The climate change debate continues.

[kgwilson]

From the Industrial revolution till today, in just 260 years we have used most of the resources nature has laid down over the past 4,500,000,000  years & in so doing have released CO2 plus countless other pollutants into the atmosphere, the sea, the soil and into almost every living thing including us. So we have done this in just 0.00000057% of this planets history in time.

[Dax]

2 hours ago, spacesailor said:

How can Humanity make the sun expand, which is happening now.

It will be about 5 billion years before the earth feels the effects of the sun expanding, once it does it will envelope the earth, or push us further away and we have no idea what will actually happen.

 

They say as the supposed hydrogen the sun is burning begins to run out, it will expand and start to burn helium, then it will turn into a white dwarf and finally shed it's outer layers and collapse into a big blob of space junk.

 

2 hours ago, spacesailor said:

Stop blaming the Human race for being here.

Only stupid people would blame humans for being here, because we are all humans, I think.

 

As Nomadpete says, Mars is a great example of what runaway climate change will do to our planet and not in 1-5 billion years, but this century because we won't stop abusing the only place we can probably exist.

 

You only have to look at the scientific facts of today and the last 50 years to see, we are doomed. Not in 50 or 100 years, but within the next 10 years probably.

 

Within 5 years there will be about 10 billion people, there is no possibility the planet can support that number of humans. Then there is the unbelievable fact that within china and india alone, they register over 1 million new ICE vehicles a month. That alone is contributing to the problem faster and faster, as everything is connected through the food chains. Add humans are eating more and more bovine meats and diaries, that release huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere, along with the thawing of permafrost releasing even more methane and fish stocked almost depleted.

 

When you add up all the stats from around the planet that are effected by humans approach to life, just about all of them are hanging over the edge of collapse and we just keep pushing and pushing them harder and harder. When one falls over the cliff of no return, every ecological and biological organism will not be able to survive because the food chains will be destroyed. We are losing bees and insects at unbelievable rates and without them, very few eatable things will grow or they will be destroyed by disease and climate change.🙄

[octave]

Rio Tinto battery to be biggest of its type in world, and shine path to 100 pct renewables

[Dax]

Problem is, that big battery is aiding climate change because it supports mining and that ore then goes through a highly polluting coal burning process. But it proves big batteries do work and that one could power a reasonably big town.

 

I've had lifepo4 batteries for over 13 years and a li-ion for over 20 years. Neither chemistry has failed and my lifepo4 which run my house, motorhome and portable battery pack, getting used daily still has 100% energy capacity. The best thing about them is you can run just about anything from them and all the real usable energy, is above 13v.

 

If I used lead acid, would have changed the house batteries at least twice, the motorhome the same and couldn't have a portable 120ah portable pack. The savings in green house gases from my life of power use, comes to quite a lot of tonnes and money.

[octave]

18 minutes ago, Dax said:

Problem is, that big battery is aiding climate change because it supports mining and that ore then goes through a highly polluting coal burning process

 

True however it is cleaning up 1 step of the process.  The fact is that we do rely on minerals no matter how green we make our daily lives.   We probably cant change things instantly be we must move in the right direction.  It is no good producing renewable power an storing it if we have no refrigerator (with many parts made from minerals) to consumes this power.      

 

There are reasons to be optimistic if you look for them.    

 

Another nail in coal’s coffin? German steel furnace runs on renewable hydrogen in world first

 

Hydrogen as a Clean Alternative in the Iron and Steel Industry

 

Hydrogen in steel production: what is happening in Europe

Edited July 3, 2021 by octave

[pmccarthy]

The temperature–CO2 climate connection: an epistemological reappraisal of ice-core messages

Pascal Richet. Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, 1 Rue Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France. Published: 26 May 2021

Abstract. As simply based on fundamental logic and on the concepts of cause and effect, an epistemological examination of the geochemical analyses performed on the Vostok ice cores invalidates the marked greenhouse effect on past climate usually assigned to CO2 and CH4. In agreement with the determining role assigned to Milankovitch cycles, temperature has, instead, constantly remained the long-term controlling parameter during the past 423 kyr, which, in turn, determined both CO2 and CH4 concentrations, whose variations exerted, at most, a minor feedback on temperature itself. If not refuted, the demonstration indicates that the greenhouse effect of CO2 on 20th century and today’s climate remains to be documented, as already concluded from other evidence. The epistemological weakness of current simulations originates from the fact that they do not rely on any independent evidence for the influence of greenhouse gases on climate over long enough periods of time.

