2014: Hottest Year On Record 560
Layzej writes Data from three major climate-tracking groups agree: The combined land and ocean surface temperatures hit new highs this year, according to the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United Kingdom's Met Office and the World Meteorological Association. If December's figures are at least 0.76 degrees Fahrenheit (0.42 degrees Celsius) higher than the 20th century average, 2014 will beat the warmest years on record, NOAA said this month. The January-through-November period has already been noted as the warmest 11-month period in the past 135 years, according to NOAA's November Global Climate Report. Scientific American reports on five places that will help push 2014 into the global warming record books.
noooo (Score:4, Insightful)
closing eyes, plugging ears and singing naaaa naaa naaaaaaa. unbiblical! 'murrican dream for all
Re: noooo (Score:2, Insightful)
Yep. Build nuclear power plants or shut the fuck up. I'm sick and tired of hearing "denier, denier, denier" from these people and then when solutions are proposed, they say "hell no, you can't do that". That fucktard RFK jr. even said no to wind power near the carbon sucking Kennedy compound. What the want is to implement economy crushing socialism, actually solving the problem is NOT what most environmentalists really want.
Back nuclear or shut the fuck up. Note: I'm not asking the impossible, clim
Re: noooo (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: noooo (Score:4, Insightful)
Despite you getting sick at hearing "denier, denier", the fact remains that a significant number of the public and in politics deny there's a problem in the first place. How can you expect people to agree on a solution when we can't agree on the problem ?
I would suggest sheer perseverance of publishing the science in the face of such unfounded denialism will eventually do the trick, in the same way that it worked to convince the public of the link between smoking and cancer despite the opposition from vested interests at the time. The attacks on the science and scientists that we see today is very much the same tactic used by the tobacco industry and conservative organisations against doctors who claimed that smoking was dangerous.
In the end, science will win over politics (just like it did with tobacco, asbestos, etc). Those "significant number of the public and in politics" who claim to know better than all the climate scientists of the world will look more and more out of touch with reality as the temperature records keep getting broken.
In fact, the deniers have put a lot of stock in the current slow-down of temperature increase, and once it starts accelerating again (as it has done numerous times when there have been similar slow-downs over the last century) then it will cause great damage to their public support. If you remember back 5 years or so years ago, many deniers were claiming that it was actually getting cooler in comparison to the El Nino year of 1998. Once the record temperatures started happening again they silently dropped that claim, although it still hasn't stopped a lot of people from still bringing up how some people considered global cooling to be a possibility back in the 1970s. How convenient that they forget their own side's similar mistakes.
Re: noooo (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me start my comment by saying I very much believe in global warming and that I believe it is primarily caused by humans dumping enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
I would suggest sheer perseverance of publishing the science in the face of such unfounded denialism will eventually do the trick, in the same way that it worked to convince the public of the link between smoking and cancer despite the opposition from vested interests at the time.
There's a big difference this time that makes your analogy break down. Smoking does not give people that much of a boost in their quality of life. (In fact, it costs them a lot of money, and it makes them horribly sick--possibly even killing them!)
Lots of cheap energy gives people an enormous boost in their quality of life. Even if you get everyone agreeing that global warming is real and caused by human industry, they're still going to want their cheap energy--even if that means we continue dumping unprecedented amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
The two primary camps today are the deniers (who are obviously deluded) and the believers (who are also deluded--they actually believe humanity will solve the problem, given enough evidence or education or whatever).
There are billions--billions--of humans on the planet, and a large percentage of them want to improve their quality of life--or, at the very least, not see it drop. There are hundreds of countries, many of them ready, willing, and able to burn all the coal and oil they can afford. (If some countries use less--in an attempt to reduce CO2 emissions--there's less demand, thus prices will drop, thus it'll become more affordable to those people and countries that so desperately want that energy to improve their quality of life.)
Humans are simply not going to stop dumping enormous quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. It. Just. Isn't. Going. To. Happen.
Our only hope at this point is some breakthrough technologies that produce energy at a lower cost than alternatives like burning coal and oil. If that happens, the free market will take care of the rest. If you want to slow, stop, and reverse global warming, we need to throw money at alternative energy research. Anything else is doomed and hopeless. There's simply too much demand for (cheap) energy.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, so let's say I'm sceptic and not a denier. After a quick Google search, I stumbled on these two links:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201... [wattsupwiththat.com]
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201... [wattsupwiththat.com]
Both are clearly claiming there is no global warming since 1997. Reading it quickly doesn't provide any clue as to whether they are bullshit or not - or at least it would require me to dig into the problem, but I don't have that amount of free time right now.
Do you have any indication about what's wrong with these assertions?
