Surprise U.S.-China climate deal reverberates north and south
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I love my subsidies... And for the record, there is a secret program to the tune of 1/2 a trillion in Southern AB alone!
So, keep send the cash Flossy... And I do mean cash, paper money... Part of the extra bonus for oil companies is that we don't really have to provide any detailed expense reports (let alone receipts or invoices).
I'm looking to buy a 2nd weekend place on the lake with my cash subsidy
There's a common phrase among people who use models. No models are correct, some are useful. We don't have another planet to experiment with, and science is a combination of observation and experimentation. So what we're left with is modelling experiments for things like investigating new hypotheses on the global climate, and looking at the importance of factors and variables of interest. As for accuracy of models, there is a fairly large list of outcomes that were predicted from models, before the observations could confirm them. They include things like polar amplification, i.e. it's warming faster at the poles than at the equator. They include other things like the decreasing diurnal temperature trend, the night time temperatures are warming faster than the daytime temperatures. Models predicted that the troposphere would warm while the stratosphere cools, and this one is particularly relevant because that can't happen without an enhanced greenhouse effect. Lots of others, like expanding Hadley cells, the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, poleward migration of storm tracks, even hindcasting of sea surface temperatures during the last glacial maximum.
So, yeah, no models are correct, but some are useful. I say some, and that's important, because it doesn't do any good to lump them all together. Lots of fields use modeling experiments, and anyone who does will tell you it's not exactly what you should expect in the field, because we can't model reality, we can't predict the random variations in the real world, but we can model it. I use models everyday at work, disease models. My lab experiments aren't good enough though for a regulating agency to accept on their own. We require field studies to confirm the effects we observe in the lab.
If we could model reality, it wouldn't be a model anymore.
This requires a bit of statistical savvy. How many samples do you need to adequately represent the population? If you buy a package of food, how certain are you that say, a bag of chips that says it contains 220 grams actually has 220 grams of potato chips? If you sample multiple bags as they come off the line, you'll get a range of values. Sample enough and you'll get a sample average that is indicative of the population mean. For climate observations, there's an extra bit of information to throw in there. One of the other climate threads I saw this morning, the lightning one, posters are talking about temperatures and the temperatures in nearby and farther away cities. The other bit I'm talking about is auto-correlation, where observations taken close together in time or space tend to measure the same effect, so the random bit of sampling is not really random anymore. Normally when you sample from a population, you want to claim that your samples are independent measurements. But with temperature, the value you measure in Brooklyn is very likely going to be similar to the measurement you get in Queens. If you followed those two stations over time, you'd see that they both tend to move in concert with one another. That's auto-correlation. So for measuring temperature on the globe, it's not really about how many thermometers you have, but what kind of spatial coverage do you have. The various agencies tracking global surface temperture have various methods for dealing with this, and they've published the results. Have a look below, at the difference between the complete US historical climate network dataset using all thermometers, and the dataset used:
Sometimes stations move, or the station owners change the method that they report temperatures by, or large scale land changes around the station occur. The meteorological agencies involved look at all of this, and make adjustments to their network to ensure that these changes aren't biasing the end result, and looking at those two time series above, that's clearly true.
As for the seabed, well that would only give you sea floor measurements! The ARGO network of floats goes around the worlds ocean, and rises and falls in the water column, so it's reporting temperature in 3 dimensions. Here's a global map showing you as of yesterday, where all the ARGO floats were:
Pretty significant global coverage.
I've covered this in other posts here before. It's not so straightforward. Not all plants use the same biochemical pathways. For the photsynthesis reaction, there are two types of plants, C3 and C4 plants. The difference is in how efficient the plant is at enzymatically converting the carbon as a substrate, into sugars. Rather than type it all out again, I'll just cut and paste it here:
"Do you know what the difference is between a C4 and C3 carbon fization by plants? In the latter case, higher temperatures and drought will erase gains made by more carbon dioxide. More CO2 does not necessarily mean more food. The plants utilizing the C3 carbon fixing pathways lose roughly 25-30% of the fixed carbon. The enzyme RuBisCO (read the products paragraph in the section on Enzymatic activity) is responsible for two reactions, carboxylation, and oxegenation. When plants are stressed by heat and drought, more carbon is utilized by RuBisCo in the oxeganation pathway, losing more than the 25-30% of carbon I mentioned above.
If the world is growing more tropical plants, then yes, generally more CO2 means more plant food. In the developed world, where we grow temperate climate cultivars, the end result is far more uncertain, because of those other factors like droughts and heat stress."
As for the reproduce more, the plants will still need space. That measn competition to fill it, and that's really where we run into problems. Our society is built on infrastructure that was built for the climate we have. Plants are part of our infrastructure, a big part of food production, and resources. We may find that what we would call weeds beats out the plants we have built supply chains and products around. The winners in the plant competition might not fit so well. Of course we can adapt, but that's not to say things will be better, or worse. And it will certainly be a cost to adapt, to change our infrastructure.
Insolation is part of the picture. Those climate models we talked about up above, none would be useful if they didn't account for insolation. They'd all produce a snowball earth if they ignored that part of the equation. Closed and open systems, conceptually they don't change the physics of a greenhouse gas molecule vibrating, rotating, absorbing energy at a bandwidth and re-emitting it to get back to the molecules rest state.
Insolation
Milankovitch cycles dominate our ice age cycle, changes in our orbits eccentricity and precession, axial tilt. The cycles alone don't explain it, you need to account for other factors as well. Like feedbacks, including greenhouse feedbacks.
