Global warming discussion IV

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aleCcowaN said:
By the way, our mischievous Niño is planning an advertising campaign of grand proportions for that event.

[Woooowwww! Forecasts in this post updated. Holly Molly guacamole! It looks baaaaaaadddd! Showing the Kid bouncing back, what we had over here but said "neeehhh! check our models, they are experimental!"]
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ouch, can't be good for Oregon's "dead zone."
 
Do you agree with everything the Google engineers stated AM. That the planet is warming due to CO2 ?

Climate scientists have definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger. Whether measured in dollars or human suffering, climate change threatens to take a terrible toll on civilization over the next century.
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http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change

You also realize of course they are talking about reversing climate change.

Since the end of the Google effort 4 years ago the cost of solar panels has plunged dramatically to the point where solar in a number of areas is lower than coal.
Lets fast forward to now

This from Bloomberg..

Fossil Fuels Just Lost the Race Against Renewables ...
www.bloomberg.com/.../2015.../fossil-fuels-just-lost-the-race-against-ren...
Apr 14, 2015 - April 14, 2015 — 1:27 PM PDT ... Heartland Power Cooperative Solar Panel Installation ... The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. ... continues to plummet, and is now on par or cheaper than grid electricity in many areas of the world.
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Solar Is Cheaper Than Electricity From the Grid in 42 of 50 States ...
ecowatch.com/2015/01/16/solar-cheaper-than-grid/
Jan 16, 2015 - Solar photovoltaic systems are cheaper than electricity from the grid in 42 of the U.S.'s ... Because solar is cheaper and cleaner than coal. ..... http://www.hubet.it/ solar-module-price-forecasts-lowered-to-42c-watt-by-2015.
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Even Texas gets it...

World's Cheapest Solar Power Lands In Austin, Texas ...
cleantechnica.com/2015/.../worlds-cheapest-solar-power-lands-in-austin-t...
Jul 2, 2015 - July 2nd, 2015 by Zachary Shahan. Update: I ... (Cheaper Than Natural Gas, Coal, & Nuclear). ... In sunny areas, it's cheaper to build solar.
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Seems your data is as dated as your thinking on climate change and it's causes.....which, as has been shown to you time and again, is wrong.
 
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I'm not convinced that's the "industrial scale" solution.

There are numerous other approaches including hydrogen but this should all be moved to the Weaning off Fossil Fuel thread.

I wonder if AM agrees with the Google Engineers about AGW....:rolleyes:
 
macdoc said:
I'm not convinced that's the "industrial scale" solution.

There are numerous other approaches including hydrogen but this should all be moved to the Weaning off Fossil Fuel thread.

I wonder if AM agrees with the Google Engineers about AGW....:rolleyes:
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It's highly likely that there are industrial scaled sources, just not with the present state of the technology. One myth mentioned is that solar is useless if the sun doesn't shine. Clearly rubbish, even an overcast day will have sufficent incident light to produce a useful output otherwise we would all be stumbling around in the dark whenever it is cloudy!

Many times that people see wind turbines shut down and turned out of the wind in the UK is that there is insufficient demand rather than forced to shut down due to high or low windspeeds.

Wind turbines are actually very useful as they can be closed down and restarted quickly in response to demand changes.

We will always need to have excess generating capacity to cope with scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. So the idea that wind in particular requires extraordinary back up generating capacity is also rubbish.

There are no simple solutions. They will all require major investment. But even the existing infrastructure will need support and renewal, especially as our energy use increases.

ETA: I agree that the biggest change will be in the growth of distributed energy generation and storage though.
 
