DSP analysis of global temperature by Agilent chap

[hamilton]

Earth Climate models are more acurate than an LTspice Diode model?

Think not..

"The Earth system is just too complex to be represented in current
climate models. I don’t think they’ll get it right for a long time."


<http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013...global-warming-study-finds/?intcmp=latestnews>

Really !! FOXnews !?!?!

 

[Bill Sloman]

Earth Climate models are more acurate than an LTspice Diode model?

I didn't say that, and the two applications really are a long way apart, but you can exhibit the same intellectual errors in both domains if you set your mind to it.

Think not..

"The Earth system is just too complex to be represented in current
climate models. I don’t think they’ll get it right for a long time."

<http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013...global-warming-study-finds/?intcmp=latestnews>

Fox News would say that - they publish everything that the denialist propaganda machine throw their way, throwing in a quote from climate scientist John Christy, a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, whose fundamentalist christian beliefs are inconsistent with a belief in global warming, and seem to have made him and his colleague Roy Spencer a little slow to notice and correct the errors in the satellite temperature data whichthey report. If the errors had been in a direction that fitted the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis one imagines that they might have been faster off the mark.

Search on "John Christy and Roy Spencer". They are controversial figures.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/satellite-measurements-warming-troposphere.htm

 

[Martin Riddle]

Pompous assholes are always certain that they are correct, and
everyone else is an idiot.

Sort of fun watching one pompous asshole attacking another pompous
asshole's "wishful thinking" >:-}

...Jim Thompson

But I'm having fun stoking the fire ;D


Cheers

 

[Bill Sloman]

I would submit that this entire debate has gone off the rails. The
Earth has been a lot warmer, and has been a lot cooler, and will
continue to do so. There are two useful questions to ask.

First, is mankind having much effect compared to the natural variation?

Yes. The current atmospheric CO2 level is higher than it has been for about20 million years, and it's all our own work, as can be seen from the declining C-14 isotope ration (Suess Effect)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suess_effect

Proving such a thing takes multiple high-accuracy timeseries of
something like a century in duration. We are at most a few decades
into this century.

But our records of weather observation go back to about 1850, and there arelots of ways of deducing earlier global temperatures which take us back atleast to the start of the ice ages, some 2.6 million years ago. Anthropogenic global warming is real. We don't know exactly how fast it's going to make things worse, but there's no doubt that it's worth doing something aboutfor it makes life difficult enough that we wo't have the spare resources to do something about it.

Second, assuming for the moment that mankind is having an adverse
effect, what exactly can mankind in general, and any specific country,
have, and at what cost?

Get a whole lot more of it's energy from renewable resources - sun and wind.. At present this doubles the price of power, but the economies of scale mean that really large scale solar power is going to be as cheap - if not cheaper - than power generated from burning fossil carbon, even before we figure in the rising cost of digging up ever-more inaccessible reserves of fossil carbon.

In the US at the moment about 8% of the GDP is spent on buying energy, so doubling its price overnight (which isn't what we'd do) would chew up about three years of normal economic growth (or pretty much what the sub-prime mortgage crisis did). We'd have to spread the process over a decade or more, so it would be pretty painless.

Now, the combined population of China, India, and Pakistan is about
three billion, in round numbers this being ten times that of the US or
of the EU.

Now, the populations of China, India, and Pakistan are all mostly poor,
and the countries are powered mostly by burning coal. China, India,
and Pakistan would like to achieve something resembling the standard of
living of the US and the EU. If the per-capita energy use of China,
India, and Pakistan approaches that of the US and the EU, their carbon
footprint will transcend anything the US and the EU can do.

True. And global warming, which is already making their lives more difficult, would make their lives much more difficult.

Said another way, even if the US and the EU went to zero carbon
emission, it would make zero difference.

The US alone is responsible for 25% of the CO2 going into the atmosphere. That's not "a zero difference".

So, the key is to convince China, India, and Pakistan to remain forever
poor.

No, the key is to persuade them to switch from burning coal to building solar plants. Providing enough coal every year to let them get to western levels of energy use would certainly at least double the cost of coal, so it's in their economic interest to start moving to solar power as fast as possible, even if they take a short term hit on the cost of energy.

Going renewable wouldn't make them poor - it's probably the better investment, and would leave them richer. With enough renewable power they really could enjoy a western standard of living.

