When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-05-06 09:40:42

Terraformer wrote:

What? Iranians don't hate Americans, they just have some people in government who aren't very nice.

They have had the same consistently evil governments since 1979 when they overthrew the Shah. I would ask the same question about the Russians, why are their governments more often bad news for us rather than the opposite? What gives rise to their tendency to have evil governments that mean to cause us trouble and disturb the World peace? They are always trying to build their empires by reducing the amount of freedom in the World. I believe in peace, why don't they?

The Russians overthrew the Czar, was it because he was oppressive or insufficiently evil?, they replaced the Czar with the Bolsheviks, their leader promised "Land, Peace, and Bread" but did not deliver on any of those. The Iranians overthrew the Shah, whom they claimed was oppressing them, but they replaced him with an even more oppressive bunch of leaders, and warmongering ones that chant "Death to America" at that! Why should they be allowed to have nuclear reactors capable of producing bomb grade Uranium or Plutonium? the World was a much better place before they entered the scene and started destabilizing the region. We don't need the endless conflicts in the middle east that they tend to cause. if they would just seem to maximize their economic output and mind their own business, that would be fine with me, but they don't!

So what is the cause of evil rising to the top if they are not evil themselves? I would ask the same of the Germans who put Hitler into power, but perhaps they don't know the answer. Hitler made his attempt at World conquest and it cost Germany dear! Why would people want to put such a self-aggrandizing evil egomaniac in charge of their country? I don't think Germany was any better off because of him.

There are a lot of dead Germans who died fighting for Hitler's dream of grand conquest, why take the chance? Why couldn't they just live in peace and try to prosper? Ultimately the people are in the end responsible for the governments they have, the Iranians had a chance at democracy when they overthrew the shah, but they chose a theocracy instead, The Russians had two chance at Democracy, the first when they overthrew the Czar, the second when they overthrew the Communists, they failed at both tries, what the Hell is wrong with them! If Poland can have democracy why can't they?

Are the Russians too big to have a truly representative government? are the temptations to try and conquer the World at every opportunity just too great for them to resist? I think in the 1990s the Russians had choice, they could either strive for more freedom in a free society or they can attempt to build another Empire and attempt to conquer the World, why do they always seem to want to go for the second? Why do we have such trouble makers in the World when we do not need them?

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2017-05-06 09:42:03)

GW Johnson · 2017-05-06 10:03:39

Not being an electrical engineer, I know nothing about motor and generator design. The motors and alternators on my cars seem able to convert around 80+% of the mechanical shaft work into electricity. I thought the big commercial generator machines were around 90%, but that's not based on any real data. The problem is the one-way efficiency of the lead-acid battery: ~70%. Which means you get just about half the energy back out of it that you originally put into it. Supposedly, the new lithium ion batteries do better than that.

For uranium nuke power, the pressurized water designs we have now are good enough, but I would like to see the maintenance and safety design standards tightened up to resemble more what the US Navy has used since Rickover. Fuel reprocessing would greatly ease the waste stream size, but we want to be careful not to repeat the contamination mistakes of the Hanford site when we build the reprocessing plants. The Yucca Mountain disposal facility would serve for a much longer time if the waste stream was smaller due to reprocessing. And we need to address risks posed by bad siting hazard decisions with some upgrades.

I am not a nuclear engineer either. What I know about thorium is likely obsolete and incomplete. Supposedly, you put Th-232 into a uranium or plutonium reactor to breed it into U-233, which is fissionable. If you get enough U-233 reactors going, it is supposedly possible to use them to breed the thorium, relieving you of the need to have so many uranium/plutonium breeders. The breeders aren't nearly as suitable for electricity production. No commercially-ready designs currently exist for any of this, as far as I know.

But we need nuclear and natural gas to shoulder the majority load of electricity production until some sort of mass energy storage solves the intermittency problem with the renewables. If the market shifts toward electric vehicles, then electricity production means and grid improvements become even more crucial. You have only to look at photos of Chinese and Indian cities to see that conventional pollution abatement as well as unburied carbon pollution are both addressed by this approach. The benefits are quite real.

Kbd512 may be right: solar concentrator power with a heat engine-driven generator may be best for power plants. But residential rooftop solar PV is quite important to address transmission losses in the grid, as I mentioned somewhere above. In many places this is best done in combination with a small windcharger.

I really think both central solar concentrator plants and distributed-generation with rooftop solar PV make great sense and offer much promise. So do the big wind farms, as long as the transmission infrastructure is built with them. I am glad these things, especially small rooftop solar PV, are becoming affordable and competitive. As long as fossil fuel has subsidies, so should these things. That's the roughly-level playing field.

Oldfart1939 is right about fusion: don't hold your breath for it, but always maintain hope. It's been "20 years away" for at least 65 years now that I know of personally.

