… persuade them to stop being rightwingers[1]
I have a piece in Inside Story arguing that the various efforts to “frame” the evidence on climate change, and the policy implications, in a way that will appeal to those on the political right are all doomed. Whether or not it was historically inevitable, anti-science denialism is now a core component of rightwing tribal identity in both Australia and the US. The only hope for sustained progress on climate policy is a combination of demography and defection that will create a pro-science majority.
With my characteristic optimism, I extract a bright side from all of this. This has three components
(a) The intellectual collapse of the right has already proved politically costly, and these costs will increase over time
(b) The cost of climate stabilization has turned out to be so low that even a delay of 5-10 years won’t render it unmanageable.
(c) The benefits in terms of the possibility of implementing progressive policies such as redistribution away from the 1 per cent will more than offset the extra costs of the delay in dealing with climate change.
I expect lots of commenters here will disagree with one or more of these, so feel free to have your say. Please avoid personal attacks (or me or each other), suggestions that only a stupid person would advance the position you want to criticise and so on.
fn1. Or, in the case of young people, not to start.
John Quiggin 
Watkins Tench
I notice you don’t address the point I made about the technical summary on low cow estimates. How curious you overlook the primary point I was making in regard to your assertion @20…
‘ZM- the tech report doesn’t refute the policy makers report. You referencing Hansen in an annotation to the tech report doesn’t make it so.’
Where did I say it refuted the policy makers summary?
I said politicians force changes in the policy makers summary whereas scientists are not forced to make so many political changes in the technical summary.
I noted 450ppm or 2 degrees of warming was a goal not chosen because of science but because of political convenience.
350ppm carbon equivalent has be recommended by Hansen and other scientists as the highest safe rise in emissions over the pre-industrialisation atmospheric level.
Although I am suspicious you are just being annoying and ignoring references on purpose now, I will helpfully provide references in case other people take you as being informed.
The technical summary explains that the mitigation strategies it looks at are guided by the UN Framework on Climate Change:
“Mitigation, together with adaptation to climate change, contributes to the objective expressed in Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to stabilize “greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system… within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt… to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner”.
However, Article 2 is hard to interpret, as concepts such as ‘dangerous’ and ‘sustainable’ have different meanings in different decision contexts.
…
Something is dangerous if it leads to a significant risk of considerable harm. Judging whether human interference in the climate system is dangerous therefore divides into two tasks.
One is to estimate the risk in material terms: what the material consequences of human interference might be and how likely they are.
The other is to set a value on the risk: to judge how harmful it will be.
The first is a task for natural science, but the second is not [Section 3.1].
As the Synthesis Report of AR4 states, “Determining what constitutes ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’ in relation to Article 2 of the UNFCCC involves value judgements”. Judgements of value (valuations) are called for, not just here, but at almost every turn in decision making about climate change [3.2]. For example, setting a target for mitigation involves judging the value of losses to people’s wellbeing in the future, and comparing it with the value of benefits enjoyed now.”
Faustus:
Once again you are simply making stuff up. I said:
There is obviously no need to completely eliminate carbon dioxide output since only net output matters and carbon sinks like trees and various technologies, some of which don’t exist today, will invariably do some of the heavy lifting.
You say:
Again you are being cryptic. Who is the idiot of whom you speak? Why would you believe the IPCC climate models and not the economic models? Are you picking cherries again?
You say:
Yes, pollution taxes and fuel efficiency standards have fuelled technology and efficiency gains. We already know this. Look at the vast lit on taxes regs etc on innovation, for example sulfur dioxide pollution and the Clean Air Act trading scheme. Also note how fuel fuel efficiency standards panned out.
Even without much being done we’ve seen solar become solar become a real player in recent years. And now we have those plastic trees and varios other techs in development.
If you think we are entering some End of Times epoch we’re technologies will no longer advance, please give us evidence.
Also do you have any evidence that your shopping list of prescriptions will work better?
It is a sunny day outside so I will now go outside and plant some more trees. I will also be planting trees with a voluntary group on Sunday, which is something almost anyone can do.
Climate believers,
Poppers science is quantitative, the pseudo science of climate is qualitative (you can not measure the climate) Climate science is like economics, it masquerades as a real science.
