Please post comments not directly related to Petroleum in this thread.
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251 thoughts to “Open Thread, Non-Petroleum Dec. 13, 2016”
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Please post comments not directly related to Petroleum in this thread.
Thanks
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Grab a favorite drink, grab a comfy seat, because it’s time for… Cae’s Power Pak™!
The Farm as a Thermodynamic System: Implications of the Maximum Power Principle
The maximum power principle predicts the outcomes of two-species competition experiments
Thanks, Watcher…
With regard to power and a clearer picture of it from a global standpoint, it would seem to pay to pay attention to land-size (geopolitical/national level); energy amounts per geopolitical area (including food production and capacity of that and general power amounts per capita); access (by force, proxy wars, destabilization/arms-‘dumping’, and/or other means like trade agreements) to energy; capacities to protect and/or build and/or plunder energy sources and infrastructure; overall national EROEI (who’s got the highest?); money manipulations/power (petrodollar?); media propaganda (for ideologically ‘pushing’ the rest of society toward ‘the max power’ and the capacity to do so… consider the recent ‘fake news’ issue by the legacy mainstream media); false flag ops/coups, etc.; false and misleading statistics; Jeffrey J. Brown’s Export Land Model; and so on.
Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump – The Washington Post
I’m glad this is being done. A backup of the data out-of-country has been needed for a long time. Same with pretty much any EPA pollution data.
Predicting changes in climate patterns from local weather patterns makes a lot of sense since the only thing that actually happens is weather. Climate is average sets of weather over a long period. Using less computation power
“Scientists measure impact of local weather on global climate patterns
Scientists usually study weather as a consequence of global climate patterns — an output rather than an input. But new research by scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is a reminder that weather can be analyzed as both a cause and an effect.
Researchers at PNNL built a computer model to measure the impact of local weather conditions on global climate patterns. Scientists hope building “upscale” connections between weather and climate will improve the accuracy of global models.
As their new model revealed, rain, storm clouds and local turbulence can influence air patterns in another hemisphere. Local weather can shift jet streams and reroute storms on the other side of the globe.”
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/12/13/Scientists-measure-impact-of-local-weather-on-global-climate-patterns/7391481644101/
link to research paper contained in article
Energy Dept refuses to name staffers who worked on climate | TheHill: ‘They have no wish to be caught up in political winds — they are nonpartisan employees — scientists, engineers, statisticians, economists and financial experts — who were hired for their knowledge and they bring their talent and experience to the job every day,’ he said, adding that the union ‘will do all it can to ensure that merit system rules are followed.
Laws and regulations regarding civil service workers make it illegal to fire or punish workers for political purposes, even when an administration changes.”
The Trump Administration’s mandate is likely to include cooperation with Congress to create a modern Hoover Commission able to investigate the justification of any and all government departments and programs. Once complete, Trump’s team can complete a thorough overhaul of the federal government. Many DC bureaucrats will lose their jobs, entire agencies will shut down (Department of Energy is one of the biggest targets), but such is the price to pay when you neglect your job duties to engage in pushing leftist political ideology.
Lol thanks for coming out Nancy!
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter”~ Winston Churchill
Lol thanks for coming out Nancy!
I don’t get it? What is this supposed to mean?
I just read this piece at Clean Technica.
It sounds almost too good to be true, but it still has the ring of truth to it, to my ear. I really think this guy has the hots for his Tesla S, lol.
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/13/tesla-model-s-long-term-review-year-1-summary-cleantechnica-exclusive/
Of course a car that costs as much as a Tesla S ought to also do the dishes and take out the trash as well…… but I wouldn’t be too surprised to see Musk selling household robots as well, within a few more years.
The super charger network is real, the car is real, the performance is real, and so far it appears that the S will last as long as any other car, and maybe a LOT longer.
IF the price of the big old batteries needed in pure electric cars does fall by half within the next four or five years, the ever loving ever super optimistic scientifically illiterate ( most of them, apparently) economists may be right once again, maybe we really can just substitute electricity for gasoline, lol.
Considered from my working class pov, the range issue is really a NON ISSUE, for at least one third to one half and maybe as much as two thirds or so of the new car market, ONCE the public gets used to the idea that not every car NEEDS to have a three or four hundred mile range with the option of pumping a tank of gas and going another three or four hundred.
Almost everybody with two cars or more cars can VERY easily get by with one being a pure electric, or plug in hybrid, that has a range of as little as fifty or sixty miles on juice.
And right at this very minute, I know at least five or six people personally who would be GLAD to own a raggedy ass old Leaf that will go on only forty or so miles on a charge, if it were otherwise in good working order- because they are VERY short of money , but still have to drive twenty plus miles round trip to work.
There are at least ten or twenty million people in this country in this same situation, probably twice that many, who REALLY NEED a really cheap running car so they CAN work.Millions more just need a car that will go forty miles or so occasionally, such as yours truly. One trip a week generally covers my need to shop for everything I buy in the way of food, medicine, and other stuff. The truck is for days when I need to haul stuff, sometimes daily, sometimes only once in a couple of weeks. IF I need to go a long way, I could drive the truck, which is a gas hog, but I seldom need to go very far these days, and I could get by just fine with an electric car with a range of only forty to fifty miles.
It’s one thing to talk about urbanization, and everybody moving to down town, or telecommuting, but reality is DIFFERENT. If I had RW’s way with words, I would write this up the way he writes up the use of coal, it’s just simply our day to day reality that we burn coal, and it will CONTINUE to be our day to day reality that we burn it, for some years to come.It’s reality that we will by and large continue to live where we live NOW and continue to work where we work NOW, and this reality will hold for quite some time yet.
So – I read his comments on coal as poking a little fun at the starry eyed souls who have allowed themselves to float away dreaming about giant solar and wind farms that don’t YET exist, and WON’T , for some years to come.
Most of us simply cannot AFFORD to move closer to our work. Most of us are NOT going to be telecommuting. And most of our jobs are going to stay pretty much where they are now, for quite some time, unless they are shipped overseas or disappear altogether.
Paraphrasing Twain, and Ron P, ” The death of suburbia has been greatly exaggerated.”
A mass migration from the burbs to the city is just not in the cards, but peak oil IS. Switching out one or two cars out of every three for a plug in car is entirely possible, with nothing, really, to stand in the way of it happening but the price of batteries, and our collective reluctance to buy a new car that MIGHT NOT be reliable and long lasting, or MIGHT leave us stranded out of juice.
We will get over that reluctance very quickly, once the price of electric cars comes down a few thousand more bucks, and an electric sells for the same or only a little more than a COMPARABLE conventional car.
Hey OFM! It’s really spooky how things happen sometimes and the timing of your post in relation to a video I just watched is almost surreal. The video I just watched is the most recent presentation by Tony Seba available on Youtube:
2nd Unifi Innovation Lecture in memory of DR. APJ Abdul Kalam
At about 1 hour 43 minutes (6 minutes of introductions) it is the longest Seba presentation I have watched. It is from a November 7 presentation he made in India to the Unifi Foundation, a foundation associated with Unifi Capital Pvt Limited. From the Unifi web site:
Each Seba presentation is tailored to its audience and in this case he is talking to a room full of investment advisors. He spends the first fifteen minutes or so addressing the importance of energy to civilization and sweeps through many topics we discuss on this blog on a regular basis (energy and water use in agriculture, pollution, ocean acidification, health, FF subsidies etc.). He then addresses the question as to why people, experts in particular, fail to anticipate disruptions and proceeds to outline over the next hour and fifteen minutes how the transportation and electricity sectors are going to be upended by 2025 to 2030. The key point is rapidly developing EXPONENTIAL trends. Before the naysayers chime in, Seba does address the S curve of adoption where growth eventually rates level off so, he does not suggest that exponential growth will or can go on forever.
Seba does a pretty good job of indicating how and why batteries are going to enable renewables to disrupt FF and EVs to disrupt ICE powered vehicles. It makes me wonder about your reference to RW and his description of our current reality and his “poking a little fun at the starry eyed souls who have allowed themselves to float away dreaming about giant solar and wind farms that don’t YET exist, and WON’T , for some years to come.” IMO that is a classic case of people about to be blindsided by a disruption that they just cannot see coming. I don’t know how fast your internet connection is but you should be able to watch the video at the lowest video quality setting (144p) by selecting the lower quality from the settings (click on the little gear icon in the lower right section of the video window as shown in the attached image). I strongly urge you to take the time out to watch the video since, Seba outlines how, if anything, the projections he has done are probably conservative since the trends are accelerating faster than he projected.
The first Seba presentation I watched is now more than two years old and it is particularly interesting to see how projections made two years ago are playing out. If anything things are playing out slightly faster than the projections. While I may be one of the “starry eyed souls” RW pokes fun at, RW and others who think I am excessively optimistic may well end up like a deer caught in the headlights. Check out the video.
Good morning Island Boy,
I’m a big time Seba fan, and can watch this sort of video just fine with my dsl connection, and will watch this one. But as rule, I’d much rather read, because I read one hell of a lot faster than even a carny pitchman can talk.
Now as far as RW’s real opinions and thoughts are concerned, I am not willing to be on what he really thinks about ANYTHING. He may not believe in an electric car revolution at all, but my guess that he does, since he is obviously an intelligent man.
He does say something specific once in a while that indicates to me that he has a pretty good grasp of reality in respect to the physical world.
(The ONE thing that leads me to think he is actually in favor of coal is that I notice he doesn’t say much if anything at all about it eventually running out. )
But his talent runs toward commentary along the lines of great comic philosophers such as Mencken, or some of the better comedians around today.
Personally I am willing to believe Seba is right, assuming all the major cards involved in the electric card game fall in favor of the revolution. The high face cards are all about the price of batteries, the next ones down may be about lithium supplies, and new tech needed to extract lithium from lower quality ores, etc.
And some cards are about the acceptance of electric cars by the motoring public. Reluctance to switch might delay the revolution a few years. It’s also hard to say just how much BETTER conventional cars will be ten years down the road, how much it will cost to own and drive them, etc.
But I’m thinking I might actually eventually own an older one, a cheap but up old Leaf or Volt, most likely, since those are apparently going to be the most common ones on the used car market for a long time, and sit on the porch and watch her charge up on my own personal share of all that free sunshine!
This will involve buying the panels too, which I have been putting off now for years, because they are getting so much cheaper so fast I just can’t justify the investment, having far more productive uses for the money.
One thing I will be spending for this winter is blight resistant American chesnut seedlings, another is a selection of fruit and nut trees that are not grown in this area.
Both are sound and environmentally justifiable investments, although the fruit and nut trees are more of an experiment than an actual investment. Hopefully some of them will do ok.
I’m also going to spend a modest sum trying to reestablish the brook trout that used to live in the stream bordering my farm. All the farms on the stream from my place on up to the head are now either operated responsibly in terms of chemical run off, or shut down altogether, so there’s a good chance the trout will make it, if restocked. Pesticide run off killed them out back in the late fifties and sixties.
If your Youtube player is like mine (should be, since that sort of stuff should look the same whether you’re using Windows or like me, are using Linux) you should be able to change the speed from normal to 1.5x and get through it in two thirds the time. Assuming you don’t mind listening to people talking really fast.
The latest version of the model S with the 100kWh battery does 0-60mph in 2.5 seconds. People have them out on drag strips beating everything. And you don’t have to be a pro driver, there is no shifting. I saw one race with between a Lamborghini and a Tesla pulling a trailer with a Lamborghini on the trailer – and guess what? The Tesla …lost – but it was really close.
Tesla has introduced the model 3 for about $35,000, but they have sold out for at least 1.5 years (orders are for over 350,000 cars). Plus it comes with both supercharger and autopilot support. The 100kWh model S is something like $100,000, but they do have the 60kWh version for about $70,000 and it’s available. The $7500 tax credit still applies, but will start phasing out on the model 3 as they fill those orders.
At the low end I think there are lots of Leaf’s out there coming off lease and they may have somewhat reduced range due to old batteries. The older Leafs had only 80 miles, so these may be down to only 60 miles or so. I think they are under $10,000. Plus there are some less well known brands that didn’t sell like the Mitsubishi i-miev http://www.mitsubishicars.com/imiev#hero-area
only $23000 – $7500 tax credit brand new.
I wonder if Trump has talked to Rick Perry about this.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says innovation is key to solving the clean energy problem: “‘We want to be cheaper than coal or gasoline for transport. And so that bar is particularly low right now,’ the billionaire Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist said. ‘But there are a lot of paths that make us feel confident we can get there. We have five or six paths. We have several companies in each path.’
Gates, who recently pitched energy innovation to Trump in a phone call, said he’s confident the president-elect would consider his ideas.
‘This administration likes a good deal,’ Gates said, adding he’s prepared to lobby Trump on making sure America is on the forefront of energy research and development. ‘It’s not a huge part of the budget and yet it can help the economy just like shale gas has.'”
‘It’s not a huge part of the budget and yet it can help the economy just like shale gas has.’” WTF like Windoze 10’s multi-million lines of unnecessary filthy rotten worthless code.
I once had a used Ford Escape Hybrid.. Sold it … because it had bleeping Micro$oft Sync in it.. Forget It..
Billy Gates just knocked millions of Computers offline. My Sister had to pay $150 for a tech .. hours to figure it out. This turd is a Dangerous Criminal and should be divided by zero.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/12/14/161218/windows-10-update-broke-dhcp-knocked-users-off-the-internet
Still, it is better for someone like Gates to promote clean energy tech than to use his money to fight it, like the Kochs do.
What’s happening in the D party right now:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/keith-ellison-barack-obama_us_584d98fbe4b04c8e2bb04985
This piece demonstrates a substantial understanding of the actual turmoil and troubles festering inside the D party at the moment, and lays out the case for both the leading candidates to be the next party leader. It’s about as well balanced as any single piece I have seen in laying out the case, both sides, for the direction of the party for the next few years.
Here’s one little excerpt that backs up what I have been saying here all along.
xxxx
“Democratic leaders generally agree the next DNC chair needs to do a better job organizing working Americans and sharpening an economic message for the working class. In a narrow loss such as Clinton’s, any single factor can be blamed for the defeat.
But the primary consensus is that the party could have done a better job targeting working people.
I was in 40 states, in the field, all the time, with my members and with communities. And there was a disconnect between what we said and what we stood for and what was heard,” Weingarten says.
That’s Ellison’s pitch. His DNC platform calls to “focus on working people” by making “labor a full partner” and emphasizing small-dollar fundraising over big donors ― not too different from Sanders’ $27-a-person donation strategy.
xxxx
Read carefully, HB.
You seem to be pretty fond of the Huffington Post. I read it regularly myself.
Note this line. It makes the one of the most important points I have been making right along.
“But the primary consensus is that the party could have done a better job targeting working people.”
And this, about big money and D party voters:
“That’s Ellison’s pitch. His DNC platform calls to “focus on working people” by making “labor a full partner” and emphasizing small-dollar fundraising over big donors ― not too different from Sanders’ $27-a-person donation strategy.”
You DO want to win in 2020, don’t you?
Do you like eight hour work days? Do you like weekends off? Do you like vacations? All liberal ideas.
Well, you can’t have them anymore!
Working class people do not like the affordable care act. They resent having to buy insurance, mandated, forced, you have no choice. They feel enslaved, indentured servants, not citizens. Their tongues have been cut out and all they can do is bang pots and pans all night long. That is how they really feel. They are not being heard, they can’t talk.
All rests on the shoulders of the Democrats. There is a price that must be paid, that price is loss of support from the working class.
You are not going to win the hearts and minds of the working class when you refer to some of them as deplorables. It is not going to happen. You will not gain any ground by grinding away at the election process and try to subvert the results of the election. Can’t accept facts, the reality. The resentment and anger builds, is ceaseless.
The working class are not potted plants, they are not as dumb as a box of rocks. If anybody is as dumb as a box of rocks, it would be the leaders of the Democrat Party for not paying attention at all to the will of the people who vote and who also do not like being manipulated.
You are going to lose support and it is not going to come back anytime soon if ever. See ya, Democrats, wouldn’t wanna be ya. You have made your bed and you will sleep in it.
This year, I am seriously considering paying a visit to my favorite coal mine and buying about ten ton of coal, metric tons, you get ten percent more, and placing small chunks of coal into nicely wrapped gift boxes for every Democrat leader and deluded Democrat congresscritter in the House and Senate. I won’t though, I am not going to spend a nickel on any Democrat, ever, not in any form, no how, no way, it will never happen. They can all crumble to dust. Aaaaaaannnnndddddd…. they’re gone.
Got lots of snow too, time to build a snowman, that means chunks of coal for snowman eyes and three small chunks for the buttons on the snowman’s fake coat. Frosty will be appreciative, will have enough sense to thank the builder, those who did the work to put him together. Nobody wants to put together the humpty dumpties in the Democrat Party, they can’t and they won’t. The Democrats had a great fall and nobody cares.
If there is any political party out there who feigns allegiance to the working class to gain the popular vote, it is the Democrat Party. When the time is right, the Democrats will abandon the working class in a New York minute. The Democrats need to play by the rules, not rule. I won’t hold my breath. I won’t stand on one leg.
Donald Trump targeted the right block of voters, the block that was abandoned by the Democrats. Democrats are nothing other than damn dumb feckless fools and nothing else. Thankless hypocrites who live by double standards. Owl Gore is the living example of a stupid hypocrite.
Now the Democrats have to eat humble pie and heaping dollops of crow for the next eon.
The working class has all they can stands and they can’t stands no more, the ennui is firmly ensconsed, the working class no longer trusts the Democrats and if every single Democrat is gone tomorrow, it won’t be soon enough.
Nothing fake about the feelings of the working class, the working class will not tolerate Democrats any longer.
The Democrats have more or less managed to isolate the working class and cause economic hardship to them, you are going to be looking up a dead horse’s ass. They’re lucky this is not 1792 in France.
The Democrats are toast. A political nuclear winter they will endure until their very last four breaths, then they’ll be gone for good.
If there is a God, then God will breathe a sigh of relief. The meek will inherit the scorched earth left by the Democrats and bring it back to life. A world without the goofy Democrats will be the change the world needs, we can all hope it happens now.
And to think that at one time the only vote I would cast would be for a Democrat, now I’ll never do it again. There is no hope for them, I won’t listen to those Democrats anymore. Nobody will.
The Democrats pulled the most votes. The system is flawed.
Hi GF,
Note this comment is not directed at you personally, but rather at the RHETORICAL you, the entire readership, if anybody reads it.
You DID read the VERY FIRST twenty five words of RW’s satirical remarks, I am sure.
RW’s only making fun, or mostly just making fun. He’s doing what he can, and doing a good job of it, explaining the current political scene in this country.
SURE his narrative is incoherent and self contradictory. So are most people, who are after all only naked apes under their clothes. Talk to fifty people at random ON THE STREET , and you will hear everything RW says in his comment come out of the mouth of at least one of the fifty,and most of what he says out of the mouths of dozens of the fifty.
Now about that ACA aka Ocare.
I have said all along that while I am in favor of a Western Euro style health care system, the ACA would bite a major chunk out of the D party’s ass at election time.
Pardon my French, but here is the xxxxing reality of the ACA, as it is viewed from the inside of the actual working class of people. I am one of them, born and bred, although in one sense I am an outcast, having gotten lucky, got that old degree, learned to wear a suit, not to cuss, to make sure my ears and fingernails are spotlessly clean, go to work for THE MAN, nine to fiveish, but it didn’t take all that well on me.
My redneck mentality rejected the culture transplant , after a decade or so of living in an apartment in a bohemian city neighborhood in the university district, hanging out with the sort of crowd that hangs around any large city university, walking to the restaurants and bars, riding a bike to class, etc. . Married to a Big Apple Jewish artist, part of the time, etc. Accumulating grad credits at random, mixed in with a few higher level under grad classes in history, literature, etc. Some hard science classes too, but back to my old school, Tech, for those. That “special grad student” id card was my ticket to entry into the inner sanctums of that world, and I kept it current.
Now here’s the score on the ACA. If you look at my comments, a year ago, you will see that I said the ACA would be a short term disaster for the D party, and a long term hit, the lottery winner.
In the long term, people will remember, most of them, who put it in place, originally, when it morphs into a politically viable new law. For now, it’s a disaster, politically, because for every person who has actually signed up , and voted D because of it, there are probably at least two who are FURIOUS at having it rammed down their throat, when they didn’t want it, and then having the SALT rubbed in by holier than thou D politicians and mouthpieces with the UNMITIGATED GALL to tell them it’s NOT A TAX, when suddenly they are short a few thousand bucks they expected to have for other purposes. None of them voted for Clinton, not among the ones I know.
The BIG mistake was putting the burden of paying for the ACA on individuals rather than paying for it out of general tax revenues.
Then there are TONS of people who are stuck at twenty eight hours, part timers, because of mandates involving health care coverage by employers. BIG MISTAKE, politically. I know at least three or four people at this very minute in this situation. Employers may not actually LAY OFF anybody for this reason, but when somebody retires or quits, well, the view from down in the working class pit is that the full time with bennies job is replaced with TWO part time jobs.