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I'm not saying global warming isn't a thing...just curious about why nobody ever addresses the data.
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I would take a quick glance at the author/proprietor's wiki page: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A... [rationalwiki.org]
It may shed some light as to why that specific site isn't exactly treated as though it has any scientific credence.
-Rick
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, so let's say I'm sceptic and not a denier. After a quick Google search, I stumbled on these two links:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201 [wattsupwiththat.com]...
Your first clue is that anyone who says climate is warming based on a period that not an integer number of years is an imbecile. If you are taking odd months on, at best you're contaminating the data with seasons rather than years.
Once you've appreciated that, realise that climate is an average of temperature over enough years that the noise is minimised. At 18 years it's still mostly weather. For a strong climate signal you have always needed at about 30 at least.
Anyone using less WAS doing it because they were cherry picking a period to start at the high point El Nino. It's no longer possible to do even that because 2014 exceeded that temperature. Which is why they are no reduced to the stupidity of using periods that are not even divisible by 12 months.
Re: noooo (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting. No global warming in 17 years... what a funny number, 17. It's a prime number. Why not 10 years, 20, or even 100? Why are "skeptics" always so hung up on 1997 as the baseline for all global warming trends? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the 1997-1998 El Nino event generated a record year for high temperatures [wunderground.com]? I was just getting interested in the science of global warming when this phenomenon hit, and I remember NASA scientists warning everyone that we could not blame rising carbon dioxide levels for the anomalously hot temperatures of those two years.
Ironic that 17 years later, the 1997-1998 El Nino event is now the holy grail baseline year to which all skeptics cling like a polar bear to a melting iceberg. In 2008 the skeptics were using this baseline to claim that global cooling was taking place [ideonexus.com]. Then, as yearly record high temperatures kept happening, they used this baseline to claim that global warming had flatlined. Now, just eight years later, the trend from 1997 is on an incline, but the skeptic story is that temperatures aren't warming as fast as predicted. Keep clinging to 1997, you are just one El Nino event away from looking really really silly.
As for the WattsUpWithThat blog, I used to respect it until Anthony Watts pulled a 180 [wikipedia.org] on accepting the findings of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project. Originally he said he would accept the findings whatever they may be because it was funded by the Koch Brother's, but when the independent research led by a prominent skeptic further confirmed Global Warming was real [nytimes.com], Watt's rejected it. The man has zero credibility at this point.
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Regardless of any facts of climate change, it is an undisputed fact that Nuclear Power is waaaayyyyy cleaner in every way (including spreading of radioactive particles!!) than coal powered power plants.
We should be switching to Nuclear in the US because its just BETTER.
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Regardless of any facts of climate change, it is an undisputed fact that Nuclear Power is waaaayyyyy cleaner in every way (including spreading of radioactive particles!!) than coal powered power plants.
We should be switching to Nuclear in the US because its just BETTER.
Your logical fallacy is: False Dichotomy. Your uniqueness rank is: 342349523480572347. Troll rating: -23804723. Better luck next time!
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Because agreement isn't required.
That's the nice thing about the scientific method.
Also, in the case of nuclear, and just general environmentalism, cheaper, cleaner power that destroys our dependency on fossil fuels and just generally leaving the earth a cleaner place than we left it is NEVER a bad idea. REGARDLESS of what any given person thinks about global warming/cooling/climate change/what-have-you.
And NO, we don't have to use 50 year old fission-based BWR forever. There are advanced reactor designs
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The problem is you are acting like we'll have to do that _immediately_ when in actuality we'll have to do that over the next 200-500 years.
This means that there will be instances where mitigation will be more effective (and more doable) in the future than acting now to drastically (extremely drastically) reduce our use of carbon to make these changes not take place.
There is a lot of mitigation technology and infrastructure that can be deployed and used in the next 200-500 years to deal with climate change i
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It's already too late to "make these changes not take place." If we magically stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow it would still be a century before the excess we have already put up there will finally be cycled out into carbonate rocks, peat, and such. Even more fun, the excess heat is cumulative, we're not getting rid of as much as we should and it's just going to build up. Scariest of all is that we seem to be exceeding the temperature that keeps the subsurface methane clathrates stable.
So no, we probably
Re: noooo (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not anti-nuclear, but requiring other people to agree to your solution before you'll admit the problem exists is pretty pathetic bullshit.
How about we agree there's a problem and then start determining what the best solution will be? I'm pretty sure it will include nuclear power, so there's no reason to be an asshole about it.
Denial as a form of negotiation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: noooo (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not anti-nuclear, but requiring other people to agree to your solution before you'll admit the problem exists is pretty pathetic bullshit.
He never said he wouldn't admit the problem exists. He just wants people who aren't interested in real solutions to stop complaining about a lack of action.
