Man Based Global Warming....

ufourya,

The US NAS has a charter to advise the government, It discharges these periodic requests by forming research commitees drawn from the expertise in their ranks. No conspiracy I'm afraid. As for some members sitting on this panel also sitting on IPCC, that should not be a cause for wonder. IPCC draws from each nation's experts. This was the 2006 group:


Gerald R. North (chair)
Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Oceanography and
Harold J. Haynes Endowed Chair in Geosciences
Texas A&M University
College Station

Franco Biondi
Associate Professor of Physical Geography
University of Nevada
Reno

Peter Bloomfield
Professor of Statistics and of Financial Mathematics
North Carolina State University
Raleigh

John R. Christy
Professor of Atmospheric Science, and
Director
Earth System Science Center
University of Alabama
Huntsville

Kurt M. Cuffey
Professor of Geography
University of California
Berkeley

Robert E. Dickinson1,2
Professor
School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta

Ellen R.M. Druffel
Professor of Earth System Science
University of California
Irvine

Douglas Nychka
Senior Scientist
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Boulder, Colo.

Bette Otto-Bliesner
Scientist
Climate and Global Dynamics Division;
Head
Paleoclimate Group; and
Deputy Head
Climate Change Research Section
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Boulder, Colo.

Neil Roberts
Head
School of Geography
University of Plymouth
Plymouth, United Kingdom

Karl K. Turekian1
Sterling Professor of Geology and Geophysics
Yale University
New Haven, Conn.

John M. Wallace1
Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, and
Director
Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean
University of Washington
Seattle
--------------------
NAS currently, again in response to chartered US government request, is organizing a symposium to address proposed actions to address climate change. You should take note of this -- while denialists are sticking their heads in the sand, the world is deciding how to spend money and where.

 

Sage - according to NOAA, sea surface temperatures have been rising since at least 1910, long before anthropogenic CO2 could have been a factor. So even assuming the sst measures are accurate, and rising -which it is far from clear that they are - how would a "*trend* over the past 50 years" prove anything regarding anthropogenic warming when the *trend* existed for at least 50 years prior as well?

In fact, according to NOAA data, the sea surface temperature rise from 1910 to 1940 (~0.5 C) exceeds the rise for any 30 year period since. And of the rise from 1970 onward (~0.4 C), over half (0.21C) occurs during the 1998 El Nino year alone!

 

Are you using means, or cherry picking numbers from where ever the limits of uncertainty suit you ?

 

While people (myself included) are arguing the relative merits of hoaxers and deniers, the reality of living life as we know it moves on.

This is from a commencement speech (wish they were all this informative and fact-based) given in Utah (one of those ridiculously conservative states). What follows is a realistic look at our energy situation with real figures.

"...There are no near-term alternatives to oil, natural gas, and coal. Like it or not, the world runs on fossil fuels, and it will for decades to come. The U.S. government‟s own forecast shows that fossil fuels will supply about 85% of world energy demand in 2030 – roughly the same as today. Yes, someday the world may run on alternatives. But that day is still a long way off. It‟s not about will. It‟s not about who‟s in the White House. It‟s about thermodynamics and economics.

Now, I was told back in the 1970s what you‟re being told today: that wind and solar power are „alternatives‟ to fossil fuels. A more honest description would be „supplements‟. Taken together, wind and solar power today account for just one-sixth of 1% of America‟s annual energy usage. Let me repeat that statistic – one-sixth of 1%.

Here‟s a pie chart showing total U.S. primary energy demand today. I “asked” PowerPoint to show a wedge for the portion of the U.S. energy pie that comes from wind and solar. But PowerPoint won‟t make a wedge for wind and solar – just a thin line.

Over the past 30 years our government has pumped roughly $20 billion in subsidies into wind and solar power, and all we‟ve got to show for it is this thin line!
Undaunted by this, President Obama proposes to double wind and solar power consumption in this country by the end of his first term. Great – that means the line on this pie chart would become a slightly thicker line in four years. I would point out that wind and solar power doubled in just the last three years of the Bush administration. Granted, W. started from a smaller baseline, so doubling again over the next four years will be a taller order. But if President Obama‟s goal is achieved, wind and solar together will grow from one-sixth of 1% to one-third of 1% of total primary energy use – and that assumes U.S. energy consumption remains flat, which of course it will not.

