Climate researchers; They call this science? more

[jshore]

GreyMatters, it gets a bit tiresome to argue against highly selective and distorted facts and opinions (with no cites, of course), but I will try to respond to the issues that I do know about off the top of my head.

*Originally posted by GreyMatters *

1. The mechanisms of the climate have not been completely discovered. The small parts of the climate we do know about are not even fully understood. As the IPPC summary states, this is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, …

Yes, we know there are considerable uncertainties. We’ve already talked about the fact that IPCC gives a quite broad range (2.5 to 10.4 F) of predicted temperature rises by 2100 precisely because of such uncertainties. But, in particular, the fact that a system is coupled non-linear and chaotic does not mean you can’t say anything about it. In particular, it is a much different problem to predict the climate than it is to predict the weather. The system being chaotic has much more to say about the inability to predict, say, what the exact weather will be in Washington D.C. a year from today than it does the climate in general. Not to say that the nonlinearity has no impact on climate…there are concerns, as noted in something that sirjamesp posted to earlier that the climate could change abruptly and that forcings, especially those that are currently being put on the climate system by humans, could contribute to such abrupt change. There is a recent NAS report on this. This research is still pretty preliminary and, in fact, most of the global warming naysayers have tried to downplay it since it doesn’t exactly support their case for not being concerned about the the human impact on climate! Anyway, here is a link to the chapter of the NAS report that discusses the connection between global warming and abrupt climate change: http://books.nap.edu/books/0309074347/html/82.html#pagetop (By the way, you might want to note the sentence, “It is now the consensus of the scientific community that the changes observed over the last several decades are most likely in significant part the result of human activities and that human-induced warming is expected to continue.”)

5. The data used to support any of the theories is all over the place. Urban temperatures, sea temperatures, Antarctic temps, atmospheric temps are all in some disagreement with one theory or another. Which means that, at the very least, we have little to no idea how any of these sub-systems work. But, then they turn right around and say, “Yep, it is definitally man made.”

Needless to say you are vastly oversimplifying the reasoning that has gone into the conclusion that we are most likely already seeing anthropogenic warming in the climate system. As to the temperature data, hey, there is an NAS study on that too (concentrating especially on the surface temps. vs. the temps in the lower and mid troposphere as measured by satellites and balloons). I linked to it earlier in this thread, but since for you actually reading what I write and linke to seems to take a distance second place to criticizing it, I will link to the finding part of the report again for your benefit: http://books.nap.edu/books/0309068916/html/21.html#pagetop

So, again, I note, we have the National Academy of Sciences and the IPCC on one side and GreyMatters on the other. Just who are we to believe?

*Originally posted by Kimstu *
Oh. Well, hey, the most reliable predictions are the ones that are already true, right?

Can’t argue with that!

[sleestak]

*Originally posted by Anthracite *
**

There are also many cases where subsidies are a really good idea - subsidy is not a dirty word. I have no figures of course, but it seems reasonable to imagine that a huge amount of of that nuclear research either went towards safety, or went towards increasing awareness and operations controls, which leads towards safety.

**

I don’t have a number but I do know a huge amount of money went to government labs for saftey research on nuclear power. How do I know? My Dad ran the nuclear reactor saftey division at Sandia Labs for like 18 years.

Heck, my Dad once bought an F-4 Phantom and ran it into a wall at ~580 mph to test the wall. The test came about because someone raised the question on what would happen if a plane fell on a containment dome. I’ve seen the footage on the Discovery channel and had an 8x10 of the plane about half way through the impact. It’s quite cool. BTW, the wall passed with flying colors. The deepest dent was ~2.5 inches. The wall was 12 feet thick and made of concrete and rebar.

Slee

[jshore]

*Originally posted by sleestak *
Heck, my Dad once bought an F-4 Phantom and ran it into a wall at ~580 mph to test the wall.

I hope your Dad got Sandia to at least chip in a bit for the plane!

