To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.
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El Cid
Eggsackly. And completely, utterly friggin’ obvious, too. Thanx to them.
Brett
I like that – the “Parable of Horseshit”. Mark Lynas had a good name for it as well in his book – he called it the “White Knight of Technology”.
It’s not entirely wrong, of course (maybe some technological fix will come along and save us from the consequences of what has been done, like a magic cheap carbon sequestration and atmospheric removal technique), but it’s incredibly foolish to plan around the mere hope that something like that will turn up.
Brick Oven Bill
DougJ; I understand you to be a math teacher. Plato’s First Two Understandings are as follows:
Number One: First, there is certainty.
Number Two: Mathematics gives us the power of perception.
Now, back to today. Think 5000-Year Leap, not 500-Year Slouch. We are men of the Enlightenment.
The rise in temperature, in the presence of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide, would take the form of a second degree differential equation.
Be honest.
This means that temperatures would have accelerated upward for the last ten years if the theory that Al refuses to defend was valid. But temperatures have instead trended down.
Down is not up. Up is not down. Down is down, and up is up. Acceleration is up in the form of a parabola, I think. Bringing us to Plato’s Fourth Understanding:
Number Four: Mathematics is thought, and therefore is eternal, and can be known by all.
Ann B. Nonymous
@Brick Oven Bill: Shorter BoB: I’m so drunk right now, I can’t compose an intelligible sentence.
dmsilev
Can someone reset the Bill-bot please? It’s babbling again, worse than normal.
Thanks.
-dms
kay
@Brett:
It’s a great piece, probably because Elizabeth Kolbert works so hard to read and research and she’s offended by the hacks.
It has the fine, righteous rage of the careful and rigorous when confronted with sneering and surface critics.
She’s pissed.
cleek
oh yeah, well climate change is a religion, too!
tripletee
@Brick Oven Bill:
Ha ha! Good one, BoB.
cleek
damn my broken link.
climate change is a religion too!
so there.
Brick Oven Bill
“Of course I put my money where my mouth is”
-Al Gore
In mathematics, a ‘corollary’ is transferring the Logic of one understanding to gain a better understanding of a different issue. One corollary of Al’s statement above could be:
“Of course I put my mouth where my money is.”
Generations Investment Limited Liability Partnership.
Owners: Al and Dave (Goldman Sachs)
“Commitment to Clients: Our first commitment is to provide exceptional service to our clients. The best way to achieve this is to deliver superior long term performance.”
This is why Al will not debate. This would hurt return on investment. Return on investment is Al’s ‘first commitment’.
Al Gore is fat, and eats meat. He lives in a very large house which reportedly has a larger monthly electricity bill than most houses have for a year.
Al has a business selling carbon credits.
I sat next to a lady on a plane who worked for Al. She defamed a Flight Attendant by telling lies about her to the pilot.
aimai
God I hate the freakonomics guys. I think all I have to say about this is that a lifetime spent on making the counterintuitive argument for fun and profit is probably a lifetime badly spent. Because generally when things are counter-intuitive its because they are counter-reality. Not always. But certainly at the level that the ohmygoshitscheaper! economics hot shots think of counterintuitive its always bullshit. Or maybe I mean the way they think of reality.
aimai
someguy
Yeah, what kind of an insane jackass believes that trees eat CO2! You’d have to be a moran to think like that.
Face
Global warming only exists until the first hard freeze on the East coast. Then it’s “what? Global warming my ass!”. Until July, when it’s suddenly valid again.
The media have an attention span and science understading of an average 4 year old.
jcricket
Great post Doug – It’s hilarious when “serious thinkers” like Sully parrot that kind of nonsense. He’s all conservative when it comes to things like national healthcare, progressive taxation and conservation – but come up with something that liberals hate and sounds science-y (Bell Curve, geo-engineering, Laffer curve) and he’s on board.
Why do I still read his blog? I can’t say. He’s no John Cole (who seems to have recognized his errors enough to now not be so prideful about his ability to come to the right conclusions).
inkadu
@cleek: Belief in global warming is sending out warm thoughts, which in turn causes the world to become warmer. We often neglect the impact of our spirit bodies on Mother Gaia, which also has a spirit body manifests itself as the physical world. Changes to the spirit body reflect ten fold in the physical world. Einstein taught us that e=mc^2, or that m=e/c^2. Warm thoughts are “e” so as we add spiritual energy, the physical (m) world also heats up.
It’s basic physics.
Zifnab
@Brick Oven Bill:
Shorter Brick Oven Bill: Pie!
http://www.seed.slb.com/uploadedImages/Science/Earth_Science/Global_Climate_Change_and_Energy/Related_Articles/global_temp1.jpg
Alternately,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_temperature_1ka.png
If you’re going to put forward bald-faced lies in defense of your argument, and couch it in a bunch of math you clearly don’t even understand, you might want to do it on a comments board that doesn’t have access to Teh Googlez.
