Why no one cares about global warming.

[wolfpup]

@Aji_de_Gallina

It mentions funding to conservative stuff, never a specific link or number to specific ice-melting stuff.

That’s what the whole damn paper is about. You should read it. And it’s hardly the only source. You continue to nitpick about the exact percentage of advocacy funding that went to climate change denial as opposed to “something else” while consistently denying that there’s a huge industry built around climate change denial. Read the books I mentioned. Watch the documentaries. Read the polls about what Americans think and then read the scientific literature or the statements of the National Academy of Sciences or any other creditable science body. Read what Exxon Mobil alone has contributed to denial. Read about how lazy journalists get sucked into treating denialist garbage as if it was real science.

@Aji_de_Gallina

That’s not relevant for this thread.

It’s not relevant that the world’s national science bodies state that the science is settled on the major issues that oil and coal companies still want to debate? OK! :rolleyes:

@Aji_de_Gallina

My point wasn’t a scientific one.

Yes, that’s a common problem. Your point was in fact an anti-scientific one.

@Aji_de_Gallina

It was that the headline “record low” is misleading because it doesn’t include “record high”, regardless of the causes.

“Regardless of the causes” … lol! It’s not misleading because there is absolutely no equivalence between the two things. It states a relevant and extremely important point of information that is scientifically established to be linked to global warming. It doesn’t include an infinity of other things that are not relevant to the topic. Because it’s a headline, not a book.

Know what would be misleading? A headline and an entire article about a “record increase in Antarctic sea ice” that never explains the difference between land ice and sea ice, between the Arctic and the Antarctic, that claims that loss of Arctic sea ice is “balanced by gains in Antarctic sea ice”. It not only fails to provide very relevant scientific background explaining the huge major differences, it does the opposite – it directly and falsely implies a direct equivalence. This is unconscionable scientific deception. Authored by your friends at the Heartland Institute, with funding by Exxon Mobil and the Koch brothers. And then of course the pinhead readers of that kind of junk then go off convinced that climate change isn’t happening.

@Aji_de_Gallina

You mentioned funding, I answered funding.

Nope. You can’t even see or acknowledge the difference between legitimate scientific research and the kinds of lies coming out of the lobbyists like the one I just cited above. The fact that these lies are being funded at all is reprehensible and irresponsible. The fact that they’re being funded in such exorbitant amounts is absolutely appalling.

[wolfpup]

@ralph124c

But the fact is, they don’t work (wind and solar). Germany has spent a fortune on windmills and solar-and now concludes that because of variable output and high cost, lignite fueled thermal plants are the answer. Offshore wind is worse-both Denmark and Germany have abandoned large scale projects, because of high maintenance costs and output at the wrong time. Solar (Germany) is particularly bad-from November to February, German solar arrays produce almost no electricity-moreover, it comes at the wrong times (the hours around noon). Building more arrays doesn’t solve the fundamental problem-peak power demand comes when the arrays produce very little or no power. So in Germany “Brown” (lignite coal) is the new “green”. Which is sad, because the new generation of nuclear power reactors are much more relaible and safer than the ones now in use (and they do not shut down when the wind stops., or the sun isn’t out.
Which leads to the question: if you are serious about reducing fossil fuel use, what power source can you use?

A few points.

A phrase like “German solar arrays produce almost no electricity”, even in the context in which you used it, is really quite inaccurate. Unless you consider 25 GW of installed solar power (end of 2011), or more than one-third of their peak summer power demand, to be “almost nothing”. That is also 21 times more solar power per capita than the US produces, 24 times more relative to GDP than the US, and 39 times more relative to electricity production than the US.

Those numbers are so dramatic that Fox News had to come to the rescue, explaining to their idiot viewers that this was because Germany gets ever so much more sunshine than the US! Possibly a new record for gibbering nonsense, even for Fox News!

I saw a report not too long ago on the successes of wind power in Europe, though I don’t have a link readily at hand. Wind power can be remarkably reliable when spread over a large enough geographic area. Where I live, Ontario is expanding its wind farms, currently at around 2700 MW. There’s a provincial park I sometimes go to that involves driving mile after mile after mile past spinning white turbines, and that’s apparently one of the smaller installations. With nuclear providing more than half of all electricity generation, wind and solar power growing, and coal plants being shut down and demolished, and a recent carbon-cap deal signed with Quebec, things are looking hopeful.

