A power plant just south of Lansing, Iowa.
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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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Natural climate variability is extremely unlikely to have contributed more than about one-quarter of the temperature rise observed in the past 60 years, reports a pair of Swiss climate modelers in a paper published online December 4. Most of the observed warming—at least 74 percent—is almost certainly due to human activity, they write in Nature Geoscience.
Since 1950, the average global surface air temperature has increased by more than 0.5 degree Celsius. To separate human and natural causes of warming, the researchers analyzed changes in the balance of heat energy entering and leaving Earth—a new "attribution" method for understanding the physical causes of climate change.
Their findings, which are strikingly similar to results produced by other attribution methods, provide an alternative line of evidence that greenhouse gases, and in particular carbon dioxide, are by far the main culprit of recent global warming. The massive increase of atmospheric CO2 concentrations since pre-industrial times would, in fact, have caused substantially more surface warming were it not for the cooling effects of atmospheric aerosols such as black carbon, they report.
Previous attempts to disentangle anthropogenic and natural warming used a statistically complex technique called optimal fingerprinting to compare observed patterns of surface air temperature over time with the modeled climate response to greenhouse gases, solar radiation and aerosols from volcanoes and other sources.
"Optimal fingerprinting is a powerful technique, but to most people it’s a black box," says Reto Knutti, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, one of the authors of the report.
A balanced view
Knutti and his co-author Markus Huber, also at ETH Zurich, took a different approach. They utilized a much simpler model of Earth’s total energy budget and ran the model many thousands of times, using different combinations of a few crucial parameters that contribute to the energy budget. These included global values for incoming shortwave radiation from the Sun, solar energy leaving Earth, heat absorbed by the oceans and climate-feedback effects (such as reduced snow cover, which amplifies warming by exposing darker surfaces that absorb more heat).
By using the combinations that best matched the observed surface warming and ocean heat uptake, the authors then ran the so-constrained model with each energy parameter individually. This enabled them to estimate the contribution of CO2 and other climate-change agents to the observed temperature change. Their study was greatly assisted by a 2009 analysis of observed changes since 1950 in Earth’s energy balance, says Knutti.
Knutti and Huber found that greenhouse gases contributed 0.6–1.1 degrees C to the warming observed since the mid-twentieth century, with the most statistically likely value being a contribution of about 0.85 degree C. Around half of that contribution from greenhouse gases—0.45 degree C—was offset by the cooling effects of aerosols. These directly influence Earth's climate by scattering light; they also have indirect climate effects through their interactions with clouds.
The authors calculated a net warming value of around 0.5 degree C since the 1950s, which is very close to the actual temperature rise of 0.55 degree C observed over that period. Changes in solar radiation—a hypothesis for global warming proffered by many climate skeptics—contributed no more than around 0.07 degree C to the recent warming, the study finds.
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121 Comments
Add CommentUnlike many, I'm quite uninterested whether global warming is man-made. Suppose a giant asteroid would be detected on a course towards Solar System. It would be absolutely natural phenomenon. But it wouldn't matter. Important questions would be if it would cause damage, and how to respond the best.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, SA and climate lobby is silent over this more important question: which of the many possible responses to changing climate (do nothing, compensate, prevent, which way) is most efficent. This would we like to hear. Even if evaluation of possible responses would reveal than many proposed actions (like biofuels) are like selling snake oil for cancer.
Mankind will rapidly switch to clean energy because this new energy technology is so cheap: There is a new clean energy technology that is 1/10th the cost of coal. Don’t believe me? Watch this video by a Nobel prize winner in physics: http://pesn.com/2011/06/23/9501856_Nobel_laureate_touts_E-Cat_cold_fusion/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStill don’t believe me? It convinced the Swedish Skeptics Society:
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3144827.ece
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/05/swedish-skeptics-confirm-nuclear-process-in-tiny-4-7-kw-reactor
LENR using nickel. Incredibly: Ni+H(heated under pressure)=Cu+lots of heat. This phenomenon (LENR) has been confirmed in hundreds of published scientific papers: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf
By the way, here is a current survey of all the companies that are bringing LENR to commercialization: http://www.cleantechblog.com/2011/08/the-new-breed-of-energy-catalyzers-ready-for-commercialization.html
Well, considering that energy efficiency measures tend to pay for themselves in less than 2 years and then make money every year thereafter, we should aggressively pursue high efficiency standards, retrofits and fuel switching as our first order response to the problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisImagine that, making money to solve climate change. The only problem is that entrenched energy interest (Koch Brothers, Peabody Coal, etc.) will be on the loosing end of this transition, and they have mobilized a huge astroturf movement to keep it from happening. So we've got to ignore the bellyaching from the corporate megaphone and do what's best for the country as a whole instead of the few megarich people that can and will drown out our individual voices if we let them.
Since coal destroys $2 for every $1 it creates,
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.101.5.1649
If we force the dirtiest plants to either upgrade or shut down, we'll spend way less on healthcare costs and missed work days by people who inhale coal power plant pollution. There's enough slack natural gas capacity to completely cover the power shortfall, and since this would cut our emissions 10% without having to build ANYTHING really, this is another cheap emissions reduction.
We should continue to require increasing fuel efficiency from our vehicles and incentivize vehicles that don't run on petroleum. The fact that these advanced vehicles DON'T spew pollution into the air right next to people means that they save society money on healthcare costs and property damage too, just like displacing dirty coal with clean(er) natural gas. Taxing imported oil bu $1 per barrel could help out our energy security and geopolitical situation as well.
Finally, people will need to realize that buying a 5000 sq. ft. house in the exurbs and filling it up with cheap crap from China isn't sustainable in the 21st Century. Yeah, this is more of a psychological change, but it has so many benefits that I don't have space to outline them here.
Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Oh yeah, almost forgot about renewable energy and how the cost of solar PV has gone down 50% over the last 2 years! If we'd just take the subsidies that dirty energy has enjoyed for decades and instead spend them on building up clean energy (for a couple of decades just to even out the unfair advantage that dirty energy has accumulated over time), then that would add up to some SERIOUS carbon reduction while lowering other pollution a great deal as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLENRs (color me skeptical of this one) or LFTRs (color me a little less skeptical of this one) might prove useful for satisfying the last 10% or so of electricity demand that's hard to do with 100% renewables, but either technology is decades away and have never been proven to operate on a commercial scale.
Wind, solar PV, solar thermal baseload, wave, tidal, biomass (NOT corn ethanol btw), geothermal, etc. all have great potential if we as a civilization put preserving a pleasant environment at the top of our priority list.
Three quarters of global warming is man made... Even comatose people know that and only idiots and morons would deny it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are things we can start doing quickly to reverse the man-made part: First and most important is; start mass producing all electric cars and use solar power to charge them. General Electric is way ahead in this field since they developed solar parks that can supercharge thirteen cars in about a half hour and the remaining electricity goes into the grid. This will greatly improve when the new batteries hit the market in less than five years. GE even have car ports that function like the solar parks, and it costs a fraction of the cost to build a solar park as it does a gas station and even less to put a solar car port up, and you can even put a small wind mill up to capture the energy at night.
We can replace all the coal burning, natural gas burning, and oil burning plants with geothermal, tide and wave, and solar with liquid salt and produce almost 0 or 1% pollution. Our most abundant resource is salt and solar...both work together like a charm. We can even start to factory mass producing mini nuclear reactors that is very very low in radiation when they use thorium or another low radiation fuel. These can even be placed in small bunkers, out of sight and away from dangerous people. Two or three mini nuclear plants can supple all the electricity a city the size of New York will ever need and so will any of the others mentioned above. These clean energies are only as expensive to build as we allow them to be and give a huge return in a very short time. All we have to do is start doing it.
@sault
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are lots of lobbies, each pushing its own: subsidise electric cars, subsidise biofuels, don't subsidise biofuels, subsidiste this, subsidise that.
What is worrying that scientists love climate models, but are silent over cost/benefit analysis of each response. This raises concern that they are connected to one particular lobby, and push for it - no matter its efficency.
In my earlier comparison of global warming to asteroid: if mankind would decide on the plan which was unffective, and spend time and resources on it, this would be true disaster. Suppose, the best plan was to blow asteroid off course using rocket, but lobby of building companies would convince the government to instead subsidise digging of giant underground shelters and food stores. This would be terrible mistake. That is why it is not enough to shout "climate change!". Important is to ask "so what?".
