Carbon tax scrapped

[clive milne]

My 15 year old step daughter would beg to differ.
The language and conduct shown by members of this forum is an order of magnitude more cordial and respectful than that of her peer group and those considerably younger. She is privy to, and master of a lexicon of colourful vernacular the likes of which has never been posted on IIS. I think I can safely posit that she is not an outlier data point in the distribution curve either.
She would also put it to you (if she were even interested in engaging in a political discussion on an astronomy forum when there is 24 hours in a day where she could be on face book) that censoring debate on a crisis of existential magnitude is in fact more offensive than the occasionally inflamed passions expressed within it.

2c

[clive milne]

Onshore wind is now the cheapest form of new electricity generation in Denmark, undercutting coal power, according to the government’s energy agency.

New analysis shows that onshore wind plants due online in 2016 will cost half the price of coal and natural gas plants, coming in at around 4 cent euro (3 UK pence) per kilowatt hour.

Rasmus Petersen, Danish Minister for Energy, Climate and Buildings said:



Full article here:
http://tcktcktck.org/2014/07/wind-declared-cheapest-energy-source-denmark/63626

[clive milne]

Renewable energy is ready to supply all of Australia’s electricity

AUTHOR


Mark Diesendorf
Associate Professor and Deputy Director, Institute of Environmental Studies, UNSW at UNSW Australia



Even when the wind doesn’t blow, it is technically possible for Australia to get all its electricity needs from renewable sources. David Clarke/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
In a recent article on The Conversation, University of Melbourne Professor Emeritus Frank Larkins wrote that Australia’s targets to increase renewable energy will make electricity more expensive, thanks to problems with consistency and storage.

But Professor Larkins is several years behind developments in renewable energy and its integration into electricity grids. In fact, we already have technically feasible scenarios to run the Australian electricity industry on 100% renewable energy — without significantly affecting supply.

When the sun doesn’t shine…

Professor Larkins states that hydro, wind, solar depend on:

irregular weather patterns, which lead to uncertain and intermittent power output. This is a big challenge for electricity generators and retailers, and it can cost lots of money.
But the problem of “consistency” or variability of some renewable energy sources is now better understood, both from empirical experience with lots of wind power in electricity grids, and from hourly computer simulations of electricity supply and demand performed for many states, countries and global regions.

For instance, South Australia nominally has two coal-fired power stations, several gas-fired ones, and at least 15 operating wind farms. Wind now supplies an annual average of 27% of South Australia’s electricity generation. As a result, one of the coal stations is now shut down for half the year and the other for the whole year. And the state’s electricity supply system is operating reliably without the need for any additional non-renewable energy supply.

In Germany, the northern states of Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern have about 100% and 120%, respectively, of their electricity generated from the wind. Of course they use their transmission links with neighbouring states (including each other) to assist in balancing supply and demand with such high wind penetrations.

100% renewable — without supply problems

But Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) has no such links to other electricity supplies. How could it increase generation from renewable energy without hurting electricity supply?

Ben Elliston, Iain MacGill and I at UNSW have performed thousands of computer simulations of the hour-by-hour operation of the NEM with different mixes of 100% commercially available renewable energy technologies scaled up to meet demand reliably.

We use actual hourly electricity demand and actual hourly solar and wind power data for 2010 and balance supply and demand for almost every hour, while maintaining the required reliability of supply. The relevant papers, published in peer-reviewed international journals, can be downloaded from my UNSW website.

Using conservative projections to 2030 for the costs of renewable energy by the federal government’s Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics (BREE), we found an optimal mix of renewable electricity sources. The mix looks like this:

Wind 46%;
Concentrated solar thermal (electricity generated by the heat of the sun) with thermal storage 22%;
Photovoltaic solar 20% (electricity generated directly from sunlight);
Biofuelled gas turbines 6%; and
Existing hydro 6%.
So two-thirds of annual energy can be supplied by wind and solar photovoltaic — energy sources that vary depending on the weather — while maintaining reliability of the generating system at the required level. How is this possible?

It turns out that wind and solar photovoltaic are only unable to meet electricity demand a few times a year. These periods occur during peak demand on winter evenings following overcast days that also happen to have low wind speeds across the region.

Since the gaps are few in number and none exceeds two hours in duration, there only needs to be a small amount of generation from the so-called flexible renewables (those that don’t depend on the vagaries of weather): hydro and biofuelled gas turbines. Concentrated solar thermal is also flexible while it has energy in its thermal storage.

The gas turbines have low capital cost and, when operated infrequently and briefly, low fuel costs, so they play the role of reliability insurance with a low premium.

No need for batteries

Our research, together with similar extensive hourly computer simulations by others spanning up to a decade from Europe and the USA (reviewed in Chapter 3 of “Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change”), refute Professor Larkins’ statement that “We need baseload electric power [from non-renewable sources] to guarantee security of supply”.

