Home/BlogGiven current technologies, it makes no sense to destroy $100 Trillion in wealth this century for an unmeasurable reduction in warming.
Bjorn Lomborg.
The more efficiently we can do those things, the greater humanity prospers. Affordable energy is part of that efficiency.
But when human prosperity suffers, people die.
So, can it really be called “anti-science” that the moment Trump was inaugurated, the White House deleted all references to climate change on their web pages?
No, I don’t consider it anti-science. Because science has nothing to say about what it would cost in terms of human suffering to avert climate change. What to do about climate change is a matter of engineering and economics… not science.
As a lukewarmist I believe (but can’t prove) that humans are probably responsible for some of the recent warming (which has been mostly benign).
I further believe (but can’t prove) that humans will cause somewhat more warming in the future…. I’d put my best guess at maybe another 1 deg. C this century, based upon our (and others) research into climate sensitivity.
But until some new energy technology comes along (probably from the private sector) we are stuck with fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. The oil industry’s use of fracking has already reduced carbon dioxide emissions — through a switch from coal to natural gas — by more than any government command-and-control efforts.
As Bjorn Lomborg has recently estimated, efforts to “fight” global warming under the U.N.’s Paris Agreement could cost the world $100 Trillion in lost wealth by the end of this century.
That, I guarantee you, will lead to (preventable) deaths, due to poverty and all problems stemming from poverty.
And for what gain? An unmeasurable decrease in further warming of maybe 0.1 deg. C at best (and that’s assuming climate sensitivity is high and that we are in for several deg. C of future warming — which I don’t). As someone who knows how temperatures trends are measured on the ground (I’ll bet none of the thermometer climate data “experts” passed NWS weather observer certification exams like I did) and by satellite (I’m the co-inventor), I can say that this level of future temperature reduction is unmeasurable by any system we have.
So, while the White House deletion of “climate change” references from their website might be met with accusations that the new administration is anti-science, what I suspect it really means is that President Trump does not want to waste time and destroy prosperity just for those who want to feel good about their efforts to Save The World™.
Because the price for them feeling good might well mean the premature deaths of millions.
And that’s the way I would argue this issue. Poverty kills millions. As far as we know, human carbon dioxide emissions have killed no one. In fact, it has saved millions of lives and increased prosperity. For example, I’ve blogged before on the fact that more CO2 has increased corn crop productivity more than rising temperatures have hurt it, and that climate models have badly botched forecast warming post-1960 in the U.S. Corn Belt.
Eventually, we will probably run out of fossil fuels. We will probably have replacements before that ever happens, anyway. Those replacements will arise through market forces, not governmental fiat.
I don’t really care where our energy comes from. As long as those sources benefit humanity.
Well said, Roy, I think it’s a hoot that the Obama climate propaganda site is gone.
Now it’s time for Canadians.
http://weather.rap.ucar.edu/surface/snowAFus.gif
ren..we’ve got no snow in Vancouver and surrounding regions right now. The rain has washed it all away. There is snow on the mountains.
The forecast jetstrem on January 28.
http://weather.unisys.com/gfs/8d/gfs_300_8d.gif
Sorry. Jetstream.
So which Lomborg is right, Roy’s or this one:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/30/bjorn-lomborg-climate-change-u-turn
Lomborg argues here for spending $100B/y to combat climate change which he called ‘undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today’
He advocates a carbon tax.
It is quite confusing….
That article is dated 2010 and published in the Grauniad.It is now 2017. Perhaps Lomborg’s ideas have evolved.
Yet after he wrote the Skeptical Environmentalist?
I think Bjørn Lomborg position is quite clear he says a small amount of money into Research and development is sufficient in terms of “climate action”. No need to deploy expensive and unready technologies. If sensitivities are indeed on the higher side it makes sense to be prepared.
The purge begins. Reminds me of other times in history when politically incorrect science and scientists were attacked and purged. In the nazi era it was ‘jewish physics’, which meant relativity and quantum mechanics. That continued until they needed ‘jewish physics’ for the bomb project.
I do not think that neither the Obama nor the Trump administrations are comparable to the Nazis, but if one must choose, I see more similarities between the Obama’s administration and the early actions of the Nazis. Skeptics lost their jobs under Obama. They were told not to apply for jobs. Other skeptics were reassigned and told not to participate in the discussion. Facts were distorted. Either ignorance or willful deception were behind many government proclamations and documents.
We will see whether people lose their jobs under Trump. (I can see disagreements arising on whether loss of temporary or grant funding will be called loss of jobs.)
Rather than the Nazis, I see a more applicable comparison to Lysenko science and the Obama administration. In Lysenkoism,the government said what the science was, and only supporters of Lysenko could get jobs or funding.
Which skeptics lost their job under Obama?
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to ask what skeptics were hired?
I suspect it will start like it did in Florida, certain words will be banned, then firings happen:
In Florida, officials ban term ‘climate change’ State environmental officials ordered not to use the terms climate change or global warming in any government communications, emails, or reports.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article12983720.html
The difference is that ‘climate change’ is a legitimate science question, with much evidence to support it, and a need to do further investigation, similar to relativity and quantum mechanics in the 1930s.
To halt investigation of it, for purely political reasons, is basically saying we dont need to know, we dont want to know.
Can we agree that science is useful and ought not be politicized?
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ Not deleted, just archived, but still accessible.
Too little to late media got away with another low blow.
Maybe that is why borrowing $9.5 Trillion in eight (8) years is nothing to worry about. Only $75,000 per taxpayer is a bargain compared to $100 Trillion.
It actually works out to about the same amount per year. People don’t realize how much our debt will hurt future prosperity. There are several ways to handle it, and economists tell me any one of them will be painful.
ALL will be painful. Current interest rates are extraordinarily low, but will likely rise when the US economy comes off FED life-support. I haven’t done the math, but various economists have, and the “pain” will be staggering. Even a 4% growth from here for, say, 5-6 years won’t bring debt levels down from the very painful levels. Very sad and very irresponsible.
Carbon tax could help tremendously with govt debt.
Look to the government to kill the golden goose. “Carbon” taxes are not free money.
True. @ doe estimated $50/ton C, which is est cost of inaction, this adds 10 cents to a gal of gas. Big wup.
Nate,
First, the “cost of inaction” is BS in that the reduction in CO2 emissions will have negligible effect on the climate.Secondly, unless your government returns the carbon tax windfall to the poor and low income citizens, the tax is regressive in that it hurts those people disproportionately.
‘reduction in CO2 emissions will have negligible effect on the climate.’
Where do you guys get these nutty ideas?
Sounds like you would never recommend calorie restriction– it will have a negligible effect on your weight.
Also you are mimicking car manufacturers in the 70s regarding the Clean Air Act and air pollution.
At the moment govt-revenue/gdp is lower than what it has been historically when the budget deficit was near 0 (e.g. in the late 90s). Taxes are a little to low. This is a problem that has to be fixed.
A carbon tax is the best market solution that we know of.
James Hansen recommends giving all carbon taxes collected back to every American on an equal per capita basis. A yearly dividend check, much like Alaskans give an annual oil dividend (the Permanent Fund Dividend).
An economic study calculated that 60% of Americans would get back more money than they paid in carbon taxes.
@davi appel
A tax is not a market solution at all, so it can’t be ‘best market solution’. Something like a common law toxit torts would be though. ah, but that’d require actually proving, in a courts of law, the atual damage done. Nah, easier to subvert the government.
Neither the debt, nor deficits can possibly be shrank by rising taxes; rather, they are shrank by cutting taxes, as it is the only way to force govet to cut its spending. It is THE only way.
Tax cuts. Been tried several times. Most recently under Bush. Pedictably it failed to lower the deficit.
Tax increases were tried under clinton, and surprise, the budget balanced.
Needed more cuts then. Clinton didn’t contribute to his era prosperity, he just happened to be there (just as bush happened to rap the bust fruits of clinton’s boom)
coturnix19,
‘Neither the debt, nor deficits can possibly be shrank by rising taxes, rather, they are shrank by cutting taxes’
How about Kansas? Louisiana? They have substantially cut taxes. The miracle growth never materialized to save them and their deficits blew up.
http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article114021098.html
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/10/louisiana_budget_cuts_1.html
Does evidence matter?
does reading and understanding waht i said matter? i’d say no.
‘Cause your argument is a strawman argument. Ok, let me explain my position in details (sorry for bad language, but i am a white trash uneducated b-tard with english as second language):
The government, it works more or less like this:
First, it plans to collect some amount in taxes, and it also plans to spend some amount for whatever purposes it deems necessary. If at some point in its spending spree it finds it doesn’t have enough funds, it doesn’t halt its activity, nor start cutting down on it and firing office people. No, what it does, is it borrows money, either from the market of from the central bank (which can simply print it, lending it into existence), often/usually by creating and selling bonds. And because the government *knows* that it can borrow money at any time, in reality it never plans to fit into the pre-determined budget. In fact this pattern of deficit spending spree planning is so ingrained now that the deficits are commonly planned ahead, and the spending budget is almost alway planned to be larger than the projected tax revenue.
If at some point the revenue is more than had been planned, than that incentivises the government to spend more the next time. It is a natural, institutional incentive to do so as it spends money that’s not its own, and it runs debts that the officials are not in any way personally liable for. This incentive works at all levels, form parliament down to the smallest service office.
Therefore it appears to me to be impossible, unless some special conditions are met, to reduce deficits not to mention the body of the debt, by raising ever more revenue. That is why i had said that raising more revenue will not help shrink the deficits. It may though make it look like as if the budget produces surpluses, as government agencies fail to anticipate to revenue and thus fail to spend it on time, but that is only a temporary situation that only makes the whole situation worse. That is what happened under clin-ton (and of course he personally had no virtue in making it happen, that goes without saying).
Therefore, one can only see two ways to cut deficits, balance the budget and reduce the body of the debt (presuming one even wants to do it in the first place; some schools of though say that more debt is better, i think maybe chartalists think so). One way is an outstanding political will that can force the government to shrink its functions, but it is quite unusual to happen, but it does happen under special circumstances. That is how canada (temporarily) avoided the budget catastrophe in the 90s: they cut spending mercilessly: welfare, pensions, entitlements, bureaucrats; some say, rcmp even prepared for the riots of the disenfranchised welfare consumers and fired bureaucrats, but the riots never materialized. The other one is, if one lacks political will to impose voluntary draconian cuts, and bureaucracy lacks self-preservation (which almost always is the case), is to cut the funds available to the government for spending, by cutting taxes (not just for the rich, but across the board) big time. ONCE MORE, PAY ATTENTION RIGHT HERE! I explain for the kids with special needs: the goal of this policy is to choke the revenue flow into the government and force it to cut its spending, not to ‘unburden’ the taxpayer and the market – that comes as a extra benefit. And if as the result of the tax cuts the tax revenue rises – that is a failure of the policy, because the goal is to choke the revenue and force and force the government to decrease the spending, rather than to ‘cover the deficits’ with extra revenue as per supply side policy which, I assume, you assumed I had suggested. No, that’s not what i meant. That is why your complaint about the ‘kansas, louisianer’ is a misguided strawman argument as it assumes something i didn’t mean and didn’t say.
Of course, this latter policy can only work if there is some kind of cp on the amount of money the government can possibly afford to borrow in a single year. that is the case with those governments in the world that don’t print their own money, such as state governments in the states, or governments of the countries lacking own central banks. Unfortunately, the us federal government is not of that kind, and its ability to borrow/print money is only limited by its ability to keep rates low without causing hyperinflation and/or run on the dollar. So perhaps, i was wrong all along: in the case of the us federal government, there is no practical way to restrain its spending and balance budget with any voluntary policy; only the run on a dollar will help. Touche…
Not a strawman argument at all. I dont think you know what such a thing is. I presented to you cases (and there are more) where cutting taxes (with intent to cut spending) has failed to work in the real world.
But, lets look at US govt revenue. It has basically been ~ 20% of GDP for several decades. Last few years it has been well below that. This despite the growth of health-care costs. Part of this was because of Bush tax cuts, part suspension of payroll tax after recession. Attempts have been made to cut spending-DOD, but much of it is health care related. So, inevitably the debt has ballooned.
For me this is clear evidence that tax revenues need to be back near 20% of GDP, plus reform of health care and SS spending, to bring budget closer to balance. But the GOP has a one track mind when it comes to taxes: always cut.
Fed revenue/gdp by year
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Deficit/gdp
http://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending_chart_1965_2015USp_XXs2li111mcn_G0f_Fifty_Years_of_Federal_Deficits_as_Pct_GDP
You can’t prove with evidence that 2+2=4, at best you can prove that 2+2~3.99999999999….. or something. I’m talking logic, u’re talking braindead empiricism. I don’t see how we can agree on anything since we’re talking of completely different things.
Empiricism, as opposed to mindless ideology, would be welcome change to govt policy development.
Actually the public debt only increased by $8.1 T under Obama, and almost all that came to bail the country (well, the banks and corps) out from Bush JR’a disastrous Great Recession.
Debt was up 127% in Obama’s first term, only 24% in his second.
Don’t forget, Reagan tripled the debt.
OMG Thank you David!!!!!!!
Please cite your publications on Economics!!!!!!!
TacoJ:
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/current
When you take 220 years of debt and double it four years (127%) and then only increase that number by 24% over the next four, that is because it’s hard to compound a parabola exponentially in a finite universe. It has nothing to do with economics.
Whacked.
http://thehill.com/policy/finance/315823-cbo-federal-deficits-to-rise-in-2019-for-first-time-in-decade>
David,
I’m surprised you didn’t remind us that Lincoln borrowed money in order to kill Southerners.
Your statement, more than any you’ve written, shows that you are a shill for the socialists/totalitarians who’ve been in charge.
Lewis
David has cognitive blindness badly.
Lewis: How does citing the public debt make me a socialist?
PS: How do you like your own socialism? Quite a lot, I’d bet.
Yeah, Reagan tripled the debt to bring us out of the stagflation that defined the Carter administration. Remind us all again what Reagan’s GDP was versus that of Obama’s?
And the use of “only” when mentioning $8.1 TRILLION of debt under Obama should be viewed in the context that it’s more than all other presidents’ debt (through Dubya’s first term) combined.
And Obama accumulated debt to pull the country out of the worst depression since the 1930s.
Recession,not depression. Get your terms correct.
Great Recession.
Let’s not forget the debt and war(s) the Bush administration left Obama and how Obama was able to pull the auto industry out of the ditch; the economy back on track and an increase in job creation on a monthly basis since before 2006; helped create a healthcare system for 50 million who prior to his administration had none. No question it needs tweeking, which now the GOP has for some ‘reason’ adopted a “repeal and replace” plan. Maybe killing bin Laden is not a current priority, but it certainly was for Bush/Cheney; only they weren’t able to pull it off in spite of billions spent on their war machine (Hallibuton, etc). Let’s not forget stopping the Iran build up to a nuclear weapons status.
All that aside, no one has mentioned the fact that alternative energy industries create jobs (some specific, others not so much that will include a need for professional and nonprofessional) which will generate tax revenue. If people want to continue using their inefficient autos, at this point – or any point, 10 a gallon will not break anyone. For those whose income cannot manage it, exemptions can be made for even that.
There will always be denyers on either side, but resolution can be reached to create workable solutions that can make sense to each. The conversation at least must continue.
The answer is not denial, but conversation and action.
“Stagflation” is really not the same as “recession”.
Let’s not forget the debt and war(s) the Bush administration left Obama and how Obama was able to pull the auto industry out of the ditch; the economy back on track and an increase in job creation on a monthly basis since before 2006; helped create a healthcare system for 50 million who prior to his administration had none. No question it needs tweeking, which now the GOP has for some ‘reason’ adopted a “repeal and replace” plan. Maybe killing bin Laden is not a current priority, but it certainly was for Bush/Cheney; only they weren’t able to pull it off in spite of billions spent on their war machine (Hallibuton, etc). Let’s not forget stopping the Iran build up to a nuclear weapons status.
All that aside, no one has mentioned the fact that alternative energy industries create jobs (some specific, others not so much that will include a need for professional and nonprofessional) which will generate tax revenue. If people want to continue using their inefficient autos, at this point – or any point, 10 a gallon will not break anyone. For those whose income cannot manage it, exemptions can be made for even that.
There will always be denyers on either side, but resolution can be reached to create workable solutions that can make sense to each. The conversation at least must continue.
The answer is not denial, but conversation and action.
Schmidt, so it seems you are admitting that govt deficit spending can be good for economy? Anathema to repub principles…
Schmidt, so it seems you are admitting that govt deficit spending can be good for economy? Isnt this anathema to repub principles…
Debt/GDP is what economists look at. Keep in mind the chart below is the funded public debt and ignores the $100 trillion+ of unfunded liabilities like Social Security, Medicare, VA, etc.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
Labeling them “unfunded liabilities” is like labeling your mortgage an “unfunded liability.”
But you assume you’ll have an continual income to pay our mortgage off.
So will the US government have continual tax revenues to pay SS, Medicare, VA, etc.
Your argument is nothing but a scare tactic, with no logic behind it.
So…..Dave, are you assuming the debt will be paid down by increased tax revenues or by reduced spending or is it some combination of each?
Try diagramming the system and put things in motion…..That may
provide a clue about how feedbacks in a system work…..Reduced spending will result in a reduction in tax receipts…..increased taxes will result in price increases (inflation) driving spending higher. But, ahhh, how’s about a massive Treasury default on outstanding debt to wipe the slate clean? Of course if you happen to be the “owner” of any of the debt either via mutual funds or direct ownership of Treasury notes and bonds you may not be too happy about having your “nest egg” be made to disappear.
I don’t assume anything but revenue, but I don’t think the federal debt will ever be paid off. Inflation will work to reduce it, but federal deficits will keep adding to it. The US will simply carry the debt.
I don’t think it will be paid — there’s no real demand for that, and politicans always to give budget surpluses back to some group or the other, usually the rich — nor do I think it’s something that has to be repaid.
Thomas, PS: The US Treasury can’t ever default, because the US controls its own currency and can always print more money. Not ideal, certainly, but a default just won’t happen — way too risky.
Most rapid rises in debt/gdp ocurred in reagan-bush I, then bushII. Brief fall under Clinton. Facts are stubborn things.
David, I can see how you come up with your figures, but it seems a dishonest display. You give FY 2009 to Bush instead of to Obama. That is the wrong choice for two reasons. First, the conventional method was to give Fiscal years to the current president — until Obama supporters wanted a different story. Second, most of the deficit in FY 2009 was not for expenditures but rather investment in Preferred Stock in banks. That investment — plus more — was paid back by the banks to the government and reduced Obama’s deficits in future years.
The recession started under the Clinton administration even though it had benefited from being able to pretend Gingrich’s Contract with america was their own policy…and they had benefit from the tech bubble that was a bust for the bush administration.
The Clinton Administration Social[ist] engineering was also responsible for the GFC as Clinton mandated the dodgy mortgages to people with no jobs…no income…no ability to maintain payments…the administration even sending organisers out to intimidate bankers who resisted..often in their homes.
Those worthless mortgages were the foundation for the dodgy securities that the Clinton-enabled megabanks packaged and dispatched around the world.