The rogue nuclear state problems with Iran and North Korea are going to get worked out, one way or another, Tom. I hope we can do that without war, but the odds favor conflict. A lot of people are going to die if war comes, but the vast majority of casualties will be in those two places, and will be civilians killed because a minority of their number who are leaders insisted on being insane dictators living in luxury.

What you have to remember to put this into perspective is that the likes of either country has only a handful of rockets and a handful of bombs small enough to ride those rockets. Neither has both, yet. If they use them, what they face is hundreds to thousands of rockets from the rest of the world, tipped with many more and smaller bombs of greater yield. They face total destruction.

Because the dictators in those rogue states are demonstrably insane by any western standards, they may actually choose to commit suicide this way, and by doing so, cause the genocidal obliteration of their peoples. But they will lose, and they cannot do us that much damage. Bad, but not our destruction, certainly.

The same level of risk applies to nuke weapons in the hands of terrorist organizations: they can hurt us, but they cannot destroy us. The problem there is where do we strike? My only suggestion is to strike at all, just to make sure we get the right ones. Many innocents will die, since these evildoers have taken to hiding behind human shields in the heart of populated cities. But there is no other way.

And, Tom, to balance your one-sided diatribe about Iranians, the grudge their leadership and some of their people hold against us is that the US CIA put that popinjay dictator the Shah onto the peacock throne in Teheran, by overthrowing their leftist-leaning president in 1953. The shah mistreated them badly, which is why the people plus the mullahs overthrew him by 1979.

The mullahs installed a theocracy dictatorship in that power vacuum, backed up by the Revolutionary Guard, their private army. No different from Hitler and his SS and SA. And we fundamentally caused all that for nothing but political ideology about a leftist-leaning president in what was then more-or-less a voting democracy.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-05-06 10:32:43)

SpaceNut · 2017-05-06 20:52:42

Power point of Lenz's Law for magnetic field induced current and voltage of a conductor that is relative to some motion of either the field or of the conduction in that one or the other but not both are in motion and is Faraday's Law

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-05-07 06:42:28

GW Johnson wrote:

Not being an electrical engineer, I know nothing about motor and generator design. The motors and alternators on my cars seem able to convert around 80+% of the mechanical shaft work into electricity. I thought the big commercial generator machines were around 90%, but that's not based on any real data. The problem is the one-way efficiency of the lead-acid battery: ~70%. Which means you get just about half the energy back out of it that you originally put into it. Supposedly, the new lithium ion batteries do better than that.
For uranium nuke power, the pressurized water designs we have now are good enough, but I would like to see the maintenance and safety design standards tightened up to resemble more what the US Navy has used since Rickover. Fuel reprocessing would greatly ease the waste stream size, but we want to be careful not to repeat the contamination mistakes of the Hanford site when we build the reprocessing plants. The Yucca Mountain disposal facility would serve for a much longer time if the waste stream was smaller due to reprocessing. And we need to address risks posed by bad siting hazard decisions with some upgrades.
I am not a nuclear engineer either. What I know about thorium is likely obsolete and incomplete. Supposedly, you put Th-232 into a uranium or plutonium reactor to breed it into U-233, which is fissionable. If you get enough U-233 reactors going, it is supposedly possible to use them to breed the thorium, relieving you of the need to have so many uranium/plutonium breeders. The breeders aren't nearly as suitable for electricity production. No commercially-ready designs currently exist for any of this, as far as I know.
But we need nuclear and natural gas to shoulder the majority load of electricity production until some sort of mass energy storage solves the intermittency problem with the renewables. If the market shifts toward electric vehicles, then electricity production means and grid improvements become even more crucial. You have only to look at photos of Chinese and Indian cities to see that conventional pollution abatement as well as unburied carbon pollution are both addressed by this approach. The benefits are quite real.
Kbd512 may be right: solar concentrator power with a heat engine-driven generator may be best for power plants. But residential rooftop solar PV is quite important to address transmission losses in the grid, as I mentioned somewhere above. In many places this is best done in combination with a small windcharger.
I really think both central solar concentrator plants and distributed-generation with rooftop solar PV make great sense and offer much promise. So do the big wind farms, as long as the transmission infrastructure is built with them. I am glad these things, especially small rooftop solar PV, are becoming affordable and competitive. As long as fossil fuel has subsidies, so should these things. That's the roughly-level playing field.
Oldfart1939 is right about fusion: don't hold your breath for it, but always maintain hope. It's been "20 years away" for at least 65 years now that I know of personally.
The rogue nuclear state problems with Iran and North Korea are going to get worked out, one way or another, Tom. I hope we can do that without war, but the odds favor conflict. A lot of people are going to die if war comes, but the vast majority of casualties will be in those two places, and will be civilians killed because a minority of their number who are leaders insisted on being insane dictators living in luxury.
What you have to remember to put this into perspective is that the likes of either country has only a handful of rockets and a handful of bombs small enough to ride those rockets. Neither has both, yet. If they use them, what they face is hundreds to thousands of rockets from the rest of the world, tipped with many more and smaller bombs of greater yield. They face total destruction.
Because the dictators in those rogue states are demonstrably insane by any western standards, they may actually choose to commit suicide this way, and by doing so, cause the genocidal obliteration of their peoples. But they will lose, and they cannot do us that much damage. Bad, but not our destruction, certainly.
The same level of risk applies to nuke weapons in the hands of terrorist organizations: they can hurt us, but they cannot destroy us. The problem there is where do we strike? My only suggestion is to strike at all, just to make sure we get the right ones. Many innocents will die, since these evildoers have taken to hiding behind human shields in the heart of populated cities. But there is no other way.
And, Tom, to balance your one-sided diatribe about Iranians, the grudge their leadership and some of their people hold against us is that the US CIA put that popinjay dictator the Shah onto the peacock throne in Teheran, by overthrowing their leftist-leaning president in 1953. The shah mistreated them badly, which is why the people plus the mullahs overthrew him by 1979.
The mullahs installed a theocracy dictatorship in that power vacuum, backed up by the Revolutionary Guard, their private army. No different from Hitler and his SS and SA. And we fundamentally caused all that for nothing but political ideology about a leftist-leaning president in what was then more-or-less a voting democracy.
GW