[jshore]

Here are a couple of links about the test that sleestak referred to. Note that this test apparently does not really demonstrate what some in the nuclear industry have claimed it demonstrates because an F-4 is much smaller than a jumbo jet and the test was designed to measure the forces on the wall and not to see whether the wall would withstand the impact and was thus unrealistic in various ways for assessing the latter question:

http://www.nci.org/02NCI/01/back-27.htm
http://www.nctimes.com/news/2001/20011006/11111.html

[Una_Persson]

Originally posted by Ace_Face *
**
By cost, of course. But using a definition that takes externalities into account. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/september5/windpower-95.html
Even without accounting for externalities, wind has seen significant cost reductions the past few decades – if one assumes a continuation of this trend, wind will indeed be cheaper than coal someday soon. Add the environmental benefits and I think it’s more than competitive – it would be a rout except for the geographical limitations of wind.*

The problem is, even though that article is just a news report of an article published by two people I never heard of (which doesn’t mean anything except that I would like to see more facts), this is the key thing that people ignore:

“Much of the recent U.S. energy debate has focused on increasing coal use,” they note. “Since the 1980s, though, the direct cost of energy from large wind turbines has dropped to 3 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with that from new pulverized-coal power plants. Given that health and environmental costs of coal are another 2 to 4.3 cents per kilowatt-hour, wind energy is unequivocally less expensive than is coal energy.”

Can you tell me the three statements in this quote which are either misleading or demand some sort of proof?

1. “Much of the recent U.S. energy debate has focused on increasing coal use”. Yes, there’s been a lot of debate. However, with all of the environmental factors at play, but most importantly the capital versus O&M cost tradoff mentality of utilities and genco’s today, coal is not making up the majority, or even a large part of new power production in the US in the last 10 years. Gas is. I defer to the EPRI EEPIC report (public domain) for the most authoritative estimate on how coal is going to contribute to the future energy needs of the US.

2. “comparable with that from new pulverized-coal power plants.” What percent of US power generated from coal is generated by new coal plants? Very…very…little. IIRC, the average age for operating coal plants in the US was 29 years in 1998. And because these plants have been grandfathered into much of the CAA Amendment legislation, they for the most part have not needed to install scrubbers, SCRs, etc. Now, this is not really a good thing - polluting more. BUT…one cannot compare wind power with new coal plants to say they are an “affordable alternative to coal” without qualifying the statement.

Also…at the time the article was written, there was still not a good idea of what the capital and O&M costs of scrubbers, low NOx burners, SCRs (especially!) was going to be. From my work with actual clients that have them in place and operating, I know that they are cheaper than people expected. I cannot give true prices here, but I will see if I can find something online to support my assertion. Otherwise, I don’t really have any backing other than proprietary and anecdotal. (hey, at least I admit when I don’t have a source to share…you gotta admire that, right?)

3. “Given that health and environmental costs of coal are another 2 to 4.3 cents per kilowatt-hour” - I’d love to see how this number was calculated. I’m not arguing there is a number, but this is really, really, quite high.

That having been said…I agree there are externalities, and I agree that renewable energy must increase, by some means. I hope wind can deliver even half of what its proponents claim, because I sure would like to see it succeed.

[David_Simmons]

*Originally posted by Ace_Face *
**

And the current power infrastructure won’t support transmitting large amounts of juice from, say, California to Georgia – i.e transmission tends to be state- and regional-level, but not national (maybe more R&D $ should go into high-temperture superconductors as well?). I’d be happy to be wrong about that though – it would mean large wind farms could be developed in windy, rural, midwestern locations, and shipped across the country.
**

This discussion isn’t really germane to the subject of the OP but … (there is always a “but”). True, electric power can’t be shipped coast to coast. We have to think of all power generation in the country as one big system. A lot of coal is currently carried by rail into California, for example, for electric power generation. If California could develop significant wind-power generation then that coal wouldn’t need to be transported here. And there are rail lines running toward the east from the mines so the coal could be shipped in that direction. In effect this would be the shipment of wind from California to, say, Iowa or maybe Ohio.

