WSJ: Whatever Happened to Global Warming?

[estesbob]

Oh, great! Burn a bunch of fossil fuels and dump a bunch of greenhouse gases (and other pollutants) into the atmosphere so I can travel to New York City and attend an event protesting the dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere?



I think I’ll take a rain check.

It’ll probably snow.

 

[lynnvinc]

It’ll probably snow.

Wouldn’t doubt it with AGW causing increase in Rossby waves (neg arctic oscillations, Nor-easters).

The people who are causing this problem (us) without any compunction to do something about it… It just boggles my mind. I will never get used to iniquity no matter how old I get (and I’m pushing 70 now).

 

[Ridgerunner]

Wouldn’t doubt it with AGW causing increase in Rossby waves (neg arctic oscillations, Nor-easters).

The people who are causing this problem (us) without any compunction to do something about it… It just boggles my mind. I will never get used to iniquity no matter how old I get (and I’m pushing 70 now).

C’mon Lynnvinc. This is really too much. Disbelieving in the various MMGW disaster scenarios, or operating one’s car, for that matter, is not objectively evil. It’s not “iniquity” to heat one’s house, either.

 

[styrgwillidar]

nypost.com/2014/09/14/leo-v-science-vanishing-evidence-for-climate-change/

'Oregon-based physicist Gordon Fulks sums it up well: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.”

Consider:

• According to NASA satellites and all ground-based temperature measurements, global warming ceased in the late 1990s. This when CO2 levels have risen almost 10 percent since 1997. The post-1997 CO2 emissions represent an astonishing 30 percent of all human-related emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. That we’ve seen no warming contradicts all CO2-based climate models upon which global-warming concerns are founded.
•Rates of sea-level rise remain small and are even slowing, over recent decades averaging about 1 millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges and 2 to 3 mm/year as inferred from “adjusted” satellite data. Again, this is far less than what the alarmists suggested.
• Satellites also show that a greater area of Antarctic sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979. In other words, the ice caps aren’t melting.
• A 2012 IPCC report concluded that there has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the modern era. The NIPCC 2013 report concluded the same. Yes, Hurricane Sandy was devastating — but it’s not part of any new trend.
The climate scare, Fulks sighs, has “become a sort of societal pathogen that virulently spreads misinformation in tiny packages like a virus.” He’s right — and DiCaprio’s film is just another vector for spreading the virus.

The costs of feeding the climate-change “monster” are staggering. According to the Congressional Research Service, from 2001 to 2014 the US government spent $131 billion on projects meant to combat human-caused climate change, plus $176 billion for breaks for anti-CO2 energy initiatives.

Federal anti-climate-change spending is now running at $11 billion a year, plus tax breaks of $20 billion a year. That adds up to more than double the $14.4 billion worth of wheat produced in the United States in 2013.

Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, calculates that the European Union’s goal of a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, currently the most severe target in the world, will cost almost $100 billion a year by 2020, or more than $7 trillion over the course of this century.

Lomborg, a supporter of the UN’s climate science, notes that this would buy imperceptible improvement: “After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference.”

Al Gore was right in one respect: Climate change is a moral issue — but that’s because there is nothing quite so immoral as well-fed, well-housed Westerners assuaging their consciences by wasting huge amounts of money on futile anti-global-warming policies, using money that could instead go to improve living standards in developing countries.’

 

[weller2]

And what has not progressed? Malthus made a static analysis that was deeply flawed.

If you look at any work comparing 1972’s Limits to Growth with subsequent historical development, you’ll see that their prediction has been quite accurate. What they were guilty of was underestimating the total resource base. However, the nature of exponential growth dictates that increasing the resource base does not eliminate collapse – it merely postpones it in time. And not by much; for example, assuming that resource consumption grows by 5% yearly, increasing the total resource base by 100% only postpones exhaustion by 14 years.

As to what has not progressed, the answer is simple: energy generation. Here is US energy mix over the last 50 years:

http://www.celsias.com/upload/uploads/admin/renewables44566.jpg.png

As you can see, fossil fuels accounted for 100% of energy generation in 1960, and today they still account for over 80%. At that rate, de-carbonization would take another 200 years. Global warming aside, there is simply not enough fossil carbon for that, under the assumption that GDP will continue to grow, and carbon consumption will grow with it. There is enough carbon, but only under the assumption that the consumption will not grow – in other words, assuming 200 years of economic stagnation.

