Climate change - the POLITICAL debate.

[kerplunk]

SpeedMattersNot said:

AFAIK, there is plenty of evidence that suggests our contributions to Co² is still (at maximum) 4% of total Co² output.

Also, they used ice core data to monitor the past emissions, but you can't use that to measure the current atmosphere. So who is to suggest that the calibration between the two models is just...too different to give accurate results from which to draw a solid conclusion?

Well you're really going in at the thick end there with that CO2 isn't ours/ice-cores are rubbish line - high risk of being written off as delusional I'd say, so maybe lower your sights a bit.

[Jinx]

kerplunk said:

Well you're really going in at the thick end there with that CO2 isn't ours/ice-cores are rubbish line - high risk of being written off as delusional I'd say, so maybe lower your sights a bit.

Well for a start the you have a graph with ice core measurements and then taped on the end the "direct CO2" measurments from the current years (anyone else know what is wrong with this)?
Next up what measurement for CO2 did they use - here is a direct CO2 chart from Salt lake city - Graph Notice how in a 12 hour period the CO2 can vary between 390 ppm and 480 ppm. How reliable does this make the comment that CO2 has never been above 300 ppm before? I call BS on this as 90ppm variance is observable today I suspect peaks above 300 ppm have happened in the past (smoothed out by using the ice core proxy) .
The assertation that because CO2 absorbs IR in a closed system in a lab it "must cause the Earth to warm in response " is not science. This is unproven and given an open system such as the earth's atmosphere has many ways to distribute energy (heck all it need to do is expand and there goes the energy) this needs to be shown (also as historically temperature has always increased before an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere - proof is available from those same ice cores) and given that temperature increases have flatlined in recent years with no flatlining of CO2 emisssion this assertation has a lot of work to do.
NASA's reliability on this issues with eco activist James Hansen at the helm is in serious doubt. If he was there when the moon landings took place I'd might even have joined the tin-hat brigade.

No Dr Lewandowsky that was a joke - yes a joke- an article of language to induce a laughter response? no? An risible comment for humorous effect? still not getting it huh. Oh well just class it as denier with everything else you don't understand........

[Pointman]

My turn to flay Lewandowsky ...

As with all great tragedy, there were elements of comedy to it, but unfortunately more in a Benny Hill sense, rather than Dante. Lewandowsky thinking he could take out McIntyre on points of statistical methodology, was right up there with a one-legged man entering an ass kicking contest.

http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/intent...

Pointman

[The Don of Croy]

turbobloke said:

False Alarm

This week Silent Spring will turn 50. Rachel Carson’s jeremiad against pesticides is credited by many as launching the modern environmentalist movement, and the author, who died in 1964, is being widely lauded for her efforts. In Silent Spring, Carson crafted a passionate denunciation of modern technology that drives environmentalist ideology today. At its heart is this belief: Nature is beneficent, stable, and even a source of moral good; humanity is arrogant, heedless, and often the source of moral evil.
Ronald Bailey, Reason Online, October 2012

Some prog on R4 yesterday devoted much time to this 'milestone', the start of the environmentalist movement, seeing the light, etc etc...yawn.

I've read somewhere that one of the bods who developed DDT ate a teaspoonful every day to test it's effects on the human body. He was still doing it after 40+ years. My own aunty was powdered with DDT as a girl in native Italy to ward of the mozzies when playing outside in the summer months (didn't stop her contracting polio unfortunately). However, she is still going strong in her late 60's.

This isn't to say DDT is not without it's negatives (residual effects and accumulation in fatty tissue) but the hype that came from the book was, as we see today, all too familiar.

[kerplunk]

Jinx said:

Well for a start the you have a graph with ice core measurements and then taped on the end the "direct CO2" measurments from the current years (anyone else know what is wrong with this)?
Next up what measurement for CO2 did they use - here is a direct CO2 chart from Salt lake city - Graph Notice how in a 12 hour period the CO2 can vary between 390 ppm and 480 ppm. How reliable does this make the comment that CO2 has never been above 300 ppm before? I call BS on this as 90ppm variance is observable today I suspect peaks above 300 ppm have happened in the past (smoothed out by using the ice core proxy) .
[/footnote]

When they talk about CO2 levels not being above 300ppm etc they're talking about the 'background' level. I think the diurnal cycle you see in the Salt Lake City obs are typical for that type of location and are a result of being close to sources and sinks ie. the daily respiration of plants.

I doubt this observed diurnal variation is a good way in for the claim that the ice cores are smoothing out peaks - not much vegetation around antarctica for a start. You need evidence of decade/century scale large variations in the whole atmosphere, not localised daily swings.