Long live the consensus, 98% scientists have given up skepticism based on falsification and embraced a true belief.
Forget your independent minds Climate believers, hail climate science and never be skeptical.
Kind regards,
Phoenix
I’m getting exasperated now, Watkin. I have repeatedly shown you references that indicate a) carbon taxes will not achieve zero tax by themselves and b) trees will not make up the shortfall. You even requested those references. I have referred to them several times and made them available to you. Yet you refuse to engage with them in any way, and continue to insist that trees will do the job.
This irrational insistence on a policy in the face of scientific evidence against it is the basic definition of “anti-science” used widely on this blog. You also don’t appear to be aware of some of the more recent debates in the climate science literature. I am, frankly, not interested in wasting my time “debating” with someone who refuses to engage with the evidence.
I only hope that our host will return to this topic in the coming months and attempt to engage a little more seriously with the limits of his carbon tax policy recommendations than he has to date.
I don’t think you can get the Abbott-bots on the far right to soberly consider evidence concerning our part in climate change, particularly the global warming part: witness the Lloyd article in the weekend edition of Australia’s loss-leader, and you will see how an old hand at doubt-casting is at it (yet) again, scouring Australian local temperature series for a few in which the statistical homogenisation process has supposedly changed a cooling trend in the raw data to a warming trend. The author presents a graphic of the temperature series for one town in Australia, which quite notably has a break of several years in the raw time series. When there is a gap like that, how do you ensure that the restarted time series isn’t biased up or down due to a change in measuring apparatus or micro-local environment (eg a shady tree chopped down)? Why, you use a statistical process such as the homogenisation technique: that is why it was created in the first place. No matter though, a theo-neo-con could not care less about the process, just about finding those needles in the haystack which can be paraded as if they are representative of all the hay instead.
Sorry John, I think your optimism is mis-placed. Pity.
Faustus,
Since nothing anyone says here including our host is likely to change ghg emission outcomes, I’m not sure why you are so agitated.
You say reaforestation could soak up 4 Gt per yr co2 human co2 emission. Since these emissions are ~ 26 Gt per yr that figure is already very significant, even if only half the potential is achieved.
I think we’ll be laughin’.
@phoenix
I am indeed a gullible believer then. All those pseudoscientists with their thermometers, barometers, anemometers etc fooling me into believing they were taking measurements, when all they needed to do was read rightwing blogs to discover that there is no such thing as average temperature. Also, degrees and radians are just different names for the same thing.
ZM,
I checked the RealClimate website which I think approximates the mainstream science position and I couldn’t find support for your contention that 450 ppm is inappropriate or that SPM.
You say:
I found this group post re previous SPM:
As with Faustus, your appear to be getting carried away by outlier opinions (James Hansen etc.. ) and getting too emotional to think clearly. Keep calm and take a deep breath. Provided sensible and reasonable policies as recommended by mainstream economists are undertaken, there is no need to panic.
Also, while you and Faustus were busy hyperventilating, I planted another 20 trees. What did you do today that really counts?
Watkin Tench,
I am quite calm thank you for your exceedingly kind concern, it is a very pleasant day in the country here as spring weather approaches.
In case you are accidentally rude I will mention here to you it is *very rude* when you are out-argued by quotes from the IPCC contradicting you that you cannot counter reasonably yourself to tell people they getting carried away, too emotional, need to keep calm and take a deep breath, are panicking, and hyperventilating. I would like an apology for this rudeness sir!
I am glad you plant trees, I planted plants on national tree day here, landcare are always looking for volunteers. We have many landcare groups in our shire who do a great job despite limited assistance from the government, which is now being cut.
however you likely are like most people and need to keep making improvements to cut your ghg emissions, such as taking public transport, walking, and cycling places, not eating meat and dairy, trying to purchase food not grown too far away, eating produce not grown with artificial fertilisers producing nitrous oxide, not buying many consumer goods with embodied emission etc.
“I checked the RealClimate website which I think approximates the mainstream science position and I couldn’t find support for your contention that 450 ppm is inappropriate or that SPM.”
