the commodity price of lithium.

Oh Dear

[alock]

Toaster said:

Humans have increased atmospheric CO2 concentration by a third since the Industrial Revolution began. This is the most important long-lived "forcing" of climate change. http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

I came across this graph earlier.


What it shows are over 90000 direct measurements of atmospheric CO2 levels by chemical methods. This is plotted alongside the ice-core measurements that the IPCC choose to use.

[Toaster]

alock said:

I came across this graph earlier.


What it shows are over 90000 direct measurements of atmospheric CO2 levels by chemical methods. This is plotted alongside the ice-core measurements that the IPCC choose to use.

And the actual web linky for that page is where?

[hairykrishna]

Toaster said:

hairykrishna said:

I was asking PRTVR about his numbers for more energy being used to gather wood than produced by burning it.

Hmmm its public forum...

But you quoted my question? I wasn't really sure why you were replying to it with a non-sequitur.

[hairykrishna]

Toaster said:

And the actual web linky for that page is where?

The web link appears to point to 'principia scientific'.

It's been knocking about for a few years. The paper it originates from is;

Beck, Ernst-Georg. "180 years of atmospheric CO 2 gas analysis by chemical methods." Energy & Environment 18.2 (2007): 259-282.

The wet chemistry methods were deeply shoddy and subject to very significant sampling errors. There are any number of papers and articles and papers from well qualified people spelling out why nobody uses that 'direct measurement' data for anything serious but it doesn't stop people dredging it up every so often.

[hidetheelephants]

Toaster said:

hidetheelephants said:

If everyone had a battery on the wall it would have no effect on anything except making the national grid's job a little easier and raising the commodity price of lithium.

Oh Dear

Bloody right it's Oh Dear; this crap's being sold to us as a solution. It's marketing bks; all that's missing is some iBattery branding and morons will lap it up.

[LongQ]

hidetheelephants said:

Toaster said:

hidetheelephants said:

If everyone had a battery on the wall it would have no effect on anything except making the national grid's job a little easier and raising the commodity price of lithium.

Oh Dear

Bloody right it's Oh Dear; this crap's being sold to us as a solution. It's marketing bks; all that's missing is some iBattery branding and morons will lap it up.

I think you may have misinterpreted Toaster's comment.

I think he might have realised that toasters will be under employed in a wall battery driven world.

I'd like to say they'll be bread .... but I'm not sure what would power the ovens to do the baking.

[mko9]

plunker said:

PRTVR said:

plunker said:

PRTVR said:

Note the lack of ice.

http://reallysciency.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/zombie...

Interesting, you posted a picture that reinforced what I was saying, how thin must the ice be to punch a hole through with a sail of a sub, is there a date connected to the pictures?

See link - March 1959. The fact it was in March, close to the sea-ice maximum, underlines that the thin ice they broke through was a re-frozen lead in the ice they chanced upon. Sorry but this is just duff mis-info that you've bought into - tells you nothing about the state of the arctic ice in 1959.

I have never surfaced at the North Pole, but my father did on USS Pargo in the early 70s. My brother is also a submariner. I would ASSume the Skate picture was in the summertime, or near the edge of the pack ice, or something. Anyway, the ice is not some uniform slab across the Arctic. Some places are much thicker than others, it moves, it splits apart, it refreezes. They do have to look for a place where the ice is thin enough to break through. Then they use 4600 tons of buoyancy (in a Sturgeon class boat) concentrated on the few square feet of the top of the sail to push through. On the older boats that had sail planes, the planes would rotate so they pointed straight up so they wouldn't get bent or broken. Bottom line, I don't think you can really make any grand extrapolations from a couple of pictures. They are quite literally snapshots in time.

[PRTVR]

mko9 said:

plunker said:

PRTVR said:

plunker said:

PRTVR said:

Note the lack of ice.

http://reallysciency.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/zombie...

Interesting, you posted a picture that reinforced what I was saying, how thin must the ice be to punch a hole through with a sail of a sub, is there a date connected to the pictures?

See link - March 1959. The fact it was in March, close to the sea-ice maximum, underlines that the thin ice they broke through was a re-frozen lead in the ice they chanced upon. Sorry but this is just duff mis-info that you've bought into - tells you nothing about the state of the arctic ice in 1959.

I have never surfaced at the North Pole, but my father did on USS Pargo in the early 70s. My brother is also a submariner. I would ASSume the Skate picture was in the summertime, or near the edge of the pack ice, or something. Anyway, the ice is not some uniform slab across the Arctic. Some places are much thicker than others, it moves, it splits apart, it refreezes. They do have to look for a place where the ice is thin enough to break through. Then they use 4600 tons of buoyancy (in a Sturgeon class boat) concentrated on the few square feet of the top of the sail to push through. On the older boats that had sail planes, the planes would rotate so they pointed straight up so they wouldn't get bent or broken. Bottom line, I don't think you can really make any grand extrapolations from a couple of pictures. They are quite literally snapshots in time.

I agree, but also is the time that research has been conducted in the Arctic, in comparison to the age of the planet, do things run in cycles, how long do the cycles last?
But the picture along with the paper article demonstrate that there has been times in the past when there was minimal ice, it may happen again, and if it does the link with the rise in CO2 is tenuous.

[alock]

Toaster said:

And the actual web linky for that page is where?

I learnt a long time ago not to do that because the source just gets attacked instead.

It's not difficult to find lots of references to it. Try this.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=1920-1961+Northe...

[Toaster]

alock said:

I learnt a long time ago not to do that because the source just gets attacked instead.

It's not difficult to find lots of references to it. Try this.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=1920-1961+Northe...

Ok so here is a link from 2007

Eminent geologist person M.Ray.Thomasson PhD who happens to work for Thomasson partner Associates Oil and Gas Exploration http://www.tpaexpl.com

amongst other statements in his conclusion he says

• CO2 is a second order greenhouse gas after water vapor.
• Man has introduced a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere.
• Up to a concentration of about 150 ppm CO2 can play a very important role in global warming. Beyond 150 ppm its role diminishes.

included within the slide pack is the 1920-1961 data, lots of slides

Others would have argued for or against however even though he appears to be saying its down to water vapour (as I would expect from a rep from the oils and gas industry) http://i2massociates.com/Downloads/ClimateChangeTh...

Just one thing you cannot put one slide or data set et up and say there you go

[mko9]

PRTVR said:

I agree, but also is the time that research has been conducted in the Arctic, in comparison to the age of the planet, do things run in cycles, how long do the cycles last?
But the picture along with the paper article demonstrate that there has been times in the past when there was minimal ice, it may happen again, and if it does the link with the rise in CO2 is tenuous.

I agree. For example, if the medieval warm period was a good +1C in the Northern Hemisphere compared to today, such that Greenland was actually green, and grapes were being cultivated by monks wearing sandals in England, then there is probably a pretty good probability the Arctic was ice free. At the very least there had to have been a lot less ice than there is today, yet polar bears survived.

[Toaster]

mko9 said:

I agree. For example, if the medieval warm period was a good +1C in the Northern Hemisphere compared to today, such that Greenland was actually green, and grapes were being cultivated by monks wearing sandals in England, then there is probably a pretty good probability the Arctic was ice free. At the very least there had to have been a lot less ice than there is today, yet polar bears survived.

Really thats a scientific response