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This idea of having to store stuff for 100K years is so fantastically ridiculous that I can't really believe anyone takes it seriously.
Almost 400 years ago, the Swedish king Gustaf II Adolf planted oak trees outside of Stockholm, with the expressed intent that they were to be used as war ships in the twentieth century. The oaks are still standing. They are nice and everything, but it's sort of laughable to imagine that they will be cut down for war ships. Still, when he lived, the difference between life t
Re: noooo (Score:5, Informative)
We need these to store it. For 100.000 years.
Sure. If we're stupid.
If we're smart, we start using thorium reactors instead (so we don't add any more waste than necessary), and build some breeder/burner reactors to reduce the current waste handling to manageable amounts/time spans.
Yeah, nuclear energy research has moved on from the 60's, even though we still use reactor designs from back then. We should really, really stop doing that.
Re: noooo (Score:4, Insightful)
Tying renewables and other non-nuclear solutions to some sort of socialist plot is just another way to scare people away from dealing with the problem.
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Well some did try to ban the sales of inefficient (incandescent) light bulbs a few years ago and you see how some of the yahoos railed against that as anti-free-market.
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In the past 10 years, both a very large wind farm and an Natural Gas power plant have been build with 100 miles of where I live. Hydro is already very well utilized in my state. I am fully supportive of all of that. I'm not going to be marching and shouting NIMBY!
40% of the electricity I use is renewable already.
What we need to build next is a Nuclear Power plant.
I never said I was against renewables or Hydro power. I am against regulations and taxes that spike the price of energy and have severe negat
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Technology didn't stop 200 centuries ago. It marches forward. Instead of throwing all our eggs into either the Nuclear or Renewable basket, we should invest in both. Nuclear has some serious drawbacks. Don't
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Nuclear is fine, but it is expensive and it takes forever to build outside China. 15 years from decision to first power is a typical figure.
If you are an unfortunate country with little access to hydro power and no land wind or solar resources really worth exploring, you may have to use nuclear and pay the £0.085 pr kWh. This is the case for England. Most of the world has cheaper options.
Re: noooo (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, much of that delay you mention is the endless lawsuits by the anti-nukes and NIMBY types.
If the nuke plants were built based only on technical issues, they'd go up much faster (and be much cheaper - yeah, decades of lawsuits have to be paid for).
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Yep. Build nuclear power plants or shut the fuck up. I'm sick and tired of hearing "denier, denier, denier" from these people and then when solutions are proposed, they say "hell no, you can't do that".
Who are you talking to? Mr. Strawman?
The US is currently building 4 nuclear reactors. "Anti-Nuclear" Obama appointed a bunch of "anti-nuclear activists" to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They have approved 4 reactor construction applications. For those keeping score, that would be 4 more approved applications than Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush's RCS did combined over the previous 28 years.
At the same time, France and Japan are shutting down reactors. One of the new
Re: noooo (Score:5, Interesting)
> solving the problem is NOT what most environmentalists really want.
And as long as you keep blaming them for the problem, then the actual problem will never get solved.
> Note: I'm not asking the impossible, climate change luminaries like James Hansen have called for nuclear power to be used
Not impossible, just expensive. As the CAPEX is generally three to four times that of wind, and the lead times are four to five times as long, no one is giving them the money. That's it, end of story. Start here:
http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
Now turn to page 11. On-shore wind was going in for $1.40 to 1.80/Wp in 2014, it's gone down since publication. Combined with a 30% CF, that gives you an effective CAPEX/Wh of $4.66 to 6. Lazard gives $5.39 to 8.40 for nuclear, although it's gone up since publication (current average is around $9/Wp). Combined with an 85% CF, that's $6.35 to $10/Wh. Which means, all else considered, wind power costs around half that of nuclear.
And that's why no one other than the Chinese, who are handing out billions of dollars of interest-free and risk-free money for infrastructure, is building them. And even their program is on serious hiatus. The money simply isn't there.
The *actual problem* with nuclear is that practically every other option is cheaper and lower risk. It is, straight up, a bad investment. So unless you have a few hundred billion sitting in your bank account to buy one, guess what, you're part of the problem.
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If you finally would tell me where you want to dump the shit after it no longer works, I'd be happy to back nuke power. I'm dead serious, tell me where to dump the waste after it's done and I'll be the biggest supporter of it.