The validity of models will, in particular, not be demonstrated as long as at least the most important features of climate changes, namely the glacial–interglacial transitions and the differing durations of interglacial periods, remain unaccounted for. Similarly, the constant 7 kyr time lag between temperature and CO2 decreases following deglaciation is another important feature that needs to be understood. Considered in this light, the current climate debate should be considered as being the latest of the great controversies that have punctuated the march of the Earth sciences, although its markedly differs from the preceding ones by its most varied social, environmental, economical and political ramifications.

[Dax]

Knew I should have gone to school, makes as much sense to me a having a BBQ, beside a sewage outfall. 🤔

[onetrack]

The bloke who wrote that piece of scientific obfuscation, is obviously attempting to become a politician. It is a poorly written piece of scientific mumbo-jumbo, padded out with large words and dubious scientific relationships. Some people have no ability to communicate clearly.

[facthunter]

Confusion is part of the strategy. Nev

[pmccarthy]

Perhaps the fault of the translator and not the author. The bottom line is that temperature drives CO2 levels, with about a 7000 year lag.

Edited July 11, 2021 by pmccarthy

[octave]

 PM  - There are many scientific papers published, it is important to understand the peer review process (which I am sure you do)    If someone came to me and said vaccination causes autism, "this person with a medical degree says so"   My answer would be to look at the weight of the evidence.  In terms of vaccination I would suggest they look at well respected sources. perhaps the Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine etc.    When it comes to Climate change I personally have the same method.   Whilst there might be a variety of scientific papers as a non scientists I can only take what I believe is the sensible way of determining the current scientific consensus by going to those sources of information that I believe are the soundest. 

 

i am guessing that you believe  that CSIRO is either scientifically incompetent or part of some conspiracy.  

 

As a non physicist or climate scientist I can only act as I do with say medical assertions. I can only weigh up the published evidence from sources that I believe are trustworthy. I have to ask,  how is it that just about every scientific organization on earth can be so wrong.  I reject that vax causes autism  thing because it is an outlier assertion. 

 

Am I right? who knows but I am going with the majority of scientists in the relevant fields just as I do with questions of medicine.  If I ever have to look my grandchildren in the eye and justify myself I would say that I took what I thought was the most cautious option..   Even if the world is wrong about climate change then all that will have happened is we have put maximum effort into making a change in the way we do things at an earlier time than we needed to and by the way here is loads of coal and oil that we saved for our grandchildren.

 

Those who deny climate change need to be 100% sure that are right whilst advocating for moving to cleaner technologies doesn't   preclude backtracking if people like me are wrong.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

[pmccarthy]

Octave I agree with your approach. I use it too, and as you know am unconvinced that CO2 can drive climate change. In fact all the evidence says it cannot. The politics is another matter, my concern is with the science. 

[Dax]

If Co2 is not driving climate change, what is. Of course we are emitting many more dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere, which may be helping, so if it's not Co2 what is causing the changes to our climate. It is changing there is not doubt about that, or is it all propaganda.

 

The changes I've seen over the last 50 years are staggering and remember years ago reading the planet was going into its natural cooler climate era and that's not happening. It would be hard for anyone to deny the simple facts of what is happening to the poles and worlds glaciers in such a short time in the planets history.

[pmccarthy]

We are in a post-glacial warming period. Local conditions vary over decades and centuries, they always have. The variations may be caused by solar cycles, subsea volcanism or other causes, no one knows. The climate models are unverified by historical data, in fact they are contradicted by the data.

[octave]

1 hour ago, pmccarthy said:

The climate models are unverified by historical data, in fact they are contradicted by the data.

 

Human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, are increasing the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and causing surface temperatures to increase, leading to an “enhanced” greenhouse effect. There is now an energy imbalance of around 0.7–0.8 Wm^–2 averaged over the global surface of the Earth.

