The ethical question no climate denier will answer

Ridicule, conspiracy theories, strawman arguments and Lies is all you have left because reality is getting harder and harder to deny.

My first goal would be to stop you naysayers from lying:
Japan Set to Overtake Germany as World’s Largest Solar Market

That's some failure. Increase in solar in China, Japan, and the US.
And Germany?

Can You Have Too Much Solar Energy?

That's some "failure"!!!

 

So the liberal think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/about

is lying when they say

on page 10 of this http://science.house.gov/sites/repu...ts/HHRG-113-SY18-WState-BLomborg-20130425.pdf

I guess I should just take the word of some anonymous poster over them ...err right

back to your link though did you see the part where

of course you probably think we should just borrow some more money from China to pay people to install more expensive boondoggles instead of using the cheap and efficient natural gas supplies we already have and investing in R&D to find solutions which actually work

oh and if solar is so good why is Germany building more coal plants ? maybe they want to have electrical at night and on rainy days perhaps ? what a concept !

 

Ridicule, conspiracy theories, strawman arguments and Lies is all you have left because reality is getting harder and harder to deny.

So "green energy is not ready to take over from fossil fuels. " is true but misleading as alternative energy is not supposed "to take over from fossil fuels"; it's supposed to supplement FFs.

JD: lie -- 1 // strawman argument -- 1

 

Sure there is. In fact, there is one operation in California that I am surprised is not used more often. And that is a renewable hydroelectric power plant.

In short, it is a combination of 2 dams, Pyramid Lake which is upstream, and Castaic Lake which is downstream. During the day at peak electric and water use, Pyramid Lake flows into Castaic, providing water for the water district, as well as electricity. Then at night (when power usage is at it's lowest), Castaic then pumps water back up-hill to Pyramid Lake. So the next day the cycle can be repeated all over again.

This system only uses 2 smaller sized reservoirs, yet still provides almost constant power. It is also at this time the most efficient way of "storing electricity". In essence, Pyramid Lake acts as a battery, with the water being held until peak usage times, when it is released to generate electricity.

But the hippy-dippy crowd is not only preventing the construction of new hydro plants, they are actually trying to rip out some that are already operational. There has been a group actively petitioning for the removal of the O'Shaughnessy Dam. Even though it has been there for close to 100 years, and provides a major chunk of the water for San Francisco, as well as power. They have no solution for how to try and recover the reservoir that has been in place for almost 100 years, and no solution how to produce the power or replace the drinking water that will be lost, they only want to "return nature to it's pristine condition".

Most new hydro proposals fail because of the EPA and Environmental Impact. During the survey process they find some rare tree slug parasite that lives nowhere else on the planet, so the entire program is scrapped to keep it alive.

 

And this is not true at all. I can think of a great many ways right now.

Hydroelectric is first.
Nuclear, uses no fossil fuels at all.
Geothermal, uses heat that is naturally occurring.
Biomass, such as methane, and this according to the idea that is a "greenhouse gas" actually reduces the release into the atmosphere.
Then there is one other that was researched heavily prior to the surge to solar, and that is tidal power.

I think the biggest problem with "renewable energy" is that the MMGW crowd is also predominantly "Solar Energy" at the same time. They are wearing blinders in all directions, not only seeing only a single problem, but also a single solution. And you are parroting it right here.

The only "source" of CO2 neutral energy (after they are built, shipped and installed) that is viable today for mass distribution is solar panels.

Sorry, not true. And with the amount of raw materials and energy required to make those panels (as well as the fact that many of them are toxic), then I question if they are "CO2 neutral" at all.

 

Either you don't understand what you're talking about, or you're not expressing your meaning adequately. The entire science of geology is built around very old data.

Typical science-denier nonsense. You don't like what the science says, so you pretend the answers must be wrong. Ostrich tactics.

Typical climate denier nonsense. Only someone who had never actually looked at a climate model would make such absurd claims about what the allegedly say (but don't).

Probably a lot more than you, but I'm not going to get into a "mine is bigger than yours" pissing contest. I'm a lot more interested in why you have made any changes at all. Is it because deep down, you secretly agree that climate change is a bad thing?

 

If it's so easy to answer, why have to spent the last two days not answering it?

