"Hit"? Abuse has to be vaguely credible to have any kind of impact.
And you think I ought follow Don Quixote's example. You tilt at enough windmills yourself that you may even expect your advice to be taken seriously. The example you seem to want me to set would be of someone silly enough to waste their time and energy on cutting their CO2 output in a way that wouldn't significantly slow anthropogenic global warming if every last private individual adopted it.
Did not bother to read article. Sun flares can be quite varied, and there are cycles as well; that has been known for over 20 years and has been measured. Did someone finally decide to re-member ancient data to manufacture more stupidity?
The sun's output does NOT vary "by some tiny amount" in certain parts of its cycle; magnetic, ionic, particulate, EM, etc all can vary by a fair amount and mess with the Van Allen Belt at times. Certainly screws up communications at times..ever heard of blackouts?
Of course. But there's nothing to indicate that variations in the sun's output have any significant effect on climate, and they certainly can't be realistically invoked to explain the current global warming. The suggestion that because the sun's output can vary, the evidence for anthropogenic global warming is in any way devalued, is just another misleading theme put out by the denialist propaganda machine.
Jan Panteltje likes the idea, because he doesn't like anthropogenic global warming, but the fact that he posts it here - where it is off- topic - means that he is acting as a "mindless idiot" shill for the Exxon-Mobil (amongsts others) funded organsiations who are busy trying to minimise the public impact of the results of the scientific research.
Jan's responses have made it perfectly clear that he hasn't thought about the physics involved or read any of the literature, and the substance of his counter-argument - if you can call it an argument - seems to be that because I don't spend my time in the - futile - minimisation my personal carbon footprint my opinions can be discarded as coming from a hypocrite.
It's depressing feeble stuff, and one can only wonder what he thinks he is doing.
Oh, back a ways (20-40 years) there was research on the sun cycles VS global weather and there was reasonable correlation. Do not know if that has been updated or not. CO2 creation by man has for a small part, been tied to possible global effects. But that does not give an excuse to stupidity of "electrical" cars where the added INEFFICIENCY compounds the problem and the total refusal to answer the pointed question WHERE does all that energy come from (whacha goin ter burn) and the fact that transmission lines would need severe upgrading (burn fuel for mining, transportation to smelter, etc & etc; burn more to construct power line systems). Ignore facts; the energy is "free" and has NO costs involved whatsoever..
There's some correlation. The sun's heat output has been observed to vary slightly through the sun-spot cycle - roughly 0.1% - for the last thirty years, as long we've the had satellites and the technology to measure that accurately.
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The measurements have been continuing, as you could have found out with a single visit to Google.
What do you mean by "a small part"? The average global temperature is rising - by about 0.13 K per decade at the moment
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- and this is entirely explicable in terms of increased greenhouse warming, all of it due to human activity, although the increase in the water vapour in the atmosphere, which is the biggest single effect is an automatic positive feedback from the increases in CO2 and methane levels (which seem to be entirely anthropogenic). The increase in CO2 level is driving the larger part of the change, and can be expected to continue as along as we keep on burning fossil carbon at an ever- icreasing rate.
In the long term, almost all the energy comes from the sun. Fossil carbon was made by past photosynthesis, which is about 0.1% efficient. In the long term we are going to have get our energy directly from solar power - we are currently burning fossil carbon much faster than it is being laid down - and making the change now, rather than later, will minimise eventual anthropogenic global warming.
Nobody is claiming that we aren't going to have to make massive investments in solar power generating plant to get to a position where we don't have to burn fossil carbon for energy, and it has long been recognised that we will have to up-grade our power grids to allow us to move that energy from latitudes where solar irradiation is relatively high to the latitudes where we want to consume the energy.
oever..
I certainly don't claim that solar energy is free - I've been arguing that the changeover is going to roughly double the cost of energy in the short term. Economies of scale will eventually bring solar power down to grid parity - economists were projecting that this would happen by 2045 but the Ivanpah solar power plant
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has been claimed - by some - to be going to get there in 2013.
How "factual" this claim is is open to discussion, but you certainly seem to have ignored it.
What i am talking about is not the short 7 year or 11 year cycles..
The data is bogus; improperly mounting IR sensors to (sort-of) point to asphalt parking lots does not exactly get useful data, never mind improper calibration and bad maintenance.
"recognized" but NOT accounted for in any measure. How much EXTRA CO2 would be created by _all_ of the operations needed to "merely" (as you seem to imply) upgrade the grid.
oh, do not forget YET MORE CO2 generated for making of inefficient solar panels (we are up to maybe 20%), placement, etc & etc.
So far, the jury is out as there seems to be some smoke and mirrors on that...
