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Educated" opinions on climate change - Part 5 11

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Young Turk, you missed out a bit, a very important bit as it happens.
The bit about publishing full data and methodology sufficient to allow others to duplicate the work and verify it.

The bit that is missing from the AGW argument, the missing bit of "scientific" method, is the unadulterated temperature data that Hadley has "lost" or won't release, the CRU computer algorithms that no one will declare.

The level of AGW "verification" is about the same as perpetual motion machines or ZPE energy scams where about the time you want to see the results of your investment, they'll have the money squirrelled away in the Cayman islands and declare bankruptcy.... we won't ever see the results. We are looking to be the same in the AGW (Abrupt Climate Change or whatever, AGW is passe).


JMW
 
Ooops!
Just how good is that tree ring data for temperature proxy's?
No good at all suggests Science Daily, commenting on a new paper in Nature.

The paper suggests that trees ;leave control their own temperature which explains also why some trees are better in certain climates than others.

Watts Up With That takes this and discusses Liebigs law of the minimum.... good stuff.

From Dr Kieth Briffa's background comments on tree ring studies, they are not necessarily invalidated by Liebigs law since he suggests that for trees at high altitude temperature is the dominant factor i.e. the Liebig minimum property is temperature.

However, the Science Daily article says that temperature was determined not from tree ring widths but from Oxygen isotope proportions. The new work invalidates the link between temperature (environmental temperature) and isotopes because the leaves control their own temperature.

This is going to be an interesting discussion as the arguments fly back and forth on this.

Science Daily: Briffa: WUWT:
(I can't access the Nature article.)

JMW
 
If carbon dioxide and other emissions are viewed as harmful, permitting their continued emission utterly without cost is foolhardy. If there are costs associated with these emissions, they need to be borne substantially by those creating the emissions so there's a market feedback to them to reduce their emissions.

What some of you are arguing is that until there's concrete proof that CO2 is a harmful emission, investing in its reduction is risky madness. Yeah, we get it. We just don't agree with you, and will have to agree to disagree on that point.

I personally agree at least that CO2 emissions shouldn't be the focus. Rather, we should focus on reducing the CONSUMPTION of fossil fuels- all of them- because by so doing, we will reduce ALL the undesirable impacts of their (mis)use, and reaping ALL the benefits of their conservation for higher value uses.

Doing this on the basis of their carbon content just happens to also match up nearly exactly with their environmental impact even if CO2 emissions are not part of that impact. Therefore a carbon tax accomplishes the desired job- unless such a tax gives credits to carbon dioxide sequestration schemes. Personally I think such schemes are risky and low priority because they will actually push us to piss through our fossil carbon reserves even faster.

As to the argument about standard of living: people in North America could reduce their per capita energy consumption in half merely by behaving the same way that Europeans do. Last I checked, the average European didn't have a third world standard of living. YES, clearly there are some differences between North America and Europe that lead us to require more energy per capita, but most of the consumption differences are the result of bad choices made economically sensible or at least tolerable by cheap energy.
 
To paraphrase:
"If Dihydrous Oxide and other emissions are viewed as harmful, permitting their continued emission utterly without cost is foolhardy. If there are costs associated with these emissions, they need to be borne substantially by those creating the emissions so there's a market feedback to them to reduce their emissions."

What some of you are arguing is that until there's concrete proof that Dihydrous Oxide is a harmful emission, investing in its reduction is risky madness. Yeah, we get it. We just don't agree with you, and will have to agree to disagree on that point."

Yes, that's right, there is a lot of indisputable evidence that dihydrous oxide is a major factor in climate change and forms a very potent greenhouse gas.
It is also a killer, sometimes singly but sometimes hundreds of thousands of people at a time.

It does huge amounts of property damage each year, destroys crops, kills live stock, and makes land untenable.

And yet some people think it is not a poison, is not toxic and is in fact vital to life.

But, the dangers are such we should invest in trillions to sequester this under the earth .... even as a precautionary principle...... we can't afford to wait for absolute proof.


JMW
 
Again with the f*ing water straw man!

