Climate Change

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by science_man_88

people say well wouldn't global warming make more low pressure systems

Isn't it that GW is predicted to cause an increase in average system severity, rather than an increase in number of systems?

So, there'll be more hurricanes, but that's because more systems will intensify to hurricane level instead of topping out at sub-hurricane severity.

[science_man_88]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Isn't it that GW is predicted to cause an increase in average system severity, rather than an increase in number of systems?

So, there'll be more hurricanes, but that's because more systems will intensify to hurricane level instead of topping out at sub-hurricane severity.

yeah cat 5 is supposedly highest the scale should be but if you follow one possible pattern you can get to cat. 18 before the atmosphere becomes a vacuum. yeah well to increase severity of hurricanes increase the pressure in the high pressure systems, the worlds hurricanes will be lower pressure and higher severity. a cat 5 vents at least 11325 joules/m^3 (Pa) to produce it's winds if my math is correct.

[science_man_88]

980-965 = 15
965-945 = 20
945-920 = 25

if this continues you get

920-30 = 890 
890-35 = 855
855-40 = 815
815-45 = 770
770-50 = 720
720-55 = 665
665-60 = 605
605-65 = 540
540-70 = 470
470-75 = 395
395-80 = 315
315-85 = 230
230-90 = 140
140-95 = 45

though if it gets above a cat 5 I'm hoping we can get off earth in a hurry.

ironically it seems that the same pattern fits winds only adding that much:

95+15 = 110
110+20 = 130
130+25 = 155
155+30 = 185
185+35 = 220
220+40 = 260
260+45 = 305
305+50 = 355
355+55 = 410
410+60 = 470
470+65 = 535
535+70 = 605
605+75 = 680
680+80 = 760
760+85 = 845<-breaks sound barrier
845+90 = 935
935+95 = 1030

though 81*10^c/15 (rounded to nearest 5) give even higher estimated winds in the higher categories.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

[c] There really is a huge pro-AGW conspiracy which involves wholesale fabrication of model data.

Now I don't give [c] any credence (although I do begin to worry when powerful political and financial interests get involved, e.g. Wall Street's keen interest in emissions-trading exchanges),

Isn't it interesting that so many anti-AGWers who bring up this possibility fail to bring up the mirror-image possibility, which has a whole lot of actual historical data of past occurrences to support it:

[d] There really is a huge anti-AGW conspiracy which involves corporation (oil and coal in this case; tobacco a couple of decades ago) sponsorship of various "astroturf" and disinformation campaigns to persuade the more-easily-persuadable people to fight against the scientific truth of something that the corporations view as being detrimental to their corporate interests.

Personally, having grown up in The Oil Capital of the World, having worked for oil companies, and having relatives currently working for oil companies, I give [d] lots and lots of credence. There are plenty of decent, honest people who care about our environment working for oil and coal companies ... but not all are in that category.

[ewmayer]

A Bad Bet on Carbon

ON Wednesday, John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman introduced their long-awaited Senate energy bill, which includes incentives of $2 billion per year for carbon capture and sequestration, the technology that removes carbon dioxide from the smokestack at power plants and forces it into underground storage. This significant allocation would come on top of the $2.4 billion for carbon capture projects that appeared in last year’s stimulus package.

That’s a lot of money for a technology whose adoption faces three potentially insurmountable hurdles: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move the newly captured carbon dioxide is woefully insufficient; and the volume of waste material is staggering. Lawmakers should stop perpetuating the hope that the technology can help make huge cuts in the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions.

My Comment: This kind of capture-and-sequester technology strikes me as the CO2-emissions equivalent of liposuction - at great expense it may help with the immediate symptoms (patient is obese), but it does nothing to address the underlying problem (patient needs to eat less), and may even give the patient an excuse to not take the needed corrective measures.

