The Science of Climate Change

SpaceNut · 2019-03-19 18:40:22

I guess the fear of volcanic erruption is powerful as Geo Thermal Power goes.

Drilling to start at the UK’s first deep geothermal electricity plant The U.K. site is to drill two “deep geothermal wells” will be drilled into granite rock, with the deepest reaching 4.5 kilometers. But why no look for other locations not so deep?

JoshNH4H · 2019-03-20 12:28:42

Hey kbd512,

I don't think we have any disagreement on the desirability of nuclear power or the extent to which the public overestimates the danger. However, I do try to see this one from the other side. A Chernobyl-style release of radiation, no matter how unlikely (and I bet the average person would overestimate the probability by a factor of 100 or 1000 or more), can never be made impossible. It's true that a nuclear reactor that is being run by the book with adequate reinvestment in maintenance should never melt down. It's also true that no system works perfectly forever. You're probably right that opposition to nuclear power probably stems more from environmentalism as an ideology than anyone's objective self interest (if such a thing exists).

There's an interesting, vaguely related factoid that I heard somewhere or other about vegans. People are vegan for lots of reasons, but I would say the big three reasons are personal health, environmental footprint reductions, and animal cruelty concerns. Vegans, in general, don't expect people to quit meat cold turkey (so to speak) and often advocate for incremental steps. This is where there is the potential for conflict: If you believe that people ought to be vegan for personal health or environmental reasons, you might tell them to eat less beef and more poultry; If you believe people ought to be vegan for animal cruelty reasons, you might tell them to eat less poultry and more beef. Instead, they present a simpler message to the world: Eat Less Meat, something all vegans can agree on. There's a lesson somewhere in there about compromise and coalition building.

I may have gotten ahead of myself in thinking about a global power grid. I stand by it as a good idea, and if we do see a global boom in solar energy it will likely happen whether it's done intentionally or not.

On intermittency: Vox has a good article about how scheduled solar intermittency affects the energy grid. The tl;dr is that with the current mix of power sources it's not a problem until you hit 10-15% of total generation. That's far above where we are now but solar is growing very rapidly and could reach this level in the next few years. In California solar is already 12% of electrical generation, with wind contributing another 6%. Turbines using natural gas are much more flexible in their output, but people are concerned about the economics of building new ones: Once you've built electrical generating infrastructure there are strong incentives to keep it running as long as you can to get the most out of your sunk costs. Hydro is also fairly flexible. It's not crazy to overgenerate by a bit during peak solar hours, storing the power if you have the infrastructure but letting it go to waste if you can't use it.

Anyway, there will come a time, perhaps at 10% solar penetration or perhaps at 50%, when (Assuming a global grid does not get built at the same time) you have no way to deal with its intermittency without grid-scale electricity storage. The US uses about 500 GW of electricity on average, so if your grid is 100% solar you will need to store and release about 2.5e16 J every day. To the extent that other forms of generation can compensate during off hours you will need proportionally less.

I can't say I have any new ideas on the storage front. At the moment, we have a bunch of imperfect battery technologies that we can start trying to deploy. No technology is perfect but there are lots of avenues for potential research and development. Terraformer brought up sodium ion batteries, an idea which I think is good. GW brought up flow batteries for their ease of use and that seems like a good idea. Louis brings up hydro storage, which has questionable economics in that you need to move massive amounts of water but which is in use now and likely will continue to be. I have brought up the idea of a global power grid as an ultimate solution, which has its own challenges but also, to my mind, the potential to be way cheaper than any of the solutions brought up thus far. I don't believe it requires room temperature superconductors, although without a doubt they would help.

