rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 18, 2019 18:10:03 GMT -8
Gaspipe, you are living back in the stone age. Sure you can’t make a guess whether the sun will rise in the East tomorrow, anything might happen.
The rest of us have learned a few things including how to make predictions of the future which usually come true. What was all that science that led to these computers, our medicines, weapons, building materials? We continually use our vast learning and knowledge to make accurate predictions about the future. Maybe you can’t but others can. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 17, 2019 19:32:31 GMT -8
I plugged in a few numbers to see what we would have to pay extra for our gasoline to cover the cost of pulling the CO2 back out of our air. It looks like estimates range from $24 to $39 for a ton of CO2 and one gallon of gas gives about 20 lbs of CO2. So you could figure on paying an extra 30 cents a gallon to fix the CO2 problem. This is really crude and depends a lot on how efficient will be the CO2 extraction. For me that would be no big deal but for poorer people who have to drive a long distance to the job, that might be a lot. Years ago, when I think we were paying about $1.50 for a gallon, congress wanted to add a 5 cent tax to the gasoline. The public went hysterical and any congressman wanting to stay in office had to vote it down. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 16, 2019 5:34:08 GMT -8
Yes, the Madrid conference demonstrated again that progress will be slow. Countries can agree to aim for goals and then change their minds. Countries can fail to reach the goals. Countries can completely refuse to cooperate. When the science/engineers have a clear and affordable solution to the climate problem, it will probably help countries reach an agreement. The longer we take, the harder reversing the problem will be. It will probably take a string of natural disasters to wake up more people before we get going on the solution. Maybe a couple more decades?
A short while back Gaspipe mentioned briefly the Stratosphere Ozone thing that got a lot of attention a couple decades ago. It has a lot of parallels with Climate Change except it worked out the way it should.
Scientists discovered we humans were destroying the ozone layer which protects us from too much UV light exposure. Some people think it is pretty important for making earth habitable. We were making and releasing lots of CFC chemicals (ChloroFluoroCarbons aka Freons). These last a long time and drift up to the ionosphere and catalyze the destruction of ozone. The “Ozone hole” in the southern hemisphere was growing to where Australia was getting increased UV already.
The Montreal Protocol was an agreement by all nations to ban the production of the CFC’s. We mostly used them for air conditioners and aerosol sprays.
There was resistance by the chemical companies that make CFC’s, but they didn’t get organized like the fossil fuels and start a lying-to-the-public campaign. In the end, the chemical firms all made lots of money by coming up with replacements for the bad freons and selling lots to replace the bad freons.
The stratospheric ozone has been slowly recovering since then. Really a big success story. In contrast, fixing the CO2 problem has become a political nightmare.
Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 15, 2019 13:25:49 GMT -8
My guess at the way it will be: So what does the future of Global Climate change look like. One recent technology involves building a plant. Using a fancy CO2 capture technique to grab CO2 out of the air or cheaper, out of smokestacks. Then pump the CO2 into underground cavities where it can sit for millions of years. This needs energy, and if you got it by burning fossil fuel, it would be no good and really stupid. So you use renewable, solar, wind, tidal, wave or nuclear.
That technology would need about 30,000 plants worldwide (To grab enough CO2 to bring the atmosphere back to before things were warming much), and they already know where the underground storage can be found.
For me, I buy a gallon of gasoline for my car now and I pay the cost of pulling the oil out of the ground, refining it, shipping it to me and it costs maybe $2.50. Other places like Europe often put a big tax on it so maybe $5-$8. I did not pay for the chunk of CO2 my car exhausts when I burn that gallon. There have been estimates of how much more it will cost to include the cleanup of that bit of CO2, but it depends on what approach is used for capturing the CO2. Basically I will have to pay more for the gallon of gas. If my electricity comes from fossil fuel burning, then my electric and my gas bill will go up. Some people say what about India or China, and yes they will only pay if they use fossil fuel. They are both scrambling to switch to renewables like some of the US.
