Global warming discussion III

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macdoc said:
I suspect the courts will get engaged at some point...took them to get SO2 under control.
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Unfortunately, even the U.S. courts (including SCOTUS - Citizen's United anyone?) have been unduly biased towards deregulation over the last decade or so. I don't see any of this changing substantially until an overwhelming and angry citizenry forces the issue, and I simply don't see that happening until it is far too late to achieve effective and cost-reasonable redressment.
 
Yes Viriginia there is another climate driver in play...

Thanks, volcanoes! Earth cooler than expected due to recent eruptions



Sid is a freelance science journalist.

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By Sid Perkins 21 November 2014 1:30 pm 17 Comments
Minor volcanic eruptions substantially slowed Earth’s warming between 2000 and 2013, a new study suggests. The small particles, or aerosols, were spewed high into the atmosphere and scattered sunlight back into space, preventing the global average temperature from rising from 0.05°C to 0.12°C. That cooling effect represents between 25% and 50% of the expected temperature rise during that period because of rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, the scientists say, so the finding helps explain the so-called hiatus in global warming over the last 15 years.

“This is an important paper,” says Brian Toon, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The team’s results “help us understand why Earth didn’t warm as much as expected by climate models in the past decade or so.”

Scientists have long known of the cooling effect of major volcanic eruptions, which spew large amounts of light-scattering aerosols into the stratosphere. The Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo, for example, cooled Earth by a few tenths of a degree Celsius for months after it blew its top in June 1991. But the chilling effect of minor eruptions has been hotly debated, says David Ridley, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. That’s because scientists have presumed that most of the aerosols from minor eruptions do not rise beyond the troposphere, the layer of Earth’s atmosphere where weather occurs and where natural processes quickly clear particles from the atmosphere.
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http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/...es-earth-cooler-expected-due-recent-eruptions
 
macdoc said:
Why should uncle anthony care anyways....he doesn't
a) think it's warming
b) if it is think it's manmade....

Total idjit. At least his funding from fossil interests has been outed.
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.

Remember Macdoc ... it is YOU who funds the oil industry
 
Yes - I pay for services...I do not include in that as acceptable corrupting politicians and funding denidiots like Anthony Watts and and all the repuglies and right wing anti-science crap.

So do I buy selectively....yup.

Do I campaign against the kind crap the fossil fuel companies try to get away with ....say Kinder Morgan and tax dodges, buying politicians AND taking corporate subsidies while clocking up immense profits.

Some fossil fuel companies are responsible and understand the risks of climate change, discuss it openly and look towards their role in energy distribution post hydrocarbon age....too many are not especially coal.

Not in my backyard.
Coal-combustion ash, the waste product left over after coal is burned in power plants or other industrial applications, actually ends up in everybody’s backyard—the Earth’s air and water—not just the backyards of people unfortunate enough to live next door to an ash dump. Coal-combustion waste typically contains arsenic, mercury, chromium, cadmium, and various other pollutants, but its disposal is unregulated under federal law, having been exempted by Congress in 1980 from hazardous waste rules.
State rules governing coal-combustion-waste disposal are inconsistent; some states have minimal or no regulations in place. The waste can be dumped in unlined landfills and ponds, above ground in great heaps, or in active and abandoned mines.
Rain and groundwater leaching through this waste has caused significant groundwater contamination at ash dumps around the country, and at least two federal Superfund sites are associated with coal-combustion waste.
Ironically, as federal clean air legislation has prompted better capture of pollutants at the smokestack, the federally unregulated solid waste stream from power plant scrubbers and boilers has grown increasingly toxic. A risk assessment report commissioned by the federal EPA concluded that “current management of coal combustion waste in landfills and surface impoundments results in significant risk to human health and the environment.”
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http://www.plunderingappalachia.org/theissue.htm
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Criminal level of environmental abuse not to mention HR abuse and political corruption.
I'm a realist....I'm not a greenie which you seem to forget. They are just as much a problem in other ways as the idiots denying AGW in the first place.

THEY however are not cooking the planet...unregulated fossil fuel use is.
There are responsible fossil fuel providers that acknowledge the issues with their product and are working toward a civilization that is not dependent of products that load fossil carbon into the atmosphere as an external consequence....especially then dodging the cost of the consequences.

If it was dumping into the water supply ( which in the case of coal and sometimes fracking ) then at least there are some controls....there are SOME controls over air pollution - severely insufficient in the case of C02 to avoid the kind of risk than even Exxon acknowledges......after spending millions denying it and funding the likes of Heartland and Dear Anthony.

THAT is irresponsible if not edging on criminal .....the Exxon board thought so.
Fossil fuel companies are still a requirement of this civilization.
Reckless, irreponsible and in some cases criminal fossil fuel companies need to be held to account and pay for the consequences of their product use in terms of the environment just as a ship like the Exxon Valdez incurred costs relating to it's damage to the environment.

And I tell you, Exxon has done a bloody good job at Valdez in showing what CAN be done to mitigate damaging externalities as a consequence of it's operations.

We need fossil fuels for a while yet, we DON'T need irresponsible ones corrupting the political system keeping them in check.

••••

THIS....

On Thursday, one of the country’s leading energy companies announced new goals aimed at subtantially cutting carbon emissions over the next several decades. NRG Energy, a massive enterprise with over 100 power plants situated primarily across the Northeast, set a target of cutting its carbon emissions 50 percent by 2030 and 90 percent by 2050. Billed as part of establishing a “clear course towards a clean energy future” the announcement accompanied the groundbreaking ceremony for the company’s new, environmentally-friendly Princeton, New Jersey headquarters.

