As I understand it, that's true vaguely near the Caribbean, near El Nino's home in the Pacific, but becomes less true as you go further east.Originally Posted by Ragnarök_62
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As I understand it, that's true vaguely near the Caribbean, near El Nino's home in the Pacific, but becomes less true as you go further east.
Well preserving ecosystems by moving them to where the climate is conducive to them WILL require a lot of help from mankind. We will have to be flexible in identifying where ecosystems will thrive instead of arbitrarily and legalistically insisting that certain lands "belong" to certain species. We may even have to have hybrid ecosystems. Want to preserve elephants and lions and Cape buffalo? Move them to South America and Texas where game laws will be enforced and poaching strictly punished. Don't want to have "canned hunting" to pay for it? Have taxpayers pay for it. Amur tigers and leopards in coastal Northern British Columbia. A lot of these megafauna existed in North America before Native Americans got here--or have analogs.
It's really not that expensive an undertaking, carried out and paid for over the course of 100 years or more. Even ecosystems like Tasmania can be transplanted to places like Macquarie Island that have very few species--basically just seabirds that nest a lot of different places. We save ecosystems by saving them someplace, not by being purists. Nature abhors purity as much as it abhors a vacuum.
As for baseload power, Thorium reactors that produce only heat, leave only lead and shut themselves off by melting metal plugs and separating into 6 non-critical masses if they overheat may be the safest way to accomplish this. The truly dirty little secret about how nuclear power developed was that Thorium was eschewed in favour of Uranium reactors because nuclear power was always about producing nuclear bomb material, with the power as a by-product. The secret of nuclear waste is that most of it isn't waste, but a hoard of fissible material to be reprocessed into bombs, only reprocessing was stopped after Karen Silkwood died at Pantex. And nuclear power was downplayed during and after the Carter Administration, mostly out of fear of nuclear proliferation. Which is a lot harder to stop than we thought, given what North Korea and India and Pakistan have done. Thorium reactors don't produce fissible material. Which is why China has started building them.
All that we have accomplished with our moral panics about nuclear power, including Thorium is to create a situation in which an authoritarian govenrment that can strangle dissent may be a prerequisite for having nuclear power.
Last edited by MordecaiK; 01-15-2016 at 12:27 AM.
Ice Age vs Milankovitch
A CNN piece that addresses the Ice Age v Global Warming question: Ice age delayed by humans... by 100,000 years. It mentions the Milankovitch cycles. Reprises several of my prior posts.
Hadn't seen the 100,000 years number before. I'm dubious about the number. The warming force factor that results from the polar ice caps melting is greater than the cooling force factor from the Milankovitch Cycles. There were no ice ages when the poles were last clear of ice.
There is also another hurricane, Pali, that is not only a rare January hurricane, but at south of 6 degrees North is the closest hurricane to the Equator on record. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b086bc1cd5d02a
You can be scared of it, but I am more scared of a national power running amok and dominating others, and going rogue. In a globalized world, there is no substitute for global governance and regulation of behavior. And when it comes to the environment, there ARE no borders. All actions to deal with pollution and climate change must be international.
No, that's why we need the UN. It's predecessor was founded at the start of our age. Millions died in the trenches, testifying to the failure of nationalism and the dawn of one world, forever. Quite the opposite; the UN is in its early days, and will expand in its sovereignty and responsibilities. The Concert of Europe was a precursor of our international organizations of today. It was formulated to suppress revolutions, but it did make the 19th century the most peaceful since the Pax Romana.The United Nations Organisation is basically just a tax free (so far, until the Seabed Authority starts bringing in money from minerals leases) foundation, created as such by FDR and the Rockefeller Brothers because creating corporations is what both knew how to do. And like the Concert of Europe before it, it has reached or passed it's "use-by-date".
Do you trust a corporation to run the world? I sure don't.
Totally agree
1984 Civic
ISFJ
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This is why we need to DE-Globalise. By expanding into the rest of the Solar System and eventually, via the Oort Cloud and the oort clouds of nearby stars to other star systems, so that we are not stuck on one planet. Continued competition between nations will give humanity incentive to do this. Otherwise we are just substituting collective imperialism of a few hegemonic powers (or the dominance of one hegemon, probably China) for the competitive imperialism we had before WWII.
I think all that will be very expensive and disruptive; far more than launching a green energy boom in 2 years that will transform our country into a sustainable and prosperous land. There's not enough land up north and up south anyway to replace the vast lands in the central and temperate zones. Instead of conceiving expensive and destructive ways to dislocate people and species, we need to charge our fossil fool CEOs for the destruction they make, and force them to change. The CEOs need to pay for the global warming they cause; not innocent folks who don't cause it. It's not rocket science; it's just good science.
