- Crude
- Hopping down the Bunny Trail
- Screwed
- Christmas shopping
Crude
The Way Things Break has posted Crude – The Incredible Journey of Oil which turned out to be much better than I anticipated. Good, accessible presentation of the carbon cycle, geological history, anoxic oceans, and the last 30 min are quite heavy hitting on climate change. Ninety minutes not wasted and excellent for educating your friends and family
Cavet, as you are warned at the site “there are some sound issues for the first few minutes. Things clear up around 3:33 …” They do clear up, but for three and a half minutes you are really annoyed.
Hopping down the Bunny Trail
Eli Rabett advises that honouor among bloggers (interesting hypothesis, any evidence?) requires that rather than jump straight to a good resource one should send people down the blog path so that all the good folks get credit.
So, to get you this video of Myles Allen debating Bjorn Lomborg it is necessary to send you to Rabett Run who will send you to Quark Soup who will direct you to Climateprediction.net to see the video.
I cheated, but actually advise you to go down the bunny trail anyway because it is really worthwhile:
Rabett does a good summary/critique of the key points and what Lomborg choses to ignore (there’s news).
David Appell at Quark Soup has listed some of the key stats from the talk and 
a couple of comments. Also , while there, you might accidentally stumble across his most recent post which is just fun if you share his frustration and rage (which I do).
As for the video itself, I skipped right to the 11:22 minute point (“The Right Priorities: reply) as I have had more than too much of Lomborg’s sophistry and obfuscation in my life (here and here).
Allen has a fantastic little visual presentation that I think really communicates just what a precipice we stand on and how suicidal any “keep using carbon” strategy is. This simple and clear presentation is accompanied by a lot of hard (and useful) numbers.
That being said, unless I am very much mistaken his presentation is slightly misleading in the sense that it talks about climate change only in terms of CO2 we deliberately release through fossil fuel use.
Good as his presentation is, it would be easy to leave it without the slightest inkling of albedo, methane clathrates, permafrost methane, carbon reserves in the soil, etc. This is a dangerous omission in my humble opinion.
In fairness, he was trying to pack a huge amount of information into very little time, and do it clearly and succinctly – he did a fantastic job of it.
Note that in the upper right of the screen is a “back” button to check out the other presentations if you are so inclined.
Screwed: Cheerful (Not) News Dept
Brians Angliss writes “The Weekly Carboholic: carbon dioxide lifetime 50-100x longer than generally reported“, which pretty much explains itself.
The why is explained in his post, but as he states “This conclusion reinforces the importance of CO2, and of CO2 emission reduction, with respect to climate disruption.”
Hence headlines like “Warming is forever, climate science warns.”
From Gwynne in the Japan Times we get Four harsh truths about climatic change:
• Scientists are really scared. Their observations over the past two or three years suggest that everything is happening a lot faster than their climate models predicted.
• The generals are right. Food is the key issue, and world food supply is already very tight.
• There is a point of no return after which warming becomes unstoppable. And we are probably going to sail right through it.
• We will have to cheat. In the past two years, various scientists have suggested several “geo-engineering” techniques for holding the temperature down directly.
That is in line with what I am seeing; anyone have some good rationale for why any of them are not the case? Sucks, but we have to deal with what is.
There has been a lot of news about Poznan ranging from ‘ambitious goals set’ to ‘disappointing.’ Fred Pearce reports on Poznan as “World leaders ‘failing to get’ climate message,” which I suspect is the real answer ie much, much worse than merely ‘disappointing’.
Christmas shopping
Christmas is coming: how about getting your special partner “200 Ways Every Woman Can Help Stop Global Warming” from Women’s Lifstyle, regardless of their gender?
OK, does anyone know this one? I’m not quite ready to drop the $17.00, but I am curious. I find the web site far too ‘mainstream’ for me, but then I don’t think I am their target demographic.
Who knows? maybe it is the perfect “bridge” gift for that special someone who is not quite ready to dump the car, go vegan and occupy a coal plant (gifts for that person next time).
We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
IMAGE CREDITS:
Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 65 … still no evidence.
Greenfyre's 
[…] Vote Climate News: Crude and Screwed […]
I take it your on the global warming bandwagon. [1] Tell me how this sounds then: Lets say 1/2 of CO2 is man made [2], the other half being decaying foliage, volcanoes and CO2 emitted from ocean warming.
Taking that man made CO2 level as a whole and calling it 100% we can start with this.
Al Gore just said a couple weeks ago that 30% of man made CO2 comes from 3rd world countries using wood to cook their meals. Until someone supplied the whole 3rd world with samll gas operated stoves, thats not changing. So right away we start with 70% of man made CO2 having the potential to change. for the heck of it, lets say we can change it by 25%. That would only be about 8.5% I think of a change.
Now this is on a gas that is only .037 of the atmosphere. I don’t see it being anything that we can affect much.
The sun has too much to do with earths temperatures than we do. .2 degrees up or down every decade is not going to matter. It’ll all even out in the end. You have to hope we don’t have global cooling. We would never be able to stop that.
Now, tell me how my figures are wrong and how any changes in the figures would make any difference what so ever. [3]
Mike
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mike P:
Lets say 1/2 of CO2 is man made, the other half being decaying foliage, volcanoes and CO2 emitted from ocean warming.
Alternatively, let’s look at what the evidence tells us about the proportions of CO2 in the atmosphere.