Because that's the damn problem. Maybe the US solved it, I dunno, but in Europe this is actually the effin' issue with nuclear plants: What do we do with the shit after it no longer provides power? Because nobody wants to sit on a pile of radioactive waste that's gonna glow for a few m
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Because that's the damn problem. Maybe the US solved it, I dunno,
The US certainly hasn't solved it, we've got hot waste sitting around in water pools above reactors with the same design as the one that blew up in Fukushima all over the place right now. I don't know of any sited for such a perfect storm as Fukushima Daiichi, but it's still a bit creepy.
but in Europe this is actually the effin' issue with nuclear plants: What do we do with the shit after it no longer provides power? Because nobody wants to sit on a pile of radioactive waste that's gonna glow for a few millennia.
But, but, I keep hearing that this problem is solved in Europe, because France! This is unpossible!
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Hint: the overwhelming majority of the radioactivity is gone in 50 years.
Because that's how radioactivity works - the shorter the half-life, the hotter it is. The stuff that'll still be radioactive for a thousand years will be about as radioactive as coal (or the human body) for the vast majority of that time.
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If we ever get bulletproof failproof rocket launches what's wrong with sending the shit one way to the sun?
That is a big if. Anyway, it is cheaper to send it to Alpha Centauri than to send it to the Sun.
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> If we ever get bulletproof failproof rocket launches
Well if you're just going to wave your fairy wand and create perfect rockets, why not just skip a step and wish the fuel into non-existence?
After all, it's much easier to build bulletproof failproof reactors and bulletproof failproof underground storage, but we don't have those either.
Also, $10,000 a kg does really bad things to your OPEX.
Re:noooo (Score:4, Informative)
Re:noooo (Score:5, Funny)
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If you want to say we should do things differently
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My point about survival is that many global warming people say that rising C02 levels are an existential threat - hence my use of the term survival. Sea levels change all the time, with or without industrial activity. Island chains appear and disappear; coastlines expand and contract. If C02 levels
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Because 135 is too short a time frame.
Too short for what, exactly ? It's long enough to determine that the rise in temperature is not due to random fluctuations (i.e. weather). What exactly would we learn from looking at a longer time period ? By the way, we do have proxy data going back further, if you're interested in seeing the data in historical perspective. So, now what ?
Re: (Score:3)
Why is that?
Are our measurements wrong? Or did something change (perhaps tectonic shifts that changed water and air currents?) All this shows is that things aren't static. What makes
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But if you look back only 135 years ago you're then taking those temperature and C02 levels to be the established norms and I think that is a g
Re:noooo (Score:4, Insightful)
Mammals were flourishing 55 million years ago. So the temperature and CO2 levels would be just fine for people.
i hate to break this to you, but the mammals that thrived 55 million years ago were not the same as the mammals of today, much less people.
just because some long-extinct animals made it fine back then doesn't mean that people would.
i can't believe i even have to explain this to people.
Re:noooo (Score:4, Informative)
55 million years ago the global mean temperature was roughly 30C [cmmap.org]. that's compared to 14C today.
Re:noooo (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, yes, because "global" warming isn't really global - a global average is kind of meaningless for determining the local effects in any given region.
The problem I have with global climate change "debate" is not that climate is changing, but that there is an assumption that the net effect will be negative. Some regions will surely become less hospitable, and some will become more hospitable. I'm disappointed that more studies haven't shown which will prevail (or if there will be a net neutral effect). Instead we just get fear mongering about famine and war.
Also, I still believe the focus is on the wrong thing: rather than try and stop climate change (after all, if it doesn't change because of CO2, it may change due to something else) we should try and work on technologies so we can survive - no, thrive - regardless of the climate. (Isn't that what humanity has done for most of its existence anyway?)
Re:noooo (Score:4, Interesting)
Some regions will surely become less hospitable, and some will become more hospitable.
Indeed, let's add most coastal cities to the "less hospitable" (read - "underwater") category. What you also casually ignore is we don't know what sort of feedback loops might engage as CO2 levels continue to soar.
Re:noooo (Score:5, Informative)
For some places, Climate Change will be a positive. But the net is hugely negative. 1/3 of the world's people are close enough to a coast that they will have to do something when sea levels rise.
Climate Change is happening too fast for much life to cope. The speed of the change is all negative.
The driver of Climate Change is Atmospheric Change. Everyone talks about warming, but all this CO2 has a lot of other effects. The other big effect is Ocean Acidification. This is deadly for shells and corals. The whole oceanic food chain is being strained to the limit from this, and from overfishing.
Re:noooo (Score:5, Insightful)
So why don't people move now before they're underwater? Put another way - have all the people who are proclaiming coming disaster started moving their assets away from the coasts? Why are we focusing on emissions rather than moving people now? Surely moving people is cheaper (and more direct - that is, localized) than trying to control emissions. Such a thing would avoid depending on other people to fix their behaviors - it would also guarantee an outcome, rather than a probabilistic estimate of what happens if we curb emission X.
