'Educated' opinions on climate change 41

[csd72]

As engineers we are educated in physics and chemistry and should have a reasonable idea on what really effects the energy consumption that causes climate change. I am looking for peoples opinions on what suggestions have been good ideas to reduce your individual impact. Alternatively what suggestions have you heard that are utter nonsense.

It would be good to hear comments from engineers on this matter.

 

[LCruiser]

The problem with the approach to the dogmatic "better safe than sorry" concept is that
1. Not only is the population on Earth exploding, but
2. CO2 is the base of the food chain,
3. Alarmists have no clue about thermodynamics, and
4. Models really are a very long way away from reality.

So what is known as the "Precautionary Principle" really says "Don't waste CO2".

 

[moltenmetal]

LCruiser et al: yeah, we get it. There's uncertainty in the climactic models.

There's also SERIOUS RISK associated with greenhouse gas emissions, as identified overwhelmingly by the people who study the climate for a living and who report their results in peer-reviewed journals. And contrary to your assertions, a few of the peers who review such journals DO understand thermodynamics. Contrary to your assertions, this isn't all hot air from Al Gore and his ilk.

What do YOU propose we do about it? Or your discourse just an excuse to continue with the status quo and ignore the risk, hoping for some undemonstrated benefit with relation to food supply? There are risks to our current fossil fuel addiction that are far less uncertain than the risk of global warming, and yet we continue to do NOTHING.

 

[rb1957]

moltenmetal ...

"serious risk ... ghg" ... is there ?
"overwelmingly ..." ... is there ?
"this isn't all hot air ..." ... you're right, this is about money, and lots of it; and politics. this is not about the survival of the human race, 'cause the predictions of doom change with every prediction.

have humans affected the climate ? ... of course (other posts have noted the impact of agriculture, cities, etc.) but then so do beavers (should we nuke them?)

are humans solely responsible for climate change ... of course not ... there's that great big glowing ball in the sky that has some effect.

are ghg responsible for a significant part of climate change ... well that's the point up for debate, and unfortunately it has taken on the bi-polar positions found in religious "debates" (arguments, contradictions)

should we humans be more sensitive to the impact we have on the world around us ... of course, the conservation movement/ideal has been around for a long time, but we live in a world of "free will", so people can buy SUVs, etc 'cause they want to. now we've "invented" a new boggie man to frighten us into doing "the right thing" and to allow politicans to skim more of our money in taxes; but then they have also created whole new industries.

should we as engineers prepared for some changes we anticipate ? ... i think so, how many trillions of dollars will it cost to defend against increases in sea-levels ?? who pays ???

do you think that if we stop producing ghg (now) that the climate change (due to the sun) will be reduced to levels that are "acceptable" to us humans ??

why are the levels of 1990 so acceptable ? 'cause its a compromise that's politically expedient.

what will happen even if we achieve the IPCC targets ? ... the climate will continue to change, and the politicans will say "i told you so", and we'll still be skrewed.

we cannot control the world's climate; the tail does not wag the dog.

rant over, for today.

 

[josephv]

Exxon Mobil softens its climate-change stance
Thursday, January 11, 2007
By Jeffrey Ball, The Wall Street Journal

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07011/753072-28.stm

Exxon has stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank that last year ran television ads saying that carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is helpful.

 

[LCruiser]

GW could be bad, or it could be good like it always has been in the past. Mankind blossomed during the Holocene Maximum. Arable land is being eaten up at a faster and faster pace - the food supply is not sustainable. Increased CO2 will increase the food supply, so we know that decreasing CO2 will be bad - what it will do to climate we don't know. Until ZPG happens we have a problem one way or the other. Alarmism on climate is just what the carbon brokers want - and Exxon Mobil just wants to get in on how regulations are written.

 

[cranky108]

So are we creating a new problem with our reactions to what we preceve?
Yes there is a glowing ball in the sky, but is that helpful, or harmful? Do we want more heat from it or less?

There was a statistic that said if we all painted our roofs white we can balance out global warming. So far I haven't many people doing that. But I have seen people putting black solar panels on there roofs, so I could conclude we are wanting more heat from that glowing ball.