 

What the heck does that mean? "Viable for mass distribution"? So you're ignoring the following, to make your "point":
Hydro
Wind
Biomass
Nuclear
Biofuel
Geothermal
Tide
Wave
OTEC

 

Well, if you can do 3 or 4 or 5, why not just do all of the big ones and let us all be educated? For example, on the fossil fuel side alone I would love to see how much the CapX and OpX of fossil fuels must shift to take all of the methane hydrates and turn them into something much more useful (natural gas at first but synthetic crude through the GTL process next). Using your type of calculation someone could do a rough shot at whether or not the kerogen oil in Colorado is a better, or worse (economically speaking) event than the hydrate conversion to synthetic crude. Versus solar towers, nukes, windmills, PV's mandated on every rooftop in the country under new and better building codes, damn up the Mississippi somewhere and turn it into a nice hydroelectric exercise, the variations on a theme as well as the main pieces themselves (as you've already tackled) should all be some of the basic factual information everyone has to even begin these types of conversations.

 

Actually, he who asserts, must prove. If those who think mankind is responsible for...whatever...and they want humanity to change their errant ways to correct....whatever...., they can show us the cost/benefit of their plan.

For example, the first thing needed to do this to for the human effect on world CO2 emissions is to calculate the benefits of shutting down all human emissions of CO2. The benefits are, the planet will continue to do whatever it is it wants to do, temperature wise, CO2 levels will begin easing down starting in another 30 years or so as human emissions will no longer contribute to the rise in CO2 (not a guarantee but let us just assume) and the losses are the end of all human life on the planet. Admittedly to some of the eco-fringe this isn't a loss, but stepping aside from that issue for a moment, do you seriously think people will just decide to stop breathing to gain the benefit of this particular plan?

Me neither.

 

OK, then tell me, what was the temperature like in 1012CE? What was it like in 450BCE? How about 42,000KYA? And were there differences between the climate of Greenland in comparison to today? How about calving, was that more common, less common, or about the same 25,000kya as opposed to today?

How about around 1600CE, was that a wet or a dry year?

Of course, I know those questions are unanswerable. And that is precisely the point. And there is one logic fallacy that I have constantly questioned, and never gotten an answer for. If Greenland's ice sheets are melting, from where? From the top, skewing the data? From the bottom, skewing the data? If the caps are melting, how can we be sure the "record" is uncontaminated? And how can we be sure that prior records were not erased, leaving unexplained gaps that are not seen?

I for one have never stated that the climate is not changing. I however take the long-term view of a geologist or paleontologist. I know how little short-term jumps actually mean, and look at the long-term scale. During the timeframe of "modern humans", we have gone from huge segments of the Northern Hemisphere being covered in ice and North Africa being a tropical wetlands, to most of the Northern Hemisphere being ice free and North Africa being a barren desert wasteland. Man made global warming, or natural climate change?

I love how anybody who does not buy into the "Man Made" part is automatically shoved into the "denier" faction. Sounds familiar to me, a kind of scientific "Class Warfare". Marx and Stalin would be proud of your tactics.

 

The globe uses 144,000 TeraWatt Hrs per year.

The largest nuclear power plant is 0.0082 Terawatts - we would need 18 million power plants that size.

The largest hydro plant is 0.0225 Terawatts, we would need 6.4 million of them - we ain't got enough water.

The largest geothermal is 0.000303 Terawatts, 475 million this size power plant.

Shall I go on?

The only "source" of CO2 neutral energy (after they are built, shipped and installed) that is viable today for mass distribution is solar panels.

That is why I clarified after they are built and shipped. I have no idea how many hours of operation are needed to offset the energy required to build solar panels, and don't know if we could process the toxic byproducts.



This is why I keep asking the warmers just what do they think they are going to do?

 

Sorry, your entire argument there is nonsense.

http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/co...1&__uuid=18a19fd5-65bc-4647-87ea-359e65223908

And Solar Panels are not the solution. They never have been, they never will be. At most they provide a good augment to reduce the amount of power made in large-scale production. For well over a decade I have believed in the use of solar shingles and other solutions which utilize already existing terrain to produce power that is otherwise lost. But the production of large arrays is not effective, because of the sheer amount of land needed to produce the power, which is highly dependent upon where they are located (as well as temperature and time of day).