The megabanks were only made possible when the Clinton Administration with Rubin as Treasury Secretary repealed Glass Steagall which was to have prevented such catastrophes as followed.
Before the ink was dry on the repeal, Rubin was off to join Citibank on a massive salary and the securities boondoggle was on.
It was the Democrats ..not the Republicans who were gung ho for making squillions out of mortgage-backed securities that were without a reliable …or any… payment stream.
When George W’s administration saw the danger and tried to rein it in, Barney Frank and other Democrats sneered and ridiculed them and blocked any mitigation.The Democrats were also allegedly the biggest snouts in the trough of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
That disaster drags the world down still today and it could not have happened without Clinton’s Social Engineering.
What will be the cost of Obama’s precipitate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and his timidity and obvious lack of courage and resolve that has emboldened ISIS , Assad and Russia..four years ago he sneered at and ridiculed Romney for saying Russia was a threat…now he has made that existing threat exponentially worse.
Extremely revisionist history.
So what happened to economy in 2008 was all due to Clinton in 90s??!
The disaster of Iraq beginning in 2003 was all due to Obama in 2013??
What did Bush et al do during 2001-2009?? Hmmm…
So what happened to economy in 2008 was all due to Clinton in 90s??!
What did Bush et al do during 2001-2009?? Hmmm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM
President Bush and Senator McCain warned of Financial and housing crisis. With a minority in House and Senate, they were powerless to stop it.
Can you say Community Investment Act.
Copy and paste in search bar on You Tube.
Bill Clinton – Democrats Resisted GOP Efforts to Rein in Fannie Mae.
How The Democrats Caused The Financial Crisis: Starring Bill Clinton’s HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo And Barack Obama; With Special Guest Appearances By Bill Clinton And Jimmy Carter
Cheers
There a lot of videos about how the earth is flat as well
Jim Dean,
Seriously, for every time you can find a video on the internet that presents a partisan viewpoint on an issue, particularly such a complex one as the financial crisis, there are 5 other videos that present the opposite viewpoint.
When looking at such videos I recommend:
1) consider the source: is it partisan or not? Does it have an agenda or not?
2) Find an alternative source of info and check the facts.
3) Are facts/stats being cherry-picked in order to convince you?
The fact is blame can be assigned to many for the financial crisis. Deregulation was pushed by both parties but is a hallmark of repubs.
Ultimately greed and unethical behavior on part of mortgage companies, wall street, and ratings agencies was to blame. Lax regulation helped.
Noone forgets about Reagan. He is a false prophet indeed, whose good intentions paved the road to hell (just like so many before and after him, but his particular contribution was particularly to the debt problem)
Hi Nate,
Self preservation played a role in the Sub-Prime mortgage market. As usual, when Da Guberment gets involved, business as usual is no longer workable. The attached was written by a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, appointed by Congress to investigate the 2008 Financial Crisis. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/hey-barney-frank-the-government-did-cause-the-housing-crisis/249903/
Just look at our screwy tax system. Everyone I know, do everything they can to pay minimal amount in taxes. Such as: Figure their own taxes, Hire a “tax Expert”, Hire a Tax Lawyer to find loop holes, the rich keep money overseas to avoid paying taxes. Regardless, the middle class always gets squeezed. The middle class can’t afford a tax lawyer, they don’t get “Earned” income credit like the poor, so they get burdened with making up for the what the rich and the poor don’t pay.
Enough, I could go on for hours. I learned to listen to people that are intimately involved in their respective professions, like Roy Spencer, to help shape my understanding. People are at their best when the government does the least.
Ok indeed, what you are showing me is what one member of the committee felt. In fact he wrote a dissenting view from the main report which is here:
https://fcic.law.stanford.edu/report
Most of the committee disagreed with him. Many others who’ve analyzed it and written about it disagree with him.
There is strong evidence that mostly private Mortgage companies, like Countrywide, practically gave away mortgages, often with no-docs, and variable-interest rates (thank Reagan for that one) that were very likely to go into default. This ramped-up between esp. 2004-2006, apparently overseas investors had lots of money to invest and Wall Street packaged these into funds and this pushed banks to make more and more bad loans. This led to the boom and bust as interest rates went up.
I see you make a habit of aligning with dissenters (like Roy). That’s ok, but just understand, that many, many, in fact most other experts disagree with them.
Again your choice, but I wonder if the issue involved your kid with a serious medical issue, would you go with the dissenting doctor?
And this author also wrote in 2004,
Study after study have shown that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, despite full-throated claims about trillion-dollar commitments and the like, have failed to lead the private market in assisting the development and financing of affordable housing.
This quite opposite to what he is saying above about Fannie and Freddie in 2010, as discussed here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/business/18nocera.html?ref=business&pagewanted=all
Hi Nate,
I appreciate your polite and analytical discourse. Several comments you’ve made compelled me look a little deeper into some assumptions I’d come to believe. I appreciate your candor and willingness to listen to opposing positions. A few other commenters on this blog aren’t as cordial.
There were circumstances in our family (My Uncle on my Dad’s side) that made this more of an emotional situation for me. My Uncle was a banker that had protesters follow him home and harass his wife and kids to the point that he quit his banking position and became an insurance agent.
It was a miserable time for his family and it affected all of us as we watched his family go through the move and job change. The government’s involvement hurt as many as it helped. Both political parties are at fault.
Thank you Dr. Spencer for a well thought out commentary.
I’m not a scientist, but have always felt that our climate conditions are cyclical.
Feelings and beliefs matter little and ought to be set aside when doing science.
Yes correct. Feelings and beliefs do little, however the belief and arrogance that comes with these scientists thinking they can fix the climate is just unreal!! They can’t even get the records accurately recorded. Data is “Fixed” so that this data now support the hypotheses they stated. The money wasted in all these policies, and all that based on JUNK science!!
Again these are unproven feelings.
It is amazing how fast the same people can switch from a danger of global cooling to a danger of global warming. They may have been mistaken yesterday, but they are surely right today – never mind that they were surely right yesterday. Such is the power of consensus.
The shift you are referring to never occurred. It is a myth promoted by those who want to undermine the scientific process for political reasons. There were studies in the 1970’s looking into the effects of particulates on climate (hint, they cool) and also into the effects of CO2 (it warms). There was some scientific debate as to which effect was stronger but as climate science advanced (and our air became cleaner, thanks EPA) the consensus began to grow that global temps were on their way up.
I personally am aware of over 20 theories attempting to explain gravity. And at least five models describing how the “fabric of reality” might work. I am aware of serious level theoretcial physicists thinking there may be no particles anywhere and that all things may be waves. I am aware of serious level theoretical physicists that declare this mathematically impossible, because were such the case, the sun would not work. would give off it’s heat and become a frozen ball almost instantly. I am aware of other serious level theoretical physicists that say, the latter must alsmost certainly be true.
Science?? Really? That is the field used to promote the concept that humanity is catastrophically changing the Earth’s energy budget. I call foul.
Anyone who wants to claim science is there justification for taxing all, to feed their fears, should at least then be able to identify what it is they consider to be the correct science. They should be able to choose a “fabric of reality” and then prepare to defend their choice. They should be able also to identify which they consider the proper explanation for the existence and operation of gravity, and then prepare to defend their choice.
Only then should they go prancing around the globe spouting “science” “science” “science”.
But alas. Instead, what we have is a bunch of wankers who don’t actually know actual science, spouting the reflection of their inner fears, and their inner loathing of others.
They hold up an apple and let go. Look they exclaim, there is a “force” and it grps the apple and “pulls” it to the ground.
Then they hold up a plate of glass and assert, “this let’s all the light through, but catches some on it’s way back, that is how the entire Earth’s atmosphere works, and that is science”.
Meanwhile the atmosphere puffs and settles, the volume in constant flux, the energy allowed to dissipate this way and that.
Science.
Pah. Insert sigh of disgust.
What science exactly is this of, which you speak?
Do you have the ability to identify the pillars of that which you hold up?
Here is a handy list so you can let us know which “science” it is you choose to throw in the face of others, along with your assertions….
String theory 12D
String theory 11D
Loop Quantum Gravity
Asymptotic safety in quantum gravity
Euclidean quantum gravity
Causal dynamical triangulation[52]
Causal fermion systems,[6][7][8][9][10][11] giving quantum mechanics, general relativity and quantum field theory as limiting cases.
Causal sets[53]
Covariant Feynman path integral approach
Group field theory[54]
WheelerDeWitt equation
Geometrodynamics
HořavaLifshitz gravity
MacDowellMansouri action
Path-integral based models of quantum cosmology[55]
Regge calculus
Scale relativity
Shape Dynamics
String-nets giving rise to gapless helicity 2 excitations with no other gapless excitations[56]
Superfluid vacuum theory a.k.a. theory of BEC vacuum
Supergravity
Twistor theory[57]
Canonical quantum gravity
E8 Theory
Quantum holonomy theory[58]
The science of the enhanced greenhouse effect is very old by now and is based on extremely well-established physical laws, like the S-B Law and the spectra of molecules.
The theories you mentioned are all at the very cutting edge of research and having nothing like the observational and theoretical backing that anthropogenic climate change does.
BTW, the theories you listed are trying to explain more than just gravity. For gravity, Einstein’s general relativity has never failed an experimental or observational test. It’s even needed to keep GPS satellites accurate.
that would be all fine and dandy if we could assume the atmosphere was a fixed volume container. gravity is the assumed provision of the nature of the volume of said container.
to date, we have no ability and do not track the size of the container.
heat is not heat without pressure. volume is a direct part of the heat/pressure/energy equation. lose control of knowledge of the volume, you lose control of any dampening or moderating effect that may be included in volume fluctuation.
the assumption that we understand gravity is blown out of the water by unexplainable (currently), fluctuations in earth’s gravitational constant, although the measurement seem loosely coupled to some activity within the sun, but this is not even close to confirmed by any stretch of the imagination.
einstein doesn’t enter the equation it applies to celestial bodies, and even then, fails to properly predict the movement of galactic arms and contraction and expansion of different areas of the universe, thus the perceived need to backfill the einstein vision of the universe with dark matter and dark energy at a ratio of 1 to 19. hmmm
it is well known that quantum mechanics as accepted and confirmed to how ever many decimal places (8 I think), doesn’t just fail to explain gravity, but rather didn’t even attempt the effort. thus the many many theories in an effort to do so.
what we are left with, is a bunch of hypothesis. none the favourite. scientists with varying opinions of what the “fabric of reality” looks like, how it operates, leaving open the doors for multiple infused dimensions, time travel, things that are there and not there at the same time, vacuum catastrophes, and a whack of physically observable phenomena with no reasonable explanation.
if the “science” of the church of climatology were actually so “settled”, it sure seems to me, that the underlying science should be close to settled. and it’s mathematics identifiable.
the above set of potential theories taking shots at how things might “really work”, are mathematically disparate.
and again, at the least, isn’t it fair, to expect those asserting all others need donate their hard earned tax dollars, at least be willing to PICK ONE, and say,
“As WELL as believing CO2 is warming the planet, THIS is how we believe physics works, and this is the math we use in our assumptions”.
Or are those of us who are skeptical of the assertions of the alarmists, just supposed to say, sure, you can’t actually identify which mathematical model you use in your assumptions, but go ahead and tax us anyways”.
well, that doesn’t sit OK with me. at the very least, the onus should be on the alarmists to fully disclose which assumptions they use in their SO CALLED “science”.
my tax dollars are not so easily given to people who based on their emotions, and their FAITH, wish to assert that oil users are evil, and those promoting windmills and solar cells, are the good guys, and that only oil producers can be greedy and self interested, but that all windmill and solar cell investers only have the good of the planet in mind.
meanwhile, the earth greens, the major ice sheets are doing fine, agriculture is on a year after year record breaking incline, and at least the US is enjoying a hurricane drought, not more frequent and nastier hurricanes. sea level rise, is almost non-existent in some places, and is partially explainable by what may be expansion due to some warming that could as easily be natural, since the slope of increase is not statistically different than the slope of increase during the 20s and 30s.
there is very very obviously bias in the climate research and algoreithmic data adjustments, potential skewing of measurements due to expansion of urban development in some areas, but yet alarmists wish to dismiss satellite based collection as non-consequential.
if you google “predictions of apocalypse”, you will find a list of over 200 predictions of mankinds demise. ALL wrong.
what makes the current alarmists necessarily less wrong?
it sure isn’t their understanding of gravity and the fabric of space-time.
does actual void exist? do particles of substantial and persistent nature exist? are we a 2D projection of some sort?
Maybe we have an impact on the climate. Do I accept that we know enough to properly assess such to necessarily be the case.
who instigated the climate concerns. the US two years after an oil crisis that showed them the temporarily weak spot they had in their economy. hmmm.
are the bulk of the US administration and policies based on christian values, anyone who watched todays inauguration would have to answer YES to that one. and every christian is brought up brainwashed to believe Man’s Sins = Global Flooding. talk about reruns.
So. Wanna put my country in debt. Further enlave my kids to a future of perpetual payment of interest on debt because we didn’t do our due diligence. then I suggest you better, at the least, the very least, be transparent. you want to claim “well established science”, OK, I’ll bite….
All I say is SHOW ME THE SCIENCE. Not observation, I don’t require that. Not hockey sticks. JUST the science you alarmists wish to propose is the underpinning of your justification for alarm.
That would shut me up.
But assertions that you are doing “science”, not making observations and guesses, well they won’t cut it, unless you can say, THIS IT THE MATH WE BASE OUR SCIENCE UPON.
and I haven’t even bothered to point out that the current “all known physics” equation includes “i”, the square root of -1, a number that is not real. imaginary.
well, maybe I went farther and said more than needed.
perhaps, OK, you wish to say science, I only ask to SEE it. ALL of it. is that a fair request, before I allow the alarmists to stick their hands in my wallets.
cause so far as I have seen, there is NO actual, hard, confirmed science to act as the foundation.
how is mass made again? how much do neutrinos weigh again? how does time work exactly?
hmmmmmmm
Sorry David Appell, I over answered, and ranted a fair bit. my apologies. I really meant…
Science, fine, show me which. that’s all. just be transparent and up front. nothing else was necessary.
“The science of the enhanced greenhouse effect is very old by now and is based on extremely well-established physical laws, like the S-B Law and the spectra of molecules”.
It was first proposed by Arrhenius as the scribblings on his lunch bag and it was disproved back then, over a century ago. The greenhouse effect is a metaphor for a process no one has ever successfully described. The extended GHE is an extended metaphor.
The basis of AGW is wrong. The fundamental theory is that solar energy heats the soil in a greenhouse and the soil radiated IR which is trapped by glass. That is nonsense and was disproved by Woods circa 1909. He built mini greenhouses, one with glass and the other with halite, which freely passes IR. Both houses heated to essentially the same temperature. Woods concluded a greenhouse warms due to a lack of convection. Same with a car with windows closed in hot weather.
The atmosphere is rife with convective currents. There is absolutely no reason why GHGs should act as a roof on a greenhouse and to claim they trap heat reveals a complete misunderstanding of what heat is. Heat is a property of atoms and to trap heat, you need to trap atoms, as does the glass in a greenhouse. There is no mechanism in the atmosphere to trap atoms.
Gordon,
I often wondered about the miracle of glass and greenhouses.
It always seemed to me the point of glass, or any clear material, is to let sunlight in, not insulate from outgo of energy. Otherwise it would be better to build in an insulated building and use electrical lights.
With modern materials, one could probably use the new thermal panes and improve insulating ability, but your point about convection seems to be most important.
One has to agree, however, that gasses can inhibit the outflow of energy. Cloudy nights and days for example.
The question then remains, can the increase of CO2, in parts per million, and a small portion relative to H2O vapor, make so much difference?
I tend to follow Dr. Spencer on that: Maybe and probably but not much.
And, MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY, the good outweighs the bad.
“…the assumption that we understand gravity is blown out of the water by unexplainable (currently), fluctuations in earths gravitational constant”
That doesn’t even make sense — Earth doens’t have a “gravitational contant.”
If you don’t know where to find the mathematical details of climate science and climate models, it’s because you aren’t looking very hard. Read some textbooks like Dessler and Pierrehumbert. Look on the climate model sites:
“Description of the NCAR Community Atmosphere Model (CAM 3.0),” NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN464+STR, June 2004.
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/atm-cam/docs/description/description.pdf
GCM Model E
Model Description and Reference Manual
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/modelE.html
GR: Does our atmosphere store heat?
Clearly it does.
Then there is a greenhouse effect.
QED
The fact you describe it as a greenhouse effect proves your lack of understanding. Mic drop.
For the surface:
GHE = (a planet’s surface temperature) – (the planet’s brightness temperature)
from
http://ase.tufts.edu/cosmos/view_chapter.asp?id=21&
The warming by heat-trapping gases in the air is now known as the greenhouse effect, but this is a misnomer. The air inside a garden greenhouse is heated because it is enclosed, preventing the circulation of air currents that would carry away heat and cool the interior.
By the way water vapor causes 90% of the “greenhouse effect” if you insist on using fake terms.
mic drop
Everyone knows the Earth does not literally have glass surrounding it.
It’s a metaphor. A pretty good one, actually.
BTW, water vapor in certainly important to the baseline greenhouse effect. (CO2 is too.) But not to the increase in the greenhouse effect. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere depends on it temperature, and doesnt change in the temp changes.
But as the temperature is changing, water vapor is too, and this has been studied and documented. It’s a strong positive feedbak.
Air quality trends were improving long before the EPA was invented.
http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/federal-government-give-americans-clean-air/
Read about the 1948 Donora, PA smog event.
Or the 1969 Cuyahoga river fire.
Nixon created the EPA, but mostly as a way to counter McGovern’s environmentalism for the 1972 election.
And since the EPA was created by executive order it can also be eliminated by executive order which is probably what we’ll see over the next few years. mic drop
Wrong. It was created by congress with Clean Air Act
Not according to the news at the time.
False. A literature survey of that time found there was no cooling consensus:
“The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus,” W. Peterson et al, Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 89, 13251337, 2008
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
If you were alive then David you’d agree with me. Ask anyone who lived during that period and they will say the same.
So whom do we believe our lying eyes or a paper done after the fact?
I was alive during the time of that so-called myth. If Global Cooling was not a concern of scientists, it was well hidden — especially among science reporters.
I was alive then, and I don’t agree with you at all. I remember one half-hour show with Leonard Nimoy talking about a coming ice age, but that show hyped everything in order to be sensational.
Your memory is not sufficient or trustworthy.
I’ll go with the actual literature survey I cited above.
And here’s a partial list of the global warming work being done then — Pres Johnson had already been warned about CO2, and so had Nixon.
http://www.davidappell.com/EarlyClimateScience.html
David, kinda like global warming fanatics have been hyping warming to suck up tax dollars to fund their disaster fantasies. Sorry to wake you but the joy ride is over, grown-ups are in charge now. mic drop
It’s the greedy FF corporations and the politicians they bribe who are the ones lying — excuse me, present “alternative facts” — to protect their huge profits without regard to the environment or the future.
matt
Its the barefaced denial of reality that marks a true warmist.
