Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[bobwtfomg]

Some of you have been here long enough to recall that I predicted this;

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/10/19/1242227/scientists-turn-air-into-petrol

Nucs or windmills plus this process (or one very similar) = the future.

How much electrical power will be needed to produce a litre of petrol? Also until all electricity is produced by renewables isn't this just an inefficient way of turning coal and gas into petrol?

"We ought to be aiming for a refinery-scale operation within the next 15 years.

Although the prototype system is designed to extract carbon dioxide from the air, this part of the process is still too inefficient to allow a commercial-scale operation.

The company can and has used carbon dioxide extracted from air to make petrol, but it is also using industrial sources of carbon dioxide until it is able to improve the performance of "carbon capture"

So, correct me if I'm wrong please, but it seems to me the plan is to use electricity, mostly generated by burning coal and gas, to turn a (probably very small) part of the related carbon emmisions into petrol.
While I can see this may be economically viable if the world's economy grows leading to an exponential rise in crude oil prices, I don't see how this cuts down on overall carbon emmissions.

P.S. whatever happened to algae bio-fuel,(supposedly hundreds of times more efficient than corn bio-fuel) I'm sure I read several years ago there were already prototype production units operating.

 

[BenBurch]

If this somehow works in a large scale, these people will be rich be beyond their wildest dreams...

It will. I know something of the process, and I can see no reason it should not scale.

They are also not the only ones doing this.

 

[BenBurch]

How much electrical power will be needed to produce a litre of petrol? Also until all electricity is produced by renewables isn't this just an inefficient way of turning coal and gas into petrol?.

...

Energy input does not matter cost-wise - eventually this will be cheaper than gasoline.

And as I said, we need to build out carbon-free energy sources.

I would strongly favor a plan to build about 10,000 500 MW nuclear power stations, which would about double the planet's electrical generation capacity, and then this process can be run with nuclear energy.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Taking the CO2 contained in the exhalation of politicians in campaign and converting it into industrial diamonds and canned oxygen to be used to break Baumgartner's recent record would be even better.

Besides the fact of using what is vented through the exhaust to synthesize fuel has the same appeal of using what dropped in the toilet today to synthesize the hors d'oeuvre of tomorrow, I find the fact of synthesizing gasoline departing from the product of edge power generation technologies to be like Henry Ford creating clockwork horses instead of cars.

It's reassuring to know we can -and we already know we could-, but I don't think using 1.2, 1.4 or 1.8 Kwh of electricity to produce 1 Kwh worth of gasoline is good business when compared with directly using the original Kwh (unless you want to power an aircraft).

 

[CapelDodger]

The scientific method works when it's allowed to work. Denying publication of studis that refute the "consensus" ...

Which valid studies are you referring to? They will surely have been published on a blog and heavily promoted by Watts, McIntyre and all the rest, so what are they? And why haven't they prevented AGW? Enquiring minds would like to know.

... labeling sceptics as "deniers" ...

We label deniers as deniers; they are never sceptical of anything which fits their determined beliefs.

... and calling for their persecution is flying in the face of the scientific method as I'm sure you'll agree.

The persecution of Mann by agents of the state (Virginia, that is) and powerful moneyed interests does not help the scientific method along. Demands for an end to any kind of academic privacy in the US (or at least in Virginia) lest scientists spread subversive ideas under its cover are similarly unhelpful. It's not easy being an honest climate scientist these days but fortunately they soldier on.

That point aside, the average temp of the USA is around 14.1 C. The temp of Brazil is 21.5 C. They don't seem to have a problem growing tremendous amounts of food, more than enough to feed their burgeoning population.

They do it by deforestation, besides which the US won't become tropical or adopt Brazil's hydrological cycle.

Next?

Perhaps not next but fairly soon Brazil's going to have a recurring drought problem, just like much of the US and Argentina. Between the floods, that is. It's not just the temperature, you see, it's what the temperature does to the climate system.

 

[CapelDodger]

Some of you have been here long enough to recall that I predicted this;

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/10/19/1242227/scientists-turn-air-into-petrol

Nucs or windmills plus this process (or one very similar) = the future.

Gasoline is, of course, a wonderful way of storing and transporting energy, so this changes the economics of producing energy in remote desert areas. It could be a game-changer. Certainly worth a bit of venture capital.

