OT; Widespread Global warming

I've often thought that the difference between science knowledge and other types is quite simply whether or not the knowledge has been "borged." If it is Borg, it is science. If not, it's not.

If I had to pick a single, defining thing that causes science knowledge to stand out it is its UNITY. It is of a piece. Each bit supports, and is supported by, the rest. It is part of the Borg; a highly integrated knowledge web. Either your tidbit is integrated into it, or not.

This is what makes Tarot card reading, necromancy, and tea leaf reading NOT science. Not because they aren't useful to some at some times. But because they are isolated and separate. If one is proven wrong, it impacts none of the others. They have no relation.

Another way of thinking about this is the difference between farm walls, built up of loose rocks slumped together to form an animal perimeter barrier and an archway, where each stone is fitted together and the strength of that archway is sufficient upon which to carry a civilization. The farm wall is not. But it still may be useful to some, of course. But if you blow out a chunk of the farm wall, nothing else is affected. You take out a key stone in the archway and it all comes down. But the unity is its strength. Same with science.

Get over it. It's why science is so strong and powerful.

Jon

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From what I understand about Roger Revelle's 1957 paper, the upper ocean isn't going to source or sink anything like as much CO2 as simple Henry's Law calcuation would suggest, so the exchange with the deeper ocean is going to be the dominating factor.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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So says one of the nitwits who has been assimilated by the denialist propaganda machine.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Doubling the price of energy - raising is share of GDP from 8% to say

16% isn't going to reduce industrialised countries to cnetral African levels of development. Granting that lots of China's power generating plants are shockingly inefficient, it might reduce them to current Chinese levels of development.

I can't imagine where you got the idea that modern industrial society couldn't be powered from sustainable energy sources - it is the kind of nonsense that denialist propaganda might spread, but it is such an obvious nonsense that anybody with a technical education ought to be able to see straignth through it.

The seriously anti-scientific demagogues are all being paid by Exxon- Mobil and the rest of the fossil-carbon extraction industry.

Exxon-Mobil and its friends aren't gambling on their big lie. They see it as an investment that allows them to keep on making a good income for a few more years before the reality of progressive anthropogenic global warming becomes painfully obvious to people outside the scientific community.

When you think about the value of low-lying property that is eventually going to be threatened by rising sea levels - a six metre rise if we get Greenland warm enough that its ice sheet slides off into the ocean, as the Laurenstian ice sheet did at the end of the last ice age, its a very cynical investment indeed, particularly seeing that many oil refineries are located in ports.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

BFD. In a few more years we will have figured out ways to counter the deleterious effects of global warming at a lower cost than raising the cost of energy. It isn't as if the answer has to be not using petroleum products.

Dan

So, you want to bet the planet on that? In fact we probably won't even be raising the cost of energy in the long term. Wind energy is already close to breaking even with coal-fired generating stations, and the the projected break-even date for solar power is not that far away either

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Not burning fossil carbon is an answer that will certainly work. It's an answer that will double the cost of energy - raising it from 8% of the GDP to 15% - this putting an 8% crimp in the economy. Spread over a few years - as it has to be, since we can't build sustainable energy plants overnight - it translates into a few years of reduced economic growth.

Not doing anything about anthrpopgenic global warming until we have a better solution is another approach. Persistent warming is going to introduce other costs, some of which we don't know about yet. We may get your imagined solution before these costs beat the 8% hit we'd get from going away from burning fossil carbon, or we might run into a somewhat bigger hit and end up without the spare capacity to engineer any kind of solution.

It's a gamble, and the worst case loss you are risking is the disintegration of current world economy and a fairly dramatic population crash.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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A better strategy is just conserving. I'm using

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Wait a minute--I'm saving energy and the planet every day, using a tenth what my neighbors do, turning out lights and getting up in the cold, you're the one walking around telling people it's not worth conserving, living large, demanding gov'ts step in force us to do things your way, and I'm the problem?

Thanks Bill, that made my day.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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You are the problem. Your personal economies are doing a little - very little - to slow down anthropogenic global warming. My estimate of milliseconds was not a joke - if you check out what an individual contribution does, that's the right order of magnitude.

