505 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, September 12, 2017”

  1. VW Group Will Electrify Every Model By 2030

    The automaker will invest more than $24 billion to achieve its plan.

    Yet another major automaker is announcing plans to electrify its entire lineup. “Launching the most comprehensive electrification initiative in the global automotive industry,” the Roadmap E, Volkswagen Group aims to electrify its entire model portfolio by 2030.

    That’s not pretty impressive given Volvo’s intentions to do the same in about two years and Smart’s decision to go entirely electric by the end of the decade (globally, this year in the US), but the German auto giant wants to have “at least one” electric, hybrid, or PHEV version of each of the 300 or so group models across all brands and markets.

    Simply said, the Volkswagen brand is not the only one from the group going electric – all of them, including Audi, Skoda, SEAT, will use electric support for its conventional models. The manufacturer estimates that “around one in four new Group vehicles – up to three million units a year depending on how the market develops – could already be purely battery-powered in 2025.”

    For those who subscribe to the ideas of disruption, this is a good example of why disruption happens. If you believe that the ICE automobile is about to be disrupted then the entire legacy auto industry is moving too slowly. In the extreme case as described by Tony Seba, only token amounts of new vehicles with ICEs will be bought in 2030. In the more aggressive case for disruption, EVs are going to be cost competitive with regular vehicles, even at the low end of the market by 2025, in addition to offering a more pleasant ownership and driving experience. If that is the case, why would anybody buy an ICE apart from gear-heads buying them for nostalgic reasons? In such a scenario, is “one in four” (25%) of vehicles sold being purely battery electric in 2025 a realistic expectation?

    1. This probably isn’t a great idea. They would be smarter focus on a new line of vehicles that are pure-bred electrics.

    1. I remember that car when I was in college. It really was the sexiest car ever made.

      1. I agree.
        But you needed two of them, as you could drive one while the other was in the shop.

        1. Yes, true. My college roommate’s father collected Jags and they were always in the shop.

        2. They could have a setting in the software that causes regular overheating and oil leaks to give it that authentic feel.

          Hopefully, the EV version will be reliable. Might be fun for weekend outings without the worry of the constant maintenance. The specs aren’t bad in terms of acceleration and it should handle well.

          1. I am highly disappointed. Looks too much like some old car, should have a whole new look.

      1. You guys are way off in left field. The sexy was what sat next to you in the car at the drive in. Nothing like a big muscle car from the 60’s for that.

        1. Well Du-uh! Of Course bro… 😉
          Not to pat myself on the back too much but when I was young and in my prime I didn’t even need a car. All I needed was my old bicycle and my tiny one bedroom apartment down by the beach in Rio de Janeiro.
          Though that’s when I had my sky blue Brasilia.

          1. Remember the 1979 movie “Breaking Away”? An Italian accent (even a fake one!) and a Masi 10-speed bike could “get you the girl” over a hot car.

    2. It has a huge front end to fit the internal combustion engine.

  2. the U.S., year-to-date temperature and precipitation patterns not playing by their usual rules

    This year so far has been one of the warmest on record for the contiguous United States, with the January-July temperature ranking as the 2nd highest since records began in 1895. It has also been a wetter than average year (even before Hurricane Harvey), with the precipitation total for the first seven months of the year ranking as the seventh wettest in the 123-year record.

    https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/us-year-date-temperature-and-precipitation-patterns-not-playing

    1. Thanks for the link.

      For me this paragraph sums it up better than her whole “This Changes Everything” book (which I found a bit disappointing after “Shock Doctrine”):

      “But Trump’s timing is even more revealing for what it shows about what’s really driving climate change denial on the right. It’s not a rejection of the science, but a rejection of the consequences of the science. Put simply, if the science is true, then the whole economic project that has dominated American power structures since Ronald Reagan was president is out the window, and the deniers know it.”

      Full article is here:

      https://theintercept.com/2017/09/11/irma-donald-trump-tax-cuts-climate-change-republican-ideology-capitalism/

      Including this:

      And this isn’t only about the right — it’s also about the center. What mainstream liberals have been saying about climate change for decades is that we simply need to tweak the existing system here and there and everything will be fine. You can have Goldman Sachs capitalism plus solar panels. But at this stage, the challenge we are up against is much deeper than that.

      1. Re: Choosing whether to believe in climate change or not. The biggest problem here is the very term climate change has come to be synonymous with CO2 emissions output. However the two aren’t the same. I’ll explain in more detail.

        Personally I can believe that Earth is getting warmer. If that was the only question asked, then most people like myself would probably give you an overwhelming Yes. The reasons why are multiple: Deforestation, unchecked development, inefficient infrastructure, and so on. All of those could contribute to warming the planet. Then there’s also that elephant in the room: How the amount of people on the planet isn’t just over six billion, but keeps rising at a breakneck pace. With more people comes more warming.

        Now if climatology was confined to these areas only, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of controversy because they are all easily verified as true or false. The dialoging problems come instead when talk shifts to CO2 emissions output. The fault here cannot just be easily verified, since it exists in computer models only. Now the problems with climate change theory become clearer. Many will see how models are being used to justify changes to society, and they are going to look at who is putting together these models. What they are going to see will worry them, because they won’t trust the scientists and politicians who are pushing the narrative. They will see climate change as a first and foremost issue of control through using data which can be easily altered to say anything just by changing the parameters put into the computers.

        Then you could add together statements by environmental and scientific leaders about how their actual goals of climate change mitigation are: 1) To alter the fundamentals of our economic systems and 2) To eliminate the lifestyle choices we are presently allowed to make. Beyond that you could add ongoing mistrust of elites, as exemplified by the case of Jonathan Gruber, who admitted to lying in order to advance specific agendas. Finally there turns out to be yet another elephant squeezed into the room: The developing world (including China and India) is always made exempt from controls, meaning the United States would wind up redistributing trillions of dollars in wealth to foreign countries, including ones that don’t like us. Put two and two and two together, for conservatives, climate change begins for all intents and purposes to look like a prescription for a New World Order nobody on that side of the political spectrum asked for.

        This is just a brief summary of what gets so many people skeptical: Not the warming alone, but when talk turns to CO2 emissions output, and what agendas might be involved. Until this tension is resolved (and this included the continued vilification those who are skeptical of science, and have a right to be) society will be unable to come to any meaningful agreements on climate change.

        1. Then you could add together statements by environmental and scientific leaders about how their actual goals of climate change mitigation are: 1) To alter the fundamentals of our economic systems and 2) To eliminate the lifestyle choices we are presently allowed to make.

          Another Koch Brother Troll! BTW, you guys need to update your population data. The planet has over 7.5 billion inhabitants now. It had 6 billion almost 20 years ago…

        2. The reason why the planet is getting warmer is because of CO2, until you understand that churning out all those words is really a waste of your time.

          1. It’s also important to understand nonlinear dynamics, Chaos Theory, tipping points and feedback loops.

            Case in point: Why increased CO2 is NOT good for plants and agriculture.

            http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511

            The great nutrient collapse
            The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.

            Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton…

            …What Loladze found is that scientists simply didn’t know. It was already well documented that CO2 levels were rising in the atmosphere, but he was astonished at how little research had been done on how it affected the plants we eat. For the next 17 years, as he pursued his math career, Loladze scoured the scientific literature for any studies and data he could find. The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect he had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”

            I don’t have a crystal ball so I don’t know how history will record the events of the mid 21st century. But, I strongly suspect that the Trump administration’s anti science ideological stance, will go down as a very dark period in our history.

            Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump plans to nominate his longtime campaign aide Sam Clovis (aka Jabba the Hut) to head science at the US Department of Agriculture, despite the fact that Clovis lacks a background in science and a congressional rule maintains that the role must be filled “from among distinguished scientists.”
            .

            1. Here’s a paper by Irakli Loladze
              https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034684/

              Hidden shift of the ionome of plants exposed to elevated CO2 depletes minerals at the base of human nutrition
              Irakli Loladze1,*
              Ian T Baldwin, Reviewing editor
              Ian T Baldwin, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Germany;

              Abstract
              Mineral malnutrition stemming from undiversified plant-based diets is a top global challenge. In C3 plants (e.g., rice, wheat), elevated concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (eCO2) reduce protein and nitrogen concentrations, and can increase the total non-structural carbohydrates (TNC; mainly starch, sugars). However, contradictory findings have obscured the effect of eCO2 on the ionome—the mineral and trace-element composition—of plants. Consequently, CO2-induced shifts in plant quality have been ignored in the estimation of the impact of global change on humans. This study shows that eCO2 reduces the overall mineral concentrations (−8%, 95% confidence interval: −9.1 to −6.9, p carbon:minerals in C3 plants. The meta-analysis of 7761 observations, including 2264 observations at state of the art FACE centers, covers 130 species/cultivars. The attained statistical power reveals that the shift is systemic and global. Its potential to exacerbate the prevalence of ‘hidden hunger’ and obesity is discussed.

              Yet from the Koch Brother’s trolls we have this shit:

              Then you could add together statements by environmental and scientific leaders about how their actual goals of climate change mitigation are: 1) To alter the fundamentals of our economic systems and 2) To eliminate the lifestyle choices we are presently allowed to make.
              Pat Clogger

              Mother Nature thinks your economic systems and lifestyle choices are laughable!

            2. That pig feeding at the trough isn’t even a distinguished idiot.

        3. Hey Pat, nice of you to show up here! I’ve never seen you here before and a Google search of this web site for your moniker brings back zero results so, if you don’t mind my asking, what is it that brought you here? What were you searching for or which web site were you visiting that linked to peakoilbarrel.com? Are you interested in the topic of Peak Oil, that is, do you believe that global oil production will one day peak and start to decline and if you do what time frame do you have in mind for the peak? What are your views on electric vehicles and renewable energy, especially wind and solar? Have you ever heard of Tony Seba or his ideas on business disruption from exponentially improving technologies? Have you ever heard of the book “Limits to Growth” and if so what do you think of the ideas therein? I’m just trying to get to know you a little while we engage you in this conversation.

          You said, “The developing world (including China and India) is always made exempt from controls, meaning the United States would wind up redistributing trillions of dollars in wealth to foreign countries, including ones that don’t like us.” In light of what you said, what do you make of a comment of mine on the previous non-petroleum thread that contained the following links?

          China halts building of coal power plants
          China To Install 403 Gigawatts Of Wind Energy Over Next Decade, According To MAKE Consulting
          China installed 24.4 GW of solar in first half of 2017, shows official NEA data
          AECEA: China installations to surpass 40 GW in 2017
          AECEA: China could reach 230 GW of solar by 2020

          To provide some context, according to data from the Wikipedia page Growth of photovoltaics in 2000 China had 19 MW of solar installed, increasing by a factor of 42 to 800 MW in 2010 and again by a factor of 140 to 112,340 MW. This underscores that despite the fact that China is exempt from the controls related to global warming, they are spending gargantuan amounts of money on renewables.

          1. Hey islandboy, I’m betting Pat is at least related to one of the following.

            https://medium.com/data-for-democracy/spot-a-bot-identifying-automation-and-disinformation-on-social-media-2966ad93a203

            Bots vs. sockpuppets vs. good old fashioned trolls
            It’s easy to jump on the bots, but fully automated accounts are only part of the problem when it comes to disinformation and harassment. In addition to bots, which are accounts that are fully automated and controlled by code (or an app) set up by a human user, there are two other categories of high-volume accounts that we have seen in our research (and the research of others): sockpuppets and trolls.

            Maybe POB needs a captcha sign on process somewhat like realclimate employs. Granted that doesn’t stop human trolls but it does keep the number of bots down…

            Cheers!

            1. Shhhh! Quiet! I’m waiting patiently for a response from “Pat”. 😉

            2. Whispers back… oooook!

              While you wait check out this ebike launch from Delfast.

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_vwJlSCt6s

              You think you could come up with a solar charger for them that could double as an ebike rental kiosk?

              And maybe further alter and disrupt the fundamentals of Pat’s economic systems

              Cheers! 😉

          2. Re: What interests me here. The demand and supply issues of gasoline, ultimately oil, is what interests me the most to have found this web site from Seeking Alpha reports. The so-called peak oil mathematics don’t interest me much, because I have always believed there’s plenty of oil in the ground to last the remainder of my life. But demand and supply is a very real issue, seeing as how the oil companies monkey around with supply at the pumps all the time to gouge consumers, and that’s just not right.

            Take just a few weeks ago: Prices went up about 15 cents in only a couple of days around here, supposedly due to the Harvey Storm. At least that was a somewhat decent excuse for raising the prices this time. People who drive past gas stations on their way to and from work every day, checking the prices on the board as they pass by, know that they will more often raise the prices for completely BS reasons or for no reason at all, other than that they can.

            Then there are other scams in the gas industry: Propane refills are a big one. For the most part the portable propane tanks you see sold at gas stations, Wal Mart, and such are 20 Lbs. However companies like Blue Rhino now only fill up the tanks with 15 Lbs when you go to exchange one for a refill. They did this when gas prices got up to $4/Gallon in order to keep people from rioting at the sight of the price signs on the propane cages I guess. Anyway, once the oil prices came back down to a
            realistic level, they continued the policy of not filling up the tanks to full, so as to be even greedier by pocketing more profits.

            Electric powered cars are no answer for the majority of Americans. Stopping to “repower” all the time is a major inconvenience and they’re not really environmentally friendly anyhow as electricity just doesn’t magically come out of a wall socket. Then the biggest thing electric car advocates refuse to talk about: There is much information about how destructive and poisonous getting the components for the batteries is. Finally there’s the issue of manliness: How do you rev up an electric pickup, enjoying a little whiff and plume of exhaust as you cruise down the road? For many those are the very things that make owning a powerful gasoline vehicle appealing in the first place.

            1. Finally there’s the issue of manliness: How do you rev up an electric pickup, enjoying a little whiff and plume of exhaust as you cruise down the road? For many those are the very things that make owning a powerful gasoline vehicle appealing in the first place.

              No problem, just get yourself a pair of these!
              .

            2. Let.s start from the end of your post. Check out Tesla Racing Channel on Youtube to see what this very southern sounding dude is doing to some peoples manliness with his gutted Tesla. Did you know that the Koch brothers are carrying out “a lobbying effort that will spend $10 million a year to campaign against electric cars”? I put that last part of the sentence in quotes because, I copied it from one of the results I got from doing an internet search for “Koch brothers anti electric car campaign”. Do you ever wonder why they would do that? If you’re interested you can do the search yourself .

              As for “Electric powered cars are no answer for the majority of Americans”, that depends on the range and the amount of models with a range of 200 miles or more now stands at three, with more to come. As for the inconvenience of recharging, how inconvenient is it to charge at home while you sleep and then not have to ever stop at a gas station?

              Speaking of gas stations, it sounds like you have an issue with gas stations and price gouging. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to give them the middle finger as you drive past them every day? EV drivers can do that! If you’re worried that the electric utilities might do the price gouging instead, except for in Hawaii, they don’t use petroleum. In fact electric power can come from many different sources and depending on where you live can have a significant share coming from hydro (more than 50% in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Vermont), solar (California 10%, Nevada 6%), wind (25% or more in Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma), nuclear (more than 50% in South Carolina, New Hampshire, Illinois), Natural Gas (80% or more in Rhode Island, Delaware, Mississippi) or coal (West Virginia 94%, Wyoming 86%, Kentucky 83%, Missouri 77%). That data was obtained from a really neat widget (pictured below) in an article at the Washington Post, Mapping how the United States generates its electricity .

              With such a wide diversity of available sources, what might be the justification for price gouging by electricity utilities? At any rate, if you live in a state with lots of sun there is the possibility that you could generate your own electricity with solar. Middle finger again! (Check out Jack Rickard at EVTV.me )

            3. Pat, if I offered you a poisonous snake to hold and gave you the alternative of holding a non-poisonous snake which would you choose. You have no choice in this, you must choose one or the other and hold one.

              From your comment I say you are already holding the poisonous snake in your hand and holding as tightly as possible to it, refusing to give it up. When the poison is injected, how much and how often is not up to you, it’s up to the snake you so dearly grasp.

              You can of course continue to hold the poisonous snake or you can let go and hold the non-poisonous snake, who at worst may bite you a little or not. Those are your only choices. What you hold onto. Choose well or choose poorly. Up to you, but liking the poison does not change it.

            4. You could always add a fake engine noise generator like Ford and BMW did.

              Admittedly, it would be hard to fake this though:

            5. Just build an hybrid:

              A good old steam engine, fired enviroment correct with self grown fire wood. You can store a heap of wood on your pickup truck with no problems.

              Add a generator and a battery, so you don’t need to steam full throttle away when only driving short trips.

              Steering the steam engine through an machine telegraph copied from an armored cruiser, to have the right feeling.
              Add a cannon turret on the roof when the state laws allow.

            6. “I have always believed there’s plenty of oil in the ground to last the remainder of my life”
              Not planning to be around long?

              “Prices went up about 15 cents in only a couple of days around here, supposedly due to the Harvey Storm. At least that was a somewhat decent excuse for raising the prices this time. People who drive past gas stations on their way to and from work every day, checking the prices on the board as they pass by, know that they will more often raise the prices for completely BS reasons or for no reason at all, other than that they can.”
              Republicans regard this as good business.

              “propane tanks you see sold at gas stations, Wal Mart, and such are 20 Lbs. However companies like Blue Rhino now only fill up the tanks with 15 Lbs when you go to exchange one for a refill”
              I just ask for X amount of gas and that is what I get, one of the disadvantages of living in Mexico.

              “Stopping to “repower” all the time is a major inconvenience”
              You are out of date, read back over Hurricane Irma stories. Note, electric cars could still keep going while gas powered ones had to stop when there was no gas.

              “There is much information about how destructive and poisonous getting the components for the batteries is”
              “There is much mis-information about how destructive and poisonous getting the components for the batteries is”
              FTFY

              “Finally there’s the issue of manliness”
              Do your own research instead of the crap that has been given to you
              https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+drag+race&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjqrofkvKXWAhUH2WMKHXYQBwoQ_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=946

              NAOM

      2. Naomi Klein is consistently disappointing. She has taken the bait of right-wing trolls, and accepted the idea that dealing with climate change requires a fundamental redesign of our society. That’s a very handy scare-line for right wing propaganda.

        Now, there’s no question that dealing with climate change is a challenge to FF industry profits, and to free-market “fundamentalism”. But it’s silly to suggest that we have to remake society in order to deal with climate change: Wind and solar keep the lights on just like coal plants, and EVs are built in the same plants, and drive just like ICEs.

        Carbon taxes are just fuel taxes and utility taxes, calculated in a new way. There’s nothing scary about them, no whiff of communism.

        1. But it’s silly to suggest that we have to remake society in order to deal with climate change: Wind and solar keep the lights on just like coal plants, and EVs are built in the same plants, and drive just like ICEs.

          Yes, but the money goes into someone else’s pockets if and when that happens and that, my friend, will certainly create a different society.

          Have you ever dealt with a cornered rat?! They can be quite nasty…

          1. Absolutely. The Kochs, Mercers et al certainly fit that description.

            OTOH, the fact that there will be winners and losers in a transition away from FF doesn’t mean that it’s a different type of society.

            It would be very nice to greatly reduce income and wealth inequality. And, there’s no question that income & wealth inequality tend to reduce democratic control of society and therefore degrade the quality of decision making. But…Jeff Bezos has as much money as anyone, and he’s on the other side of the climate change fight (as Boomer II often notes…).

      3. Very good points George. Very few people (right or left- so to speak) are ready to accept the possibility of meaningful global warming.
        The ramifications are too difficult to digest.
        There is no easy way to roll back this bulldozer.
        Only hard ways, since we didn’t start to hit the brakes back around 1960, only the accelerator.
        So people bargain- ‘no it can’t be true’, ‘it won’t be all bad’, ‘we can tweak the incentives. or change the tax structure’, ‘we can change the technology’, etc.
        All of this is pretty much just pissing in the wind.

        I see two wild cards. One is an outbreak of massive vulcanism. That can change the dynamic, but it would be immensely catastrophic and the chances are occurrence are minuscule.
        Secondly, geoengineering experiments on a grand scale could change the scenario. I wouldn’t put it past someone with a huge vested interest in fossil fuel to give it a shot. Who has the incentive, and the wherewith-all- Vlad Putin. The result of an attempt on a grand scale would likely be massive gyrations in climate.

        1. Sadly I cannot really disagree with your thoughts on the subject.
          However, I would like to leave everyone with these simple results showing how much of a bargain common energy transistion solutions can really be.

          One single solar panel over it’s possible useful lifetime will produce enough power to run a house for over 4 years or an EV for about 60,000 miles. That is $300 initial cost and not much material to do all that without any added pollution to the environment while it does that.

          One simple thermal solar panel, 10 feet by 4 feet, produces enough heat over it’s probable lifetime to replace the burning of over 2500 gallons of heating oil. One can be built for just a few hundred dollars.

          One standard unobstructed clear window to the south, with an insulated panel put over it at night during cold times will add the equivalent heat of about 2000 gallons of heating oil over one century (windows and houses can last that long and longer). All for the cost of the an insulated panel ($40) and a small amount of time.
          (put up an awning over it during warm times to get further savings on cooling, or at least a white shade to reflect most sunlight back out during the day).

          Further insulating and sealing your house might cost a few thousand dollars but in the long run will save you lots of money in lower fuel costs and longer life of heating/cooling equipment.

          One EV can eliminate 4000 gallons of fuel for every 100,000 miles driven. One hybrid can eliminate 2000 gallons of fuel burned for every 100,00o miles driven.

          Then take all those reductions and multiply by 1.7 to get the actual overall savings of oil equivalent carbon based energy due to upstream energy inputs needed to produce, refine and distribute those gallons of heating oil and gasoline.

          The principles of using free solar energy and high efficiency systems saves money as well as help solve environmental problems. So why didn’t you do these already?

    2. Conservativism is a belief system (“things should stay as they were when I was young”). It does not need a connection to reality at all.

      You could also try to tell Christians that their beloved Jesus most probably never existed at all [1] and they’d still believe he did.

      [1]
      I heavily recommend David Fitzgeralds “Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All” as it sums up the relevant research and arguments.

      1. Conservatives also feel a need to follow a strong leader, thinking for themselves is hard. This climate denial is pretty new, back in 2000 Bush’s campaign claimed he would be more green than Al Gore regarding climate change. They mostly didn’t deny it back then.

        Regarding Jesus, chances are he did exist but during those “missing years” from 12 to 29 he traveled to India and studied at a Buddhist Monastery. Among other things, he learned, through meditation, to be able to control his heartrate, respiration, etc. When he returned to Israel, he and Judas worked together to fake his death on the cross. After “rising from the dead” he moved back to India; there is an actual shrine there marking his grave. see the BBC documentary on Jesus in India (on youtube)… Also check the gospel according to Judas. He specifically was trying to live up to those old stories.

      2. Not part of the historical record.
        And the Romans were good historians.
        No mention by any Jewish or Palestinian historian either.
        Just in a Magical Book, along with Talking snakes and Rib Women.

        1. He is part of the historical record in India where he spent most of his life. The monks keep very good records, but they may not share them with just anyone they don’t trust. The BBC in their documentary uncovered lots of records of him in India. The shrine in Kashmir was built in 114AD and has carvings of his feet showing scares.

  3. Sollega Solar Racking Conquers Hurricane Irma

    “Sollega’s solar racking stayed 90% intact after Hurricane Irma’s 190mph winds blew through the the Caribbean. Thanks to the Fastrack 510 heat weld mechanical anchors and ballast, the 900KW hybrid system on the roof of the Westin Hotel in St. Maarten appears to need minimal maintenance before it’s up and running again. Watch the video of Irma’s wrath here: https://http://www.youtube.com/embed/lkSNWkgkH4Q .”

    Well, not quite! I viewed the video, took a screenshot and made a “before and after” collage which can be viewed below. Impressive performance for a system with no roof penetrations but 90% intact? Judge for yourselves.

    1. The only question I have is, is it still capable of producing electricity?
      On the bright side, no toxic spills or nuclear radiation! I like it!

      1. Not according to the system monitoring paged at the following link:

        https://www.solrenview.com/SolrenView/mainFr.php?siteId=2083.

        On the other hand communications have probably been severely disrupted on the island and I can’t imagine that getting the internet back up and running is a high priority task right now! It could be that part of it is up and running but, just not reporting to the web site.

        1. Should be interesting to see how long it takes for them to get back on line and especially how long it takes for even partial capacity recovery. I’ll bet they are back sooner than any other kind of generating technology might be under similar circumstances.

  4. I am not going to directly respond to someone who might be a troll, but here’s my thought on lifestyle changes and climate change.

    I can understand why people might have trouble getting their heads around climate change. Most of the predictions still put the worst of it in the future. And the most dismal predictions say it is too late to do anything anyway, so it is easy to ignore.

    But I think we are seeing the end of the fossil fuel era anyway because resources are declining or will do so, and there are increasingly better options. A number of countries and companies already see this and are making changes so they can economically capitalize on the future.

    Those Americans still wedded to big oil and big coal are tying themselves to the past and won’t be prepared when everyone else moves to renewables. Now, some fossil fuel folks probably do see the future and are selling assets to those who don’t see the future.

    The market is getting more skeptical, so private money may no longer be available to keep fossil fuels afloat. The US government could subsidize them, but doing so will likely hurt the US economy as money is either printed out of thin air or sucked away from better uses of that money.

    If the US wants to think it is still in the 1950s, there are other countries willing to allow us to do so. We’ll support fossil fuels and a big military, and they will do business and make deals with each other.

    1. If the US wants to think it is still in the 1950s, there are other countries willing to allow us to do so

      Just because there are pockets of idiots living in the US, mostly where the roughly 30% of the US population aka Trump supporters live, doesn’t mean that everyone in the US lives in the past or is unaware of the rest of the world or wants to go live in a cave or under some rock! While most of the rest of us may be embarrassed as hell right now, I’m sure that this too shall pass and we will rejoin the civilized world once again! We might even be better for the experience.

      1. Quite a few businesses and some cities and states are ignoring the Trump administration and are preparing for a renewable future, so there will be deals cut that bypass what the current administration appears to want.

        1. Yes, they are. In the big picture and long term, Trump, is irrelevant and fossil fuels are on the losing end. The smart money is no longer on their side.

          http://www.triplepundit.com/2017/09/trumps-paris-debacle-leading-companies-go-full-steam-ahead-renewables/

          After Trump’s Paris Debacle, Leading Companies Go Full Steam Ahead on Renewables

          That development is clearly reflected in the findings of Smart Energy Decisions.

          The firm garnered survey responses from 94 corporations and institutions shortly after Trump’s announcement of the Paris withdrawal, which occurred on June 1. A good 40 of the respondents are included in the Fortune 500 list.

          Here’s the rundown from Smart Energy Decisions:

          Energy cost reduction was the single most important factor for 29.1 percent of organizations that already purchased or are interested in purchasing renewable energy, followed by meeting GHG reduction targets (25.6 percent) and meeting renewable energy targets (16.3 percent).

          Green branding does not disappear entirely off the map. A decent proportion of survey respondents — 8.1 percent — selected brand image as “the most important factor” influencing their renewable energy buys.

          So at the end of the day, very much as expected, Its about the bottom line stupid! Renewables are already competitive with fossil fuels. They are also fast becoming more reliable in a world plagued by natural human disasters. Being ‘Green‘ no longer has all that much to do with leaving fossil fuels behind.

      1. I actually got into eating live damsel fly’s for a while (trout bum period in Montana).
        They are crunchy, with a vinegar finish.
        Humans have been eating insects forever, in both the adult and larval stages.

        1. Hmm, never tried that! I’ll be on the look out for some poor unsuspecting damsel flies to munch on. Though I’m not sure if the wings are worth eating?!

          I have no doubt that we in the west will join the rest of humanity in eating insects…

  5. EIA-
    [Coal production is up and will continue to rise through next year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s latest Short Term Energy Outlook. Coal production for August was the first month since October 2015 where production topped 70 million short tons (MMst).

    But EIA also noted that utility-scale solar is rapidly growing. Capacity at the end of 2016 was 22 GW, and the agency expects that to reach 29 GW by the end of this year and 33 GW by the end of 2018.]

    That is a big projected increase for USA solar- 33% in two years ( if I’m doing the math right).

    1. How much of that change is power coal and how much is metallurgical?

      NAOM

  6. Bill McKibben in the Guardian:

    STOP TALKING RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE THREAT OF CLIMATE CHANGE. IT’S HERE; IT’S HAPPENING

    The problem is, our current business-as-usual trajectory takes us to a world that’s about 3.5C warmer. That is to say, even if we kept the promises we made at Paris (which Trump has already, of course, repudiated) we’re going to build a planet so hot that we can’t have civilisations. We have to seize the moment we’re in right now – the moment when we’re scared and vulnerable – and use it to dramatically reorient ourselves.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/11/threat-climate-change-hurricane-harvey-irma-droughts

    1. I shared this article with Hank Hill. This was his response. ??????

      1. I shared your name with an anagram finder and got this: Krass oily TV.

          1. Actually King Of The Hill was one of the most well written shows on TV with very clever observational humor. Seasons 3 and 4 especially, so many good episodes there.

            1. I gave away my last personally owned tv in the early eighties, and even back then, I never watched much tv. There’s one in the house now, with a cable connection that comes with the internet connection, but I haven’t turned it on for at least six months. But I might, in the event there’s something on such as a live space launch happening. My computer and the DSL aren’t the greatest combo for video.

              You get a whole new life when you give up tv. A moderately fast reader can put away from fifty to a hundred serious books a year in the time that most of us spend staring at the idiot box.

              I haven’t counted, but I suppose I’m up around five or six thousand now, not bad at all for a non academic.

              But I do think of myself as a sort of scholar, lol, albeit one without formal connections to the academic community.

            2. Ho yeah! Hello fellow Arlenian (or was it Arlenite?) ????

              For the others who aren’t familiar with this great show, this is the dialog the meme references ?