And then if you care to sit down in any old country store, or small town bar, drinking cokes with peanuts, or beer with your peanuts, you can hear as many stories as you please told by old guys and girls who have worked their asses off, for forty years, and then been bankrupted or nearly so by hospital bills- guys and girls who know people they consider riff raff who seldom bothered to work, and who got the same treatments at the same hospital, with the bill written off.
I could go on all day, but I want to get outside and maybe murder Bambi, since the weather is finally right for butchering.
The actual facts matter, but PERCEPTIONS, justified or not, matter a hell of a lot more in the voting booth.
One more point though. A hell of a lot of liberal commentators seem to believe that working class people are too stupid to understand where their own best interests lie, and there is a LOT of truth in that position.
But as INDIVIDUALS, working class people have to deal with short term survival as their foremost consideration. Short term survival is seldom ever the foremost consideration of a liberal with a good education and a nice secure job insulated from immigrants newly arriving. I have a couple of ( expired) professional licenses that insulate me from such worries, one teaching, another driving trucks, neither option being readily available to people without all the right paperwork, etc. I know what I’m talking about, been there, done that, both ways, both sides of the question.
And I don’t HAVE to work, not any more. When I do, I make excellent money, in the form of capital gains, for instance fencing my land, or building a small lake. Six figure money on an annual basis, not that I do these things more than a few days here and there. Fifty pounds of venison in the freezer is worth at least two hundred bucks,probably three hundred, so even my recreation pays rather well, lol.
But I have relatives and friends who NEED jobs cleaning houses, baby sitting, operating machines in the last nearby furniture factory, etc. Their meal tickets ARE are at risk, short term.
And consider the gun question.
For Sky Daddy’s sake, think about how FURIOUS you would be if somebody were to tell you you have NO RIGHT to own , buy , sell, and DRINK ALCOHOL. The problems associated with it would have almost nothing to do with your indignation and anger.
Ditto the gun question, in the minds of the people who want them, and have always had them, and are actually scared to be without them. I am such a person, and I have lived both with and without guns. I mostly didn’t keep a gun handy living in the city, but the ONE time I really needed the cops, they were as slow as molasses in January showing up. The bad guys were long gone. They were never arrested, never even identified. I could have been dead, but I got off with a quick visit to the ER. After that, I kept one handy.
Calling the cops would be a total waste of time in the event somebody wants to rob or murder me , considering where I live. It takes thirty to forty five minutes on average to get a cop or fire truck to my place. IF the phone is working. The cell is not dependable, and the land line can easily be disabled by a bad guy.
The gun owning faction of the voting public feels the same way about their guns as you likely feel about your beer and wine, or brandy or whatever.
And while you may actually believe the goal is reasonable regulation, the gun faction believes it’s confiscation, eventually.
There’s a line in the sand, just like the line in the sand that separates people on the abortion issue.
We don’t trust each other.
We have done a hell of a lot, all of us, on both sides of the political divide, to PROVE our lack of trust is justified.
Just watched this post election town hall “postmortem” on the recent election, held on Monday (12/12) in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Bernie Sanders: Town Hall With MSNBC (11/12/16)
Interesting.
Here, in Washington State, we gun owners have to contend with the no-transfer Bloomberg law. I live in far Eastern Washington.
So, what was the purpose of the law, anyway? To limit gun proliferation, I suppose?
So, now, what people do is buy their rifles over in Idaho. There’s no law abridging the right to bring firearms across state lines.
In a pleasing way, Bloomberg’s law is backfiring, because now there’s more guns in Washington State than there ever were.
regarding: “Working class people do not like the affordable care act. They resent having to buy insurance, mandated, forced, you have no choice.”
#1 sentence is true. Of course if you have a pre-existing like cancer or type 1 diabetes, then……
#2 is not true. In my country mandatory health insurance (single payer) is a working man’s gift from heaven. It is also an employers gift from heaven. Sure, the medical industry at first fought it and even went on strike, but the citizens of Sask. voted to support it and the rest is the historical unfolding of single-payer across Canada. Each Province has its own plan, but the concept is the same. Employers do not have to fear unrest or unionization for healthcare coverage and working people do not have to fight for what is considered to be a God-given right of citizenship.
The Democrats should have had the jam to impose single-payer when Obama won all three levels of Govt. Now, it will never happen. Under Trump get used to increased company profits, and workers getting it up the wazoo. It would have been the same under Hillary. Although, there might be free jars of vaseline.
Hi Paulo,
As you are Canadian, I think, you may not be aware that it takes 60 votes to get anything passed in the US Senate (otherwise the other 40 Senators can participate in a filibuster to hold up legislation). Obama did not have the 60 votes needed and was forced to compromise, the ACA was the result, it was modelled on legislation passed under Mitt Romney as Governer of Massachusetts.
I would also prefer a single payer system or something like the Affordable care act with a default to Medicare for all if people don’t want insurance and tax rebates to those with their own private insurance coverage at a cost equal to the premiums they would have paid for the equivalent of the Medicare insurance. In 2009, such legislation did not have the 60 votes needed to move forward in the US Senate.
The US has a very conservative system that tries to make any change very difficult.
A parliamentary system allows more to be done, note that Republicans may have the same problem trying to repeal the ACA because they do not have 60 votes in the Senate.
Hi Dennis,
Actually there was a very short period of time that Obama had the House and 60 votes in the Senate between the time Al Franken settled his close election and the time Ted Kennedy pasted away. During that time Obama tried to get a bipartisan agreement for the bill, but the GOP were kicking and scratching(I’m being nice). When Kennedy past away, Obama’s back was up against the wall and had to push what they had into a bill though the means of reconciliation.
Republican obstruction never let the bill get cleaned up to work optimally. Instead they used it as a wedge issue and pretty much did everything they could to make it fail.
Hi Huntingtonbeach,
I am thinking there were not 60 Senators who would have voted for a single payer Health System or maybe even a “government option”.
I may be wrong, Obama was a terrible negotiator, always giving away too much at the start, not really playing hardball.
There were a couple of Dem Senators rising their tail feathers, but when it came time to vote. They all showed up. I think Evan Bayh was one of them. With a wife who was a VP for one of the major health insurance companies.
Well Obama did get handed a pile of problems when he took office. Like the TWO wars in the Middle East, an economy in free fall losing 750K jobs per month. An auto industry in complete failure. Housing market in crisis. Banks out of money. I don’t think the administration was 100% focused on healthcare, but it was part of the long term economic fix. Health insurance rates had been going up at 10 to 20 percent per year for the prior 8 years.
I think Obama was soft his first couple of years dealing with the Republicans. It took him to long to figure out no matter what, they weren’t going to play ball with him. Except maybe if he agreed to cut taxes.
Hi Paulo,
While I might not go quite so far as to call it a gift from Heaven, I agree with you that the Canadian health care system is as far ahead of what we have here in the USA as a new Tesla is ahead of a Model T. My personal physician for some years was a Cuban refugee, then twenty years or so after that, when he retired, I started seeing a physician who was a Canadian refugee. Dr Sutter fled Cuba for the sake of freedom and prosperity, and but Dr Mc Millian, ( same family name, no known relation) fled Canada in only so he counld make more money.I knew both of them well, at the personal level. So I know something about single payer from people who have lived it, on the professional side, and I have read many accounts written by people who believe in it due to personal experience.
The KEY WORDS in your comment are SINGLE PAYER.
The ACA for the most part TAXES ( and yes anybody who argues OTHERWISE is a whiny hypocritical STUPID D partisan) the hell out of successful self employed people so as to subsidize those who are not well enough off, or don’t have jobs with good insurance. THAT’s the BIGGEST flaw, politically, and the biggest single reason countless people are utterly furious about it.
The subsidy should have come out of general tax revenues, then those furious people wouldn’t have either stayed home in droves, or voted for Trump, in respect to THIS single issue.
Now as a practical matter, the D’s thought they would “get away with it” politically, because when you look at the demographics of who is who, in terms of employment, there are proportionately a hell of a lot more R types than D types who experience this involuntary dry sex. Big union workers have otj insurance. The VAST majority of lawyers are D’s but they are smart enough to pay their bills with before tax money, no matter how the law may be written, even if they work in nickel and dime sized firms. The large majority of teachers, and of all the government employees I have ever met are D’s. Damned near every one of them has good group insurance via their job. So the D party thought this ACA was a good political bet, and yes, it does show the D party has some real consideration for poor people.
Very few people seem to realize it , but out in rural and small town America, government employees are one HELL of a powerful political constituency. In my county, teachers and out number every other class of workers. And the other govt types who work at the health department, the police dept, the social services department, the library, etc, how many of THEM do you think are registered D voters, percentage wise?
But the OTHER big flaw is that the ACA doesn’t really do much to control costs, and it does virtually NOTHING to control cost, compared to your single payer system. If you read the financial press, you will quickly come to understand that a hell of a lot of people, including hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies and some doctors are tickled pink with the ACA, since it substantially INCREASES their incomes.
You go on to say “The Democrats should have had the jam to impose single-payer when Obama won all three levels of Govt. Now, it will never happen.”
I agree they should have, but they didn’t WANT to, not REALLY, as a PARTY, because way the hell too many of them are in the vest pocket of big pharma, big insurance , big hospital corporations, physicians who donate money, etc. And it would have taken every last one of them, plus a few R’s who would have been HARD to deal with, for them to have succeeded.
Don’t underestimate the power of the pendulum when it swings back the other way. My generation is fast headed to the grave, and the younger generations will giterdone, in my estimation, and within fifteen years, in my opinion.
As a health insurance broker for the last 15 years. I can say there is a lot of bad information(right wing talking points) in your comment Mac.
There are lots of things in the ACA that help control cost. Insurance companies are required to spend 80 percent of their premium dollars on actual healthcare and not an administrative expenses(was running around 75%). The plans that were being offered by the companies are required to be uniformed. Making them easy to compare. So that competition from the market place could help drive down costs. It required dental coverage for kids because it is known that it lowers medical costs over one’s life time. It supplied money and incentives to computerize medical records to drive down costs. This is only a short list.
The ACA paid 100% to the states for the first three years to pay for Medicaid for low income Americans at no cost to them. Then 90% after the 3 years. But most of the Republican Governors refused to accept it for their citizens because they said they couldn’t afford their 10% portion after 3 years. That left nearly 10 million citizens in red states without coverage. This is also a factor why red states economies aren’t keeping up with blue states. For medium income individuals(15K to 46K) who need to buy coverage. The Federal Government help pay for their coverage. Families with higher income also got help.
Is the ACA perfect ? No, but it was a hell of a lot better for the working class than before it was implemented. Did the ACA step on special interest toes? Yes and those interest have fought back in the name of profits to the dismay of the working class.
I can tell you from my experience that more than 99% of American including yourself don’t understand the ACA. Just like they don’t understand how to preform open heart surgery. But hey, let them shoot themselves in the foot with their guns. Just remember when they show up at the emergency room without insurance and don’t pay their bill. Your still going to pay for it out of your own monthly insurance premiums. Because the hospital is going to add that cost to the people who do pay for coverage though insurance.
Poorly educated Republicans are their own worst enemy.
Hi HB,
First off, I didn’t say the ACA did NOTHING to reduce costs, but that it did little or nothing . Within the context of conversation about single payer systems, that’s basically true.
And you are up to your usual partisan bullshit, which you may very well believe yourself, when you talk about one branch or another of government, regardless of which branch, paying a bill , and call that REDUCING COSTS.
NO. That is NOT reducing costs.
It’s simply paying the same old costs out of a DIFFERENT POCKET.
Go on out there and buy yourself a new TESLA S, and you can probably get the government to pay part of the cost of the car for you, via a subsidy.
But the car costs the same, regardless if you pay for it in the entirety, or if you pay part and somebody else pays the rest FOR YOU. Elon Musk will be depositing the full purchase price in a TESLA account, even if it comes from two separate sources.
I am firmly on record as supporting a health care system for this country modeled after the ones prevalent in Western Europe.
Another point. I am NOT a Republican, capital R, nor am I a Democrat, capital D.
I am an independent, and tend toward conservatism, but as I define the term conservative, the Republican party and the right wing establishment is most definitely NOT conservative.
I’m technically literate, and thus I can, with a perfectly straight face, and total sincerity, say that strong environmental laws are fully justified, and NECESSARY, because protecting the environment, which defines the physical space in which we EXIST, is about as conservative a proposition as I can IMAGINE. Clean air means I have a better shot at living longer, and more productively, and more happily. Ditto clean water, lots of wildlife, renewable energy, etc.
I can say with total sincerity that you are a part of the problem, given that you are part of the money grubbing semiparasitic class that contribute far less to our health than you consume in revenues, as PROVEN by the much lower costs and better results achieved in Western European countries, lol.
As a TRUE conservative , one with a working brain, and a broad based knowledge politics, economics, history, class conflicts, cartels, monopolies, oligopilies, sweet heart deals involving various business interests in bed with government regulators, who are all to often one and the same, etc, etc, etc, here is my reasoning concerning our current heath care MESS.
Just about everybody involved has as his or his organizations primary goal not the actual delivery of care, but rather the optimization of net revenues. This includes brokers salivating at any change in the day to day operations of the overall industry, SO LONG as they are not frozen out, as a result. Every change in things as they stand now generates more revenue opportunity for traders.
Now let’s look at what is actually GOOD for the country, and for the people in it.
You seem to be perfectly happy to insinuate that I would pull the plug on Grandma, and watch little kids starve, rather than pay for food stamps and free school lunches, since you persist in lumping me in with your worst case R stereotypes.
Now as it happens, I have read a LOT of history, and know a LOT about how people survive when they are hard up for money. I strongly suspect I know TEN TIMES as much in this respect as you ever will. I have BEEN there. And people in that situation often come to my house to borrow fifty bucks to get thru till payday, or to work for me for the fifty. I hire them, often, even though I don’t necessarily get good value for the money, because sometimes I don’t really need the help.
I’m relatively prosperous, not rich by any material measure, but not broke. I am very glad that I live in a reasonably stable society, one in which I am not at very high risk of being robbed, or lynched, by a mob along the lines of the mobs that dominated the French Revolution.
I don’t wan’t that sort of mob in this country, and the only way, short to medium term I can see to prevent it from coming into existence, is to make sure we have very very few people, preferably none, who are truly destitute, with nothing to lose. It’s a damned sight cheaper to feed the poor, and provide them with at least minimal basic health care, than it is to deal with the potential mob, and infinitely better, from the moral pov.
It’s a damned sight cheaper for me to pay to fix a working man’s broken hand, than it is to support him on welfare because he can’t work, or to find that he is stealing my stuff with his one good hand, in order to feed his kids.
I am obviously painting very fast with a broad brush.
Looking after those less fortunate than I am , myself, is a VERY conservative thing to do, because in terms of the big picture and in the last analysis, this is the best policy in terms of preserving my own health, safety, and prosperity. Of course you have be able to SEE the big picture to realize the truth of my argument.
NOTE that I have described the ACA as a lottery ticket type winner, long term, for the D party, but as political disaster, short to medium term, due to the fact it has so THOROUGHLY pissed off so many people who have found themselves a LOT worse off , personally, because of it.
You MAY eventually come to understand that PART of the reason the R party mopped the floor with the D party a few weeks back is that the ACA contributed mightily in motivating LOTS of people to vote R, or at least stay home and not vote at all.
Maybe not. You appear to be such a political true believer that you cannot accept the reality that Clinton and the D’s lost because they messed up, in terms of computing the political calculus, and made a lot of mistakes, mistakes that cost them the election.
Blaming your losses on the opposition, when the opposition was badly fragmented, seriously disorganized, running a party crasher candidate with the WORST negatives in R party history, etc, is CHILDISH.
It SHOULDA been a cake walk for the D party, and WOULDA, except for the mistakes made by the party as a whole and especially by Clinton personally.
And anyway, I have not been out to tear down the ACA in and of itself, but rather to explain , as best I can, WHAT the people who voted for TRUMP ( or stayed home) believe about it, and WHY.
Whether their beliefs are rational, based on sound reasoning and easily verifiable facts, is debatable, to a disinterested observer, but to you, since in your mind D’s in general and HRC in particular NEVER make mistakes, of course all those Trump voters are ignoramuses, or worse.
And let’s not forget that the COUNTRY doesn’t vote, and political parties don’t vote. INDIVIDUALS vote.
It’s possible, maybe even likely, probably TRUE even, that the COUNTRY as a whole is better off WITH the ACA than without it, everything else equal.
But this does NOT mean that the fellow down the street from me who has to lay out the cash for a policy he didn’t want is PERSONALLY better off. And in the voting booth, he votes as a PERSON, as an individual.
Go back and read RW’s comment, and mine following his, about the fact that under our clothes, we are just naked apes, and that we are NOT noted by scientific observers for being rational or consistent in our thinking, lol.
I tell it like it is, or at least like I THINK it is, as best I can, and when I think the D’s are right, I say so,quite often. Every once in a while I think the R’s are right about something, and I say so then too. I am trying to EXPLAIN the political landscape, rather than trying to make a case for or against the ACA, or the D party, or the R party.
I can’t remember you ever having anything to say about the R’s that’s even remotely positive, or anything about the D’s that’s less than laudatory.
So far as I am concerned, that’s AMPLE proof that you are either a true believer, incapable of critical thought in respect to party politics, or else just a cynic in the habit of reflexively defending all D policies and actions, “My party, right or wrong, but let’s PRETEND it’s ALWAYS right. ”
ONE last little stick in your eye, lol.
Your next to final line is “Because the hospital is going to add that cost to the people who do pay for coverage though insurance.”
Tell me , if you can.
Is it really going to make any difference whether the people who pay for indigent’s care via higher hospital bills pay for that care via a higher tax burden? Whatever they pay in higher hospital bills, collectively, they can expect to save in the form of lower taxes, and vice versa. Higher taxes, with the extra money spent on indigent’s health care, will lower their hospital bills, collectively, by about the same amount. We call that a WASH.
Yer argiments doan stan’ up when ya taken ah good lookatem, lol. Even a poorly educated RERpublikin kin see thru ’em like a nice clean winder.
Now I will take the liberty of fixing your very last line for you.
“Poorly educated PEOPLE are their own worst enemy.”
Ignorance is no respecter of person or class. Some of the DUMBEST people I know are Democrats, lol.
But I DO agree that the D’s are on average somewhat better educated, this being a consequence of D’s dominating the younger age brackets, politically.
Hey Mac,
I judge to quality of my posts by the length of your response. I don’t even read them. But, what I have noticed is I’m improving.
I also think I’m going to be the biggest and best chapter in your book. Let me know when I can purchase it on Amazon in hard copy and I would be happy to be the first to buy one. Now of course if I were The Donald, I would tell you something different in another ten minutes or less.
Also, I think you need a new keyboard. Your cap button seems to work intermittently.
President elect Trump has been good to me. The stock market has been on roar and when he lowers the tax rate. It will be even better. I love Christmas and December.
DOW- 20,000 and only 750 Carrier jobs that needed government subsidies.
Back atcha, HB
Winter has finally arrived, and I have last minute things to do, given tonight’s predicted low, but I will be back later.
In the meantime, be sure to keep your head buried as deeply as possible in the sand.
The R’s in general, and the Trumpsters in particular will thankya for making it easier for them.
Keep it up, and I will take a page from YOUR playbook, and start speculating about you being a closet Republican, yourself.
You said it,I didn’t, that you are making money in the stock market, and that you are a trader/ broker in the health care industry. You wouldn’t be doing that trading just for the FUN of it, would you?
As it happens, I have a young second cousin who just recently graduated from Duke ( the toughest and most prestigious nearby university by a substantial margin, possibly excepting Wake ) who is making a killing as a young gun speaker and analyst in the industry, going from institution to institution , explaining the nuances of current and possible future policies. She started out as an intern in a D congress critter’s office working with staffers working on health care issues.
She tells me it hardly matters at ALL what the policies and regulations actually ARE, from the pov of people who make their living administering, buying, and selling medical services and insurance.
All they really give a crap about, in her unvarnished opinion, is that they know as much as possible about what is going on, as soon as possible, in order to rake in more business, and more loot.
By the way, she’s a single payer advocate- in private. It wouldn’t do for her to endanger her paycheck by saying so publicly.
Now speaking as a REAL conservative, I believe in single payer for the perfectly obvious and indisputable reason that single payer provides a hell of a lot more bang for the buck, about double, actually, while also taking care of poor people that get the health care shaft from our current Yankee system. I am closely related to a lot of poor people, so that matters a hell of a lot to me.
I am not opposed to the ACA in principle. I am simply trying to get it across to my two or three loyal readers that it was poorly conceived, and even more poorly implemented, and fatally flawed, due to putting the burden of paying for it squarely on the backs of INDIVIDUALS who HATE being forced to buy the policies at high rates so as to enable less well off enough people to buy them at low rates.
Woulda, coulda, shouda, it’s the same old story.
The D’s shoulda put the bill into big pile paid out of general tax revenues, and they coulda, and that woulda resulted in a political victory, as well as making the country a better place, but they didn’t.