I'm having a difficult time understanding what a "terrible" man the Shah was considering what the Iranian people put themselves through with their theocracy, it seems like in either case, these people were not ready to accept democracy, and while they were under the Shah, they were less of a threat to us than they are under the Ayatollahs! I think the Shah had more respect for human rights than the Ayatollahs did, women were certainly freer to wear whatever they wanted, the didn't have to cover themselves like they do now. Putting ourselves in this perspective, we didn't react to King George III and Lord North's Parliament putting a tax on our tea by installing an even more ruthless tyrant than he was! So what was the choice for us?
1) Left leaning President
2) The Shah
3) Islamic Theocracy
None of these choices is very democratic! Joseph Stalin was not a very nice man, we did not want to give him a base in Iran, so he could point missiles at us. There was and is something wrong with the Iranian People if they give us choices such as these, as if they are not ready to be free and live in a republic with a leader that does not threaten to overthrow such. The Iranian People are ultimately to blame for being so radical in the first place, for being the type that would accept a leftist leader who would overthrow democracy and give bases to the Stalinist Russians so they can threaten he rest of the free world! We let Venezuela have its leftist leader Hugo Chavez, apparently in an attempt to apply he lessons learned about not interfering in Iran, he acted as a destabilizing influence in South America, sought to overthrow neighboring countries by sponsoring leftist revolutions in those causing a lot of death and destruction, and because of the mismanagement of Hugo, Venezuela now faces 25% unemployment and starvation, it might have been better off under a leader we picked for them rather than one the picked for themselves! Damned if we do, damned if we don't!

Also I might add that its been almost 40 years since their revolution in 1979! You think that a reasonable people would have gotten over their America hatred by now, no matter what you think we might have done prior to 1979. 40 years is about 4/5ths my life! How are my children supposed to understand these extremely hateful people? I don't think we've eve done anything so terrible to them to earn that kind of hatred, do you? Even the Jews don't hate the Germans that much, and the Germans did a lot worse things to them than we ever did to the Iranians, I can tell you that for a fact.

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2017-05-07 06:48:06)

kbd512 · 2017-05-09 00:31:31

Is there any chance of limiting discussion of Dictator A vs Dictator B to political threads? None of that adds to the topic of this thread. Can we talk about the science of our planet's climate and tools or technologies to use to combat pollution (something I think any reasonable person would agree is never a good thing if we can avoid it)?

SpaceNut · 2017-05-09 07:19:13

kbd512 LIKE button pushed, and its something that I can agree with to "talk about the science of our planet's climate and tools or technologies to use to combat pollution (something I think any reasonable person would agree is never a good thing if we can avoid it)?" just as regulation are just one of the tools used to slow or stop pollution which can have the unintended consequence of lossing jobs, paying more for an item ect....

When we took the lead out of gasoline we did not stop using it, but in the same token when we added MBTE to it we saw that we should not have done so...the coal industry is the same we just did not get given the time to react to make change to coals use....

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-05-09 09:30:22

kbd512 wrote:

Is there any chance of limiting discussion of Dictator A vs Dictator B to political threads? None of that adds to the topic of this thread. Can we talk about the science of our planet's climate and tools or technologies to use to combat pollution (something I think any reasonable person would agree is never a good thing if we can avoid it)?

