There’s no question in my mind the “Intelligent Design” movement has lost all its arguments with Science. Unfortunately, post Trump-it, that fact is now an irrelevance. With Trump’s appointment of Betsy de Vos as Education Secretary, it looks like religious fundamentalism no longer needs its figleaf. What concerns me much more is that a similar fate awaits climate research if his appointment of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State is any indication of future policy on combating climate change.
The science and politics of Global Warming seem to have roots going back to 1950, the year I was born. Two irrefutable examples of rapid climate change stand out for me. Around then atmospheric 
was not much more than 250 ppm. Today it is pushing 500 ppm and shows no sign of tailing off. We have ice-core samples showing how atmospheric has changed previously over 800,000 years and present levels and rate of change are unprecedented.
Also the extent of land and sea ice globally appears to be changing rapidly. I can look out of my window now across at les Monts d’Olmes in the Pyrenees, which are almost devoid of snow cover. Glaciation has reduced to 10% of what it was in the Pyrenees at the start of the nineteenth century. The story of retreating glaciers is repeated on every continent.
The Arctic sea ice seems to be on a rapid trend of shrinkage, especially when one looks at volume and not just area. There have been suggestions that the loss at the Arctic was being balanced by increases in sea ice at the Antarctic but latest information suggests this is no longer happening.
Today I see Barry Arrington has posted a “Friday Chuckle” cartoon mocking change as if it were a myth created by scientists. That his attitude is widely shared, even in the US administration, is worrying. One would expect the argument to move to considering whether the undeniable change is caused in whole or in part by human activity and whether changes we make now can help reverse the trend and if that is achievable or desirable. Has electing Trump condemned us to four lost years of denial and inaction?
What do others think?
ETA password protection removed, sorry!
GlenDavidson,
I considered the references to it by both vj and petrushka to be rather simplistically expressed – as if the only objection to nuclear power comes from those pesky ‘Greens’. So that was what I was ‘attacking’, if that’s the right word.
dazz,
🙂
China invests more in alternative energy than the US and Europe combined.
And are World leaders in cheap and cheerful solar hot water production kits.
We already do.
Demonstrably false.
We do admit it.
Demonstrably false.
We already do but please give us your definition. This should be a hoot.
Demonstrably false.
What information gets withheld and who withholds it? Please be specific. Not teaching kids YEC lies isn’t withholding valid information.
Not only that, but why? Who is lying knowingly and about what colewd?
Can you give an example? Is Lenski’s experement an example of such biological information arriving? If so, why? If not, why not?
newton,
Share of total emissions
28.21% China
15.99% USA
6.24% India
4.53%
3.67%
2.23%
1.75%
1.72%
1.71%
1.56%
Germany
• 2.23%
ChinaU.S.IndiaRussian FederationJapanGermanyKoreaIranCanadaSaudi Arabia0%2.5%5%7.5%10%12.5%15%17.5%20%22.5%25%27.5%30%32.5%
Given the US has 25% of the population of China your point is well taken.
OMagain,
I understand you think the Lenski experiment is evidence of rmns creating biological information despite very small changes to the actual DNA sequences.
Lets agree to disagree here or we may derail the op.
We know that dirt and soot on top of snow and ice packs causes melting even when the ambient temperature is below freezing. Just add the sun. Look at the glaciers that are melting and they are very dirty.
Frankie,
Tell them about pyramid power joe! Zero emissions?
An artful dodge. No, wait! It was a ham-handed evasion. I get those two confused sometimes.
You have run into what’s called the Black Knight problem (after Monty Python): what can you DO when you’re faced with simple, flat denial of the obvious or self-evident.
The late great Molly Ivins wrote about this. She told of a case where something (surely some gas) escaped from a military base and killed thousands of sheep. The ranchers, understandably upset, demanded answers from the Pentagon, which duly sent a couple of Official Deniers. They held a meeting in a house surrounded by dead and rotting sheep, and the stench was overpowering. The Official Deniers said “sheep? What sheep? We don’t see any sheep!” and THAT, folks, was the Official Pentagon Response to the event.