I would like to introduce flywheels as a possibility for nighttime power storage. Perhaps it's my bias as a mechanical engineer to like technologies which are fundamentally mechanical, but a well-balanced steel flywheel on a low-friction central bearing (magnetic, perhaps?) and in a low-pressure environment could be a simple, robust way to store power overnight.

louis · 2019-03-20 15:19:07

"The Ukrainian state pays benefits to about 35,000 people whose spouses apparently died from Chernobyl-caused illnesses. Some scientists have told her they think 150,000 deaths is a more likely baseline for the Ukraine alone."

https://phys.org/news/2019-03-scholar-u … s.html#jCp

It depends who you read or believe, but Chernobyl was quite possibly the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths across Europe.

However safe the operation of a plant, you have to take seriously the threat of terrorism - with either an internal agent (an employee) or an external agent (e.g. attack by hijacked plane) deliberately releasing radioactive material. Moreover, we often hear on this site about how smaller Toshiba style nuclear power plants are going to revolutionise energy generation. Sadly that would increase the terrorist threat exponentially - essentially you would have hundreds of potential "dirty radiation bombs" sited all over a country like the USA or UK awaiting a terrorist attack. If you tried to provide effective 24/7 military protection for each and every plant you would simply make the plants uneconomic.

kbd512 · 2019-03-20 15:59:46

Josh,

If that Vox article was too long for people to read, then perhaps they're uninterested in the subject matter. It was a fairly straightforward explanation of why some form of storage will eventually be required to support greater expansion of solar power. We still have very little of it, despite also having vast expanses of otherwise unused land where the Sun beats down with a fury. I don't see the storage problem as a showstopper, but for whatever reason a lot of people are convinced that new battery technology, which hasn't materialized in decades of concerted development, will solve it. Hydrogen fuel cells work right now, but so do LNG fuel cells. They so rarely fail to produce power that we trust them to produce power and drinking water for space flight applications. I see this as a "stick in the mud" problem. Some is better than none. LNG fuel cells work right now. Cleaner than pure driven snow? No, but still a lot better than burning coal.

Flywheel and electromagnetic energy storage systems certainly have potential applications for grid stability as power buffers, but their inherently low energy density precludes other uses and the land use for such systems is excessive. AFRL "what-if'ed" this type of energy storage mechanism with known materials and technologies back in 2013.

Development of Superconducting and Cryogenic Power Systems and Impact for Aircraft Propulsion

IIRC, NASA still has an ongoing program experimenting with the use of flywheels and superconductors. At best, as the AFRL slides indicate, we're talking about a system on par with the latest and greatest Lithium-ion batteries. It's better than current production battery technology, though not by much, and fantastically expensive and complicated in operation. However, like you, I tend to favor and trust mechanical systems, even though I know that electrical systems with no moving parts tend to be more reliable. Using magnetic bearings and assuming sufficient quality control during production processes, a mechanical system that has no physical bearing surfaces could still be extraordinarily reliable.

JoshNH4H · 2019-03-20 18:04:55

Louis,

I won't mince words: Chernobyl was a catastrophe on the scale of 9/11. Estimates for the number of deaths range wildly, from a few dozen (certainly too low) to the number you have provided. Wikipedia suggests a good estimate is 4,000. It can be difficult to say. For example, let's say a woman who lived in Chernobyl at the time and is a lifelong smoker was exposed to some radiation as a result of the event and ultimately dies of cancer in 2025 at the age of 79 years old. Did the radiation cause the cancer? Might she have lived longer? Life expectancy for a woman in Ukraine is 77. Even if the radiation did cause her death, how much longer might she have lived otherwise?

I'm not trying to minimize Chernobyl, merely to point out that a simple count of fatalities perhaps overstates the size of the public health impacts of released radiation by a bit.

