Breaking: Gore Wrong on Global Warming

[drewtam]

I think the folks at "wattsupwiththat" lay out some pretty good criticisms of the science too. But its not a slam dunk "myth busted" set of criticisms.

In my mind, since the evidence for and against is pretty weak, that makes microb's arguments all the stronger.

The cherry on top is the way those who say its a crisis, don't act like its a crisis.
For example, if its really a crisis, then stop flying all over the world for climate conferences and using so much fuel. Start teleconferencing. I know the big universities have all the tech and bandwidth to do massive teleconferencing events for each region.
If its really a crisis, then its time to go nuclear in a very big way. If the US went 100% nuclear electricity, we would far exceed the Kyoto target reductions.
If its really a crisis, then its time to support nat gas frac'ing in a big way. It is much lower CO2 fuel than coal, and could also replace some transportation fuel needs.

[Boomhauer]

I think the folks at "wattsupwiththat" lay out some pretty good criticisms of the science too. But its not a slam dunk "myth busted" set of criticisms.

In my mind, since the evidence for and against is pretty weak, that makes microb's arguments all the stronger.

The cherry on top is the way those who say its a crisis, don't act like its a crisis.
For example, if its really a crisis, then stop flying all over the world for climate conferences and using so much fuel. Start teleconferencing. I know the big universities have all the tech and bandwidth to do massive teleconferencing events for each region.
If its really a crisis, then its time to go nuclear in a very big way. If the US went 100% nuclear electricity, we would far exceed the Kyoto target reductions.
If its really a crisis, then its time to support nat gas frac'ing in a big way. It is much lower CO2 fuel than coal, and could also replace some transportation fuel needs.

It is however, a damn good way to get money and control over people...

Which is exactly what the global warming movement people are getting...and they are laughing all the way to the bank.

[Balog]

Euroweenie climate change czar admits she doesn't care if AGW is a real thing or not since it's causing all the policies she likes to be implemented. In my miond even more damning than the leaked emails where the climate "scientists" admit how they rig their models.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10313261/EU-policy-on-climate-change-is-right-even-if-science-was-wrong-says-commissioner.html

[Sergeant Bob]

Euroweenie climate change czar admits she doesn't care if AGW is a real thing or not since it's causing all the policies she likes to be implemented. In my miond even more damning than the leaked emails where the climate "scientists" admit how they rig their models.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10313261/EU-policy-on-climate-change-is-right-even-if-science-was-wrong-says-commissioner.html

From the article:

However, EU and other policymakers are worried that the IPCC's forthcoming admission, expected on Sep 27, that previous forecasts are wrong will damage the legitimacy of climate change policies, such as levies and fuel taxes on consumers to fund renewable energy.



The Government's own estimates of meeting the EU target are a cost increase of 33 per cent to the average electricity price paid by households in 2020. New EU levies on carbon emissions from industry are estimated to cost the British economy £700 million, a bill that is passed on to the consumer via higher prices.

Follow the money!

[brimic]

Euroweenie climate change czar admits she doesn't care if AGW is a real thing or not since it's causing all the policies she likes to be implemented. In my miond even more damning than the leaked emails where the climate "scientists" admit how they rig their models.

To paraphrase: "We don't care that our sound science that shows the Earth is flat might be wrong, our policies are still right!"

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

http://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2013/09/19/real-climate-science-the-ipcc-doesnt-want-you-to-see-n1704053/page/2

[Scout26]

It's going to be a cold winter....


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Solar-activity-drops-to-100-year-low-puzzling-scientists/articleshow/22719807.cms

Money Quote:

Variations in the amount of heat and light reaching the planet's surface as a result of the cycle are tiny. Total solar output reaching the surface varies by just 1.3 Watts per square metre (0.1 percent) between the maximum and minimum phases of the cycle.

Even this variation has profound impacts on climate and weather. Rainfall, cloud formation and river run-off are all strongly correlated with the sun's 11-year cycle.

Just so everyone understands the earth consists of
Surface area: 510,072,000 km²
148,940,000 km² land (29.2 %)
361,132,000 km² water (70.8 %)
or
Approx. 120 trillion m².

