Antonio wrote:
Yes, the real issue of debate is with regards to climate models as well as their anthropogenetic component (human-impact?), not weather models which are indeed wonderfully accurate up to one week ahead.
The antrophogenic influence can not be looked at separately as models don’t care about the origin of the data. What you feed in, they will take as a starting point and work from there. With Climate Modelling as I understand it, they feed the “experience” of ages past into them as well, so they would take whatever antropogenic influence there has been into the basic data anyway, given that that influence started out with industrialisation. They should have ample data by now.
However, that is not the point in the question I was trying to answer. I’ve been to countless climate seminars and back and I’ve seen people present data to peers and then read the SAME data outputs in the press or in statements of political interest groups. And you wonder if they are looking at the same stuff. The answer is, yes they are, but depending on their bias they use different datapoints.
So let’s assume you got the two opposing fractions looking at the same model output, which in an ensemble way of doing things, gives you
- A maximum
- A minimum
- The result of the ensembles (which means they draw the line that most model members “agree” on or determine an average, only two of many ways to do this, there are many more).
If you read the summary written by someone close to the “we are going to die” fraction he will take the max values and extrapolate them.
If you read the summary by someone who thinks it’s all bollox he will take the minimal values (in case of global warming).
In other words, who ever interprets models will pick the values which best suit what HE wants it to be and writes a “war and peace” paper about those. Add politics into it, and you got a breakfast each self respecting dog would respectfully decline.
I am not in any fraction. I observe and read up as much as I can digest. There is no doubt the climate is changing but it is more often than not following the predictions given 10 years previously. There are so many factors which work into this, that while a general trend is visible, it is far from a straight line or even a curve which leads in a given direction without moving back and forth. And that is only logical, as the effects caused also cause counter effects.
To give a simple example which might influence a small number: As winters have become warmer in recent years in central Europe, heating output of CO2 has decreased. So the logical consequence would be that this will have some influence on Co 2 output, hence temperature rise would decrease as well.
Ah- shouts the activist – not enough, not fast enough, not sufficient, it has to hurt, it has to destroy evil capitalism, it has to…..
Bah- shouts the oil lobbyist – see, we told you so, now get of the fecking soap box and carry on.
Both are wrong. Both are not showing a doable way forward but only their extremist views. Not one of the efforts will change something on it’s own, many efforts will change more. And they are expensive, so we will need a working economy so we can actually afford them. And we need the flexibility to change opinions and methods if we see that it is appropriate to do so, e.g. nuclear power. A decade ago nuclear power was the big poh-poh after Fukushima. Today, quite a few governments realize that if they are serious about CO2 reduction, there are few ways around it.
Same with solar. Same with everything else. No, two roofs with solar panels won’t have a lot of effect, but a million roofs will. No, cars won’t be able to drive solar for a long time if ever, but having solar roof on a car may add 10-20 km a sunny day. One car means nothing in the global picture but millions will. Here a watt, here a kw/h there a tad and all of a sudden we have a quite big improvement.
So my opinion about it is, yes, let’s work on making it better, together, rather than tearing each other new posterior orifices and bouncing of walls (or gluing on roads) and being at the same position as before or worse, if the wrong people get to power because people are scared to freeze to death over activist rules.
Mooney you are quite right about the reductions is CO2 emissions in winter due to global warming making it so that less energy is needed for heat during winter.
If you go to any electricity grid control centre you can see how such things have been changing over the years.
Conversely, in Summer more energy is now being used for air conditioning, and in winter more energy is needed to pump flood waters away from housing and industrial areas. Both of these counteract the saving in CO2 through needing less heat in winter.
If increasing CO2 is the cause of climate change and if it is the man made CO2 mostly from humans and animals, energy usage or transport that is the major part of that increase it seems to me that we have several choices.
Decreasing population without a pandemic or a war: Many countries are already depopulating, at for them, an alarming level. France, UK, Japan and the latest report is South Korea, where their Governments are offering incentives to have kids.
Yes some countries like India are seeing a population increase but I have not seen any figures showing what the world net increase or decrease is if one ignores the fact that people live longer.
So are we going to put a block on medicines which help people to live longer.
I don’t think so.
Anyway so as not to write a book here. What we need are reasonable solutions to the problems and to use technology to help us work with climate change rather than against it especially as there is no guarantee that even massive reductions in man made CO2 will solve the issues caused by climate change.
IMO there are solutions to problems which do not involve, for instance, the bug bears of activists at the moment ie air traffic and oil being cut off at the knees.
Use of fossil fuels and the change to other forms of fuel for transport will reduce for economic reasons even without climate activists.