I agree with you about nuclear power. It’s not that “they don’t shut down when the wind stops” because those problems are soluble with widespread wind farms and peak generation plants, but nuclear is extremely scalable and can produce vast amounts of clean power in a very small footprint.

So I would also agree with you that Germany is short-sighted in shelving their nuclear program. But I’m appalled by the implication that lignite coal is “the new green”. Not sure if you believe that or if anyone in Germany is making that claim, but that’s absurd. There’s no such thing as clean coal, but worse, lignite is the lowest grade and lowest energy density form of coal and is actually the most polluting. The only reason Germany is using it is because they have a lot of it. The whole thing goes completely against the grain of the environmental responsibility that is otherwise fairly strong in Europe and is really disappointing.

[FXMastermind]

@wolfpup

That is also 21 times more solar power per capita than the US produces, 24 times more relative to GDP than the US, and 39 times more relative to electricity production than the US.

The situation with solar in the US borders on criminal. It really does. I believe, but can’t prove it, that vested interest of all kinds are doing shit to delay, destroy, and prevent solar energy from being used in the US.

It’s so absurd and illogical, it seems obvious.

[elucidator]

Also, its the kind of science that makes it harder for the average person to grasp. Its not like taking a germ from a diphtheria victim, growing it in a dish and injecting it into a lab rat to prove that, yes, indeed, that germ causes diphtheria. Science by experiment is the hardest of hard sciences and gives solid and certain results, GW is more science by inference and studying very big patterns.

(Point of fact, if there were no anomalies, no unexpected whipsaws in temperature, etc., I would be inclined to hold the question as suspect, the lack of such data would invoke the scent of cooked books, of data trimmed to fit neatly into expectations. But I digress…)

This is the science of inference, collecting masses of information to search for relatively subtle changes in pattern. One cannot simply fashion an elegant experiment to test, to falsify. One would expect such science to take a long time to accomplish, and so it has.

Further, there is the very fact of its growing acceptance. GW didn’t burst onto the science scene like a hot new rock band gaining instant applause. It only gradually gained acceptance as the data piled up. Now, science wise, that is how it should be, extraordinary theory requires extraordinary evidence, and when that theory relies on inference, a whole fuck of a lot of data. Which would be cool if the clock hadn’t kept ticking while we clever monkeys pondered.

The very fact that it acquired its acceptance in the boffin community only gradually underscores its legitmacy.

What is more foolish, to take no action to avoid disaster and hope for the best, or assume the worse and prepare to deal with it.

And besides, suppose we are motivated at long last, and somebody stumbles on cheap green energy. With enough energy, we can do almost anything, it is the most important limiting factor. Abundant green energy would be a massive boon to personkind.

So, OK, we find the Holy Grail and then find out we were wrong, we didn’t need it as bad as we thought. So, we give it back?

[ralph124c]

Quote:
A phrase like “German solar arrays produce almost no electricity”, even in the context in which you used it, is really quite inaccurate. Unless you consider 25 GW of installed solar power (end of 2011), or more than one-third of their peak summer power demand, to be “almost nothing”. That is also 21 times more solar power per capita than the US produces, 24 times more relative to GDP than the US, and 39 times more relative to electricity production than the US.
I said that solar produces little (or no) power in the winter. This is fact. If solar is such a success, why is Germany building new coal (lignite) fueled plants? Solar produces peak power between 10 AM and 2 PM-when demand is low. So if you have no storage, you dump the power. As with wind-the variable output imbalances the grid-so the Denmark and Germany have to have auxiliary power plants to balance the grid. The situation is not trivial at all.
Offshore wind is even worse-scouring (by tidal currents) of the foundations is a problem, and corrosion of the wiring and generators another.
Nuclear is the only feasible solution-but the “Green party” fanatics will prevent that from happening.

[FXMastermind]

@elucidator

And besides, suppose we are motivated at long last, and somebody stumbles on cheap green energy. With enough energy, we can do almost anything, it is the most important limiting factor. Abundant green energy would be a massive boon to personkind.

The worldwide glut of solar panels—which has lasted nearly two years—is partly the result of big government-backed investments in factories in China, where two-thirds of solar panel production capacity is located. The surplus has been good news for consumers and installers, because it’s helped drive a precipitous drop in solar panel prices. They’ve dropped 60 percent since the beginning of 2011, according to GTM Research. Solar panels sold for $4 per watt eight years ago. Now it’s common to buy them at 78 cents per watt, says Jenny Chase, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512516/why-we-need-more-solar-companies-to-fail/

A Chinese solar giant goes bankrupt, and why that’s a good thing

Will Distributed Solar Drive Utilities into Bankruptcy?

