And the truth was that GM has, so far, not intended it to be a car sold on a wide release. At the levels it is being sold it is really a gross exaggeration to claim that nobody wants it.
I still can see that it will not be a big hit, but it is doing good in it’s niche, what I will expect is to see new cars models with improved technology, and if not the Volt, then we will see others.
As I see it the issue is still the nonsense of not putting the real costs of releasing so much CO2 in the atmosphere into the value of things like coal and other fossil fuels.
At the levels it is being sold it’s a gross exaggeration to claim that anybody wants it. The definition of not selling cars is… wait for it… not selling cars.
absolutely. We’ll be drowning in electric cars when the battery technology catches up to the utility value expected of cars. I’ve said this many times but you can’t stand to see anything green berated because of your obsession with global warming.
And as I see it, the real world can’t afford to destroy what little is left of the global economy because by doing so we will NEVER see green technology advance. Have you ever looked at pictures of cities during the great depression? Not a lot of trees around. Guess where they went when people couldn’t afford to heat their homes? The law of unintended consequences will add more co2 to the air then reduce it if we continue on the financial path you suggest.
Piffle, once again you are reaching for a contradiction, you are indeed implying that there **is **a problem. Your obsession is clearly with finding contradictions on others were there are not, while you are happy to keep yours.
You are not the first to make this argument. Lindzen made it with his postulated “iris effect” and Eschenbach has made it with his temperature “governor”. Neither of them argue against water vapour feedback however - instead they argue for a large negative cloud feedback. Cloud feedback is still uncertain and might just turn out to be a net negative, but it is unlikely to be large.
It is perfectly true that the Earth’s temperature has been remarkably stable over a wide range of conditions including a much weaker Sun and different arrangements of continents. However, note that this limited temperature variation has still included both ice-ages and ice-free poles. It isn’t stable enough for us to bet that it will take anything we can throw at it.
Well, “not as bad as we thought” is a fairly unusual definition of “disproved”, in my opinion! I do agree that the fundamental issue is how the science informs policy.
It’s a nice cite, but you realise a climate sensitivity range of 1-5 degrees (“three degrees, give or take a degree or two”) has very different policy implications between the top and bottom of those ranges?
I gave my view on policy in post 302: I consider that economic growth cannot and should not be opposed in the developing and third world (not so important for us) as it is the only way that global quality of life can be improved. Learning how to grow sustainably is therefore paramount and carbon-neutral energy should be a mainstay of that. BUT, if I may throw in a hypothetical, suppose GLORY hadn’t crashed and the next ten years of GLORY and ARGO data led the IPCC to narrow down that sensitivity range to, say, 1 - 1.8 degrees, most likely value 1.4 degrees per doubling. Then I would be okay with doing away with cap-and-trade and carbon taxes, pumping the oil and gas till it runs out, and just putting a small tax on coal burning. OTOH if the sensitivity range was narrowed to say, 4.6 - 5.4 degrees, most likely value 5 per doubling, then I would be okay with going to a wartime-like economy in order to solve the problem. Rationing, conscription of scientists and engineers, building nuclear power plants like they were Liberty ships, the works. The thing is, we don’t have a well-constrained estimate of climate sensitivity at the moment and the resulting policies are frankly the worst of all worlds - they cost a lot and don’t do much.
It depends what you mean by “argue against water vapour feedback.” Presumably they believe that the net result of all factors is negative feedback.
The warmists presumably maintain that the net result of all factors is positive feedback, i.e. that any water vapor feedback loop dominates other interactions.
Perhaps, but it is stable enough to presume that net feedback will be neutral or negative absent solid evidence to the contrary.
It depends what you mean by “not as bad as we thought.” If the IPCC predicts disaster and all we get is the same level of warming we got over the last 100 years, i.e. about a degree, would you agree that the warmist case has been disproved?