There are huge savings to be made all round by insulating old properties better.
This would reduce the need for both summer and winter energy, drastically.
Less need for both heating and air conditioning.
And there are natural ways to do it. Or ways using waste products so the manufacture of the insulating products does not need to take much energy.
This is something that could be done, now.
Governments talk about it, promise it but don’t do it. Or if they do they find there are not enough people wanting to do the jobs or the cowboys and scam artists move in take the grants and people’s money and don’t do the job. And of course there is not enough people trained to search out and punish these cowboys and scam artists.
This one measure alone though could obviate the need for faster reduction in Jet fuel for travel or for a faster move to EVs instear of ICEs and other drastic changes to our way of life that the hair shirt brigade would have us believe is the only answer. Especially as technology is constantly improving the ways we use energy for our transport so that CO2 production is dramatically reduced.
Why do we have just stop oil activists, when surely what they want to stop is CO2.
But is it necessary to stop it.
Some of us would like a little more heat in winter. Some would like a little less in winter. But such change has consequences and IMHO it is these consequences we should be spending more time money and effort, looking into.
Such things as flooding, wild fires, and pollution of both air and water.
Again IMHO all are solvable at much less cost to the quality of our lives than this search for net zero.
Some ideas to solve the problems we already know about. Such as avoiding building on flood plains. And there are ways of avoiding pollution of rivers and seas if the political will is there to work with land owners.
Other ideas may require some far out thinking but there has always been far out thinking.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a way to move some of the water flooding homes to areas where they are desperate for rain or to put out wild fires (which are producing massive amounts of CO2 and other pollutants).
Yesterday, someone was telling me about cloud seeding and ways of making it rain in places like death valley and apparently it is possible now.
What we need people with vision and that doesn’t necessarily mean another Einstein or Stephen Hawking. Great ideas can come from anywhere as long as the people who can make it happen, listen. Who would have thought that without what now seems like a simple idea from a Hollywood actress
Hedy Lamarr, we would possibly have never had Wifi.
If all people want to do is ban something without considering the consequences and gluing yourself to the road or simply burying their heads in the sand, then we are all doomed.
Doomed to extinction or a life of boredom wandering round like Zombies eating
raw plants,wearing sackcloth, going nowhere and doing nothing.🙂
derek wrote:
Interesting video from Sabine Hossenfelder that @LeSving posted. If I understood it correctly, a higher equilibrium climate sensitivity than currently used in IPCC models would mean we have less time to decarbonise than currently predicted. It did not sound to me like she was arguing that CO2 is just “a drop in the ocean”, or that it is unimportant. Looking at the earlier video of hers that she referenced, it seems that she is particularly concerned about global warming.
What she believes is unimportant, but the problems she is pointing out is not. Climate models have always been evaluated based on consensus. In essence, a whole bunch of people makes a whole bunch of models. From those models some kind of average is made. Outliers from this average are dismissed, while models creating roughly the same results are taken as “good models”. This may perhaps sound like a good approach for many people, very “democratic like” 
, but this is confirmation bias set into system, as SH explains. Confirmation bias is a trap that many scientists get caught up in, but there are ways around it, also explained by SH. In short, consensus is unscientific and there is no prior experience that shows that consensus will give more correct results. It’s the opposite that usually happens. Consensus creates results that are hopelessly stuck in error.
Now, how SH reach the conclusion believing in a higher climate sensitivity than IPCC is not clear to me (she could very well be right though). The only conclusion I get out of all that is the climate sensitivity is a parameter nobody has any clue what should be. Which is essentially what the IPPC say almost in clear text. (the firing squad and so on).
With their consensus method, emphasizing models that predict the “average” while dismissing outliers, what IPPC is actually doing is:
This isn’t science, it’s politics and nothing but politics.
The only prediction for which you do not need a (flawed or not) model is that we will run out of fossil fuels or they become economically unviable to extract. In itself a valid reason to go for renewables. And nuclear.
Great post by LeS.
Also add in the bread on the table at home, and perverted research funding by demanding cross border collaboration regardless of synergy, for EU grants.
Nuclear is the only known solution.
If I understand LeS argument though, he’s essentially saying that we don’t know with enough confidence. The predictions could be correct, or it could be much worse or it might be nothing to worry about at all.
It’s a bit like finding a bottle with a clear liquid in it in a factory when you’re thirsty. Drinking it might make you sick, it might kill you, or it might just cure your thirst. Do you drink it? Or do you say, it’s not worth the risk?