Somehow, I don't think that this will be the outcome.

The Chinese have a clearer idea of their long-term economic interest than does the US, where the decision-making is dominated by people who are makinga lot of money out of digging up fossil carbon and selling it for fuel. They are nervous about the short term consequences of the anthropogenic global warming that we are dealing with at the moment, and are investing quite heavily in renewable power.

 

[Bill Sloman]

There are many arguments on both sides.

Some considerably better than others. The weight of evidence is solidly in favour of anthropogenic global warming.

I take no position on this, as
it seems too soon to tell whose theories are correct and whose are not.

3% of climatologists might agree with you. The other 97% find the evidence for anthropogenic global warming convincing. The anti's are an interesting mix. Richard Lindzen is a contrarian, but accepts most of the evidence for anthropogenic global warming. Christy and Spencer find that idea doesn't fit with their religious beliefs.

The problem is that temperatures recorded in 1850 are of unknown
accuracy, and the globe was sampled quite sparsely.

The records are sparse, but they fit with the data derived from the geological record.

As for the data over millions of years, these are all from proxies to
the actual temperature, the variation of isotope ratios in various
physical and chemical reactions. These are necessarily indirect, and
cannot be calibrated against the ground truth from before humans
emerged.

There are a variety of different proxies, and they do seem to be consistent..
People have speculated that the constants of physics may vary with time, but not over the past few million years - or at least not enough to mess up the temperature proxies.

I would date the start of data sufficient for answering climate
questions to the availability of high-grade satellite-born radiometers.

Spencer and Christy managed to get rather poor results out of their satellite data for some 13 years, until other investigators got puzzled enough to look at the calibrations for themselves. Scientists get restive when thingsdon't fit together. Pinning all your faith on something that has only recently become available - and had it's own bugs - doesn't strike me as a goodapproach.

Yes, Double: I did see the Notable and Quotable (WSJ, A13, 7 Sept
2013) item quoting Spiegel Online (4 Sept 2013) saying that renewable
electricity sources are costing German consumers by doubling their
electricity bill.

It seems unlikely. Germany is currently getting 25% of it electricity from renewable sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

8% comes from wind power, which is already very close to parity. The Wall Street Journal does seem to publish a lot of denialist propaganda, and I'd re-read that article very carefully.

On the millennial timescale, it may well be that solar is the answer.

Scarcely millennial. Solar is about a decade or so short of parity with current fossil-carbon energy costs, and there's only a finite amount of fossilcarbon, and it's getting progressively more expensive to dig it up.

The problem of today is that one cannot store electrical energy all
that well, and long-distance transmission is expensive (and the power
lines are ugly).

Using superconducting cable and bury it. The Germans are working on a super-grid to get electrical power from the Sahara.

Thermal solar stores enough heat for overnight generation.

I can't find the reference right now, but there was an article in the
January issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE within the last few years
on the millennial scale by an Australian, perhaps Derek Abbott, that
lays out the case for solar thermal. The article is very interesting,
but I must say that the author overestimates the practical difficulties
of nuclear, and underestimates the practical difficulties of solar
thermal.

The real practical difficulty of nuclear is finding anywhere to dump the radioactive waste. We've had reactors for fifty years now, and nobody has gota solution for long term storage. The aversion to having nuclear waste stored in your backyard may be unreasonable, but it seems to be universal.

Solar thermal electricity generation is still under development but there are two substantial prototype systems running in Spain - 20MW since 2009, and 17MW since 2011 and there are bigger systems that should be completed this year

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

Doubling painless?

Aluminium refineries - where the cost of electrical power is a large fraction of the running cost - won't find it painless. Few - if any - other manufacturing processes are that energy intensive. The world economy coped with a quadrupling in the price of oil during the 1973 oil crisis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

People took to being more economical with energy ...

Well, in the US, fracking has caused the cost of natural gas to drop
well below coal, and we are now reading stories of US industries moving
factories back to the US to take advantage of this new low energy cost.
So, a general doubling of electricity prices will most likely cause
factories to move away.

There's not a lot of point in switching to more expensive renewable energy in one country if everybody can move away and keep on burning fossil carbonfor fuel.