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aleCcowaN said:
I wasn't aware of it or I had forgotten. Thank you for reminding me. Not sure what is happening in the zone in these times of RRR.
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I was just looking at the huge warm spot of the pacific northwest coast of the continental US. Warmer water tends to be more anoxic than cooler water, thus it looks like no improvement for our regional problem. I did read something the other day about some pacific fish that seem to be surviving okay in these zones,...ah here it is:

Rock fish, we used to pull these up all the time while long-lining for halibut. The rule was that all the rock fish and crabs (some crabs would grab ahold of the baited hooks and not let go all the up to the deck of the boat) would go into the galley for crew meals. It was delicious eating but there were a lot of people whose stomachs take a while to adjust to both the motion of the ocean and the constant smell of cut bait in the sun and crawling inside 300 lb halibut minutes after they've been pulled on deck to scrape out the blood line. Personally, such never really bothered me. good inner ear system and a cast iron stomach that loves seafood! but I digress...

NW scientists discover Pacific fish surviving dead zones
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2015/03/nw_scientists_discover_pacific.html

GRANTS PASS -- Scientists say they have found that some fish can survive in low-oxygen dead zones that are expanding in deep waters off the West Coast as the climate changes.

While the overall number and kinds of fish in those zones are declining, some species appear able to ride it out, according to a study published this month in the journal Fisheries Oceanography.

The study focused on catches from 2008 through 2010 of four species of deepwater groundfish -- Dover sole, petrale sole, spotted ratfish and greenstriped rockfish.

Catches of ratfish and petrale sole both declined in low-oxygen areas, while catches of greenstriped rockfish and Dover sole showed no changes. Dover sole are well-known for being adapted to low oxygen, but greenstriped rockfish are not.

Oregon State University oceanographer Jack Barth, a co-author, says commercial fishermen will likely start taking oxygen levels into account as they decide where to tow their nets.
(more at link)
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Life in the dead zone
http://fishbio.com/field-notes/ocean-bay-delta/life-in-the-dead-zone

...The first low-oxygen zone in the eastern Pacific was discovered in 2002 off the coast of Oregon, and more have since been discovered off the coast of Washington and California. While low-oxygen zones are often associated with agricultural run-off, which inputs nutrients that spur algal blooms that quickly exhaust oxygen in the water, scientists blame this Pacific dead zone on climate change. Increasing ocean upwelling is predicted to occur in a changing climate: wind pushes surface waters offshore and allows nutrient-rich waters to rise from depth, bringing more phytoplankton to the surface. The sudden exposure to sunlight allows these tiny algae to flourish and their populations explode. When these algae die, they sink and decompose, which uses up oxygen in deeper waters and leads to an oxygen shortage for the animals that live there.

Researchers from Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association joined forces to look at how low-oxygen zones impact deepwater groundfish. They examined landings records for Dover sole, petrale sole, spotted ratfish, and greenstriped rockfish from 2008 through 2010. The number of landings of ratfish and petrale sole declined in low-oxygen areas, but the number of landings of greenstriped rockfish and Dover sole (shown above) remained steady (Keller et al. 2015). The results imply that greenstriped rockfish and Dover sole are able to survive in the so-called dead-zones, while ratfish and petrale sole don’t fare as well.

The researchers plan to continue investigating how the low-oxygen zones impact different species, which may aid predictions as to how fish populations will respond if low-oxygen zones continue to increase. In the future, the scientists plan to study if fish growth rates or reproduction are impaired in low-oxygen regions. They hope their work will help fisheries managers to make informed decisions about the future of fisheries in these impacted regions.
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As a species, we extract so much protein from the oceans, that even small changes in an already overstressed environment are going to dramatically impact food situations around the world. We currently extract more than 90 million tons of seafood a year from the oceans, much of this goes toward providing feed for livestock and use as fertilizer. Currently, aside from humans, domestic cats, cattle, pigs, and chickens have unknowingly become the next leading consumers of the most seafood of any other land animals!
 
Mikemcc said:
It's highly likely that there are industrial scaled sources, just not with the present state of the technology. One myth mentioned is that solar is useless if the sun doesn't shine. Clearly rubbish, even an overcast day will have sufficent incident light to produce a useful output otherwise we would all be stumbling around in the dark whenever it is cloudy!

Many times that people see wind turbines shut down and turned out of the wind in the UK is that there is insufficient demand rather than forced to shut down due to high or low windspeeds.