This is the Black Knight problem. Colewd, I’ve noticed, repeats verbatim falsehoods he’s been corrected on ad nauseum. And like the Official Deniers, he simply keeps doing it. Where facts refute Official Truth, as we see, they have absolutely no influence.
I tend to think we’re seeing brains on religion. THIS is what intractable belief does when its positions are simply wrong. Yet what can anyone do except keep slicing heads off the religious hydra to no effect. It’s a parenting problem.
w/r/t nuclear power, Nova’s going to do a special on its history and future on the 11th you’ll want to watch. I’m going to watch it.
In my own case, when I was in physics i was much more pro-nuclear than I am now, because solar wasn’t as mature. Now i’m not in favor of nuclear power because it’s just not necessary.
The problems with nuclear power are well known. We’ll always fuck up and have accidents like Fukushima because humans are DUMM. It’ll never be as cheap as we think it should be, because of the liability. The plants cost billions of dollars. We’re not even dealing with the waste we’ve already accumulated, we’re parking it in ‘swimming pool’ storage right now cause we can’t get our shit together. And then you’ve got the externalities of nations having to deal with / bribe / attack countries which are trying to use their reactors to proliferate.
It’s a whole mess of unnecessary headaches. For probably about a trillion dollars* you could install enough solar and storage to run the US electrical grid on 100% solar. No worries about coal, or nuclear, or methane leaks from natural gas, etc. PV cells have gotten much more efficient since I looked into it, and so have storage technologies. I can’t believe the performance characteristics of lithium batteries nowadays.
*(A few years ago Scientific American I think it was estimated converting the US to 100% solar would cost about $700 billion. That sounds like a lot, but we’ve spent 3x that on Iraq so far. )
We have the technological know-how to fix these problems, but we can’t fix them when the moneyed interests who profit from the current system can spend a few million bucks on propaganda and convince half the country that it’s a scientific conspiracy. That’s the tragedy. The scientists and engineers could fix the problem, but the voters and politicians will refuse.
Frankie,
Because the glaciers that piled up all that enormous amount of silt and gravel moraine outside the basin they used to occupy were as pure as the driven snow.
AhmedKiaan,
Sadly true. The tragedy of the commons.
Glaciers get dirty due to the soot and dirt in the atmosphere
Hi Alan,
Thank you for your response. You query my figure of 100,000,000,000,000 dollars (and possibly 200,000,000,000,000 dollars) for the cost of stopping global warming. All right, what about this?
The total cost of fighting global warming has been realistically estimated in a 2014 report by the International Energy Agency, at 44,000,000,000,000 dollars. That’s what government and investors need to invest in clean energy and related technologies from 2011 to 2050 in order to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Such an outlay will require spending of 1 trillion dollars a year. What’s more, the IEA’s estimate that fighting global warming will cost 44 trillion dollars is based on an ideal scenario. That scenario tell us what it will cost to switch away from fossil fuels, if we all act now and make intelligent decisions, and if technologies work out the way we hope they will. And if technology for capturing and storing carbon dioxide can’t be deployed, the cost of stabilizing greenhouse-gas levels will more than double, according to a recent IPCC report.
Here’s another estimate by an oil engineer, Ryan Carlyle, who puts the figure at about 100,000,000,000,000 dollars. And another estimate on the same page puts it at 75,000,000,000,000 dollars. And as I mentioned earlier, Mark Jacobson’s estimate (which I linked to in my comment above) is around 100,000,000,000,000 dollars. So I think I’m in the right ballpark.
Knowing that governments tend to screw things up, I think we can safely say that the 100,000,000,000,000-dollar figure is an underestimate. As an Australian, I remember all too well what happened with the Sydney Opera House. To quote Wikipedia:
You may argue that we’ll probably recoup most of the costs of eliminating global warming. Some economists take a similar view. Others are more skeptical and hard-nosed. Even if we recoup the costs in the long-term, they say, in the short-term it will be very painful. Also, many of the estimates of how much we’ll save are based on rosy scenarios. As someone with a background in economics and accounting, I tend to side with the hard-nosed economists.