People must really place a huge time preference on things to delay moving in spite of the proposed huge future costs. Or, they just don't believe it... or the "speed" of things isn't really as fast enough for people to care.
This is both defeatist and probably more political than technical. If political will is high enough, humans can do crazy things in short (e.g., decade-span) timeframes, especially when we don't have to invent anything but just have to move people inland or build hydroponics or desalination plants etc. It's all political, not technical. If we want to reduce the cost of sea level rise, why not tax people closer to the coast, and reduce tax away from the coast? Rhetoric talks, but money walks. And hitting the individual harder (rather than corporations) will motivate people much faster than not. Hell if you think the future disaster is high enough, you should ask your governments to build everyone living within X of a coast a brand new house inland and giving it to them (and personally be willing to be taxed for it), because that will cost less than the future cost of disaster mitigation later.
I guess, at the end of the day, the focus is too one-sided on emissions, rather than on relocation or adaptability. I know if I lived close to a coast, I would move inland rather than rely on some disparate group of companies and nations to reduce their emissions which will maybe prevent my land from eroding away or getting hit with bad weather in my or my child's lifetime.
I would rather put in policies to avoid turning inland (midwest US for instance) farmland into subdivisions - I hate to see our local farmland turning into cookie-cutter homes; reducing farmland seems to make us more sensitive, not more robust.
So that's what I mean by too narrow focus, in tech, in media, etc - everyone is focused on emissions, not on adaptation. If we don't adapt, we die - trying to refuse to adapt is actually worse in my mind.
Re:noooo (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I have with global climate change "debate" is not that climate is changing, but that there is an assumption that the net effect will be negative. Some regions will surely become less hospitable, and some will become more hospitable. I'm disappointed that more studies haven't shown which will prevail (or if there will be a net neutral effect). Instead we just get fear mongering about famine and war.
If sea levels rise and destroy hundreds of cities in the process, who really cares if a few Midwest regions get a little longer growing season? People don't waste time talking about pros and cons because the cons outweigh the pros by such a wide margin that it isn't worth talking about.
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Some regions will surely become less hospitable, and some will become more hospitable.
That is undoubtedly true. Part of the problem is that change in general is costly as it requires adaptation. Many died and billions were lost [wikipedia.org] during the Russian heat wave of 2010 although the temperature was not likely much higher than the average summer day in Texas. You'd think they'd welcome a bit of heat in that frozen wasteland but there ya go.
Regarding adaptation vs. mitigation - the best approach will minimize costs and probably be a combination of the two.
Re:noooo (Score:5, Informative)
The problem I have with global climate change "debate" is not that climate is changing, but that there is an assumption that the net effect will be negative. Some regions will surely become less hospitable, and some will become more hospitable. I'm disappointed that more studies haven't shown which will prevail (or if there will be a net neutral effect). Instead we just get fear mongering about famine and war.
How can you say this when an entire third of the IPCC report (Working Group II) was dedicated to the "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" of climate change? They show the positive and negative affects (both direct and indirect).
Here is a quote from the introduction of the Summary for Policymakers [www.ipcc.ch]:
The assessment of impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability in the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (WGII AR5) evaluates how patterns of risks and potential benefits are shifting due to climate change. It considers how impacts and risks related to climate change can be reduced and managed through adaptation and mitigation. The report assesses needs, options, opportunities, constraints, resilience, limits, and other aspects associated with adaptation.
And on a local level... (Score:5, Informative)
...it was the warmest year in the CET (Central England Temperature) record, which goes back to 1659.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ha... [metoffice.gov.uk]
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Re: And on a local level... (Score:4, Informative)
Manley's paper explains how the various figures were derived. The early figures are subject to a good deal of approximation, but if you leaf through the paper you'll see various sources have been used to compile the data. By the mid 1700s records are accurate enough that no approximation is needed. Although it's a far from perfect way of doing things, it's the best we have. The CET series is the world's longest monthly temperature record series, FWIW.
"Before 1671 intstrumental readings are few; accordingly all values before 1671 have been rounded to whole degrees C. Regular thermometer readings began again in 1672. "
Here's a link to the paper on the Royal Meteorological Society's website:
http://www.rmets.org.uk/sites/... [rmets.org.uk]
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Which of course is somewhat more likely in a global warming scenario, but could happen nonetheless whether the globe was warming OR cooling.
We have to get past this mode of thinking like this: "It's May and we had to put the air conditioners in already, it must be global warming." Or this: "Temperatures outside are near-record lows. So much for global warming."