Wind turbines are actually very useful as they can be closed down and restarted quickly in response to demand changes.

We will always need to have excess generating capacity to cope with scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. So the idea that wind in particular requires extraordinary back up generating capacity is also rubbish.

There are no simple solutions. They will all require major investment. But even the existing infrastructure will need support and renewal, especially as our energy use increases.

ETA: I agree that the biggest change will be in the growth of distributed energy generation and storage though.
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Macdoc is probably correct about needing to take this to the weaning off fossil fuels thread, but again the main issue from my perspective is not to try and find one alternative energy form to replace coal, oil and gas, but to use whatever energy solution(s) work best for a given place (e.g. solar for areas with lots of arid sunshine, wind where the wind blows steadily and consistently, geotherm, wave/tide and hydro where appropriate, etc.,). And this doesn't mean that you never ever burn any gas or oil to produce power, it just should not be the primary or typical means of producing electricity moving forward.
 
Trakar said:
As a species, we extract so much protein from the oceans, that even small changes in an already overstressed environment are going to dramatically impact food situations around the world. We currently extract more than 90 million tons of seafood a year from the oceans, much of this goes toward providing feed for livestock and use as fertilizer. Currently, aside from humans, domestic cats, cattle, pigs, and chickens have unknowingly become the next leading consumers of the most seafood of any other land animals!
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Well, total marine fish captures are falling, even though the number of species commercially exploited doesn't stop going up. It's fish farming, mainly in China, what has gotten the total fish consumption up (levelled in a per capita basis). Now it's set to a sad decline (I eat fish above the world's average and way above the Argentine average, so I'm concerned).

About the dead spots there's a double pressure: warm waters doesn't contain much gases -"nor life, that's why you see the crystal blue waters of the Caribbean and nice colourful fishes and say «how wonderful» when they are in fact almost dead waters; our ocean's is turbid and looks muddy because it's cold and full of gases and full of life", it's only adding how warm champagne, beer or cola foams and spills all over the place, and people got the notion at once, it always works for me-. I was saying ... warm, not much gases; deep and cold, not much oxygen either -because life down there and decomposition processes have taken it away-. So what seems to work is having upwelling plus nice "whisking" winds making a deep mixed layer. Summer mixed layers are shallower by the very definition of "Summer" -so it doesn't surprise me these dead spots show in Summer-. I am too lazy to use the ARGO profiler and get some info about the East North Pacific, someone wants to give it a go?
 
macdoc said:
http://www.newscientist.com/article...level-rise-locked-in.html?page=2#.VaCFlmCLjHA
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...but because carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for many centuries...
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All this kind of argumentation wilfully ignore that the ocean bellow 250m still matches a planet with <300 ppm CO2 concentration both in its gas content and temperature profile; that the oceans currently absorb 35-38% of the global emissions and that reached the 500 ppm mark and stopped, they'd pull 3 ppm a year out of the atmosphere and have us back to 1950 in some 150-200 years. That kind of argumentation is also a part of a larger family of notions that ignore the ocean as a whole through its temperature profiles set an anchor for all temperatures on the atmosphere above that opposes to change for centuries.

When I read this kind of press I feel like we're back in the 80's and what we knew then, still using 80086s and wearing mullets, but with disaster films still in fashion and regarding The Poseidon Adventure like a cult film.

Unlike science, magazines publish what their public like to read, and no derivative of the word "science" nor any use of nature, climate and similar words are going to change that simple fact of life.
 
Thanks Darwin (and Xenu), the typhoon's winds were weak enough (peaking just 105 miles per hour at most) to cause only this:

2ex93yq.jpg
 
Perhaps you want to argue your point with David Archer...in Nature.

Nature Reports Climate Change
Published online: 20 November 2008 | doi:10.1038/climate.2008.122

Carbon is forever
Carbon dioxide emissions and their associated warming could linger for millennia, according to some climate scientists. Mason Inman looks at why the fallout from burning fossil fuels could last far longer than expected.

