OT: Global cooling 34 million years ago

No coal is 27 kJ per gram. You are saying coal is 32. Oil is about 36 kJ per gram.

natural gas produces about 11, and oil about

EIA already has all of this

Power is expressed in Watts. Energy in Joules.

All industrialized populations have about the same specific energy consumption, it's a function of technology.

Fusion is not available. Nuclear fission could displace some fossil consumption, but nothing will reduce total CO2 production until the total population begins to decrease for other reasons.

There is no real "uptick" since surface temp data are corrupted by UHI effect. See Pielke, et al 2007, Journal of Geophysical Research, vol 112. This paper also shows other errors in surface data. Amundsen-Scott, Halley and Vostok stations have good surface temperature data. They all show NO warming at all since records began 50 years ago.

(snipped future speculations)

It also has some small CO2 emissions in building the infrastructure and looking after the waste products. But at the preset time it is by far the least worst option for serious amounts of power generation.

Big problem now is that we have a supply of pure terrorists so that any nuclear reactor will have to be built to withstand a 1kt yield kinetic energy round combined fuel air bomb (a la 9/11). I know UK nuclear sites have no fly zones and I expect they do have air defences now.

Decay rates of the worst species are fairly rapid. But you would still not want to stand near high level nuclear waste for a very long time.

Salt or anhydrite layers in geologically stable regions should be OK. You really don't want it to encounter any ground water for at least a few millennia.

An old uranium mine is the last place to put the waste. Uranium is a very common element - what is rare is to find it in economically mineable concentrations. It is the source of radon gas that escapes into homes.

Once it has been through the fuel cycle it is full of nasty neutron rich soluble radioactive hot fission products you don't want loose in the environment. Natural abundance uranium is fairly harmless - we used to demonstrate U in tap water to visitors until the suits complained. Water companies who were customers didn't like people seeing it.

Japan had one of the most insanely stupid criticality accidents ever at the Tokaimura plant in Ibaraki. Japanese people do not have accidents. Anzen-dai-ichi (roughly translated : safety is number one)

Despite this claim the (sanitised) report of the accident makes frightening reading. They would probably have got away with it (and most likely were doing) if the fuel had been ordinary 5% enriched civil reactor grade. A full English transcript of the timeline of events is online but unchecked for technical accuracy at

Like in the UK they renamed the failing plant shortly afterwards.

Regards, Martin Brown

"Sorry, this article is no longer available"

I might be wrong about over what period plant growth increased that 7% I said or how much, but...

Mauna Loa 2007 annual average CO2 383.55 ppmv

Mauna Loa 1987 annual average CO2 348.93 ppmv That's a 9.9% gain in CO2 over the 20 most recent years I quickly found data for.

6.2% gain of plant growth for 9.9% CO2 gain is better than I thought was the case, but it did not stop CO2 from rising.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

What makes you think I don't believe in evolution?

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

I was thinking of the figure for pure carbon. I forgot that coal is not pure carbon. The correction would be saying 8 kilocalories per amount of coal having 1 gram of carbon.

Vegetable oils (esters of fatty acids and glycerol) achieve at least that, at 9 calories per gram. Hydrocarbon oils achieve more.

CRC Handbook (43rd edition) says six figures ranging from 18,910 to

19,510 BTU per pound for crude oil from 5 various USA states and Mexico. 4 figures for fuel oil range from 18,510 to 19,376 BTU/pound. Divide by 1.8 to get calories per gram. After that multiply by 4.19 to get joules per gram. This means 43 to 45.4 kilojoules per gram.

Oops, I slipped there. Would have been correct to say rate of energy consumption, probably what I meant to say.

I was thinking of what would happen later this century, when fusion may be available and may enable global per capita energy usage rate to approach current Western levels with 9 or 10 billion people.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

The major El Ninos and La Ninas should be mere blips on post-1978 global temperature trend within another decade. Any cooling over the next decade or two would have only the AMO and sunspot cycles to credit.

That article mentions wind-blown chunks of ice and snow in an area that often has snow this time of year, and Saginaw Bay actually normally has ice on it this time of year.

Saginaw Bay as a whole, at last report, had ice cover close to normal, with a fair balance between areas running high and areas running low compared to normal:

0004261730.gif

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

In the past decade or two, the AMO has shifted the warming northward, in addition to the trend for global temperature to change more where the positive feedback is greater - in and near the Arctic.

Meanwhile, NASA's GISS has satellite observations of surface temperature of rural regions, to add correction factors to surface data for urban heat islands and other surface station irregularities.

Global surface temperature statements include oceans, which have 70% of the world's area and no urban heat islands and much less than land of other issues in temperature measurement.

Meanwhile, we have two interpretations of MSU satellite data for lower tropospheric temperature trend. The less-warming one of those, the UAH one, is noted to be checked against radiosondes in parts of the world that have them. UAH still shows warming.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Incomplete link.

I plug phrases from below into Google and can't find the paper - only

display&thread=509

and

Is there a way to find the whole article?

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Yes, 44 kJ is the number I use. I erred in somehow thinking you meant vegetable oil.

I've done the same thing for decades. Following generations will adapt to available resources.