              DALE: I know what’s wrong with your truck. It’s your quote unquote pollution controls. I heard on talk radio you don’t even need ’em, they’re just an egghead government plot.
              HANK: How is cutting down on pollution a government plot, Dale?
              DALE: Open up your eyes, man. They’re trying to control global warming. Get it? “Global?”
              HANK: So what?
              DALE: That’s code for U.N. commissars telling Americans what the temperature’s going to be in our outdoors. I say let the world warm up, let’s see what Boutros Boutros Ghali Ghali has to say about that. We’ll grow oranges in Alaska!
              HANK: Dale, you giblet-head, we live in Texas! It’s already 110 in the summer, and if it gets one degree hotter, I’m going to kick your ass!

            3. Arlenites is the Channel 84 preferred term for residents of Arlen, sug. 😉

    2. Bill McKibben is an amazing fellow, he is right on about so much and has been doing an amazing job about getting the word out. “Winning slowly is just a different way of losing.” says a lot about what is happening and what will happen.

      Sadly, though he may know this, he and others do not get the full message out. The one that includes the other factors. The one that shows that just the albedo changes to the earth are enough to keep it at 3.5C for a long time, let alone the added CO2 and methane from melting permafrost and warmer oceans (I am talking about gas equilibrium temp here). The one that does not account for the extra water vapor from a warmer ocean. The one that does not account for uninhabitable tropical and desert zones. The one that does not account for the extra 400,000 square miles of ocean surface to absorb more sunlight. One that does not account for all the “extra” fossil fuel we will burn fighting the effects of climate change on both the weather and infrastructure front (one could also consider all the war and migration costs too).
      So once this planet warms, there will be no need for fossil CO2 to keep it warm. It will do it itself, for a very long time, even better than we can.

      The point? Take McKibben’s urgency and double it. Also find ways to reduce that CO2 level fast or we might as well just realize we are in the backseat being taken for a ride to a very new kind of world.

      1. Don’t forget wildfires: the Pacific Northwest has spent much of the summer covered in smoke from wildfires raging across British Columbia. Now the smoke is coming from the south as fires burn across the American West. I fear yet another climate change tipping point from fires. Perhaps it’s here already? Assuming another degree (or two) of warming and multiply the number of fires (and dead trees). Warm winters encouraged invasive species such as the spruce budworm, affecting over 50 million hectares and the mountain pine beetle which has killed 18 million hectares of B.C. forest resulting in a loss of 723 million cubic metres (53%) of the merchantable pine volume.

        1. I am sure that nature has put up with a lot of similar changes in the past, most slow, some fast. That at least gives me some hope that things will survive in some semblance of present nature.
          However, that said, it is very painful to watch beautiful forests and jungles be turned to scrub, savannah and desert as we watch.

      2. If we continue to have a string of natural disasters, our economy is going to reflect that. While disaster recovery may lead to more spending to rebuild, it will also likely suck money out of the system from somewhere else (unless we up the national debt).

        I continue to expect that consumption will go down as people have less money to spend. This process may not be enough to stop global warming, but the economic impacts of what we are dealing with might be starting now. In other words, nature may reduce consumption even if if people won’t willingly choose to do do.

        We can discuss the infliuence global warming has on natural disasters, but in the mean time, each time one happens, an area is affected. Get enough places around the world dealing with natural disasters and that becomes the focus of the global economy.

        1. Maaan! Think of all those corporations looking forward to selling hundreds of thousands of replacement gas guzzlers, rebuild home sell new colour TVs and household electrics, furniture all on government pork. They’ll have a whale of a time and do it all in exactly the same places so they get more pork next time around.

          NAOM

  7. We’re a bit Atlantic oriented here but spare a thought for the Pacific: typhoon Talim has suddenly strengthened to cat. 4 and looks likely to run up the length of Japan starting Saturday.

    For Jose UKMET and ECMWF (which have been more reliable recently) have it hitting Cape Cod and up to Nova Scotia as a tropical storm, while GFS has it staying out to sea.

    1. Two more disturbances have formed off Africa in the Atlantic. Chances of more to come.

      1. The one currently located about 300 miles south of the Cabo Verde Islands is already looking troublesome…

  8. Looks like that chap’s theory that the weather in Kansas City is a predictor of sun spot activity and hence we must be due for global cooling is in trouble. Actually it looks more like the jet stream has shifted so eastern US will be warm and the west cool. The Arctic looks like it’s setting up for another continuing warmer than average freeze season

    1. Hehe, I note he didn’t post that one, only the cooler ones.

      NAOM

    2. Now you are continuing to mock me. Look at the map. Six states had a record top 10 coldest August. That’s simply remarkable in this day and age.

      1. The Arctic warms more than the equator, therefore there is less heat transfer south to north, therefore the jet steam slows down, that causes there to be much bigger loops in it (something to do with maintaining angular momentum), the dips bring colder air further south than in the past and the loops carry hot air further north (hence Alaskan and Siberian heat waves), and the patterns can be stable for weeks or months. Therefore that weather pattern was not remarkable but entirely consistent with the current understanding of climate change.

      2. We don’t need to mock you! You seem to be doing a bang up job of doing it to yourself…
        .

        1. Let’s just save him the trouble. From the link:

          If you look at all four seasons across all of the Lower 48 states — for a grand total of 192 state-season combinations — there are only three instances of cooling. The Dakotas and Iowa are cooling ever so slightly in summer.

          Otherwise, there’s only one direction temperatures have gone: up.

          I’m not sure he could parse the 192 state-season combinations, let alone the fact that even the Dakotas and Iowa are still warming in the Winter, Spring and the Fall…

          And Now back to learning about the Saturn system tks to Cassini
          https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html#public

      3. What’s remarkable is that there are still Americans who believe that a Mercator projection of the lower 48 US states is a map of the world.

  9. From Utility Dive:

    DOE expands SunShot program after hitting original cost goal 3 years early

    Dive Brief:

    The U.S. Department of Energy announced plans to expand the SunShot program after hitting its 2020 goals to trim utility-scale solar costs to $0.06/kWh — or under $1 per watt — three years early.
    Under the new goals, the popular program plans to cut utility-scale solar costs in half to $0.03/kWh by 2030. The agency also plans to trim commercial solar costs to $0.04/kWh and residential solar to $0.05/kWh in the same timeframe.
    The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), which houses SunShot, also announced $82 million in funding for early-stage research in concentrating solar power and power electronics.

    Utilities see benefits in energy storage, even without mandates

    The fact that California’s three investor-owned utilities were at the top of the Smart Electric Power Alliance’s recent rankings is not surprising, but the presence of utilities in Indiana and Ohio is notable.

    California has been a leader in energy storage, with a 2010 law that requires the state’s IOUs to procure 1.3 GW of storage capacity by 2020 and then a 2016 law requiring each IOU to procure another 166 MW of storage.

    There has been no similar legislative push in either Indiana or Ohio and yet Indianapolis Power & Light and Duke Energy Ohio were third and fifth, respectively, in SEPA’s rankings of utilities that connected the most energy storage to their systems in 2016. IPL installed 20 MW in 2016, and 16 MW were connected to Duke Energy Ohio last year.

    Customer grid defections are a utility branding issue

    For decades, customers regarded electricity as a commodity, and electric utilities as its regional monopoly providers. Fast forward to today, and the landscape is undergoing a tectonic shift.

    Companies such as Apple, IKEA and MGM Resorts have made it publicly known that they are now adopting new energy strategies as a core component of their business operations. Others, such as 3M, Dow Chemical and General Motors, have signed renewable PPAs to attain sustainability and/or cost-efficiency goals. Each company’s approach to energy may be unique, but the underlying trend is that the largest and most influential companies are signaling to the marketplace that the days of electricity as an undifferentiated commodity are over.

    The Stickiness of Brands May Become a Sticking Point for Utilities in the Not-So-Distant Future

    When an energy consumer adopts energy strategies as a core component of its business and makes that fact publicly known, energy becomes a brand driver for that entity. And this has scary slippery-slope implications for electric utilities.

    How?

  10. Much as people discuss science and engineering, they usually have little idea about the difficulty of even making meaningful measurements in the real world. The real world is highly variable, even chaotic. It covers everything from the very minute to huge planetary areas of more. Things don’t happen in tight even amounts (maybe at the lowest quantum level but not above that). Plus conditions vary, measuring tools change, and that which is being measured can change into new forms and materials over time.
    Whether it be the molecular weights of polymers, lengths of fibers, surface charges on a material, distributions in a mixture, populations of bacteria, number of species, strength of materials, temperatures over an area, flows of rivers, flow of materials or currents, or any of other millions of types of measurements; they are all messy and distributed. To get meaningful and comparative results is a lot of work and thought. And knowing the limits of those measurements is a work in itself.
    Even just measurements from maps.
    https://books.google.com/books?id=lT4q8-MKrrEC&pg=PA66&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

    So appreciate the knowledge and work that goes into just getting any meaningful and useful result from the real world. It’s a big and messy world out there.

    1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-14/irma-displaces-world-s-best-quant-now-he-s-on-a-climate-mission

      Irma Displaces World’s Best Quant. Now He’s on a Climate Mission

      ‘Did the Math’

      “To make people listen, sometimes you have to put it in economic terms,” Vogel said in an interview at Bloomberg offices in New York on Sept. 12. “If there was no rule about throwing trash in a landfill, you’d throw it in a neighbor’s yard. That’s what this is, people just throwing out trash. And it’s causing hundreds of billions in damage.”

      Vogel promotes his research on the drivers and costs of climate change and advocates for solutions through his charity, the VoLo Foundation. Though he speaks about his numbers-heavy findings in a way that verges on a foreign language, all it takes is basic multiplication to prove climate change is man-made, he said.

      As a quantitative thinker, Vogel isn’t one to accept an opinion without first seeing the data. Two years ago, he decided to do just that with the science surrounding climate change. Among several exercises, he downloaded raw data from reported oil and coal consumption. He then calculated the carbon output with each ton of substance burned, and matched it with corresponding rising levels of carbon in the atmosphere.

      The numbers were indisputable, he said. Humans were causing the climate to change.

  11. 2017 Volkswagen e-Golf Gets Price Hike, More Range

    Volkswagen unveiled the 2017 e-Golf for the U.S. market back in mid-November last year, but it’s only now the fully electric compact hatchback finally has a price.

    The cheapest version money can buy is going to set you back $30,495 (excluding destination charges) for the entry-level SE trim. That makes it $1,500 more expensive than its predecessor, but there are some big improvements that VW hopes justifies the premium.

    For starters, gone is the 24.2-kWh battery of the 2016MY e-Golf as instead the new version has received a 35.8 kWh pack, which has effectively boosted range between from 83 to 125 miles. Not only that, but the 7.2 kW charger is now standard equipment across the lineup and it will recharge the battery in less than six hours when using a 240V charging station.

    The first e-Golf was sold in the US in October of 2014 so, just about three years later it gets a 50% increase in battery size, a 50% increase in range and 5.1% increase in price. If the car continues to improve at this pace, the 2021 model will have a 53 kWh battery, a range of 187 miles and cost $32,075. Taken into consideration that this is not an isolated case (Nissan Leaf and Ford Focus EV), this gives credence to Tony Seba’s idea of EVs being like computers (smart phones) on wheels. That is how things seem to be playing out.

    1. this gives credence to Tony Seba’s idea of EVs being like computers (smart phones) on wheels. That is how things seem to be playing out.

      So how soon do you think, before we get to see a VeriZoom“Can We Drive You Now?” Ad campaign… 😉
      .

      1. It’s autonomous, right? It ought to be: “Can you steer me now?”

        1. No, there is no steering needed and the car does the driving for you 😉

    2. A year ago, a small engineering company from Austria bragged about having swapped the original battery of an electric Golf with their own pack.
      A 55 kWh pack at the “exakt same size and weight” as the original pack.
      Charging with up to 150 kW, from 20% to 80% SOC in 20 minutes.

      German only, try Google Translate:
      http://www.kreiselelectric.com/blog/der-kreisel-e-golf-bietet-mehr-als-die-doppelte-reichweite/

      And apparently that car had already been in daily use for half a year at the time of writing the blog post…

      Germany is a complete joke right now in terms of energy and transportation, and I say this being a German.

      1. Do you remember this from 2010?

        DBM Energy’s electric Audi A2 completes record setting 372 mile drive on a single charge

        Little Lekker Mobil, a four-seat Audi A2 refitted with an experimental electric powerplant as part of a government sponsored project with Germany’s lekker Energie and DBM Energy, just completed a 372-mile (600-km) stretch of road between Munich and Berlin on a single charge, a journey that lasted around seven hours. Even with the heater running, the modified A2 with fully usable trunk arrived with spare electricity in the “tank.”

        Eventually there was this:

        The Mysterious 400-Mile Electric-Car Battery: Does It Really Exist?

        Finally, what is left of that whole debacle now exists as Colbri Energy but, they haven’t really lived up to their early promise. Nonetheless, a team did build a battery powered car that went 600 km on single charge way back in 2010, unless that was a very slick piece of deception.

        1. Yeah, remember this.
          Considered it a fake then. Still consider it a fake.

          If I remember correctly, nobody of the media people was allowed to sit in the car during the “record” drive and AFAIK sitting in the chase car they lost sight of the electric car long enough that shady stuff might have happened.
          And I think no one was allowed to examine the car more closely, e.g. looking for a range extender.

        2. Sounds good but probably was never able to make it last over multiple charges. Many great batteries chemically die early, the hard part is not so much achieving adequate charge density so much as the reliability. We don’t know how much the battery weighed either.

    1. Mmmm, are they sure that it is not they that are being punished for their attitude of hate? After all there are more of them so that makes more sense.

      NAOM

      1. That, and the fact that there are 1.3 billion Indians all wanting electricity, which probably can’t be done long term with a finite resource like coal even under the best of circumstances. So sooner or later something is gonna give.
        .

        1. As that song goes “Plenty of sunshine coming my way …” Much of the world has far more solar resource than they can ever need. Certainly enough for a refrigerator, a few LED light bulbs and for a cell phone. India could probably run on what the US wastes in electricity every day.

          1. Certainly enough for a refrigerator, a few LED light bulbs and for a cell phone. India could probably run on what the US wastes in electricity every day.

            In the US and the industrialized West an off the shelf kit containing all of the above could be put together for probably less than $2,000.00 and would make a great hurricane or disaster emergency kit. Sure beats sitting in the dark with no cell phone, internet or cold drinking water and at least a little fan which is what about 6 million Floridians experienced this week.

            There are still about 3 million without power throughout the state. Not to mention if there is no power, gas stations can’t pump gasoline for generators and people can’t drive to get gas, and there are no working traffic lights.

            If that is not STUPID, then I don’t know what is. BTW the sun was shining on Tuesday and I rolled my own little home made solar powered emergency kit out into the courtyard to charge.

            A couple of years ago I tried to market something like that but people seemed to prefer gasoline generators. Maybe times have changed and the technology has greatly improved so maybe I could try again…

            1. I feel your pain Fred, having experienced about 4 weeks without power in a 12 month period, two weeks of which were for Sandy.
              In Sandy we could go nowhere since trees and wires were down across roads for several days. Even after we could travel, getting gasoline (mostly for generators) was very difficult since power had not been restored to many service stations and the main port as well as refineries had taken hits.
              Some gas stations set up their own generators but soon ran out of fuel since the fuel trucks could not get through even if they had fuel to deliver. So much for the reliability of gasoline. It depends upon a complex external mechanical and transport system and local storage is just a day or so away from empty.

            2. I lived a year in Micronesia without running water or power.
              I got really good with a spear gun.

            3. Well, I went for a week, and stayed a year.
              So, more like a adventure than a vacation.

            4. Most of my vacations and weekends were adventures. Going back to work was recovery time for me. 🙂

            5. I’m afraid to see what happened to our reefs here in Florida… The beach was littered with dead fish, sponges and sea fans.The coral bleaching was already doing a number. I can only imagine what the Keys looks like.

    1. Cassini plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere and disintegrated about 3:31 a.m. PDT (7:31 a.m. EDT) on Sept. 15, 2017.

      What and absolutely fantastic mission from launch to Grand Finale!!

      A very sincere thank you to all the scientists and engineers who made this and other mission’s possible.
      You have greatly enriched our knowledge of the solar system. You are a shining example of what science is and does! You stand out in stark contrast to the pettiness, ignorance and lack of curiosity displayed by all those who deny the wonders of the universe.

    2. I went bird watching with the Launch Manager a few months back.
      He had some interesting insights.
      (I had no idea- he had on a Cassini tee shirt, and that started the conservation.)

    1. Things might cool down soon though – sudden jump in La Nina probabilities from the Columbia Enso ensemble.

  12. Just how would an electric car utopia work in the Florida Keys at the moment?? There’s very little functioning electricity there right now and there may not be for several weeks more. But there *are* 3 Tom Thumb’s that have managed to reopen to sell gasoline, the lifeblood of the recovery and rebuilding efforts right now.

    1. Wow, that’s great. Three gas stations for the state. Amazing. Downed wires cause electrical outages.

      Anyway, electric car utopia would be in the future and would have lots of solar PV to charge them up. The hurricane did not blow out the sun.
      Also the cars could be used as storage batteries also to run critical needs. People would have charged up their cars and home backup batteries before the storm. Definitely better than waiting days and weeks for the crews to repair the transmission system.

      And guess what? The studies were already being performed for new Atlantic wind farms to be able to stand the high winds and veer of Cat 5 hurricanes! There is no end to this, the reign of FF is breaking fast.
      http://www.climatecentral.org/news/seasonal-temperature-trends-united-states-20040

      And don’t forget the HAM radio operators.
      https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/09/10/during-hurricanes-emergency-officials-turn-ham-radio/651994001/

      1. That’s 3 Tom Thumb’s open in the Keys, not the entire state.

        But anywho you are completely certain all solar panels can withstand a category 4 or 5 storm?

        Or how about a scenario…your Keys home is your second home. After the Storm, when roads cleared up, you drive down from mainland to take a look at your property. What you find is your home heavily damaged, the roof all torn apart, the solar system is completely broken. Your neighbor’s houses have all suffered the same fate. So you are stranded where you are then I guess, because you used up most of your battery getting to your house and now you got no way to recharge your vehicle. Unless you could do so with a portable gas generator, but then that would require using some dirty fossil fuels.

        1. Your scenario is beyond ridiculous! It’s like saying you would drive an off road vehicle into the middle of Death Valley to find out if there was a gas station there when you ran out of gas. Do you really think someone who drives an EV wouldn’t check the news reports for availability of charging before venturing on such a drive? You really are a fucking idiot!

          1. Now, now Fred! Take it easy on the guy! Some people need somebody to hold their hands in a time of crisis. Not everybody is as imaginative as Elon Musk you know! 😉

          2. Like we couldn’t cobble together a charger from the existing solar panels and components. Right on the spot.
            Try drilling an oil well, setting up a refinery and tapping gasoline on the spot in the Keys. Might have to bring some equipment for that and the neighbors and government would complain, plus what would run the oil rig and oops no oil anyway?
            By then the EV ranges will be about 600 miles or more so what is the problem anyway? If you drive at slower speeds now the ranges are over 400 miles per charge.

        2. So you are saying I am so stupid and would drive a vehicle near it’s total range into an area that probably had no power to recharge it.
          Nahhh, not that stupid.
          Hey, maybe the generator got crushed when the house went down or maybe all that gasoline stored there caught fire and burned the whole thing so no problem.
          We can trade dumb stories all day long. Got to go do something smart now though. Good luck down there.

        3. Yawn, covered

          http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-september-12-2017/#comment-614913

          might even hold your crappy roof in place, if well installed. Alternatively, if you are building in a hurricane and flood zone WHY DON’T YOU BUILD A PROPER HOUSE THAT CAN RESIST IT? So many homes, I see in the news coverage, are built from short life materials that are totally inappropriate for the area they are built in and if you are building in a flood plain, tough, 1)you should not be allowed to 2)you should be totally refused for ANY sort of insurance!

          NAOM

    2. Just playing with ideas here. If electric cars were to become mainstream, I would imagine that disaster preparation would include a fleet of battery charger trucks with several hundred kWh of batteries mounted on the truck. These trucks could bring electricity from where it is available to where it is not, pretty much like how fuel tank trucks work except several of these charger trucks would be needed to fuel the amount of cars that one tank truck does under the current scheme of things.

      I also envision semis (articulated trucks for the Europeans out there) with 50 foot (15 metre) trailers that can park in a field and fold out a PV array several times (5?, 8?) the area covered by the trailer, working out to between 185 to 295 square meters of array good for 40 to 60 kW DC with the highest efficiency panels available now. 40 kW mobile arrays if you will. Should be able to generate enough juice to fully charge about 5 of the new 2018 Nissan Leafs on a good sunny day in the Keys (200 kWh).

      Just a couple of thoughts. Maybe others can come up with better ideas. Trying to think my way out of a box as opposed to just sitting in the box and wringing my hands.

        1. Yup, those would work too. Battery trucks and mobile PV arrays could do more than just charge cars though. A hospital or store with a need to keep stuff in cold storage from going bad might benefit.

        2. Maybe send a drone to do some aerial reconnaissance before actually going there yourself! 😉

          1. I doubt it. Can the Florida Keys even survive as they are now with sea level rise and a likely drop in tourism once oil depletion really sets in? I was responding to a general comment on responses to disasters which included the comment “If electric cars were to become mainstream” – well there are alternatives, and there is also air travel to consider.

      1. How good do the electric cars work out in cold weather? I’m just wondering. I don’t mean like Siberian cold (although it would be interesting to see if anyone could actually use electric vehicles in such climates) but just in places where a car must sit in below freezing temperatures for days or even weeks at a time. From living in one of those areas I am aware most electronics will work below freezing, but batteries usually don’t hold as much charge or last as long as in warmer temperatures.

        1. Uhmmm…if you look inside your petrol car, you’ll notice that it has a battery! It doesn’t work below a certain temperature. Also engine blocks freeze up.

          Turns out Canadians and scandinavians figured out how to fix that: lots of places where you can plug in your car to keep the block warm. This isn’t rocket science…

  13. Here’s an alternative view for renewable energy development to that of McKibben’s or Klein’s (above – more in-line with Klein overall maybe):

    100 PERCENT WISHFUL THINKING: THE GREEN-ENERGY CORNUCOPIA

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/14/100-percent-wishful-thinking-the-green-energy-cornucopia/

    (commenting on previous 100% renewables papers):

    Scenarios did not account for the overcapacity and redundancy that will be needed if a high-energy economy is to function in an increasingly unpredictable global climate. (This year, the people of Texas, Florida, and the West in particular can attest to the deep impacts of that unpredictability.) Studies did not account for the expected four- to five-fold expansion of the power transmission infrastructure that will be required to accommodate renewable energy. And they did not address the difficulties of maintaining voltage and frequency of alternating current within extremely tight limits (a necessity in technologically dependent societies) when a large share of the supply is from wind and solar. This all adds up, writes the Heard team, to a systemic “fragility” that will render futile all attempts to deliver the promised output of electricity when it is needed.

    and

    Moriarty and Honnery show that given all of these factors, expansion of renewable energy will hit a brick wall, a point at which as much energy is required to install and operate electric facilities as they will end up generating in their operating lifetimes. But even before that point is reached, it will have become pointless to expand generation capacity that has lower and lower net output. They conclude that as a result, future renewable output “could be far below present energy use.”

    1. Bollox. We will need a lot less energy and only slightly more grid electricity as we become fully electrified. Four or five fold increase in transmission lines needed my arse. The whole system will be increasingly dispersed and self regulating. My state has over 300,000 power generation sites now and growing. How far does the power have to go? Compare that to twenty yers ago.
      As direct electric heating is replaced by heat pumps, demand falls drastically. As multi-phase motors are implemented more widely, demand falls. As older equipment is replaced demand falls.
      All my gadgets are much more energy efficient than earlier ones. More and more systems will be smart systems that interact with the grid and local power generation.

      Of course anything can be done stupidly and studies can be heavily biased (using large amounts of base load power in the study as well as large amounts of overbuild).

      The top ten solar PV states have about 8 million PV generation sites as of 2016. The top ten states already have solar capacity per capita ranging from 223 watts to over 700 watts per capita.
      Then there is wind power ….
      Too late Moriarity, the game is afoot and you are getting left behind. Switching to electric transport is inherently efficient and you loaded the game such that high growth and other inefficiencies would continue. Playing with loaded dice one gets caught out. Keep assuming there will be not technical progress either or that scientists, engineers and businessmen are stupid and don’t learn.

      I think the power companies fear that they are dinosaurs now, but as I said many times the new money is in storage systems now. Also the money is in interactive smart management systems. Forget the stock market, computer (AI?) run trading of power will be the biggest area of trade on the planet from between residences to across continents. And it will get smarter all the time.

      Lets say my house can generate 120 percent of it’s power needs (including transport) but there is 15% of the time when I run short of that day’s generation need. My system goes out and finds local excess or storage and I get back some of that excess I put out there. Properly designed dispersed systems will rarely have to move money or power beyond the local area. And no, things will not be the same, nor will they need eternal growth. Yes, the homes and businesses will adapt to changing power availability of power but much of it will be in the background.

    2. Holmes described Moriarty as follows:
      He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it, he won the mathematical chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the University town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and come down to London. He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city…
      — Holmes, “The Final Problem”

      1. We need a hundred Moriarity’s. Problem is we have thousands, and millions of toadies to help them.

    3. Hey George, are you familiar with the work of Hermann Scheer? The German Renewable Energy Act of 2000 and several books count among his works. There are lots of Youtube videos featuring talks he gave and interviews with him. He was fond of saying that you couldn’t really expect solutions to the energy problem to come from the practitioners and beneficiaries of the existing system so, this sort of report is to be expected. I wouldn’t be surprised to find Koch brothers funding behind this kind of report somewhere.

      I find it frustrating to read or listen to people who only see problems with new approaches without even trying to really think about creative solutions. You may have noticed, I am a big fan of Elon Musk for that reason. He is certainly not afraid to try different ways of doing things!

      1. I find it frustrating to read or listen to people who only see problems with new approaches without even trying to really think about creative solutions

        Most people are still stuck in the cubical boxed in way of thinking and are incapable of thinking outside of it. Then there are some who are already thinking outside the icosahedron…
        .

        1. And can’t find a door to get back in.
          I’m kinda on the fence on this one.
          The battery bottleneck seems to go on and on.
          End the EROEI is not clear– 2 to 8 years at point of production for PV.
          Anyway hoping for the best.
          It seems like a desperate clinging to a BAU world.
          But I am shopping for a Electric Bike!

          1. And can’t find a door to get back in.

            Look for the clear silicone hinge holding the silicon triangle shut… 😉

          2. One watt of PV costs less than $.50 these days. Energy input costs are typically well below 10% of manufacturing gross costs. Polysilicon is relatively energy intensive, but I have a hard time believing that the $.50 cost can include more than maybe 2 kWhs.

            A normal capacity factor for solar is 15%, and a minimum life is 30 years. 8,760 hours per year x 15% x 30 years = 39kWhs.

            That gives an E-ROI of about 20.

            1. Here’s another point to ponder regarding the EROEI of solar power.

              Fossil fuel generated energy is still dirt cheap, at least in terms of dollar costs, because fossil fuels are still cheap.

              Later on, FF will be scarce and expensive, and whatever portion of the cheap stuff we use now to build out solar infrastructure will be one of the biggest bargains of all time, in terms of putting it to the best possible use.

              People who are used to living high on the hog who suddenly lose their jobs often find themselves selling a thousand dollar toy to pay a couple of hundred on the utility and grocery bills. Cheap fossil fuel invested today in FUTURE FUEL FREE electricity will return a profit of several times the investment, in terms of actual real money cost per kilowatt hour. Later on, we’re going to feel the same way about the thousand we wasted on our BELCH FIRE V8 six thousand pound beer hauler, when we are having a hard time buying enough gasoline for our two thousand pound subcompact car.

              The EROEI of solar electricity, measured in real, honest, practical terms, is WAY better than twenty to one .

              You get the those future kilowatt hours at zero purchased energy costs, lol. What will be the REAL net energy cost of a ton of coal, or a barrel of oil, or a cubic meter of gas, in terms of energy invested to get it out of the ground, and delivered to the place it will be used, and the losses involved in using it, ten or twenty years down the road?

              Aren’t we already spending ten or fifteen times as much, in terms of concrete, sand, steel, hauled water, etc, to drill an oil well that produces maybe four hundred barrels a day and declines fast, as we spent drilling a well that produced several times as much and held up well for decades just a few years ago?

              The coal industry within easy driving distance of my home is doomed no matter what, because all the really good quality coal is already used up, and the so so quality stuff left is getting harder and harder to mine, being deeper and deeper and in smaller seams, as it continues to deplete.

              It’s going to be funny as hell, if I live long enough, and I MIGHT, to make fun of people who believe in coal because it’s delivered on electric trains powered mostly by wind and solar farms, lol.

              Power companies down around Atlanta used to burn coal mined by some of my relatives in West Virginia , but now they are shipping coal all the way from the upper midwest, because local coal costs so much to mine these days.

              And we can already store a LOT of solar electricity quite effectively, and at a trivial long term cost, on the homeowner’s scale, so that using quite a lot of it is going to prove to be VERY economical indeed.

              Thermal storage is DIRT , or should I say GRAVEL , cheap, fireproof, decay proof, and virtually one hundred percent fool proof and trouble free. A double insulated refrigerator the size of a typical twenty cubic footer like the one I use now could be built with five or six cubic feet of ice storage and with a tiny little battery to run the fan and computer chip, it would run all but three or four days a year where I live on solar power alone, no problem at all. A triple insulated hundred gallon hot water heater would perform as well, I might have to turn on the grid juice to it once or twice a year for a day or so.

              And it’s anybody’s guess what gasoline will cost within ten years, if the electric car revolution is slower growing up that we hope, and Peak Oil makes itself felt with a vengeance.

              I don’t have any problem at all envisioning various scenarios where in I could sell a Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt or other used electric car with fifty thousand miles on it for substantially more than I paid for it NEW.

              Cut your need for gasoline from ten gallons a week to five by driving a plug in hybrid, and at four bucks, that’s a thousand a year AFTER tax dollars saved. Millions of people today could easily pay for their own pv system by using it to charge an electric car within five to ten years, lol, and within the next five or six years, electrics will be cost competitive with similar conventional cars, without subsidies, and without having to take into account maintenance costs.