Global warming is an increase in the TOTAL kinetic energy of the atmosphere, which is a spherical shell 6371 km in radius and 100km thick. That shell
Re: And on a local level... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: And on a local level... (Score:5, Informative)
I'd love to see references or articles how temperature is measured to this degree of accuracy then how they are aggregated to a single number
Happy to oblige:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monit... [noaa.gov]
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/... [nasa.gov]
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/... [nasa.gov]
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/... [nasa.gov]
sounds logical. (Score:4, Interesting)
CO2 levels measured in the middle of the ocean, far away from most humans:
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_full_record.png
I'm not speculating what CO2 level is normal, what caused it, or how long it will take to go down again, but looking at that graph I would be very surprised if the average temperature temperature didn't rise.
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That's assuming the global warming is mostly due to the CO2 levels which is all but a certainty right now. I've read that the correlation isn't really up to speed these last years.
But That Pause! (Score:3, Interesting)
Go Nuclear (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Go Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear energy is the only viable technology we have at the moment that can both reduce CO2 emissions meaningfully and avoid throwing an additional billions of people into poverty.
[citation needed]
You people keep making these bald assertions, but I don't see any reason that wind and solar can't handle this problem. We need more power storage, yes. So what? We're building it, and we know how to build more of it. Since solar power produces the most power when we need it the most, and pays back its energy investment in less than a decade but lasts more than two, I'm having a hard time figuring out just where you people got the idea that nuclear was the only answer. Most people who think that there is only one answer are wrong. The world is a lumpy place.
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Solar power repays its energy cost in production in 6 to 12 months, not decades and it lasts over 30 years, not just 20 ... talking about PV obviously.
Ofc you are right otherwise, except perhaps that storage is overrated. Storage is pointless as long as you are far away from even producing 50% of your needs by renewables.
Storage is interesting if you want to take your house (or boat or caravan) off grid. For a nation spanning grid it is nearly irrelevant until you approach 100% production of peak demand.
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Solar power repays its energy cost in production in 6 to 12 months, not decades and it lasts over 30 years, not just 20 ... talking about PV obviously.
Ofc you are right otherwise, except perhaps that storage is overrated. Storage is pointless as long as you are far away from even producing 50% of your needs by renewables.
Storage is interesting if you want to take your house (or boat or caravan) off grid. For a nation spanning grid it is nearly irrelevant until you approach 100% production of peak demand.
Maybe you can cite some of your sources? I'm all about renewable energy, but it sounds like you're cherry picking and blurring data.
Re:Go Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Solar power repays its energy cost in production in 6 to 12 months, not decades and it lasts over 30 years, not just 20 ... talking about PV obviously.
Sigh. You obviously know nothing about avoiding people accusing you of exaggeration. I'd say you must be new here, but...
Also, you're exaggerating. It takes around three years for a thin-film panel to repay its energy investment. But I'm accounting for the entire system, installation, side preparation, et cetera. And then I'm anti-exaggerating, as mentioned previously. All that's important is to show how foolish the claims are.
Storage is interesting if you want to take your house (or boat or caravan) off grid. For a nation spanning grid it is nearly irrelevant until you approach 100% production of peak demand.
That's nice. We don't have a nation-spanning grid. You can't just move power from anywhere to anywhere at will. It doesn't work like that. First, there are far too few links; many cities are served by a single point of ingress for electrical power. Second, we lack long-haul capacity, even if we could get the power to the long-haul links, we couldn't carry it.
We need more storage, or to dramatically improve the grid. It would be nice to do both. But storage pays revenues when the grid fails, which it can do even if you improve it. We clearly need more storage.
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Also, you're exaggerating. It takes around three years for a thin-film (we did not talk about thin film, and I doubt the energy usage for creating them is much higher) panel to repay its energy investment. But I'm accounting for the entire system, installation, side preparation, et cetera. And then I'm anti-exaggerating, as mentioned previously. All that's important is to show how foolish the claims are.
That is wrong! The entire system, including aluminium frames is less than 3 years. (And this is true sin
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[citation needed]
70 years of nuclear history show that it is fully capable of meeting the requirements.
Can you smelt aluminum with solar and wind?
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Re:Go Nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't GT Advanced Technologies claim that their sapphire glass manufacturing process were damaged by unreliable power?
Yes, but they also explained that it is SoP for having equipment on-site to mitigate that problem, and that Apple insisted that they not install it. So in fact, the grid is already not capable of delivering power reliably, and this is hardly a mark against renewables when it's already a mark against everything. The primary reason that we can't deliver power reliably is that we have a dumb grid. Only now is this changing; PG&E for example is literally in the midst of adding sensors to their long-haul lines because they actually cannot monitor their condition. When people hear "smart grid" they think of smart meters and commercial A/C that won't activate when you want it to, but the most important parts are actually nowhere near their houses. It's all about adding sensors and intelligence to back them up to the actual transmission equipment so that PG&E knows that a line is reaching its capacity before it happens, and not after an equipment failure which is the only way they've been able to do it so far. Presumably, the other utilities in the country are in the same shape, but I don't really know about them first-hand.