Many regions of the world could operate a 100% renewable electricity system reliably without any baseload power stations. Indeed, in electricity supply systems with a lot of renewable energy, inflexible coal and nuclear baseload power stations get in the way. What we really need to balance the variability of wind and photovoltaic solar are the flexible renewable energy power stations: hydro, solar thermal and biofuelled gas turbines.

This mix needs only a little storage from hydro and solar thermal to maintain reliable supply. With enough fuel, biofuelled gas turbines could also be considered storage. Such a mix has no need for expensive batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.

Using BREE’s conservative projections for the costs of renewable energy technologies in 2030, we find that the cost of 100% renewable energy is A$7-10 billion per year more than that of the existing polluting fossil fuelled system. Although this is a 50% increase, it is likely to be less than the damage caused by the increased frequency of heatwaves, droughts and floods in a business-as-usual scenario.

The renewable scenarios would be economically competitive with the fossil system either with a carbon price of A$50 per tonne of CO2 (reflecting part of the environmental and health damage from fossil fuels) or, in the absence of a carbon price, by removing the existing subsidies to the production and use of fossil fuels and transferring them temporarily to renewable energy.

As an alternative to BREE’s cost estimates, Bloomberg New Energy Finance calculates that wind and solar are already cheaper than new build coal and gas in Australia. If this is correct, 100% renewable systems are already economically competitive with a new fossil-fuelled system.

Australia could be more ambitious

Is Australia’s Renewable Energy Target of 41,000 gigawatt hours per year in 2020 “ambitious”? Not on a world scale. The table below compares several countries' renewable energy contributions, as well as their official long-term targets.


Considering that Australia has much greater solar energy and wind potential than the European countries, its present renewable contribution and its 2020 target are both modest.

Moving to 100% renewable electricity is safe, technically feasible and affordable. It can cut greenhouse gas and other emissions and land degradation, while creating local jobs and energy security. It is ready to go!

Full article with source links here:
http://theconversation.com/renewable-energy-is-ready-to-supply-all-of-australias-electricity-29200

[Renato1]

Proof positive that you don't understand positive outcomes for the good of the citizens as decided by the citizens (something called democracy), rather than by philosopher kings who supposedly know best.
Cheers,
Renato

[Renato1]

The Japs revealed their smarts when they signed the Kyoto treaty. No problem reducing to 1990 levels, they said, we're going to build 27 new nuclear reactors. No complaints from Greens then.

And now that they've closed their reactors and going back to coal, they've put a new CO2 target out, which misses their Kyoto target by miles.

No complaints from Greens - because the Japs have a target, they are doing something about Global Warming!

Gotta love both of them.
Cheers,
Renato

[Renato1]

Hi again Pete,
You seem to miss one very important point - the two score or so supercomputer models all predict past climate without a hitch! (Or they wouldn't get any credibility or funding).

So - they either replicate the past climate either with or without the pacific oscillation.

If they did the simulations without it - well - how can it be so? The oscillation is now considered one of the major factors that is stuffing up their predictions, and they haven't accounted for it.

If they did use it in their simulations of the past - they have to use it in simulations of the future. You volcano comparison is flawed. For all intents and purposes a major volcano eruption is an unpredictable event. But a Pacific Decadal Oscillation is a recurrent event, to which one can assign probabilities, and which can be modelled.
Cheers,
Renato

[Astro_Bot]

You're a fair bit wide of the mark there, Renato.

Firstly, Japan isn't going back to coal. The vast majority of the the shortfall from a lack of nuclear power capacity has been taken up by petroleum (oil), liquified natural gas (LNG) and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) - from 36.8% to 60.8%. Meanwhile coal consumption increased only by a small amount, from 25.0% to 27.6%.

Secondly, the nuclear shutdown is probably not permanent. Two reactors have already been approved for re-start by the Japan Nuclear Regulatory Authority, with the re-starts expected before November 2014. That isn't quite the final decision - there's a series of public consultations planned before the Japanese Government makes the final call and they could yet cave to minority political pressure, if there are seats to lose - but PM Abe is pushing pretty hard for nuclear power. There are 17 more reactors with re-start applications pending. That's not all of them (there are 48 reactors in total), but it's a large chunk of Japanese nuclear generating capacity. The 6 reactors at Fukushima will never be re-started.


Since I've never met a card-carrying greenie who didn't complain about nuclear power, I find this very hard to believe. :)

[Renato1]

Hi Pete,
Very interesting - discrimination on the grounds of religion. Spencer got a medal from NASA for all his work with satellites recording the earth's temperature. Yet you dismiss him as a nutter because of his religious beliefs, and despite his championing of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation as a major factor in climate for decades, which it now transpires is a major factor affecting the climate models.

