Almost certainly. Which makes it an exquisite irony that the morons who voted for Trump did so because they thought he would protect them from this sort of thing.
Global Warming
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
- Start date
Almost certainly. Which makes it an exquisite irony that the morons who voted for Trump did so because they thought he would protect them from this sort of thing.
Not quite sure how he benefits from wasps in December, though, which is the real issue here.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a24357/solar-power-cheapest-energy/
Anyone on here that knows their stuff about solar energy? According to this, it is cheaper than coal. At least some solar energy, this cites a plant in Chile.
If true, it should change the calculations on emissions quite a bit - since many electrical solutions today assume coal is what used on the margin.
Anyone on here that knows their stuff about solar energy? According to this, it is cheaper than coal. At least some solar energy, this cites a plant in Chile.
If true, it should change the calculations on emissions quite a bit - since many electrical solutions today assume coal is what used on the margin.
Holy shit...
The sooner we get rid of all this ice the better.
Holy shit...
Guaranteed that next year there'll be some Mail headlines about it having grown relative to 2016.
Don't get that chart. Seems to have no trends, 2007 and 2010 were lowest (discounting 2016) but then peaked back up again? So can 2017 be better than 2016?
It's all the Chinese.
It's all the Chinese.
That color coding really helps.
It helps to show the normal variability (noise) from year to year. It would probably help to have another graph which plots something like year on the x axis and low-mid-high thickness on the y axis.
Arctic:
Antarctic:
So the antarctic had been actually rising slightly year on year to mask the fall of the arctic, but now has completely shit the bed.
Antarctic:
So the antarctic had been actually rising slightly year on year to mask the fall of the arctic, but now has completely shit the bed.
It's like the ice caps saw the US election results and just thought 'feck it'.
Yeah thats pretty damn terrifying. Its alright though its all a liberal conspiracy and there's some scientists who disagree...sigh 
I really wonder if bottle caps will be currency in some grim post-apocalyptic retirement of mine. Supposing it doesn't get bad enough for me to eat a gun first.
Penguins trying to walk in the desert sand will make for some brilliant youtube videos.
I'd put my money on seashells, given that huge swathes of urban populations will be under sea level before too long.
Then bottle caps would be the larger denomination. Unless you're Canadian, then it'd be aluminum can tabs.
my first thought is why the fook is Swansea's location so important 
Poll needed. I'll go with April 18th.
march 11
Trump will make ice great again.
@Fearless seen as you don't want to derail the Trump thread, give us your view of climate change here and why you deny it.
We'll be drinking better wine through our blistered, skin cancer-riddled lips.
To be fair, climate change will re-map the prime wine growing regions. Washington State, NZ, and others will benefit.
There's that ice-age comment I joked about last night!
The stupidity and ignorance of such a huge percentage of human-beings continues to blow my mind. 2016-2017 has reached new levels entirely.
The stupidity and ignorance of such a huge percentage of human-beings continues to blow my mind. 2016-2017 has reached new levels entirely.
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The Nazis denigrated "Jewish " science and Lysenko described Darwin's theory as " bourgeois" science. Is Trump's attitude to climate change along the same lines ?
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Right wingers having a field day with former NOAA official John Bates and his "whistle-blowing" the spin they are putting on this story is quite bizarre, well not really bizarre, pretty much what we have come to expect. Had a long discussion with my dumbass brother and sister as they argued that Global Warming had completely stopped in 1998, while I pointed out that it had only slowed for the period of 1998 to 2013. They are convinced John Bates is questioning the very existence of Climate Change, while I point out his issue is with the methodology and data sets used, not with the entire issue of Climate Change.
I have yet to see an actual quote from John Bates where he denies the existence of Climate Change. Though if anyone can produce one, I would love to read it.
I have yet to see an actual quote from John Bates where he denies the existence of Climate Change. Though if anyone can produce one, I would love to read it.
it's amazing how few people are aware or simply refuse to accept how utterly doomed we are if we continue in this fashion. Mass immigration, mass flooding, mass droughts - we are completely fecked as a species once we hit the 2 degree tipping point, which at this rate, we will hit very soon.
I actually don't want to have children, I genuinely think we aren't going to stop until it's too late, we in the developed world love the lifestyles we have too much. We won't stop driving cars, boarding planes, eating excessive amounts of meat, relying on fossil fuels to fuel our daily needs. We're a selfish, lazy species and the earth will continue on without most of us, probably in the not too distant future.