They put the bill on the backs of MOSTLY R type voters and potential voters, expecting to get away with it, but this mistake backfired on them, helping the R’s mop the floors with them during the recent elections.
Hard core D partisans may refuse to admit it, but there IS such a thing as political backlash, and they bit off a little too much too fast in terms of changing the country to suit their values and agenda. This miscalculation goes a LONG way toward explaining why Trump is prez elect, and the R’s gained even more seats in Congress, and all thru local governments, nation wide. There are other reasons too, I am not saying there aren’t other reasons.
Incidentally you will have to look long and HARD to find anything truly important in my comments indicating I disagree with the overall D agenda, with only a couple of exceptions, the biggest one being the teachers monopoly.
It’s the fumbled EXECUTION of that agenda that pisses me off. I will continue to do what I can to help make sure it is better executed in future elections.
Yeh, you (RW) and Putin.
btw- The democratic candidate won by over 2,500,000 votes nationwide, even though she was not very popular.
I haven’t seen this posted before, but even if it has it’s worth another go. It’s one of the better, simple explanations for climate change causes, effects and mitigations and seems to be up to date with the latest data and research findings. I especially like the way he relates things to local changes (in Virginia).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWcPG9S9SUY
ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET STUDY REVEALS 8,000-YEAR RECORD OF CLIMATE CHANGE
“Global climate models that look at the last several thousand years have failed to account for the amount of climate variability captured in the paleoclimate record… The research team’s hypothesis is that climate modelers have historically overlooked one crucial element in the overall climate system. They discovered that the centuries-long phases of enhanced and reduced Antarctic ice mass loss documented over the past 8,000 years have had a cascading effect on the entire climate system…”
http://phys.org/news/2016-12-antarctic-ice-sheet-reveals-year.html
While it might be politically effective to empathize with the working class, I don’t see any real solutions to trends other than an entire rethinking of work and income. Global competition has lowered the bar on wages in many occupations, and even if we required that all jobs be based in the US, technology is eliminating many of those.
There are still jobs best done by people (e.g., childcare, elder care, care of the disabled), but we don’t want to pay a decent salary for any of those.
There was a time when manpower was necessary. And then when we replaced some of that with machines, we still needed human brain power. But now many of those jobs are being eliminated by computers.
If we could elevate caretaking jobs to the highest paid in the country, then maybe income would match need. But if we expect families to have the money to pay for those caretaking jobs, that won’t happen. It would likely make more sense to provide everyone with a guaranteed minimum income so that some family members could stay home to provide that personal care that is so important.
We also don’t want to have an honest talk with the working class about changing energy needs. Maybe we could sell them on renewable energy as a great way to create new jobs, but if, as some people believe, civilizations will collapse when fossil fuels run out and/or the consequences of global warming, do we really want to talk to the working class about that?
I think the big problem is that politicians don’t want to talk about complex problems and voters don’t want to hear about them. So now we’re just asking politicians to tell working class people they matter, without necessarily telling them about the challenges ahead.
“I think the big problem is that politicians don’t want to talk about complex problems and voters don’t want to hear about them.”
Hi Boomer, Well it’s probably more like most voters can’t comprehend, don’t have time, get distracted or don’t care about important complex issues. Even here it becomes a problem. You wrote a nice post to open a conversation. But, it got distracted by the troll infestation in the last two days.
“Maybe we could sell them on renewable energy as a great way to create new jobs”
I think that idea went down in flames on November 8 as well as Hillary. It’s more like the guys in the water are asking for a life jacket and getting concrete blocks. Maybe they’ll figure it out when they run out of oxygen on the bottom.
http://www.seia.org/research-resources/us-solar-market-insight
U.S. Solar Market Insight
Solar Adds More Than 4 Gigawatts of Capacity in Q3, Marking its Largest Quarter in History
Updated December 13, 2016
The U.S. installed 4,143 megawatts (MW) of solar PV in Q3 2016 to reach 35.8 gigawatts (GW) of total installed capacity, enough to power 6.5 million American homes. With more than 1 million residential solar installations nationwide and record-breaking growth in the utility-scale sector, the industry is poised to nearly double year-over-year.
This reinforces the point made in my post further up and in posts on other threads, about exponential growth trends in renewables (and EVs). Barring a major Black Swan event this growth should (I hope) continue through to market saturation.
Hi Islandboy,
At some point the exponential growth phase becomes linear, it is unclear what the slope of that line will be, Seba thinks by 2025 100% of new car sales will be EVs, probably by 2060 we could transition to no fossil fuel use, possibly sooner if battery, solar and wind costs continue to fall at 15% per year.
NEW ENERGY OUTLOOK (BLOOMBERG)
1. Coal and gas prices stay low. A projected supply glut for both commodities cuts the cost of generating power by burning coal or gas, but will not derail the advance of renewables.
2. Wind and solar costs drop. These two technologies become the cheapest ways of producing electricity in many countries during the 2020s and in most of the world in the 2030s. Onshore wind costs fall by 41% and solar PV costs fall by 60% by 2040.
3. Asia-Pacific leads in investment, representing 50% of all new investment worldwide. Despite slower growth in the near-term, China remains the most important center of activity.
4. Electric car boom. EVs increase global electricity demand by 8% – reflecting BNEF’s forecast that they will represent 35% of new light-duty vehicle sales in 2040, some 90 times the 2015 figure.
5. Cheap batteries everywhere. The rise of EVs further squashes the cost of lithium-ion batteries, boosting power storage and working with other flexible capacity to help balance renewables.
6. A limited ‘transition fuel’ role for gas outside of the US, with only 3% growth in gas demand for power to 2040, and generation peaking in 2027.
7. Coal’s diverging trajectories. Coal generation plummets in Europe and peaks in 2020 in the US and in 2025 in China; however it increases 7% globally due to rapid growth in other Asian and African emerging markets.
8. 2⁰C scenario. On top of the forecasted $9.2tn investment in zero-carbon power, an extra $5.3tn is needed by 2040 to prevent power-sector emissions rising above the IPCC’s ‘safe’ limit of 450 parts per million.
https://www.bloomberg.com/company/new-energy-outlook/
For anyone interested in climate change (and feedback) I recommend this video:
FEEDBACK MECHANISMS & CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE CHANGE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_aMbM20mbg
Tks, Doug, that was rather sobering to say the least.
And I thank you, Fred, for one of my favorite quotes:
“A technologically advanced civilization that is not ecologically informed simply has no long-term prospects; it will not even understand the ways in which it is destroying itself.” — Fred Magyar
Our economy is a mystery to almost everyone, including economists.
Hi Doug,
This is the source of my quote of the article’s author, Dr. Joanna Boehnert .
Fred would do better to attribute his quotes more distinctly.
And you’re welcome. 😉
Caelan,
Fred would do better to attribute his quotes more distinctly.
As you might note I do make a rather concerted effort to correctly attribute statements to their authors whenever possible.
So you can add this direct quote from me to your collection:
Grow up already your behavior reminds me of my son when he was two!
Fred Magyar
Your diapers are showing yet again, Freddy-poo, and they smell full.
Doug, I have no doubt I posted that at some point and while I wish I could claim authorship, I believe it was originally written by Dr. Joanna Boehnert. So if I failed to credit her at the time I do so now with my sincerest apologies.
It was probably embeded in one of my many fruitless attempts to promote the ideas of The Circular Economy to certain people who are incapable of understanding that the world is not always starkly black or white but often contains gradations of gray and that occasionally holding apparently contradictory thoughts is not sufficient reason to reject thought experiments out of hand.
https://ecolabsblog.com/tag/ecological-literacy/
A Critical Look at RSA and TSB’s ‘New Designs for A Circular Economy’
In the UK social institutions maintain their legitimacy with claims that they are responding the environmental crisis with initiatives capable of transforming our economy into something that could exist in perpetuity. The single most important factor in the continued failure of the vast majority of initiatives is the dismal lack of ecological awareness demonstrated by those who put these projects into practice. A technologically advanced civilization that is not ecologically informed simply has no long-term prospects; it will not even understand the ways in which it is destroying itself. Businesses are keen to project the image that they are working towards a circular economy and dramatically lowering both pollution and quantitaties of natural resources needed in the industrial cycle. Are these flashy claims an honest representation of progress, or simply a new front for business as usual?…
I, Fred Magyar, contend that this kind of critical self examination is an essential part of moving towards an alternative paradigm that is the antithesis of BAU. I personally do not have a problem with individuals, societies, governments, and many existing corporations and businesses exploring paths towards these new paradigms. Some on this site have vehemently attacked me for simply saying that I see change happening. Sometime this change may be incremental.
…Basic sustainability literacy is an essential element of education. Without sustainability education, students are not supported to develop the knowledge that they will need to understand contemporary problems – or the skills they will need to address these problems. Considering global ecological conditions, it would be wise for higher education to create capacities across disciplines to respond to current problems. Unfortunately this is simply not happening on a significant scale (outside the disciplines that deal directly with the environment, i.e. conservation biology, the earth sciences and geography). Educational establishments create blind spots by failing to embed sustainability literacy in education. By not acknowledging environmental problems as an educational priority, higher education reproduces the problems of the past. Educators remain oblivious to the ways in which their own practices further perpetuate environmental problems.
Lots more to think about and explore at the link I posted.
Cheers!
I find it striking how there seems to be a omission in mentioning water vapor in cloud form also acts as a (negative) climatic feedback. Not that this kind of thinking is any bit unusual; IPCC et al convenient enough ignores the role of clouds in any future warming as well as TOA (top of atmosphere) solar irradiance. Why? Well that’s a question many of us self-funded climate investigators have been asking for years. Presumably there’s a monetary ($$$) aspect to be discovered; or it’s simply religious fervor.
In any event, were I to get a chance to ask IPCC some serious questions, that’s #1. The others would be why is atmospheric CO2(g) (mw: 44.01 g/mol) apparently well-mixed while H2O(g) (mw: 18.015 g/mol) is not, despite being lighter? Furthermore why would the past 18 years of contemporaneous temperature measurements within the lower-to-mid troposphere show very little warming, despite this truth violating the very basis of the climate change theory?
I think I can answer that. CO2 is a gas at every conceivable temperature on the planet, while H2O shows the three states and easily precipitates as liquid or solid from the atmosphere. Additionally, humidity saturation point changes a lot with air temperature. O2 and N2 are also well-mixed gases.
The properties of water are amazing. It is a very weird molecule with a very unusual behavior. If its properties were slightly more like for other abundant simple molecules, life as we know it would be impossible.
It seems Trump election is already having a strong effect on global warming.
According to Hadcrut4 global anomaly has already fallen by 0.5°C since February and has given up all the gains of 2015 and 2016, the record years.
When people tried to point that the record warming was due to a record El Niño, Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS replied by saying that 2015 would still have been a record year without El Niño, because according to his calculations El Niño only added 0.07°C to the 2015 temperature record.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/01/2015-temperatures/
Michael Mann also told the Guardian that the El Nino contribution to 2015 record was less than 0.1 °C.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/04/is-el-nino-or-climate-change-behind-the-run-of-record-temperatures
If they are right and the warming was not due to El Niño, but to anthropogenic global warming, then the cooling cannot possibly be due to the end of El Niño. Must be global cooling then. You cannot have it both ways and the warming be anthropogenic and the cooling natural variability or weather.
We still don’t know if temperatures will drop further, but for the time being temperatures are back to what we have seen multiple times during the past 20 years.
Government employees in Washington DC know a new boss will be in town next month. So they are probably adapting work output to match the new boss’s ways of thinking. I can’t say I blame them — when you have a good-paying job and know not only that new management will be in charge soon but that they will be wanting to cut waste, you start changing the way you work so that the top brass sees how “essential” your job is. I seen the same thing happen in NM government here when crooked taxer and spender Richardson was replaced by fiscal conservative Martinez.
Its going to be interesting now to see if government scientists still proclaim 2016 as the warmest year EVER. Or maybe they will just stop reporting on the temperatures?
Yeah, must be all the global cooling. Are you for real?
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/
https://mobile.twitter.com/ZLabe/status/798240539409690625/video/1
https://mobile.twitter.com/petar_baka/status/802511329437294592/photo/1
I hear Rush Limbaugh has a comments section on his website for those who like to discuss global cooling.
I thought alarmists would be glad temperatures are coming back down so fast after El Niño. They were so worried when temperatures were going up last year. But they seem disappointed. They are difficult to understand.
Javier is now working for Trump, Tillerson and Company.
Let’s not feed him…
I agree. Internet trolls debase, devalue and undermine discussion. My “reaction” is to ignore them; perhaps not the ideal approach but at least it saves some space.
FredM, DougL,
Suggestion:
Google open mind/tamino to get Tamino’s site Open Mind. Bookmark it.
Scroll down to the post Climate Denier David Does It Again, and compare it and the previous posts on David Rose to the graph Javier posted.
Tamino is a statistician, a very capable one. He is worth paying attention to.
Tks Synapsid,
One of most insidious things I learned from one of the comenters in that section was this:
Doc Snow | December 13, 2016 at 8:29 pm | Reply
Amazing… I’m sitting in the DMV office in Columbia, SC, and just watched a perfect little Rosean “Global temps fall with end of NATURAL El Nino warming cycle” propaganda piece. It’s not from a news agency, apparently, the video crawl is in-house. There’s either a very diligent PR guy outside, or a denialist vigilante inside, the media department, apparently. Wow.
Doc Snow | December 13, 2016 at 8:34 pm | Reply
Apparently not in-house, but through MVN. Anybody want to give them a call and ask why they are channeling propaganda?
So the Motor Vehicle Network is showing videos that are denying science and climate science in particular and spreading outright falsehoods to an unsuspecting captive audience that is scientifically naive at best. Now what I would like to is how something like that happened and who is behind it.
Something is very very rotten in Denmark!
Tks Synapsid
Sure, because anybody that disagrees with you is a paid troll.
That’s a good way of living in an echo-chamber.
You are a minority in thinking that global warming is a serious urgent problem. A UN global poll with millions of participants shows climate change dead last on a list of 16 problems. Most people are unconvinced despite an overwhelming media campaign, because the evidence is not there.
One has to distinguish between empirical evidence and scientists opinion, because the last one is as likely to be wrong as any other group thinking. Continental drift acceptance was delayed 20 years despite huge empirical evidence because scientific consensus was against it. Scientific consensus doesn’t cut it, empirical evidence is lacking, and nobody is showing skill in predicting climate. that’s the bottom line.
Now back to your echo-chamber and your fake climate news, like El Niño not being responsible for record warm.
You are a minority in thinking that global warming is a serious urgent problem. A UN global poll with millions of participants shows climate change dead last on a list of 16 problems. Most people are unconvinced despite an overwhelming media campaign, because the evidence is not there.
That is the stupidest most logically flawed argument I have ever heard! What people think, is totally irrelevant and the scientific evidence is there in spades.
It is not when we are talking about implementing policies that affect their lives, unless you don’t believe in democracy.
There is not such thing as scientific evidence as there is not non-scientific evidence. I suppose you are talking about empirical evidence.
So, empirical evidence of what exactly? What has been demonstrated?
Continental drift acceptance was delayed 20 years despite huge empirical evidence because scientific consensus was against it.
No, no, no… That is just flat out wrong Javier. The exact opposite is true. Continental drift was rejected because there was no empirical evidence supporting it. Google it Javier, that’s all you have to do. Just Google it.
Why was continental drift rejected
He suggested that the continents plowed across the ocean floors. Unfortunately, Wegener could not provide a satisfactory explanation for the force that pushes or pulls the continents. Because Wegener could not identify the cause of continental drift, most geologists rejected his idea.
Geologists changed their minds when the evidence supported it. And it happened almost overnight, relatively speaking of course. The Glomar Challenger provided the evidence that was missing.
The core samples retrieved provided definitive proof for continential drift and seafloor renewal at rift zones. This confirmation of Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift strengthened the proposal of a single, ancient land mass, which is called Pangaea.
That’s what scientist do Javier. True, they hold on to old outmoded ideas until the evidence proves them wrong. Then when the evidence proves them wrong the scientists, well the good scientist anyway, will turn on a dime.
The evidence for global warming is absolutely overwhelming. And all the good scientists now accept that obvious truth.
As a geopysiscist I concur 100% with your comment: you’re spot on Ron. As far as I’m concerned Javier is: 1) an idiot; 2) a troll; 3) a paid provocateur or some combination thereof. In any case he certainly doesn’t understand plate tectonic science and he doesn’t have (or display) a fucking clue about climate science. I will continue to ignore his consistently inane comments.
As you only write to insult me and show your ignorance. I concur that it is best if you ignore my posts.
You are the one that is wrong about this Ron,
Wegener had a lot of empirical evidence coming from four different disciplines of science. This is called consilience of evidence and is one of the strongest evidence that one is dealing with a real phenomenon:
– Geographical evidence. Continents could be fit together as pieces of a puzzle.
– Geological evidence. Rock layers fitted across continents in the puzzle positions. The rock layers that form the Appalachian mountains of the eastern U.S. match quite well with those in Scotland.
– Paleontological evidence. Fossils found on the east coast of Brazil match quite nicely with fossils found in western South Africa. Also, he noticed that a lot of the fossilized life found in the rock record didn’t fit in the climates they were found in. For example, rocks in Alaska contain fossil palm tree leaves.
– Biological evidence. Biological groups matched better the reconstruction with fauna in North America more similar to Eurasia, and South America to Africa.
There was plenty of evidence, but the evidence was rejected because he could not provide a mechanism. His evidence was against prevailing theories of the time. It is one more case in which evidence was ignored for giving more importance to theories than to evidence. What was the evidence that continents didn’t move? Nothing.
The evidence for what exactly? That the world has warmed? It has been doing it for 350 years. And it was cooling the previous 500. And warming the previous 400. If anything this is evidence that the climate is always changing.
No, the evidence was skimpy. It was mostly that the continents looked like they might fit together. The fossil and biological evidence could be explained in other ways.
What Wegener could not do is explain how the continents could plow through the earth’s crust. No one, not even Wegener, suspected that it was the entire crust of the earth that was shifting, not just the continents.
But what you are ignoring Javier, is how fast all the geologists on earth changed their minds when the evidence came in. They all accepted the evidence.
What you are engaged in Javier, is evidence denial, not just climate change denial.
The evidence was not skimpy and several prominent scientists took Wegener’s side, like Alexander Du Toit from South Africa, Arthur Holmes in England and Milutin Milanković in Serbia. They were probably called deniers too.
While other explanations could be found for each piece of evidence, a specific explanation was needed in each case. Wegener’s hypothesis explained all, and the economy of explanations is the basis of Occam’s principle.
The lack of an explanation only speaks of how little we know and how much we ignore. It is never an argument to deny the evidence.
Absurd. Climate change is an obviousness and I always accept the evidence.
Catastrophic anthropogenic CO2-mediated global warming is a hypothesis that is surprisingly short on evidence. And it is not people but Nature which is denying it.
Evidence shows moderate warming (except for El Niño), moderate Arctic ice melt, and no increase in extreme weather for most of the 21st century despite very immoderate CO2 emissions. Who is denying the evidence?
Hi Javier,
There is very good evidence that atmospheric CO2 has risen very quickly relative to the past 800,000 years and that atmospheric CO2 has reached levels not seen for the past 3 million years. It is also well understood that increased atmospheric CO2 increases net radiative forcing. The magnitude of the increase is less well understood due to incomplete understanding. There is incomplete understanding of the speed that warm surface waters mix with the deeper ocean over time (the empirical record is relatively short for ocean temperature over many depths for a wide area) and there is incomplete understanding of how cloud cover may change as the atmosphere warms. There is also incomplete understanding of the land and ocean carbon cycle. The warming of the past 50 years has been relatively rapid relative to earlier periods, based on empirical evidence.
Hi Dennis,
I agree with everything you say except the last phrase.
The early 20th century warming is not significantly different to the late 20th century warming. That’s what the empirical evidence shows.
Some of the people nominated by Trump for cabinet posts don’t seem especially qualified for those jobs. In other cases, names are floated and then dropped.
A person with serious ties to energy may not want to give up so much for such a job.
Donald Trump’s Nominees Are In for a Rough Ride – The New York Times: “Nominees face a long process to ensure they’ll be working for the American people, not for their own enrichment. By law, they must submit hundreds of pages of financial disclosures, shed assets and jobs and take other steps to avoid conflicts of interest. They must undergo an F.B.I. background check that looks back 15 years. That’s just the executive branch. The Senate, which has the power to confirm or reject nominees, has its own disclosure requirements.”
More good news from the CO2 department.
Keenan, Trevor F., et al. “Recent pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 due to enhanced terrestrial carbon uptake.” Nature Communications 7 (2016).
“Here using global carbon budget estimates, ground, atmospheric and satellite observations, and multiple global vegetation models, we report a recent pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2, and a decline in the fraction of anthropogenic emissions that remain in the atmosphere, despite increasing anthropogenic emissions.
