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My impression as a parent (and now grandparent) is that mathematics (especially basic calculus) which was once covered by most students during secondary schooling is now covered by only a minority, yet it is now critical for social policy that voters have the skills to interpret graphs and trends for themselves. (I was dumbfounded that my daughter did some VCE maths, but no calculus was covered).
Is this worrying anyone else?
Was anyone else as amused by "time flitches" as I was?
Dave, Eli Rabett seems to think the death of calculus could be a good thing:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/05/death-of-calculus-one-of-standard-mo…
The Heartland Institute has announced the theme of its upcoming Fourth International 'Conference' on Climate Change.
I don't remember calculus being taught in O'level maths even in the 70s.
It was taught in A levels and further education courses (OND). So if you left school at 16, you didn't do calculus.
Paul, calculus was not required in my high school in New York state in the early 1970s either, but it was available as an advanced course to grade 12 seniors who had already completed the require maths curriculum. Having other priorities at age 17, I didn't take it until first year university.
Dave...I'm having trouble with this graph. It seems to suggest that CO2 was higher during the Dalton Minimum than the 1940's.
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2/bayreuth/bayreuth1e.htm
At the same time they are trying to give the impression that CO2 lags temps. What's the go?
Beck. He is clueless and happy about it.
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2006/10/amateur-night.html
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/beck-to-the-futur…
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/03/beckies-as-tonstant-weader-knows-eli…
First, if you look at the swings in that graph it would involve moving incredible amounts of CO2 into and out of the atmosphere
Second, most of those measurements were made at inappropriate sites. Some, for example, are from the center of Paris.
Third, the methods, are shall we say, susceptible to error
Personally I think basic statistics would be a more useful set of knowledge for your punter voting on social policy than calculus. Especially an understanding of error bars, standard deviations and probability distributions.
Too many things get pushed as certainties which could happen by chance or, conversely (as with AGW), the existence of an error bar around future climate predictions is treated as meaning that the science is uncertain.
Too many people get scared by things that have a one in a million chance of happening (e.g. child abduction by pedophile rapists) and treat things that are very likely to happen (lung cancer, traffic accidents, deaths due to low vaccination levels) as "just the way things are".
El Gordo, do you really think atmospheric CO2 fell - for example - by 100 parts per million in the 20 years from 1940 to 1960, as that graph of E-G Beck's estimates implies?
Where do you think all that C02 it went? And where did it come from if the 30 years before that when it rose by about the same amount, according to EG Beck?
And why do you think the wild fluctations indicated by Beck's data, even after it's smoothed, contrast so vividly with the steady change indicated by the Mauna Loa observatory?
Could it be that Beck's data is crap, which is [hardly a new thought](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/10/more_nonsense_about_co2.php)?
And why do you think the line on the graph labelled "HadCrut3 2006" stops in the 1960s?
Could it be that even with a notoriously dodgy CO2 data set, the denialists still need to cherry pick by cutting off the most recent *half a century* of temperature data?
Thank you for providing us all with a classic example of wilful ignorance.
Here's a question for you - why do denialist trolls habitually abbreviate temperatures as "temps"? Is it to give a false impression of easy familiarity with climate science, or are you just lazy typists as well as being intellectually lazy?
Like a great many people who visit this site, I'm interested in the related issues of climate change, renewables, and environmental and social policy more generally. I think it only fair to avow that on the question of renewables, I've long been on the enthusiastic-at-the risk-of beiing-too-credulous side of the argument.
For a very long time, I'd been reluctant to acknowledge this predisposition. Like many on the left, I've always set great store in arriving at inferences through resort to pertinent evidence, sound modelling and a rubric within which the wellbeing of humanity, and most especially those parts that can be described as working or disadvantaged humanity has been key. In an ideal world, as I see it, every human gets to be the best that they can be, and the social context in which they pursue this, facilitates this effort.
Unsurprisingly, often, as I read back over the things I've
written and relfect on the way that I've gone about deciding what is worthy and what is not, I've found myself deploying the language of general utility as one might find it in Mill or Bentham. I often describe myself as a humanistic left-wing utilitarian and draw comfort from that. And yet, on reflection I think it would be inadequate to describe myself or left-of-centre politics in thse terms. We are, as far as I can tell, no mere humanistic bean-counters or actuaries. We lefties (no less than our right of center counterparts) are to a greater or lesser extent, the result of a whole range of cultural and aesthetic mores. I'm a late baby boomer, coming of pubescence on the cusp of the 60s and 70s. This was a time when a gee-whiz fascination with what can be broadly called scientific progress jostled with counter-cultural angst over authority, elites, notions of the natural and a a more fluid notion of what it was to be truly human. The world of moon landings and the bomb ran up against Woodstock, Timothy Leary and the notion that contemporary life was analogous to the narrative in The Sorcerers Apprentice. Slogans such as Stop the World, I want to get off and The Kinks track "Ape Man" were prpfoundly resonant. While not all that was countercultural was left, and not all that was left was countercultural, the overlap was large and we were all forced to respond to it, one way or another.
With this in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that much of the left, in its vision of what would be a better world, opposed the widespread rollout of nuclear energy, sometimes with a fervour that was borderline religious, and truth be told, I was amongst the offenders here. At the time, it seemed so obvious, and though I looked hard for Bentham-style rationalisations for my positions, some of which were plausible, I do rather suspect that if nuclear energy could have been seen as 'natural' and not possessed by large corporations that I, along with much of the left, would have found ways of shrugging my shoulders. There is something very culturally and aesthetically pleasing to us leftists in the notion of community owned wind-turbines or wave machines or in everyone pitching in to recycle waste into biofuel. There's a huige warm inner glow factor. It conforms marvellously well to that simplest of leftwing secular humanist notions of a better world -- one in which everyone should 'play nicely with others'.
I'm not sure who it was who first uttered the maxim that to will the end is to will the means but he or she was certainly onto something substantial. While means and ends need to be reconciled to create solutions that are maintainable, you do need viable means to get to worthwhile ends. Just saying that some end would be worthy is pointless unless one can show means that would get us there and for which one takes political responsibility. While we leftists are not mere prisoners of cost-benefit feasibility we are surely not entitled to parry its insistent demand with a perfunctory nod at our ideals or a wave of the hand at what would be nice. From such gestures do misery and failure fall.
In my opinion, it is time for us to re-examine our fascination with renewables, because at least as I write these lines, it does seem that renewables, perversely, are not sustainable, if by sustainable one means meeting human need indefinitely into the future.
I'd encourage people here to look at David Mackay's excellent e-book Without Hot Air. Here, an eminent physicist goes beyond the generalities with which we are mostly familiar to drill down into what is possible, in terms of reconciling use of renewables with life lived in the way most people regard as dignified. What he finds is that while some countries may well find living on renewables viable without substantial cuts in the standards of living, this is not close to being true of most countries. In the UK, for example, on average, each citizen gets by on about 125KwH per day of energy (not including the energy embedded in imports from outside the UK, which might add a further 40KwH per day, and the figures for the US are much worse still -- double the European average and triple that of Hong Kong). Depending on which figures one accepts or how one does the calculations, somewhere between 10-60% of the UK demand might be recoverable by resort to renewables, in theory but much of it only at what would be an unacceptably high price and over the trenchant opposition of the NIMBY elements in the UK.
Nor are people, by and large willing to accept significant cuts in the standard of living of each person, and IMO, this is broadly reasonable. While some usages of contemprary society are wasteful and perhaps even noxious, nowhere near enough are so readily discarded to make this trategy viable for bridging the gap between what renewables can deliver and what we westerners demand. Nor is importing renewables (eg solar thermal from North Africa to the UK) really an equitable strategy anyway for it simply shofts the burden someplace else -- in that case onto people a lot less well off than in the UK. If the Golden Rule applies then Africans and others in the LDCs are entitled to aspire at least to what we are minimally ready to live with. We have to allow them enough energy to live as we do, AND reconcile that with protecting the biosphere and its services, on which all human possibility rests.
Plainly, we cannot go on as we are -- that much is self-evident. So what to do?
Frankly, I believe we do have to factor in very substantial amounts of nuclear energy if we are to have any realistic hope of avoiding a human catastrophe. This course is not without its risks, but then, this is true of any system configuration we can adopt. What seems inevitbale though is that if we become stuck in old arguments about what is natural and what is not, about big centralised technological fixes and small local ones, we may authort a future in which no substantial part of our vision is capable of realisation, and that, I take it, would be self-evidently paradoxical. If we leftists continue to block with the enemies of nuclear power, then the big winners will not be wind and solar thermal, but dirty coal and dirty liquid fuels and the losers will be all of working humanity.
We ought, I believe to propose an immediate plan of replacing the 1000 worst coal fired power stations with the best equivalent nuclear replacements. This one line item could cut the output of CO2 from coal fired electricity by about 72% and likewise cut emission of toxic particulate by whatever the antecedents were producing in the fuel cycle. A whole brace of coal miners would lose their jobs, but their lives and health and those even of their children would be extended. That latter is surely something over which every leftist could feel a warm inner glow, particualrly since the bulk of these deaths would be avoided in places where the said miners are poorest.
Trouble is Fran, it will take about 15 years to get those nuclear power stations up and running. It will also prove to be very expensive initially, to build the infrastructure.
Hey, wait a minute. 'A whole brace of coal miners would lose their jobs, but their lives and health and those even of their children would be extended. That latter is surely something over which every leftist could feel a warm inner glow...'
TROLL ALERT
I'm with you all the way James, a basic statistical education is far more important than calculus (Even though I love maths,and am studying first year calculus right now at Uni). I would say that it's even more important than trig, for most people. We did a little bit of it in highschool, but it was always taught as a thing in and of it self (probability), never related to the real world much - except trivial examples. Now I'm doing basic stats at uni, with ~800 other people, and 95% of them find it difficult. It's crazy.
I reckon it could even save people's lives - people learn they have some life threatening illness, and doctors tell them they have 6 months to live. I you don't understand stats, then you have two choices: assume you're going to die in 3 months, or assume the doctor it full of crap. Both of those are not healthy choices - the most appropriate response is to note that three months is just the most probable length of time given you're an average joe, and any number of factors THAT YOU CAN CHANGE (like diet, or exercise, medication) can have significant effects on your life expectancy, perhaps even to the point that you're cured.
This just in from the BBC:
[Arctic Warmest for 2000 Years](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8236797.stm)
However, I can already predict the Denialist's attack vector, as...
The result is a "hockey stick"-like curve in which the last decade - 1998-2008 - stands out as the warmest in the entire series.
Fran, Interesting topic, what is your assessment of the suitability of Mackay's [Plan G](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c27/page_210.shtml)? Particularly for Australia will a lot more capacity and one third the population?
One of my concerns with some "anti-renewables" arguments is the dependence on costs taken from extremely low production rates. The past (low production, bespoke, adhoc) prices are not representative of prices that will be achieved with an increase in several orders of magnitude of production and experience.
Ins some costing there also seem to be insufficient discussion of the capacity of demand management. The cost of renewable improve dramatically with a bit of demand load shifting.
Eamon...thanks for the link. A Reuters article said human induced global warming has saved the world from sliding into the frozen abyss.
Natural orbital forcing stopped in its tracks by the industrial revolution.
We are an intelligent design, but we couldn't have worked this out on our own, the timing was perfect.
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN02547411
Shorter el gordo:
I ask lots of questions about climate science, and then ignore all your answers. Therefore, we should do nothing to stop global warming, and even if we should do something, it should involve nukes.
Fran, I thought Mackay's book was a bit too pessimistic. In particular, I thought using an "affluent person" rather than an average person as his standard of comparison, and his neglect of behaviour change and demand management (i.e. he doesn't do any projections for increasing public transport use) as opposed to technical change only (electric cars rather than petrol driven cars) were a bit misleading.
Folks, re calculus.
I wasn't suggesting people should remember their calculus, but once you've done the basics, you look at graphs and trends differently (be it graphs the politicians and pundits throw at you, or even braking distances for different speeds and conditions). Such understanding, cutting the chance of being fooled, is intuitive, and certainly requires no calculations.
Here in Oz during the 70s, most year 11 students did maths (16/17 yo), and even in "veggie maths", calculus was the first thing you did. (According to my dad, in the 40s, the basics were covered in year 10).
I disagree James@18. Mackay does speak highly favourably of behaviour change. See for example the sections on home heating where he does endorse turning down the thermostat as a strategy and public transport. He also speaks favourably about bike ways and city design to accomodate it.
I think it's great to have numbers and he does make it clear that he is doing arithmetic rather than advocacy per se. There was only one place where I thought he departed from hsi own careful policy of comparing like with like (he did the old "if you don't like the risks of nukes based on deaths per GwH then you'll have to campaign against roads" thing without comparing death rates in energy terms), but it didn't affect his claims so I let it slide.
El gordo,
Berger and Loutre suggest our current warm climate may last for 50,000 years.
Jan Hollan, of the Nicholas Copernicus Observatory in the Czech Republic thinks the next glaciation might occur 130,000 years from now, though 620,000 years from now is more certain.
MarkB@15
Plainly, he was talking about the UK alone, and as he noted, he was talking about importing 14% of British power. It's not something that would scale up all that well.
Moreover whether looking at the installed cost for offshore wind, which would be prohibitive (about $3-5000 per KW depending on how far offshore) plus the back end 400 Dinorwigs for the pumped storage the capital investment would be huge. You probably do have to go offshore because in practice, as he argues elsewhere, on shore you'd have to cover 10% of the UK and the chances that all those communities would say yes in a hurry would be low.