You can of course laugh at 19th century predictions of doom caused by a too big number of horses inb mid-20th century, which have been rendered moot by the invention of internal combustion engine. The difference is however, that for the last 50 years, there has been no invention comparable to the internal combustion engine – i.e. no invention which would allow us to quickly move the entire energy generation off carbon.

 

[weller2]

Which is why we should not be overly concerned about CO2 emmissions

Yes, yes I know.

Meanwhile, could you answer my earlier question, which is: how do you plan to run the US economy after you will have sold all your coal to the Chinese and Indians? Back to beewax candles and water mills?

 

[weller2]

Costa Rica is 97th in the world in per capita income. Not something to emulate despite left wing nostalgie de la boue, indulged from afar.

HDI incorporates 3 factors, which are: life expectancy, education and GDP per capita. So, it’s possible to have medium-level HDI with low GDP per capita – you just need good healthcare and education.

On the other hand, the US economy manages to combine high GDP per capita with comparatively low HDI – that’s because your healthcare and education systems are sub-par to the rest of the developed world. Also, actual quality of life in the US is lower than HDI would indicate – because GDP is distributed very unevenly.

 

[weller2]

May be technically infeasible as well, unless an outside company/national runs it for them.

Not a problem at all – oil extraction industry already runs this way for a large part.

 

[styrgwillidar]

…
Global warming aside, there is simply not enough fossil carbon for that, under the assumption that GDP will continue to grow…

Exactly. Just because one rejects the AGW theory, doesn’t mean they reject the necessity for alternative energy sources, cleaner energy sources, conservation, and good stewardship of the planet.

This becomes a credibility problem, because when folks insist we need to make changes due to AGW, the implication taken by some is that if AGW is false, no changes need to be made. As you indicate, the requirement to change in terms of finding additonal energy sources is inevitable (barring the second coming) given carbon resources being finite. This assumes of course that some technology doesn’t come along permitting ‘farming’ energy through plants somehow. Hopefully, the changes can be done in a deliberate manner without excessive disruption or the impoverishment of a large number of people. It can certainly be a more gradual shift than many AGW proponents insist must be made. (Which I suspect is behind much of the dire predictions, not that the science supports it but because the believers think change will only be made if people perceive disaster around the next corner).

 

[weller2]

Without going into the situation for each country, the U.S. consumes approximately 25% of the world’s petroleum, for example. But it also produces approximately 25% of the world’s goods and services. So, where’s the inefficiency in use?

Example: distance from SAN to LAX is 200km. There are 25 flights per day on that route, mainly to serve passengers to/from SAN flying intenationally via LAX.

In similar situations in Europe, after arriving at the international airport you simply take an elevator to the train station located directly below the international terminal and board the train which takes you to the center of the other city within an hour. Even if the train runs on oil, it burns a fraction of oil that the plane does – not to mention being more comfortable.

US economy is littered with similar examples of wasting energy.

 

[RGCheek]

My mistake. I trusted to memory when replying to Ender. But even at 1 degree per 50 year period, that is still 10 times faster than it looked like to me from the summary data I posted in post #149. Still outlandish.

Is that really where you looked to conclude that temperatures rose 1 degree per 50 year period? I find that hard to believe, since the HadCRUT3 data you reference here is a 9 Megabyte ZIP file of numerical data for individual reporting stations, most of which do not go back far enough to say anything about the Little Ice Age. (I did find one Czech station that started in 1805). You would have had to write a computer program to read in all these station reports to average them. Then you would have had to devise a policy of how to handle station data (discard or whatever) that does not go back far enough. Did you really do that? I am getting more and more curious how you came to your 1 deg. C per 50 year figure, as it would take me at least a day to develop such a computer program to analyze that HadCRUT3 data, and I am a professional computer programmer. I showed you my source for my figure of 0.6 deg. C over 300 years, and you can just look at it and see what I see. Why can’t you do the same for me and show me a summary graph of global temperatures that show the warming after the Little Ice Age was 1 deg. per 50 years?

No, there are two separate responses I made; 1) what did I think global temperatures are doing, and 2) where to get raw temps.

The first I got off charts based on historical data going back to the Maunder Minimum which seems to have ended around 1810 or so. We have seen about a 2 degree increase on average based on those charts.

The second is something I googled for, and I did not write a program for you to analyze the data. Sorry, don’t have that much time to spend answering questions for you.