Our analysis suggests that enhanced carbon uptake is due to the combined effects of rising CO2 on photosynthesis (the CO2 fertilization effect) and, in the past decade, a slowdown in the rate of warming on global respiration. The continued enhancement of the terrestrial carbon sink during the recent slowdown in global warming led to a pause in the atmospheric CO2 growth rate, and a decline in the fraction of anthropogenic emissions that remains in the atmosphere.”
As the effect of CO2 on temperatures is logarithmic, if the increase in atmospheric CO2 remains constant, its effect on temperatures will be decreasing.
However in the latest years our emissions are not growing. If with increasing emissions we were not seeing an increase in the rate of growth of atmospheric CO2, with flat emissions we are likely to see a decrease in the rate of growth of atmospheric CO2.
Nature has powerful negative feedbacks, and plants are taking on our emitted CO2 with gluttony.
So, which is it? Is increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere a problem or no? If global warming is not being caused by greenhouse gases, why is it important for you to point out this “Recent pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2”? You’re confusing me man! Hold it together!
It is a fact. It has demonstrable benefits and hypothetical drawbacks. It is important because it affects most plants on the planet whose growth is not limited by other factors, and therefore it affects most living creatures, including us.
Why do you think we are getting record crops with record CO2 and record temperatures?
It is also important because we are considering very expensive carbon capture schemes, and resources wasted unnecessarily are not available for more important issues.
“It is also important because we are considering very expensive carbon capture schemes, and resources wasted unnecessarily are not available for more important issues.” Ahhh! I see and I agree. IMO, expensive carbon capture schemes are a waste of time and money. Nature is much better at dealing with “excess” CO2, like in 2014 when Sargassum Inundates the Beaches of the Caribbean. All that carbon capture didn’t cost anybody a dime!
As far as “resources wasted unnecessarily are not available for more important issues” goes, I would rather see the resources used to develop more renewable energy and/or storage in my neck of the woods. I am actually quite concerned that a process to build a brand new NG fired power plant is well underway, with the electricity utility in the process of trying to arrange financing, despite news like the following:
Lazard: Solar PV, storage costs fall in 2016
LCOE 10.0 shows solar costs falling faster than other forms of generation, with utility-scale PV costs falling 11% to between US$46 and $61 per megawatt-hour (MWh), with thin-film costs a fraction lower than crystalline silicon costs.
This puts solar below PV at a cost below all fossil fuel technologies, among which gas combined cycle plants were the cheapest at $48-$78/MWh. This is the second year that Lazard has reported that utility-scale PV generation is cheaper combined cycle gas plants or any fossil fuel source. It also puts PV at less than half the cost of nuclear generation.
and
BNEF: Solar beats wind on CAPEX in the developing world
With solar costs continuing their historic declines, it is only a matter of time before solar becomes cheaper not only than conventional power but also wind. According to a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), that day is fast arriving in the developing world.
BNEF’s latest data from its Climatescope service finds that the average capital expenditure (CAPEX) for new solar plants in 58 nations in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East is now lower than that of wind projects. The report documents that the CAPEX for new utility-scale solar has fallen to US$1.65 per watt in this region in the first three quarters of 2016, just below that of wind at $1.66 per watt.
Obviously. It is already taking up 60% of what we emit, and greening the planet with it. Try to pay for that.
I am fine with that. I don’t think people should be forced to use one type of energy over other. I do not oppose renewable energy. In some cases it makes more sense, and islands are indeed a special case.
Your link goes nowhere. How appropriate.
Whoever did Figure 1a should get a good reprimand and be sent back to school. Bogus straight lines when the whole pattern is ascending. Typical denier tactic.
Decadal Average Annual Growth Rates
Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO)
1958 – 2014
Growth Rate Atmospheric CO2 Growth Rate
2005 – 2014 2.11 ppm per year
1995 – 2004 1.87 ppm per year
1985 – 1994 1.42 ppm per year
1975 – 1984 1.44 ppm per year
1965 – 1974 1.06 ppm per year
1959 – 1964 0.73 ppm per year (six years)
Yes the link is bad. Too late to fix it.
Try here:
http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13428
The pause they show is:
Year ppm/yr Unc.
2002 2.38 0.07
2003 2.28 0.10
2004 1.56 0.05
2005 2.43 0.07
2006 1.77 0.06
2007 2.09 0.07
2008 1.78 0.05
2009 1.62 0.10
2010 2.44 0.06
2011 1.69 0.09
2012 2.35 0.09
2013 2.47 0.09
2014 1.99 0.09
It is a hard sell to claim an acceleration with that data.
So now you think skeptics have taken over Nature and Phys.org. That would be quite some news.
http://phys.org/news/2016-11-carbon-hungry-impede-growth-atmospheric-co2.html
Did you even read my post? There is a consistent decadal rise in CO2 rate of increase. Maybe they are choosing a convenient data set to prove a point, better to look at long term averages, since the rates do fluctuate due to natural and unnatural occurences.
Just lately the increase is much higher, despite supposed reductions in the rate of fossil fuel burning.
2015 3.05 ppm increase over 2014
2016 3.36 ppm increase over 2015 (first 11 months -December not in yet)
Believe what you will, the data says otherwise.
No. They claim they identified the trend break point in the data by statistical methods and confirmed it by comparison with a carbon model. Good enough for Nature referees, apparently.
Looking at long term trends is certainly the way to go, but then you don’t get any information about change of rate. If you can claim an acceleration you should be able to claim also a deceleration, as they do, right? It is bias that accelerations are accepted blindly and decelerations are questioned. There is too much bias in climate science.
Did you even read my post? If you did, how can you promote assertions that cO2 atmospheric concentration rate is diminishing?
Last five years show an average rate of CO2 increase at 2.64 ppm/year. That is 3.62 times it’s original rate of increase.
If you’re responding to Javier, you’re talking to the wall Fish. 🙂
No one can hear you in Javier space.
Like I don’t provide arguments and scientific literature to support my point of view. You just want to be happy in your echo-chamber without anybody challenging your beliefs.
My beliefs? Ha, the evidence and science brought forward by reputable climate scientists around the world is what you mean. You seem lacking in knowledge of basic scientific principles and latch on to any article or paper that seems to produce a result that fits your agenda driven belief system.
Do you happen to know the evidence you talk about?
I have looked for it but I have failed to find any convincing evidence that most of the warming is produced by CO2.
The authority argument doesn’t hold it when time and again scientists have shown that they can be as wrong as anybody.
Hi Javier,
Try
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
Especially Chapter 10, the science is pretty clear that increased atmospheric CO2 results in quite a bit of warming and the theory though not perfect is the most likely hypothesis.
How does one explain the glacial interglacial cycles without the warming that results from increased CO2?
Do you have an alternative hypothesis?
Without a better theory, scientists stick with the best theory they have.
Hi Dennis,
I already tried IPCC.
I agree that an increase in CO2 should result in some warming all things being equal. But we don’t know how much. Since 1910-1945 warming was not that different and the atmosphere had much less CO2 then it is possible that we have overestimated its warming capacity.
There is little evidence on how much CO2 warms.
“How does one explain the glacial interglacial cycles without the warming that results from increased CO2?
Do you have an alternative hypothesis?”
That we cannot think of anything else is evidence of nothing except our limitations.
Alfred Wegener could not provide a mechanism for continental drift, yet he was right. We cannot provide a mechanism for the effects of solar variability on climate yet there is the evidence.
When science advances it always supports evidence over theories.
And in other non good news…
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/first-mammal-extinct-climate-change-bramble-cay-melomys/
First Mammal Species Goes Extinct Due to Climate Change
The humble Bramble Cay melomys has disappeared from its island in the Great Barrier Reef.
The rats were first seen by Europeans on the island in 1845, and there were several hundred there as of 1978. But since 1998, the part of the island that sits above high tide has shrunk from 9.8 acres to 6.2 acres (4 hectares to 2.5 hectares). That means the island’s vegetation has been shrinking, and the rodents have lost about 97 percent of their habitat.
“The key factor responsible for the extirpation of this population was almost certainly ocean inundation of the low-lying cay, very likely on multiple occasions, during the last decade, causing dramatic habitat loss and perhaps also direct mortality of individuals,” writes the team, led by Ian Gynther from Queensland’s Department of Environment and Heritage Protection.
And from the discussion in Javier’s good news story the not so good news:
The slowdown in global warming is expected to be temporary23 however and may already have ended with the strong El Niño Southern Oscillation of 2015 and 2016, with subsequent consequences for the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 (ref. 36). The likely continuation of warming in the coming decades37 suggests further future increases in net carbon releases.
… Ultimately, there are a myriad of factors that influence the carbon cycle, particularly at regional scales. Our analysis suggests however that CO2 and temperature are most likely the dominant factors driving global long-term change.
Despite the decline in the airborne fraction and the resulting pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2, the ultimate outcome regarding the pace and magnitude of climate change depends heavily on future emission pathways. CO2 emissions, through the burning of fossil fuels, cement production and land use, have continued to track close to the high end of all scenario predictions24. Enhanced carbon uptake by the biosphere to date has served to slow the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 and our results support the hypothesis that net terrestrial CO2 uptake has been especially strong recently45. Without effective reduction of global CO2 emissions, however, future climate change remains a stark reality.
Give me a break, Fred. You know what’s the deal. Bramble Cay is not an island, but a sandbar in front of the Fly river mouth, very much like White Island. Sandbars appear and disappear with the change in river flows and currents.
Nobody knows when Bramble Cay formed or when the melomys got there, but as a colonizer of such precarious environment its existence was always hazardous.
It is also not great loss. The Bramble Cay melomys is almost identical to the abundant Cape York melomys except that it had some protein differences and a coarser tail caused by elevated scales. Differences probably explained by founder effect and genetic drift. Many times these differences do not warrant a species name. Probably they could interbreed just fine. But researchers eagerness to name a new species sometimes does the trick. So now instead of the loss of a small precarious population they can talk of the loss of a species. The reality is the same regardless of the name.
That it has been killed by climate change is also doubtful. A strong storm at a perigean tide could have done the trick equally well. Nobody knows.
Really if this is the best example of species extinction due to climate change that we can come up with, I say the problem has been hugely magnified.
So the good news are tempered by speculation about the future?
Do you distinguish between evidence and opinion? If not, you have a problem.
Say what??? Since when the future remains a reality? Are the authors, and referees, and the readers that believe this, stupid? Do you believe this?
Nobody knows what the future climate is going to be. And everybody that tried extrapolating, from the warming alarmism of the 1920-30’s, to the cooling alarmism of the 1960-70’s, to the present warming alarmism, has failed miserably. The people that think that they know how future climate is going to be are victims of self-deception.
“however, future climate change remains a stark reality.”
Say what??? Since when the future remains a reality? Are the authors, and referees, and the readers that believe this, stupid? Do you believe this?
That is a direct quote from your GOOD NEWS post!
But whatever, everything is just fine in the world! Climate change is not a problem, biodiversity loss is not a problem and we can all just go along our merry way with BAU!
That you were trying to use to dilute the good news. To say the future is still bleak despite evidence to the contrary found, is proof of how hypothesis trumps data nowadays.
Biodiversity loss is a problem not caused by climate change. How convenient to drop our responsibility for that on others.
That you were trying to use to dilute the good news.
Are you insane?! How exactly was I trying to dilute the GOOD NEWS, by posting a direct quote from from the paper YOU posted?!
By directly comparing opinion to evidence. What the authors think about the future is irrelevant. The evidence that they show about the present is relevant.
As I said you need to distinguish between opinion and evidence.
Whatever!
Whatever #2
Biodiversity loss is a problem not caused by climate change. How convenient to drop our responsibility for that on others.
Would you like to read the 729 papers I referenced last week saying that it is a problem. Then you can read the 200 or so related papers that I pulled up referencing just one out of the 729.
Fred,
Biodiversity loss is a very serious problem, but S. L. Maxwell et al. 2016. “The ravages of guns, nets and bulldozers.” Nature 536, 7615, 143-145. quantified the causes of biodiversity loss in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and Climate Change came a distant seventh factor. And even this is probably an overestimate as we are sensitized.
http://dl.umsu.ac.ir/bitstream/Hannan/121776/1/2016%20NATURE%20Volume%20536%20Issue%207615%20August%20(10).pdf
So I think that arguing about biodiversity loss when discussing climate change is missing the mark.
As evidenced hereon, Fred even misses his own mark, so to speak, and I wouldn’t doubt it if he was missing his rocker some days too. Maybe it’s electric.
But I don’t blame him, when society in general is off its.
Caelan, you are obviously NOT the brightest bulb in the chandelier are you?
On top of that you are profoundly ignorant as to how climate impacts biodiversity. You are clueless about most science and don’t understand non linear dynamics, chaotic systems, feedback loops and tipping points in such systems. You are also an arrogant little twit with a very childish and naive world view. You don’t have the slightest clue about me. So fuck the hell off!
^ There’s an example of your own ‘mark’ that you keep missing. ^
“And if climate change doesn’t exist, then maybe the elites can tap those Siberian methane clathrates for us.
And let’s face it, who’s not getting impatient for the Arctic sea ice to completely melt? Certainly not Canada and it’s vast archipelago of future subtropical resorts…” ~ Caelan MacIntyre
‘u^
Did you practice that beforehand, including the juvenile name-calling, in front of a mirror and just wanted to reflect that onto me, or are you referring to my interest in living a free, ethical and harmonious life in balance with nature, as opposed to sucking on and up to the corporatocratic elite teet, like you apparently? Because I hear that’s quite the naive, arrogant and/or ignorant lifestyle or ‘world view’.
Last winter was mild, now this winter is bad from the start and will be on record as being a bad winter because they are all bad. Somewhere in Argentina for a summer day is the place to be. Sun, surf and sand, what else is there?
Global warming is absent today. Colder than Hades out there.
Watch out for CO leaks this time of year.
I could pick on Republicans, but suffice it to say that the diatribe would never come to an end, so it goes without saying that they’re purdy much rotten right down to the rock ribs and ossified brains that exist in their worthless dyed-in-the-wool Republican hides. The day will come when one can pick at the carcass of the Republican Party.
Every living thing on the planet will be happy to take part.
It’ll be a party. The phoenix will rise from the ashes. I’ll see the Republicans in hell!
Nearly all the electrical energy used in Manitoba begins as the kinetic energy (energy of motion) of flowing rivers, primarily in the north.
In a hydroelectric generating station, flowing water spins a turbine connected to a generator, where a moving magnetic field creates an electric current in surrounding coils. The amount of electricity that can be generated varies with the energy available to spin the turbine. The amount of energy available depends on the height of the waterfall and the volume of water passing over the fall.
http://www.gov.mb.ca/jec/energy/initiatives/hydro.html
Hydroelectric power is solar driven. That depends on keeping the sun at a good distance away. Too close and the water turns to steam, too far away and it turns to ice. We do live in a Goldilocks world where everything was just right and we just don’t appreciate it.
Global warming is a harsh mistress, or maybe just a harsh teenager. Doesn’t do what you what, where you want it, when you want it. You were supposed to store all that wonderful summer heat and use it all winter. You goofed again, looked a gift horse in the mouth.
Javier’s trolling is blatantly dishonest. He compares Schmidt and Mann’s quotes about the effect of ENSO on the 2015 annual average temperature to the 2016 monthly change from Feb to Oct. This is highly deceptive – does he think anybody here is stupid enough to fall for this? Their point about the 2015 annual average is that El Nino’s warming is delayed about 6 months – its main influence on temperature was in 2016, not so much in 2015.
Measured peak-to-peak, from 97/98 El Nino to 15/16 El Nino, the globe warmed by about 0.3 to 0.5C (depending on the index used). That is consistent with the long term trend. Picking out individual months to find a falling trend is using weather to hide the long term change.
Comparing temperatures for recent months that are ENSO neutral to slightly negative to previous ENSO positive peaks is another dishonest point by Javier.
The claim that CO2 airborne fraction has leveled off or is declining is totally blown up by the latest data. Even last month – after the El Nino has passed – the YOY increase is off the chart from that paper. The long term trend of accelerating CO2 continues.
Ocean Heat Content continues to increase, and the rate of increase is steadily accelerating. That is the true measure of Global Warming. All else is looking at the last few hairs on the tip of the wagging tail of the dog.
You don’t know that as you don’t know how much of the warming was due to El Niño each year. It may have been all of it.
More assumptions. As each El Niño is different you cannot compare peak-to-peak temperatures and talk about global warming rates. You deceive yourself.
The best practice is to exclude the years of strong El Niño and strong La Niña. When you do that (2001-2014) you are left with 0.00307889°C per year in Hadcrut4. In other words, 0.3°C/century. We should compare that trend with temperatures in 2019-2024 to find the long term change.
So now it is OK to use the latest data even though we know is due to El Niño? Now you show how dishonest you are.
No. It is not. And it amounts to a temperature difference so small that we can’t measure it reliably.
Just because you say so. You must live in the deep ocean then.
“The best practice is to exclude the years of strong El Niño and strong La Niña. When you do that (2001-2014) you are left with 0.00307889°C per year in Hadcrut4.”
The cherry picking goes deep.
He sounds like he is whining from his mother’s basement. Can’t wait for a comment like “by comparing 2014 against 2014 we can see there is no change in temperature”.
NAOM
Hi Javier,
I wouldn’t feel too bothered by some trolling/flame-baiting by some people on here with regard to your particular stance on anthropogenic climate change or anthropogenic global warming, at least because, or in the context of, their own apparent hypocritical steadfast ‘memes’, ‘narratives’ and/or ‘religions’, such as with regard to circular-economy ‘corporatism’; business-as-usual perpetuation ‘for as long as possible’; and militarized crony-capitalist plutarchic governments (large-scale, centralized, coercive), solar panels and electric vehicles ‘stepping in and saving the day’.
Society doesn’t currently mass-build-out alternative energy systems (wind and solar systems, etc.) and electric cars and maintain highway systems, etc., without tax coercion, corporate wage slavery or fossil fuels.
As much as some would like to think that’s somehow all nicely ethical and green.
I’ve had a long-standing concern, incidentally, that the status-quo (through the fronts of circular economy and the like) if/when it found out about about permaculture (and similar concepts/movements), might likely try to gut out its Care of People ethical dimension (if maybe pay token gestures or lip service to it) and just take the agricultural, ‘closed-loop’ and similar portions, while leaving the rest to rot.
And, based on some inquiries, some of which I’ve quoted and linked (as per my comments under the petroleum thread), there seem to be similar concerns.
this link, kindly posted by Lloyd a few days ago, is what I think is going on here:
http://consciouslifenews.com/paid-internet-shill-shadowy-groups-manipulate-internet-opinion-debate/1147073/#
It’s a piece of cake to create confusion!
Prove me wrong, Javier!
One could argue that for others beyond just Javier.
In fact, one could argue that for Trump, with the difference being that it’s called ‘the law’ and drones and cops, etc., might be sent to your door to uphold his and his cronies’ ‘legal trolls’.
Do you have an address where I can request payments for posting my opinions? How much could I get? Do you think they pay for posting in a not-so-well-known peak-oiler blog?
Mexico-Size Chunk of Ice Missing from the Arctic
The Arctic is missing a chunk of sea ice the size of Mexico.
While fall ushers in the season of sea ice growth, November saw a brief retreat that was virtually unprecedented in nearly 40 years of satellite records, according to data released Tuesday by the National Snow and Ice Data Center. That dip helped November set a record low for sea ice area — the seventh month to do so this year, also a record.
At the opposite pole, the sea ice fringing Antarctica also set a record low for November, reversing several years of record highs, though what’s driving the flip-flopping isn’t clear.
“It is very striking this November in both hemispheres,” NSIDC scientist Julienne Stroeve said in an email. “It certainly is continuing the long-term decline in Arctic sea ice. It’s a bit more curious about what is happening in Antarctica, so more research on that is needed.”
Unusual Cold Season Retreat
Arctic sea ice follows a seasonal cycle, waxing during the cold, dark months of fall and winter, and waning when the sun re-emerges in spring and summer.
But skyrocketing Arctic temperatures, which are rising twice as fast as the global average, have set off a downward spiral in sea ice levels. Summer has seen the biggest decline, with the end-of-season minimum half of what it was just three decades ago.
The thin ice the climate change deniers are standing on… is getting thinner. 😉
The Arctic ice spiral of death is a myth. Arctic ice this summer was more extensive than in 2007. That’s 9 years without decline. Another unpredicted pause. Let’s remember that Al Gore said in 2007 that the North Pole could be ice-free by 2013. Well that was three years ago, and there is more ice than when he said that.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/wrong-al-gore-predicted-arctic-summer-ice-could-disappear-2013
Get a load of this crap!
Water to power future cars, homes
TOKYO, Japan:
Imagine needing to refuel your car, but instead of popping the tank open to a petrol pump, you are doing so to a generator that produces energy from water.
Yes, you read correctly; the universal thirst quencher is the new fuel in town.
In Minato-ku, Tokyo, Honda Motor Co Ltd is showcasing their hydrogen fuel cell-powered car, standing next to a hydro generator.
The generator produces energy from water, breaking the molecules to release hydrogen as fuel with the by-product oxygen, which is released into the atmosphere – emissions do not get cleaner than this.