Your half-baked and ill-informed opinions are part of what is stopping society as a whole from doing what needs to be done. You aren't inarticulate or un-educated, but you've swallowed the denialist propaganda line as if nobody had ever taught you anything about critical thinkings. That really is a problem, and indicates - to me - that it is going to take some tolerably dramatic climatic disaster, killing at least hundreds of people, to get people thinking that climate change is real and a problem that needs to be dealt with. Katrina had the right proportions, but it could - and probably would have - happened without any kind of global warming.

A depressing thought. A complacent idiot gloating over his complacency.

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But negligible effect. Conservation isn't going to do enough to reduce US oil imports to zero, let alone reduce the individual carbon foot- prints from the current 20 tons of CO2 per year to the 0.5 tons that would stabilise CO2 levsl in the atmosphere.

In fact James Arthur's economical approach to heating might eliminate the 15% of his carbon footprint that goes on gas,coal and oil, so he might be down to 17 tons of CO2 per year.

Bill lives in Europe, and is probably responsible for a typically European 10 tons of CO2 per year. If James Arthur's government forced him to live as economically as citizens currently do in the UK and Germany, his footprint would be appreciably reduced.

I don't want his government to force him to do anything, but I would like it if they restructured their tax system to make it rather more expensive to burn fossil carbon for energy, and used the tax raised in the process to encourage people to invest in generating energy from sustainable sources. Some of the idiots who post here claim that this would involve reverting to the low-energy life-style of our great- grandfathers, but this is obvious nonsense.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

And if you factor in population growth, which remains exponential despite a gradual change in a power term, mere linear convervation measures will soon be swamped by the exponential factor.

There is a still bigger problem to deal with.

Jon

My experience in the stock market suggests otherwise. I see a lot of "herd mentality" there. Elsewhere, I see this being a common factor. I see lots of people getting into "groupthinks".

When scientists can be funded (employed) by those lacking biases and employing scientists to work for "The Truth" rather than passing on some biases, truth comes out.

Sadly, it appears to me that AGW, marijuana and cigarettes are so politicized that most of the money has bias. It appears to me that scientists working on determining degree of existence of AGW have better employment prospects if they determine that AGW is either so bad a problem that worldwide government action is needed, or that AGW essentially does not exist. Of these two extremes, the former appears to me more scientifically supportable.

However, my own amateur workings in climate science being-my-own-dog rather than needing any loyalty to anyone, make me think that "The Truth" is in-between. With a somewhat lesser level of "working things out" than Dr. Roy Spencer mentions in his blog, I am finding mild added-positive feedback in "climate sensitivity", much less than IPCC leans towards existing. (While Spencer likes to mostly see that being negative, sometimes barely positive, and in-my-likings-degree-of-positive when the variable is solar variation, as I remember my experiences looking at his blog.)

I seem to think that climate science gets contaminated by ability to get funding varying directly with ability to support one extreme or the other.

I would hope some scientist working for some government agency can make a name for him/her-self by coming up with actual scientific determinations of "The Truth" that are inconvenient to both biased extremes that more money comes from.

However, I seem to think that enough time will add "good science" and filter out the junk such as these biases. Sadly, for all I know, that could take until ~2050; I fear that it could take that long to hash-out getting models "that predicted the past" to get time-tested with a full cycle of AMO and low-frequency-component of PDO, along with a somewhat- to-fairly likely near-repeat of the "Dalton Minimum" of solar activity.

More optimistically, the next few to several years will force adjustments of AGW climate models in order to "successfully have predicted" what accurred by 2015 or 2020. Maybe that soon, we may have significantly updated figures of Earth's sensitivity to change in CO2 and how much warming from AGW we are likely to be in for.

If, for sake of argument, 70% of "relevant science industry" can get sustained or increased funding by coming up with "findings" that support one or another or some "power grabs" or taxation schemes by government, and 3-4% is paid to "scientifically" argue that the other side has no truth at all, what would you or anyone else expect to be the result from scientists employed to investigate the matter in question?

My thought here is that "The Truth" would be better told by "mavericks" not being employed by someone who gets and passes on money better by supporting a more extreme position to one side or its opposite. Maybe soon enough some maverick will make a name for him/her-self faster than the money preferring one side of some argument dries up, if so could be in for a Nobel Prize.

