Climate Change / Global Warming Discussion

[ggies07]

Even the conservatives are getting it. The Governator goes off on the climate change deniers: http://www.businessinsider.com/arnold-schwarzeneggers-went-on-an-epic-rant-about-climate-change-2015-12?r=UK&IR=T

Thanks for sharing and he makes some great points.

 

[ggies07]

This is great to see: American Electric Power quits Alec as it helps states move to clean power | Environment | The Guardian

American Electric Power (AEP), one of the largest electricity utilities in the US, is to ditch its membership of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), a rightwing organisation that has consistently opposed the deployment of renewable energy and action on climate change.

 

[beeeerock]

Even the conservatives are getting it. The Governator goes off on the climate change deniers: http://www.businessinsider.com/arno...c-rant-about-climate-change-2015-12?r=UK&IR=T

In recent times I had him pegged as a bit of a right-wing nut, driving a Hummer... I was apparently wrong. I guess it's acceptable to like him again :smile:

I'd really like to hear him wrap his accent around this one again, though, in a public speech... surely he could use these words in another climate change tirade??

 

[ggies07]

I know this seems odd posting this show on this forum, under this thread, but it was cool to see Harrison give a shout-out to Conservation International as his charity and to give a brief summary on why we need this planet.

 

[ORB]

This was released by University of Leicester scientists on Dec. 1st, wondering what the reaction to this was (if any) at the Paris conference.

http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/press-releases/2015/december/global-warming-disaster-could-suffocate-life-on-planet-earth-research-shows

 

[AudubonB]

Wow - Royal Dutch Shell and​ AEP turning their backs on ALEC. Couldn't happen to a nastier bunch of scoundrels.

 

[Johan]

Haha, nice artcile about what the Saudis are trying to pull at the COP21... Wow, just wow:

Saudi Arabia accused of trying to wreck Paris climate deal | Environment | The Guardian

“It is unacceptable for developing countries, like my own, to be asked to participate in this so called ratchet mechanism,” the Saudis were reported to have told the session.

“It was tough, we had to go to every ministry, every part of government. We developing countries don’t have the capacity to do this every five years. We are too poor, we have too many other priorities. It’s unacceptable,” a Saudi delegate said.

Yes poor poor Saudis.

And although Saudia Arabia ranks as the world’s 15th largest economy, it has resisted efforts to grow the Green Climate Fund to help poorer countries cope with global warming – insisting only industrialised countries contribute.

 

[Robert.Boston]

Haha, nice artcile about what the Saudis are trying to pull at the COP21... Wow, just wow:

Saudi Arabia accused of trying to wreck Paris climate deal | Environment | The Guardian



Yes poor poor Saudis.

Although the more reason a comprehensive carbon tax should be instituted, as it would squarely tax Saudi Arabia's primary export.

 

[beeeerock]

Yes poor poor Saudis.

Solving that is quite simple, if they're willing to melt down a few of their solid gold toilets.

Although the more reason a comprehensive carbon tax should be instituted, as it would squarely tax Saudi Arabia's primary export.

Egg timers? What do we have against egg timers??

 

[tigerade]

Wow, that would be amazing if COP21 ended with a deal with a 1.5C target. But call me skeptical that the deal will be that strong.
Paris climate talks: biggest polluters back tougher warming target | Environment | The Guardian

 

[nwdiver]

Wow, that would be amazing if COP21 ended with a deal with a 1.5C target. But call me skeptical that the deal will be that strong.
Paris climate talks: biggest polluters back tougher warming target | Environment | The Guardian

That would be awesome... the biggest obstacle is likely to be the anti-science wing in the US..... but.... what kind of makes me a little giddy is the talk that Trump could sink the entire anti-science ticket if he's at the top.

Imagine that... in a round about way Trump could save the world... :scared:

 

[ScepticMatt]

I'm not anti nuclear if it's done right, (LFTR preferably), but I don't know if it's necessary at this point.

I have mixed feelings about nuclear. One issue nuclear advocates in the US seem to gloss over is nuclear waste management. Very costly at best, potential environmental hazard for decades to millenia at worst. Simply storing it within some mountain ranges is not as permanent as previously thought, as you can see in Germany.

Right now the dealbreaker with the Thorium fuel cycle is U-232 contamination from side reactions. 220 parts per million for the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment.

U-232 is extremely deadly. It has a much shorter half life, 69 years vs. 159,200 years for U-233, so the amount of reactions is orders of magnitude higher as well. To make matters worse most of its radiation dose after 2 years in it's decay chain is in the form of deeply penetrating gamma rays, 85% 2.6 MeV vs 0.36% <0.1 MeV for weapon grade plutonium (Pu-241). Radiation shielding is ineffective against this amount and type of gamma radiation, which means it has to be handled remotely.

The total absorption coefficient of lead for gamma rays plotted versus gamma energy. (Wikipedia)
Note the minimum around 2.6 MeV

http://fissilematerials.org/library/sgs09kang.pdf

 

[JRP3]

I wasn't aware of the issues with U-232.

 

[AudubonB]

Wow, that would be amazing... But call me skeptical....

Wow. Never pegged you as a climate skeptic.

 

[tigerade]

Wow. Never pegged you as a climate skeptic.