I've heard the Chinese are experimenting with a MagLev VAWT that can operate in ultra light and heavy winds with a theoretical capacity of about 1GW and if this is feasible, that might change the calculations a lot. Either way I like the idea of building piles of pumped storage because whatever energy sources you have, you will always need load following capacity that is efficient, and with good pumped storage you can store everything at low cost. As he notes in his section on nuclear, even uranium at current levels of consumption isn't sustainable for 1000 years unless we go to breeders and seawater extraction, so we might well be well advised to extract every last drop of energy from even this source until we are more certain.
One of the more amusing aspects of the book was mackays' cost comparisons on renewables. he notes for example:
On the next page he puts this £1.7 billion per year figure into some perspective. Apparently the British spend roughly 20 times as much each year on perfumes and cosmetics (£33bn). On this basis, purely cosmetic changes in the fabric society are worth quite a bit ...
Oops ... mea culpa!!! ... that's world expenditure on perfumes and cosmetics. Something more pertinent to the UK
Dave Bath, I matriculated in 1967, in Adelaide, and did the Maths/Science stream at high school. (I think as an aside that it was the last year for a long time where English was compulsory.) I'm pretty sure we didn't do any calculus in Leaving (Year 11), but we did a fair bit in Matriculation (Year 12).
I *did* do calculus at age 15, but that was because our teacher taught it to us rather than it being part of the curriculum.
It was part of the A level curriculum (17 years).
That was in the 80's in the UK in a central secondary school. The grammar school may have done calculus before A levels.
@Paul UK:
...and, following on the statistics theme; having done SMP O-level, I didn't do stats - it was in the A-level curriculum, I believe. Doing 2 trad maths A-levels, I didn't do it at A-level either - I'd have had to do the single trad maths A-level, which was maths with statistics...
Interesting comment made by Stefan at the end of this comment:
It reminded me that there is no evidence that the global average was probably warmer at any time since the last ice-age, European variations notwithstanding. This means we've made a world that is probably the warmest in at least 115,000 years and getting warmer.
Eamon,
Well aren't you prescient? Or perhaps you haven't actually looked at the paper.
If you strip out the tree ring proxies (remember the trouble with those?) there is no 20thC uptick in temperature.
Chris O'Neill'
"This means we've made a world that is probably the warmest in at least 115,000 years and getting warmer."
Wow, sweeping statement there! Where's your evidence?
In Australia it has long been the case that the individual states and territories have different curricula, even for final year.
For example, in Victoria in 1981 calculus was taught in the Maths I stream for the form 5 (second last year of high school) students. That included integration by parts, various recurrence tricks for integrating trigonometric integrands by parts, etc. The typical age in form 5 was 17 years old. Through an accident of moving interstate from South Australia, I was 15 during form 5, and initially a fair way behind the rest of the students (except Frank :-) ) in the mathematics subjects - perhaps a gap of 4-6 months due to the differences between Vic and SA curricula and recruitment ages.
On the other hand, the year 12 matriculation year (final year PEB "Public Examination Board", which was the university entrance requirement) in South Australia in 1982 taught calculus from scratch. I'm fairly confident it wasn't taught in year 11 by then.
One of the secondhand textbooks I had in SA had group theory as one of the PEB/HSC topics. Since that book pre-dated my SA studies in 1982, presumably somewhere in Australia group theory was a final year topic in maths in the 70s.
Fran Barlow:
The nuclear industry lied repeatedly about power being too cheap to meter, the proliferation of nuclear power plants was a transparent cover for weapons research and construction, the hazards of radiation were politicized, and those who pointed out the hazards of atomic testing were villified by the same nuclear industry - the US taxpayer had to pay for R&D on nuclear power plants, and for ALL liability insurance on ALL plants (Price-Anderson). Decommissioned nuclear power plants become unusable, and most of them have less than a 25-year lifecycle. Nuclear power plants dodged oversight, violated EPA statements and crushed whistleblowers.
These are all FACTS, Fran. These are not environmental fantasies, religion, superstition, or anything else the libertarians and energy companies want to LIE and say they are. They're facts and part of the historical record.
Your long-winded diatribe didn't mention a single one. Your "theory" is the current line-of-the-day: that nuclear power is the only "serious" energy source besides fossil fuels, that you can dismiss anyone who doesn't boost it as "unserious," etc. It's exactly the same line those of us who said the US shouldn't invade Iraq got - we weren't "serious." Our opposition was based on the superstition that American military power can't accomplish good results, an American intervention is always wrong. It's the same line we got when we said don't cut taxes on the rich - that was an "unserious" idea based on the superstition that some people become poor because others become rich.
It's an inherently deficient, kneejerk, bigoted, stereotyping boilerplate right-wing argument. It's completely invalid. If you have a case to make for nuclear power, make it. Use specifics. Handle criticism. Deal with real history. This blowhard Limbaugh psychoanalysis does not cut it. at all.
Well that was a spray wasn't it MarionD@33? Disappointing too because elsewhere in this blog you speak eminent good sense. It's also a shame that in addition to a string of baseless insults: "bigoted"; "rightwing"; "kneejerk"; "long winded diatribe" or engaging with the points I made or the material to which I pointed you, you chose to conjure strawmen and adduced Iraq and Limbaugh and US tax policy to your aid. This doesn't suggest you really want a discussion on the substance of the contribution nuclear power might make to decarbonising economies, but rather want to have me "assume the position" of some whipping boy, or to spend most of my time hurling insults at you. I see no value in that. You're very probably a person of reasonable disposition and admirable humanistic sentiment with whom I could spend an amiable hour in conversation if we steered clear of nuclear power.
At no point did I claim or imply that those who didn't favour resort to nuclear power in some circumstances were 'unserious' -- I was for a very long time, and not so very long ago, amongst these people, and then and now I self was very serious, though with hindsight underinformed on the scale of the challenge, overly optimistic on the practical contribution renewables could make and rather too predisposed to concepts like 'naturalness' in human systems. Nor, I should add, do I assert that nuclear power is indispensible everywhere. In many places, other options will work as well or better and whether it is or is not, I unconditionally accept that a part of the viability of nuclear power rests on public acceptance. People are entitled to attach any value they like to doing without nuclear power, but I do think it incumbent that they have a clear view of the costs, benefits and risks they are accepting when they make these choices. In Australia, where I live, it seems to me that the case for resort to nuclear power is fairly weak since we, fortunately, do have viable alternatives, and that if all that mattered was what Australia did with its energy systems, one might stop discussion right there. But this is a discussion that goes far beyond Australia's shores, reaching into densely populated countries with limited scope for non-fossil energy production, whose populaces, not unreasonably, demand a lifestyle comparable to ours. It is precisely in these places that the next wave of emissions growth will come and be locked in, so unless we can find good maintainable alternatives to coal and gas, no amount of remedy in places like Australia will suffice.
The claims you make in your first paragraph are either irrelevant or misleading. What the advocates of nuclear power first said is beside the point. "Too cheap to meter" was suggested, but advocacy of resort to nuclear power today doesn't entail endorsement of claims made 40 or 50 years ago by salesmen. Similarly it is true that the choice to use uranium rather than thorium as the principal feedstock was driven by the desire of the US to have weaponizable Pu. This (along with crushing the miners' union) was, no doubt a factor in the uptake by Thatcher of nuclear power in 1980. It is said, probably correctly, that Thatcher's early advocacy of AGW was partly driven by such considerations. So we have an excellent opportunity to do a bit of 'poisoning the well' but none of that means that Thatcher was wrong to declare AGW a problem or nuclear power a contributor to the solution in the UK. In the US, some who advocate renewables do so because they want to "stop paying money to them Ay-rabs" but renewables are worthwhile, even if people who are bigots advocate them.
Price-Anderson is often trotted out but here the problem is more apparent than real. The prospect of a catastrophic consequence from operation of a contemporary nuclear plant is so tiny that to impose a substantial premium on it is unreasonable. During the recent swine flu scare, there was the remote prospect that every organiser of a local fete could spread the virus amongst thousands of people, have it mutate and wipe out whole swathes of humanity. Yet public liability quite rightly saddled this remote risk with the public rather than organisers of fetes. These days, nuclear plants have robust measures to prevent uncontrolled releases to the wider environment of hazardous materials. Certainly, the controlled releases of radioactivity from coal plants are much greater. Far more people have their lives shortened or damaged by coal each year than nuclear power, even putting this on a per-unit of energy basis. If this risk and cost were properly accounted in the costs of coal, we might get somewhere.
You are wrong to say that nuclear plants generally have a 25-year life cycle. Many are much older than that. What data do you cite for this? And what data do you have that says 'decommissioned plants' become unusable? It's true that like any other major industry, one can point to poor management of nuclear power plants in some cases. That should prompt us, as should have been the case with the finance industry, to devise a more robust regulatory framework, but the problem isn't insuperable. This would be true of any major area of work. In good systems, one learns from past errors without junking stuff that might have been worthwhile.
Fran
Fran, regarding this statement:
>*Price-Anderson is often trotted out but here the problem is more apparent than real. The prospect of a catastrophic consequence from operation of a contemporary nuclear plant is so tiny that to impose a substantial premium on it is unreasonable.*
I'd suggest that this argument is in conflict with those who would argue that renewables are too expensive. That is it would be a bit rich for some people (not putting your with them) to say both that renewables are too expensive and nuclear should be except of the market price for risk.
The price of risk can be the difference is cost between renewables and nuclear.
Not only does everything i said stand, unaltered by the telephone book followup by Fran Barlow, but it's made even clearer.
The only change is, no more feeding the troll. Plus apologies for previous trollfeeding to all.
Well said Marion.
Fran is a subtle troll, a Trojan Horse, sent out to create division by using nuclear energy as a crow bar.
Read between the lines everyone, Fran's first post was a satirical piece.
el gordo, thanks for revealing yourself as a malicious prat!
But why didn't you change your name [from this](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/08/plimers_bluff_called.php#commen…) before you started concern trolling here?
Please comeback under another name to continue your rotten behaviour.
Marion, Fran has been strongly advocating renewables over at Bravenewclimate.
Dave Andrews @30
Eamon,
Well aren't you prescient? Or perhaps you haven't actually looked at the paper.
It's behind a paywall - have you looked at the paper?
If you strip out the tree ring proxies (remember the trouble with those?) there is no 20thC uptick in temperature.
Oh, you've answered my question above. So...you've not only looked at the paper, you've also stripped the tree-ring proxies out and come to a controversial result.
Please post your calculations. I'm sure with a little polishing here you'll have an amazing letter to send to Science.
I'm back. Time for you all to be the beneficiaries of my humble wisdom. That is if 'dear leader tim' is feeling ok today.
Thanks bi - IJI. (#4) Chicago is a fine city indeed. They have some of the finest pizza in the world there.
I am going to try to attend. It will be refreshing to hear from people that know what they are talking about for a change.
And I would like to pass on my good wishes to Girma. Keep up the good work and the informative posts. I appreciate it, even if most of the scribes here form the dark ages do not.
It's regrettable, Marion, that you seem determined to avoid discussing any of the substance the boundaries of the contribution nuclear power might make to effective policy, and hopeful that others will follow your suit.
To the extent that others follow your example, people do themselves, and I would argue, the cause of rational debate on the options for low carbon alternatives a disservice.
I feel considerable empathy, because as recently as four to five years ago, I might have posted as you have here, but it seems to me that we do have to be explicit about the choices we make.
How much CO2 do we wish to cut from anthropogenic emissions? Over what timeframe? What means can be used to achieve this and as a matter of practice, rather than theory, are these approaches plausible? Are the resulting emissions levels consistent with the world of 2050, or 2100 we wish to author? What are the implications for the configurations of urban life that flow from our proposals and are these likely to be acceptable or defencible?
Not the least problem with resort to renewables is their political acceptability. Arguments that I amongst others over the efficacy of intermittents plus storage are but one aspect of the problem. There are people whose opposition to renewables near them is quite as vociferous as is yours to nuclear power. If one sets aside considerations of comparative utility associated with resort to various power sources and acknowledges -- as I do -- that people can weigh the cultural value of non-resort to various energy technologies as they please, then it seems to me that one must accept that objections to local wind harvest or incinerating waste biomass plants cannot be dismissed as irrational. And if all that is controversial is excluded, then the winner can only be the status quo, which status quo you, I take it, seek to change.
I of course, proposed above to take a step away from placing such weight on naturalness in systems, in the direction suggested by Professor Mackay -- not so much pro-nuclear as pro-arithmetic.
I obviously can't restrain you from branding me a troll and a bigot. That's entirely a matter for you, but of the two of us, you are flaming and I am proposing civil discussion of the energy options. Others may well conclude that your charges of trolling fit the objection:tu quoque.
>*How much CO2 do we wish to cut from anthropogenic emissions? Over what timeframe? What means can be used to achieve this and as a matter of practice, rather than theory, are these approaches plausible? Are the resulting emissions levels consistent with the world of 2050*
The Greenpeace [energy blueprint](http://www.energyblueprint.info/) modelling shows how Australia could cut 64% of CO2e by 2050 with a gradually rising carbon price to $50/tonne by 2050. Given Hansen's later study showing 350ppm is a necessary target, I would suggest that the carbon price would need to be higher or raised more quickly to get more than 64% reductions.
That is not unachievable with renewables.