              Trump and the Koch brothers and all their idiot foot soldiers together can’t stop the transition to renewables. All they can do is fight a rear guard action to slow it down.

              All the arguments about solar and wind power never being able to take the place of fossil fuel power are basically irrelevant in the real world, where we LIVE, from minute to minute to decade to decade. It doesn’t matter a fucking whit if wind and solar can never giterdone entirely, as a practical matter.

              Sufficient unto the day, and the decade and to our personal lifetimes, are the problems thereof. We may NOT succeed in going entirely renewable, but we sure as hell can extend the life of our one time endowment of fossil fuels substantially, and that’s an ENTIRELY SUFFICIENT argument for staying pedal to the metal on renewables.

            2. Absolutely.

              E-ROI analysis is a very narrow thing, and almost all of what you see is unrealistic. It’s useful only occasionally for debunking things like cellulosic biofuel.

            3. Cost has nothing to do with EROEI.
              This is hard to understand for most people.

            4. Of course. But…my comment is still correct. Industrial/commercial power is around 6 cents per kWh. It’s very, very unlikely that one watt of PV requires more than 2kWh to produce.

              Actually, it’s probably rather less. PV E-ROI was 6-10 about 15 years ago, when researchers stopped doing solar E-ROI analyses because it was no longer an interesting topic (solar E-ROI was “good enough”). PV costs (and energy inputs) have dropped really dramatically since then, and solar E-ROI is probably higher than 30.

        2. Then there are those advocating “techno-fixes” to tinker with global climate systems as an excuse to avoid unpopular but necessary measures to reduce carbon emissions: like “albedo modification”. Can we control the climate system when we can’t control ourselves? Of course we can, humans are smart enough to solve any problem. Yup, let’s get on with geo-engineering the planet and see how that works out; lots of creative solutions there.

          1. Yup, let’s get on with geo-engineering the planet and see how that works out; lots of creative solutions there.

            I’m coming around to idea that anyone who seriously advocates geo-engineering the planet needs to be put in a straight jacket and placed in a padded room for their own safety… And no, I don’t need to wait for a professional psychiatric evaluation to be performed on such people to know they are fucking insane!

            1. OK if you don’t want to geo-engineer the planet, let’s fill it with EVs. That should fix everything. Let’s see, we’ll be adding three billion or so people to Earth shortly. They’ll all be wanting an EV of course along with roads and bridges to drive around on. No problem. Will have to expand operations at cobalt mines in Africa and REE mines in China of course but there will be lots of kids we can sacrifice for that. Actually, what use are wildlife reserves (and ignorant kids) when we can have personal virtual worlds? Yup, technology will save us. Meanwhile let’s get on with genetically modifying all the fish so they can survive in the warming oceans. Even though we can live in a virtual world most people still want their fish and chips.

            2. Doug, first, I really don’t think we will be adding all those people to the planet. Second, I also don’t think the next paradigm includes personal ownership of transport vehicles, EVs or otherwise. Third, I do agree that no form of technology will save humanity from itself.

              IMHO, The only thing that might save us is a completely different way of thinking and doing things. That will include completely new technologies.

              BTW, If you haven’t yet, go to NASA’s website and see the end of the Cassini project. Think of all the science, and engineering and innovative uses of technology from all those brilliant people that went into pulling it off,

              Might restore a tiny bit of your faith in at least a minute portion of humanity.

              Cheers!

            3. Sorry Fred, just feeling a bit cynical this morning. In fact, I spend more and more of my time keeping up with developments in physics, mathematics and astronomy. It just pisses me off when people suggest that technology will save the planet while watching them wandering around like zombies staring at their smart phones and preaching that salvation comes via driving an EV; because, EVs, etc., are, in fact, just another version of BAU. We are fucking up the planet at an increasing rate and “technology” is too often just another word for toys-for-the-rich.

            4. It is not going to work anyway.
              And a vision of a world covered in PV panels and wind turbines to preserve a dying way of life just doesn’t rock my boat currently.
              We are in a predicament, as far as i can tell.
              Not that they don’t have a function.

            5. That’s the kind of perspective that the Koch’s would like us to take.

              EVs won’t cure cancer or save wildlife, but they can and very likely will dramatically reduce oil consumption.

              Of course, the Kochs would also like us to take a passive attitude and believe that EVs will sell themselves. They won’t – we’re going to be fighting the likes of the Kochs every step of the way.

      2. No, never heard of him. I don’t know much about renewables, still trying to learn, and just because I post a link doesn’t mean I agree with it. I can see there is much less agreement in this field than with climate change, which I think is now fairly well agreed on (though every new paper seems to edge things along to being a bit worse).

        I think a lot of the published work and ideas are very specific to the USA and not necessarily completely applicable to elsewhere. The US life style is assumed sacrosanct, and it’s built around a car; but really it’s a status signalling TV dream lifestyle, not the reality for the many living pay check to pay check and dying in increasing numbers from opioid o/d’s. Therefore I think something would have to change no matter what, climate change and resource depletion are going to make it faster. Ideas that go against that (i.e. to maintain BAU, bad as it is and getting worse for many) are unlikely to work out well in my opinion.

        I also think there’s a risk that we assume EVs will solve everything, then find that renewables can’t meat the needs and everybody switches back to coal as oil depletion sets in. From my industry background I tend to always try to foresee and mitigate the downside risk (starting with the catastrophic and working up), not maximise the potential upside. Most OECD countries have long term GDP growth trends that go negative in the early 20’s, any idea of considering climate change might simply disappear at that stage, but the likely oil supply crunch after 2019 might accelerate things along (for good or bad – I don’t know).

        There are demographic changes that might have bigger nearer term impacts as well. Most people on this site I think are fairly comfortably retired or looking forward to it. That is not a likely future for most people, including younger generations in OECD countries. In the UK retirement age is likely to be in the 70’s and rising pretty soon. That might be OK if there are enough suitable jobs and a functioning health service to keep people healthy enough to work at those ages, but both assumptions are looking shaky.

        1. a risk that we assume EVs will solve everything, then find that renewables can’t meat the needs and everybody switches back to coal

          Why would everybody switch back to coal? I think that in the scenario you’re talking about the worst possibility is that the transition away from fossil fuel-fired electrical generation stalls out at some percentage, say 50% or 75%.

          I’d say that’s mighty unlikely – wind and solar are going to keep getting cheaper, and information about our understanding of the true costs of FF will be easier to disseminate as FF billionaires lose power to the Bezos of the world.

          1. And I say I don’t really care what you say, I have no interest in someone who just keeps asserting opinions as if they are facts, with no supporting evidence or line of reason, and with apparently no concept that he might not have all the facts or be seeing the whole system (I think you are probably an economist of some sort). You are worse than the deniers. I’d prefer you not to comment on anything of mine.

            1. Wow. You sound very angry. I’m surprised.

              You expressed an opinion about coal, without supporting evidence. I disagreed, with an accompanying short supporting argument. My understanding of the normal way things are done in a (polite) online argument is that you’d disagree, and either give an argument, or ask me to expand mine & maybe give a source or some numbers to support it.

              I’ve often given detailed evidence in the past based on what I like to think is a depth of experience with the related technical and system issues, but my sense has been that it has often been a waste of time, as often the disagreement was about different and perhaps more fundamental issues. It makes more sense to refine the source of the disagreement before getting into the weeds of detailed evidence.

              So…what’s the real disagreement here? Has your career in the oil industry left you with a really strong intuition that a good life is impossible without fossil fuels, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is impossibly Pollyannish?

            2. There are no guarantees but due to supply, efficiency and energetics and economics it is likely a lot of transport will move to electricity and/or have fuel produced from electrical energy .
              Civilization always seems to get itself dependent upon a one horse system. Right now not very much can operate without electrical systems and/or electricity itself. Certainly not much can be manufactured without it, so might as well go there since there are many benefits to the total changeover.
              We do need to improve our way of life, less energetic, less materialistic and more social/productive. Swinging the aim back to local areas might help. Being extremely dependent upon a global system is a weak point so far.

            3. We do need to improve our way of life, less energetic, less materialistic and more social/productive.

              I agree. Having “stuff” (housing, transportation, etc) is very important up to a certain point, but most people in OECD countries have more than enough stuff – after that certain point, too much stuff is counterproductive. Our problem is that most of us don’t know what to do to try to make life better except…just getting more stuff.

              Cars are a good example – most people spend way too much on new cars and throw them away before the end of their useful life – I like to buy them used, and keep them for 20 years. I agree that people need to focus more on other people (in person, not on a screen), and learn to develop their interior life (meditation, etc).

              I’m not sure about localization – I tend to think that having countries pretty well connected tends to reduce the likelihood of war. OTOH, oil imports seem to be an exception to that rule…

            4. I too tend to run my vehicles into the dirt, that and a number of other things.

              You are right, world trade does tend to reduce some war. A lot of war has been economic lately, using sanctions against countries. That can lead to war and goes against free trade.
              I was thinking of a place being vulnerable to loss of materials due to the providing country having problems or setting sanctions. Loss or limitations of a major material can happen instantly now, with no or little control over the situation.

            5. George – “(I think you are probably an economist of some sort)”

              Nick – “I agree. Having “stuff” (housing, transportation, etc) is very important up to a certain point”

              “In economics, diminishing returns is the decrease in the marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant.”

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns

              Nick, I like to buy new vehicles and keep them for 6 to 10 years and dump them. Before they need any expensive maintenance or repairs. The first miles are the best. The tires, brakes, shocks, steering, seats, and drive train are at there best. Plus no squeaks or rattles. It’s a time, when the vehicle will never drive nicer. After that, it’s a matter of diminishing returns(or performance).

            6. buy new vehicles and keep them for 6 to 10 years and dump them. Before they need any expensive maintenance or repairs.

              Well, if you’re looking at simple costs, that was true 30 years ago, but now: both fleet operators and Consumer Reports will tell you that your annual cost falls each additional year you keep the car. Depreciation falls much faster than maintenance and repair costs rise. Commercial fleets keep vehicles pretty much as long as they’re not *functionally* obsolete.

              The first miles are the best. The tires, brakes, shocks, steering, seats, and drive train are at there best.

              I haven’t observed that for tires, brakes, steering or drivetrain – I don’t think commercial fleet operators report that either. Perhaps it depends on high quality maintenance, including preventive maintenance where needed.

              I think suspension and seats may deteriorate. I’d be curious about people’s experience with that.

            7. Well Nick, we both know the largest fleet owners of cars are the rental companies and they only keep’em for about a year and 20,000 miles.

              There is no argument that vehicles are much better built and dependable than 30 years ago. But, my point is you get what you pay for and there is a reason the market discounts 3 to 5 year old vehicles as much as they do. It cost a lot of money to keep up a vehicle to the standard of new.

              Every used car I’ve ever sold had more play in the steering wheel than when it was new. For me, nothing has improved the ride better than replacing an old set of tires for new ones. Unless you let the shocks go past their useful life.

              I like to buy virgin vehicles. To each his own.

            8. By 2025, nearly all models from GM’s global brands in China—Buick, Cadillac and Chevrolet—will offer electrification technology. To support GM’s growing NEV fleet planned for China, its SAIC-GM joint venture is opening a new battery assembly plant in Shanghai this year.

              Barra said that GM believes the future of personal mobility will be driven by the convergence of electrification, autonomous vehicles, and connectivity and shared mobility services. China is playing a key role in the company’s strategy.

              http://www.greencarcongress.com/2017/09/20170916-barra.html

            9. For the first time in a while, new vehicles have new features that make buying them seem worthwhile. They don’t seem quite ready yet, though. A bit more electric range, a bit more selection, and fully developed autonomous features would make them a lot more attractive.

  14. ARCTIC SEA ICE ONCE AGAIN SHOWS CONSIDERABLE MELTING

    “This September, the extent of Arctic sea ice shrank to roughly 4.7 million square kilometres, as was determined by researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute, the University of Bremen and Universität Hamburg. Though slightly larger than last year, the minimum sea ice extent 2017 is average for the past ten years and far below the numbers from 1979 to 2006. The Northeast Passage was traversable for ships without the need for icebreakers.”

    “The low Arctic sea ice extent ranks amongst the low values of the last decade. We do not expect an extent of 6 or 7 million square kilometres in the coming decades, as it was typical for the decades up to the year 2000.”

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170915103604.htm

    1. Less than 20 percent ice coverage. Wake me up when this starts to happen in August.

  15. I think global warming is a crime. I mean not only did it put a lot of ice cutting companies out of business but just think how far we will have to go for ice soon if the refrigerators stop working. Or was that refrigeration that put them out of work? Well anyway even if there were no refrigerators global warming would have done them now. Maybe it was a conspiracy.

    The lighter side of global warming:
    https://www.thoughtco.com/cartoons-and-memes-about-climate-change-2734107

  16. Let’s face it. By the time that PV, Wind power, EV’s and other transistion fixes get big enough to do more than scare the fossil fuel companies (who are going out the door anyway), it’s going to be in the 2040’s. By that time CO2 will be doubled, the Arctic will be free of ice most of the summer, it will be a lot warmer (and all that entails) and there might be a lot more people on the Earth. I think we are a few decades late on this but let’s give it a go anyway. I probably won’t be here to see it so good luck folks.

    https://cleantechnica.com/2016/11/28/evs-will-save-world-help-energy-efficiency-renewables/

    1. I agree– except for there will be a lot more people on Earth.

      1. YES, POPULATION OF THE WORLD, 2015, 2030, 2050 AND 2100, ACCORDING TO THE UN’S CURRENT MEDIUM-VARIANT PROJECTION: 7,349; 8,501,9,725,11, 213 BILLION. Of course Dennis, Fred and others will disagree but they don’t have teams of scientists working on population demographics spread across the planet, they just don’t think, or don’t want to think, these numbers are valid. Unfortunately, thinking or feeling or wanting doesn’t make it so. I think the moon is made of green cheese and I also think the UN’s projections are more realistic than anyone commenting on this Blog. 🙂

        1. Hi Doug,

          I’m certainly not a demographer, never mind an expert one with the resources necessary to make long range predictions.

          But I have expertise of a different kind, known as common sense, backed up with half a century plus of study as a scholar of everything, in a manner of speaking.

          I can’t prove it, with specific examples, but anybody who has read extensively in history, politics, economics,culture, religion, geography, etc, over many years will agree with me that Yogi was right when he said predicting is hard, ‘specially the future, lol.

          Now here’s a common knowledge observation that is so common place as to be a cliche not even worth mentioning among people that KNOW something about the way governments and or almost any large organizations come up with predictions about what will happen years and years down the road.

          The fucking people in charge decide on a set of assumptions that will be fed into the computers, and then the computers spit out possible future scenarios, based on the assumptions.

          The ASSUMPTIONS are generally dictated by the agendas of whoever is running the show, or if not, then by the obligation of the program manager to use data and predictions produced by OTHER government agencies, or by sister organizations, or by other third party organizations.

          I have read LOTS of theses predictions over the years, and have laughed my ass off about the assumptions used in creating half of them.

          Now MAYBE we WILL have enough oil and gas and coal to generate CO2 the way some people believe we will, but virtually everybody WITHOUT BAU INDUSTRY TIES whose opinion about this I have read so far is that we will be running short of easily affordable oil and gas and maybe coal too, and within another generation at the outside.

          I’ve worked for government, and know lots of people who have worked and do work for government. You need big balls, and a job lined up, if you want to contradict the assumptions made at the top of the administrative heap.It’s common knowledge that various government agencies find out in advance what the rest of the government wants to hear, and then proceed to find data to support the wish list. That’s the way agency managers and their underlings do it to be sure of collecting their salaries and bennies, and eventually their pensions.

          NOBODY knows what the birth rate will be, in the various parts of the world, with any real certainty, even ten or fifteen years from now. NOBODY knows how fast electric cars and trucks will displace oil fired cars and trucks.

          NOBODY knows how many new invasive species will be fucking with farmers ten years from now. ( THANK SKY DADDY that most of our enemies are lacking in initiative and imagination. )

          Nobody knows if some super rich guy will pay for a satellite and fifty million super cheap tv’s that will enable three times that many third world kids to learn how to read and do basic arithmetic, or if some equally well intentioned but less than judicious person may fund the development of a highly contagious and highly drug resistant and slow moving variant of an existing venereal disease which will not show sign for five or ten years, and then shows up partly as INFERTILITY. Nobody knows if a nuclear WWIII will wipe out ninety percent of us.

          One BAD assumption is more than enough to render the results of any study of future history as useless as the tits on a boar hog.

          Garbage in, garbage out.

          Nevertheless, I must agree with you to the extent that I believe the UN projections are as good as anybody’s . But I don’t think they are any BETTER than my own, or Dennis’s, or Ron Patterson’s, or Fred Maygar’s.

          1. Doesn’t matter what we “believe”, we will pay in direct proportion to the extent of our failures. As an undergraduate engineering student we used typical Safety Factor (SF) for structural steel work (in bridges) in the 5-7 range. Sometimes there were arguments to the effect that this added too much cost. What’s the cost of fucking up Earth?

            1. Doug, regardless of how qualified a team of scientists making a forecast is, we don’t often know what assumptions go into the making of said forecasts. Case in point might be food production forecasts that, because the current administration does not believe in climate change, cannot accommodate the likely effects of climate changed on food production so they predict food production rising to be adequate to comfortably feed 11 plus billion by 2100. Teams working on population and demographics might then take the food production forecast and run with it.

              I have had an issue with oil production forecasts since becoming aware of Peak Oil in late 2007. Up, up and away seems to be the rule and before LTO came along most forecasts were really struggling with reality. Since the LTO boom reality has kept up with the forecasts a little better but, I’m sure at least a few of the readers here believe that, the LTO boom will run out of steam in way less than a few decades. If the long term global oil production forecasts turn out to be far too optimistic, does this have any ramifications for global food production forecasts and population forecasts?

              On the other hand the same agencies that forecast what I consider to be unrealistic oil production forecasts, have also produced embarrassingly unrealistic forecasts for the growth in renewable energy, specifically solar, this time being way too conservative, what gives? Every regular reader of this blog knows that I am a huge proponent of solar energy and EVs and have put forward the idea that based on recent trends (and the ideas of one Tony Seba) that we could witness a extremely rapid and tectonic change in the electricity production and transportation landscape over the next decade and a half. I’ve watched Seba presentations over and over again and have yet to come up with any real challenges to the basis of his projections, except that he is assuming BAU, that is, no serious black swan events over the next decade or so. Increasingly, I am seeing more and more optimistic projections on the solar and EV fronts, as current growth rates defy conventional reasoning.

              Another set of projections that some call into question are those with regard to global warming and climate change. Why do I side with 97% of scientists? As someone who’s education was heavily biased towards mathematics and the sciences, I “get” the foundations on which the scientific consensus of the 97% is based. This is in contrast to the population forecasts, where I have no idea what went into making these forecasts.

              So here we have all these forecasts, projections and extrapolations. Which will be on the money and which won’t? I will give the projections out 10, 15 or even 25 years some slack but, IMO anything outside that has to be taken with more than a grain of salt. Even M King Hubbert was only right about his 14 year prediction of the US peak, which has held up to now. He was wrong about the global peak and may yet be proven wrong about the US peak because, in addition to what he knew, there was far too much he didn’t know.

              The forecasts for EV and solar penetration also interact with all the others in that more solar and EVs should mean less CO2 emissions and hopefully a more stable supply of reasonably priced NG for manufacturing fertilizers and fuel for farm machinery, at least for a decade or two. There are just way too many variables for most long term forecasts to be valid.

              As an anecdote, I remember as a young man working at the local offices of IBM (anybody remember them?) and attending the annual staff meetings to review the past year and look at what was expected for the ensuing year. I distinctly remember listening to the local GM talk about how much business they expected to do in the following year and thinking, “this is just bullshit!”. Half the time I was right, like when the local economy would take a sudden unexpected downturn as a result of unexpected events, like tourism arrivals going down due to events in the countries from which visitors came or a drop in demand for aluminum and hence bauxite and alumina or a spike in oil prices. Occasionally he would be right and the following year the narrative would be all about having exceeded the targets and “looking forward to another great year!”. Like Yogi says “Predictin’ is hard, specially about the future!”

            2. We have to make our projections based on a limited set of circumstances, i.e. no major wars and no major plagues.
              Of course realistically we should throw in a few wrenches to any projection, slow it down, speed it up, give it some period where materials are scarce, etc. Throw in some competing tech too.
              That would be more realistic.

              Of course we have to understand the starting points first.
              Here is an interesting graph on how people get to work.
              https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/how-america-gets-to-work-in-1-very-long-graph/282349/

              Over 100 million people driving alone to work. Why? Not much rail use at all.

              Now think about how that might change and why. Then make some projections and throw in some wrenches along the way.

              Well, off to ride the train tomorrow and see how the other percent lives.

            3. Had a nice train ride, clean well ventilated cars with good ride. About 2.5 hours each way.
              Sad part that even though this was going thought one of the densest population areas in the country, the trains were heavily populated with empty seats.

        2. Of course Dennis, Fred and others will disagree but they don’t have teams of scientists working on population demographics spread across the planet, they just don’t think, or don’t want to think, these numbers are valid.

          While it’s true that none of us has teams of scientists working on population demographics spread across the planet we can make some reasonably educated guesses about the carrying capacity of our planet for sustaining a human population and what might be some of the limiting factors to continued population growth.

          Let’s just say that I’m not a ‘Growth Denier’ but I remain skeptical that we have not already hit or are not going to hit limits soon. 😉

          There are schools of thought that posit that we have indeed already entered a phase of ecological overshoot. One could start with visiting the 40 year update to the Club of Rome’s scenarios.
          https://www.clubofrome.org/report/the-limits-to-growth/

          Yes, humans are quite ingenious and we have pulled many a rabbit out of our collective hats in the past, including a ‘Green Revolution’, which allowed our population to grow exponentially. I won’t completely discount the possibility that we might not do so again. However this time the odds seem stacked against that possibility.

          Ecological Footprint
          http://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/ecological-footprint/

          World Footprint

          The world’s ecological deficit is referred to as global ecological overshoot. Since the 1970s, humanity has been in ecological overshoot, with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year. Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.6 Earths to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year. We use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate through overfishing, overharvesting forests, and emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than forests can sequester.

          http://www.footprintnetwork.org/resources/data/
          Data and Methodology
          Global Footprint Network bridges science, policy, and economics to change how the world manages its natural resources and create a sustainable future.

          https://www.esa.org/esa/science/reports/ecological-limits/

          Human Population and Consumption: What are the Ecological Limits?

          Conclusion:

          In recognition of the fact that issues of human population growth are fundamental to sustainability, the original Sustainable Biosphere Initiative report featured a segment on human population growth which stated that “to more fully understand how human populations affect and are affected by ecological processes, the complex interfaces between ecology and social and economic sciences and policy analyses must be developed to a much greater extent (Lubchenco et al. 1991).” This symposium provided a venue for further elucidating the role of ecologists in pursuing this goal.
          There is general agreement throughout the scientific community that growth of the human population, and the resultant increase in consumption, is exerting an unsustainable amount of pressure on global systems. Ecologists are accustomed to identifying natural constraints to growth; however, issues of consumption become much more complicated. An interdisciplinary approach is critical to incorporating the social and economic factors that influence the growth rate of human population and consumption. In addition to fostering interdisciplinary communication, ecologists must provide basic information on trends, continue to research how natural systems work, and educate the public and policy makers.
          Symposium participants identified many constraints to slowing human population growth which will require huge societal and economic change. Although this symposium was a good start, the issues raised by the participants must be used as stepping stones to more clearly defining the role of ecologists and identifying specific research opportunities related to human population growth and consumption.

          So given that we are already in deep ecological overshoot as it is, and coupled with what we know about the future probable effects of climate change on global agriculture, increased intensity of droughts and floods and continuing top soil depletion, I find it increasingly difficult to accept a prediction from the UN or anyone else, for that matter, of 11 billion humans living in peace and harmony on this planet.

    2. Hi Gone fishing,

      It is unlikely CO2 will double by 2040. Only possible if you believe the cornucopian estimates of fossil fuel resources.

      For those that believe more reasonable estimates for peak fossil fuels, only RCP4.5 is reasonable. That scenario is more consistent with a doubling of CO2 after 2100.

      Not good but TCR is about 1.8 C, the ocean will take time to warm, CO2 levels will fall a bit and we are likely to refuce FF use as fossil fuels increase in price after the peak in 2032.

      1. It is unlikely CO2 will double by 2040. Only possible if you believe the cornucopian estimates of fossil fuel resources.

        Well, in my case, I worry more about the butterfly effect…

        http://paulbourke.net/fractals/lorenz/

        The lorenz attractor was first studied by Ed N. Lorenz, a meteorologist, around 1963. It was derived from a simplified model of convection in the earth’s atmosphere. It also arises naturally in models of lasers and dynamos. The system is most commonly expressed as 3 coupled non-linear differential equations.

        dx / dt = a (y – x)
        dy / dt = x (b – z) – y
        dz / dt = xy – c z

        One commonly used set of constants is a = 10, b = 28, c = 8 / 3. Another is a = 28, b = 46.92, c = 4. “a” is sometimes known as the Prandtl number and “b” the Rayleigh number.

        The series does not form limit cycles nor does it ever reach a steady state. Instead it is an example of deterministic chaos. As with other chaotic systems the Lorenz system is sensitive to the initial conditions, two initial states no matter how close will diverge, usually sooner rather than later.

        There is code at the link to download and play with.
        Enjoy!

        Strange Attractor graphic…
        .

        1. “It is unlikely CO2 will double by 2040. Only possible if you believe the cornucopian estimates of fossil fuel resources.” Dennis C
          Nahh, easy if you don’t ignore both human and a multitude of natural sources. I was really thinking more like 205o and all the GHG’s but it is still quite possible with just CO2.

          Let’s examine your premise to achieve that lower amount.
          1) you believe the estimates for fossil fuels are at least somewhat accurate
          2) you believe the major source of CO2 will continue to be from manmade sources
          3) you assume that the models accurately portray how the earth system operates
          4) You assume that human progress is static

          Just a few thoughts on that (worth a book or two)
          1) I don’t believe that the estimates of natural gas are accurate at all
          Coal and oil are probably somewhat underestimated.
          2) The production of CO2 and methane from natural sources is just getting started. The carbon cycle is not in equilibrium (lots more from the ocean and the land).
          3) Most models have been found to underestimate the carbon cycle changes and the albedo changes when compared to actual field data studies. The actual sensitivity is still not well known, especially in a shock system. The reservoir of natural methane is at a peak and not accounted. The massive burning of forests and jungles is not well incorporated or modeled, yet it is consistently happening.

          4) The ability of humans to make progress in both finding and acquiring fossil fuels will not stop. Huamns are amazing technicians and when renewables do not fill the demand in a growing world, fossil fuels will be strongly pursued with methods we do not know of today.

          Your idea that GHG production must be from anthropogenic sources will be tossed aside in the next decade even by “mainstream” climate scientists.
          Also remember the kicker of cleaner air from massive implementation of clean renewable energy, it rapidly increases warming (which pushes all the feedbacks faster).

          By the way, how much CO2 will enter the atmosphere just by warming the ocean by 1C?

          1. BTW On average, one acre of new forest can sequester about 2.5 tons of carbon annually. Young trees absorb CO2 at a rate of 13 pounds per tree each year. Trees reach their most productive stage of carbon storage at about 10 years at which point they are estimated to absorb 48 pounds of CO2 per year. But, we are increasingly cutting down and burning down our forests (not to mention bug kills discussed previously). In B.C., 1.2 million hectares of forest scorched during this year’s record wildfire season so far.

            1. Trees reach their most productive stage of carbon storage at about 10 years at which point they are estimated to absorb 48 pounds of CO2 per year.

              Well, compare that to burning one gallon of gasoline which creates about 20 pounds of CO2. The average car emits about six tons of carbon dioxide every year, or about 12,000 lbs.

              So you’d need about 250 trees to sequester a single ICE powered car’s yearly CO2 emissions.

            2. “So you’d need about 250 trees to sequester a single ICE powered car’s yearly CO2 emissions.” That’s correct. And, according to a report from Macquarie Bank, 88.1 million million cars-light commercial vehicles were sold worldwide in 2016, up 4.8% from a year earlier.

            3. Funny how the increase of population is similar to the number of new cars sold each year.
              I wonder how many vehicles are junked per year.

        2. “It is unlikely CO2 will double by 2040. Only possible if you believe the cornucopian estimates of fossil fuel resources.” Dennis C
          I guess you really believe the fossil fuel estimates and that human technical progress will be static over the next few decades.

          I just have one question for you, what is the atmospheric increase in CO2 and H2O from warming the ocean surface by 2C?

          1. Hi Gone fishing,

            The main stream science is not perfect, but if I am correct about the fossil fuel resource that is likely to be recovered (my medium scenarios) and the 95% range of the Global climate models covers the likely range then I stand by my estimate that a doubling of global atmospheric CO2 by 2040 has a very low probability, less than 1%.

            Note that at the Global average level carbon dioxide and temperature do not suggest a chaotic system.

            Technological progress will continue, but coal, oil and natural gas extraction are mature industries where major technological breakthroughs are less likely, it is much more likely that technological improvement will be far more rapid in wind, solar, and lithium ion battery development as solutions are sought to replace limited fossil fuel resources.

            We are likely to see increasing costs for fossil fuel energy and decreasing costs for alternative energy and non-fossil fuel transportation and this will accelerate with economies of scale as these newer industries ramp up and more money and expertise are directed towards non-fossil fuel energy systems.

            There is no fixed business as usual in a capitalist economic system, the only constant is continual change, the system is far from perfect and requires limited government oversight to remedy externalities and public goods, some countries do a better job of this than others.

            1. Hi Dennis
              You said”Note that at the Global average level carbon dioxide and temperature do not suggest a chaotic system”
              Averages as indicators of a chaotic system? Really? Maybe the people in Florida, Texas and Japan just had or are having average days. Maybe those people in Vietnam are having average days.
              As before:
              I just have one question for you, what is the atmospheric increase in CO2 and H2O from warming the ocean surface by 2C?