Happily, India and China have even more to fear from anthropogenic global warming than the US - it's much more difficult for them to keep their population fed, and they haven't got the option of diverting corn from feeding cattle to feeding humans if floods or drought cut back agricultural yields.

It is far from obvious that the poor of those countries would list
global warming very high in their list of concerns. Their most
fundamental problem is that there are far fewer jobs of any description
than people.

None the less, as anthropogenic global warming makes agriculture less productive - and it's already having this effect, mainly by making floods and droughts more common - the poor start complaining about the increasing price of food, and shortages of their preferred crops.

Yes, today, except that the amount of warming isn't large today - if it
were large, the terms of debate would be far different.

It's already large enough to make a difference, and getting worse at a steadily increasing rate as we burn more fossil carbon every year.

But the point was about the future.


I have recently been reading stories that the Chinese government is
putting in clean-air laws, but the problem they are solving is the
extreme smog in some Chinese cities. They are not worrying about
carbon dioxide.

They are worrying about carbon dioxide. Why do you think they now dominate the market for photovoltaic generators? At the moment their most cost-effective investment is in shutting down 8% efficient coal-fired generating plants and replacing them with 40% efficient modern plants, but they know that they are going to have to move into renewable power if they want to deliverwestern levels of electric power to the whole of their population.

I don't see any evidence that the Chinese think that the cost of coal
will double from increased consumption (increases in scale usually
cause the cost per unit to drop), or that they think that solar is the
way to go.

Then you haven't looked very hard.

Coal and oil are finite resources, and doubling consumption means digging up less accessible sources - doubling consumption certainly isn't going to lower the unit price.

Manufacturing solar-powered generating gear is a different story - there you can expect a ten-fold increase in production volume to halve the unit cost.

Germany did exactly that with solar panels a few years ago, and dominated the market for a few years, until China repeated the exercise and knocked the Germans out of that market.

It's never obvious how manufacturing on a larger scale is going to cut the unit price - people keep on seeing ways of making large volumes of stuff more cheaply, but it's all bright ideas and innovation rather any single predictable change.

Well, judging by actions and words, the Chinese do not seem to believe
this. Far more persuasion is needed.

You haven't been paying enough attention.

The Chinese government has not expressed any nervousness about global
warming that I've seen. Can you provide a reference?

The US declined to sign the first Kyoto treaty because the Chinese
would not agree to reduce their emission by the stated percentage. The
reason the Chinese gave was that the West had developed by burning coal
and oil, and that the Chinese needed to do the same, or be forever
poor. More recently, the Chinese have been proposing that the CO2
limits should be per capita, not per country.

That seems perfectly reasonable.

By the way, there is an article in the Wall Street Journal by Matt
Ridley (14 September 2013 issue, page C3) saying that the upcoming
report of the IPCC will reduce the predicted warming levels.

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014241278873245490045790675324857124
64.html?KEYWORDS=matt+ridley>

The Wall Street Journal has a long history of publishing denialist propaganda as if it was objective news.

"A Canadian mathematician and blogger named Steve McIntyre" is more usuallydescribed as a card-carrying denialist.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Steve_McIntyre

So, we are back where we began - only if China, India, and Pakistan are
convinced will there be any real and lasting change.

China digs up 49.5% of the world's coal every year. The US is second at 14.1%, and India is third at about 5%. Australia is close to India, but we ship most of it to China. China also leads the world on CO2 emissions, but it's not much ahead of the US.

India and Pakistan are minor league. China and the US have the resources todevelop large scale renewable energy generating plant. Once it's - relatively - cheap and reliable, everybody else will buy it.

The US has a problem with people who own and largely run the country - theyalso own a lot of the oil and coal. So it's going to be China that ends upmaking a lot of money out of that business.

 

[Bill Sloman]

As for the above paragraphs, I was not adopting a position on AGW.

Sure you are. "Not proven", which all the denialist propaganda machine hopes to achieve.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt

Yes, I have an opinion, but it actually does not affect the main
argument here, so I didn't state it here - that's for a different
debate. But see next.


Yes, it does take some time to work the bugs out of any technology,
satellite radiometers included. The problem with any sparse set of
measurements is that one is always vulnerable to questions about the
places not measured.

Some of the isotope ratio based proxies are genuinely global.