Do you even know what a second order differential equation measures?
Apparently not.
General Winfield Stuck
Al Gore is fat. No horseshit.
inkadu
@inkadu: Oh, and I forgot the obvious conclusion — the less people that believe in global warming the less it will be a problem. In this sense global warming is indeed “man made” but not in the way everyone thinks it is! However, we are stuck in a trap. The warmer the earth becomes, the more people will believe in Global Warming.
Hence, efforts at propaganda like BoB’s, while seemingly insane, are really the only effective counters to the continued warming of the planet.
LarryB
@Brick Oven Bill: The myth of recent global cooling has been thoroughly debunked. I made a fantastic chicken pot pie last night. Also.
ChrisZ
If global warming were real then it would be hot outside right now!
Also, even if the earth is warming it’s probably not man-made because the earth has warmed before and there weren’t people around!
Also, even if global warming is real and it is man-made it’s probably no big deal, we’ll just turn up the air-conditioners.
Also, even if global warming is real and it is man-made and it is a big deal we can just shoot a shit load of sulfur into the air and cool it down again! A cheap, easy, no risk, no consequences solution!
Also, even if global warming is real and it is man-made and it is a big deal and we can’t find an easy solution down the road that just probably means that Jesus is coming back so in fact we should be trying to warm the earth faster!
Randy P
@Brick Oven Bill:
Temperatures have “trended down”? Is this that tired chestnut where if you start your fit with 1998, a very warm year indeed, but not 1999 or 1997, then you can fit a downward sloping line to it?
Yeah, BOB. Lots of people are convinced by that one.
You can also take most any random person who’s gained 50 pounds in the last few years and find a short term period where you can say, “See? Their weight is actually trending downward!”
Did you know that gas prices since June of 2008 are actually TRENDING DOWN? So I don’t want to hear any complaints that gas is getting more expensive.
Jonny Scrum-half
I’m not sure that I understand why even thinking about possible geo-engineering solutions to global warming is somehow a bad idea.
DougJ
God I hate the freakonomics guys.
Short and sweet.
Brick Oven Bill
A second order differential equation does not measure Zifnab. It is simply a mathematical tool that delivers to man the ability to perceive, should he be daring enough to choose to do so.
The equation of a parabola.
y^2 -4y -4x = 0 from the link can be re-written:
x = -y + 0.25 y^2
This is of course acceleration, represented by a second order differential equation.
Al’s equation stopped fitting in 1999 and was a stretch when he established Generation Investment Limited Liability Partnership in 2004.
Now it does not fit. This, and return on investment, is why he will not debate. Al Gore is fat and eats lots of meats and cheeses.
Nuclear Power + Oil Shale = American Energy Independence.
Brick Oven Bill
It is difficult to write equations without triggering goofy html functions. There should be no line through the first equation.
Zifnab
@ChrisZ:
I heard the ice caps in the Arctic were actually destroyed by rampaging bands of polar bears. Now those free love hippies want to SAVE the polar bears while they try to preserve their precious ice caps.
‘tards!
Randy P
@someguy:
I don’t believe that the point is that trees eat CO2. We know that. So does the author of this article. The point is that Freeman Dyson has declared that “carbon-eating trees” are the solution to global warming. So they’re something different than ordinary trees, which we already have and which are not solving global warming.
ChrisZ
@Brick Oven Bill:
Your differential equations have no derivatives in them . . .
Randy P
@Brick Oven Bill:
That’s not a differential equation. That’s a sideways parabola.
A differential equation has derivatives in it.
Jay B.
@someguy:
Of course if you read Kolbert’s piece — well, here, this is the contextual segment on “carbon eating trees”:
l.
Wow. Hmmm. It almost sounds like you don’t actually know what Kolbert was referring to or you decided to leave out her actual point.
Mike E
My roasted chicken is delicious:
add minced garlic, Mrs. Dash Italian Medley, fresh-ground pepper and kosher salt to a quarter-cup of EVOO; spoon mixture under the 3.5 lb bird’s skin and rub the outside, also.
[email protected] 2.75 hrs; reserve gravy, then roast [email protected] for another 15 min or until skin is crispy. Remove, let rest. Defat gravy. Enjoy!
Mike E
Sorry for the [email protected] Also.
4tehlulz
Considering their quality work on crime rates, I’m surprised that the authors of SuperFreakanomics do not suggest that India and Pakistan just unleash their nuclear arsenals for the good of humanity.
It solves so many problems : global warming, nuclear proliferation, outsourcing…why not?
ChrisZ
@Mike E:
This reminds me of another reason not to worry about global warming!