However, on the other hand, I seem to fear that it could take until around or after 2020 before "The Science" gets a much better handle on this.

When that happens, I expect Spencer or anyone following his footsteps being like him and IPCC to have only minor disagreements with each other. I do see Spencer having biases and having had need to be corrected, but it appears to me that he does at least intermittently "let facts get in the way".

Apart from this, and the scam of a parallel economy based upon carbon trading, it is also a convenient cover for weather warfare via atmospheric maniputation presently being conducted by Russia, China and the USA at the expense of their own populations.

Glenn Syborn

I don't accept your point of view. No point debating it.

Mavericks are great!! Sometimes, knowing _too_ much means potential avenues are prematurely left unexamined because they appear unpromising to the expert eye. But that doesn't mean ignorance is better, either. It's just that we need all kinds involved. And I'm glad of that.

It's been getting better far faster than I'd expected, even these last few years. But of course, as more of the puzzle pieces get placed and prioritized, the evolving puzzle's resolution will improve at an even faster rate. It's a lot easier to place a piece in the roughly correct "position" if you have most of the puzzle already done.

Sadly, we cannot afford the time. Enough of it is already far too clear, even with the gaps.

I expect the shimmering and flickering understanding to gradually get better over time, of course. "Reality" is not a sharp image. It's a bevy of nearby possibilities all combined and blurring the resulting picture. But as time passes the focus gets a little better. And, of course, the dispersion diminishes.

Jon

"Upper ocean" - 600 meters deep, 70% of Earth's roughly .5 billion square kilometers or roughly .35 billion square kilometers or roughly .21 billion cubic kilometers at average temperature 10, maybe 11 degrees C:

Looks to me 2.2 grams CO2 per kg of water at 14 C likely worldwide average surface temperature, with CO2 partial pressure of 1 atmosphere.

Multiply that by .00039 for current atmospheric CO2 around 390 PPMV.

That works out to .86 milligram per kilogram of water, close enough to .85 milligram per cubic decimeter. That translates to .85 gigagram or .85 kiloton per cubic kilometer. Multiply this by .21 billion cubic kilometers, and that means .178 teratons or 178 gigatons of CO2 in the "upper ocean" with equilibrium to current atmospheric CO2 concentration.

The actual truth is probably significantly more, since solubility of CO2 in water varies slightly less than proportionately with varying partial pressure of CO2, due to CO2 dissolved in water resulting in more than one molecular species, with diversity of such increasing as CO2 partial pressure decreases. There is some law that my highschool advanced chemistry teacher told me that product of concentrations of all resultant molecular species on one side of a reaction equation varies proportionately with variable concentration of a reactant concentration on the other side of the reaction equation.

Maybe a moderately quick web search may turn up mass of CO2 in the "upper ocean", though I have yet to get that far just now.

Now, for CO2 in the atmosphere:

Average surface-level pressure close enough to 1 bar (as opposed to average sea-level pressure more like 1.012 bar), as in 100,000 newtons per square meter.

Divide 100,000 newtons per square meter of atmosphere weight by the 9.81 figure for Earth's gravity (unit of that is m/s^2), result is atmospheric mass is 10,190 kilograms or 10.19 metric tons per square meter of Earth surface. Multiply this by a million square meters per square kilometer, and .5 billion square kilometers of Earth surface, and result is that atmospheric mass is about 5,090 metric teratons.

Multiply that by .00039 from 390 PPMV PPMV and ratio of 44/29 (ratio of molecular weight of CO2 to "molecular weight of air"), and result is that atmosphere has about 3,000 gigatons of CO2. (390-280)/390 means 846 gigatons of added CO2 in the atmosphere.

Somebody please check my "work" above, since my "work" above would make me get much more pessimistic about ocean ability to continue the recent past pattern of a significant portion of CO2 emissions being absorbed by the oceans.

I think at this moment that I boggled these figures somewhat, maybe in light of atmospheric CO2 gain in 1959-2010 stretch (most of it so far) being 147.7 gigatons of carbon, or 44/29 times that = 541 gigatons of CO2.