Carbon is forever
Distant future: our continued use of fossil fuels could leave a CO2legacy that lasts millennia, says climatologist David Archer

123RF.COM/PAUL MOORE
After our fossil fuel blow-out, how long will the CO2 hangover last? And what about the global fever that comes along with it? These sound like simple questions, but the answers are complex — and not well understood or appreciated outside a small group of climate scientists. Popular books on climate change — even those written by scientists — if they mention the lifetime of CO2 at all, typically say it lasts "a century or more"1 or "more than a hundred years".

"That's complete nonsense," says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. It doesn't help that the summaries in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have confused the issue, allege Caldeira and colleagues in an upcoming paper in Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences2. Now he and a few other climate scientists are trying to spread the word that human-generated CO2, and the warming it brings, will linger far into the future — unless we take heroic measures to pull the gas out of the air.

University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer, who led the study with Caldeira and others, is credited with doing more than anyone to show how long CO2 from fossil fuels will last in the atmosphere. As he puts it in his new book The Long Thaw, "The lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25 percent that lasts essentially forever. The next time you fill your tank, reflect upon this"3.

"The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge," Archer writes. "Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far."
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more
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.122.html
 
macdoc said:
Perhaps you want to argue your point with David Archer...in Nature.



more
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.122.html
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How good of you to highlight the oratory in yellow. If the scientific content in what you quoted were highlighted in red, the text would still look exactly the same. The whole quotation can be summarized as pretty much everything you link here: "yada, yada".

Why did real scientists cared to sample and analyse carbon isotopes high and low throughout the oceans during years and analyse the carbon cycle when a journalist was in the end to elicit and edit the answers of some Archer dude for some random guy who works with computers to quote it and say he is right about what he willingly chose to believe?

Do you want sources for how it really works? My estimation is you have at least a 100 different ones, many cited repeatedly, just in this forum, posted along the years. But you wouldn't learn. Why would anyone provide a hundred more for you?
 
So David Archer is not a "real scientist" and Nature is not a science publication. I see.
Your distain for David Archer is hilarious and just demeans any contribution you might make here.

Don't read climate science much do you?...:rolleyes: Aside from being wrong on CO2 being limited by ocean.

Edited by Agatha: 
Removed breach of rule 12

He writes textbooks on science - he teaches it at Chicago University
...I'd say he's far better qualified than you to assess CO2 in the oceans.

David Archer

David Archer is a computational ocean chemist at the University of Chicago.
He has published research on the carbon cycle of the ocean and the sea floor, at present, in the past, and in the future.
Dr. Archer has worked on the ongoing mystery of the low atmospheric CO2 concentration during glacial time 20,000 years ago, and on the fate of fossil fuel CO2 on geologic time scales in the future, and its impact on future ice age cycles, ocean methane hydrate decomposition, and coral reefs.
Archer has written a textbook for non-science major undergraduates called “Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast” published by Blackwell, and a popular-level book on the longevity of climate impacts from CO2 release called The Long Thaw: How humans are changing the next 100,000 years of Earth’s climate. More information can be found here.

- See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/david-archer/#sthash.t40Liade.dpuf
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Perhaps you should follow his posts and learn something instead of strutting your arrogance.

or take his class..

Open Climate 101 Online
Filed under: Climate Science — david @ 16 January 2012

Almost 3000 non-science major undergraduates at the University of Chicago have taken PHSC13400, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, since Ray Pierrehumbert and I (David Archer) first developed it back in 1995. Since the publication of the textbook for the class in 2005 (and a much-cleaned-up 2nd edition now shipping), enrollment has gone through the roof, it’s all I’ve been able to teach the last few years, trying to keep up with demand. I hear it is the largest class on campus, with 4-500 students a year out of an annual class of only around 1400. Now the content of this class is being served to the internet world at large: Open Climate 101.
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here you go
http://forecast.uchicago.edu