All I can say is Wow! Just Wow! Of course I had to submit a comment, trashing the idea. Let’s see if the moderators approve it.
The car sounds good, runs on hydrogen at a cost of 1.7 cents per mile, with a range of 420 miles.
There is not enough info about the generator to comment. Honda has had hydrogen generators for a decade now, but they were bigger.
Hi GF, Island Boy,
I am SURE both you guys know better than to think you can separate water into hydrogen and oxygen without inputting MORE energy than can be recouped by then using the hydrogen to run a fuel cell, or even by allowing the two elements to come together again.
The article makes no mention of where the energy needed to run this socalled generator will come from.
Most likely the idea is to use cheap and plentiful wind and solar power, or maybe nuclear power ( not so cheap overall, but still cheap off peak) to run this contraption, and run it at a fairly low cost.
But it will never GENERATE any energy, in the sense of getting more out than is put in.
I’m not making fun of Honda.The folks there have all forgotten more hard physics and chemistry than I have ever known, or ever will.
I don’t know if the Honda people will ever manage to manufacture cheap reliable fuel cells, but they certainly know how to make a few that cost a hell of a lot. Whether these prototypes and early commercial models will prove to be reliable remains to be seen.
At any rate, whoever wrote this puff piece is apparently technically illiterate.
If the so called generators and fuel cells can be built at low enough cost, the wind and solar energy industries problems involving intermittent production will mostly be history.
Now THAT’s a pleasant thought indeed!
Fuel cells have their place, particularly in mobile military operations.
Fuel Cell technology for Military Use
Perhaps the appeal for Honda is that a fuel-cell powered vehicle might be lighter in weight than a battery powered one.
Using hydrogen as the preferred energy conveyor would make most sense if you have a lot of hydrogen (as, perhaps, the by-product of fossil fuels), or a lot of energy which can convert water to hydrogen (e.g., an isolated renewable power station that isn’t connected to a grid but can be used to extract hydrogen from water which can then be used to power fuel cells in other locations).
So the technology has merit but won’t release energy from water without some input of energy into the process.
So it’s a matter of storage and transportation from hydrogen creation to energy consumption elsewhere. It might also be easier to swap out hydrogen to recharge your car than to find a place to plug in your car to recharge your batteries.
I have posted a site several times here of a fellow in NJ that uses solar PV to produce hydrogen then fuel cells to tap it. He runs his car on hydrogen and makes over 10 grand a year in excess power to the grid.
With the hydrogen storage he never lacks for power and never lacks for fuel for his car.
If some home hobbyist can do it with existing technology and have excess energy after even powering his car, why is it so difficult to think it can’t be done commercially? The use of hydrogen does remove some of the range problems of EV’s and is cheap to make. Probably makes the car lighter also.
I assume Honda knows what it is doing by developing a fuel cell vehicle.
No, hydrogen won’t come out of water directly unless there is energy input, but hydrogen and fuels cells can be used when flexibility, storage, and weight are factors.
Old Farmer, efficient ways to transform energy into different forms is the key to the energy transistion. I don’t think that energy is the problem, since 10,000 times the energy we use hits the earth each day. If we can’t make a go of it with that much excess, well we will have to really learn how to live a lower energy lifestyle. Probably be best to do that anyway in the long run.
Why “water-based” hydrogen fuel is the future and always will be, using 6th grade math.
This is basic water electrolysis in-action, using the produced hydrogen as an energy-storage device (and venting to atmosphere marketable O2!) The energy- in-to-H2-out ratio of this conversion at theoretical perfect efficiency = 39.4 kWh/ kg H2. Figure 50 kWh/kg real energy use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water
Add compressor to compress H2 to 10,000 psi – figure 5 kWh/kg.
Total energy input per kg = about 55 kWh/kg
We will ignore the energy and cost to distribute H2 for now and assume that everyone has their own home H2 generator and personal 10,000 PSI compressor (or cryogenic chiller to make liquid H2)
The Mirai travels about 300 miles using 5 kg, or 60 miles/kg H2.
Therefore, the net miles per kWh of utility energy for an FCV = 60/55 = 1.1 mile/kWh from the utility
The typical EV gets between 3.5 to 4 miles/kWh of electrical energy from the utility.
Which makes more sense in an energy-efficient future?
Catalytic splitting is the way to go. Research is finding new catalysts that make the process much more energy efficient.
Here is one that is 82 percent efficient, runs at room temperature and is fairly cheap nickel-iron oxide.
So the standard electrolysis method will not be used to produce hydrogen. High efficiency catalysts will split water with low energy levels.
http://news.stanford.edu/2015/06/23/water-splitter-catalyst-062315/
Did any of you guys actually READ what I wrote?
I’m wondering.
I most certainly did not say H2 cannot serve as a practical automobile fuel, IF it proves possible to build affordable and reliabe fuel cells.
What I DID say is that nobody will ever extract any energy from water, or generate any energy from water, via splitting the water molecule into H2 and O2.
AIN’T gonna happen, can’t happen, unless every physics text book in every university in the world is WRONG.
The ENERGY used to actually operate the fuel cell HAS to come from someplace, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to get as much energy out of the H released by splitting water as it takes to SPLIT WATER.
I SAID the idea is probably to source the actual energy via wind or solar farms, or maybe by using otherwise very cheap off peak nuclear juice.
I said the person who wrote the article appears to be technically illiterate.
Maybe it was written by a bot, bot’s aren’t too smart as a rule.
I wouldn’t even have mentioned this except that Island Boy seemed to accept the article at face value, which surprised the hell out of me, because he knows better, without a doubt.
GF did mention in his original comment that the article provides insufficient info to comment on this socalled generator.
So -Maybe Island Boy is guilty of commenting before having his wake up coffee, which is not exactly grounds for being shot at dawn, or maybe he just assumed everybody here would realize that the actual energy would necessarily be supplied to this socalled generator from some unspecified outside source.
I’m guilty of making a mountain out of a molehill.
Sorry guys!
But my point stands. This so called generator cannot possibly generate any NET ENERGY by splitting water. It HAS to be powered by some outside source.
I will not dispute that it can manufacture H2 and O2 using water as the feed stock.
If somebody, anybody, can demonstrate that there is NET energy to be gained by splitting water, I will, to put it in redneck backwoods country terms, give them an hour to draw a crowd and and kiss their butt.
The laws of physics cannot be broken, but they CAN be finessed, to some extent.
Story:
Over drinks at dinner,
University prez poses this hypothetical situation to the heads of his math, astronomy and engineering departments.
There is food at one end of the gym, and a hungry student at the other, who can travel HALF the distance to the food every five minutes. What will happen?
The mathematician says he will starve, because he can NEVER reach the food.
The astronomer says that since this is a converging series, he CAN reach the food, but it will take him an infinitely long time to do so, and so he will still starve.
The engineer scribbles for a minute on his napkin, and says he will be CLOSE ENOUGH in half an hour.
Generating H2 via splitting water can work as a practical matter, but where the hell is the energy going to come from, if this gizmo is mounted in a car?
This so called generator CAN’T be part of the car. It will have to be stationary, and hooked up to some sort of apparatus capable of powering it up, with the only LIKELY practical solution being an electricial connection, which will lead back to an electrical generating plant, or maybe to a personal pv system.
This can work, as both a technical and business or economics matter, because what is lost manufacturing hydrogen from water can be recouped and THEN SOME , compared to running a car using a conventional oil fueled I C E, because an automotive I C E is only about a third as efficient as an electric motor.
I passed chemistry and physics, LOL.
Hi OFM, I thought I made myself clear when I wrote “Get a load of this crap!”, crap in this case meaning shit, bull shit to be precise! Also when I wrote “Of course I had to submit a comment, trashing the idea. Let’s see if the moderators approve it.” I thought it would be clear beyond any doubt that I thought it was rubbish!
For the record, here is the comment I submitted to the newspaper web site before posting here:
It can be quite frustrating to try and submit comments to articles to the local newspapers as they don’t moderate to make sure the language is clean. They make sure not to approve anything that does not fit in with any agenda they are pursuing. It makes me wonder if Honda is considering introducing Fuel Cells to Jamaica and the piece was in fact an advertorial.
Good morning Island Boy,
I have apologized once already, and hereby do so again.
It’s quite obvious that I am the one at fault. I must have must have been nearly asleep myself . I don’t always get to bed on a normal schedule, due to family issues. Sometimes I’m up all night, and well into the next day.
Or maybe I’m starting to have more so called “senior moment” episodes than I really care to think about.
It bothers me that I misinterpreted your remarks so badly, failing to note the word CRAP, which is a synonym for shit of course.It’s a damned good thing I wasn’t driving, and failed to notice a red light the way I failed to see the word “crap”.
In American working class vernacular, crap is just about always ” bad”, with shit usually being “good” , as opposed to BULLSHIT which is always “bad”. Most Yankees know this, but a reader from another country might not be well acquainted with American “slang”.
My face is double deep dark red when I think about the number of times I have tongue lashed other people for failing to read carefully.
Ah well, I am sure you will forgive me. I did say I KNEW you knew better than to be hoodwinked, lol.
‘
Apology accepted. These things happen. Sarcasm is often missed in forums such as this! I guess my advice would be to think about whether what has been posted is “out of character” for the person posting. If it is, it is probably sarcastic. It could also be a troll impersonating a regular poster with whom they disagree, although that would be uncovered very quickly.
Old Farmer, my response was not to you but to HVAC who said that hydrogen production from water for cars will not happen because of the energetics involved.
So what if there is a small loss in transformation, when we have 4 magnitudes of excess hitting the planet?
GF – Catalytic splitting is the most common technique – primarily with platinum. A catalyst reduces the peak energy or voltage “hump” required to push a material to chemically react in way desired, but does not change the fundamental thermodynamics. The fundamental energy balance equation for converting molecular H2O to elemental H2 and O2 takes 39 kWh per kg of H2 produced. Bottom line. Remember that combining H2 + O2 creates H2O PLUS releases a lot of energy. Rocket fuel! It is exothermic. To reverse the reaction and dissociate water to H and O, you have to push the same amount of energy into the water. It is an endothermic reaction. At 100% efficiency, that energy is 39 kWh per kg. Typical electrolyzers are 50-60% efficient. These new processes and enhanced catalysts could get the efficiency up to the 90% level. But even at 100% efficiency, the energy on both sides of the equation has to balance.
The Wiki link I posted included a detailed discussion on the thermodynamics of the process and “tricks” to use less electricity, at the expense of adding more thermal energy to the process through heat or exothermic chemical reactions.
The fundamental energetics of hydrogen-based electrical energy storage vs. lead-acid or LiON battery storage are disastrous in a limited-energy economy where efficiency will be a premium asset.
As a chemist I call it activation energy. A catalyst provides an alternative route for the reaction with a lower activation energy. Thus the new route is a lower energy route.
Research is being done on plant catalysts which split water at ambient temperatures.
RE GLOBAL WARMING HISTORY
If anyone is interested, I suggest Googling Svante Arrhenius, the father of modern climate science. Arrhenius built on work of others, especially Joseph Fourier, and used the basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric CO2 increase Earth’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. His work led him to conclude that human-caused CO2 emissions, from fossil-fuel burning and other combustion processes, are large enough to cause global warming. These conclusions have been extensively tested, winning Arrhenius a place at the core of modern climate science.
The discovery of warming was by Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), a famous French mathematician and natural philosopher, who did groundbreaking work in mathematics and the theory of heat. Fourier was the first to propose that the Earth’s atmosphere acts to raise the planet’s temperature. In many respects Fourier was also the father of modern geophysics; Fourier Analysis is fundamental to seismic science, for example.
Back to D party internal politics for a minute.
This link lays out the case, as seen by the author, an insider, for the party taking a new tack.
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/national-party-news/310563-bernie-sanders-is-right-about-the-dnc
I believe this guy has a pretty good head on his shoulders, and that Sanders way is the way forward for the D’s, if they want to regain the WH, majorities in congress, control of local goverments, etc.
Coach Lloyd sez:
Javier is very aggressive today: two lead comments! (He typically responds.)
I hadn’t given him that much thought before, as far as being a professional troll; I thought it unlikely.
But I’m coming around to the idea.
I find it interesting that Nicholas Schroeder is also posting today (in his favoured first-response-to-a- comment position.) The two are more often seen apart (as they cover the same ground.)
Two other opposing players, either new or just off the bench: Dave Hillerman (Texan) and D. Graham. Both posted simple boilerplate dialogue pairs trying to reframe our conversations as political/ rather than fact based. Good work, Survivalist, picking out Dave Hillerman.
Javier himself posted a dialogue pair (his response of 12/15/2016 at 10:44 am) which is why my Troll meter is going off, as far as his being paid.
What does it mean?
I’m not sure. I’m an amateur trying to put together a playbook, and K-street and the other pros have 150 years of experience on me (and their sitting down to analyze strategy is what they’re paid for, rather than something that interferes with real work.)
My thoughts: If we are being targeted by a specific group, they are trying to have a constant presence. The Nancy Grebauer identity was an inexpensive way to do that: I’m sure Javier is a more expensive answer to that problem. The Javier identity requires the support of other right-wing identities, so he doesn’t stick out so much: hence Hillerman, Graham and Shroeder. Shroeder is an interesting case, as he provided a place for Javier to agree, something he does rarely (at least on the climate side.)
Javier’s two lead postings suggest that they are trying to lead the narrative more than usual: it takes more time to respond to actual postings than to start the direction of the dialogue. The ratio of climate denial column-inches to our usual comments is higher now than I’ve seen it in some time.
I seem to recall WHT mentioning that Javier posted other places. If it is a job, it makes sense to rotate employees in and out of locations when their effectiveness is declining (it is also probably unpleasant to be told you’re an asshole who doesn’t know what he’s talking about all the time.) Hence Javier coming back and Nancy being gone (though I bet my talking about her brings her back, kinda like Beetlejuice.)
My thought is that we are a small part of a larger program: one site among many, targeted by anonymous hacks with multiple internet addresses and identities, all with the same employer.
It struck me while writing this that there is an (obvious) reason for the unusual aggressiveness: the Trump Transition (which I now remember Fred also alluded to), particularly in light of the efforts being made to avoid the suppression of existing climate data. Have those of you who follow other climate sites noticed a similar uptick in denier activity?
-Lloyd
Lloyd,
I object to such lowly categorization without you knowing much of me.
I do not live nor vote in the US, so I couldn’t care less who is your president or if your president wears skirt or pants.
I was celebrating a possible resumption of the pause in warming, and a possible pause in the CO2 rate of change. These should be excellent news to anybody worried about excessive planet warming. Unless of course the warming is just an excuse in the pursuit of an agenda endangered by lack of warming.
Regarding being a troll, that is an ad-hominem argument that alarmists would like to stick.
How many trolls do you know that write brainy articles full of scientific quotations and illustrations in one of the best climate blogs around, Climate Etc.?
This one, for example,
Nature Unbound I: The Glacial Cycle
is very good (I know because I wrote it). It deals with the causes of the alternation between glacial and interglacial periods, and the length of the Holocene. I recommend it.
Read it and let me know if you still think I am a troll, and the chances that Judith Curry would let a troll publish in her blog.
I was not a Science Major.
I was an Arts Major.
Lots of people here can argue the science, but few have a background in the ad world and can see manipulation happening, and more to the point, consider how it could be done.
I look at your postings and seeing patterns and aims: I am more interested, at this point, in the way you are trying to push a narrative rather than the specific content. I also see anomalies from your past posting style which suggests someone who is working within a time frame, when you haven’t in the past.
To your points:
I object to such lowly categorization without you knowing much of me.
I’ve been here a long time, and I’ve seen your postings. I don’t need to know any more about you. This isn’t Tinder. I’m debating you, not dating you. If your ideas and the way you present them don’t stand up to scrutiny, that’s not my problem.
I do not live nor vote in the US, so I couldn’t care less who is your president or if your president wears skirt or pants.
This is a stupid argument on two levels:
1) A paid troll has no allegiance except to the money. Who cares where the money comes from, as long as the cheque clears?
2) I don’t live in the US either, but I sure as hell care who their President is. To deny the power of the US president to affect affairs outside his country is disingenuous, to say the least.
Unless of course the warming is just an excuse in the pursuit of an agenda endangered by lack of warming.
The old you’re some kind of counter-troll argument! Nancy does this too.
Straight out of the troll playbook.
Regarding being a troll, that is an ad-hominem argument that alarmists would like to stick.
I didn’t call you a paid Troll: I said I was coming around to that viewpoint. I merely pointed out extensive paid troll-like behaviour.
So my attack was not ad-hominem.
But your response is out of the troll playbook.
How many trolls do you know that write brainy articles full of scientific quotations and illustrations in one of the best climate blogs around, Climate Etc.?
Someone certainly has a high opinion of himself. The fact that no one here agrees with you suggests that confidence may be misplaced. That said, I’ll get back on message: the idea that writing “brainy articles” precludes one from being a paid shill is specious.
Read it and let me know if you still think I am a troll, and the chances that Judith Curry would let a troll publish in her blog.
Whether someone else publishes you is immaterial. We are talking about your behaviour here, and whether it is troll-like.
How can you tell, someone might ask?
I do have a useful tool for doing it. A simplified version of Hill’s Criteria called a Duck Test:
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and has feathers, it is most likely a duck.
And you, Javier, are showing your feathers.
For more on paid trolling, see “I Was a Paid Internet Shill” http://consciouslifenews.com/paid-internet-shill-shadowy-groups-manipulate-internet-opinion-debate/1147073/#
Good analysis regarding Javier.
I once posted an article on Curry’s blog and kept commenting until eventually she figured out I wasn’t on her side so she banned me from commenting further.
My suspicion regarding Javier is that he is just a biologist with feelings of inadequacy and so wants to make a name for himself by acting like a big fish in a small pond. The problem is that it ain’t gonna work outside of incestuous circles such as Watts and Curry’s blogs. They eat that #FakeScience stuff up like they eat up #FakeNews.
The difference is that we don’t, and can smell the fakes a mile away. That’s why #FakeNews and #FakeScience doesn’t work with progressives.
For what I gather you were thoroughly demolished in your criticisms by Vitaly Khvorostyanov after you did one of your tricks of getting things out of context.
https://judithcurry.com/2014/09/08/vitaly-khvorostyanov-responds/
“Now, it should be clear to all who have been following this on Judith’s blog that the criticisms by WebHub and Paul Pukite are inconsistent and irrelevant to this book.”
Pretty much describes you.
LOL poor Javier
Now he wants to start arguing physics with me. What Curry and her coauthor did was laughably inept and of course they want to try to save face.
I’m sure I will get the last laugh because I presented a couple of climate models at a talk at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco earlier this week.
These models will shake things up because they explain the behavior of both the stratospheric phenomenon known as QBO and the oceanic phenomenon known as ENSO (i.e. El Nino, La Nina oscillations).
Read about it here:
http://contextearth.com/2016/11/21/presentation-at-agu-2016-on-december-12/
If Curry was not upset with me before, she will really be steamed about the fact that these models work really well and essentially stomp over her AGW denying collaborators Richard Lindzen and Anastosius Tsonis. Those guys tried but couldn’t make any headway with the physics.
LOL poor WebHubby, that thinks Judith Curry can worry about somebody that has never published in climatology, with the impressive CV that she has.
Those models won’t shake anything from a mere abstract at a conference. It appears that all the referees from all the journals must agree with Khvorostyanov and Curry if you haven’t been able to publish them in, how many years? I’ve lost count when you first sent the paper out.
You know you can always pay and have them published in one of those #fakeJournals. Most people won’t notice the difference here. And then you will be a #fakeClimatologist. Then Judith Curry will be real sorry she mistreated you.
So Javier, when are you going to present your results to a #realScience conference, like the American Geophysical Union meeting that I just presented to? It’s a real conference with about 20,000 attendees.
Or are you scared? Or don’t want to risk the embarrassment in the event that the audience starts laughing at you?
BTW, you didn’t even pay attention that what I presented had nothing to do with the junk on cloud physics that Curry published. You don’t know physics, but the mistake she made was to apply Bose-Einstein statistics to cloud droplet nucleation. To an experienced physicist, this is the most laughable and bone-headed mistake one can make.
I don’t do original research on climate. You are barking up the wrong tree here.
Conference abstracts are no big deal. A big proportion of them are presented by students, and many never make it to a publication. They are not peer-reviewed and seldom cited because they are considered grey literature. Boasting about such small accomplishment really gives a measure of your scientific stature.
Are you nuts? I was able to do one-on-ones at the conference with scientists that are working similar research.
But all that really matters is that the research is meaningful. I have a lot of patience when it comes to publishing. The main thing is to get the model right.
Sounds like he’s done a bloody sight more than you ever have.
NAOM
Just a friendly suggestion that, while we’re paid-witch/troll/shill/whatever-hunting, their pay (if they and it exist), may come from your very pockets. So it may also be important to consider symptoms and causes.
Lloyd – I don’t read Javier’s stuff but I must say the rebuttal posts like yours and the others in this thread, and occasionally from Dennis Coyne, can be some of the more interesting, original and well written on the non-hydrocarbon discussions.
Thanks, George.