A couple of things Mark. Australia is one of the few industrialised countries where a plausible case can be made for the argument that renewables could do the entire job of meeting energy demand at a cost we could live with. We are fortunate indeed to have access to high quality geothermal, masses of highly insolated low value land, high quality wind resources, a massive coastline where we could build pumped storage and wave and tidal power, masses of waste biomass and that most of us live in places that don't get too cold. Reconfiguring our urban infrastructure and our lifestyles and ramping up renewables is viable. We could probably do the job. Bully for us ... I don't think $50 per tonne is enough. I favour at least $100 per tonne which is widely touted as the starting point at which CC&S would be commercially viable. At that price renewables would be even more viable and we could end the silly CC&S argument and move on. I also think it has to go onto everything -- no exceptions with rebates allowed based on something like "carbon sequestration years" which would put a price on locking up carbon. It's worth noting though that it won't be cheap, even for us.
Outside of Australia though there are places where the calculus gets a little more difficult. It's hard to imagine, for example, Japan going close to either supporting its current usages on renewables or getting its population to live at the standard that their capacity for renewables would imply. Ditto India or China or Russia and probably the US. Hell, in the US a fairly modest proposal on health care reform has people running hysterical campaigns in which government nabobs decide on which children and grannies get to live. Is it conceivable that within the timeframe needed, the US government would spend the dollars and political goodwill necessary to switch from coal to renewables? It seems far-fetched.
And of course, no matter how loud or shrill we become on the question of nuclear or coal for that matter, there is absolutely no way that we can stop of even slow down the energy development programs of either country. With a bit of nudging, we might nudge them away from coal and in favour of nuclear and this would be an almighty step forward for the emissions to come this century and the safety and health of Chinese and Indian coalminers. Some of those coal mines in China have long walls that bleed methane continuously. See also (p7 here.
Your comments on Price-Anderson. My problem here is seeing this as a subsidy. While it is technically true that the nuclear industry is being relieved of the burden of liability for the remote possibility of catastrophic damage on a large scale, so this relief is more apparent than real. No business in the US or elsewhere is charged premiums to cover such damage. The operators of the aircraft used in 9/11 had no coverage for that incident and still don't. If every operator and every airport had had every year to pay a premium to cover losses from a 9/11 style attack there would be virtually no aircraft flying. Nobody can really know how likely such a thing is and so nobody can really calculate the risk since it was, and remains such a perverse event. And it is worth noting that even so, it was still more likely than a sequence of events in which a nuclear accident kills and injures as many people and destroys as much property, particularly as no such accident within any area covered by Price-Anderson or any similar provision has ever occurred. Unlike car accidents which though sometimes catastrophic (on a small scale) happen often enough to give us the data we need to model the risk, we are just guessing with nuclear power. TMI apparently cost $70 million -- mostly in losses to businesses -- but well under the $9.5billion dollar cap.
Price Anderson caps the damage at a figure in excess of the value of the total capitalised value of a number of operators -- which is why the industry as a whole gets to step in if such a thing happens. If the damage exceeded the ability of the operators to pay, they'd declare bankruptcy and get relief that way, so Price Anderson in fact raises the amount of protection from the industry as a whole, and it would still be open to the government to claim more, should it feel so inclined.
And one may add, that insofar as coal and the combustion of fossil fuels more generally creates a far more foreseeable long term risk of catastrophic harm to humanity as a whole than nuclear power properly supervised does, and much of the costs of supplying nuclear power are costs borne by industry stewardship of their waste that such a cap is reasonable since it forecloses another more compelling hazard. This too is another reason for placing the cost on fossil fuel combustion.
Mark, i'm from the far left, but on the issue of climate change I reserve the right to cross the floor.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_Aug_091…
Now that's what I call a random walk.
Ooops...go to the August temperature anomaly.
Yeah, you and Dave Andrews from the far left! Remind me to avoid going that far left!
Frankly I don't think much of what you tell me you are when it so contrasts with what you show me you are.
>*Plimer is to be applauded for his courage in the face of msm hostility around the world. From my perspective, a blank sun, cold PDO and still-born El Nino, suggests your side of politics is in for a thrashing.*
*your side of politics* was [your term](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/08/plimers_bluff_called.php#commen…). What side in my side as distinct from yours?
>...*a nasty change in the weather will see the [chattering classes](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/08/plimers_bluff_called.php#commen…) wondering who sold them this AGW porky.*
Chattering class is propaganda term. My side more likely be open to seeing people labelled this way as informed, educated, thinking people. Talking is seen as a positive engagement by fair minded people, as opposed to swallowing spin and the cherry pickings put out by consolidated corporate media.
The term 'chattering classes' is used by both sides of the political spectrum and I used it correctly.
'Your side of politics', yeah, on this AGW issue alone. I think of myself as a free agent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattering_classes
This might help.
Fran said:
>"Nor are people, by and large willing to accept significant cuts in the standard of living of each person, and IMO, this is broadly reasonable."
This really highlights the hypocrisy of the left (and right) in the UK and elsewhere. The 'standard' of living that both want to protect is financed by low living standards outside that privileged community.
The fact is neither is willing to make the hard choices and accept that those living standards are not sustainable environmentally or socially.
Sounds OK to me bi - IJI (#17).
Everyone should take a Bex Powder and have a good lay down.
All the 'global warming' will pass, as it has always done.
Trust me. :-)
Mark@48
Let me assure you Mark as someone who was a member of a far left organisation between 1979 and 1991 and who in that capacity spent most of my political time becoming and remaining familiar with the nuances of the claims of rival OROs (ostensibly revolutionary organsiations) that none of them would use the term 'msm' as El Gordo deploys it here, principally because the term renders classless that which in the view of left wing organisations is defined by its class character.
The term used was bourgeois press (later in the 80s media and sometimes capitalist press/media
'MSM' was and is a term circulated by the right wing astroturfers and their dupes.
Similarly, chattering classes is really an instantiation of anti-intellectual right wing populism. The corresponding semantic content would be covered in ORO-language by bourgeois/capitalist intelligentsia or in some contexts, the petit bourgeoisie.
I'm not sure what flag El Gordo marches behind, but it's hard to imagine it has any red in it as he/she would never present this way.
Fran
Paul UK@51
Your objection is one reason why I beleive that we first worlders absolutely must support industriual development in the LDCs, albeit that it should be near zero carbon emissions and supported where necessary, by us and why I don't think we can dismiss nuclear power from the mix.
I do believe that most of what we have achieved in the west is something to which all humanity should have access. We simply have to do it sustainably.
MSM is only an abbreviation of main stream media, nothing more, nothing less.
I don't march under a 'concern flag' or a discredited red flag and the political language of last century is irrelevant today.
As a refugee of the far left I stand alone and unencumbered, conversing freely with every political persuasion.
Dave Andrews:
Bullshit. There are reconstructions that don't use tree-rings: Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millenia.
Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millenia
El Gordo@54
I am reminded of that line from The Red Flag
The two quotes are in blatant contradiction. In the first you're a far leftist reserving the right to cross the floor and in the second you're a refugee from the far left -- a piece of political flotsam or jetsam. This latter I can well believe for no serious leftwing organisation would surely would have such as you in its midst. That you missed the significance of my description of msm underlines the point. You were never a far leftist. You are merely a poseur.
>"That you missed the significance of my description of msm underlines the point."
I was thinking that same thing. And similarly missed the point with the presentation of the chattering class wiki link.
But most notably el gordo you are judged on my part by this [nasty peice](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1906…).
And el gordo's recent nasty piece sits quite oddly [with this](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/08/plimers_bluff_called.php#commen…)
>*I'm actually a big fan of Britain's Royal Society who think we should implement 'plan B' if Copenhagen fails, ie. simulate a volcanic eruption to force temperatures down.
...and we may need a few small nukes to get things moving in the right direction. ...somewhere in the northern hemisphere close to American, because they have been the most recalcitrant?*
The warmest temperature anomaly in the Epica ice core since the last ice age was 0.5 deg C at 10784-10645 years before datum which is 1950. This temperature anomaly is relative to the average between 38 and 102 years before datum, i.e. the average between 1848 and 1912. So the world is now warmer than any of the anomalies in Epica since the last ice-age since it is now an average of 0.7 deg C warmer than 1848 to 1912. Also, long-term temperature variations for the global average are normally something less than half the long-term variations that occur over Antarctica, so the global average anomaly for the period 10784-10645 before datum was probably less than 0.25 deg C.
So barring short term variations (less than 140 years long), the global average is now probably warmer than at any time since the beginning of the last ice age, about 115,000 years ago.
The far left are dead. Those of us who were part of the Moratorium believed we stopped the Vietnam war and that it would help create a better world.
Cynical? For sure.
Mark, I admit to being sarcastic, but if we can't laugh at our own flaws then I will move to the far right where they appreciate deprecation. The British Brainwashing Corporation is tied up with the Met and the Royal Society is in bed with both of them.
Is it possible to have a rational debate about climate change without involving politics?
El Gordo said:
You haven't established that you're capable of having a rational debate about anything yet. You aren't consistent. You've tried to provoke flames. You've lied.
Now you suggest a debate about climate policy that is not 'political'. That's either gobsmackingly ridiculous or you are again being cynical.
>*but if we can't laugh at our own flaws then I will move to the far right where they appreciate deprecation.*
When you get there, tell them I sent you on account of my not appreciating your humour.
BTW, I didn't realise the far right were renoud for their self deprecation, or do you mean you will enjoy with the far-right, their deprecation of others?
Dave Andrews:
Chris O'Neill's link to the Mann et al. 2007 paper didn't work. Here it is again.
They found that taking out the tree ring data did not alter the conclusions. The abstract is as follows ...
http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/NorthH264.mp4
The National Academy report, video of a talk by North
If Dave Andrews can sit through this and understand it and still persist in posting debunked talking points, I'll not be too surprised. Still, it would be worth trying, Dave. See if you can understand what the man's saying.
bi-IJI's early comment about the next Heartland conference seems to have been ignored.
Apparently the non-existent debate has moved on:
>"...the debate is not between âskepticsâ and the âconsensus of scientistsâ but between science and alarmism."
So the skeptics are the scientists now and the scientists are alarmists.
Yes, why would a skeptic pay $432 to hear something they already agree with?
A contribution to a business i guess.
...and, following on the statistics theme; having done SMP O-level, I didn't do stats - it was in the A-level curriculum, I believe. Doing 2 trad maths A-levels, I didn't do it at A-level either - I'd have had to do the single trad maths A-level, which was maths with statistics...
I'm with you all the way James, a basic statistical education is far more important than calculus (Even though I love maths,and am studying first year calculus right now at Uni). I would say that it's even more important than trig, for most people. We did a little bit of it in highschool, but it was always taught as a thing in and of it self (probability), never related to the real world much - except trivial examples. Now I'm doing basic stats at uni, with ~800 other people, and 95% of them find it difficult. It's crazy.
I reckon it could even save people's lives - people learn they have some life threatening illness, and doctors tell them they have 6 months to live. I you don't understand stats, then you have two choices: assume you're going to die in 3 months, or assume the doctor it full of crap. Both of those are not healthy choices - the most appropriate response is to note that three months is just the most probable length of time given you're an average joe, and any number of factors THAT YOU CAN CHANGE (like diet, or exercise, medication) can have significant effects on your life expectancy, perhaps even to the point that you're cured.
Hank,
You know that Gerry North "talk". What did he mean when he said if you go back "there are differences in the physics"?
Dave, do you mean where he said they don't argue with the conclusion? If not, look at the little clock thing at the bottom of the video and specify the time in the video.
PS: for those of you not yet born when that "hockey stick" argument happened, you can look it up. The video, in which North is showing slides while speaking to a university class, is looking backward on the events connected with this:
http://www.nationalacademies.org/images/testimony7-19-06.pdf
I have to say again how much I like the Firefox+Greasemonkey+killfile combo. Blocking just 2 IDs on this page reduced the comment size by about half.
Let me add a recommendation for Zotero - the firefox bibliography plug-in. I was caught short on a wiki i put a page on by it not having wikimedia citation templates, but if you have them, it's worth pointing out that one of Zotero's oodles of styles (MPLA, etc. etc.) is Wikipedia citation. You could take an entire list from an amazon lists page or a wikipedia article and export the whole thing as full wikipedia references, then just paste them in as needed.
Read it and weep.
'How will Earth's surface temperature change in future decades?'
Judith L. Lean, Space Science Division, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D. C., USA.
David H. Rind, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York, USA.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL038932.shtml
Paul UK:
> Yes, why would a skeptic pay $432 to hear something they already agree with? A contribution to a business i guess.
I'm guessing that most of the 'skeptics' attending will be 'sponsored' by think-tanks they're affiliated with, which means they probably won't have to pay a dime.
Speaking of the 'conference', is anyone familiar with Helen Roe, Gary Sharp, and/or Graeme T. Swindles? I don't think I've heard these names before...
Graeme T Swindles:
http://palaeoclimate.blogspot.com/
Hele Roe (I'm assuming):
http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/gap/Staff/AcademicStaff/DrHelenRoe/
Gary Sharp?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Gary_D._Sharp
Expect the deniosphere going "all a-twitter" again:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17742-worlds-climate-could-cool-f…
Darn! Helen Roe's from my old Alma mater.
She doesn't seem to be a wingnut by any means, but this, in the paper [A 4500-year proxy climate record from peatlands in the North of Ireland: the identification of widespread summer âdrought phasesâ?](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VBC-4VV1BCY-…):
Recent research has shown that peat-derived water table reconstructions reflect summer water deficit and therefore the dry phases are interpreted as periods with a higher frequency and/or greater magnitudes of summer drought. These âdrought phasesâ occur during periods of relatively low 14C production, which may add support to the hypothesis of persistent solar forcing of climate change during the Holocene. Any relationship with the North Atlantic stacked drift ice record is less clear.
