Coal being phased out

Getting rid of the bit coin miners would be a start.

regards Martin

At last! - some sense in the last 3 or 4 posts.

When younger I was told that it was not considered polite to discuss politics or religion at the dinner table as this would cause arguments that would not lead anywhere - perhaps we should add climate change to the list.

I personally am convinced it's happening, it does not take a degree in physics to read a thermometer and weather stations and geographers around the world agree the world is warming up. If it's not human activity which is causing this rapid change then I see no other plausible alternative explanation and I agree with Martin's last post.

I am concerned that vested interests and a desire to continue living our usual lives may be acting to delay any effective remedial action until everyone can be convinced, and then it may be too late as some effects of warming, such as loss of albedo caused by ice cap melting may not be easy to reverse.

Rod

Well, Hopper, I don't claim we were there first, but the Dinorwig pumped storage power station opened in North Wales in 1984:

Dinorwig

21% of the UK's renewable energy is from hydroelectric (appropriate for such a wet part of the world), which is 4.2% of total total electrical generation.

But I was impressed by all the rooftop water heaters that I saw in WA in 2004.

Bill

Hi again

My reference above to "Martin's last post" was to his Goodnight nurse post, not the Bitcoin one. , he must have been typing again as I was typing.

Rod

Very good Bill. Liquid sunshine power!

Yes I forgot about the solar hotwater heaters that are just about standard equipment here these days. Saves a fortune on power or gas bills. Both of which have gone through the roof since our various governments in their wisdom privatised them. Don't fall for that one in the UK if you haven't already. The free market and competition have not, in our sad experience, led to lower prices, but to monopolies, duopolies and price gouging. Surprise surprise!

I fully agree, Hopper. I think it was Thatcher (and Reagan) that kicked off the privatisation thing. The UK suffers with near-monoplies dominating various services, plus the inability of these separate units working together. Our railways are a prime example. Our public sector is by no means perfect, and significants cuts has caused much harm, but private sector firms hide behind secrecy (commercial confidence) and use their wealth to sway governments from providing for the greater good. But this another rabbit hole for us to chase down.

It is a shame that Dinorwig is mostly powered by fossil fuels for most of the time. Dinorwig was not installed to save energy - it was just to reduce the primary generation during peak periods. It simply used cheap base load power during the night and then ‘regenerated’ less power at peak usage. Renewables have come along (much) later.[

I'll have a go at a partial answer at least with the caviat that this is my understanding only and I am not a climate scientist. Broadly speaking :-

Prior to large scale 'biology' on the planet global temperatures were determined by solar irradience, albedo (ration of radiation absorbed to reflected) and the insulating properties of the atmosphere which varies according to composition. This was a dynamic system which oscillated wildly with positive and negative feedback loops.

With the advent of large scale biology additional feedback loops arose that had the effect of stabilising the climate.

Vulcanism (generating dust in the atmosphere), geological subduction (recycling of carbonates again through vulcanism) and variations on solar output and mean orbital radius shifted the equilibrium from time to time.

As with any regulating system biology (mostly plants) can only cope with a certain degree of disturbance. The human emissions of CO2 for much of the last 200 years was within the level that the biosphere along with oceanic absorption could cope with. In recent decades atmospheric CO2 has pushed the regulating mechanisms beyond capacity and the result has been a rapid rise (in geological terms) of global temperatures.

To go back to the original question (with all that has been done so far must contribute to reducing the weather?):-

What has been done so far is to reduce the rate at which CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere with the ambition of halting net additional CO2 by 2050 or before. This has already 'baked in a probable rise in temperature of 3 to 4 degees by 2100 at which point, hopefully we get to a new equilibrium. We are already at around +1.5 degree's. In order to reverse the rises our only lever is to draw down CO2 and there are currently no large scale methodologies of doing that although people are trying. So with what has been done so far we hopefully will succeed in slowing the rate at which things are getting worse and with luck end up in a situation which is survivable

Global temperatures with time

regards Martin

Martin, your link to the global temperatures over time is very revealing. I have not any compelling 'natural' explanations for the rapid rise after relative stability for the last 12,000 years since the last ice age; orientation of Earth's axis, sunspots, etc.

Thanks, Bill

Edited By Bill Davies 2 on 25/02/2020 14:10:28

Here we are, trying to understand just how this new 'fossil free' economy is going to work when the government

have the answer already.

Perhaps we should ask them to give us their answer ( with exact figures ) to this forum ?

Now that would be interesting.

How about this as an off the wall thought:

What about global population growth? that has exploded in the last 200 years from 2 billion to a projected 10.9 billion in 2100. before 1700 it was below 600 million.

if you watched the Matrix, it quoted an average human body producing around 25,000 BTUs of heat, all those billions of extra bodies are pumping out insane levels of extra heat and CO2 (breathing and farting).

