More Climate BS...

[OrangeTsar]

I lived there for a number of years after moving to Tennessee. Funny story, if I told it before, forgive me: I was doing some work for Qualcomm and we were involved with buying some bandwidth in the UK.

So early in the mornings, REALLY early for San Diego, we would jump on a conference call. The UK, the lawyers, the team in SD and me. The call would get started with: "London online? Yes. Washington DC online? Yes. San Diego? Yes. Tellico Plains? Yes."

It would me laugh almost every morning.

Did some graduate work on trout populations in the Tellico River. Go back to hike every chance I get. Bald River Falls Wilderness area is one of my favorites

 

[hog88]

I could have sworn you just described how you would source energy

Yes you did.

 

[GroverCleveland]

Wind turbine blades are also notorious for not being able to be recycled. And they wear out quickly

That is what I'm thinking. The capital expenditures may not be fully accounted for. But I'll see.

 

[GroverCleveland]

Did some graduate work on trout populations in the Tellico River. Go back to hike every chance I get. Bald River Falls Wilderness area is one of my favorites

Have camped a number of times along Bald River. Need to go back. Have not been in years.

 

[OrangeTsar]

That is what I'm thinking. The capital expenditures may not be fully accounted for. But I'll see.

Yeah, the entire lifecycle costs are what would interest me. The Germans with their heavy reliance on wind energy ran into some real issues a while back when there was a period with lower than normal winds for a few weeks.
Geothermal is my favorite „green“ energy source because it is so constant. Unfortunately it only works in certain geological areas. I think Iceland gets quite a it of peer that way.

 

[GroverCleveland]

there are proposed solutions to put partial sun shades into orbit if it ever becomes necessary (true story)

I remember reading about proposals to put mirrors into orbit that could focus on the coming glaciers and keep them in Canada.

 

[hog88]

The only true way to slow/stop the progression of man made climate change (if there truly is such a thing) is to reduce the population.

Discuss.

 

[BernardKingGOAT]

I lived there for a number of years after moving to Tennessee. Funny story, if I told it before, forgive me: I was doing some work for Qualcomm and we were involved with buying some bandwidth in the UK.

So early in the mornings, REALLY early for San Diego, we would jump on a conference call. The UK, the lawyers, the team in SD and me. The call would get started with: "London online? Yes. Washington DC online? Yes. San Diego? Yes. Tellico Plains? Yes."

It would me laugh almost every morning.

I own some property in Monroe County. Mostly around Vonore in undeveloped areas around Tellico Lake. I do own a couple of tracts adjacent to Tellico Plains. Tsar's assessment that Obama couldn't handle Tellico Plains is hilarious. The people there would have much more of a problem with Obama than he would have with them. Let's just say he nor any other African Americans would have any desire to live there

 

[OrangeTsar]

The only true way to slow/stop the progression of man made climate change (if there truly is such a thing) is to reduce the population.

Discuss.

I get the theory. But not sure it would be more than a temporary solution as the average amount of energy needed per human has been steadily increasing for centuries now. AI is the current new culprit. Our energy appetite will continue to grow faster than any reasonable plan to reduce population which at best would take a couple of generations to take effect (unless we did the morally unthinkable)

 

[BernardKingGOAT]

Yes you did.

I absolutely agree with most of it. Something needs to break the negative stigma with nuclear energy. Maybe after we have completed our 4th quarter

Edit: I was speaking of our 4th quarter as in the 4th quarter of our own personal lives. I am thinking you are in your early-mid 50's??

 

[GroverCleveland]

Yeah, the entire lifecycle costs are what would interest me. The Germans with their heavy reliance on wind energy ran into some real issues a while back when there was a period with lower than normal winds for a few weeks.
Geothermal is my favorite „green“ energy source because it is so constant. Unfortunately it only works in certain geological areas. I think Iceland gets quite a it of peer that way.

I have wondered about that as well. Say for example we were able to extract energy from the heat of the mantle. If we extracted enough, would that cause some problems?
I'm still not 100% that taking energy out of the atmosphere through windfarms does not have repercussions. Thermodynamics comes into play at some point, but it may be so negligible it is adjusted to by the system and has no real effect.

 

[GroverCleveland]

I own some property in Monroe County. Mostly around Vonore in undeveloped areas around Tellico Lake. I do own a couple of tracts adjacent to Tellico Plains. Tsar's assessment that Obama couldn't handle Tellico Plains is hilarious. The people there would have much more of a problem with Obama than he would have with them. Let's just say he nor any other African Americans would have any desire to live there

Yeah, I've heard the stories. But let's say people there having a problem with someone tends to beget the someone having a problem. Am I right?