When Science becomes perverted by Politics is a political thread! How can it not be when Politics is doing the perverting, and what is politics about than about who has power. Power is what motivates the Global Warming crowd, if hey conclude one thing about global warming and the public acts on it, they gain more power than if they conclude something else. If there is one thing science teaches us is the need to have a disinterested observer or experimenter. The reason why socialism, for example, is tried over and over again, no matter how man times it has failed, is because the experimenter is not disinterested, he is really not interested in finding out the truth, but rather to make a show to convince skeptics that socialism works, so he will doctor the results to show that socialism is the wave of the future so that the gullible masses will buy into it and give him power! With global warming it is much the same, it is an end of the world doomsday scenario which requires that if we are to survive, we must all pull together and contribute. Do you remember this movie perhaps? When Worlds Collide What is the movie about? About the end of the World, about people putting aside their differences, national boundaries and political differences to save humanity. Now people who watched this movie dream of something similar happening, so the need an "End of the World" scenario to have the same effect as in this movie. Since there are no rogue planets currently known to be on a collision course with Earth, Global Warming will have to do. So what they want us to do is panic, make sacrifices, and incidentally make their careers. it is a racket, a way of separating people from their money! When Worlds Collide is science fiction.

GW Johnson · 2017-05-09 10:44:12

Tom over-reacts and over-politicizes everything, because he cannot see the world objectively, he can only see it through the lens of a false political belief system (that far right-wing wacko stuff). He not the only believer in that stuff whose view of the world overlaps reality at about the 5% level. Self-delusion that severe is quite dangerous to the rest of us.

That being said, he's right about the thread title, just wrong in what he chooses to post about it. The perversion of science due to politics comes from "science denial", which is really discounting scienctific data and facts in favor of preferred political beliefs, without regard to truth. There's plenty of this to go around on both sides of the aisle here in the US.

In the modern GOP dominated by the minority tea party / freedom caucus / pick-a-name right-wing extremists, it has become a touchstone requirement for membership that you deny any human-caused connection to climate change, irregardless of the facts right in front of your face. Implementing such beliefs as public policy is quite dangerous, and certainly wrong.

This is not the only case on the GOP side, but is sufficient to make my point.

The same is true with the Democrats on the false belief that vaccines cause autism. (There are some GOP types who subscribe to this too, so it's not uniquely Democrat). The one and only paper that made the autism link claim was completely-discredited and retracted years ago, yet it is still cited by the vaccine-avoidance crowd. Multiple studies done since have confirmed there is no such link, yet this evidence is ignored because it conflicts with the preferred political belief system. As a result, there is an outbreaking measles epidemic in Minnesota even as we converse, because too many skipped vaccination, and the "herd immunity" has fallen too low.

This is also not the only case on the Democrat side, but it is sufficient to make my point.

Is not a preventable outbreak of disease not a danger to the body politic? Is not making worse land ice melt (with resulting sea level rise) not a danger to the body politic? All the other cases I didn't cite on both sides present similar dangers.

The common thread here is that preferring political belief systems over objective truth is a clear and present danger to us all. It seriously endangers our republic. Perhaps it should be added to the definitions of treasonable activities.

Perhaps dumbing-down our education system for easier control of the masses was a really stupid idea. That is something I have personally witnessed and can testify to.

If these things were made treasonable offenses, routine activities in the House and Senate would certainly change. Perhaps the White House as well.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-05-09 10:56:25)

elderflower · 2017-05-09 13:08:16

How about an Institute of Statisticians with severe entry criteria, who's members would be the only ones allowed to publically quote and interpret statistical data. Anybody else doing so would be guilty of a felony with severe penalties. That should bring down quite a number of card houses.

SpaceNut · 2017-05-09 13:28:31

Actually Tom the intent of the When Science becomes perverted by Politics was not to be a political thread but rather one of actual science from the first post....

Here is an example of what can be done EPA signs off on North Dakota regulation of CO2 wells

The administration is proposing to make North Dakota the first state with the power to regulate underground wells used for long-term storage of waste carbon dioxide captured from industrial sources such as coal-fired power plants. North Dakota, which has a large coal industry, would be the first state to get such authority, according to the EPA. Giving the state authority over CO2 wells, known as Class VI wells, could help advance carbon capture and sequestration technology, Pruitt said. CO2 is a greenhouse gas said to contribute to global warming. As for the technology itself, "not enough is known to see if this is a long-term solution to reducing CO2 in the atmosphere," he said.

Like I have said before shuting down a business was the unintended happening and here is a solution to keep it going...Rather than removing regulations implementing them was the solution to an already exisitng problem.

SpaceNut · 2017-05-09 18:59:56

I do not know how many remember Void but some of the musing was about how to control the climate some of which is in this article...
These Scientists Want to Put 10 Million Windmills in the Arctic. Here’s Why

From putting a giant umbrella in space to zapping clouds with lasers, scientists have come up with some pretty audacious plans to ease global warming and its consequences.

arctic_turbine_diagram_2_23_17_final_3b1b2b9aa9db7319a4144f5276aedc87.nbcnews-ux-600-480.jpg

Remember that ice melt due to climate well here is a solution....