Which is to say an imagined possible variation in solar output, for which there's no evidence and no plausible theortical basis. The Sun's output is believed to have increased about 30% over the past four billion years, but that's going to be the result of a very smooth and gradual process
Anthony Watts has a web-site and gets a lot of publicity for his quixotic opinions. He's clearly part of the denialist propaganda machine. The local weather-monitoring stations he's so excited about haven't been the primary data source about US weather since commercial aviation got under way. The airlines are lot more interested in day to day weather than anybody else, and the weather observations at airports are correspondingly more frequent and more detailed - the US weather servive went to the trouble of automating them about a decade ago.
You are just recycling bogus denialist propaganda - as as has been discussed here earlier.
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Get some numbers if you want to get excited about it. And large scale solar power generation is probably going to be thermal solar, not "inefficient" solar panels, not that their "inefficiency" makes them in any sense ineffective. According to
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"first generation" silicon solar cells offer up to 33% efficiency, but are too expensive to produce solar power at a competitive price. The second generation solar cells, based on other semiconductors, lend themselves to high volume production but only offer efficiencies in the 10 to 15% range, while the third generation will offer efficiencies close to the theoretical maximum of about 59% in cells that can be mass-produced when and if the various problems involved in getting them to work are ever worked out. But there are lots of people researching away on various approaches that may get us there - one of the less obvious side effects of the economies of scale is that manufacturers invest in research that may lead to a better, cheaper or easier to manufacture product.
atsoever..
In so far as the facility isn't working yet, it's just an estimate. And you've quoted Anthony Watts' idiotic arguments as if they weren't entirely smoke and mirrors.
If you count a 0.1% variation as "variable". It's rather less variation than astronomers traditionally associated with the stars they labelled variable - classical Cephieds can vary by as little as
10% or as much as a factor of six.
The sun isn't "variable" in the sense that Cephieds are, or any of the classical variable stars. The magnetic storms on its surface - sun- spots - do means that it's brightness varies a bit with sun-spot cycle, but there's absolutely no reason to expect any longer-term variation beyond the very slow increase - over billions of years - caused by the build up of helium as the hydrogen in the sun steadily fuses
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Not much is clear to Ken S. Tucker, because he doesn't know much.
Better qualified scientist than Ken S. Tucker - and there are a great many of them - would beg to differ.
What if a 75-80% efficient electrical car fueled by ~35%-efficiency combined of generation, transmission and distribution is in competetion with a gasoline-powered one that achieves 25-30% efficiency in good moments from good engines, more-usually closer to 20%?
AND, some electric-motive cars "recycle" some of the kinetic energy that needs to be converted to another form of energy to decellerate or stop the car - otherwise usually being converted into heat mainly in some brake system parts.
There's nothing advanced about the concept of variable stars - the concept itself goes back to 1638. The explanations for variability are more recent - Eddington published a classic paper in 1917 but the details didn't get sorted out until the 1950's, so Ken S. Tucker is only about fifty years behind the times.
"Area 51" is a concept I've come across only in "Sceptical Enquirer" - trust Ken S. Tucker to identify himself with the flying saucer fringe community.
It's not all that interesting. SourceWatch lists the author as someone who gave a presentations at the 2009 "International Conference on Climate Change" organised by the Heartland Institute, which is to say a denialist propaganda stunt organised by one of the bogus think tanks organised to spend industry money - Exxon-Mobil and the tobacco companies - on devaluing inconvenient scientific facts.
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If the author was any good - and his area of expertise, before he retired and sold his integrity to the denialist propaganda machine, was the Aurora Borealis which occurs rather higher in the atmosphere than greenhouse warming - you have expected him to mention that the little ice age is frequently seen as a Bond Event
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These are essentially confined to the North Atlantic, and repeat every
1470+/-500 years, neither of which suits his - fallacious - argument, so he's suppressed that inconvenient idea.
That's not "discussion", that's simple-minded denialist propaganda,
"Note that computer models are just concatenations of calculations you could do on a hand-held calculator, so they are theoretical and cannot be part of any evidence."
Greenhouse warming is real enough, and more CO2 in the atmosphere causes more greenhouse warming. The fact that you can - roughly - calculate how much doesn't devalue the point. The theory that the calculations are based on is well-established and explains a great many other observations. If you want to claim that they cannot be part of any evidence, you should realy discard the results people claim to get with these new-fangled thermometers and barometers as well ...
I don't give a toss what 'SourceWatch' say about him. Is this the first thing you check to see if he's a "CLIMATE SCIENTIST" and should be 'BELIEVED' or an evil denier and should be damned with all vigour?
I try to look at the data.
Is what he says correct or not?