If the earth gets warmer, it will just take less energy to cook things because it will take less energy to get the oven up to temperature. This will, obviously, mean that we use less energy which will put less carbon in the air which will then cause the earth to cool!
Joel
that article was, to borrow a term from sullivan, a “fisking” from top to bottom.
if freeman dyson is a “brave thinker” does that make the recently deceased francis crick – who essentially created the field of molecular biology – a “brave thinker” for claiming that aliens seeded life on earth?
Mike G
replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction
For most of the people who believe that horseshit, it’s a tactcial retreat from their laughable young-earth-Jesus, the-rapture-is-coming-so-we-can-fuck-up-the-planet-with-impunity feel-good fantasy to technology-will-solve-everything-at-no-cost-to-me magical thinking.
Like fundie religion, it’s all about pumping up the ego and placing oneself above others by being judgemental; don’t dare ask them to do anything or sacrifice anything or live up to any higher standard, it’s all about how fantastically great they are just for belonging to the tribe. FSM forbid any of these assholes have to give up driving to the mailbox in their SUV.
ChrisS
@Face:
Indeed. A couple of weeks ago, it snowed. In October. In New England.
“Skeptic” comments came out of the woodwork: “This snow almost makes me believe in the hoax that is man-made global warming.”
Today? It’s 72F in upstate NY on November 9th. My bow-hunting friends had to find access to walk-in coolers for their recently harvested deer.
Is today rock-solid evidence for anthropogenic climate change? No, it’s weather. But, if I’m using a little snow in late-October to support my skepticism then 70s in early November should crush my personal hypothesis. Can’t have it both ways. Of course those same people are perfectly silent (except for those exclaiming that “… if this is global warming, I’ll take it!”).
Mark S.
@Jonny Scrum-half:
No one is saying that. What is a bad idea is having blind faith that some technological innovation is going to save us. It might, but if it doesn’t, we’re screwed. Kolbert makes this point in the piece:
Sloegin
Pirates are cool.
…Which makes about as much sense as the Freakonomics chapter on global warming.
ChrisZ
@Jonny Scrum-half:
That’s not why the book is receiving criticism. The book is receiving criticism for putting forth bad arguments and misinformation in support of their “geo-engineering is the best way to solve the global warming problem” argument.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Brick Oven Bill:
Of course not. Zifnab is uncountably infinite and unchanging in all dimensions. You, on the other hand, remind me of many people in the freshman physics class I teach, a shining example of America’s future scientists and engineers.
Mike E
@ChrisZ:
I gotta figure a way to cook the bird via the sun or hot air–I’ll be mentioned in the same breath as algore, tho my BMI can’t compare….
PeakVT
I think the SuperFreakyEconoGnomes have “The Creamy Baileys No-Bell Peace Prize for Science” locked up – if The Editors get around to holding the contest this year.
Brick Oven Bill
x = ay + by^2 is a second order differential equation.
Deravitives.
x in this instance represents temperature.
Since Al postulates that existing elevated CO2 levels are causing temperatures to rise, they would continue to rise at the same rate should CO2 levels remain constant. But CO2 levels are rising, yielding a theoretical temperature acceleration upward.
Temperatures are however trending down. Not rising at a steady rate. And not accelerating upward.
DougJ can provide you with the exact equation.
Those men cooking with Brick Ovens should be given tax credits, as the carbon in wood is released to the atmosphere by decay even if this wood is not burnt.
Therefore burning wood in Brick Ovens reduces the use of fossil fuels, and thus the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I deserve the money, not Al Gore.
The Moar You Know
I read the Superfreakonomics guys and a small part of me wants to put a bullet in my head while society is still smart enough to produce bullets. I realize, after reading Superfreakonomics, that probably won’t be a very long period of time.
“Fucktarded” seems to damn these losers with faint praise. What the hell is happening to our society?
itsbenj
@Randy P: the majority of CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by blue-green algae living in the top level of the ocean. these algae are being killed off by increased temps and acidification in the ocean.
you can plant trees morning and night by the millions, they will not be enough to remove the CO2 that we depend on those blue-green algae to remove. won’t even come close.
ChrisS
Sadly, this Kolbert article will not get near the amount the airtime that Levitt and Dubner will have received.
That liberal media.
r€nato
stolen from the comments at the RealClimate blog:
SpotWeld
B.O.B. That’s a second order expoential equation
DougJ
x = ay + by^2 is a second order differential equation.
No, it isn’t. A second order diff eq would involve the second derivative of something. What you have written is a *solution* to the second order diff-eq
x” = 2b.
But it is not itself a second order differential equation.
Do you mean
x = a y’ + b y”
or something like that?
4tehlulz
Contrarianism for its own sake is the cancer killing humanity.
licensed to kill time
Al Gore looked skinnier recently on the Daily Show. Therefore, global warming is now more real than evah.