Adding more nuclear production won't improve our ability to deliver reliable power, because of the inadequacy of the grid. The grid is often cited as a reason why renewables won't work, but it has to be upgraded anyway because it's not doing its job now. And it's not just monitoring; we have little unused long-haul capacity, and many towns and even cities are served by a single link. You can't call it a grid when it's star-wired.
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Why not a diverse set of power sources.
Wind and Solar where it makes sense, Nuclear in other spots.
And why the heck doesn't anyone recognize hydro electric as an excellent source of energy as well.
I keep on hearing these all or nothing approaches to power. Why isn't the conversation about energy diversity?
Re:Go Nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
Even assuming that we do invent those magic baseload batteries soon, your all-renewable energy system is a wavery network (requiring a "smart grid", to be built from scratch at the cost of teradollar or so) of fluctuating sources requiring vast amounts of mechanical maintenance. I would rather have a few AP-1000s chugging away in secluded valleys while we work on getting thorium up to commercial speed.
Cautionary tale: Germany is now in the throes of building out its smart grid. The flat-earth lobby, now that it no longer has anything nuclear yo protest, has turned its attention to stopping the new transmission lines needed to bring renewable power to market:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12... [nytimes.com]
Re:Go Nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
It takes more energy to produce a solar panel than it produces in its lifetime of use
This isn't just bullshit, it's obvious bullshit. Buying panels at consumer prices has a measurable RoI, which is 3-10 years depending on various conditions (and most of the cost for consumer installations is the labour cost of the installation). Buying them at wholesale prices has a much shorter RoI. If they cost more energy to produce than they generate then even with manufacturing and raw material costs of zero then this wouldn't be possible.
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but the process of creating solar panels is ridiculously dirty and the panels themselves aren't exactly bio-degradable or easy to recycle.
[citation required]
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and what we're learning is that we're going to need a politically infeasible amount of industrial build out to dot the land with tens of thousands of thermal storage facilities and storage reservoirs, both consuming stupid quantities of water that, somehow, no one has a better use for.
Ahh, I see you are either ignorant or being disingenuous, since anyone actually interested in this subject cannot be unaware of the usefulness of used EV batteries, or the existence of flywheel systems.
put down the windandsolar crack pipe
Ahh, there we go, crack pipe. And people think I'm an asshole.
Re:Go Nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
Base load is so low that it is completely uninteresting.
Spot the guy who doesn't know anything about power generation.
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I have a very tasteless joke on my mind concerning the pyrolysis of people but I doubt that's what you mean...
Sometimes the handwriting's on the wall... (Score:2)
But its cold where I live today (Score:5, Insightful)
The inability of the human species to extract itself from personal state to think globally is going to be our demise. If we can't recognize that we are responsible for maintaining our environment in a livable state we are in big trouble.
And it really is not "globally" any more. The entire planet is our personal space.
Cool (Score:2)
Lets see what happens if we cut down the rest of the trees.....
What happened to the US? (Score:5, Insightful)
While we sit around arguing whether global warming is a real issue or not, the rest of the world is moving forward with solutions. We're getting left in the dust.
I'm not sure how so many modern conservatives still manage to think of themselves as patriots while sticking their heads in the sand. It's pathetic.
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Yet somehow today we're teetering on the edge of socialism.
The epitome of alarmism (Score:5, Insightful)
"last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 — with an error range of one tenth of a degree. True scientists would have said: this year is unlikely to be significantly warmer than 2010 or 2005 and left it at that."
http://judithcurry.com/2014/12... [judithcurry.com]
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http://judithcurry.com/2014/12... [judithcurry.com]
Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
It's very interesting that 2014 was so hot for most of the world, because 2014 was also the coldest year in Iowa for a long while. Which really is not good for food production; Iowa is some of the most fertile and most valuable cropland in the United States. It just goes to show why we say "climate change" instead of "global warming": sure, global average temperatures are rising, but in anybody's local area what we're actually experiencing is instability. They'd have known that in the 70s if the climate wasn't so hard to accurately model. It sure would be great though if we could know what the climate will be like in any local area after a global rise of 4 C.
Here in Providence, RI (Score:3)
Re:Before or after? (Score:5, Informative)
This is a legitimate question
Since the answer is a trivial google search away, I doubt that. I found this in 5 seconds: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist... [nasa.gov]
Re:Before or after? (Score:5, Informative)
Q. Why can't we use just raw data?
A. Just averaging the raw data would give results that are highly dependent on the particular locations (latitude and elevation) and reporting periods of the actual weather stations; such results would mostly reflect those accidental circumstances rather than yield meaningful information about our climate.