            2. Take a look at the number of Hurricanes since 1494, when Columbus and his men were the first European to experience and record an Atlantic basin hurricane.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlantic_hurricanes_before_1600

              As an example the Hispaniola hurricane of 1508:
              “José Carlos Millás hypothesizes that this storm developed east of the Lesser Antilles and crossed the archipelago near Guadeloupe or Dominica. It perhaps also affected the southern part of Puerto Rico. Moving west-northwest, the eye of this hurricane passed near Santo Domingo, leaving the city devastated and many men lost there and in the greater part of the island. According to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, the natives said they had never witnessed a storm “as intense or even similar in their lives, and they did not remember having heard or seen anything so frightful in their lives or in those of their forefathers.”[24] The hurricane demolished the village of Buenaventura “to the level of the ground” and destroyed its entire population.[25]”

              A lot more went unreported as very few places were populated by Europeans. This was the Little Ice Age, when CO2 levels were very low. The lowest in several centuries before and after. I wonder what or who they blamed then.

              If you think reducing CO2 emissions is going to affect hurricanes in any noticeable way you are not thinking properly.

            3. Hi Gone fishing,

              The ocean surface probably won’t warm that much by 2040 and the ocean has continued to sequester about half of CO2 emissions, so there might not be any increase in CO2 emissions from ocean warming and the H20 changes are included in the climate models in response to warming.

            4. Actually the ocean only sequesters about 26 percent of manmade CO2 and over 90 percent of the heat goes into the ocean.
              Since the model warming is too low, all the feedback results are too small. Many feedbacks are not included.
              Scripps disagrees with your assessment about the carbon uptake rates and say it has been diminishing and will continue to diminish. Thus putting more CO2 into the atmosphere.

              https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2013/07/03/how-much-co2-can-the-oceans-take-up/

            5. Hi Gonefishing,

              Correct, the Earth system has continued to sequester about half of CO2 emissions, what proportion goes into land vs ocean is not well measured, so my statement that half is sequestered by the ocean was incorrect.

              The fact is that the models reproduce the warming quite well and actual global temperatures have risen slightly less than the model mean has predicted, so an argument that the climate sensitivity of the models is too low is not confirmed by empirical evidence.

            6. Hi Dennis, Scripp Institute and many others I have read disagree with you on the CO2 uptake problem.

              The models do not and cannot account for global dimming since there are not enough ground stations in Asia and other important areas to estimate it. With more than twice the amount of coal being burned and more oil being burned, I find it difficult to believe we are actually in a period of brightening. Maybe in some areas but measurements did not shift with the shifting industrial movement.

            7. Hi Gone fishing,

              From the page you linked above:

              As a result, ocean waters deeper than 500 meters (about 1,600 feet) have a large but still unrealized absorption capacity, said Scripps geochemist Ralph Keeling.  The rapid emissions growth is unlikely to continue much longer as the reserves of conventional oil, coal, and gas become depleted and steps are taken to reduce emissions and limit climate impacts.  As emissions slow in the future, the oceans will continue to absorb excess CO2 emitted in the past that is still in the air, and this excess will spread into ever-deeper layers of the ocean.  The ocean uptake, when expressed as a percent of emissions, will therefore inevitably increase and eventually, 50 to 80 percent of CO2 cumulative emissions will likely reside in the oceans, Keeling said.

              If fossil fuel emissions continue to increase at the rate experienced from 1960 to 2010 for the foreseeable future then you would be correct. I think that is a vey poor assumption and Keeling has this right.

              We might not be in a period of brightening, but decreases in pollution in some areas may have offset increases in Asia, we don’t have very good aerosol data, I agree, but China is working on cleaning up emissions, not sure about India though.

            8. Hi Gone fishing,

              I do not know, but the climate models seem to do a fairly good job of estimating and the includethe effects of a warming ocean on CO2 and H2O, what makes you think they do not? Due to ocean mixing it will take hundreds of years for the surface of the ocean to rise by 2 C. The water vapor will increase by about 14% for a 2 C rise. The CO2 might be more tricky, because although solubility decreases there might be more plankton activity at an average Global Ocean Surface temperature increase of 2 C, whether the net effect is positive or negative is not known, but over the 1870 to 2016 period where ocean temperatures rose by 0.8 C and more recently from 1978 to 2016 when ocean temperature rose by about 0.5 C there was very little change in the amount of CO2 sequestered on a percentage basis and due to rising emissions the net carbon sequestered by the ocean has increased over this period. The global climate modelers are well aware of the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship so this is already included, whether CO2 will be released rather than absorbed by the ocean (on a net basis) as temperature rises further is not known.

        3. One of my pastimes is finding strange attractors while strolling in the woods.
          They are more common than one realizes.

    3. it’s going to be in the 2040’s. By that time CO2 will be doubled, the Arctic will be free of ice most of the summer, it will be a lot warmer (and all that entails) and there might be a lot more people on the Earth.

      1. Certainly wrong. There is no way CO2 can double in 25 years.

      2. Certainly wrong. Arctic sea ice hasn’t melted in 10 years and it is unlikely it will melt much for another couple of decades. There will be plenty of summer ice in the Arctic.

      3. Very likely wrong. It depends on your definition of a lot. Temperatures are unlikely to increase more than ~ 0.3°C in the next 25 years and they could end up increasing less. Is that a lot warmer?

      4. Very likely right. We are adding about 70 million each year. Unless there is a huge die off there will be a lot more people in the world for certain.

      1 out of 4. You have no future as a prophet.

  17. Guess what folks, article in Scientific American says a paper was just published that shows a solid chance of 5C rise by 2100. They recommend fast action including CO2 removal. Are people starting to wake up to the obvious? Didn’t we hear calls for strong action in the 80’s, 90’s, 2000’s, now the 2010’s? I say listen. Reforest, switch to EV’s, build lots of PV and wind turbines, get rid of fossil fuels. Try a few other things. At worst the air will and water will be cleaner, the people healthier, lots of jobs, lots of power, more trees. At best it might even slow climate change too. Not a bad deal since the fossil fuels have to go anyway and they have some bad side-effects.

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-window-is-closing-to-avoid-dangerous-global-warming/

    1. It says a 5% probability under a business as usual scenario.

      We don’t have enough fossil fuels for BAU so the probability is far lower than 5%.

          1. Ray Kurzweil: Solar Will Power the World in 16 Years

            It’s been powering the world for almost 4 billion years. Ray Kurzweil must have been born only yesterday…

            1. I was going to mention that, but that is obviously over Ray’s head.

        1. 40% chance of 4C rise.
          I bet those numbers are going to rise during the next decade as field studies increase our knowledge of what is actually happening and how much.
          Those at the cutting edge of climate science are still getting surprised and cannot keep up with reality. Mainstream science is falling way behind and into the ditch.

          1. And I bet we are going to see very little warming for the next decade, so those numbers will have to go down, or be moved farther into the future. As always.

        2. Hi Fred,

          Many feedbacks are included in climate models including Earth system feedbacks in many Earth system models. Perhaps the more extreme estimates are correct, but there are extreme views on both sides of this issue, both views (very low and very high Earth System Sensitivity) are likely to be incorrect and do not match well with paleoclimatology estimates.

          Note that it would be better to take action to reduce carbon emissions as much as possible in my view as there is a great deal of uncertainty in future emissions (due to uncertainty in fossil fuel resource estimates) and the response of climate to rising atmospheric CO2 (ECS of 1.5 C to 4.5 C, but with most models in the 2.5 to 4 C range). Note that my medium fossil fuel scenarios (which many claim are ridiculously optimistic [too high]) are roughly consistent with RCP4.5. The long range models (see Chapter 12 Fig 12.42 p. 1103 of AR5WG1) suggest 1.5 to 3.5 C of warming (mean about 2.5C) by 2300. This is the main stream view as of 2012, but may have changed with newer research.

          1. Note that it would be better to take action to reduce carbon emissions as much as possible in my view as there is a great deal of uncertainty in future emissions (due to uncertainty in fossil fuel resource estimates) and the response of climate to rising atmospheric CO2 (ECS of 1.5 C to 4.5 C, but with most models in the 2.5 to 4 C range).

            You won’t get any disagreement from me on it being better to take action on reducing carbon emissions as much as possible. All I’m saying is, that even if many feedbacks are included in climate models including Earth system feedbacks, Chaos Theory shows us that due to feedback loops tipping points can be passed rather suddenly and without warning.

            My main point being that there are way too many unknowns for us to be complacent about how we assess risks of all the interacting non linear systems.

            http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n1/full/nclimate1660.html?foxtrotcallback=true

            The impacts of climate change on terrestrial Earth surface systems
            Jasper Knight & Stephan Harrison

            Abstract

            National and international policy initiatives have focused on reducing carbon emissions as a means by which to limit future climate warming. Much less attention has been paid by policymakers to monitoring, modelling and managing the impacts of climate change on the dynamics of Earth surface systems, including glaciers, rivers, mountains and coasts. This is a critical omission, however, as Earth surface systems provide water and soil resources, sustain ecosystem services and strongly influence biogeochemical climate feedbacks in ways that are as yet uncertain. We argue that there is a significant policy gap regarding the management of Earth surface systems’ impacts under climate change that needs to be closed to facilitate the sustainability of cross-national Earth surface resource use. It is also a significant challenge to the scientific community to better understand Earth surface systems’ sensitivity to climate forcing.

            And that, IMHO, (no pun intended) is just the tip of the iceberg.

            U51C Ecosystem Regime Shifts: Drivers and Responses I
            Big Changes From Small Forcings
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ia5IQ1WN6A

    2. Here’s a link to the paper should anyone wish to read it.

      http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/09/14/1618481114.full

      Well below 2 °C: Mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes
      Yangyang Xua,1 and Veerabhadran Ramanathanb,1

      Abstract
      The historic Paris Agreement calls for limiting global temperature rise to “well below 2 °C.” Because of uncertainties in emission scenarios, climate, and carbon cycle feedback, we interpret the Paris Agreement in terms of three climate risk categories and bring in considerations of low-probability (5%) high-impact (LPHI) warming in addition to the central (∼50% probability) value. The current risk category of dangerous warming is extended to more categories, which are defined by us here as follows: >1.5 °C as dangerous; >3 °C as catastrophic; and >5 °C as unknown, implying beyond catastrophic, including existential threats. With unchecked emissions, the central warming can reach the dangerous level within three decades, with the LPHI warming becoming catastrophic by 2050. We outline a three-lever strategy to limit the central warming below the dangerous level and the LPHI below the catastrophic level, both in the near term (<2050) and in the long term (2100): the carbon neutral (CN) lever to achieve zero net emissions of CO2, the super pollutant (SP) lever to mitigate short-lived climate pollutants, and the carbon extraction and sequestration (CES) lever to thin the atmospheric CO2 blanket. Pulling on both CN and SP levers and bending the emissions curve by 2020 can keep the central warming below dangerous levels. To limit the LPHI warming below dangerous levels, the CES lever must be pulled as well to extract as much as 1 trillion tons of CO2 before 2100 to both limit the preindustrial to 2100 cumulative net CO2 emissions to 2.2 trillion tons and bend the warming curve to a cooling trend.

    3. the-window-is-closing-to-avoid-dangerous-global-warming/

      We just don’t believe them anymore.

      1989 Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) says that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process. Associated Press. June 29, 1989

      2006 NASA scientist James Hansen says the world has a 10-year window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert catastrophe.
      NBC News. September 14, 2006

      2007 U.N. Scientists say only eight years left to avoid worst effects
      The Guardian. May 5 2007

      The window story is fake. They have been saying that repeatedly for the past 20 years and lots of windows have already closed. Looks like catastrophe was averted despite not doing anything.

      1. So what makes you so sure you are right and everybody else is wrong Doc?

        Just suppose those guys were right and the window to avert catastrophe is closing now, as we speak. Due to hysteresis, if the forcing of current levels of CO2 are increasing the average global temperature and we have passed a tipping point, we could see a sudden acceleration of temperature rise next year or the year after that. If we have a continuation of the current string of record hotter years and it becomes undeniable that dangerous warming is taking place, what you gonna do? You gonna say oops! as all hell breaks loose?

        At this point, even if CO2 emissions were stopped dead in their tracks, which would pretty much end life as we know it for much of human civilization, warming would continue for some time yet. I find the approach to risk analysis by you and your ilk (global warming deniers) extremely irresponsible.

        By the way, I think that people like Doug and the victims of the two recent hurricanes might say that all hell is already breaking loose!

        1. So what makes you so sure you are right and everybody else is wrong Doc?

          Thirty years of failed predictions by catastrophic-climate advocates. If they were right we would know by now.

          Just suppose those guys were right and the window to avert catastrophe is closing now

          If they were right the window did already close. Despite huge amounts of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere for the past 30 years, more than in the worst case scenarios they imagined, temperatures are increasing moderately at ~ 0.15°C per decade as they have been doing since the end of the Little Ice Age. We have already done the experiment and got the result. Moderate warming and moderate sea level rise. Do you think running the experiment 30 more years is going to give you a different result? Two problems:
          – We don’t have enough fossil fuels to repeat the experiment.
          – We are increasing the amount of energy that doesn’t produce CO2, so we don’t need to repeat the experiment.

          That’s the end of the global warming scare.

          And there have been victims of hurricanes since humans populated the Atlantic basin of the Americas and much longer in Asia. Regardless of CO2 levels all hell broke loose to them.

          1. Sorry, I guess you just don’t understand hysteresis. Funny how things that are second nature to engineers, seem to fly right over the heads of some people!

            1. I understand hysteresis perfectly well, thank you. In climate it is explained to people without scientific background as “warming in the pipeline.”

              I just don’t believe that warming has a significant hysteresis for a number of reasons. CO2 effect is instantaneous at the very same instant the molecule is in the atmosphere. So only some of the feedbacks might show hysteresis, therefore only a part of the response can present hysteresis. And a large hysteresis would make hiatus periods extremely improbable, unless the delay is really huge. So we move, as always with catastrophic-climate, to the imaginary realm. You just have to see that scientists are not considering that hysteresis is a real problem, and the “warming in the pipeline” threat is rarely discussed with any specifics.

          2. Incidentally, the Sunday (Sept. 17) edition of one of the newspapers in my neck of the woods, published a rebuttal to an article by one of the newspaper’s regular columnists who was citing Judith Curry. The rebuttal, A. Anthony Chen | Consensus on climate change, is from retired Professor Anthony Chen of the University of the West Indies Mona (Jamaica) Campus, Member of the IPCC, astrophysicist and Nobel Prize winner. His rebuttal concludes:

            “Mr Henry has also quite rightly said that “over the long haul, the planet has seen many big-climate swings, several in recorded history”. But implying that the present change is just such a swing is neglecting what the data are showing us. Proxy and instrument data show that temperatures have never been as high over the last two millennia as it currently is, so this is not a swing; it is an outlier.

            In addition, the increase in temperature over the last 50 years has been exponential, coinciding with the exponential increase in carbon dioxide, and there is a well-established scientific connection between carbon dioxide and planetary temperature. And this brings us to one of the flaws in Dr Curry’s analysis.

            Dr Curry and other climate-change deniers have said that their data show a pause or ‘hiatus’ in warming since 1998. The data set they use is derived from satellite data, from which they determine lower atmospheric temperature. They skip ocean temperatures (which accounts for more than 90 per cent of the warming), measurement at the surface of the earth using instrumentation (thermometers) and ice loss, which requires warming.

            Others who use a more complete data set see a continued warming. For example, Iselin Medhaug, et al, in the leading journal, Nature, in May 2017 showed that “apparently contradictory conclusions stem from different definitions of ‘hiatus’ and from different datasets. A combination of changes in forcing, uptake of heat by the oceans, natural variability and incomplete observational coverage reconciles models and data. Combined with stronger recent warming trends in newer datasets, we are now more confident than ever that human influence is dominant in long-term warming.”

            And to top it all, Carl A. Mears and Frank J. Wentz, in Journal of Climate in June 2017, using the same satellite data as the sceptics, but correcting a problem with satellite data, viz, drift in altitude and their orbital horizontal drift, show that there was “more warming than most similar data sets constructed from satellites or radiosonde data”. In other words, even satellite data showed that there was no hiatus, agreeing with other methods of determining temperatures.

            Locally, the Climate Studies Group at Mona found that there is a warming trend from 1992 to 2012, certainly no hiatus in Jamaica. The moral of the story is that science is objective and calculating; it gives equal time to both sides of a debate if they have equal weighting, but in the end, it aims for consensus, which is achieved by experimental and analytic agreement.”

            In addition I would add that the current warming is happening very much faster than at anytime in the geological past, largely because it is being driven by this creature that figured out how to unearth vast amounts of mostly buried carbon and burn it, with a view to expanding it’s population and the territory it occupies.

            1. Being a Nobel prize doesn’t mean that he can’t be wrong, specially when talking about other disciplines. He makes a number of errors:

              Proxy and instrument data show that temperatures have never been as high over the last two millennia as it currently is

              He doesn’t know much about climate proxies. I have looked with detail into the issue and it can’t be said with certainty whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer or not. A US commission looked into the issue and reached the same conclusion. We can only be certain that temperatures are higher than past 800 years.

              Dr Curry and other climate-change deniers have said that their data show a pause or ‘hiatus’ in warming since 1998.

              He is very partial here. Many of the most prominent climatologists that support the official hypothesis, like Ben Santer, Michael Mann, Ed Hawkins, John Fyfe, … defend the pause. The use of the term climate-change deniers for scientists that defend a different hypothesis shows a strong bias that makes anything he says suspect.

              I would add that the current warming is happening very much faster than at anytime in the geological past

              You don’t understand the nature of climate proxies. If the warming in the past was measured with the same instruments perhaps you could say that, but proxies are averaged irregularly over long periods of time, so periods of just 30 years like the 1976-2003 warming period cannot be resolved in proxies. And I guess you never heard of Dansgaard-Oeschger events, when temperatures in the Atlantic region changed by several degrees in just ~ 80 years. The vegetation of the region responded to those changes in a much stronger way that it has responded to present changes.

            2. Thank you very much but, I’ll take the word of a Phd. who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change over yours any day. You’ve got a lot of balls brother. Why don’t you respond directly to the good Dr. Chen yourself and tell him how wrong he is? His email is at the bottom of the article. Let us know how he responds.

            3. Who do you believe is up to you. The catastrophic-climate advocates already have demonstrated they can’t be trusted. In my case, as I can check the evidence myself, I don’t need to believe anybody. I don’t see what I could get from talking to Dr. Chen. Time will demonstrate how wrong he is.

            4. Here is my problem with your stance Javier.
              Its is not that you are skeptical of the ‘global warming hypothesis’. Skepticism is fine with me. Some people want absolute proof in the pudding, fat lady singing, calamity on TV type of proof before they will accept that the ‘world may be round’ (or warming). So be it.

              But you are not just skeptical. You in fact have concluded that there is no global warming related to human changes in the atmosphere content. In effect, you have said that the vast majority of scientists are wrong on this. You are being absolute on this issue when all we can work with is models and probabilities, since it is the future we are talking about.
              Its one thing to say ‘I think you are jumping to conclusion on this with insufficient trend data’, but quite another to say ‘sorry, you are just flat wrong’. You, Javier, just don’t have data to conclude that. If you came to the committee with this as your thesis, I’d send you back to the drawing board.

            5. Sorry Hickory, but that’s not it.

              I have no problem with believing the world is warming, and I am different from most skeptics in that I believe human emissions are contributing to the warming. I looked for evidence that extra CO2 was having an effect and found it to my satisfaction. Therefore I am with the supposed 97% scientists that believe that.

              What I don’t believe is that global warming is going to lead to a catastrophe for humankind or the environment. There is simply zero evidence for that thesis. And a scientist is bound to reject a thesis for which there is no evidence.

              An example is unicorns (or God). Their existence is a thesis without evidence, therefore as a scientist I reject that they exist even if I cannot go to a committee and present data to conclude that they don’t exist.

              IPCC is so far removed from catastrophism, that catastrophic-climate advocates also reject their conclusions, but in this case as too conservative. As usual the extremes are closer to each other than to the middle.

              Some examples. IPCC predicts 30-40 cm of sea level rise for 2100. This is only slightly faster than what we have experienced for the past 150 years. IPCC predicts that the Arctic is in no danger of disappearing before 2060, and that only under the more extreme unrealistic emission scenarios. Does this sound as the shit we read about all the time from the catastrophic-climate advocates?

            6. Thanks for the clarification Javier.
              So you are on board with the idea that a warming is underway, but not convinced by the ‘alarmists’ about its severity or extent of impact. OK.

              Many people have concluded that we would be smart to err on the side of caution with this (CO2/methane), since the ramifications could be severe if we wait until there is clear evidence of disruption/gyration related to it.

              I believe that is a correct stance, and I would rank it up there with a few other issues of calamity- massive overpopulation (which we achieved over 70 yrs ago), warfare (which we achieved who knows when but the Gatling gun is a good marker of first weapon of mass destruction), and chemical pollution.

              Look at Bangladesh and Florida as examples. Many millions of people should be moving uphill. But they won’t until the water is waist deep. It will be.
              They is more to say… you say it.

            7. we would be smart to err on the side of caution

              Any proposed measure should be accompanied by a serious cost/benefit analysis that so far is lacking. For example sea level rise. It has been rising for the past 150 years at least, so any idea that it is due to our emissions is wrong. The cost of reducing emissions in one country has to be gauged against the expected effect on sea level rise, which will likely be inappreciable. However measures have to be taken to protect the population against present and future sea levels, as many areas become flooded with storm surges. Some measures are not very expensive like changing building codes so no more construction is allowed in dangerous zones, and making most exposed areas public land. Some areas are simply not suitable for human habitation.

  18. Ray of sunshine in a dark world:

    EIGHT-YEAR-OLD PUBLISHES IN A SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL

    At only 8 years old, Sophia Spencer has published a paper in a scientific journal, Discover Wildlife reports. Last year, Spencer’s mother emailed the Entomological Society of Canada (ESC) in Winnipeg to explain that her daughter was being bullied for her love of insects, and asked to be put in contact with a professional entomologist who could answer the girl’s questions. After sharing an anonymized version of this email on Twitter, ESC received more than 100 messages from scientists and people who encouraged Spencer to keep exploring the world of bugs. Following this outpouring of support, Morgan Jackson, the social media editor who sent the original tweet for ESC, decided to write up the story for a special issue on science communication for the Annals of the Entomological Society of America, and invited Spencer to be a co-author.

    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/sifter/eight-year-old-publishes-scientific-journal

    1. Which is why we should be talking about carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). So, if one kg of methane is emitted, this can be expressed as 25 kg of CO2e (1kg CH4 * 25 = 25kg CO2e). Converting CO2 to carbon is not useful as doing so does not allow comparisons between different GHGs, in the way that converting to CO2e does. According the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gasses Center at MIT, total heat forcing equal to CO2 when all the other gasses were added in was about 478 ppm CO2e during the spring of 2013. Adding human greenhouse gas contributions since that time gets us to around 480 ppm CO2e value. Scary!

      1. That 25X multiplier isn’t really right. The 25x was the 100 year equivalent average which factors in the shorter lifetime of methane vs CO2. But, over the short term it’s more like 100X and methane is continuing to rise – it’s not decaying. They should just look at the net effect,which like I said, it’s more like 100. If you want to talk about some day in the far future when that methane does decay, then that’s fine, but they are kidding themselves using 25X when talking abut the effect on temp near term.

      2. Since my internet has been acting up, pay no attention to partial and duplicated posts.
        THE NOAA ANNUAL GREENHOUSE GAS INDEX (AGGI)
        Increases in the abundance of atmospheric greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution are mainly the result of human activity and are largely responsible for the observed increases in global temperature [IPCC 2014]. However, climate projections have model uncertainties that overwhelm the uncertainties in greenhouse gas measurements. We present here an index that is directly proportional to the change in the direct warming influence since 1750 (also known as climate forcing) supplied from these gases. Because it is based on the observed amounts of long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this index contains relatively little uncertainty.

        https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html

          1. Note that most of the rise in radiative forcing (2/3) is from CO2 since 1750, and an even larger proportion since 1980 (about 77% of the increase) has been due to the increase in CO2 forcing.

            Over the long term, CO2 is more important as it remains in the atmosphere far longer than methane.

            1. Interesting article on climate sensitivity at realclimate.org

              http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/08/sensible-questions-on-climate-sensitivity/

              Two recent papers help bridge a seeming gap between estimates of climate sensitivity from models and from observations of the global energy budget. Recognizing that equilibrium climate sensitivity cannot be directly observed because Earth’s energy balance is a long way from equilibrium, the studies instead focus on what can be inferred about climate sensitivity from historical trends. Calculating a climate sensitivity from the simulations that is directly comparable with that observed shows both are consistent. Crucial questions remain, however, regarding how climate sensitivity will evolve in the future.

            2. Dennis-
              A while back you had some interesting stats on CO2’s duration in the atmosphere.
              Are they still available?

    2. On Coast to Coast, these scientists explained the hypothesis of how the high Arctic as in Barrow is the energy exhaust pipe of the world. The Gulf Stream transports all the emissions and exhaust there to vent out toward space. Therefore methane/co2 spikes aren’t actually new or concerning, but rather something discovered recently thanks to having more and better instruments and technology in more places around the world these days. Further there’s the thought because the spikes cannot be “controlled” mainstream climate science isn’t giving much attention to them.

        1. Yo! I’ve actually been out to the edge of the Gulf Stream in my kayak, that was a 10 mi. round trip paddle… I did it with a friend and even though I never told her, I have nightmares to this day about all the things that could have gone wrong…
          But I do know where the Gulf Stream is, just sayin 😉

  19. Somebody needs to show President Trump this area where “America isn’t winning anymore”

    Plug-In Electric Vehicles Hit Landmark Milestone Of 1 Million Delivered In China

    Many countries have a desire to reach a goal of 1 million plug-in vehicles (AKA New Energy Vehicles), but only China can boast actually putting the 7 figure mark in the rear-view mirror.

    A fairly unique feature of the Chinese plug-in market is the rate of pure-EV adoption; more than 80% (825,000 out of 1,018,000 total) of all PEVs sold were all-electric.

    We should note that the “official data” from the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) is slightly behind the local China dealers association data (CAAM) (more than 950,000 sold between 2011 and 2016 – see chart above) with an additional 200,000 moved in the first seven months of 2017.

    I did a quick spreadsheet comparing US and China plug-in sales and produced the chart below. I have said before that I think China is going to be “ground zero” for EVs, both in terms of manufacturing and sales.

    edit: Incidentally, if my memort serves me right, there have been articles at insideevs.com this past week or so, highlighting that EV sales are growing quite strongly in the UK, France and Germany. Also IIRC overall vehicle sales are down in most markets for 2017 so far.

    1. Shit! The first two are named Jose and Maria, they should have named the third one Jesus! Instead they named it Lee?! WTF?

      This is not good!
      The Government of France has issued a Hurricane Watch for
      Guadeloupe.

      SUMMARY OF WATCHES AND WARNINGS IN EFFECT:

      A Hurricane Watch is in effect for…
      * Antigua, Barbuda, St. Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat
      * Guadeloupe

      A Tropical Storm Watch is in effect for…
      * St. Lucia
      * Martinique
      * Dominica
      * Barbados
      * St. Vincent and the Grenadines

      1. Jose is heading for Washington by ECMWF and might stick around for some time (lot’s of rain – but the track changes every day, I think it’s like Sandy in that there is an offshore high (the presence of which is related to a warmer Arctic I think) that might or might not drive the low onshore), so too Maria by UKMET Storm Track.

        1. The sea surface temperatures off the east coast USA look pretty strange – some hot areas next to some cold, which must make it difficult to predict how the storms will react. Could be normal like that though, I haven’t looked before, or could be to do with passage of previous storms.

  20. This year’s Arctic minimum appears to be in.

    2017 9 1 4.758
    2017 9 2 4.791
    2017 9 3 4.801
    2017 9 4 4.782
    2017 9 5 4.723
    2017 9 6 4.643
    2017 9 7 4.635
    2017 9 8 4.697
    2017 9 9 4.641
    2017 9 10 4.628
    2017 9 11 4.646
    2017 9 12 4.611
    2017 9 13 4.651
    2017 9 14 4.651
    2017 9 15 4.686

    http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/

    It is provisionally in the top 4 of the past 10 years, not yet confirmed. Clearly above the decadal average.

    And something interesting I wrote a month ago:
    “According to the trend and methodology, the 2017 melt season is projected to end on day 255 (September 12) ± 1 week.”
    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/11/arctic-melt-season-changes-and-the-arctic-regime-shift/

    It appears I hit the exact day of the month. The trend towards an earlier end of the melt season is proceeding. Not precisely what was predicted by some polar experts that said the melt season should be getting longer.

    I also said we were not going to have a 2016 September record low in June 2016, when the talk was the May record low.
    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/14/arctic-sea-ice-sets-new-record-low-for-may/#comment-2236910

    It’s too bad the end of Arctic sea ice was proclaimed in 2007, just when it stopped melting. Its summer extent has grown a little since.

  21. I see Thing Two is back, escaped from the village again to tell us stories. If only we had an Inter-Net.

  22. Read this and cuss the goddamned pharmaceutical industries, which are doing all they can in the name of today’s bottom line to put our very LIVES at risk down the road.

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/antibiotic-food-poisoning-big-chicken-mckenna/

    I didn’t even need to read it,because this sort of stuff is common knowledge among people in my field.

    Undergrad animal science classes are basically the same classes as biology majors take, covering such topics as mammalian anatomy and physiology, etc, with the only real difference being that there is some additional extra emphasis put on the management of particular species such as chickens for commercial purposes.

    So I was hearing all about putting antiboitics in animal feed even back in the dark ages. I was of course also taking some straight up biology classes as well, as required by the ag college, classes which were taught by biology professors, who were hopping mad at the stupidity of the very idea, because they knew damned well that putting antibiotics into animal feed in large quantities would result in countless species of every sort of microbe, insect, mite, etc, eventually evolving resistance to any drug used this way over an extended period of time.

    The thing is, they couldn’t actually PROVE IT back then, because it hadn’t yet happened.