Also, anytime you put an “at” sign into a word, you get funny links, like “mailto:birdat400F”, or “mailtosociaIist”, which could be considered hidden messages on our pinko-commie site.
ChrisZ
@Mike E:
I’m convinced because it rhymes. Although I should note that since fat people lose heat to their environment less quickly than thin people, Al Gore may have an advantage over you still (unless of course you were saying your BMI was way higher, in which case kudos to your environmentalism!)
The Moar You Know
@Brick Oven Bill: You deserve to be fed into your lame-ass over via the agency of a woodchipper.
Don’t ever change.
Mike E
@ChrisZ:
My enviromentalizm is phat, yo! My BMI, no so much. See: Moore, Michael. Also.
inkadu
I don’t get it.
We have technological solutions (inefficient brakes, really) for global warming NOW, and the fucktards don’t want to pay for it at the same time they are saying there will be technological solutions for global warming in the future. If there ever WERE those solutions in the future, these assholes would refuse to pay for them, probably arguing that there will be cheaper alternatives in the future. I mean, how much more of an asshole is it possible to be without shitting out your own skeleton?
Woody
I think it was Heidegger who first formalized the thought: Every technology devised to remediate a specific problem contains within it the seeds of a future crisis.
The problems with “Nuclear Power + Oil Shale = American Energy Independence” are numerous and effectively insoluble, all having to do with the impacts of such technologies on the crucial resources necessary for simply maintaining life, civilzation, and everything…
r€nato
@ChrisZ:
It shouldn’t take more than 5 seconds for a thoughtful, intelligent layman to figure out that geoengineering is something we don’t know anywhere near enough about to practice, it would be horribly expensive, and could have many, many, MANY unforeseen consequences.
Kind of like cavalierly dumping millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for a century or longer.
As for contrarianism… I see a definite value in it. I think that the common wisdom is often wrong.
But there’s intelligent contrarianism… and then there’s knee-jerk, feel-good, posturing, rationalizing-disguised-as-contrarianism chic. And I passionately loathe that kind of contrarianism.
Brick Oven Bill
You are the math teacher DougJ so are better at those number thingies. But the concept is solid. I spend my time dealing with pinhead bureaucrats these days. Everybody should be made to do this before being allowed to vote.
But I also know that carbonic acid (CO3) is highly unstable and cannot affect the oceans below the very top surface of the oceans. Maybe an inch or so. This is why the smartie-pants measuring the acidity of oceans always take their readings in a rising column of gas, and not in the open water.
r€nato
@Woody:
Turning oil shale into petroleum consumes TREMENDOUS amounts of water, something which is going to become increasingly scarce in years to come.
Mike E
@inkadu:
SpotWeld
Okay BOB’s had enough spoof posts for this thread.
Move along
gwangung
And it should take 3 seconds for a thoughtul, intelligent layman to figure out that the longer you put off implementing ANY solutions, the MORE expensive, the messier and the LESS effective it gets.
Mike E
I mean, how much more of an asshole is it possible to be without shitting out your own skeleton?
That’s what I say!
r€nato
…the problems of geoengineering aren’t ‘merely’ confined to its overall effects upon the biosphere. There would be tremendous political issues to overcome which would make the current negotiations over a new treaty to replace Kyoto, look pretty uncomplicated.
What do you think the Europeans or Asians might have to say about the proposal to geoengineer to counteract global climate change, which could plausibly lead to dramatic changes in weather patterns in their nations?
The next time some coastal area of China is savaged by a monsoon, they could conveniently blame it on American geoengineering, for instance (whether it was actually the cause or not).
Zifnab
@DougJ: I think he’s just trying to come back to the general concept of motion.
Postion
Speed
Acceleration
And then he claims that since he can’t find acceleration in tempurature change (even after I linked him: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_temperature_1ka.png) that temperature can’t be increasing if it isn’t increasingly increasing. All the stuff about derivatives is just additional expression of ignorance.
Of course, the joke is that you can have a negative second order equation and still have a positive increase in temperature. If, for instance, temperature went up 8 F in year 1, 4 F in year 2, 2 F in year 3, 1 F in year 4, etc…, you’d have negative acceleration but positive temperature change. And then your real problem is asking what the limit is after which the planet is “too hot” and whether the increasing temperature will exceed this limit.
Of course, all of that is very high level stuff compared to BoB’s nonsensical insistence that “it’s not a parabola”.
ChrisZ
@Brick Oven Bill:
All of my math was wrong but the solution is still right!
Everyone needs a BoB around.
Doctor Science
Because it sucks up critically limited time and brain cells from thinking about approaches that are not insane.