Q. Can you illustrate the above with a simple example?
A. Assume, e.g., that a station at the bottom of a mountain sent in reports continuously starting in 1880 and assume that a station was built near the top of that mountain and started reporting in 1900. Since those new temperatures are much lower than the temperatures from the station in the valley, averaging the two temperature series would create a substantial temperature drop starting in 1900.
Q. How can we combine the data of the two stations above in a meaningful way?
A. What may be done before combining those data is to increase the new data or lower the old ones until the two series seem consistent. How much we have to adjust these data may be estimated by comparing the time period with reports from both stations: After the offset, the averages over the common period should be equal. (This is the basis for the GISS method). As new data become available, the offset determined using that method may change. This explains why additional recent data can impact also much earlier data in any regional or global time series.
Another approach is to replace both series by their anomalies with respect to a fixed base period. This is the method used by the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK. The disadvantage is that stations that did not report during that whole base period cannot be used.
More mathematically complex methods are used by NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NOAA/NCDC) and the Berkeley Earth Project, but the resulting differences are small.
Re:Before or after? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Before or after? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you honestly think the scientists are going to give you a signed confession reading "Yes, we mislead you!" or something?
No, I expect you to come up with some proof. That means you do your own research, and when you get different results, then you publish them. That's how science is done.
Re:Before or after? (Score:4, Insightful)
Was that before or after the historical data was fudged in ways the 'climate science" community won't disclose?
(And no, moderators, I'm not trolling. This is a legitimate question.)
Have you finally stopped beating your wife?
Before or after? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it's a legitimate question. It's not that you're asking loaded questions in bad faith and have no intention of believing anyone who gives you an honest answer. And people who are asking legitimate questions always put climate science in scare quotes. And they would never ask a leading question that they could easily learn more about with some google searches. Nor is it trolling to make unfounded, baseless, and unsourced accusations about climate science being shadowy manipulators of data that refuse to provide any details about how they derive their work.
You're not a troll at all. Just a reasonable person interested in honest discourse. Exactly the kind of person I frequently see here on Slashdot.
(For those who are truly interested in learning more on the topic of how they correct biases in sea level temperature, unlike the guy "just asking questions" above, perhaps you might find this NASA paper [nasa.gov] informative and interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Throwing around nebulous, 100% unsubstantiated accusations to start a flamewar, just to see what sticks? Yes, you are trolling.
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Re: (Score:2)
You pose a question but don't give enough information to answer it or even check for validity in the implied claim you're making. Try again.
Indeed - textbook example of a troll post.
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Warmer? Are you crazy?
It's so hot I can't sleep - 12:38am right now and the temperature is 30.7C, with an expected high tomorrow of 41 (105.8F)
Re:Propaganda (Score:5, Informative)
No doubt man contributes to it, but Solar activity and earth history going back millions of years indicates this is a normal pattern shift.
The temperature seems to be defying its historical link to solar activity. Based on solar activity we should have been seen fairly severe cooling over the last few decades: http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl... [woodfortrees.org]
Re:Yeah, hottest year on record (Score:5, Insightful)
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The bleeding of credibility from each [exaggeration, lie, bald untruth (pick one)]...
Yes? go on...
Re:Math Lesson For the Kids. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not making any statement on the validity of warming. I'm pointing out how even "Scientific" reports and journals like Scientific American paint a falacious picture with word manipulation. A single temperature 9 degrees higher that 19 average is NOT a meaningful statistic. It is ENTIRELY normal!
What we are reading is written for the eyes of a mass audience. The only people that know enough to understand the actual basis of their conclusions are other climate scientists. Climate variations are very hard to measure and describe for an average person to understand in the time it takes to read an article. We are past the tipping point of climate change and the environmentalists are getting more desperate every year to convince the average person to take action. It also just so happens that global warming is melting glaciers and permafrost all over the world. Things that have been frozen for longer than anyone can remember, even in the summer. Glaciers from which climate scientists have taken core samples precisely because they have existed for so many thousands of years that they still contained frozen evidence of what the atmosphere was like every single year when a new layer of snow was compacted into them. The melting is the #1 simplest evidence for an average reader to understand, and you want to criticize the wording for not being statistically meaningful? If you want the statistically meaningful results, study climate science and read what the scientists read.
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If you don't think "Human Powers" have a major impact on the environment, take a look around you. I mean really take a look. How much of what you see day to day hasn't been shaped by people? Even most of wild places in the US (outside of Alaska perhaps) are wild because we allow them to be,