The advantage of satellite observation is that it
is not at all sparse. That network of ground observation points is
then used to provide ground truth to calibrate the satellite data, and
the satellites fill in the gaps between the ground observation points.

My opinion is that this is how the questions about presence or absence
of warming, and if it is trending up or down, will finally be settled.

It's been settled, but the denialists have been all too successful in persuading the unsophisticated that the debate is still active.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt

The point was that because Germany got so much energy from renewable
sources, electricity bills were double what they would otherwise have
been, so pointing out that Germany gets 25% from renewable sources
does not refute the point being made. Instead, it is somewhere between
neutral and supporting the point.

I was questioning the "doubling" figure. The Wall Street Journal is not an unbiased or reliable source in this area, as I demonstrated below.

The WSJ was quoting Der Spiegel. You might wish to read the actual Der
Spiegel article. John Larkin found the URL. It's quite interesting.
I particularly liked the part about ice cream. That had to hurt.

<http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-ge
rman-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html>


As always, the issue is economic. Exactly this approach was suggested
in the PIEEE article.

The economic of allowing unrestricted anthropogenic global warming aren't attractive either. At some point or other, the Greenland ice cap is going toslide off into the Atlantic and we are going to have to rebuild every lastone of our coastal cities. Switching to renewable energy earlier rather later is going to be quite a bit cheaper than doing that.

But at very low density.

Not true. A big chunk of molten salt stores a lot of heat.

The person that solves the storage problem
will become very rich.

True. I get lists of published papers from the American Journal of Chemistry and about half of them seem to be on work that might lead to better batteries or cheaper photovoltaic systems, some of them offering power storage as well as solar energy capture.

Anyway, I was introducing the following PIEEE article, which goes into
storage and transmission issues. The issue is what one means by
"sustainable".


Fifty years is not millennial scale.

It's long enough to illustrate that the problem is intractable.

The reason we have so much trouble with current reactor design is a
historical oddity. The original development of boiling-water power
reactors was by the US Navy, to power the nuclear subs that were one
leg of the deterrence triad during the Cold War. All subsequent
commercial designs used this as the starting point.

Not strictly true. "Breeder" reactors were developed - and work - but everybody hates processing plutonium.

Anyway, the engineering journals have articles from time to time on
various next-generation reactors that do not have the problems of
boiling-water reactor. The political problem has not become acute
enough to cause sufficient money for full-scale development to appear,
but little research efforts continue, and one or more of these
proposals will be developed some day.

Not until we solve the storage problem.

Here is one such research effort, from Bill Gates:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower>

One hundred years isn't millenial scale either.

Spain is better suited to solar than Germany for sure, but still the
Spanish have not figured out how to get the Sun to shine at night.

Which is why they have gone for molten salt thermal solar where you can store enough heat to keep the turbines spinning overnight. Thermal time constants rise rather rapidly with scale.

The Germans are planning on building their solar power plants in the Saharaand shipping the power north via a super-grid.

In the US, many of the aluminum refineries are in the Tennessee Valley
Authority service area, for just that reason.

So what.

But it isn't true that nobody else cares. There is a whole spectrum.
For instance, steel mills and forges. Heavy industry in general.

I didn't say that "nobody cares". What I said was that the process was survivable, and wasn't going to disrupt society or drive us all into poverty, any more than the 1973 oil crisis did. That wasn't fun, but didn't start anyrevolutions either.

Yep, and it's happening.


My question was not what they should believe, but what they in fact
*do* believe.

China seems to be convinced, though you won't have read that in the Wall Street Journal.

As for alcohol from corn in the US, there has been study after study
that shows that corn ethanol is a dead loss (costing more fossil energy
to produce than the resulting alcohol contains), and is forcing the
world cost of food up, starving the poor (one quarter of the US corn
crop goes into ethanol).

Sure. It was a simple bribe to buy the US farming vote. The US political system isn't in good shape, and seriously needs to be dragged into the 20th century. The 21st century would be better, but they need to learn crawl before they can walk.

The only reason it continues is that the major farm states have been
able to protect the federal subsidy. The standard corporate bad guy is
Archer-Daniels-Midland.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Inequality-Endangers-ebook/dp/B007MKCQ30


Actually, there have been multiple articles in Science and Nature
showing that increase CO2 makes the plants grow bigger and faster.