So that's 156 trillion LESS watts of energy that the earth will receive and the Globular Woerming 'Scientists' are saying "Doesn't matter, Erf will still be warming."   I vote we eat their frozen corpses first. 

[AZRedhawk44]

156,000 gigawatts?  156,000 gigawatts!  Great Scott!

It can't be done, Tom!  It can't!

[Scout26]

Heartland Institute rebuts that IPCC 1,018 page report in 14 pages.

http://heartland.org/media-library/pdfs/CCR-II/Summary-for-Policymakers.pdf

Story here:
http://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2013/09/19/real-climate-science-the-ipcc-doesnt-want-you-to-see-n1704053

[Hawkmoon]

It's going to be a cold winter....


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Solar-activity-drops-to-100-year-low-puzzling-scientists/articleshow/22719807.cms

Money Quote:

Just so everyone understands the earth consists of
Surface area: 510,072,000 km²
148,940,000 km² land (29.2 %)
361,132,000 km² water (70.8 %)
or
Approx. 120 trillion m².

So that's 156 trillion LESS watts of energy that the earth will receive and the Globular Woerming 'Scientists' are saying "Doesn't matter, Erf will still be warming."   I vote we eat their frozen corpses first. 

It's still humankind's fault. The sun is basically a fire, right? A big, hot, ball of fire. And fire needs oxygen, right?

So OBVIOUSLY all the excess CO2 we humanoids are generating is escaping our atmosphere and being drawn to the sun by the sun's greater gravitational attraction -- where the CO2 is cooling off the sun's fire.

[AZRedhawk44]

Scout's post about 156TW of lost heat energy had me thinking... there's no time component on that so I'm assuming it's just a constant?  As long as the sun is shining on something on earth, it's getting X watts.  When it's not shining, it's getting 0 watts.

Given that X - 1.3 = 999X/1000 (a translation of "Total solar output reaching the surface varies by just 1.3 Watts per square metre (0.1 percent) between the maximum and minimum phases of the cycle"), that means that:

X - 1.3 = 999X/1000
1000X - 1300 = 999X
X - 1300 = 0
X = 1300

The sun delivers 1300 watts per square meter of earth, and varies by 1.3 watts during max/min cycles.

120 trillion square meters yields 156,000 trillion watts of juice.  Getting lazy and dividing by half (the sun only shines on half the planet at a time, right?  Well, not really and not with full intensity) that means that the planet really only gets 78,000 trillion watts for 24 hours a day, or 78,000TWh per hour.  A variation of 0.1 percent, or 78TWh, is accounting for a dip in planetary temps.

In a year, the sun bestows on us 28,470,000 TWh

Total world electrical generation in 2009 (wikipedia's latest data) suggests mankind creates 20,000TWh total in a year.

The sun dumps 1423.5 times the amount of energy we produce, into our atmosphere, our oceans, our land and our crops, than we do.  Almost 100% of that is in the form of heat.

Question:

Given 20,000TWh of power generation per year and an average electrical efficiency such that 75% of that power is converted to heat as either resistive waste or intent, and given that the volume of the earth's atmosphere is 4.2 billion kilometers... how much could 15,000TWh of waste heat warm 4.2 billion kilometers of air?

[Ron]

As most of the long timers here know, I'm no advocate of the anthropogenic global warming religion.

Yet from what I can ascertain the article is actually wrong about the arctic sea ice. The measured long term trend is toward less. Just longer time scales than the alarmists were predicting. There is no massive accelerated melt like they were predicting (hoping).

The earth may in fact be getting warmer, pretty sure it is as much as any layman can be.

It does that over time, gets warmer, gets colder, rinse and repeat.

I'm all for increased efficiencies, smaller carbon footprints, reduction of pollution and preserving wilderness habitats. There is no need to employ the religion of scientism to justify any of the above. Heavy handed statism isn't needed either.

Objective science and serious folks in government capable of weighing the costs/benefits would be ideal...oh well, back to the real world, lol.    