If we really wanted to do something about carbon we could embrace nucular energy. But we don't. What we seem to be wanting is less reliable wind, and to back it up with the evel carbon burning power plants.

Believe what you want to believe, but stop and think about what your doing to the other guy.

We can fix global warming, or cooling, but ruining our economy isen't the answer.

 

[KENAT]

By the way Kenat, did you really think you were going to get a word in edgewise on the original topic? Sorry.

Not really.

Though I did think the big brother/nanny state implications might raise a few heckles.

KENAT, probably the least qualified checker you'll ever meet...

 

[moltenmetal]

rb1957: yes, and yes. There is a serious risk, and overwhelming majority of those who study this for a living agree that the risk exists.

Not a certainty, but a risk.

Yeah, I get it: you don't trust the climate experts because they're all in somebody's pocket- they all have a self-serving agenda. So you believe a group of skeptics who, you guessed it, are in someone (else)'s pocket. But of course, your own desire to let the status quo continue unabated has nothing to do with your lending credence to one side versus the other.

We will pay whatever it costs to adapt to climate change because we will have no choice. The only question is what we'll pay to mitigate the risk ahead of time. Right now that appears to be limited to lip service and research dollars for a magical non-existent technological fix. My sincere hope is that one day we will make a serious, concerted effort to kick the fossil fuel monkey off our backs by investing in, monetarily and in terms of personal commitment, changes to the way we do things to conserve this finite resource.

Consider that reducing fossil fuels consumption has inestimable benefits aside from reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the whole thing's a no brainer in my view.

I'm with you on the zero population growth. Unfortunately we're all addicted to the economic growth pyramid scam and that requires increasing population to support it. We'll have to conquer that mindset before population growth could ever realistically be addressed.

Consider though that we're not in our wildest dreams looking at reducing [CO2] in the atmosphere: we're hoping to stem the rate at which this concentration GROWS every year, to hopefully stabilize it one day far distant. So the food production argumen doesn't hold watert. More severe weather and increased evaporation could easily eat up every bit of benefit the extra CO2 could ever give us- and more. And though the seed/fruit production rates go up with increasing [CO2], the nutritive content doesn't.

 

[LCruiser]

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for energy conservation and climate research. So far though, they are two different questions. Artificially linking the two brings up the apparent question: Does the end justify the means?" It really isn't a question at all, depending on one's vision. Whatever the case, "the end includes the means". So if we are to condone lying about this to the public, where would it stop?

I'd just as soon not encourage that type of society myself.

The big question is how much does CO2 affect climate, but the bigger issue so far is how much CO2 benefits the food supply.

And, don't think there is some kind of consensus that increasing ghg's will create a catastrophe, because there isn't:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/17/32-000-deniers.aspx

There is pretty much consensus that CO2 affects climate (I personally know of no exceptions among real scientists), but that it may remain forever buried in natural variability. For over ten years people have been spewing panic, but for those ten years the globe has not warmed.

 

[ykee]

LCruiser, there is very good research that shows that at least some parts of the planet have warmed considerably -- Google something like "arctic climate change". In fact, there has been so much climate change that the Northwest passage will become a viable shipping lane in the not too distant future.

Being engineers, we all know that part of our job is risk mitigation -- because we do not know what the changes in things like rain patterns are going to be, we are facing uncertainities. Attempting to limit greenhouse gas emissions is about risk mitigation. If you ask the question "To what degree does increased CO2 benefits food supply", we should also ask "To what degree is climate change going to mess up known weather patterns".

 

[LCruiser]

hkee,

You too are making the invalid assumption that climate change, particularly in the Arctic, is caused by CO2. CO2 is global, correct? If this was all caused by CO2 then why has the *South* pole continued to cool?