Oh - and good to see you admitting that your assertion about me and the Heartland Institue was baseless. Very interesting to see also that you dismiss everything from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, despite the fact that all it does is point out to good news buried in the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report - which you can easily verify with a few clicks on Google and then at the AR5 site. Perhaps you are unaware that the IPCC 5th Assessment Report is a document which claims global warming is happening and is bad?
Cheers,
Renato

[Amaranthus]

The Japan situation is problematic but still in flux. I worked recently with a PhD student of mine to evaluate the 4 proposed governmental scenarios, which ranged from a phase out nuclear energy through to an expansion to about 50% of supply by 2035. The original paper is here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513000049

and the blog post covering the results here:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/02/04/energy-policy-substance-wins-over-style/

[Renato1]

Pretty easy to find out for yourself.
Look up the Arctic Sea Ice Anomaly on Google.

You see two important things there.
1. It is still there.
2. It did take a dip, but is now increasing again relative to where it was.

Regards,
Renato

[Astro_Bot]

Hi Barry,

It is still in flux, but the papers you referenced are a bit out of date. The re-starts were only approved last week.

[Renato1]

Good point.

I should have said that the Japanese are using fossil fuels for power generation - the sort of things that emit CO2.
Regards,
Renato

[Amaranthus]

Astro_Bot, yes, these papers are about 1.5 years old, but you'll see that we recommended that a full restart of the existing fleet, and an incremental addition of new Gen III+ reactors, was the optimal strategy for Japan if it still aims to meet its GHG reduction targets. So with the restarts, they're back on track!

[Astro_Bot]

Ah, well, I didn't have time to actually read the whole thing ... ;)

That strategy does sound rather well thought out, though, so no complaints from me. (Edit: I mean in the context of Japan, not necessarily Australia.)

[Renato1]

The temperature drop from the mid 1940s to the mid 1970s was an Hiatus?

That was 30 years of climate cooling, which lead to all sorts of alarmist dire predictions of the coming Ice Age, including a documentary by Leonard Nimoy!

Hansen claims the cause is particulates and aerosols. Others say it is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Others say the missing heat is in the deep oceans (where ther aren't any measurements). Others say it is the missing sunspots. Take your pick.

Oh, and when you say that measuring the particulates would be very expensive - doesn't that raise the interesting question of how Hansen knows that particulate levels and the required amount for them to have kicked-in back in 1998?

As I said to you yesterday, most everyone agrees that doubling CO2 content, by physics alone, increases the temperature by 1C.
Skeptics say that negative feedback ultimately decreases it to 0.5C or less.
Luke warm observational warmists at the IPCC are now favouring that positive feedback ultimately increases it to 1.5C to 2C
And computer modellers at the IPCC are still favouring positive feedback ultimately increasing it to 3C to 4C.

What was Arrhenius's position on feedback? Did he favour negative or positive?
Cheers,
Renato

[xelasnave]

This thread just gets better
I am happy with denier now and thank all who there that aspect around

[wulfgar]

Vot generational period of cooling post war2?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly.svg



This is serious question? Positive of course!

How could increasing temperatures within the given ranges cause a negative water vapor feedback?????????:rofl:

Water vapor increasing at altitude with warming is an empirical fact.



No that's incorrect. Gilbert Plass established for the Anglo-Western world that temperature rise would be 3 to 4 C with CO2 levels doubled and with water vapor feedback. Angstrom was found to be both empirically and theoretically incorrect on this. Angstrom's problem is he viewed atmosphere as a simple medium.......it ain't! The Germans had already worked this out much earlier but their research was lost in WW2. Unless of course somebody found them and Plass was a plagiarist?

Show me where "most everyone" is saying Plass is wrong? This is news to me!:eyepop:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/qf/c/PopularMechanics/8-1953/lrg_greenhouse_effect.jpg

The amazing thing is the 2080 AD prediction is still on the money.



Spencer is a duck that goes, quack, quack, quack! He thinks AGW theory is a conspiracy to halt the second coming. The guy is a loon of the first order!!!:rofl:Might as well get into Rudolf Steiners theories about the second coming, at least Steiner's view on that was intricate and sophisticated and well aware that moderate amounts of carbonic acid wouldn't stop the second coming! And although Steiner was also a loon he was an epistemologist of quality

The critical region in Global Warming is the Stratosphere. So if you got any quaint theories tucked away, first tell me what they got to do with the Stratosphere?

[andyc]

You know, I said to people I wouldn't waste my time on this thread, but it's ... tooo .. tempting! [and thanks for the kind words earlier from a few]. Here's a little debunking for the morning:



This is an old chestnut, which I'm fairly sure I've pointed out to you before: Most research in the 1970s predicted warming, and there is even a paper documenting this - Peterson et al 2008 (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1). Between 1965 and 1979, just 7 papers predicted global cooling, while 42 predicted warming. Read more about it here (http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-1970s-science-said-about-global-cooling.html). Maybe Leonard Nimoy fronted a documentary, and there were cerainly articles in popular magazines like Newsweek, but the scientific community expected the world to continue warming. Guess what ... they were right!