Geo-engineering is *insane*. Geo-engineering solutions are fragile, untested, overflowing with unintended consequences, ill-considered, self-centered and indeed imperialistic. They have only one “upside”: any geo-engineered solution will, as a “side effect”, channel money to some small set of pockets. I put side effect in scare-quotes because I think that’s the actual attraction of geo-engineering: “We can rule the world! and by we I mean me, and by rule I mean get money from.”
Zifnab
@inkadu: Going back to the horseshit parable, it’s interesting to note how you had a number of major cities literally swamped in feces with the powers that be all convening to address this pressing issue and the end result was… a walk-out.
When you’re literally drowning in your own shit and you still can’t cut down on shit production, it paints a bleak picture for the future of climate change.
I feel like we’re all on Easter Island, and I’m reading a book entitled, “SuperGiantHead: How building more giant statues is the solution to our problems!” on paper made from the last tree they just cut down.
Brick Oven Bill
Through the use of a closed steam cycle, shale oil can be produced from oil shale with negligible water use. There are no water losses. I can make oil for four hundred years at around $20/bbl.
There are powerful interests involved in oil politics which I do not understand. Rush Limbaugh is even on the take, in my opinion. Our national policy makes no sense.
In the end, the good guys win though. The oil is here. Molon Labe.
Windmills, in contrast, do not work. These things are a religion with regard to a national energy policy.
El Cid
High school equations prove global warming is false, because Al Gore is fat. None of these damn fancy pants scientists who claim to study the Earth’s climate have ever seen or done any equations, whereas many contractors have used maff in their work.
ChrisZ
@r€nato:
Really, it should take anyone claiming to be thoughtful a lot more than 5 seconds to conclude anything about an area in which he is not an expert.
I was in no way arguing for geo-engineering solutions or even looking into them in my earlier post, I was just pointing out that Levitt and whoever else wrote that chapter did a fucking terrible job at it.
SpotWeld
I sincerly doubt BOB knows what a “closed steam cycle” is, I say that as someone who has studied thermodynics engineering.
Further, BOB.. shut up
ChrisZ
@SpotWeld:
But I could have said that having no idea what a closed steam cycle is myself!
r€nato
@ChrisZ: I think I was talking about the ability of the average thoughtful, intelligent layman to ask some good, skeptical questions about the proposal to geoengineer our way out of anthropomorphic global climate change.
Which is a lot more thought than went into the notion that we could fix anthropomorphic global climate change by building an 18 mile long hose to shoot SO2 into the atmosphere.
(christ, the research into a space elevator requires a 22 mile long cable and we are nowhere close to achieving that!)
Joel
@r€nato: conventional wisdom is typically more right than wrong. people just take most of what constitutes common wisdom for granted, because much of it is mundane. stuff like, “the earth revolves around the sun” and so on.
contrarianism for the sake of itself is simply a stupid endeavor. evidence that contradicts conventional wisdom is usually the result of some sort of rigorous scientific examination. usually the intent of said examination is not to debunk conventional wisdom but to make observations about what is real.
Mark S.
@ChrisZ:
BoB’s could replace demons as the must-have home accessory.
Davis X. Machina
BOB’s specialty is apparently the Anchor Steam cycle….
Zifnab
@Brick Oven Bill:
Well, shit. Don’t tell the Dutch.
ChrisS
As for the horseshit parable, the problem of mounds of horse manure was solved through the use of an unanticipated technological revolution. The problem of horseshit was geo-engineered away and there were no more problems and everybody lived happily everafter …
… then storm clouds on the horizon …
… 50 years after the introduction of the internal combustion engine, scientists started noticing an odd, but steady, increase in atmospheric CO2. They thought about it and hypothesized that maybe a significant increase in CO2 might affect global climate. Lo and behold, the problem-free solution to biodegradeable horseshit led to an unanticipated larger problem that could lead the the collapse of numerous ecosystems the 6 billion people depend on. Awesome!
ChrisZ
@r€nato:
Yes but space elevators sound neat!
Joel
another obvious problem with geoengineering, bypassing all the things that have been already mentioned, is that we’d be living under a red sky.
matt
Off topic: If you think you’re so cynical about politics that you can no longer be dumbfounded, check out this article from the Martinsville Bulletin: It’s Tom Perriello explaining his yes vote on health care, followed by a rebuttal from Robert Hurt, a potential challenger to Perriello in 2010. The amount of bullshit from Hurt is stunning. Just breathtaking.
Props though to the newspaper for fact checking the various claims made by Perriello and Hurt so the readers come away better informed and not just scratching their heads at what the fuck just happened. LOL, just kidding.
matt
I suck at this: http://www.martinsvillebulletin.com/article.cfm?ID=21288
ChrisZ
@Mark S.:
I feel an iPhone app in the making.
El Cid
Look, I don’t know what you liberals have against my idea of putting a giant Coca Cola logo bearing disc in between the Sun and the Earth reducing what Coca Cola feels to be excess light. Clearly you people hate science.