My skepticism resides on whether or not 1.5C of warming is even attainable at this point. Even if we did everything possible to move away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the globe will still probably warm past 1.5C. That is because a certain amount of warming is "locked in" based on the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Really the only way to make it to 1.5C is to move completely and totally to renewable energy as fast as possible AND to find a way to remove current greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, which really doesn't exist outside the laboratory for the most part. But hey, a 200 mile EV was a pipe dream 20 years ago. I do believe that 200+ nations are capable of a lot if we put our heads together and make a firm commitment.

 

[beeeerock]

I do believe that 200+ nations are capable of a lot if we put our heads together and make a firm commitment.

For sure. Consider how much was done by two countries, in competition with each other and definitely NOT sharing knowledge for a common goal back in the 60's (space race). From zero to the moon in a few short years. We have the tools, now we just need to find the will to use them.

Where we are now is much like the typical science fiction movie in which the citizens of Planet Earth must overcome their differences and come together, in order to fight an alien enemy from outer space. Thinking and behaving in terms of countries, ethnicity, religions etc, is so incredibly small-minded when viewed at galactic scale.

I have to wonder if we've arrived at the Great Filter... Fermi Paradox.

 

[In2oil]

Global warming caused by CFCs, not carbon dioxide, study says | Waterloo News

 

[tigerade]

Global warming caused by CFCs, not carbon dioxide, study says | Waterloo News

It's CFCs

A paper published in an obscure physics journal by the University of Waterloo's Qing-Bin Lu (2013) has drawn quite a bit of media attention for blaming global warming not on carbon dioxide, but rather on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs, which are also greenhouse gases). However, there are numerous fundamental flaws in the paper, which is based almost entirely on correlation (not causation) and curve fitting exercises.

Lu's hypothesis was disproven very simply by Nuccitelli et al. (2014). Lu argues that the radiative forcing (global energy imbalance) from CFCs matches global surface temperatures better than that from CO2 over the past decade. This is because as a result of the Montreal Protocol, CFC emissions (and emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, which replaced CFCs) have been flat over the past decade, and global surface air temperatures have also been essentially flat during that short timeframe, while CO2 emissions have continued to rise.

However, a global energy imbalance doesn't just impact surface temperatures. In fact, only about 2% of global warming is used in heating the atmosphere, while about 90% heats the oceans. Over the past decade, ocean and overall global heating have continued to rise rapidly, accumulating the equivalent of about 4 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations per second (Figure 1).
So while CFCs might match surface temperature changes better than CO2 emissions over the past decade, CO2 emissions better match the relevant metric – overall global heat accumulation. Since a global energy imbalance influences global heat content and not just surface temperatures, this by itself is sufficient to falsify Lu's hypothesis (though the paper contains several other fundamental problems – see the Advanced level rebuttal for details).

 

[nwdiver]

Global warming caused by CFCs, not carbon dioxide, study says | Waterloo News

That's certainly not supported by any math or science... so I can certainly see why AGW deniers believe it...

The anthropogenic radiative forcing of CO2 is >5x that of CFCs.

 

[tigerade]

Nice article with a cute cartoon to go with it:
Why Climate Skeptics Are Wrong - Scientific American

Consensus science is a phrase often heard today in conjunction with anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Is there a consensus on AGW? There is. The tens of thousands of scientists who belong to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Medical Association, the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society, the Geological Society of America, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and, most notably, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change all concur that AGW is in fact real. Why?
It is not because of the sheer number of scientists. After all, science is not conducted by poll. As Albert Einstein said in response to a 1931 book skeptical of relativity theory entitled 100 Authors against Einstein, “Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough.” The answer is that there is a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry—pollen, tree rings, ice cores, corals, glacial and polar ice-cap melt, sea-level rise, ecological shifts, carbon dioxide increases, the unprecedented rate of temperature increase—that all converge to a singular conclusion. AGW doubters point to the occasional anomaly in a particular data set, as if one incongruity gainsays all the other lines of evidence. But that is not how consilience science works. For AGW skeptics to overturn the consensus, they would need to find flaws with all the lines of supportive evidence and show a consistent convergence of evidence toward a different theory that explains the data. (Creationists have the same problem overturning evolutionary theory.) This they have not done.

A 2013 study published in Environmental Research Letters by Australian researchers John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli and their colleagues examined 11,944 climate paper abstracts published from 1991 to 2011. Of those papers that stated a position on AGW, about 97 percent concluded that climate change is real and caused by humans. What about the remaining 3 percent or so of studies? What if they're right? In a 2015 paper published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology, Rasmus Benestad of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Nuccitelli and their colleagues examined the 3 percent and found “a number of methodological flaws and a pattern of common mistakes.” That is, instead of the 3 percent of papers converging to a better explanation than that provided by the 97 percent, they failed to converge to anything.
“There is no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming,” Nuccitelli concluded in an August 25, 2015, commentary in the Guardian. “Some blame global warming on the sun, others on orbital cycles of other planets, others on ocean cycles, and so on. There is a 97% expert consensus on a cohesive theory that's overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence, but the 2–3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other. The one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking, curve fitting, ignoring inconvenient data, and disregarding known physics.” For example, one skeptical paper attributed climate change to lunar or solar cycles, but to make these models work for the 4,000-year period that the authors considered, they had to throw out 6,000 years' worth of earlier data.