[petrw1]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

A Bad Bet on Carbon

My Comment: This kind of capture-and-sequester technology strikes me as the CO2-emissions equivalent of liposuction - at great expense it may help with the immediate symptoms (patient is obese), but it does nothing to address the underlying problem (patient needs to eat less), and may even give the patient an excuse to not take the needed corrective measures.

Or one of these on every street corner?

http://www.air-quality-eng.com/aqe_8000.php

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

A Bad Bet on Carbon

My Comment: This kind of capture-and-sequester technology strikes me as the CO2-emissions equivalent of liposuction

Good one.

If we'd started funding trial projects eight years earlier, we'd probably have a better consensus on whether CCS was workable. (I.e., those who are still hopeful now would've learned differently by "now" in that alternate history.)

[cheesehead]

Interesting parallel.

PBS is showing a Rachel Carson documentary.

When her book Silent Spring came out, the chemical industry (and their allies) made accusations (such as "McCarthyism", bad science, etc.) against her that were very similar to the accusations now being made against AGW scientists (such as "McCarthyism", bad science, etc.) by the fossil-fuel industry and their allies now.

You anti-AGWers have been duped by an extremely skillful and well-funded campaign of FUD and disinformation by Big Coal/Big Oil into being their short-sighted allies. The guys who crafted that campaign have improved their skills with experience from the DDT and tobacco campaigns earlier.

When you eventually realize that, and wake up to what a ridiculous, absurd, impossible conspiracy theory about AGW climatologists that you've swallowed, what will you do to atone for the years you've managed to delay efforts to take action against AGW?

Your efforts will have succeeded in making our global climate future much hotter than it would have been if we had started migrating away from carbon fuels a decade earlier. Your great-grandchildren will curse you for that delay.

- The chemical industry against Rachel Carson and her warnings about DDT and other environmental threats.

- The tobacco industry against the researchers who warned of the link between tobacco and lung, mouth and throat cancer.

- The fossil-fuel industry against the climatologists warning us about anthropogenic global warming.

Which side of history do you want your great-grandchildren to view you as having been on?

The sooner you wake up, the sooner you can stop making things worse.

[cheesehead]

Here's something for denialists:

If you face reality rationally and confidently, you're more likely to discover ways of coping with the un-pleasant parts than you would when you deny reality.

Example -- a discovery that could make carbon sequestration more reliable:

"Bacteria will keep CO2 safely buried"

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ly-buried.html

Take a dollop of bacterial gloop, add a splash of urea and pour into an underground aquifer. That's the latest recipe for a secure carbon dioxide storage site.

With the world still heavily reliant on fossil fuels to meet its energy needs, carbon sequestration technologies could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But one of the big challenges to making that a reality is ensuring that the CO2 stays locked away underground.

One way of doing that is to physically trap the gas, by pumping it into permeable rock strata beneath a layer of impermeable "cap rock". An alternative technique, called solubility trapping, pumps the CO2 into brine held within the rock, to create an underground reservoir of carbonated water. This captured CO2 can also react with minerals in the surrounding rock to form carbonates that hold carbon in solid form.

Now Andrew Mitchell at Aberystwyth University in the UK and colleagues at Montana State University in Bozeman think microbes could help these rocks hold carbon even more securely.

. . .

[cheesehead]

From Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America:

"Expert credibility in climate change"

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/20....full.pdf+html

Although preliminary estimates from published literature and expert surveys suggest striking agreement among climate scientists on the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), the American public expresses substantial doubt about both the anthropogenic cause and the level of scientific agreement underpinning ACC. A broad analysis of the climate scientist community itself, the distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing researchers, and the level of agreement among top climate experts has not been conducted and would inform future ACC discussions. Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.

"(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,"

and

"(ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers."

[retina]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

"(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,"

So all I need to do is pay a bunch of people to start "actively publishing" on ACC, and of course instruct them to say they don't agree, and then the figures will come down to below 50%. Hmm.

Percentages mean nothing. Incontrovertible evidence, even if presented by just a single researcher, is where the truth is to be found. ACC truth, or otherwise, is not a popularity contest. Is it?