Grandfather was born in Tellico Plains.

 

[OrangeTsar]

I have wondered about that as well. Say for example we were able to extract energy from the heat of the mantle. If we extracted enough, would that cause some problems?
I'm still not 100% that taking energy out of the atmosphere through windfarms does not have repercussions. Thermodynamics comes into play at some point, but it may be so negligible it is adjusted to by the system and has no real effect.

The human need for energy will eventually require either affordable fusion or else gigantic space based solar grids in my opinion. Technology growth is exponential. Current energy production methods are not.

 

[EasternVol]

you/them should be worried regardless of the climate warming/changing. The people in New Orleans are idiots for living below sea level, continental glacier melt raising world wide sea level .1" isn't responsible for any of their idiocy.

Its not like they were at no risk until Ford released their V8 engines, and NOW things are screwed for a bunch of people who were perfectly safe before.

It’s a valid concern for a whole lot of people worldwide. If you want to pooh pooh people losing their homes and livelihoods over time then knock yourself out.

 

[EasternVol]

Hotter than in the 1930's, nope.

Tell NASA and the NOAA.

 

[LouderVol]

It’s a valid concern for a whole lot of people worldwide. If you want to pooh pooh people losing their homes and livelihoods over time then knock yourself out.

Never said it wasn't a valid concern. I don't think I even "pooh pooh"d it.

just pointing out some people making dumb choices shouldn't require changes by all, that in all likelihood wouldn't fix the issue to begin with.

 

[OrangeTsar]

It’s a valid concern for a whole lot of people worldwide. If you want to pooh pooh people losing their homes and livelihoods over time then knock yourself out.

I know….i mean it’s not like there were any hurricanes at all in the Gulf of Mexico before 1980 or anything

 

[BartW]

I'll bite. I think we can agree the climate is one of those most complex systems on the planet. We should be able to agree the modeling systems are consistently getting it wrong with their predictions. While what you are saying may be entirely correct, it is based on the supposition that the system is completely and fully understood and that the observation does not demonstrate a correlation, but the causation as postulated. It also requires that some part of the system previously unknown or understood will not correct as part of a feedback loop.

Additionally, it is my understanding that as it is, we are only at a fraction of the estimated high, give or take a few % points of the estimated high for CO2 contained in the atmosphere since the meteor took the dinosaurs?

While some may believe (still have a strong suspicion that dollars has a lot to do with one's conviction on the topic) that humans account for all of it, again, I'll go back to we are trying to predict a very complex system and I do not for minute we have anywhere near all the input variables and feedback loops identified to know without question what is happening, why it's happening or what is going to happen.

Hey, I appreciate your discourse on the subject. I seriously do. But do you know how many times in history people have become absolutely convinced the world was going to end and they could explain why? I suspect you might and given all the above, it is why I'm skeptical when a new crowd jumps up and screams the sky is falling.

Thanks for the cordiality.

First of all, the world is not going to end, the sky is not falling. And on that note, there was recently news that the IPCC is retiring the RCP 8.5 emissions scenario, which was considered as a “worst case” or “business-as-usual” scenario. The world has already made great progress on climate change. Excluding China, global emissions are dropping. China is still developing and burning lots of fossil fuels, but they are also leading the way in building out alternative energy, battery storage, and EVs. Globally, we’re on a promising trajectory. We’re not keeping warming to the 1.5-2 C target all countries agreed to, but 2.5-3 C is very realistic, and hopefully not that bad. That said, we should still be making reasonable efforts to improve. A half degree may well be the difference in some low-lying nations (and US cities!) being wiped off the map. And if we don’t want China to be the energy superpower of the future, we better keep up.

In the US, we mostly have piecemeal command-and-control style climate policies, which are generally inefficient. I would prefer a more systemic, market-based approach, and have advocated for policies such as revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend. Not that that discussion goes anywhere on this forum. But whatever, we are getting there. Two steps forward one step back. I’m hopeful AI and other technological advances continue to accelerate the clean energy revolution.


I don’t really see a specific question or suggested explanation for stratospheric cooling here, just a general vibe that “climate is complicated”. I get that. But forget about the nitty-gritty internal dynamics of the system for a second, and just consider the boundary conditions. If heat entering the system is greater than heat leaving the system, the temperature goes up. We can directly measure the heat entering and leaving the system. The heat entering the Earth system is relatively unchanged; the heat leaving the system has decreased. This is consistent with the increased greenhouse effect.