All these nay-sayers reminds me of the joke;
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"What if golbal warming is all a hoax and we make the world a better place for nothing."
lol
It is crucial to know whether it is man-made. If it is not, we can expect it to be a fluctuation that will reverse it by itself, as it has done for many millions of years. But, if it is man-made, we have no idea on how it will evolve. However, in this second case, we can probably reverse it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI take it that James Davis is not a doctor of medicine, has shares in or works for General Electric, and lives in a fairy land where the global economic crisis never happened and contractors and big business couldn't give a hoot about making a profit? If he could spend a little time in the real world, perhaps he'd care to wonder whether it's even been satisfactorily shown that the 3/4 of 0.5 degrees that is allegedly due to human activity is anything to actually worry about (given that climatologists simply can't get catastrophe out of any rise less than 2 degrees no matter what model they use), note that natural climate variability if (or rather, when!) reversed will reduce the alleged rise without any assistance, and remember that human attempts to fix things almost always result in the opposite effect and that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone will pay for this transformation of the planet that he proposes and it will inevitably be those who can least afford it. Electricity generators in Europe have already put a premium on 'green' energy in the hope of cashing in on eco-guilt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf it is a hoax, it is a costly hoax and one which may ultimately damage the hoaxters as well as the economy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDefine 'better'! Restricted air travel, expensive fuel, being held to ransom by Governments and business "for the sake of the planet", areas of outstanding natural beauty forested with wind turbines, recreational waters cut off by tidal generators, and every action subject to the scrutiny of lobbyists and nutters (environmentalism attracts as many as does Christianity!) does not strike me as a vision of Heaven! Indeed it seems like a recipe for "more and bloodier wars"!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA couple of Swiss scientists building a climate model that accurately reproduces *past* observations isn't exactly earth-shaking news. The real test will be whether or not it can accurately predict future climate data.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm still skeptical of anyone who makes claims about how much of climate change is anthropogenic. That we have some impact I'd say is pretty much beyond doubt, but until we thouroughly understand *all* the drivers of global climate we can't reliably assign quantitative contributions to *any* of them. But even if human influence on global temperature were negligible, there would satill be plenty of other reasons to clean up our act - cleaner air & water, ending our dependence on foreign oil, being ready for when the oil runs out, etc.
Personally, I lean towards hydrogen fuel cells. We can use solar to generate the electricity needed to generate the hydrogen (through the electrolysis of water) and have a completely clean system.
Ignorant joke. So-called "fighting climate change" is extremely expensive and very heavy burden to bussiness and individual people, especially the poor. Fat cats can easily afford electric car, poor and middle class - not.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLook here:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-limits-economy.htm
Basically, to get the emissions reductions the science says we need, we'll have to wait until June 2050 to be as rich as we were by January 2050 if we didn't do anything. That's if Climate Change imposes ZERO negatives on the economy, and since mankind has caused 3/4 of climate change so far (which will only increase as the slower feedbacks kick in and thermal inertia to our climate forcing is overcome), that is a ridiculous proposition.
The reality is closer to your asteroid analogy than you might think. Efficiency and renewables (E + RE) can provide a great deal of the emissions reductions we need to stave off the effects of climate change. Like I said before however, they are also a direct threat to the bottom line for the established dirty energy companies. EVERY study claiming E + RE can't work in the real world (even they actually do) can be traced back to "think" tanks and astroturf groups funded by these dirty energy incumbents. See: Heritage Foundation, API, etc. for examples. They are lobbying against solutions that threaten their bottom line and IT ACTUALLY WORKS! When congress was debating the repeal of the $4 Billion / year that the oil industry gets (these were only the worst of the subsidies the industry gets), the 40 senators that killed the bill had gotten $55 million in career donations from dirty energy. That's over 70 to 1 return EVERY YEAR!
Good point - many models of climate change are several years old. Did anybody check if they correctly predicted current temperature?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese graphs filmed in Al Gore's "The Inconvenient Truth" from 2006 - did they predict 2007-2011 correctly?
"areas of outstanding natural beauty forested with wind turbines, recreational waters cut off by tidal generators" - Whether it's wind turbines & tidal generators or oil derricks & NG fracking operations, we can probably kiss the unspoiled spaces goodbye no matter who wins the argument.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"being held to ransom by Governments and business 'for the sake of the planet'" - We're already being held hostage by government & business for the sake of profit, so thre's no real change here. Like The Who sang: "And the parting on the left/Is now the parting on the right/And the beards have all grown longer overnight."
"every action subject to the scrutiny of lobbyists and nutters... does not strike me as a vision of Heaven!" - It strikes me as a vision of every day's 6-o'clock news.
This would actually be another advantage of a solar/hydrogen fuel system - it would make it a lot easier to break the stranglehold of the big energy companies. Since you can set up an electrolysis operation anywhere there's water & sunlight, small operations could be set up in every town. And with water as the fuel cell's waste product & the sun not likely to go out any time soon, there's essentially an unlimited supply of energy. If Big Energy can't control supply, they can't control the price.
So what will cause the climate to cool back down? Some sort of unknown negative feedback that will save us? Or how about crossing your fingers and holding on to your lucky rabbit's foot? If you can't identify the natural forcing that will cancel out the warming we've already caused and the warming that's in the pipeline due to our inability to start cleaning up our mess, then that's pretty much your plan for dealing with climate change.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh, and humans' contribution is 0.5C total, but this figure also incorporates cooling by aerosols so it is probably closer to 0.7 or 0.8C. However, aerosols stay in the air for weeks while CO2 levels will be elevated due to our emissions for 500,000 years after we stop emitting. This means that we have to slow our emissions growth, start declining and eventually get to as close to zero carbon emissions as possible so that the peak warming we experience isn't fatal to our civilization.
That is pretty funny... it isn't scientists that are silent over cost/benefit analysis (that is after all a scientific tool), it is the fossil fuel industry that consistently sells their "inexpensive" products on the "free market" by under pricing them dramatically because they don't add in all the indirect costs to health and environment... they simply ignore them... no wait, more than ignore them, they know they are there, so they spend countless millions to make people like you ignore them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a lot of good science out there illustrating cost/benefits of practically every angle of the climate change issue, from switching to renewable energy, to improving efficiencies, to doing nothing...
Either you have your own agenda (i.e. you work for fossil fuels companies or their cronies), or you have such a strong personal bias you have blinded yourself to the truth, or you are being intentionally ignorant of the facts and trying to mislead others, because the data, the many many good studies, all the information you need is readily available to you.
How about no moonscapes where the Canadian boreal forest once was since we didn't get every last drop out of the Tar Sands?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr not having mountains blown up looking for coal in Appalachia?
Or how about never having to deal with Exxon Valdez or BP Deepwater Horizon-type oil spills? Or not funding tyrants in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, etc.?
What about having cleaner air and water while not having to pay for a lot of the healthcare we do now because of our pollution?
How about still having to rename Glacier National Park in 20 years, but telling your kids when you visit, "We're doing our best so that these glaciers will come back someday" instead of offering no hope at all?
Oh and if you think Environmentalists have a lot of lobbyists, you'll black out at the number of lobbyists dirty energy employs and the level of funding that goes towards this activity.
I saw few calculations of future economy. Which is strange, because heating and health costs should be much easier to calculate than atomsphere.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost estimates that the supposed cost of climate change, tsunamis, health cost, saving biodiversity and all, is in the line of 1-5% of GDP by 2050. In this case, the best strategy would be climate compensation. That is, develop as fast and possible now, and use small part of generated wealth to pay for future dams, new farms, new nature reserves etc.
In any case, proposed strategy "pay anybody any money if he says it will fight climate change" is untenable.
"They are lobbying against solutions that threaten their bottom line and IT ACTUALLY WORKS!" - That's because we no longer truly live in a republic "of the people, by the people, for the people", but one of the special interests, by those rich enough to finance a campaign, for those who can make big donations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately, I don't see anything short of a Constitutional Convention changing this. Of course, it'd have to be mandated by a public referendum, since the government will never voluntarily fix itself. Maybe it's time to do away with elections & draft people for office - something like selective service. At the end of their term, we could have a vote on how they did to dtermine whether they should be rewarded or punished.