The problems with wind and solar power become apparent when you look at their footprint. To generate electricity comparable to a 1,000 MW gas-fired power plant you‟d have to build a wind farm with at least 500 very tall windmills occupying more than 30,000 acres of land. Then there‟s solar power. I‟m holding a Denver Post article that tells the story of an 8.2 MW solar-power plant built on 82 acres in Colorado. The Post proudly hails it “America‟s most productive utility-scale solar electricity plant”. But when you account for the fact that the sun doesn‟t always shine, you‟d need over 250 of these plants, on over 20,000 acres to replace just one 1,000 MW gas-fired power plant that can be built on less than 40 acres.
The Salt Lake Tribune recently celebrated the startup of a 14 MW geothermal plant near Beaver, Utah. That‟s wonderful! But the Tribune failed to put 14 MW into perspective. Utah has over 7,000 MW of installed generating capacity, primarily coal. America has about 1,000,000 MW of installed capacity. Because U.S. demand for electricity has been growing at 1-2 % per year, on average we‟ve been adding 10-20,000 MW of new capacity every year to keep pace with growth. Around the world coal demand is booming – 200,000 MW of new coal capacity is under construction, over 30,000 MW in China alone. In fact, there are 30 coal plants under construction in the U.S. today that when complete will burn about 70 million tons of coal per year.

Why has my generation failed to develop wind and solar? Because our energy choices are ruthlessly ruled, not by political judgments, but by the immutable laws of thermodynamics. In engineer-speak, turning diffused sources of energy such as photons in sunlight or the kinetic energy in wind requires massive investment to concentrate that energy into a form that‟s usable on any meaningful scale.
What‟s more, the wind doesn‟t always blow and the sun doesn‟t always shine. Unless or until there‟s a major breakthrough in high-density electricity storage – a problem that has confounded scientists for more than 100 years – wind and solar can never be relied upon to provide base load power.

But it‟s not just thermodynamics. It‟s economics. Over the past 150 years America has invested trillions of dollars in our existing energy systems – power plants, the grid, steam and gas turbines, railroads, pipelines, distribution, refineries, service stations, home heating, boilers, cars, trucks and planes, etc. Changing that infrastructure to a system based on renewable energy will take decades and massive new investment.

To be clear, we need all the wind and solar power the markets can deliver at prices we can afford. But please, let‟s get real – wind and solar are not “alternatives” to fossil fuels..."

http://www.questar.com/news/2009_news/UVUSpeech.pdf

WARNING for knee-jerkers and those who would rather antagonize others than educate themselves - the speaker is the CEO of an ENERGY company and it covers 10 pages in pdf. The quote is but a very small part.

 

The IPCC authors aren't the only people/organizations that "believe" in AGW.

Hey, I have an idea. Let's start this argument all over again..

http://priuschat.com/forums/environmental-discussion/56792-man-based-global-warming-5.html#post772378

 

Cherry pick? If I recall, your data began in 1950 (after the large run up in sea surface surface temperatures that occurred - without the help of CO2 - from 1910-45). And your chart ended in 2002/3 before the recent decline in sea surface temperatures. Cherry picking indeed.

I'll ask again. How did SST rise by 0.5C from 1910 to ~1940 when CO2 only rose by 10 ppm? If you can't answer that, then how can you claim CO2 drove the smaller 0.4C rise in the 50+ years since WWII, when CO2 concentrations rose by roughly 10x as much? And how do you account for the fact that half of the post WWII rise in SST happened at the time of the 1998 El Nino? CO2? Me-thinks not.

 

Krugman takes on China, in the upcoming carbon era:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/opinion/15krugman.html?_r=1&em
(free subscription required)

Sometimes I think he allows himself too much latitude outside of his areas of expertise, but he sure nailed it this time.

 

I'll say it again...
OHC, at least conceptually, must be analyzed in terms of total heat buffer capacity. Some climate change researchers like to use a metaphor of a budget for obvious reasons. Cherry picking on one sub-system, or a sub-system of a sub-system is not instructive. Picking snapshots in time, along with inconsistent points in the range of uncertainty, is denialist drivel.

Your one fair question, why I picked 1950, deserves an answer: Those were the graphs I was looking at from Willis' and Domingues' articles. I also point out that the uncertainty range of OHC has narrowed considerably over the past couple of decades, so it's hard to put much stock in data from 100 years ago without supporting data from a separate process and data collection. I'm trying to say that I don't know the answer to your question, and I am not sure that an answer is possible.

Go ask the experts. I will say this: it didn't take you long to jump from your last (now refuted) most_important_denialist_issue_of_the_month(tm) to a new one. You probably cannot see it, but you are just continuing the same old, same old: picking a datum that may or may not be anomalous (depending on the expertise of who you ask) as proof that denialism has merit, while ignoring the well understood ton of evidence pointing the other way.