Thorium is a possibility and I wouldn't oppose it necessarily, but it's probably dangerous compared to batteries, wind and solar and other green renewables that are already being built. 350 sq. miles of land is all that's needed for solar to power the world. If many more homes and businesses have solar panels, plus wind and batteries for nightime, we won't even have to improve the grid very much, there will be so much energy. Imagine that 350 sq miles spread out over millions of homes, desert lands and wind farms around the world. Imagine tidal and river power without big dams. Imagine geothermal and locally-produced biomass. We can transform our energy system in 10 years, and if Bernie Sanders is elected we just might make it. Then vast dislocations won't be necessary, even though some people will have to move their seaside homes inland and dikes may be needed in some places to hold back the extra water unleashed by 35 years of Republican and New Democrat policies.As for baseload power, Thorium reactors that produce only heat, leave only lead and shut themselves off by melting metal plugs and separating into 6 non-critical masses if they overheat may be the safest way to accomplish this. The truly dirty little secret about how nuclear power developed was that Thorium was eschewed in favour of Uranium reactors because nuclear power was always about producing nuclear bomb material, with the power as a by-product. The secret of nuclear waste is that most of it isn't waste, but a hoard of fissible material to be reprocessed into bombs, only reprocessing was stopped after Karen Silkwood died at Pantex. And nuclear power was downplayed during and after the Carter Administration, mostly out of fear of nuclear proliferation. Which is a lot harder to stop than we thought, given what North Korea and India and Pakistan have done. Thorium reactors don't produce fissible material. Which is why China has started building them.
All that we have accomplished with our moral panics about nuclear power, including Thorium is to create a situation in which an authoritarian govenrment that can strangle dissent may be a prerequisite for having nuclear power.
By the time your cosmic expansion scheme is actually going on, 4 or 5 hundred years from now, the world will be so globalized that borders may not even exist, or even be necessary to make globalization fair for all. You do not acknowledge the fact that your space dream is a pipe dream. What we need is to value and identify with our Earth home, our Gaia Spirit; not dreaming in vain of trying to get away from it and leaving a junkyard behind.
The UN is international responsibility; it is the opposite of imperialism. National competition will just mean dominance of a few hegemonic powers just like before WWI, which would just bring more world wars. Your US vs. Russia cold-war style competition will not make a pipe dream possible, but bring nuclear war closer. We don't need any of that nonsense anymore. It's time for humans to grow up. We need to remember the vision of the Awakening to move beyond war; to build space bridges here on Earth, not bridges to the Oort Cloud.
http://grist.org/article/can-you-gue...=weekly-static
Can you guess which country just set a new world record for wind power?
By Brian Kahn on 18 Jan 2016
Wind turbines are as ubiquitous as clogs, Legos, and tall people in Denmark. Unlike the latter three, though, Denmark’s wind turbines were busy setting a world record in 2015.
According to Energinet, Denmark’s electric utility, the country’s turbines accounted for the equivalent of 42 percent of all electricity produced for the year. It’s the highest proportion for any country — breaking a record the country set just last year — and represents more than a doubling compared to just 10 years ago.
There are other countries that generate more wind energy each year, but Denmark gets the largest chunk of its energy from wind by far. The government has committed to generating 50 percent of its energy from wind by 2020 and 84 percent by 2035. Denmark is part of the European Union, which committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030 at the recent Paris climate talks.
In western Denmark, the heart of the country’s wind industry, turbines spun up more energy than the region could use for more than 16 percent of the year, letting the country sell some of its surplus power to its Scandinavian neighbors (though on less gusty days, Denmark also bought nuclear, hydro, and solar power back from them).
The sheer number of turbines is one key ingredient for generating a huge amount of wind power. The other is, of course, wind, and as luck would have it, the winds blew harder than normal last year (note this is probably not due to El Niño, for a change).
The amount of offshore wind generated in Denmark is also staggering. The country has more than 1,200 megawatts of generating capacity already installed and two other major projects in the works that will generate an estimated 1,000 megawatts, or enough to power 300,000 American homes.
In comparison, the U.S. has a whopping zero megawatts of offshore generating capacity, representing what scientists say is a huge “missed opportunity” for clean energy. That’s slated to change in 2016 with the Block Island facility set to open off of Rhode Island. It’ll only have 30 megawatts of generating capacity, but hey, you have to start somewhere.