As someone wise (I think it was Mark Twain) once said - "The surest sign that a man is unqualified to hold public office is that he actually wants the job." (I'm probably paraphrasing a bit here, but it still gets the gist of it across.)
If there is cost/benefit analysis, why Scientific American doesn't report it? Only has an average of two vague scary articles about climate change per week?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't have any agenda. But go on! Don't look for lobbyists, evil corporations and lizard men from Mars around.
I challenge you to present your own agenda. Show us, readers, hard, economicaly sound calculation of most economic solution to climate problem which a good accountant can accept.
CO2 traps heat and the 40% increase in its concentration we've brought about has caused an observed 1.7 W/m2 increase in heat retention in the Earth's climate system. Numerous lines of evidence point to the Earth's climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 (the forcing we will experience if we get to 560ppm) at 3C:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-advanced.htm
Your standards of evidence are so high that we would NEVER be able to know ANYTHING about the Earth's climate. There is uncertainty in EVERY measurement, but we have a pretty good handle on the FACT that CO2 emissions jack with the Earth's climate. That's just like saying, "Until we thouroughly understand ALL the drivers behind heart disease, we can't really know if fried twinkies cause heart attacks or not." A MOUNTAIN of evidence points to poor diet choices (like fried twinkies) as being a major driver behind heart disease just like a MOUNTAIN of evidence points to CO2 being a major driver in the Earth's climate. If you would have us wait until we know what EACH AND EVERY little molecule in said fried twinkie does, it will be too late to prevent a bunch of heart attacks. We've moved WAY beyond Descartes in understanding what we know and don't know.
Oh, as for H2 fuel cells, they are an energy conversion device and H2 is merely an energy carrier. You still have to generate the electricity to make the hydrogen. However, when you intend to use the fuel cell where a battery would suffice, you'll spend 3x as much electricity going through the energy conversion steps to get electrical energy out of the fuel cell vs. just storing the electrical energy in a battery. H2 was just a distraction to keep California from requiring zero emissions cars on its roads.
Too bad the poor bear the brunt of climate change and pollution already.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe best proposal I have seen as to how to deal with climate change is the so-called "wedge" proposal of Pacala and Socolow:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Wedge_Game
They identify 15 different things that can be done with proven technology already in use to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions. The goal is to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at current levels.
Cold fusion is BS. In the same category as faster-than-light neutrinos, ESP, UFOs, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot necessarily. Depending on the magnitude of the natural effect we might still be well-advised to adopt a mitigation strategy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere have been a number of different climate models all of which have converged on the same order of magnitude of predicted warming. I would recommend you study this subject in any good college-level text on atmospheric physics or climatology. If you still are skeptical after doing this, fine, but at least you will have seen what the evidence is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey predict decadal trends with climate models, not specific yearly totals. Trying to do what you ask would be asking them to try and predict ENSO and other cyclic variations, which is impossible to do more than a few years out. If you don't understand this fundamental aspect of climate science, no wonder you're so clueless on this issue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou know what they say about opinions, right? (Aside from the obvious fact that they have ZERO relevence to a scientific discussion)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn what way exactly is this "An independent study" ?? What utter nonsense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrom reading this study it seems clear that this group has used the same core modelling module used by previous AGW groups, and anyone who knows anything about modelling knows that they are deeply dependent on the enormous amounts of assumptions laid down by the writers of the models.
They also used "a much simpler model of Earth’s total energy budget and ran the model many thousands of times" Wow. That is so convincing. Simpler is so much better ... in a dynamic system like our atmospheric climate that has millions of independent variables and a multitude of completely unknown variables, more of which are being discovered every year.
Role out the usual establishment supporters and sceptic abusers.
Are we considering "fighting climate change" or "climate control"? I hate to break it to everyone but the planet will eventually destroy us all naturally, even if we emmitt zero carbon emissions. All living things will eventually perish and the world itself will be destroyed. The only way we can save ourselves forever is to develop the technology control the world, the climate, and everything. Is this the right thing to do? Is this our destiny?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, we should do whatever we can to prolong our lives. Eat healthy, exercise, stop carbon emissions, while decreasing our footprint on the world, but putting so much emphasis on who is to blame for our eventual destruction seems a bit irrelevant. It will be interesting to know but it will not change the fact that we need to change regardless of the degree of harm we do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey're not assigning blame to be spiteful. There's a group of people, mostly either funded by dirty energy's PR efforts or irrationally influenced by them, that deny that humans are changing the climate. So proving them wrong once again is necessary to start cutting our carbon emissions, even if the deniers will just plug their ears and ignore ALL proof that doesn't jive with their preexisting beliefs. This study attempts to quantify the impact mankind's carbon emissions are having on the climate. Anyway, to all the people that doubt these models, look here:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.skepticalscience.com/search.php?Search=Predictions_150
As a geologist I can confidently say that this is a STUPID headline not worthy of the 'scientific' of Scientific American.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPutting a percent on the influence of humans on the climate is silly and infantile speculation.
"That's just like saying, 'Until we thouroughly understand ALL the drivers behind heart disease, we can't really know if fried twinkies cause heart attacks or not.'" - It would be if I had said that we need to understand all the drivers in order to know IF humans are contributing to climate change, but I said we couldn't know HOW MUCH of climate change is our fault. This is more like saying that we don't know what proportion of heart attacks are caused by eating fried twinkies, which we don't. How can you say "Humans cause X% of global warming" before you know the causes of 100%?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"You still have to generate the electricity to make the hydrogen." - You must have missed the part where I talked about using solar for that. In fact, I said it more than once.
Still bringing ZERO proof or any real SCIENCE to the debate, I see...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou will not be able to understand Monte Carlo analysis or the iterative nature of model refinement. If you want moisture forecasts, see here:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.81/full
Okay, change that to: "We won't know HOW MUCH fried twinkies cause heart attacks..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the hydrogen issue. When you run the numbers, if you turn electricity to hydrogen and then back into electricity again, you lose 2/3 of the original energy as waste. Steam methane reformation is slightly better, but if you're going to use natural gas as a fuel for cars, then why not just burn the natural gas itself? Using hydrogen storage for the grid presents the same problems just on a larger scale. Once there are enough electric cars out there, the massive storage available in the top 1 - 2% of the vehicles' batteries will be more than enough to even out variable renewable energy generation. Heck, if you're going to throw away 2/3 of your energy by generating hydrogen, you might as well build the 3x as many solar arrays / wind turbines you'd need anyway and then use the money you'd spend on the hydrogen infrastructure to bump that up to 4x. Spread out the wind turbines and allow the solar arrays to "ship" their power eastward a time zone or two and your variability problem is almost solved anyway.
Sophistry is no substitute for scientific sophistication.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJudging by your many comments that I have read in this forum over the last year or two, most having little evidence or objectivity to them, your expertise is about 75% jelly roll with a bit of geo thrown in to muddy the mix. Climate science is present only in trace amounts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore news from the world of automobile excess:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMassive pileup in Japan involving
8 Ferraris
2 Mercedes Benz
1 Lamborghini
2 Toyotas
Isn't it great how the 1 percent crowd puts such effort into taking good care of the environment and the rest of us?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16027006
Yes, village geek. i agree that climate science is present in only trace amounts on Scientific American. This is why this latest pronouncement of a specific 'percent' of the climate being influencesd by man is ridiculous.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis type of statement 'thrown out' reflects agenda and not science. Fortunately the folks making these pronouncements are losing credibility...except among tinpot dictators who use the quotes as a reason to scream for even more money via western taxpayers.
"Heck, if you're going to throw away 2/3 of your energy by generating hydrogen..." - So, we can put up solar arrays to extract water from hydrogen and waste 2/3 of the energy or not put them up & waste all of it? Seems like an easy choice to me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"why not just burn the natural gas itself?" - Because buning NG emits CO2. Solar & hydrogen don't.
"Spread out the wind turbines and allow the solar arrays to "ship" their power eastward a time zone or two and your variability problem is almost solved anyway." - Hydrogen has much better portability than solar or wind. If you can develop a practical solar- or wind- powered car/truck/train/plane, I'd be more than happy to congratulate you on your Nobel Prize.