Why bother with the pseudo-science ?

 

he missed the real problem for all of us. Who has financed the massive scale of economic development? Any correlation between that and the massive debts in the US? Duhhhhhhhhhhh.

 

If 'nailed it' means he's living in an alternate reality, yeah.

Krugman's an idiot.

From the same speech I quoted earlier:

"...You can argue about whether global warming is a serious problem or not, but there‟s no argument about the consequences of cap and trade regulation – it‟s going to drive the cost of energy painfully higher. That‟s the whole point of cap and trade – to drive up the cost of fossil energy so that otherwise uneconomic “alternatives†can compete. Some put the total cost of cap and trade to U.S. consumers at $2 trillion over the next decade and $6 trillion between now and 2050 – not to mention the net loss of jobs in energy-intensive industries that must compete in global markets.
Given this staggering cost, I hope you‟ll ask: will cap and trade work? If Europe‟s experience with cap and trade is an indication, the answer is “noâ€.

With much fanfare, the European Union (EU) adopted a cap and trade scheme in an effort to meet their Kyoto commitments to cut CO2 emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012. How are they doing? So far, all but one EU country is getting an “Fâ€. Since 2000 Europe‟s CO2 emissions per unit of GDP have grown faster than the U.S.! The U.S. of course did not implement Kyoto – nor did over 150 other countries. There‟s a good reason why most of the world rejected Kyoto: with today‟s energy technologies there‟s no way to sever the link between CO2 emissions and modern life. Europe‟s cap and trade scheme was designed to fail – and it‟s working as designed.
Let‟s do the math to explain why Kyoto would have failed in the U.S. and why Obama‟s cap and trade scheme is also likely to fail. Americans were responsible for about 5 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions in 1990. By 2005 that amount had risen to over 5.8 billion tons. If the U.S. Senate had ratified the Kyoto treaty back in the 1990s America would‟ve promised to cut manmade CO2 emissions in this country to 7% below that 1990 level – to about 4.6 billion tons, a 1.2 billion ton per year cut by 2012.

What would it take to cut U.S. CO2 emissions by 1.2 billion tons per year by 2012? A lot more sacrifice than riding a Schwinn to work or school, or changing light bulbs.

We could‟ve banned gasoline. In 2005 gasoline use in America caused about 1.1B tons of CO2. That would almost get us there. Or, we could shut down over half of the coal-fired power plants in this country. Coal plants generated about 2 B tons of CO2 in 2005. Of course, before we did that we‟d have to get over 60 million Americans and a bunch of American businesses to volunteer to go without electricity.

This simple math is not friendly to those who demand that government mandate sharp cuts in manmade CO2 emissions – now..."

http://www.questar.com/news/2009_news/UVUSpeech.pdf

Now, close your eyes and ears and tell me again how we're all gonna die if the earth continues to burn fossil fuels. The IPCC and NAS say so.

Hop on your Schwinn, switch to flourescent and find those .05 w vampires - you'll save the world!

 

See my comments in CAPS:

 

These things are never as cut and dried as they appear:

...Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, "Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with 'At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .' "

I haven't seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer...

John R. Christy

My Nobel Moment - WSJ.com

 

I'll provide my take of some of the comments. Please note that none of my comments have anything to do with AGW aspects at all.

OK. So what should we do? There will only be alternatives if someone starts working on alternatives. Yes it is about thermodynamics and economics. $10gal/gas really drives economincs pretty hard. Why did he not mention these economics whatsoever? We have already seen $4gal/gas. Is his point that we should ignore doing anything till after 2030.

Yep. How long was nuclear power around before it got past 1%? The best possible employment of solar and wind is as a supplement for quite some time. He makes that sound like a bad thing. When he gives the next commencement speech 10 years from now and points out that wind and solar are only 12%, is his point still valid or meaningless? There is a LOT of plants being built underway now, so this is going to change rather quickly over the next two decades.

What is the point? He can't have it both ways. Is he pointing out we have a very long way to go, or that we should give up?

That's probably more energy than $20 billion of new nuclear would have provided!!!!! The new plant Progress Energy is proposing has numbers as high as $13 billion....and these have a long history of overrunning. If the whole pie is many, many trillion (and it is), then all you get for $20 billion is a thin line regardless of the type of power plant.

Again, the speaker is trying to have it both ways. He points out the the line is thin and then piles on when someone wants to double an infinitely small line? I emphasize this because WHOEVER would be president would be advocating alternative energy.