Those old enough to remember the 60ies and 70ies lived through the global cooling scare.
It was no big deal then just a talking point to consider.
The Vietnam War and Nuclear War Armageddon were much more important topics.
Sure you can find the odd paper to suggest warming possibilities .
These of course would be written by climate sceptics trying to defuse unnecessary alarm.
You would probably espouse the then consensus of catastrophic global cooling.
Perhaps David was a mere boy at the time and his memory doesn’t accurately reflect the times.
I don’t remember cowering about an imminent ice age, but maybe you reacted differently.
A rigorous study proves my point:
“The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus,” W. Peterson et al, Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 89, 13251337, 2008
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
He who controls the past, controls the future. The tactics of Phil Jones, Bill Connelly and the rest of the Climategate conspirators is right out of “1984”
A 2009 investigative report from UKs Telegraph detailed the extent of dictatorial-like powers Connolley possessed at Wikipedia, allowing him to remove inconvenient scientific information that didnt conform to his point of view.
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didnt like the subject of a certain article, he removed it more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolleys global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedias blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
After eviscerating references to 1970s global cooling scare and the warmer-than-now Medieval Warm Period from Wikipedia, and after personally rewriting the Wikipedia commentaries on the greenhouse effect to impute a central, dominant role for CO2, Connolley went on to team up with two other authors to publish a consensus manifesto in 2008 that claimed to expose the 1970s global cooling scare as a myth, as something that never really happened.
– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2016/09/13/massive-cover-up-exposed-285-papers-from-1960s-80s-reveal-robust-global-cooling-scientific-consensus/#sthash.RCCUQzsD.dpuf
There was no consensus on global cooling in the ’60s and ’70s. Unlike today, it was a time before satellites were routinely provide loads of observational data, and scientists were not very sure what was going on. A literature survey of that time found there was no cooling consensus:
“The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus,” W. Peterson et al, Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 89, 13251337, 2008
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
In fact, by 1965 plenty of scientists had already been warning about global warming from the buildup of greenhouse gases, and by the late ’60s climate models were calculating the warming expected from CO2. List of some papers and reports here:
http://www.davidappell.com/EarlyClimateScience.html
The author of the “study” you linked.
William Connelly
You know, the infamous wiki revisionist referenced above.
How obtuse do you have to be to attempt and refute the activities of a scoundrel by posting a link to a “study” by the same scoundrel?
Care to post a Madoff study on ethics in trading?
At least you bring comedic value.
Your side of the argument comes from a blog, a nasty one. While Davids side comes from a published review article with loads of lit citations. Which is more believable? Hmmm..
I’d rather believe people who were alive at the time and able to report it.
A scientific ‘consensus’ would have appeared in the sci literature. It didnt. Matters not what blogs say about it.
A published reviewed article is still after the fact. I would still believe the people alive at the time. What you may be forgetting is that even if the paper says that it isn’t true the public and the media did.
I went to the blog ‘Notrickszone’ just to see what it’s all about. The front page article is about a new paper on temp record of North China.
Apart from the insignificant size of this part of the world, I noticed a comment of the blog author on a graph in the paper which says this:
‘Notice there has been no significant net warming in North China since about 1950, consistent with the temperature trends for the Northern Hemisphere in general and similar to the identified pattern in reconstructions of Total Solar Irradiance.’
Here is an actual graph of solar activity and N. Hemisphere temperature since 1950. http://tinyurl.com/gs4r9zh
So right off the front page, here is a thoroughly false statement.
This does not give me great confidence in this blog.
When you cite a study by a “Radical Global Warming Propagandist”
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/lachlan-markay/2010/10/21/wikipedia-bans-radical-global-warming-propagandist-editing-all
To support the position of the same radical warming propagandist who co-authored the paper after he was banned from Wikipedia, it rests firmly in the theater of the absurd.
Guess what. All of Lysenko’s papers supported Lysenkoism.
Connelly’s paper on the “myth” carries the same weight as Lysenko’s work.
I think William Connelley was a good Wiki editor who was concerned about getting Wikipedia right on climate change and keeping out unscientific and denier propaganda.
http://giphy.com/gifs/jennifer-lawrence-thumbs-up-ok-Fml0fgAxVx1eM
Your right, William Connelly was banned because he was a “good” editor
Michael Man is an expert in the Monte Carlo method
Peter Gleick is who you turn to for protection from identity theft
Trenberth is your guy when your house gets cold so he can find the missing heat
John Cook can help you with period dress for a 1940’s party and back-up Gleick on identity theft
Toss in Tamino to honor women in STEM
The entire AGW “experts” community is a clown car and your description of Connelly is rib splitting laughable.
everry thing in this whole post is bullshit[[[none of the names or pees are real
You have to love a well thought out response like “everything in this post is BS.” How long did it take your dazzling intellect to come up with that one? Also, please compare your credentials to Dr. Spencer’s so I can determine which one of you I will to give more creedence.
BTW, that last line was sarcasam. I didn’t want you to confuse it with BS.
I appreciate the term “Lukewarmest”. It’s the argumentative position using the most logic.
Agree.
Recent heating in Artic during the winter proves the ability of adjusting temperatures and gives small harm to few.
Isn’t it science’s job to explain that the excess heat from the El Nino time period is distributed to the poles for it be dissipated there? I am sure that the job of the ice at the south pole is to melt as a result of the excess heat energy transferred there by the ocean currents. Isn’t this why global temperatures started to drop so dramatically in the second half of 2016? Record ice melt (Speed and extent)at the the antarctic ice shelf is directly related to the extent of the dropping global temperatures in the latter half of 2016. So I am sure that the extreme heat brought to the Arctic in November and again in December served as purpose to help lower global temperatures.
Funny thing tough is that CO2 is not dropping, quite the opposite.
ENSOs are a natural part of the climate system. They always will be, with others. There are more climate factors than just CO2 — natural factors STILL EXIT — and basing a statement about climate change on 6 or 9 colder months is very unscientific.
Temperatures also dropped after the 1997-98 El Nino. Look how much higher those dropping temperatures are after the recent El Nino — they’re about 0.4 C higher.
What caused that +0.4 C?
“Central US snowstorm to precede invasion of arctic air early next week”.
It seems from this post that some of your scientific skepticism comes from a belief that a transition to a carbon-free energy economy will be costly in terms of broad prosperity. I am an engineer (not an economist or a scientist) and from my perspective, a shift to move our economy to be less carbon-intensive (and let’s not forget methane) has great potential to BOOST productivity and ELEVATE people from poverty. In short, you are basing your skepticism on a very debatable point. Sure, if we were tomorrow to stop using all fossil fuels, of course, it would ruin our economy and send many into poverty. However, even a very aggressive move towards renewables and efficiency, done in a sensible way (say, through a gradually ramping carbon tax) could be a boon to the economy on a broad scale. Here’s the thing, the current fossil economy is necessarily controlled by, and profited from, a small number of huge corporations. Many of the solutions to move us to a low-carbon economy are on a smaller scale: energy efficiency, residential solar, technology start-ups aimed at all sorts of sharing/resource reuse. Any short-term costs in higher energy prices could be offset and more by a broader distribution of economic benefits. Plus, we are already at the point where solar and wind are quite competitive. Sure, we could put oil and coal back on top by cutting environmental regulation, but at what cost? Pollution and the majority of the burden of climate change are hitting the poorest hardest. A broader deployment of energy resources (and increase in efficiency) will provide more stability in the market. Fossil fuel energy costs have historically swung wildy, these swings are what can be disruptive, if not deadly, for people around the world who spend a significant part of their income on energy. I’ve seen it first-hand internationally. A new energy economy will provide more broadly distributed benefits and more stability. It will lift people out of poverty and prevent the potential for terribly disruptive climate effects on the poor. I hope you can take the time to re-examine your suppositions. I follow your blog because I want to expose myself to differing opinions and I trust that you are sincere in your desire to see science be unbound from politics and to see it be deployed in service of all; if you read this whole message, thanks.
You seem to have missed one of the main points of the post that even draconian reductions will only cause an insignificant reduction of the estimated temperature increase:
An unmeasurable decrease in further warming of maybe 0.1 deg. C at best
This is a basic “broken windows fallacy” harrumph.
I too am an engineer, but I know a bit of economics.
The free market does a pretty good job in signalling that which is best economically and what is the most economically efficient. In that sense, the market acts as an ecology driving evolution of technology and business modes.
So, if moving to renewable energy is good, then the free market should be selecting for it, without any subsidies.
I suggest that we remove all subsidies from alternative energy except some R&D funds. We should also get rid of the many unnecessary barriers to the use of new generation nuclear power.
Then, let’s sit back and see what evolves naturally. It might be nukes, solar might win (if and only if the intermittency problem is solved by *economical* storage), or natural gas CCGT might continue to win.
Exactly right, John Moore.
The degree of warming provoked by human CO2 can be argued about, but not only are the disaster scenarios built on the shakiest of foundations, but our ability to reduce temperature rise – and reduce those disasters, if they turn out be be real, is very close to nil. This is what Lomborg has been saying quite effectively for a couple of decades.
And there aren’t many examples of a good outcome when the Government thinks it knows better than the market. Much of human political history is a chronicle of this. Yes, it can sometimes nudge the market in a different direction, but even that has big downsides and such moves require both great wisdom and cast-iron justification. Both are demonstrably lacking in the CAGW area.
Government’s “nudging of the market” — a US cap-and-trade program for SO2 and NOXs, in place since 1991, has certainly reduced emissions:
http://www.hypothetical-bias.net/.a/6a00d83451bd4869e20133f53d9269970b-popup
John Moore says:
“So, if moving to renewable energy is good, then the free market should be selecting for it, without any subsidies.”
This is wrong, because of negative externalities.
Right now, fossil fuel producers and users get to pollute for free.
The cost of the effects of that pollution are passed on to the country’s entire citizenry to deal with. For CO2 the costs are passed on to the next 4,000 generations, who must pay for the reprecussions.
Fossil fuels producers and user should (clearly) pay the damage cost of the pollution.
But instead society is socializing those costs, so all pay.
Appell, you mostly present reasonable arguments, not that I necessarily agree with them. But occasionally your inner alarmist escapes in the most ludicrous flights of fancy.
“The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate,” David Archer (University of Chicago), 2008.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10727.html
There is no damage from CO2. It is plant food and thus a net benefit resulting in improved crop yields world over. Therefore, renewables that do not produce co2 should pay a penalty as they do not offer the benefits that fossil fuel plants provide. mic drop
Who’s going to pay to the fossil fuel producer for the positive externalities of the 30% increase in food crop productivity due to rise in co2 levels? I suggest, if you are logically consistent, should advocate for 25% food tax in lieu of oil and coal companies.
What is your source for a 30% increase in crop production?
I’m genuinely intereted….
Various googled-up climate deniers, like that guy, frgot his name, demonstrating differently-sized trees grown with different co2 concentrations under controlled conditions. Though, now that i think of it, the 30% increase may only refer to vegetative mass and not the fruiting yield… this one, for example http://www.nature.com/articles/srep04978 says that fruiting yield in soybeans attributable to co2 seems to have increased only 4 to 8 percent over 30 years, so i may be wrong about the magnitude of the effect. We should only tax foodstuff 4 to 8% in lieu of oil companies. Darn it.
Subsidies have been used for a long time to help develop and expand technology that is in the national interest. Nuclear power, oil and gas exploration, ethanol, now LED lighting. The subsidies for solar and wind have led to rapid expansion of these industries, numerous jobs, clean energy, and rapidly decreasing prices. Now these clean energy sources are competitive with dirty sources like coal that have demonstrated health effects.
All in all a good investment.
And, Roy, no poor people were kiilled in the process.
To the contrary. A great many poor people are being killed by poverty that persists while developed countries waste their resources tilting at imaginary windmills.
‘A great many poor people are being killed’ is constantly being asserted, but no-one ever offers any evidence whatsoever.
Second of all, I was talking about US energy subsidies. Developing countries will have different priorities…
I’m all for free markets, which is why I advocate a gradually increasing carbon tax. As I said, I’m no economist, but I know enough to generally understand externalities and “tragedy of the commons”. This is why your “free market will solve it all” approach won’t work to generate the best solution in this case.
matt rooke…”In short, you are basing your skepticism on a very debatable point.”
Not debatable at all. The data on this site reveals essentially no true warming for 18 years and 15 of those years between 1998 and 2012 has been confirmed by the IPCC. Such a lengthy warming hiatus proves beyond a doubt that GHGs have nothing to do with warming.
The proposed carbon taxes are punitive, aimed at forcing people to use less fossil fuels. Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau is having Town Hall meetings in which he allows people in various areas to give input. One woman stood up and claimed her power bill now exceeds her mortgage.
That’s the kind of nonsense being proposed by climate alarmists. Even here in BC, where we generate our power via hydro-electric dams, the cost of electrical power exceeds the cost of natural gas. Governments are out of control with the way they gouge consumers for power.
It has nothing to do with science, warming or climate, it’s about ways to gouge people for more taxes.
All is well with the assumption that solar activity is high and constant. Unfortunately, it is not. Of course, the length of the solar cycles causes that we forget this. However, it is not a coincidence that during periods of low solar activity, such as the Maunder Minimum is changing circulation around the poles.
Therefore, it will be snowing in southern California and southern Spain.
“The Arctic Ocean between the huge ice sheets of America and Eurasia was not frozen throughout, but like today probably was only covered by relatively shallow ice, subject to seasonal changes and riddled with icebergs calving from the surrounding ice sheets. According to the sediment composition retrieved from deep-sea cores there must even have been times of seasonally open waters.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_glacial_period
Freak heavy snowfall in SAHARA desert turns massive sand dunes into sledging paradise.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/miracle-heavy-snowfall-sahara-desert-9659252
Yes Amazing. Now this also happened in 1979. In 1979 ice in the arctic was at record highs, compared to this years ice level. Yet this recent event was explained by the heat in the arctic causing a weakness in the jet stream, pushing the cold all the way down. Still have not heard from anyone why it would have happened in 1979 though? If it is Polar Vortex this time, what about 1979?
Where did this heat in the Artic come from??
Still also we forget about the geothermal activity on the Arctic Ocean.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/2008_age_of_ocean_plates.png/1024px-2008_age_of_ocean_plates.png
The “debatable point” I was referring to is not any of Dr. Spencer’s satellite data. The point is that he acknowledges human’s role in increasing global temperatures, is very sceptical of the climate’s sensitivity to CO2, but seems most sceptical, especially in this post, about human’s ability to reduce CO2 to a meaningful amount, and even more so, the effect on increasing poverty. The effect on the economy, and the global poor in particular, of transitioning to low-carbon is what I was saying is very debatable.
I have seen in several climate skeptic scientists, that their conclusions are, somewhat admittedly, influenced by their economic understanding and/or political beliefs.
What do you pay per kwh?
There is global warming… for about 10-15,000 years in between ice ages that last for 100,000 years. Enjoy it while it lasts and if you have real estate north of Chicago sell before it’s buried under 5,000 feet of ice.
Steve — who the heck ever gave you these silly notions??
5,000 ft of ice?
Get lost — that’s totally unbelievable….
I’m afraid i have to agree with you, that’s crazy misinformation. Chicago was at the very edge of the ice sheet, and the ice thickness there was never more than 1000 feet, and only at the very apex of glaciation.
Though I don’t agree with all of the points you made, I thought this was an excellent and balanced commentary until I got to the line “what I suspect it really means is that President Trump does not want to waste time and destroy prosperity just for those who want to feel good about their efforts to Save The World.” That took a turn toward being insulting and exposed a few inches of what looks an awful lot like bias.
What is the cost of not addressing climate change?
(Or not reducing traditional pollution from fossil fuels?)
“What is the cost of not addressing climate change?”
Less than zero.
“Or not reducing traditional pollution from fossil fuels?”
Depends on where you are. Very high in China. High to moderate in LA and other large US cities. Small in the countryside.
It’d be great to do, but how do you propose to do it? Wind and solar power? Pfft. They’re more damaging to the ecosystem than fossil fuels.
Bart says:
“What is the cost of not addressing climate change?
“Less than zero.”
Prove it.
You’re the one with all these whacky accusations about something that’s basically unprovable so no. YOU prove it. You’re the one with the mouth that’s been flapping here through this whole charade and article. Libertarians like myself aren’t impressed with any of this climate change nonsense. Mainly because anything the govt is for costs the taxpayers money that would be put to better use for their own economic struggles in paying for costly and presently highly taxed energy currently available and used today. Trump was right to toss that global warming or climate change hokus-pokus right into the garbage can and off that website. This country has enough problems on it’s economic plate without bringing in any costly and unproven hoaxes that would increase the govt take while making all Americans even more economically…challenged due to those increased costs. It’s a new day with a new man at the top. And right now at least I’m thinking he agrees more with my position than what you keep regurgitating here to your educated yet limited audience in what should be a more commonsensical (if that’s a word) economical approach until science catches up with reality, especially on this contentious, as yet unprovable and potentially even more costly issue. Until then we say prove it, prove it and prove it some more. You and all these other…believers in this scam have some things to prove and iron out before you’ll ever convince Main Street America that taxing them for global warming or climate change would be a wise and prudent thing to do. Because instinctively they know any mention of this with the govt’s blessing is going to cost them even more money that they don’t have. No thanks…we’ve (society) suffered enough already from the prospect of what they don’t know about global warming. (Can you imagine the costs if they do prove it?? Neither can I…) And if they don’t know, which they don’t, why would anyone with a brain and money want to participate in another govt sponsored scam like that??
DA…”What is the cost of not addressing climate change?”
No cost at all. You alarmists live in a dream world.
The cost is very small and as Lomborg’s PR study found Paris COP 21 impact will be be very hard to measure by 2100.
And as Roy says that’s assuming sensitivity is much higher than the latest studies have found. Studies like Lewis and Curry etc.
In fact all the later studies were showing lower sensitivity when IPCC AR 5 was published. But by all means tell us what the cost will be. Should be very interesting, but first educate yourself by reading Lomborg’s PR study.
http://www.lomborg.com/press-release-research-reveals-negligible-impact-of-paris-climate-promises
Oh now I get it. DA cannot tell us why not “addressing” his so called CAGW will be a problem.
Let’s hope he can tell us how he would “address” it. Come on DA tell us how.
What is the cost of not addressing climate change?
But here the argument comes……. when did CO2 become a pollutant? Can we get a consensus on that?
CO2 isn’t a pollutant — anthropogenic CO2 is.
pollutant: an undesired substance with deleterious effects.
Under the US Clean Air Act, aCO2 has been determined to be a “pollutant” by the Supreme Court (Mass. v EPA 2007).
But co2 is a desirable substance with deleterious effects! Those effects only show themselves when concentrations rise many times the current ones, but that can be said about *any* substance, including the usual water. ‘Mind you, floods are among the most lethal non-biological natural disasters on earth.
If we do not address climate change, climate will change. If we do address climate change, climate will change.
Climate changes all the time since man does not control the weather or climate short or long term. addressing it or not incurs no costs other than to impoverish people economically and fund lying climatologists and transfer wealth from one country to another. mic drop
Steve: How do you know that climate changes “all the time?”
