It's actually total nonsense. Mann's graph has been reproduced repeatedly by people who were being careful to avoid McIntyre's criticisms - the hockey stick was always in Mann's data.
The noise in the "random" data from which McIntyre extracted his hockeystick wasn't quite as "white" as denialist websites would lead you to believe - it was in fact "red" noise or 1/f^2 noise where the amplitude of the lower frequency components of the noise increases in inverse proportion to the square of the frequency.
But at that time in 1988 the 386 wasn't all that quick - especially so on larger problems. In the 1980's VAX 11/780's were the work horse of quite a few major international astronomical software projects.
The good thing about a 386 PC was that you could leave it running over the weekend and it was all yours. You tended to get into trouble for hogging a VAX overnight (although I have done it).
I know. I was surprised at Martin Brown's comment.
Last time I bench-marked against an 11/780 was many years ago, and then my PC was 20X as fast.
Now-a-days AMD chips staying with the x86 architecture are at least an additional 10X from back then.
Intel going "gaming" scuttled their ability at number crunching.
...Jim Thompson
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I love to cook with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food
In fact I blamed US politics - buying votes with special interest tax breaks and subsidies has such a long history in US politics that they've got an idiom for it
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I've not looked into the source of the EU bio-fuel schemes. I'd suspect French farming interests, as I'd already pointed out in the post to which are responding.
What processes can you invent to produce big year-on-year variations while maintaining a more r less steady 280ppm for the longer-term level?
How would they affect our interpretation of the current situation?
It is all very well for you to parade some minor fact that you have dug up from your rather indiscriminate browsing, but if it doesn't advance the discussion it is a waste of bandwidth.
Stronger yet, the fluctuations are roughly what you would have expected, based on the the early work in the late 1950's with instrumental CO2 detectors which could - for the first time - sample more or less continuously and show the variation through the day (and night). The first long term monitoring of CO2 levels was carried out at Manua Lao and in the Antarctic at locations where precisely this kind of large local variation wasn't a problem.
For quite a time CPU speed was measured in "VAX MIPS", with a VAX 780 defined as the 1 million instructions per second baseline. It was, after all, made out of TTL. My HP here is probably in the ballpark of
1000 Vax mips, before you consider Windows.
A VAX would start printing as soon as you told it to print; my PC can wait a good chunk of minute to get going, even with 1000x the compute power.
I don't need to invent processes. I leave that to the AGW crowd.
We currently have a rising CO2 level. The question is is this atypical? Or has it happened before? If CO2 did vary during the period where we only know the long term average it would be relevant.
The minor facts I keep digging up, and that you would rather ignore, do cast doubt on the validity of some of the AGW data.
Yes my browsing is indiscriminate, I even look at realclimate.org. Unlike you I am actually interested in both sides of the argument.
As you know I have difficulties with the Mauna Loa location but the overall data is broadly consistent with other sites such as Barrow, Antartica, and Samoa. Note consistancy and accuracy are different things, the results could be consistantly wrong, a point you made about German chemical analysis a while back.
That 2005 paper says the sugarcane ethanol energy balance was negative. So, making it destroys energy while trashing the environment, and--at least in their case--destroying capital too. (That paper says the US *subsidy* on corn ethanol was $3/gallon in 2003.)
Gore's mantra in 1998 was that money and magic would fix the negative balance. It hasn't.
AFAICT a basic problem with all bioethanol is that, whatever the feedstock and fermentation process, fermentation stops around 10% concentration, and it takes 3x distillations to purge the 90% that's water. Distillation is energy intensive, ergo the negative energy balance.
Plants capture only about 0.1% of the sun they receive; even
10% efficient photovoltaics are 100x better. Fermenting and distilling ethanol just makes things worse.
I stand corrected on Brazil's motives. But they're often held up as an ethanol example to emulate, and they should not be.
I was in some "rain forest" cafe, and they had Foster's. It was awful. I also got a grilled salmon fillet, and it tasted exactly like the stuff that comes in a can.
You've pretty much described the denialist camp, but they are the ones who run around denying that our society is creating a problem for itself by pumping a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere with such enthusiasm that we have raised its concentration in the atmosphere by
38% since 1750, with half the rise since 1975.