Mike E
@Mark S.:
I have a demon!!
Morbo
@Brick Oven Bill: Do the energy balance or GTFO.
twiffer
@r€nato: okay, i haven’t this book…but someone suggested shooting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere? who thought that was a good idea?
Tonal Crow
@Brick Oven Bill: Your “math” takes the form of second-degree curve-fitting hocus-pocus, similar to the “technical” models of stock prices that have enriched hundreds of millions of daytraders worldwide. Oh, wait….
Mark S.
Also, I’m not a climate scientist, but wouldn’t pumping SO2 into the atmosphere have some really bad side-effects? There’s a theory that human beings nearly went extinct the last time there was a super-volcanic eruption.
Of Bugs and Books
@SpotWeld:
I just hope there is a BOB and not DougJ changing his clothes, voice and mannerisms in between comments to argue with himself.
LLeo
I used to work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in the Climate and Radiation branch (climatologists). 40+ Phd’s and everyone did their doctoral research on how man has affected the climate; from Desertification of the Sahara (growing at 1km/year) causing increased particulates in the air which in turn correlated to increased monsoon seasons in Bangladesh; to plankton die-offs in the southern pacific correlated to the Ozone hole down there (btw we fixed the Ozone hole). These guys were hard core scientists. I never heard a political opinion out of these guys. Though one guy was training to be a Orthodox Rabbi and was cool to talk with.
A myriad of causes and reactions go into modeling the Global Warming is daunting for professional scientists much less political morons. The Earth surface is %70 water, so more captured heat would cause more clouds, but what kind of clouds? Tall bright Cumulus clouds which reflect incoming IR spectrum, or flat dense clouds that lay like a blanket upon the Earth. Also the warmed oceans would absorb more CO2 (becoming more acidic); how much? Lay onto this that we’ve dramatically cleaned up the atmosphere of industrial particulates (yeah! Clean Air Act and global treaties). The particulates were artificially cooling the Earth by 1-2 degrees. The polluted air was suppressing warming signals, cleaner air leads to more warming (btw that last finding was confirmed due to 9/11 when we grounded all the airplanes; contrails induce a non-trivial cooling affect).
Finally, even the guy who coined the term “Global Warming” regrets his choice of words. To a physicist “warming” means accumulating energy in the system, not hotter days and nights. How is that energy expressed? Wind, Rain, Storms, or just hotter days and nights? Where is that energy expressed? In the upper latitudes (like Alaska) have observed 7-9 degrees increase in yearly temperature. Peoples houses and towns have started to sink into the Perma-frost (not so “perma” anymore). Yet we observe a barely measurable 0.5 degree increase near the equator.
So please, bitch slap any Global Warming denier for the sake of reason and science. Let the scientists do their work and take heed.
Evinfuilt
@Randy P:
Of course if we were actually smart, instead of trying to design and plant new uber tree’s we’d actually not clear cut current forests (that of course we burn most of the lumber, and then raise cattle on the grounds or just plant lots of sugar cane to convert to ethanol to burn in our cars.)
In all honesty, we should be looking at massive tree plantings throughout the world, and at the same time make it financially beneficial to not cut down forests.
We’ve tried paying people to not chop down tree’s, but then lumber poachers take the tree’s from the landowners (and will kill anyone in their way.) So it would be wise to make virgin lumber an illegal commodity, something that no one could get away with selling on the global market. Yes, I realize that its sadly failed to help all the endangered species that are being poached, but I think that’s been a lack of political will to make actual enforcement happen, instead of bribery.
twiffer
@twiffer: argh!
haven’t READ this book. stupid fingers.
SpotWeld
@Of Bugs and Books: It’s entirely possible that BOB is one of the admins spoofing us. Or it’s a oddly programmed Eliza software app..
or it’s an admin pretending to be software pretending to be a spoofer..
terry chay
It’s about time that the world see what frauds Levitt and Dubner are. They were the same in Freakonomics but liberals (and libertarians especially) ignored it because it was politically expedient.
Brick Oven Bill
The Dutch have historically used windmills to bring water to the surface for tulips, move water around on the surface, grind corn, and things like that. In these applications, an intermittent power source is fine.
Electricity, in contrast, cannot be effectively stored to meet national energy needs. Therefore the intermittent electricity provided by windmills is a religion. Windmills need to be backed up by conventional sources of electricity, operating in an inefficient manner. This makes them counterproductive.
Even at a subsidy rate of $23.44/MW-hr, T Boone could not make a profit. This is a huge subsidy. I talked with a guy in the solar business recently, and even with huge solar subsidies, the return on investment for solar panels is very long. In the free market, these energy sources cannot compete.
This is because they just don’t work.
Al Gore is full of meat-based crap.