Chernobyl is a bit of a worst-case scenario, both from a risk standpoint and an outcomes standpoint. To briefly recap the conditions that caused the accident and the release of radiation:

The Chernobyl reactors had what is known as a "positive void coefficient", meaning that they are dynamically unstable and not self-regulating
The Chernobyl reactors had no "Scram" mechanism to kill the nuclear reaction in the event of nuclear runaway
The Chernobyl reactors were being operated by engineers transferred from a coal plant with very little training in nuclear-specific concerns
The Chernobyl reactors had no containment building that would prevent the release of radiation in the event of a meltdown
The Soviet system treated failure as being akin to sabotage and therefore dis-incentivized engineers from speaking up about potential issues. While this can be a problem in any system (Ask the engineers who spoke up about the O-rings on Challenger in that same year) the risk of a life sentence in Siberia is a lot worse than the risk of being ignored, yelled at, or fired.
The Soviet government tried to cover up the accident at first, rather than admitting to it and taking steps to protect people

Taken together, these amount to "worst practices" for a nuclear reactor. If you compare to the Three Mile Island accident in the US (no radiation was released despite a nuclear meltdown*) or the Fukushima disaster in Japan (in which an earthquake/tsunami that killed 20,000 people also caused a reactor meltdown which itself caused one single fatality) you'll see that nuclear power mishaps needn't end that badly.

The question of terrorism seems a bit more like a red herring--short of actually bombing the reactor it doesn't seem like there's much a terrorist could really do without causing the reactor to shut down or scram. While a bombing on US soil is certainly a big deal the threat is not limited to reactors. We don't have a military brigade protecting individual skyscrapers or sports stadiums after all, but rather one centralized military which protects the whole country.

Finally, I would like to point out that estimates suggest that the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused 150,000 to 200,000 fatalities each. Unless you'd also contest those figures I would say it's not credible to suggest that Chernobyl--a disaster much smaller in size and scope--killed the same number.

As I said above, I do not and cannot deny that operating a nuclear reactor comes with an inherent risk of the release of radiation, even if this risk is egregiously overestimated in the popular imagination. I will close by reiterating 2 of kbd's points:

1. The average coal plant releases more radiation into the environment per joule of electricity than the average nuclear plant. While coal plants have many issues this is rarely if ever cited as one of them.
2. Cheap, reliable energy also has a value which can be measured not just in dollars but also in lives, as economic development increases life expectancies and decreases mortality.

*CORRECTED: A small amount of radiation was released with no known consequences to human health

SpaceNut · 2019-03-20 19:23:26

What makes nuclear a disaster waiting to happen is scale of size. Smaller reactors would be less dangerous and could be more spread out to balance feeding the grids. The power wall of musk is just that same balancing of consumed versus excess for later. If they were not so expensive to install for residential use I would want one of the 10 kilowatt units.

kbd512 · 2019-03-20 20:01:18

Louis,

My grandfather was at Hiroshima shortly after the bomb was dropped. I visited Hiroshima 55 years later. I can report that as of the year 2000, Hiroshima was a thriving modern city. Apart from a few buildings left as reminders of the past, it's as if nothing ever happened.

Sooner or later, something is going to kill you. That's an absolute, unequivocal fact. Vastly greater numbers of people have been killed by every other type of non-nuclear weapon and from atmospheric pollutants generated by other forms of energy production, like coal. On that note, the Chernobyl death estimates are patently false. As the years go by, the claims become increasingly absurd.

Josh,

Three Mile Island did, in point of fact, release radiation. Some Radon, Cesium, and Iodine were released. Nobody that we know of died from that radiation release.

SpaceNut · 2019-03-20 20:45:09

A judge blocked oil and gas drilling across almost 500 square miles in Wyoming and said the U.S. government must consider climate change impacts more broadly as it leases huge swaths of public land for energy exploration.

The order marks the latest in a string of court rulings over the past decade — including one last month in Montana — that have faulted the U.S. for inadequate consideration of greenhouse gas emissions when approving oil, gas and coal projects on federal land.

SpaceNut · 2019-04-03 16:45:39

The eyes can see what the brain wants to deny but The Great Barrier Reef, study finds; Climate change has caused an 89% decrease in new coral

kbd512 · 2019-04-03 18:21:56

SpaceNut,

Complaining about problems may be cathartic, but it never helps to solve them. Humans aren't using any less energy as time goes on. Science provided a realistic answer to the problem of how to generate massive quantities of energy with minimal resource input and without CO2 emissions more than half a century ago. Nuclear power wasn't perfect then and it still isn't perfect now, yet the majority of people claiming to care about the environment still outright reject the most ridiculously obvious solution to the problem.