The atmosphere and oceans will continue to warm until enough extra heat can escape to space to allow the Earth to return to balance. Because increased levels of carbon dioxide and other long-lived greenhouse gases persist in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, further warming and sea level rise is inevitable.

 

CSIRO

 

I would assume you would disagree with the above statement.   So my question would be, do you believe CSIRO is incompetent?  

[pmccarthy]

No, CSIRO is definitely NOT incompetent. But they rely on others. I quote from their latest "climate change in Australia" (24/12/2020):

 

The projections are based on data from up to 40 global climate models, developed by institutions around the world, that were driven by four greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions scenarios.

 

My own experience tells me that models are useless until verified by actual results. Adding more useless models does not improve accuracy. And these models are driven by greenhouse gas scenarios. If there is only a weak link between greenhouse gases and global temperature then the models are all wildly inaccurate.

[octave]

5 minutes ago, pmccarthy said:

No, CSIRO is definitely NOT incompetent. But they rely on others.

 

Surely just relying on  "incompetent" sources would in itself be incompetent.   

[kgwilson]

The argument that the climate is continually changing and has done for millennia is true but how do those who believe this is the case now reconcile the fact that the change since the industrial revolution (230 years ago) is far more dramatic than any other change in recorded history and that those other changes happened over thousands of years.

 

Releasing carbon always occurred from all sorts of causes like forest fires, volcanic eruptions etc but we have dug up billions of tons of coal and oil that took billions of years to accumulate and released it in just 300 years. The maths and as Greta said the science is crystal clear.

[Dax]

1 hour ago, pmccarthy said:

My own experience tells me that models are useless until verified by actual results.

What do you class as accurate results, denial of reality right before your eyes, unless you spend all your time in an urban environment which is completely different to the real world and doomed.

 

At port Arthur, almost 200 years ago, an officer chiselled into rocks the current high and low water levels at that time. When I first encountered then decades ago, they were pretty much the same and about 26 years ago they were still much the same. Last time I was there, the low water mark never surfaces and the high water mark, taking into account spring tides is over 10cm above the line.

 

Down here, even in summer swimming in our waters was very cold and surfing required a thick wet suit, even then you froze. Now the water is tolerable, even in winter and summer, no wet suit needed most days for surfing summertime.

 

In winter it used to snow here quite a lot in winter down to the sea, with temps around zero for days. Hasn't really snowed for over a decade. The last 4 years, has not seen our day time temps drop below 10deg, without the wind chill factor coming from the sth and even then it still isn't that cold.

 

When I first moved here, we had heaps of birds even though the place was just a sand desert, now there are very few birds, just about all the native bees have gone, as has the honey bees.

 

I have rain and temp records going back a very long way, looking at them, rain decreased by close to 50% until the last 3 years, when it started to go up again and our summer rainfall dramatically increased. Winter temperatures temps are way higher than 30 years ago and drier. There is a scientific reason for that, which is interesting and hopefully this year will see it continue lessening our fire season. All our beautiful cold climate gums are dying even though the property is now back to almost natural condition.

 

In Sweden where my lady is stuck, they are having daily temperatures in the 30s, which is unheard of that far nth and they have no air conditioning as it has never been required.

 

They are verified results, just as you'll find round the planet the same thing, Russia, Canada and the USA are having unbelievably high temps, as is all the nth hemisphere. Permafrost hundreds of thousands of years old is melting, what other verified results do you need other than reality.

[spacesailor]

It is happening  !.

BUT

Did we humans start the warming. 

AND

Will we humans  stop it !.

spacesailor

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

yWe have presented the data from reliable and integral global institutions ad nauseam on this thread and others, yet some people still refuse to believe them and often proffer up theories and data form questionable sources. But forget us doing it..

 

With the old saying, money walks and BS talks in mind, financial institutions from insurance companies to asset managers to investment banks are now including man-driven climate change into their risk calculations (at least in the "western" and SE Asian developed world.. Companies and institutions that contribute to climate change are already finding it difficult to get insurance and development finance for projects that will develop excess CO2 (i.e. won't be carbon neutral. And now, even the US government admits it is a problem..Only Australia's government is actively encouraging investment in fossil energy by such means as a parliamentary inquiry into why banks aren't lending to their coal-company and fossil-fuel sponsors, er, political donors.