So possibly she's a 'It's the Sun!' person.
Billy Bob @73
I'd advise you to read it and try and comprehend
Two topics of great interest to Deltoid and his readership are covered in this new doco:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/not-evil-just-wrong/
Cheers,
Hi Jennifer,
I did a quick search and found interesting stuff in an [Irish Times interview](http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2008/1115/1226408678797.html) with the directors:
But there are some eminent scientists among the contributors, including Dr Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Centre and Prof Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist from MIT, both of whom are sceptics.
Nothing new there.
Do McElhinney and McAleer themselves reject climate change, reject the need to cut down on our dependency on oil? "The idea that CO2 causes climate change or causes global warming - let's keep it clear - is not settled," says McElhinney. "The idea of dramatically altering the way we live would be a mistake until more information has been gathered." Both believe that there is no panic, and that the world has 300 years (until coal is exhausted) to come up with alternative sources of energy.
Huh? CO2's physical effect on the climate 'not settled'? [This](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/07/climate-sensitivi…) from the Rabett might change their minds - if their minds were open to change.
Jennifer, the DDT story is an old one, and Tim will probably have a few words to say on that biased information. You may want to do a search on this site before getting inundated with some major criticism. It would allow you to prepare a 'rebuttal'...
Mark Byrne,
I have never said I'm from the "far left". Reading the Guardian does not automatically put you in that category :-). My politics have always been to the left, however.
Hank,
Well unfortunately my download didn't have a 'little clock thing' at the bottom. (You did look at this before you cast aspersions didn't you?)
No matter, I reckon its about 80-85% of the way in, as he's comparing the hockey stick to Esper and others.
But North then goes on to say somethiing really interesting. Talking about the hockey stick and its long handle he says -
"Mike Mann played it like it was just a statistical error, it isn't of course its much more unresolved than that, and we don't even know what the errors are, there are biases here we have no way of knowing"
(That might not be verbatim as sometimes the recording is not clear)
But obviously, this is not the ringing endorsement of MBH98/99 that you and others are wont to proclaim the NRC report is.
Hank,
Well unfortunately my download didn't have a 'little clock thing' at the bottom. (You did look at this before you cast aspersions didn't you?)
No matter, I reckon its about 80-85% of the way in, as he's comparing the hockey stick to Esper and others.
But North then goes on to say somethiing really interesting. Talking about the hockey stick and its long handle he says -
"Mike Mann played it like it was just a statistical error, it isn't of course its much more unresolved than that, and we don't even know what the errors are, there are biases here we have no way of knowing"
(That might not be verbatim as sometimes the recording is not clear)
But obviously, this is not the ringing endorsement of MBH98/99 that you and others are wont to proclaim the NRC report is.
Like we're really going to believe that a dave andrews quote-mine honestly represents North's view of Mann 98/99.
Re: Marohasy's 'interesting.'
I beg to differ. Marohasy's 15 minutes were over a year or two ago. Akasofu decided to drag my alma mater, a good science school, through the mud by jumping into the great global warming swindle, and hasn't rejoined the science world where facts and research dwell since then. Lindzen is the assigned fallback for do-nothing. If he'd had different marching orders, he would have been out there with the Ian Plimers trashing all the science.
Jennifer Marohasy writes:
>*Two topics of great interest to Deltoid and his readership are covered in this new doco: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/not-evil-just-wrong/ Cheers,*
The last part of the title made me think of the way Jennifer cherry-picked the remaining healthy bits of the Murray Darling system and so privileged those above the warning signs of distress in her 2003 work [Myth & the Murray: Measuring the real state of the river environment](http://www.ipa.org.au/library/IPABackgrounder15-5.pdf).
Some people have barriers to weighing up and discerning the implications of the full weight of evidence.
Dave, if you want to ask, ask the person who was speaking:
http://atmo.tamu.edu/weather-and-climate/climate-change-statement
For anyone who thinks that Jennifer Marohasy has the slightest shred of credibility, I suggest you read her 'Myth of the Murray' document which Mark Byrne linked to above, then Google "murray darling collapse" and read a random selection of the 29,000 links that are thrown up.
The system was in free-fall toward collapse when she wrote that excrement, and very obviously so. And things have only continued to get worse. She's either a cretin, or unbelievably dishonest. People like her would like to see the entire planet follow the same trajectory as Australia's greatest river system and the species and communities that rely on it.
>*People like her would like to see the entire planet follow the same trajectory as Australia's greatest river system and the species and communities that rely on it.*
From this I'm confident that Craig is meaning: people like her are unlikey to yeild their views without evidence as strong as the collapse of the major ecosystems.
I.e. signals early enough to make a differnece will be dismissed by such people.
As the crowd at WUWT always pull my posts down post-haste, I haven't been able to get any sense to the questions I have posed.
So, perhaps I might elicit a response by posting here...
Watts, during his [hissy-fit](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/04/dmi-arctic-temperature-data-anima…) about the [news that the Arctic is warming](http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/325/5945/1236), says:
I'm not yet sure where Watts found the quote from Miller, and so I cannot say at this point if Miller himself said "itâs about 0.6 million miles further during the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice than it was in 1 B.C.", but someone with half an attogram of scientific nouse should have queried the rate of 0.6 million miles in 2 000 years.
Given that the rate at which the Earth is moving away from the sun is about [15 cm/year](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17228-why-is-the-earth-moving-awa…), after 2 000 years the Earth would only be "about" 300 metres further away from the sun "during the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice [or at any other time of the year] than it was in 1 B.C."
Watts' figure is 3.2 million times greater than the reality appears to be.
What's up with that?
Further To Craig's comments about fraudster, right-wing gun for hire, and the recently sacked, Marohasy, it's worth noting that prior to her scientific(sic) report on the Murray Darling basin being released, the IPA, of which she was a Senior Fellow, had just received a sizable donation from Murray Irrigation...Lol!
This woman is a disgrace, and every comment she makes can safely be disregarded as being from the mouth of a discredited and embarrassing (obviously even to her right-wing mates) crank.
I have indeed Eamon @ #80. No doubt the universe is stranger than we can all imagine ! :-)
When the 'anthropogenic CO2 signature' is 'blown away' once and for all, (as it will be), then I'd say the UN will probably be calling for atomic power reactors all round I'd say.
I wonder if the good Dr Hansen approves ?
Jennifer is only promoting this video because she gets $5 if you click on the link to the DVD seller from her blog.
Oh, and Jennifer, you still owe me $1000.
Bernard J, it looks like they are talking about precession of the equinoxes/solstices; the NH summer solstice is now occurring when the earth is at a different point of its oval orbit. It's rather badly phrased.
Thanks James, I did wonder about that.
Whilst precession certainly affects the way the planet is heated, it is an entirely different matter to the "earth moving away from the sun". I'm not sure that Watts' repetition of any quote excuses the fact that he let an entirely different phenomenon slip though in a discussion of science.
If Watts so readily makes these confabulations (even in editing), he is only demonstrating that he does not have sufficient understanding of the subject to presume to be making the statements that he does.
Sekerob posted this interesting link over on the Pilmer's Homework thread on Real Climate:
[CO2 up, Wheat quality down](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17617-wheat-gets-worse-as-cosub2s…)
I bet all of you doubted me when I said, over in that crazy-long, Crazy-Girma thread:
["I'm sure Jennifer Marohasy will be arriving any day now..."](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/08/matthew_england_challenges_the…)
Although her last post was off-topic, I'm sure she's come back to fulfill her one-year-old promise to explain [how to graph temperature data](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/08/the_australians_war_on_science_…).
Then again, maybe she's decided that Girma has it pretty well covered.
How about it, Ms. Marohasy? Would you like to take this opportunity to state, for the record, that Girma Orssengo is this year's poster child for "How To Do Statistics"?
Eamon.
I think someone tossed that at Tim 'Tiddles' Curtin, before he got hisself banned. I was really looking forward to his reply, too...
The only differnce between Curtin and our current infesting troll is that Curtin at least had an excuse for his scientific ignorance!
I notice that Marohasy has already given the [thumbs up](http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/08/stop-averaging-global-temperat…) for Tim Curtin's method of measuring global warming.
Girma has got to right up their with a chance!
Craig @ 91, Marohasy has a PhD, so she's certainly not a cretin, and she must actually have been educable at some point. That really only leaves one possible conclusion ...
Marco:
> Graeme T Swindles: http://palaeoclimate.blogspot.com/Helen Roe (I'm assuming): http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/gap/Staff/AcademicStaff/DrHelenRoe/Gary Sharp? http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Gary_D._Sharp
Eamon:
> Darn! Helen Roe's from my old Alma mater.
> She doesn't seem to be a wingnut by any means, but this, [...]
> So possibly she's a 'It's the Sun!' person.
Thanks, Marco and Eamon! But I still wonder if there's -- well -- more information about these folks. Such as, why they'd want to associate themselves with a wingnut think-tank.
TCiaJ.
Erk! That thread is the perfect installment in the ongoing demonstration that there is no bottom to Stupid.
Bruce Sharp.
You were dead on the money.
And I have to confess that I thought it unlikely that we'd see the differently-employed Jennifer here spruiking her old antiscience nonsense. I doubt though that Marohasy will revisit her series on graphing, unless she wants to dig through bedrock to lower her reputation any further.
Besides, she has Girma Orssengo here committing professional suicide with the very same misunderstanding of graphing conventions, and of matters of statistical significance. She can let someone else destroy themselves for the same outcome.
Frank@102
The only excuse I can think of is that Helen Roe isn't aware of Heartland's reputation.
Whilst that might seem impossible there are two facts:
*Heartland, like any serial fraudster is constantly reinventing itself.
*Northern Ireland - where QUB is situated - is a pretty insular place.
Marion @33:
> The nuclear industry lied repeatedly about power being too cheap to meter
Not too cheap to meter, but at least competitive with fossil fuels and cheaper and more scaleable than wind and solar if you're looking to cut co2 emissions.
> the proliferation of nuclear power plants was a transparent cover for weapons research and construction
Was. Is it now? How does the civilian US power programme, say, relate to US weapons development?
> the US taxpayer had to pay for R&D on nuclear power plants
because the US taxpayer paid for the military programme for the nuclear sub power plants from which the civilian power programme arose. So what? The US taxpayer has paid for lots of research on lots of subjects, including military research that was commercialized. The US taxpayer subsidizes lots of commercial research, including, say medicines and renewable power. At least this research is producing co2 free power.
> ALL liability insurance on ALL plants
.. after the first 10 billion dollars, of course
> Decommissioned nuclear power plants become unusable
Well thank god for that. Imagine a decommissioned plant going on working. Desastre!
> and most of them have less than a 25-year lifecycle
Where did you make that up from? Many are looking at extensions out to 60 years and more.
> Nuclear power plants dodged oversight, violated EPA statements and crushed whistleblowers.
So have pharmaceutical companies. So have car companies. So have breakfast cereal companies. So have banks. So have governments. All have cost lives. This has nothing to do with nuclear power. It does however point to the need for a strong and transparent regulatory regime.
> These are all FACTS, Fran.
I submit that they are not FACTS, as you put it. They're either irrelevant or wilfully misrepresented or false.
> the US shouldn't invade Iraq .. the superstition that American military power can't accomplish good results .. American intervention is always wrong .. don't cut taxes on the rich .. the superstition that some people become poor because others become rich .. stereotyping boilerplate right-wing .. Limbaugh psychoanalysis ..
Ummm .. ok. Anyway, back to nuclear power.
So Marion, could you tell us your plan to cut co2 emissions to zero?
> 'bigoted'
Thats a nasty word you've used there. A real nasty word. Would you care to justify your use of it, in the context of Fran's post? Why have you called her a bigot? Use specifics.
Post nr. 68 looks like a blog spammer, posting a random excerpt that vaguely looks like discussion, and linking to his site through his name. I didn't click through to verify that it is porn, but it sure sounds like it.
Hot off the press, 'nuclear power plants can operate beyond their typical design lifespan of 30-40 years..'
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2007/npp_extension.html
And humans can live on 1/4 the power used at the moment.
Billy Bob:
Your citation says:
Thus giving a total warming over ten years (roughly a solar cycle) of 0.18 ± 0.04°C, slightly higher than the average rate over the past 30 years. i.e. continued global warming.
So, Billy Bob, your point is what, exactly?
Sure if you say so.
Well it's certainly taking a while. It has taken more than 100 years so far. I wouldn't hold out much hope before you're dead, if ever.
âYou Can Never Be Cynical Enoughâ
â¦Paul Krugman during an 80-minute Q&A on how science fiction led him into economics. The night before, a couple thousand of us got to be flies on the wall for another hour-and-a-half free-form conversation between Krugman and Charlie Stross....
From: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=641
Published at: 06:08 pm - Saturday August 08 2009
By the way, up above, whatever he meant by this is wrong:
"this is not the ringing endorsement of MBH98/99 that you and others are wont to proclaim the NRC report is.
Posted by: Dave Andrews | September 6, 2009 6:04 PM"
Dave is describing this backwards (and has the wrong agency).
Dave, get it right. The NAS (National Academy of Sciences) report was _criticism_ saying the analysis, in hindsight, could've been done better, but improving the methods would not change the results.