The pumps — each connected to a hose and a windmill, with the whole apparatus fixed to a buoy to stay afloat — would suck up frigid seawater and spread it on the ice during the long Arctic winter. The scientists say that would help protect existing sea ice and speed the formation of new ice. Pumping 1.4 meters of seawater onto a given area of the frigid surface would yield an additional 1 meter of ice in a single winter, the scientists say in a paper published recently in the journal Earth's Future. To build a sufficient quantity of ice over roughly 10 percent of the Arctic (the minimum area required to yield a significant benefit), 10 million of the pumps would be needed.
Building, deploying, and running them all would cost an estimated $50 billion per year.

Price tag ouch.....

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-05-09 20:01:22

GW Johnson wrote:

Tom over-reacts and over-politicizes everything, because he cannot see the world objectively, he can only see it through the lens of a false political belief system (that far right-wing wacko stuff). He not the only believer in that stuff whose view of the world overlaps reality at about the 5% level. Self-delusion that severe is quite dangerous to the rest of us.

Which far right do you mean? That of Hitler? I do not think I can be compared to Hitler, and as far as I know, references to "Far Right" usually means Hitler, or Nazi or Fascist, that is far right. Someone like Rush Limbaugh is not a Hitlerian, a Fascist or a Nazi so he does not qualify as Far Right in my book. Are you making up new terms and definitions for old labels by any chance? By your standards, most of th Presidents of the United States would be called "Far Right" because most of them were not socialists!
Most Presidents of the United States were not like Barack Obama.

Here is a example, see the picture above, which ones of these Presidents would you consider to be "Far Right-wingers"? Donald Trump was to the right of which Presidents? I can think of only 2 out of these 45, that would be Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. I think for instance that Trump's position on immigrants and minorities was more liberal than FDR's. FDR for example interned Japanese-Americans, he presided over segregated armed forces for example, I don't think Trump has advocated any of that, so I am just saying becareful of who you call a "Far Right Winger" I believe most of the Presidents of the United States would qualify under that definition.

That being said, he's right about the thread title, just wrong in what he chooses to post about it. The perversion of science due to politics comes from "science denial", which is really discounting scienctific data and facts in favor of preferred political beliefs, without regard to truth. There's plenty of this to go around on both sides of the aisle here in the US.

Okay, if someone effectively says, the world is going to end because of Global Warming, don't we have a right to be skeptical? Skepticism is part of the Scientific method after all. You have a bunch of liberals that advocate we make drastic changes because of global warming, so what I'm saying is before we make these drastic changes, you have to prove that there is global warming.

In the modern GOP dominated by the minority tea party / freedom caucus / pick-a-name right-wing extremists,

I wish it were so, if it were so, the Republican Party would have nominated Ted Cruz instead of Donald Trump, we would have repealed Obamacare within the first 100 days of the new Presidency, it would have been real simple to do, if what you were saying is true, but to not! We have a lot of "mushball moderates" in the Republican Party, people who say they will repeal Obamacare when they are running for election, but then find excuses not to do it once they are elected. A Tea Party dominated Republican PArty would have cut taxes, and would not have looked for new revenue to balance it out. The Tea Party is a Political Party within a party made up mostly of moderate and RINOs, it wouldn't have passed and funded so many of Obama's programs over the past 8 years if it were not! I think, in the future, the Republican Party may split due to lack of competition from the Democrats. It is a two-Party system after all, and if the Democrats can't fill the shoes of that other party, someone else will fill that vacuum.

it has become a touchstone requirement for membership that you deny any human-caused connection to climate change, irregardless of the facts right in front of your face. Implementing such beliefs as public policy is quite dangerous, and certainly wrong.
This is not the only case on the GOP side, but is sufficient to make my point.
The same is true with the Democrats on the false belief that vaccines cause autism.

Lets take these two propositions you put forward:
1) Humans cause climate change.
2) Vaccines cause autism.

Why do you automatically assume 1) to be true and 2) to be false? How come for instance, you do not have to prove that vaccines do not cause autism? Then why do you assume that we hve to prove that humans do not cause climate change with a default position that the do. The data collected has been suspect, where you put your thermometers to detect climate change is very important, for instance, if you put them on top of smoke stacks of factories and power plants, you will detect climate change and global warming.

(There are some GOP types who subscribe to this too, so it's not uniquely Democrat). The one and only paper that made the autism link claim was completely-discredited and retracted years ago, yet it is still cited by the vaccine-avoidance crowd. Multiple studies done since have confirmed there is no such link, yet this evidence is ignored because it conflicts with the preferred political belief system. As a result, there is an outbreaking measles epidemic in Minnesota even as we converse, because too many skipped vaccination, and the "herd immunity" has fallen too low.