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/antibiotic-food-poisoning-big-chicken-mckenna/

    Now here’s the thing that’s so fucking maddening, and tragic.

    Farmers as a group don’t make a goddamned extra DIME using antibiotics in animal feed, because we all compete on the same basis, using about the same techniques, and we operate on average at economic breakeven, because farming as an industry is as cutthroat competitive as any industry in the world. When we find a way to produce a given product a little cheaper, we all use the new technique, and we are right back where we started. If I find a way to grow apples a dollar a bushel cheaper, pretty soon all the other apple growers copy my innovation, and everything else held equal, the price we get falls by a dollar, so we are no better off.

    Lots of guys raise chickens in my neck of the woods. Virtually all of them use any and every legal trick to cut their production costs. Take away a drug they use, and their costs will go up X cents per bird sent to market. BUT the PRICE they get, on average, will go up by that SAME X cents per bird, and they will all still be in the same situation as previously , making the same net profit, which is generally just BARELY enough to stay in business.

    The ONLY people who make any money out of this stupidity are the people who own the drug companies.
    The rest of us get industrial chicken a little cheaper, but over the long run, we may LITERALLY pay with our very own life. One of my best friend’s mother died sometime back of what should have been an easily treated infection……….. but every drug the hospital could obtain failed………..because she had the misfortune to be infected with a new strain resistant to everything available.

    There is little question in my mind that there are millions of malnourished people right here in the USA who might be and possibly ARE better off eating this industrial chicken than not eating enough meat or other high protein food, as individuals. Malnutrition isn’t a joke.

    But we would all be WAY the hell better off if we were to outlaw such practices , and made up the difference by subsidizing the cost of drug free meat so poor people could still eat enough of it to satisfy their nutritional needs.

    Sure we could become vegetarians, but we aren’t GOING TO, and even talking about doing that as a SOCIETY is foolishness squared. People WANT to eat meat, and millions of people make their living producing and processing and selling it, from the farmer who owns a thousand cows to the teenager who rings up your hamburger.

      1. Fred, forget gravity, everything just sucks. Well, except for weather and that blows. 🙂

        I mean are you really attracted to the earth or does it just desire? ;-}

        1. Gravity is a liberal plot to raise your taxes and destroy capitalism.
          We all know the truth:
          It is really Intelligent Falling

          “I don’t like the theory of gravity, I feel personally insulted that engineers design structures only considering physical mass. What about our souls? I propose that science classes also teach the theory of “Intelligent Grappling”. There’s no way a weak force such as gravity can possibly hold everything onto the planet. It must be God, using our souls, to hold everything together.”

        2. I mean are you really attracted to the earth…

          Oh Yes! Though I know well, it could be a fatal attraction depending on the value of ‘r’.

          F = (Gm1m2)/r^2
          .

      2. “We both know FF’s are finite and that global warming appears very real, so I consider both moot points at this stage. I mean we both agree on gravity I hope? We don’t have to clarify our positions on it all the time.” ~ Caelan MacIntyre

        “Curiosity got the better of me and I unblocked you [Javier] just to see your reply.” ~ Fred Magyar

        Gravity, just a Theory!” ~ Fred Magyar

        Just a theory.

    1. Well, hells bells, looks like Frisky Bobby is becoming quite the regular bout these parts.
      So are those checks from the Kochs keeping you in the green these days?

      1. I find it more likely Frisky Bobby real name is VladimirBotTeamPutin.

        “An Internet bot, also known as web robot, WWW robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet.[1] Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering (web crawler), in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. More than half of all web traffic is made up of bots.

        Some bots communicate with other users of Internet-based services, via instant messaging (IM), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), or another web interface such as Facebook Bots and Twitterbots. These chatterbots may allow people to ask questions in plain English and then formulate a proper response. These bots can often handle many tasks, including reporting weather, zip-code information, sports scores, converting currency or other units, etc.[citation needed] Others are used for entertainment, such as SmarterChild on AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger.”

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot

        “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say

        The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

        Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.”

        https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?utm_term=.18b4e4278380

        There is a sucker born every minute. Right, OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster ?

        1. Hi HB,

          Glad to see you back, I was beginning to think maybe something happened to you.

          I CERTAINLY agree with you about a sucker being born every minute. Actually, it’s more accurate to say THOUSANDS of suckers are born every minute, lol.

          Please post more often, you and I are about the only two members posting anything to do with national politics right now, excepting politics relating directly to the climate issue.

          I posted a link from the Washington Post earlier today about Mueller going after Trump’s associates.

          It’s the sort of news that ought to put a big grin on your face.

          But I’m wondering how you feel about the USA mucking around in the internal affairs of other countries, not only fucking with elections, but actually putting troops on the ground and killing people. HRC voted with the R’s on going to war, etc.

          Now we can have it ONE of two ways, she EITHER agreed with the policy of going into other countries and killing people because she thought it was the right thing to do, OR ELSE she was STUPID enough to fall for the Republican propaganda justifying actually invading and occupying other countries, and keeping our troops occupying vast stretches of foreign lands, while she was sec of state, lol.

          Now of course this does not excuse or justify the Russians meddling in our elections, but it does throw a little light on the subject, lol.

          What’s your opinion?

          1. If the superpowers after WWII learned two things. It was the importance of the nuclear bomb and oil. Ever since, the US has been out over their ski’s in the Russians back yard mining. Much to often, not doing the right thing. More often than not now, what we are dealing with most of the time is blow back from our greed and mistakes. I don’t believe the official story behind 911 today and wouldn’t be surprised if the Russian’s were behind it. But what I do know. Who ever controls the resources of the Middle East after 45, controls the world.

            I remember HRC’s reasoning on her vote giving “W” the power of war and agreed with her. Knowing what we know today. Only the far right would vote for it. I thought giving that power was the right thing to do regarding WMD. But the Iraq War was a power grab gone wrong by the Bush Administration. When Bush threw out the inspectors. I knew giving him that power was a mistake and became part of 10% at the time against the invasion of Iraq. I cut my teeth on the internet regarding this subject.

            HRC fought for single payer back when Bennie was still having sex with is wife. Trumpster, you are your own worst enemy to often. Sooner or later, you will come along.

    2. Bob, you might be right.
      Chance of that- 2.9%
      Which is much higher than the chance that the world is actually flat.
      So, you are doing real good.
      Pat yourself on the back.

    3. Bob Frisky – you do understand that is taking the piss out of Pruitt do you? Or maybe not, do you really think Soros has given each climate scientist a private helicopter? It’s not even very subtle – did you actually watch it or just read the title? It’s really difficult not to mock you when you set yourself up like this all the time. (or have you had an epiphany and it’s me who’s not getting it?)

  23. A very good example of the predictive capacity of current models.

    On February 16, hightrekker23 posted the following comment:
    http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-feb-16-2017/#comment-596050

    “https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4zEAFGUYAAvtVB.jpg

    The latest ECMWF forecast is quite aggressive at calling for the return of ElNino conditions over the next few months.

    And I wouldn’t bet to often against the ECMWF”

    I answered:

    “Why not? They already failed when they predicted a 2014 El Niño. It is not as if they had an untarnished record.

    This caused Fred Magyar to enter attack mode:

    “I don’t really give a rats ass if you actually sincerely believe the bullshit you spout or if you are being paid by the Koch’s or some other organization like theirs. You are denying reality.”

    Well, Let’s see how that model prediction went (see figure). Oops! Another big fail. Not a single spaghetti predicted the situation 7 months later. The models can’t be trusted to predict ENSO. Another case of too much trust misplaced on climate scientist models.

    By the way, usually temperatures follow ENSO, so expect a continuation of the present cooling trend that started in February 2016 for a few more months at least.

    1. A little bit of common sense is worth a lot more than these very expensive models. One year after very big El Niño events it is unprecedented that another El Niño will take place. Although some heat might have been left as a residual in the ENSO system, not nearly enough to repeat another El Niño. Perhaps next year, but in my opinion in 2018 and 2019 La Niña conditions are more likely. And my opinion cannot be worth less than ECMWF predictions.

  24. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/09/15/did-james-comey-violate-federal-laws/?utm_term=.d02a940462f3

    In any case, it’s rather obvious that Comey was going after Trump with even more tenacity than he went after HRC and her email which clearly violated the spirit if not the actual letter of the law.

    And now Meuller is looking more and more likely to nail Trump’s mangy hide to the wall. He may not succeed in getting Trump himself, but I’m now willing to bet that he gets a number of Trump ‘s associates, which will go a LONG way to helping the D’s regain some seats in the House and Senate, and in some local races as well, when the districts are competitive. Local races are often won and lost, when they are close, based on the news about national politics.

  25. RF from GHG in 2050 = 2.6 w/m2 minimum
    Increased heating from snow ice loss in 2050 = 1.0 W/m2 (eventually as high as 6 W/m2 with half snow/ice gone in NH)
    Increased heating from loss of aerosols = 1.5 W/m2 (probably higher)
    Unaccounted H20 forcing = 1.0 W/m2 (low value)
    Unaccounted ozone forcing =1.0 W/m2 (low value)
    Permafrost melting = ??????
    Shallow sea and lake methane releases = ???????
    Forest/Jungle burning =???????
    Diminishment of CO2 sinks = ???????(under study due to ocean dynamics causing greater complexity than initially conceived)
    Total (not including many other feedbacks and some GHG) = 7.1 W/m2 + 4X ?????? + unaccounted for feedbacks
    Temperature will rise beyond 5C
    To Thing One to Thing N:
    So you want to keep burning fossil fuels and keep thinking it will all be minimal/ slow/ good for the planet?
    Betting on that big algae bloom and die off? Betting on increases in clouds? Betting on old and paid for ideas? Betting on short term life of persistent GHG’s?
    Things don’t think very well so they should not bet on a safe and controllable future. Stop betting the lives of the children/grandchildren and the lives of the other inhabitants of this planet on narrow and erroneous thinking.
    We have an opportunity to at least mitigate this problem. Sure we have other predicaments, but amazingly reducing one reduces several. Continued shirking of responsibility results in maximum pain.

    Oh and while your at it, put your head around the fact that we are now seeing about 60 percent of the temperature rise from RF of 40 years ago, not what is in the sky right now, due to thermal inertia of the oceans. What we have now and more of what we did in the past will show up in the future.
    Still looking forward to it?

    Have a pleasant day.

    1. ‘I will pick up the hook.
      you will see something new.
      two things. and I call them
      Thing One and Thing Two.
      these Things will not bite you.
      they want to have fun.’
      then, out of the box
      came Thing Two and Thing One!
      and they ran to us fast.
      they said, ‘how do you do?
      would you like to shake hands
      with Thing One and Thing Two?’
      .

    2. So you want to keep burning fossil fuels

      I have zero interest in burning fossil fuels. From a thermodynamic point of view is a waste of energy. From a carbon chemistry point of view it is a waste to burn valuable highly energetic molecules that have been produced naturally by solar energy, and that have literally thousands of applications. From an ecological point of view, extracting fossil fuels is damaging to the environment. From a human health point of view combustion particles are a serious health problem in many cities.

      All I say is that the climate scare is a false proposition. And I will be proven right on that eventually. Nearly all previous scares have been false propositions, so that should give people a clue that fear is a tool used on the populace by the elites.

      With that out of the way we can discuss anything about our energetic future.

      1. Just one question? What would the average global temperature of the earth be if there was no CO2 in the atmosphere?

        1. I don’t think it is known, and certainly it hasn’t been measured. You can find some educated guesses by running a search. The effect of CO2 on temperatures is logarithmic so the effect of each molecule is slightly lower than the previous one. The first 20 ppm have a huge effect. The last 20 ppm hardly any.

          1. It takes an understanding of geophysics and phase changes to come up with the answer.
            So to the best of your ability what would the average temperature of the earth be if CO2 was removed?
            A) 13C
            B) 10C
            C) 0C
            D) -15C

            1. LOL! I Googled the answer… 😉

              But it does come with an explanation as to why that would be the case from a physics standpoint.

              Of course if there were no CO2 in the atmosphere there would be no carbon based lifeforms on the planet and it probably wouldn’t really matter anyway.

            2. Here is one reasonably good explanation.
              https://www.skepticalscience.com/What-would-a-CO2-free-atmosphere-look-like.html

              Since there is physical evidence pointing to a snowball earth condition, it is worth thinking about.
              You are right CO2 is quite critical since SiO2 is tough to breathe. It’s robot time then.
              It’s actually water that is the limiting factor. Water solidifies at below zero C making the world dessicated for plants. Modern plants are adapted to modern levels of CO2 but that does not say they could not adapt to lower levels.
              We live upon a Goldilocks world and are about to have to consume the too hot porridge.

            3. I don’t need to redo what has already been done. According to Lacis et al., 2010, in the absence of non condensing GHGs (CO2 is the main) the temperature of the Earth would drop to -21°C within 50 years. That’s just an educated guess based on computer models from an inadequate knowledge.

              We all know non condensing GHG’s, and specially CO2 are extremely important to the planet. We also know CO2 levels were dangerously low during the past glacial period. 150 ppm is generally considered the lowest safe limit to most plants.

              So far I fail to see what your point is.

            4. Understanding basic physics and chemistry, then understanding geophysics is critical to making decisions about what is real, what potentials there are and what is just logical flaws.
              Taking a stand and then allowing others with a similar attitude to make your decisions is a very shaky ladder of logic.

            5. I only took my stand after an extensive review of the available evidence. Before I was convinced the catastrophic climate proposition had to be real since it was supported by so many scientists. It turns out IPCC reports contain very little catastrophism and catastrophic-climate scientist advocates are a small minority.

              For the past 30 years we have seen moderate warming and moderate sea level rise. Chances are the next 30 years we will see moderate warming and moderate sea level rise. The warming scare is gratuitous and false.

            6. Moderate warming? 70 times the normal planetary rate of change? I think you need to adjust your scale.

            7. Yes, moderate warming. Only a few fractions of a degree that have had no ill effect. Quite the contrary, the effects have been mostly beneficial.

              And no, there is no normal planetary rate of change. The maximum rate of change appears to be 0.4°C/decade, and this was the same in 1900 than in 2000. The long term average since 1900 is about 0.15°C/decade. Part of it is the post Little Ice Age warming.

    3. Hi Gone fishing,

      Well clearly you know more than the scientists that participate in the IPCC. Under the RCP4.5 scenario, those values are not very likely, perhaps you think the cornucopian view of fossil fuel resources is correct and we will see 5000 Gt of carbon emissions through 2300 (total from 1750 to 2300). I believe that view is incorrect, the albedo, water vapor, and aerosol changes are included in the GCMs and the ESMs attempt to estimate permafrost melting and changes to the carbon cycle.

      I suppose you could argue that the models are wrong, they might be, they could have estimates of climate sensitivity that are too high or too low, it is far from clear which view is correct and there is a wide range of climate sensitivity.

      Technological development might allow RCP8.5, but only if there is no technological development in solar, wind, and batteries. A more likely scenario is that scarcity of fossil fuels that can be easily extracted will cause prices to rise while the price of the relatively immature industries of EVs, wind, and solar will see falling prices due to technological development and economies of scale.

      I believe the uncertainty in climate sensitivity should cause us to be careful and reduce fossil fuel use and other greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as is feasible.

      1. Dennis said “Well clearly you know more than the scientists that participate in the IPCC. ”
        Oh Dennis, you never learn.

        1. Hi Gone fishing,

          I was responding to your 9/17 comment at 8 AM

          http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-september-12-2017/#comment-615211

          Any peer reviewed research backing up your 7.1 W/m2 forcing by 2050 (your minimum estimate with a claim of 11.1 W/m2 or more as a high end estimate).

          You really think all the climate scientists (or those that are involved with Global Climate Models and Earth System Models) have things very wrong.

          I will have to respectfully disagree unless you produce some peer reviewed research that backs up your claim. There are scientists that think that climate models may have too high a climate sensitivity and others that think the reverse.

          We just don’t know who is correct. I don’t put a lot of stock in Low Probability events, a near term 5C increase in temperature has a very low probability especially if one, believes as I do, that peak fossil fuels will arrive within 15 years.

  26. This article says most humans can’t process complex situations where the impact is in the future, hence the problem of convincing them to do much about climate change. I agree. I don’t think it is the biggest motivator for change.

    Other pitches I focus on are these:

    1. Economics. As renewables get cheaper, they become more attractive. Eliminating the need for a car can be cheaper than owning one.

    2. Control. Distributed generation and decreased dependency in fossil fuels means more people and more countries can control their own energy generation.

    3. Pollution. There are still visible affects in using fossil fuels. Controlling those means cleaner air, less water pollution, etc.

    4. Fracking protests and economics. As companies continue to lose money and as homeowners push back against drilling next to them, more people are forced to contemplate a life with less oil.

    5. Shifting business priorities. There is money to be made in new energy related technology. There is or will be a tipping point where these companies have more political clout than legacy industries.

    6. Security and global power. Countries that see future energy developments will likely be better fixed than those clinging to what worked 50-100 years ago.

    http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-victor-amaya-obradovich-why-our-brains-make-it-hard-to-stop-global-warming-20170917-story.html

  27. Maybe we forget the tremendous droughts and starvation in Ethiopia, the Mongolian massive floods and many other disasters in recent history. But there are a lot of disasters happening right now that are just getting to be too much to ignore. at least for people with a working brain.

    But meanwhile, multiply the damage from Harvey and Irma a hundredfold and you’ll get a feeling for the climate-related suffering taking place right now in the rest of the world. In India, Bangladesh and Nepal, an estimated 40 million people have been affected by massive flooding, with more than 1,200 deaths. More than one third of Bangladesh’s land mass has been submerged. As if that’s not enough, Africa has been suffering its own under-reported climate disasters, with hundreds of thousands affected by flooding in Nigeria, Niger, Congo, Sierra Leone and Uganda

    What is so disturbing is that we’re experiencing this wave of disasters at a global temperature roughly 1°C above historic norms. It’s a virtual certainty that we’re going to hit 1.5° before long—perhaps in the next ten years—and unless we do something drastic to transform our fossil fuel-based society, we could be hitting 2°C as early as 2036. By the end of the century—when half the babies born this year should still be alive—conservative estimates have global temperatures hitting 3.3°C above baseline, based on the commitments that formed the 2015 Paris agreement at COP21. And that’s not including potentially devastating feedback effects such as methane leaking from permafrost, which could lead to temperatures way higher, causing an earth that would literally be uninhabitable for humans in many regions

    https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-catastrophe-2485745545.html

    1. But let’s say we can get the message across America that we will be hit with ever increasing and more damaging natural disasters. What will Anericans do?

      We’ve got several areas were we shouldn’t continue to have business as usual. Florida is one, Houston is another. Both are likely to continue to be hit with more flooding until their areas are permanently underwater.

      If we can’t convince those two areas that they must relocate or find a better way to prepare for flooding, I think it will be harder to get people in other areas to moderate their behavior.

      Extreme heat will likely be a factor in some parts of the country. Will that drive people to action?

      1. I keep hoping that depletion will be one of the economic incentives to wean people off fossil fuels.

      2. A pullback from potentially future devastated areas would be wise but unlikely at this stage. First stage is reactionary, then defensive and finally when defenses are breached often enough the pullback will occur. It’s not a great way to be but civilization is built on ownership and property rights.
        Maybe the insurance companies will draw back from or quit certain areas. That will be major motivation, especially for business.

          1. We humans discount the future, think heuristically rather than critically, and live by story and myth rather than observation.
            This obviously brought genetic fitness in the past, but is a liability now.
            I would not hold your breath.

      3. How much do you know about how the expansion of Devils Lake in North Dakota has been dealt with? Maybe that’s a guide to the future if the oceans really do start to rise someday.

          1. The Google Earth timeline of historical satellite photos is remarkable.

            Circa 1985 here

          2. Is it too expensive to build an drainage channel? Or put some money together and build a pump station like in New Orleans or the Netherlands, where half the land is on “pumped ground”?

            They did exactly this already in the 18th century with wind power.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmills_at_Kinderdijk

            So it should be possible today?
            If you want you can power it our days again with solar or wind energy – it doesn’t matter if you pump all the time, you have only to keep the lake in a certain level, as in the netherlands. They have lakes and channels as water buffer there, too. So they don’t need to calculate their pumps on emergency loads, they just pump the whole year.

            1. According to the article the depth of the lake is about 8 ft. below the original spillage point of the ancient lake bed that all these people are currently occupying. A few more years and the lake should stop growing…

            2. What would be involved in lowering the original spillage point by 8 ft.? Would it require excavating a 100 m (yd.) spillway or 100 miles? Does the spillway empty into a natural, uninhabited drainage channel or waterway? It seems that would be one obvious remedy, since whoever would be affected by the excavation, is going to be affected after the next 8ft. of rise anyway.

            3. One of the three articles discussed the pumping idea. Evidently no one wants the water that would be pumped out, both because it would add flooding problems to other areas in ND and because the water isn’t all that clean so Canada doesn’t want it in their waterways.

            4. They’ll get it anyway when the lake spills over – unregulated.

              Flooding problems? They can stop pumping when the level of rivers rise over a certain benchmark, that’s no reason.
              Anyway it would be only a small river when you pump around the year.

              I looked – there IS already a pump system installed, operating since 2009. I don’t know if they have it switched off.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devils_Lake_(North_Dakota)

  28. There are only four types of Facebook users, researchers have found
    Written by Lila MacLellan

    https://qz.com/1026914/the-four-types-of-facebook-users-relationship-builders-window-shoppers-town-criers-and-selfies/

    Now a new study, published in the International Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking, confirms that Facebook has a Rashomon effect: various user groups interpret the experience of using it very differently. Surprisingly, however, the researchers also found they could easily categorize users into four broad types: “relationship builders,” “window shoppers,” “town criers,” and “selfies.”

    The study authors, from the School of Communication at Brigham Young University, say these four categories emerged from a survey that asked subjects to respond to a list of 48 statements. These included phrases like, “Facebook is a source of stress, and it depresses me” and “Facebook is an instant way to ask for help or something I need from people.” Subjects ranked each statement on a scale from “most like me” to “least like me,” and were later interviewed by the researchers who gathered additional insights and qualitative data.

    1. From the article:
      What about the increasing strength of these storms? Here, too, the science is fairly conclusive.
      Whether or not we see more tropical storms (a matter of continuing research by the scientific community), we know that the strongest storms are getting stronger, with roughly eight meters per second increase in wind speed per degree Celsius of warming. And so it is not likely to be a coincidence that almost all of the strongest hurricanes on record (as measured by sustained wind speeds) for the globe, the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere, the Pacific, and now, with Irma, in the open Atlantic, have occurred over the past two years. A stronger storm means not only more damaging winds, but a bigger storm surge as well, adding to the coastal flooding impact of sea level rise.

      It’s quite simple really. The force of the wind is proportional to the square of the velocity,
      (F = V^2). This ain’t exactly QED…
      Q.E.D. 😉

  29. The Spiral of Police Violence
    A Work of Art Criticism

    “We cannot see the force that fixes the officers in place, but we can try to name it. The spiral gives us the clues we need, representing the dynamic growth of all life, order without domination, the possibility of any future.

    If Orwell warned of a future in which a boot stomps on a human face forever, this photograph offers a glimpse of an alternate future: a Fibonacci spiral of police falling and being pinned by their own inelegance, into eternity. In this light, we might imagine their leap over the fence as a joyous act of self-annihilation, born of a desperate desire to render themselves harmless. Like Antaeus in reverse, these officers lose their strength in the earth’s embrace, and that is their salvation.”

  30. It’s hard to even imagine just how good life might be half a century or longer down the road.
    Too bad I’m an old fart already, as appears to be the case among all the regulars here.

    If the economy holds together, and the dingaling R types don’t succeed in cutting off the research money for science across the board, in every field, it’s altogether possible that today’s kids will be as vigorous at seventy or eighty as we were at forty.

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170915144151.htm

    1. It’s hard to even imagine just how good life might be half a century or longer down the road.
      .

    2. The oldest human we have actual birth records on died in the 1990’s.
      Total life span is not increasing.
      Being composed of Eukaryotic Cells, death is part of the game.
      Sex also, luckily.

  31. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-emirates-dubai-solar/dubai-awards-3-9-billion-solar-energy-contract-to-shanghai-electric-acwa-power-idUSKCN1BR0JU

    People burning oil NOW to keep the ac on will be able to sell that oil later, and most likely they will earn quite a lot more from the sale of the oil they SAVE by building out solar farms than the farms cost them.

    It’s a good thing too, and not just because of the climate problem. Barring some real miracles, most of the people in what I refer to as Sand Country sometimes are going to be in one hell of a spot for something to eat once the oil money runs out, considering that they are more populous than ever, and drawing down their fossil water reserves at a frightening rate.

    Food production in that part of the world may crash to as little as a quarter of what it is now, if the local climate there heats up as little as three or four degrees and they get even less rain than at present.

    Farming may become literally impossible in a lot of localities since irrigation water won’t be available.

  32. My gut tells me that, Australia is going to be the first of the G20 nations where, electricity from solar sources (PV and thermal with storage) is going to out compete all non renewable (FF) sources of electricity.

    Rooftop solar and storage – cheaper than subsidising old coal

    The idea of using rooftop solar and battery storage (part of what is known as “distributed energy”) has been raised in numerous studies – by the CSIRO, by energy networks, and most recently by the Australian Energy Market Operator, which sees 40 per cent of all demand being serviced by localised generation and storage.

    (See our story today about rooftop solar meeting 48 per cent of South Australia power needs on Sunday afternoon, sending grid demand to a record low).

    AEMO boss Audrey Zibelman sees such resources as critical to not just lowering prices, but also creating a smarter, cleaner and more reliable grid than the system which now relies heavily on centralised generation and extended networks, and is vulnerable to catastrophic failure of equipment, storms and bushfires.

    The government knows only too well the benefits of rooftop solar, and battery storage. Many politicians have rooftop solar in their homes and some like Malcolm Turnbull have battery storage. Yet none have ever chosen to champion this, instead promoting the technologies deployed by large corporations.

    “One of the few constants in Australia’s energy debate is the fervour of politicians’ and administrators’ homage to the idea that electricity prices should be lower than they are,” Mountain says.

    “That electricity prices have reached the level they have, suggests the homage has all too often been a camouflage for other agendas.

    “For too long ideology and the protection of vested interests has lurked behind the apparent pursuit of “lower electricity prices”. The obsession with coal-fired “baseload” generation is an enduring manifestation of this malaise.”

    Rooftop solar provides 48% of South Australia power, pushing grid demand to record low

    South Australia’s level of minimum demand hit a new record low this weekend – barely a week after the previous benchmark was set – with a fall to just 587MW on Sunday afternoon.

    The record eclipsed the previous mark by nearly 200MW – with AEMO data showing minimum demand at 1.30pm of exactly 587.8MW, compared with the previous low mark of 786.42MW posted last Sunday. (See graph above courtesy of Melbourne’s Climate and Energy College).

    The key here appears to be the moderate temperatures of early spring, which meant few air conditioners switched on, combined with excellent solar output, with the state’s more than 700MW of rooftop solar producing 538.54MW at the time of minimum demand.

    That is a phenomenal share of 47.8 per cent of the state’s electricity demand being met by rooftop solar (compares with 36 per cent in the previous record last week) and is clearly a record for South Australia, and for that matter in any large grid anywhere in the world.

    As we reported last week, the tumbling records confirm that the times of record low demand have shifted from the night to the middle of the day.

    The Australian Energy Market Operator has predicted that by 2019, record low demand may fall to just 354MW, and within 10 years the grid demand may fall to zero because of the increasing amount of rooftop solar. This is also likely to occur in Western Australia around the same time.

    One wonders what the electricity generation mix fo South Australia was on September the 17th (yesterday) when the foolowing is taken into consideration:

    Graph of the day: South Australia’s “baseload” wind supply

    I’m sure that people in South Australia can confirm that it has been windy over the last few days. What might surprise them is how wind has dominated the state’s electricity supply – and how consistent its output has been.

    This graph below comes from Dylan McConnell at Melbourne’s Climate and Energy College and quite frankly, it is barely believable: it shows wind output in the state at a constant output of around 1200MW over the last three days.

    As the graph shows, the orange and dark orange bits represent gas – which is also pretty constant due to the new guidelines imposed by AEMO, the market operator. Yellow represents the output of the state’s 700MW of rooftop solar.

    The graphs below accompanied the last two of the three articles above.

  33. On a slightly lighter note: I’ve been amusing myself lately by using ‘Google Translate’ to translate Donald Trump’s tweets into Mongolian while simultaneously celebrating my Asian roots. ( Mongolian is related to an acient scripted Hungarian language, székely Magyar rovásírás). Then retranslating the Mongolian back to English, they seem to make so much more sense that way.

    Original Tweet:
    Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
    My use of social media is not Presidential – it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!
    6:41 PM – Jul 1, 2017

    To Mongolian from Google translate:
    Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
    Миний нийгмийн хэвлэл мэдээллийн хэрэгсэл Ерөнхийлөгчийнх биш. Энэ бол МОДЕЛИН ӨДӨР ҮНДЭСНИЙ. Америкийг дахин сайхан болгох!
    6:41 PM – 2017 оны 7-р сарын 1

    Back to English from Mongolian via Google translate:
    Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
    My social media is not the president’s. This is the day of the National Day. Make America rejuvenated!
    6:41 PM – July 1, 2017

    Maybe I can offer my services to the translators at the UN tasked with making his ramblings intelligible to the people of the world living outside the US… 🙂

    1. Man, this is no joke for the poor folk on a lot of those Islands. They haven’t even begun to clean up, Given all the debris still piled up on the streets here in Hollywood Florida where I live, I can only imagine what will happen to all of that stuff flying around in what is now a CAT 4. A lot of the buildings on these islands have been severely weakened, many without roofs. A possible direct hit on US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. Not to mention the Dominican Republic and the one place that seems to bear the brunt of every possible kind of natural disaster, Haiti.

      BTW, thanks to Jose they are expecting 12 ft waves in Brooklyn, NY.

      http://abcnews.go.com/US/maria-forecast-intensify-category-dangerous-major-hurricane/story?id=49923831

      Hurricane Maria was upgraded to an “extremely dangerous” Category 4 storm this afternoon, the National Hurricane Center said, as islands including Puerto Rico brace for the impact.