Although we often think of energy (kWh) as the only thing we buy from utilities, in truth we buy another valuable service: electricity on demand. Even a home with enough PV to produce all the electricity it needs on an annual basis cannot disconnect from the grid: The power must be kept on at night and on cloudy days, and excess electricity needs to go somewhere when the sun is bright.

Electricity storage could be used to take a home entirely off the grid, but such storage would be prohibitively expensive.

The disruptive potential of solar power

For those who just won’t read, the bottom line, and this is from the electric companies, is that cheap solar will bankrupt them. Even a 3% share will destroy a utility. Peak demand occurs at peak sunlight hours. It’s where they make the profit. Reducing this, even by 3%, they say will be the end of the utility companies.

There is also the problem Germany encountered, when too much power is being fed into the grid. You have to have some way to bleed the power off. Otherwise the system crashes, and badly.

Cheap abundant solar energy, something that sounds great, might destroy the companies that built and maintain the grid. An affordable way to store solar power would bankrupt them in a hurry.

Because physics.

[wolfpup]

@elucidator

What is more foolish, to take no action to avoid disaster and hope for the best, or assume the worse and prepare to deal with it.

And besides, suppose we are motivated at long last, and somebody stumbles on cheap green energy. With enough energy, we can do almost anything, it is the most important limiting factor. Abundant green energy would be a massive boon to personkind.

So, OK, we find the Holy Grail and then find out we were wrong, we didn’t need it as bad as we thought. So, we give it back?

And regardless of whether we find some Holy Grail of super-abundant clean energy, we have to find clean energy to replace fossil fuels. That’s a given. Because we have to stop transferring geologically sequestered carbon into the atmosphere and into the rest of the earth’s carbon cycle. That much is clear to all but hard-core denialists. The only question is whether the consequences of failing to do so will be catastrophic in 50 years or 100, or a little more or a little less.

There is a lower bound on climate sensitivity that says that we’re already close to forcing temperature rise with the same magnitude as the forcings that have ended ice ages and melted mile-thick continental ice sheets, but we’re doing it from the warmth of an interglacial, and we’re doing it much more rapidly, with the result that we’re effectively trying to recreate the climate of the Cretaceous at an unprecedented and unnatural speed. It’s true that the timing and details of all the physical and biological consequences are hard to predict. Which is not the same as claiming that there’s nothing to worry about, or that technology will magically fix it for us. That’s why “not caring” about global warming is escapism and denial, an expression of scientific ignorance that is the result of relentless propagandizing by the fossil fuel industry, the industrialists who profit from it, and most sadly of all, by some of the politicians that they own.

[FXMastermind]

@wolfpup

The only question is whether the consequences of failing to do so will be catastrophic in 50 years or 100, or a little more or a little less.

That is certainly far from the only question, In fact, the premise of the question might be false.

[wolfpup]

@ralph124c

Quote:
A phrase like “German solar arrays produce almost no electricity”, even in the context in which you used it, is really quite inaccurate. Unless you consider 25 GW of installed solar power (end of 2011), or more than one-third of their peak summer power demand, to be “almost nothing”. That is also 21 times more solar power per capita than the US produces, 24 times more relative to GDP than the US, and 39 times more relative to electricity production than the US.
I said that solar produces little (or no) power in the winter. This is fact. If solar is such a success, why is Germany building new coal (lignite) fueled plants? Solar produces peak power between 10 AM and 2 PM-when demand is low. So if you have no storage, you dump the power. As with wind-the variable output imbalances the grid-so the Denmark and Germany have to have auxiliary power plants to balance the grid. The situation is not trivial at all.
Offshore wind is even worse-scouring (by tidal currents) of the foundations is a problem, and corrosion of the wiring and generators another.
Nuclear is the only feasible solution-but the “Green party” fanatics will prevent that from happening.

I didn’t “misquote” you, I acknowledged that when you said “produce almost no electricity” you said it in a specific context. But the nature of these kinds of debates is that phrases like that stick in the reader’s mind, which is kind of unfortunate when Germany, as I mentioned, has the capacity to meet more than one-third of summer peak electricity needs with solar, a pretty impressive fact that you completely failed to mention.