You know science isn't democracy, you don't prove something to be true by having scientists voting on it, and whoever can get enough scientists to agree to position A is the winner. You know scientists only exist because someone has hired them and pays their salary. So what do you get if you have tobacco companies hire scientists to determine whether cigarette smoke causes lung cancer? If they say it does, they may be out of a job! Just polling scientists is not the scientific method. Most scientists like to keep their jobs, and if they have to lie or fake data to do so, many of them will.

This is also not the only case on the Democrat side, but it is sufficient to make my point.
Is not a preventable outbreak of disease not a danger to the body politic? Is not making worse land ice melt (with resulting sea level rise) not a danger to the body politic? All the other cases I didn't cite on both sides present similar dangers.
The common thread here is that preferring political belief systems over objective truth is a clear and present danger to us all. It seriously endangers our republic. Perhaps it should be added to the definitions of treasonable activities.

I note the fact that many Democrats cannot accept the fact that Donald Trump is our President, I still see cartoon covers of President Trump on many magazines with titles suggesting "How we can fire Donald Trump!" The campaign has not ended for many Democrats, they are still attacking Trump o everything they can think of, putting up resistance and not accepting the results of the last election, this sort of behavior is a threat to democracy itself! If they cannot accept the results of the last election, then what can they accept? I've never seen so much hatred for a newly elected President, than I have for this one, yet he has not gotten us in any wars, has not presided over a recession that is clearly his fault, yet the Democrats were on full attack mode for day one, they don't seem to understand that there will be another election in less than four years, if they position themselves as the party that hates everything that is Republican, they are going to blow it, because most Americans don't care as much about Partisan politics as they do!

Perhaps dumbing-down our education system for easier control of the masses was a really stupid idea. That is something I have personally witnessed and can testify to.
If these things were made treasonable offenses, routine activities in the House and Senate would certainly change. Perhaps the White House as well.
GW

With he emphasis on slavery instead of the abolition thereof. Also why did they get rid of Lincoln's Birthday as a national holiday and replace it with Martin Luther King's? Clearly who was the most important person for the civil rights movement, was it the one who freed the slaves, or the one who organized marches on Selma, Alabama? I thought it was a mistake to get rid o Lincoln's Birthday as a Natinal Holiday, maybe it was because he was a Republican.

SpaceNut · 2017-05-09 20:48:57

The response post is all political and off the topic....being right or left And so are the quotes I thinks its time to stop....

GW Johnson · 2017-05-10 10:17:06

Ice makers in the Arctic is the first new geo-engineering idea I've seen in a long time. Loss of sea ice has deleterious effects, but the fundamentally most dangerous problem (linked to sea level rise) is loss of land ice above current sea levels.

This may require that we undertake some geo-engineering activities, we'll see. I personally think without evidence that limiting CO2 emissions is not really going to work effectively enough, because of very long lag times. That is because the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 3 centuries, according to what I read. Based on the rate of ice melt, we just do not have that long to do "something."

The problem with geo-engineering proposals is that many of them are just not reversible. One such is seeding the stratosphere with sulfate particles. Once you do them, you are committed "for the duration". And what if you were wrong (as we so often are)? Such an example might be doing that seeding, and then having a massive volcanism event also occur, which "overdoes" things for you. Such geo-engineering proposals must be considered, but only those that are reversible, because of the very high odds that we are just plain wrong about our understanding of exactly how climate really works.

Having to make decisions in the face of incomplete or otherwise imperfect data is exactly the point of the little trade matrix I described much earlier in this thread. That's basically how it's done, unless you want to corrupt things with financial or political interests. And I don't, certainly.

As for the quality and reliability of the scientific data that we do have, by and large it is pretty good. Of course there are those that cheat or defraud, but the peer review process makes that fairly rare before it gets very far. Of course research results can be colored by the source of the funding, but fortunately, there are multiple projects and funding sources out there, because of the requirement for reproducibility. That tempers the effect rather well, really.

So the consensus data and prognostications that say human activities are causing problems can be trusted very much more than the deniers so loudly contend. It ain't about "equal time" or "fairness", it's about confirmation via reproducible results. But it ain't perfect, and you must deal with that, too.

The deniers' behavior and agenda are perfectly understandable in terms of basic human motivations, although that does not make them "right", and they are not "right", in my opinion, or the opinions of the majority of knowledgeable scientists. In the trade study matrix I described, the only cell that did not have serious costs was the cell for which we choose not to act while human-caused warming proved not to be true in nature (something over which humans have no control, devout wishes to the contrary notwithstanding). For too many, the lure of the money overwhelms the need to ponder the possibility that the required guess about nature could be wrong.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-05-10 10:43:18)

SpaceNut · 2017-05-10 17:23:09

Co2 3 century lag to effects is why the nay sayers are calling foul as they can not infer the connection....