      Maria may be nearing Category 5 strength as it approaches the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico on Wednesday. Maria might make landfall on the eastern side of Puerto Rico and could bring major damage to the U.S. territory late Wednesday morning and into the afternoon, two weeks to the day since Hurricane Irma tore through Puerto Rico, killing at least three.

      1. I did not mean to be facetious. Sorry if it came across that way. It does call into question the existence of a benevolent and just deity. These folks did nothing to deserve this!

        1. Oh, no worries! I knew you weren’t being facetious. I’m not exactly big on deities either but based on what I experienced during Irma I sincerely feel for those people in Maria’s path.

            1. No man is a god. In fact he doesn’t even make a decent animal.

            2. Great revolutionary—-
              However, a very dogmatic and science illiterate leader.
              But, China went from a feudal backwater to a major world power under his leadership.

            3. One of the 3 great butchers of the 20th century.

              China was holding against the japanese without Mao(they sabotaged any attempts by Chiang Kai-shek), so he more delayed the rise of China.

              The emperor and his feudal government was already history in this time.

            4. For a very short time.
              I would say that is speculation about a event that did not come to pass.

              Not a Mao fan, and caused the death of millions.

            5. About Mao’s scientific literacy, or lack thereof……

              Most of what I read about China indicates that the current leadership is by and large quite well educated, with a substantial portion of honest to Sky Daddy real scientists, engineers, etc, holding important positions.

              Does anybody here believe otherwise?

            6. I don’t
              However, in wildlife protection and ecology they seem a bit clueless.

            7. BUT so far as we KNOW, gods are only figments of our imagination anyway.

              So why shouldn’t a man be able to set himself up as a god?

              It looks as if the current North Korean what’s his name doughboy is doing ok playing god, and his dad and granddad are actually seriously worshiped by at least a few NK citizens. The rest of them have to pretend to worship, lol.

    1. Over the weekend there were a couple of articles in UK papers suggesting Trump may be turning democrat or at least RINO, in part maybe to try and head off impeachment. Is that anything being discussed in USA?

      1. Nothing making the major papers along those lines. The R’s are fast finding out that Trump is a thief with no honor at all, one ready to screw anybody at any time, so long as he benefits sufficiently by doing so.

        He may have some business associates ( not EMPLOYEES ) who have been able to do business with him on a repeat basis, but if so, they are seldom if ever in the news.

      2. A few people did burn their MAGA hats after Trump made a deal with Dems on DOCA. But it’s unlikely anything will likely happen and it’s just Trump trying to pressure the Rs in congress.

  34. High-Ranking CIA Agent Blows Whistle On The Deep State And Shadow Government

    “Some of the revelations the former CIA anti-terrorism counter intelligence officer revealed included that ‘Google Earth was set up through the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and InQtel.’ Indeed he is correct, the CIA and NGA owned the company Google acquired, Keyhole Inc., paying an undisclosed sum for the company to turn its tech into what we now know as Google Earth. Another curious investor in Keyhole Inc. was none other than the venture capital firm In-Q-Tel run by the CIA according to a press release at the time.

    Shipp also disclosed that the agency known as the Joint Special Ops Command (JSOC) is the ‘president’s secret army’ which he can use for secret assassinations, overturning governments and things the American people don’t know about.”

    “The president of the United States does not have power over the shadow government or the CIA… There was nothing Barack Obama could do about it

    Enter Donald Trump… He has terrified the shadow government…” ~ Kevin Shipp, Former CIA officer

    “I do find it intriguing how Paul Craig Roberts’ opinions on the subject butt up against others’, as well as the idea of Trump being taken out of context or misinterpreted, etc..

    While as Survivalist suggests, Trump may have his ‘limits’, so do others, like for example those who might take Trump out of context or misinterpret him, even deliberately, and then run with it (like as a published piece)…” ~ Caelan MacIntyre

    Despots don’t get anywhere of course without a whole lot of collusion, misinformation, mindfucking and mass complicity.

    New Jerusalem

    “In Iraq a quarter million dead
    How’d you feel about being misled
    The number one surveillance state
    Zero regulation and there´s no debate…

    Look what we’ve become…”

    This comment is dedicated to Chelsea Manning.

    1. If anybody runs across any good figures, especially ones already nicely charted, lol, on the amounts of coal and gas that are being displaced by wind and solar power in various countries and globally, please post them or links to them, thanks.

      I’m hoping to find published work by a well respected or at least well known person or organization outlining this data, with an analysis of the effect it has had, and IS having on the actual market prices of gas and coal, and(later on) of oil as well , but for now there aren’t enough electrified cars on the road to affect the price of oil enough to measure the effect.

      BUT

      It looks as if one or another small, rich, and environmentally aware oil importing country with a good solar and or wind resource will soon be reducing their oil bill substantially by switching to electric cars and light trucks.

      And while China may be leading the way in terms of building out renewable infrastructure, it’s also obvious that China is going to need one hell of a lot of coal, gas, and oil, most of which will have to be imported, for quite a long time yet. It’s hard to put a figure on it, but every time China puts a megawatt’s worth of renewable capacity out the factory door, that reduces the competition in the market place for coal, gas, and eventually oil as well, for the life of that capacity. It won’t be having much effect on the price of oil for a few years yet, but if people such as Tony Seba are right, ten years from now the wind and solar farms being built today will be powering electric cars and light trucks by the tens of millions with millions more added annually.

      Most of us, just about everybody actually, seldom bother to stretch our thinking out into the farther corners of the ball park. WHO stands to benefit the MOST, as a country, or per capita, from the transition to renewables? Such questions must be asked in terms of economic and military security as well as in environmental terms. If things continue as at present, China may well OWN the economic future, as far as international trade is concerned, because as fossil fuel supplies wind down, China will be the dominant go to supplier of renewable infrastructure equipment, and maybe the expertise needed to install it as well.

      What would the price and availability of oil be, today, if the USA and a few key allies had not jumped into the Middle East with hobnailed combat boots over the last few decades?I can’t find even one article written about this fascinating thought written by anybody who seems to really have a good handle on it.

      Suppose one or another faction that hates western infidel guts ( with ample justification from their pov of course ) manages to sieze control of a major oil exporting country, and decides to henceforth export ONLY enough to obtain funds sufficient to remain in power? Will we go back in again, and kick them out, the way we kicked Saddam H. out ? If we don’t, how much will the price of oil go up?

      How much effect would that have on the transition to electrified transportation?

  35. Category 5 Hurricane Maria Hits Dominica

    Category 5 Hurricane Maria made a direct hit on the small Lesser Antilles island of Dominica (population 72,000) near 9 pm EDT Monday, becoming Dominica’s first Category 5 landfall on record. At the time of landfall, an Air Force hurricane hunter aircraft measured surface winds of 160 mph and a central pressure of 924 mb. Maria likely did catastrophic damage to Dominica.

    Heavy rain squalls and rising winds were being observed late Monday afternoon at Melville Hall Airport on Dominica, which measured sustained winds at 31 mph, gusting to 48 mph, at 6 pm EDT Monday. That station then went off-line, as did Canefield Airport, an hour later. A personal weather station on the northwest end of the island stopped transmitting as of 9:50 pm EDT Monday, after measuring a pressure of 986 mb. Satellite loops and radar out of Martinique and Barbados clearly show Maria’s small, 9-mile diameter eye, surrounded by a daunting array of spiral bands with heavy thunderstorms, Maria’s hurricane-force winds were confined to a relatively narrow 40-mile diameter region around the hurricane’s small eye, but the tropical storm-force wind area was 230 miles in diameter.

    Maria put on an incredible display of rapid intensification on Monday, going from a low-end Category 1 storm with 75 mph winds and a pressure of 982 mb at 0Z Monday, to a Category 5 storm with 160 mph winds and a 925 mb pressure 24 hours later. There have now been two Atlantic Category 5 storms in 2017: Maria and Irma. The Atlantic has had only five other years on record with multiple Cat 5s: Dean and Felix in 2007; Emily, Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005; Carla and Hattie in 1961; and two Cat 5s each in 1932 and 1933.

    Category Five Hurricane Maria batters Dominica, takes PM’s roof

    Category Five Hurricane Maria has torn through the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica leaving a trail of damage and destruction.

    Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit has taken to Facebook reporting that he has lost his roof.

    “Certainly no sleep for anyone in Dominica. I believe my residence may have sustained some damage,” Skerrit posted about 8 p.m. Monday night.

    Thirty minutes later, the Prime Minister reported that the situation had worsened.

    “My roof is gone. I am at the complete mercy of the hurricane. House is flooding,” he said.

    But within eight minutes, Skerrit said he had been rescued.

    “Rough! Rough! Rough!” he posted.

    1. Bah! It’s just a light breeze, islandboy! We humans can take it! Right?!

  36. Evolutionary Success and The Subtlety of Beekeeping Technology

    Bees For Development: Beekeeping and Sustainability
    factsheet

    “Bee populations are declining as a result of ‘multiple interacting causes of death’

    These are human-induced: flowerless landscapes, monocultures (which become food deserts for bees for much of the year) and pesticides (including insecticides, fungicides and herbicides).
    When bees are malnourished, diseases and parasites have greater impact.
    But the situation is remediable: everyone can plant bee-friendly flowers, and stop contaminating them with pesticides.
    Trees are good sources of food and nest sites, hedgerow shrubs provide shelter and forage through the year, and native flowers in meadows and verges provide pollen and nectar at crucial times of reproduction and preparing for winter…

    Sustainable methodologies are determined by the way the bees want to live. Bees do not need beekeepers for them to survive, but they do need people to stop destroying and poisoning their food, habitats and nests. Bees in extensive natural systems in Africa remain healthy despite the presence of pests and diseases; research in Europe is increasingly demonstrating that ‘unmanaged’ colonies are able to resist parasites such as Varroa

    Beekeepers who try to prevent swarming in order to maximise the size of the colony and the honey harvest run the risk of compromising genetic diversity and undermining sustainability…

    Key principles
    Natural management is based on key principles. These principles are not dependent on particular hive types but are generally applicable to all beekeeping:
    • The bee colony is treated as a complete organism
    The natural processes of the bees are respected
    • The heat, scent and humidity of the nest are maintained at all times
    • Intrusion into the colony is minimised
    • Bees make all their own comb
    • The bees’ own swarming impulse determines reproduction
    • Bees overwinter on their own honey
    • Bees are local, adapted to local microclimates and environment
    • Colony density is appropriate to forage availability and maintenance of health.

    Regular observation allows the beekeeper to understand and recognise the health and development of the colony. Management is informed by the bees’ own needs. Interventions are minimised, using three broad principles:
    • Do not put anything into the hive which did not come from the bees
    • Do not take anything out of the hive which the bees cannot afford to lose
    Be guided by the bees. “

    The points, such as those highlighted, can be applied to people as well: ‘Government’, corporate and general impositional/coercive ‘intervention’ doesn’t work.

    We can argue about, for example, solar panels or electric vehicles, but if they are being imposed upon people– and the world at large– then that is also yet another reason why they will ultimately fail. It might take awhile, but it will fail.
    Take the ‘green revolution’ WRT to agriculture: It is proving a failure. Why? Because it doesn’t quite work the way nature does, at least in terms of subtle gives-and-takes. It doesn’t, at least, subtly, allow nature to call the shots, nor does it subtly work within nature’s rules or needs. It wants to impose its own. This lack of subtlety, if that’s the best word, appears like it will create and/or is creating a similar and opposite reaction from nature.
    Any technology for it to work (and not fail) needs to allow nature to do what it already wants to do, naturally. Or, at the very least, nature has to be able to handle it without ‘equal and opposite’ backlash effects that threaten extinction. Technology should not be about threatening extinction.
    This is why I keep advocating for ‘appropriate technology’: It is technology that works with nature– humans and other species– rather than against it. Many forms of living creatures don’t have access to fossil fuel or vast amounts of energy, so the effects of their usages are less-than-subtle. And that’s a less-than-subtle problem that we may not be able to back out of.

    EV and PV-production and usage is not subtle. It may be subtle, relative to the effects of burning FF’s, but not relative to their effects on humans and their communities and the rest of nature.

    As I’ve said before, we have two footprints. One is our own, the other– the ‘techno-energetic’ one– may be of a scale vastly larger than the dinosaurs. And, aside from the little birds, where did they go?

    Will the Darwin Award be awarded to our entire species? It’s sure looking that way…

    If there’s no one left to award the award, though, will we still receive it?

    “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” ~ Matthew 5:5, New Testament

    1. We can argue about, for example, solar panels or electric vehicles, but if they are being imposed upon people– and the world at large– then that is also yet another reason why they will ultimately fail. It might take awhile, but it will fail.

      So, why leave out kerosene lamps, portable generators powered by gasoline, diesel or lpg, two or three wheelers powered by two stroke motors, diesel powered farm or construction equipment. trucks, buses, diesel powered trains, two stroke outboard motors, diesel powered fishing boats, bulk freighters, container ships, aircraft of all types powered by aviation fuel, radios, televisions, cell phones, computers and even light bulbs? Of all the technology available, most of which consumes fossil fuels during it’s manufacture and operation, why do you constantly babble on about technology that reduces mankind’s need for fossil fuels when in operation or at least has the potential to do so. It strikes me as somewhat hypocritical. You might be better served barking up some other tree.

      1. Your little list of technologies there speaks to the kind of far goneness that is shaping up to get us all killed.

        I side with the birds and the bees, etc., and the bees are not talking about the tech in your list.
        They are talking about honeycombs, flowers, meadows, sunshine, cleanness, trees and beeswax, etc., which speak to a viable world and the kinds of resilient stuff that can also make our lives far better than what some of you would appear to be unable to imagine, so far gone you seem to be in the mental and physical cage of your cold, gray, dead, manufactured world.

        Let go, islandboy. Get back to the land. This is not for you or anyone else. You are living and pursuing a nightmare-in-progress.

        1. You have not addressed why you insist on singling out two particular examples of technology, while ignoring all of those in my “little list” which I’m sure we could all expand to a much larger list of technologies that got us into this pickle. Said large list of technologies show very little promise of helping to get us out of the pickle so why pick on EVs and solar panels? More importantly, why give all that other stuff a pass? What about the environmental damage being done by backyard refineries in Nigeria? Why not rail against the oil industry? Is a solar panel that gets blown off a roof in the Caribbean and ends up in the ocean going to have any effect that is even remotely comparable to the Exxon Valdez disaster or the Macondo blow out? Why do you have to pick on only the new “zero emissions” technology?

          1. Let’s just get right down to the nitty gritty, and face up to the fact that there are always a few people around who spend their days on sidewalks with signs saying the end of the world is near.

            Caelan is this community’s bearer of ” the end is near ” sign, lol. Hardly anybody ever takes such a person seriously, especially if they see him arrive in a nice shiny automobile, laughing my ass off. I don’t have the foggiest idea what sort of car, if any Caelan may have, but he sure as hell has an internet connection! His posts aren’t arriving via smoke signals.

            I won’t go so far as to say he might not be right, ultimately, but on the other hand, I doubt he ‘s going to convince any of us to move into caves and go back to stone knives instead of using iron, lol.

            Well, if things collapse back to the point that only a few thousand people survive, and repopulate the Earth without having an industrial civilization, at least they won’t have to learn the art of stone knapping all over again, because there will be countless millions of nice stainless steel knives and meat cleavers, etc, around, enough of them to last indefinitely.Countless millions of nice nearly indestructible cooking pots and pans, too, lol.

            1. “I enjoy making a fool of myself in public jousting with Caelan…” ~ Oldfarmermac

              Good times…

              How’s Dad and the book going by the way?

      2. We can argue about, for example, solar panels or electric vehicles, but if they are being imposed upon people– and the world at large– then that is also yet another reason why they will ultimately fail. It might take awhile, but it will fail.

        I don’t read Caelan’s BS anymore but that comment alone is a good example of his lack of knowledge and critical thinking skills. Solar panels and electric vehicles are most certainly not being imposed on anyone anywhere. If anything they are being fought tooth and nail by the status quo, at least in the USA.

        The main reason being is that it is a technology that allows a path towards democratizing and breaking long establish economic monopolies of centralized power generation.

        It also is a way for the underprivileged around the world in places like Bangladesh, India, Africa etc… to leapfrog their dependency on expensive dirty, inefficient fossil fuel technology such as the use of kerosene to light their homes further undermining the fossil fuel business’ model to literally enslave vast portions of the world.

        These are the things that Caelan promotes and defends when he criticizes the transition that is underway whether he or anyone else likes it or not.

        As for his ridiculous uncritical promotion of permaculture as the sole means to save the planet from itself and feed 7 plus billion people, he is profoundly ignorant of basic biological and ecosystems science.

        There is certainly a place for permaculture and none of us should stick our heads in the sand and give the Monsantos of the world a free pass but Caelan is an ignorant cultist. Whose world views are not worth a bucket of warm spit.

        1. With CO2 equivalent due to cross 550 ppm in the 2030’s and CO2 to double soon after that, I don’t think it means a hill of beans what idiots think, what deniers deny, what mediocre middle road people claim (just another form of denial) or what Trump and the repubs do.
          We are going to be too busy in the near future trying to save our own asses. I will be too old to give a shit by then or not.

          But we can see the very possible future. Just look at what is happening in Yemen right now. 600,000 with cholera now and growing fast. Meningitis epidemic looming. If that doesn’t get you a bomb or starvation will.
          The health system there is collapsed.

          Collapse has been happening around the world in different places. Collapse happens fast and collapse happens slowly. We don’t need the Huns to come over the hill to wreck our civilization, we have climate change, overpopulation, stupidity and the 1 percent to shed us from the planet.
          But go on in delirium and delusion, I am sure you will feel sort of alright until you don’t.

          Maybe at this time we really need some religious magic. Really, really, really need it. Do your stuff Pope.

          1. I would not count on The Grand Warlock.
            Can you say predicament?

            1. Can you read? I just listed them above.
              The bottom part was humor.

            2. You might be right. But we do keep on since we know that not will be worse.

          2. “We are going to be too busy in the near future trying to save our own asses. I will be too old to give a shit by then or not.”

            You’re probably right, but the it might take a little longer than you think for the shit to hit the fan in places like the USA.

            ”Just look at what is happening in Yemen right now. 600,000 with cholera now and growing fast. Meningitis epidemic looming. If that doesn’t get you a bomb or starvation will.
            The health system there is collapsed.”

            Those who escape cholera, bombs, and starvation are still going to have to deal with the barbed wire and machine guns at national borders as they flee.

            “But go on in delirium and delusion, I am sure you will feel sort of alright until you don’t.”

            “Maybe at this time we really need some religious magic. Really, really, really need it. Do your stuff Pope.”

            Some guy smarter than I am, Lord Chesterfield, IIRC, once said that when men cease to believe in God, they do not henceforth believe in NOTHING.

            Other people express this concept using the words that nature abhors a vacuum.

            Since people are obviously determined to believe in SOMETHING larger than themselves, it might be a good policy to try to find the common ground and enlist the religious people in the environmental movement, instead of driving them OUT by making fun of them.

            Like it or not, there are MILLIONS and MILLIONS of them, and they have the right to vote, and quite a lot of them exercise that right.

            Does the political right have its head up its ass ? Sure.

            Does the political left demonstrate the same failing, in many respects? Certainly.

            There are an infinite number of fights that we could get into, but we have the resources and will power to fight only a few of them, and WIN.

            So we NEED to do some damned serious thinking about the fights we pick, and who will line up on our side, as the result of WHICH ones we pick.

            I strongly recommend that environmentalists think long and hard about the culture war, and WHY so many people vote Republican, rather than D, on election day, when for the most part it’s obvious that overall the D party has a platform better suited to the NEEDS of the average voter. Maybe it would be best to back off on some of the cultural changes the leftish wing is determined to force down the throat of the rightish wing, given the evidence of election results, lol.

            The ONE overriding issue that is more important than all others combined these days is the environmental issue. Just about every old country boy I know would STRONGLY consider voting D if the D’s had fucking sense enough to back off on the gun control rhetoric and endorse buying up a few thousand acres of land kept open for hunting near where they live so they can go out and murder bambi a couple of weeks a year.

            An environmentalist with brains enough to wipe his ass ought to understand that another five or ten thousand acres added to state parks and national forests open to hunting is a damned sight better deal than having that same land developed.

          3. Hi Gone fishing,

            If one does a regression on CO2 equivalent vs temperature in a multifactor model (including aerosols, AMO, and ENSO as well as nat log of CO2 equiv) for 1871-2012 data the TCR for CO2 equivalent is far lower than CO2 alone (using KYOTO protocol for CO2 equiv), about 1.28 C for a doubling of CO2equiv vs 2.1 C for a doubling of CO2.

            Bottom line CO2 equivalent is not a great measure, better to focus on CO2. In addition it is mostly CO2 that has been increasing since 1979, so that should be the focus, in my opinion.

  37. I’m thinking Tesla engineers designed the original S so that a fast battery swap is easy and practical, once the need for it arises, when the battery eventually fails.

    And if I remember correctly, I have seen a video demonstration where an S battery IS swapped more or less automatically, in a matter of a few minutes, but apparently that was only a one off demo of the possibility using an automated swapping station.

    Now it looks as if Tesla is preparing to put swapping stations into production sometime in the near future, along highways, so that long distance travelers, and possibly commercial trucks as well, can get back on the road in as little as fifteen minutes or maybe even less.

    A swapping station of this sort could easily be built to fit on a dedicated trailer, so that it could be used as a portable unit.

    https://techxplore.com/news/2017-09-tesla-patent-battery-swapping.html

    I’m wondering how many problems will be encountered when rolling out fast charging stations on the grand scale in terms of supplying enough grid capacity to power them up at peak use hours.

    Charging a few tens of millions of cars during the day when they are in parking lots, and at night in driveways will be pure gravy work for electric utilities, but fast charging a few thousand cars all at the same time in a limited area with a grid that’s already at or near capacity may prove to be another ball game altogether.

    WILL fast charging work at four pm in a place like LA ? On the grand scale? WITHOUT some serious grid upgrades?

  38. Good news from the climate experts.

    The Times:
    We were wrong — worst effects of climate change can be avoided, say experts

    “Scientists admit that world is warming more slowly than predicted

    The world has warmed more slowly than had been forecast by computer models, which were “on the hot side” and overstated the impact of emissions, a new study has found.”

    I was able to read The Times article from The Australian version at this link

    “The worst impacts of climate change can still be avoided, senior scientists have said after revising their previous predictions.

    The world has warmed more slowly than had been forecast by computer models, which were “on the hot side” and overstated the impact of emissions, a new study has found. Its projections suggest that the world has a better chance than previously claimed of meeting the goal set by the Paris agreement on climate change to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

    The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, makes clear that rapid reductions in emissions will still be required but suggests that the world has more time to make the changes.

    Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London and one of the study’s authors, admitted that his past prediction had been wrong.

    He stated during the climate summit in Paris in December 2015: “All the evidence from the past 15 years leads me to conclude that actually delivering 1.5C is simply incompatible with democracy.” He told The Times yesterday: “When the facts change, I change my mind, as [John Maynard] Keynes said. It’s still likely to be very difficult to achieve these kind of changes quickly enough but we are in a better place than I thought.”

    The latest study found that a group of computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had predicted a more rapid temperature increase than had taken place. Global average temperature has risen by about 0.9C since pre-industrial times but there was a slowdown in the rate of warming for 15 years before 2014.

    Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and another author, said: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.” He added that the group of about a dozen computer models, produced by government institutes and universities around the world, had been assembled a decade ago “so it’s not that surprising that it’s starting to divert a little bit from observations”. Too many of the models used “were on the hot side”, meaning they forecast too much warming.

    According to the models, keeping the average temperature increase below 1.5C would mean that the world could emit only about 70 billion tonnes of carbon after 2015. At the present rate of emissions, this “carbon budget” would be used up in three to five years. Under the new assessment, the world can emit another 240 billion tonnes and still have a reasonable chance of keeping the temperature increase below 1.5C.

    “That’s about 20 years of emissions before temperatures are likely to cross 1.5C,” Professor Allen said. “It’s the difference between being not doable and being just doable.”

    Professor Grubb said that the fresh assessment was good news for island states in the Pacific, such as the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu, which could be inundated by rising seas if the average temperature rose by more than 1.5C.

    Other factors pointed to more optimism on climate change, including China reducing its growth in emissions much faster than predicted and the cost of offshore wind farms falling steeply in Britain. Professor Grubb called on governments to commit themselves to steeper cuts in emissions than they had pledged under the Paris agreement to keep warming below 1.5C. He added: “We’re in the midst of an energy revolution and it’s happening faster than we thought, which makes it much more credible for governments to tighten the offer they put on the table at Paris.”

    The Met Office acknowledged yesterday a 15-year slowdown in the rise in average temperature but said that this pause had ended in 2014, the first of three record warm years. The slowing had been caused by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a pattern of warm and cool phases in Pacific sea-surface temperature, it said.

    The Times”

    The scientific article is here:
    https://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo3031.html

    OK, so let’s get this straight.

    – They proposed ditching democracy in favor of unreliable computer models.

    – They claim computer models were wrong because they were 10 years old, yet they are predicting effects 80 years in advance. How wrong do they estimate they will be by then?

    – They just discovered what every skeptic has known for a long time: That models run hot, and that the rate of warming for the 2003-2014 period has been very low.

    – They acknowledge their hypothesis produced wrong predictions, yet instead of ditching or correcting it they insist in doubling down asking for renewed efforts to reduce emissions.

    You all have misplaced your trust. The catastrophic global warming scare is fake, and all its predictions will turn into news like this one: “It didn’t happen, yet we are still right.”
    A little bit of skepticism would do you good.

    1. Javier. You should consider getting a new hobby. Your current one doesn’t look good on you- by that I mean that it looks like a big waste of your mental energy. This is meant as constructive advice. Really.

      1. This is meant as constructive advice.

        Thank you Hickory. I take it as such.

        The CO2-induced catastrophic climate change hypothesis has become the most interesting scientific problem of our time, and as such I am attracted to it as a moth to a light. It has all the ingredients, an extremely complex wicked problem to analyze, uncertain past climate evidence that can be interpreted in different ways, an existential threat proposition, most people taking sides on political grounds. And unlike most scientific debates of our time, it interests most people.

        Science is both my career and my main hobby. My mind doesn’t like being idle. Posting here is no problem to me, because I don’t like being in echo chambers, unlike most people. I learn more when people challenge my ideas than when they agree with me, and quite often they have some good arguments that stimulate me to learn more about certain aspects of the problem. Science doesn’t usually flourish in isolation, and the best science is often done when others disagree and point to the failings. That catastrophic-climate advocates reject opposition so fiercely is not a good scientific sign. After all if nobody tells you that you are wrong, how do you know that you are right? You may be missing something.

    2. The models don’t predict natural variability very well. There have always been periods when warming was slower or faster than the models have predicted, over the long term they have been pretty good, though not perfect. We do not know what future warming will be due to uncertainty about natural variability and future emissions.

      1. Let’s just leave it at this, every time. Javier doesn’t believe in the precautionary principle.

        His opinion, in his opinion, is worth more than the opinion of countless scientists and organizations that actually do climate work on a continual basis.

        Whatever we do to slow down the use of fossil fuels NOW simply means we will have MORE and less expensive fossil fuel LATER, in the event that the renewable energy industries are unable to shoulder the FF load.

        Likewise whatever we do now means a cleaner, happier, healthier world not only for naked apes but also for all the other so called “higher ” life forms living on this planet.

        It’s all upside, when we get right down to it. All the mechanics I know, and I’m a pretty decent one myself, used to cuss pollution controlled automobiles, but now we all not only admit but state positively that cars with computerized engines and emissions systems last longer and run WAY cleaner and need far FEWER repairs than the older cars they have replaced, not to mention they use a LOT less gasoline, lol.

        We need tax revenues anyway, so just WHY should we tax the hell out of every body except the coal, oil, and gas industries? They all get off dirt cheap, compared to just about all other major critical industries, to the best of my knowledge.

        I say it’s time we slapped a quarter a gallon on gasoline and diesel at the REFINERY level, and use the money to either clean up the environment, or at least to offset some of the general revenue money used to maintain the highway system.

        And why the hell should somebody who can’t afford to fly, or never wants to fly, pay a significant fuel tax to use his automobile or truck, when airlines pay just about zero fuel tax for an eighteen wheeler tanker load every time they pack a jumbo jet full of people like sardines?

      2. Hi Dennis,

        Models don’t include climate cycles and oscillations, like the ~ 60-year oscillation observed in multiple indices, like PDO, AMO, sea level rise, temperatures, …
        This defect is due to design. The cooling phase of that oscillation was attributed to aerosols, and the warming phase to greenhouse gases. The result was a complete inability to predict the pause or to interpret it correctly. The problem is that if a significant contribution from the ~ 60-year oscillation is accepted, then anthropogenic contribution lessens and the foregone conclusion of catastrophic climate change is no longer tenable.

        It is my opinion that the pause has not ended. We just went through a pause of the pause courtesy of El Niño. 2017 will be cooler than 2016, 2018 is very likely to be cooler than 2017, and 2019 is likely to be cooler than 2018. That means 3 years of negative rate of warming are possible, leaving the rate of warming since 2003 so low as to start questioning again the reality of the CO2 as overriding climate factor hypothesis. That coupled to the refusal of the Arctic to melt is going to make for a very amusing climate change debate over the next years.

        1. Hi Javier,

          I have done a simple model including the AMO. The “CASA” model uses the natural log of atmospheric CO2 (C), Aerosols (A), SOI (S) and AMO (A) as independent variables and BEST Land Ocean Temperature as the dependent variable and a simple linear regression from 1871-2012 (only had complete data for all variables over this range). R squared 93% and the TCR is estimated at 2.1 C a rough estimate of ECS can be found by doing the same model on land only data (to avoid the thermal inertia of the ocean) and we get an ECS estimate for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 of 3.2 C. Chart below shows the Global land ocean model. Note the model has a slightly lower temperature trend than the data.