You mustn’t have checked more than scantily -I guess you were tired out from your tree planting! – since they have a search box and if you enter 350 you get a number of posts !
This from 2009 by Gavin says
“However, as the final line in my NYT quote should make clear, personally I think the scientific case not increasing CO2 any further is very strong. Since the planet has not caught up with current levels of concentrations emissions (and thus will continue to change), picking an ultimate target that is less than today’s level is therefore wise. Of course, how we get there is much trickier than knowing where it is we should be going, but having a map of the destination is useful. As we discussed in the ‘trillionth ton‘ posting a couple of months back, how we get there also makes a difference.
In my original email to Andy Revkin, I had actually appended a line:
If you ask a scientist how much more CO2 do you think we should add to the atmosphere, the answer is going to be none.
All the rest is economics.”
– See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/350/#sthash.RmyUstxq.dpuf
ZM,
Gavin Schmidt’s quals are in mathematics and that is why he is involved in climate modelling. Look at his RealClimate bio.
Why should I give undue weight to what a mathematician thinks?
What do the actual scientists at RealClimate think?
If you want to convince me that 450ppm is bunk you’ll need to do much better than that.
@John Quiggin
John, in addition to there is no such thing as average temperature derp, I once had a conversation with a person who didn’t believe that it was possible for doctors to distinguish between hyperthermia and hypothermia on the basis of thermometer readings. When I pointed this out to him he (and I’m confident it was a he) apparently didn’t have a problem with that.
@Watkin Tench
Shakes head in disbelief
@Watkin Tench
[I am sure that you are a very nice empathetic person, but please don’t equate solar pv evangelists with those giving up smoking. If we don’t get our shit together on distributed energy production, then we will all be smoking – as a result of climate change.]
The globe went into energy surplus from the time atmospheric carbon passed 280ppm. Correct or not?
It is still in energy surplus now, only more so. True or not?
At 450ppm it will still be in energy surplus only even more than now. True or not?
Your conclusion about stabilising temperature at 450ppm is therefore … ?
NB: according to Dana Nuccitelli at Skeptical Science between 1998 and 2012 the world accumulated heat at the rate of 4 Hiroshima strength atom bombs per second, or about 2 billion atom bombs worth.
All of that was done at concentrations of CO2 of less than 400ppm. How much heat will the world accumulate in the 50 years after we stabilise at 450ppm?
Read Judith Curry’s blog daily instead. It’s the only climate blog worth following.
Please delete last as it had a clipboard error with an irrelevant quote.
@Watkin Tench
The globe went into energy surplus from the time atmospheric carbon passed 280ppm. Correct or not?
It is still in energy surplus now, only more so. True or not?
At 450ppm it will still be in energy surplus only even more than now. True or not?
Your conclusion about stabilising temperature at 450ppm is therefore … ?
NB: according to Cook and Nuccitelli at Skeptical Science between 1998 and 2012 the world accumulated heat at the rate of 4 H!roshima strength atom bombs per second, or about 2 billion atom bombs worth.
All of that was done at concentrations of CO2 of less than 400ppm. How much heat will the world accumulate in the 50 years after we stabilise at 450ppm?
Watkin Tench,
I am still waiting for an apology for your rudeness @8.
You stated:
“I checked the RealClimate website which I think approximates the mainstream science position and I couldn’t find support for your contention that 450 ppm is inappropriate”
I stated:
“You mustn’t have checked more than scantily -I guess you were tired out from your tree planting! – since they have a search box and if you enter 350 you get a number of posts !
This from 2009 by Gavin says…”
You stated:
“Why should I give undue weight to what a mathematician thinks?
What do the actual scientists at RealClimate think?
If you want to convince me that 450ppm is bunk you’ll need to do much better than that.”
At no stage did I state I wished to or hoped to convince you of anything whatsoever. All I wished was to state were that you were wrong about Real Climate and did not check with any sort of diligence.
I in fact doubt you can be convinced of your wrongness or encouraged to be more diligent in your scanty researches. This is likely uncharitable of me, but given your great rudeness I am not presently inclined to be charitable to you.