I actually don't want to have children, I genuinely think we aren't going to stop until it's too late, we in the developed world love the lifestyles we have too much. We won't stop driving cars, boarding planes, eating excessive amounts of meat, relying on fossil fuels to fuel our daily needs. We're a selfish, lazy species and the earth will continue on without most of us, probably in the not too distant future.
So much this.
All this concern about immigration now. Imagine the world once we hit 2-3 degrees of warming.
(Personally, I think Children of Men minus the fertility problems is a pretty good vision of the latter years of this century)
Could be. immigration into Europe will likely be insane. We're the only continent expected to actually get colder. We'll get them from all over Africa and the Middle East. It'll be chaos, and we won't be able to support it (look how bad we are with a single country), the infrastructure and economy here will fall to shit, we'll likely all annihilate each other.
Simply put, 150-200 years from now (if we're lucky) humanity will probably be mostly gone *poof*.
We're already seeing those things happen if, like me, you postulate climate change affecting food stocks/prices played a large part in the Arab Spring as well as the rise of Boko Haram.
Can anyone point me in the direction of academic papers that discuss potential tipping points that might vastly increase/decrease the tempo of global warming? I am fairly clueless about this, but would think about stuff like melting of arctic ice, thawing of perma-frost areas, death of certain algae, changes in the atmosphere or an increased death/growth of vegetation.
To be fair NZ already has lovely wine growing regions. Waipara Springs...
As for global warming. I read this article a while back so I thought I'd post it here.
A grand solar minimum would barely make a dent in human-caused global warming
Posted on 14 August 2013 by dana1981
The Maunder Minimum was a period of very low solar activity between 1645 and 1715, and the Dalton Minimum was a period of low (but not as low as the Maunder Minimum) solar activity between 1790 and 1830. Solar research suggests that we may have a similar period of low solar activity sometime this century.
400 years of sunspot observations data, via Wikipedia
Recent articles in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (translation available here) and in the Irish Times both ran headlines claiming that another grand solar minimum could potentially trigger an "ice age" or "mini ice age" this century. These articles actually refer to the Little Ice Age (LIA) – a period about 500 to 150 years ago when global surface temperatures were about 1°C colder than they are today.
Thus a grand solar minimum would have to cause about 1°C cooling, plus it would have to offset the continued human-caused global warming between 1 and 5°C by 2100, depending on how our greenhouse gas emissions change over the next century. Though in the Jyllands-Posten article, Henrik Svensmark (the main proponent of the galactic cosmic ray-climate hypothesis) was a bit more measured, suggesting,
"I can imagine that it will become 0.2°C colder. I would be surprised if it became 1–2°C"
So these two articles are suggesting that a grand solar minimum could have a cooling effect of about 1 to 6°C, depending on how human greenhouse gas emissions change over the next century. Is it plausible that a grand solar minimum could make that happen?
The short answer is, 'No.'
Fortunately, Solar Output is Stable
We're fortunate that the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface is very stable. Climate contrarians will often ask if we'd prefer if the planet were warming or cooling, suggesting that global warming is a good thing because at least the planet isn't getting colder. This is a false dichotomy - an ideal climate is a stable one. The relatively stable climate over the past 10,000 years has allowed establishment of human civilization, by making it possible to create large stationary agricultural farms because we could rely on stable weather patterns.
What difference would a grand solar minimum make in the amount of solar energy reaching us? Relative to current levels, the Dalton Minimum represents a 0.08% decrease, and the Maunder Minimum represents a 0.25% decline in solar radiation at the Earth's surface. That's how stable solar activity is. That's also why we're playing with fire by increasing the greenhouse effect so much and so quickly. We're threatening the stability of the climate that has been so favorable to our development.
Peer-Reviewed Research Says Global Warming will Continue
There have been several studies in recent years investigating what impact another grand solar minimum would have on global surface temperatures, since solar research suggests it's possible we could be due for another extended minimum. Generally these studies will run climate model simulations under a given greenhouse gas emissions scenario with stable solar activity, then run the same scenario with the sun going into a grand minimum, and look at the difference in resulting global surface temperature changes.
Feulner & Rahmstorf (2010) (PDF available here) estimated that another solar minimum equivalent to the Dalton and Maunder minima would cause 0.09°C and 0.26°C cooling, respectively.
The global mean temperature difference is shown for the time period 1900 to 2100 for the IPCC A2 emissions scenario (relative to zero for the average temperature during the years 1961 to 1990). The red line shows predicted temperature change for the current level of solar activity, the blue line shows predicted temperature change for solar activity at the much lower level of the Maunder Minimum, and the black line shows observed temperatures from the NASA GISS dataset through 2010. Adapted from Feulner & Rahmstorf (2010).