            1. Hi whut,

              Yes I realize that, Javier and some others like AMO and offer it up as an explanation for the change in temperature so I include that in the model rather than LOD, I should also include TSI, with that added the TCR drops to 1.75 C. The adjusted R squared is 94% for CASAT (where T is TSI) all coefficients with t-stats of 4 or higher.

            2. Hi Javier,

              There is well understood science for why these thing might be correlated. The correlation is just empirical evidence that supports the theory.

              This is the way science is done.

      3. the article posted says no more than “ANY” reasonable, objective person could, can and did see for themselves. My guess is that unlike many here, the authors were trying to maintain some shred of credibility, at least among the real scientist in a world and industry (climate hysteria) which is devoid of such characteristics. bout time?

        1. The article is BS since just the lag time temperature rise (what we would get if mankind stopped producing all CO2 right now) has been determined to be at least 0.6C and that does not take into account effects of reducing aerosols.

          1. has been determined

            Has been assumed. You cannot determine what cannot be observed and is going to take place in the future.

            A lot of things that you believe are known, are actually assumed, and probably assumed wrongly.

            1. Exactly. The climate change brigade absolutely likes to cherry pick and choose their own facts just about the same as the people who believe in gun control. Additionally these all tend to be the same sort of folks who think they have superior intelligence over the rest of us. Well, only the march of time and history (not science) will be able to ultimately prove which side was right.

            2. Another brilliant insight, brought to you with the kind support of the happy billionaires! (Just to be clear who’s ideas are being propagated here)

            3. Ever notice if you turn what deniers say around it resembles reality? I love how they think there are sides, like the scientists have an army and are at war with something. They also think we cannot predict things when we do it successfully every day. What a bunch of banana heads.

            4. Tony, scientists are not more intelligent than many other people. There are highly intelligent people across the board of careers and job types. It’s just that scientist’s jobs are to determine what is and what can be, how reality and nature actually work. It’s what they focus on and have developed the methods and tools to do that job. They also spend a lot of time seeing how wrong they might be and how strong or weak are their results.

              Now if they were really smart they would all be making lots of money and own their own companies, but that is not what they choose to do. They choose the difficult, the fantastically boring and repetitive, the frustrating search for what is not yet known. It’s hard work with long hours and often not much reward. Assembling huge amounts of data into a sensible form and accounting for every little thing since they know their results will be heavily examined and checked is not an easy task. Plus trying to get grant money for projects and never knowing when it will be withdrawn or reduced, all to make just a regular salary.
              These people are not in it for the money, yet people with large amounts of money and power are definitely against them. Climate scientists are doing everyone a huge favor but must then feel the wrath of those with limited understanding because they think things will get worse if we listen to them. Just the opposite is actually true.

            5. Tony Cowley – out of interest if you got sick with some exotic ailment would you’re preference be to a) see the brightest and best qualified consultant possible, maybe a few to get a good consensus; b) talk to the local plumber who has been incessantly telling you how clever he is and how everybody else is wrong about everything, but has actually never got one prediction even remotely close; or c) wait for the march of time and history (not science)?

            6. Only if you do not understand math, physics and chemistry. But then again the medieval mind believes whatever it is told and does not think or understand anything beyond popular dogma.

            7. The current understanding of math, physics and chemistry has not prevented the making of climate models based on shaky assumptions that are not correctly predicting the warming rate. This is now being recognized and proves that your waving of math, physics and chemistry is just another improper application of first principles on shaky assumptions to reach wrong conclusions. Science is not on your side. Scientists are now correcting their previous wrong beliefs.

            8. “This is a recording. The message is the same no matter what so hang up and don’t bother trying again. Have a nice warm day!”

    1. If Doudna and Charpentier don’t get the Nobel this year, something is funny with the process.
      Being both women, it is interesting—-

    2. I’m engaged in gainful employment at the moment. But I do know a bit about how butterfly wings display color and how some genes are involved in creating the structures that create them. So can’t wait to read up on it. Tks!

    3. I am sure the Monarch butterflies will appreciate that, if any can be found to recolor.

  39. http://www.smh.com.au/world/trump-says-us-may-have-to-totally-destroy-north-korea-mocks-kim-jongun-20170919-gyktqk.html

    I’m not yet losing MUCH sleep thinking about dingalings like Trump and doughboy having access to nuclear weapons, but maybe I ought to be.

    Perhaps I can understand one thing better about this problem, given my ROOTS, my coming from a backwoods southern mountains redneck macho society. I have had PLENTY of contact with semicivilized men, experience lacking on the part of most people who have always lived in safe places and peed their panties and called the cops because they happened to see somebody WALKING thru the neighborhood, lol.

    Both these guys, at the fundamental level, are the sort of men who would have been well suited to life in a totally uncivilized society, where the rules consist basically of doing whatever you can get away with, if you have the balls to do it.

    I hate to say ANYTHING that makes Trump look better than he IS, which is not very good at all, but dough boy is the sort who just might take a threat to break him in half and stuff his testicles down his throat seriously, if the threat comes from a credible source.

    I’m NOT saying threats are going to accomplish anything, but I learned when I was a kid that appeasement generally does not work with bullies. The more concessions you make, the more they demand.

    If sanctions strong enough to convince him to back off can’t be put into place, he will continue to build up NK’s nuclear arsenal to the point that he might actually think he can get away with using part of it on some smaller country, such as South Korea or Japan, without the rest of the world retaliating due to the threat of being hit with nukes themselves.

    1. The difference between Trump and Doughboy, is that Doughboy realizes he has the “Trump Card”.

      1. The question is whether he has the balls to play it, which would almost for dead sure mean the end of HIM , personally, and the end of his country as such.

        I have read a great deal of stuff that all appears to be consistent, in general terms at least, concerning NK’s military capabilities, and basically they boil down to pretty much chickenshit, except for the nukes and the dug in artillery targeted on Seoul.

        Even the trucks they put in parades are antiques.There’s probably not even enough diesel fuel in North Korea to even think about mounting an invasion of the south with his antique conventional forces.

    2. Yair . . .

      I have always wondered what would happen if a couple of spans of the Yalu bridge on the NK side were to suddenly ‘become unsafe’ . . . surely that would help enforce sanctions?

      1. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/sep/19/donald-trump/are-gas-lines-forming-north-korea/

        As a matter of fact, there aren’t enough vehicles in NK to HAVE gas lines in the usual sense of the word.

        “You are more likely to know somebody with a private jet than a North Korean is to know somebody with a car,” Car and Driver magazine wrote in 2010

        “Public transport in the major cities is done by electrically driven buses, and many trucks in the countryside are converted to wood burning,” said Erik van Ingen Schenau of the China Motor Vehicle Documentation Center in France. “Outside Pyongyang, people have no cars, and the cars in Pyongyang are (driven by) the upper class, except for some taxis and government vehicles.”

        Too bad I can’t speak the language and communicate freely with the mechanics who do the conversions. I have set aside an old truck to convert to a wood burner just so I can say I did it, lol. I’m not having any luck finding people to talk to about it, so as to avoid mistakes.

        It’s nukes or nothing, as far as fighting a war is concerned, for doughboy. And he’s smart enough to know it.

        1. Yair . . . .

          ” I have set aside an old truck to convert to a wood burner just so I can say I did it, lol. I’m not having any luck finding people to talk to about it, so as to avoid mistakes.”

          OFM. Mother Earth News out of Topeka supplied me with a set of full size drawings for a gas producer back in about 1976, they may still be available. I played around with the concept for several years as a design exercise.

          I was running a four cylinder Austin car engine (1200cc) to run a 240v generator . . . lots of problems with governing but it worked okay.

          I believe the designers ran a sawmill for many years with a small block Chevy.

          1. Hey scrub puller, are you currently in Oz? Do you ever read any of the stuff over at reneweconomy.com.au ? If so what do you make of it? It seems like quite a bit of cheer-leading for renewables but, that is to be expected from a site with a banner that reads “RenewEconomy, Tracking the next industrial revolution” and an “About” page that starts “Since its launch in early 2012, RenewEconomy.com.au has quickly emerged as Australia’s best informed and most read web-site focusing on clean energy news and analysis, as well as climate policy.”.

            1. Yair . . . Gotcha islandboy.

              Quite a coincidence you should ask!

              I bookmarked that site just last week. Haven’t spent a lot of time there but some of the folks seem quite knowledgeable . . . and some of the comments are entertaining.

              I should mention though that I come to any forum from a very low knowledge/education base and only comment on practical every day stuff I have actually done in a life time of living off the grid.

  40. People of all political stripes are prone to interpret science to suit their own agendas, or deny science, if it mismatches their agendas.

    https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-09/uoia-sdn091917.php

    I’ve been calling this the culture war for a LONG time. The evidence is gradually accumulating in my favor.

    The authors of the great classic novels understood this aspect of the way people think and believe centuries ago.

    We believe what we want to believe, and deny or ignore what we don’t like.

    If you disagree on a couple of important ideas, or even just ONE important idea or issue, this sets the stage for you to automatically disagree with your opponent on the second third fourth issue…. because you come to perceive him as your cultural enemy.

    1. Sure, science and engineering are all the wonder when they fit the needs of the government, religion and citizens. But when they come up with results and products that will cause businesses to fail or take profit away then they are a nemesis. Disagree with long held beliefs and ways (doesn’t matter if it correct or not) and the scientists and engineers become a sudden problem. Some parts of society will become very angry and punish those or undermine those whose knowledge reduces their power and profit.
      Being right is not important, being right in the right way works. For the rest, best to keep the mouth shut or at least tone it down.
      Culture beats reality, for a short while. Reality and especially nature wins in the longer run and beats down the blockheads. (definition of blockhead = someone or some group that has their views and ways firmly set as in concrete).
      So if scientists were to discover that most everything we have done so far is harmful and should be changed, there would be a cultural backlash and trench warfare would ensue against all who try to change or even speak of such things.

      1. (definition of blockhead = someone or some group that has their views and ways firmly set as in concrete).
        .

  41. A full paper on the ever important and growing need to recognize tipping points in the Earth system. Just as my graph of Arctic sea ice showing increases in dynamic range of late should have alerted some to the changes happening in the north, this paper might alert some to the coming stepwise occurrences that happen in a complex multiple phase system such as the Earth system.

    Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system
    Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change. Our synthesis of present knowledge suggests that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under anthropogenic climate change. The greatest threats are tipping the Arctic sea-ice and the Greenland ice sheet, and at least five other elements could surprise us by exhibiting a nearby tipping point. This knowledge should influence climate policy, but a full assessment of policy relevance would require that, for each potential tipping element, we answer the following questions: Mitigation: Can we stay clear of ρcrit? Adaptation: Can F̂ be tolerated?
    It seems wise to assume that we have not yet identified all potential policy-relevant tipping elements. Hence, a systematic search for further tipping elements should be undertaken, drawing on both paleodata and multimodel ensemble studies. Given the large uncertainty that remains about tipping elements, there is an urgent need to improve our understanding of the underlying physical mechanisms determining their behavior, so that policy makers are able “to avoid the unmanageable, and to manage the unavoidable”

    http://www.pnas.org/content/105/6/1786.full

  42. Digging down on this one. CO2 releases from soil could be massive, a tipping point to avoid.

    Writing in journal Nature, they project that an increase of 1C (1.8F) will release an additional 55 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere by 2050.

    This could trigger a “positive feedback” and push the planet’s climate system past the point of no-return.

    Previous assessments have not taken carbon released by soil into account.

    In their Nature paper, an international team of scientists said that the majority of the Earth’s terrestrial store of carbon was in the soil.

    “Where it is really cold, the activity and growth is limited but when it warms, and warming is likely to be disproportionately happening in cold areas, then the more active they are set to become.”

    Dr Crowther said the increased activity by the organisms would mean that they would consume greater volumes of the carbon in the soil, and this would be released as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

    “It is very similar to the way we respire and produce carbon dioxide. Because there is such a huge biomass of microbes and soil animals, that respiration really can be massive,” he said.

    http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38146248

    Access to the full paper through the BBC article.

  43. Maria is back to category 5 and still on course for a direct hit on Puerto Rico, and close to San Juan. There are still debris fields around from Irma, plus areas without electricity and many aid workers and refugees from other islands there. I think it’s infrastructure is in fairly poor condition because it has basically been in a recession for the last twelve years and effectively bankrupt for the last three. Hopefully everybody is in shelter’s, the warnings have been clear enough for long enough, but the damage is going to be horrendous.

  44. For anybody interesting in learning more about weather and climate the uk met office has a pretty good site:

    https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/learn-about-the-weather

    It’s articles are short and basic but kept up to date with the latest research, and usually include a video. One of interest is:

    https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/learn-about-the-weather/how-weather-works/pacific-decadal-oscillation

    Which, with a couple of recent Met office papers, was referenced in a pretty confusing front page article in The Times yesterday (and which was quickly removed from the front of the of the electronic copy I noticed). The papers cover the supposed warming pause (which I must say I thought had been debunked through proper instrument corrections and apportioning of heat to oceans and atmosphere, but maybe not). The Metoffice puts a lot of it down to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation being in negative phase until 2014 and is now positive – hence the recent record years (it has about a ten year cycle). They actually predicted the change to faster warming in the 2013 paper, so I guess they have a right to be pleased. The PDO is like El Nino but spreads to waters in the far north. There is also an interdecadal Pacific Oscillation that is currently negative, and longer term and affects southern waters (and might turn positive soon) – the Met office has no info. on it though, it’s even less well understood than the PDO.

    If I understand things correctly if the IDPO, PDO and El Nino all went positive together (which might be on the cards in the next ten years) then atmospheric temperatures would likely be seeing significant high records, over and above the general climate warming, as heat would be released from all the Pacific ocean rather than the narrow band that El Nino impacts.

  45. From DNV GL Energy Transition Outlook (apologies if this has already been posted, it came out a couple of weeks ago).

    https://eto.dnvgl.com/2017/

    OUTLOOK: FUTURE HOLDS ENERGY MIX SHAKE-UP

    Fast-forward to 2050 and the oil and gas share of the world’s energy mix has dropped to 44% from today’s 53% as solar photovoltaic (PV), wind power and other renewable energy sources make up roughly half of the supply.
    Natural gas has become the largest single source of energy, surpassing oil, although gas supply peaked in 2035.
    The number of electric vehicles on roads has skyrocketed from less than 10% to about 90%.
    This comes as energy efficiency continues to improve with energy demand having plateaued 20 years earlier. Emissions of energy-related carbon dioxide have been sliced in half, yet the world fails in its goal to lower the Earth’s temperature. The planet’s temperature warms by 2.5 degrees C.

    https://www.epmag.com/outlook-future-holds-energy-mix-shake-1657946#p=1

    All I’d add is that if it’s 2.5 degrees up in 2050 and we’re still burning as much fuel as they say then we’re heading fo around 5 and it’s game over.

    1. A nice middle of the road future view. All energy players are happy since they all get to participate, except for coal for some reason. Still, a very strong prediction of renewable energy rise and EV’s too.

      Looks like coal fades back and oil slowly loses some ground but is still significant in 2050. Makes some sense for coal with increasing natural gas and renewable energy increases. Natural gas will be used more than currently, not sure why. Not sure why oil holds out against a background of EV use. So much for the FF cutback. Some people will wonder where all the oil came from but these guys are pros and have access to industry knowledge.

      To get to 2.5C global in 2050 we only need to add about a degree. Latest rise was at the rate of 0.4C per decade so not much of a stretch there. That would give about 3.5C in the northern cereal areas and 5C in the Arctic. NYC will be shopping for dams, levees and waders and Miami will be trying to move uphill. Too bad about all that historical structure at port level. Maybe some of it will be moved, but probably not.
      Now for a commercial break from the “it isn’t happening” and the “no way can that happen” squad.

      1. Hi Gone fishing,

        What period do you use to get 0.4C/decade? My guess is that it is very short interval which represents natural variability due to ENSO rather than a proper 30 year interval which is more representative of climate. For the past 30 years the temperature has increased at about 0.28 C per decade based on BEST land ocean data. It is unlikely that there will be enough fossil fuels to continue the rate of increase in emissions at the rate of the past 40 years. Fossil fuels are likely to peak by 2030 (all fossil fuels combined in barrels of oil equivalent), then they will become very expensive while the price of alternatives will fall in price. It is possible that fossil fuels will be nearly eliminated for energy use by 2070 even making conservative assumptions.

        The rate of increase in global temperatures of the past 30 years is unlikely to continue in the future, due to fossil fuel depletion.

  46. Fish – you might find this interesting.

    IT TAKES JUST 4 YEARS TO DETECT HUMAN WARMING OF THE OCEANS

    “Our work shows that scientists need less than 4 years of ocean heat measurements to detect a warming signal. This is much shorter than the nearly three decades of measurements that would be required to detect global warming if we were to use temperatures of air near the Earth’s surface. It is also slightly better than the nearly 5 years of sea level rise data that are needed for detecting a long-term trend. This means that the warming is not natural, but rather stems from the human-induced climate change, primarily from increases in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/sep/20/it-takes-just-4-years-to-detect-human-warming-of-the-oceans

    1. Meanwhile,

      WIND, WARM WATER REVVED UP MELTING ANTARCTIC GLACIERS

      “The speed at which the Marguerite Bay glaciers responded to a relatively small increase in ocean temperature was startling, Walker said. “We detected the warmest water first in January 2009, and by November the glaciers were already losing ice at a rate of eight meters [25 feet] per year in thickness.”

      https://phys.org/news/2017-09-revved-antarctic-glaciers.html

      1. It doesn’t take much to lubricate the slippery slope. Antarctica is not losing mass at a high rate, similar to 80 gigaton per year. However, there has been a 45% increase in the rate of loss lately, so the trajectory is greater mass loss with time.
        Antarctica is a particular problem since it is so high and cold but has most of it’s snowfall near the coasts. Added weight and increasing ocean temps could help accelerate glaciers.
        I wish that these articles would estimates for thickness and total mass of glaciers, along with approximate input from upstream glaciers. Would make a lot more sense to communicate in more detail, otherwise it’s mostly just a blurb.

    2. Thanks Doug, makes sense, especially since we now have much better ways to measure ocean heat uptake. This is important in that it removes the undetermined cloud factor and may be a way to measure the cloud factor changes or at least act as an indicator. The heat energy rise looks non-linear so far indicating an increase in radiation forcing with time. Good terrestrial measurements are key to calibrating satellite observations.
      Strange in a way though, that there is still a need to prove human interference in the atmospheric system. It’s obvious, based on hard data and hard science. The only real questions left are how much and how fast. Since only a 1 percent change in temperature is significant to the environment and humans and two percent change could be disastrous, we are looking for small changes in a system with a much larger range.

  47. Why coal’s rebound might be just a bounce down the stairs
    http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2017/09/19-coals-small-bounce
    ++++++++++++++++++++
    In the old days there was a lot of regional competition in railroading with two or more companies going to the same area or even running parallel to each other physically. When disaster struck for one railroad critical services could be run over other railroads (at a price of course) until things got repaired. When service from one carrier lagged, there was sometimes the ability to chose another. That is not really the case now, problems at one major railroad or even regional ones can be felt through much of the system now. “When one railroad gets the flu, the rest catch a cold. ”
    Breaking up is hard to do
    http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2017/09/19-csx-improves

  48. In the meantime:

    Maria Slams St. Croix, Rips Across Puerto Rico

    Ferocious Hurricane Maria made landfall around 6:15 am EDT Wednesday near Yabucoa in far southeast Puerto Rico as a top-end Category 4 storm, with peak sustained winds estimated at 155 mph.

    Maria was the second strongest hurricane ever recorded to hit Puerto Rico, behind only the 1928 San Felipe Segundo hurricane, which killed 328 people on the island and caused catastrophic damage. Puerto Rico’s main island has also been hit by two other Category 4 hurricanes, the 1932 San Ciprian Hurricane, and the 1899 San Ciriaco Hurricane.

    In terms of top sustained wind, Maria is the fifth strongest hurricane on record to hit the U.S. behind only the four Cat 5s to hit the country (Hurricane Andrew of 1992 in South Florida, Hurricane Camille of 1969 in Mississippi, the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 in the Florida Keys, and the 1928 hurricane in Puerto Rico.)
    In terms of lowest atmospheric pressure at landfall, Maria (917 mb) ranks third in U.S. records behind only the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane and Camille.
    Maria’s landfall at Category 4 strength gives the U.S. a record three Category 4+ landfalls this year (Maria, Harvey, and Irma). The previous record was two such landfalls, set in 1992 (Cat 5 Andrew in Florida, and Cat 4 Iniki in Hawaii.)

    Maria did not hit Puerto Rico as a Category 5 hurricane, thanks to an eyewall replacement cycle (ERC) that began on Tuesday night. The storm’s “pinhole” eye, less than 10 miles wide, was supplemented by an outer eyewall that contracted around the smaller one. The process helped lead to the slight weakening of Maria’s top winds, but it also likely broadened its core of winds topping 100 mph.

    1. The sick thing is how all these major hurricanes, Harvey, Irma, Maria, have been manmade thru scalar wave frequency pulses. Everyone should watch this amazing you tube,
      https://youtu.be/FiW6OKPIWkk?t=24m7s they even laugh about the big hurricane (they) created.

  49. How a small change in climate can have a large effect. Averages are not that important, it’s in how the distribution shifts and that can be much more important to us here on the ground (or in the ocean).

    For illustration, let’s take the most simple case of a normal distribution that is shifted towards the warm end by a given amount – say one standard deviation. Then, a moderately extreme temperature that is 2 standard deviations above the mean becomes 4.5 times more likely (see graph below). But a seriously extreme temperature, that is 5 standard deviations above the mean, becomes 90 times more likely! Thus: the same amount of global warming boosts the probability of really extreme events, like the recent US heat wave, far more than it boosts more moderate events.

    http://www.countercurrents.org/rahmstorf270312.htm

    1. Agreed. The conclusion is that extreme events should become so much more frequent as their increase becomes statistically significant. However after 40 years of global warming, the IPCC tells us that extreme events have not become more frequent with any confidence. The IPCC thinks some of them will in the future, but 40 years of global warming is already plenty of time to assess if the effects are going in the predicted direction. Since they are not, we must conclude that either extreme events do not depend much on global warming, or the warming has been exaggerated.

        1. And this is what the IPCC AR5 says on extreme weather events:

          -“Overall, the most robust global changes in climate extremes are seen in measures of daily temperature, including to some extent, heat waves. Precipitation extremes also appear to be increasing, but there is large spatial variability”
          -“There is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century”
          -“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”
          -“In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale”
          -“In summary, there is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms because of historical data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems”
          -“In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends, and dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated. However, it is likely that the frequency and intensity of drought has increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and decreased in central North America and north-west Australia since 1950”
          -“In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low”

          After 40 years of global warming the IPCC recognizes there is no evidence linking the warming to most manifestations of extreme weather events.

          Pretty pathetic, isn’t it? We can go like this another 40 years no problem. Maybe then climate scientists will see some effects, or maybe not. Perhaps they got it wrong. Obviously this reality is not a problem for climate advocates with an agenda that feast on the disgrace of people hit by extreme weather to blame climate change and deniers.

          1. Javier, I have large amounts of data showing the increase in storm intensity, the increase in occurrence and hurricanes, the increase in energy of storms over the last few decades. I am not going to bother because with you it’s like going down a rabbit hole to a party that even the Mad Hatter would avoid.

            1. Then how do you explain the disparity between your large amounts of data and what IPCC and NOAA are saying? Are they lying to hide the severity of the climate situation, or their data is better than yours?

    2. How a small change in climate can have a large effect. Averages are not that important, it’s in how the distribution shifts and that can be much more important to us here on the ground (or in the ocean).

      And it is precisely those small changes that can cause major tipping point thresholds to be crossed resulting in a very different environment. This does not bode well for global agriculture as has been previously discussed by many of us here on this site. I guess climate change deniers either just don’t understand Chaos Theory, or they don’t want to think too hard about the implications.

      http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/sectors/agriculture

      Agriculture
      Climate disruptions to agriculture have increased. Many regions will experience declines in crop and livestock production from increased stress due to weeds, diseases, insect pests, and other climate change induced stresses.

      1. Yes, they will, will, will. But after 40 years of global warming, food production has never been so high. So 40 years of evidence indicate the opposite of what you say. I guess understanding chaos has little to do with producing food.

  50. REI exhibition: India will surpass 175 GW renewable target, says MNRE

    Anand Kumar, the secretary of India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), made a bold statement at the opening ceremony of the Renewable Energy India (REI) expo in Delhi that India can not only meet its ambitious solar targets, but surpass them.

    Under the National Solar Mission (NSM), India is aiming towards 100 GW of solar capacity installed by 2022. Currently, the country has around 17 GW of installed capacity according to the latest data from Bridge to India, and is on course to add close to 12 GW over the course of 2017.

    Even at this pace, India would struggle to meet its goal, but Kumar was bullish in his address to a packed audience.

    “Under Prime Minister Modi, we upscaled our total renewable energy target to 175 GW by 2022,” Kumar said. “This, you will all agree, is fairly ambitious target. With advancements in technology, and with price of solar and wind reducing, we are not only sure but confident that we will achieve the target, and exceed it.”

    Kumar added that in recent consultations, the MNRE has begun to take more seriously the potential of India’s offshore wind and hydropower capacities, and he strongly hinted that these technologies will be brought under the renewable energy target. It was not clear whether government would then increases the 175 GW target, or alter the share of technology goals within it.

    Currently, solar is tasked with hitting 100 GW, and wind 60 GW, of that target. Either way, Kumar spoke of India’s “silent revolution”, which will see the country rapidly scale up its electricity generation capacity and consumption. “The key challenge is: how should we enable higher energy consumption in India, at a cost people are willing to pay?” he asked, adding: “And not only willing to pay, but able to pay?”

    The path of least resistance, Kumar affirmed, is the one with the lowest carbon intensity. “India has limited fossil fuels. We depend on imports for petroleum. If we have to support and meet the demand of 1.25 billion people, then renewables are the only way.”

    India heading to 20 GW of installed capacity by the end of this financial year

    India’s total utility scale solar capacity reached to 16.2 GW in September 2017. The enormous growth is demonstrated by the fact, that 84 % of the installations were added in the last 4 quarters, in total 7.5 GW. Additionally, 10 GW of solar capacity have been allocated to developers, According to Bridge to India’s India Solar map 2017 September edition.

    1. Yes, we all know the world has warmed 0.6-0.8°C in the 20th century. What’s so terrible about it? In terms of temperatures, as with most other things, we are better now than in 1900.

      Did you know that during the Little Ice Age, in 1696, one third of the population of Finland, and >15% of Scotland died? Such was the pre-industrial climate some people miss.

      1. Sounds like they were not prepared for a minor and temporary regional climate change. Maybe they had your ancestors telling them it was not much and they should ignore the changes. Then it was too late.
        Yes, love the warmth Javier. The thousands dead from heat in southern Asia must have enjoyed it too.

        1. In this warmed world cold kills a lot more people than heat. Global warming has been saving lives since the LIA.

          Gasparrini, A., et al. “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study.” The Lancet 386, 9991 (2015): 369-375.
          http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.724.8184&rep=rep1&type=pdf

          “Our findings show that temperature is responsible for advancing a substantial fraction of deaths, corresponding to 7·71% of mortality in the selected countries within the study period. Most of this mortality burden was caused by days colder than the optimum temperature (7·29%), compared with days warmer than the optimum temperature (0·42%). Furthermore, most deaths were caused by exposure to moderately hot and cold temperatures, and the contribution of extreme days was comparatively low, despite increased RRs (Relative Risks). The study was based on the largest dataset ever collected to assess temperature–health associations, and included more than 74 million deaths from 13 countries.”

          Curiously the results are solid even for tropical countries like Brazil, where moderate cold conditions kill far more people than heat.

          1. “In this warmed world cold kills a lot more people than heat. Global warming has been saving lives since the LIA.”

            Surely it is not being suggested that it would be better if extreme heat killed more people than extreme cold?

            As a resident of the tropics I am a little concerned about extreme heat when coupled with high humidity. Last Friday, I had to do some work in an enclosed 18m x12m (60′ x 40′) tent before the air conditioners were turned on. It had rained the evening before and water had seeped along the grass under the tent so it was extremely humid inside in addition to being hot. After a few minutes inside, I was covered in sweat and the sweat was not evaporating so, to avoid hyperthermia I could only spend minutes at a time inside the tent.

            When temperatures are high it is far more noticeable after a shower of rain when the humidity is extremely high. If temperatures keep rising the way they have been, I would not be surprised to see the numbers of heat related deaths spike, especially during periods of high humidity. Access to air conditioning could become a matter of life and death.

            1. As a resident of the tropics I am a little concerned about extreme heat when coupled with high humidity.

              Then you should be happy to know that the theory predicts the highest warming at the poles (Arctic amplification) and the lowest at the tropics.

              Also sea surface temperature tops at ~ 30°C, because from ~ 27°C tropical convection starts to take place.

              This is figure 9.6 from IPCC AR4

          2. A LITTLE BIT of forced warming is one thing, and Javier may be right that in human terms, the results seen SO FAR may be positive, for humanity as a whole.

            But he appears to be totally ignorant of the basic fact that forced warming is not only real but that the effects of it are gradually ACCUMULATING, and that the effects will CONTINUE to accumulate, with a large number of KNOWN positive feedback loops.

            The actual average temperature is going to rise FASTER as more greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, and more positive feed back effects or loops come into play.

            To DENY these perfectly obvious observations is basically the same thing as to deny that physicists and engineers and even hillbilly mechanic/farmers understand their own fields of work.

            When I’m working my tractor under very dusty conditions, with lots of trash in the air, I notice that the coolant temperature gradually starts to rise as the debris accumulates on the protective screen over the radiator, and the more debris, the faster the rise, until at some point, the coolant temperature rises VERY fast, reaching the critical stage of boiling over, and potentially ruining the engine.

            The BAD effects of many bad things show up only very slowly, and get gradually worse only very slowly, in HUMAN terms, but over time, the bad effects ACCUMULATE and begin to FEED ON THEMSELVES, and then the overall situation deteriorates quickly.

            A prime example is that eating a modern conventional American diet with lots of sugar, highly processed foods, etc, doesn’t actually do much if any harm, SHORT TERM.

