Looks like we do not have to do anything about global warming...

[ERD50]

Quote:

Originally Posted by . . . Yrs to Go It would be easier if you would provide links to your sources . . .

Yes, guilty as charged and I apologize - bad form on my part. I was trying to get out the door, and I just didn't have time to dig up the links.

Quote:

SPM2feb07.pdf doesn't register a definitive hit, even at the IPCC web site.

Curious - I have it downloaded to my computer. When I searched I found many refs to a link on the ipcc website, but that appears to be dead now, and a site search comes up empty?

***www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf*** <<< dead link?

They may have newer data on this, but they should keep the old around for reference. OK, the same data is in the 18 page summary, linked from wiki:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Quote:

Warming and sea level rise will continue for centuries, even if greenhouse gas was not used any more, the amount of warming and sea level rise depends on how much fossil fuel is burnt for the next 100 years (pages 13 and 18)[7].

ref # 7 is here:

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/WG...oved_05Feb.pdf

Quote:

and I assume "without the hot air" references this . . .David MacKay FRS: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Contents which I'll take a look at. ... So I'm scanning the "hot air" document and nowhere do I see a recommendation that everyone in the UK be forced to live like a "Chinese Peasant". Instead I see he thinks that by 2050 transportation should be electrified, electricity should be produced from "clean sources", buildings should be really well insulated, some crop land is devoted to bio fuels, move to light emitting diodes, etc, etc. And his estimated cost to do this in today's dollars . . . ₤14,635 / per person.

Yes, that is it. But I don't see your ₤14,635 / per person number - can you point it out? What I see is:


[page 111-112]

Quote:

To make a difference, renewable facilities have to be country-sized. ... To get a big contribution from wind, we used wind farms with the area of Wales. To get a big contribution from solar photovoltaics, we required half the area of Wales. To get a big contribution from waves, we imagined wave farms covering 500 km of coastline. To make energy crops with a big contribution, we took 75% of the whole country. To sustain Britain’s lifestyle on its renewables alone would be very difficult. A renewable-based energy solution will necessarily be large and intrusive.

And page 103, his 'red stack' is consumption, his 'green stack' is production of renewables - he manages to get them to almost match, but...

Quote:

The red stack in figure 18.1 adds up to 195 kWh per day per person. The green stack adds up to about 180 kWh/d/p. A close race! But please remember: in calculating our production stack we threw all economic, social, and environmental constraints to the wind. Also, some of our green contributors are probably incompatible with each other: our photovoltaic panels and hot-water panels would clash with each other on roofs; and our solar photovoltaic farms using 5% of the country might compete with the energy crops with which we covered 75% of the country. If we were to lose just one of our bigger green contributors – for example, if we decided that deep offshore wind is not an option, or that panelling 5% of the country with photovoltaics at a cost of £200 000 per person is not on – then the production stack would no longer match the consumption stack.

-ERD50

[Texas Proud]

One of the points of the article was that a reduction in emissions does nothing... repeat.. nothing... for the long term rise in sea level... there is already enough global warming gasses in the air to do the damage...


An analogy... we have all heard that it takes a long time to stop or turn an oil tanker... and I remember reading an article from this reporter who was on a training simulator for driving a ship.... he was in some narrow passage and did not make the turn when he should have.... the instructor told him he was going to crash.. IIRC it took 5 minutes for the ship to crash... but when the instructor told the guy, it was already to late...


From what I am reading from a lot of the articles... we have past the point and we are going to crash... maybe the question is can we do anything to make the crash 'softer' or not... but we are going to crash none the less... all the people who talk about limiting the global warming gasses seem to imply that we can avoid the crash... but when push comes to shove they seem to admit that 'something' will happen... and they do not know the real answer to what that 'something' really is.... and they can not tell us if the crash that will happen will be X amount greater or lessor if we did what they want... the range of errors overlap... so we can be not so bad if we do nothing.. or we can be really bad even if we do everything...

I just want to know what benefit I will get with the tens of thousand of dollars they want me to spend to 'pollute' less.... now, with a lot of the older problems... we got cleaner air, cleaner water... stuff that was easy to see the benefits... here I can not see for sure any real benefit when it comes to the water rising... again, there might be clean air benefits and some other good things that can come out of some of this... we will see...

[lets-retire]

As I read through the pages a few things that occurred to me.

Britain, from what I've heard, is already having trouble meeting it's electricity requirements.

The warmest modern year on record was 1998. Atmospheric CO2 has continued to increase in the last 11 years, but the temperature has not. This causes a huge question in my mind as to how important CO2 really is at effecting the weather.