So? How many acres does the US lose every day to new parking lots and roads? Note how the pollution differences are totally left out to point out that more room is needed. Would I accept having my house and kids by the 40 acre nuclear plant, coal plant, gas plant or 20,000 acre solar, wind plant?

And where does all the mercury released by the coal go? Does this coal last forever?

Because they were content to let the next generation be faced with the problems.

Totally agree with this. The only thing that many solar and wind power corporations ask for is a level playing field, not rules specifically written to favor coal and nuclear plants. (e.g. Florida Utilities allowed to raise electric bills to raise money for nuclear plants a decade away and solar companies denied any source of revenue till the plant is complete.)

Not today. How about 100 years from now? Is planning ahead a bad thing?

It's obvious he thinks like most other CEOs.....from standing on his wallet.

 

Good points.

I think this from Christy really helps put the whole thing in perspective:

Congress is now discussing an 80% reduction in U.S. greenhouse emissions by 2050. That's basically the equivalent of building 1,000 new nuclear power plants all operating by 2020. Now I'm all in favor of nuclear energy, but that would affect the global temperature by only seven-hundredths of a degree by 2050 and fifteen hundredths by 2100. We wouldn't even notice it.

 

Since your questions revolve only around the quoted portions, may I suggest you read the whole thing? Many are answered there.

I cannot speak for the CEO, but I would venture that most of his opinions could be distilled into the crucible of free markets working in a capitalist environment without government interference. This view is, of course, what allowed our nation to grow into the most productive, inventive and successful one in history.

Update: here's another realistc look at the future:

http://masterresource.org/?p=2610#more-2610

 

All looks into the future are just opinion. That's one of the core points of the entire thread. However, forward thinking actions are not opinions, they are forward thinking actions and that is what is totally missing in his address.

The problem of free markets is the definition of "free" varies with the person benefitting due to a particular definition. For example, should the owners of a coal power plant be responsible for safely and permanently disposing of the waste ash as part of the free market? Or is it a free market when they are allowed to do what they want with the waste?

I'm a true supporter of "free markets", but that really does not mean much. Until we get into the details of what "free market" really means in a very specific market, it's the same as saying I'm for effective politicians.

 

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market"]Free market - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

Yes, it's complex. Basically, we have not a free market but a mixed market due to government interference.

When some folks rail against the fossil fuel industry they are completely unaware that the US government owns the Tennessee Valley Authority which operates 11 coal-fired plants, one of which, Kingston, was responsible for the massive billion gallon coal ash spill in 2008. Is this a problem with self-regulation that we hear leveled at the industry, or our government's problem?

People also forget that as president Carter gave this forward-looking speech in 1977

American Experience | Jimmy Carter | Primary Sources

in which he predicted we would run out of oil and gas reserves by the end of the 80's. He suggested utilizing more coal, solar and nuclear (plus conservation, because we are so wasteful).

Thank God he was so ineffectual and was unable to force us to his view. Unfortunately, we now have a president who probably has the power to institute an energy policy that will kill the free market and subject us to deprivations that can only please those who hate America - and he'll use the very thing this thread is about to implement it. Another politician making policy in an area he knows nothing about. Sigh.

Most problems we encounter seem to work themselves out just fine without the interference of government, and most advances occur the same way (without government).

As the CEO mentions in his speech, we have huge gas reserves for decades to come.

Some folks are naturally negative and others are optimistic. The nay-sayers are those who are most susceptible to climbing aboard the doom, gloom and catastrophe band wagon. The optimists have history on their side. Invention is the daughter of necessity.

I've started to ramble.

 

Interesting article:

What if global-warming fears are overblown? - May. 14, 2009

 

Jimmy Carter is a fantastically awesome dude that has done more good in this world than most of the last 10 presidents put together.

And Obama is the best thing to ever happen to your sorry butt.

A statement of such vast ridiculousness - that he will kill the free market, pleasing those that hate America - is so lame, you sir must be so incredibly ignorant, that it baffles the mind.

You are the very type of person that gives Americans such a bad name in the world.

 

Well, this is getting a bit off topic, but I'll bite. JC means well and is a better ex-President than he ever was president. But overall he was pretty ineffectual. That is why he was swiftly pushed aside by the Reagan revolution.

Obama on the other hand, appears to be highly effective. Unfortunately, he is effective at implementing wrong-headed policies that are going to bankrupt the country.

As for American's having a bad name - I don't worry about that too much. When you lead the world, some people are going to like you and some not so much. The irony is folks in Canada and Europe that are all so willing to criticize and complain about the US, while happily sitting under the umbrella of freedom, economic stability, safety and security that we provide. All while not lifting a finger to help.