There's a really good talk given by Richard Alley a few years ago at the 2009 American Geophysical Union Fall meeting conference. I'd highly recommend it if you're interested in this topic, the talk is called "The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth's Climate History". It's a great talk, a bit technical, but he explains it all very well I think.
Richard Alley: "The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth's Climate History" - YouTube
Damn, that was longer than I thought! In Praxius' league.
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You can blame Monsanto, not a couple of warmer than average years for the bees dying off.
But way better than the regurgitated garbage we get from the agenda trolls.
Thanks for that awesome post Ton.
Yours was useful. I calculate you'll be getting an infraction for that.
Thanks, though. I'm actually gonna look up/read/watch all your references.
So you're a wannabee First Nation. You're a wannabee and you bought into the myth that Native Americans and First Nations were so in tune and lived as one with nature in peace and harmony.
Did the elders ever talk about how they contributed to the extinction of many North American mammals including the Wolly Mammoth?
Looks like Cliffy has a friend!
COnsidering most subdivision houses are uglier than a bag full of a$$holes I could never figure out why they pick on solar panels. Can only be that the right person isn't getting a kickback.
I couldn't agree with you more. Anyone that buys a home in one, would eat a bag of dicks as far as I'm concerned. I don't care affluent the neighbourhood is.
NIMBY's. Being an ecofreak is all well and good, until your property values are being affected, lol.
Hey Bear... looks like we have another wannabee First Nation in our midst.
Being a native must be so cool! Everyone seems to want to be one. One guy here is so obsessed here he believes he's a reincarnated Cree and another had a DNA test with the hopes of being one.
Alas... they are middle aged white men after all.
Being a native must be so cool! Everyone seems to want to be one. One guy here is so obsessed here he believes he's a reincarnated Cree and another had a DNA test with the hopes of being one.
Alas... they are middle aged white men after all.
Not that I care what some proto latino thinks but both my grandfathers and my mother spoke Cree while one white grandfather spoke it because he was the son of and eventually he himself owned a store and grew up as the minority in the Ft. Mac area back when it was still just a post. The other grandfather spoke it because it was the language of his mother though his father did not approve. This would've been in the late 1890s.
Growing up we sometimes visited the reservation so my mother could visit with her Uncle (my great uncle) and his fragmented family. In my neck of the woods I also grew up with lots of ndn kids in the community though I wasn't in a minority. I know a little bit of Cree through mother who was very in touch with the roots but have lost most through non use. My children all speak French.
Recently I had my DNA tested through 23+me but not for the purposes of proving or disproving native ancestry but rather for trying to find bio markers that put me at higher risks for disease so that I can proactively tackle them and extend life. Knowledge is power as they say. I was surprised by several things I learned about myself and aside from the discovery and match of several unknown cousins, I was surprised to learn that my percentage of ndn DNA is much smaller than I would have presumed. Science does not lie but people do. Perhaps my mother's father was adopted and he didn't know? He was one of 12 kids at a time when the death of women in child birth was common. For example one of my grandmothers was a little girl of a family of seven when her mother died in childbirth. I am working it out now. I highly recommend everyone have their DNA tested if they have the gonads to face a fairly accurate timeline of when they'll die and how.
Did you know the dream catcher was not native in origin but was actually a prop invented by an early American writer for a novel? I've hardly bought into a myth. I have spoken with many elders over the years from my time in the military through the Ranger program, whenever I ask a band council if I can hunt their land, the odd time I return to my great Uncles reservation.......I have never known anything but wisdom from the elders I've spoke with and myth in your mind or not, they possess a wisdom through experience we should all respect more.
I do not believe there will be many "quality" elders in the next 20 years and I support the work of the government to start documenting the oral histories and corporate knowledge of the remaining ones.
Maybe the camel too. So what?
I know eh. You should try that sometime, you wouldn't be viewed like you are.
They are, unlike yours.
Hey can I put that down if I am ever looking for a new job? I'm Latino ese! (proto-type)
Nice concession speech. Thanks for showing up, tho.
Because all that carbon is part of a recurring cycle. The oil underground has been out of the system for millions of years and humans have oxidized enough of it in the blink of an eye to significantly raise the concentration of CO2 from around 280 to 400 ppm. Those extra CO2 molecules abosrb longwave radiation and re-emit some of it back to the surface of the earth, resulting in warming.
I didn't say CO2 was bad. That's you. I said CO2 abosrbs longwave radiation in a certain spectrum and re-emits some of it back to earth. You can jump up and down all day long, but it won't change that fact.
I get what you're saying.
To play devil's advocate, the organic materials that is oil today was also trapped on a sudden(ish) basis.. The dinos (or algae, plantlife, etc) was sequestered in such a manner that it was unable to actively be a part of the ongoing carbon cycle.
One can argue that the events that resulted in that situation simply acted to defer the inevitable release.
And yes, I get that the 'release' is an anthro source... That said, to suggest that these hydrocarbons would remain untouched indefinitely is not accurate. The Athabasca oilsands are proof-positive that the hydrocarbons to get back in the system over time (geologic).
If in doubt, I recommend that you take a trip to Northern AB, specifically Clear Water Creek... Don the swim attire and jump in... You'll notice when you get out that your skin will be covered in many, tiny droplets of oil.
PS - Clear Water Creek is upstream from any developments
See above.. It is only a function of time before CO2 returns into the system at varying rates.