On the causes of the levelling off of global temperature change from about, 1950-1980, it's not just Hansen that thinks aerosols were important, but perusal of IPCC WG1 Chapter 8 (http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_Chapter08_FINAL.pdf) (18MB download) shows they have high confidence in this cause too. On Figure 8.18 (a graph of the forcings in the 20th Century) you can also see that the Sun is well accounted for, its variations being the tiny wiggles accounting for less than about 10% of current radiative forcing. Reading the IPCC does make quite a change from reading denier 'literature' that often includes the magical thinking fo the mystery unobserved, unmeasured "natural variations".

And Renato and I both know that there are measurements for the ocean down to 2000m (Levitus et al 2012 (http://data.nodc.noaa.gov/woa/PUBLICATIONS/grlheat12.pdf)), and the IPCC figure I posted earlier), to which Renato has been pointed more than once. This contains almost all the energy measured when we talk about the Earth having accumulated more heat in the past 15 year than in the previous 15 years - measured heat, not inferred, or guessed or imagined. The heat is not only directly observed, but also manifests itself as sea level rise, which continues to rise rapidly (http://sealevel.colorado.edu/). If the oceans had stopped accumulating heat, we would expect to see a massive deceleration within that graph. Why do you continue repeating debunked myths, Renato?



How, for the love of clear skies, do you get glacial-interglacial changes with a climate sensitivity of less than 1.5C/doubling? Palaeoclimate does not work with low climate sensitivity. The forcing for glacial-interglacial change is both understood (orbital), and small, and provide the pacing for changes like glacial-interglacial cycles. CO2 and other feedbacks amplify this process, providing the variations (e.g. Shakun et al 2012). And watch Richard Alley's lecture about CO2 acting as a teperature control knob too (http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml). He's politically a Republican, but one of the best science communicators on the planet, and a great scientist.

Go and re-read Knutti and Hegerl (2008) (http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/ghegerl/KH2008.pdf) - another one I've pointed you to multiple times, and go and re-read Figure 3A, and please, please do come back and tell me that it's only "computer modellers at the IPCC" who suggest sensitivities above 2C/doubling. Because then I will know how honest you are with your assertions...



Positive.

"I should certainly not have undertaken these tedious calculations," Arrhenius wrote, "if an extraordinary interest had not been connected with them."(18) (http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#N_18_) The prize sought by Arrhenius was the solution to the riddle of the ice ages. He focused on a decrease in CO2 as a possible cause of cooling, and found that cutting the level in half could indeed bring an ice age. But he also took the trouble to estimate what might happen if the amount of gas in the atmosphere, at some distant time in the past or future, was double its present value. He computed that would bring roughly 5 or 6 °C of global warming." from The Discovery of Global Warming (http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#L_0821).

Another quote from Spencer Weart's excellent hisory of Global Warming (http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm):
"The next major scientist to consider the Earth's temperature was another man with broad interests, Svante Arrhenius in Stockholm. He too was attracted by the great riddle of the prehistoric ice ages, and he saw CO2 as the key. Why focus on that rare gas rather than water vapor, which was far more abundant? Because the level of water vapor in the atmosphere fluctuated daily, whereas the level of CO2 was set over a geological timescale by emissions from volcanoes. If the emissions changed, the alteration in the CO2 greenhouse effect would only slightly change the global temperature—but that would almost instantly change the average amount of water vapor in the air, which would bring further change through its own greenhouse effect. Thus the level of CO2 acted as a regulator of water vapor, and ultimately determined the planet’s long-term equilibrium temperature."

Positive feedbacks were obvious even to 19th Century scientists! Of course, maybe Arrhenius was in some grand global conspiracy to raise 21st Century taxes and hurt those poor, honest 21st Century fossil fuel companies...

So Renato, you're posting a huge pile of myths. I'd advise any readers, if they see a climate posting by Renato, to look at the list of myths at Skeptical Science (http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php). It'll be on there somewhere! I laughed out loud at your claim that Arctic ice is somehow recovering too, yet another 'noise' vs 'signal' fail from you.

And again, if anyone wants to discuss any of the papers, especially those about the cryosphere or palaeoclimate data, or modelling (the areas in which I did research), but also those about forcings, feedbacks, ENSO or any of the myriad things that Renato and friends misinterprets on a daily basis, then please drop me a PM (Renato's welcome too, as it's not personal, he's just the one posting the most myths). There's no conspiracy in climate science, just as difficult reality that some people are unwilling to accept.

[el_draco]

Woops :rolleyes:

Nothing like being a die-hard optimist....:question:
... and you STILL haven't answered my question Renato!!??

[andyc]

I missed Renato's last reply to me, so apologies for another long one...



This is fun! You seem to be under the impression that the only evidence used for global warming is surface temperatures. Wow! That's news to Arrhenius, Tyndall, Plass and all the the others who worked out the physics of the CO2 greenhouse effect many decades ago.