What would Sourcewatch have said about Einstein, after all he was just a lowly patent clerk.
If it wasn't for the damage that's being done in the AGW cause this would be laughably ironic.
The whole AGW 'thesis' is based on computer models. [Which have been tweaked to give the right results for historical data]
Even the 'raw data' which shows the word is warming has been 'manipulated' before it is released, I'm glad you now see this can't be trusted as evidence.
Experience shows that you're a 'BELIEVER' and can't be convinced to even consider a different point of view, so that's my last post in this thread.
As is typical with deniers in general what he says is partly true but with the natural components deliberately exaggerated.
I am convinced that some of the very steep rise from 1970's to 2000 was due to a periodic natural phenomena although that only accounts for about half of the observed changes. We are presently on what should be a cyclical down swing in temperature but the AGW component is sufficiently strong now that it is holding steady. Global temperatures will begin to rise noticeably again at around 2014 if my hypothesis is correct. IPCC predictions if anything may err on the conservative side.
No-one not even the scientifically honest sceptics can get a global energy balance after 1970 without including GHG forcing. You cannot magic the sun any brighter because it is constrained by multiple satellite measurements of total solar irradiance.
About half the changes since 1840 are natural in origin. The remainder is due to GHG forcings and took place in the last four decades.
It is more like the US right wing believe in their divine right to trash the planet and are easily fooled by Exxon propaganda.
So why all these generous contributions from Exxon-Mobil to people like the HeeartLand Institute, originally set up to lie to the public about the dangers of cigarette smoking, and now busy lying about anthropogneic global warming?
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And heaven - with a little help from the Heartland Institute - forbid that the customers should wonder about their part in raising the CO2 level in the atmosphere from about 270ppm before the start of the Industrial Revolution to 390ppm now, or the knock-on effects of the consequent increase in greenhouse warming.
It does save time. The critical points about Syun Akasofu are that he is retired, and that he was never active in climate science. His paper doesn't seem to have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and it misses the obvious point about the Little Ice Age being a Bond Event.
There isn't much, and what there is is mined from other people's work.
It's not even wrong.
It wouldn't have said anything about him when he was a lowly patent clerk. When he was the best-known scientist on the planet in the
1930's and 1940's, they might have been interested in how he used his high profile to support causes that he liked - such as the atom bomb letter he wrote to Roosevelt (prompted by Leo Szilard).
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Our understanding of greenhouse warming predates computers, and it depends on some very well-established physics. Once we had computers we could devise and explore much more complicated models of the phsyical reality involved, and once we had satellites in orbit we could test those models in much more detail. They turned out to be pretty good.
Anthropogenic global warming is just greenhouse warming. The yet more complicated models you are complaining about are being tweaked to try to make them even more accurate so that they can integrate tolerably insignificant effects - like heat being shifted from the equator to the poles by ocean currents - which weren't captured by earlier models.
The proposition that because that the scientists involved are trying to refine their models, anthropogenic global warming is in some way suspect, is about as realistic as a claim would be that because semiconductor physicists are trying to refine their computer models of the transistor, transistors don't work.
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ence.
All raw date has to be manipulated before it can mean anything - the business is called data processing and involves suspect activities like calibration. The height of mercury column in a glass tube can be manipulated to tell you temperature or barometric pressure, once you've looked at the surrounding glass work in enough detail to identify it as part of a thermometer or a barometer.
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You are not the first to invite me to consider another point of view on gobal warming. Since you - like most of the others posting similar invitations - post references to much the same half-baked nonsense, these are invitations which I have been declining, with progressively less courtesy, for some years now.
We can survive very well without yet another reference to some inadequate "paper" from a hireling of the Heartlands Institute.
"Smoking" tobacco leaves, in the sense of fire-curing them, doesn't damage anybody's health, and can a useful step in the production of nicotine, which is a useful poison, which certainly used to be used as an insecticide. Done properly, it could make you money, which could - indirectly - benefit your health.
Inhaling the products of the partial combustion of tobacco can help a few patients with specific digestive diseases, but the side-effects are too severe to make it the drug of choice.
If you smoked, you'd probably die earlier which would make the rest of us marginally healthier and the population as a whole marginally more intelligent.
It's a limited list.
The gullible idiots are those who fall for the anti-smoking propaganda
- as with denialist propaganda, it isn't aimed at people who can do critical thinking and see the obvious flaws in the arguments. You are right in the dumb dead centre of their target audience.
There is apparently some evidence it's a less bad drug for treating bipolar disorder than the psychoactive drugs that are typically used.
Of course there could well be better ways of getting controlled amounts of nicotine, assuming that's the active ingredient, than smoking.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
--
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