Some of the reasoning behind these pieces comes from your Sept. 15th comments on the “dead time delay in the feedback” in the price/demand/supply equation for oil boom and bust leading to instability. (Really.)
There is a feedback disconnect baked into most computer-mediated systems, and I believe it has effects similar to those you observed in Oil prices. Michael Lewis’ excellent “Flash Boys” looks at how tiny delays are used to essentially front run stock transactions; the current problem with fake news is essentially liars “front running” the fact-checking system.
The trolls make use of this disconnect in a similar way: they can say anything they want, and when someone reads the forum, they see that comment before any rebuttal. There will also be a period where they are unchallenged. The disconnect between the overall impression of an entire thread and the intent of individual items and posters, is striking: to try and reshape the narrative of a whole thread (as I believe happened here) or across the totality of a site, requires having a plan at the very start. Having a plan allows them to deal with the feedback delays built into the system more easily than those counter-punching.
My answer to the delay has been to look at the whole thread as an entity, and describe their actions: essentially preventing my interpretation of the facts from being front run, and forcing the trolls to counter-punch (which typically makes them look bad, opens up their motivations to scrutiny, and forces them off-message.)
Which I probably wouldn’t have figured out if I hadn’t absorbed your ideas about oil prices.
-Lloyd
This is all very interesting, but as an Arts Major you have no allegiance to the facts or the scientific method. Anecdotical evidence or logical argumentation are equally valid to you.
You see what I mean? You jump from a fact to an explanation, when your hypothesis has no support at all. That doesn’t bother you the least. An hypothesis without empirical support in science is not even an hypothesis. We call it a conjecture.
This shows the insolvable difference between you and me, because we not only have completely different education background, but we see reality in very different terms. For you a conjecture is valid as long as it is logically tenable. For me a conjecture has no value at all except as an stimulus to gather evidence.
And by the way, your conjecture is wrong. It is not me who has changed but the structure of the blog. Previously this was essentially a Peak Oil blog with most articles dealing with oil or other fossil fuels, and exceptionally other issues. Out of respect for Ron Patterson and the people that come here exclusively to follow the fossil fuel situation I did not initiate any climate discussion. My interest for PeakOilBarrel is for the fossil fuel situation, as this is not a climate blog. However it is populated by a few climate trolls that have consistently being posting comments about climate alarmism.
But the blog has changed, and now half of the threads are Open Thread, Non-Petroleum. It is clear that you can discuss anything here without stepping on anybody’s toes. The people that only want fossil fuel related news and discussion can limit themselves to the fossil fuel threads.
Now you see why science gets to the truth eventually, while arts doesn’t care about the truth. No wonder that you “can see manipulation happening” even if it is only in your mind. That is your specialty. That’s what you are doing now.
That doesn’t make me wrong. I think it is good people here are exposed to a different opinion and to published evidence that points that the science is far from settled. The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is probably wrong. In the late 90’s everybody accepted it, but resistance has been growing since the pause started to show that the models are wrong. There is a very distinct possibility that temperatures will not rise over the next 5-10 years, so by 2025 temperatures might be very similar to those of 2000. The hypothesis is unlikely to survive to that. We will see what happens then to alarmists. They will probably be worried by something else. Climate alarmism was already wrong in the 1930’s and in the 1970’s, but it has no memory.
So you think. But you have shown no skill in getting to the truth, because the truth doesn’t matter to you, the expert in manipulation.
One final thing. How do you know everybody disagrees with me here? When one opinion is found intolerable by the dominant position, and those that hold that opinion are insulted and attacked, they simply shut, but they don’t change their opinion. That’s why polls become so unreliable and why seemingly outrageous results happen at elections. Every time you or the others attack somebody showing a different opinion, like me, your attack on freedom of speech makes society a little less free. Learn to attack the arguments, not the person.
This is all very interesting, but as an Arts Major you have no allegiance to the facts or the scientific method.
And yet I spend time in a forum where there is a great concern for facts, and have managed to keep my nose clean.
It is not me who has changed but the structure of the blog. Previously this was essentially a Peak Oil blog with most articles dealing with oil or other fossil fuels, and exceptionally other issues.
This is not a response to anything I wrote. Reference, please.
This shows the insolvable difference between you and me, because we not only have completely different education background, but we see reality in very different terms.
And yet I get along fine with the people here, who also have vastly different educational backgrounds. Reference for my seeing “reality in different terms” please.
You see what I mean? You jump from a fact to an explanation,
I wrote in that comment that your actions suggested someone with a time frame. I offered a potential answer to an issue that was of the moment. I couch my statements as probabilities because they are theories.
You are free to disagree with them.
How do you know everybody disagrees with me here?
I don’t play to the audience- I interact with the contributors, and there do seem to be a lot who disagree with you. I don’t care who agrees with you out there. If you don’t post, you’re not part of the conversation. (To readers: the purposes of this blog are advanced by your reading and being informed. Happy to have you, but I don’t play to you.)
Every time you or the others attack somebody showing a different opinion, like me, your attack on freedom of speech makes society a little less free.
Ah yes, the “intolerant democrat” argument! Another classic that Nancy liked to use. You are free to make this argument. I stand by my actions. People can draw their own conclusions.
Learn to attack the arguments, not the person.
I would posit that your argument comprises the totality of what you say here, and the way in which you say it. Your persona is part of your argument. And your persona is interpreted in a negative light by many here. Let’s quote wehappyfew :
Trollish behavior exhibited by Javier here recently:
– as you point out, immediate and vociferous responses to any conflicting arguments.
– deflection from looking at all the data, focusing on narrow slices of data, over short timespans.
-Gish Galloping (a rapid-fire delivery of many wrong or misleading arguments, too many to rebut in a reasonable length post)
– arguing opposite sides of the same argument, as need to advance his point.
My opinion remains that your behaviour in this thread is atypical. Your efforts to change the narrative are obvious.
Reputation matters. Your feathers are intact.
Whatever.
Your interpretation is wrong, and therefore irrelevant. Nothing of what you say interests me the least. Including your opinion of me.
Your wrong Javier, like always
“Your interpretation is wrong, and therefore irrelevant.”
Disinformation and fake news has consequences. The country is coming to terms with it regarding the election. It needs to be called out and eliminated.
Your interpretation is wrong, and therefore irrelevant.
I WIN!
LOL (a real one.)
(edit after half an hour)
Yeah…. I know it’s immature.
But the idea of Javier just dismissing me cracks me up.
I’m still smiling.
Good thoughts, Coach Lloyd,
The evidence for/against Javier being a PAID troll would be difficult to come by, all we can go on is behavior. Looking at Javier’s online presence in other discussion fora, he is most adamant that CO2 is definitely NOT causing much warming, it is instead solar/natural cycles, involving UV, solar wind, solar magnetic fields, etc modulating clouds, etc.
Trollish behavior exhibited by Javier here recently:
– as you point out, immediate and vociferous responses to any conflicting arguments.
– deflection from looking at all the data, focusing on narrow slices of data, over short timespans.
-Gish Galloping (a rapid-fire delivery of many wrong or misleading arguments, too many to rebut in a reasonable length post)
– arguing opposite sides of the same argument, as need to advance his point.
Case in point, Javier argued above that El Nino maybe caused ALL of the warming in 2016, who can tell? It’s all a huge mystery, we have no way of quantifying how big an ENSO event is, or how much influence it has on temperatures. He argued we have no way to compare one El Nino event to another – “every El Nino is different” – can’t possibly compare then, no no no.
Yet in other fora, Javier has laid out a concise, accurate description of how Los Ninos/Las Ninas move heat from ocean to atmosphere and back again, using the standard peer-reviewed scientific literature, and referenced all of the various indices that quantify ENSO and its effect on tropical and global temperatures.
So we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that Javier is stupid or ignorant. He knows the literature backwards and forwards. The fact that he advances obviously wrong/stupid/ignorant arguments despite his extensive knowledge is another strong indicator of trollery, IMHO.
His strong attachment to a particular flavor of “Its Natural – Definitely NOT CO2” in other fora leads me to think he is not part of an organized fossil fuel disinformation campaign. He may have wrapped up his own self image and sense of worth in this iconoclastic quack-theory-of-everything-climate-related, and he shows up to regurgitate the latest denier talking point whenever it meshes with his own pet theories.
…
Javier and the trolls are most anxious to prevent discussion about particular obvious facts… like this graph:
El Nino events do not matter, they are recycled heat from sunlight and the drying they cause promotes forest fires adding to the CO2 burden. The ocean cannot heat the planet’s surface in fact the depths are so cold if they surfaced they would cool the planet. The ocean does store solar energy and when winds and currents change, regions will get warmed or cooled.
It is fallacy in point.
I haven’t said such thing. You are inventing a strawman argument. You are good at that because you are bad at scientific discussion. We have several ways of comparing El Niño events that give slightly different results.
Yes they are. That’s why it is not very smart to measure peak-to-peak temperatures and imagine that you get a meaningful temperature trend.
I am always happy to discuss facts, and I do not prevent discussion of anything. More strawmen. You build an image inside your brain and then confound it with reality.
So now correlation is proof of causation? And how can you claim causation from CO2 if it is lagged 10 years? Now the cause comes 10 years after the effect? seems you are trying to prove warming produces CO2.
Hi whf.
Nice analysis.
The evidence for/against Javier being a PAID troll would be difficult to come by, all we can go on is behavior.
That is the crux of it.
Money is a possible motive, but not the only one.
To mention the other possible motives, however, would verge over into ad-hominem. 🙂
I appreciate your sharing your opinion regards Javier and organized disinformation. It does leave me without an explanation for anomalous behaviour, however….perhaps Javier is influenced by the El Nino? 🙂
-Lloyd
Last time he was about he was convinced we were heading for an ice age which rather contradicts global warming being caused by anything other than CO2. Warming = Ice age … right.
NAOM
Obviously a glaciation is what comes after every interglacial. But that is unlikely to happen for hundreds to a few thousand years.
I am suspecting Javier is 2 people, am keeping an eye on it. Started just before he disappeared so didn’t get enough data.
NAOM
Do you also think I have super powers?
I am not surprised at all that you can believe we are heading to a catastrophic future climate in a few decades. It seems you can convince yourself of anything.
Hi Lloyd,
Great post! Thanks for chiming in with your thoughts, I was eagerly waiting for your analysis, and you did not disappoint.
I rarely post, but I find this fascinating enough to make an exception. I would even go a step further and speculate that Javier is not an actively practicing biologist, as he claims. In fact, it would be very hard to convince me otherwise at this point. His continual politicized talking points and the absolute certainty (and condescending attitude) in his contrarian viewpoints give him away. I don’t know any scientist that think this way, at least someone who’s opinions I respect. It’s one thing to disagree, or offer a countering opinion, but this is getting way beyond that. Javier even says he’s not a climate scientist, which is the only thing I believe at this point!
For example:
Javier posted this (12/14 @ 10:44):
“The Arctic ice spiral of death is a myth. Arctic ice this summer was more extensive than in 2007. That’s 9 years without decline. Another unpredicted pause. Let’s remember that Al Gore said in 2007 that the North Pole could be ice-free by 2013. Well that was three years ago, and there is more ice than when he said that.”
Hahaha… who the hell even mentioned Al Gore?! He’s not even a climate scientist!
I could also mention Wieslaw Maslowski, Jay Zwally, Mark Serreze, and Peter Wadhams as specialist scientists who have made failed predictions about Arctic sea ice evolution and point you to where those predictions were made. But it is probable that you don’t know those names unless you look them up.
The utter failure of almost every alarmist prediction surprisingly doesn’t seem to shake the faith of the true believers in a catastrophic climate future. I guess facts don’t matter when you have faith.
probably wrong.
and case in point on the condescending attitude.
signed,
science based true believer
I skip over most of these climate debates. Yes, I believe the science. In fact, I accept the findings enough that I don’t bother to look for more info to back it up.
But I think economics will provide the bigger leverage. I am hoping that lower carbon use makes sense for economic and strategic reasons. The faster companies and countries wean themselves off fossil fuels, the less reason there will be to support fossil fuel companies and countries. Distributed energy production, which is less dependent on a small group of suppliers, is better for global politics.
There will be major political shifts once resource-rich countries no longer have that to hold over other countries.
Utah’s Great Salt Lake is shrinking.
“After the Great Lakes, Utah’s Great Salt Lake is the largest body of water (by area) in the United States. Back in the middle of the 19th century, when pioneers first arrived in the area, the lake spread across roughly 1,600 square miles (4,100 square kilometers). Now, the lake covers an area of only about 1,050 square miles (2,700 square km), new satellite photos from NASA reveal. In October, the Great Salt Lake reached its lowest level in recorded history, with the water’s surface elevation at only 4,191 feet (1,277 meters).”
http://www.livescience.com/57055-utah-great-salt-lake-shrinking.html
The Greenland ice sheet (Danish: Grønlands indlandsis, Greenlandic: Sermersuaq) is a vast body of ice covering 1,710,000 square kilometres (660,000 sq mi), roughly 80% of the surface of Greenland.
It is the second largest ice body in the world, after the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The ice sheet is almost 2,400 kilometres (1,500 mi) long in a north-south direction, and its greatest width is 1,100 kilometres (680 mi) at a latitude of 77°N, near its northern margin. The mean altitude of the ice is 2,135 metres (7,005 ft).[1] The thickness is generally more than 2 km (1.2 mi) and over 3 km (1.9 mi) at its thickest point. It is not the only ice mass of Greenland – isolated glaciers and small ice caps cover between 76,000 and 100,000 square kilometres (29,000 and 39,000 sq mi) around the periphery. If the entire 2,850,000 cubic kilometres (684,000 cu mi) of ice were to melt, it would lead to a global sea level rise of 7.2 m (24 ft).[2] The Greenland Ice Sheet is sometimes referred to under the term inland ice, or its Danish equivalent, indlandsis. It is also sometimes referred to as an ice cap.
The ice in the current ice sheet is as old as 110,000 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet
Most of it melted during the Eemian, looks like the same will happen this time around.
Greenland has been seismically active for a long time, lately showing an increase. The movements in the ice sheet and in particular the calving events causing large waves and impacts against standing ice are seismically detectable. Earthquakes (actually icequakes) in Greenland are on the order of 5.2 to 6.2 and can be observed almost anywhere. The wave patterns are monitored with closer seismic systems to determine the loss of ice mass.
“Looking through the seismic data, the scientists were able to detect incredibly small changes in the velocity of seismic waves, of less than 1 percent. They tracked average velocities from January 2012 to 2014, and observed very large seismic velocity decreases in 2012, versus 2013. These measurements mirrored the observations of ice sheet volume made by the GRACE satellites, which recorded abnormally large melting in 2012 versus 2013. The comparison suggested that seismic data may indeed reflect changes in ice sheets.
Using data from the GRACE satellites, the team then developed a model to predict the volume of the ice sheet, given the velocity of the seismic waves within the Earth’s crust. The model’s predictions matched the satellite data with 91 percent accuracy.”
http://news.mit.edu/2016/tracking-greenland-ice-melt-seismic-waves-0506
‘THE ARCTIC IS UNRAVELING,’ SCIENTISTS CONCLUDE AFTER LATEST SOBERING CLIMATE REPORT
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13122016/arctic-melting-climate-change-noaa-science
No it doesn’t look like that at all. It is more unfounded alarmism.
What most people including you ignore, is that Greenland gains more ice almost every year that it melts. The balance is thought to be negative when including icebergs that break from Greenland coastal glaciers.
Even with current situation held forever, it would be impossible for Greenland to lose an important part of its ice as coastal glaciers held a limited amount of Greenland’s ice. For Greenland to melt completely it would be necessary that gains were less than melt for thousands of years. Your ignorance shows.
By the way 2016-2017 is being a record year for Greenland’s ice gains, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute. I guess they know what they talk about.
https://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/
Calling me ignorant is the complete inverse of reality, which is your schtick.
You must be a moron or think we are morons. We have satellites that regularly measure the mass of the ice sheet, it’s getting less massive. You are consistent though, but hopelessly consistently wrong.
I got you this time though, you not only did not show the other graph but you completely misrepresented what the website concluded.
“Over the year, it snows more than it melts, but calving of icebergs also adds to the total mass budget of the ice sheet. Satellite observations over the last decade show that the ice sheet is not in balance. The calving loss is greater than the gain from surface mass balance, and Greenland is losing mass at about 200 Gt/yr.”
That is 200 gigatons per year loss, not gain. You also seem to have zero grasp of how an ice sheet melts.
So take you lies and fake sideshows elsewhere, people are getting sick of the crap you spew onto the internet.
Caveat, the snow amount is not really measured on Greenland to get the amounts, it is the result of modeling from some weather data.
What they say is what I said:
“Greenland gains more ice almost every year that it melts. The balance is thought to be negative when including icebergs that break from Greenland coastal glaciers.”
You seem to also have a reading comprehension problem.
I don’t think very highly of you, but I am too well educated to tell you.
” For Greenland to melt completely it would be necessary that gains were less than melt for thousands of years. Your ignorance shows.” Wrong, wrong and wrong. The mass loss has to be greater than the mass gain, that is all. End of story.
Your ignorance is showing.
You also do not have a clue about how the melting works nor how altitude and decreasing albedo affect the melting process. I would educate you, but in your case, nothing gets in.
Greenland is a bowl surrounded by mountains. For the mass loss to continue being greater than mass gain, the melting has to exceed the accumulation. If the accumulation exceeds melting as it happens now, all the interior of Greenland will remain iced regardless of iceberg calving.
You really need to stop pretending you know much about glaciers, ice caps and how they form and recede or the energetics involved.
Anyway, the Danish mass system is just a model extrapolated from weather data, it is not actual data on snowfall or melt.
You don’t need to stop pretending anything because by saying that it looks like Greenland is going to melt this time, you show you have no idea what you talk about.
Scientists have demonstrated that Greenland ice cap is thickening and moving more slowly now than during the previous 9000 years.
MacGregor, Joseph A., et al. “Holocene deceleration of the Greenland Ice Sheet.” Science 351.6273 (2016): 590-593.
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/68n4q5mk.pdf
“Recent peripheral thinning of the Greenland Ice Sheet is partly offset by interior thickening
ice flow in its interior is slower now than the average speed over the past nine millennia.
Thus, recent interior thickening of the Greenland Ice Sheet is partly an ongoing dynamic response to the last deglaciation that is large enough to affect interpretation of its mass balance from altimetry.”
Tedstone, Andrew J., et al. “Decadal slowdown of a land-terminating sector of the Greenland Ice Sheet despite warming.” Nature 526.7575 (2015): 692-695.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter_Nienow/publication/283322277_Decadal_slowdown_of_a_land-terminating_sector_of_the_Greenland_Ice_Sheet_despite_warming/links/56eac1ae08aec6b500162bcd.pdf
“Our findings suggest that, over these three decades, hydrodynamic coupling in this section of the ablation zone resulted in a net slow- down of ice motion (not a speed-up, as previously postulated).”
So yes, Greenland ice cap is thickening and slowing, very much in disagreement with what you postulate.
You defend unfounded alarmism against scientific knowledge. Greenland is not going to melt significantly. Its interior is gaining ice, not loosing it.
OK, let’s say I want to browse the actual scientific papers on the topic of: Greenland ice cap is thickening and slowing, very much in disagreement with what you postulate…
So for shits and giggles I do a Google scholar search on ‘Greenland Ice Sheets’ and out of the myriad hits on that topic, I pick a paper from what is generally considered a highly reputable scientific source such as Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n4/abs/nclimate2161.html
Here’s the title and abstract: (Bold in Abstract, mine)
NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | ARTICLE
Print
Share/bookmark
Sustained mass loss of the northeast Greenland ice sheet triggered by regional warming
Shfaqat A. Khan, Kurt H. Kjær, Michael Bevis, Jonathan L. Bamber, John Wahr, Kristian K. Kjeldsen, Anders A. Bjørk, Niels J. Korsgaard, Leigh A. Stearns, Michiel R. van den Broeke, Lin Liu, Nicolaj K. Larsen & Ioana S. Muresan
AffiliationsContributionsCorresponding author
Nature Climate Change 4, 292–299 (2014) doi:10.1038/nclimate2161
Received 28 October 2013 Accepted 04 February 2014 Published online 16 March 2014
Abstract
Abstract• References• Author information• Supplementary information
The Greenland ice sheet has been one of the largest contributors to global sea-level rise over the past 20 years, accounting for 0.5 mm yr−1 of a total of 3.2 mm yr−1. A significant portion of this contribution is associated with the speed-up of an increased number of glaciers in southeast and northwest Greenland. Here, we show that the northeast Greenland ice stream, which extends more than 600 km into the interior of the ice sheet, is now undergoing sustained dynamic thinning, linked to regional warming, after more than a quarter of a century of stability. This sector of the Greenland ice sheet is of particular interest, because the drainage basin area covers 16% of the ice sheet (twice that of Jakobshavn Isbræ) and numerical model predictions suggest no significant mass loss for this sector, leading to an under-estimation of future global sea-level rise. The geometry of the bedrock and monotonic trend in glacier speed-up and mass loss suggests that dynamic drawdown of ice in this region will continue in the near future.
