Originally Posted by Justin '77

Not just that; there's also the fact that batteries are full of all sorts of nasty stuff. Plus they're not, like, pooped out by unicorns -- there's the whole mess of manufacturing them, too. Which is far from eco-friendly.

As is mining uranium. My 1948 father believes that nuclear, coupled with electric cars, is the answer to everything.

Originally Posted by Earl and Mooch

As is mining uranium. My 1948 father believes that nuclear, coupled with electric cars, is the answer to everything.

It is, but not in the fission sense of nuclear. Fusion is not that far away, and the fuel is virtually unlimited. Batteries may not be as simple, but the chemical options for batteries are many, as are supercapacitors.

We'll see.

Amateur dreams up way to curb warming of planet

SCIENTISTS TEPID

But at least 1 expert says his water-vapor plan may have promise

by Greg Gordon


Inventor Ron Ace "is making public a U.S. patent petition for what he calls the most 'practical, nontoxic, affordable, rapidly achievable ' and beneficial way to curb global warming and a resulting catastrophic ocean rise.

"Spray gigatons of seawater into the air, mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, and let Mother Nature do the rest, he said.

"The evaporating water, Ace said, would cool the Earth in multiple ways: First, the sprayed droplets would become water vapor, a change that absorbs thermal energy near ground level; the rising vapor would condense into sunlight-reflecting clouds and cooling rain, releasing much of the stored energy into space in the form of infrared radiation.

"Although it may sound preposterous, a computer model run by an internationally known global-warming scientist suggests Ace's giant humidifier might work.

"Kenneth Caldeira, a climate scientist at...at Stanford University, roughly simulated Ace's idea...on a model that is used extensively by top scientists to study warming.

"The simulated evaporation of about one-half inch of additional water everywhere in the world produced immediate planetary cooling effects that were projected to reach nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit within 20 or 30 years, Caldeira said.

"Ace said the cooling effect would be several times greater if the model were refined to spray the same amount of seawater in strategic locations.

"He proposed installing 1,000 or more devices that spray water 20 to 200 feet into the air, depending on conditions, from barren stretches of the West African coast, bluffs on deserted Atlantic Ocean isles, deserts adjoining the African, South American and Mediterranean coasts and other arid or windy sites. To maximize cloud formation, he'd avoid the humid tropics, where most water vapor quickly turns to rain.

"It would be relatively easy to design spraying equipment to carry out his plan...but it would be a major international effort to install 1,000 large spraying devices, or thousands of smaller ones. If fully deployed, the 15,800 cubic meters of sprayed water a second would be equivalent to the flow of the Mississippi River and would require enough energy to power a medium sized city.

"However, spraying only a portion of that amount for a decade would be enough to cool the equivalent of current human-made global warming, estimated to range up to 0.76 degrees Fahrenheit, Ace said. Such cooling, he said, could buy humankind decades of times for more research and precision.

"Depending on its scale, the water-evaporation scheme would cost anywhere from hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars a year, but Ace said it would have 'a net positive financial effect.' It would prevent global warming-related damage, he said, and the extra rainfall would provide the cheapest way to transport water to drought-stricken regions, counteract desert expansions, increase natural irrigation for crops and boost the output of hydroelectric-power plants.

As we all know, the future lies in DeLoreans fueled by nuclear-powered Cuisinarts.

The Amateur continued....

The article goes on, stating that water is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but that the cooling effects are expected to overwhelm the warming effect.

I've seen a few end of the year climate reviews. The most succinct was the NY Times, predicting a 100% chance of alarm and hype. Yahoo's NASA reports 2008 is ninth warmest year since 1880 is a bit more balanced. The general downtrend since the peak of the last 11 year solar cycle continued, and was boosted by a La Nina in the Pacific. Thus, this was a cooler year than we've seen in quite some time, even if it is in the hottest 9 since measurements have been taken. There was slightly more ice at the end of the melting season in the Arctic than last year, but last year was a record melt.

We have just returned to Seattle's typical rain after an unusually long period of snow/ice.

Oddly enough, much of the rest of the country seems to be going from blizzard conditions to early spring weather. A high of 57??? today for Chicago. A high of 60??? degrees for Detroit.

What is going on?