According to an report by the UN, one of the biggest contributor to climate change is mostly livestock raising.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html
So simply eating a diet with less meat is one of the biggest thing you can do to reduce global warming. Requires absolutely no "expensive" alternative energy sources to do either. Not to mention that in the US, the meat industry contributes more water pollution than all other industries combined. Why does the meat industry get about 75% of the ag subsidizes while it is bad for the environment and your health while fruits and vegetables get less than 1%, which most Americans don't get enough of. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/why-a-big-mac-costs-less-than-a-salad/
Suggestion on decreasing meat consumption: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html
Not saying we should limit ourselves to just improving our diet but I didn't see any comments on it, so I decided to share. Why do oil companies that are bad for the environment get the subsidies?
Anyways, saying exactly 74% seems a little bit against statistics. No confidence interval? Something like "between 69-79%" would seem better.
According to an report by the UN, one of the biggest contributor to climate change is mostly livestock raising.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html
So simply eating a diet with less meat is one of the biggest thing you can do to reduce global warming. Requires absolutely no "expensive" alternative energy sources to do either. Not to mention that in the US, the meat industry contributes more water pollution than all other industries combined. Why does the meat industry get about 75% of the ag subsidizes while it is bad for the environment and your health while fruits and vegetables get less than 1%, which most Americans don't get enough of. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/why-a-big-mac-costs-less-than-a-salad/
Suggestion on decreasing meat consumption: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html
Not saying we should limit ourselves to just improving our diet but I didn't see any comments on it, so I decided to share. Why do oil companies that are bad for the environment get the subsidies?
Anyways, saying exactly 74% seems a little bit against statistics. No confidence interval? Something like "between 69-79%" would seem better.
srry for double post. Dont know how to delete
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI see no mention of urban sprawl which includes deforestation, additional black top (absorbs heat very well) and the addition of more than 300 million new car owners in China (basically more people drive cars than we have people in China alone and India is surely catching up). The ocean has taken on some of the CO2 sink but that has added to problems of acidification which is quite destructive to the fish hatcheries and expatiates the overfishing that has been going strong and healthy from the fifties on.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have watched in amusement at the loss of 90% of the tropical rain forest and musicians are up in arms over the fact that Gibson insist on stripping more forest on the small and fragile island of Madagascar.
BP has come out with a feel good advertisement claiming that the Gulf of Mexico is better than ever and in the back ground the truth of the existential damage is slipping through but seldom noticed. But there are groups that claim man is not responsible for the change and in the end it is a non issue anyway.
Based on the loss of migration trails, the introduction of invasive species and the northward movement of ecosystems with no natural enemies into old forest the symptoms today will be minimal to the damage seen soon. And then mother Earth has her own surprises waiting for us as we enter the current Solar Max with earth quakes, volcanoes and possible pole switching.
I think no matter what we do it will either not be enough or worse the absolute wrong solution. By that I mean trying to fix the problems with technology such as adding foil to the atmosphere or compounds of sulfur that by crossing international lines may create undesired results (war). So sit back and enjoy the biggest extinction seen in 65 million years.
I always wonder why the required number of trees to be planted to absorb the notorious GHG is not specified and is always lost in the conversation as the best response to the situation. How is it that scientist do not specify the required number of hectares of land that need to be restored to become forests so as to completely address the concern over CO2.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou can extract methane from animal manure. That will prevent release of greenhouse gases and provide alternative to fossil fuels. Methane can be used for internal combustion engines and gas turbines. The by-product of anaerobic digestion can be used as organic fertilizer to replace synthetic fertilizer from fossil fuels.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe that's better than everybody becoming vegetarian, burning fossil fuels and using synthetic fertilizer.
If you're driving 10,000 km per year in a compact sedan, you need to plant 140 trees to offset your CO2 emission. At 100 trees per acre, that's 1.4 acres of reforested land. If you're driving longer in an SUV, you need more trees.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo offset all man-made CO2 emissions, you need to reforest about 90% of total land area which is unrealistic.
It's not happening because the U.S. is bogging down the process for some strange reason...oh, that's right, Faux News viewers are the most misinformed about climate change:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://climateshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/FeldmanStudy.pdf
And what was it that I said about opinions?
You seem to not understand. We can build the solar arrays and wind farms anyway and either:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. Generate hydrogen with the electricity and loose 2/3 of the energy content in the process. OR, more likely, build 3x as much capacity as we would need, tripling the cost of a completely renewable energy supply. And I don't know WHERE in the world you get the idea that hydrogen GAS is MORE portable than electrons. If you think electric transmission losses are high...just wait until you see the energy needed to pump hydrogen over long distances.
OR
2. Put up as much renewable energy generation capacity as we need and distribute it normally just like we do today. Efficiency, demand management and Vehicle-to-Grid can help match demand with supply while having widely-dispersed renewable energy generation can even out the variability in the first place.
Here's a solar-powered car:
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2011-10-30/business/os-cfb-cover-wattnext-20111030_1_chargepoint-solar-panels-rubestation
Wherer's my Nobel Prize?
To piggyback on your response, we have to realize that fossil fuels were laid down over millions of years as plants absorbed CO2 and then got buried under special circumstances. That we're on pace to burn through most of those fuel deposits in a couple hundred years means we're burning them thousands of times faster than they can be replaced. The ocean will take up a lot of our CO2 emissions, but as the Earth warms, that process will slow down and we'll have to count on rainfall and chemical weathering to do the trick.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlanting trees is a good way to slow desertification caused by man-made climate change and decrease the net accumulation of CO2 in the air, but like the good Dr. said, covering 90% of the Earth's land area is a bit unrealistic.
However, if we cut out emissions by 80 - 90% by 2050 like the science tells us, then reforestation and plowing pyrolysis-derived charcoal into the soil could actually decrease the peak heating the planet will experience while also shortening the man-made supergreenhouse period many geologists are calling the Anthropocene.
Just found more of the study that wasn't reported. Apparently:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Knutti and Huber found that greenhouse gases contributed 0.6–1.1 °C to the warming observed since the mid-twentieth century, with the most statistically likely value being a contribution of about 0.85 °C. Around half of that contribution from greenhouse gases — 0.45 °C — was offset by the cooling effects of aerosols…"
This would support the idea that the Earth's climate sensitivity is high instead of low like some would have us believe. This makes sense because of the vast array of positive feedbacks that have been identified totally overpower and are much faster than the slow negative feedbacks that have been identified. Those arguing for a low climate sensitivity are really arguing for some unseen, and probably mythical negative feedback since the data just doesn't support it.
Found a good video that shows how deniers weasel out of getting caught by the facts. This one shows their hero, Christopher Monkton getting torn apart with science and his lies exposed:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.youtube.com/user/potholer54?blend=1&ob=4#p/a/u/1/9K74fzNAUq4
So why is it that China, the hungriest nation on earth when it comes to snapping up a business opportunity, are not rushing headlong into this profitable green utopia? Because it does not exist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInstead they are pushing ahead with innovative nuclear designs while throwing eco friendly crumbs to the eager green sparrows. They must be laughing their heads off. While we dither they develop their nuclear technology. In a couple of decades the world will be buying modular systems off the Chinese, some as small as a refrigerator to power large rural towns in the third world while the West once again misses the starting gun. What is more, their solution will work in reducing fossil fuel consumption for energy production while our utopian plans will not.
Here's proof that we're gumming up the works in Durban:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/12/05/381681/un-climate-official-blasts-us-climate-policy/
An independent study the article claims. Independent of what? Government or institutional funding? Previous scepticism? Independent of any serious critical review? Latter more likely.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"build 3x as much capacity as we would need, tripling the cost of a completely renewable energy supply" - Are you figuring in the cost of the GIGANTIC inverters that would be necessary to convert the DC genrated by solar arrays or wind turbines to AC? Remember, there's a reason DC lost "the War of the Currents" - it doesn't transmit well over long distances.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"And I don't know WHERE in the world you get the idea that hydrogen GAS is MORE portable than electrons" - I said hyrdogen is more portable than solar or wind. If you don't believe that's true, try driving a solar car through a big rainstorm. If you're trying to change the subject to a solar-CHARGED ELECTRIC car, see below.