Not very mysteriously, the WMO has been doing it for 75 years (see Arguez and Vose 2011 for a discussion (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2010BAMS2955.1)), with the first such standard 30-year period being 1901-1930.

Again with the cherry-picked El Nino of 1998! Are you under the impression that El Nino events do not lead to a temporay high in annual temperatures? And you are unaware that starting a short timeseries from an extreme high in the noise will skew the trend? Why are all the La Nina years since 2001 warmer than the El Nino years before 1998? Could there be an underlying trend that you refuse to see (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20140121/gistemp_nino_100.jpg)? A trend that is plainly evident if you use 30 years from 1984 to 2014. And a trend for which we have a very strong physical understanding of the cause.




Another fail by you, and not by the models. Just because you hadn't grasped this does not mean that the science community hadn't grasped this. None of the CMIP5 models have "failed". Have you ever looked at individual climate model runs? Did you know that they are not smooth warming trends where each year is warmer than the last? None have ever been like that. Each one has "pauses" every time modelled El Nino-dominated phases are followed by the reverse, just like we see in the real world. A cold fortnight in October doesn’t invalidate the progression of Spring :lol: But because ENSO is not a regular oscillatory process (like the annual cycle), it is not predictable, and so each model run has highs and lows in different places about the underlying trend. Warmer periods were dominated by El Nino, cooler years by La Nina, just like the real world. We expect big El Nino years to be towars the upper band of modelled variation, and big La Ninas to be towards the lower bounds. Earth's actual climate is effectively one single model run, where the years centred on 1998 were above the trend, and recent years were below the trend, due to the prevailing phase of ENSO. What do you think will happen when we next get one or more El Nino years? Where did the extra heat come from?

Actually, since we've just had the hottest April, the hottest May, and the hottest June on record (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/6) as a result of some very marginal El Nino-like conditions in the Pacific, I think you know the answer to that one. Previous record-setters were after full-blown El Ninos, such as 2010.

Perhaps you could point to the place where climate modellers in the 1990s said that they would be able to predict the future evolution of ENSO? You don't appear to understand what the models are designed to do, yet you cast aspersions on them and the model creators. You have persistently failed to understand the results of Risbey et al 2014. Which is not surprising, because it involves the collapse of both of the myths "No warming since 1998" and "The models are wrong".



The whole planet’s economy? Huge cost?? Because there’s clearly no jobs in the world if our energy comes from low carbon sources!! And yes, I’d prefer a slight (even a large) reduction of GDP to the full consequences of a massive negative carbon isotope excursion. Anything else is just selfish and very poor risk management.

Poor old Roy Spencer and others can't posit a mechanism by which an oscillatory process like the PDO or ENSO might add energy to the global climate system over an extended period, or why this suddenly started happening in the 20th Century. They just shout with varying degrees of politeness "Magical cycles"! and hope that nobody would notice that it's not physical, nor consistent with all our vast array of oceanic and atmospheric observations.



You know what, I've enlightened you on many things. That I have to keep re-enlightening you about the same, really obvious things over and over again rather suggests that you are not wishing to gain further understanding of the physical processes going on in the Earth system. If you stopped getting what you think is climate science from denier blogs, then perhaps you could even enlighten yourself with some real, published research science. I heartily encourage it even if the results are, to both me and you, very uncomfortable reading.

Apologies to others for the long posts, I probably ought to recuse myself from this thread, after all, I feel like I've repeated some basic points way too many times! But I'm always open to a friendly PM question or two.
Clear skies,

[casstony]

On the issue of renewables disrupting the economy, Wall Street and London bankers are a greater threat to the economy by orders of magnitude. Putting them all in prison would do a great deal to help the planet.

[el_draco]

Gawd No! Love a good read :thumbsup:

[xelasnave]

Dito

And polite as well.
Well done:thumbsup:

[wulfgar]

You're kind, I'd go Stalin on them.

[doppler]

Queensland was once a vast tropical rainforest (in warmer times), now there are only remnant's of forest left along the coast and the old forests are buried underground as coal. The Earth was warm before, are we not just recycling the carbon?

[el_draco]

Absolutely, but you might read a bit about the Carbon Cycle. Most of that fossilised carbon was once floating around in the atmosphere, BEFORE the atmosphere was capable of supporting the current ecology of the earth... including us.

[colinmlegg]

Andy, this work also nicely summarizes what your saying here -


http://spaceweather.com/swpod2009/04sep08/leanrind.jpg?PHPSESSID=38uu553vhgaj 4omhqhdvoq1uv6

[doppler]

The dinosaurs and rain forests were doing ok for a few millennia before it cooled down too much (the ice age?)

My question is : is climate change life threatening or just an economic inconvenience?