For anyone else skeptical science has a good overview of why returning ASAP to a concentration of 350ppm co2e at the highest is necessary:
“A CO2 level of 450 ppm (the lowest target being considered by governments) would eventually melt all the ice on the planet. Both observations of the climate change currently underway, and the paleoclimate-based estimate of slow-feedback sensitivity, suggest even the current level of 390 ppm is too high. If CO2 is at or above its current level for too long, it will eventually result in a planet unlike the one on which humans evolved: a planet 2°C warmer and with sea level 25 metres higher. Imagine waves crashing over an eight-storey building. It is hard to dispute that this would be “dangerous” climate change.
To stabilize the climate, we must return the Earth to energy balance. And in order to do that, we need to reduce CO2 to 350 ppm, as soon as possible. To meet this target we must leave most of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground. We need to 1) rapidly phase out coal (including coal-to-liquid-fuels), 2) not burn the tar sands and oil shale, 3) not burn the last drops of oil and gas, and 4) turn deforestation into reforestation. And we must hurry: one more decade of business as usual would make this goal practically impossible. If we fail, we face an uncertain future in which the only certainty is a continually shifting climate.
I’ll leave the final word to Hansen et al, whose concluding statements are pretty strongly worded coming from a dense, technical, peer-reviewed, scientific paper:
Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision-makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the era beyond fossil fuels. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.
The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is Herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.”
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=351
Fran:
Let me complete that sentence:
Nothing else needs saying.
ZM:
I don’t care about a blog post at Skeptical Science. Why should anyone care about that? I mean, it is just so boring to think that anyone could possibly find that persuasive. You might as well cite Lindzen or Curry or Monckton or Watts like the denialists.
Alarmism and denialism are two sides of the same bad penny.
Watkin Tench,
I am still waiting for an apology Watkin, and now I am waiting for another one for saying I might as well cite Monckton when I quoted an article citing James Hansen. You should be moderated and given a dressing down for consistent rudeness and misrepresentation!
“Rajendra Pachauri, the United Nations’ principal climate scientist and chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has personally endorsed a 350 ppm target: “What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target.”” http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/climate_law_institute/350_or_bust/
You state: ‘what the latest IPCC SPM suggest as a reasonable goal.’
(It has been documented that the SPM – The Summary for Policy Makers – is influenced by politicians. As I stated earlier, the Technical Summary is better because politicians do not influence the writing of it so much.)
As usual Watkin you do scanty research and misrepresent the matters you choose to pontificate on.
The target of 2 degrees – 450ppm – was not decided upon by climate scientists at the IPCC ‘as a reasonable goal’ – Please note:
“The 2 target, however, reemerged as an important issue in 1990, the year when IPCC published its first assessment report. Remarkably, perhaps, the 2 target was not discussed there, and it
has never been since then in any IPCC document.”
Jaeger, C. C., & Jaeger, J. (2011). Three views of two degrees. Regional Environmental Change, 1115-26
I do not have time to do a literature review on the matter – since you are so derelict and scanty I will provide a couple of sources: “Tol’s review of the literature has suggested that there is little explicit scientific evidence for why 2?C should be the preferred target” and it seems to have originated with the economist Nordhaus who has been criticised for various reasons on climate change.
“The temperature target has its roots in the ways in which scientists and economists developed heuristics from the 1970s to guide understanding and policy decision making about climate change. It draws from integrated assessment modeling, the ‘traffic light’ system of managing climate risks and a policy response guided as much by considerations of tolerability of different degrees of climate change as by simply reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The European Union (EU) proposed 2?C as the policy target in 1996, with support from some environmentalists and
scientists. It was subsequently listed as the desirable temperature target in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord.
…
By 1996, the EU commissioners focused upon not just a target for keeping 2000 emission levels to
1990 levels, but also to working toward a maximum allowable temperature target of 2?C.41 The EU target drew inspiration from being toward the lower end of the mid-range IPCC emissions scenario in the SAR in 1995. This was interpreted to be a 2?C temperature rise by 2100,41,42 and as the point beyond which climatic ‘dangers’ would become more visible. Indeed that IPCC report, and reiterated again in 2001, suggested that 2?C may represent a boundary beyond which there would be risks to many unique threatened ecosystems and a large increase in the number of extreme weather events.