            The food INDUSTRY, ( NOT farmers as such ) is fond of pointing out how big and tall we are as the result of eating this diet, lol.

            But anybody who knows shit from apple butter knows that the mid term and LONG term consequences of such a diet are a DISASTER, resulting in epidemic obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular troubles out the ying yang, etc, and that the LONGER you stay on the diet, the FASTER the effects accumulate, until it KILLS you.

            Javier totally disregards the precautionary principle, which is all the evidence I will ever need to understand that he is either a troll, or incompetent.

            I add these simple real world analogies because they will be far easier understood by any reader who has not taken a few courses in the basic sciences. That’s MOST people.

            1. Yep, probably too dumb to get out of the way of an oncoming bus. It’s in the future right? Most people are killed by heart attacks, cancer and cars right, so buses are not a problem right?
              Love the illogic.

    1. Re: The Thirteenth Tipping Point

      Tks, its a good read but apparently not much has changed for the better since that article was written 11 years ago. Most Americans still seem to think they are god’s gift to the planet.

      LOL! Cockroaches, have been here 300 million years and counting and Spinner Dolphins 50 million years on the planet, both have evolved mutually beneficial altruism for their common good.

      Homo sapiens imbecilicus, has been here, what? maybe 200 thousand years?
      We certainly seem to lack the basic wisdom that evolution has conveyed on the lowly cockroach and the wise dolphins. Maybe if we check back in another 50 million years things will have changed for the better…

      1. Maybe we should redefine the word intelligence to include doing things that actually work over the long term.

        1. Either that or we could show a little humility and try to learn a lesson or two from the lowly cockroach’s 300 million years of experience in survival. They’ve been hanging around through some pretty major changes during all that time. The way things are going they might just be around for another 300 million while we bite the dust before completing our first 300 thousand.

          BTW, a bit of entomological trivia:

          Termites have long been accepted to be closely related to cockroaches and mantids, and they are classified in the same superorder (Dictyoptera). Strong evidence suggests termites are highly specialised wood-eating cockroaches.

          So it’s probably not too surprising that since termites are highly social insects, cockroaches have evolved altruistic tendencies that benefit large groups of them all living in close proximity to each other.

          Giraffe dwarfed by 2000 year old termite mound.
          .

          1. World’s within world’s within worlds. The human view is narrow human-centric and when it comes down to it we are just animals. As animals we do not see much of the world. We cooperate with each other to a large degree but are also destructive to most other species as well as to ourselves. Maybe being very flexible and intelligent as well as manipulative will not work out. Maybe the test of time is upon us and we are just entering a down cycle. The true depth of a species is how it handles the difficult times, too bad we made things very difficult for ourselves and most of the other species as well.
            “We are all in this together.” has never been more appropriate than now.
            See you Fred, it’s been fun, at least with you. I know at least you and Doug understood where I was coming from and why. Wish we could have actually met.

            1. Yep, I have several important projects coming up now that need a lot of attention and time. If I come across anything really interesting I will drop it in, but will probably not be part of the discussion (not that there is much with all the trolling that goes on and the agenda beating).

            2. “We are all in this together.” has never been more appropriate than now.
              See you Fred, it’s been fun, at least with you. I know at least you and Doug understood where I was coming from and why. Wish we could have actually met.

              Agreed! When the ice age arrives in Miami, I’ll be building those geodesic ice igloos…

              Cheers!

  51. How (Not) to Run a Modern Society on Solar and Wind Power Alone

    First, we could count on a backup infrastructure of dispatchable fossil fuel power plants to supply electricity when there’s not enough renewable energy available. Second, we could oversize the renewable generation capacity, adjusting it to the worst case scenario. Third, we could connect geographically dispersed renewable energy sources to smooth out variations in power production. Fourth, we could store surplus electricity for use in times when solar and/or wind resources are low or absent.

    As we shall see, all of these strategies are self-defeating on a large enough scale, even when they’re combined. If the energy used for building and maintaining the extra infrastructure is accounted for in a life cycle analysis of a renewable power grid, it would be just as CO2-intensive as the present-day power grid

    Before the Industrial Revolution, both industry and transportation were largely dependent on intermittent renewable energy sources. The variability in the supply was almost entirely solved by adjusting energy demand. For example, windmills and sailing boats only operated when the wind was blowing.”

    100 Percent Wishful Thinking: The Green-Energy Cornucopia

    “Serious energy scholars who publish analyses that expose the idea’s serious weaknesses risk being condemned as stooges of the petroleum industry or even as climate deniers…

    Most scenarios assumed unprecedented and deeply unrealistic improvements in energy efficiency… Because the chief renewable technologies, wind and solar, fluctuate continuously in their output and regularly drop to zero output, they must be backed up with large supplies of ‘base load’ electricity if all demand is to be met without interruption; no studies managed this without ecologically destructive levels of biomass burning or wildly unrealistic estimates of hydroelectric output…

    The Loftus group found several of the same weaknesses in the studies they examined… They concluded that it would be ‘premature and highly risky to ‘bet the planet’ ‘ on the achievement of scenarios like those…

    Finally, all production of wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and especially hydroelectric energy has an ecological impact on the landscapes where it occurs. So if we are to halt our degradation and destruction of the Earth’s natural ecosystems, it will be necessary to declare large areas off-limits to the energy sector.

    Moriarty and Honnery show that given all of these factors, expansion of renewable energy will hit a brick wall, a point at which as much energy is required to install and operate electric facilities as they will end up generating in their operating lifetimes…

    Herculean quantities of physical and mental labor power will have been expended, boundless physical resources (including vast tonnages of fossil fuels) will have been consumed, and countless entire ecosystems across the Earth’s surface will have been sacrificed to generate more electricity. All of that would make for a pretty grim world… [and] there’s no reason to expect that other problems, including enormous distortions in economic and political power and quality of life, along with racial and ethnic oppression, would have been solved

    If our hope is to deploy solar and wind capacity that maintains indefinitely the current throughput of energy in the world’s affluent societies, then, yes, the situation is hopeless. But there can be other hopes that, although they’re looking dim for now, are at least within reach: that greenhouse warming can be limited sufficiently to allow communities around the world who are currently impoverished and oppressed to improve their lives; that access to food, water, shelter, safety, culture, nature, and other necessities becomes sufficient for all; or that exploitation and oppression of humans and nature be brought to an end.”

    1. “Because the chief renewable technologies, wind and solar, fluctuate continuously in their output and regularly drop to zero output, they must be backed up with large supplies of ‘base load’ electricity if all demand is to be met without interruption; no studies managed this without ecologically destructive levels of biomass burning or wildly unrealistic estimates of hydroelectric output…”

      That is BS. You do not need (expensive) base load as back-up.

      BTW: Fraunhofer Institutes have simulated some nice stuff, which contradicts the nonsense you post. 🙂

      BTW: What is your alternative? You still dodge this interesting question? or could it be that you have no realistic plans?

      1. Hi Ulenspiegel,

        Yep, sufficient unto the day are the problems thereof, and while we may never have an industrial civilization based on renewable energy, we sure as hell aren’t going to have one long term based on fossil fuels.

        So if one is actually concerned with continuing to actually LIVE, and seeing his kids and grand kids LIVE, we need to be doing whatever we can to transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, because even if we fail to make a fully successful transition, we sure can at least stretch out and supplement our fossil fuel endowment at least a generation or two .

        AFTER THAT……. who knows?

        But peeing and moaning that nothing will work, and therefore that nothing can be done, is absolutely no help at all.

        Caelan ought to go someplace as far from so called civilization as he can get, and start a school teaching the hunter gatherer way of life.

        Nobody actually KNOWS what the future will be like. But assuming life continues more or less as usual, we have an excellent chance of leaving this world in better shape generation after generation, not only for us naked apes but for all other species as well, IF the cards fall in such a way as to inspire and sufficiently motivate us to actually DO SO.

        We know enough NOW to know how to control our own numbers, and how to live well without mucking up the environment, once we reduce our numbers sufficiently, or Mother Nature reduces our numbers FOR us.

        Speaking as a PRACTICAL observer of the political scene, I hope Mother Nature delivers a CONTINUING SERIES of what I refer to as Pearl Harbor Wake Up Events, natural disasters equivalent to a muggers brick upside our collective human head.

        Pearl Harbor events are ones that HURT, that do a LOT of harm, enough to get our ATTENTION, but not enough to cripple us in terms of our ability to respond to them.

        There is ZERO doubt in my mind that they will be arriving, and that they will be coming faster and faster, and that they are going to hurt more and more as time passes.

        The question is whether we are collectively smart enough to respond to them, by setting aside our tribal differences, and working together on them.

        We’re already deep into overshoot, and there’s hardly anything at all we can do now that we are actually likely to do to prevent tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people from dying very hard over the coming decades as the result of famine, epidemic disease, and violence up to and including hot war over the next few decades as the result of changing climate and localized overpopulation.

        It’s possible that the entire planetary economy and ecology could collapse, and it might, especially if helped along by WWIII, but it probably WON’T, from my perspective.

        What’s far more likely to happen, in my opinion, based on my own professional background , is that collapse will be localized, taking place in small areas such as Haiti, and in larger ones such as the Indian subcontinent, depending on how long it is until a really big time drought ( etc) hits, wiping out the local production of food.

        If I’m right, things might be pretty much ok in the USA, but could go entirely to to hell in Mexico. We would be able to feed and shelter our own people if drought takes out the southwestern quarter of the country for instance, although few people would call that “OK”, lol. But it would be a trivial problem for us, compared to the problem for smaller, poorer countries that might be ENTIRELY located within a super drought event.

        Will it get hot enough to threaten the WORLD food supply, on a global basis? It might, but probably not before it wipes out the food supply on a LOCAL basis in many separate places, and probably not for some time yet.

        We could cut out most of our consumption of beef and pork and get rid of half our dogs that eat better than half of humanity anyway, and do ok with half the total amount of stuff leaving our farms today. We WILL, if we MUST, later.

        And we would be all the healthier, and happier, after realizing how MUCH healthier we would be, as the result of doing so.

        Too much of any good thing destroys our appreciation of it. One steak a week or every two weeks is a treat, one every day is no more enjoyable than pinto beans with a little fat back.

        Will the rest of the world be ABLE to feed three our four hundred million people who find themselves starving on short notice, and WILLING to do so?

        Maybe. Right now the necessary reserves of staples needed are JUST BARELY THERE, and using them up would put the countries that have them at risk at home, and it takes an absolute minimum of a year to substantially ramp up production of any primary food such as wheat, corn, rice, or soybeans.

        And who would pay?

        1. Good questions.

          It would be an interesting exercise to look at the world’s total agricultural production, and calculate how many people it could feed if we reduced by 90% the production of meat AND all the things that are not needed in a certain sense: decorative plants (lawn grass, flowers, christmas trees, etc), ethanol (drinking and motoring), coffee, coca, cacao, poppies, tobacco, marijuana, etc., etc. Then factor in a reduction from the current average levels of per capita calories, that create obesity, to healthy levels (which are probably 25% lower).

          I suspect we could reduce current ag production by 70% and still have enough for the current population.

          1. Hi Nick,

            You might be right, it might be possible we could actually get by with a third or a little more of our total agricultural production, if we could do all the things you suggest.

            My own opinion though is that there is a near zero chance of putting such measures as you suggest into effect on a global basis, or even on a national basis except maybe in a country mired nose deep in a long term famine.

            When I said “half”, I intended it as a conversational, rather than a specific factual statement.

            Somebody may have done some research on this subject, but I have never looked for it, except as it applies to a given locality.

            Coming up with a realistic answer would be one hell of a job, requiring the gathering of mountains of statistics that might not be all that reliable anyway, and tons of computer time to crunch the numbers, and THEN…….

            The answer would still be only as good as the assumptions you make before you even begin to crunch the data. I believe I could make a good argument that ANY set of assumptions presented to me would be highly questionable at the very least, but having even a very rough estimate would be good, as it would allow us to have a deeper insight into the problem and possible solutions.

            I’m not a nutritionist by any means, but I know without a doubt that you can grow up big and tall and strong and live a very long time on a diet consisting almost entirely of veggies, fruit, and grain or beans, so long as you get a minimal amount of high quality protein- and that can come from the right combination of nuts, soybeans, rice, corn, and so forth, but getting it that way can be tricky. A little meat and dairy is damned good for you. Too much is damned bad.

      1. He is a known liar and manipulator.

        Here you have the data:
        http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E11.html

        Data is biased low before 1966 due to poor coverage and reporting
        “Beginning in 1966, daily satellite imagery became available at the National Hurricane Center, and thus statistics from this time forward are most complete (McAdie et al. 2009).”

        The year with most major hurricanes was 1950, when there were eight.
        The year with highest Accumulated Cyclone Energy was 1933.

        You know catastrophic-climate propositions are fake when they start lying about the data.

        This is what IPCC AR5 says:
        “Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”

        These are the NOAA graphs from that link.

        1. So according to the data (all in the data base in the above link) doesn’t confirm the Cat 5 data?
          Aside from being a climate denier, you now deny math?

        2. “He is a known liar and manipulator.”

          Words from the arch cherry picker of data.
          Pot, kettle.

          NAOM

      2. Look at the data.
        It is all there to view,

        Atlantic HURDAT database goes back to 1851

        1. The methods available now to measure hurricane strength are in a completely different league than what was available 50, 100, 150 years ago. Back then, hurricane strength was primarily measured by damage at landfall. Most hurricanes, however, don’t make landfall when they are at the strongest point in their lifetimes, and plenty of strong hurricanes never make landfall at all. For those latter storms, the only way of measuring anything was with ship reports, but, for obvious reasons, maritime traffic tries to stay as far away as possible from the center of hurricanes.

          The point is, there’s just no way to accurately count the number of category 5 hurricanes before about the 1960s.

    1. Hightrekker – I was interested to see if those numbers were just because the NHC / NOAA HURDAT data set used had missing data which accounted for the numbers more than a real trend. But I think it is real trend. This paper from 2011 gives a more detailed analysis if you are interested (full text can be dowloaded):

      https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijge/2011/259529/abs/

      Observed Change in Sahel Rainfall, Circulations, African Easterly Waves, and Atlantic Hurricanes
      Since 1979

      The chart below shows all tropical cyclones and intense ones separated out. I took the lists from wikipedia and extended them out through this year below.

      1. This is my chart (for hurricanes only) with a short data set it can get skewed by a few big years like 2005, but this year may continue the trend higher the way it is going.

          1. I’m surprised MSM broadcast that.
            They let him have more that a few soundbites.

            1. Well, first of all it’s not Fox News, it’s MSNBC (a communist network 😉 ).

              Secondly, stranger things do happen, like the other day I stumbled upon a group of Republicans, calling themselves republicEns. From the “About” page on their web site:

              Who we are

              We are 3617 Americans educating the country about free-enterprise solutions to climate change.

              Members of republicEn are conservatives, libertarians, and pragmatists of diverse political opinion. We stand together because we believe in American free enterprise. We believe that with a true level playing field, free enterprise can deliver the innovation to solve climate change. But America’s climate policy needs to change. Change requires that conservative leaders step-up and lead.

              Climate change is real and we believe it’s our duty and our opportunity to reduce the risks. But to make a difference, we have to fight climate change with free enterprise instead of ineffective subsidies and regulations.

              3,617 down, a few million to go! The Koch brothers are sure as hell going to do their damnedest to ensure that none of these 3617 ever get their name on a ballot! Sad!

  52. Maria Back Over Water After Devastating Hit to Puerto Rico

    After making landfall in southeast Puerto Rico near 6:15 am Wednesday as a top-end Category 4 storm with 155 mph winds, Hurricane Maria finished a devastating pummeling of the island near 1:30 pm, when its eye emerged over the ocean off the northwest coast. An Air Force hurricane hunter aircraft found that Maria’s 70-mile traverse of Puerto Rico had knocked the top winds of the storm down to 110 mph by 5 pm Wednesday, making it a high-end Category 2 hurricane. Satellite images show the hurricane is still well-organized, though, and the Hurricane Hunters found that Maria’s pressure was falling again late Wednesday afternoon: 957 mb at 5 pm, compared to a 961 mb reading at 2 pm. Maria will continue to bring dangerous torrential rains and powerful winds to Puerto Rico and the eastern Dominican Republic into Thursday.

    Maria brought extreme rainfall amounts to large portions of Puerto Rico that caused record or near-record flash flooding. Numerous stations in Puerto Rico recorded rainfall amounts in excess of ten inches. Rainfall amounts in excess of 47 inches in 24 hours were recorded at three stations on the southwest side of El Yunque, the high mountainous area in the northeast corner of Puerto Rico; these are so extreme as to be unbelievable, and the gauges may have been impacted by flash flooding, or by a callibration problem at extreme precipitaion rates:

    96.65” at Quebrada Arenas, including 67.75” in one hour ending at 6 am.
    72.07” at Barrio Montones, including 34.04” in one hour ending at 8:45 am.
    47.25” at Rio Valenciano, including 19.66” in one hour ending at 7:11 am.

    These rainfall amounts would break virtually every world record for precipitation, and are highly likely to be in error. Water levels at the Rio Gurabo at Gurabo, where the nearby Gurabo Abajo rain gauge recorded 23.64” of rain in less than 24 hours, jumped by 27 feet in less than 12 hours (see Figure 2), so that rainfall amount is believable.

    An island-wide power outage in Puerto Rico

    Not since the great Category 5 1928 San Felipe Segundo hurricane has Puerto Rico experienced a hurricane catastrophe as extreme as that wrought by Hurricane Maria. The storm’s powerful winds caused catastrophic damage to the island’s power grid, knocking out power to 100% of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million residents. In the Virgin Islands, there was also heavy damage on St. Croix, and serious flooding has been reported on St. Thomas. Maria is almost assured to be the most expensive hurricane in Puerto Rico history, and may challenge Hurricane Hugo (1989) and Irma (2 weeks ago) as the most expensive hurricane on record for the U.S. Virgin Islands.

    One wonders if 2017 is going to be a record year for costs from natural disasters. Surely it’s got a chance as far as the Caribbean is concerned. Not sure about the situation globally.

  53. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/manafort-offered-to-give-russian-billionaire-private-briefings-on-2016-campaign/2017/09/20/399bba1a-9d48-11e7-8ea1-ed975285475e_story.html?utm_term=.9ca404eb0c54

    This is a fairly long article, and it goes into substantial detail, and I think anybody who reads it will have to agree with me that it’s looking like the chances of getting rid of Trump are getting better all the time, and are now at least good enough to be taken seriously. The odds of a lot of R’s in swing districts or states losing their seats are now EXCELLENT as the result of Mueller’s investigation.

    I’m not getting much help from old HB in pointing out just how rotten the Trump administration actually IS, but maybe he has come to the realization that the FBI takes such things SERIOUSLY as setting up home brew secret email systems and then wiping half the contents while holding high federal office rather than using the proper government supplied and hopefully properly protected systems provided at no cost to the user, lol.

    Comey was going for Trump’ ass, no doubt about it, and would have gotten a huge chunk of it had Trump not fired him which was a colossal mistake on Trump’s part.

    Mueller now has all the tools Comey had, times three, plus he has the FIRE in his belly, and his TEAM has the fire in the belly as well, with every thing they have stood for as honorable law enforcement men on the line to be proven.

    They will prove that they go after R’s just the same as they do D’s, lol. They’ve proven it already.

    And while I understand WHY so many D’s are pissed about Comey allowing late breaking news about Clinton’s homey girl what’s her name having official business on her personal computer accessible to her pervert husband, etc, I’m wondering how many of these pissed D’s ever give any serious consideration to the fact that the PUBLIC, meaning all potential voters, have a RIGHT to such information, given that part of the issue is whether HRC did in fact put the security of the country on the line so as to hide her sneaky dealings from public view.

    It takes an utterly naive true believer to believe that she didn’t wipe that server MOSTLY to hide things she didn’t want the public to ever know about her tenure as secretary of state and her business dealings with low life people doing business with the state department. Hells bells, there was fucking ZERO reason for even HAVING it in the first place, for any OTHER reason. Convenience my ass.

    If a REPUBLICAN had done the same thing and claimed the same justification, the D’s who continue to defend HRC would be ROLLING on the floor laughing.

    Hypocrites and cynics, right HB?

  54. Global temperatures have been decreasing already for the past 19 months, as the effects of the strong 2014-2016 El Niño dwindle.

    Looking forward, the cold conditions in the tropical Pacific that have prompted a La Niña watch, the low solar activity, and the easterly Quasi-Biennial Oscillation phase, make probable a continuation of the downward trend at least into the spring of 2018.

    1. Yabut if you look at the data from early January 2017 to late January 2017 there is a very clear upward trend.

      Yep, Javier was cherry picking his years again.

      NAOM

      1. Harvey: Cat 1 to Cat 4 in 24 hours
        Irma: Cat 3 to Cat 5 in 24 hours
        Jose: Cat 1 to Cat 4 in 24 hours
        Maria: Cat 1 to Cat 4 in 12 hours, and Cat 1 to Cat 5 in 15 hours

        “Most of the rapid intensification records for major Atlantic hurricanes were set by 2005’s phenomenal Hurricane Wilma. However, Maria has tied Wilma for the fastest vault from tropical depression to Cat 5 hurricane (54 hours)”

    2. Hi Javier,

      Interesting that you would choose a model (CFSR is model based), when you consistently claim the models are all wrong?

      You should not believe the data in that chart as it is model based if you were being consistent.

      http://cfs.ncep.noaa.gov/cfsr/docs/

      Better to use NOAA data, if you don’t believe the models.

      However if you like CFSR, the trend from 1979 to 2016 has been 1.4 C per century.

      If we use the JRA-55 reanalysis (from 1958-2013) to find the trend for 1958-1978, we find only 0.18 C per century over that period (likely due to aerosol emissions and natural variability).

      Longer term reanalyses such as 20CR V2c (1871-2010), a 2nd Generation reanalysis show a long term trend from 1900-1979 of 0.7 C per century, so the rate of warming has roughly doubled from the pre-satellite era (before 1980) to after.

      The data can be found for those interested at

      http://cci-reanalyzer.org/reanalysis/monthly_tseries/

      1. Using actual empirical data rather than relying on models we find that from 1900-1979 the temperature trend was about 0.5 C per century and from 1980-2016, about 1.7 C per century, so roughly 3 times higher a rate of temperature increase in recent years relative to 1900-1979 using NCDC data from the NOAA.

        https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land_ocean/all/6/1880-2017.csv?trend=true&trend_base=10&firsttrendyear=1880&lasttrendyear=2017

        Also using the NOAA data for Jan 2014 to August 2017 the temperature trend is 5 C per century.

        I realize however that using such a short interval tells us very little about climate and more about the weather. 🙂

        Using a more sensible period of 30 years (Sept 1987 to August 2017) the temperature trend is 1.8 C per century. This is fairly close to the 50 year trend of 1.7 C per century from Sept 1967 to August 2017. The 50 years prior to this (Sept 1917 to August 1967) the temperature trend was 0.5 C per century. Over three times lower than the recent 50 year period.

      2. Hi Dennis,

        Interesting that you would choose a model (CFSR is model based), when you consistently claim the models are all wrong?

        I don’t have a general opinion on models. Models have to be contrasted with real evidence to see how well they perform. You and I know that climate reanalysis models track very well measurements by other means, among other things because they include measurements by other means. A weather prediction is produced every few hours and contrasted with weather measurements afterwards. Climate models have nowhere near that level of scrutiny, and when wrong they are defended instead of corrected.

        Reanalysis before 1970’s, can’t be trusted much as much of the data was simply unavailable or low quality, but temperature trends are very sensitive to the choice of starting and ending points, so if you choose 1900-1979 you get two periods of cooling and one period of warming and the result is a lower rate of warming that doesn’t indicate warming acceleration. To analyze warming acceleration you have to look at rate of warming (first derivative of temperatures over time), not temperatures. The warming acceleration is the rate of change of the warming rate.

        The figure I showed is quite clear. There is a clear periodic component that explains most of the rate of warming variability. The positive rate of warming hasn’t changed much. It is the negative rate of warming (rate of cooling) that has changed most. The rate of cooling has decreased.

        An extrapolation of the data predicts low warming ahead. You have been warned.

  55. Zeke Hausfather runs in defense of models and utterly fails in a laughable way.

    https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/910454958998224897/photo/1

    He sets his defense in the best possible terms, by using model runs with RCP 4.5 scenario. If that is the case we are doing really well in limiting emissions, as this is the second lowest emission scenario, except that we don’t. Globally we aren’t limiting much our emissions. He then excludes satellite measurements so they don’t spoil the party.

    He concludes that “climate model projections agree quite well with observed temperatures.” Except they don’t. Even under this cherry picked test if models and observations did agree, then temperatures should be above the model average between 30-70% of the time. However since 1997 temperatures have only been above the average mean during the very strong 1998 and 2016 Los Niños.

    Somehow models believe we are stuck in very strong El Niño conditions, even with lower emissions than we have experienced, and some scientists call this “agreeing quite well.” Laughable. As very strong El Niño events are rare, they should look forward to another 20 years of model/observation disagreement.

    1. Hi Javier,

      You call a chart using 46 years of data cherry picking? Can you explain what you mean by cherry picking, perhaps in Spanish the meaning is different?

      If a longer range had been presented, it would be clear that over many periods the models either under estimate or over estimate global temperatures (over the instrumental era from 1850 to the present).

      This is due to natural variability. The supposed 60-70 year cycles proposed by some cannot be confirmed by only 160 years of data. No physical mechanism has been proposed for these cycles so they amount to curve fitting and tell us little.

      1. Here is the chart for 1860-2100. Notice there are many periods when the climate models both underestimate or over estimate global temperature. Your expectation that the models will be perfect for such a complex system is unlikely to ever be met.

        Nobody knows what future temperatures will be, but it is likely that they will fall in the 95% confidence interval of the models about 95% of the time over 100 year intervals.

      2. Hi Dennis,

        He has picked a most favorable RCP than used when making scary predictions, and he has picked temperature datasets that show the highest warming. Try comparing RCP 8.5 to satellite datasets to get a quite different picture. Skeptics have been saying all along that RCP 8.5 was unrealistic while every catastrophe advocate kept using it to predict a horrible future, and then when our thesis that models run too hot becomes evident, then all of a sudden they start using the lower emission scenarios to say that models are fine.

        1. Hi Javier,

          But when looking at models vs data over the short term there is very little difference between RCP4.5 an RCP 8.5 about 10 Gt higher for the latter from 1800 to 2016 (in other words, negligible). Several different data sets were used, the satellite data does not have a long enough history to be compared with 1850-1869 temperatures. The longer term chart shows the models often are above or below actual temperatures, nobody except you expects perfection from these models. 🙂

          1. Hi Dennis,

            Yes, of course, tomorrows data is the same under all scenarios, but the important thing is that RCP 4.5 is an scenario that stabilizes at +2°C if you believe models (I don’t). That it is the one chosen to compare to observations conveys a powerful message that acknowledges that models run too hot, as skeptics have been saying all along.

            Nobody expects perfection from these models, but if the models are not performing they should acknowledge it, stop making predictions from them, and go back to fix them. A model that only fits observations during very strong El Niño events is a useless model.

    2. Hi Javier,

      The satellite temperature measurements depend on models, they can’t be trusted 🙂

      Through 2016 the RCP4.5 scenario has the second largest emissions of the four scenarios and is most likely to match long term emissions due to fossil fuel depletion. The satellite measurements also have a very short history so they are not very useful for looking at changes in temperature since 1860. I imagine including them with Cowton et el and Berkeley Earth estimates would change very little.

      1. Hi Dennis,

        As I showed you satellite temperatures are confirmed by other techniques, like global positioning system radio occultation.

        You and I know RCP 8.5 is bonkers, but that is not what has been told when trying to scare people. James Hansen uses RCP 8.5 in his famous sea level article.

        It is good to see progress in my direction. Scientists recognize models run too hot and we have more time. They recognize observations should be compared to 4.5, not to 8.5.

        With enough time skeptics will be vindicated after being vilified.

        1. Hansen believes there is a lot of coal that might be extracted, or he did a few years ago. We don’t really know the size of fossil fuel resources and many biologists disagree with your assertion that there cannot be too much warming, maybe 2 C will not be catastrophic, but we do not know what climate sensitivity is and assertions that we know it must be very low don’t jibe very well with a temperature change of 3.6 C or more with an increase in atmospheric CO2 of only 44% from LGM to HCO (about 180 ppm to 260 ppm). Much of this was due to a big change in albedo as ice sheets melted, but there is much that is not understood about climate. So we have an ESS of 6.8 C for a world with large ice sheets, if 3 C is the ECS then other effects add 3.8 C to the ESS. Today ice sheets are about one tenth the size of the LGM in the Northern Hemisphere, if all of the 3.8 C was due to ice sheets alone (probably incorrect) then today perhaps this is only one tenth as much or 0.38 plus 3 for an ESS of 3.4 C, this is likely to be too low 4.5 C is a more reasonable estimate. In any case 520 ppm of atmospheric CO2 is pretty likely (under my medium fossil fuel scenario) which suggests over the short term (400 years) about 2.7 C of warming. To do better than this will require a fast transition from fossil fuels to alternatives, if one assumes keeping the temperature rise to under 2 C is a good idea (which I do, but you seem to disagree). I also believe our lack of understanding about the complex Earth system means that the larger the change in temperature the higher the risk of unforeseen consequences.

          1. we do not know what climate sensitivity is and assertions that we know it must be very low don’t jibe very well with a temperature change of 3.6 C or more with an increase in atmospheric CO2 of only 44% from LGM to HCO (about 180 ppm to 260 ppm)

            You are getting it wrong. That doesn’t demonstrate a high ECS, but that deglaciation is not driven by CO2, that just came along for the Milankovitch ride, and nobody knows how much it contributed to deglaciation, but probably not much.

            which suggests over the short term (400 years) about 2.7 C of warming.

            Full of unproven assumptions. In 400 years the world might be cooling again and below present temperatures. That’s what cycle analysis predicts.

    1. It is possible that some of the rain-gauges were overwhelmed and gave false readings. There is a bit on this at Wunderground.

      NAOM

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