You also write:
I wholeheartedly agree with you on this point, just as I’d agree with your comment: “The problem, especially with wind, with renewable energy is storage and distribution. This is where research and development needs to go.” I’m fine with spending money on wind and solar research. Spending money on building more wind and solar power stations right now, however, strikes me as foolhardy: they’re too inefficient. I wish the Greens would take to heart Aesop’s old adage: “Slow and steady wins the race.” Cheers.
Nobody disputes this. Where does the soot come from? What goes up with the smoke when coal is burnt? When did humans start burning coal on an industrial level?
Well, yes I’m inclined to suggest that many adjustments we could make that might mitigate climate change are worth doing for other reasons. Here I’m stretching “cost” beyond raw economic figures.
Alan Fox is a great fan of niche construction. Just think of all the new designs coning our way!
Denmark manages to get nearly half its energy from wind. The wind blows for free. It’s not the solution (any more than nuclear is) but it’s a solution worth developing where conditions are favourable.
I think you are mixing me up with someone else. Neil, perhaps?
The intelligent design movement has lost all it’s arguments with Science, Alan. It’s hard to care about anything after that.
petrushka writes:
Hear, hear! I’ve been an advocate of thorium for several years now. And as Alan pointed out, fusion may also be the way to go, further down the track.
AhmedKiaan writes:
Look, I hate to break it to you, but we just can’t put all our eggs in the wind-and-solar basket. The following articles explain why we need nuclear, very convincingly:
We need nuclear power to solve climate change. Ted talk by Joe Lassiter. Excerpt:
There are three compelling reasons why renewables cannot supply most of the world’s energy within the next 50 years: the energy returned on energy invested is too low for them to be commercially viable; they can’t be economically scaled up; and they generate a large amount of environmental damage (especially solar and biofuels). Additionally, they require vast amounts of land.
The Catch-22 of Energy Storage by Professor John Morgan.
Energy intensities, EROIs, and energy payback times of electricity generating power plants (Weißbach et al., Energy 52 (2013), 210).
Solar PV – an irresistible disruptive technology? by Graham Palmer (May 8, 2014).
The World Needs Post-Silicon Solar Technologies by Rhodes Scholar and physicist Dr. Varun Sivaram. Argues that as solar energy’s market share increases, it’ll actually become more expensive and less economical, making it commercially non-viable. In his article, Sivaram points out that “solar panels face a moving target for achieving cost-competitiveness with fossil-fuel based power that becomes more difficult as more solar panels are installed. As a result, even after the expected cost reductions that accompany increased experience with silicon technology, solar PV cannot seriously challenge and replace fossil-fuel generation without advancing beyond the economics of silicon.” In short: new technologies are necessary for solar to successfully compete.
The darker side of solar power by Konrad Yakabuski in The Globe and Mail (May 27, 2015). Few people realize that solar energy causes massive environmental damage: the components of solar panels, which include several “conflict minerals,” are often mined in countries with weak health and safety regulations. Even worse, solar energy has to rely on batteries for energy storage, due to the intermittent nature of sunlight. Just one electric car battery contains 50 kilograms of graphite, an environmental pollutant which is wreaking havoc in China.
Finally, even if solar energy were to take off in Western countries, it will do very little to alter the situation in India, where despite a burgeoning local solar industry, coal use is projected to increase by 2.5 to 3 times by the year 2030, according to a recent IPCC report. “Even with the most aggressive strategy on nuclear, wind, hydro and solar, coal will still provide 55% of electricity consumption by 2030,” declares Jairam Ramesh, who led the Indian delegation at the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.
Ahmend Kiaan also writes:
That estimate is a very old one: it comes from Scientific American, “A Power Grid for the Hydrogen Economy”, 2006). But it only applies to electricity, not total energy usage.
In fact, almost half of the world’s primary power consumption is via liquid transport fuels, and solar can’t directly replace oil for that.