 

[RGCheek]

If you look at any work comparing 1972’s Limits to Growth with subsequent historical development, you’ll see that their prediction has been quite accurate. What they were guilty of was underestimating the total resource base. However, the nature of exponential growth dictates that increasing the resource base does not eliminate collapse – it merely postpones it in time. And not by much; for example, assuming that resource consumption grows by 5% yearly, increasing the total resource base by 100% only postpones exhaustion by 14 years.

As to what has not progressed, the answer is simple: energy generation. Here is US energy mix over the last 50 years:

As you can see, fossil fuels accounted for 100% of energy generation in 1960, and today they still account for over 80%. At that rate, de-carbonization would take another 200 years. Global warming aside, there is simply not enough fossil carbon for that, under the assumption that GDP will continue to grow, and carbon consumption will grow with it. There is enough carbon, but only under the assumption that the consumption will not grow – in other words, assuming 200 years of economic stagnation.

You can of course laugh at 19th century predictions of doom caused by a too big number of horses inb mid-20th century, which have been rendered moot by the invention of internal combustion engine. The difference is however, that for the last 50 years, there has been no invention comparable to the internal combustion engine – i.e. no invention which would allow us to quickly move the entire energy generation off carbon.

What I laugh at is static analysis and that is what Malthus did, and IIRC that was also pointed out to him by his critics at the time.

While human population growth causes a linear increase in the amount of resources required, the growth in population causes an exponential growth in technology, usable acreage and new alternatives for resources. Plastic is a perfect example of what Malthus could not have foreseen, and for which we have many products that are not only cheaper to make but are of better quality than the products he had available in his day.

A growing population is a blessing on mankind, not a curse, as it gives us the most precious resource of all; the human mind.

 

[JWH123]

Wow, isn’t is amazing that a condition can have more than one cause!

Yes, the multiple causes are sunspots and solar flares.

Nothing man-made or under human control.

I’m not saying that we don’t need to be environmentally conscious. We are in danger of exhausting our resources within this century if we aren’t. But the need to conserve resources is for this reason, not because of some concept of man made climate change.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

No, there are two separate responses I made; 1) what did I think global temperatures are doing, and 2) where to get raw temps.

The first I got off charts based on historical data going back to the Maunder Minimum which seems to have ended around 1810 or so. We have seen about a 2 degree increase on average based on those charts.

OK, I guess we can just chalk it up to an unsubstantiated claim that modern temperature rises are nothing more than a continuation of the recovery rates from the Little Ice Age.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

Yes, the multiple causes are sunspots and solar flares.

Nothing man-made or under human control.

The “multiple causes” that Lynn was referring to were the factors at play in pre-historic times, before man inhabited the planet. An admission of those “other causes” in that period is not an admission that those same forces are acting today. That was then. This is now, and now is CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

 

[weller2]

the growth in population causes an exponential growth in technology, usable acreage and new alternatives for resources.

If population were everything, then India should be churning out more patents than Germany… oh wait, where is it?



Let’s now look at per capita numbers:



As any child playing Civilization will tell you, to be doing any research at all you must first have (a) food surplus then (b) trade surplus and (c) an educated population. (a) is the reason India does not even register on the graph. (b) is why Germany trumps Poland, although diet in both countries is similar; and (c) is why Japan and Korea beat US. If you have none of these things due to overpopulation and/or overconsumption of resources, you are not able to afford any research. Game over.

The reason Malthus was wrong is that he made his prediction at the beginning of the carbon age – when we have learned to use fossil carbon to support the ever-growing popualtion. In case you didn’t know how modern agriculture works – we’re essentially eating oil. Today, we’re running out of carbon, and there’s nothing on the horizon which is coming close to replacing it.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

 

[Ridgerunner]

HDI incorporates 3 factors, which are: life expectancy, education and GDP per capita. So, it’s possible to have medium-level HDI with low GDP per capita – you just need good healthcare and education.

On the other hand, the US economy manages to combine high GDP per capita with comparatively low HDI – that’s because your healthcare and education systems are sub-par to the rest of the developed world. Also, actual quality of life in the US is lower than HDI would indicate – because GDP is distributed very unevenly.

Life expectancy at birth tells you very little about overall healthcare. It can tell you a lot about how people count “live births” (that varies from country to country). It can tell you a lot about violence. It can tell you a lot about the condition of people who are allowed willy-nilly into a country. Even the Old Testament talks about the normal human life span as “three score and ten”. It’s hardly different now.