[Jinx]

kerplunk said:

not much vegetation around antarctica for a start

Not now obviously but would have been a fair amount awhile back. As such to claim that when Antartica was a lush overgrown paradise it's CO2 levels never reached over 300ppm would be non-sensical.
Anyway I was arguing against what was on the site not what "they meant" which if it was what "they meant" they should have bloody said it. CO2 is not well mixed now (check the images from JAXA) as such to assume it was and that the ice cores have an accurate measure of the "maximum" (background) is another assumption without foundation.

[LongQ]

The Don of Croy said:

turbobloke said:

False Alarm

This week Silent Spring will turn 50. Rachel Carson’s jeremiad against pesticides is credited by many as launching the modern environmentalist movement, and the author, who died in 1964, is being widely lauded for her efforts. In Silent Spring, Carson crafted a passionate denunciation of modern technology that drives environmentalist ideology today. At its heart is this belief: Nature is beneficent, stable, and even a source of moral good; humanity is arrogant, heedless, and often the source of moral evil.
Ronald Bailey, Reason Online, October 2012

Some prog on R4 yesterday devoted much time to this 'milestone', the start of the environmentalist movement, seeing the light, etc etc...yawn.

I've read somewhere that one of the bods who developed DDT ate a teaspoonful every day to test it's effects on the human body. He was still doing it after 40+ years. My own aunty was powdered with DDT as a girl in native Italy to ward of the mozzies when playing outside in the summer months (didn't stop her contracting polio unfortunately). However, she is still going strong in her late 60's.

This isn't to say DDT is not without it's negatives (residual effects and accumulation in fatty tissue) but the hype that came from the book was, as we see today, all too familiar.

From what I understand of the "Silent Spring" developments the main understanding it brought to the ecologically minded movements was that it was possible to develope widely based support from emotive writing partly because most people had no background in understanding the scientific issues and by then, certainly in the USA, were succumbing to the simplicity of getting all of their news and current affairs 'knowledge' spoon fed by TV and the local area printed news was competitng along the same lines. The mass market information had to be right and "big business" wrong.

That routine treatment with DDT had probably saved the live of hundreds of thousands of soldiers in WWII and, arguably, produced a fitter army was being forgotten.

That scientists would be keen to fudge the experiments for matters important in the public domain (rather than just for vanity projects in labs) was probably little recognised but may have been the first enlightenment of how to encourage people to make assumptions and draw conclusions about matters they barely understand and feel they have become experts and obviously knew the reality all along. That's the key. Once you have thought or said "I told you so" it's almost impossible for people to back track and admit they might not have been entirely correct.

A few people who managed to leave their observations so well written that they could jump in any direction they needed to. Hence how so many smart people managed to talk up and predict new Ice Ages and catastrophes in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then U-turn that into warming catastrophes in the late 70s and onwards.

[Silver Smudger]

I am just a telecomms engineer with an interest too, so can you (or anyone else) expand on the points I've added in bold, please

kerplunk said:

Jinx said:

Well for a start the you have a graph with ice core measurements and then taped on the end the "direct CO2" measurments from the current years (anyone else know what is wrong with this)?
No comment on this bit?
Next up what measurement for CO2 did they use - here is a direct CO2 chart from Salt lake city - Graph Notice how in a 12 hour period the CO2 can vary between 390 ppm and 480 ppm. How reliable does this make the comment that CO2 has never been above 300 ppm before? I call BS on this as 90ppm variance is observable today I suspect peaks above 300 ppm have happened in the past (smoothed out by using the ice core proxy) .
[/footnote]

When they talk about CO2 levels not being above 300ppm etc they're talking about the 'background' level. I think the diurnal cycle you see in the Salt Lake City obs are typical for that type of location and are a result of being close to sources and sinks ie. the daily respiration of plants.
Why do you think this? The next point you make depends on it so we need to know

I doubt this observed diurnal variation is a good way in for the claim that the ice cores are smoothing out peaks - not much vegetation around Antarctica for a start.
what time of day does the carbon 'lay down' in the ice? At the highest point of concentration of the day? the lowest? gradually during the day, thereby smoothing off the peaks?
You need evidence of decade/century scale large variations in the whole atmosphere, not localised daily swings.
[b]How long does the peak at 1950 last on that graph? - The scale markings on the time axis are a bit vague - A peak would have to last some time to be visible on a chart at one hundred thousand years per division - Is it possible that such short peaks have occurred before and just didn't show up in the ice core? Maybe we need to wait for a century or two to see if this is a blip or not at this scale?