Originally Posted by TimWalker

We have just returned to Seattle's typical rain after an unusually long period of snow/ice.

Oddly enough, much of the rest of the country seems to be going from blizzard conditions to early spring weather. A high of 57??? today for Chicago. A high of 60??? degrees for Detroit.

What is going on?

The last few years we've had real snowy Decembers in the midwest as the jet stream dives down in the middle of the country. Then the jet has gone flat. For January and February, very little arctic air has been pulled down to lower lattitudes. It is far too soon to declare that this is the new normal, but the same northern wind pattern that has been blowing the Arctic Ocean ice towards Greenland and Iceland, resulting in far more polar melting than expected, may be giving us winter in December then mild Jan - Feb.

Again, a it is far too soon to say this pattern will continue, but that would be the sort of permanent shift that one might expect with global warming.

From CNN: Global warming hits Antarctica, study finds

It seems the hole in the ozone layer has a cooling effect. As a result, it has been thought that Antarctica has been getting cooler, rather than warmer, and a series of weather stations along the coast have supported this. This article paints a more complex picture, with new satellite data providing information from far inland, and a cooler east having a different climate zone from the warmer west. It is in the west that a lot of ice flows have broken into the sea, with signs of increased glacial melt also showing.

Conjecture is that anti freon regulations to protect the ozone will result in more warming effects in Antarctica.

Two routine looking articles from the New York Times...

Analysts Warn Emissions Are Growing features another report that we must act now or doom comes.

Obama’s Order Is Likely to Tighten Auto Standards covers allowing California and other states to mandate tough auto emissions standards.

The Times Again...

The Greenhouse Effect and the Bathtub Effect Reviews an obvious if much misunderstood perspective on global warming. To halt the warming, the addition of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere much be reduced to a level lower than its removal by plants and the ocean. Many proposals simply do not do this. They propose levels of reduction that are clearly not going to work.

Many enviornmentalist activists have been waging propaganda war against the cutting down of rain forests. One major theme is that trees take carbon out of the atmosphere, thus clear cutting may doom the planet.

Recent studies show that the amount of forested area is actually vastly increasing. In many parts of the world, small farmers are having a hard time making a go of it. They are abandoning small farms and moving to the city, leaving once cleared land to return to a forested condition.

Thus, as the New York Times explains, New Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rain Forests.

From Salon.

Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2009 14:25 PST
East beats West for that new car smell

• January sales of cars and trucks in the U.S.: 656,976
• Expected January sales of cars and trucks in China (final numbers come out next week): 790,000

January 2009 marks the first month in which more cars and trucks were sold in China than in the U.S. There are at least two ways to interpret these numbers.

1) The U.S. numbers testify to the staggering collapse of the U.S. auto market. The economy is screwed.

2) The Chinese numbers (even though slightly down from a year earlier) testify to the long-range challenge China's economic growth poses to the climate. More cars mean more greenhouse gas emissions. The earth is screwed.

― Andrew Leonard

And with the American economic collapse, accompanied by what appears to be only a small dent in China's economy, it becomes a little harder to blame the US for the whole climate situation.

A slightly unusual NY Times piece, Protecting Fish Ahead of the ‘Big Melt’

We hear a lot about fishing failures, about no lobster in Long Island sound, fewer crabs in the Chesapeake, salmon runs failing on the left coast...

This story mentions a tribal Eskimo group calling in the US feds to report a massive fish kill, large numbers of salmon dying in a stream that feeds from a zinc mine. Nasty nasty miners. It turns out that as the arctic ice is melting, the salmon are moving north, and salmon are spawning then dying in streams that have not seen salmon in living memory.

It may be that the Arctic Ocean might be a new great fishing grounds as the ice vanishes in summer, but at the moment the fishing management organizations are blocking fishing until the stocks take hold and everyone understands the new environment.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle5687751.ece

Geo-engineering

Every silver lining has a cloud

Plans to engineer the climate may be less effective than had been hoped

"...ideas...suffer from fundamental limits that stop them being scaled up indefinitely...

"...sulphate particles into the stratosphere...would cool the earth by reflecting more sunlight into space. (Nature has already shown that this concept can work, since volcanic eruptions that send sulphur-rich plumes into the stratosphere can temporarily alter the world's climate)...However, Dr Lenton notes that the method becomes less effective as the atmosphere becomes more saturated with particles. At most, he reckons, the sulphate-injection approach could counteract half of the global warming the world is expected to suffer over the next 100 years if carbon-dioxide emissions contoinue to rise unchecked.