 

And yes, some of the financial services industry response will be about protecting their reputation.. But, we are talking about an industry that will just about do anything to make money and then usually dodge bullets - you know, thinks like fund armed conflicts and arms supplies, facilitate payment to pedophiles, fund terrorism, and the like.. Look at the shenanigans exposed by the Royal Commission... In terms of reputation, it confirmed what we already knew about financial institutions and why they are hated so much (BTW, I now work in cleaning up the mess).  And, yet, apart from dragging Australia kicking and screaming into regulatory line with the rest of the world vis-a-vie prudential risk, and a little bit on Governance Risk and Compliance, it wasn't much more than a slap on the wrist to them.. and we still hate them, and they will still stuff it up..

 

So, from that low base, saying they are taking climate risk seriously only to preserve their reputation is like saying used car dealers (or new car dealers for that matter) will suddenly point you to the dealer next door if they don't have a car for you that is good value for money... It is because there is real legal and financial risk associated with these industries now..

 

I run a team that, amongst other things, is responsible for delivering financial risk models to our bankers.. And, yes, a large part of the focus is human driven climate risk. I work for a "sell side" capital markets company (i.e. trading,  securitised financing and that sort of stuff).. So we have to take counterpart credit risk very seriously, and we model their exposure to human driven climate risk very seriously... and it covers many factors - some the loss of business they may face due to reputational damage as well as being superseded by cleaner technologies, as well as chances they will go broke due to legal exposure of what they have done or the environmental damage the cause (or in the case of insurers, underwrite).

 

Blackrock, the worlds largest asset manager, has just purchased as second-tier consultancy's climate risk scenario model to understand the drivers of climate change and assert economic influence accordingly. Again, they have invested and still invest is some pretty shady operations... But they also see a big risk to them by continuing..

 

But you can discredit the CSIRO for using sources of data form other reputable scientific organisations (as well as its own) because, well, global scientific co-operation has never really existed before and hasn't yielded better results faster, even amongst politically opposed countries (and we never celebrate the achievements, for example, of Russia and America's cooperation in the space station). You can discredit independent government scientific organisations that continually tell a different story than their fossil-fuel loving governments politically want them to (e.g. NASA, and CSIRO until apparently the SFM government virtually gagged them). And of course, there is the human-driven climate deniers that espouse the theory that human driven climate change is a conspiracy theory... but can never actually articulate what that conspiracy, no matter how ludicrous a conspiracy theory can be, is? Is it the scientists want the meek to inherit the earth sooner rather than later so we can all manually pull ploughs through the fields while our scientists masters whip us continually until we drop dead? Or maybe the conspiracy theory is that they don't want the world to decay into an uninhabitable climatic nightmare for future generations?

 

And while your experience is that models are useless until verified by actual results, my experience is different. Predictive models all work on a set of probabilities and are calibrated on historical data. By definition, when you validate a model with actual results, you are back-testing it with historical data as the results have occurred. Predictive model accuracy and calibration will depend on many things, including the predictive horizon. For example, in risk modelling I work with, we model a 99% probaility of losses over 1 day or 10 days. These relatively short periods allow us to compare to results to the models quickly and recalibrate if we need - in fact our regulations state we have to do this daily and explainto the regulator with the reasoning why and how we are going to recalibrate. But we didn't make these models up out of thin air. We used both our own and industry wide data to test and tune the models until we found them to be accurate enough to pass peer (in this case regulator) review.

 

Admittedly, weather models are making longer term forecasts weather data that is only, say, 70 years old, but able to be interpolated/extrapolated through scientific investigation of ice cores, rock, and the like- as other other known factors. These are modeled and tested and peer reviewed and released.. They by definition won't be as accurate as forecasting the future impacts and yes, some have been wildly pessimistic, while others have been wildly optimistic. However, these seem like outliers and from what I have read is that climate change is accelerating faster than the majority of the models have predicted - so we sort of already have actual results, anyway. But, whether the apocalyptic point of no return comes in 10 years, 20 years, or 50 years, is a moot point - there is general consensus it is coming, and the data points to human factors as the main cause of it.. and we have the technology to stem it but are so resistant to change we aren't going to change, or as Bill Maher puts it, too stupid to do anything about it.