Zifnab
@Joel:
HOW WOULD SUPERMAN GET HIS POWERS?!
inkadu
@Zifnab: Walkout? What do you mean? The African reps walked out of a recent global warming conference, much to the dismay of the industrialized countries who had to explain to the Africans that this was all for show. Apparently, burning cow turds for heat makes you bitter.
Easter Island — heh.
scav
@SpotWeld: I’ve had conversations with Eliza. BoB is no Eliza.
ChrisZ
@Brick Oven Bill:
The logic leading from premise to conclusion there is just beautiful . . .
Zifnab
@Brick Oven Bill:
So, I know I’ve posted this before and I’m fairly sure you’ve read it, but nuclear reactors have a very similar problem. Once you start splitting atoms, it’s very hard to regulate exactly how much juice to produce.
So nuke plants have developed a very cost efficient and energy efficient method of preserving excess energy.
They pump water up a hill. When they need it back, they drain it down again. 70-80% energy retention.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
It’s called pumped storage hydroelectricity. There’s absolutely no reason it would work for nuke reactors and not windmills. Hell, you don’t even really need water. Just get a big rock. Lift it. When you need the energy again, lower it. Holy crap, you’ve just created a big battery.
As are we all. You continue to be as factually incorrect as humanly possible.
SpotWeld
BOB: Simple answer. Windmills are used to pump water up to a elevated cistern, water from cistern is used to run a eletricity genearating turbine to cover non-peek periods.
BOB: Looses again.
BOB: Shut up
ChrisS
In the free market, these energy sources cannot compete.
Because the waste stream of fossil-based fuels isn’t fully accounted for.
It’s an incomplete comparison. Hence a carbon tax.
licensed to kill time
__
And BoB is an ugly bag of water.
Zifnab
@ChrisS: Oh hey, don’t forget the fact that oil land is leased practically rent free, that royalties on the oil are next to nothing when they aren’t waved entirely, and that even with all the kick backs and bonuses and perks and advantages the oil companies give us, they were still charging $4+ / gal just last year.
You pay through the nose for oil. You just call it “taxes”.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@SpotWeld: As someone who had to study that in the Navy, I wish you hadn’t brought those memories back.
Ash Can
BOB’s role in this thread is to illustrate the quintessential climate-change denier: he clearly demonstrates that he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, he rebuffs any and all attempts to correct him, and he continues to insist that he’s right and everyone who disagrees with him is wrong despite any and all evidence to the contrary. Trying to get these people to see the light is a fool’s errand, especially if they think they’re arguing with you on the same factual level.
tamied
@Mark S.: Now there’s the real solution. If the human race was extinct, the earth would heal itself in no (geologically speaking) time at all.
ChrisZ
@Ash Can:
But they are fun to poke at with sticks!
geg6
@r€nato:
I agree and so, FWIW, does Scientific American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-hidden-dangers-of-geoengineering
Brick Oven Bill
Power output from nuclear plants can be precisely controlled Zifnab.
You are rivaling Al Gore, and if you two were to bring cameras into your toilet stalls, perhaps that could be some Balloon-Juice competition thread. The concept of constructing massive water tanks, with associated generators, to back up dumb-ass windmills, is laughable in terms of cost effectiveness.
There is much nuclear power generation in Illinois. Illinois is flat. There are no elevated lakes in Illinois to store nuclear power.
The answer to America’s energy needs is nuclear power, and oil shale.
Zifnab
@Ash Can: It’s an exercise in refutation. Now, if a serious thinker engages me with any of these questions, I will have a better chance of recalling enough to correct him. There’s nothing wrong with that.
BoB just serves as a foil for “all ignorant people everywhere” by serving up every conceivable question one might need to address.
Corner Stone
@Mike E:
The first time I read this I thought it said, “Defeat gravy!”
My first thought was, “You fool! Don’t start a battle you can’t win!”
Ash Can
@ChrisZ: Oh, definitely. I do it myself on occasion; it can be very cathartic. It’s just an exercise in futility, that’s all (unless your actual objective is just to let your troll-bashing freak flag fly).
jcricket
It’s so sad. We really could get ourselves out of this pickle:
1) Conservation (use less energy) – works when people have the right price signals and understand the consequences (see California)
2) Better recycling and composting (see Seattle, WA)
3) Waste/Packaging reduction (ditto, and also amazon frustration free packaging)
4) Efficiency (California’s regulations forced manufacturers of refrigerators to make their items like 90% more efficient after being enacted; see also LEDs, etc.)
5) Solar & wind (combined also with #4) – combined with national energy grid improvements.
Boom, 75% reduction in need/use of fossil fuels.
But it’s boring to talk about solutions that aren’t “big bang”, or that don’t have an obvious boogey-man. But this is what Krugman is talking about – serious governance would be involved in figuring out how to do all this basic stuff slowly over time through a combination of tax increases, incentives, regulations, public information campaigns, etc.