North, chairman of the NAS committee, in the hearings:
"... our reservations with some aspects of the original papers by Mann and colleagues should not undermine the fact that the climate is warming and will continue to warm as a result of human activities. In fact, the scientific consensus regarding human-induced climate warming, global warming, would not be substantively altered if the global mean surface temperature 1,000 years ago was found to be as warm as it is today ...."
-- Gerald North, in the hearings
[109th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:31362.wais]
Dave, you can do much better than this. Look up what you believe, test your memory, learn what's new.
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2007/npp_extension.html
I should have said 35 years:
It's also true that techniques of extending plant life are being developed, most of which involve extra monitoring and non-destructive tests, meaning that it will vary plant to plant. Nukes cost tens of billions to build, so the longer you can have them running flat out, the more cost effective they are, but you're also decreasing safety once you run them past their design lives.
The idiot above surely doesn't represent most people here, I hope, in not realizing what it means when I say a decommissioned nuclear plant site becomes useless toxic wasteland for an incredibly long period of time, and that those sites will accumulate.
During the Bush administration the DOE was a pure nuclear booster and brushed aside any and all information that thwarted that agenda - a big reason it pushed for a hydrogen economy, because one of the main sources would have been nuclear power plants. At least now a little reality will intrude now and then.
And again, the bigoted trope of calling people opposed to relying on nuclear power as the solution to our problems "superstitious" is very rich, given that most of the boosters follow the superstition of Friedman-style neoliberal economics.
It's one thing to say nuclear power technology can be improved, as it clearly can - it's another to say that cleaner and safer power research should be starved of money, that nukes should continue to be taxpayer welfare projects along several lines, and that any safety concerns are superstition.
Hank,
Of course you're right, it was the NAS not NRC. My bad. But that doesn't alter what North said, which is at least pretty interesting.
dhogaza,
I fail to see how I can be accused of "quote mining" if I follow a link provided by Hank and then comment on something said in it. If you don't like North's words, there is nothing I can do about it because he said them, and in front of many students as well. Of course, he wasn't commenting 'officially' on the NAS report but talking to students and so perhaps he was a bit more candid in what he said. In any case it doesn't amount to a ringing endorsement of Mann.
Dave Andrews wrote:
We know.
Indeed you can. It's even more fun to do when you're aware of what it means instead of simply believing you're incapable of the act due to ignorance of its meaning.
pough,
I don't think you have listened to the piece. North said it, almost irrespective of what he had said before. He even sounded a bit embarrassed after he said it and shortly changed the subject.
Oh, incidentally, he also said something along the lines of instead of a "hockey stick maybe its like a bow".
We can't really say JM is an idiot, but he is a friend of Fran. He might be the enthusiastic
pro-nuclear energy expert John D Morgan who was spotted over at Barry Brook's blog, but that is pure speculation.
Let's just hold fire on the nukes until we see which way the weather's blowing.
John Morgan and I hold some different views, but he's not an idiot. He's one of the most fair minded nukies that I've crossed-keyboards with.
el gordo, regardless of if the solution is nuke or renewables, are you competant to understand the probable long term implications of delaying mitigation for another 15 years?
Let's not delay for a minute, I will give up my car if you give up yours.
Two unsuported assumptions in just one short sentance from el gordo.
...'implications of delaying for another 15 years'. After just reading David Dilley I predict global cooling is about to engulf us, but that's just my natural bias.
>*After just reading David Dilley I predict global cooling is about to engulf us, but that's just my natural bias.*
From someone so rich with unsupported assumptions, why am I not surprised?
And I'm still waiting on that evidence you promised would be forthcomming.
Marion, speaking as the idiot above, can I suggest you'd do your credibility a great service by not resorting to name calling?
el gordo, yes, thats me (JDM) over at Brook's blog. I don't know Fran in any way other than occasional exchanges on that site, and where we've disagreed, its been polite and respectful.
I'm also not an energy expert. I have no expertise in that area, though I do hope I have ability to look objectively at data, which leads to my support of nukes for co2 emission reduction.
Mark Byrne, nice of you to say, and its appreciated.
I checked up David Dilley for his peer-reviewed publications of the WoS.
Guess what - couldn`t find any. Nix. Surprise surprise.
Chris @ #110. My point is this.
There is clearly growing evidence now that 'dangerous global warming' (not my words) because of anthropogenic CO2 is not as severe as some may think it is considered in the scheme of thingsagainst other major influences on climate change. (Solar influences being just one).
Gasp. Yes I know. I can already surmize your response:
'Yes he says..., but just wait until this natural cooling cycle ends (and I don't disagree that it will), then we will see 'super-double-exponential-explosive-hockeystick'o'death-burn,burn,burn' climate change etc etc... repent, repent now... pay your carbon tax indulgences... etc...'
All I can say is, lets just wait and see. No need to panic.
Let's be 'alert' but not 'alarmed' is my point.
> Marion, speaking as the idiot above, can I suggest you'd do your credibility a great service by not resorting to name calling?
> Posted by: John Morgan
Why?
These gems from the denialosphere don't seem to have harmed them:
http://notahedgehog.wordpress.com/2008/12/25/the-christmas-spirit/
since they have not lost ONE PERSON through "Well, I was all with you until you resorted to name-calling".
When someone's a complete and utter fwit, calling them anything less than a fwit is giving them undeserved approbation.
And the only ones "lost" to name-calling" are those who have never appeared to believe the science of AGW but have stated WITHOUT PROOF that they used to.
> Let's not delay for a minute, I will give up my car if you give up yours.
> Posted by: el gordo
Done.
I've not got a car. Have a driving license for 19 years.
> Oh, incidentally, he also said something along the lines of instead of a "hockey stick maybe its like a bow".
And did he do a mathematical test to see if it was?
No.
He wasn't making a statement of truth, just a statement of opinion. And then only an opinion of possibility (he said *maybe* not *is* or *likely*).
How about you turn your laser-like gaze on McIntyre's paper? There's plenty more wrongs there to get your teeth into.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/uah7908.JPG
Harvey, peer review is not what it once was. How about you show me your graphs and i'll show you mine?
el gordo,
What an embarrassment!
Can you tell me the predictive value of that 4th order polynomial spline?
Why select 4th order rather than 3rd, 2nd or linear?
You have just shanked any credibility of your source and your self.
I'll knockup some charts to demonstrate.
el gordo,
guess why that graph does not include the data for july and august 2009...
Fatso.
If you want to see some of Jeff's graphs, have a peruse through the following (a not-up-to-date selected list).
Apologies to everyone else for the bulk posting, but Jeff's online link seems to be down.
Fatso.
In case you did get my point, I was saying that I would trust Jeff's graphs, and the peer review that has has assessed them, far above anything that you might produce.
If it weren't for the fact that I could never persuade my children's mother to allow them to spend a few years away from their grandparents, I'd be begging Jeff to let me work in his institution - that's in how high a regard I hold his scientific bona fides.
Guess which one of [these trend lines](http://i32.tinypic.com/viptzn.jpg) El Gordo thinks makes the most valid representation of the data.
Mmm
Fuck off Billy Bob. Get back to your hole.
There you can show your "increasing evidence" where it won't pollute minds unprotected from your shilling.
El gordo,
So who is David Dilly and who is hosting and passing off [that chart](http://i32.tinypic.com/viptzn.jpg) as evidence that *global cooling is about to engulf us*?
This is for you Billy Bob, the UK papers are full of it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/07/global-warming-religion
Lord May, a former British chief scientist, said recently that people who believe the end is nigh don't believe in global warming. "I think there is quite a strong connection between the religious right and climate change," he said.
Thanks Mark, I will sleep on those graphs and catch you later.
> Lord May, a former British chief scientist, said recently that people who believe the end is nigh don't believe in global warming.
Strawman.
Please post the link to someone on this site saying the end of the world is nigh.
Or where in the IPCC report it says it.
> "I think there is quite a strong connection between the religious right and climate change,"
It's true: the religious right are ADAMANT that the AGW is wrong because God wouldn't do that to His People. Or they don't like the idea that we could change His Handiwork. Or they think that The Rapture is coming and don't want to stop it.
They are denialists.
Re #132.
Should have read 'didn't.
>*"I think there is quite a strong connection between the religious right and climate change"*
El gordo, can you cite where this quote is? Its not in the link you provided.
He made it up, Janet.
Made up the content AND context.
[Fat One,](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1914…)
There is nothing remotely like the characterization nor the quote you attribute in the Guardian article you cite.
You are lying like a pig in his own shit.
Do you think you are fooling anyone but yourself? Really?
See a therapist.
Ehh?
What's he smoking?
Am I missing the punch-line?
Lean et al:
and accelerating
Billy Bob:
Your non-sequitur proves you don't know what you're talking about. The net solar influence over the cycle is ZERO. You just do not understand what this means at all. The total warming over ten years (roughly a solar cycle) of 0.18 ± 0.04°C means that that total warming (0.18 ± 0.04°C) has very little solar influence in it. It is caused by AWG and is a continuation of, and slight increase increase in, the rate of temperature rise of the past 30 years. The fact that you don't understand that paper's abstract shows you are blinded by your favoured political ideology.
Can someone explain the whole El Gordo/Fatso/Fat One thing?
BTW he said "Lord May, a former British chief scientist, said recently". I take that to mean it's from a different article.
Mark@126
"When someone's a complete and utter fwit, calling them anything less than a fwit is giving them undeserved approbation."
Well yes. Perhaps. But I'm not seeing fwittery in any of Fran Barlow or John Morgan's posts in this thread. I'm bemused that Marion Delgado's tone was so instantly hostile as it seems out of character.
Regards
Luke
> I'm bemused that Marion Delgado's tone was so instantly hostile as it seems out of character.
> Regards Luke
Fair enough.
So say that.
But complaining about "please don't be rude, it puts people off" is bollocks. In your case, the REAL problem isn't the rudeness, it's the unusual rudeness and you would then want the reason for it.
That WOULD solve your beef: you'd then know what brought on "out of character".
Just because someone is usually perspicacious doesn't mean they can't have shown up some fwittery. Take BPL's latest unfortunate toy-throwing tantrum. As far as most people are concerned, unwarranted fwittery. And as even more people consider, a loss.
El Gordo:
"Mark, i'm from the far left, but on the issue of climate change I reserve the right to cross the floor."
Justin Flude, is that you?
Mark,
"He wasn't making a statement of truth, just a statement of opinion. And then only an opinion of possibility (he said maybe not is or likely)."
I see. So when North is commenting officially on the NAS report he is stating 'fact' but if he says something different to his students that is 'opinion'.
Thanks for alerting me to that, I'm now beginning to see how climate science operates!
#129 Mark Byrne
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1913…
You are on the right track, but that's a 6th order polynomial!
Check this out for more than you ever wanted to know about that graph:
http://deepclimate.org/2009/04/09/the-alberta-oil-boys-network-spins-gl…
Animation of UAH 1979-2008 from linear to 6th order polynomial (from my post) :)
http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/uah-polynomial-animation…
#114 - NRC vs NAS
Hank R, Dave A,
Strictly speaking, I don't think there is any problem referring to the NAS review as the NRC Report. The title page reads:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=R1
As to the attitude of the NAS towards the ongoing significance of Mann's work, it is no coincidence that Mann et al 2008 (the monumental update to the work begun in 1998) was published in PNAS. As in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Sounds like a ringing endorsement and vindication of Mann to me.
Janet...found three over at Graham's green blog. I think the quote came from the UK Telegraph, which illustrates perfectly my argument that different papers are cherry-picking Lord May's comments to suit their own particular bent.
http://blogs.news.com.au/couriermail/greenblog/
Mark...let's avoid some of the vagaries associated with atmospheric measurements. We should take Julia Gillard's advice and plunge into the sea.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/07/22/sea-level-rise-a…
Ooops...before I get roasted alive, that should say Penny Wong and not JG.
Translating from Spanish to English, el gordo = "the fat one".
It is of no consequence.
Perhaps I have just won a very big lottery. Always nice to get the last word on an open thread.
The Fat One quotes Lord May:
>"I think there is quite a strong connection between the religious right and climate change."
Attribution to the Guardian where no such quote can be found.
What does appear in the [Telegraph](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/richard-alleyne/6146656/Maybe-re…) is:
>I think there is quite a strong connection between the religious right and climate change denial."
Chinga tu puta madre, mentiroso pendejo.
Bernard, many thanks for the support! I really appreciate it.
My query to El "corpulento" Gordo was just to suggest that one should always follow the science. As I once wrote with Stuart Pimm in Oikos, the data trails of the contrarians often go cold very quickly. They make a lot of noise but it is rarely backed up with rigid science that is accessible in solid journals. We have heard all of the lame excuses before from them why this is so, but these excuses do not cut it. They generally rely on web sites and think tanks to spread their gospel of doubt. Like creationists, whose strategy is to find flaws in evolutionary theory instead of evidence in support of creation, very often the strategy of the climate change denialists is not to provide evidence showing that other factors account for the current warming, but to poke holes in climate models and empirical studies that link warming with the burning of fossil fuels and attendant increases in atmsopheric concentrations of C02. Many of the climate change sceptics once argued the warming was a doomsday myth; as the evidence accumulated showing that the Earth`s surface was indeed warming, they quite quickly shifted their position, focusing on natural forcings or else arguing that the rates of change were within normal boundaries. One of their major efforts is to exaggerate uncertainties over the outcomes of clmate change, and then to apply these uncertainties to the process of climate change itself.
