Resisting Climate Hysteria

[orr]

Nice ad homs there fellows, dressed up a bit, but just ad hom.

Pixel,

I don't think the laws of thermodynamics apply as you think they do. Can you elaborate on this.

Anyhooz from woodfortrees.org


In addition there is the problem of extreme weather events... or lack thereof.

This all points to a scenario playing out, other than the alarmist worst case scenario.

By the way, every time anyone invokes the "D" word - you lose.

Good to see you back wayne, no ad hom intended.

May I elaborate? You've presented a graph that indicates stability to slight incremental warming over the last ten years or so.
A ten year period of persistent La Nina(do we still need to detail the historical global cooling effect? of such an event. ).
I hope for your's and my sake that it persists for a long time yet.

But I suspect it will not. And when an El nino returns the (excised) fifty to hundred years previous to your graph may be a little more telling. I've been wrong about plenty of things, so hopefully that too.

And to date Capitalisms greatest peril has come from it own invented underclass, not the environment. I suspect things to remain the same. But there's always hope.

Apologies to Milan Kundera, but I feel an 'Incredible heaviness of being' about 36 giga tonnes a year, but it weights as not a feather.

 

[wayneL]

I'm glad you've highlighted selected use of data... guilty as charged. But it is 200 months ~17 years.

Still a short time. (But others are also guilty of slecting convenient starting points also). Nevertheless contrary to predictions and that is the point.

Totally agree an el nino is going to pump temps up and have the alarmists.... uhhhh... celebrating?

As I've tried to impress on you guys, personally I'm a lukewarmist, and I think the anthropogenic factors are far more varied than green house gases... land use changes and UHI effect for eg.

However I doubt the worst case scenario, based on my (admittedly laymans) interpretation of the data and consideration of what I think are untainted (and detainted, tainted) hypotheses.

I am especially skeptical of the leftist political agenda, which disingenuously cherry picks hypotheses for its own ends. Obama currently is the most repulsive and alarming example of such. (eg inter alia - CC made my daughter have asthma)

 

[pixel]

Nice ad homs there fellows, dressed up a bit, but just ad hom.

Pixel,

I don't think the laws of thermodynamics apply as you think they do. Can you elaborate on this.

Quite simple, Wayne:
Industrial activity (by humans) has been using an ever-increasing amount of energy over the last centuries of the Industrial Age. Thermodynamics deals with those processes where potential (stored) energy is converted to drive machinery or change the structure of iron ore to steel. The part of the TD Laws that deals with entropy, translated into plain English, says at every step excess heat is created. In most cases - combustion engines, metal forges, jetliners - the bulk of such heat is a waste product that is released into atmosphere or ocean.

It does not matter one bit what amount of heat Nature injects as per normal, and in age-old cycles of, e.g., El Nino and La Nina. The critical issue is the additional amount of Giga-Petajoules that has been released from anthropogenic sources over several centuries.
Do the sums: Find out how many barrels of oil have been pumped up during the last 100 years; calculate the heat content. Do the same for coal and gas. Inject the Total into the surface water, and translate the result into extra degrees Celsius of average sea temperature.

If the increase of atmospheric CO2 doesn't scare you, I'm sure the average ocean temperature will.

PS: As regards cherry-picking and political agendas, that will always be the case. It would be remarkable if Anarchists and Fluffheads of either persuasion would fail to exploit partial issues for their own fringe purposes. I didn't quite follow Obama's argument, so cannot comment. But I'm afraid the Social Media are full of misinformation, seeded by groups with specific political and commercial interests, and then taken up by gullible illiterati.
That abuse doesn't change the fact that human activity is polluting the Biosphere at a rapidly increasing rate, and every day our politicians dicker about whether and how much to clean up is a step closer to the point of no return.

 

[wayneL]

Ocean datasets from woodfortrees last 20 years just a fair bit of noise there. Long term trend is up from little ice age as per previous discussions, independent of anthropogenic factors.