As to Pascal's argument, believing because it is better then not believe is not belief. It is covering your bases. Personally I choose not to believe.

We already have the technology to lower our carbon footprint. From reports I've read the majority of our oil and coal consumption comes as a result of the production of electricity. Simply changing to nuclear power plants would reduce the CO2 output. I do agree that the problem of disposal of nuclear waste is an issue. But as a nuclear scientist once told me, "The solution to pollution is dilution." I don't know, but would it be possible to maybe take the nuclear waste and basically reverse enrich it? So instead of pulling radioactive atoms out of unenriched material we put it back in non-radioactive material.

[ERD50]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lets-retire The warmest modern year on record was 1998. Atmospheric CO2 has continued to increase in the last 11 years, but the temperature has not. This causes a huge question in my mind as to how important CO2 really is at effecting the weather.

While I understand the difference between short term changes and long term trends, I found this piece to be very interesting. The New York Times, no less, reporting that reputable scientists propose we may not see any global warming over a 30 year period (emph mine):

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/sc...3cool.htm?_r=1

Quote:

Mojib Latif, a prize-winning climate and ocean scientist from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel, in Germany, wrote a paper last year positing that cyclical shifts in the oceans were aligning in a way that could keep temperatures over the next decade or so relatively stable, even as the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming continued to increase. ... faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years [ERD50 note - see how they changed "the next decade or so" to "the next few years"?].

Interesting spin. 30 years (the past 10 plus two more decades) of no global warming isn't a good thing according to NYT, it is an inconvenience for those people who are trying to tell us how bad global warming is. We can't let a little detail like no increase in global temperature affect our thinking on global temperature!

30 years! Gosh, I probably won't even live long enough to know how this turns out. Darn it!


-ERD50

[samclem]

I'm guessing Dr Latif won't be getting an invitation to Al Gore's Christmas party at the mansion.

If we get a decade or two of stable temps, we can all just hop in our flying cars to go to higher ground before the water comes up.

Even the most ardent believers in man-made GW concede that higher CO2 levels will lead to higher CO2 uptake and binding (by more algae, phytoplankton, etc). If this accelerated re-uptake, together with a reduction in the growth rate of man-made CO2 in the atmosphere (via whatever means) starts reducing overall atmospheric CO2 before the present cyclical climate cooling described by Latif runs its course, we might dodge the global warming bullet entirely (or mostly).

I think a lot of people are having trouble accepting that the climate modellers really know what is coming. The "there's no more need for debate, we have consensus" crowd loses a lot of credibility when the "consensus" model requires frequent significant adjustment in the face of real-world data. "Okay, this time we really mean it" is getting tiresome. Scientific progrss demands continued inquiry and skepticism.

The same goes for retirement portfolio modeling, by the way.

[harley]

It appears this issue of decreased oil production is even more critical than we previously knew! It effects other issues that are of extreme importance.



The Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock, or, Why We’re All Out of Good Songs | Overthinking It

via http://reason.com/blog/

[eridanus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lets-retire The warmest modern year on record was 1998.

2005

[eridanus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ERD50 Interesting spin. 30 years (the past 10 plus two more decades) of no global warming isn't a good thing according to NYT,

First, the last 10 years have seen 4/5 of the hottest years in modern records. The year 2008 was #10.

Second, Latif was mis-quoted. His presentation was about the variability of single-year records compared to the long-term warming trend. In fact, Latif believes in AGW.

So it looks like he'll be at Al Gore's party after all.

[Maurice]

Who would have guessed there were so many climatologists on this site?

[ERD50]

Quote:

Originally Posted by eridanus First, the last 10 years have seen 4/5 of the hottest years in modern records. The year 2008 was #10. Second, Latif was mis-quoted. His presentation was about the variability of single-year records compared to the long-term warming trend. In fact, Latif believes in AGW. So it looks like he'll be at Al Gore's party after all.

Yes, I did get the impression that Latif believes that there are underlying, long term global warming mechanisms in action. And that these 30 year stable temperatures he predicts are masking those.

But I find the NYT response interesting. Seems OK to refer to last ten years as some kind of "proof" of AGW, but thirty years of stable temperature must be explained away. Global temperatures only seem important if they match your view.

And Latif may be right on all counts, but that does give us 30 years to understand this better. Unless we really are at a tipping point now, but in that case I think our future is set anyhow. I suspect that we will get a clearer picture and find better solutions (if needed) in the future.