The people who are telling you about this have pretty much all got university jobs with tenure, and publish papers on the subject because they can get them into peer-reviewed journals, which how you progress in academic life. Every last one of them knows very well that if they could publish a good paper that genuinely disproved anthropogenic global warming, they'd become rich and famous.
Quite a few people have published papers aimed at winning this prize, but none of the papers have turned out to be particularly persuasive. In fact, most of them have turned out to be total rubbish that should nevr have got through the refereeing process - the prospect of fame and fortune is seductive.
I mis-spoke earlier. I don't dispute the fossil fuel accounting for much of the added atmospheric CO2 increase.
I now have time to examine Hadley more closely. I picked 1908 only to illustrate a simple 100 year comparison. I don't trust GISS data, it's easy to access, though. A substantial response will take some time, I am examining the J. Geo. Res.
2007 paper by Pielke et al regarding the reliability of surface temp data. I also will examine the Le Quere site, it looks very interesting.
Actually, you do. The only thing that is producing a dramatic change in CO2 level at the moment is our burning fossil carbon. Summer/winter changes in vegetation show up in the northern hemisphere CO2 records - less than 10ppm at Mauna Loa - so if you want to imagine fluctuations that would be masked by the 40-year lag, you need to imagine some mechanism that could create them.
In other words, you don't believe that our burning loads of coal and oil is an adequate explanation of the current rise in CO2 level. The accountants assure us that we are burning enough carbon to explain about twice the current rate of rise in atmopsheric CO2, but you don't want to beleive them
What "minor fact" are you asserting that I want to ignore?
I'm interested enough. I dive into denialists web-sites quite often, in the hope that they will have screwed up obviously enough to give me counter-information that I can squeeze into a paragraph or two and drop on one of our resident denialists. It's not a particularly rewarding task - one denialist being rude about the hockey-stick curve is one thing, but a hundred of them making the same mistakes is decidedly boring.
It is unlikely. Pretty much all the early work was done with off-the- shelf industrial gas analysers - Mauna Loa used the same type of Siemens unit for nearly fifty years - and they have to be stable and reliable.
The earlier wet-way chemical analyses require rather more skill, and took appreciably longer. Even so, the main problem with the earlier data is probably where and when the air was sampled, rather than the analytical technique. The first instrumental measurements were bedevilled by exactly that problem, which is why the first permanent monitoring stations are where they are.
This doesn't exactly fit with Brazil using sugar-cane ethanol to replace the oil they couldn't afford to import. If the balance was negative, where was the extra energy coming from? Wikipedia suggests that the extra energy came from burning what was left of the suggar-cane after the sugar-syrup had been extracted.
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"Brazil=92s 30-year-old ethanol fuel program uses modern equipment and cheap sugar cane as feedstock, the residual cane-waste (bagasse) is used to process heat and power, which results in a very competitive price and also in a high energy balance (output energy/input energy), which varies from 8.3 for average conditions to 10.2 for best practice production.[3][8]"
Yet. Dubbya was long on magic, but short on money to be spent on potential competitors for the oil producers and importers who financed his election campaigns
It doesn't follow. You need heat to boil the water ethanol mixture, but you get most of it back when you condense the water-enriched and ethanol-enriched fractions; counter-current heat-exchangers and the occasiona heat pump can help a lot.
Photovoltaics do seem to be the way to go, but they do require matching investment in over-night energy storage. Fuel tanks of full of ethanol are cheaper.
rs
Perhaps not, but ethanol from sugar cane is a great deal less stupid than ethanol from corn.
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"A 2006 University of Minnesota study shows a positive energy balance for ethanol of around 25%, but also highlights many environmental and economic limitations affecting the viability of corn ethanol.[7]"
which doesn't look too good against the Brazilian "high energy balance (output energy/input energy), which varies from 8.3 for average conditions to 10.2 for best practice production"
As marginal land it wouldn't be much use for growing sugar-cane
At the moment the Indonesians are cutting down their rain forest for the timber. Planting palm trees for palm oil would be a small step in the right direction. Not cutting down the rain forest in the first place would be a much better idea, but Indonesia is one of the more corrupt countries around
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