perpetual california drought

Convection and boiling water processes are chaotic.

Nevertheless I remained confident that my kettle would boil within the usual timeframe, what with with a few kW going into it.

Nicely put.

If global energy consumption continues to increase at historic rates, then in ~400 years the world's oceans boil.

Clearly energy consumption cannot continue to increase in the current way for that long. The point of the article is that economists haven't started to get their collective heads around that, yet.

Except it's not crazy.

This year fits right into the long-term noise pattern.

What was crazy was to observe a few dry years and extrapolate perptual drought.

Are you in the UK?

Noisy data there too, but no obvious trend. But if people are determined to see stuff that's not there, they will.

There are some long-term periodicies, but that is overlaid by huge amounts of noise on all time scales. If you mean that it's generally colder in winter than in summer, I'll conceed that. How much colder isn't very predictable.

Will next winter have a lot or a little snow in the Sierras?

What caused the great ice ages, or the LIA?

That's a prime example of the stupidity of mindless extrapolation.

In 1860, you would have confidently predicted that the entire land area of the planet would now be covered by railroad tracks. In 1950, it would have been swimming pools and golf courses.

Am I still allowed to say "duh" ?

Economic growth is doing things that make human beings happier/healthier/mo re comfortable.

There's no explicit requirement to use more energy for any of that, althoug h that has often been the obvious way to get to that destination.

One traditional science fiction solution is to put people into a dream stat e where they make no physical movements at all and have the illusion of liv ing whatever kind of life they want to, and can interact in any kind of - n on-destructive - way they want to.

Stephen Wolfram seems to think that we can transfer out intellectual proces ses into hardware, and dispose of the biological body entirely, which does carry the idea slightly further.

If we sink the hardware into liquid helium, there is still an irreducible e ntropy-driven energy consumption, but it would probably take us longer than 400 years to get there.

The weather has been bizarre in New England as well; over the past several years there's been a clearly noticeable pattern of winters that start off very mild, almost balmy through December, and then ramp up in fury to where by early March you're getting slammed by storm after storm and sub-zero arctic blast after arctic blast. Then it all evaporates in an instant.

Three weeks ago the heat went out in my girlfriend's apartment one night, and she had to put in an emergency call because the temp was about 40 degrees on the third floor and we could see our breath. Last week we had a day where it was almost 90.

Look at this serious rollercoaster ride:

I see why Sloman spends so much time ragging on JL. JL is amazingly ignorant of a number of topics. This post clearly illustrates his ignorance is both climate and chaos theory. Chaotic systems *are* predictable, just not specific details. While we can't say when a hurricane will develop with much accuracy, we can provide an estimate with some degree of accuracy of the number of hurricanes that will be spawned in a season. We can't say what stock is going to make you rich tomorrow, we can give an idea of when the Dow index will top some figure.

The most important thing in science is knowing what you know and what you don't know. JL fails at this every time.

That's weather, not climate.

The Milankovitch effect, amplified by quite a lot of positive feedback (but not enough to run away).

The little ice age was an essentially North Atlantic phenomenon, probably due to deep oceans currents choosing different routes for a while. The Argo buoys are still delivering data about them (but the Argo buoys weren't around during the little ice age).

We've told you all this before, but you don't seem to be able to take it in.

That's not what was going on. Nobody predicted perpetual drought, and the reduced long-term rain-fall was predicted on the basis of what more CO2 in the atmosphere was expected to do Californian rain-fall patterns, not from mindless extrapolation.

He is.

Or in your case, you will not bother to find out what is actually being said, because you prefer to invent stupid claims that nobody serious has actually made.

Anthony Watts and his ilk have been known to quote what journalists claimed to have understood climate scientists to be saying, but that is the way denialist propagandists work.

Precisely; that was the *whole point* of the conversation in that link!

It was a physicist pointing out to an economist that wealth cannot increase indefinitely in the way that they presume it can.

The bit about the oceans boiling in 400 years is accurate physics, based on the stated presumptions. The presumptions were designed to match the economist's presumptions. Since the result is untenable, clearly the presumptions aren't realistic.

That was discussed in another of the dothemath's blog posts.

Indeed. And continues to be with little if any deviation evident, unfortunately.

I've always been frightened by part of a similar plotline in Arthur C Clarke's "The Lion of Comarre".

I'm just re-reading Fred Hoyle's "The Black Cloud" for the first time in 20 years. The last time was

Statistically there is significant correlation.

As the old saying goes "the race is not always won by the fastest horse, but that's the way to bet".

That's weather, not climate - so of course nobody (other than the farmer leaning over his gate talking to his cows) has any idea.

It was your word, not mine.

The more interesting question is whether the mean value or standard deviation are changing.

Just so.

Yup.

Oh, I've seen and experienced worse! In '76 we even appointed a "Minister for Drought" who was the most effective politician I've ever come across. (Two weeks later it started raining!)

But we have had a number of "100 year" weather related events over the past decade or so. That could merely be an excuse for civil engineer's inadequate modelling, but maybe the models were based on outdated assumptions that no longer hold.

Overall, it is the stats that count.

One thing that we have now is precision instruments everywhere [1], and satellites. 100 or 200 years ago, hurricanes would happen and not get recorded. Tree rings are not accurate thermometers. Old thermometers weren't accurate either.

A lot of this "climate change" thing is collective neurosis.

There is /some/ pretty solid /direct/ evidence available. Tree rings and bubbles of the atmosphere trapped in glaciers spring to mind. There is also a lot of indirect (and therefore more circumstantial) evidence available.

Given the simplicity of the /basic/ physics and measurements, some solid /broadbrush/ conclusions can be drawn. The principal uncertainty is with the details of the timing and detailed effects.

Did I mention Climate Change? Did I? Wow, what a leap!(still wondering why they dropped Global Warming - the climate always changes after all, so the new title is an oxymoron)

I was pointing out a fact that some 'sciences' can't predict worth a damn. That was all. I list Economics as a 'science'.

John

The Climate Change thing is not very interesting in itself, except as a great example of modern scientific wrongness and profiteering. And the enduring power of fear in a relatively safe world.

"The Black Swan" talks a lot about institutional wrongness. The author explicitly excludes engineers.

At 90% humidity ?