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.
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
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!
So Renato, since you are so terribly fond of the second hiatus, what do you have to say about the first one?
This isn't the first hiatus!
Arrhenius proposed his theory around 1900 as he claimed increasing industrialization with attendant release of the carbonsink would cause a general temperature rise. It did indeed rise from the time of Arrhenius until 1940. Then there was hiatus until the late 1970's. The pre 1940 general temperature rise was nothing out of the ordinary in the CET record. However the post 1970's rise in temperature was without parallel in the CET record dating back to the mid 17th century.
Hansen claims the hiatus is the result of particulate matter from a sudden rush to polluting industry during WW2 and post war, a then again with the rapid Chinese industrialization from the 90's onwards. However particulate levels in the atmosphere would require worldwide constant daily measurement at varying attitudes, an expensive procedure.
And then again it could be anything else as well. The CET record reveals general rises and falls that can last a generation. However since 1900 we've no periods of fall, but merely leveling out.
When we no longer see generational falls in temperature, then we know the Earth is heating up.
But as I said to you few years ago, it wouldn't make any difference to me if the hiatus went for 30 years. Basic GW theory is sound, and eventually Anthropomorphic Global Warming will over ride anything else. AGW is in the young adults book on Earth Science I was reading in the 1960's. I was reading German speculations (trans into English) that were from 1920's in my late teens.
The world spends huge sums on consumer junk, science research gets a pittance, as satirized by the Micheal and Webb look.
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
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 it is the missing sunspots. take your pick.
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?
This is serious question? Positive of course!
How could increasing temperatures within the given ranges cause a negative water vapor feedback?????????
Water vapor increasing at altitude with warming is an empirical fact.
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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.
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!
The amazing thing is the 2080 AD prediction is still on the money.
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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.
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!!!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?
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:
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Originally Posted by Renato1
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!
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. Between 1965 and 1979, just 7 papers predicted global cooling, while 42 predicted warming. Read more about it here. 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!
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Originally Posted by Renato1
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.
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 (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), 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. 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?
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Originally Posted by Renato1
As I said to you yesterday, most everyone agrees that doubling CO2 content, by physics alone, increases the temperature by 1C.
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Originally Posted by Renato1
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.
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. 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) - 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...
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Originally Posted by Renato1
What was Arrhenius's position on feedback? Did he favour negative or positive?
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Originally Posted by Renato1
Cheers,
Renato
Positive.
"I should certainly not have undertaken these tedious calculations," Arrhenius wrote, "if an extraordinary interest had not been connected with them."(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.
Another quote from Spencer Weart's excellent hisory of Global Warming:
"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. 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.
I missed Renato's last reply to me, so apologies for another long one...
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Originally Posted by Renato1
Hi Andy,
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Originally Posted by Renato1
Well, if climate is measured over 30 years - earth cooled till around 1975, then started heating up.
So, some 14 years later, Margaret Thatcher jumped on the Global Warming bandwagon and the ball really starts rolling - "climate" had been determined on just over 10 years.
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.
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Originally Posted by Renato1
Warming continued till 1998 - all those IPCC Assessment Reports, where "climate" related to 23 years or less of warming.
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Originally Posted by Renato1
Now, we're at nearly 18 years of no warming by some datasets, and "climate" mysteriously can only be measured over 30 years!
Not very mysteriously, the WMO has been doing it for 75 years (see Arguez and Vose 2011 for a discussion), 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? 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.
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Originally Posted by Renato1
Regardless, the super computer models are supposed to predict. … But as I stated, 95% have fallen apart predicting the future. It is all very nice to predict after the event that "ENSO "Noise"" is the cause of the pause that nobody predicted before it happened. Was there any mention in AR1 through to AR4 that this was likely?
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 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?
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".
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Originally Posted by Renato1
And was there any mention in AR1 through to AR4 that all the model's predictions - on which the whole planet's economy was recommended to to be turned on its head at huge cost - could be inaccurate because of Pacific Oscillation?
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.
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Originally Posted by Renato1
Perhaps you can enlighten me on one thing...
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,
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.
I 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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
I missed Renato's last reply to me, so apologies for another long one...
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? 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.
Andy, this work also nicely summarizes what your saying here -
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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? 