That’s the future. We can whine and gripe all we want. Deny global warming is caused by burning fuel if it makes you feel good, but the science is done. Now we just need the scientists and engineers to develop cheaper ways to solve this crisis. Can’t expect much help from politicians. Although note that all the new technology is funded by our government and our military. We just had a friend visit from Washington DC. He has been a big funding manager for the US air force during his long career. He assures us the military has been aware of how much the climate crisis is going to hurt us and have been looking for a solution for years.
Also you can individually do little things which are more symbolic if it makes you feel better, but eventually we will all pay more for the luxury of burning fossil fuels. Personally I don’t do much symbolic gesturing. Put your energy and money where it will do real good. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 15, 2019 6:35:47 GMT -8
When I was growing up in a Cleveland suburb, the Cuyahoga river caught on fire. Actually this happened several times but that was a big one. My family liked bass fishing, but we didn’t fish in Lake Erie because you couldn’t eat the catch- too much mercury. They had to stop us from swimming in Lake Erie because so much raw sewage was being dumped it was easy to get sick. People complained about the terrible smog in LA, but on my first visit there my reaction was- this isn’t so bad, you should see Cleveland where it rains sulfuric acid.
All that got fixed. You can eat the fish and swim there and the river never catches fire. People figured out that the dumping of waste, industrial, utilities, exhaust, all of it ruins our lives.
If you build a utility plant now, or start a mining operation you have to plan for funding the cleanup and the removal and straightening up of your operation when you are done decades in the future. If you go bankrupt, you must have set aside the cleanup funds so the taxpayer won’t foot the bill.
When humans started digging fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them, some early scientists in the 1800’s pointed out that the waste CO2 would cause the earth to heat up. If we started this whole thing now, we would realize that we’ve got to set aside the money to clean up the CO2 waste because it will destroy us. The cost of clean up would have been added into the cost of the fuel. Instead we got cheap fuel and we polluted our atmosphere big time.
We cleaned up a lot of the environmental messes from my youth, and we’ll fix this one. The only question is who pays.
I read the chemistry news, and a lot of funding has gone into CO2 sequestration. It looks like several approaches will make it possible to continue the use of fossil fuels with major extraction of the CO2 from the smokestacks and the atmosphere. Eventually the cost of the fuel will reflect this cleanup cost. Who knows the details on how we’ll get there? Not me. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 7, 2019 5:36:33 GMT -8
Gaspipe believes that the models are not trustworthy. He disagrees with the 10,000+ scientists who actually study global warming. Exoticimports doesn’t trust scientists because they are funded by governments. Those 10,000+ scientists are from many countries, working for many decades under many political regimes. Some were funded by the petroleum industry (like Exxon). Many polls have shown that scientists span the full political ideology range, far left to far right. That tends to be irrelevant to the science. The science process has been successful because it weeds out the errors and fraud that any individual scientist might publish.
We all make a personal choice to guess that the scientists are right or wrong. If you understand science-the methods, the process, the history of how it can fail and get fixed, then you will feel very confident to trust the scientists on this one.
Exoticimports likes to follow the money unless he doesn’t like the results. The petroleum industry set out to confuse the public. The dollars they have spent, company by company are huge and known. All the typical confusion about this topic – “scientists talked about global cooling in the 70’s” “All models are untrustworthy”, “volcanoes” , “the sun cycles” originated many decades ago by the “think tanks” of the oil industry. All the confused arguments were adequately addressed decades ago and are just being recycled. The fossil fuel industry campaign to confuse the public was successful as is evidenced by this discussion. Several very smart people like gaspipe, exoticimports and leptraps are completely wrong about global warming, thanks to the confusion-campaign of the oil industry. The confusion has prevented the world from taking much action, so the future looks much worse than it might have. Tough luck. That’s the way people are.
Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 6, 2019 6:51:22 GMT -8
Nice sarcasm Jan. It is the same here. Although the global average temperature may be up 0.06 degrees F from last year, I can’t see it on my thermometer. My backyard isn’t all that global.
Apparently the global climate models were giving essentially the right answers about 50 years ago and with all the refining and added sophistication, they are getting reduced error bars, but they tell the same story- We are in big trouble. When the global average temperature goes up 1 or 2 or 3 degrees C, this is really, really important in many ways.