It’s called google, learn to use it. But i’ll help u this time http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033589404000870
A parable: what is the cost of standing on the rail tracks with your eyes and ears closed? Yes, it is very high. But it costs very little to just walk 2 metres to the side, and there is no need to ban all trains.
In other words the cost of not addressing climate change is irrelevant because it will inevitably be (and is) addressed. It just will be addressed in a sane way by stepping aside rather trying to stop the train with your bare hands.
Sticking strictly to C based reductions the cost is negative meaning it is a positive result to do nothing.
The reasons are fairly straightforward:
a) the proposed reductions would be insignificant in T terms to achieve anything (and even more so if one considers where most of the T increase has and is supposed to occur).
b) doing nothing avoids the cost of economic change which will be of the order of at least 2% of GDP (ongoing) if a tax or impost or imposed productivity loss is to have any significant effect on CO2 reduction until some other more productive energy source is found.
c) the net benefit of extra CO2 in improving agricultural output (and with less water use).
Perhaps we should penalize those who wish to deprive us of the benefits of extra CO2.
Great post Roy, any chance you or anyone here can explain (perhaps a separate post or link an article) the physics behind the C02 saturation theory ie Does more and more C02 add to more warming because it pushes the radiative force higher into the atmosphere OR is our atmosphere saturated with C02 and thus no more of the ~17 um re radiated IR energy can be trapped by the addition of MORE C02?
CO2 doesn’t saturate — that’s a myth. See
“A Saturated Gassy Argument,” June 26, 2007
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument/
and/or, see the sidebar “Saturation Fallacies” on the penultimate page in
Pierrehumbert RT 2011: Infrared radiation and planetary temperature. Physics Today 64, 33-38
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/PhysTodayRT2011.pdf
It’s no myth …
http://forecast.uchicago.edu/chapter4.pdf
See pg 35.
“Then, as you go up to 100 and 1,000 ppm, the change in energy
balance for each new molecule of CO2, or each new ppm of CO2, gets weaker” …. I understand Dave, the behavior is logarithmic. Since it’s asymptotic, one would expect the impact (eventually) to produce a signal that’s undetectable.
see the box on p 35
That box provides only a relative statement, I’m surprised that a guy that demands facts, proofs and journal articles would lead with a relative statement. The article summarizes by stating that saturation dampens signals. Don’t do the end around Dave.
Jake: It’s not a “relative statement,” whatever that’s suppose to mean. It tells how the the gas’s GHE expands at the atmosphere warms.
CO2 is not saturated.
Sorry.
Roy, you’re really still hawking this Lomborg number without any details of where it came from or how, no peer reviewed paper?
That shows your large bias. It is a number you like, so you cite it.
Its the biggest number he could think up.
Is reminiscent of the alarming predicions from industry about the costs and horrific economic impact of implimenting the Clean Air Act.
Who are the alarmists?
$100 B/year is better-a thousand years to reach Roy’s $100T?
How about $100 billion per year?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Climate_Fund
I think Bjorn Lomborg’s comments are very sensible. I’ve often puzzled over the fact that societies seem so reluctant to spend money in order to protect themselves against predictable repetitions of past extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts and hurricanes, yet think it’s appropriate to spend huge sums of money combating a very uncertain effect of rising CO2 levels.
Surely a better approach would be, for example, to determine the historical level of flooding in a particular area before building one’s house, then make sure that one’s house is raised above those past flood levels.
If one has some concern that rising CO2 levels might cause increased severity of flooding in the future (and there’s no sound evidence so far that this is the case) then to be on the safe side, one should build one’s house perhaps a metre or so above the worst previous flood level.
I suppose the explanation for why such procedures are often not a part of the building regulations, is that local governments do not want to stymie economic development in their area. Too many people might decide that the extra cost of raising a house 4 metres high on concrete piers is too much and might decide to live and work elsewhere.
Vincent says:
“If one has some concern that rising CO2 levels might cause increased severity of flooding in the future (and theres no sound evidence so far that this is the case)”
IPCC SREX SPM (2012), pg 6
“There have been statistically significant trends in the number of heavy precipitation events in some regions. It is likely that more of these regions have experienced increases than decreases, although there are strong regional and subregional variations in these trends.” [SREX 3.3.2]
DA…”It is likely that more of these regions have experienced increases than decreases”
Like Vincent said, there is no sound evidence. A ‘likely’ from the IPCC means they have rated the odds at over 66%. A bit better than flipping a coin.
GR: compared to you, the opinions of the IPCC contributors are pure gold.
Why should I beliv Lomborg’s $100 trillion number?
What assumptions did he make to derive it?
I’ve read enough of people picking apart Lomborg’s WSJ op-eds that I’m not going to accept it just on his say-so.
“It is likely that more of these regions have experienced increases than decreases, although there are strong regional and subregional variations in these trends.”
“Likely” Appel, really very scientific.
Why should we believe your likely summary ?
What assumptions did you make to derive it?
You’re really still hawking this “likely” scenario without any details of where it came from or how, no peer reviewed paper?
Steve S…”Likely Appel, really very scientific”.
He got it from the IPCC where they have set up an arbitrary scale to rate opinion. ‘Likely’ is a probability over 66%.
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch1s1-6.html
A question one might ask is how they can rate uncertainties when they have no way of knowing whether the outcome is accurate.
“David Appell says:
January 20, 2017 at 6:55 PM
Why should I beliv Lomborgs $100 trillion number?”
Well you likely won’t, will you? You are not easily persuaded by facts. Back in December you challenged me:
“michael hart says:
Obama [..] publicly vowed to make electricity prices skyrocket and to destroy the coal industry.
Can you present evidence he did either?
I doubt it.”
Yet Obama is on video record of stating that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4
Were you perhaps just disputing his ability to actually realise his unpleasant ends before he left office? Or just being supremely dishonest in denying evidence that is open to all on the internet?
michael hart says:
“Well you likely wont, will you? You are not easily persuaded by facts.”
What facts?
Name one fact in Lomborg’s 5-minute video.
Show me where I can read his argument and see what his assumptions are.
Michael: Did real electricity prices rise under Obama?
Did coal-generated electricity users pay the costs of damages to human health and the environment brought on by using coal-derived electricity?
David Appell
Here is your answer to Obama and electricity rates.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/09/power-is-a-lot-more-expensive-under-obama/
Prices generally went up under his Administration.
I’m not allowed to reply with details here. Will try at the bottom.
Wow 10% in 7 years! 1.4%/ year! OMG
Less than the rate of inflation.
Climatologists are so stupid. I can talk out of my ass better than you. I feel smarter because I go against stupid theories like gravity. Idiots! 💃
Dr. Roy,
Hopefully the Trump administration will stop spending money on wasteful projects which will eliminate many from the free ride they have had shouting “Danger Will Robbins”
If, as is his stated intent, he is able to cut the federal budget by $1,000,000,000. many things will change, not least the grants given to measure inanities.
Certainly that should balance the budget and begin to pay off the debt.
Will it hurt? Some people! Those who have been living off the borrowed money and those who have been living off transfer payments!
But someone has to be hurt and if we don’t do it now, then when?
So the waste of fighting some vague climate change agenda at the long term expense of the national, even international economy, will, hopefully go away.
As an aside, I believe the best alternative for industry is nuclear. As it is a centralized source, solar and other less centralized sources should be used by small companies and individuals.
How do you like your own benefits you get from the federal government?
Lewis, I assume u meant more 0s. That is only $1 billion. Reminds me of Dr. EVIL.
Such a distribution of ozone in the lower stratosphere makes the jet streams over North America and Europe come down far to the south.
http://images.tinypic.pl/i/00861/vdujra7a97np.png
http://pics.tinypic.pl/i/00861/rgyv7728zn7s.png
River atmospheric coming to California.
http://www.intellicast.com/Global/Satellite/Infrared.aspx?region=hipacsat&animate=true
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphOiginal.action?resid=EXC&waterYears=2014&waterYears=1982&waterYears=1977&waterYears=2016
Well said, Roy.
Extremely well said, Dr. Spencer.
As an independent operational meteorologist observing the global atmosphere daily the past 4 decades, this is what I’ve observed while the planet has warmed slightly and CO2 levels have increased.
1. The best weather, climate, growing and living conditions for life on this planet in at least 1,000 years, since the Medieval Warm Period that has evidence from 100 legit studies.
2. The planet is greening up, crop yields and world food production are smashing records. Some of this is from good weather, some from increasing CO2. Much from technology.
3. Some measures of extreme weather have decreased(violent tornadoes). Decreasing the meridional temp gradient by warming the higher latitudes most means the atmosphere does not have to work as hard to redistribute the heat imbalance.
4. Global drought has decreased slightly
5. Arctic ice reached the 2nd lowest level this last September, since humans have been able to accurately observe it.
6. Sea levels continue to increase at around an inch/decade.
7. The slightly warmer atmosphere(and oceans) have increased precipitable water values slightly and caused a slight uptick in rains, including high end/extreme events.
8. There has been no trend in hurricanes/typhoons. The ACE index maxed out in the mid 1990’s.
Life on this planet has always done better when temps were a bit warmer than this. The 1 deg. C of warming has been beneficial. The 120ppm increase in CO2 has been massively beneficial.
Based on authentic science and biology, most life should continue to benefit with increases even greater than that.
If the busted climate models had been correct, one could see some potential problems evolving for human life that decided to live and build along the coasts…….even while much of the rest of life welcomed the warmth.
Maybe now, we can live in the real atmospheric and biological world and not the one programmed into computers that simulate/speculate on a future world based on mathematical equations to represent a theory.
Mike Maquire…”Arctic ice reached the 2nd lowest level this last September, since humans have been able to accurately observe it”.
It’s important to emphasize Arctic ice is only that low during the two months of Arctic summer. Right now, there are 3 metres of ice covering the Arctic Ocean from the North Pole to Ellesmere Island at the north end of Canada.
Heavy rain prevents Obama from landing in Palm Springs; causes mudslides, flooding across region.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-la-rains-20170120-htmlstory.html
Monthly rainfall totals for Australia December 2016.
http://www.bom.gov.au/web03/ncc/www/awap/rainfall/totals/month/colour/latest.gif
Weekly rainfall totals for Australia.
http://www.bom.gov.au/web03/ncc/www/awap/rainfall/totals/week/colour/latest.gif
24 Hour Rainfalls for Australia.
http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/flood/?ref=ftr
The natural California drought continues to rapidly be “washed” away from natural climate/weather as reservoirs have also filled this month. In fact, only the southern parts of California still have long term drought, with more wonderful rain on the way…….several inches in the south the next few days.
Starting early next week, there will be a pattern shift and the West Coast will dry out under a natural upper level ridge.
Why use the term “natural”?
Well, its been assumed that the term climate change, refers to “human caused” climate change and not natural climate change (-:
For instance, when folks blamed the California drought on climate change, we all knew they meant “human caused”.
Or the first widespread, severe US cornbelt drought in 24 years in 2012(despite that being a record without drought) being from or being worse because of climate change.
Or climate change making Super Storm Sandy worse(Hurricane Hazel in 1954 was stronger and 1 of 3 hurricanes to hit the same region in 3 months of 1954).
In today’s world, many folks automatically look for a connection between extreme weather events and (human caused) climate change. There is no evidence of this, outside of the slight increase in high end rain events and increase in record warm minimums.
Do you think that an AGW-enhanced drought is supposed to last forever?
you cant prove it was an agw enhanced drought. mic drop
Read the SREX.
I know you won’t, likely because you aren’t capable of understanding it, and you have no real interest in the science anyway. Like a lot of others here, you come just to find someone, anyone who agrees with your anti-science. I guess tha somehow gives you peace, but it doesn’t give you knowledge or understanding.
“I further believe (but cant prove) that humans will cause somewhat more warming in the future.”
As much as I agree with your approach outlined in this article I would like to ask your opinion on the recent work showing that there is no “proof” that human emissions are effecting the atmospheric content or the global temperature. Hertzberg and Schreuder, 2016 concludes with Nothing in the data supports the supposition that atmospheric CO2 is a driver of weather or climate, or that human emissions control atmospheric CO2.
This supports Salbys contentions. Wallace etal 2016 demonstrates no correlation of human emissions and global temps as well as no tropospheric hot spot that is an expected fingerprint of enhanced greenhouse warming. You also did at least one post on the possible alternative explanation for increasing atmospheric CO2. With all these in consideration do you really expect(but can’t prove) increased human caused warming?
Radiative forcing measured at Earths surface corroborate the increasing greenhouse effect, R. Philipona et al, Geo Res Letters, v31 L03202 (2004)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2003GL018765/abstract
“Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010,” D. R. Feldman et al, Nature 519, 339343 (19 March 2015)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature14240.html
Here is a wonderful graphic display by Prof Hans Rosling showing the worlds countries health improvements over the last 200 years. If only we could get everyone to spend the 5 minutes to watch his video there would be very few people who would doubt the benefits of fossil fuels
Amazing how all countries started as a tight bunch at the bottom left corner but once the IR started and developed quickly the wealthier western countries moved away. But now a lot of the once poorer countries have almost caught up to Europe, Nth America, OZ, Japan etc. Incredible to think that this has happened over the last 60+ years and certainly within my lifetime. The graphics and data collection for his display were all financed by the US taxpayer and today everyone can quickly look at all the UN and other data and easily understand it.
Of course Lomborg and his mate Ridley have highlighted the incredible health benefits since the beginning of the IR and paid the price demonstrated by verbal abuse etc . Rosling has also had the dopey Ehrlichs hot on his tail for trying to spread this good news. Here Prof Hans Rosling’s 5 minute video from 1810 to 2009.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
Love it.
These benefits are due to the availability of ENERGY, regardless of its source.
Exactly David, we should be using more nuclear.
I’m fine with nuclear energy, as a bridge to a truly sustainable energy system.
Can we dump the nuclear waste in your backyard?
No, but Australia has a rather large backyard.
There are many very good locations to put nuclear wastes. David, you pretend that nuclear materials is some unnatural occurrence. Not so. Nuclear is found in nature. There are many wide open areas in the world well suited for same.
What is stupid is what we are doing now, which is storing them on site at reactors, while Harry Reid and BHO play politics, which is leaving them in my backyard, but hey, that’s working ok too. It’s just stupid.
Aren’t those your political partners – by the way.
So you like nuclear as long as you don’t have to deal with the long-term waste.
Have you thought that every other place feels the same about their backyard?
WIPP already has leakages and contaminated people working there. Barrels break. Or are forgotten. Accidents happen. Transportation trucks crash and leak. Radiation leaks.
We have to also find a way to tell the next several tens of thousands of years not to mess with our garbage site site. No one has yet figured out a safe way to do that.
In this video Hans Rosling looks at the Bangladesh miracle that has occurred over the last 30 years or within just one generation. Why is it that a majority of the globes population are unaware of this miracle and the wider world health miracle since 1950?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPTwE0qIuNA
While Goklany, Lomborg, Ridley, Rosling and others have worked hard to counter our ignorance we still find that most so called EDUCATED people havent got a clue. But why is this the case? Ive had SFA education yet I can easily answer these questions and believe me Im not super intelligent. But I do read a lot and I hate BS and BS artists.
Heres Roslings 2014 TED talk to a huge crowd. Even if you just watch the first 5 minutes it is worth it. It must be very difficult for these people trying to cut through the BS and nonsense to deliver the real facts and data. They certainly get little help from the MSM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm5xF-UYgdg
Read William Nordhaus’ book “The Climate Casino” (2013).
Climate might not be our main problem.
We seem to be entering a weird worldwide cultural conflict.
The middle ground is becoming uninhabitable.
The resulting costs will dwarf all others.
The Cold War and Global Warming might soon seem quaint.
I don’t buy Lomborg’s “$100 T” number for a second.
First of all, everyone here should be a skeptic about numbers that are mentioned but not proved in any way — numbers whose methodology is not even presented.
That’s true and all of you know it.
If I said addressing climate change would save $100 T, every one of you would be jumping on me expecting to see my methodology and proof.
Mindless accepting Lomborg’s number shows you are more interested in propaganda then science.
Far more than this, well established and respected environmental economics have come to much different conclusions.
William Nordhous of Yale, one of the most eminent climate economists in the world, who Republicans justs loved more than a decade ago for his promotions of cap-and-trade programs (programs conceived by Republicans as a market solution to pollution, which has worked for SO2 and NOXs), comes to much different conclusions.
He published a 2013 book titled “The Climate Casino,” that everyone here should read.
Like Lomborg, he uses models (mostly his DICE model) to estimate costs.
On pg 174 he gives his results, showing that a 20% reduction in 2025 global emissions woudl cost about 0.25% of world personal income.
If we take world personal income to be GWP (gross world production), about $70 T, that’s about $250 billion.
Far, far lower than Lomborg’s result.
Lomborg’s number is so outrageous that, frankly, it ought to set off the BS detector of everyone here. It simply doens’t smell right.
That’s why I want to see Lombgorg’s paper. Is it out yet?
Crickets.
I love to hear crickets.
Very well put once again Dr Spencer. What continues to annoy me about the whole climate change propaganda is that we are constantly being bombarded in the media with claims that crops are ripening earlier or later or whatever the case may be, because of climate change. The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching because of warmer water temperatures or lower water levels oh they seemed to have forgotten that the sea level is supposed to be rising because of global warming. The claims being made are just a tad premature. With the accepted temperatures having only warmed less that 1 degree F how can people try to justify the start of armagedon. I just wish everyone would take a deep breath and stop continually blaming everything on climate change. I look forward to your next post.
Sea level rise:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Good.
That means the glaciers are melting!
Opens more land for agriculture and houses.
Not necessarily.
How much land is being lost to sea level rise?
David, not much. South Florida, some other areas.
In the meantime Canada and Russia have huge amounts of land which the leaving permafrost will open to ag.
Melting permafrost is a big positive feedback to global warming, ~200 Gt carbon.
Is South Florida the only place that will go? Says who?
What about Louisiana? Norfolk? Bangladesh? Many southern Pacific islands?
Do you care? Or is it more important to you to save $0.15 on a gallon of gas?
Increase in land temperatures, cp 1850-1900, from CRUTEM4:
1.7 C (=3.0 F)
That’s about 1/3rd of an inverse ice age. And there is no signs of the warming stopping now.
Good.
Makes for a longer growing season!!
More food for pests and people.
“We also find that the overall effect of warming on yields is negative, even after accounting for the benefits of reduced exposure to freezing temperatures.”
— “Effect of warming temperatures on US wheat yields,” Jesse Tack et al, PNAS 4/20/15
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/05/06/1415181112
O M G. David, real life data trumps fake data. Scientific Method 101.
Yet you offer no data. Hmm……..
“Suitable Days for Plant Growth Disappear under Projected Climate Change: Potential Human and Biotic Vulnerability,”
— Camilo Mora et al, PLOS Biology, June 10, 2015
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002167
By the way, there are other numbers out there that have far different conclusions than Lomberg. And that are published and peer reviewed.
Im suspect youll all simply dismiss these numbers, and Roy too, for no reason other than you dont like them.
Short answer: reductions of fossil fuel emission SAVE MONEY and SAVE LIVES.