CO2 and other greenhouse gases absorb and emit IR radiation in the lower atmosphere. In the upper atmosphere it’s basically just CO2 and ozone. Looking down from above, the upper CO2 sees less and less IR radiation to absorb the higher you go. But the upper atmospheric CO2 is still emitting heat, half of it to space. The amount of heat leaving the upper atmosphere exceeds the amount of heat entering, therefore, it cools. Yet the Earth system as a whole is warming, because it’s becoming less efficient at getting rid of heat. This phenomenon is only consistent with the increased greenhouse effect, and not “natural cycles”.

And it’s not just the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere that tells us it’s the greenhouse effect. We directly measure the spectrum of radiation in and out, and see most of the changing flux is specifically in wavelengths absorbed by CO2 etc. The evidence is quite conclusive.

 

[Vol423]

@OHvol40 Come on man. What's your ideal policy for dealing with man made climate change?

If you had a free hand to mitigate the problem (it can't be reversed) what would you do?
I'll even narrow it down to 2 subjects:

Where would you dictate we get our electricity from, percentage coming from each source.
What would we power our cars, trucks, trains and planes with?

You're planning to let him off the hook without solving the cow fart issue?

 

[EasternVol]

Did you meet any hot babes at these lectures/conferences? That would probably be the highlight after listening to a bunch of John Kerry and Al Gore wannabes telling the public that they need to start cutting their lawn with scissors to reduce emissions.

The Bolivians have been ahead of that game for years. Somewhere I’ve got a pic of a guy cutting grass at the La Paz airport with a five inch straight blade.

 

[hog88]

You're planning to let him off the hook without solving the cow fart issue?

I'm really curious how he and others in his camp think about how we should get our power. They want to preach on the subject but seldom offer any real alternatives to how we currently operate.

 

[BartW]

didn't fixing the ozone have something to do with this. maybe not the act of "closing" - i know its not really "closed" - but something to do with the chemicals in the air. like whatever caused the holes in the ozone was heating those upper portions, and now that they are decreasing those temps are dropping.

I would have to go back and find that study to remember what it was really saying. but IIRC it was talking about stratification changing/being more defined, and with the chemical/density changes we should see changes to temperatures even with the same input.

*may not have been those ozone related chemicals, but maybe some other ones we have removed.

this isn't the study itself, and it doesn't address the stratification effect, I will keep looking. but it touches on some law of unattended consequences.

Reducing air pollution has triggered something even worse for the planet that scientists did not predict

Cleaner air is making marine clouds dimmer and oceans warmer, revealing a climate trade-off called the "clean air paradox."

www.earth.com

Ozone does play a role, yes. Ozone depletion in the lower stratosphere due to CFCs did/does actually contribute significantly to cooling at that elevation. As you go higher in the stratosphere and beyond, that ozone influence disappears, while the cooling effect of CO2 remains (actually increasing with elevation). And the ozone layer is well on its way to recovery, so the contribution of ozone depletion to lower stratospheric cooling has diminished over time.

I know you as a poster genuinely interested in fact-finding. Glad this caught your interest! It sounds like maybe you’re referring to the rising tropopause (boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere) which is related to stratospheric cooling. I think you’ll find it worthwhile to look into these topics.


On the link, it's a pretty ridiculous headline. I saw it posted a while back. That aerosol pollution has a cooling effect on climate is not news. In fact the *very few* scientists who predicted cooling in the ‘70s did so based on aerosol pollution. We addressed that with the Clean Air Act. It’s not an effect of climate policy per se, as was insinuated ITT. We cleaned up the smog, and the “unintended consequence” (which was entirely known) is that less clouds mean less reflectivity mean slightly more warming. What, would you rather we put the smog back? How about we block out some sunlight with a nice nuclear winter? I kid, but there are real proposals to try to alter Earth’s reflectivity via cloud seeding etc (climate geoengineering). Talk about unintended consequences!

 

[Vol423]

I absolutely agree with most of it. Something needs to break the negative stigma with nuclear energy. Maybe after we have completed our 4th quarter

AI is going to force a transition to more nuclear energy.

 

[EasternVol]

Never said it wasn't a valid concern. I don't think I even "pooh pooh"d it.

just pointing out some people making dumb choices shouldn't require changes by all, that in all likelihood wouldn't fix the issue to begin with.

A whole lot of people don’t have much choice in the matter. They’re born where they’re born and take up their parents’ vocations. It’s not much an issue of smart and dumb.

 

[BartW]

I reject the premise that the earth's temperature is getting warmer.

Well, there it is...

Rik's position was somewhat common on this board 15+ years ago. It's telling how out of place it is now. You too have come a long way, VN!