I am certain that history will not view the contrarians and their obfuscations kindly at all; we are at a crossroads in my opinion. The choices are divergent and stark. Either we act to deal with the burgeoning threat posed by climate change and other human-mediated assaults upon nature, or we keep procrastinating until it is too late and the worst consequences manifest themselves.
'One of their major efforts is to exaggerate uncertainties over the outcomes of climate change...'
Global cooling can have serious consequences too and that's no exaggeration.
El Gordo,
Correct. But the planet is not cooling now. It is warming and warming at rates far exceeding rates of warming or cooling experienced in many thousands of years. It is not the absolute mean surface temperature that should be of concern, but the rate of change, particularly at higher latitudes where it is greatest. Natural systems can and do respond to change, but within normal definable boundaries. As I have said many times before, the capacity of complex adaptive systems to adapt to global environmental changes are limited within certain thresholds.
Once those thresholds are exceeded, then systems become to break down. This is concomitant with a loss of vital ecosystem services that sustain humanity. We already know that ecological systems have a reduced capacity to support man - there are many examples where this is documented. What we do not know with any precision is how much more nature can be simplified before critical services disappear altogether. This is the problem with the rather shallow observations of Girma on another thread. He writes as if natural systems function linearly, and that changes in atmospheric levels of C02, citing just one example relevant to this discussion, will result in linear and gradual changes in surface temperatures. But again, he ignores thresholds and the decidedly non-linear characteristics of complex systems. Once some undetermined threshold is passed, then it is likely that gradual changes will suddenly become dramatic. A good analogy would be as if one was rocking a canoe back and forth, but was still able to stand in it. Suddenly, their rocking will exceed a certain critical point, and they find themselves in the water.
This is what happens when complex adaptive systems are simplified. Humans are doing so in a large number of ways. Given the biological component in climate regulation, and the fact that humans are altering vast expanses of the planet surface, I have little doubt that we are entering a period of consequences. To be clearer, I mean serious consequences. Our understanding of the way ecological systems evolve and function is still in its relative infancy. However, this in no way precludes the fact that we are conducting a large single experiment on terrestrial and aquatic systems, as well as on the atmosphere. Speaking as a senior scientist, it is my opinion that large scale tinkering on systems we barely understand but which sustain us is not a wise thing to do. There are clearly many who disagree, including some scientists. However, the vast majority of the scientific community are providing warnings that I believe should be heeded.
El gordo,
When [I said](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1913…) you have shanked your credibility, I wasn't kidding. Then you follow that up with a [doctored quote](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1916…). Shameless. This together with your nasty slight on Fran Barlow tells me that you, el gordo, have not behaved in good faith.
I would understant if readers here assume anything you present is a distorted misrepresentation ,and conclued anything you present is not worth following up on.
Tim Lambert can count me as one who thinks El Gordo is only a time waster, a propagandists, and a misreprsenter. I would understand if others thought that El gordo doesn't belong on a discussion blog devoted to genuine discussion.
Hat Tip to Deep Climate. [Nice work!](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1913…)
You think me a worthless troll because I have independent thought? Get me SNIPPED if you have the bottle girlie man.
That was no 'doctored quote', it was a 'brain fade' too early in the morn. Anyway, I'm a denialist and take offence at the thought of being associated with religious fanatics.
I may believe in a parallel universe, but it has nothing to do with pearly gates or creationism.
El gordos [indepednent thought](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1913…). So independent that someone told him what to think and prepared this chart [for him](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1913…)
[Another vesion](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1913…) of independent thought.
Now let me go and lie down after being so labelled a "girlie man".
El Gordo intoned
As the saying goes, you can't always get what you want. The religious fanatics have a stranglehold on the denialist corner, including at the top.
Not the least amusing thing is listening to a Young Earther holding forth about the significance of the paleontological record for understanding climate change.
Denialist quote of the year from Richard Steckis(can't link directly to comment, scroll down to comment headed "Wrong"):
"Why have you used 2000 as a start point? That is cherry picking on a grand scale. Breakpoint analysis shows that there is a breakpoint in the temperature time series in December 1997. Therefore, 1998 should be used as a start point for statistical analysis."
oops. Here's the link:
http://www.desmogblog.com/climate-denial-crock-week1998-revisited#comme…
> Global cooling can have serious consequences too and that's no exaggeration.
> Posted by: el gordo
Yes, it can.
So one reason to avoid nuclear weapon proliferation is to stop nuclear weapons being produced and reduce the number of them.
It's called the "non-proliferation treaty".
But we don't worry about a treaty demanding ice not form beyond a certain level since it isn't us doing it.
So when warming is due to natural features, we don't make a treaty to stop it but when it is due to our actions or could be the result of our actions, we make a treaty to avoid the result.
But you are the person who disbelieves AGW science in the face of all the evidence, and that is RELIGIOUS belief, yet you hate being lumped in with the religious types.
"Mark...let's avoid some of the vagaries associated with atmospheric measurements."
So, during a cyclic event where deeper colder water is pulled to the surface, you want to use shallow sea temperatures to work out if it's warming, gordo?
Now *why* did you want to do that...
> I see. So when North is commenting officially on the NAS report he is stating 'fact' but if he says something different to his students that is 'opinion'.
> Posted by: Dave Andrews
Nope, North is officially saying "it could be" WITHOUT having done the checks to see if he's right.
Or can you show that he worked it out and confirmed that possiblity as a likely explanation?
No.
You can't can you DA.
missed out on 166, because a nuclear war with lots of nukes flying can cause a nuclear winter.
Man Made lobal Cooling.
Hank,
Sorry about the NRC-NAS red herring. I see on re-reading that Dave Andrews was copping to that "error" to avoid answering you substantively. Typical.
Mark,
"Nope, North is officially saying "it could be" WITHOUT having done the checks to see if he's right."
Oh, so he wasn't Chair of that NAS Panel then, that supposedly reviewed all the evidence about the hockey stick? And his comments therefore can't be given any credence?
Well Deep Climate,
Tell me what you think Gerry North was saying to his students then.
Fran walks in off the street with the intention of convincing everyone here that its cool to replace coal fired power stations with nuclear. Then JD Morgan comes to her aid and now Tim takes up their cause.
Snake oil salesmen have success: Deltoid 0 Trojan Horse 1
El gordo's usual standard of analysis. Tim was a sleeper cell waiting since 1988 to leap forth and provide a discussion threat on nuke power.
Sits [quite neatly](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1916…) with his [other comments](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1916…).
Pardon the Freudian slip!
Tsk tsk Mark @ #124.
No need to blow your top.
I am not the 'Zen Master' here. Just wanting to point out that whilst some are sure the 'Science is settled', others are not.
There has be some 'wait and see' with this issue. It's the 'nature' of things.
Thanks El Gordo @ #126. Yes, there is a lot of 'alarmist' 'chatter' and other assorted nonsense out there for sure.
Some days when I read the headlines particularly on 'your ABC', I almost get the impression that we will soon see people pushing their wooden carts up the street, yelling 'bring out your dead'... just like in ye olde 'dark ages'. :-(
All these 'alarmists' would benefit from taking a bex powder and having a good lay down.
*There has be some 'wait and see' with this issue*
And there sure is. We`ll all wait until humanity goes to hell in a handbasket if the contrarians have their way... Procrastrinate, procrastinate, procrastinate... That is the clarion cry of those anxious to ensure that business-as-usual is the *only* business. Wait until it is too late. The northern bog lemming mentality.
Adaptation will be a key word in the coming decade.
Mark believes we don't have 15 years to waste and I agree, let's not procrastinate, after this northern hemisphere winter we should have a clearer picture of how to adapt to changing climate.
Mmm more [considered opinion](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1919…), with El Gordo's usual backing of...aaah...mmmm....nothing.
We know where to file that don't we El Gordo.
'The Fasto' and Billy Bob make a good couple. But I think you should team up with Girma to at least gain some intellectual rigor.
Until then, please continue with more empty snipes and fatuous comments. It would be boring without you.
El Gordo,
It is not a question of whether WE can adapt. It is whether complex natural systems that generate services permitting us to exist and persist can adapt. Therein lies the rub...
You see, too many people think we can sit on a branch, saw it off, and remain suspended in mid-air while the tree crashes to the ground. It is the same old refrain: humans are exempt from the laws of nature. Sorry to rain on the parade. And please excuse me as I repeat myself for the billionth time. The crux of the matter is this: we have few technological substitutes for most critical ecosystem services. These emerge freely from natural systems over scales of space and time that vary considerably. As the planet`s complex adaptive systems begin to buckle under the human load, the concern is not if natural systems can survive - of course they will persist long after Homo sapiens passes from the scene - but whether these systems are resilient enough to continue sustaining life in a manner that we know.
We may be the most intelligent organism ever to have evolved on this planet, but no species relies more on nature or utilized more from nature than we do. We co-opt some 40% of net primary production and 50% of freshwater flows. We depend on a stupendous array of biotic interactions to sustain soil fertility, to control pests that threaten our crops, to recycle nutrients, to pollinate our crops, to filter toxins on both land and water and to help maintain a breathable atmosphere.
As humans reduce biodiversity, we reduce the capacity of the planet to support man. It is as simple as that. I have to admit that the words ` we will adapt` is often thrown about frivolously in response to a range of human assaults across the biosphere. Were it so simple...
Harvey,
I agree, humans are having a huge negative impact on the environment. If you just look at the cloud of pollution hanging over China its obvious this mess has to be cleaned up. The Chinese authorities laugh it off by saying 'we are the factory of the world,' but they are just dangerously slack.
Where we part company is that I know CO2 is not a pollutant, while you think it is.
El Gordo,
ANY element is a pollutant if its concentrations increase beyond a certain level in the environment and have deleterious effects on communities and ecosystems. Plants must synthesize the extra C, and this means to higher C:N and C:P ratios. Given that N and P are much more limiting terrestrial nutrients for consumers, then we can expect all kinds of ecological responses to the current experiment, many of them unpredictable and nasty.
Saying C02 is not a pollutant is also like saying nitrogen is not a pollutant. But look at he effects of fertilizers on wetlands in terms of hyper-eutrophication.
The definition is very anthropocentric. But if there is a strong effect of increased C02 on climate, and the balance of scientific opinion suggests that there is, then the current experiment humans are conducting is unwise at the very least, and more likely dangerous.
Harvey,
There is an interesting protest coming up this weekend at Hazelwood, in the Latrobe Valley.
Direct action of this kind should get considerable media coverage, but society at large won't give it a second thought.
http://www.switchoffhazelwood.org/
>*Where we part company is that I know CO2 is not a pollutant, while you think it is.*
Jeff,he's not after a debate. He prefers reproducing [propaganda](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1916…). And he knows the facts before reading the evidence. Just like he knew what Lord May thought, without needing to read the [full sentence](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1916…).
> Where we part company is that I know CO2 is not a pollutant, while you think it is.
So when you burn coal, you WANT and USE CO2 from the reaction???
If not, then it is a waste product and pollutant.
And try breathing 10% CO2 mixture air if you think it's safe.
Corn (the US staple) produces less insecticide naturally under slightly enhanced CO2 regimes. Therefore, though it may grow bigger, it ends up smaller because pests eat the leaves.
And you forget too that plants are not pure carbon. Sugars are HYDRO Carbons. So if you up CO2, but not H2O, then you don't have any hydrocarbons.
Now, if you only care about the good life for plants and go hang for humans, say so, but us humans want sugars and other hydrocarbons, not carbon, to eat.
Weirdsville from gordo:
> Mark believes we don't have 15 years to waste and I agree, let's not procrastinate,
this does not gel with
> after this northern hemisphere winter we should have a clearer picture of how to adapt to changing climate.
Since saying "if we wait, we'll have a clearer picture IS procrastinating.
Thanks Mark, you're correct.
What I should have said is let's wait six months and then we can reevaluate the situation. A denier has no right to procrastinate.
Christopher Booker takes the 'mickey' out of AGW Arctic ice melt.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6143587…
> What I should have said is let's wait six months and then we can reevaluate the situation.
Why?
What will we know in six months that we don't now?
When Copenhagen fails to pass muster the 'alarmists' will lose considerable traction. A blank sun, cool PDO and neutral NAO should provide a unique experience.
So we won't have learned anything about the science, just what lobbying has done.
Pathetic.
The rest won't change significantly in six months: 11 year cycles, 15 year cycle. Not a lot of change in 1/2 a year.
So procrastination: you wait six months so that in six months you can wait another six.
Despite greater summer sea ice extent in 2008 (compared to the record low in 2007), the actual volume reached a record low:
http://nsidc.org/news/press/20081002_seaice_pressrelease.html
Note this: NSIDC Senior Scientist Mark Serreze said, âWhen you look at the sharp decline that weâve seen over the past thirty years, a ârecoveryâ from lowest to second lowest is no recovery at all. Both within and beyond the Arctic, the implications of the decline are enormous."
Most of the sea ice is now first year ice and much thinner, regardless of actual extent:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090901143321.htm
And note the incredible footage of the Ilulissat Glacier calving in Greenland:
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_balog_time_lapse_proof_of_extreme_ice_lo…
So much for the deniers lame arguments. Dum-de-dum-dum-dum...........
Mark,
At least El Gordo has dropped his concern trolling shtick. Just a trolls troll, plain and very simple.
Dave Andrews:
If you had listened to him you would have easily found out but since you're a troll you just want to pretend there's a big mystery. North was referring to the fact that different techniques were used in the different studies to combine tree ring proxies of different ages in order to get continuous proxies covering the whole 1000+ year period.