Benefits of ~$250 B/yr, 5-10 times larger than the cost of such reductions.
From:
Climate and health impacts of US emissions reductions consistent with 2C, Drew T. Shindell et al, Nature Climate Change, published online 22 FEBRUARY 2016 | DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE2935.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v6/n5/full/nclimate2935.html
From the abstract: We examine the impacts of such highly ambitious scenarios for clean energy and vehicles. US transportation emissions reductions avoid ~0.03 C global warming in 2030 (0.15 C in 2100), whereas energy emissions reductions avoid ~0.050.07 C 2030 warming (~0.25 C in 2100). Nationally, however, clean energy policies produce climate disbenefits including warmer summers (although these would be eliminated by the remote effects of similar policies if they were undertaken elsewhere). The policies also greatly reduce damaging ambient particulate matter and ozone. By 2030, clean energy policies could prevent ~175,000 premature deaths, with ~22,000 (11,00096,000; 95% confidence) fewer annually thereafter, whereas clean transportation could prevent ~120,000 premature deaths and ~14,000 (9,00052,000) annually thereafter. Near-term national benefits are valued at ~US$250 billion (140 billion to 1,050 billion) per year, which is likely to exceed implementation costs. Including longer-term, worldwide climate impacts, benefits roughly quintuple, becoming ~510 times larger than estimated implementation costs. Achieving the benefits, however, would require both larger and broader emissions reductions than those in current legislation or regulations.
Conflating genuinely harmful chemical air pollution and the the vital colourless odourless trace gas CO2.
If you’d notice, both result from burning fossil fuels.
The renewable carpetbaggers try to piggy-back on genuine concerns about true air pollution, an entirely separate concern that can be minimised in cities with highly developed economies.
The tactic is typically dishonest.
The burning of fossil fuels is the cause of the huge increase in health and longevity cited in Rosling’s youtube piece cited earlier.
The fact is early in the Industrial Revolution pollution was not seen as a concern. Additionally, controlling soot and particulates and other such are relatively expensive and are usually not the first things a young, ‘backward’ economy is concerned about.
Later, as the society becomes richer, due to the large amounts of energy available and the evolution of the industrial economy from one of heavy industry to consumer goods, pollution control becomes more important. For all intents, it is a consumer good.
At the same time, so much excess time becomes available, it allows people the ability to become advocates for all sorts of esoteric causes – saving the snail darter, spotted owls, creepy crawlers and other such. I wouldn’t be surprised for some radical environmentalist to take up saving salmonella.
What made the world richer and healthier was ENERGY. It need not come from any particular source. Fossil fuels do a lot of damage though, already and far into the future. Did the accounting include that?
Insofar as the comments went off the rails awhile back, those with an interest in history might enjoying “Pittsburghs Dark History”:
http://popularpittsburgh.com/darkhistory/
DA always wimps out? Come on David tell us how to address your so called CAGW? Give us the energy sources and don’t forget the EIA, IEA and reports etc.
Oh and don’t forget China, India and the developing world. Don’t forget you’re behind by 34% according the US EIA report.
What does the “C” mean? The definition of the word?
It’s not a scientific term, nor one I use.
So how do you define it?
“C” – Catatonic for David.
“Is” – you’ll have to ask Bill Clinton.
Come on Davy boy answer your question. You can’t wimp out forever. And you know what the c means as well as anyone. So tell us how to mitigate your problem.
You used “catastropic.” Define it.
David,
If it’s not ‘C’AGW why are we so concerned? Climate has been changing for thousands of years, the sea level has been rising for 20,000 + years. It is an established fact of human history. Why then are we so concerned now? Because we are told the change is threatening the humans with ‘C’.
Otherwise, nothing much has changed, and there is no reason to get excited, no reason to subsidize so many alternative inefficient projects.
I wrote I didn’t know how you were using the word “catastrophic.” I can’t judge CAGW until I know that much, at least.
David,
You’re being obtuse. You know exactly what it means. Even I know what it means. It’s in the news every day. You know the story line – CNN or MSNBC (AKA CHICKEN LITTLE) tells us the sky is falling. (C)
If you know what it means, tell us.
Crikets.
Well I could use dangerous or terrible or whatever, but just tells us how to fix your problem. Let’s tease it out in little bits. What are your energy sources for the future and what difference will they make?
Roy
I hope that President Trump and the new Administration will find gainful employment for redundant climate scientists.
The bloated climate science departments in many universities will now be trimmed back.
Many very smart people will find themselves out of a job and will perhaps not have a skill set to match with industries requirements.
Retraining will be required.
Suggested topics for retaining include
Thermodynamics,electrical and mechanical engineering,new material utilisation (eg Graphene) etc
These are smart people many of whom have drifted into climate research perhaps since it was the only growing area of significant budget increase in recent years.
It would be a waste of human talent if their potential was unutilised.
In California will still be snowing. Above Europe is still frosty high-pressure area.
http://images.tinypic.pl/i/00862/cyn74kdsm2bd.png
Roy – disappointed. Beliefs and guesses – is that what counts for science in this brave new world? Eastern Atlantic 5N to 20N is all you have to look at to get the idea of what is happening with the planets largest weather system. Sure don’t look like SST heading south.
I suppose we should try to help poor timid Davy boy and hope he will find the nerve to dip his toe into the mitigation pond. Here’s two 5 minute videos from Lomborg full of evidence and data to help educate him about their so called CAGW.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sgm3QOWt6Tc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PWtaackIJU
I want to see the papers, so I can see the assumptions and exactly what calculations are taking place.
Even the big daddy of CAGW (Dr Hansen) likened a belief in solar and wind energy to a belief in the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy. IOW it’s a fairy tale and definitely inviting all the delusional donkeys to have a swig of the Kool aid.
https://climateaudit.org/2011/08/13/hansen-and-ipccs-green-kool-aid/
So let’s help DA in his struggle to try and dream up a proper response to my challenge. Here is the pie chart from the IEA (EU) showing S&W + geo supply just 1.3% of TOTAL world energy. But IEA told Lomborg that S&W alone was just 0.5%. And they forecast that may increase to just 2.5% by 2040. IOW ZIP, but will they ever wake up.
http://www.iea.org/stats/WebGraphs/WORLD4.pdf
And here is the 2016 US EIA report, forecasting that co2 emissions will increase by 34% by 2040. See page 3. Just a pity that Obama and Holdren etc didn’t have enough brains to read their own report.
https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/presentations/sieminski_05112016.pdf
Creates a big problem for the extremists. So I think DA should book his flight to China and India etc and carry out his protests over there. I’m sure they’ll give him a warm reception.
The US has already emitted more than twice as much CO2 as has China (since 1850), and we currently emit about twice as much CO2 per capita than them.
We’re the energy hogs, not them.
Heating in winter in northern India can also be a problem.
https://accuweather.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/52c5fe4/2147483647/resize/590x/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Faccuweather-bsp.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fda%2F9b%2Ff7b4f99a4b4e9f48dd8de1891271%2Findia-1-22.jpg
Roy,
You are betting that global warming will be mild and beneficial.
If I understand your position, you do this by rejecting a large share of research on climate sensitivity for reasons that are based more on a political outlook (lack of trust in the researchers) than an analytical one.
Last I read from you, you dismiss research on the ice age transitions of the late Quaternary, that suggest a stronger climate sensitivity than you have outlined. Your view is that the knowledge on these transitions is too uncertain, though you’ve not detailed why, AFAIK. It seems that, rather than incorporate that uncertainty into your own analysis of future climate change, you dismiss it outright such that it does not impinge on the likelihood of your own analysis.
There is a wider spectrum of possible futures/climate sensitivity estimates in the literature, your view being limited to a narrow band. I think you could be a lot more even-handed.
So could the Trump administration.
Did they truly “delete” every mention of climate change from the government website?
No.
Content from the Obama administration was removed. The USA.gov website was cleaned out, same as 8 years ago. The Trump administration deleted nothing. They have been busy filling up the website with their own material.
The misinformation here is pure political theatre. A trap for climate warriors (whatever their bent) who have trouble disentangling science from politics.
Is new ways of influencing the climate are beneficial for the environment? Can you assure us of this?
barry
You were commenting on Dr. Spencer’s view of Climate Sensitivity.
Here is an older article you may find interesting.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0450(1979)018%3C0822%3AQCTPIO%3E2.0.CO%3B2
I think reality would suggest that for some unknown reason Climate scientists are inflating the climate sensitivity figure (at least double I think).
The accepted value for doubling of Carbon Dioxide alone is 3.7 W/m^2
This article found that the Plank Feedback is around 1 k/(3.3 W/m^2)
http://www.atmos.albany.edu/facstaff/brose/classes/ATM623_Spring2015/Notes/Lectures/Lecture03%20–%20Climate%20sensitivity%20and%20feedback.html
They use this low number (1 K/(3.3 W/m^2) to get a value for how much the globe would warm with an increase of 3.7 W/m^2.
I really do not see the logic on how they come up with such a number.
With the Earth system you have some downwelling radiant energy used up in evaporation so it takes even more input energy to reach some equilibrium higher value.
Look at things this way. With no water and a blackbody surface you would need to continuously add 390.079 W/m^2 to maintain a surface temperature of 288 K. If you wanted to raise the surface temperature of your blackbody by 1 K you would have to add an additional 395.525 W/m^2.
To increase a blackbody without evaporation losses by 1 K would require and additional 5.446 W/m^2. I cannot see anyway they could arrive at a figure of 3.3 W/m^2 raising the Earth’s surface temperature by 1 K when to raise a blackbody would require a minimum of 5.4 W/m^2. On Earth some of the Watts go to evaporation so you actually need even more than 5.4 W/m^2 to raise the surface by 1 K.
If you use the 5.4 figure you can see the Climate scientists have increased the sensitivity 1.6 times higher than what is possible under ideal conditions. There seems no way a 3.7 W/m^2 radiant energy increase would warm the Earth’s surface by 1.2 C. Under ideal conditions (no evaporation or thermals) the increase could only be 0.69 C. I think Roy is much closer to real science than the abstract and complex programs of a climate model.
Norman wrote: “I think Roy is much closer to real science than the abstract and complex programs of a climate model.”
You do know, I hope, that Roy uses a complex model to convert satellite readings into atmospheric temperatures?
David Appell
Thanks for your thoughts but the context of my post was not to discredit climate models because of their complexity. It was a question of when you get a model that claims a 3.7 W/m^2 increase in radiant energy will raise the surface temperature by 1 K you should seriously question the model’s output. Explained above that to raise a blackbody object in space from 288 K to 289 K would require and addition of 5.4 W/m^2 to the objects surface to accomplish such a temperature rise. How would it be possible that a 3.3 or 3.2 W/m^2 increase in energy could somehow raise the Earth’s surface temperature to 1 K and a 3.7 W/m^2 increase would raise it to 1.2 K (or C)?
Norman says:
“It was a question of when you get a model that claims a 3.7 W/m^2 increase in radiant energy will raise the surface temperature by 1 K you should seriously question the models output.”
Why?
Where does this claim come from?
David Appell
One source is yourself. On another thread you pointed out that a doubling of Carbon Dioxide (which should give an increase of radiant energy to the surface of 3.7 W/m^2) would raise the Earth’s surface 1.2 C. Not sure what thread it is on and I am not going to look for it at this time unless you insist you did not make such a claim.
As for a link I posted one above (I usually post links to most my data, I am not an accumulator of data and need to rely on others for this information)
Here is the link it you are really interested.
http://www.atmos.albany.edu/facstaff/brose/classes/ATM623_Spring2015/Notes/Lectures/Lecture03%20–%20Climate%20sensitivity%20and%20feedback.html
1.2 C is the temperature increase without feedbacks.
Norman, you misunderstood.
UAH and RSS use complicated models to extract average tempertures from microwave readings.
These aren’t “climate models.” But they certainly are models. Complicated models. Carl Mears of RSS think the surface results are more reliable.
“Without models, there are no data.”
– Paul O’Neill
Norman says:
“I cannot see anyway they could arrive at a figure of 3.3 W/m^2 raising the Earths surface temperature by 1 K when to raise a blackbody would require a minimum of 5.4 W/m^2.”
An important point is that radiative forcing is defined with respect to the tropospause, not the surface.
David Appell
YOU: “An important point is that radiative forcing is defined with respect to the tropospause, not the surface.”
So then why would the overall temperature of the temperature of the tropospause be of concern to surface dwelling life forms?
The surface will not warm by 1 K so how will this exactly cause problems?
Norman: Doesn’t matter. RF is defined with respect to the tropospause. Blackbody radiation is calculated with respect to the surface.
See the difference?
Norman says:
“So then why would the overall temperature of the temperature of the tropospause be of concern to surface dwelling life forms?”
What do you calculate for CO2’s surface warming, given its RF?
Norman, here’s why RFs are defined with respect to the tropopause and not the surface:
https://scienceofdoom.com/2011/09/02/radiative-forcing-and-the-surface-energy-balance/
See especially the quote from Ramanathan from 1998.
David Appell
Thanks for the link, it was a very interesting read. The more I learn about climate science the less I know. I think I know something and the complex wrench gets thrown into the mix.
Norman wrote:
“The more I learn about climate science the less I know.”
I think that might be true for all knowledge.
“USA.gov”
Should be “whitehouse.gov”
http://www.snopes.com/white-house-web-site-trump-changes/
I’ve got a theory about the excessive concern about climate change, which I’d like to hear comments on.
I’ve had experience in relationships with women who appear to have OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).
Such women are terribly concerned about cleanliness and very minor issues which they perceive as a huge, potential problem. They tend to clean the house every day, check several times that the doors are locked, be excessively concerned about ‘use-by’ dates on food labels, and if they have children, they protect them from every imaginable situation that might be contaminated with dirt or bacteria.
Their children, as a result of such extreme maternal protection, often develop problems in later life because their immune system was not exercised in combating basic infections when they were young.
I can’t help wondering if the typical climate-change alarmist falls into this category of some type of OCD.
Climate change alarmists seem to ignore the capacity of organisms to adjust to changing conditions. They seems to want everything to remain the same, like a house which is perpetually clean because the house-proud woman vacuums and dusts it every day.
What do you think? This is just an hypothesis at this stage. (wink)
The blog comment equivalent of fake news.
Barry,
I only pay attention to arguments that are supported by reason. If you want to criticize my proposition, then please provide either hard evidence or hard, logical reasoning in the absence of direct evidence.
I think you can double down on the disingenuosness in a more amusing way. Your quip was a bit long-winded.
Still paying attention? (wink)
My criticism of this site would be the frequency of ad hominem attacks that occur in response to any argument presented that upsets in some emotional way the views of a respondent.
In my previous comment, or hypothesis relating to OCD, I’m searching for an explanation for the fixation of certain scientists on problems arising from CO2 levels.
I would categorize this fixation as a form of OCD, for reasons that I’ve mentioned. If you want to debunk my hypothesis, then please provide some evidence that might imply that what I suggest is not true, or cannot be substantiated.
Vincent,
It is difficult, if not impossible, to answer your question. There are more general answers available, however.
Some people have guilt feelings about themselves, their situation, even about how humans affect other animals and plants. There are also those who believe humans have more influence on their environment than could possibly be true. We see the results of this in human sacrifices to the gods in order to alleviate/atone for some perceived misbehavior of the people towards the gods which caused the gods to unleash drought or floods or volcanoes.
Today, with the climate change alarmists, the process is the same. Alleviating their individual or group guilt requires punishing someone – usually not themselves. It becomes a matter of belief, not much different than religious belief, and the result – see the Inquisition – is the same. So they rationalize their meanness to others in order to assuage their personal guilt.
I hope that helps.
Lewis Guignard
Crouse, NC
Why is it you never post any data and evidence for your positions??
He’s trolling.
DA claims that the US are energy hogs,but not the Chinese. What a stupid response, because we know that the Chinese would have followed the same course if they had the opportunity 200 years ago. Just imagine the different geographical response if the IR was invented in Korea and not the UK.
Asia could have been the world leaders and perhaps USA and Europe would have lagged way behind. Who knows. But we do know that the world changed quickly over the last 200+ years and life expectancy has doubled in the developed world. And the developing world is now catching up quickly and all because of the use of fossil fuels.
Plus we now live in a much safer and greener world since the die was cast more than two centuries ago. At least you prove that you understand your predicament. The US has had the biggest reduction in co2 emissions over the last decade because of the change from coal to gas. Germany on the other hand has wasted endless billions on stupid unreliable energy like S&W and yet haven’t reduced co2 emissions. The poor German people have copped it in the neck because of some of the highest electricity prices on the planet. And of course no measurable change to temp by 2100 at all.
But once again please tell us how to mitigate your CAGW? I’ll be very interested.
Could have would have might have.
Fact is, China didn’t.
I see high electricity prices in Germany as their own fault, by deciding to scrap nuclear power after Fukishima. Decisions have consequences.
Does a man affects the the polar vortex in the stratosphere? You can change the direction of the jet stream? Do you have an impact on the strength of the solar wind, which operates in the polar regions?
Below you can see what is happening with the circulation, when polar vortex is weak.
http://files.tinypic.pl/i/00862/zvap9xwos0j4.gif
You can fire off nuclear missiles into the stratosphere and destroy ozone. But whether it will be good for humans?
Earth to cleanse, it shows Chernobyl.
ren…”Does a man affects the the polar vortex in the stratosphere?”
According to John Christy at UAH there is a lot scientists don’t know about the real atmosphere. Much of the propaganda comes from climate models, programmed by people who are often not even qualified as climate scientists, meteorologists, or atmospheric physicists.
What don’t scientists know about the real atmosphere, that John Christy does?
Are we to climate change? Of course!
Just see the changes in temperature in the North Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2017/anomnight.1.19.2017.gif
Those aren’t “changes” — the map is for one day only.
You must see as the southern hemisphere blooms vegetation.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/overlay=co2sc/equirectangular
Click on the map and check.
David Appell how you think, how many meters will be snow in eastern Canada this year?
https://accuweather.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/77e93e2/2147483647/resize/590x/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Faccuweather-bsp.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fce%2F64%2F2690c2554f0d8b3ab31902f696f5%2Fnortheast-storm-mon-tue.jpg
ren
Since you seem to be able to locate material on polar conditions I am wondering if you have a history of the extent of the very cold polar air. Currently the super cold air is located in Eastern Russia and Alaska. My question is the size of the super cold air (subzero by many degrees) getting smaller or time so it covers less surface area or is about the same size and just sits over different locations on any given year? Sometimes Europe, sometimes US.
Alaska had been warmer the last few years and now it is in the frigid grip of the very cold blob of air.
Thanks.
Look at the waves in the stratosphere. These waves are formed over the eastern Siberia and move east.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/temp10anim.gif
With some reason the polar vortex is locked over the eastern Siberia.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_t10_nh_f00.png
See how it looked in 2014.
http://files.tinypic.pl/i/00862/c4o9az1i3xnb.gif
So it looked in October 2016.
http://images.tinypic.pl/i/00862/2hp2s3s8l6ck.png
This pattern is not new, but is visible moving north and west.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao.loading.shtml
Sorry.