So, I seem to think I got the atmospheric CO2 gigatonnage gain "at least roughly correct". I have doubt about my figure for solubility of CO2 in ocean as extrapolated downwards by about 3.5 orders of magnitude while I mentioned a nonlinearity of solubility of CO2 in water as a function of "partial pressure of CO2" that gives some reduction in comparison to linearly-proportionate of consideration to partial pressure of CO2. I doubt this matters a lot over atmopspheric CO2 concentration varying by a factor of maybe 3 or so, but it probably does matter a lot in terms of an extrapolation through a CO2 change by a factor of over 2500 downward from atmosphericd presssure.

(I seem to think "at this moment" that "upper ocean" has much more CO2 than "I worked out above" due to the nonlinearity that I mentioned above.)

I invite comments here, attempts at corrections, and comments based on attempt to work from science and/or engineering and/or catching me doing any notable screw-ups in whatever I did above!

(Who is going to be first to "chime in" with a cite-able figure for CO2 gigatonnage in "upper ocean" or ""ocean-as-a-whole" different from what I extrapolated above by linear extrapolation over a factor of 2500-+ while I expect some nonlinearity for reasons that I mentioned above?)

All cheers and best regards to everyone here debating honestly "logical-Or" according to their consciences...

--
 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

I could argue that 2 tons of CO2 per person per year is "sustainable". Do you invite me to argue that some figure that high or close to that is a "non-problem"?

Heck, I think an 80% reduction from 20 to 4 tons per year is spectacularly good!

At this moment, I am starting to question the numbers. I would ask for cite-able support for such small numbers for reduction and such large numbers of consumption by J.A.

It does appear to me that there are plenty of American right-wingers implementing means to reduce their otherwise-inflating monthly and annual energy costs - same as less-lazy of the not-so-"right-wing" Americans.

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 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

What makes you think we each cause that much?

You are a statistical twit. Can't argue that.

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I've wasted hundreds of hours reading papers, FORTRAN models, IPCC propaganda, and so forth to conclude as I have.

You've read Al Gore.

Further, I got it confirmed straight from one of the guys whose entire career, specialty, and employment was climate modeling. Said gentleman said as I have, that global climate models diverge uselessly from reality over a span of months, and are completely uncorrelated with observed conditions somewhere shortly thereafter.

He also pointed out specific critical shortcomings of current models-- clouds, currents, etc.--as I've related here before. That his work was used by politicians to project climate decades into the future was a profound embarrassment to this principled scientist.

Ah, you say, my opinions are what's stopping society? Contradicting that masterpiece of deduction is your own example--despite knowing what you think you know, and not holding my opinions at all, you're still an energy glutton, a carbon criminal, an unabashed unapologetic energy spendthrift.

OTOH, if you and everyone else lived and conserved as I live and conserve, there wouldn't be any problem at all.

Shall I petition the government to force you to my lifestyle?

Nope, you're the problem, not me. But I have to thank you yet again-- your shenanigans and rationalizations had me laughing out loud, twice in one day!

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Is the argument of someone lazy here that an individual being individually lazy about reducing energy consumption "gets to be a good guy" if "spreading the Word"?

Like Al Gore?

Meanwhile, who among the frequent posters in S.E.D. in these debates are better at practicing what "The Warmingists" preach?

Who here designs lighting product units more energy-efficient than what they compete against?

Who here drives bicycles twice as much mileage per year as driving motor vehicles? Majority-commutes by bike? Drives bikes through rain at +1-3 or even minus 3 C? managed driving a bike through half a meter of accumated snowfall during a snowstorm still-in-progress?

Who here designs products that result in in-comparison-to-otherwise worldwide fossil fuel energy consumption? And by how much?

Who here applies engineering to reduce energy consumption for climate control of their homes and/or their workplaces? And by how much?

As much as nowadays how much most people would let preachings pass through in-one-ear-out-the-other or argue against such preachings, I give low weight to preaching and more weight to practicing the preachings that I agree with. I would get preachers better grades for ability to get more people on their side in practicing; likely better if the preacher practices what the preacher preaches. Likely also better long-term if the preacher in question does not preach matter so extremist as to draw a backlash or to cite a blow-up of overblown "conventional wisdom" that "science" turns out to "back off somewhat from" a decade or 2 later.

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 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)