[drewtam]

The sun dumps 1423.5 times the amount of energy we produce, into our atmosphere, our oceans, our land and our crops, than we do.  Almost 100% of that is in the form of heat.

Question:

Given 20,000TWh of power generation per year and an average electrical efficiency such that 75% of that power is converted to heat as either resistive waste or intent, and given that the volume of the earth's atmosphere is 4.2 billion kilometers... how much could 15,000TWh of waste heat warm 4.2 billion kilometers of air?

I'm not sure if your asking that because you are curious, or trying to imply that it somehow debunks the possibility of human cause global warming.

If curiosity...
    Then delta_Q = Cp *m * delta_T
delta_T = delta_Q/(Cp * m)
delta_Q = 15,000TWhr = 5.4*10^16 kJ
Cp = ~1.01 kJ/kg/K
m = 5*10^18 kg
delta_T =~ 0.0107 K or 0.0107 C or 0.0192 F

Which is a lot more than I expected.


If arguing about the science...
    Then you are way off base. Nobody (of intellectual leadership) has ever said anything about waste heat being an issue. The issue is H20, CO2, and CH4 trapping the sun's energy more effectively, at least that's the theory.

[AZRedhawk44]

Just curiosity.

Though that obviously ignores the fact that the various water bodies of the earth are also heat transmission mediums and capture part of that waste heat as well.

Thanks, I had no idea what the formula might have been to accomplish that.

[drewtam]

Yeah, that formulation assumes that 100% of the energy is put in the atmosphere. Since the majority of human waste heat uses air as the primary heat sink (factories, cars, homes, etc), its probably not too far off.

The major power plants are lake, river, and air cooled. The lakes I suppose return their heat to the air and ground, while the rivers will likely carry the energy to the oceans. Direct sea water cooling is (I think) pretty rare since the salt water will eat the heat exchanger, or requires a more expensive heat exchanger to resist the corrosion. Marine vessels will have a sea water cooler, but I don't think anybody else bothers.

But we don't want to just look at electric production, we want to look at total energy usage. Wiki is saying that number is closer to 143 petawatt-hour.
The reason we should include others is that we are converting all fuels into heat. Very little of it is stored long term as potential or kinetic energy. The only one to subtract is sun powered renewables (wood, solar, wind, biofuel, food, hydro, etc). Since this energy is already counted when it comes in from the sun. These sources can add up to be significant, so the number is closer to 123PW-hr.

[Ben]

From the wire - “Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10 to 15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries. The U.S. also urged the authors to include the ‘leading hypothesis’ that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean.”

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/09/20/climategate-ii-scientists-pushed-to-hide-data/#ixzz2fRwMCaGx

Interesting tactic, considering the AGW people are always shoving "hottest recorded year on record" down our throats. Planetary climate is measured in millennia, people.

[Hawkmoon]

From the wire - “Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10 to 15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries. The U.S. also urged the authors to include the ‘leading hypothesis’ that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean.”

And if we're supposed to be looking at decades and centuries, we have to consider that Erik the Red settled Greenland in 983, and established an agrarian society ON GREENLAND that survived for approximately 500 years before global COOLING made the area untenable. 500 years -- that's about the length of time since western Europeans first set foot on the North American continent, and nearly twice as long as the United States has existed as a country.

I don't think we need to worry until we see the Vikings farming Greenland again. At that point, maybe we should start looking at whether it's going to continue warming, or cool off again as it did around 1400 A.D.

[Sergeant Bob]

And if we're supposed to be looking at decades and centuries, we have to consider that Erik the Red settled Greenland in 983, and established an agrarian society ON GREENLAND that survived for approximately 500 years before global COOLING made the area untenable. 500 years -- that's about the length of time since western Europeans first set foot on the North American continent, and nearly twice as long as the United States has existed as a country.

I don't think we need to worry until we see the Vikings farming Greenland again. At that point, maybe we should start looking at whether it's going to continue warming, or cool off again as it did around 1400 A.D.

There you go again. Confusing the issue by using logic.