"Here's a solar-powered car:... Wherer's my Nobel Prize?" - That's not a solar-powered car. That's a solar powered charger for a battery-powered car. And it takes 8 hours to recharge a car. Until recharge times get down to how long it takes to fill a tank of gas, electric won't be practical. And unless you're Bill Ferree, you didn't develop it. No Nobel for you!
We could clean up the environment and help curb the population explosion if we stop raising livestock and start EATING VEGANS!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust kidding, but it does bring up a point - there'd be less fossil fuel use, less deforestation and lower demand for meat if there were fewer people on the planet. I doubt we'll ever truly get any of our environmental problems straightened out without instituting some form of worldwide mandatory population control.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHate to burst your bubble, but Fuel Cells put our DC.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh, and wind turbines put out AC
Oh, and High-Voltage DC transmission lines have LESS losses than AC transmission lines anyway:
http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/power-transmission/hvdc/hvdc-ultra/#content=Benefits
And yeah, it might take a while to charge an electric car, but charging overnight can satisfy 90% of your driving needs. When you want to go out on the highway, we should have drop-in SOFCs that can run off biodiesel or just have rental cars available for the odd road trip people take once a year or so. If this doesn't cover your driving needs, then yeah, pay 5x as much and use 3x as much energy driving a H2 fuel cell-powered car.
In fact China is pushing hard to increase its own green energy sector. Last year it surpassed the U.S. as the country with the most installed wind power, for example.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe nuclear power in a satelite must be smaller than a refrigerator, must last more than 25 years and seems to have come from US technology.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps, the risk of a melt down is non-existant and the safety features simple. The cost from a production line assembly may be a restricting factor but new technology could drive down the costs.
Maybe house sized nuclear power could be an option that could be considered.
The amount of nuclear waste and proliferation issues associated with smaller nuclear reactors will be much worse. For each ton of reactor components that are themselves nuclear waste at the end of a plant's life, small reactors will generate much more than larger reactors. Thousands of small reactors will be MUCH harder to protect from terrorists seeking nuclear materials than the 400 or so large reactors in use today.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSmall reactors still have all the headaches associated with larger reactors, just on a smaller scale. They will still need to be refueled / serviced every 9 - 18 months and they will still generate waste that needs to be stored on-site. EXCEPT, now that you have thousands of little targets for Fukushima-type natural disasters, the odds of seeing a meltdown in any given year increase dramatically. Since these meltdowns render vast swathes of land uninhabitable, the apparent cost savings of these reactors, due to shorter construction times for example, evaporates.
As early as 1987, vegan author John Robbins cited a report on the energy crisis in Scientific American which warned: "The trends in meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVeganism Is Direct Action!
According to a recent United Nations report, Livestock's Long Shadow, raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined.
Researchers from the University of Chicago similarly concluded that a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating animal products than by switching to a hybrid car.
Factory farm pollution is the primary source of damage to coastal waters in North and South America, Europe, and Asia.
Meat production causes deforestation, which then contributes to global warming. Trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and the destruction of forests around the globe to make room for grazing cattle furthers the greenhouse effect.
The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations reports that the annual rate of tropical deforestation has increased from nine million hectares in 1980 to 16.8 million hectares in 1990, and unfortunately, this destruction has accelerated since then.
By 1994, a staggering 200 million hectares of rainforest had been destroyed in South America just for cattle.
Half of all fresh water worldwide is used for thirsty livestock. Producing eight ounces of beef requires an unimaginable 25,000 liters of water, or the water necessary for one pound of steak equals the water consumption of the average household for a year.
The Worldwatch Institute estimates one pound of steak from a steer raised in a feedlot costs: five pounds of grain, a whopping 2,500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and about 34 pounds of topsoil.
Thirty-three percent of our nation's raw materials and fossil fuels go into livestock destined for slaughter. In a vegan economy, only two percent of our resources will go to the production of food.
The number of animals killed for food in the United States is nearly 75 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.people.
Rubbish. Small reactors are being designed that can be buried in solid concrete & will operate unattended for twenty to thirty years. By the way, two satellites heading out of the solar system have been operating unattended for what? Thirty years yet? Actually about thirty four years . Nuclear powered. Not sugesting this particular process but other methods will work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVoyager 1 is almost 70 times farther from the Sun than the Earth. Out there, the Sun is only 1/5,000th as bright as here on Earth. It is extremely cold, and there is little solar energy to keep the probe warm and to provide electrical power. 'The probe can continue to operate at such great distances from the Sun because it has radioisotope thermal electric generators (RTGs) that create electricity. The fact that the spacecraft is still returning data is a remarkable technical achievement'.
That was printed 13 years ago. They are still sending signals back to Earth.
"The Worldwatch Institute estimates one pound of steak from a steer raised in a feedlot costs: five pounds of grain, a whopping 2,500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and about 34 pounds of topsoil."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Worldwatch Institute must be exaggerating. A cattle consumes about 10 gallons per day. From birth to slaughterhouse takes 42 months. It will consume 12,775 gallons but it weighs 1,200 lbs or 10.6 gallons per pound. Btw, the water doesn't disappear. It's part of the natural water cycle. When the cattle urinate in the wild, it evaporates and comes back as rain or it sinks to the ground and becomes part of groundwater which we tap in wells.
Cattles don't eat topsoil. They eat grass and the topsoil may be eroded as a result. But this happens in all of agriculture, even if you're just farming wheat.
"Thirty-three percent of our nation's raw materials and fossil fuels go into livestock destined for slaughter."
Exaggerated too. Cows don't eat copper and iron ore. Their transportation and electricity requirements are minimal compared to people who commute everyday and live in aircon homes.
The tone of the present study is quite definitive and strongly implicates man-made climate change. Having reviewed the original article ("Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance"), the authors' apparent degree of confidence seem high and any limitations of their approach, sources of error and bias are not explicitly mentioned.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is in contradistinction to their 2010 article ("Constraints on climate sensitivity from radiation patterns in climate models") in the AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY Journal of Climate. At that time, they noted that:
"The climate sensitivity estimates derived here crucially depend on the accuracy of the reference datasets." "The limitation here is that the number of models is rather small" and that there are "biases and deficiencies in the observational reference data sets". "A variety of uncertainties arises in every step of our procedure."
The classic digital caveat, "Garbage In = Garbage Out" comes to mind.
Also too much truth leads to job insecurity :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes and loss of tenure and grants, but they declared no financial conflicts of interest;)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow, your dangerously simplistic caclulation ignores lapse rate, absorption spectra of greenhouse gases, and the OBSERVED non-linear behavior of the Earth's climate system. However, I would expect as much ignorance from one who basically denies the Scientific Method as well. And I guess if you think all climatologists are in on a conspiracy to get government grants or something, you'd be led to believe that your utterly ignorant "sensitivity" calculation was somehow missed by the DECADES of climate science trying to determine the same thing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor examply, if you attribute 1 W/m2 negative forcing due to aerosols, then the ACTUAL forcing by CO2 is 4 W/m2, not 2! This is just the most glaring error in your "analysis".
You CANNOT say with any credibility what the Earth's climate sensitivity was over its ENTIRE history. We don't know exactly where all the continents were, what their makeup was and what the exact composition of the atmosphere billions of years ago. However, we have a good handle on the Earth's climate for the last few million years due to core samples. Sensitivity under 2C is highly unlikely and inconsistent with OBSERVED evidence:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-advanced.htm
Hey, if you want to power the world with RTGs, good luck finding enough unraium on the planet, and then good luck finding enough LWRs to turn it into plutonium. The "bury in concrete and forget" reactors are based on theoretical concepts that have yet to be put into practice. Also, I doubt they would be buried for long as soon as enough plutonium built up in the reactors as the bad guys would find them too tempting. So, you couldn't "Forget" these reactors, even if it was impossible to build weapons from their waste.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou also have to consider the irrigation required to raise the grain the cattle are fed. And for about 90% of the beef in the U.S., they're raised on feedlots for the last few months of their life. Thier waste doesn't "evaporate", it runs into waste lagoons, polluting ground-and surface-water.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHardy har har! Let's joke about the future suffering of billions just so the dirty energy companies can keep their gravy train running for just a few years longer! That's so funny!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot true. Cattle belches 150 liters of methane a day. The 1.5 billion cattle worldwide emits 54 million tons a year. Other livestocks emit less than cattle. The transport sector emits 6.5 billion tons of CO2 annually.