2015 smashes record for hottest year, final figures confirm
Experts warn that global warming is tipping climate into ‘uncharted territory’, as Met Office, Nasa and Noaa data all confirm record global temperatures for second year running
Damian Carrington
@dpcarrington
Wednesday 20 January 2016 10.30 EST
http://www.theguardian.com/environme...P=share_btn_fb
2015 smashed the record for the hottest year since reporting began in 1850, according to the first full-year figures from the world’s three principal temperature estimates.
Data released on Wednesday by the UK Met Office shows the average global temperature in 2015 was 0.75C higher than the long-term average between 1961 and 1990, much higher than the 0.57C in 2014, which itself was a record. The Met Office also expects 2016 to set a new record, meaning the global temperature records will have been broken for three years running.
Temperature data released in the US on Wednesday by Nasa and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) also showed 2015 shattered previous records.
Experts warned that the record-breaking heat shows global warming is driving the world’s climate into “uncharted territory” and that it showed the urgency of implementing the carbon-cutting pledges made by the world’s governments in Paris in December.
Heatwaves have scorched China, Russia, Australia, the Middle East and parts of South America in the last two years, while climate change made the UK’s record December rainfall, which caused devastating floods, 50-75% more likely.
The Paris agreement commits the world’s nations to limit warming to below 2C compared to pre-industrial times, or 1.5C if possible, to avoid widespread and dangerous impacts. But the Met Office data, when compared to global temperatures before fossil fuel burning took off, shows that 2015 was already 1C higher.
A strong El Niño event is peaking at the moment, putting the “icing on the cake” of high global temperatures. El Niño is a natural cycle of warming in the Pacific Ocean which has a global impact on weather. But scientists are clear that the vast majority of the warming seen in 2015 was due to the emissions from human activity.
“Even without an El Niño, this would have been the warmest year on record,” said Prof Gavin Schmidt, director at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He said he expected the long trend of rising global temperatures to continue because its principal cause – fossil fuel burning – was also continuing.
“It is clear that human influence is driving our climate into uncharted territory,” said Prof Phil Jones, from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which produces the temperature record – called HadCRUT4 – with the Met Office. Peter Stott, at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, said 2015 was the first year global average temperature was more than 1C above pre-industrial levels.
Noaa’s global temperature records stretch back to 1880 and it also found 2015 was the hottest year yet, beating the previous high by a record margin. The agency also found December was warmer than any other month in the record, when compared to long-term averages. Ten of the 12 months in 2015 had record high temperatures for their respective months, according to Noaa.
Nasa’s new data for 2015 also shattered its previous record and showed 15 of the 16 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.
“Climate change is the challenge of our generation,” said Nasa head Charles Bolden. “Today’s announcement is a key data point that should make policymakers stand up and take notice - now is the time to act.”
The Nasa, Noaa and HadCRUT4 temperature records all use independent methods to calculate the global average. They use many thousands of temperature measurements taken across the globe, on land and at sea, each day.
The above all looks right, but doesn't mention the 11 year solar cycle. We're currently near peak warm. In not so many years things won't be so clearly trending warmer. I kind of wish they'd review all the relevant reasons for a particularly warm year so when one of the reasons goes away folks won't be tempted to say 'global warming has ended!' based on several years of data which are trending cool for well understood reasons.
Solar Cycles
Just thought I'd post the recent solar cycle chart. The higher the number of sunspots, the more energy the sun is sending towards Earth.
You can see where the solar cycle was contributing a cooling trend through the first decade of the millennium. During this interval many denialists were claiming global warming had stopped. It was just a quite predictable pause.
There was a massive El Nino in 1998, near the peak of the last solar cycle. This produced a very warm year. It is only now that we are topping it.
The current sunspot peak is considerably smaller than the last one. There are times when the solar cycle gets muted, when there are many decades (even centuries) without bursts of heavy sunspot activity. In the past such times have contributed to cold eras such as the 'Little Ice Age'. However, if the solar cycle does go flat while greenhouse gasses continue to build up, the result will not be a cool era. Sunspot activity doesn't drop below a level of zero sunspots. Greenhouse build up will continue to increase heat. The heat would just build up more evenly over time. We wouldn't get a cluster of very hot record setting years every decade plus with slightly cooler years between. We'd see a more slow steady climb.