“The goals you never set, you are certain to never meet,” said David Crane, NRG’s CEO, during the groundbreaking. Crane said he believes it’s NRG’s destiny to be a leader in creating a more sustainable and prosperous future while “winning the fight against climate change.”

NRG, the second-largest conventional power generation company in the country, has already reduced CO2 emissions by 40 percent since 2005, according to the company. They estimate that these new targets will avoid approximately three billion tons of CO2 emissions by 2050 — the equivalent of offsetting all of New York City’s CO2 emissions, at 2005 levels, for 65 years.
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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/21/3594916/nrg-groundbreaking-emissions-cuts-power-plants/

Yes it CAN be done.
 
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stevea said:
And if a computer model represented evidence then you'd have a valid rebuttal.
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Computers models ARE evidence and are used as such in pretty much every field of science you choose to mention. You might choose to argue that they are poor evidence but they are still evidence.

And are you disputing the notion that there is more CO2 generated in the northern hemisphere than the southern hemisphere?
 
Interesting...

stevea said:
The scientific method is not about discovering 'truth', and it's a massive error to assume it ever does. It's only about creating a model of the observable universe. You cite some of the rules for this model-building.
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bit_pattern said:
Interesting...
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Sorry, this post caused some translocational confusion for a several minutes. I clicked the quoted link to read Stevea's full context message, thinking it was somewhere up thread and I had missed the exchange, and responded to Stevea's post only to realize that I was suddenly in a new thread and discussion! Strange feeling.

In my response I basically provided the definition and understood purpose of the scientific method and tried to clear up some confusion about the terms Truth and true, regardless, glad to be back. (warning the above link goes to different thread)
 
Best analysis yet and a clear connection of violent weather swings to climate change.

Buffalo’s Climate Change Driven Mega Snow-Flood
Earlier this week something rather interesting and disturbing happened to the Jet Stream.

In the extreme northwest, a large heat pool over Alaska and the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean kept temperatures in the range of 10 to 36 degrees Fahrenheit above average. To the south, a powerful super typhoon, gorged on Pacific Ocean waters ranging from 1-2 C hotter than normal, raced into the extratropical region of the Central and Northern Pacific. And to the north and east, the cold core that normally resides over the North Pole began slipping south.

Arctic Anomaly Map



(Massive warm air invasion of the Arctic earlier this week led to a major polar vortex disruption driving cold air out of the Arctic and setting off record snowfall in the region of Buffalo, New York. Image source: Climate Reanalyzer.)

As the supertyphoon’s remnants hit the warm weakness in the Jet Stream near Alaska, it bombed out into a monster extra-tropical low. This kicked warm air even further north, causing a whiplash in the Jet and driving the cold air core south over Canada.

Cold air rocketed down over the relatively warm waters of the Great Lakes. These waters, having soaked up the heat of yet another hotter than average American October and early November, squeezed an epic amount of moisture and storm feeding energy out into the air. Over the past two days, the result was as kind of thundersnow storm that parked itself in one location, dumping foot after foot of snow. By the time the final tally was counted this morning, as much as 8 feet had fallen over Buffalo New York. A record amount never before seen in so short a time span and yet so far ahead of winter.

More than seven deaths, multiple building collapses, a paralyzation of transportation, and extraordinary damages prompted the New York State governor to declare a state of emergency.

Yes, Climate Change Has Put the Weather on Steroids
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more

http://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/category/climate-change-2/

and it is far from over with temperatures climbing to near 60 degrees tomorrow - flooding next...
 
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An interesting concession from BHP Billiton - the stranded assets message is sinking in at the boardroom level

BHP Billiton would need to gradually move away from mining coal if carbon capture and storage technologies do not prove successful, according to chief executive Andrew Mackenzie.

Speaking on the ABC Radio on Tuesday, Mr Mackenzie said BHP mined coal for an economic return and was not committed to the commodity for any other reason.

"We are not committed to develop coal any more than we are committed to developing copper or potash, we make those decisions on an economic basis because they are the things we can put our people to work on so we can get a higher return for our shareholders," he said

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/mini...-mackenzie-20141125-11t74d.html#ixzz3K3blmTan
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Hawaii issuing green bonds...

...The Hawaii State Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism last week issued a US$150m of AAA-rated green asset-backed securities in two tranches. The first tranche for US$50m has an eight-year tenor and coupon of 1.467 per cent. The second tranche for US$100m has a 17-year tenor and 3.242 per cent coupon. Goldman Sachs and Citi were joint bookrunners.

These are the first asset-backed green municipal bonds in the United States, with the issue backed by a Green Infrastructure Fee that is being applied to the bills of customers of state-owned electricity utilities. It will be offset by a reduction in the Public Benefits Fee currently applied to electricity bills.

It’s fundamentally an on-bill financing model for development of green energy infrastructure, with proceeds of the green bond used to fund loans to consumers to cover the installation of solar PV panels and solar connectors such as storage, advanced inverters and monitoring devices.

The state government has extra-sweetened the whole deal by making interest from the bonds tax-free for investors.

“This is what we need to understand: there is really nothing new about this – the climate mitigation and adaptation challenge is essentially all about infrastructure financing, just that it’s also green. Great to see Hawaii connecting the dots on this,” Mr Kidney said.
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http://www.thefifthestate.com.au/bu...ing-infrastructure-financing-innovation/69968
 
I see the great lakes are starting to freeze earlier than usual

And last summer they had ice remaining longer than usual
 
Arnold Martin said:
I see the great lakes are starting to freeze earlier than usual

And last summer they had ice remaining longer than usual
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Got links to evidence that this is a trend, it is but one small region of the globe, but, it would be interesting to track, if this is really a situation and not just an anecdote without supporting evidence.
 
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