Jones et al. (2012) (PDF available here) arrived at a nearly identical result, with cooling from a Dalton and Maunder minimum equivalent at 0.09°C and 0.26°C, respectively. Similarly, a new paper by Anet et al. (2013) found that a grand solar minimum will cause no more than 0.3°C cooling over the 21st century.
Consistent with these previous studies, Meehl et al. (2013) (PDF available here) estimate a Maunder Minimum would cause about 0.26°C cooling, but as soon as solar activity began to rise again, that cooling would be offset by solar warming. This is a key point, because a grand solar minimum would not be a permanent change. These minima last for a few decades, but eventually solar activity rises once again. Thus any cooling caused by a solar minimum would only be temporary.
A as contrarians argue is the case), it's also insensitive to natural influences like changes in solar radiation. If we assume the most likely climate sensitivity estimate is correct (3°C for the equivalent of a doubling of atmospheric CO2), the equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter is 0.8. But only about two-thirds of that temperature change will be realized over short timescales, due to the thermal inertia of the global climate. So we can estimate:
∆T2100 = 0.7*0.25*0.8*0.67*∆TSI = 0.09*∆TSI
So for a 0.25% change in TSI to Maunder Minimum levels (that's 3.4 Watts per square meter), our crude estimate is that a 0.3°C cooling would result by 2100; right in line with the model estimates.
[paste:font size="4"]The Heating of the Deep Oceans
In the Jyllands-Posten article, Svensmark also disputes the data showing the accelerated accumulation of heat in the deep oceans.
"How can the ocean below 700 meters be heated up, without the upper ocean warming up accordingly?"
This is an increasingly common argument made by climate contrarians, and a bit of a strange one. The data are what they are - we've measured the deep ocean warming, including with reliable Argo buoys for close to a decade now. Even if we couldn't explain how the heat got there, it's there.
5-year average ocean heat content for 0-700 meters (red) and 0-2000 meters (black), from NOAA.
But let's address the question anyway - do we expect to have seen some obvious indication of heat being transferred from the shallow to deep ocean layers?
It's certainly not clear that we should. Consider the analogy of a bathtub. Water from the faucet represents heat entering the shallow ocean layer, water exiting the drain represents heat leaving the shallow oceans and entering the deep oceans, and the water level in the bathtub represents the heat in the shallow ocean layer. If the amount of water entering the tub from the faucet is the same as the amount of water draining out of the tub, the water level won't change. Yet the water still flows down the drain. Climate scientist Gavin Schmidt discussed this point, summarized here.
In short, we wouldn't necessarily see the heat being transferred through the shallow to the deep oceans. However, there has been plenty of warming of the shallow oceans that could have been transferred to the deeper oceans. In our case, the water is flowing into the tub faster than it's draining out.
Svensmark Gets Ocean Warming Wrong
Unfortunately Svensmark appears to be unfamiliar with ocean heating data, saying,
"The thousands of buoys that we have deployed after 2003 to measure the ocean temperature, have not registered any temperature rise."
This is simply wrong, even if we ignore the rapid warming of the deep oceans (as is clear from a simple examination of the figure above). The ocean heat content data can be downloaded from the National Oceanographic Data Center here. The heating trend since 2003 in the upper 700 meters of oceans is 1.4 x 1021 Joules per year, which is an amount of energy equivalent to nearly 1 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonation per second (plus another 3 per second in the deep oceans).
Human Influence on Climate Change is Bigger than the Sun's
The bottom line is that the sun and the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth are very stable. Even during the Maunder and Dalton grand solar minima, global cooling was relatively small - smaller than the amount of global warming caused by human greenhouse gas emissions over the past century.
A new grand solar minimum would not trigger another LIA; in fact, the maximum 0.3°C cooling would barely make a dent in the human-caused global warming over the next century, likely between 1 and 5°C, depending on how much we manage to reduce our fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. While this is equivalent to about a decade's worth of human-caused warming, it's also important to bear in mind that any solar cooling would only be temporary, until the end of the solar minimum.
The science is quite clear that the human influence on climate change has become bigger than the sun's.
Also see an earlier video by Peter Sinclair at Climate Crocks debunking this myth.
Note: This post has been adapted into the new rebuttal to the myth "A grand solar minimum could trigger another ice age"
This is actually pretty impressive
And the overall production mix
So even though gas has taken up much of the slack (which is still better than coal at any rate), renewables have more than doubled since 2012 and nuclear has increased to nearly a quarter.