North was referring to the fact that later reconstructions than MBH98/99 showed generally lower temperatures over the period 1200 AD to 1700 AD than MBH98/99 while still being similar during the MWP.
Of course, this is all ancient strawman history that only a science denying troll like Andrews would bring up. Even North's talk on the subject is 3 years old now.
Chris O'Neill,
"Even North's talk on the subject is 3 years old now."
Chris, it was Hank who provided the link to that talk. Why don't you take up its 'age' with him?
Jeff Harvey,
"As humans reduce biodiversity, we reduce the capacity of the planet to support man. It is as simple as that."
Surely it is NOT that simple. Some might say that biodiversity has been reduced in the last 60 years. In that time, however, human population has more than doubled.
How do you reconcile this fact?
Luke, just so you know, when someone's level of argument is this:
... they're idiots. More to the point, life's too short to waste reading anything they say, because they're substituting dittohead rah-rah sloganeering and adolescent machismo for analysis. The fact that nuclear plants render their grounds useless, possibly for millenia, is deeply serious. Fratboys can't appreciate that, but then again, I can't appreciate fratboys. Idiots like that are better off without me reading them, in my opinion, and I'm certainly better off not reading them.
Dave Andrews,
IT IS that simple. Here are some facts for you: ecological systems do not function linearly. Ecology is an immensely complex field because of this fact. Cause and effect relationships are therefore not easily extrapolated. In other words, one small change in parameter *a* can have huge effects on processes *b-z* that were hard to predict before. The loss of nitrogen fixing bacteria, for instance, would be catastrophic whereas the loss of more functionally redundant species would not, at least in the short term. There are drivers and passengers in ecological systems, but many of the passengers become drivers when the dominant keystones disappear.
Putting this all together I am saying that the reason humans have been able to simplify nature at such an astounding rate over the past century while the human population has grown dramatically is because of functional redundancy built into the system. We are certainly pushing systems towards a threshold beyond which they will be able to sustain themselves, and us, but thanks to this redundancy they are still able to function effectively. There are countless examples of redundancy in the ecological literature; I think Steve Carpenter`s freshwater studies with dominant and interstitial zooplankters in upper midwestern lakes in the US remains one of the best.
A simple metaphor is that the systems are bending under the human assault but most have not yet broken. Again I am talking about sudden shifts in system properties that occur once certain critical thresholds are exceeded. We can therefore expect (and in fact are already seeing) nasty surprises as humans continue to cause the biggest mass extinction in 65 million years. This extinction is not only one of species, but as importantly, the loss of genetic material as populations are extirpated. A study by Hughes et al. (1997) in Science estimated that humans are exterminating some 30,000 genetically distinct populations of species daily out of a total of perhaps between 1 and 6 billion. A species loses its ecological value long before it becomes extinct.
So Dave Andrews, it IS that simple. I am sorry to be harsh, but it is clear that you do not read any ecological literature. If you did, you would frankly not make such an inane remark. There are plenty of book you should read and learn a little about the systems that permit humans to exist and to persist; Gretchen Dail`s "Nature`s Services" (1997), Simon Levin`s "Fragile Dominion", or Geoffrey Heal`s "Nature and the Marketplace" would be a good start.
The mid term effects of biodiversity loss on human welfare should in fact be a no-brainer. The trouble is that humans have become so insulated in our urban confines and with technology apparently limitless that many of us think we have outlived the usefulness of natural systems. But, as I said, this is only because most vital ecosystem services emerge freely from nature and thus do not carry prices. If they did, and were captured in full-cost pricing, we would realize how vital they are in sustaining civilization and would be acutely aware as to their loss. There several excellent examples of where ecosystem services have been valued: the Catskill Mountain watershed which gives New York some of the purest drinking water in the world, the costs saved to the oil palm industry in southeast Asia through the introduction of a pollinating beetle from the native range of the palm in West Africa, the value of Anolis lizards in controlling injurious insect pests of crops in the Caribbean, and the classical study of using ecosystem products in Peru in lieu of logging. There are clearly many more. As I said in my last post, nature`s services permit humans to exist and to persist (to coin a phrase from Simon Levin at Princeton University). There is an important lesson in remembering this.
Speaking of idiots...
"Some might say that biodiversity has been reduced in the last 60 years. In that time, however, human population has more than doubled.
How do you reconcile this fact?"
Posted by: Dave Andrews | September 10, 2009 5:46 PM
Ye gods do you never ever do any reading or research??? Has the connection between extensive biodiversity loss and a burgeoning human population completely escaped you?
Simple question for you: if you keep on increasing the rate at which you turn the planetâs partially renewable but generally finite resources into non-renewable junk and on top of that keep on increasing the numbers of people who are doing so and on top of that bugger up those remaining ecosystem services that you havenât already plundered, what do you think is going to happen?
Answers on a postcard to Julian L Simon, Milton Friedman Road, Cornucopia.
Please come back from 'lah lah land' Mark (#185).
CO2 is not a pollutant any more than H2O is from similar combustion of hydrocarbons.
It is the 'alarmists' and their ilk that have painted themselves into a corner calling CO2 and indeed carbon a 'pollutant' - when or course it is not.
Pray tell us also Mark when you think atmospheric CO2 concentrations will reach 10% or indeed 10,000ppm for that matter.
And since you appear to be fond of extreme examples, try halving CO2 in you plant growth experiments - see what actually does happen then.
Dave Andrews:
So nothing about the strawman-making statements you made earlier and instead just another strawman. You're nothing but a pathetic troll.
Steve C - Dave Andrews appears to have advanced the view that human population growth increases biodiversity because humans are all different, although he has wisely avoided direct attribution of this completely idiotic view to himself by using the words "some might say".
Dave Andrews asked Jeff to reconcile the simple claim that loss of biodiversity is bad for us. DA's rationale was that human have multiplied and prospered whilst biodiversity has suffered. I suspect DA is being contrary, to pick on Jeff use of the term 'simple', but the basis for this short term prosperity partially:
1). genuine progress (social, political, and technological) and;
2). partly cancer like growth- were the cancer grows exponential (for a period) by draining its host.
Dave Andrews engages in another logical fallacy with:
Dang.
The quoted text should have been:
Et cetera, et cetera...
Need to watch those forward slashes.
Mark Byrne:
A very appropriate simile. Cancers usually do really well until the host dies. Dave Andrews' argument is the same as saying that because a cancer is doing really well, the host must also be doing really well.
Janet,
...'a trolls troll'. Is that like being a man's man?
El Gordo,
More like a creeps creep. Men usually behave decently.
What makes you think I'm a man?
Look up, I just implied that I don't think you are a man. Don't go getting delusions of adequacy. I suggest you start with basic decency and work your way back up.
> Dave Andrews' argument is the same as saying that because a cancer is doing really well, the host must also be doing really well.
> Posted by: Chris O'Neill
Or "Of course the water's good to drink: do you think all those things would be living in it if it weren't???"
Not withstanding Janet's apposite characterisation, the grammar structure of your pseudonym, el gordo, would seem to indicate you're a male of the [indeterminate] species. Of course, that could just be a misrepresentation, which you appear to be good at in at least one other area.
"man" used to be the gender neutral form of the dominant hominid homo sapiens sapiens.
Given that homo sapiens sapiens means "seriously wise man", I would suggest el gordo is not a man.
But if you want to attribute some human intelligence in that blob of gloop, "man" would be correct and not necessarily indicate "male".
Marion@196
Thanks for replying, but I'm afraid it doesn't really address my confusion. The bit you've quoted is from post #106 (by which time the snark levels had gone critical), but what I was concerned about was why your reply at #33 contained so much heat that didn't seem warranted by Fran's original post at #11.
Anyway it's all water over the dam now, since there's a separate thread.
Regards
Luke
PS - The David Mackay mentioned by Fran in her original post had a brief slot on the BBC's Today show (heavyweight politics/policy morning radio programme) this morning and came across as both sensible, articulate and media savvy.
Steve Chamberlain,
OK then. how many people do you want to kill off in order to stop the 'destruction' of biodiversity that you say is happening?
Luke,
You may already know this but David Mackay has written an excellent book- 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air' It's available on his website
http://www.withouthotair.com/about.html
as well as from Amazon. Well worth reading.
*OK then. how many people do you want to kill off in order to stop the 'destruction' of biodiversity that you say is happening?*
What an infantile remark. This is comic level book intellectuality.
First of all, you can take the quotations off of the term biodiversity; you are also creating a strawman when you say that Steve is the one who alone says that the destruction of biodiversity is happening. This is classic contrarian behavior: turn a fact into an allegation that apply that allegation to someone you are wishing to discredit.
The empirical evidence is voluminous and growing. We know that between 10 and 40% of well studied species - that is to say vertebrates and vascular plants - are threatened with extinction according to the IUCN. We also know that area-extinction models of exponential decay that link biodiversity loss with habitat loss generally underestimate extinction rates because they exclude other anthropogenic processes such as pollution and the introduction of exotic invasive species that also reduce biodiversity. Given that some half of the world`s species rich wet tropical forests are gone, then one does not need a calculator to know that with it has gone many species that were probably never formally classified.
Your final point is even more of a strawman. I cringe when I read this kind of childish stuff, but I feel compelled to respond. Read this and learn: there is not a trade-off between the protection of biodiversity and the welfare of humanity. Making frankly flippant remarks like
*how many people do you want to kill off in order to stop the 'destruction' of biodiversity that you say is happening* have no place in intellectual discourse. As I said above, which you clearly did not read nor understand, this is an artificial choice. It is therefore not a choice between nature and people; it is the choice of a sustainable or an impoverished future for man. Nature generates conditions through a stupendous array of interactions crossing innumerable hierarchal scales from individuals to populations to communities to ecosystems to biomes to the biosphere that permit our species to exist and to persist. Biological interactions purify the air and water, recycle nutrients, disperse seeds, pollinate plants, help to maintain a breathable atmosphere, provide us with food and materials in which to build our civilization and provide for emotional well being. It is therefor not a choice between wild places and people. This, as I said, is the classic refrain from those who know nix about ecology.
Dave, if it be known I have had to repeat this kind of post several times on Deltoid over the past few years become some layman has waded in with the same kind of fatuous remark as you made to Steve. I find it quite disturbing to say the least that there are so many people who think that humans derive little from nature except what we use to build our cities or to feed our populations. Until I resp@onded, you had probably never heard of the term "ecosystem services" which has been a staple of the ecological literature for the past 20 years. Only a few neoclassical economists hang on to the notion that humans can exist on a planet covered in concrete and computers. Many more ecologically minded economists realize that the cumulative total of all GDPs of all countries on Earth represent but a tiny fraction of the sum total of the value of supporting ecosystem services alone. By supporting I mean the indirect services I described above that do not carry prices. If they did, we would protect them more vigilantly because we would realize that humans are taking significantly more out of nature than nature is sustainably putting back., and that these services that sustain us would be threatened. This cannot go on indefinitely.
The Global Ecosystem Assessment published in 2006 painted a stark picture: humans have degraded or locally eliminated some 60% of important services that have no technological replacement. The consequences of losing many of these services will be disastrous for rich and poor alike.
I am willing to discuss this with you but please ignore making such fatuous remarks that have little substance.
What do we expect from Dave Andrews but a strawman. No-one is suggesting killing off anyone. You should have got a clue from the word "burgeoning". Governments could act rationally by stopping their crazy incentives to increase the birth rate. Then at least they're not intentionally causing the problem to be worse than necessary.
>*OK then. how many people do you want to kill off in order to stop the 'destruction' of biodiversity that you say is happening?*
I'll buy into the tripe from Dave Andrews. Dave its is the denialists who are responsible for the impending poopulation destruction. It is the denialists who rev the machine of increasing consumption. It is the denialalists (together with those enjoying current "wealth" and "prosperity" and the apathetic detraction) who are responsible for what the human species will be left with as biodiversity shrinks.
The cancer has been diagnosed by the specialist (ecologists) and denialists are egging the cancer on, rather than treatment to slow or stop its destruction. (That means less cream and more beans for you and I, so that we can sustain the current population, and provide decent prospects for 6 billion until we can come ups with a better solution).
WARNING : This post is now off-topic. It may not have been about 120 posts ago, but I've only just found this thread.
I've been looking for a while now for the data needed to check for myself the various claims, from both sides, about the "divergence" between the IPCC AR4 scenarios and the CRU / GISS / NCDC / UAH / RSS datasets.
The data I am currently using for the AR4 "Model Average Surface Air Temperature Changes" are as follows (sorry about the horizontal compression of the first line, I can't see how to avoid it) :
Year A1B A1FI A1T A2 B1 B2
1990 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
.
2000 0.16 0.16 0.16 0.16 0.16 0.16
2005 0.19 0.21 0.24 0.24 0.21 0.24
2010 0.30 0.33 0.36 0.33 0.32 0.36
2015 0.40 0.45 0.52 0.43 0.41 0.48
2020 0.52 0.60 0.66 0.52 0.53 0.62
2025 0.69 0.72 0.80 0.65 0.64 0.75
2030 0.86 0.91 0.97 0.79 0.73 0.86
2035 1.05 1.08 1.13 0.94 0.84 0.98
2040 1.25 1.33 1.35 1.13 0.93 1.10
2045 1.42 1.59 1.52 1.28 1.02 1.24
2050 1.59 1.91 1.68 1.47 1.14 1.37
2055 1.76 2.15 1.82 1.68 1.26 1.50
2060 1.95 2.49 1.96 1.87 1.37 1.62
2065 2.12 2.78 2.07 2.11 1.46 1.75
2070 2.31 3.07 2.16 2.34 1.55 1.88
2075 2.43 3.34 2.25 2.55 1.65 2.00
2080 2.57 3.58 2.33 2.80 1.71 2.13
2085 2.69 3.85 2.39 3.04 1.79 2.26
2090 2.79 4.09 2.46 3.29 1.83 2.38
2095 2.87 4.26 2.47 3.56 1.87 2.51
2100 2.96 4.41 2.49 3.78 1.90 2.62
You don't want to know where I got these numbers from, the important thing is that they are definitely "a bit dodgy" (as they say in England).