The net result of everything has to be negative feedback, or else the Earth’s climate is analogous to a pencil balanced on its point - give it a nudge and it’ll tip right over. The big “feedback” everybody neglects, because it is trivially obvious, is that hotter things lose heat faster. That’s why a lightbulb filament reaches a new constant temperature when you turn up the dimmer switch. There is a fraction of a second of transition during which the electrical energy going into the filament exceeds the energy being radiated from it. During that transition, the temperature goes up. That transition is supposedly where we are at now, with a calculated (not measured) Top-of-Atmosphere (TOA) energy imbalance. At some new elevated temperature, the rate of radiative loss will have increased to match the incoming energy and the TOA imbalance will disappear. Problem is, continuing to elevate the CO2 level is equivalent to continuously nudging the dimmer switch upwards. We must have net negative feedback, but it simply governs how far the temperature shifts for a given change in forcing.
But all this is an aside. The phrase “water vapour feedback” is usually applied only to the expected increase in atmospheric water vapour from rising temperature, with a consequent increase in the water vapour contribution to the greenhouse effect. Expecting a positive water vapour feedback in this sense is like expecting a bowling ball to roll downhill - a no brainer. The cloud response is generally considered seperately since nobody knows what cloud coverage changes will occur and what their overall effect will be. Both Lindzen and Eschenbach propose mechanisms for negative cloud feedbacks. Eschenbach goes even further and proposes a mechanism beyond negative feedback, acting more like cruise control in a car and making the climate very stable. (Eschenbach is basically just an amateur on the Internet but I find him quite interesting to read.) Observational data on clouds is surprisingly poor and the theoretical understanding of them is even worse. Many models simply assume they don’t have a net effect either way.
Some (not all) “warmists” appear to like any evidence supporting positive feedback contributions, high climate sensitivity, “tipping points” etc. because they believe the best way to implement change is to ramp up the percieved urgency and scare the crap out of people. Personally I think this is terribly counterproductive but it seems to be the tactic of choice.
As I said, net feedback of everything has to be negative. How negative it is, overall, determines how far the temperature will shift for a given change in forcing. It’s analogous to hanging a weight on a spring. The spring’s return force is a negative feedback - add a bit to the hanging weight and the spring force increases to match the weight. The question is how stiff the spring is, how far the spring will extend before the new equilibrium is reached. Our continued emissions are the equivalent of continuously adding weight to the spring - it WILL extend and keep extending! If the spring is sufficiently stiff (low climate sensitivity) we’ll run out of fossil fuels and stop adding weight before the extension becomes a problem. If the spring is weak, we really need to curb emissions. If the spring is somewhere in between, I see no problem with pushing the no-regret emission reductions that are possible - partial vehicle electrification, higher-efficiency IC-engined vehicles, low-energy housing, heat-pump cooling and heating, solar panel hot water (not photovoltaics, yet), combined heat-and-power, phasing out coal power generation for combined-cycle gas, and making sure any coal power uses the higher-efficiency, supercritical technology. These are all win-win, positive-payoff steps if they’re implemented sensibly.
I’d say “rendered moot” rather than “disproved”, but sure. Whatever happens, it will be interesting to look back on this period through the lens of hindsight!
I’m not sure I understand your point. Let me ask you this:
Do you agree that using just basic physics, it’s possible to calculate the expected increase in global surface temperatures from a doubling of CO2 levels from pre-industrial levels assuming that there are no feedbacks or other interactions?
Do you agree that generally speaking, people on the “pro” side of the debate hold that the actual sensitivity is greater than this basic amount? i.e. they hold that the effects of CO2 will be amplified?
Do you agree that it’s reasonable to characterize such amplification as being the result of net positive feedback?
That certainly does seem to be PART of politics, but it isn’t that simple.
Again, while true that the oceans are the largest source of CO2 changes, it isn’t that simple.
No, it isn’t that simple. We know a lot about the earth now, but we don’t enough to know that it is “that simple”. Biological factors, weathering, tectonics, solar wind, cosmic rays, dust, circulation of the atmosphere and oceans, it’s very very complicated.
Absolutely. I also happen to believe that the proposed water-vapour-greenhouse amplification mechanism on its own is entirely reasonable, but unlikely to be the whole story.
It is commonly described as such, but to me this is truly horrible terminology because a real net positive feedback has to lead to a runaway situation. I dislike much of the terminology of climate science - “forcings”, “feedbacks”, “greenhouse effect”, even “relative humidity” gives a misleading impression! We’re kind of stuck with it though. I’d prefer the amplification to be talked about in terms of “amplification mechanisms” rather than “feedbacks”, but that’s just me.