 

[CapelDodger]

It's reassuring to know we can -and we already know we could-, but I don't think using 1.2, 1.4 or 1.8 Kwh of electricity to produce 1 Kwh worth of gasoline is good business when compared with directly using the original Kwh (unless you want to power an aircraft).

It could hypothetically be an efficient way of storing excess production, or production at a remote site. On a large enough scale it would compete with oil- and tar-sourced gasoline, making its production uneconomic and - hooray! - saving the day in the final reel!

Or not, whatever. We'll see. It seems to me that thermodynamics is against it being viable. Too many stages, too much energy loss.

 

[Westwall]

No I do not.

A. The denier tag applies to the bloggers & media commentators (can apply to contrarian climate scientists who commentate in the media & make claims not supported by the research they publish) who deny evidence. Real climate scientists don't deal in opinion anyway, their results either support the 'sceptical' POV or they don't. And there is precious little research that does, outweighed significantly by the fatuous opinion that passes for evidence by deniers.

B. The allegations you refer to are completely unfounded & have been demonstrated as such in at least three independent inquiries.

Proving once again the axiom that it takes moments to create misinformation but years to debunk, evidenced by the fact we are STLL debunking claims made over three years ago



Food of much lower nutritional & protein value. Wheat makes up a huge proportion of the world's calories, they don't grow much wheat in Brazil, do they?

So, the fact that Steven McIntyre has demonstrated repeatedly that the math the climatologists are using is wrong is negated by the fact that he is "merely" a blogger? Even though he has been shown to be absolutely correct? You would still classify him as a "denier"?

 

[Westwall]

You again assert it, but show no evidence beyond catchphrases from the denialist eco-chamber. Again, do you have any evidence that the peer-review system was not working before? Remember that letting through papers that you ideologically disapprove of is not evidence.



Really? Any evidence that their peers where not able to question the results? Any evidence that the paper went through for any other reason than being solid scientific works?



They're closing down E&E? Don't worry, it didn't count as a scientific journal anyhow.



I have the feeling you mean "studies I agree with". It apparently will not happen, unless you re-think your position and face reality.

How about Dr. Monnets wife (Lisa Rotterman) "peer reviewing" his drowned polar bear paper along with Andrew Derocher the lead researcher for a Canadian study funded by Monnet? Does that count?

Go ahead and google it yourself so you know I'm not making it up.

Or how about when Steig was allowed to be one of the reviewers of the Antarctic warming paper that refuted his own paper? Where in science is that sort of unethical behavior ever proper?

 

[CapelDodger]

So, the fact that Steven McIntyre has demonstrated repeatedly that the math the climatologists are using is wrong is negated by the fact that he is "merely" a blogger? Even though he has been shown to be absolutely correct? You would still classify him as a "denier"?

McIntyre has been shown to be wrong repeatedly. Hardly surprising when he's not a mathematician and is trying to argue from a result (all climate reconstructions are wrong) to a method for arriving at it.

The Hockey-Stick on which McIntyre made his name has been reproduced many times, using different data and different statistical methods. Apart from which AGW just keeps on happening, and the hypothesised benefits (longer growing seasons and such) fail to materialise. And of Lindzen's Iris not a sign.

 

[lomiller]

The world "rapidly" warmed during the Holocene Thermal Maximum too.

Only if you define “rapidly” different in the two cases.

From 18 000 years ago to 8000 the earth warmed ~7 - 8 deg C. That’s less than 1/10 of a deg per 100 years. Warming from business as usual would be ~3 deg over the next 100 years or ~40 X faster.

 

[lomiller]

Because climatology has been corrupted by the "pal review" problem for far too long.

“Mainstream science is suppressing the truth” is at the core of all conspiracy theories. You need to be a little more sceptical in your approach to the woo you find on the internet.

 

[Westwall]

Which valid studies are you referring to? They will surely have been published on a blog and heavily promoted by Watts, McIntyre and all the rest, so what are they? And why haven't they prevented AGW? Enquiring minds would like to know.

We label deniers as deniers; they are never sceptical of anything which fits their determined beliefs.

The persecution of Mann by agents of the state (Virginia, that is) and powerful moneyed interests does not help the scientific method along. Demands for an end to any kind of academic privacy in the US (or at least in Virginia) lest scientists spread subversive ideas under its cover are similarly unhelpful. It's not easy being an honest climate scientist these days but fortunately they soldier on.

They do it by deforestation, besides which the US won't become tropical or adopt Brazil's hydrological cycle.