I wish I could find the link again, but there was a study that estimated that you would have to cover half of the state of Arizona with traditional solar cells just to provide the power needs of the LA Metro area. Needless to say, that will never happen.

 

My point isn't that solar panels are the answer, my point is there is no answer today, and nothing on the horizon close enough to meet a zero CO2 by 2030.

Solar panels are about 14%, the highest efficiency is a concentrator Sterling at 31%. Until there is a storage method, solar electric is limited to providing power 5 or less hours a day.

There are only 3 source of energy, solar, tidal and nuclear. Rather than chase 100 interesting, but marginal sources of energy, we need to focus on one or two.

The only viable solution I have seen so far is oil from algae (algae collects the energy, oil is the storage medium). I have seen numbers running from 5,000 to 150,000 gallons per year per acre (30,000 is equivalent in efficiency to our existing solar panels). They can squeeze oil out of algae today, but not a yields high enough to justify any excitement. Once we can, that oil drops into our existing infrastructure.

 

Here ya go:
Stern Review

Common sense conclusion; act now and pay or wait to act and pay even more.

 

Sorry, there was nothing "common sense" about that report. For example, apparently they aren't even familiar with what I will call "The Hansen Effect", whereby world class experts have shown that their models predict a temperature rise if we cease emitting CO2 tomorrow afternoon, when in fact we burn everything we can find furiously for decades and have a much lower than predicted temperature. Your report instantly equates CO2 with a given rise in temperature which is exactly what "The Hansen Effect" is.

There are other interesting tidbits just in the general conclusions section, calling for kum-bye-yah international cooperation and whatnot (you seriously want to reference a study which says our first assumption is...the impossible happens...and then everything works out like we want?).

Sorry, we are talking about real world things here, not just some study which makes a few impossible or already contradicted by the evidence claims and then proceeds to try and sell you a load of goods.

Unless you think I need to read more to see how they handle "The Hansen Effect"?

 

This could be a gay marriage question.

 

Poor Debater really did demonstrate a near complete lack of coherence in writing that question? It assumes others shame his morals, whatever they might be, it assumes that potentially natural changes in climate are irreversible when the planets history shows that it is reversing all the time, the word experiment presumes we are doing it on purpose to see what happens rather than just doing it as a side effect of trying to make a better lot in life for everyone, and "only atmosphere" appears to be an ignorant attempt to preclude the ones we make, carry around with us while scuba diving, or can find on other planets as we expand across the galaxy. Between lack of vision, bad writing, and assumptions not in evidence, I think you might be right.

 

"Unanswerable" questions. That have, in fact, been answered.

Global mean temperature anomaly, 1012 CE: -0.8 ± .14 °C. (Marcott et. al. 2013).
Global mean temperature anomaly, 450 BC:+.025 ± .13 °C (Marcott et. al. 2013).
Gobal mean temperature anomaly, 42000 bp: -5.08 ± .12 °C (Lisiecki & Raymo 2005).
Greenland ice calving 25000 bp: This was a period of glacier advance with stable ice margins, i.e., less calving than today. (Funder et. al. 1998 ).
Precipitation in 1600 CE: like all years, wet in some places, dry in others.

More stuff they didn't cover on Fox News.

Skewing what data? How?
But in answer to your question, mostly from the edges. At lower latitudes and elevations, also from the top.

Because ice cores are taken from the highest, coldest places on the icecap, where it's below freezing even in summer.

There are a few surface melting episodes in the cores, but they're easy to spot. For the most recent part of the core, annual layers can be seen and counted directly. For deeper portions annual changes in pollen and chemical deposition are analyized to determine age. See Johnsen et. al. 1992.

Natural climate change, proceeding at a natural (slow) pace. And all of which preceded human agriculture, upon which civilization depends. So how will agriculture respond to the current rapid change? I guess that's part of the ethical question no climate denier will answer.

You're the one who is clearly ignorant of what modern science has actually done (see previous citations). I find it laughable that you have almost no clue about what modern science has done, yet somehow you're so darn cocksure that whatever it is, it must be wrong. That, my friend, is the height of ignorance. And arrogance. Love the Stalin reference too. Are you going to throw in Hitler next?