Although the Leptraps and Exoticimports and Trumps of the world have closed their minds, many younger folk can still listen and think and realize what the future is going to be. It doesn’t look pretty.
Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Nov 21, 2019 20:11:30 GMT -8
In case you wish to look this up, the correct spelling is Ichneumon wasp. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Nov 7, 2019 19:49:48 GMT -8
Probably some species of Ophryastes. Some have that weird pronotum, like latirostris bugguide.net/node/view/229545/bgpageor ovipennis bugguide.net/node/view/354440/bgpage I don't know them well enough to say. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Oct 28, 2019 8:01:00 GMT -8
Exoticimports writes that he doesn’t trust anything funded by government money. To each his own, but my experience of science funding is very different.
During my career, I was mostly funded by government money (it was a National Lab after all), but also some corporate money, Goodyear, Texas Instruments, Applied Materials etc. I also talked to an immense number of scientists at conferences. Never in all those years did I hear of anyone being pressured to report anything other than their true results of experiments or computations. The only exception is that often if a pharmaceutical or other business funds my work I may sign a non-disclosure agreement that limits what I can publish. For a scientist like me it is almost absurd to hear it suggested that the government would tell me what I must report. The government administrators decide on program directions and the politics of the day affect these directions. During the Reagan years, nuclear power was more emphasized and other energy sources like solar and wind were de-emphasized. Under Clinton, renewables were emphasized and nuclear was less supported. Obama pushed the study of pollinators, honey bees and native pollinators and scientists I was working with got some of that. Mostly the research shifted directions, but nobody handing out the money ever said what I should find out.
The government might fund global warming research more or less, but the people funding the programs never say what results you should get. Hypothetically a scientist with a climate model would write for a grant to study how different models for cloud formation and global cloud dynamics could influence climate. Never would any scientist be pressured to say the new cloud model should make global warming more (or less) scary. The scientist will get whatever the model shows. If the result says forget global warming, it won’t happen because the increased cloud cover will reflect enough heat to neutralize the warming after the first 2 degrees, this would simply get published. All the other modelers would try this cloud method and if it all panned out (was reproducible), the first scientist would get the Nobel Prize, and we’d all breathe a sigh of relief. For decades, this hasn’t happened. Every idea has simply reinforced that we are in big trouble with the climate. The government is a giant monstrosity with inertia which funds research with a certain level of mild political interference. Don’t trust it if that makes you happy. You are then imagining a level of interference in science which does not really happen. If I had a model that showed climate change is not caused by fossil-fuel burning, I would publish it immediately. Exxon would gladly fund all my future work. As soon as other scientists confirmed that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I would accept my Nobel Prize. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Oct 27, 2019 4:49:18 GMT -8
Just got back from another month in Europe and I see this topic is still going strong.
One thing that has been mentioned by gaspipe is that the models of the climate do not include all the necessary variables. This is almost certainly a wrong idea. At least it would take an expert in climate modeling to make such a statement, and he/she would then mention the missing variable, would include it in the model and would show what effect it has.
I was a research scientist for most of my career studying plasma chemistry/physics. Plasmas are notoriously complex systems, equal or worse than the climate in complexity. I worked years measuring plasma behavior and comparing to modelling attempts. In my last decade of work, I did plasma-modeling software development and plasma simulations on thousands of massively-parallel processors. My wife also worked with both experiments and modeling of chemical systems used to make microelectronic device chips, and her models are still used by the chip manufacturers to refine the processes. We really understand modeling of complex systems.
These models, like the climate models are very complex, but they yield results that are correct- meaning that the experimenters check and say the model predicted correctly. The climate model cannot say whether the USA will have a cold year or whether there will be cloudiness over Germany next week. Likewise I could not use my plasma model to say lots of plasma details, but I could predict some things very well- good enough to guide the device designers.
Importantly, with many models of climate available and many hundreds of scientists using them, it is ridiculous to say the models have missed something, unless you can say what you think they are missing. You might think insects are eating lots of wood and belching methane and the models have forgotten to include this. As soon as it is suggested, and the numbers look plausible, then some researcher will add this to the model and see if it does anything (I suspect termites are already accounted for). The model does not have to be perfect to give very good results. That is what the error bars on the predictions are all about.