Lots of hypothesizing but..........

 

[explod]

PS: As regards cherry-picking and political agendas, that will always be the case. It would be remarkable if Anarchists and Fluffheads of either persuasion would fail to exploit partial issues for their own fringe purposes. I didn't quite follow Obama's argument, so cannot comment. But I'm afraid the Social Media are full of misinformation, seeded by groups with specific political and commercial interests, and then taken up by gullible illiterati.
That abuse doesn't change the fact that human activity is polluting the Biosphere at a rapidly increasing rate, and every day our politicians dicker about whether and how much to clean up is a step closer to the point of no return.

Well put and on the nail.

 

[moXJO]

Does anyone know if emissions have been dropping or going up over 2013-2015 period?

 

[wayneL]

If there is to he any progress on pollution of the biosphere front and I also agree with Pixel here, it's up to we the people.

In fact Im quite sick of being lectured on this point by those with highly consumptive, resource hungry and therefore polluting lifestyles.

These people consol their conscience by driving a Toyota Pious and voting for The Greens (meaning the rest of us have to endure the appallingly specious Ms Milne).

Regulation helps and general pollution has improve in some respects. But ultimately it is our individual actions which will make a difference.

So step right up, consider your personal impact and lead the way instead of being Pharisaical.

 

[explod]

These people consol their conscience by driving a Toyota Pious and voting for The Greens (meaning the rest of us have to endure the appallingly specious Ms Milne

Some elaboration ole Pal?

And these are part of the sneaky and nasty little references referred to by Pixel.

And Milne would not be my choice either, but she does not run the Greens, all of the membership do, something no other party can claim

 

[pixel]

These people consol their conscience by driving a Toyota Pious and voting for The Greens (meaning the rest of us have to endure the appallingly specious Ms Milne).

LOL Wayne, now we're talking.
But you forgot the even fluffheadier Ms Hanson-Young.

PS: I do however include waste heat and industrial effluents, as well as over-fertilising, when I lament pollution of the Biosphere. Much of that is outside "we, the people's" area of adaptability, unless you count Federal Elections as a means of cleaning up the messy intermingling of Industry and Politics..

 

[basilio]

If there is to he any progress on pollution of the biosphere front and I also agree with Pixel here, it's up to we the people.

In fact Im quite sick of being lectured on this point by those with highly consumptive, resource hungry and therefore polluting lifestyles.

These people consol their conscience by driving a Toyota Pious and voting for The Greens (meaning the rest of us have to endure the appallingly specious Ms Milne).

Regulation helps and general pollution has improve in some respects. But ultimately it is our individual actions which will make a difference.

So step right up, consider your personal impact and lead the way instead of being Pharisaical.

For real Wayne ? Really?
97% plus of the scientific community are xxxxscared of the impact of global warming. We have evidence across the Arctic, the oceans, temperatures around the world that show a significantly warming of the environment. The final consequences have yet to be played out but just the effect of melting Arctic /Antarctic ice on sea levels will be catastrophic for our current civilizations within the next Century

And yet you suggest that the solution is individual action rather than any systematic national/international policy?

Just for a number of comparisons would we ever consider individual actions to be the way of tackling the effects of smoking? What about mercury pollution? The use of fluorocarbons that destroyed the ozone layer? Perhaps we didn't need pollution laws to reduce industrial smoke that caused thousands to die in London's infamous smogs?

How effectively would our community have tackled asbestos poisoning if we all just did our little bit ?

It is a nonsensical argument. If the issue of human caused global warming has even a small likelihood of creating the range of projected outcomes then relying on random individual action is crackers.

We have national governments and international agreements to give us the tools to tackle the big problems that ultimately affect us all and are beyond our individual capacity to change.

 

[Smurf1976]

Does anyone know if emissions have been dropping or going up over 2013-2015 period?

Not sure about in total (assuming you are referring to Australia only rather than global) but I can comment so far as electricity generation emissions (the largest single source) are concerned.