In greenhouses, with unlimited supplies of water and other nutrients, whereweed control isn't a problem. In the field, weeds do even better than our carefully selected crop plants when you change the environment.

But the current rise isn't enough to have much of an effect, so we are
back to a population that is too large for its economy.

The current level of anthropogenic global warming is having it's main effect by making extreme weather more frequent. Even slightly warmer global temperatures translate into more water vapour in the atmosphere, and more latent heat of vapourisation to fuel storms and higher wind speeds.

"CO2 is a fertiliser" is one of the denialist mantras, and it's rubbish.

The future starts tomorrow.

Ad hominem argument; does not answer the question.

I did go on to point out that they were putting money into solar power, so the comment was valid.

And the bit about increasing volume causing decreasing unit cost is
Econ 101.

Then you need to move on to Econ 201, and get a better idea of the processes involved, as I point out below. You were applying a rule of thumb in an area where it doesn't work.

Ad hominem argument; does not answer the question.

You've been relying on the Wall Street Journal for your information, and itshows. Australian newspapers pay a lot more attention to China - it's our biggest export market and we are seriously interested in how they are doingand where they are going.

Try reading something other than the Wall Street Journal.

It's true that WSJ doesn't really believe in AGW, but what does that
have to do with the article from Matt Ridley giving an advance peek at
the coming IPCC report? You might wish to read the article.

I did - whence the comment below.

What does this have to do with the above?

Matt Ridley quoted Steve McIntyre as if he was an unbiased commentator. Either Matt Ridley doesn't know anything about the subject he's writing about,or he's consciously peddling denialist propaganda. Either way, that singleomission vitiates the whole article.

If China, with a largely poor population (where $5/day is good money),
already burns half the world's coal production today, what will happen
when their average income and thus energy use doubles or triples? The
US per capita income is about five times that of China.

There isn't enough coal available to let them double or triple their energyuse by burning fossil carbon. They've got to go renewable just to satisfy the demand.

Not exactly. Although I'll grant that the Chinese economy is far
larger, my point was about huge populations of poor people who very
much do not want to be poor, and the fact that India and Pakistan are
poorer than China reinforces that point.

Burning more coal isn't going to get them out of poverty. The isn't enough coal to start with, and the consequent run-away anthropogenic global warming would make them even poorer, not richer.

Per capita, the gap isn't nearly as wide as per-country.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_cap
ita>

Developing cost effective renewable energy generating plant involves investing a critical mass of cash. Per capita doesn't come into it

Well, maybe yes and maybe no, but neither of us will live to see it.

I've probably got twenty years to go - maybe longer. My mother is 95.

But it's clear that China will be a world power by then, no matter
what.

It's a world power already, even if the Wall Street Journal hasn't noticed yet.

 

[Bill Sloman]

Something of an exaggeration. Energy costs have gone up since 2000 but tis's less obvious that the whole rise - or even an appreciable fraction of it can be blamed on the renewable energy sources.

Hey, this is cool:

http://www.spiegel.de/international...-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html

Quotes:

Electricity is becoming a luxury good in Germany, and one of the country's
most important future-oriented projects is acutely at risk.

For society as a whole, the costs have reached levels comparable only to the
euro-zone bailouts.

Journalistic hyperbole, comparing apples and pears.

This year, German consumers will be forced to pay 20
billion euro ($26 billion) for electricity from solar, wind and biogas plants
electricity with a market price of just over 3 billion euro.

On the other hand, when the wind suddenly stops blowing, and in particular
during the cold season, supply becomes scarce. That's when heavy oil and coal
power plants have to be fired up to close the gap, which is why Germany's
energy producers in 2012 actually released more climate-damaging carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere than in 2011.

Not much more, and nowhere near as much extra if the increased power demandhad all been met by burning fossil carbon.

John Larkin is good at seeing what he wants to see. Less good at recognising journalistic hyperbole for what it is.

In fact the thrust of the article was that Germany isn't managing it's renewable energy as well as Sweden does, and it should run it the way Sweden does. There's no real suggestion that renewable energy - as such - is a bad thing, but they do draw attention to places where the administration is fouled up - as in letting pumped storage systems be taken out of service because the owners aren't getting paid enough for keeping them available.