Decide what problem you think is worse, CO2's impact on our environment or the potential problems and costs associated with using nuclear power. The French already have CO2-free electricity production. Their electricity predominantly comes from nuclear power. It's cleaner than anything else we've come up with, if all inputs and outputs are considered. If we actually burn every bit of the fuel we put into a reactor, instead of just 2% of it, it's the cleanest source by a country mile.

There is no such thing as a grid scale battery. In our life times, there likely never will be. We've poured absurd sums of money into solar panels and batteries, yet the fundamental math and physics problems with using them at global scale remains just as significant now as it ever was in the past. At best, it's a "feel-good" solution that doesn't solve the problem. Saying "every little bit helps" is a bit like saying bailing water with a coffee cup helps when you have a ten foot hole in the hull of your ship as the ocean's pouring in. At most, it's only delaying the inevitable outcome.

Even if we could wave our magic wand, and "poof", the US was powered by sunshine overnight, not a liquid hydrocarbon to be found in use anywhere in the country, the rest of the developing world doesn't have the money to virtue signal about how pristine they left their environment. They live hand-to-mouth and use whatever is cheapest and available because they have no other better options. Are you going to start wars with those countries and wipe them off the map because they're not using the forms of energy that you want them to?

If not, then people claiming to care about the environment had best learn to accept realistic solutions to the problem, however imperfect, and stop complaining about spending money on practical solutions that can be delivered by existing technology. We've blown mad money on solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, but haven't put a dent in the energy provisioning and storage problems. It's time to consider the alternatives, namely nuclear energy, fuel cells where appropriate, and cleaner alternative fuels that provide equivalent energy content to gasoline or kerosene when used in a fuel cell. There's still a place in the overall energy economy for solar and wind and batteries. However, that place is not attempting to provide base load electrical power or powering vehicles that need megawatts of continuous power, such as ships and aircraft.

elderflower · 2019-04-09 13:47:56

One renewable that is available in very large installations is Hydro. Suitable hydro installations can also store power in large quantities and release it to the grid at high rates with respectable efficiency.
For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffestiniog_Power_Station.

SpaceNut · 2019-04-09 16:12:27

Its the power lines that feed from those hydro plants which are the issue for many that have the not in my back yard syndrum...
NH is to get hydro but we are going through this process which would have made our power costs lower but its not to be believed....

I did see and read a few more articles that talked about the glaciers of the alps and other places to which it is indicated that the rate of melt is faster than expected...

louis · 2019-04-09 16:40:33

There is a lot of environmental damage associated with hydro; there is a risk of catastrophic failure; and in populous advanced countries nearly all the useable sites have already been bagged.

I think there could be a role for creating artificial lakes for pumped storage (either as coastal islands or inland) but I don't think real hydro could ever meet the growing needs of the world's growing population.

The solutions for low or no net carbon emission are already here. Solar and wind energy are both already among the lowest cost solutions for energy generation and their costs continue to fall dramatically. To solar and wind you can add limited hydro, energy from waste, bio energy, geothermal, tidal, sea current and wave energy. To balance out your grid, you could deploy a combination of battery storage, continental size grid connections, artificial methane electricity generation (produced from water and air using solar and wind energy) and increased short-term use of energy from waste and bio fuels.

elderflower wrote:

One renewable that is available in very large installations is Hydro. Suitable hydro installations can also store power in large quantities and release it to the grid at high rates with respectable efficiency.
For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffestiniog_Power_Station.

GW Johnson · 2019-04-10 16:13:08

The contention that "there is a lot of environmental damage" with hydroelectricity is mostly wrong. The other contention that most hydro sites are already being used is mostly correct.