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17257

Look here:

http://climatesci.org/2008/05/12/ne...rnes-and-roy-in-geophysical-research-letters/

and here:

http://climatesci.org/2008/03/25/new-paper-elevates-the-role-of-black-carbon-in-global-warming/

And here's the reason why the alarmism:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ma...BQWIV0?xml=/earth/2007/11/04/eaclimate104.xml

 

[CrazyHorse81]

In physics, the law of conservation of energy states that the total amount of energy in any isolated system remains constant but cannot be recreated, although it may change forms, e.g. friction turns kinetic energy into thermal energy. In thermodynamics, the first law of thermodynamics is a statement of the conservation of energy for thermodynamic systems, and is the more encompassing version of the conservation of energy. In short, the law of conservation of energy states that energy can not be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy

With that stated I believe that we do not have an influence of climate change, cooling warming or whatever.

 

[ykee]

LCruiser -- I definetly agree that CO2 is not the only thing causing climate change -- interesting articles from climate scinece. Although I would note the content of the NASA article -- only one part of the south pole is cooling, the rest of the area is warming. Speculation in the article relates the cooling to being caused by changing precipitation patterns, or ozone. I think the bottom line is that weather patterns are changing....slowly.

CrazyHorse -- No one is saying that conservation of energy does not apply to climate change. The earth is not an isolated system: there is this thing called "The Sun" it blasts us with all kinds of radiation, various attributes of our planet affect how this energy is absorbed/reflected etc.

 

[csd72]

Crazyhorse,

Conservation of energy has no relevance in this field. The earth is pounded with energy from the Sun each and every minute of the day.

The queation is, how much of that is reflected as black body radiation compared to how much is coming in. It is the difference between these two that is the cause of global warming.

 

[LCruiser]

ykee - The part of the South Pole that is cooling is the furthest from the ocean. The ocean is carrying heat from the northern hemisphere caused by factors listed (other than CO2) down to the Antarctic ocean.

 

[GregLocock]

Well, while we're grovelling around pretending that the experts in their fields are beyond criticism, the experts in economics say that the cost to fix up the worst case scenario results from the global warming crowd are of the same order as the cost to prevent them. So do nothing is a sensible economics driven approach, given the uncertainity of the models.

Or are some experts more equal than others?

"There's uncertainty in the climactic models"

Understatement of the year, in the light of the scientific method, you know, the old hypothesis -test -result thing?

Hypothesis - the earth will get warmer if the CO2 rises

test - CO2 has steadily risen over the last 8 years

result - global temps fell slightly.

Conclusion? give us more money.

As I said, there is no harm, and there is presumably some good, in increasing our understanding of the climate, and ability to predict it in the future. But to waste any resources (that is, to do things that do not have a rational (if not necessarily economic) payback), at the moment on the basis of models that fail completely when tested in the real world, seems to me to be a non-rational act. Even more so when the economic costs of coping with the predicted changes is of the same order as the cost of preventing those changes in the first place.

This reliance on peer reviewed journals is a bit of window dressing.

Galileo tried to understand how the stresses in a cantilevered beam worked out. He was a bright bloke, and everybody knew it. If he had published a paper on it in a peer reviewed journal, it would have been accepted.

But he was wrong, completely, utterly, wrong. Luckily the builders and architects at the time didn't pay any attention to Galileo. Mathematicians did, and a couple of centuries later they were able to explain the stresses in beams and so produce a reliable predictive equation.

Or for another example, the Bohr (?) theory of atomic structure where the electrons are in neat little orbits around the nucleus. Absolutely and completely misleading. It fit the data at the time, yet as soon as it was tested in the real world as a predictive approach, it (almost literally) exploded. Yet that old red herring is precisely what I was taught in school. It's a Just-So story for physicists. You can bet that was in peer reviewed journals.

So, I'll leave the climatologists to get on with the real science, using the scientific method, hopefully in less than two centuries they'll come up with a useful model. But I'm damned if I am going to pay overmuch attention to their predictions at the moment.


