Mark Steyn says I didn’t write the half of it in that blog post that Mann’s suing me over.
25 thoughts on “Six Degrees Of Warmerization”
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Mark Steyn says I didn’t write the half of it in that blog post that Mann’s suing me over.
Comments are closed.
Funny column. 🙂
Several recent papers, one by IPCC lead authors, have estimated the transient climate response based on observational data at 1.3 C, which I’m guessing might be a bit high because most of our data was taken in the running up to the Grand Solar Maximum, but let’s just take the 1.3 C and look at the implications. We’ve already had most of it, since it refers to a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial 280 ppm towards 560 ppm, and we’re at about 400 ppm. Assuming the CO2 effect is linear (instead of diminishing, which is the reality), we’ve should expect an extra 0.37 C of warming by the time we hit the 560 number.
Often I translate warming into degrees latitude in the temperate region, which averages 90 miles north or south per degree C, so the warming to come means you’d need to move 33 miles to enjoy the same blissful climate that you’re adapted to. But then, having grown up in the hills, I thought I’d translate it into altitude. If you convert it with the dry adiabatic lapse rate you’d need to move about 120 feet higher, and the moist adiabatic lapse rate says you need to move about 220 feet higher. But since we’re talking surface warming, I’d go with average surface temperature change versus elevation, which indicates that you should move 268 feet higher to avoid the coming apocalyptic doom.
You could also use a combination, perhaps moving 15 miles north and finding a house that’s 130 feet up the hill. Back home everyone lives in the valleys and we have over 2000 feet of elevation to play with, so we can take 4 C of warming (twice the international drop-dead limit) before we even have to move to the next county.
As someone who grew up on top of a hill, I find it odd to live in a world where so many gulllible fools are convinced that the life they know isn’t possible down at the bottom end of the driveway – because the climate there is too extreme.
While those papers are certainly encouraging, I don’t think it’s right to conclude that they are correct and everything else is wrong.
http://judithcurry.com/2014/05/13/climate-dialogue-on-climate-sensitivity-and-transient-climate-response/
Annan makes a reasonable point: obviously estimates should be going down the longer we have a Pause – that’s straight Bayesian probability. But Nic Lewis is willing to look at nothing but recent temperatures, and that also seems like overdoing it.
Anyhow, you’re right that half a degree is not _at all_ a good reason to restructure the world’s economy. On the other hand, while lower sensitivies make really disastrous “tipping points” less likely, we just don’t know enough to rule them out definitely, and that’s what I would focus my concern on. Can we find out more about Black Swans, really major climate shifts, in time to prevent them?
In general – other things being equal – running huge open-ended experiments on the earth’s climate seems like a bad idea. Except that I don’t see an alternative being offered to hoping for the best. Mitigation clearly isn’t going to happen.
Probably this won’t go on indefinitely. Sometime around mid-century things like solar power will probably be really cheaper, not just with creative accounting practices and subsidies.
“Probably this won’t go on indefinitely. Sometime around mid-century things like solar power will probably be really cheaper, not just with creative accounting practices and subsidies.”
Except that if the predictions of the doomsayers are correct, then you don’t have to wait for mid-century tech improvements.
If the alarmists really meant what they said, they would embrace Nuclear energy as a short term solution and then wait for the mid-century breakthroughs in solar. The cataclysms they predict are nigh are far more damaging than an occasional Fukushima. And Fukushima’s can be made to be far fewer occasions.
But we don’t see them doing that do we?
I am not sure why I should care whether alarmists are hypocritical fools. There are fools everywhere. I would like to understand what I think we need to do – if anything.
I too support nuclear, but it’s hard for me to believe that it could be built fast enough to make much of a difference. Probably it’s a good idea anyhow – most of the objections to nuclear are sheer nonsense.
You use the word “probably” alarmingly often in your posts, yet you seem to follow that word up with phrases and predictions that are rather superlative and definitive.
Why even bother, if you can’t commit to your own views?
The over-hedging is strikingly similar to the “One of the” trope recently lampooned by XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1368/
Sorry to have alarmed you! 🙂 But I think hedging is a good idea, especially about the future.
Golden Arches, St Louis Arch, Arches National Park,Washington Square Arch (New York City), Arches in the Brooklyn Bridge (one of them is for sale).
But we don’t see them doing that do we?
Wrong, Hansen and many other expecting CAGW are urging that more nuclear power stations be built.
“many other?”
How many?
Who?
What percentage of others expecting CAGW are urging that more nuclear power stations be built as compared to all expecting CAGW?
Germany has given up on solar and wind. They are now burning filthy soft coal because they shut down their nukes.