There's a world of difference between water and carbon dioxide with respect to this issue. If you don't understand this difference, frankly listening to anything you say on this issue is of questionable benefit.
 
indeed there is ... water vapour is by far a much more significant GHG than CO2 ...

of course i think your point is that CO2 emmissions are somewhat discretionary (whereas water vapour is beyond our control) so let's do something about the things we can affect.

the contray position is why work hard (inflicting pain on ourselves) at affecting something which won't have a significant effect in the long run ...

as you said earlier, we agree to differ
 
Water vapour is in PHYSICAL (rapidly established) equilibrium with the enormous amount of liquid water in the oceans, lakes and rivers, as well as being involved in chemical and biological processes. The equilibrium position established with liquid water is complex, shifting, variable from place to place- but RAPID.

CO2 is a GAS. Yes, it too is involved in complex chemical, physical and biological cycles, but with a very, very much longer timescale than those involved with water vapour.

There's hard proof (by means of direct measurements, not inference) that we've nearly doubled the CO2 content of the atmosphere. The CO2 content has risen in such lock step with human consumption of fossil fuels that you need the sort of wilful blindness of a 1960s cigarette company executive to NOT see the correlation. As to whether or not this will affect the earth's climate, and how, and when, and to what extent- these are questions we may never know the answer to.

I'm sorry, but I'm done arguing with people who can't see this very obvious difference, which should be immediately apparent to anybody with high school chemistry under their belt. Heck, even a kid with gr 8 environmental studies would probably have a shot at understanding this point!
 
well of course we're releasing CO2 into the atmosphere when we burn fossilised organic deposits (solid, liquid, or gas). i agree with you that everyone reading this forum would (or should) agree with that.

the question is ... is this a bad thing ? a different question altogether is should we try to conserve the reserves of these fuels ?

the answer to the first question (as you yourself state) is unknown (and probably unknowable). the answer to the 2nd is governed by economics, pure and simple.
 
The simple question for anyone wanting to tax carbon is, do you want to live the way you are asking other people to live?
Just ask Al Gore about his utility bills?

Personally I want to arive at work without geting my car stuck in 2 in of snow. Or wake up stoke the fireplace.

And yes I've tried candles instead of electric lights, and cleaning the cealing afterwards isen't fun.
 
taxing carbon emissions doesn't by itself force any wide-reaching changes in standards of living, within a very large range of tax rates.

 
While I agree that water vapor is in equilibrium with water liquid, so is carbon dioxide in equilibrum in the carbon cycle. Anthropogenic CO2 is only 3% of the total carbon cycle.

Of course the proportion of CO2 is increased by burning carbon, that is exactly how feedback loops work. Increasing the level of atmospheric CO2 will increase the speed of the cycle, as the equilibrium point shifts (carbon fixing reactions become slightly energetically more favorable, carbon releasing reactions become slightly less so).

However I do agree that using a valuable resource like oil as a heating fuel, or feedstock for industrial ethanol, is ridiculous in the extreme, and shows that the market price for oil is far too low.

So although I think the whole AGW thing is just an unproven trendy fad, I do support reductions in oil usage. If it has to be done by taxes rather than common sense, oh well, such is life.



Cheers

Greg Locock

SIG:Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.
 
One thing that has always burned me is Hybrid Cars. There are small efficient cars that get almost 40mpg. While some hybrids may get 50mpg, they typically cost more. Even if they only cost 5k more, thats allot of gas and by the time you break even, you may have to buy expensive new batteries. The batteries themselves are lithium. I don't believe lithium is a renewable energy source. It has to be mined which has environmental impacts. And what about plug in hybrids? While they reduce our dependence on foreign oil, they don't cut back on co2 since most electricity in this country (US) comes from coal. I think cars with small, four cylinder turbo charged engines that run on cellosic ethanol or low sulfer diesels running on biodiesel are the way we should be headed. I've said for years its not the cars its the fuels.
 
Fifth thread, and someone got out of bed the wrong side.

So, somewhere along the line CO2 has gone from being a beneficial component of our atmosphere to a poison.

Nonsense.

Dihydrous Oxide? yes.
YES.
And I'd put it up again in a flash.