It is evidence, but what is it evidence of? We cannot tell, and guessing or asserting a correlation of some sort, or declaring it 'unprecedented' is not very helpful or convincing.

[kerplunk]

Jinx said:

Not now obviously but would have been a fair amount awhile back. As such to claim that when Antartica was a lush overgrown paradise it's CO2 levels never reached over 300ppm would be non-sensical.

I agree, however the claim is with reference to the ice cores, ie the last 650 thousand years, not millions of years ago.

Jinx said:

Anyway I was arguing against what was on the site not what "they meant" which if it was what "they meant" they should have bloody said it. CO2 is not well mixed now (check the images from JAXA) as such to assume it was and that the ice cores have an accurate measure of the "maximum" (background) is another assumption without foundation.

I disagree- CO2 is well mixed with only small variation over the whole globe and it seems reasonable to assume it has been thus as long as the wind has blown.

[Blib]

^^^ Shouldn't this be on the science thread?

I read this on the JAXA site.

JAXA article said:

In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted at the Third Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP3), making it mandatory for developed nations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by six to eight per cent of their total emissions in 1990, and to meet this goal sometime between 2008 and 2012.

Has any nation reached the Kyoto Protocol targets? If not, has any nation got close to the proposed reduction? (My emphasis).

[Ali G]

There should be little doubt that we will ultimately determine if there is in fact some foundation to anthropogenic global warming, since China is full on burning coal, the US is not abating in its use of fossil fuels (with the advent of shale gas) and now Germany seems to have switched back to coal powered for its electricity too (since the the windmills cannot meet its power demands).

When the lights go out in the UK - hope all those concerned will be able to look back and say 'job well done'

[Blib]

Ali G said:

When the lights go out in the UK - hope all those concerned will be able to look back and say 'job well done' lined up against a wall.

EFA.

[rovermorris999]

Ali G said:

There should be little doubt that we will ultimately determine if there is in fact some foundation to anthropogenic global warming, since China is full on burning coal, the US is not abating in its use of fossil fuels (with the advent of shale gas) and now Germany seems to have switched back to coal powered for its electricity too (since the the windmills cannot meet its power demands).

When the lights go out in the UK - hope all those concerned will be able to look back and say 'job well done'

This is what really bugs me. Even if you believe in MMGW UK CO2 emissions are under 2% of worldwide emissions and falling. Crucifying our economy will achieve diddley-squat. It looks like Germany has seen the light apart from the daft decision to close all their nuclear plants because of the risk from all those devastating earthquakes and tsunamis they get there.

[kerplunk]

Silver Smudger said:

I am just a telecomms engineer with an interest too, so can you (or anyone else) expand on the points I've added in bold, please

Jinx said:

Well for a start the you have a graph with ice core measurements and then taped on the end the "direct CO2" measurments from the current years (anyone else know what is wrong with this)?

Silver Smudger said:

No comment on this bit?

I've often pondered whether CO2 measurements from ice cores qualify as a direct measurement or as a proxy measurement? It's supposedly air samples conveniently captured and stored for us by nature and the CO2 concentration is then directly measured - which doesn't sound like a proxy to me (unlike say plant stomata analysis). I guess I'm saying they're both empirical obs so why wouldn't you join them together?

kerplunk said:

When they talk about CO2 levels not being above 300ppm etc they're talking about the 'background' level. I think the diurnal cycle you see in the Salt Lake City obs are typical for that type of location and are a result of being close to sources and sinks ie. the daily respiration of plants.

Silver Smudger said:

Why do you think this? The next point you make depends on it so we need to know

I dunno where I learned of that, it's just up there <taps temple>

Worth having a feel for the physical scales involved - 90ppm variation in a single day is so large it can ONLY BE a localised effect caused by proximity to sources/sinks.

kerplunk said:

I doubt this observed diurnal variation is a good way in for the claim that the ice cores are smoothing out peaks - not much vegetation around Antarctica for a start.

Silver Smudger said:

what time of day does the carbon 'lay down' in the ice? At the highest point of concentration of the day? the lowest? gradually during the day, thereby smoothing off the peaks?

I don't know the answer to that, or even if it's a good question to ask - perhaps the first question should be 'is there a diurnal CO2-level cycle in antarctica?'. I've already suggested there isn't (because of an absence of vegetation) but maybe there's an effect from the ocean, however Vostock (where the longest ice cores come from) is well over a thousand miles from the nearest coast, which is maybe why they go there!