There are two things to consider when damming a river for hydro: (1) what gets flooded by the lake, and (2) how do you build a dam that won't fail. You do those up front. And you pay the money to build the dam right. After that, there is no "environmental damage" at all, because there are no emissions at all.

Building pumped-reservoir hydro incurs those same exact two things to consider up front. Pumped-reservoir hydro is merely a storage medium for energy you already have, not a source.

There are still some hydro sites that could be considered, such as in Brazil and in China. Whether the flooded area is worth the benefit is what you decide up front. Best to keep both politics and big-monied entities out of that decision, but few ever do.

GW

louis · 2019-04-10 17:07:07

I am not saying that damage to eco-systems should never happen...but there is absolutely no doubt that dams can cause damage to ecosystems over large areas - that can be milliions of square miles. To deny that is silly:

https://www.internationalrivers.org/env … ts-of-dams

Yes, building a reservoir lake does not add energy to the system but it is a way to expand energy storage in quite an energy-efficient manner.

GW Johnson wrote:

The contention that "there is a lot of environmental damage" with hydroelectricity is mostly wrong. The other contention that most hydro sites are already being used is mostly correct.
There are two things to consider when damming a river for hydro: (1) what gets flooded by the lake, and (2) how do you build a dam that won't fail. You do those up front. And you pay the money to build the dam right. After that, there is no "environmental damage" at all, because there are no emissions at all.
Building pumped-reservoir hydro incurs those same exact two things to consider up front. Pumped-reservoir hydro is merely a storage medium for energy you already have, not a source.
There are still some hydro sites that could be considered, such as in Brazil and in China. Whether the flooded area is worth the benefit is what you decide up front. Best to keep both politics and big-monied entities out of that decision, but few ever do.
GW

SpaceNut · 2019-04-10 17:21:03

Another thing would to be is make lakes where draught condition pervail and capture the flood waters to be redirected to them so that we are storing even more for later use.
The new topic posted is sort of the off shoot of how the nasa and other satelites could be better used if the data got to the correct hands to aid in making change possible.
This is also another topic that Man is still looking at in the hydrogen based economy in fuel cells whether its plain water output or starting with ammonia which gets fed in for energy it still comes at an up front energy cost with not always it being much better output for efficiency to that of a car burning gas. Its a question of temporary storage form versus other questional effects that we are trying to avoid.

tahanson43206 · 2019-04-16 10:57:44

For kbd512 .... Hoping this item will fit into your topic. It is a stretch, but it ** is ** science....

https://www.iflscience.com/technology/n … -snowfall/

This is one of several links I found that report on deriving electrical current (albeit minuscule) from falling snow.

One link I found led to an article written by someone who (obviously) lacks fundamental understanding of electricity.

I offer the link above here as an example of ongoing scientific discovery in the field of climate generally, but also as the germ of an idea for snow protection on Earth.

It doesn't seem likely to have much applicability to Mars for the foreseeable future, but it might stretch to falling Carbon Dioxide flakes.

In that context, the discovery is thought (by some) to have potential as a way of measuring snowfall on Earth.

Conceivably it might have a similar potential on Mars.

That said, on Earth, I am intrigued by the idea that a roof set to generate a positive electrostatic charge might be able to deflect snowflakes away from the charged surface.

In some parts of the Earth, where snowfall still occurs, this might help to protect human structures from the overburden of snow fall.

However, I recognize that the physics of this situation may preclude a practical application of the technique to keep a roof free of snow.

(th)

Last edited by tahanson43206 (2019-04-16 10:58:46)

SpaceNut · 2019-04-16 19:47:39

Maths shows the nature of 'tipping points' for climate and eco crises

"Human action might be insignificant when the tipping point is far away, but could be the final straw as we approach it. Understanding this context is crucial to judging when we might topple into a new state."
Earth's climate tipping points. Humans need to be wary of breaching a 'point of no return' that leads to ecological disaster such as loss of rainforests or irreversible climate change, thin line separating the Earth's current climate from a frozen one – the so-called snowball state.
The Earth flipped multiple times between a warm and snowball state about 650 million years ago, preceding the beginning of multicellular life.