Take another look 2013.
http://oi64.tinypic.com/2ajtjpw.jpg
Norman..”or is about the same size and just sits over different locations on any given year? Sometimes Europe, sometimes US”.
If you look at the UAH temperature contour maps over the years the warming spots seem to move around. Unfortunately they don’t show the base temperature. That is, if a region in the Arctic show it as +5C above the 1980 – 2010 average it does not reveal in winter that the base temperature may be -50C.
The Arctic Ocean is a dynamic system with ocean currents and wind currents over it. The ocean currents move massive weights of ice around as if they are toy boats. I’m sure the wind currents in the atmosphere move the areas of cooling around as well.
If you look at a current ice coverage map of the Arctic it shows 3 metres of ice from the North Pole to Ellesmere Island with parts of the Russian side of the ocean with little or no ice. That’s testament to the power of circulating ocean currents that can pack the ice up against the north coast of Canada while leaving parts of the Siberian side bare.
Temperature differences between Siberia and the Canadian north coast are not enough to explain a lack of ice on the Siberian side.
Gordon Robertson
Would you have some link to show if the blob of cold air is staying roughly the same size (km^2) or expanding or shrinking?
They have sea ice extent maps that I can look at daily but I was not sure if they had cold air extent maps. I do know it moves around and sometimes sits at some location a long time before moving. My curiosity is what the overall size of this cold air is doing. Thanks.
Snowfall totals from this upcoming storm in Sierras (National Weather Service).
http://www.trbimg.com/img-5883f220/turbine/la-sgrad-1485042267-snap-photo/686/686×386
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-new-storm-california-floods-muslides-snow-20170121-story.html
Well i am a human 5 years ago the water company run anew lines and end up cuting my Gas line (Columbia gas ) and never fixe it back I was out quite a bit of money to blow it out and it came back in ur face so I my self has heat by a Electric heater n my kids has froze to deaf and can’t afford kerosine at $5.00 a Gallon and propane same price I do understand why the Gas company want run some Gas lines where we and my neibour s lives they burn wood burning stoves and I’m sure they would sign up for the Natural Gas we all live up old stripped mines and hard to get any thing I live on Johnson drive Johnson bottom in Inez ky if you can tell me what I can do please let me no I sure appreciate it my p o box 845 inez ky 41224 thank u I’m a widow and 69 years old and not afford thes Gas prices
“The first images from the new weather satellite just arrived, and theyre absolutely incredible”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/01/23/the-first-images-from-goes-r-have-come-in-and-theyre-absolutely-incredible/?utm_term=.ac1705c9edf2
While I will no longer waste my time debating climate trolls like David Appell I need to express my admiration for the brilliance of this post.
Roy Spencer, you are amazing. You are more than worthy to take over the mantle of the superb Judith Curry.
Please lose your obsession with me.
Your replies are purely ad hom and never give *any* science to counter my claims.
You make the point that more CO2 benefits plants and animals so I hope you will like this:
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/benefits-of-co2.pdf
You have to like the quality of the GWPF advisory council that has Nobel prize winners:
ACADEMIC ADVISORY COUNCIL
Professor Ross McKitrick(Chairman)
Professor Deepak Lal
Adrian Berry
Professor Richard Lindzen
Sir Samuel Brittan
Professor Robert Mendelsohn
Sir Ian Byatt
Professor Ian Plimer
Professor Robert Carter
Professor Paul Reiter
Professor Vincent Courtillot
Dr Matt Ridley
Professor Freeman Dyson
Sir Alan Rudge
Professor Christopher Essex
Professor Nir Shaviv
Christian Gerondeau
Professor Philip Stott
Dr Indur Goklany
Professor Henrik Svensmark
Professor William Happer
Professor Richard Tol
Professor David Henderson
Professor Fritz Vahrenholt
Professor Terence Kealey
Dr David Whitehouse
“More than 800 Earth scientists and energy experts (and counting) urge the incoming president to take six crucial steps,” Scientific American, 12/6/16
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/an-open-letter-from-scientists-to-president-elect-trump-on-climate-change/
Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change, signed by 36 Nobel laureates:
http://time.com/3945630/lindau-nobel-laureates-meetings/
This appears to be an appeal to authority.
4 days later.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2017/anomnight.1.23.2017.gif
ren, has someone purposely sent you here to contaminate the comment sections with irrelevant fluff?
Would that be you, and your magic mirror?
“Since Oct. 1, total precipitation in the Sierra Nevada has been soaring at rates similar to the wettest winters in the modern record: 1982-83 in the northern and central Sierra and 1968-69 in the southern Sierra.
As of last week, Lake Shasta, the states largest reservoir and a major source of water for San Joaquin Valley agriculture, is 82% full and releasing water to create more storage room. Oroville, which supplies the State Water Project, is 77% full and also making releases.”
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-rain-record-la-20170123-story.html
Ozone shows the course of the jet stream. Continued to rain in California.
http://pics.tinypic.pl/i/00862/ep3fwrk9ot11.png
We have these very strong west-to-east winds we call them zonal winds at the jet stream level in the atmosphere that has sort of propelled this prolonged series of storms toward California and actually allowed these storms to strengthen, Swain said. The presence of this strong jet stream is key, Swain said, as California lies in a region in which storms often weaken as they approach the state.
Last year, the strong west-to-east winds over the Pacific Ocean did develop, but instead of being aimed at Southern California, it benefited areas to the north, especially Oregon and Washington. This year, it really is headed right at us, Swain said.”
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-rain-la-20170123-story.html
The rapid growth of ice on Greenland Sea and a large increase in mass of snow in Greenland.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02186/plots/4km/r07_Greenland_Sea_ts_4km.png
http://www.dmi.dk/uploads/tx_dmidatastore/webservice/b/m/s/d/e/accumulatedsmb.png
The Solar System Large Planets influence on
a new Maunder Minimum.
Harald Yndestad *) and Jan-Erik Solheim **)
*) Norwegian University of Science and Technology
**) University of Troms, Norway
http://yndestad.priv.no/Doc/P-EGU2016-160418.pdf
http://blog.yndestad.priv.no/#comments2
That’s like using a credit card to live on. Eventually the card hits its limit and ya gotta start makin the payments.
Actually, the public debt isn’t at all like a credit card.
For one thing, we control our own currency, so we can always print more money to satisfy our debt obligations. Hardly ideal, but it means the US can never default and will never default.
While David is technically correct, in reality the printing of paper money causes inflation so the payment of debt is with inflated dollars which, practically speaking, is a default on the debt.
Of course (usually). But the US can never default, and never will.
Meanwhile, our interest payments are way low:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=cyYj
barry
Above you talked about climate sensitivity. I had a response for you and I would like to include another. A lot of the “Official” climate sites think clouds might be a positive feedback but the CERES data clearly shows this is very flawed thinking.
Under a warmer world you get more evaporation (which should act like cooling that I have seen no one include in their discussions of climate sensitivity) which should produce more clouds.
https://ceres-tool.larc.nasa.gov/ord-tool/jsp/EBAFSFCSelection.jsp
If you Visualize the Data and bring up the tool’s graphs (not mine) you will see the last graphs show the amount on energy reaching the surface Clear Sky vs All Sky is a positive 25 W/m^2 at the peak. The overall effect of clouds is to considerably allow less radiant energy to reach the surface. If you discuss a few W/m^2 increase in radiant energy to the surface, the increase in any clouds would greatly overwhelm the increase.
The more I look at the details of this climate sensitivity the more it looks like political manipulation by the Obama Administration (via grants to hungry scientists like leading a horse with a carrot stick). The European Union and Obama wanted to create a large super government to take care of everyone. Climate Change is the one idea they could come up with that could rally all the diverse groups of citizens under one common banner “Save the Earth!” The movement seems much more political and control minded than a scientific research. Hopefully now real science can come shining through the haze of politics and the suppressed voices can rise up and speak the Truth!
Norman…speaking as someone who has had a lot of experience with positive feedback in electronics I find the definitions of PF on the Net and elsewhere to be seriously off base.
In electronics, there are two kinds of PF. One is used in servo systems and it is nothing more than a positive error voltage that indicates a monitored device has deviated from a set reference voltage that would indicate it’s desired function. With that kind of PF there is no gain or amplification involved.
The other kind of PF is the kind implied by climatologists who incorrectly insist there is an amplification in the atmosphere due to PF.
In physics, that kind of PF is clearly defined and the definition does not state that PF amplifies anything. PF is part of a system of amplification but it requires an amplifier.
Before saying more, anyone can throw around the term positive feedback. That was NOT a shot at you, I am talking about the general use of the term. In certain climate science minds it implies an exponential, runaway effect in which temperatures increase out of bound due to PF.
Mathematically, gain with positive feedback is: G = A/(1-AB)
Where G = overall system gain or amplification
A = the gain in the amplifying device, often a transistor
B = feedback
You can see immediately that the feedback component is just one part of the system and that it has to be less than one. B cannot be equal to 1 or greater than one since a value of 1 gives a denominator = 0 and greater than one would give a negative gain.
The term 1 – AB is the crux of the system. The feedback is always a fraction and multiplied by the amplifier gain. If the feedback is negative, it changes the sign to 1 + AB and the gain is reduced. If B is +ve, 1 – AB is always less than 1 and AB < 1.
A typical small signal transistor gain is 100. You can see that the PF must be a small fraction to keep AB 0 ; G -> infinity. Therefore, as
AB -> 1 ; (1 – AB) -> 0.
That’s the basis of Hansen’s argument for an atmospheric tipping point. Hansen never bothered to explain where the amplifier is found in the atmosphere. He presumed many things that have no basis in the physics definition of true positive feedback.
Water vapour feedback makes no sense. The feedback component is not water vapur it is infrared energy transmitted by the water vapour. It is the IR that must be considered as part of the feedback system which comprises a theoretical cyclical exchange of IR between the surface and GHGs in the atmosphere.
Immediately, it becomes plain that such a cyclical system has no amplifier and that it has losses. Furthermore, the IR flux involved in the cycle is a tiny fraction of the overall massive IR flux from the surface.
The system completely messed up my math. It printed:
A typical small signal transistor gain is 100. You can see that the PF must be a small fraction to keep AB 0 ; G -> infinity. Therefore, as
AB -> 1 ; (1 AB) -> 0.
That should have read:
You can see that the PF must be a small fraction to keep
AB < 1.
Anyway as 1 – AB goes to zero, the gain (G) goes to infinity.
As AB goes to 1, 1 – AB goes to 0.
It’s amusing how many engineers thing the climate system is a simple circuit. Just because that’s the only model they have to think about it.
Where is the peer reviewed publication proving this?
Come on, Norman, you’ll gain instant fame by showing the clouds are a negative feedback.
David Appell
I think CERES data already strongly proves the point. I can prove nothing. I command no satellites nor compile data from such. Others are doing this and providing their results. Their results show clearly that clouds overall greatly reduce energy to the surface of the Earth.
Do you have evidence proving contrary? I already steered you to a peer reviewed article on clouds that made the claim that a loss of clouds increased energy to the surface by 6.8 W/m^2 over a couple decades. You rejected the paper so it seems when it comes to peer reviewed material it can only be useful when it agrees with your belief systems.
Because of this doesn’t it seem pointless for me to provide you with peer reviewed material? You will reject what you don’t like.
Did you even take a look at CERES? Is the data they provide worthless to you? They have graphs over 16 year time frame showing Clear-Sky conditions vs All sky. All sky means with clouds included and when you compare the two conditions you can clearly and without doubt see that, based upon their evidence, that a lot more energy reaches the surface in clear sky conditions meaning clouds have an overall cooling effect (some clouds warm other cool, the total effect is cooling on a global scale and it is a considerable amount).
Can you answer why you have a complete fear of CERES graphs? You never look at them or consider them. What is causing this fear in you? Is it because you know they do not support your views?
David Appell
One big point is you think I am driven by “fame”. This could be your motivation so you are on the band wagon of the more popular idea (right or wrong). I care less about fame. I like scientific integrity and search for truth.
Yet you’re afraid to submit your claims to scientific journals where they can be evaluated for scientific integrity and truth.
How come?
David Appell
You: “Yet youre afraid to submit your claims to scientific journals where they can be evaluated for scientific integrity and truth.
How come?”
Primarily they are not my claims. They are evidence provided by the CERES team. I am only pointing you the way to the evidence. Please try to understand this simple point, it is not MY data. It is the property of the CERES team and their efforts to provide the best data they can.
Why would I submit their graphs to a scientific journal and take credit for what is not mine?
And I ask again, why are you petrified with fear and loathing to dare to look at graph from the CERES team? You seem to avoid even a peek? Why is that?
Norman, data like these aren’t available to the research community and the public?
https://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/order_data.php
https://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/science_information.php
Norman wrote:
“Why would I submit their graphs to a scientific journal and take credit for what is not mine?”
Scientific papers cite CERES all the time. The science they’re using is based on those data.
“And I ask again, why are you petrified with fear and loathing to dare to look at graph from the CERES team? You seem to avoid even a peek? Why is that?”
Because:
1) I’m not here to be your research assistant,
2) from what I’ve seen in your comments, and some of the junky papers you push (like Martin Hertzberg), I simply don’t believe your claims, and wouldn’t unless they’re peer reviewed and published (and not in E&E).
3) If you were good you wouldn’t be writing things like “petrified with fear and loathing,” which don’t exactly make me want to waste time on your stuff.
Norman: Again, are you saying the CERES data are’t available for the public and the research community to use?
Norman: The science is looking more and more like the cloud feedback is positive:
Dessler, A.E., A determination of the cloud feedback from climate variations over the past decade, Science, 330, DOI: 10.1126/science.1192546, 1523-1527, 2010.
Dessler, A.E., Observations of climate feedbacks over 2000-2010 and comparisons to climate models, J. Climate, 26, 333-342, doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00640.1, 2013.
Observational and Model Evidence for Positive Low-Level Cloud Feedback,
Amy C. Clement et al, Science 24 July 2009: Vol. 325 no. 5939 pp. 460-464
DOI: 10.1126/science.1171255.
Zhou, C., M.D. Zelinka, A.E. Dessler, P. Yang, An analysis of the short-term cloud feedback using MODIS data, J. Climate, 26, 4803-4815, doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00547.1, 2013.
Dessler, A.E., Cloud variations and the Earths energy budget, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L19701, doi: 10.1029/2011GL049236, 2011.
David Appell
Then don’t look at the graphs. Not my problem. The CERES graphs clearly show clouds allow less overall radiant energy to reach the surface. I can’t make you look and am clearly NOT asking you to be a research assistant. I was hoping you would look and with your intelligence would explain how these graphs do not show what I am stating they do (though it would seem unlikely you could do this).
I really do not know why you would at least look at the graphs and see what I am claiming. It really does not take much time. Maybe 5 minutes. Then at least you would know what the claim is. As it stands now you are just be obtuse. You won’t look but you will post claims the information or my interpretation are not valid and you base it upon other links I have put into posts.
Since you won’t look at the graphs, please do me a favor and if I post them to someone else to look at, don’t add your comments, they are highly unwelcome. If you give the courtesy to at least look, consider and then reject based upon a logical evaluation I can respect that. What you are currently doing is pointless and shows a deep dishonesty in your nature. You don’t look at the data but claim it is wrong or incorrect. That is really a stupid poster and that is not an insult but a correct assessment of a person who ridicules something they will not even attempt to look at and then give stupid explanations of why they won’t.
David Appell
You won’t look at the CERES graphs in the link I provide but you make these reasons:
“Because:
1) Im not here to be your research assistant,
2) from what Ive seen in your comments, and some of the junky papers you push (like Martin Hertzberg), I simply dont believe your claims, and wouldnt unless theyre peer reviewed and published (and not in E&E).
3) If you were good you wouldnt be writing things like petrified with fear and loathing, which dont exactly make me want to waste time on your stuff.”
If I do not post directly to you, please keep your idiotic comments to yourself, I want someone to look at the graphs and explain what they see. Since you will not look at the graphs then just please and kindly Shut-Up!
Norman, a lot of your comments are addressed directly to me. You ask me in particular to look at your stuff.
The above is why I”m not gonna spend much time on them.
Norman says:
“I really do not know why you would at least look at the graphs and see what I am claiming.”
Because I’ve seen too much of your stuff here to conclude you really always know what you’re doing.
However…: a week or two ago I wrote a comment on another post saying that you needed to start doing more back of the envelope calculations. (I might have called them order of magnitude calculations, not sure.)
I was wrong about that. Since then I’ve realized that you DO try to do many such calculations — far more than other commenters here.
So I apologize to you for that.
I don’t usually agree with your OOM calculations — and I’ve usually tried to point out why — but I respect you for thinking more deeply than almost all here and trying to understand the numbers.
You and I debate sharply. But I hope you’ll accept this apology.
— David
It’s such a shame (and I mean shameful) that our generation cannot reply on the scientists any more to objectively study this issue and report factual findings. Are there any honest scientists left? I only trust engineers who are so annoyingly consistent making cut-n-dried, logical analyzes and decisions.
V. Williams…”Its such a shame (and I mean shameful) that our generation cannot reply on the scientists any more to objectively study this issue…”
It’s not just this issue, the ignorance spans the breadth of science. There is an ad running on TV by Gilead, a drug manufacturer, urging baby boomers to get tested for hepatitis C. There is no such virus according to the tests for a virus put forward by the Louis Pasteur Institute.
The pantomime Hep-C virus is reported to remain hidden in the human system for decades then suddenly appear. The same claim was made for HIV, which has not been identified either according to the Louis Pasteur criterion.
Here is a good article that explains this phenomenon about so-called viruses that remain hidden.
http://www.whale.to/vaccine/slow_viruses.html
This is the kind of pseudo-science with which we must endure. One of the authors, Peter Duesberg, is an authority on viruses and won the California Scientist of the Year award at one time. He has been in scientific purgatory since he claimed HIV is a harmless passenger virus that could not possibly cause AIDS.
Very recently, the scientist who discovered HIV, Luc Montagnier, seems to have validated Duesberg. He claimed HIV will not harm a healthy immune system. Montagnier claimed further that he has never isolated HIV, purified it, or even seen it. His team hypothesized it based on RNA strand found in contaminated blood. The same applies to HEP-C.
The amount of money the drug companies can make from this pseudo-science is staggering. The potent drugs provided by them come with a disclaimer that the drugs cannot cure HIV and may cause AIDS infections and liver damage.
Montagnier explained that AIDS is caused by oxidative stress which can result from malnutrition, contaminated water, parasites, drug abuse, or questionable sexual practices. He claimed HIV can only operate once the immune system is compromised.
Luc Montagnier also thinks water has “memory,” the basis of homeopathy.
V. William says:
“Are there any honest scientists left?”
V. — are you honest?
The Trump White House did not delete any of the Obama White House data including references to climate change.
The information was archived to:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/
I have long suspected that climate alarmists have psychological issues that compel them to use any convenient cause to further there religious ideologies. I got the evidence watching the huge crowds of idiots attending the inauguration.