[Amaranthus]

Correction: the recent 'ice ages' (glacial-interglacial cycles) are a Quaternary phenomenon, i.e. the last 2.5 million years. The dinosaurs got knocked off by a bolide strike about 65 million years ago (well, all except from the birds); at the time of the late Cretaceous, Earth was 4-6C warmer than today.

[colinmlegg]

It depends on the rate of change. If gradual, ecosystems/societies adapt. If rapid, things die off. We've seen examples of both throughout Earth history.

[doppler]

Its only theory about the dinosaur demise, but we would survive with a lot warmer earth? I moved to Qld because I like warmer weather, but its been unseasonably cold this year. :)

[el_draco]

Depends on the extent. There is some "wiggle room" in which some systems and species can adapt but beyond that we get systemic collapse of ecology, change of natural systems like weather cycles, rainfall patterns, growing seasonss. Loss of many, many species. Anything listed as Vulnerable will probably go.

From a human perspective, think about the redistribution of agricultural areas and massive drop in production, unpredictable and violent climate, changed rainfall patterns. etc. On a catastrophic level, the Monsoon may fail completely, ocean level rise will cause flooding of many cities, such as London,, acidification and subsequent collapse of oceanic ecology. Possible changes to ocean currents including the Gulf Stream.

The one that worries me a hell of a lot is the thawing of the permafrost across Siberia. If that happens, Carbon Dioxide wont be the issue, Methane will make that look like a minor blip.

Before the worst of it though will come the human response to shortage of resources, war, disease, famine. History is resplendent with examples.

Unfortunately, the list of possible consequences is long and not well understood but the very possibility of any of this happening should be enough to scare the bejesus out of everyone, Still the num-nuts stick their heads in the sand and say "It just isn't so"...:shrug:

[Amaranthus]

The K-T boundary asteroid/comet crater found in the Yucatan is not a theory, it is an observation. The vast bulk of evidence now points to post-impact climate and atmospheric effects as being responsible for the die-offs.

Some areas on Earth would be tolerable or even pleasant in a 4-6C warmer global climate, provided one could cope with rapidly rising sea levels and more energetic weather events. However, many areas of the world, not so, due to severe web-bulb physiological constraints: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/04/26/0913352107

[wulfgar]

Certainly, we would survive on a warmer Earth. Plass predicted we would hit CO2 at 560 ppmv in 2080 AD which looks rather likely. Arrhenius assumed that level of CO2 would prevent the occurrence of another Ice Age. The exact nature of the climate consequences remain speculations.
However once we reach 800 ppmv we are facing the extinction of Man and most mammal species. You have plans that could deal with that one?

[Amaranthus]

I don't think it's credible to say 800 ppm equates to extinction of humanity, but that level of GHG forcing would cause major climatic disruptions, over a century-to-millennial time-scape, compared to the Holocene climate, and would thus require substantial technologically driven adaptation, and likely result is a lot of extinctions due to synergies with land-use change, etc.

[doppler]

If you guys are correct this is more serious than most realize. Once the underdeveloped countries catch up with us, I think we will all be stuffed.

[el_draco]

Catch up? You mean economically? Sorry, NOT GONNA HAPPEN! More likely, We will head South.

[colinmlegg]

Yes. Here's a study of the possible consequences of 'burning all the fossil fuels'

http://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/what-if-we-burn-all-the-fossil-fuels/

[wulfgar]

What species are you? I'm a mammal, healthy air for me ends at CO2 800 ppmv. At that point advanced mammals begin to suffer acidosis of the blood as a chronic condition. This leads enviable births, birth defects and an increase in chronic diseases. 800 ppmv may not be extinction itself but it wouldn't take much more to lead to extinction.

If you're so fired up on this CO2 business, then how come you're oblivious to this?

CO2 is a waste product for animals, once the ability to expel it is compromised the end is nigh!

It depends on the species, primitive mammals, avians and reptiles can tolerate higher levels. However a level like 5000 ppmv would see the extinction of most animal forms beyond single cell.

[doppler]

Like I said we are stuffed, the rest of the world will do whatever it wants, we have to do what is best for us and our family. I am close to retirement we will buy a property (self sufficient acreage) its just a matter of northern or southern Aust.

[el_draco]

By all means head NORTH. Tasmania is a horrible, backward place. Bogans and Liberals everywhere and trees, Damn trees, no money in them....:P

[doppler]

You are just trying to keep us away from tassie ha ha but with a a bit of global warming up it might be a nice place.

[el_draco]

Not if Little Willy Hodgman has his way... and remember Herr Abetz, You'll have to listen to him whining about how AGW is a Greenie conspiracy!! :mad2:

Besides, Mackay? You're almost as North as you can get. Why travel so far to get South? Waste of fuel!

[doppler]

Hey I am a greenie from way back (before it was a political party) Tassie is nice , I have family there , its just a matter of predicting the future and picking the place to migrate to.

[Astro_Bot]

Mars? :P

[doppler]

Na too much red sand like WA , that red dust gets in everything.