That’s nice and all but it’s only one paper and who knows maybe 97% of the other peer reviewed science papers on this topic have contradictory information and completely discredit this hypothesis, maybe Nature is just promoting alarmism…
So I then take the URL of that single paper from Nature and plug it in to my friendly little AI search engine and ask for related papers to that topic and I get the following first level result:
Sustained mass loss of the northeast Greenland ice sheet triggered by regional warming
I’ve identified 720 related papers and grouped them by concept.
The 9 concept titles it lists are:
Ice
Greenland
Snow
Elevation
April figure
April figure B
Ocean Warming Regional
North East
Sheet
I can then start reading those 720 papers…
Each of these headings has lists of science papers under each of them.
As an example under the concept Ice: (Bold in Abstarct, mine)
I’ve found this paper for you in:icemass
CLOSE
-2006
Acceleration of Greenland ice mass loss in spring 2004
Velicogna, I, Wahr, J
GO TO LINKBROWSE PAPER
Abstract
In 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected the contribution to sea level rise from the Greenland ice sheet to be between -0.02 and +0.09 m from 1990 to 2100 (ref. 1). However, recent work has suggested that the ice sheet responds more quickly to climate perturbations than previously thought, particularly near the coast. Here we use a satellite gravity survey by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) conducted from April 2002 to April 2006 to provide an independent estimate of the contribution of Greenland ice mass loss to sea level change. We detect an ice mass loss of 248 ± 36 km3 yr-1, equivalent to a global sea level rise of 0.5 ± 0.1 mm yr-1. The rate of ice loss increased by 250 per cent between the periods April 2002 to April 2004 and May 2004 to April 2006, almost entirely due to accelerated rates of ice loss in southern Greenland; the rate of mass loss in north Greenland was almost constant. Continued monitoring will be needed to identify any future changes in the rate of ice loss in Greenland. © 2006 Nature Publishing Group
Then if I’m really interested in a particular aspect of any of the 720 papers I can take the URL of that paper and reenter it in the AI search engine and find hundreds more related papers to each and every one of them.
Surprise, surprise! The fact of the matter is the vast majority of these papers are suggesting that the evidence doesn’t support your original statement. So could you please provide at least an equal number of peer reviewed papers say 700, from reputable science journals that support your position? I would be willing to read all of them!
Bet you can’t!
Fred,
My statement was:
“The balance is thought to be negative”
So those papers that you show are in agreement with me when they say that there is a mass loss in Greenland. I have never say the opposite. Prove it otherwise.
My other statement is that:
“Greenland ice cap is thickening and slowing”
I have already shown a paper on the thickening and two on the slowing, one is regional, the other refers to Greenland interior.
The thickening of Greenland ice cap is taking place in its central part. Obviously not in the periphery because there is a mass loss. Here you have a bunch of papers about it:
Zwally, H. Jay. “Growth of Greenland ice sheet: Interpretation.” Science 246.4937 (1989): 1589.
“An observed 0.23 m/year thickening of the Greenland ice sheet indicates a 25 percent to 45 percent excess ice accumulation over the amount required to balance the outward ice flow. The implied global sea-level depletion is 0.2 to 0.4 mm/year, depending on whether the thickening is only recent (5 to 10 years) or longer term (less than 100 years). If there is a similar imbalance in the northern 60 percent of the ice-sheet area, the depletion is 0.35 to 0.7 mm/year. Increasing ice thickness suggests that the precipitation is higher than the long-term average; higher precipitation may be a characteristic of warmer climates in polar regions.”
Krabill, W., et al. “Greenland ice sheet thickness changes measured by laser altimetry.” Geophysical Research Letters 22.17 (1995): 2341-2344.
“Precise airborne laser-altimetry surveys, at locations on the Greenland ice sheet, that had been accurately surveyed in 1980 and 1981, reveal a thickening in western Greenland of up to two meters between 1980 and 1993.”
ZWALLY, HJAY, et al. “Growth of Greenland ice sheet- Measurement.” Science 246.4937 (1989): 1587-1589.
“Measurements of ice-sheet elevation change by satellite altimetry show that the Greenland surface elevation south of 72 deg north latitude is increasing. The vertical velocity of the surface is 0.20 + or – 0.06 meters/year from measured changes in surface elevations”
Thomas, Robert H., et al. “Thickening of the western part of the Greenland ice sheet.” Journal of Glaciology 44.148 (1998): 653-658.
“Within the accuracy to which we know snow-accumulation rates, the entire area is in balance, but localized regions inland from Upernavik Isstrom and Jakobshavn Isbra both appear to be thickening by about 10 cm a-1.”
Sundal, Aud Venke, et al. “Melt-induced speed-up of Greenland ice sheet offset by efficient subglacial drainage.” Nature 469.7331 (2011): 521-524.
“Recent studies addressing the mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) show that snowfall-driven thickening of the interior is more than offset by near-coastal mass loss caused by increased surface melting”
That interior parts of Greenland show ice cap thickening is a well known and measured phenomenon. Even though Greenland is losing mass, it is premature to think that there is any risk of substantial melting of the ice cap.
What Gonefishing is saying is not what the experts and the literature are saying, so go after him with your 700+ articles and show him that Greenland is under no risk of catastrophic melting. That is the evidence that is lacking.
ALARMISM IS UNJUSTIFIED.
Javier, ‘thickening’ and ‘thinning’ are different from ‘mass gain’ and ‘mass loss’, respectively, and the papers you cite don’t seem very recent, either.
If anything, it would seem to stand to reason that if climate were warming, there’d be greater precipitation and therefore possible thickening, rather than absolute mass-gain of Greenland’s snow/ice sheets.
Lastly, I would caution about being cavalier about initial conditions.
Yo Javy, I never used the term catastrophic or gave a time line. You do make things up.
Nice set of papers you present that are all refuted by current measured mass loss rates.
Caelan,
“Javier, ‘thickening’ and ‘thinning’ are different from ‘mass gain’ and ‘mass loss’”
I know that and I have never mistaken them. The situation is clear. Greenland receives more snow that it melts, but sustains a mass loss due to iceberg calving. While its ice cap is peripherally thinning, it is thickening in its interior. The discussion about if Greenland ice is accelerating or slowing continues, but the latest data indicates it is slowing. While Greenland contributes to sea level rise, no serious scientist believes that Greenland situation is in any danger of catastrophic melting.
“the papers you cite don’t seem very recent, either.”
I didn’t search by date. Once something is well known you don’t get to publish about it. But one of the papers I cited above that talks about movement, MacGregor et al., 2016:
“Thus, recent interior thickening of the Greenland Ice Sheet is partly an ongoing dynamic response to the last deglaciation that is large enough to affect interpretation of its mass balance from altimetry.”
I think it is pretty clear that I am right in what I have said, therefore GoneFishing has to be wrong, once more.
“If anything, it would seem to stand to reason that if climate were warming, there’d be greater precipitation and therefore possible thickening”
Exactly. A warmer climate with warmer oceans increases snow precipitation over Greenland while increasing melting and ice calving at the periphery. The increase in snow reduces mass loss and gives the ice cap more resilience to warming. It is one more of those negative feedbacks that alarmists fail to consider. We know thanks to the Eemian, that to melt Greenland a significantly warmer world and thousands of years are required. Any news about Greenland melting posing a threat are garbage.
ALARMISM IS UNJUSTIFIED.
GoneFishing,
“Yo Javy, I never used the term catastrophic or gave a time line.”
You said it looks like Greenland is going to melt also this time around.
That phrase is alarmist and wrong. It displays a profound ignorance of Greenland ice dynamics.
No. It does not look like Greenland is going to melt this time around. If the melting continues at this rate, it would take 13,000 years to melt all of Greenland’s ice. But nothing says it will continue. Long before that it will get colder than now.
Colder? Why? There is no evidence or actual science that says it will get colder. In fact it is getting warmer and we know the physical reasons why.
You argue like teenager, always refuting anything said and no real evidence to stand on.
You can’t claim orbital cycles, NH is increasing in insolation and will stay above current insolation for 40,000 years.
GHG’s are high enough to bring the earth 3C warmer and are on the increase. Permafrost is melting, releasing more GHG’s.
So by what method will the earth get colder? Why would one think that Greenland will stay at a constant rate of melt in a warming world?
GoneFishing,
“Colder? Why? There is no evidence or actual science that says it will get colder.”
Au contraire mon ami, all the evidence in the world. It has always got colder after getting warmer. You claim this time is different. Such claims are almost always invariably wrong.
“You can’t claim orbital cycles, NH is increasing in insolation and will stay above current insolation for 40,000 years.”
I’ll give you the dates when NH insolation was increasing like now, and obliquity was falling like now, and you can check by yourself what happened (spoiler, a glaciation):
119,400 yr BP
202,700 yr BP
323,500 yr BP
567,600 yr BP
612,400 yr BP
775,000 yr BP
Every single one of those times the NH insolation was on the increase and every single one of those times the world plunged into a glacial period nonetheless. Do you see a pattern there? Six times in 650 kyrs. In a few thousand years it will be our turn. But nothing to be alarmed about now.
“So by what method will the earth get colder?”
Same method as what brought the pause that stopped global warming this century, only stronger. It is called Natural climate change. really powerful stuff.
“Why would one think that Greenland will stay at a constant rate of melt in a warming world?”
One shouldn’t. It will go up and down, but Greenland won’t melt.
ALARMISM IS UNJUSTIFIED.
The climate debate rages on.
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/elnino/what-is-la-nina.
Neonics
Neonicotinoids
Neonicotinoid coated seeds for insect control
Bad for honey bees.
http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12459
https://www.honeycolony.com/article/shedding-light-3-big-lies-systemic-pesticides/
The solution?
Control the use of neonics. Honey bees won’t die off!
Fake news, the narrative, the propaganda, is real.
I read a story about six months ago that Charles Manson had died on May 15, 2015. It was a hoax, fake news. Fooled an old fool like me. I was gullible enough to believe the fake news until I found out that Charles Manson is not dead. Charles Manson will one day die, so the story won’t be fake then. The real news will get here soon enough.
The beekeepers in Australia know that neonicotinoids kill honey bees and the populations decline.
Beekeepers in Australia have been able to survive, explains Gibbs, because after being exposed to neonics, they can run their hive into the forests for fresh nectar and pollen (primarily red gum and iron bark trees).
You have to control the use of neonics on crops where honey bees gather nectars. A simple solution to not kill and collapse colonies.
Fake news, lies and propaganda, has consequences.
I have honey bees at the farm during the summer months, they are busy as bees. They fly approximately 12 to 15 feet above the ground back and forth all day long from morning to evening to the hives and then back out to where the plants are. One colony goes rogue and sets up shop in an old wood granary inside the walls. Must get crowded at the hive location. Anywhere within 75 feet of the hive location, they begin to attack. You stay clear, fear is real. No such thing as fake fear.
Good morning RW,
I ‘m sure neonics are responsible for bee die off to a very substantial degree. The evidence to this effect is strong.
But I have also heard about too many dead hives in places where the bees are not close enough to any cultivated field or orchard to be exposed to neonics.
There is substantial evidence that neonic poisoning is not the whole story. In the end, it is almost sure to turn out to be the case that die off is due to a combination of factors including neonics, monocropping, loss of natural sources of nectar and pollen,with consequent inadequate nutrition, parasites, an unknown viral disease, etc
An oversimplified, stripped down environment is dangerous as hell to honeybees. They NEED ecological diversity to thrive, maybe even to survive.
There’s a lesson here that applies to naked apes.
We had best be lending a collective ear to guys such as Fred Maygar, who really and truly understands the truth of this observation, and posts a lot of evidence to support it.
And even though a beesting would kill him, unless I happened to be right on the spot with the adrenalin injection, he wanted bees on the place, and we had four nice busy hives within a hundred yards of the house until about a year ago.
I celebrate the renewed presence of bears in my immediate neighborhood. There were none around for at least a century previous to about 2012 or so, due to over hunting.
But they are BACK now, and a bear family paid us a visit one night, and busted up a thousand bucks worth of nice hives, and ate nearly all the bees, and all the honey.
Our bees were doing ok despite the use of neonics within a hundred yards, right across the road, by a neighbor who has NOT retired. I suspect they remained healthy in large part because there was plenty of natural forage, the right stuff, within easy flying distance.
If they get to be too big a problem, local beekeepers can fence in their hives using electric fences that deliver a heavy duty shock, or elevate the hives on sturdy steel posts above the reach of a bear, or whatever.
If they get to be numerous, I will feel free to put some bear meat in the freezer and bear rug in front of the fireplace, lol.
Kill my old Daddy, not Fred, lol.
I think you folks will enjoy this short Q&A interview/article on climate, FF industry, etc. Please note she is a former engineer with the oil industry. The comments are very interesting.
All the best
https://thetyee.ca/News/2016/12/16/Climate-Change-in-Age-of-Trump/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-stock-act_us_58536830e4b0b3ddfd8c08b8
Trump will have to back off about running or letting his kids run his businesses, , but in the meantime, the more he blows and blusters, the more it distracts attention from whatever other foolish and dangerous activities he is up to.
He’s bad news, but he’s not stupid, when it comes to manipulating people, friend or foe.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-bakersfield-police-killing-20161215-story.html
This cop ought to be bankrupted, banned from even serving as a parking meter patrolman, and the dispatchers office overhauled. There’s no excuse, with computerized data instantly available, for the cops on the scene , and numerous previous visits to the same spot, not to have known they were likely dealing with a senile individual.
And any cop who is afraid enough to empty his gun into a man just because he fails to show his hands , in broad daylight, with half a dozen more cops on the scene,all armed, is no better than a bully with a gun, a twenty four carat coward lacking even the minimal measure of presence of mind necessary to doing such dangerous work. If an individual lacks balls enough to handle dangerous work, he ought to be working in a nice safe office someplace.
Pulling his gun and holding it on the old man was justified, but shooting him with his hands in his pockets was not. All of us who drive are expected to be able to react CORRECTLY on a moment’s notice to a dangerous situation, for instance swerving violently to avoid a kid who runs into the street, if there is no time to stop. Same thing for the cop, in terms of judgement.
I watched a local deputy disarm my next door neighbor back in 1958, without help, all by his lonesome, with the neighbor drunk as a skunk and waving a real pistol as plain as day, and actually threatening to shoot the deputy. He walked right up to him, and took the pistol away from him. I was still a kid back then of course. He didn’t even get an attaboy from anybody except a few family members, one of them being me years later. The drunk guy was married to one of my aunts.
Now it’s one thing for a cop to make such a mistake, because mistakes do happen. People die every minute, due to accidents and miscalculations of one sort or another.
The real issue here is that such incidents destroy the confidence of working class and especially minority community members in law enforcement, with grave and growing consequences for community peace and quiet and good order society wide, every time it happens. It’s not that this cop wouldn’t be ok writing parking tickets, but rather that the community needs to KNOW this sort of questionable shooting will not be tolerated by police departments, that the cop who shoots somebody under such circumstances will continue to be on the payroll, with bennies and a pension, while the family is dealing with the consequences.
We have troubles enough, from terrorists to sea levels rising, without adding to them by allowing the police establishment to get away with covering for incompetent cops, which happens all too often. I
This cop’s career is NOTHING, nada, zilch, compared to the loss of community respect and confidence in the police. Note I am NOT accusing the police of covering for THIS cop, THIS time. Hopefully they will do the right thing.
I am pretty much of a law and order sort of guy myself, but that doesn’t mean I ‘ m a true believer nut case when it comes to believing in cops and judges. There are crooks and incompetents in EVERY line of work, but we absolutely need to make sure there are DAMNED FEW of that sort in police work.
Another great intellect in the transition team!
http://amp.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/12/16/trump_advisor_anthony_scaramucci_anti_science_interview_on_cnn.html
But you’re saying that you do, and you’re saying the scientific community knows, and I’m saying people have gotten things wrong throughout the 5,500-year history of our planet.
Trump’s advisor Anthony Scaramucci
“5,500-year history of our planet”
Yes, the Bible is clear; our planet is young. I always thought the earth was six thousand years old but maybe the difference is a rounding off thing? I guess Mr Scaramucci would be able to explain the 500 year difference.
He is correct. Writing was invented about 5,500 years ago at Ur.
“The original Mesopotamian writing system (believed to be the world’s oldest) was derived around 3600 BC.” (Wikipedia)
Before that it was the prehistory of our planet.
Ridiculous!
Most people, if they are talking about the span of recorded human history, do NOT say The History of the PLANET! They are not, in any way, shape or form, the same. The only people who talk about the 5,500 years of PLANETARY HISTORY are young earth creationists.
I believe even moderately educated secular laymen who talk about planetary and geologic history, generally use terms such as eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages. I’m sure Doug will correct me if I have used those terms inappropriately. However, our PLANETARY HISTORY commenced about 4.5 billion years ago and I would expect most junior high school students to know that.
Furthermore if one is criticizing the the so called mistaken views of science then one can’t really go much further back in human history than the late 14th or early 15th centuries.
Fred,
You don’t know if he was thinking about history in the traditional meaning since writing was invented. The date coincidence suggests he was. The youngest age that Young Earth creationists defend appears to be 6000 years ago. So that one does not coincide.
So you are attacking him based on your interpretation of what he was thinking about. Not solid ground.
OK, Let’s say Mr. Scaramucci is not a young earth creationist, you are right, we don’t know that for a fact. However based on his recent public statements we do know with 100% certainty that he is a climate science denier and therefore he is a science denier!
From:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/12/what-has-science-done-for-us/#more-19808
What has science done for us?
Filed under: Climate Science Communicating Climate Scientific practice — rasmus @ 13 December 2016
So what is science? It’s more than just a body of knowledge. It’s a mindset and strategy to build an understanding of our world. This understanding is extremely valuable for our society, especially when it comes to establishing where we stand and what the likely outcomes will be from perceived future actions.
The scientific method is perfect for resolving uncertainties such as controversial claims about facts. It builds on the principles of transparency, testing, and independent replication. Every scientifically trained scholar should get similar results when the analysis is repeated for a finding that is universally true.
Scientific testing and replicating scientific facts are usually based on data analysis and require an understanding of statistical reasoning and what the data really represent. The data analysis is often the point where differences arise. Climate science is no different to other science, and I have myself contributed to the process of checking the findings in a number of controversial papers (Benestad et al., 2016).
I think comenter SecularAnimist absolutely nails it here: (Bold Mine)
19
SecularAnimist says:
14 Dec 2016 at 12:29 PM
Lynn Vincentnathan wrote: “… to explain the attack on science (but not on science that helps useful technology) …”
It’s worth noting that Trump has not only promised to end funding for NASA’s Earth Science research, but has also promised to end all Federal funding for renewable energy R&D, which certainly qualifies as “science that helps useful technology”.
The attack on “science” is very specifically an attack on any scientific or technological work that threatens the narrow, short term profit interests of the fossil fuel corporations, who own the Republican Party lock, stock and barrel, and are now in the process of seizing control of the Federal government.
That IMHO is the main reason we are seeing so much activity from the trolls, bots, idealogues, etc… on the non petroleum side of Peak Oil Barrel on many other sites with similar viewpoints.
The ideas expressed openly here, are antithetical to the financial and power interests of the fossil fuel corporations, their related business partners, and their supporters.
They sure as hell are not stupid and understand very well that should the world, some of us here envision and actively support, actually come to pass they will be left holding the bag. And it would be utterly inconceivable that they will not fight to the bitter end, to our, and ultimately their own detriment.
Instead of fighting a war they will ultimately lose, they could choose to use their vast resources and help the transition to a new paradigm.
Not that I’m holding my breath!
Well, I am 100% pro-science, and I think that scientific disputes are resolved with more science not less.
That said, I think that climate science is too much biased towards the anthropogenic component and more research into natural causes of climate change is needed. So a more neutral stance from funding authorities would be beneficial for knowledge.
I don’t know this person we are talking about. I am not defending him. I am just pointing that his words may be misinterpreted, and that solid evidence is always required to reach solid conclusions.
Javier said:
Many people are doing this. I am also and so presented models of ENSO and QBO at the AGU meeting earlier this week:
http://contextearth.com/2016/11/21/presentation-at-agu-2016-on-december-12/
But I am sure that Javier won’t like this because it’s #realScience and not that #fakeScience that he keeps trying to push here.
Oh no. I like #realScience. But #realScience is published in #realJournals, unlike what you do.
I am always reading and citing #realScience published in #realJournals. It is clear that I like it very much.
The AGU meeting is a real scientific conference that draws 20,000 attendees.
“Theory is man’s feeble attempt to define life
Nothing can substitute experience
I know nothing but feel everything
The universe already told me” ~ Chapter 2
Note the various forms of detachment/containerization in the video…
Note that it’s a video and not the outside…
Note how we are communicating…
“The problems of science are the problems of man” ~ Pope John Paul II
Yup, for pagan me, Earth’s history spans 4.54 billion years (with a gazillion subdivisions); you biology types maybe differ a bit since, correct me if I’m wrong, the earliest evidence of life on Earth dates goes back 3.5-ish billion years so you might have your own weird time-scale – or not. 🙂
We have to live with those people in the same country and neighborhoods. As soon as I find out someone believes the universe (not just the earth) is only a few thousand years old, I make no attempt to convince them otherwise.