Why is Germany building coal plants? Because solar doesn’t produce a lot of electricity at night, because they foolishly abandoned nuclear after Fukushima, and because they don’t have enough wind power and irresponsibly took the most expedient way out.

Again, I agree with you about nuclear, but wind power has been successful in major projects throughout the world including right where I live. Wind, solar, nuclear – we need all of it. All have had unreasonable opposition by vested interests.

[Magiver]

@GIGObuster

:rolleyes:

More classic climate change denier math.

Please look at what the car sales do at the end of the past years, after November and December there is indeed a drop, but it is clearly seasonal because every year after December there is a usual drop.

you cannot be this mathematically challenged. I compared quarter to quarter between 2 years. As we have just recently completed the first quarter of 2015 that is the most recent trend in sales.

[GIGObuster]

@Magiver

you cannot be this mathematically challenged. I compared quarter to quarter between 2 years. As we have just recently completed the first quarter of 2015 that is the most recent trend in sales.

I already know that. The point I make is that you are indeed using denier statistics or weird math to get what you want: you concentrate on short ranges, exactly what deniers do with climate data.

But lets see if you can redeem yourself:

Do you deny that total sales in the USA are increasing?

http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/

“2011 total: 17,425
2012 total: 52,607
2013 total: 97,507
2014 total: 123, 049”

Yes or no?

Do you deny that every single year there is a drop in sales after December?

Do you deny that every year the total number of sales for the first 3 months of the previous 3 years has increased every year?

Do you realize now that your math gave you an incomplete and ultimately a misleading value to show the opposite of what it is actually happening? You claimed that sales are down, but you are telling us that was because people do not care, meaning that sales should be down (and then remain down), actually the people at insideevs report in the same article report that sales are actually up.

For many regions in the United States this winter set some new all-time record cold temperatures, and with that same fairly tepid sales for the first two months of the year – for February just 6,951 units were sold.

However, March unexpectedly roses almost 50% compared to the moth prior, with an estimated 10,341 EV sold.

Even against some formidable numbers a year ago (9,650), March of 2015 was still 7% better – in a month that was originally expected to miss by a good margin.

So no, even in the article the conclusion is that indeed sales are not down, only by looking at a short trend is that one make it look like that, but it is a misleading reading of the big picture.

As mentioned you can indeed see that there is a drop now, but by ignoring what happened before you only make a mistake that the people at insideevs do not make, This is indeed like contrarians that look only at the latest years of the temperature record to claim that it means that there is no global warming, ignoring the past and the full record and what is going on in the oceans. In reality the temperature is not going down, it is increasing and so are the sales of EVs.

[FXMastermind]

Mobility | Toyota Motor Corporation Official Global Website

Looks like hybrid sales are steady, and growing.

Now if they would just make a hybrid light truck, that got great gas mileage. What the fuck is wrong with truck makers?

[Magiver]

@GIGObuster

Do you deny that total sales in the USA are increasing?

YES, I just showed you the quarterly changes by car. It’s an apples to apples sales trend both in specific car and time frame. The only reason the total amount went up is because they dumped a bunch of new electric cars on the road on those pathetic sales figures bumped it up. the sales trend is down across the board. Sucks to spend all that time putting out a new car but them’s the breaks.

I told you the Volt would never sell and it hasn’t. No amount of politically correct awards could make people buy the car. Nobody wants it. NOBODY CARES. And that’s starting to show up with other electric vehicles. They’ll sell when battery technology catches up.

[dasilva94]

GIGObuster whatever the merits of Global Climate Change debate are, your constant **haranguing **turns me off, and I’m guessing I’m not alone.

[GIGObuster]

@Magiver

YES, I just showed you the quarterly changes by car. It’s an apples to apples sales trend both in specific car and time frame. The only reason the total amount went up is because they dumped a bunch of new electric cars on the road on those pathetic sales figures bumped it up. the sales trend is down across the board.

You linked to the article, the ones that made it do not even agree with you.

Sucks, but you told us something and that was not the case. Again, based on the article it was a misleading number.

And if nobody wants them, it is really hard to explain why more auto makers are getting in the business.

[GIGObuster]

@dasilva94

GIGObuster whatever the merits of Global Climate Change debate are, your constant **haranguing **turns me off, and I’m guessing I’m not alone.

Sorry that you see it that way but if do not notice that the haranguing coming to me is based on faulty numbers there is not much to defend your position here.