Perhaps not next but fairly soon Brazil's going to have a recurring drought problem, just like much of the US and Argentina. Between the floods, that is. It's not just the temperature, you see, it's what the temperature does to the climate system.

What AGW? So far all i see are computer models. The empirical data shows that the last 1000 years has been remarkably stable. Even the UK's MET Office has released a report that shows the last 16 years have been steady. Phil Jones has attempted to refute that but even if you agree with his assertions the rise is within the error bars of the study. The MET Office themselves predicted in 2009 thet 3 of the next 5 years would set temp records. That appears unlikely now.

Seems to me that AGW has taken a vacation. Which, if the theory was correct, shouldn't be possible. The claims that you all have made for the last 15 years was that tipping point after tipping point was being passed and we were going to enter into a period of runaway warming.

The world temps ahve levelled off and the CO2 levels have continued to rise.

Please explain how that is possible given the tenets of the AGW hypothesis.

 

[Westwall]

Only if you define “rapidly” different in the two cases.

From 18 000 years ago to 8000 the earth warmed ~7 - 8 deg C. That’s less than 1/10 of a deg per 100 years. Warming from business as usual would be ~3 deg over the next 100 years or ~40 X faster.

Aaaannnndd, it's not happening. Hansen has "corrected" temp records from 50 years ago (universally lower). Why?

The AGW theory states that with ever increasing CO2 levels the temperature is going to skyrocket. It isn't.

How do you explain that?

 

[Westwall]

McIntyre has been shown to be wrong repeatedly. Hardly surprising when he's not a mathematician and is trying to argue from a result (all climate reconstructions are wrong) to a method for arriving at it.

The Hockey-Stick on which McIntyre made his name has been reproduced many times, using different data and different statistical methods. Apart from which AGW just keeps on happening, and the hypothesised benefits (longer growing seasons and such) fail to materialise. And of Lindzen's Iris not a sign.

Really? I see things like this and I interpret his results entirely differnt from you. Also he does have a Bachelors in mathematics so he's not a complete philistine. And the NAS found significant problems with Manns methodology according to Wegman, so the Hockey Stick (and all of those that support it....which used the same methods and data, so it figures they would get the same result, no?) is really not that robust after all.

"Dear Stephen,

I am contacting you on behalf of all the authors of the Gergis et al (2012) study ‘Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium’

An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in the study, which may affect the results. While the paper states that “both proxy climate and instrumental data were linearly detrended over the 1921–1990 period”, we discovered on Tuesday 5 June that the records used in the final analysis were not detrended for proxy selection, making this statement incorrect. Although this is an unfortunate data processing issue, it is likely to have implications for the results reported in the study. The journal has been contacted and the publication of the study has been put on hold.

This is a normal part of science. The testing of scientific studies through independent analysis of data and methods strengthens the conclusions. In this study, an issue has been identified and the results are being re-checked.

We would be grateful if you would post the notice below on your ClimateAudit web site.

We would like to thank you and the participants at the ClimateAudit blog for your scrutiny of our study, which also identified this data processing issue.

Thanks, David Karoly

Print publication of scientific study put on hold

An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in the study, “Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium” by Joelle Gergis, Raphael Neukom, Stephen Phipps, Ailie Gallant and David Karoly, accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate.

We are currently reviewing the data and results."

 

[lomiller]

So, the fact that Steven McIntyre has demonstrated repeatedly that the math the climatologists are using is wrong is negated by the fact that he is "merely" a blogger? Even though he has been shown to be absolutely correct? You would still classify him as a "denier"?

McIntyre did try to make this case one, but it’s been repeatedly shown that McIntyre got the wrong answer and the climate scientists got the right one. Since then all he’s done is repeat the already debunked claims on his blog so they could be consumed by the gullible.

Even though he has been shown to be absolutely correct?

Repeated investigations show he was completely wrong. McIntyre’s own analysis has been show to be completely WRONG. Additionally the data in question has been added to considerably and analyzed using completely different mechanisms, all of which agree with the original and disagree with McIntyre.

The book is closed on this one. McIntyre was wrong and this has been thoroughly proven in the peer review literature. If you wish to discuss the possibility that the peer reviewed literature is just a giant conspiracy theory there is sub-forum for those types of topic, perhaps you should try there.

 

[lomiller]

Aaaannnndd, it's not happening. Hansen has "corrected" temp records from 50 years ago (universally lower). Why?