Cheers

Greg Locock

SIGlease see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[electricpete]

LCruiser – Did you accelerate your use of the word "alarmist" as a favor to me ;-)

19 May 08 11:02
[regarding Woods Hole web page

http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12455&tid=282&cid=10149#ocean_3a

]

Read the rest of them – notice that when they talk about the hydrological cycle they don't get into latent heat - shows that this is not put together by someone familiar (or even aware of) thermodynamics. Average global rainfall is about a meter - a 5% increase in evaporation completely offsets the effect of CO2

You will have to provide a little more backup to prove that William Curry (Director of Ocean and Climate Change Institute (part of Woods Hole) is ignorant about thermodynamics. I don't see that he has overlooked anything. There was no discussion of heat balance on that entire page, so how can you suggest a term is ommitted? The page is addressing "Common Misconceptions about Abrupt Climate Change" and as such is not a rigorous presentation of every aspect, but an overview.

CO2 is global, correct? If this was all caused by CO2 then why has the *South* pole continued to cool?

http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12455&tid=282&cid=10149#ocean_3a

"Q. How can global warming and sudden cooling happen at the same time?
A. Confusion arises because a cooling can be a regional event, superimposed on top of continuously warming earth..."
As you can read above (and you no doubt already know) the global climate system is not so simple that we expect changes in temperature at any given point in time must occur in the same direction at all points on the globe. So cooling in the pole doesn't disprove a global warming trend. Then what is the point? Perhaps that no model is anywhere close to perfect? On that I would agree.

the experts in economics say that the cost to fix up the worst case scenario results from the global warming crowd are of the same order as the cost to prevent them.

That's the first I've heard that. Who said it? Seems to fly in the face of common sense, especially when you allow for the "worst-case scenario". I thought the economic argument against proactive measures rests on the premise that the worst case scenario is very unlikely. If the worst case scenario's do come to pass and we have done little to prepare, I'm pretty sure at that point everyone would agree in retrospect that more action should have been taken earlier. Is it a smart investment to spend $10 per day for the extra insurance when you're renting a car? Probably not. But if you get in an accident and are without complete coverage, you'd definitely wish you had spent that $10 per day.

Or maybe they are using probability-weighted cost to fix the worst-case scenario? That would make more sense to me. But the probability is the tough part – it is something that the Hadley Center has been trying to quantify by combining emissions scenario's with model scenario's to provide some sense of the range of possible and probable outcomes.

A snippet from Joseph's article:

Kenneth Cohen, Exxon's vice president for public affairs,
"we know enough now -- or, society knows enough now -- that the risk is serious and action should be taken"

I know it's just a snippet taken without much context, but I couldn't resist. Who'd of thunk it ?


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[jmw]

The question isn't about global warming it is about anthropogenic global warming producing not a cycle i n the heating and cooling, but ongoing warming with no return to a cooling cycle.

Now turn it around and assume we were in the midst of an AGC debate i.e. anthropogenic global cooling (Global chilling is a now accepted fact by the AGW group which says that global chilling is masking the full effects of global warming) and assume that we needed to warm the planet to stop ourselves chilling ourselves to extinction. Would anyone give credit to a scheme that by simply burning fossil fuels we could reverse the global chilling trend?
Would that seem a credible mechanism?

Now if we were being warned of this (as we were, some years back the great alarmist story was that we were entering a new ice age) then we would recognise that global chilling has far more perils for the human race than global warming.

Now it is being claimed by some that over the last ten years we have failed to see any of the predicted warming and may be cooling off. Now why is that?

Oh, I get it. The measures already taken are having an effect .....



JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[GregLocock]

electricpete, you are right I shouldn't have said worst case scenario, the articles I've seen probably discounted the worst case scenarios. I'd guess from memory they were going for the mid-case ones.

The following interview, if not the smarmy bitching afterwards, is interesting. Radio National is a politically correct pro AGW radio station, that I pay for involuntarily. The Australian is an un-pc, anti AGW, newspaper that I pay for voluntarily.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23411799-7583,00.html

Cheers

Greg Locock

SIGlease see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[owg]

Various sources of global temperature have reported that 2007 temperature was down by about 0.58 deg C (average of 4 sources). This was unexpected but the publishers of the data say it is too early to say that this is a new trend. However wouldn't it be diabolical if we see the CO2 come down in 2008-2009, presumably following the global cooling.

HAZOP at

http://www.curryhydrocarbons.ca