Sal used to be a big fan of junk DNA. Something about at the Fall God inserted a bunch of crap into the human genome. Sort of like a Creationist prediction about junk DNA.
Is that Creationist prediction being falsified?
Carpe diem, mung. But there is a sense in which we only hold the World in trust for future generations. In all seriousness, do you feel no responsibility to leave things in at least a no worse state than in which you first received them?
.
“The total cost of fighting global warming has been realistically estimated in a 2014 report by the International Energy Agency, at 44,000,000,000,000 dollars. That’s what government and investors need to invest in clean energy and related technologies from 2011 to 2050 in order to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Such an outlay will require spending of 1 trillion dollars a year.”
the global GDP is 75 trillion dollars. If those numbers are right we could solve global warming by putting a 1.33% tax on everything. Shit, that’s nothing, if you’re talking about an existential problem.
But we should go after the low-hanging fruit, like spending 1 trillion dollars to permanently decarbonize the US electrical grid.
Omagain writes:
I live only 4 meters above sea level myself, and if a tsunami ever hits me, I’m toast (says he with fingers crossed). So I’m not one of these people living on a high hill.
Here’s the Japan Times article your figures appear to come from: Tokyo, Osaka, other mega-cities will be swamped by surging sea levels, even at 2 degree rise: study. It says that according to a study by Climate Central, 34 million people in Japan live in areas that will go underwater if global temperatures rise by 4 degrees Celsius, while even warming of only 2 degrees Celsius would leave the homes of 18 million people underwater.
That sounds pretty horrifying, until you read further into the article, which says:
The key word here is “eventually.” As I wrote in my earlier comment (#2), sea levels are expected to rise by only 40-60 centimeters this century, and 60-100 centimeters by 2300. Actually, that’s under a strong emissions-reductions scenario, but even if emissions are unmitigated, the 90 experts participating in the survey I quoted anticipate a median sea-level rise of 200-300 centimeters by the year 2300. So when I read figures of a 4.7-meter rise under a 2 degree-Celsius scenario, it’s obvious that the people at Climate Central are looking at scenarios that are several centuries away.
At this point, I’d like to invoke Torley’s Law of Predictions: any attempts to predict the future more than 100 years ahead aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, because the future that far ahead is radically unpredictable. Classic example: the great horse manure crisis of 1894 when, The Times newspaper predicted: “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.” Heaven only knows how we’ll be living in 2300. That’s something we shouldn’t be worrying about. 2100 yes, 2300 no.
Alan asked me about the people of Vanuatu. Well, the population of Vanuatu in 2013 was just 252,763. You could give each of them 1 million dollars, tell them to emigrate, and solve your Vanuatu problem for just 250 million dollars, which is a lot less than 100 trillion dollars.
On the other hand, the cost of building hundreds of kilometers of dykes along the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta region (which will be one of the worst-affected areas worldwide) has been estimated at more than 20 billion euros. But even that’s a drop in the ocean, when compared to the 100 trillion dollars that it’ll take to combat global warming worldwide, as we saw above.
AhmedKiaan,
@ Ahmed Kiaan,
We have
enabled on the site. Dollar signs cause parsing into LaTeX. If you ask in sandbox, I’m sure someone can tell you the workaround. I just type “dollars”.
do i just use an escape character or something? that’s annoying.
AhmedKiaan,
Don’t know what an escape character is. If it is annoying, an option is to disable site-wide LaTeX and anyone wanting to use it in a comment needs to open the comment with (latexpage) changing to square brackets.
Maybe that’s why I wrote “electrical grid”? Here let me bold the original for you:
For probably about a trillion dollars* you could install enough solar and storage to run the US electrical grid on 100% solar.
And thanks for pointing out that the estimate is 10 years old: the cost of PV panels per watt has dropped 80% since then. So it’s way cheaper now.
It’s why I post in TSZ.
That the care of the world was placed in the hands of humans is such a theist thing to say, Alan. Are you certain this feeling of responsibility you think you have isn’t a vestige of Christian culture that needs to be excised rather than encouraged?