[doppler]

Some will survive

[el_draco]

I predict the rest of the world is screwed... Come HOME brother!
Help dig the ditch deeper to keep the mainlanders from boat peopling us to death... :lol::lol:

[doppler]

[QUOTE=el_draco;1102622]I predict the rest of the world is screwed... Come HOME brother!
Help dig the ditch deeper to keep the mainlanders from boat peopling us to death.

We should be screwing the rest of the world and setting our selves up for the future like they are doing to us

And unfortunately global warming means more cloud cover :(

[2stroke]

Have you herd about the economy? If you had any idea what it was about besides making UN-educated assumptions you would see its not about gas emissions but rather pure economics. By the way whats our emissions vs china vs the USA?

[Amaranthus]

Scientifically, that is complete nonsense - you are an order of magnitude out. Very mild intoxication (drowsiness) doesn't start to become apparent until levels exceeding 10,000 ppm.

[casstony]

I've reported posts 301 and 302 so they should disappear. Hopefully no need to respond to them.

[2stroke]

It's good to report the truth......:welcome:

Please avoid topics about global warming, race, politics or religion. These can be very sensitive topics, and people are usually very polarised about these issues; it can be very easy to take things the wrong way, creating arguments. Threads about these topics often end badly - usually being locked, with posts being deleted, or with people being upset.

This really upset me ;( Reporting the whole thread :(

[Astro_Bot]

Hi Barry and wulfgar,

The levels at which effects occur - talking of humans anyway - can be variable and there are short term and long term exposure effects - and that's about the limit of my prior knowledge.

Obviously, I'm no expert - I did find a figure that suggests drowsiness could occur as low as 1000ppm, even though that's considered "normal" in some spaces, but generally "adverse health effects" start around 2500ppm. Mind you, I'm a bit mystified at how the maximum allowed 8-hour concentration is above the level at which "adverse health effects" can occur ... :shrug:



Still, let's not get distracted - dangerous climate change, and a whole host of related environmental effects, kick in way below the levels that directly harm humans.

BTW, I wouldn't mind some of that general drowsiness right now - I'm still up at 2:30am. ;)

[wulfgar]

You should really think about things before making statements like that. Drowsiness can set in at levels like 1,200 ppmv, it depends on how much time you're exposed for. The maximum legal limit in an 8 hour shift is 5,000 ppmv.

But in all these cases you have a period of time in "fresh air" to get rid of excess CO2. "fresh air" is defined as sub 800 ppmv.

I'm not referring to the scale of warnings that relate to temporary exposure. If the entire atmosphere is 800 ppmv, then animal organisms are condemned to their life cycle. Adverse environmental conditions that are life long are what wipe out species.

At the present rate the Earth will reach 800ppmv in a couple of centuries and then climb above that. Then you can kiss Man and most mammal species good bye. All these species evolved in an atmosphere that has prevailed for the past 50 million years.

This was noted in the German scientific world in the immediate decades after Arrhenius. But Anglo-Saxon scientific culture has already passed its height and on the way to idiocracy.

People can live at 9,000 ppmv for prolonged periods, but conditions that lead to chronic malfunction are building up, this is reversed by "fresh air".

As I said, think about it!

[wulfgar]

There's no distraction here, "dangerous climate change" is speculation. There is no solid evidence and the alarm is based on Pascal's wager. However the 800ppmv plus condition can wipe out man with greater certainty than multiple nuclear wars.

By all means lets not be distracted by a condition that is certain to wipe out man as a species, and continue with the ones that remain speculation.:question:

[Renato1]

This Global Cooling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
Cheers,
Renato

[Renato1]

Well, if what I said is incorrect, then the IPCC 5th Assessment Report is incorrect.

It is there in black and white - the range for Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity adopted by the IPCC is 1.5C to 4.5C. And ECS is the result of a doubling of CO2.

So, are you correct or is the IPCC correct or someone else?

I won't be spending any time defending IPCC decisions, so if you disagree with them, please refer it to them.
Cheers,
Renato

[Renato1]

Jeepers, you must look really hard to find Ice anomaly graphs, that try to put the worst interpretation on Arctic Ice.

The very first one that Google shows up is the one I've attached, which is exactly as what I described in my response to you.

As I said, this graph shows that the sea ice is still there and that it is recovering after a dip.
Cheers,
Renato

[Renato1]

Darn you are making it hard for me to reply to you Andy - when I hit reply with quote, your quote doesn't come up, and I have to figure work arounds!

Good sidestepping of the issue - you quote 30 years at me as being required for measuring climate, I point out the whole heating scare got started on less than 14 years, and that it didn't even run for more than 23 years before it petered out - and you don't address it.

Instead you go over old ground about the global cooling alarmism that you claim scientists weren't involved with.