There are at least 4 surface station records and 2 satellite records for this and they all get the same results. Are you suggesting he snuck in at night and altered their data?

Again, all the adjustments made are documented in the peer review literature and all of them are perfectly justified. You not liking the outcome doesn’t alter the accuracy of these data sets one bit.

The AGW theory states that with ever increasing CO2 levels the temperature is going to skyrocket.

It’s going up 10X faster than the average warming during the last de-glaciation. Is that not enough of a “sky rocket” for you?

Not that it matters. Temperatures are going up as quickly as predicted, so if this doesn’t qualify as “sky rocketing” neither do the predictions.

 

[Westwall]

There are at least 4 surface station records and 2 satellite records for this and they all get the same results. Are you suggesting he snuck in at night and altered their data?

Again, all the adjustments made are documented in the peer review literature and all of them are perfectly justified. You not liking the outcome doesn’t alter the accuracy of these data sets one bit.



It’s going up 10X faster than the average warming during the last de-glaciation. Is that not enough of a “sky rocket” for you?

Not that it matters. Temperatures are going up as quickly as predicted, so if this doesn’t qualify as “sky rocketing” neither do the predictions.

You tell me. This is a simple review of methodology and doesn't adress the "adjustments" being made by Hansen which sometimes do indeed show up after midnight!



"We investigate the methods used for the adjustment of inhomogeneities of temperature time series covering the last 100 years. Based on a systematic study of scientific literature, we classify and evaluate the observed inhomogeneities in historical and modern time series, as well as their adjustment methods. It turns out that these methods are mainly statistical, not well justified by experiments and are rarely supported by metadata. In many of the cases studied the proposed corrections are not even statistically significant.

From the global database GHCN-Monthly Version 2, we examine all stations containing both raw and adjusted data that satisfy certain criteria of continuity and distribution over the globe. In the United States of America, because of the large number of available stations, stations were chosen after a suitable sampling. In total we analyzed 181 stations globally. For these stations we calculated the differences between the adjusted and non-adjusted linear 100-year trends. It was found that in the two thirds of the cases, the homogenization procedure increased the positive or decreased the negative temperature trends.

One of the most common homogenization methods, ‘SNHT for single shifts’, was applied to synthetic time series with selected statistical characteristics, occasionally with offsets. The method was satisfactory when applied to independent data normally distributed, but not in data with long-term persistence.

The above results cast some doubts in the use of homogenization procedures and tend to indicate that the global temperature increase during the last century is between 0.4°C and 0.7°C, where these two values are the estimates derived from raw and adjusted data, respectively."





http://itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/1212/

 

[CapelDodger]

You tell me. This is a simple review of methodology and doesn't adress the "adjustments" being made by Hansen which sometimes do indeed show up after midnight!

The power which you imagine Hansen and Mann have over the world is remarkable. You actually believe that all the data passes across Hansen's desk to be edited to his satisfaction? Every day? From everywhere?

You are simply ridiculous. There, I've said it. You claim that hockey-sticks are produced because "they" use the same data and methods when in fact they do not. Much data has been gathered since Mann et al and it all points the same way.

Some of this data has been gathered by foreigners, far beyond the sway of Hansen. Quite a lot of it, in fact. But you keep gnawing away, like McIntyre, on Mann et al and the data he must have invented.

AGW hasn't been kind to your kind, has it? But that's the Laws of Physics for you : search them as you will, you'll never find any mention of mercy.

 

[lomiller]

You tell me. This is a simple review of methodology and doesn't adress the "adjustments" being made by Hansen which sometimes do indeed show up after midnight!




http://itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/1212/

All this says is that the adjustments actually have an impact on the final result. Which is really a "well duh" conclusions because if they didn't the adjustments would not be required in the first place.

Edit to add this:
You still seem to think that whether the adjustments are good or bad is somehow based on whether or not they give the results you want to see. The reality is that they are good/bad based on whether they are required to get valid results. Their purpose and why they are required is all well documented on the GISS web site and in the relevant papers published on the methodology, including citations to the papers pointing out the issue the adjustment solves.
/Edit

The biggest single adjustment by far is for time of day. Older practices for when in the day you collected readings yielded artificially warm temperatures. If you fail to adjust for this it leaves an artificial cooling trend in the final result.

What the author of your paper found was the removal of a known, false cooling signal in the data but he was too unfamiliar with the literature to realize this. the lesson here is to actually learn something of the subject before trying to write a paper on it.