I would say that this is technically incorrect since a positive feedback loop can in theory be increasingly attenuated at each step. So for example, a degree of warming leads to an additional half a degree of warming, which leads to an additional quarter degree of warming, etc.
“Deniers” such as myself dispute even this kind of positive feedback.
Sure. The additive elements form a convergent series so there’s a finite result. In your example, a degree of CO2 warming gains an additional 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 +1/16 etc., which converges to an extra 1 degree of warming. So one degree of CO2-induced warming gains an extra degree of amplification. I object to this being described as an extra 1 degree due to “positive feedback” because that’s not what “positive feedback” means. Positive feedback is technically an output of an amplifying system that is additive to the input, not simply an additive contribution or amplification of the output. It’s just a terminology nitpick though - let’s not get too hung up on it!
That’s easy enough to say, but what is the detail of that disputation? If I understand correctly, you accept that increasing atmospheric CO2 on its own should have have a warming effect. Do you dispute that increasing atmospheric water vapour should also have a warming effect by the same mechanism? Or do you dispute that an increase in temperature should increase atmospheric water vapour? Is it a conviction that the cloud “feedback” is substantial and negative? Or an article of faith based upon the relatively narrow historic range of global temperature; a conviction that global temperature must be insensitive to changes in energy fluxes even if we don’t have a mechanism to explain why? The devil is in the details.
“Must” is a bit of a strong word. In my view, the natural a priori assumption should be that the system will push back even if we do not know the exact mechanisms at work. By “push back” I mean that the net warming as a result of all forcings and interactions should be assumed to be LESS than that expected from the simple calculation I described a few posts back.
Thus, in my view, the warmists bear the burden of proving that amplification is likely to take place.
But yes, I have no idea if the negative feedback I assume is the result of an “iris effect” or something else.
Okay. So you believe in a compensating subtractive mechanism. While I don’t rule that out, there are a couple of difficulties with it. First, we know of quite a few additive amplifying mechanisms (although the magnitude of their effects are basically WAGS) but clouds are the only possibly subtractive mechanism that we know about. Second, the observed warming so far is consistent with the warming expected from the simple calculation, plus a little bit more. Most models predict rather more warming than that observed, almost certainly because they overestimate the effects of the amplifying mechanisms. The climate sensitivity due to CO2 alone is around 1 deg. C per doubling IIRC, and the IPCC estimated range is 1.5 - 4.5 deg. C. I suspect it’ll turn out to be in the low end of that range rather than the high, but at the moment what we’ve seen is consistent with some amplification.
Amplifying mechanisms include: warmer temperatures causing the oceans to outgas CO2 (a mechanism actually proposed by some sceptics to claim that the increasing CO2 isn’t due to human activity); warmer temperatures causing winter snow cover to establish later and melt earlier, decreasing albedo; and of course, warmer temperatures increasing the atmospheric water vapour and the consequent water vapour contribution to the greenhouse effect, to name a few.
While all of these mechanisms are highly plausible, actually evaluating their effect is another matter. The water vapour “feedback” for example has generally been modelled by assuming a constant relative humidity, but satellite measurements show that the real story is a lot more complicated - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100131145840.htm. This is one of the reasons I have my doubts about the climate sensitivities derived from the models.
I disagree. For example, one possible subtractive mechanism is higher humidity –> greater precipitation in Antarctica —> more snow and ice coverage in Antarctica —> higher albedo.
Perhaps more importantly, one needs to consider that there are likely to be unknown unknowns. For example, what caused the Little Ice Age? Nobody knows. So it’s reasonably likely that there are important forcings and interactions which are simply unknown.
This is only a problem if there is a solid a priori reason to believe that recent excess warming is largely the result of CO2 levels. I am not aware of any such reason. Indeed, global surface temperatures increased significantly in the first half of the 20th century and according to the IPCC reports, this increase was NOT due to CO2. How do we know that the same force which caused this increase has not been in play more recently? The answer is that we do not know.
The ardent alarmists probably won’t even read the link, or already knows why it can’t be true, in any case, an honest debate is almost impossible to come by online. Or it seems anywhere else.