And the educational measure for HDI is in years. It does not purport to measure quality. But while I would certainly not defend the educational system in the U.S., it’s a fact that GDP per capita can make differences if resources are properly allocated. That’s true in healthcare as well.

And uneven distribution of GDP can be due to allowing millions of poverty stricken people into the country who have no skills and can’t speak the language. If, like Japan, this country virtually excluded immigration of any kind, probably the HDI would go up considerably. But we have to ask ourselves whether we want that.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Example: distance from SAN to LAX is 200km. There are 25 flights per day on that route, mainly to serve passengers to/from SAN flying intenationally via LAX.

In similar situations in Europe, after arriving at the international airport you simply take an elevator to the train station located directly below the international terminal and board the train which takes you to the center of the other city within an hour. Even if the train runs on oil, it burns a fraction of oil that the plane does – not to mention being more comfortable.

US economy is littered with similar examples of wasting energy.

Of course, your traveler arrived at “City 1” in Europe by plane, so that needs to be added back in. But let’s say one lands in Paris and wants to go to Frankfurt, and we only count that part. Well, he can take a train. That will take anywhere from almost four to about six hours. Or, he can take a plane (and they do have flights between Paris and Frankfurt) and be there much faster. If people didn’t take the plane, they wouldn’t have the flights available, right?

But some places in Europe are much closer together than that. In fact, the whole place is more heavily populated than the U.S., so depending on where you want to go, you might not have all that much travel involved. Maybe when the population of Kansas is as dense as it is in Germany people won’t need to travel as much. It’s a long way from NY to LA. Maybe if people had no need to go to either? Maybe if, say, Parsons Ks was as big as NYC and had similar amenities, people would, indeed take the train from, say, Wichita. Or maybe they wouldn’t need to even go to Parsons.

It’s interesting to look at old railroad ads from the 1920s and 1930s. Through trains took almost two days to get from Chicago to San Francisco, nonstop. They weren’t “high speed rail”, but they weren’t slow, either, easily reaching or sometimes exceeding 70 mph. So, is it really more efficient to spend two days sitting on one’s can in a train, or is it more efficient to fly and get there in a couple of hours? Depends on the person and what his time and productivity is worth, and how he affects the productivity of people on the other end, doesn’t it? Fuel use is not the only factor affecting productivity.

If one looks at fuel use only, then that would be an argument for eliminating a great deal of manufacturing. After all, muscle power requires only a day’s food. Of course, it’s less productive by far than fueling a machine.

 

[Ridgerunner]

If population were everything, then India should be churning out more patents than Germany… oh wait, where is it?

http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/ipstats/en/statistics/patents/images/patent_report_2007_31.gif

Let’s now look at per capita numbers:

http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/ipstats/en/statistics/patents/images/patent_report_2007_9.gif

As any child playing Civilization will tell you, to be doing any research at all you must first have (a) food surplus then (b) trade surplus and (c) an educated population. (a) is the reason India does not even register on the graph. (b) is why Germany trumps Poland, although diet in both countries is similar; and (c) is why Japan and Korea beat US. If you have none of these things due to overpopulation and/or overconsumption of resources, you are not able to afford any research. Game over.

The reason Malthus was wrong is that he made his prediction at the beginning of the carbon age – when we have learned to use fossil carbon to support the ever-growing popualtion. In case you didn’t know how modern agriculture works – we’re essentially eating oil. Today, we’re running out of carbon, and there’s nothing on the horizon which is coming close to replacing it.

http://omegashock.com/images/oil-humans.jpg

Japan, of course, is greatly more populated per square mile of useable space than is the U.S. So population doesn’t tell us everything. China has a huge population, but it outproduces India which has a smaller one. And, of course, Singapore has perhaps the most dense population of any nation on earth.

Governance also makes a great deal of difference. Poland was locked into 1939 until 1991.When it has as much decent governance for as long as Germany has (never mind the massive aid to German reconstruction that nobody has provided to Poland) it might be just as productive as Germany.

 

[RGCheek]

OK, I guess we can just chalk it up to an unsubstantiated claim that modern temperature rises are nothing more than a continuation of the recovery rates from the Little Ice Age.

Lol, chalk it up to whatever you want.

You asked me what I thought and I told you and I gave you far more support for my arguments than you have given for yours.