 

[[email protected]]

As for alcohol from corn in the US, there has been study after study
that shows that corn ethanol is a dead loss (costing more fossil energy
to produce than the resulting alcohol contains), and is forcing the
world cost of food up, starving the poor (one quarter of the US corn
crop goes into ethanol).

The only reason it continues is that the major farm states have been
able to protect the federal subsidy. The standard corporate bad guy is
Archer-Daniels-Midland.

I posted some links a few years ago wherein Al "Mostly Carbon" Gore
openly said ethanol took more (fossil) energy to make than it yielded.
And then boasted he was the 51rst vote that made it law.

The ethanol quotas written in under Clinton ramped up through Bush's
administration, and have exploded (as previously scheduled in the law)
under the Hope-n-Change regime. It's madness--we're burning food.

Actually, there have been multiple articles in Science and Nature
showing that increase CO2 makes the plants grow bigger and faster.

But the current rise isn't enough to have much of an effect, so we are
back to a population that is too large for its economy.

My cost of food is up somewhere near 60% under Dear Golfer, the primary cause
being the cost of energy, and DG's insistence on skyrocketing the price
thereof just as he'd said he would.

It's true that WSJ doesn't really believe in AGW, but what does that
have to do with the article from Matt Ridley giving an advance peek at
the coming IPCC report? You might wish to read the article.

Nah, reading is HARD. Here, this one has pictures:

Arctic Ice Caps Grow By 60 Percent
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[Bill Sloman]

That's US politics for you

http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Inequality-Endangers-ebook/dp/B007MKCQ30

I posted some links a few years ago wherein Al "Mostly Carbon" Gore
openly said ethanol took more (fossil) energy to make than it yielded.
And then boasted he was the 51rst vote that made it law.

But you refuse to notice the way the defects in the US political system feeds this corporate pork-barrelling

The ethanol quotas written in under Clinton ramped up through Bush's
administration, and have exploded (as previously scheduled in the law)
under the Hope-n-Change regime. It's madness--we're burning food.

It's part of the keep-making-the-richer US political system. It got nothingto do with anthropogenic global warming (except that that was used to provide a fig-leaf for teh rip-off).

In greenhouses, when they've got plenty of water and other nutrients.

My cost of food is up somewhere near 60% under Dear Golfer, the primary cause
being the cost of energy, and DG's insistence on skyrocketing the price
thereof just as he'd said he would.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Inequality-Endangers-ebook/dp/B007MKCQ30



Nah, reading is HARD. Here, this one has pictures:

In fact I did read it, and noticed that Steve McIntyre was quoted as if he was a disinterested observer, rather than a denialist mouthpiece. It vitiates the entire article - either the author knows squat about the subject or he's knowingly peddling denialist propaganda. The Wall Street Journal's record in the area suggest the latter.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Steve_McIntyre

Arctic Ice Caps Grow By 60 Percent

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html

In area, not thickness - from a very low summer minimum to a pretty low total area. It's more denialist propaganda. The Daily Mail is a cheap rag, anddoesn't look at free copy too carefully. John Larkin was too gullible to realise that he'd been suckered. Your politcal blinkers blind you just as effectively.

 

[Martin Riddle]

Hey, this is cool:

http://www.spiegel.de/international...-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html

Quotes:

Electricity is becoming a luxury good in Germany, and one of the country's most
important future-oriented projects is acutely at risk.

For society as a whole, the costs have reached levels comparable only to the
euro-zone bailouts. This year, German consumers will be forced to pay €20
billion ($26 billion) for electricity from solar, wind and biogas plants --
electricity with a market price of just over €3 billion

On the other hand, when the wind suddenly stops blowing, and in particular
during the cold season, supply becomes scarce. That's when heavy oil and coal
power plants have to be fired up to close the gap, which is why Germany's energy
producers in 2012 actually released more climate-damaging carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere than in 2011.

Makes sense, Germany is retiring Nuclear power plants at an
accelerated rate. Just one plant is almost worth about a Giga watt.
Now what do you suppose you replace that with in winter time? Coal or
oil? Maybe you'll hear more of the term Co-gen in the future.

Cheers

 

[Bill Sloman]

Seems to me that any place that has a lot of coal might have frackable natural
gas. The greenies should love fracking; ng is far cleaner than coal and makes
half the CO2. But they hate it, and are fighting to stop it, because they
don't really care about CO2; they hate all energy, and basically hate
civilization.