And the overall production mix
So even though gas has taken up much of the slack (which is still better than coal at any rate), renewables have more than doubled since 2012 and nuclear has increased to nearly a quarter.
Seems the Tories won't give renewables a priority once they remove the shackles of Brussels.
https://www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/energiepolitik-das-falsche-vorbild-deutschland-ld.1290233
The original article is in German but I still link to it for anyone who is interested. NZZ is a swizz newspaper. I'll just summarize the main points. The author argues that the German model shouldn't be adopted by other countries.
Costs:
In 2004, the German minister for the environment promised that subsidizing renewable energy would cost just about 1€ each month (as much as a scoop of ice-cream). In reality prices doubled since 2000 and are now 30% higher than in Switzerland (which is extremely expensive itself). The German government started the „Energiewende“, but consumers have to pay for it.
Why is Energy so expensive in Germany? „Dunkelflaute“: Renewable energy sources are not consistently producing energy (sun/wind). Consequently, Germany needs conventional power plants (pps), that can compensate for this. Germany has to operate two different energy systems. The renewable one and a very flexible conventional one that can balance supply/demand. That is very inefficient and even high-tech conventional pps are often losing money.
On the flip side, at supply peak hours, the renewable energy sources overproduce electricity. This leads to the bizarre situation that there are hours, where you are getting paid to use electricity. There have been 97h, where electricity trade at negative prices at the national energy exchange in 2015; estimates say that this might increase to 1000h in 2022, if Germany continues to build solar+wind pps.
In 2015 the total costs for this policy have been about 150bn€ and it is expected to rise to about 520bn€ in 2025.
Positives news is that a newly planned offshore wind-park is going to operate profitable without Feed-in tariff for the first time. So there are some good news as well.
Energy storage:
At the moment Germany's European neighbors absorb this imbalance. They absorb the spikes (e.g. Austrian and Swiss barrier lakes are „natural batteries“ that absorb a lot of this. Yet, if every country would follow Germany's path, nobody could absorb their added energy spikes.
The key problem for solar + wind energy is the storage of it. Is there any realistic solution for that problem? No. Not on this scale. It is a physical problem; batteries are too inefficient (that is not going to change because it is limited by pretty fundamental physical processes). A German economists once made a back-off-the-envelope-calculation and found out that Germany would have to build about 9000 pumped-storage hydro-power plants (we are having about 40 at the moment). So continuing to go down this road means that our politicians simply ignore reality. It also means that the German model can't be adopted by the rest of the world.
Benefits for the environment:
So now the final question: Is all this effort at least helping the environment? Is it actually reducing CO2 emissions?
Not really. Europe has a common market for emission trading. When Germany reduces its co2 emissions faster than other countries, it becomes cheaper for other countries to produce additional Co2. Just investing all the money (150bn) in buying these certificates and destroying them would have helped the climate more than, what was done with the money.
Well, what happens if we just look at Germany? Emissions for electricity production are reduced by 6% since 2000 (the year the German government adopted the law), despite renewable energy sources producing about 30% of the electricity. Emissions were reduced only so little, because we need more energy (~about 12%) and because nuclear energy is getting phased out.
It is also ignored that a big share of Co2 reduction actually comes from entirely different sources. In total the whole concept is anything but a success and simply can't be adopted by other countries.
Conclusion:
It is a prime example that good intentions don’t make good policy. German consumers are paying a lot for very little. It might make people feel good, but that is about it. Just dumping all this money in basic research would have been a lot more helpful. Or giving it back to the consumer…..afterall poor people are the ones who are hit the hardest by a sky-rocketing electricity bill. Everytime the government uses money, this money can’t be used for something else. Doing something is not always better than doing nothing.
Now the funny anecdote, after all that’s the way to convince people(involve evil rich people to manipulate your emotions):
In 1998 Frank Asbeck founded Solarworld (he is a member of the green party and was involved in their foundation). In 1999 he went public and created one of the biggest producers of photovoltaic modules. Obviously on the back of billions of public subsidies and laws that protected his line of business from competition. Otherwise his business would have never taken off. In the process he became very rich. Very very very rich. He is a lovely fella, who owns his private castle (Marienfels), where he can indulge in his passion: Hunting. Yesterday the company filed for bankruptcy. They are drowning in debt and don’t see any way to continue operating.
He should be the poster child for the German model of saving the planet. Getting rich on the back of creating a system that is extremely expensive and not suited to actually solve the underlying problem.