"...Sulphate particles, meanwhile, survive only a few years in the atmosphere. For the sulphate-injection method to remain effective they would need to be replentished constantly....

"...Encouraging cloud formation over the oceans by spraying seawater into the air would be roughly as helpful as pumping the stratosphere full of particles. Its effects, though would be geographically patchy...."

The Washington Post: Climate Fears Are Driving 'Ecomigration' Across Globe

Reviews reasons why large numbers of people might move as a result of changing climate.

C-Net news reports on a Study: Global shipping pollution ain't pretty

This is something I'd been wondering about. Many developed countries have laws forcing pollution control on cars, trucks and factories, and the developing world is following, but when one sees a the big ships, one can frequently see a good deal of particle emissions. According to a recent study, maritime shipping produces half the emissions as cars. There may be fewer sources at sea, but they are less regulated and much bigger. Also, the bulk of shipping traffic is close to the coast, where an awful lot of the population resides.

How long before California acts?

CNet News talks about a company Making solar cheaper than coal, or at least trying to.

Originally Posted by Sachs

"The science is understood, the material abundant, the product works," he said. "All that is left is to build the biggest manufacturing industry in the history of human kind. Time is a-wasting."

Something new from the always-entertaining Telegraph.

-excerpt-
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

...

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

Originally Posted by Justin '77

-excerpt-
[i]The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

Yah. Dr. Mörner doesn't prefer computers as a working tool. He apparently prefers a Y shaped stick. One of his papers is "Fields from underground tensions," trying to scientifically justify dowsing for water the old fashioned way. Couldn't find it on line, but it is referenced in the above link.

That's one way of measuring water levels, I suppose. It definitely involves "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world."

Color me dubious.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Yah. Dr. Mörner doesn't prefer computers as a working tool. He apparently prefers a Y shaped stick. One of his papers is "Fields from underground tensions," trying to scientifically justify dowsing for water the old fashioned way. Couldn't find it on line, but it is referenced in the above link.

Um. If you had actually looked into the paper of Mörner's that was referenced, instead of just what the kook wrote who chose to reference him -- like a real researcher would, and unlike a dogmatic ideologue -- you would have seen that the 'underground tension fields' to which he was referring are a fairly unremarkable feature of plate tectonics (that is, 'underground' in the sense of below the surface, 'tension' in the sense of mechanical forces, and 'fields' in the sense of three-dimensional gradients). No dowsing there at all. Just bread-and-butter engineering-type stuff. Since his studies involve sea levels, it makes perfect sense that he'd be interested in plate tectonics and geological forces.

If you wanted to find out what Mörner himself does, the Inter Nets have a wealth of his first-hand stuff.
Faulting, fracturing, and seismicity as functions of glacio-isostasy in Fennoscandia
Earthquake Geology - the Swedish Case
Revolution in Cretaceous sea-level analysis
THE KATTEGATT SEA - A TEST AREA FOR REGIONAL EUSTASY, ISOSTASY AND OCEAN CIRCULATION

And then the papers specifically mentioned in the Telegraph article:
Sea Level Change - Observations versus Models
Maldives Sea Level Project Part 1, and Part 2


Just because a wacko wants to claim that some guy's work 'proves' that dowsing is a real thing doesn't mean that the work itself has anything to do with dowsing, or that the guy unfortunate enough to have been cited is a wacko himself. It doesn't, in fact, say anything at all (except that the person who tried to make an argument with it is a lazy researcher).

In short:
Bob Butler = Fail

(something cool, by the way, that I dug up in a sixty-second google search for the -- admittedly, badly-translated -- title of Mörner's work that the dowser chose to cite.)

They call it the TORYgraph for a reason, it's a right-wing rag.

Originally Posted by Odin

They call it the TORYgraph for a reason, it's a right-wing rag.

And I'm sure that's why they ran the story and the BBC and NPR didn't. But your comment has nothing at all to do with the merits of the science they are talking about -- nor do their biases nor your biases nor anyone's biases. That's the cool thing about real science.