Since you want to get all serious.
I recall first hearing the idea from someone from native American culture.
They just love the whole “stolen concepts” thing, wonder how it feels turned back on them.
I have just been using $ (Okay, that was $)
The point is it isn’t the added CO2, Alan. Snow and ice can melt even with below freezing temps.
CO2 is not the problem. CO2 is not a pollutant. And a doubling of CO2 – from 280 to 560ppm- will only cause an increase of 0.6C if all else remained equal-
The Mathematics of Carbon Dioxide, Part 1
The Mathematics of Carbon Dioxide Part 2
The Mathematics of Carbon Dioxide Part 3
The Mathematics of Carbon Dioxide Part 4
vjtorley,
From your link on costs:
Switching from fossil fuels to low-carbon sources of energy will cost 44 trillion between now and 2050, according to a report released this week by the International Energy Agency. That sounds like a lot of money, but the report also concludes that the switch to low-carbon technologies such as solar power—together with anticipated improvements in efficiency—will bring huge savings from reduced fossil-fuel consumption. As a result, the world actually comes out slightly ahead: the costs of switching will be paid for in fuel savings between now and 2050.
Correct,but the warmer the temperatures the faster it melts, the less new snow coverage the more soot and dirt are exposed.
Sounds like the start of a model. Get the slide rule out Frankie!
Frankie,
“The point is it isn’t the added CO2, Alan. Snow and ice can melt even with below freezing temps.”
No it can’t. At least not at standard pressure and minimal salt content. Adding soot to the top of a glacier increases the temperature in the immediate vicinity of the ice to above freezing but not appreciably in the air above it.
“CO2 is not the problem. CO2 is not a pollutant. And a doubling of CO2 – from 280 to 560ppm- will only cause an increase of 0.6C if all else remained equal-“
The common trope (or tripe) used frequently by evangelists. Humans and other animals respire CO2, and plants need it, therefore it can not be pollution. Using that argument, why do municipalities spend billions every year treating raw sewage? Algae in lakes and rivers need phosphorus and ammonia, and fish need algae. And many communities include fish as a major part of their diet.
The last time I looked, raw sewage in a lake is considered a pollutant.
I know that we are not supposed to denigrate other blogs but I think this point is relevant with regard to the mindset behind AGW opponents.
42 comments in, and this thread is still, more or less, on track. Barry’s anti-AGW cartoon devolved quickly into arguments over the number of the beast and Jesus.
I do know how to derail a thread. 🙂
Do the costs of wind and solar include the cost of storage for nighttime demand and for times when wind is unavailable? And the environmental costs of building enough batteries, and the costs of replacing the batteries every five years or so?
I have nothing against wind and solar, but I’m not convinced the costs have been calculated for switching the world economy.
But you can only derail a thread if the mindset of the majority of commenters is such that they allow it.
For example, back when I commented st UD I used to get a sick thrill out of OPs posted by Mullings and Williams. All I would have to do is mention homosexuality or objective morality. But it only worked because I knew that the most vocal commenters at UD have a passionate obsession with those subjects.
It’s called summer time
if you really want to get into the numbers, you should read the relevant Vaclav Smil books. But they’re quite dense. Storage, btw, is not too hard, you build hydroelectric pump storage, batteries, maybe ice systems.
Can’t be worse than waiting 2-3 decades for an unproven nuclear tech to maybe get worked out. (China’s been working on a civilian thorium reactor for 5 years and they say they might have a full-size one up and running by 2031.)
If only the people at this site (TSZ) could embrace diversity.
Berkeley Lab Quantifies Effect of Soot on Snow and Ice, Supporting Previous Climate Findings
Even though the air temp is below freezing the ice and snow melts because the dirt and soot warm up well above freezing in the sun light. On the weather channel they did an experiment in the Artic. In below freezing temps they placed a square black piece of cardboard on the snow and started measuring its temperature, which reached 90 F in minutes.