Study suggests 'snowball Earth' was real and was reversed by 'An ultra-high carbon dioxide atmosphere'

The Snowball Earth hypothesis proposes that during one or more of Earth's icehouse climates, ..... Global temperature fell so low that the equator was as cold as modern-day Antarctica. .... situations, the freeze would be limited to relatively small areas, as is the case today; severe changes to Earth's climate are not necessary.

Climate change is the likely culprit, yet scientists are debating how ... They wobble with every season as the distribution of snow and rain change, and over long stretches as well. ... “We think this flip is happening all the time,” Ivins says. ... say that global warming has a controlling influence on Earth's poles.

Climate change” is popularly understood to mean greenhouse warming, ... on us: the earth's climate does great flip-flops every few thousand years, ... a climate flip suggests that global warming could start one in several different ways. .... Water falling as snow on Greenland carries an isotopic “fingerprint”

So do not just look at the co2 but also the oxygen and probably nitrogen as well...

SpaceNut · 2021-03-07 10:47:02

Not finding a truly space weather topic I seem to recall that some believe that the attributes for warming are thought to originate in space.
When I saw the title I though of how would such an event change earths weather.
Scientists spotted a 'space hurricane' swirling above the magnetic north pole. It was raining charged solar particles.

BB1ed0Oh.img?h=228&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f

wow its the first time I have seen this but has there been more events...

A study published in the journal Nature Communications last month describes the first space hurricane ever spotted. In August 2014, satellites observed a swirling mass with a quiet center more than 125 miles above the North Pole.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21459-y

The space hurricane was more than 620 miles wide and high in the sky - it formed in the ionosphere, between 50 and 600 miles up.

This was big...

So what was the cause, where did the storm originate...

Is it a sign or earths field of protection weakening...

Mars_B4_Moon · 2021-07-10 12:55:27

NASA Technologies Spin Off To Fight Climate Change
https://awaken.com/2021/07/nasa-technol … -change-2/

Canada-US heatwave: NASA pictures show smoke seen from space as deadly wildfires destroy most of Canadian town
https://news.sky.com/story/canada-us-he … n-12347323

GW Johnson · 2021-07-10 16:00:27

The geologic record says there have been "hothouse Earth" eras as well as "snowball Earth" eras. There are a lot of competing contributing causes to point at, but no one really fully understands why what happened on Earth really happened the way it did.

That being said, the warming seen over the last 50-ish years is definitely out-of-line with the previous 500 years. Something is going on, and that something is pointing toward melting of ice on land, which raises eustatic sea levels.

Prudence says do less of what we already know acts in the wrong direction. Simple as that, but very hard to do in actual practice. Especially with the politics of big monied interests dragging their feet.

GW

RobertDyck · 2021-07-10 16:23:18

I see efforts to manipulate data to force an agenda. When you look at global temperature over land separately than sea, there was global cooling from 1855 to 1970. Those dates are not a coincidence; the industrial revolution started 1855. Soot from coal burning spewed into the stratosphere. Those giant concrete smoke stacks created an updraft not just to the clouds, but all the way to the stratosphere. This caused global warming in the stratosphere, and shade caused global cooling on the surface over land. Regulations in 1970 were effective and enforced. That stopped the process. Measurements showed soot from coal burning was finally gone from the stratosphere in the summer of 2010. Temperature of the stratosphere dropped in perfect sync with soot, also stabilized in 2010. If you look at global temperature over land from 1550 to 1855, and assume the trend would have continued if we hadn't screwed with the climate, then the end of 1998 temperature on the surface over land equalled what it would have been on that same date. And that's exactly when the rapid global warming stopped. Global warming over land slowed to a crawl. During the first decade of this century (2000s) scientists debated whether any global warming remained, or whether any that does remain is simply nature. Most concluded there is a tiny bit of human caused climate change, but it's tiny.