While this year has its El Nino with heavy solar activity, in another year or so the El Nino is apt to fade while the solar cycle diminishes towards minimum. The next few years aren't apt to be all that hot. The early to mid 2020s though? Solar activity is apt to be going up again. As likely as not, we'll have another El Nino develop on top of the 2020s solar maximum.
Of course, if a big volcano blows its top, it could introduce several cool years. A volcano's influence can match or exceed an El Nino or solar maximum. It could happen at any time, but is unpredictable and the effect doesn't linger long.
Slowing Gulf Stream?
RealClimate hasn't been overly active lately, but one article is interesting, Blizzard Jonas and the slowdown of the Gulf Stream System. It alleges a slow down in the Gulf Stream ocean current system. This is resulting in warmth off the US east coast while there is a cool area further north, just south of Greenland.
Such a trend could effect the East Coast's weather patterns. Blizzard 'Jonas' that recently buried the Washington DC area might be an example storm, the result of warm moisture being made available causing storms passing near the area to explode. Superstorm Sandy and last years large snow accumulations in the New England area might also reflect a slowing Gulf Stream pattern.
I distrust extrapolating a few years of anomalous weather into a long term trend, but this might be something to note and watch.
Interesting article. I would like the US to push much harder on energy research and would prefer to transfer funds from other programs such as NASA( after over 50 years of US investment).
Billionaires join governments to fight climate change
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip...1063/PT.3.3078
"As representatives from 195 nations descended on Paris in December and concluded a landmark agreement to curb climate change, government leaders and billionaires from around the world announced separate initiatives to accelerate the development and deployment of new clean energy technologies. The heads of 20 nations pledged to double their countries’ funding for energy R&D over five years, and 27 billionaires, including Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Alibaba chairman Jack Ma, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, joined forces to form the Breakthrough Energy Coalition and promised to invest their resources to commercialize fledgling energy technologies”…
… "The priority, says Bunn, is for cleaner, cheaper technologies to be deployed at the scale needed to really “bend the curve on greenhouse gas emissions. That scale is huge,” says Bunn. He points to a highly cited 2004 estimate by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala at Princeton University, who calculated that keeping the global temperature rise since preindustrial times at or below 2 °C in 2050 would require curtailing carbon emissions by 7 billion tons annually. Today the United Nations Environment Programme estimates that amount to be 18 billion tons. Emissions have grown faster than had been expected, and inaction over the past 11 years has shortened the time available to achieve stabilization. Earth’s atmosphere currently contains about 800 billion tons of carbon as carbon dioxide.”…
This is a long, but interesting, article if anyone is interested.
Sensing deep-ocean temperatures
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip...1063/PT.3.3080
… "Changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere affect the thermal-energy balance in Earth’s climate system. But thanks to its huge volume, deep basins, and large heat capacity, the global ocean has largely forestalled atmospheric warming by acting as a heat sink. Indeed, the ocean stores more than 90% of the excess heat Earth has accumulated since 1971. Compare that with the scant 1% stored in the atmosphere, as shown in figure 1.”…
… "The ocean also redistributes the absorbed energy around the planet. Colder and thus denser waters from high latitudes can sink from the surface and spread toward the equator beneath warmer, lighter waters at lower latitudes. In the northern North Atlantic Ocean and the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, water is cooled so much that it can sink to great depths, where it then spreads out to fill much of the rest of the deep ocean. As surface waters warm, so do those sinking waters, which increase the temperature of the ocean interior much more quickly than would the downward mixing of warmer layers with colder ones (see the article by Adele Morrison, Thomas Frölicher, and Jorge Sarmiento, Physics Today, January 2015, page 27). The large-scale transport of water, heat, and salt in distinct density ranges, called the meridional overturning circulation, is a key part of climate studies.1”…
…”In one of the most impressive achievements of the past couple of decades, oceanographers in 2001 initiated an oceanic observing system known as the Argo program (see Physics Today, July 2000, page 50). Today its global array of 3900 robotic floats can directly and repeatedly sense temperature (to within 0.002 °C), pressure, salinity, and ocean circulation.2 Over the course of 10-day dive cycles, the floats adjust their buoyancy to record data at depths between 2000 m and the surface, where they transmit their GPS location to a satellite. An international collaboration sustains the Argo program data and controls all stages of the operation, from refurbishment or replacement of each float every 3–5 years to data control, archiving, and dissemination.”…
Instrumenting the Oceans
Measuring heat at depth in the oceans is an important step. A lot of energy is stored and released from moderate depth in the water. In theory, given constant greenhouse gas increases, we should be getting a slow steady increase in temperature. Instead we get warm years and cold years without a really good idea of why or what next. Oh, some trends we can watch and are watching. Volcanoes and the solar cycle can be measured without too much difficulty. The oceans absorbing and releasing heat isn't as easily monitored. There are concerns like El Nino - La Nina, other similar oscillations, the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and the melting of polar ice that are part of the picture but not well instrumented.