During that period we had the carbon tax in then out, weather has been variable, there has been a continuation of the trend of falling demand on the grid and also huge swings in fossil fuel prices.

The current broad trends in power generation (large scale) are:

Coal - there's an established downtrend in use although it's flattened out and come back up a bit recently. Quite a lot of capacity has been either mothballed or outright closed, such that what remains is running harder than it otherwise would.

Gas - looks to have peaked and is now starting to decline a little with huge falls expected over the next 3 years as gas becomes more expensive. Some capacity has been removed or is simply not being run in several states with more closures announced recently.

Hydro - different companies are doing different things. It's public knowledge that the largest operator, Hydro Tas, has substantially walked away from the baseload market, handing that market share to rivals (using whatever means of production) as the price has collapsed. In the meantime there's a lot of maintenance work being done - Cethana, Fisher, Rowallan and Meadowbank power stations are completely shut for major works at the moment and there's reduced capacity at Tungatinah. There's more planned major works elsewhere in the next couple of years at Repulse, Cluny, Tarraleah, Tungatinah and Devils Gate. If you're going to take plant offline for an extended outage, then you may as well do it when bulk power is selling for 3 cents / kWh.

Other companies, eg Snowy, are taking a less aggressive approach but they weren't generally in the baseload market to start with so it's less of an issue for them.

Oil - still a very minor source in the main grid but we're using a bit more than was previously the case. It's still minor though.

Wind, solar etc - rate of new installation is slowing down with all the uncertainty but the % of total generation from these sources is still rising as such.

So in terms of emissions, they've gone up with the shift back to higher reliance on coal.

From a financial perspective, well there's not a lot of money around in the generation industry at the moment. There's a few who are doing OK and a few who are struggling to break even at the corporate level but there's no boom that's for sure. At the individual plant level, it's no secret that quite a few gas-fired plants are becoming unviable and at least one is being evaluated for physical demolition in order to salvage the scrap value of the equipment. Quite a few coal plants have been mothballed or scrapped in recent times too with closures in WA, SA, Vic, Qld and especially in NSW. The lack of hot weather this Summer hasn't done much good for the finances of a few generation companies.

In short, emissions are currently going up per unit of production although the volume of production is still declining.

Market share (instantaneous) as of 9:50pm (eastern states time) 15 April 2015 (combined market all states except WA and NT):

Coal = 79%, Gas = 10%, Hydro = 7%, Wind = 4%

For south-west WA it's Coal = 50%, Gas = 36%, Wind = 14%

For NT I don't have the figures as such, but it would be 100% or very close to it gas in the major population areas. Likewise all gas in the northern industrial area of WA (that part which has a power grid) and at Mt Isa in Qld.

On a very much smaller scale, currently running 53% wind on King Island. That's a very small "grid" however.

 

[wayneL]

Bas....

Surely! Surely you can not possibly be invoking Cooks 97% travesty upon scientific process basilio?

Please!

That has been shown to be a total biased and propagandic() Furphy.

It has also been shown that... for instance measured mooted here in Oz (in combination with elsewhere)... that the nett effect on total Co2 and therefore speculated on temps is negligible and not statistically relevant.... and that is using failed IPCC models.

Pragmatically, regulation can only transfer emissions and probably increase them due to transport of production from the first and new world to the third world. That is counterproductive to both total emissions and hands away our? Such seems to be only for the plebeians and not for hypocritical ideological totalitarian alarmists

Enter the Orwellian dystopia predicated upon a false pretense. Like hell.

"We shall fight on the beaches" etc. basilio. Especially when the crappiest, most appalling and demonstrably mendacious junk science is cited as you have done.

 

[basilio]

Wayne I havn't a clue what you are talking about...

..........and I suspect you don't have much idea either.