And his urgings have had virtually no effect on the CAGW alarmists, who seem to view his stance on nuclear as a quirky character defect. They remain convinced that wind and solar is the only path, and won’t start doubting until long after we’ve caught up to Germany in green energy.
Meanwhile, here’s a video clip of what the Germans are concluding about their energy fiasco. Funny stuff.
Actually many in the CAGW crowd agree with Hansen on the nuclear power option, it’s more the dyed in the wool greens who’re anti-nuke at any cost.
“Actually many in the CAGW crowd agree with Hansen…”
I’ll ask you a second time:
How many?
Who?
What percentage of others expecting CAGW are urging that more nuclear power stations be built as compared to all expecting CAGW?
“Can we find out more about Black Swans, really major climate shifts, in time to prevent them?”
No. The idea that we can intentionally change the climate to a desired state is the height of human hubris and arrogance. This is especially true if we are talking about stopping natural processes. It is like deciding the best way to deal with earthquakes is to prevent them from happening.
“No. The idea that we can intentionally change the climate to a desired state is the height of human hubris and arrogance.” Too many assumptions buried here. I was discussing a simple idea. 1) _If_ it turns out that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is causing overwhelming severe harm to the climate, biosystem, etc. 2) We would be justified in considering overwhelmingly painful mitigation to prevent it.
Understand – 1) doesn’t mean a degree or two rise in temperature. I’m talking about tipping point scenarios that devastate world climate. The latest IPCC report says that almost all of them are very unlikely (unlike the previous report), which is encouraging. But I have Judith Curry telling me that they are no more reliable on this than on anything else, and no one really knows much about Black Swans, which is discouraging.
2) doesn’t mean Kyoto protocols – those are totally insufficient to accomplish anything at all. It means devastating cuts to CO2 by force worldwide. That would kill a lot of people, which will please no one but environmentalists. But assuming 1) is true, 2) would solve 1).
Obviously we shouldn’t do 2) unless 1) is overwhelmingly worse. So far I haven’t seen anything that supports that, but I still have Judith Curry making me nervous.
The Earth has endured far, far higher levels of CO2 in the past with no ill effects. The entire Chicken Little exercise is a bunch of nothing. There is no bogey-man in this particular closet. It is utterly childlike to be jumping at shadows like this.
We have far greater threats to worry about, from nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue regimes, to asteroid strikes., to rampaging emergence of antibiotic resistance of severe pathogens. CO2 in the atmosphere? Pffft.. Doesn’t even make my top 100 list of things to be alarmed about.
I think it’s probably silly to discuss temperature variation in absolute degrees particularly for
climate given the short term weather scale.
It’s probably far more useful to discuss climate in terms of standard deviation and
statistical confidence.
that’s a much more abstruse discussion, but it gives you better understanding.
The Latitude and Altitude measure is nice too. How high is the average florida geography?
Florida averages 100 feet elevation, but gets up to 345. However, that doesn’t matter because the warmer Florida gets, the more tourists it will attract. That’s why they go there instead of Maine or Long Island.
Interestingly, Florida doesn’t actually get very hot compared to other states. Only Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York have lower a high-temperature record than Florida (109 F). Only Hawaii has a higher low-temperature record than Florida (-2 F).
Well those are peaks and troughs. I lived in Florida for 9 years in 3 different cities and hated every single day of it. Got hot sooner in the year…stayed hot later. 85 degrees at Christmas – horrid. Humidity was awful.
You should do it by scenario too. You’ll get very different predictions of CO2 concentrations, for example, if oil discovery and extraction continues to significantly retain or even grow current global production capacity than if everything gets replaced with super-cheap solar cells.
Doesn’t matter how inexpensive they get. It still takes too much material spread out over too much area. Efficiency – that is what matters.
“Efficiency – that is what matters.”
To my way of thinking, when it comes to solar and wind, what matters – what renderes them almost useless as a main power source – is energy storage mechanisms. Coal, gas, and nuclear power plants all have a very efficient energy storage mechanism – the fuel. Want more power? You got it…….right now.
Not so with solar and wind.
Storage is definitely a big issue with wind and solar, but I also consider another issue to be the infrastructure required to balance and aggregate all of the micro-generating inputs from a solar or wind farm.
In a large wind installation, only a certain percentage of turbines are turning at any one time, either due to preventive maintenance or repairs, and you need to run myriad distribution lines to each individual turbine, aggregate them all back to sub-stations, and eventually into the grid. The latter is no small feat depending on just how remotely the farm was located relative to a suitable insertion point on the grid.
Perhaps it’s nit picking but land surface temperatures are rising faster than ocean surface temperatures.
They’ve halted for the last decade, too.
Really? Is that with or without the “adjustments”?