I like the sea water pumped to cold storage to form new ice but that must be done with alternative engery sources to be come effective in a time frame shorter than 3 centuries....

I am not sure the effects of nuclear power sources for the energy but if it works ok....

Seeding sulfates to the atmospher is the problem with using high sulfur content coal...not a good thing causing acid rain to occur.....

Something new from Mozilla... Mozilla Science Lab is a community of researchers, developers, and librarians making research open and accessible. We’re empowering open science leaders through fellowships, mentorship, and project-based learning.

I have not tried it yet but if it works why not....

GW Johnson · 2017-05-11 13:02:06

Making and distributing ice with renewable energy might be of some benefit, but I suspect it cannot work in areas that have already suffered massively decreased albedo. That pretty well rules out the Arctic Ocean, and the Antarctic Peninsula.

I kind of like the "sunshades in orbit" approach, precisely because it really is reversible if we guess wrong. Same basic technology as that required for solar sailing, or for the laser-powered "starshot" stuff. The technology crossfeed among applications certainly makes it worthwhile to think about.

Other than that, encouraging wind, solar, natural gas-over-coal, and nuclear is about the best we can do. You can extend the liquid fossil transportation fuels by blending them with appropriate biofuels, but only if the biofuels are not first-generation with the high fossil carbon footprint.

You can tell the real scientists who know about this climate issue from the rest not working in the area, and the non-scientists. They know that not all carbon is harmful, the rest do not. We are in trouble because we unburied and burned carbon isolated from the surface carbon cycle for 10^8 years.

Except for getting the fastest-possible reductions in atmospheric CO2, there is no need to worry about carbon active in the surface cycle (biofuels). Because of the 3 century lag, worrying about that surface cycle carbon effect is pointless. We do not have that long to act.

GW

SpaceNut · 2017-05-11 17:33:35

We could do the cheap thermal blankets anchored to the ice sheets to slow the melting and continue to lay more down as we progress towards the magnetic pole. Use the reflected solar power in a way to power solar panels to pump the water inwards towards the pole making use of the same machinery to we use on the sky slopes to make snow.

GW Johnson · 2017-05-12 16:23:01

When I endured those two record-setting winters in Minnesota about 20 years ago, I saw an odd flip-flop behavior on a regional/local scale that seems to apply on the larger planetary polar region scale.

The snows began lightly, which would melt the next day. They got heavier and took longer to melt, then finally came the snow that didn't melt. And bang, it went very cold, reinforcing the non-melting of the snow. There's melting and sublimation of course, but once flipped into that high-albedo cold state, these were compensated by more snowfalls.

This continued in the face of increased springtime insolation, until suddenly, there was finally enough heat to melt through and expose some dark Earth. Then in a matter of a few days, all of it melted away (the low albedo state) and the weather flopped suddenly back to warm. It's as if there was a flip-flop between two adjacent stable states, with nothing stable in between. Bistable.

This is what I believe is happening in the Arctic, except that at that scale, the time constant is years instead of days. Same thing for Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula. The main Antarctic ice sheets have longer time scales, but I really do think it's the same flip-flop between two adjacent stable states. And we're not going to like the new one, because of several meters of sea level rise in roughly a lifetime.

I think the climate modeling is largely too immature to show this bistable operation. But the geology definitely shows that it happened before. Flip-flop. Very sudden.

If it really is bistable the way I suspect, then ANY of a variety of triggers could set it off, including human pollution with dirts or greenhouse gases. That's actually not very hard to understand. Because it's just like triggering an avalanche, or disturbing nitroglycerin.

And if it is bistable, since we are already seeing symptoms, it's probably too late to head this off. It'll flip-flop long before the 3 century lifetime lag of CO2 passes. That fear seems mostly unique to me. But I do remember exactly what I saw in Minnesota, and just how astonishingly fast it happened.

Murphy's Law says I am right about this.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-05-12 16:27:01)

SpaceNut · 2017-05-12 18:08:54

I have seen the same effects here in New Hampshire to which we are lately lucky if we have snow covering the ground in December but when I was just a we grass hopper it was surely several feet deep and was looking more like northeaster after northereaster was not going to stop dumping until we were burried....So in just a meir 40 years we have gone from normal to abnormal weather conditions.....

Dave_Duca · 2017-05-14 09:25:02

"When Science Becomes Perverted By Politics"
We have two (2) Weapons to quell the Public Servant of Exacerbating Quintessence.
( Transparency ) and ( Occam's Razor )
Current Trends of Linguistic Lambasting Long-in-the-Tooth Dissertations are, frankly: boring.
(yes, I'm tasting the rainbow of flavorful vernacular)

Nothing, to this day.... has come close to JFK's Speech of September 12th.... period.