The TAR had an equivalent table (Appendix II, section II.4, page 824), but I have not been able to find one for AR4. The data must exist somewhere within the IPCC, otherwise the last row of graphs in Figure 10.26 (AR4, page 803) could not have been plotted.
I have looked through the AR4 PDF files, but not seen such a table, even in the "Supplementary Material" files. Have I just missed it (3 times) ?
Is there a web page that contains such a table (one line per decade would be enough), with at least a semi-official "Approved by the IPCC" stamp ?
Bonus points if your page has similar tables with "+/- 1 Standard Deviation" labels (the dark shaded areas in Figure 10.26 of AR4).
Nomination for MENSA if your page has tables with "Upper 95% Confidence Interval" and "Lower 95% Confidence Interval" labels instead of (or as well as) the "+/- 1 S.D." ones ...
Marc Morano to debate Roger Pielke, Jr.
Anybody else find this matchup odd?
Jeff Harvey,
No I am not an ecologist - no one can be expert in everything.
However, you say
"It is therefore not a choice between nature and people; it is the choice of a sustainable or an impoverished future for man"
Well then what is your definition of 'sustainable', how many people would it support and what do you propose to do about future population growth?
Like you, I agree Nature, or in other words the Earth, is an extremely complex system. Maybe you could spend some time communicating that fact to climate scientists.
Shorter Dave Andrews:
I insist on claiming that you want to kill off people in order to maintain "sustainability"! Why won't you tell me how many people you want to get killed? Why? Why? Why?
You can't answer that question? Haha! This shows that you are a Global Warmist Fraud!
Mark Byrne,
I'd be interested to know if you rate 'biodiversity denialists' on the same scale as 'climate denialists'? Or is just anyone who doesn't agree with you a denialist?
Dave Andrews:
Mark Byrne, I'll just ignore your arguments and claim that you just hate me for disagreeing with you!
"Well then what is your definition of 'sustainable', how many people would it support and what do you propose to do about future population growth?"
I won't pretend to speak for Jeff Harvey, but the definiton of sustainable is "that which can be sustained", or if you don't understand the root word " behaviour that we can continue indefinately". Whether or not we should behave sustainably is obviously not negotiable.
They are the same people Dave, eg. Tim Curtin, the IPA, Heartland institute etc, etc. Denialists are those who deny the science and instead substitute utopian economic ideology.
And then there's a another class who make fatuous strawman arguments, a bit like this pearl:
>*OK then. how many people do you want to kill off in order to stop the 'destruction' of biodiversity that you say is happening?*
Found a few more denialists.
http://www.green-agenda.com/
Dave Andrews,
No need to apologize for not being an ecologist. It was clear from you earlier strawman post that you have have no knowledge of ecology whatsoever and had probably never heard of ther term "ecosystem services", even though it has been extensively used for the past 20 years. If it means anything, Bjorn Lomborg completely misinterpreted it as well in his error-fileld book, "The Sceptical Environmentalist". But then again, it is hard to say what Lomborg exactly is, but an envrionmental scientist is not one of them.
I will get to the various interpretation of sustainability a bit later (below).
First, I would like to comment on that absurd post by some nincompoop that el gord linked. As for biodiversity denialists, the link el gordo posted was, as I see it, pure and utter insanity. The blogger, who is anonymous, sees some great global scientific conspiracy amongst the rank and file of the climate science and population ecology community, based on his or her grade-school level understanding of the field. They have put two and two together to come up with six.
First of all, Gaia was a serious scientific theory proposed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis more than 30 years ago that purported to explain the link between different levels of organization in ecological systems through various levels of hierarchal complexity. That it was subsequently hijacked by new age religion types and then considered some kind of wacky cult is a shame. But I would challenge the writer of this web site to give me examples where Ehrlich, Mann and other eminent scientists have ever directly described the biosphere in such a pseudo-religious way. I certainly do not ascribe an y credibility to that. But science certainly has shown that ecological systems do function as the sumn of their parts, and that how they have evolved to do this remains baffling, given that individual organisms for the most part (excluding eusocial species with high co-efficients of relatedness) are genetically programmed to behave selfishly and to behave in such ways as to optimize the fitness of theirs and closely related genotypes. Numerous empirical studies have shown that more species-rich systems tend to be more resilient to environmental change than species-poor systems. This has been one of the most enduring debates in ecology, but it now seems that species rich systems offer more links for the transfer of nutrients and energy through the system, more functional redundancy, and the various feedback loops are weaker meaning that the loss of some links are buffered by the presence of alternatives.
The gist of this discussion is that there is also a vigorous debate over the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and this debate has been acrimonious at times. One side argues that at least some part of biodiversity is functionally redundant and that systems can withstand some reduction in diversity (this is based on the idea that a few keystone species retain the capacity to keep the system effectively stable); the second side argues that a reduction in biodiversity pushes systems closer to the edge beyond which a range of critical services emerging from them are disrupted or eliminated. This is known as the rivet popper hypothesis; removing rivets continually from an aircraft will be OK until a critical threshold is reached and the plane crashes to the ground. In reality, the two hypotheses are not that different but they have generated immense debate in the ecological community. The former group sees some leeway for losing biodiversity to a point and argues that we should focus conservation efforts in protecting vital keystone species as they are identified through empirical research; the second group acknowledges that ecosystems are immensely complex entities and that a huge array of interactions occur amongst individuals, species and populations that helps to keep the systems running viably. They thus argue that we continue to exterminate any species at our peril, given that our understanding of this complexity is veryrudimentary. I opt for the latter school of thought, although I have many colleagues who argue in defense of the former. The debate is ongoing. One thing is for certain, though. The hypothesis that ecosystems function due to input from individuals over variable and often vast spatial and temporal scales is beyond doubt. Call it Gaia or whatever the heck you like, but systems do function on the basis of input from a huge number of organisms occupying different trophic levels and performing different ecological functions. This is not at all controversial, perhaps except in the minds of dead-enders who see left wing global environmental conspiracies everywhere they look.
Given what we do know the link el gordo provided is clear and utter b*, and I hate to even dignify such utter balderdash with an intellectual response. It seems to me that the reader has not read a shred of the primary scientific literature on the field of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and instead has glossed over a few books in which the information is discussed so that laypeople will appreciate the importance of biodiversity. This person I think is a moron who has come up with their own kind of conspiracy theory - as many contrarians pushing right wing agendas do - to explain why scientists spanning different disciplines are concerned about connected issues such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity. The site was a mish-mash of partial quotes, misquotes and the like. The scientific underpinning of their site was utterly incompetent. I do not wish to waste any more of my time on this kind of bilge.
Back to the question Dave proposed. What is sustainable? That is a difficult question because everyone marches to their own tune with respect to what sustainable development means. To a neoclassical economist who thinks that nature is a small subset of the economy and that there are no material limits to growth anyway, sustainable development means unlimited economic growth: production and consumption will march along hand in hand forever and forever into the future. This in my view is outdated. To a population ecologist such as myself, sustainable development is economic development that does not compromise the ability of natural systems that underpin our civilizations to repair and replenish themselves. If we continue on the current path, devouring natural capital like there is no tomorrow, this will seriously compromise the quality of life for future generations of people. It could end up being much worse than that - due in large part to vast overconsumption by 15% of the world`s population in the "quad", we have created an environmental bottleneck that is getting narrower with each passing day, and it it going to take the cumulative efforts of humanity to get us out of it to a sustainable future where there is some measure of dignity for everyone on Earth and not just the "privileged few". The joint World Bank-UN Living Planet Index, started in 1970, showed that humans have degraded the most important natural systems - coastal marine, freshwater and forest - by 35 in 2003. This cannot go on indefinitely. There will be (in fact already are) social and environmental consequences of our growing national and global ecological deficits. The number of environmental refugees is already in the millions and increases ever year.
None of this is, or should be, considered controversial. That some see what I write as a vast conspiracy against freedom shows how successful the anti-environmental campaigns waged by a small coteries of well funded groups and individuals have been.
One error - by 35 I meant "35%" with respect to the LPI.
J
Jeff,
All credit to you, though I think only the Billy Bob's of the world would take seriously anything that anything El Gorgo says after his ongoing [misrepresentations](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1916…) and poor jugdement.
How can I alarm thee? Let me count the ways...
1) Scary foreginers; yellow peril;
2) scary muslims, scary clash of civilisations;
3) scary black people; scary black presidents
4) scary homosexuals;
5) sacry taxes;
6) scary health reforms; scary public schools; scary social polices;
9) scary socialists, leftists, water melons; scary reds under the bed;
10) scary bring down social fabric;
11) scary feminists;
12) scary greens, econazis, ecofacists, ecoterrorist;
12) scary unions;
13) scary WMD in hands of brown, black, yellow, red people (other people).
I count so may ways.
Or we could count real scary stuff; asbestos, CFCs, DDT, Dioxin, Depleted uranium, weapons testing fallout, nuclear contamination, lead pait, WMD in the has of anyone, smoking, habitat disctruciton, biodiversity loss, keystone species loss, global heating, invasions, occupations, massacres....
I'm speechless, but I suspect Mr Byrne will attack you with ad hominem.
El Gordo, surely you meant "How can I humiliate myself? Let me count the ways..."
El Gordo won't even allow "speachless[ness]" slow his misrepresentations. El Gordo's latest example is misuse of the term [ad hominem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem).
It seems mis-representation is [becoming all to regular](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1916…) for El Gordo.
Ad hominem abusive.
You can have the last word on this thread, but are well advised to leave the host (Tim can look after himself) and earn your stripes on Graham's Green Blog. The poor man has an infestation of sceptics and deniers.
El Gordo,
I name what you do. If you misrepresent people, I'll call you on it. If you present fallacious charts and show poor judgement by voicing unsupported conspriacies, I'll point out those errors.
If you continue making these misrepresetations, malicious insinuations, and ill considered acusations, don't be surprised or cry 'ad hominium' when your behavour, and the implications of your behaviour is described in words.
...[you] are well advised to leave...
El Gordo,
just who is providing this "well" advice. What is so "well" with this advice?
'Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.' - Erica Jong:
I'm happy to provide you with my advice at any time Janet. :-)
In an attempt to change the discussion, anyone seen this:
http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/the-falconer-post/
Sad, now the deniosphere even resorts to death threats.
Well, I hope he's passed on all correspondence to the relevant authorities (Web and local law enforcement).
Janet Akerman,
You missed out the most scary thing of all - people :-)
Dave Andrew writes:
>*"You missed out the most scary thing of all - people :-)"*
Dave can you clarify, are you smiling at [your own strawman folly](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/09/open_thread_32.php#comment-1928…), or trying to reconstruct it?
Dave Andrews (241): What's scariest of all isn't people but unthinking adherence to dogma and wilful ignorance.
The Australian's War on Everything Scientific [continues](http://tiny.cc/or2ML), with a hefty dose of conspiracy theory added to the mix.
My budgie has taken to pressing its arse against the wire and shitting outside of its cage...
Steve Chamberlain, #244
Wouldn't disagree at all about the adherence to dogma and ignorance!
Paul UK:
> So the skeptics are the scientists now and the scientists are alarmists.
And speaking of "X are Y and Y are Z", there's yet more fun from the Heartland Institute about the coming International 'Conference' on Climate Change -- yours truly reports.
Hi, all:
On a special interest group site that has a politics forum, I'm going it alone against a half dozen deniers. Their "captain" is hammering me with Climate Audit posts criticizing Kaufman, et al.'s recent paper on Arctic warming.
Note also that McIntyre never misses a chance to take shots at Mann. Here he flat out accuses him of scientific fraud:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6932
and:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6981
Frankly, I haven't the scientific chops to argue against CA on this subject. Does anyone here have a link to a detailed rebuttal of CA's attack on Kaufman?
Thanks
Speaking of frord. Jo Nova has a nice article exposing another carbon tax fraud in ye olde europa.
"Another major carbon auditor goes down."
(http://joannenova.com.au/).
Shorter Billy Bob Hall:
We skeptics are going to win! We're going to win! When we win you'll be sorry! We're going to win! We're going to win! When we win you'll be sorry!
[Over flowing from the crazy long [Girma thread](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/08/matthew_england_challenges_the…), which is now so slow to load]
Jeff, another [stunning quote](http://www.burntorangereport.com/diary/6553/) from "The Wrecking Crew":
>*The best public servant is the worst one. A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast -- a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world -- the black plague is a housepet by comparison.*
And Jeff, Thanks for your recommendations also.
I assure you bi--IJI I am not certain of winning anything.
My assessment is that you guys have the 'upper hand' now.
I also assure you I will be sorry if you guys do 'win'.
Seems Dr Jay Lehr, the Heartland Institute's Science Director is putting [shite](http://www.heartland.org/article/25971/A_Primer_on_Global_Warming_Dispe…) out about global cooling that's been picked up by the [crazies](http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/letters/scientists-see-signs-…) in my native land.
I might just send this on to Helen Roe!