On average 5,890 gallons of irrigation water is used per ton of grain produced. At 5 lbs. of grains feed per pound of cattle, that's 13.4 gallons of water per pound of cattle. So the 2,500 gallons claimed is exaggerated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe waste problem is an opportunity. Cattle waste can be turned into biofuel and fertilizer.
On average 5,890 gallons of irrigation water is used per ton of grain produced. At 5 lbs. of grains feed per pound of cattle, that's 13.4 gallons of water per pound of cattle. So the 2,500 gallons claimed is exaggerated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe waste problem is an opportunity. Cattle waste can be turned into biofuel and fertilizer.
As technology improves nano-technology, nano-fuel may be nuclear. A melt-down will be impossible. Nuclear waste may be sealed in a lead nano-envelope. Stealing nano-fuel may not be practical because technology will make it an inefficient way to gather fuel. (Is all nuclear waste accounted for now?)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThinking inside the box makes small nuclear energy seem impractical. But I wouldn't be surprised if there are innovators working on the issue right now.
Your behavior is a prime example of what's wrong with too many supporters of the AGW theory. That hostile attitude & knee-jerk tendency to try to shout-down any voice that expresses the least bit of doubt about even the most extreme AGW claims is why the movement continues to have such a credibility problem. Do you even know how to have a clam, rational discussion of the fact on this subject? Or has it become a matter of quasi-religious fanaticism for you?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf 19,000 -21,000 years ago, Long Island was formed by two, 1 mile high glaciers that moved south, melted, re-froze and melted again; how can we be so certain that a .5 degree increase in temperture was created by man?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy couldn't there be a combination of natural occurences that are causing this? Can someone explain this to me, please?
97% of earth's surface heat is in the oceans. Forget about air temperature. The heat capacity of the atmosphere is only one-thousandth the heat of the oceans. Recent sea level rise was due mainly to thermal expansion of seawater, like the expansion of mercury in a thermometer. The ocean is a gigantic natural thermometer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor the last 7,000 years, the sea level rose 4 cm per century. In the last century, sea level rose 17 cm. What was so unnatural about the 20th century?
Incidentally, atmospheric CO2 rose to 380 ppm in the last century, the highest level in 400,000 years. Incidentally, man started burning large amounts of fossil fuels in the last century. Could it all be coincidence?
"Thinking inside the box makes small nuclear energy seem impractical. But I wouldn't be surprised if there are innovators working on the issue right now."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRefrigerator-sized nuclear electric generators are impractical for household use. The radioisotope thermoelectric generator of Voyager 1 produces only 315 watts of power. That's not enough power to iron your clothes. You need three Voyagers to power your hot iron.
House-sized nuclear reactors are already operating. The nuclear reactor of Sevmorput ship is 4.6 m high and 1.8 m in diameter. That would fit in my room but extend to the 2nd floor. It generates 135 MW. That's enough to power 45,000 homes.
Small nuclear reactors are not necessarily cheaper and safer. But nuclear plants have better safety record than coal plants.
12,000 years ago the Mega fauna of both Americas were wiped off the map of the earth. 35,000 years ago similar results in Europe. What they had in common was the introduction of Homo Sapiens. Enough said?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSmall Nuclear Reactors Are Becoming Big Business
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe race is on to develop refrigerator-size reactors that could power small towns or plants
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_22/b4180020375312.htm
If you care to you will find much more information about this American company.
http://aehi.wordpress.com/category/chinese-nuclear-energy/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBOISE, Idaho, September 8, 2010 – The nuclear industry is now dominated by giant electricity-generating power plants, but many of tomorrow’s nuclear reactors will be small-some as Lilliputian as a refrigerator. They will power entire towns or even individual ships. Daniel T. Ingersoll, a senior program manager who studies small modular reactors at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, predicts rapid growth for these mini-nukes-and big investment opportunities. “Global demand could reach 500 to 1,000 reactors by 2040,” he says.
Please read the results from actual tide gauges, some over a century old & spaced many thousands of miles apart. The gauges refute the results of many modern instrument readings. Australia is the oldest & most stable continent on Earth by the way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/1125_oz.pdf
three quarters of climate change is in your mind
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.world-nuclear.org/wnaupdate/lifecyclegreehousegasemissionsreport.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisComparison of GHG emissions from various forms of power generation including renewables. Nuclear is right up there with the best while also providing continuous virtually uninterrupted power.
"Could it all be coincidence?" - Actually, yes it could. Consider this:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(1) Since the 1950's, CO2 levels have risen dramatically.
(2) Since the 1960's, obesity levels have also risen sharply.
But you don't see anyone trying to claim that CO2 causes obesity. What you've got here is a classic example of the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" logical fallacy.
Like Dr. Strangelove, you're trying to imply causality from correlation & overlooking the possibility that other factors, such as climate change, may have caused both the human migration and the megafauna extinction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are ignoring the fact that CO2 traps heat and we've seen the changes in outgoing and reflected radiation caused by increasing CO2 concentrations. The effect right now is 1.7 W/m2, causing most of the 3/4 of the climate change we've seen so far.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo, I'm just keeping my mind open to the possibility that there could be things other than us causing that CO2 rise.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually that is a good point. About 13,000 years ago a suspected impact took place over North America and created havoc in the northern hemisphere. But I am seeing what I discussed happening today. There was an interesting show on the science networks about invasive species in Florida and the irony is that we are by far the most invasive species to date in this state and you can't blame mother nature for the damage the Army Corp of Engineers did to the Everglades. But Europe it is a given that we did the damage because before us it was doing fine even with Neanderthal who had been there 250,000 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCO2 is not known to cause obesity. CO2 is known to cause atmospheric greenhouse effect. It is not merely correlation. In science, you come up with plausible explanations for an observed effect that is consistent with scientific theories.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is your plausible explanation for unusual warming last century? Remember whatever this natural cause may be, it must not be in effect for the last 7,000 years. It should occur only in the last century.
The small nuclear reactors in the your source use nuclear fission, the same technology used in ships and submarines. Those in spacecrafts use radioactivity and produce little power. The cost of small reactors ($2-4 per watt) are comparable to big ones ($2.4/W)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like what the French are doing. 79% of their energy is nuclear. No fatality due to nuclear accident. And their ITER fusion reactor is set to produce 500 MW in 2019. Nuclear is a viable option.
Your cited article confirms sea level rose 17 cm last century and predicts 15 cm rise this century. Both are high compared to 4 cm per century in the last 7,000 years and consistent with global warming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMr. Watson's data are based only on Australia and New Zealand, and he said:
"What we are seeing in all of the records is there are relatively high rates of sea-level rise evident post-1990, but those sorts of rates of rise have been witnessed at other times in the historical record,"
This confirms global warming in last 156 years and post-1990.
"What remains unknown is whether or not these rates are going to persist into the future and indeed increase."
His prediction says sea level will increase 15 cm. IPCC says more. They are disagreeing how fast warming will occur not if there is warming.
I was unaware of the French development. If it works that will truly be great. I was aware of the process used on spacecraft. Heat & p-n junctions basically. p-n junctions are also what are used for solid state refrigerators/heaters that by reversing the current flow turn the cold junction into the hot junction & vice versa. Also transistors & photovoltaic cells use p-n junctions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do not disagree with much of what you say. I agree for instance that the oceans are like a giant natural thermometer. I also agree that the earth is warming. It is the causes & extent that I question.
"I'm just keeping my mind open to the possibility that there could be things other than us causing that CO2 rise."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAtmospheric CO2 was consistently below 300 ppm for the last 400,000 years. In the last 100 years it went up to 380 ppm. What could be the natural cause that was not there for 400,000 years then suddenly appeared? And the 29 billion tons of CO2 emitted by man every year is not a cause?
29 gigatons represents 1% of the total CO2 in the atmosphere. It is enough to increase CO2 by 2.7 ppm every year. The observed 80 ppm increase last century is equivalent to 30 years of emissions at 29 gigatons per year.