Dave_Duca · 2017-05-16 12:21:56

Another interesting Fun Fact about how our Scientists today are dismissing Science Fact....

Global Warming
"... we will be in peril is all the Polar Ice Caps melt and we'll be under 150 feet of water.
They calculated that using the entire volume of ice we have on planet earth.
Not the volume of Ice that is "physically above the water".

SpaceNut · 2017-05-16 18:06:07

They must be using the iceberg units of measurement with regards to where that measurement started....

I for one ignore the units of water rising by feet measured over 10 but then again ice traps air and just make it look larger than it does once melted....

elderflower · 2017-05-17 08:47:50

Glacial ice traps very little air. Enough small bubbles to get paleoclimatologists excited, but not to make a significant difference in density. That's why it is that lovely shade of blue. If it contained a lot of air bubbles it would be white like snow, which hasn't yet been densified to glacial ice.

GW Johnson · 2017-05-20 15:22:26

I'm not at all sure what posts 170 and 172 are even saying. Can't understand that kind of "English". Tain't standard English. Not what I learned in public school or on public US streets, either. And standard ain't that different in Canada or the UK. The accents in India and Africa are difficult for me, but not when written.

Post 171 quotes an unknown source for data that is actually in error. My response is "You are entitled to your own opinion. You are NOT entitled to your own facts."

Ice volume above sea level is computed from the difference between ice surface and the higher of either the underlying hard surface elevation, or the mean sea level elevation. This is something you double-integrate numerically over the ice-covered area. There is some uncertainty in hard surface elevations under some of these ice caps, but not all that much. The error is just not all that significant.

As Elderflower noted in post 173, gas bubbles in the ice have no effective effect on its density, which is known, as is that of average sea water (1.025 that of fresh water), and fresh water itself (always pretty close to 1 g/cc at ordinary temperatures). No errors or fraud there.

The ice volume adjusted by density ratio to a volume of fresh water is the volume of freshwater added to the sea if that ice melts. It's small compared to ocean volume, so it does not affect the overall average of ocean salinity appreciably. Thus "volume conservation" is a pretty accurate simplifying assumption to make. No fraud or mistake there.

Now, how much that raises sea level is a little less straightforward, as the ocean area increases as its level rises. How one accounts for that can make minor differences in rise estimates. Minor. Not major.

The data I have been using are at least pretty close to current estimates, close enough to be realistic: 1 m rise for 100% of the mountain glaciers, 6 m rise for 100% of Greenland, 7 m rise for 100% of west Antarctica-above-sea-level (a lot is below), and 20+ m rise for 100% of east Antarctica, which is above sea level.

The uncertainty is NOT the ice volumes, it is in how much (and which ones) will really melt.

NO ONE knows how much (or which ones) that will be. Very, very unlikely to be 100% of all of them! Much more likely to be nearer 50% of some of them. 50% of mountain glaciers and Greenland seem rather likely. That's 3.5 m rise, about 12 feet.

How fast? WHO KNOWS? The geology records say ~ 1 human lifetime, or "sudden-as-lightening", geologically speaking.

3.5 m rise in ~70-80 years is a complete disaster for humanity, because well over a billion of us will have to suddenly relocate across international borders, when there is no place for them to go. And, because very many of our high-value fixed assets will get flooded unless we spend ourselves into oblivion moving them to higher ground.

What is so f***ing hard to understand here? Why are we still arguing about this?

GW

SpaceNut · 2017-05-20 17:01:26

Not all ice was above land in the retort post but in either case HOW MUCH OF AN ICEBERG IS BELOW THE WATER

About 7/8ths of an iceberg is below the water line. This figure is approximate. to which

If the polar ice caps melted, how much would the oceans rise?

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the sea level has risen 6 to 8 inches (15 to 20 cm) in the last 100 years (see How do they measure sea level?).

The main ice covered landmass is Antarctica at the South Pole, with about 90 percent of the world's ice (and 70 percent of its fresh water). Antarctica is covered with ice an average of 2,133 meters (7,000 feet) thick. If all of the Antarctic ice melted, sea levels around the world would rise about 61 meters (200 feet). But the average temperature in Antarctica is -37°C, so the ice there is in no danger of melting. In fact in most parts of the continent it never gets above freezing.

With a resulting melt that will cause damage....

In 1995 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report which contained various projections of the sea level change by the year 2100. They estimate that the sea will rise 50 centimeters (20 inches) with the lowest estimates at 15 centimeters (6 inches) and the highest at 95 centimeters (37 inches). The rise will come from thermal expansion of the ocean and from melting glaciers and ice sheets. Twenty inches is no small amount -- it could have a big effect on coastal cities, especially during storms.

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