Source for population numbers: Our World in Data

The IPCC doesn't generate evidence, it reviews evidence generated by scientists across the world.

Fair enough though, rapid is probably not the right word, although if that change is sustained for a few more centuries then it would be fair. What we are seeing is accelerated climate change i.e.faster than normal, but not as fast as some of the catastrophic changes in the past.

An example is the Antarctic Cold Reversal which saw a 3 degree cooling and 20 metre sea level rise over 200-500 years.

Rapid or abrupt climate change is what we would see if a major ice sheet collapsed, the north Atlantic conveyor halted or there was a massive release of methane from clathyrates.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrupt_climate_change

Neil

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 25/02/2020 17:05:48

Zebethyal, 65000 BTUs, that's a lot of energy. But I'm not familiar with the comment from the Matrix. However, it's a quantity of energy and not a rate of doing work. Assuming it is used up over a day, that's about 800 watts, over a horsepower, continuously, so no-one could keep that up for long! You'd have to eat quite a few steaks, so more bovine farting.

You have some nice projects, by the way.

Bill

You are right Neil, We do only get filtered science from the IPCC. but ignoring the IPCC for a moment, it was much warmer than today during the Medieval warm period, and much colder during the little ice age, which only ended around 1860, we don't really know what normal is, with I ching, and weather/climate, the only certainty is change!

I am saying no more on this subject, as it seemed to bring out the worst in some people!

Phil

I hope, given these various points of view, that we won't lose your input to the forum, Phil, you have provided much useful information over time. Thanks for that.

Bill

There is a really good example (Einstien) who in his day was in the 3%. Trouble is he was subsequently shown to be right. So those that chose to follow and support the 97% were hoodwinked! Exactly why I would prefer to weigh up the balance of the evidence and form my own opinion even if I don't have the expertise to follow the detailed complexities. In my experience those that refuse to answer questions but evade or deflect or has often been the case on this difficult subject become aggressive or belittling are following the crowd or are politicians.

Paul.

That right there would be the difference between you and Einstein.

And most of the dissenting 3 per cent of scientists. The study by Peterson et al that I linked to above in relation to the pie chart also found that there was a strong correlation between the level of specialist expertise in climate science and being in the 97 per cent. Those with the lowest level of specialist climate science expertise, eg geologists who had submitted papers on climatological matters, tended to correlate most strongly with the 3 per cent of dissenters. Those with the highest levels of specialist expertise in climate science tended overwhelmingly to be in the 97 per cent

Conclusion: Most of the dissenting 3 per cent were like you, but at a higher level, and did not have the "expertise to follow the detailed complexities".

Edited By Hopper on 26/02/2020 00:01:09

Well whatdya expect? It's widely known the IPCC is furthering their own agenda of creating a one-world government though climate alarmism.

The Israelis and the Palestinians, the Iranians and the Yanks, the Serbs and the Croatians, the Zulu and the Xhosa, the Indians and the Pakistanis, the French and the toursists, they are all going to lay down their arms and live together under one government, united by their alarm over climate change.

Einstein was in a minority for sure - rather less than 3%. I remember reading a book, or maybe it was a paper, by Arthur Eddington published in the 1910's in which he said he'd been told that there were only three people on the planet who understood relativity. He wondered who the third person was. But by the early 1920's the theories of special and general relativity were generally accepted. Same sort of thing with the quantum theory - though I read somewhere that Plank was so upset by his discovery that he spent time trying to prove himself wrong. No one else worried so much - scientists, by and large, know when they're onto a Good Thing.

That Good Thing isn't usually a financial gravy train. The idea that scientists jump on the climate change bandwagon to get government funding because it's the sexy 'now' thing crops up quite often, but I'm not convinced that people who espouse that view have had any real experience of how science funding works. In my own experience it's harder to win government grants than to get funding from industry. I have no doubt that if anyone were able to put together a convincing research proposal which promised sound evidence that anthropogenic climate change was insignificant they'd be made for life. Shell, Exxon, Ford &c have deep pockets. Trouble is, it can't be done.

Robin

Edited By Robin Graham on 26/02/2020 02:51:07

No it can't indeed.

But that is where about 90 percent of that dissenting 3 percent of so-called climate scientists get their funding -- from the fossil fuel industries via their bogus faux-science outfits such as the Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute.

Sadly too many of the public read reports of their faux science and give it equal weight as the other 97 per cent of bonafide science. Somehow 97 = 3 is a valid equation in their minds.

Scientific American ran a good article explaining in layperson's terms a scientific study that found over half a billion dollars a year of money is funnelled into 140 such bogus science/PR outfits, previously from the fossil fuel industry but now untraceable.   https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-climate-change-denial-effort/   It includes a link to the original study. It confirms the many previous studies coming to similar conclusions.

Edited By Hopper on 26/02/2020 07:29:06

Edited By Hopper on 26/02/2020 07:29:30