I have an open mind. If you have a better explanation, I will believe.
"CO2 is known to cause atmospheric greenhouse effect." - Based on COMPUTER models. Without an EXPERIMENTAL model equipped with the ability to control all other climate-influencing variables (& we don't even know for sure what all the varibles are yet), you simply CAN'T say with certainty how much CO2 affects temperature. In addition, if you look at the paleoclimate data, you'll see that temperature increases have ALWAYS started BEFORE the CO2 increases.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs to other possible causes, nature has ways of prducing large CO2 spikes without our help (such as the volcanism in the Siberian traps that led to the Permian mass extinction. It also has ways of changing climate that don't rely on CO2. It's generally accepted that plate tectonics has a major role. The formation of the supercontinent of Rodinia caused a massive cooling that led to "Snowball Earth" & its breakup created a similar warming. If North and South America hadn't collided at Panama & blocked flow between the Atlantic & Pacific, we would never have had the Ice Ages. It could be that crustal movement somewhere on the globe hit a tipping point approx. 100 years ago that altered currents & started a new round of warming.
It's entirely possible - probable, in fact - that our activities are having SOME effect on the climate, but it would be egotistical to think that we've somehow become the principal driver of it. The earth didn't suddenly put everything else on hold 100 years ago & say "Let's see what the humans can do with it".
I'm not ignoring anything. I'm simply questioning (a) the DEGREE of effect CO2 has on temperature (b) the EXTENT of human contribution to global CO2 levels and (c) the "CERTAINTY" with which AGW proponents make their claims.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe fact that CO2 can cause atmospheric greenhouse effect is not based on computer models. It is based on the equations of atmospheric physics and supported by observations. In fact we know the exact sensitivity of doubling CO2, it's 1C to 1.2C without feedback. With feedback, it's 2C to 3C. Read the Science of Doom website for discussion of the science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYup temp. leads CO2 in the past 100,000 years. That's all natural CO2 increases because man was not burning large amounts of fossil fuels then. Now it has changed. All the events that happened millions of years ago cannot explain the last 100 years.
Show me the scientific paper of crustal movement in the 20th century that caused global warming. It's pure wishful thinking.
Why is it egotistical to think man is the driver of climate change? Give me a natural cause to explain the spikes in temp. and CO2 last century.
I think if you compare landstat pics from the 70's to the present and the population increase since WWII even you can do some interpolation sans a science treas ties. But if you need the dots connected for you I will see what I can do. I do know that when we decided Bison were a food source for native Americans it wasn't science that wiped them out it was pure mechanics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCut off the migration path with a rail road and then have a free for all on their hides. we are a very clever race when it comes to denial.
There is a cost benefit for change. Those who will bear the cost will be more reluctant to support a change then people who won't bear the cost. They will be hard to convince.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey may even be suspicious of the motives of the people calling for change particularly if the people calling for change will benefit the most from the change.
It seems appropriate to seek an unbiased referee who can sort out the facts and present them in an unbiased way.
An unbiased statistical analysis might actually weaken both sides because the analysis might support a trend but only weakly. This would satisfy neither side.
Yet, even with an unbiased analysis of the data, some people will say "Make the change because green is good" and others will say "Green should be attained without excessive effort."
When catastrophe strikes, people will change. When catastrophe is predicted, people will argue about the prediction. Getting people to change based on a prediction will always be difficult.
Why are we all complaining about CO2 and the demise of the planet when we can exploit carbon, virus tipping and better land management to create a world that will tolerate us. We are so hard wired to only do what we have always done and yet we are blessed (take that statement however you wish) to un-wire our brains, connect the dots, create new jobs and condense our foot print to allow for the rest of life to breathe again and regain the migration paths required. Do any of you look at the other sciences such as nano tubes, virus tipping, graphine based circuits, replacing rare earth metals with good old iron, carbon based composites and ceramics, diamonds performing entanglement behavior or am I the only one. CONNECT the dots. The earth is made up of feed back loops that interact with eachother and we have spent the last 400 years destroying these systems to the point of creating the largest extinction event since the death of dinosaurs and without any collisions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are a lot of dots that need to be connected but they are in our face and the science is real. Graphine walked away with two Nobels last year, Virus tipping was proved feasible in 2006, H2 and O2 production was discovered in sustainable and prolific capacity in 1993 and renewed knowledge in 11/2010 from cyanogen bacteria that only requires chlorophyll as fuel.
Yet here we are waiting for the world to end and doing all we can to make sure it does. I'm not a rocket scientist but I have taught some and I noticed that as a rule scientist as a rule stick to only a little bit of the whole field and very few look up to see that what they are working on fits what another branch is working on. Well it is time for all of you brilliant people to look up and start connecting the dots while we still have dots to connect.
I know that you think that the truth is subjective.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, why be dogmatic?
It is easy to ignore someone who knows that he has all the answers because his perspective excludes other people's point of view.
I have a problem with two issues regarding your comment. But yes I do believe in truth being subjective or at best pragmatic. That said I find that as a species we have discovered that most other living things are hard wired to look at reality in such a way that they have a chance at success. What irritates me is that we cannot extrapolate that problem to ourselves and then transcend it by accepting it and then transcending it. I also am frightened by our tendency to fall into what I have heard quite well put as group thought. Those are the two issues that create the problems that keep us from seeing the light and actually solving our issues. To put is concisely I haven't given up on us yet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn thinking a little more of your statement. I am asking the different branches of science to connect the dots and stop letting big business make the decisions on which direction to go. I have seen multiple uses of carbon, sulfur, iron, hydrogen and oxygen that could create a new world that does not require burning hydrocarbons and will bring the cost of ownership down to where the individual could drive their future. What bothers me is that the dots are overlooked (the concept of hydrogen and oxygen from bacteria has 5 comments compared to the 117 comments this article already had generated) and the article about scientist of the year for virus tipping has all been wiped off the map.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy are the earth changing ideals so overlooked? If that is dogmatic or that truth is subjective then I am missing something. I call it obvious and as big as the side of a barn but we as a race keep missing it. So as a favor enlighten me to the dogmatic quote. I will give you truth is subjective because quantum mechanics would fail otherwise.
You can not convince brilliant people by stating that brilliant people are not connecting the dots.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReally?
Are brilliant people, in your opinion, illogical? Uneducatable? Self destructive? Narrow minded? Duped? Biased? Unscientific?
Brilliant people are very focused. They spend years on research to find and then verify wonderful things. But as a lay person I have seen a lot of real science by these brilliant people that would free us from the bonds of internal combustion and burning of any thing. And the best part is we would not rely on hydrocarbon based technology rather pure organic and in some cases nano based use of viruses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut they don't mingle and they don't spend time on other peoples work. For a good example read Lee Smolin's book the trouble with physics and he is one of the most brilliant people I know. Also these brilliant people are often not in science for the money rather the science. So please do not take that as an insult it is an observation at best. But I do see a lot of dots that if connected would work and all of the parts are in place. And you know what I am not brilliant just esoteric and well read.
First of all let me replace the work esoteric with eclectic. Secondly I thought very hard about being a scientist and it is how I described above. They focus in on a project, bust their ass to fund it, write their thesis on it and move on to something else in their field while fending off peer review. Science is very like religion and very hierarchical so it is very hard for one branch to reach over to another. For example let's use Lee Smolin again (I really love him) and Benoît B. Mandelbrot who discovered how fractals appear all through nature. And just for fun lets through in Richard Feynman but he was dead before a lot of this made sense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat Feynman found was that as more energy at particles the more new particles came out but they had something in common with other known particles. In Smolin's book life in the Cosmos he started with universes may be the other side of black holes and that universes that could produce black holes (they are also strangely the ones that can hold life) they would tend to not fall from the proverbial oak tree. Then instead of tying this to fractal structure he moved off and that was that. Yet when one looks at a fractal based universe that has an Escher type space (space that falls back into itself) it delivers a perfect singularity and removes such nasty issues as infinity and perfection which are very much man made ideas somewhat like God being an old man in a robe that keeps his eyes on all of us.
Mandelbrot truly believed the Universe was fractal based but was laughed at by most so called real scientist which is why I find problems with connect the dots. In the end I think he will have the last laugh.