…
Tol’s review of the literature has suggested that there is little explicit scientific evidence for why 2?C should be the preferred target. Despite ongoing scientific debates, the target became a political anchor for mitigation policy. In the European Parliament’s restatement of the 2?C target
in 2005, they concluded that it was scientifically justified and that it was vital to promote cost-effective action to ensure temperatures did not rise beyond this point.46 Likewise the British chaired G8 meeting in 2005 reaffirmed the 2?C target.45 These statements are not legally enforceable,22 but there are movements to make this target the subject of a global treaty. In 2009, the Copenhagen Accord, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the
Parties (COP-15), proclaimed the 2?C figure as being scientifically justified, with ‘deep cuts’ in global GHG emissions required.
…
Although the 2?C target has been embraced in many quarters, there has been criticism over the choice of target and the logic of temperature targets more generally. For some economists, the 2?C target has been criticized for its weak justification in cost-benefit analysis studies of climate policy.
…
Scientists too have been skeptical of the value of the 2?C with Hansen suggesting that it is not a responsible target as it already commits the world to significant climate change.
…
Even a 450 ppmv target has a 26–78% (mean 54%) chance of exceeding 2?C. This variance highlights the risks of selecting any specific concentration target from a temperature target. This makes long-term temperature targets problematic mechanisms if they are interpreted to provide specific advice on emissions pathways. The EMF22 International Scenarios, which involve 10
integrated assessment models, examine the practical questions of how mitigation policy might proceed now within the context of long-term temperature or concentration targets.63 This work suggests that to meet a concentration target of 450 ppmv for 2100 (and even 550 ppmv), there would need to be swift, decisive emissions reductions at an international level.”
Source: Randalls S. History of the 2°C climate target. Wires: Climate Change [serial online]. July 2010;1(4):598. Available from: Publisher Provided Full Text Searching File, Ipswich, MA.
“Surprisingly, perhaps, the first suggestion to use 2C as a critical limit for climate policy was made by an economist, W.D. Nordhaus, in a graph published in a Cowles foundation
discussion paper (Fig. 1). There he claimed: ‘‘As a first approximation, it seems reasonable to argue that the climatic effects of carbon dioxide should be kept within the normal range of long-term climatic variation. According to most sources the range of variation between distinct climatic regimes is in the order of ±5C, and at the present time the global climate is at the high end of this range. If there were global temperatures more than 2 or 3 above the current average temperature, this would take the climate outside of the range of observations which have been made over the last several hundred thousand years’’ (Nordhaus 1977, pp. 39–40; see also
Nordhaus 1975, pp. 22–23, where the same words are to be found, but without the suggestive diagram).
…
According to Tol (2007), the 2 target was first raised in a statement of the German Advisory Council for Global Change (WBGU 1995). That statement was a comment on the first Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, held in Berlin and chaired by Angela Merkel, then German minister
of the environment and presently German Chancellor. Tol mentions that according to Oppenheimer and Petsonk (2005) the 2 target was introduced by Nordhaus already in the 1970s, but denies this referring to Nordhaus (1991). The latter paper discusses the idea of optimal climate policy without mentioning the 2 target at all. Figure 1, however, taken from the original paper of Nordhaus (1977) along with the corresponding quote from Nordhaus (1975, pp. 22–23) clarifies that the 2 target is indeed more than two decades older than Tol assumes. Moreover, as we will see below, AGGG (1990) is another important step between Nordhaus (1975) and WBGU (1995).
…
The 2 target has emerged nearly by chance, and it has evolved in a somewhat contradictory fashion: policy makers have treated it as a scientific result, scientists as a political issue.”
Source: Jaeger, C. C., & Jaeger, J. (2011). Three views of two degrees. Regional Environmental Change, 1115-26
Do you actually think the study was intended to measure “polarity” ? I suspect that the study was originally intended to show “skeptics” were less scientifically literate than “gullibles”. When THAT didn’t pan out, the authors of the paper went into a bunch of psychobabble about ” individual level”- substitue “believers in freedom”, and ” collective levle”- substitute “believers in statist, authoritarian control”.
I’ve no idea what the original intention of the study was. I was merely pointing out your misrepresentation of the study in your comment.