We just ended the last thread with exactly this discussion... a stupid and inane attempt to justify the precautionary principle that said we had just four options, and the smiley face comes with crippling our economy to fix something "just in case" when in fact there are more than four options and most of them bad, and some totally disastrous.

That dialogue might as well never have happened because some one who didn't join that discussion has ignored it to tell us again that CO2 is bad and mankind is responsible for destroying the planet.

So, do we have to go over it all again? and by the way, I am not the climate scientist here, these threads are about opinions not scientific judgements so what we tend to do is have a "show and tell session" where we bring along bits and pieces we've discovered to discuss.

Anyway, Precautionary Principle?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Don't do things "just in case".
Someone (an aircraft manufacturer) said most (80-90% I recall) failures are caused by maintenance.

This is one heck of a maintenance project and the negative possibilities are not nice to contemplate.

Do we have to say again that CO2 is not a poison. That its role as a Greenhouse gas is minor?
DO we have to point at the saturation levels of CO2? i.e. that beyond a certain concentration it has no further temperature effect?

This link helps put water vapour and CO2 in perspective.

CO2 lags temperature, we did that, warmer is better, CO2 stimulates plant growth and that means better crops, including biofuels, we did that.

So yes, lets call it dihydrogen oxide....because without any justification or discussion we have been lead back to CO2 is a poison and we should do something just in case.

Water and CO2: both are beneficial.
But water vapour is far more potent as a greenhouse gas and probably does kill more people than CO2 anyday of the week.
So dihydrogen oxide is a reminder of that.

Oh, and we also recently put up some new work on ocean currents that throws light on the mechanisms of climate that haven't been included in the models, work that shows the AGW signature is missing.

We have lost of problems with the temperature data, the temperature proxies, the missing source data that CRU says it has lost and the data processing they won't reveal, in case some on picks holes in it, the problems with the weather stations ( and now some research that questions the validity of the tree ring proxy data.

We did this at the end of the last thread, in case you missed it.

There is every reason to doubt the veracity of the AGW arguement but on top of that there is even a suggestion that the planet is now cooling and a climate manipulation that assumes warming when we are cooling or cooling when we are warming and which is designed to significantly affect the climate is, frankly, plain stupid.
Dangerously stupid.

But fine, ignore it all and ust tell us again that CO2 ius bad, man is evil and we should be frightened into a bad choice.

This isn't about some sensible degree of reduction, this is about stupidity to the nth degree because what the eco engineers want to do is actively engineer changes in the climate and that is about as stupid and dangerous as it gets.
You think I'll sign of on that "just in case"?

No way.

The precautionary principal I believe in is not fixing things that ain't broke.

So who is the straw man here?


JMW
 
My wife just brought home an extremely silly book from the local library - Fuel from Water by Michael A. Peavey. The book is undated but claims to be in its 11th edition. It shoots itself in the foot in the first 3 lines. "In this inconceivably enormous universe, we can never run out of energy or matter. But we can all too easily run out of brains." Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 1963.

HAZOP at
 
obviously written by zombies - their rate of brain consumption is frighteningly high.
 
So even the Beeb now admits that the science isn't "in".

Cheers

Greg Locock

SIG:Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.
 
Interesting comment on Pres Obama's green attitude.... it isn't only the climate that is said to be cooling but his commitment too.
Christopher Booker reports:
Just as President Obama was exciting the frustration of the greenies by making his conspicuously commitment-free speech to the UN about global warming, a Bloomberg poll reported that, asked what was the most important issue facing their country today, 46 per cent of Americans replied "the economy".

This was followed by health care (23 per cent), the budget deficit (16 per cent) and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (10 per cent). Way at the bottom of the list, on 2 per cent – as Obama is doubtless aware – was "climate change". As he dithers around over Afghanistan and so many other issues, it seems that, now the great campaigner is in office, his slogan has subtly morphed from "Yes we can" to "No we can't".
Click to expand...
(

Seems to methat with taht sort of support spending more than a thin dime would be politically risky.
Anyone come across these figures anywhwere else?



JMW
 
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