Silver Smudger said:

How long does the peak at 1950 last on that graph? - The scale markings on the time axis are a bit vague - A peak would have to last some time to be visible on a chart at one hundred thousand years per division - Is it possible that such short peaks have occurred before and just didn't show up in the ice core? Maybe we need to wait for a century or two to see if this is a blip or not at this scale?

That's a reasonable question and I don't know how fully it can be answered. I know of high-resolution ice-cores that also don't reveal any large variations (until recently) but they only go back a couple of thousand years (google Law Dome ice cores). It's questions like this you need a real expert for, not a telephone enjuneer

[LongQ]

Blib said:

Ali G said:

When the lights go out in the UK - hope all those concerned will be able to look back and say 'job well done' lined up against a wall.

EFA.

Depends on what sort of regime is running the country by then. You could shoot them, others may stomne them. Or you could simply leave them to die in the cold rooms they will have encouraged by their policies. If they are lucky they might starve to death first or pass on as the result of food poisoning because they could not afford to heat their meat and greens.

So long as they are able to experience the benefits of their policies I'm sure they will be satisfied.

[turbobloke]

Green Energy Chaos - Greek Electricity System Faces Collapse, New Solar Installations Banned

Greece, aiming to stave off a fresh energy crisis, plans to support its main electricity market operator through a temporary tax on renewable power producers and by extending an emergency loan, a senior official said on Friday. The electricity system came close to collapse in June when market operator LAGHE was overwhelmed by subsidies it pays to green power producers as part of efforts to bolster solar energy. Greece has slashed the guaranteed feed-in prices it pays to some solar operators and is no longer approving permits for their installation.
Harry Papachristou, Reuters, 28 September 2012

Sharp Corp. plans to end production and sales of solar cells and modules in the U.S. and Europe by March as part of a restructuring, Kyodo News said. Osaka-based Sharp plans to cut more than 10,000 jobs, or about 18 percent of its workforce, and is in talks to sell plants as it tries to return to profit, two people with knowledge of the proposal said yesterday.
Bloomberg, 27 September 2012

[turbobloke]

Guam said:

But, but, but, Green energy is going to save us all, they should be generating revenue for the Greek economy, you mean these things actually LOSE money.......Who would have gueesed?

Yep, I was expecting full employment and debt on the way to being paid off by now Oooops.

Meanwhile in what could be a pearoast:

Car Manufacturer Puts Dent In Ministerial Electric Car Ambitions

The Government’s hopes of an electric car revolution were dealt a blow this week as Toyota announced it was scrapping plans for a mass market all-electric minicar, saying it had “misread the market”. Toyota’s decision to drop plans for the widespread sale of its eQ city car came just days after the House of Commons transport committee expressed doubts about the Government’s electric car strategy, questioning its value for money. Toyota vice chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada said this week: “The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society’s needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge.”
Local Transport Today, 28 September 2012

[SpeedMattersNot]

On that note, turbobloke, have you seen this?

http://www.teslamotors.com/about/press/releases/te...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedd...

Can't see it being talked about anywhere on PistonHeads.

Actually looks promising. If this was any other company than Tesla promoting this, I'd be much more doubtful of it's realism.

[turbobloke]

Faster charging will help people who already own an electric car but the idea of a solar carport will be great in California, Nevada or maybe Arizona but not so good in Manchester or Grimsby.

[mko9]

kerplunk said:

Jinx said:

Well for a start the you have a graph with ice core measurements and then taped on the end the "direct CO2" measurments from the current years (anyone else know what is wrong with this)?
Next up what measurement for CO2 did they use - here is a direct CO2 chart from Salt lake city - Graph Notice how in a 12 hour period the CO2 can vary between 390 ppm and 480 ppm. How reliable does this make the comment that CO2 has never been above 300 ppm before? I call BS on this as 90ppm variance is observable today I suspect peaks above 300 ppm have happened in the past (smoothed out by using the ice core proxy) .
[/footnote]

When they talk about CO2 levels not being above 300ppm etc they're talking about the 'background' level. I think the diurnal cycle you see in the Salt Lake City obs are typical for that type of location and are a result of being close to sources and sinks ie. the daily respiration of plants.

I doubt this observed diurnal variation is a good way in for the claim that the ice cores are smoothing out peaks - not much vegetation around antarctica for a start. You need evidence of decade/century scale large variations in the whole atmosphere, not localised daily swings.

We may be wandering off into the weeds a bit, but apparently you have never been near Salt Lake City. It is essentially high desert next to a big salt lake (hence the name). There is very little vegetation.