/I wrote this on my phone while sitting in a taxi, so please ignore the spelling.
The original article is in German but I still link to it for anyone who is interested. NZZ is a swizz newspaper. I'll just summarize the main points. The author argues that the German model shouldn't be adopted by other countries.
Costs:
In 2004, the German minister for the environment promised that subsidizing renewable energy would cost just about 1€ each month (as much as a scoop of ice-cream). In reality prices doubled since 2000 and are now 30% higher than in Switzerland (which is extremely expensive itself). The German government started the „Energiewende“, but consumers have to pay for it.
Why is Energy so expensive in Germany? „Dunkelflaute“: Renewable energy sources are not consistently producing energy (sun/wind). Consequently, Germany needs conventional power plants (pps), that can compensate for this. Germany has to operate two different energy systems. The renewable one and a very flexible conventional one that can balance supply/demand. That is very inefficient and even high-tech conventional pps are often losing money.
On the flip side, at supply peak hours, the renewable energy sources overproduce electricity. This leads to the bizarre situation that there are hours, where you are getting paid to use electricity. There have been 97h, where electricity trade at negative prices at the national energy exchange in 2015; estimates say that this might increase to 1000h in 2022, if Germany continues to build solar+wind pps.
In 2015 the total costs for this policy have been about 150bn€ and it is expected to rise to about 520bn€ in 2025.
Positives news is that a newly planned offshore wind-park is going to operate profitable without Feed-in tariff for the first time. So there are some good news as well.
Energy storage:
At the moment Germany's European neighbors absorb this imbalance. They absorb the spikes (e.g. Austrian and Swiss barrier lakes are „natural batteries“ that absorb a lot of this. Yet, if every country would follow Germany's path, nobody could absorb their added energy spikes.
The key problem for solar + wind energy is the storage of it. Is there any realistic solution for that problem? No. Not on this scale. It is a physical problem; batteries are too inefficient (that is not going to change because it is limited by pretty fundamental physical processes). A German economists once made a back-off-the-envelope-calculation and found out that Germany would have to build about 9000 pumped-storage hydro-power plants (we are having about 40 at the moment). So continuing to go down this road means that our politicians simply ignore reality. It also means that the German model can't be adopted by the rest of the world.
Benefits for the environment:
So now the final question: Is all this effort at least helping the environment? Is it actually reducing CO2 emissions?
Not really. Europe has a common market for emission trading. When Germany reduces its co2 emissions faster than other countries, it becomes cheaper for other countries to produce additional Co2. Just investing all the money (150bn) in buying these certificates and destroying them would have helped the climate more than, what was done with the money.
Well, what happens if we just look at Germany? Emissions for electricity production are reduced by 6% since 2000 (the year the German government adopted the law), despite renewable energy sources producing about 30% of the electricity. Emissions were reduced only so little, because we need more energy (~about 12%) and because nuclear energy is getting phased out.
It is also ignored that a big share of Co2 reduction actually comes from entirely different sources. In total the whole concept is anything but a success and simply can't be adopted by other countries.
Conclusion:
It is a prime example that good intentions don’t make good policy. German consumers are paying a lot for very little. It might make people feel good, but that is about it. Just dumping all this money in basic research would have been a lot more helpful. Or giving it back to the consumer…..afterall poor people are the ones who are hit the hardest by a sky-rocketing electricity bill. Everytime the government uses money, this money can’t be used for something else. Doing something is not always better than doing nothing.
Now the funny anecdote, after all that’s the way to convince people(involve evil rich people to manipulate your emotions
):In 1998 Frank Asbeck founded Solarworld (he is a member of the green party and was involved in their foundation). In 1999 he went public and created one of the biggest producers of photovoltaic modules. Obviously on the back of billions of public subsidies and laws that protected his line of business from competition. Otherwise his business would have never taken off. In the process he became very rich. Very very very rich. He is a lovely fella, who owns his private castle (Marienfels), where he can indulge in his passion: Hunting. Yesterday the company filed for bankruptcy. They are drowning in debt and don’t see any way to continue operating.
He should be the poster child for the German model of saving the planet. Getting rich on the back of creating a system that is extremely expensive and not suited to actually solve the underlying problem.
/I wrote this on my phone while sitting in a taxi, so please ignore the spelling.
The SaltX technology is an interesting thermal energy storage solution with many potential applications. Environmentally friendly, cheap and low energy losses.
It would take me two years to write that on my phone, fair play!