I like harley's graph - looks like better correlation than anything I've seen in that Nobel Award winning book. I wonder how that would correlate with "years the Rolling Stone Contributors were in their teens"? I'm unable to explain the rise of "great songs" in the late 80's. We should probably throw those samples out, they don't agree with my beliefs .


-ERD50

[FinanceDude]

Al Gore is welcome to come up to Wisconsin anytime this winter, whereupon I will promptly throw him into a snowbank..........

[Texas Proud]

Quote:

Originally Posted by eridanus First, the last 10 years have seen 4/5 of the hottest years in modern records. The year 2008 was #10. Second, Latif was mis-quoted. His presentation was about the variability of single-year records compared to the long-term warming trend. In fact, Latif believes in AGW. So it looks like he'll be at Al Gore's party after all.

Seems the story is gone from the link.... (so not sure you are talking about the original or not)...

But I do not think he was mis-quoted. IIRC, he did believe in global warming... what he said that was not what a lot of other people have siad is 'its to late'... even if we did not put any more global warming gasses into the atmosphere, we will have a large rise in the oceans...

[eridanus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ERD50 Yes, I did get the impression that Latif believes that there are underlying, long term global warming mechanisms in action. And that these 30 year stable temperatures he predicts are masking those. But I find the NYT response interesting. Seems OK to refer to last ten years as some kind of "proof" of AGW, but thirty years of stable temperature must be explained away. Global temperatures only seem important if they match your view.

His presentation was actually about these very arguments. He didn't predict that there would be 30 years of stable temperatures. He suggested that this could happen...and then people would be calling him up and asking why he "lied" about global warming when, in fact, it was still occurring but was masked by a giant heat sink. Of course, the heat sink is easily measured.

[harley]

That's funny. I posted that little laugher chart in this thread as a joke, just because it seemed like the most appropriate place to put it. Then the conversation, which had ended 40 days ago, continued just like there hadn't been a break at all.

It's like when your dvd hangs up for a while, then picks right back up. We've got some accomplished arguers on this forum.

[TromboneAl]

Here's a link that works:

Two meter sea level rise unstoppable: experts | Science | Reuters

Reducing the earth's population from 6 billion to 2 billion over the next 300 years would make it a lot easier to deal with the decreased amount of real estate.

[samclem]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Maurice Who would have guessed there were so many climatologists on this site?

Climatologists, statisticians, psychologists, chaplains, financial planners, astrologers, health care policy--this is one stop shopping.

Pastafarians know the true reason for global warming:

[hguyw]

Oh the irony of it all...

When you drive less, grow some food, buy used, live in a smaller house, turn the lights off, unplug the cell charger when you're not using it, make anything last instead of buying a new shiny one to impress the neighbors, etc., etc., etc. - you're saving money while you do nice things for the planet. And it doesn't matter whether you believe climate change is real or just an evil plot by Al Gore.

Isn't it interesting that the "greener" I go, the cheaper my life gets and the closer I get to ER. Go figure!

[toofrugalformycat]

I've read most of the posts. Perhaps people unconcerned about rising ocean levels (or that don't see it as a big problem - those Bangladeshis can just move!) may have a different take on how important global warming is when they understand that the Southwest U.S. is becoming uninhabitable because of drought. No problem! Just move!
Global Warming Brings Perpetual Drought to U.S. Southwest
This article is quoting an April 2007 Science article that I read back then, but the Science web site is having problems at the moment, and you have to be a member to bring it up anyway.
"Projections of climate change caused by human activities conducted by 19 different climate modeling groups around the world, using different climate models, show widespread agreement that southwestern North America, and the subtropics in general, are heading toward a climate even more arid than it is today. Appearing today in the journal "Science," the research shows that there is a broad consensus amongst climate models that this region will dry in the 21st Century and that the transition to a more arid climate may already be underway.
If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought, or the Dustbowl and 1950s droughts, will, "within the coming years to decades, become the new climatology of the American Southwest," the researchers said."


So can all those Arizonans and Texans and New Mexicans just move? Seems a little less abstract now, doesn't it?

It was this and other articles that made me more or less rule out the Southwest US

as a place to ER, because I have some possibility of living another 30 years.
But even if we can't STOP global warming, I see it as irresponsible to not do what we can to reduce our rate of fouling the planet.

I choose to live as lightly and greenly as I find reasonable, because anything else would be immoral. Serendipitously, as hguyw says above, it keeps expenses down as well. Way down.

[hguyw]

Quote:

Originally Posted by toofrugalformycat I choose to live as lightly and greenly as I find reasonable, because anything else would be immoral.

Amen to that.