Actress Ashley Judd completely lost any semblance of logic or reasoning when her rant compared Trump to Hitler. I wished for a moment that she had been making such a statement against Hitler when he was in power to see the difference. Had she done that at a rally against Hitler, she and all the participant would have immediately been incarcerated in a concentration camp where most of them would have died a slow, cruel death.
She came across as an utter idiot. Same with Madonna who I have always considered an idiot. She suggested blowing up the White House.
Let’s get it straight, Madonna has made a career of sexual perversion intermingled with a questionable singing talent. He notion of propriety was kissing Britney Spears on the mouth when they both appeared on stage. She is from England, yet there she was at a religious rally claiming she’d like to blow up the White House. Had she been of Middle East appearance she would be in jail right now.
And there was Jane Fonda, another idiot who recently flew over a Tar Sands site then lectured the residents of the Tar Sands town Fort McMurray, Canada, to move elsewhere and find a different kind of work.
I wonder if anyone caught the TV coverage of the woman who was removed from a flight because she literally attacked another passenger because he seemed to support Trump? One of her beefs was that Trump…she raised two fingers of each hand to suggest quotation marks…was opposed to “climate change”. A complete raving idiot who had to be removed from the plane.
It’s unfortunate but there are people who have obsessive/compulsive issues coupled with a god-complex wherein they feel responsible for saving the planet from who knows what. They don’t care what others think, they are on a religious mission to change the world despite what anyone else may think or what damage it does to humans.
GR,
Oh. I thought Madonna was going to blow the White House [staff], not blow the White House up!
Silly me!
Cheers.
Mike Flynn…”Oh. I thought Madonna was going to blow the White House [staff], not blow the White House up!”
Hillary’s husband Bill would have been into that but Hillary would have blamed Madonna.
During the 8 years of Clinton’s tenure, VP Al Gore was too busy with his wife Tipper trying to uncover Devil worship lyrics on rock recordings to give much attention to global warming. In those days, climate change was as yet unknown.
What are you grown men doing following Madonna anyway?
It’s time to get over your 1980s fetishes and fantasies.
Good read about “climate change” and how it is natural!
http://bit.ly/ClimateChangeUM
Pseudoscience.
David Appell,
Nobody could accuse you of spouting pseudo-nonsense – you spout the real thing!
Do you really, really, believe that the climate never changed before the emergence of man?
Do you really, really, believe that you can stop the climate from changing?
Have you completely taken leave of your senses, or are you just pretending to be witless?
The world wonders!
Cheers.
“Do you really, really, believe that the climate never changed before the emergence of man?”
Really?? Honestly???
WHO claims that?
David Appell,
As somebody demanded before, ad nauseam, ANSWER THE QUESTION DAVID!!!!
Questions, actually. I suppose someone with the attention span of a goldfish might not be able to get past the first sentence.
I may have been in error, assuming you had senses of which you could take leave. If that is the case, I offer a most humble apology!
Cheers.
Flynn, you never answer my questions. So why should I answer yours?
PS: I don’t live on this site and haven’t been here for a couple of days. So stop screaming.
Norman,
You supplied 2 papers on climate sensitivity. There are hundreds.
At the end of the first paper, there is stressed the need for more study when conclusions are widely different. This leads the way back to the point I was making.
Climate sensitivity has a wide range. Ignoring most of that range is not scientific or neutral. Preferring one spectrum of that range – and justifying that with pure assertion – is unconvincing. Policy-makers have to deal with the spectrum of risk.
barry…”Policy-makers have to deal with the spectrum of risk”.
Rubbish!! We’ve had no average warming for 18 years, that’s plenty of proof that we have nothing to worry about.
Your propaganda from NOAA will soon be revealed for what it is. They have fudged the historical record and the Trump admin will soon reveal the truth about that. I hope Trump shuts down NASA GISS as the political body he claimed it is.
Gordon Robertson says:
“Rubbish!! Weve had no average warming for 18 years”
You’re just like Trump — despite all the evidence given to you, you keep lying.
Like him, you’re getting tarnished as a liar.
Reading for comprehension will increase your chances of making a comment relevant to the one you are replying to.
When it comes to climate change and energy policies, the new administration is focused on rolling back the Obama administration’s programs to cut greenhouse gas emissions and opening up more oil and gas resources to drilling.
To justify this approach, the website claims that eliminating Obama’s Climate Action Plan, which includes regulations on emissions from power plants, as well as clean water regulations will increase American wages “by more than $30 billion over the next seven years.”
Sounds great, right?
Trouble is, it’s a made-up claim. The nonprofit research and journalism group Climate Central debunked this on Friday.
Turns out that this $30 billion figure comes from a non-peer reviewed paper written by a finance professor at Louisiana State University in 2015, and it was written for a fossil fuel industry organization. The paper didn’t analyze the specific power plant regulations the Trump administration wants to repeal, which makes the administration’s claim dubious from the start.
Instead, the paper’s author wrote about the potential economic impacts that the U.S. might expect if it began drilling for more fossil fuels from public lands. Its conclusions are hardly robust enough to base national policy decisions on, given that they don’t factor in the costs that will come from climate damages. The paper reportedly doesn’t correctly analyze the combined effects of removing regulations, either, which also includes costs.
The White House site also makes no mention of how academics and the previous administration have said that the environmental regulations Trump seeks to dismantle would themselves boost part of the economy.
For example, in justifying its regulations in the first place, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calculated that the overall economic benefits of power plant carbon emissions reductions would be in the tens of billions of dollars a year.
http://mashable.com/2017/01/23/white-house-website-falsehoods/?utm_cid=hp-h-1#tnciB7MkL5qY
Seems Trump lied yet again.
You gotta see the funny side, poor old greenies 4 years no sorry 8 years to go
The election didn’t alter the laws of physics. Not addressing climate change now justs means more will be have to be paid later.
Is that the “funny side” you referred to?
Ross Brisbane…the US EPA is a hotbed of climate alarmists. I am looking forward to it being brought back into scientific reality.
You can nitpick all you want about minor issues, the major issue is that the EPA will no longer be spreading climate propaganda.
The Trump admin is also proposing cutting funding to the IPCC and the UN in general unless the UN gets off it’s partisan and fantasy games.
I am a left-winger and I am not looking forward to cuts they have in mind for social programs, even if they don’t affect me. However, breaking this trend to political-correctness is well worth it. Trump is not saying anything much different than what many of us, including left-wingers, have been thinking for some time.
Our freedom of speech has gradually been encroached upon to the point where we can no longer talk about reality without being branded as racist or homophobic.
I don’t agree with their position on abortion but when a woman on TV news claimed they were expecting several million abortions in the coming year I had to wonder what we have come to.
A woman’s decision on abortion should be her own but when it comes to 2 million unwanted babies I have to wonder what they heck is going on.
I am not a racist either but here in Canada we had multiculturalism forced on us without the least amount of consultation as to what we wanted as Canadians. We need to take our country back and tell the elitists and politically-correct where to get off.
People come to Canada because of the civility and lifestyle it presents yet many get here and carry on with the same lifestyle that forced them to leave their own countries. Rather than enforce Canadian law and our way of life, politicians like our Prime Minister are apologizing for who we are.
That’s why Trump is president in the US and why the UK left the European Union.
The thought of a US president deciding what science can and can’t be published. let alone an anti-intellectual like Trump, should send shivers down the spine of absolutely everyone.
Now you’re being hypocritical David.
Are you following the news?
(Y)es or (N)o?
David is usually hypocritical. He would never admit Obama lied, numerous times, that the EPA under Obama was/is operating outside the law, and that the climate agenda of Obama was not based on science but on politics.
Lewis: Prove the EPA was operating outside the law.
Go ahead, I dare you.
Read the 2016 book “Struggling for Air,” by Richard L. Revesz & Jack Lienke. You will learn there that what Obama and the EPA were doing was closing the loopholes present in the original Clean Air Act and its 1991 Amendments.
Because, if corporations can find a loophole, they are happy polluters, regardless of their impact on anyone downstream.
Lewis, why don’t you report back after reading this insightful book. THanks.
Jet stream pulls another portion of moisture to California.
Still raining in California. The SUN all reconciled.
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphOiginal.action?resid=EXC&waterYears=2014&waterYears=1982&waterYears=1977&waterYears=2016
Colder air to sweep across tornado-ravaged southeastern US late this week.
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/colder-air-to-sweep-across-tornado-ravaged-southeastern-us-late-this-week/70000659
California’s stormy winter sets snowfall record for Mammoth resorts over 20 feet in one month.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-mammoth-snowfall-20170124-story.html
Is California may have more water reservoirs? It is a pity to be wasted.
ren…it seems Mother Nature was creating a drought in protest over Democrat political-correctness. Now that the US has a President who tell it like it is, suddenly California has plenty of water.
No, they don’t:
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
The thoughtful dismantling of the EPA will be a wonderful thing.
Will you enjoy the dirty skies and water that existed before the EPA was in place?
Do you want cities as pollute as Beijing?
Do you resent all the money saved via the Clean Air Act?
“How the Clean Air Act Has Saved $22 Trillion in Health-Care Costs,” Alan H. Lockwood, The Atlantic 9/7/12.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/how-the-clean-air-act-has-saved-22-trillion-in-health-care-costs/262071/
C’mon David you’re being obtuse.
Answer the questions.
I like ending conversations here.
David, you don’t end conversations, people stop responding because you are too obtuse to carry one on.
For instance, a dismantling of the EPA will not lead to dirty skies and dirty water. In fact for you to even say so is only an effort at diversion.
The EPA has gone far overboard. Further, it has become a haven of religious zealots, cultists no less, who believe they have the right and responsibility to dictate to others how to live while they live…. how – I suspect very well, off the fruits of those other’s labors.
But to stop them from continuing will not change our industrialized society back to what it was in 1950. So try again. Make an accurate statement about what will happen instead of making up something.
As always, Lewis, you offer no data, no facts, no evidence, and no insight.
When the EPA is gone, we’ll be looking to you to explain why US cities now look like Beijing.
What will you say?
Interesting. I think Lomberg is being diplomatic by conceding some warming from co2. Ask him if there is an ice age coming and if our co2 will stop it. I bet 100% of scientists agree there is nothing we can do to stop it.
David Appell and Nate: Open a history book. Your facts are mistaken. Nate you compared trump to a Nazi. Trump is Limited gov’t. That is the opposite of the Nazi (big gov’t progressives). David, you should know Reagan’s expenditures created the Internet. Or at least launched it. Everything built on top of it is Reagan. At best Clinton didn’t mess it up until his dereg finally tanked the economy (glass steagal, community reinvestment act and so much more). Now lie.
Deregulation: all administrations and congresses going back to 80s were deregulating finance industry. Conservatives were certainly big drivers of it (phil Gramm etc), until it went all awry.
The internet was started around 1970 by DOD. Reagan arrived in 80s.
Trump seems very much into crony capitalism: corporations that are friendly to me, or do what I want, will benefit. He seems quite willing to pick winners and losers in economy, and tell individual companies how to run their businesses (who they can hire, where they should build or be punished).
This was/is a hallmark of Nazi-ism and Putinism.
Delegitimize the free press (no doubt Trump is doing this): was/is a hallmark of Nazi-ism and Putinism.
Trump is regularizing propoganda (false information favorable to govt) was/is a hallmark of Nazi-ism and Putinism.
Trump seems quite willing to choose winners/losers in science. (Naziism).
Darwin Wyatt says:
“Ask him if there is an ice age coming and if our co2 will stop it. I bet 100% of scientists agree there is nothing we can do to stop it.”
Nope — the next ice age looks increasingly unlikely:
“…moderate anthropogenic cumulative CO2 emissions of 1,000 to 1,500 gigatonnes of carbon will postpone the next glacial inception by at least 100,000 years.”
A. Ganopolski1 et al, Nature (2016)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7585/full/nature16494.html
We’ve emitted just shy of 600 Gt C since 1850, and it’s increasing now at about 10-11 Gt C/yr.
Darwin wrote:
“David, you should know Reagans expenditures created the Internet.”
What that an expressed goal of St. Reagan?
Reagan tripled the national debt.
Dr. Spencer’s blog is further proof that Trump was right when he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any supporters.
Liberals always have and always will lie to push their agenda.
CNNs gigapixel trump inauguration
http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inauguration-gigapixel/
Nobody can lie as fast as Trump can. He is the Liar King.
Trump does tell harmless lies usually to troll the media and it works wonders. Obama told serious lies, lies that hurt Americans.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Trump can’t even get over his own lies — now there has to be a whole investigation into voting because TRump had his poor feelings hurt over losing Inauguration attedence.
Trump lies every day.
And that was just one of about 10 blatant lies this week.
Trump has already blown his creibilitey — no one believes what he says, anymore. It will all be scrutinized for the lies.
Appell’s posts are so frequent, predictable, and repetitive – one wonders why he even bothers anymore.
Is it: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein?
jimc: Thanks for reading my comments.
That’s hilarious considering the progs single handedly picked him thinking they could beat him.
Btw, It’s been cooling since 1936 according to the EPA (link).
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/large/public/2016-07/high-low-temps-download1-2016.png
Darwin Wyatt…more from the EPA site:
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-high-and-low-temperatures
“Heat waves in the 1930s remain the most severe heat waves in the U.S. historical record”
They go on to minimize that fact by claiming the heat waves were due to poor land management. Sure…heat waves over the entire US was due to poor land management and nothing to do with the Sun.
False. 1934 is 6th warmest USA48 year.
Sun was weaker in 1st half of 1900s than the second half:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koppg/TSI/TIM_TSI_Reconstruction.png
@Darwin: Your chart analysis is incorrect. The area under the chart line since late 1950’s is increasing; therefore, warming, not cooling.
wizgeek…”The area under the chart line since late 1950s is increasing; therefore, warming, not cooling”.
It’s a heat wave index. 1934 is still the warmest year in US history and the heat waves during that era have never been seen since.
1934 is only 6th warmest USA48 year.
top three are 2012, 2016, 2015.
Wizgeek:
“@Darwin: Your chart analysis is incorrect. The area under the chart line since late 1950s is increasing; therefore, warming, not cooling.”
The previous interglacial is the ceiling for me. It was much warmer than now with lower CO2. That means until it gets as warm as then I won’t even consider CO2. Can you wrap your mind around that?
Eemian was globally warmer than where we are today, but not to where we’re going:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.svg
In Europe at least:
“…differences in the orbital parameters [and solar insolation] are sufficient to explain the reconstructed Eemian temperature patterns.”
“A model-data comparison of European temperatures in the Eemian interglacial,” Frank Kaspar et al, GRL, 11 June 2005.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL022456/pdf
David Appell:
“Eemian was globally warmer than where we are today, but not to where were going:”
And how did the Eemian end? May I suggest you switch to the “high CO2 may prevent the end of the next ice age” bandwagon to cover your bets… Besides It’s not just the Eemian that was much warmer with less CO2 but the Holocene climate optimum as well.
And btw, on progs picking trump, Google Scott foval bird dogging. Progs picked him because their internal polling showed he’d be easier to beat. Everyone thought so. Moreover, What else explains progs sitting on the sexual harassment allegations until two weeks prior to the election? That alone would have derailed him in the primary. Mind you trump merely said what Clinton did. Amazing phony outrage though…
Darwin:
I just quoted a paper showing it’s likely we’ll skip the next glacial period (which is about 50 kyrs in the future).
What is your evidence that the “Holoceneo optimum” was warmer than today, and that it was global?
When was it, anyway? What measurements show it? Are they global measurements?
DA:
What is your evidence that the Holoceneo optimum was warmer than today, and that it was global?
You’ve rejected all the evidence that it was warmer just as you have the MWP. Yet, one of your own, the illustrious Dr. Michael Mann conceded as much. The latter anyway. He said and I won’t bother chasing down his exact quote for you since it won’t matter “we are seeing unprecedented warming unseen for at least a millenium”. You guys should prob call a huddle and get on the same page.
Darwin wrote:
“Progs picked him because their internal polling showed hed be easier to beat.”
I thought Trump was picked by a plurality of votes in the Republican primaries.
You have evidence that says otherwise??
David Appell:
“I thought Trump was picked by a plurality of votes in the Republican primaries”
A plurality would be what the rest of the field had… Trump merely had the most votes overall and then only from billions in free advertising the msm (the opposition party) gave him. Did you Google Scott foval and bird dogging. How can you not know this stuff?
Darwin Wyatt says:
“A plurality would be what the rest of the field had Trump merely had the most votes overall”
Having the most votes is what a “plurality” is.
DA:
My point is the rest of field combined had the most votes. If there had been one person instead of 15+ opposing trump that one person would have won. Do you understand now?
Darwin says:
“Scott foval and bird dogging”
Ever heard of James O’Keefe?
DA:
“Darwin says:
Scott foval and bird dogging
Ever heard of James OKeefe?”
I have and I heard scott foval resigned because he got caught bird dogging… I heard him in his own words say it.
Darwin, you don’t understand what a plurality is.
DA:
I’ll say it slower. He got the most votes because the msm gave him billions in free advertising Because he was easier to beat. How did that turn out for you? Haha! Stop… side ache!
Darwin Wyatt says:
“Youve rejected all the evidence that it was warmer just as you have the MWP. Yet, one of your own, the illustrious Dr. Michael Mann conceded as much.”
Dude, you’re going to have to do better than this.
DA:
Better than Dr. Mann saying current warming is unprecedented for at least a millennium (MWP)? Okay how about Dr. Phil Jones saying current warming is insignificant? Or perhaps Dr. Lovelock recanting? What does Dr. Addell say? Oh wait you’re not a Dr. are you?
Darwin: Mann et al was right. That’s been soundly confirmed in the years since.
Actually, Darwin, I am a Dr. I just don’t make a big deal out of it, and feel no need to include that in my URL.
http://www.davidappell.com
Dr. Addell:
Then you must know CO2 is below natural variability and we are headed for an ice age? It’s almost a certainty. The only thing that may stop it is massive dust. Since its lack of CO2 that brings the dust level up, you may be on to something if for the wrong reason. But as Lomborg so well addresses, the cure is worse than the disease.
No Darwin. Read above:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/01/why-it-doesnt-matter-if-even-100-of-scientists-agree-on-global-warming/#comment-236194
Darwin Wyatt says:
“Youve rejected all the evidence that it was warmer just as you have the MWP”
You haven’t offered any.
Darwin, do you understand how science works?
DA:
“And Hillary got 3M more votes than Trump.
3,000,000.00”
I know the difference between 3,000,000 and $3,000,000.00
Darwin Wyatt says:
“If there had been one person instead of 15+ opposing trump that one person would have won. Do you understand now?”
Do you understand that definitely DIDN’T happen?
Do you understand the definition of “plurality?”
DA:
Do you understand the definition of bird dogging or billions in free advertising? Or in the case of Sanders v Clinton, democrat primary exit polls differing by up to 13.9%. Corruption is indicated when they differ by 2%…
Darwin, you’re way off the topic of this blog post.
I like ending conversations here.
Progs picked Trump??!! That’s a whopper!
Make that a double whopper.
Nate:
The progs also picked Clinton over Sanders. That’s putting it mildly. Hilarious!
And Hillary got 3M more votes than Trump.