@ZM
So much rubbish, at great length, from believers who eschew necessary scepticism. I got to the reference to Pachauri as a scientist and the treating of the unwieldy partly political processes of the IPCC as carrying authority and couldn’t take any more. Pachauri is not a scientist as could easily be checked and he is a proven liar who regularly employs partisan activists and treats partisan tracts as scientific evidence. Pachauri claimed two PhDs – not true but only corrected when caught out.
I know two IPCC lead authors, one honest but no research scientist, the other a mathematician with pretentious title who is dodgy and partisan. So I certainly have no proper sample to make an independent judgment but Donna Laframboise’s books have not been adequately answered. Ignoring someone who is not herself a scientist is presumably what the PR professionals have advised.
I note that Pachauri has said that the IPCC has for customer the UN treaty – which had as a premise dangerous AGW so the IPCC’s work is deformed accordingly. If we do face dangerous AGW isn’t it about time a commission or committee was established – maybe several in different countries -:that could generate the trust that increasing numbers withhold from the IPCC.
And none of this says anything about how one proves it worthwhile for Australia to be anywhere near the vanguard.
Yuri,
Thankyou for pointing out Pachauri the Chair of the IPCC is not a climate scientist as the article I quoted said, he seems to be an engineer by training. It is always disappointing to find an article has inaccuracies, but it does happen.
I did in fact note – as you’ll see if you read my comment again – that the IPCC Policy Makers Summary is politically altered to be more amenable to governments, and recommended the Technical Summary be read instead.
It is not polite to call someone’s comments rubbish, if you have only found one mistake in a quoted article. If you wish to be thought of as commenting in good faith, you ought to give others’ the same regard, unless you have a very good reason.
I agree with you we should have a proper Royal Commission into the causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change and the needed physical and social changes we should be making over the next quarter century in response.
Australia should continue trying to be a good country of the world, not a horrible country, so we should try our best to decrease our ghg emissions, then cease them, and draw down emissions. I am sure if you have any young children in your family Yuri you wouldn’t want them or their children facing the damaging effects of climate change late in their lives.
The Wikipedia page on mitigation scenarios lists prominent people including scientists and economists who support 350ppm
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_mitigation_scenarios
@ZM
Apologies if you drew the understandable inference that I was referring to your long detailed piece as “rubbish”. As I indicated I gave up early because on this thread and others I did see so much illfounded assertion of no added value. My first on-the- fly post was made in holiday in the equatorial tropics where I still am enjoying perfect balminess with no visible change of anything in 12 years. Not quite as good a hedge as cousin Pavel’s marina on the White Sea but I think he’s a bit premature.
You provide interesting confirmation of the view expressed to me by a former engineer turned VC that his warmists knew nothing useful about AGW but could be classified as the moral like you or the scared-to-be-disapproved of by global peers (the contemporary colonial cringe) when OS. As he is numerate and a big spender of scarce resources he had no trouble applying the key notion of opportunity cost to the question of what Oz should do (a pity that clever chap Kevin Rudd didn’t – apparently his Copenhagen debacle deranged an already disordered personality).
It’s hard to keep track of the various names people use!
“Yuri” at #21, says to “ZM” – ‘So much rubbish..’
“ZM” at #22, says to “Yuri” – ‘It is not polite to call someone’s comments rubbish..’
Then “Midrash”, at #23 says to “ZM” – ‘Apologies if you drew the understandable inference that I was referring to your long detailed piece as “rubbish”. ..’
Is “Yuri” also “Midrash”?
Multiple right wing sock puppets? I’m shocked!
From memory, “Yuri” and “Midrash” have congratulated each other for erudition, insight and genius on previous threads. They may even have had a discussion on one thread.
@Megan
Is this conspiracy theory or an investigation into multiple personality? 😉
@Megan
Most people have pairs of socks, but it appears the author of Midrash and Yuri has two right hands.
@Fran Barlow
Maybe the NSA got into both of their computers and engineered the whole thing to set them up and make them look foolish?!
Given the staggeringly high level of IQ involved, it beggars belief that it could simply be a matter of forgetting which persona was supposed to be speaking. That would just be sloppy.