[elucidator]

@dasilva94

GIGObuster whatever the merits of Global Climate Change debate are, your constant **haranguing **turns me off, and I’m guessing I’m not alone.

And those merits remain, regardless. From here, looks like he has the patience of Job and the labors of Hercules. His opposition ranges from the politely skeptical to the belligerently ignorant. I’m told this can wear on you after a while, I don’t rightly know.

Plus, the boy knows his shit. I won’t say he’s as smart as me, I suspect he is a modest soul who is offended by flattery. But he does his damn homework. His links check out, they say what he says they say.

GIGO is my designted GW spokescritter. And I’m guessing I’m not alone, either.

Get tired of waiting for him, sometimes…

[wolfpup]

@elucidator

And those merits remain, regardless. From here, looks like [GIGObuster] has the patience of Job and the labors of Hercules. His opposition ranges from the politely skeptical to the belligerently ignorant.

I’ll gladly second that. GIGO is a tireless provider of cited facts, and he is a great asset to the forum.

As for why dasilva94 takes such offense at GIGO’s posts, who knows? But I did find this little item in another thread:

@dasilva94

I don’t want to start an argument, but I’d like to ask a question?

If we can’t rely weather predictions up to about 3 days ahead.

How can we have climate models that can predict up to 5 or 10 years in the
future?

Which may not be belligerently ignorant, but it certainly qualifies as scientifically ignorant with respect to completely missing the point about what climate models are about. Perhaps some of us have preconceived notions about reality and dislike people who present us with cognitive dissonance. Which, oddly enough, is extremely relevant to the whole subject of this thread.

[GIGObuster]

Gosh, many thanks for that elucidator and *wolfpup. That made my month.

And yes, I do think that you are smarter than me. I’m still dealing with a lot of ESL grammar monstrosities, but I prefer to have them rather than not being able to at least follow or understand the basics of an issue and to know enough history to know that the kind of naysayers that appear have appeared many times before.

Changing Climates, Changing Minds: The Great Stink of London

No sane resident of a town or city in the developed world would nowadays challenge our sanitary laws and regulations on the grounds that they violate their inalienable right (in epidemiologist John Snow’s words, quoted earlier) “to poison to death not only themselves but their neighbours”. And nobody would claim that the scientific consensus on water-borne pathogens is an elaborate hoax designed to increase the authority and tax-raising power of municipalities. To be sure, there are valid objections as to how sanitary standards are to be set and enforced but no dispute about whether such regulations should exist. Since Victorian times, we have all of us changed our minds on this.

It is tempting to despair that attitudes will never shift quickly enough to drive meaningful action on climate change. But public opinion has changed radically before; sometimes even in favour of minorities and against the vested interests of the powerful and privileged. An example that springs to mind from the time just before the Great Stink of London is the abolition of slavery. More recently, attitudes have changed radically on a range of social issues. When watching a period TV drama such as Mad Men, which strives for historical authenticity, it is surprising to see the extent that societal standards have evolved in just fifty years; previously commonplace attitudes and behaviours have now become unacceptable or illegal.

Political change can be sudden and its relative painlessness can surprise the more pessimistic pundits. Consider the demise of the Soviet Union without the need for a global war, or of apartheid in South Africa, unaccompanied by the bloodbath and chaos that many saw as inevitable. No attitudes are immutable: the President of the United States is a black man.

It was fortuitous that the centre of the Great Stink of London occurred just outside the windows of the British Parliament, spurring complacent lawmakers into overdue action, if only for the sake of their own comfort. But the chances are low that climate change will produce a perfect storm that could cause physical distress to our politicians in their chambers and, even should that happen, it would probably anyway be too late by then. If our leaders are ever to be motivated to timely action on climate change by a Big Stink, then that stink is going to have be raised by us, their electors.

• On edit

[FXMastermind]

@wolfpup

I’ll gladly second that. GIGO is a tireless provider of cited facts, and he is a great asset to the forum.

As for why dasilva94 takes such offense at GIGO’s posts, who knows? But I did find this little item in another thread:
Which may not be belligerently ignorant, but it certainly qualifies as scientifically ignorant with respect to completely missing the point about what climate models are about.

What he leaves out of course, is the follow up post, after an answer was given to the question.

@dasilva94

Okay I get get what you’re saying. Thanks.

It’s that sort of dishonesty, not telling the whole story, that is turning people who actually care a lot about the planet, into skeptics of the people preaching doom all the time. Along with telling us what we have to do, rather than showing is what they have done about it.