It’s pretty easy to determine which is which — carbon that’s more active in the carbon cycle has relatively high carbon 13, while carbon that’s been stuck in fossil fuels (and thus, if it’s in the atmosphere, we put it there) has relatively low carbon 13 (it’s mostly decayed into carbon 12, which is more prevalent in plants). If humans were emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than natural sources, we’d expect the ratio of carbon 13 to carbon 12 in the air to be falling, as more carbon-13-rich CO2 is dumped in the air. Lo and behold, this is exactly what we observe happening — and this rise correlates with trends in global human emissions.
(This is very similar to the physics behind radiocarbon dating, by the way – the same radiocarbon dating that has been so revolutionary in the biological and anthropological sciences.)
As for the other natural sources, we have a pretty decent understanding of their emission/reuptake levels: The oceans are a net sink, not an emissions source (this is corroborated by the increasing trends of ocean acidity — as the oceans take up more CO2, they convert it to carbonic acid, which decreases their pH) and volcanoes are trivial (~0.3 gigatons of CO2 per year on average (factoring in eruptions!) compared to 26 gigatons of CO2 per year from industrial sources). “Decaying plants” are a tricky one — are you referring to anthropogenic deforestation (which is counted under “land use change”, a combined source of ~6 GtCO2/yr) or just natural rotting (which is considered under the biosphere’s natural processes and essentially balanced out by photosynthesis)?
All of this is in the IPCC report, by the way. It’s evident you haven’t read it.
Al Gore just said…
Fuck Al Gore. He’s not speaking on science, he’s speaking on politics. You should not form scientific opinions based on what he says (either supporting or opposing).
Why is it that Gore’s only ever brought up by denialists?
…for the heck of it…
Very rigorous. Do you have the numbers to back up your claims of ineptitude?
Now this is on a gas that is only .037 of the atmosphere. I don’t see it being anything that we can affect much.
Let’s put it this way, then. Pre-industrial CO2 concentrations were about 270ppm. It was ~270ppm (give or take a small amount) for the entirety of human agricultural history (and thus for the entire climate we’ve adapted to). CO2 levels are currently 385ppm (last I checked — note that this higher than the number you cited!). That is a 115ppm, or 42.5% increase since the Industrial Revolution alone (~150 yrs).
To put it another way, ice cores tell us that, if left to natural causes, a change of CO2 concentrations of 100ppm takes approximately 5000 and 20000 years. It’s changed by more than that in about 150 years.
The sun has too much to do with earths temperatures than we do.
Sadly, you’re wrong:
Solanki 2008: “solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades”
Ammann 2007: “Although solar and volcanic effects appear to dominate most of the slow climate variations within the past thousand years, the impacts of greenhouse gases have dominated since the second half of the last century.”
Lockwood 2007: “the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanism is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified.”
Foukal 2006: “The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years.”
Scafetta 2006: “since 1975 global warming has occurred much faster than could be reasonably expected from the sun alone.” (Note that this paper was cited by Inhofe as claiming warming was due to the sun, and Inhofe listed the co-author (Bruce West) as a denier. The fact that it shows such a strong correlation before 1975 and the strong break after 1975 only serves to reinforce how it isn’t the sun now.)
Usoskin 2005: “during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source.”
Frolich 1998: “solar radiative output trends contributed little of the 0.2°C increase in the global mean surface temperature in the past decade”
I could go on, but I’m running late. Suffice it to say, the sun has shown no appreciable trend in irradiance over the last 30 years (and possibly the last 50), but temperatures have continued to rise in exactly the same fashion we’d expect if CO2 increased that amount. (This is exacerbated by the fact that it warms faster at night than during the day, that it warms faster at the poles (the southern hemisphere has more ocean and thus a slower response, while the north pole is among the hottest areas on the planet relative to its averages) and critically that the stratosphere is cooling — a smoking gun signature of greenhouse gas warming.)
Now, tell me how my figures are wrong and how any changes in the figures would make any difference what so ever.
I’ve shown how most of your arguments are handwavy at best and inept at worst. You’ve shown how you have a poor understanding of the background science and haven’t read the IPCC report detailing the scope of the problem. I also only linked to reports refuting your claims, not those showing the IPCC underestimated the effects and that we’re seeing feedbacks almost a century ahead of schedule, underscoring the urgency of all of this.
RTFR, then we can talk.
I haven’t even gotten into the economic or national security benefits of increased efficiency, the geopolitical consequences of remaining addicted to fossil fuels, and the incredible investments in green tech that continue to grow, even in this recession.
Correction: Partway through my isotopic example, I mixed up carbon 13-12. The ratio should be *falling* as carbon-13-poor fossil fuels are burned, which is exactly what we observe. Could I ask for an edit, Mike?
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Umm…
Brian
I appreciate your knowledge of climate science and as I’ve said before, you seem to have a physics background that adds to the information. Thanks! 🙂
I would, however, like to offer what I hope is some constructive criticism about process or dynamics, since we can’t get by on substance alone in movements for change.
I’m not sympathetic with Mike P, but I wish that you could see that you don’t elevate yourself with extreme sarcasm.
It’s not witty or provocative, as some people perceive; and it has nothing to do with intelligence. Unfortunately, all it is is abusive feedback.
If you want to silence a denier, it won’t work: individuals subjected to this sort of treatment feel they have to respond, because they are being treated as inferior (to you).
On the other hand, if you are trying to engage, that won’t likely work either, because most people are not very receptive to rolling eyes and sneers.
I wouldn’t encourage you to ‘run amok’ with that part of it.
But do keep up with the rest of your good work. 🙂