The US has about 70 percent Christian and 6 percent other religions. About 25% are listed as non-religious or unaffiliated. So pagans and atheists and others are way outnumbered. About 25% are evangelical Christians.
… if I’m wrong, the earliest evidence of life on Earth dates goes back 3.5-ish billion years
Yeah, microbial mat fossils found in Australia are roughly 3.48 billion years old and there is some talk about maybe pushing the origin of life on this planet back to 3.8 billion years ago, but let’s not quibble about that 0.3 billion, which by itself is still 50,000 x the age the of the earth the YECs believe. 🙂
Javier,
You’re wrong again. He said “5,500 year history”, not “5,500 year WRITTEN history”.
There’s quite a difference between the two.
Thanks
Stanley,
We don’t know what he had in mind, but my interpretation is correct.
History (from Greek ἱστορία, historia, meaning “inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation”) is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. (Wikipedia).
Since there are written documents since 5,500 years ago, it is not incorrect to say “5,500 year history.” “5,500 year WRITTEN history” is redundant. If it is not written it is not history, as per the definition.
All things and all people are subject to other’s propaganda and lies, including science.
So let’s see how the creationists, the deniers and true believers do with the country and the world. They are the ones who got us into this fix. This will be their last chance to get us out.
I doubt very much they will even try to correct their horrendous errors. They will continue with their lies, delusions and agendas until the train wreck happens, then blame others. For they can never be wrong.
Posted in a local bookstore:
APOCHALYPTIC FICTION SECTION HAS BEEN MOVED TO CURRENT AFFAIRS
Good one Doug.
http://blog.edsuom.com/2016/12/requiem-for-republic.html
Requiem for the Republic
A hungry people neither listens to reason nor is mollified by fair treatment or swayed by any appeals.
—Seneca (c. 5 BC–65 AD), On the Shortness of Life.1
Dark Clouds Ahead.
This comment is addressed to EVERYBODY, and AT nobody.
For what it’s worth, I want to mention that I personally live in one of the deepest and darkest corners of the Bible Belt, and know quite a few hard core fundamentalists, not to mention numerous educated Christians, some of them very well educated, who do NOT take their KJB’s literally, but as parable.
I have never even ONCE ever heard any local person mention Bishop Usher and his six thousand year history of creation. No doubt some have heard of him.
I can assure the audience that preachers who mention any sort of young earth theory as serious fact from the pulpit are about as rare as families such as the Duggars, with their eighteen or twenty kids. Nobody I know, as best I can ascertain, knows of any family in this entire area that has as many as eight kids, unless all of them are at least middle aged.
Everybody has heard of dinosaurs, and it’s not hard to catch a lay preacher talking about geological time, and dinosaurs, etc, in conversation, although he won’t mention such things from the pulpit. The dumbest person I know believes the Earth is round, and that it goes around the sun, rather than vice versa, , although he can barely sign his own name.
It’s all to easy to lump everybody into the same intellectual , moral, or ethical class, based on the worst examples of the kind. The Duggars and the Flat Earthers and the Young Earthers are NOT the mainstream, and not representative of the mainstream.
Religious people ARE more likely than others to be BEHIND in their appreciation of the sciences, but it’s a big big mistake to believe the average man or woman who attends a church in rural or small town America is too ill informed or else too stupid to realize that dinosaurs, ice ages, and geological time are ( historical) realities.
Of course if you back such a person into a corner, and put him or her in a position of either denying Scripture, or endorsing it, he will invariably endorse it, because to deny it is to put himself or herself outside the community circle. We all have tribal loyalties, and we almost always prefer to defend our tribe, and maintain our member in good standing status, than to become outcasts.
Just about everybody who participates here, excepting an occasional troll, is more or less technically literate, and understands that THE question of our time is whether we take care of the environment, or don’t .
Now like it or lump it, take it or leave it, there are tens of millions, maybe as many as a hundred million , people in this country who take Christianity, as it is delineated in that old KJB, rather seriously. There are millions more who use different texts, but they count too, whether they be Catholics, or Jews, or followers of Mohammed, or some other diety.
You can make allies of them, if you have sense enough to control your own egos, and quit preening around feeling superior, and displaying your superiority, to be admired by others like you, and start talking about them and to them with respect and consideration for their values.
As some regular or another, Fred Maygar IIRC, often points out, we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts.
Facts are stubborn, and WILL make themselves felt.
It’s a fact that those tens of millions of serious Christians are out there, and that they have the vote, and that one hell of a lot of them DO vote.
Keep on insulting their intelligence, and mocking their values, if you want to lose AGAIN, next election cycle.
If you want to win, look for common ground, and common values, and you will find that you CAN reason with these people, and you CAN bring them around on environmental and social justice issues. It takes time, but it can be done.
I very quietly confronted an old neighbor, today, privately, one on one, who ought to know better , but he’s been talking Trump to the moon.
So I asked him if he understands that with Trump type presidents and congressmen and senators, there WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN and would BE no Social Security or Medicare.
He’s utterly dependent on both of course.
He got red and shut up in a hurry.
Confronting him this way in public would have been a MAJOR mistake, because he would rather deny reality than own up to his ignorance and stupidity in public. I will never mention this episode to him again, so as to minimize his loss of face.
FER SKY DADDY’s sake, all of us here have brains. When you want to win such a person over to your side, don’t attack businesses or industries or individuals who pollute our public waters DIRECTLY. That plays into the freedom to do as you please meme, the meddling government meme.
Talk about how much it costs to build and operate the water treatment plant in your town, and how it may be or will be necessary to upgrade it soon, because there is getting to be more and more crud in the water in the river your town uses as the water supply. Feel free to bitch about your tax money being spent so you can have water to drink.
Your target audience, a Trump voter, believe it or not, is smart enough to figure out on his own WHY there’s getting to be more crud in the water.
If you TELL him what to think, that business and industry and people must be prevented from polluting his water, he will resent it, even though you are obviously telling the truth.
Let him figure it out on his own, and pretty soon , within a year or two, with you throwing in a few little subtle additional lessons disguised as conversation, he will be talking about REASONABLE environmental regulation, rather than UNREASONABLE regulation.
Oldfarmermac,
I am not particularly interested in politics and not being American, much less in US politics. However I see a lot of angst from people in this blog about Trump’s victory. I must say that I was very surprised by the poor quality of the candidates to this election. However my own experience in my country is that it is the incumbent party that loses the elections, not the challenger party that wins them. In other words the incumbent party must do something wrong to not be re-elected.
It appears to be the same in the US. You probably have heard of Allan Litchman, the professor that developed a system to predict US elections and has nailed everyone of them including last since 1984.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/trump-is-headed-for-a-win-says-professor-whos-predicted-30-years-of-presidential-outcomes-correctly/
His system is based on the same principle, with 13 keys that determine if the incumbent party/president/candidate have done something wrong to lose the election. If there are 6 fails then the challenger wins. And judging by Trump it doesn’t matter much who the challenger is. On the whole, people vote on negative and they made a negative judgement on Obama presidency and Hillary candidacy.
So it is a question of when Trump will lose enough of those keys. Democrats don’t have to do anything to win back the White House. It is all in Trump’s hands.
In my country the party in government managed to win again despite serious cases of corruption. Most people I know couldn’t understand it. It was no surprise to me, because the economy has been doing better and not enough keys were negative.
It is also my experience that environmental protection is associated to economical prosperity. More developed countries have better environmental protection. In Europe we have a problem with long distance migratory birds, because they fly from countries where they are protected to countries where they are not, and fewer come back every year.
I believe that if the economy of the US does well the environment in the US has little to fear. This is a pretty solid trend for many countries under all type of governments.
I hear what you are saying OFM.
However, I believe it is time in human history to stop enabling all the ‘make believe’ systems of thought. Call it sky daddy, god, allah, whatever- its a fabrication of the human mind- an attempt to pretend that there is some order to the universe.
I have dropped out of the make believe world of religion (and thus support no franchise that claims to have the patent rights), no longer buying into the delusion.
People who subscribe to make-believe aren’t really ignorant- just severely misguided.
The views expressed here are not for sale. And no Caelan, you can’t follow me around.
“Keep on insulting their intelligence, and mocking their values, if you want to lose AGAIN, next election cycle.”
If it’s not true, grow up. If it is true, do something about it.
If you lose your ass at the race track, it’s time to take a good look at the horse you put your money on, lol.
It’s also a damned good policy, when you lose, to listen to those inside your community, camp, tribe, or profession, as the case may be, in order to gain some understanding and insight into what went WRONG, and what went RIGHT.
You can call any thing I have to say about flaws of the candidate and the campaign the D’s ran this last election ” Republican talking points” till hell freezes over, if you please, and I am pretty sure you will continue to do so.
BUT anybody who cares to can find lots and lots of life long Democrats who are party officials, and office holders, including Congressional offices, staffers in such offices, etc, who are saying the same things I have been saying right along.
I WANT D’s in office, not because I support the entire D agenda like a little martinet, but because they are right on the BIGGEST issue that ( oh unfortunate word!) trumps all the others put together, the environmental issue.
If the D party gets back to it’s roots, and away from the big money big biz bankster class, and quits relying on identity policitics, plus the moneyed elite, it will return to power-in MY estimation.
If it continues along the it’s present, recent path, well, I hate to quote a sorry sob , but the only person who actually ever said so in so many words who is known to the American public was that unlovable OLD SOUTH racist George Wallace.
He said there wasn’t” a dime’s worth of difference between” the parties. He was wrong then, but if things continue on the recent D party trend…… the D’s will just get to be more and more like the R’s.
“I WANT D’s in office”
Then start acting like it
“unlovable OLD SOUTH racist”
Is now the party of Trump
“the D’s will just get to be more and more like the R’s”
No, the D’s believe in funding education. Not cutting it.
Boomtown, Flood Town: “Climate change will bring more frequent and fierce rainstorms to cities like Houston. But unchecked development remains a priority in the famously un-zoned city, creating short-term economic gains for some while increasing flood risks for everyone.”
‘We’re ready to fight.’ Gov. Jerry Brown unloads on Trump and climate issues – LA Times: “‘If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite,’ roared Brown to the crowd.”
Who was it that mentioned the possibility of a Calexit the other day?
Who knows, maybe Elon Musk’s Space X business might suddenly get quite busy if a few of the other blue states decide they also need their own satellites…
Governor Moonbeam and any other Democrats threatening to launch their “own damn satellite” are blowing smoke as usual. Any such satellite would need to receive authority from the feds at the FCC before any transmission receivable within the United States could be made. Further, the FCC board that has the ultimate power over authorizations such as that is always controlled by whichever political party controls the White House.
Licensing shouldn’t be a problem.
Expect more commercial weather satellite operations, both in the US and elsewhere. If the US government doesn’t want to support this, it will be easy enough to purchase data from a foreign company.
California research won’t be hampered by DC. Keep in mind that Silicon Valley has enough money to do its own thing.
NOAA issues first contracts for private weather satellites | Science | AAAS: “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) made its first foray into supporting commercial weather satellites on 15 September, awarding $1.065 million in pilot contracts to two California-based startups, GeoOptics and Spire Global, to evaluate their data for potential broader use.
The small deals—$695,000 to GeoOptics and $370,000 to Spire—come as part of NOAA’s Commercial Weather Data Pilot. The deals will allow the agency to evaluate the quality of the firms’ data for forecasts and warnings, and could be the first step in a broader embrace of commercial satellites. Until now, NOAA has gathered data by building and launching its own expensive weather satellites rather than buying data from private companies.”
Licensing is a separate issue. A satellite can be licensed to any country recognized by the International Telecommunication Union. But to be “accessed” within the US, either the satellite or the “earth station” (receiving antenna on earth) has to obtain FCC authority.
Space companies are already a big thing in Silicon Valley. California already has, essentially, its own satellites. Brown knows what he is talking about.
Silicon Valley’s zero-gravity space startup boom – The Mercury News: “Just as in other technology sectors, Silicon Valley is leading the space startup boom. At least a dozen space companies have popped up in the Bay Area over the past few years, with a concentration taking over empty buildings on Mountain View’s Moffett Field.”
Feature: How tiny satellites spawned in Silicon Valley will monitor a changing Earth | Science | AAAS: “Enter the CubeSat, a cheap and small satellite form factor that is gaining momentum and finally starting to perform real science: In 2014, a record 132 were launched. Planet Labs, based in San Francisco, California, is the poster child for the movement, and a prime example of Silicon Valley ideals and technology being applied to aerospace. For less than $1 million, the company can build and launch a CubeSat telescope that it calls a Dove. With 5-meter resolution or better, each Dove can make out trees and buildings. If it can get between 150 and 200 Doves in orbit, the company will fulfill its overriding mission to assemble a daily snapshot of the entire Earth. This time-lapse flipbook will reveal flooding on rivers, logging in forests, and road building in cities, as they happen. Commercial companies—and earth scientists—are eager to get their hands on the data.”
If the US government wants to stifle weather and climate data, there are commercial companies ready to fill in the void.
Smaller Satellites — Smarter Forecasts? – Medium: “In April, Panasonic Weather Solutions announced that company has developed it own global weather model that is outperforming 2 main world models: American GFS and European ECMWF ones.”
Venture capitalists enter the space race with funding for satellites: “Space Race 2.0 is heating up, with new satellite firms attracting venture capital to develop satellites that will contribute data to serve the needs of weather, climate, maritime and other customers that are constantly hungry for information.”
A satellite could easily be launched and data from it received from floating platforms at sea, outside the territorial limits of the US. That is what Space X has been working on, launching and landing reusable rockets from ships. Plus there are plenty of nations the world over who might be interested in the data. I think if Gov Moonbeam really wants to he can find plenty of ways to do what he wants, the FCC can lump it and the data will become available. If the US want’s to outlaw legitimate science and research then science will move offshore or to some other country and it will be the loss of the USA, science knowledge and the truth will ultimately prevail.
I don’t think the Republicans want to shut down private weather satellites.
Smith, Bridenstine on First Contract for Commercial Weather Satellite Data | Committee on Science, Space, and Technology: “WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX21), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, along with U.S. Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK1), chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment for the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, today released the following statements congratulating Spire, Inc., a private sector weather company, on earning the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration first contract to acquire data from a commercial weather satellite constellation. Spire has been hired to provide GPS Radio Occultation data to increase weather forecasting.”
I doubt Europe, China, India, Japan etc will care a damn about that.
NAOM
Here is more on private weather satellites. Republican politicians have been encouraging it.
NOAA issues first contracts for private weather satellites | Science | AAAS: “Plagued by cost overruns on its own satellites, NOAA has been pressured by Congress to explore commercial weather satellites, which included a mandate for the commercial weather pilot in its 2016 appropriations. Several leaders in the House of Representatives, including Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, applauded the agency’s move.”
Here is how a US company will be using an Indian company to launch its weather satellites>
PlanetiQ Signs Weather Satellite Launch Contract With India’s Antrix Corporation: “PlanetiQ has signed a contract with Antrix Corporation Limited, the commercial arm of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), for the launch of PlanetiQ’s first two weather satellites on a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) during the fourth quarter of 2016. Ten more satellites are planned for launch in 2017 to complete an initial set of 12 satellites that will dramatically improve global weather forecasting, climate monitoring and space weather prediction, and enable advanced analytics for numerous industries worldwide.”
Some people here have assumed that Tesla will be screwed under Trump.
But two days ago Musk was named a business adviser to Trump. While it could just be window dressing, I’m guessing that Musk won’t stick around in that position if he doesn’t get cooperation from Trump.
I’m really counting on the idea that renewable energy has gotten to the point that it would be poor politics to ignore it.
Will Elon Musk Be the Champion Cleantech Needs at the White House? | Greentech Media
Now is probably the best time for the USA’s public grant funded climate scientists to get out. Of course they could stay if they wanted…nobody will be forcing them out but if they keep up the political games, agendas, Chicken Litteling instead of sticking to truthful science they will get more and more true American Patriots and militiamen watching them. Which brings the question, should climate scientists start taking lessons at local ranges?
Source…
When You Hear a Scientist Talk About ‘Peer Review’ You Should Reach For Your Browning
Ja whol! Arbeit macht frei! Mark Frei, yeah, right!
BTW, Dennis, Mr. Frei’s comment above is as close as I’ve ever seen on this site to hate speech and incitement to violence. I strongly urge you to take a position against this kind of comment and ban him/her/it outright.
Climate and science denial trolls are one thing, this is a different level.
You forgot about Noam Chomsky, Fred.
The psycholinguist always defends the freedom to speak, especially free speech that nobody likes at all. That’s what free speech is all about.
However, to redact it fully is allowed, censorship can exist too. Censorship can be free speech too, and is a form of free speech itself. You are free to limit hate speech to the digital circular file. Nobody likes censorship, but it is used all of the time.
A rebuttal that ends all of the argument and debate. There it was, gone.
However, I would not delete any comment at all, I am all for free speech, even if it is not what anybody wants to hear.
I have to agree with Noam Chomsky, show deference, as it were.
This is a privately run blog and to be associated with the suggestion that scientists be killed is not a good thing. It’s not about free speech in this case. It’s about the reputation of the blog.
If I am having a party and someone threatening comes it, I can ask him to leave.
However, I would not delete any comment at all, I am all for free speech, even if it is not what anybody wants to hear.
Incitement to violence and hate speech are not considered free speech in most civilized modern democracies.
http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/FS_Hate_speech_ENG.pdf
Violence/Coercion is built– by law and modus operandi– into many so-called ‘civilized modern democracies’, so it’s actually far worse than a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Get your priorities straight.
Ok, Caelan, you go and get your own planet and build your own civilization with its own rules… There rest of us will just have to continue to muddle through with what we’ve got…
I’m not trying to incite anything. I’m just pointing out the reality of what the USA’s climate scientists will be facing in the next few years to come.
Peer review is like democracy, the worst system, except for all the others.
Lot’s of room for improvement, though.
What are you suggesting? That the alt-right neo nazi view point should be considered acceptable? Or do you think that someone having a handle such as Mark Frei, posting a link to Breitbart is just an innocent coincidence. Because I don’t!
Noah’s provisions included beer on the Ark.
4300 BC, Babylonian clay tablets detail recipes for beer.
That is 6,316 years of the written word and it all started with a beer recipe.
Any history of humans before beer, BB, doesn’t count. No beer, no history.
http://www.beerhistory.com/library/holdings/raley_timetable.shtml
However, there were petroglyphs before the written word, so, therefore, the earth is at least as old as those petroglyphs and maybe more.
Every picture tells a story.
My guess is the earth is as old as the hills.
The crazy leftists at Berkley have determined the earth’s geologic timeline. 4 to 4.6 billion years have gone by since the Hadeans started keeping track. har
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/help/timeform.php
R Walter,
Babylonian clay tablets at 4300 BC? No. Way too early.
Likely written by a beer drinker who loves the topic unwisely and too well.
This just in:
The Dispilio Tablet – the oldest known written text
The Dispilio tablet was discovered by a professor of prehistoric archaeology, George Xourmouziadis, in 1993 in a Neolithic lake settlement in Northern Greece near the city of Kastoria. A group of people used to occupy the settlement 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. The Dispilio tablet was one of many artefacts that were found in the area, however the importance of the tablet lies in the fact that it has an unknown written text on it that goes back further than 5,000 BC. The wooden tablet was dated using the C12 method to have been made in 5260 BC, making it significantly older than the writing system used by the Sumerians.
http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-writings-ancient-places-europe/dispilio-tablet-oldest-known-written-text-00913
No, I didn’t know it existed until now either.
You can learn something new every day.
R Walter,
Some of us did know.
There’s quite a large number of objects, especially pottery, from what Gimbutas called Old Europe, that date to the Neolithic, and which have symbols on them. To call these sets of symbols written text, as the quoted material does, is a stretch that can’t be justified; we don’t know what they were for. They likely had meaning but there’s nothing to indicate they encode language, which writing does.
FYI: ancient-origins.net is a wide-eyed site of the type “And now look at THIS! ANOTHER incredible mystery!” Not particularly reliable (C12 dating, forsooth.)
Treason in the air. An opinion piece written by a former assistant secretary of state.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/12/16/trump-raises-specter-treason/zdwgXRuJBMChEXmX5kchhP/story.html
There have been suggestions that the GOP would like to get rid of Trump and have Pence instead. So if Trump takes office in January and then gives the GOP a clear-cut opportunity to push him out, you may see that happen. The Democrats, on the other hand, have to weigh which is worse, Trump or Pence. But if Trump crosses the line and does something either impeachable or shows that he is unfit for office, the GOP will be given the opportunity to get rid of him.
Pence is already getting more intelligence briefings than Trump, and he sat in on that tech meeting, so he (and the Trump kids and son-in-law) appear to be the ones who will run things. So it is just a matter of whether the GOP finds that more to their likely, or whether they want Trump out altogether.