Our scientists are telling us climate change will be bad. They might be wrong, but is it worth the risk, when we have an alternative that will be expensive in the short term, but in the long term will reduce pollution and remove our dependence on unstable foreign nations for fossil fuels and eventually work out cheaper once we’ve made the initial investment?
dublinpilot wrote:
Our scientists are telling us climate change will be bad
That’s not what they are doing. They are trying to predict how the future climate becomes by making thousands of models. But they are not particularly successful at it. In fact they have very little clue. The models stretches out in all directions, they predict all and everything. Therefore a political decision has been taken that basically say: f€ck science, give us (the politicians) something that we can use to shape plans for the future. That climate change in itself will be bad is pure speculations, mostly based on the principle that most people feel any change is bad.
I’m just fed up with this nonsense. There was a time when I saw some logic in it (a long time ago). But when you look at it, to follow a logic that is exclusively based on ignorance and fair is silly at best. Of course, not polluting the earth we live on, is not a bad strategy for a better tomorrow, but this all encompassing CO2 obsession is a distraction.
The are other much more tangible things that we can and should be prepared for.
The best investment right now is to a) smash Russia’s military capability (by supporting Ukraine) and b) stop buying oil and gas from them. W Europe pretends to have stopped buying Russian gaseous gas so instead is buying liquified gas under the table, and oil via India etc.
That in turn will shift the public debate towards nuclear. The sooner that happens the better for everybody.
This isn’t science, it’s politics and nothing but politics.
Politics using mass indoctrination techniques developed by religions to control and harness populations over thousands of years.
I’m just fed up with this nonsense. There was a time when I saw some logic in it (a long time ago). But when you look at it, to follow a logic that is exclusively based on ignorance and fair is silly at best. Of course, not polluting the earth we live on, is not a bad strategy for a better tomorrow, but this all encompassing CO2 obsession is a distraction.
Welcome to the club. It tends to be populated by people with significant technical background.
The solution is less people.
gallois wrote:
Conversely, in Summer more energy is now being used for air conditioning, and in winter more energy is needed to pump flood waters away from housing and industrial areas. Both of these counteract the saving in CO2 through needing less heat in winter.
In Summer we already have and will have more solar energy input, not only into the grid but also people who grow more or less self-contained. I am looking at such stuff right now. In Switzerland it is/was (depending on who you listen to) difficult to get permits for full blown solar arrays but you can, without any permission, put a 600W array and feed it into your plug, which then will use the power up to 600W in summer. Sounds like few, but I’ve seen a neat little calculation: A block of houses with 10 flats will produce 6kw, one with 20 12 kw e.t.c. at peak times, which is also when we need most air condition. Those things are cheap to buy and install, they start at 500 Euros and do not need any form of approval. I am looking at getting one of those from a friend who is upgrading (following a 2 year approval process) to a full 5 kw installation.
One of those will do few. Thousands of those are often already too much for the local grid to take back into circulation! Hence the battery variant which makes you independent to a degree.
gallois wrote:
What we need are reasonable solutions to the problems and to use technology to help us work with climate change rather than against it especially as there is no guarantee that even massive reductions in man made CO2 will solve the issues caused by climate change.
A good start would be to throw away the “man made” blame game and simply state, we have an issue to work and let’s find a solution, a reasonable one as you say very rightly.
gallois wrote:
Use of fossil fuels and the change to other forms of fuel for transport will reduce for economic reasons even without climate activists.
There are huge savings to be made all round by insulating old properties better.
This would reduce the need for both summer and winter energy, drastically.
Less need for both heating and air conditioning.
And there are natural ways to do it. Or ways using waste products so the manufacture of the insulating products does not need to take much energy.
This is something that could be done, now.
it can be done by each and every one of us if we take the approach that in the end, there is something in it for us. Not only moralistic values but primarily very straightforward saving of money. And the good news is that much of those technologies become cheaper now that the hype phases are over.
What is needed from the government side is cutting red tape and regulation. I.e. it should not be necessary to get planning permit to insulate your facade as it does change the looks of it and it should not be possible for neighbours blocking such actions. Same for solar installations, same for charging boxes for cars, e.t.c.
gallois wrote:
If all people want to do is ban something without considering the consequences and gluing yourself to the road or simply burying their heads in the sand, then we are all doomed.
The problem there is politics and power games. The tragedy of ecology in politics is that the ecologists glued themselves to the absolutely wrong side of the political spectrum…. technological changes like this need visionaries, not bans and reductionists, money, not socialists. I guess the best example how a technology poh pohed for decades such as electrical cars can be made sexy and desirable did not come from an ecologist nutcase but from a capitalist one in the form of Elon Musk. Not unlike Apple at the personal computer level I reckon.