Anyway I hope that explains why I am not a scientist and why I think by default connecting dots is not in their vocabulary. I do believe some such as Einstein and Freeman Dyson may be dot connectors but they are rare and only one is still alive.
In other news, the scientists responsible for the financial risk model which proves that securitising debt will mean that banks can give mortgages to people who have no chance of ever paying it back, risk free, are back in employment. They've produced a lovely model which correlates all of the warming and cooling agents in our climate and can demonstrably prove that global warming is down to mankind. They said "Although, it's impossible to predict the temperature in my town next week, we can predict what it will be in 100 years or any date when there'll definitely be nobody alive who can remember what we predicted. For the correct remuneration, we can also provide lottery results".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople breathing. There's 7 billion of us now, and the population has really spiked up over a similar time period.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat's the problem with CO2 increasing, anyway? I thought the wierdy beardies like hugging trees, and what do trees like? CO2.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt takes trees to use it otherwise the other synch is the ocean and that is what is happening. I can tell your chemistry is little light so let us look at what happens when you start to add too much carbon to the ocean. It becomes more acidic which jimmies things us for coral reefs and shells which if you follow the dots screws up the food chain. Additionally we are overfishing the oceans already and have pretty much wiped out the alphas or shall we call them the bigger fish. This will end in a Eco-crash which should show itself with large colonies of jellyfish and with the additional runoff of nitrates and phosphates from over farming we will end up with algae blooms that remove the oxygen in the ocean creating dead zones such as what is happening at the delta of the Mississippi in addition to the over use of land and death of the tidal zones which as we saw with Katrina is not healthy to us humans. Let's not forget the oil drilling which is back on the same track as before last summer's warning.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe lesson is that the more we frack around with nature the sooner we do our selves in and at this point I think mother nature is betting on us loosing so she can restart the system again. See the way it works is that we will create our own demise but Mother earth has at least another billion years before the Sun gets so hot the water boils off and then only what is way underground will have a chance. So that is why tree hugging is a nice thing but at this point the damage is so bad that we are in the middle of an extinction event and there really is no taking back the lead in keeping our seat at the table. But your salacious remark deserved an answer. Enjoy the world you have left your children and grandchildren. When the read the history books about how by us hiding our heads in the sand they get a dying world to inherit.
As to your concern we will probably see Yellowstone blow or a 9.n Earthquake off of Cascadia that will trigger at the very least a nuclear winter with the eruptions in its chain and cover most of the US with ash. The Cascadia event is probably about 200 years from now but Yellowstone is over due on its 625,000 year cycle.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso there is some new speculation that frackin for natural gas is leading to earth quake activity in places it has never been seen before. I wonder how many bullets are in the gun we are playing Russian Roulette with?
You bring up a valid point in that in all realistic possible catastrophes we have no plan a,b or c. We have only just begun to seriously study the potential of collisions and it is mostly a self motivated small group of people that have neither the resources or the backing required to find city blasting or extinction producing impact objects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbout a year ago my wife and I saw what at first appeared to be a rather bright satellite except its path was due west to east just after sunset and it was obviously revolving going bright to dark and then it appeared to come in closer with a small tail behind it like a meteor and then it seemed to rise up again and do the light, dark dance until it disappeared over the horizon. It dawned on me that what we had seen was near miss and based on it's brightness it was pretty big and since it was coming from the sun it would have not been on the scope of near miss objects.
Nothing has changed except I now understand that if we are only looking out where it is dark and telescopes are useful we will miss objects such as this and if it did impact whether an aerial explosion or an actual impact there is no plan in place and no place to go. I have seen some beautiful fire balls but this was a creature of a different sort and we missed an interesting repeat of 1908 or worse by a few seconds.
Other issues that are outside our ability to make them go away are Yellowstone (very overdue), Cascadia (about 200 years a most) and the recent discovery that the south pole (Antarctica) is melting a bit faster than thought. CO2 could and probably will double in the next 30 to 50 years based on population projections no matter what feel good steps any one or group of countries decide to do.
I think we should start looking at responses to higher tides, higher or more likely lower temperatures, better agriculture methods and create plans for thing that will happen not may happen.
I expect a great many people of morals will say it is God's revenge on our behavior to which I respond this is how nature works and we may be one of the few creatures capable of realizing the events and even capable of coming up with real steps to preserve our race.
You bring up a valid point in that in all realistic possible catastrophes we have no plan a,b or c. We have only just begun to seriously study the potential of collisions and it is mostly a self motivated small group of people that have neither the resources or the backing required to find city blasting or extinction producing impact objects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbout a year ago my wife and I saw what at first appeared to be a rather bright satellite except its path was due west to east just after sunset and it was obviously revolving going bright to dark and then it appeared to come in closer with a small tail behind it like a meteor and then it seemed to rise up again and do the light, dark dance until it disappeared over the horizon. It dawned on me that what we had seen was near miss and based on it's brightness it was pretty big and since it was coming from the sun it would have not been on the scope of near miss objects.
Nothing has changed except I now understand that if we are only looking out where it is dark and telescopes are useful we will miss objects such as this and if it did impact whether an aerial explosion or an actual impact there is no plan in place and no place to go. I have seen some beautiful fire balls but this was a creature of a different sort and we missed an interesting repeat of 1908 or worse by a few seconds.
Other issues that are outside our ability to make them go away are Yellowstone (very overdue), Cascadia (about 200 years a most) and the recent discovery that the south pole (Antarctica) is melting a bit faster than thought. CO2 could and probably will double in the next 30 to 50 years based on population projections no matter what feel good steps any one or group of countries decide to do.
I think we should start looking at responses to higher tides, higher or more likely lower temperatures, better agriculture methods and create plans for thing that will happen not may happen.
I expect a great many people of morals will say it is God's revenge on our behavior to which I respond this is how nature works and we may be one of the few creatures capable of realizing the events and even capable of coming up with real steps to preserve our race.
You bring up a valid point in that in all realistic possible catastrophes we have no plan a,b or c. We have only just begun to seriously study the potential of collisions and it is mostly a self motivated small group of people that have neither the resources or the backing required to find city blasting or extinction producing impact objects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbout a year ago my wife and I saw what at first appeared to be a rather bright satellite except its path was due west to east just after sunset and it was obviously revolving going bright to dark and then it appeared to come in closer with a small tail behind it like a meteor and then it seemed to rise up again and do the light, dark dance until it disappeared over the horizon. It dawned on me that what we had seen was near miss and based on it's brightness it was pretty big and since it was coming from the sun it would have not been on the scope of near miss objects.
Nothing has changed except I now understand that if we are only looking out where it is dark and telescopes are useful we will miss objects such as this and if it did impact whether an aerial explosion or an actual impact there is no plan in place and no place to go. I have seen some beautiful fire balls but this was a creature of a different sort and we missed an interesting repeat of 1908 or worse by a few seconds.
Other issues that are outside our ability to make them go away are Yellowstone (very overdue), Cascadia (about 200 years a most) and the recent discovery that the south pole (Antarctica) is melting a bit faster than thought. CO2 could and probably will double in the next 30 to 50 years based on population projections no matter what feel good steps any one or group of countries decide to do.
I think we should start looking at responses to higher tides, higher or more likely lower temperatures, better agriculture methods and create plans for thing that will happen not may happen.
I expect a great many people of morals will say it is God's revenge on our behavior to which I respond this is how nature works and we may be one of the few creatures capable of realizing the events and even capable of coming up with real steps to preserve our race.
I do not understand how man made CO2 can contribute "74 percent" of the increase in the earth's temperature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMan made CO2 which is 3% of the total annually generated CO2 which in turn is a whopping 0.039% of the total atmosphere.
This article further goes against studies that demonstrated that more heat is lost to space than the climate "models" predict, that the earth had up to 25% of CO2 in the atmosphere without the earth's temperature being warmer, that there have been hotter times in the earth's history before industrialization.
If the past 50 years have seen a rise, the last 10 have seen a decline in the earth's temperature.
But using a 50 year model of temperature does not look at the millions of years of temperature records that show that the earth's temperature is continually varying and that we are on a gradual upswing not unlike what has happened repetitively during the earth's history.