@Fran Barlow
I’d guess at multiple personality if either of them had what could be termed a personality. 🙂
Fran Barlow. I too like your idea at #15 (extract below) of using algae to soak up carbon.
‘That’s why I rather like the idea of using algae. It’s high yield, requires little maintenance and can be raised in ways that would have nearly zero impact on local ecology and on land which nobody was interested in using. You’re going to draw down far more CO2 per m2 with algae than with grasses or trees, and disposing if it securely will surely be far easier’.
I reckon the Nullabor might be a good site. Simply pump up lots of sea water and encourage algae growth in that sea water. You probably don’t even need to dispose of it. Just move onto another site when a particular area become unviable for more algae growth.
I don’t know enough to know what the economics might be.
And as Quiggin says in #16, its better to go early with CO2 reduction than be forced to use sequestration.
@John Goss
No, you definitely want to prevent the algae you’ve raised from decomposing and returning its CO2 to the flux. If you just leave it, within 3 years it will all be back in the atmosphere.
“Moderation” is at it again.
take 2:
“Midrash” has replied – for some reason over at #7 on the “Freedom of the Press…if you own one” thread – as follows:
test?
I tried to cut’n’paste comment #7 from the ‘Freedom of the Press’ thread – but it got me binned.
Maybe someone else can get it to work, but anyway it’s “Midrash” admitting his puppetry.
Fran at 32. I was thinking that maybe if the algae was out in the desert covered up by salt from the evaporated sea water that the rate of decomposition of the algae might be low?
@Megan
That last bit could be interpreted as a hint that “Midrash” is also “JD”.
“Watkin” is “Mel”. No “conspiracy” required.
@John Goss
It might be if you took care to seal it properly, but why move from site to site? You would build raceway style tanks or ponds, use sub-potable water in which a wide variety of high yield algae could grow (which is why saline water probably wouldn’t be ideal) and try to maximise yield so that the facilities could be in continuous operation.
Once algae forms on the surface the light falls and so does yield per square metre, so you’d probably want to agitate the pond gently so that the light reached algae below the surface or else install sub-surface lighting to allow photosynthesis to occur below the top cline. You’d continuously harvest from the top and introduce new nutrient to maintain growth rates.
You’d probably need to build the ponds near a good water source — a sullage plant might be good both for water and nutrient — so too might be an industrial facility, possibly an abattoir. You also want good links to a place where you could ship the stock, so a rail link would be good. I imagine that once the algae was dried, you’d mix it with the inert material, compress it into some easy to transport shape so that when dumped at sea it would go straight to the ocean floor.
Wow – so Yuri is Midrash and Watkin Tench is Mel (and Mel has been banned). How does this happen and why did it suddenly go all wrong like this? Intriguing.
I suppose not to be detected as duplicates they just have to use different email addresses, but why did they suddenly all get it wrong in this thread? This (all going wrong at the same time) does make them seem like some kind of spambots, but if they are spambots, they are very good ones. I get a lot of spam on my blog but it’s always very obvious: ‘blah blah blah, here is my (totally irrelevant) blog’ – which I presume is just for clicks, so they can get advertising. However with the exception of Midrash at times, all of these personas are generally relevant and on-topic, even if what they are saying is right wing propaganda or similar.
So it’s very intriguing and I would like to know more about this. Off topic here I guess, but if anyone can shed further light in the Weekend Reflections or Sandpit or somewhere, that would be interesting.
This is from PrQ’s commenting policy:
Just saying …
I can’t believe I bothered arguing with Watkin on the assumption that he or she had any good faith whatsoever. I won’t make that mistake again.
The lie is half way around the world before the truth has even got its shoes on.
Maybe next time I’m about to be banned for challenging one of these sock puppets I might have earned just a little bit of slack?
Probably too much to ask, but we live in hope.
I note that (either because of their defamations of me or for some other reason) I can’t link my website to my name when commenting – I’m over that anyway now thanks to troll attacks – and I seem to have a unique ban on including links in comments.
Again, I don’t really care – I’ve worked around it before by giving enough info to allow those interested to reconstruct the link – but the important issue here should be the silencing of dissent. And especially the role in that silencing played by dishonest players who smear honest people.