I used to be pro-climate. However, the Canadian government imposed a heavy carbon tax. And they're talking about drastically increasing it. They also talked about banning sale of new gasoline cars, all new cars will have to be electric. This I must oppose. The tax is harmful to working citizens, and very damaging to the economy of western Canada. And electric cars have come down in prices, but are still too expensive for average working people. Extremist ideology is harmful, must be stopped.

louis · 2021-07-10 19:30:56

I think you are right Robert. It's too much of a coincidence that climatologists switched from warning about a new ice age to warning about global warming just as the anti-pollution measures kicked in.

I also feel agricultural irrigation (which increased hugely in the post war period) is neglected as a factor in climate change.

I am a supporter of good air quality and green energy so am generally in favour of EVs but we should allow the market to sort this out I feel. What the state needs to do is encourage EV adoption through modest subsidies, infrastructure development (e.g. electrical charging infrastructure), and facilitating good purchasing models (EVs have lower maintenance and fuel prices - this could be reflected in the upfront purchase cost with tax incentives or similar). The free market is already offering small EVs at around $5000.

RobertDyck wrote:

I see efforts to manipulate data to force an agenda. When you look at global temperature over land separately than sea, there was global cooling from 1855 to 1970. Those dates are not a coincidence; the industrial revolution started 1855. Soot from coal burning spewed into the stratosphere. Those giant concrete smoke stacks created an updraft not just to the clouds, but all the way to the stratosphere. This caused global warming in the stratosphere, and shade caused global cooling on the surface over land. Regulations in 1970 were effective and enforced. That stopped the process. Measurements showed soot from coal burning was finally gone from the stratosphere in the summer of 2010. Temperature of the stratosphere dropped in perfect sync with soot, also stabilized in 2010. If you look at global temperature over land from 1550 to 1855, and assume the trend would have continued if we hadn't screwed with the climate, then the end of 1998 temperature on the surface over land equalled what it would have been on that same date. And that's exactly when the rapid global warming stopped. Global warming over land slowed to a crawl. During the first decade of this century (2000s) scientists debated whether any global warming remained, or whether any that does remain is simply nature. Most concluded there is a tiny bit of human caused climate change, but it's tiny.
I used to be pro-climate. However, the Canadian government imposed a heavy carbon tax. And they're talking about drastically increasing it. They also talked about banning sale of new gasoline cars, all new cars will have to be electric. This I must oppose. The tax is harmful to working citizens, and very damaging to the economy of western Canada. And electric cars have come down in prices, but are still too expensive for average working people. Extremist ideology is harmful, must be stopped.

SpaceNut · 2021-07-10 20:40:11

Part of the
130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius) and heading even higher tomorrow records 134-degree Fahrenheit (56.7 degrees Celsius) reading in Death Valley on July 10, 1913, and the other is a 131-degree (55 degrees Celsius) measurement in Kebili, Tunisia on July 7, 1931.

with that much heat is also making it easier for wildfires AALYFvk.img?h=480&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f

GW Johnson · 2021-07-10 21:04:15

Doesn't really matter about temperature records or proxy temperature records, or who might be tampering with them for whatever reason. The point is not temperature, it is heat and ice.

Over the last 5 decades, the Arctic ice pack has both shrunk in area, and thinned from 30+ feet thick to about 5-10 feet thick. The mountain glaciers are receding. Part of the Greenland ice cap has begun seriously destabilizing. Parts of the Antarctic ice cap are changing, with the ice shelves already broken-up all along the Antarctic peninsula.

It takes heat to melt ice. That heat came from somewhere, and it wasn't there 5+ decades ago.

You "doubters" can't argue with those facts. They simply "are". There are no numbers you can complain about.

GW

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#224 2021-07-10 20:40:11

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#225 2021-07-10 21:04:15

Re: The Science of Climate Change

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