 

No it doesn't. If your morals are different than mine, go ahead and explain that, and explain why your morals are better. I see you haven't done that.

Natural climate change occurs over a long time scale, and is reversible on the same long time scale. Anthropogenic climate change occurs in a geologic instant, but it is not reversible on the same time scale. I was assuming a decent level of comprehension on the reader's part, but I'm happy to dumb it down if you need it.

The word "experiment" presumes only that we don't fully understand what's going to happen, because we've never done it before. Robbing a bank might also be considered a "side effect" of trying to makes ones life better. That doesn't make it moral.

We've "made" an atmosphere? Really? Where? And a scuba tank is now an "atmosphere" instead of just a tank of air? Do you really want to defend that proposition? And finally, you're saying that if we cook this planet, that's perfectly OK because of the possibility of interstellar travel? I hate to break it to you, but Star Trek is actually a work of fiction.

 

If you believe that then you need to do some research on the start and the end of the Younger Dryas event. There was climate before 1800 you know

 

I largely ignore these kinds of individuals, simply because they can't explain any of the basics of why our climate has changed in the last 1,000 years, let alone the last 50. I have tossed at them repeatedly the Medieval Climate Optimum and the Little Ice Age (which is ironically the "baseline" for what temperatures should be), and am consistently ignored. That alone tells me that even they do not understand their own side's claims.

 

/agree

I tend to focus on the last 12K years or so, many many interesting warming and cooling periods. The AGW cult somehow has came to believe that prior to 1800 the climate world wide resembled San Diego's mild winters and temperate summers. No droughts, floods, tornadoes, or blizzards ever occurred prior to 1990

 

Ridicule, conspiracy theories, strawman arguments and Lies is all you have left because reality is getting harder and harder to deny.

What you call the "Hansen Effect" is evident only in the mind of pseudo-scientists. Hansen used a climate sensitivity (look it up) of 4.2C, a bit on the high side from what is accepted today. The only thing Hansen's paper shows is that his estimate on the CS was a bit on the high side. To match the observations since 1988, Hansen's models would have to bee run with a lower CS, about 3C. Problem is with a CS of 3C, we're still in trouble when it comes to warming.

So you ridicule the conclusions ( "kum-bye-yah international cooperation") but fail to refute the conclusions. Got it! You even fail to address the Review. Just Ridicule, conspiracy theories, strawman arguments and Lies.

 

And so many other things, that it causes me to laugh.

In 1816, we had the "year without a summer", in which a series of volcanic events (all of which pump out greenhouse gasses) caused global temperatures to plunge on average almost 2 degrees. Yet this only lasted for a single year, and then had an almost 2 degree rise the next year, back to normal.

Or how in the last quarter of the 16th century, Europe was in a particularly cold spell, with crop failures due to excessive rainfall and food rotting before and after it can be harvested. While across the ocean in the Americas, European settlers were dying because of drought.

To me, it all comes right back to the same thing. They are the ostriches, who want to burry their heads in the sand and live in a world where the climate is the same as it has ever been, and never changes, never deviates from the benchmark they created at the end of the 1800's. They want to live on a static Earth, and any change from their benchmark must be caused by humans.

Myself, I use the last few thousand years to show the way that climates vary, but I actually look at much longer time frames then that, from Snowball Earth to Greenhouse Earth. And knowing that for over 80% of the lifespan of our planet we have been in a "Greenhouse Earth" with no polar ice caps at all to me is indicative that this is really the "norm" for what the planet tends to be, we are still in a glaciation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_Icehouse_Earth

And sorry, there were no humans during the Eocene, mammals were only just beginning to evolve into the dominant genre on the planet. But the planet is changing, constantly. And we are at this time to me looking almost as doomed as the Neanderthal which we replaced. I wonder how many of them sat in their caves, looking at the retreating ice sheets and the warming of the planet and blamed themselves and their campfires for the global warming going on, looking at the new genus of Homo Sapiens, which would replace their own genre of Homo Neanderthalensis.

The simple fact is, we are here as the sole surviving species of the Homo family simply because we did evolve from a warmer climate, and were able to adapt faster then the now vanished Homo Neanderthalensis. And from all geological evidence, it is going to get a lot hotter before it cools off again.

You can't fight evolution.