It's good to know they are working it.
Denmark certainly has the steady winds to produce wind power with. And not a lot of land, unless Danes start moving to Greenland instead of giving it to the 30,000 odd Innuit who live there. So it's not surprising that Denmark has a lot of offshore power.
As for why the US dosen't produce any offshore wind power, that we can lay at the door of environmentalists, who are more concerned about visual pollution on a local level than producing renewable energy. I'm not surprised that the leading state in wind energy is the state one would least expect to--Texas.
NASA is also a worthy investment. Getting to and retrieving strategic metals from Near Earth Objects protects national security by making it unnecessary to protect access to scarce strategic metals in nations that do not want us there. Platinum from NEOs is platinum we do not have to get from Zimbabwe. And if Iridium and Osmium and Rhodium and Rhenium are no longer in short supply, new engineering applications for them will also become apparent.
My view is that the US has funded NASA for over 50 years and the tasks can be taken over by private industry and the military. Given our budget constraints, I would prefer to prioritize the funding and give much more weight to energy research.
But not from offshore wind turbines, but from the wind corridor up through the plains. Many Texas energy barons will go where the money is, like T Boone Pickens did.
I would expect many environmentalists might support offshore wind turbines. It hasn't been tried in the USA. I don't know why.
This article indicates that resulting extra ultraviolet light could adversely affect phytoplankton growth.
Record ozone hole may open over Arctic in the spring
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/...rctichole-2317
… "Lingering atmospheric pollutants and a blast of frigid air have carved an unusually deep hole in Earth’s protective ozone layer over the Arctic, and it threatens to get deeper. Atmospheric scientists are analyzing data from weather balloons and satellites for clues to how the ozone will fare when sunlight—a third factor in ozone loss—returns to the Arctic in the spring. But they are already worrying about how extra ultraviolet light might affect humans and ecosystems below and wondering whether climate change will make such Arctic holes more common or severe.
Record cold temperatures in the Arctic stratospheric ozone layer, 15 to 35 kilometers up, are the proximate cause for this year’s losses, because they help to unleash ozone-destroying chemicals. “This winter has been stunning,” says Markus Rex, an atmospheric chemist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany. By next week, about 25% of the Arctic’s ozone will be destroyed, he says.”…
One of the prime locations for off-shore wind is on the continental shelf east of Massachusetts. That got killed by, wait for it, the Kennedy family, who didn't want to have the turbines spoil their view ... and no, I'm not kidding. The area off the Virginia coast may be in the offing, though the turbines will not be in as shallow water. Floating them, and maintaining station, is a lot harder than simply anchoring them to the shelf. Of course, navigation must be maintained, and tidal action is a twice daily occurrence, so it's of primary importance.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
Global Dimming
I just bumped into a PBS Nova episode on global dimming, Dimming the Sun. (Link is to a transcript of the episode.) It reviews a point I've made from time to time on this thread, that there are two significantly different types of pollution. Greenhouse gasses warm things up. Particles such as sulfates promote cloud formation and reflect light back out into space, thus cooling things down. The two factors, global warming and global dimming, to some degree balance each other. Over all, global warming has been the stronger forcing factor. Things have been warming up.
The problem is that there is a greater obvious need to fight global dimming, and affordable technology is available to do so. The health problems developing from particle pollutants in places like China and India are tremendous. The West mandated stack scrubbers, catalytic converters and similar devices decades ago. The money spent at the point of pollution was more than saved in the health care industry, not to mention quality of life. It is widely believed that China, India and other developing nations are going to follow the West's lead.
At which point Global Dimming will no longer be holding Global Warming in check, and we could see things get hot very quickly.
Nova covers it in depth.
I would do both, and lots of each. We have talked ourselves into believing that we can't do anything, so, of course, we don't even try. Everyone watches as the interest rates drop and drop. That's indicative of extremely slow economic activity. Since private industry seems disinterested in changing that, we have to do it ourselves. Both of those areas could stand some serious funding. We need infrastructure including a robust yet dynamic electric grid. Let's do that with borrowed money. It's available at nearly zero interest at the moment. In some places, the rates are negative. Obviously, they need it even worse than we do.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