Owing to the sensitivity of Washington and Oregon about California “stealing” their water I wouldn’t want this to get out. Washington water is already being shipped, in effect, to California. There are a number of pumped storage generating plants here, like the San Luis dam in the Central Valley, that use Washington’s water to conserve California’s. But, as I said, I wouldn’t want that to get widely known in the northwest.

[jshore]

At the risk of beating a dead horse, there is one more thought that has sort of been stirring in the back of my mind that I thought I ought to bring up.

GreyMatters and some others who have argued the contrarian side here are fond of bringing up ways in which they believe there are uncertainties in our understanding of the climate system. However, the irony of the debate as it is actually occurring between the scientific consensus and those few contrarian scientists with reasonable credentials in the field is that the scientific consensus as expressed by IPCC and NAS honestly expresses a fairly wide range of uncertainty in the magnitude of the effect.

On the other hand, these few contrarian scientists often claim to have extremely specific knowledge of what is going to happen. I already gave the example of Lindzen who seems to know exactly how much the earth will warm in response to a doubling of CO2, whereas the IPCC gives a fairly broad range. And, likewise, Patrick Michaels says very specifically that the warming will be 1.5 deg C over the next 100 years (which puts him right at the bottom edge of the IPCC range of 1.4 deg C) but claims even further knowledge in knowing exactly where the warming will almost all occur (in areas with shallow cold dry high pressure systems, if you want the details).

Finally, there is a British forecast meteorologist who was cited by a local TV weatherman here as another global warming naysayer. (Unfortunately, I can’t dig up his name at the moment.) If you go to this guy’s web site, you find that he claims to be able to predict the weather on particular days 1 to 2 years in advance on the basis of solar cycles, etc. In other words, he doesn’t believe that the atmosphere is a complicated coupled nonlinear chaotic system at all!

In this sense, the people who are often dubbed “skeptics” (and I have even used this term here) are often anything but skeptical in the positive connotation with which that term is often used. Rather, they are quite certain in having special knowledge of exactly what is going to happen.

In a related vein, here is what the IPCC working group I technical summary has to say about the issue of chaos and how it impacts the climate models:

Many aspects of the Earth’s climate system are chaotic – its evolution is sensitive to small perturbations in initial conditions. This sensitivity limits predictability of the
detailed evolution of weather to about two weeks. However, predictability of climate is not so limited because of the systematic influences on the atmosphere of the more slowly varying components of the climate system. Nevertheless, to be able to make reliable forecasts in the presence of both initial condition and model uncertainty, it is desirable to repeat the prediction many times from different perturbed initial states and using different global models. These ensembles are the basis of probability forecasts of the climate state.

By the way, they use a similar approach now, of using both several different models and by using several different initial conditions (what they call “ensembles”) in weather forecasting, particularly in the 5-14 day time frame. See http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/ and particularly http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/610day/fxus06.html. The extent to which the different members of the ensemble stay “clustered together” gives them a good idea of how reliable the model predictions are…i.e., how insensitive they are to small perturbations. And this can really vary…some days the ensemble members are all over the map in their predictions whereas other times they can all be in very good agreement. (In case you can’t tell, I’ve been fascinated by weather and weather forecasting since I was a little kid.)

[GreyMatters]

I do agree in spirit with your last post Jshore. It is a good post, but it is something I have acknowledged.

In most regards I like what the scientists of the IPCC did for that report. They used the best tools they had, the best thoeries on atmospheric resonse to CO2 concentration levels, with the most up to date data, and they did use a valid approach. However, I do not think any of these things the scientists used are advanced enough to tell us any kind of a trend.

I think that we have the potential to understand everything that goes into the dynamics of our atmosphere. Humans just aren’t there yet.