3,000,000.00
DA:
I’m confused are you endorsing voter ID now? Besides the popular vote is meaningless. How many conservatives even bother to vote in California? I know I wouldn’t.
DA…”And Hillary got 3M more votes than Trump”.
And she is a major loser. Your point? The media are now revealing themselves as major fools over backing Clinton while pollsters are wearing bags over their heads.
BTW…opinion polling that failed so dramatically in the US election is far superior to the confidence levels used by the IPCC.
Here in Canada, the ruling party gets about 40% of the vote. Same in the province of British Columbia where the ruling party most of the past 50 years has garnered no more than 42% of the popular vote.
If they change the voting system in the US, loonies from California and New York will run the country.
Trump doesn’t think the popular vote is meaningless. He’s been lying about it since he took office.
You are spot on with your assessment! Thank you for daring to speak the truth about the big picture associated with the “Climate Change/Global Warming” cabal. As a Meteorologist and Public Speaker, I couldn’t agree with you more. Our society just needs more people like you and other common sense, rational science folks to advocate such a message and overcome the powerful, intimidating (often heretical) and unscientific claims from the other side.
I just came across your blog, and now, will follow it. Another great advocate for the message you addressed in this write-up is Alex Epstein (Author of “The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels”, https://www.cato.org/events/moral-case-fossil-fuels) . He is doing fantastic work on “enlightening” the publics awareness on the value of energy in human society and extolling the untruths propagandized by the “Alarmists”. A must read for folks like us. Thanks!
The summer season at the South Pole ends two weeks before the expected date.
Ever wish you lived in a country where the leaders were fiscally responsible and did not borrow to the hilt? Here are just a few of the nations with a debt to GDP ratio that we Americans could only dream of:
Haiti
Bangladesh
Sudan
Ethiopia
Bolivia
Guatemala
Rwanda
Congo
Afghanistan
Chad
Botswana
Cuba
Mexico
Cambodia
Snape…”Here are just a few of the nations with a debt to GDP ratio that we Americans could only dream of:”
Is this a joke of some kind? You have listed countries where human rights are not recognized.
Besides, America is a continent. Bolivia, Guatemala, and Mexico are all in America as is the United States. All citizens of those countries are Americans as are Canadians.
“You have listed countries where human rights are not recognized.”
You made his point.
My main point is that a lot of prosperous countries have a high government debt, while the majority of countries with low debt are actually very poor. I’ve often wondered if tea party types are even aware of this. Economies are very complicated. Lots of factors besides debt.
A lot of tea party types understand very well. Do you?
Do you understand what public debt is and what the cause of it is? Do you also understand the long term effects?
I suggest not and that your point is to rationalize something you don’t understand in order to justify the behavior of the political class.
Do tell — what are the long-term effects of public debt?
The strong rise in temperature in the stratosphere over the Arctic Circle. But this is not the end of winter?
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_TEMP_MEAN_JFM_NH_2017.png
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_WAVE1_MEAN_JFM_NH_2017.png
California should prepare for rain.
http://www.intellicast.com/Global/Satellite/Infrared.aspx?region=hipacsat&animate=true
In three days will be a strong increase in the speed of the solar wind (geomagnetic storm).
During this time, a more activated the storm that reaches the West Coast.
“Although chromospheric eruptions involve the transfer of energy to the particles (directly through reconnections or indirectly by generating instabilities and shock waves in the crown), the immense shock waves that accelerate the coronal ejections can excite the particles On a much larger scale. These energetic particles must be dissociated from those associated with chromospheric eruptions because they are differentiated by their composition, their charge and their spatial dispersion, the latter being much more localized.
Today the theory of Dr. Jack Gosling is accepted because it is demonstrated that the coronal ejections are at the origin of the strongest magnetic storms and the phenomena of auroras that accompany them. These phenomena are related to the high intensity and configuration of magnetic field lines, their speed, and not to the energy of the particles.”
http://system.solaire.free.fr/soleil-effet-sur-terre.htm#effetsoleil
Ahead of us a longer period of strong solar wind (speed).
http://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/animations/enlil/latest.jpg
Polar vortex will accelerate and air temperature over the Arctic fall.
Need to see a jump of temperature in the stratosphere.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/05mb9065.png
Aren’t we now over 25 years from the initial predictions of the IPCC? That’s a quarter of a century of fearing that the planet is overheating!
And, we still have no clear evidence of “global warming”?
Christy and Spencer have indicated that NONE of the IPCC predictions have been correct.
I guess we’re still waiting….
“And, we still have no clear evidence of global warming?”
You mean, besides all the warming, the ice melting, the seas rising?
DA…”You mean, besides all the warming, the ice melting, the seas rising?”
Even when the IPCC and its 2500 reviewers tell you about a 15 year warming hiatus you are still in denial.
What ice is melting and what oceans are rising?
Be specific.
GR: You know the answer to your own question; I’ve given it to you many times.
And you know about ice melting and seas rising as well. I don’t understand why you’re pretending no to.
The ice isn’t melting any faster than it has in the past 20,000 years, nor are the seas rising any faster.
Try another tact.
Further, are you advocating for colder – you know, more snow and ice? Why? Will it feed you better, or do you think you can set the global thermostat on moderate?
Lewis:
Wrong, and wrong.
You clearly have no idea what’s going on.
— David
jdhuffman…”NONE of the IPCC predictions have been correct”.
The IPCC is seriously confused. In 2001 they claimed future climate states cannot be predicted then they used the term ‘projected’ to infer a prediction without actually predicting anything.
Unvalidated models cannot predict.
In 2013, they revealed a warming hiatus of 15 years from 1998 – 2012. That hiatus is now 18 years long. In the same breath they raised the likelihood that humans are causing the warming from 90 to 95%.
Warming??? What warming??? They just said there had been no warming.
No climate model can predict, in principle.
Because no model(er) can foresee the forward path of aGHG emissions, volcanic eruptions, and solar changes.
Roy,
You cannot possibly guarantee that $100 trillion spent to avoid global warming will result in a lower standard of living for the world’s poor. We have plenty of wealth and wealth-generation capacity for everyone in the world to have a decent standard of living now- we’re just not making the decision to turn our productive capacity to that end. I have no idea where you’re getting the $100 trillion figure from, but let’s just assume you mean a sum over the next fifty years, so assuming (almost certainly wrongly) that it would be front loaded in real terms, that’s $2 trillion per year. North American GDP is $19.5 trillion. We could loose $2 trillion of our GDP and have no impact at all on poor people- after all, the top 20% of US population alone earned $3.6 trillion. These households all had incomes above $100,000. They could all take a 50% loss in income, and not be anything like poor.
So even if it really takes 3% of global GDP to convert to a low-carbon economy, the only reason that has to come out of the income of poor people is if that’s the way we want it to be. I don’t want that, and I don’t see why it should be that way. The alternative, obviously, is that rich people would just have a harder time finding cheap domestic labor, because more people had the option of working on installing solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear power plants.
As far as agricultural productivity goes, you know very well that only a very small component of the large increase over this century has anything to do with CO2 fertilization. It has mostly to do with deliberate nitrogen fertilization, and some to do with improved breeding (mostly to take full advantage of the nitrogen).
Roy, if what you care about is helping poor people, how about you spend more time doing that and advocating for it here. How specifically would you like us to change public policy to help poor people? I’ve got an idea- let’s tax investment income the same as regular income, and raise the top income bracket to 40%. That way, it will make more sense for firms to spend the money they have available for salaries and stock options on people lower down the income scale, rather than on wealthier people, who would just see the government take a big chunk of it.
Best regards,
Dan
With all due respect, but whether California should not have more water reservoirs?
How do you want to stop the jet stream in the tropopause?
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_o3mr_250_nh_f00.png
There will be more snow.
http://www.onthesnow.com/california/skireport.html
@Dan: Poverty is a symptom whose underlying cause is insufficient education, insufficient trade skills, inappropriate career choices, and, in rare cases, unforeseen circumstances. Why treat the symptom that is poverty when it’s far more effective to address the underlying causes? Like some of the unethical members of the medical profession, treating symptoms instead of causes increases repeat business and, therefor, revenue. Poverty has its ne’er-do-wells–they’re called pandering politicians and public sector leeches.
And government spending does a lot to provide sufficient education, sufficient trade skills, create business choices and provide a safety net for unforeseen circumstances.
@David: Recognizing that “government spending” is a convenient euphemism for “redistribution of taxpayer money”, the overarching question is why should ideological government bureaucracies be the entities that determine social winners and losers? Education serves the community, and the community is comprised of individuals engaged in mutual commerce; so commerce should heavily influence (and support) basic education that best serves the community via skills/career education and selection. Yes–I know, I know–we all should be free to choose our life’s trade and career (blah, blah, blah,) but if said freedom of choice is likely to result in undesirable or unusable skills, then where’s the corresponding acceptance of personal responsibility for having made such a incongruous decision? Where is the protection of a community’s liability for these poor personal decisions? Additionally, the “safety net” for employment gaps is in reality an existing, mandatory insurance policy funded by a payroll tax–much like Social Security–because some ideologies hold the condescending opinion that the general population is too ignorant to take care of itself or too ignorant to learn how to do so.
I’m not interested in debating a libertarianism — which I mostly see as a cult — here.
I’m surprised you know the meaning of the word cult. Would you include the AGW beliefs under that broad blanket?
Absolutely not. AGW is based on science.
WizGeek…”Why treat the symptom that is poverty…”
Symptom??? Have you ever been poor???
The poor have to eat, they have to pay rent, they need medical care. Some can’t even get clean drinking water and die from the lack thereof. Those are not symptoms they are facts…absolute reality that ideologues don’t seem to understand.
Some in Canada can’t afford the power to heat their abodes. It will only get worse if climate alarmists have their way.
I am a left-winger who grew up in poverty. I know first hand what it means. I differ from other left-wingers in that I cannot stand political correctness nor can I stand the practice of subverting science as a means to enable an unrelated agenda. Climate propaganda is not helping the poor it is working against them.
Unlike what many thing, poor people are not pathetic dependents. In fact, the poor I grew up with were proud and independent. They were people with a deep integrity who did not rely on handouts. Poverty is about far more than circumstances. There are places where no amount of energy or integrity will get you ahead.
One woman in Ontario complained to the prime minister that her power bill now exceeds her mortgage. This is wrong and it has to change. People cannot be held hostage by governments who use power sales as a means of income.
Canadian electricity prices don’t look so bad — lower than many US cities.
see figure, pg 4:
http://www.hydroquebec.com/publications/en/docs/comparaison-electricity-prices/comp_2015_en.pdf
@Gordon: Yes, I’ve been poor (single mother with limited skills) and at one time lived out of my vehicle or by the grace of co-worker’s couch; but this is a misdirection–I did what was necessary to remove my symptoms of poverty by retooling, apprenticeship, and a lot of hard work–I addressed the causes. Like medical professionals not needing to be a victim of a disease, one need not be poor to understand the symptoms of poverty and its underlying causes.
Children aren’t born to be poor–this is self evident. Children might be raised in poverty, but that’s not a decree they’re doomed to be poor adults–plenty of examples of poverty-to-fame people. Children might be culturally indoctrinated to accept poverty, but that’s a social failing not rectified simply by unqualified money injection because that just treats the symptom, not the cause. And thus we’ve come full circle.
We can have endless dialog using generalities and euphemisms centered on the well-meaning but ineffective enabling of faceless, disconnected and dehumanizing policies. The real work to address poverty needs to be very personal and honest discussions between people in need and professionals in social science, psychology, career development, and money management as well as building stronger ties to family, community, and spiritual circles. But this is a discussion for another time in another thread. 🙂
Growing up in a poor community predicts very well whether you are going to be poor. Why do people with kids want so badly to move away from poor communities?
@Nate: Did you miss this section in my post?: “Children might be culturally indoctrinated to accept poverty…” Cultural poverty is a very real problem that is best rectified by deprogramming parents, influential, positive-thinking community leaders, and crime prevention.
Dan…”How specifically would you like us to change public policy to help poor people?”
If public policy had anything to do with it poverty would have been eradicated long ago. The truth is that the intent is lacking. That brings it back to human greed and ignorance.
Roy is correct The money going to fight the pantomime climate change should go straight into programs for the poor. There is no point whatsoever in attempting that indirectly by carbon taxes as proposed by the UN to redirect funds from wealthy nations to poor countries.
If you are going to help the poor, DO IT!! Stop talking about it, DO IT!!
We can send a space craft to Mars but we can’t solve poverty. Pathetic!!
I would gladly pay a carbon tax if I knew that money went directly to helping the poor. Here in Canada where I live the carbon taxes go to private companies.
“Because the tax must, by law in BC, be revenue-neutral, the province has cut income and corporate taxes to offset the revenue it gets from taxing carbon. BC now has the lowest personal income tax rate in Canada and one of the lowest corporate rates in North America, too.”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2014/07/british-columbias-carbon-tax
da…”Because the tax must, by law in BC, be revenue-neutral, the province has cut income and corporate taxes to offset the revenue it gets from taxing carbon”.
Proof positive of your abject naivete. I happen to live in a province with one of the most corrupt governments imaginable. We have the highest rate of child poverty in Canada.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2011/12/05/CarbonTrustDrawsHeat/
Our former premier was caught driving under the influence in Hawaii and did not resign. He left us with a debt of 2 billion dollars.
The party is known as the BC Liberal Party. It used to be the Social Credit Party who were right of Attila the Hun. When they were decimated at the polls circa 1990 for abject corruption, the leader just mentioned was left in a vacuum. Rather than rebuild the party he loaded a leadership convention of the Liberal Party, which had just been revived, and stole the party from the guy who revived it.
Anything you read about the carbon tax from their supporters, like The Economist, is propaganda. The current premier promised to help families but she omitted the small print, she meant wealthy families. As I said, we have the highest level of child poverty in Canada.
The carbon tax goes straight into the pockets of private companies. This government has no idea what revenue neutral means, there sole objective is to feather the pockets of their private supporters.
They took a public corporation, BC Hydro, and gave chunks of it away to private concerns. They allowed former party hacks to build small power generating stations that supplies power to the Hydro electrical grid at considerable profit.
I think that coal heat and power plants with appropriate filters are the most ecological to the local environment.
There are also economically justified in countries where winter lasts from October to April.
Just to see the extent and thickness of the snow cover in eastern Canada. And this is only half the winter.
https://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/snow_model/images/full/National/nsm_depth/201701/nsm_depth_2017013005_National.jpg
https://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/snow_model/images/full/National/nsm_swe/201701/nsm_swe_2017013005_National.jpg
Need to distinguish between automotive smog in big cities of the need for home heating.
Gordon Robertson
Can you vote such dishonest people out of office? Does Canada have a process of recall elections?
GR:
I trust The Economist’s reporting far more than you factless anecdotes.
Norman…”Can you vote such dishonest people out of office? Does Canada have a process of recall elections?”
Here in the province of BC we can recall but the process is so convoluted it is almost impossible to remove someone. Besides, when it comes to global warming, the opposition party is up to it’s ying yang with eco-alarmists.
Sorry.
http://img5.onthesnow.com/image/la/47/1_19_17_snow_go_1_478738.jpg
Let’s see how falls the surface temperature of the North Pacific.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2017/anomnight.1.30.2017.gif
I wonder, what does the number trillion above mean? Is it 10^12 or 10^18?
10^12
Sharply increased the speed of the solar wind. Lows in the Atlantic and the Pacific will become more active.
Solar wind
speed: 740.0 km/sec
Nobody cares.
Repeat it the people of California.
http://pics.tinypic.pl/i/00865/o02f67r0txcd.png
What do you think you are accomplishing on this site?
Do you think Californians are checking in here to see what ren has to say about their weather, so they know if they have to wear boots or sneakers?
In a viable market economy energy and money are connected to each other at both ends — IF the economy is an economy that is functionally sustainable.
hi,
watched hundreds of hours on climate change.
2 questions
does the current modelling take into account the refrigeration
affect of evaporation when water changes phases.
the other is. do any of them take into account the affect the sun spot activity, the affect of procesion of the earth in its orbit ,the malvitish cycle and lastly the affect of the yearly movement of magnetic north as well as the moon slow movement away from the earth.
normal farmer asking a question
we have to produce the food this is critical.
we as humans still know so little and the interaction of diff factors are so complicated we just do not have the computing power or long term accurate data to make accurate presumptions
that i why we all still act on faith and hope.
keep up the good work and best of luck chaps, nature makes everyone humble.
max:
Yes to your first question.
No to your second question. The climate is not very sensitive to sunspots or solar changes, and the orbital factors change far too slowly to affect decadal or even century-scale climate.
Hi Max
Tip of the day…….dont listen to David look for someone who understand the climate
Regards
Prove me wrong. I dare you.
David,
I read above where you say you have your Doctorate.
This goes only to prove my contention that universities no longer teach people how to think but only regurgitate. It certainly doesn’t teach them how to have a give and take, respectful conversation with those they disagree with.
In fact, if you are an average example, it seems to teach them to be boors.
Lewis, I knew you couldn’t prove me wrong.
And you didn’t.
— David
Hi Roy I tried your email which bounced back. Found this interesting tool on the NASA web site. They have temp data from 1890 to 2010. They also show you how to produce graphs using excel with gradients ie rate of temp change. I used said tools to calculate the rate of temp change from 1916 – 1945 and also from 1977- 2004 and guess what the rate of change of temp is identical (ok a 0.14% difference). This is screaming out to me that the causes of the temp rise are one and the same (with a periodicity of about 60 years. Now the CAGW proponents are claiming that mans influence via CO2 impacted post 1950’s. So they cannot account for this identical rise prior to 1950. Please construct your own graphs. I can supply my spread sheet if required.
http://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/module-3/temperature-change-industrial/exploration-2.php
http://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/content/teacher-materials/temp-investigation2-exp2b-instruc.pdf
How many periods did you have to try before you managed to come up with that selection?
You’re right Elliott — big cherry picks.
Makes all that analysis useless.
Anomaly pressure in the stratosphere means the weakening of the polar vortex.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_HGT_ANOM_JFM_NH_2017.png
The problem here is that the only really authoritative studies of the costs of global warming, the IPCC reports and the Stern report, both unambiguously indicate that the costs of not acting are going to vastly exceed the costs of acting.
Why do you dismiss Nordhaus’s studies?
Elliott…”the IPCC reports and the Stern report, both unambiguously indicate that the costs of not acting are going to vastly exceed the costs of acting”.
The IPCC also reported an insignificant warming (could have been a cooling according to error bars) in the 15 years between 1998 and 2012. That has been extended to 18 years by UAH.
Can’t have it both ways. If the real data shows no warming and the projectors claim we need to do something, something is seriously wrong.
It’s not the trillions of $ ‘lost’ that counts, it’s the trillions of $ of wealth transferred, from the private to public sector.
I don’t think anyone seriously believes that one or two extra molecules CO2 in 10,000 of air, is ever going to drive any noticeable change in the climate. Most proponents are not particularly interested in the science so it’s pointless to debate it, it’s about the ‘solutions’ it’s a 100% political movement
This puts that $100 Trillion in perspective
Just How Much Does 1 Degree C Cost?
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/just-how-much-does-1-degree-c-cost/