Keep the BS antennae tuned at all times.
Cheers.
Fran at #38
I was trying to think of a scheme which involved minimum labour, so efficiency was not a prime focus. There is so much land in the SA/WA deserts adjacent to the Southern Ocean that it wouldn’t matter if carbon storage per hectare was on the low side as compared to the algae farms. That’s also the reason I’d use sea water, as there is so much of it. Pumping of the sea water up to areas with suitable clay soils could be done with solar power.
This process would be similar to the way oil was formed. I understand that the first stage in the formation of oil often came from algae growth in saline lakes.
@John Goss
I see your point, but the varieties of algae that will flourish in seawater or even brackish water are quite limited.
Also, as I said, because we’d want to harvest and and do secure disposal, concentrating the area makes sense, precisely so as to keep labour costs down per tonne of CO2 recovered.
It’s worth bearing in mind that deserts are actually ecosystems, and presumably interfering with them in large ways will have unexpected ecological effects elsewhere.
@faustusnotes
That’s true. That deserts aren’t of obvious immediate benefit to humans doesn’t mean that we should zero-rate them. Let’s keep our footprint as small as possible based on the precautionary principle.
I see scope for algae farms in abandoned or underutilised industrial estates, which tend to have good access to water, transport and the labour required, can be heavily insolated and the cope for local processing of the resultant biomass (drying and compression).
The big problem with use of biomass for energy is the energy cost in transport to the point of use. I assume this would apply to biosequestration too, so if we can choose where to conduct the activity (which we can’t in the case of things like sugar cane and woody biomass) then we’d probably choose urban fringes since transport is going to be nearby, and because the land is already within the human footprint, the net footprint should be close to zero. It would make some sense to co-locate with sewage treatment since this tends to be energy intensive, moving water is a major call on power and of course nutrients in the sewage can feed the algae. A putrescible waste site might also be a good partner for this.
This article here explains why stabilising at 450ppm is simply not good enough:
http://sustainabilityadvantage.com/2014/01/07/co2-why-450-ppm-is-dangerous-and-350-ppm-is-safe/
It points out that 450ppm gives us only about a 50% chance of avoiding pre-industrial + 2degC according to the IPCC.
Admittedly, it advocates 350ppm as ‘safe’ but it adds that avoiding even 450ppm is unlikely at this stage. We are already seeing quite serious disruption to the climate system and the biosphere which is dependent on it at just under pre-industrial +0.8 degC. Nor is it clear that + 2DegC will allow the Earth to keep the West Antarctic Ice Shelf.
Clearly, we ought to be peaking now and aiming to get as quickly into reverse gear on concentrations as possible. We must keep getting concentrations down at least until we can be confident of avoiding decomposition of any further glaciers and ice shelves and the permafrost. Given the heat absorbed by the oceans, unless we manage this really soon, then ultimately, later if not sooner, we simply will lose much of our glacial mass. That ought to be unthinkable.
It’s hard to imagine how we could get to energy balance above 280 ppm. It’s hard to imagine reversing the warming unless we go below 280 ppm, since that was about where we were when we started warming.
Oh dear me, I’ve been otherwise occupied for a few days and return to find I’m at the centre of one of Megan’s many conspiracy theories.
As Megan has previously said her computer has been damaged and secret phone calls have been arranged by secret spy agencies, one wonders why anyone would take her seriously.
Fran:
May I respectfully submit that since you are a primary school teacher rather than a climate scientist, this is hardly surprising. Ditto for myself, of course.
How about we stop letting ourselves get carried away by adolescent fantasies and leave the scientists to do the sciencey stuff.
BTW, JQ
Are you ever going to take me off moderation?
I am in a grey area of being banned but not always.
@Watkin Tench
FWIW I’m a high school teacher. That said, I am not an atmospheric physicist. I am entirely reliant on scientists to make scientific inferences about matters such as Charney forcing.
I can read of course and if i have read correctly, those who are atmospheric physicists infer that we have been in positive energy balance since atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rose above about 280 ppm.
Please don’t patronise me. Explain, or point me to a suitable explanation or stay silent on the matter, following your own advice.