As I pointed out to you last time, Wikipedia covers it well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

And the notion that scientists weren't involved with it are preposterous.
Regards,
Renato

[Renato1]

Andy,
Both you and I know that 2000m is not the deep ocean, and if all the missing energy were in the water down to 2000m depth, the 5th Assessment Report would have said so, loudly. But they didn't because it can't be accounted for to that depth, which is why they surmised it went into the deep ocean where there aren't any measurements.

I recollect citing reference to the missing heat being in theDeep Ocean in AR5 in our last discussion, and all you could do was give me Cook's supposition's at Skepticalscience. I'll be happy for you to find where in AR5 the IPCC backs up Cook's claim and your claim above that the missing heat is at 2000m depth and above. As far as I am concerned, you have debunked as much as last time - zilch, because you haven't supported it with anything.

Back to the Hiatus.
Last time we discussed this over a month ago, you claimed the Hiatus was definitely accounted for by heat not staying in the atmosphere and mysteriously going into the ocean. Which you re-iterate above.

And then you go along with Hansen and the aerosols/ particulates.

And five pages of posts back, you assert the Hiatus is definitely accounted for by ENSO noise.

Have you noticed that you are backing three entirely different things? Yes, two are somewhat related (water), but they are different mechanisms.

What are you going to be backing as the cause of the Hiatus next month?

Oh, and I forgot, you also claim there is no Hiatus and that it's cherry picking - so what does the heat in the oceans and the aerosols/particulates have to do with something that supposedly doesn't exist?
Cheers,
Renato

[Renato1]

Hi Andy,
Given that the IPCC now give a range for ECS of 1.5C to 4.5C in AR5, perhaps you can take it up with them why the 1.5C figure is rubbish.
No point arguing it with me, I don't want to defend the IPCC.
Regards,
Renato

[Renato1]

..

[Renato1]

Hi Andy,
Using the end point of now and working back gives a valid trend.

See attached RSS satellite dataset. The zero trend goes back 17 years and 10 months to before 1998. And there hasn't been any statistically significant warming for 26 years using that dataset.

I didn't notice the 1998 El Nino figure being disregarded by the warmist alarmists at the time - did you accuse them of cherry-picking? Weren't they measuring the trend to the then end point?

Well, how about we just entirely disregard the 1998 figure?

We're then left with 15 or 16 years of zero warming by the RSS dataset attached. Where's the cherry-picking?

You say, "A trend that is plainly evident if you use 30 years from 1984 to 2014."

You seem to be in entire disagreement with the IPCC who refer to an "Hiatus" - which means a pause or gap in continuity.
Regards,
Renato

[Renato1]

Hi Andy,
All the models give an upper and lower bound to their predictions. The models which I say have failed all have lower bound predicted temperatures which are higher that what we have actually had now for 15 years or so. Only two of them still have lower bound predicted temperatures which accord with actual observation.

You say all the models haven't failed - presumably you mean they are correct. I'd love to know what you think would qualify as them ever being incorrect, since prediction not being in accord with observation doesn't appear to be a criterion.

Are you trying to misdirect by pointing to the hottest April, May and June on record? I mean it sounds impressive, but it misdirects from the obvious - by the models, they and all the other months, on average, should have been hotter.

Or may it not also have been pertinent to point out that. for example, what you linked to was not the definitive "record"? May 2014 for example, was indeed the hottest for the NOAA, but was only the third warmest for the UAH Satellite dataset and sixth warmest for the RSS satellite dataset.
http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/uah-and-rss-report-a-warm-may-according-to-satellite-data.html

The notion you express that the El Nino Southern Oscillation cannot be modelled into predictions is absurd. It is a recurrent event. One must be able to assign a probability to its occurrence, and a probability to its strength, and model those. Computer modelling is all about putting all those known probabilities into the models - it least it was when I was doing a post graduate Diploma in Operations Research. Maybe things have changed?
Regards,
Renato

[wulfgar]

Sorry, please show the "almost everyone" you claim? The vast majority in the report concur with Plass.

There was one model which claimed a climate sensitivity of 1.5 C. How does one report become "almost everyone" I would be fascinated to know?
If you said one guy claims 1.5C I would've agreed with you. But you exaggerated and one report for you equals "almost everyone".

[wulfgar]

Renato, general ocean below 2000 meters as a static medium will neither heat or cool under normal range conditions. You seem to be unaware of that? If energy is applied to it then that must turn into movement.

[el_draco]

Draw a line of best fit on the graph you have provided AND THE TREND IS DOWN !! Your graph also stops at 2008 where there was a miniscule spike. The ice plummeted again after that. Please refer to the 3 graphs I attached

ARE YOU BLIND????? :screwy::screwy:

... and YOU STILL HAVE NOT ANSWERED MY QUESTION Renato

[sheeny]

Once again guys, these sort of discussions rarely end well. If you really want to get into these climate, religion, political type discussions, perhaps find a more suitable forum.

The thread is closed.

Al.