 

And maybe these organisations are so biased, we are to believe those that are aligned to political parties hell bent on fossil fuels, or funded by fossil fuel lobbies, amongst others.. you know.. like the medicos who were funded by cigarette companies to say they were completely safe in the face of the contrary evidence which was believed by most of the other scientific community at the time. The governments chose to believe the cigarette company medicos because they are innately more impatial than people who have no benefit to gain.. And yes, tobacco companies no longer have easy access to the finance they used to have (they can still get it, don't get me wrong, but when I was on a bond issuance desk, the market would charge them a higher rate to buy the bonds than even fossil fuel companies).

 

The fossil fuel companies are not the only ones contributing to climate change - of course. The big elephant in the room is, well, human population growth.. Which has to be by definition, a human driven issue. This causes a demand on resources, which causes things like more and more land clearing, etc., all of which contribute to accelerating inability for the earth to absorb the levels of CO2 we produce - and leave it to the oceans, which are warming at an alarming rate, going more acidic, and, well, we can then get our fish effectively pre-cooked - no need for the extra gas to cook 'em, I guess.

 

I've blabbed on enough.. we have been through this multiple times. This CSIRO web page doesn't give the cause but shows that climate change, normally a gradual process, is accelerating and the impacts is is having. Even if humans aren't the source of it, but have the technology to arrest it, why wouldn't they? That will be the question of the next species, if there is one. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/climate-change/state-of-the-climate/previous/state-of-the-climate-2018/australias-changing-climate

 

 

Edited July 12, 2021 by Jerry_Atrick

[Bruce Tuncks]

400 parts per million doesn't seem much, but I worked out how much carbon would be needed removed to fix the atmosphere over our farm. Well 400ppm is equal to 400 tonnes of CO2 per cubic km of atmosphere.

That's a real lot I reckon. If a farm is 5 sq km  and the atmosphere is effectively 15 km high, there are over 30,000 tonnes of CO2 over the farm.

Of course, we don't have to remove it all. 100 tonnes per cubic km would do to start...  so we only need to remove 7,500 tonnes.

Edited July 12, 2021 by Bruce Tuncks

[pmccarthy]

I have been reading about the global freeze and famine of 535 to 540AD. No one knows if it was volcanic dust or a comet impact. Probably a volcano. So what will happen if it happens again, which it must one day? There was a similar event in about 1000 BC and of course the one 12,800 years ago. If we come to rely on solar energy, how quickly could we revert to Fossil fuels? Not quickly enough to help the global famine and, if like the 535AD event, plague.

[octave]

1 minute ago, pmccarthy said:

If we come to rely on solar energy, how quickly could we revert to Fossil fuels? Not quickly enough to help the global famine and, if like the 535AD event, plague.

 Certainly you have a point there and this is why almost no one advocates using only solar.  In the scenario you have outlined would the wind stop blowing? Would geothermal become unusable?  Would nuclear cease to be an option?  Would hydro stop working?  Indeed if we move away from fossil fuels within the next few years coal won't disappear and will still be available  to exploit if needed.

[onetrack]

I certainly do believe in never becoming 100% reliant on any one thing in life. Even when I was in business, I made sure I had income sources from 3 separate unrelated areas of the economy, that meant that I would never be wiped out in a downturn - as if I would have been, if I was totally dependent on just one source of income.

I did make the mistake of being dependent on just one bank for my finances, and that was my eventual downfall, when they foreclosed on me with no good reason, in an act of utter bastardry.

 

That was the ultimate lesson, and since that time I have never ever relied upon, or trusted any financial institution, and I now get a satisfactory income from a source that is secure in the extreme.

As to power sources, if you do not have a fossil fuel backup somewhere in your reserves, you're making a serious miscalculation.

 

Even the people of East Gippsland (VIC) and the Kalbarri-Northhampton (WA) regions have just realised that power supply is not 100% guaranteed, and if badly damaged in a disastrous event of extreme nature, they're on their own, sometimes for multiple weeks. In the Kalbarri-Northampton region, 4000 power poles were flattened by a once-in-100 year cyclonic event that no-one planned for.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-10/stand-alone-power-systems-cyclone-seroja-midwest/100268518