AMO oscillates with a known period. See Sutton & Hodson, SCIENCE 2005 Volume

309: 115-117 There is no NET positive feedback, there can't be. All natural feedbacks contain links to threshold limits.

I don't dispute that some good data exist showing short term regional warming. Regional warming is not global warming. Carbon soot is likely causing northern ice melting. There is just not enough satellite data to confirm century scale proxy data. I do see that most of the pre-satellite surface temperature data is corrupted and must be rejected.

My mistake:

I wonder how much affect the cold contracted ionosphere and upper atmosphere has on global temperature. Smaller atmosphere means less area to absorb solar insolation etc.

SNIP

Hadcrut shows warming peaked in 2004 which agrees nicely with Dr Spencer and UAH. These curves effectively ignore the major El Nino of

1998. 5 years of cooling and counting. This is not a mere blip.

SNIP

rote:

. e y

=3D

Not a lot, since the atmosphee is transparent to the bulk of the energy/radiation coming in from the sun.

That's how the "greenhouse" effect works.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Not to mention that the "surface" (if one wants to imagine something like that) of the atmosphere is essentially pasted like a sheet of paper to the surface of the Earth. It's not particularly thick --

6-10 miles or so compared with 4000 for the radius of the Earth -- no more than 1/4% and it varies from as little as 6 near the poles to maybe 10 or so around the equator. I'm talking about the tropopause here. I'm not sure what the effective absorption level would be, but that might be representative -- even taking into account the point that a significant portion of unreflected insolation is absorbed at the earth's surface (more than twice what the atmosphere absorbs.)

I'll leave it to Raving to work out what a 1 mile variation in altitude for some parts of the atmosphere might do in the overall picture of things. Doing it right, I hope he's competent with taking derivatives and applying finite differences. And no one is suggesting a 10% or 20% variation in thickness, but it might be instructive for him to work out what even something that large might mean.

Isn't it nice how Raving's ignorance makes all challenges seem reasonable in his mind?

Jon

I don't know why they say "Global average temperature 1850-2008" and nothing past that last red bar, and underneath say the red bars are for 1850-2007. Counting bars from the 1998 one indicates the last one is

2008 now.

Link to a text data file:

Individual year HadCRUT-3 peaked not in 2004, but with the 1998 El Nino and second to that in 2005 - the second-most recent complete calendar year excluding the most recent La Nina. So we have one year of cooling to explain with a long term cooling trend or with noise.

Smoothed HadCRUT-3 still includes the greatest La Nina in the past 21 years - and peaked in 2004, center of the most recent 5 year period to exclude that 2007-2008 La Nina. The first year to be the center of a 5 year period excluding that La Nina will be 2011, and that 5 year period will include 2013. A couple months into 2014 we should see whether smoothed HadCRUT shows the world to be warmer or cooler after the

2007-2008 La Nina than before that event.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

North Atlantic is what this is of. Since this index is factored for global temperature as a whole, when North Atlantic wars from this, somewhere else in the world would do the opposite. And it ain't the Arctic, which surely appears to correlate well with AMO, though lagging a little.

There is positive feedback that got us the comings and goings of the Ice Age glaciations from the Milankovitch cycles.

Most of the globe warmed, not just the Arctic. The Arctic merely warmed more.

Like effects of change of presence of urban heat islands only occurred before the satellite data determinations started in 1979 while half of global warming since 1850 occurred afterwards when satellite determinations and surface determinations agreed rather well? UAH shows almost 80% as much warming since 1979 as HadCRUT-3, GISS and NCDC do, and RSS shows over 90%.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

I can't find anything about how much this solar activity change is likely to or estimated to change the global warming trend.

I am reminded of:

brought to attention in a thread of subject line:

"OT - Hansen acknowledges solar forcing"

It says estimate of effect of decrease in solar activity was increased to magnitude of offsetting 7 years's worth of atmospheric CO2 increase.

Some very high percentage of solar absorption is in or below the ozone layer. Most of the sun's "vacuum ultraviolet" gets to the ozone layer - VUV is what forms it. Most other solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere is absorbed by the atmosphere is absorbed below it. Most solar radiation reflected by the atmosphere is reflected below the ozone layer, where over 90% of atmosphere mass and close enough to all clouds are.

I think it would be a huge change if the ozone layer or its associated specific pressure levels (related to percentage of atmosphere above/below such levels) moved a few hundred meters in altitude.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Jim, I've not said much on that subject. What you write here is merely a strawman you create. So I don't need to respond to it more than to say so.

---

My point was that when someone is ignorant about a subject, all things seem possible. Magic, necromancy, tea leaf reading, etc., all seem to make sense when ignorant. People who don't really have the knowledge to know any better bring up all manner of possible explanations, trying to say that climate scientists haven't got it right. Not much different than bringing up witches or Loki as an explanation. To them, it sounds just fine. Better informed, they would change their minds.

Rather than check for yourself on the point Raving brought up (and I know you could in a few short seconds if you cared to) you would rather merely root for your team and throw tomatoes at the other side. I don't expect to change that. But you are sitting on the losing side of the arena. Which can be fun, if you don't take yourself seriously about it.

Jon