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?author_name=david
 
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aleCcowaN said:
Edited by jsfisher: 
Moderated content removed.
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I don't want to get into this little tête–à–tête, but it would have probably been more instructive/informative if Archer's papers had been linked or an explanation of the reasoning he uses to derive the carbon lifetime in our planet's active carbon cycle. For instance:

Atmospheric Lifetime of Fossil Fuel Carbon Dioxide
http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/geocarb/archer.2009.ann_rev_tail.pdf
Abstract
CO2 released from combustion of fossil fuels equilibrates among the various carbon reservoirs of the atmosphere, the ocean, and the terrestrial biosphere on timescales of a few centuries. However, a sizeable fraction of the CO2 remains in the atmosphere, awaiting a return to the solid earth by much slower weathering processes and deposition of CaCO3. Common measures of the atmospheric lifetime of CO2, including the e-folding time scale, disregard the long tail. Its neglect in the calculation of global warming potentials leads many to underestimate the longevity of anthropogenic global warming. Here, we review the past literature on the atmospheric lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 and its impact on climate, and we present initial results from a model intercomparison project on this topic. The models agree that 20–35% of theCO2 remains in the atmosphere after equilibration with the ocean (2–20 centuries). Neutralization by CaCO3 draws the airborne fraction down further on timescales of 3 to 7 kyr.
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(full paper available for review at above link)

Millennial Atmospheric Lifetime of Anthropogenic CO2
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~victor/archer.subm.clim.change.pdf
Abstract
The notion is pervasive in the climate science community and in the public at large that the climate impacts of fossil fuel CO2 release will only persist for a few centuries. This conclusion has no basis in theory or models of the atmosphere / ocean carbon cycle, which we review here. Although the models vary widely in their formulation and underlying assumptions, they are quite
consistent in their prediction that release of fossil fuel CO2 will impact climate for tens of millennia and longer into the future, subsiding on time scales typically associated with nuclear waste. Many slowly-responding components of the climate system, such as ice sheets, deep ocean temperature, permafrost, and methane hydrates, will be sensitive to the long tail of the CO2 climate impact. Most of the CO2 drawdown will take place on time scales
of centuries, as CO2 invades the ocean, but it is too simplistic to call the invasion timescale the atmospheric lifetime of the CO2, as is commonly done in popular and scientific discussion. We argue that a better shorthand for the lifetime of anthropogenic CO2 would be "hundreds of years plus a significant fraction that changes climate forever".
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(again full paper available for review at the above link)​


Anytime we use popular press quotes, we have to expect a loss of context and qualification, that is why science demands the use of formalized, published statements with all the attendant context and proper qualification of terms and situations. I consider myself lucky to count both David Archer and Raymond Pierrehumbert as acquaintances and the two most important sources and influences in what I know and understand about AGW and Climate Science in general. Their writings (both journal and popular), their lectures (both public and in coursework), and their discussions (both personal and in public - they are both participants at real climate) have, and continue to, shape and refine my considerations and understandings.

There is more fruit in the discussion of their actual published statements and conclusions than there is in the discussion of any journalist's take on the "quoted" researcher's out-of-context blurb,...in my opinion.
 
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Lennart Hyland said:
Anyone seen this?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150709092955.htm

Your thoughts?
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As the study itself has only just been published it will require review and replication attempts before much with real authority can be said. Having said this, however, I find the popular press accounting rather out of touch with most mainstream climate considerations with regard to the actual effects of the 'Maunder minimum,' which are generally very minor. Most of the major impacts popularly considered the "mini-ice-age" were actually more regional than global and have been tied more to episodic increases in volcanic activity and coincident N. Atlantic conveyor circulation variations rather than insolation reductions. Actual changes in the solar emissions have been calculated to have only reduced insolation during the Maunder Minimum by a small percentage resulting in about 0.2°C of cooling over a half century time-frame. AGW is currently adding about 0.2°C of warming each decade (at an accelerating rate). So while a grand minimum might offer some fractional respite of marginally reduced warming for a few decades it really shouldn't significantly or noticeably impact AGW issues or problems.
 
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