Most of the objections to fracking are based on the risk of it contaminating ground water. There may be greenies who hate all energy and want to go back to the stone age. I've never met any, and it certainly isn't part of Green Party policy in Australia.

As far as I know their official position is that renewable energy is fine, and more of it is better. They aren't worried that it is currently twice asexpensive as energy generated by burning fossil carbon - fossil carbon is getting more expensive as we run out of easily accessible deposits, and renewable energy prices are going to halve several times in the process of ramping up our renewable energy generating capacity until it can take over from fossil carbon fueled generators. Wind power is apparently on schedule to hit parity in 2017 (if IEEE Spectrum is to be believed), large scale thermal solar is supposed to be there already, and even photovoltaic generation isn't much more than a decade away from parity.

The people who have it in for civilisation would seem to be the people who don't want curb the rate that we inject CO2 into the atmosphere. The planetdid work fine with lots more CO2 in the atmosphere some 55 million years ago, but it didn't suit the species that had evolved to exploit a cooler climate - a lot of new species evolved to occupy newly created ecological niches.

Our civilisation is exquisitely well-adapted to our current weather patterns and sea levels. It's going to be a lot easier to adapted to slightly moreexpensive electricity from renewable sources than it is going to be to adapt to new crop plants in the new places that are going to get the rain fromthe new climate.

The Sahara was a good place to live 8000 years ago

http://www.livescience.com/4180-sahara-desert-lush-populated.html

The climate change from then to now isn't a big as the one we seem to be dead set on effecting now.

 

[Bill Sloman]

What you are in effect saying that nobody can get it to work, not even
after 50 years of effort. I don't know about you, but predicting even
five years into the future rarely works.

The problem with storing nuclear waste isn't technical - there are lots of schemes that would work - but with human opinion. Nobody wants even the safest nuclear repository in their backyard, and that's unlikely to change.

That's the point of the TerraPower and allied approaches.

Having a reactor that runs for a hundred years and can then be buried for the next 100,000 until the waste has become safe makes the nuclear reactor the waste repository.

Nuclear power can be millennial scale, but it does not follow that any
single reactor design will last 1,000 years.

No, but once it stops working it stays radioactive for about 100,000 years

Where would you suggest one look?

Sydney Morning Herald?

https://smh.digitaleditions.com.au/

Weeds do grow better too, but so what? That's an independent problem.

There are a lot more different species of weeds than there are of crop plants. Change the environment and one of those weeds is going to like the new conditions a lot more than our crop plants.

I've read the experiments in those denialist rags, Science and Nature.

Not carefully enough. In the wild, some trees are doing better - they have retained the capacity to shrink their stomata to match the rising CO2 level, so they lose less water diffusing out per unit CO2 diffusing in.

It's less obvious that our food crops are so blessed. Plants have been adapting to CO2 levels cycling between 180ppm during ice ages and up to 300ppm during interglacials for the last 2.6 million years. It's not likely that they've got the capacity to fully exploit the the 400pmm level we have today(which hasn't been seen for the past 20 million years) and they will be even less well-equipped to exploit 500 and 600ppm levels if we are silly enough to keep on pumping out CO2 at the current rate and faster.

Umm. Mining coal is a very well understood art, with centuries of
experience.


China is the US's biggest trading partner, and we hear all about China
in the papers here.

I also read The New York Times.

What specific publications would you suggest people read?

https://smh.digitaleditions.com.au/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China

Most estimates are that we have a thousand years worth of coal in the
ground.

Digging it out gets progressively more difficult and expensive as you go on..

The economies of scale mean that wind power is due to hit parity in 2017. Thermal solar isn't far behind, photovoltaic may take another decade or so.

It makes better sense to ride the reducing costs of renewable power down, rather than keeping on using progressively more expensive fossil carbon, andaggravating global warming in the process.

And - as a chemist - I hate to see perfectly good chemical feedstock being burned for fuel.

They do not see it that way.

Then they will find out the hard way.

In economics, yes. In military matters, well they are working on it,
and I assume that they will get there.

Military power isn't everything, any more than financial power is.

I will be offline for a few weeks, so you may have the last word.

No chance of that.