So I would suggest you forget about criticizing the models unless you can flesh out the weakness you perceive.
Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Sept 25, 2019 11:06:36 GMT -8
Gaspipe: About reading Patrick Michaels
It is important to remember that all science is done through the peer-reviewed literature. Individuals like Patrick Michaels, regardless of his credentials as a former climate scientist, is welcome to his opinions, but his honesty or mental fitness are in question when he is using the same science (the same publications) as the other 70,000 climate scientists but comes to a different conclusion. Scientists are only human and you cannot tell if someone is paying him to lie about this. I would check every one of his science citations in his books to make sure he is not misrepresenting them. It is a mystery why any honest climatologist can read the papers and come to his dramatically wrong conclusions. You yourself should read the raw literature.
It started with smoking and the tobacco industry getting the support of some respected physicists to lie to the public about the cancer connection. The tobacco industry tried successfully to delay public perception of the danger as long as they could. For all you know, the Cato Institute and Michaels may be funded by the Koch brothers or the fossil fuel industry to lie to you. Check it out. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Sept 24, 2019 13:34:06 GMT -8
I read these forums, but usually don't feel it is worth commenting because it has all been said. I had extra time while waiting to fly to Europe, so here is my comment (as a retired scientist who really understands science, its history and its operation):
There is a lot of science ignorance in the US and the rest of the world, so it is not surprising that lots of us still don’t believe in evolution, global warming, the safety of vaccines and more.
Science occasionally comes up with discoveries that conflict with our wishes or beliefs. A common answer is to assume the scientists are wrong.
Of course when enough time goes by most smart people come around to realizing science does get the answers. Stories that have come up in this forum several times like back in the 60’s and 70’s scientists thought we were going to have an ice age is just nonsense. This is a crude attempt to tell everyone- don’t trust science. Of course that ice age stuff is not true. If you think you remember that, your memory is not quite right.
As soon as the anti-global warming crowd started “reminding” us of how wrong scientists were back then, some real scientists went back and looked at that recent history. There were essentially no science publications suggesting that the next ice age was immanent. Compare that to the tens of thousands of global warming, peer-reviewed publications.
There were articles about nuclear winter, guessing about the future if we have a major nuclear war. There was a business consultant of science background (I think it might have been Iben Browning) who had an idea that economic collapses are occasionally driven by weather patterns (climate), and there are some good examples of this. He got a lot of press talking about future war and economic disasters when the next ice age starts. I don’t know if he was advising investors to act on that, but his ideas got a lot of press back then. None of this was science.
Science is about discovering stuff in data or by theory or simulation, and putting your reputation on the line by publishing it. Then you allow all your science friends and enemies to test what you saw and try to prove you are wrong.. Global warming and fossil fuels as the big problem is so far beyond this stage (and it was decades ago) that it is solid science. Ever known anything with this much science to be wrong? I guess not.
Even when Exxon hired really good scientists to prove it was all wrong, they couldn’t do it. The climate scientists ignored how great their career advance would be if they could tell their bosses that fossil fuels were ok. Exxon executives began strategic planning based on their certainty that Alaska oil will be more accessible when we warm up a little. Meanwhile Exxon continued to try to convince the public it was all BS. Delay delay delay. Their strategy has been quite effective.
So any of you that think there is any scientific doubt about global warming, are wrong. I personally don’t care at all. I’m getting old and am delighted that my science colleagues brought this climate disaster to our attention. The fact that the general populace chose to do nothing just gives me a chuckle. We scientists did our part. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Jun 25, 2019 5:38:21 GMT -8
Well it is clearly a Bostrichid beetle, but I don't know the European beetles. Something maybe like Micropate see bugguide.net/node/view/242172I think these are relatively harmless, won't bite and they bore into wood, but I think they are not destructive. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Jan 8, 2019 5:19:45 GMT -8
Well as I've said before, I don't hate immigrants. Many of us are descendants of immigrants. Rather than build a wall lets kick out all immigrants and descendants of immigrants. That will leave the native americans and the space aliens like Leroy.
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