About the only thing that comes through the fog is a steely certainty that ,somehow. nothing significant is happening with regard to our climate; that human activity is only vaguely related and that whatever we do it won't work so why bother/waste money trying to tackle some vague problem that won't amount to a hill of beans anyway ?

Back to square one with you arn't we mate ?

 

[cynic]

...
About the only thing that comes through the fog is a steely certainty that ,somehow. nothing significant is happening with regard to our climate; that human activity is only vaguely related and that whatever we do it won't work so why bother/waste money trying to tackle some vague problem that won't amount to a hill of beans anyway ?
...

Hooray!!!

The message is finally starting to get through!

 

[basilio]

And dismissing the overwhelming majority of Climate Scientists, Earth scientists, Geographers ect research as

the crappiest, most appalling and demonstrably mendacious junk science

Just priceless Wayne.

 

[cynic]

...Especially when the crappiest, most appalling and demonstrably mendacious junk science is cited...

I'm sorry Wayne, but it appears that you've made a grievous error in your post.

The word "science" quite simply does not belong in the aforequoted phrase and should ideally be omitted!

 

[wayneL]

We have been through this point before bas

For your perusal here is one examination of Cook's paper that contains a number of links to other discussions in the comments.

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/cooks-survey-not-only-meaningless-but.html

...and from WSJ

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303480304579578462813553136

In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.

Mr. Cook's work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found "only 41 papers””0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent””had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso,Nicola Scafetta,Nir J. Shaviv and Nils-Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.

Surely you are not in denial that this paper has been soundley and deservedly trashed?

 

[Logique]

Sometimes when you turn on the light, the cockroaches scuttle into the corners.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/04/profits-doom/

Seems the Climate Council is rather a shadowy organization.

 

[basilio]

Well Wayne your links just demonstrate how dishonest Spencer and Co and the rest of the denialists are in their treatment of this issue.

Bu lets ignore the fabrications that Professor Spencer conjures up to undermine the overwhelming scientific weight of evidence around the causes and the effects of AGW. Maybe we just want to focus on particular research which notes

1) The reality of increased warming
2) The consequences of this increase on ocean levels.

Antarctic ice shelves rapidly melting
Once-expanding East Antarctica now seeing losses
By
Thomas Sumner
2:00pm, March 26, 2015


MELTDOWN Antarctica’s Venable Ice Shelf, shown, is on track to disappear within a century, new research shows.

Antarctica’s ice shelves are shrinking at an accelerating rate, one of the longest satellite records of ice thickness reveals. Researchers report online March 26 in Science that several West Antarctic ice shelves are now on pace to disappear completely within 100 years.

Floating ice shelves mark the outermost edges of an ice sheet and line nearly half the Antarctic coastline. Using ice thickness measurements collected by satellites from 1994 to 2012, glaciologist Fernando Paolo of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., and colleagues analyzed how recent warming has impacted Antarctica’s ice. The researchers discovered that Antarctic ice shelves shrank on average 25 cubic kilometers per year from 1994 to 2003. The melting then accelerated to 310 cubic kilometers ”” roughly twice the volume of Lake Tahoe ”” on average per year from 2003 to 2012.

While scientists have known that the West Antarctic ice shelves are thinning, the research also shows that the East Antarctic ice shelves, which expanded between 1994 and 2003, are thinning now as well.

The shelves serve as doorstops for glaciers. As the bottom of an ice shelf grinds over the seabed, it stems the flow of the land-based ice queued up behind it. Because ice shelves float, their melt water does not directly contribute to sea level rise. Their disappearance, however, speeds the loss of glacial ice, which does raise sea levels.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/antarctic-ice-shelves-rapidly-melting

 

[wayneL]

Ahh the D word again. You lose basilio.

However, to repeat *yet again*, nobody is denying the warming and sea level trend since the end of the little ice age, otherwise we'd still be in the little ice age wouldn't we?

But wasn't the immediate point the lack of integrity and debunking of the Cook paper? What has that got to do with a paper on Antarctica?