Instead it’s all “NAZI SOCIALISM DEATH PANEL ECONOMY KILLING ECO TERRORIST” on the Republican side and “I’M SERIOUSLY CONCERNED ABOUT THE PROFITS OF BIG PROFITABLE COMPANIES AND WHAT DRUDGE SAYS” on the Democrat side.
Oy.
Nuetron Flux
@Zifnab: You are not correct in the entirety of your statement. Pump storage is used exlusively at hydroelectric plants.
WRT to nuclear reactors, there is no issue with controlling the amount of power produced. The power production side of the nuclear plant is typical of any closed steam cycle production unit. Standard power plant technology.
Reactor power is controlled by limiting the fission process thru the use of “poisons”, boric acid and silver/indium/cadmium or halfnium control rods.
Easy peasy. No problems.
SpotWeld
Okay.. spoofer in charge of BOB, it’s stopped being funny about 3 posts ago and now it’s just insulting.
Take it to another thread please.
Ash Can
And what Zifnab said. Also.
El Cid
I think that any private company who wants to build their own nuclear power plant, with zero dollars from either the government for construction or insurance, and with zero advance charge to ratepayers, should be allowed to do so within regulation, and then we could see if it was as net efficient as the boosters like to claim.
That is, unless, it’s like military industry scams, i.e., a good excuse to channel public monies to private investors, who then turn around and fail to complete the project within timeframe and budget and then underdeliver the energy, all with more taxpayer and ratepayer dollars required (via public utilities regulators) to contribute to the boon-dogglers.
Zifnab
@Brick Oven Bill:
So how do Illinois nuclear power plants perform load balancing and how would one apply those techniques to a wind farm?
You’re not really winning any arguments here, BoB. Can you at least provide the cost effectiveness of nuclear energy to wind energy in kilowatt hours? Right now, I can get one kWatt for $.15 from Green Mountain. That’s well within my budget.
If the government steps in and subsidizes wind energy (as they’ve done with coal, oil, and gas) this will drive the price down further. Coal electricity prices average $.08 – $.13, so wind/solar is well within range.
The Populist
Didn’t Reagan try to sell us on the bullshit known as “Star Wars”? Gee, this stuff in the New Yorker has more chances at reality than a super smart missile that can intercept all incoming nukes.
Sheesh, when did this country become a place for cynical a-holes to ruminate on everything? Using logic thrown out there by these jerks, the moon mission would never happen nor would we have a rover on mars.
God, why can’t we shoot for the moon and try to make this stuff a reality? Aren’t we supposed the country where dreams can come true?
Wow, these people call out libs for being unrealistic, yet these idiots must truly HATE America to not want to revel in being the best in science, research, etc.
El Cid
@Corner Stone: The Campaign for Real Gravy. Gravy will not go down so easily. You’ll find yourself in the middle of a thick and hearty battle. No thin gruel here.
The Populist
You are so wrong, it’s not even worth the effort to explain why.
R-Jud
Yeah, it’s a relief. It was hip, at least in some of the liberal humanities-graduate circles I ran in at the time, to say you’d read the first book, so that you could seem all worldly about economics, in addition to world music and movies with subtitles and other “serious” stuff. I’m not particularly mathematically savvy myself– my last maths course was second-year undergrad calculus– but you don’t have to be mathematically savvy to spot lazy thinking and poor conclusions. It’s a dumb person’s idea of a smart book.
Corner Stone
And as for Global Warming, I thought we had all agreed to encase the planet in a nice glass sphere ala Highlander II.
Reason60
I had been ignoring the Freakonomics issue during the health care debate, but finally read Kolbert’s article.
Assuming she presents their case correctly, any serious thinker whose line of reasoning contains “soutions are bound to present themselves” loses me right there.
Its funny how skepticism used to form the basis for conservatism; a skepticism of the government’s ability to engineer society, a doubt of the ability of government to run the economy, and so on.
Today, credulous childlike faith in the marketplace and all consuming faith in the goodness of the Security State, and unshakable faith in the power of technology are all seen on the Right.
“Let the market take care of it” is a conversation-stopper in any conservative discussion. There is no problem the market cannot cure. If the problem is not cured, it can only be that the market has not been tried.
I have been told repeatedly by those on rightwing blogs that we shouldn’t worry about warrantless wiretapping, suspension of habeas corpus, and the like because we can trust that the government will only use it on scary bad guys.
But we should fear the prohibition of smoking in restaurants as the “shadow of the jackboot” of oppression.
Sometimes I despair.
Thadeus Horne
@Brick Oven Bill: Don’t tell an old Machinist’s Mate that there are no water losses in a closed steam system. BoB, you’re full of shit, as usual.
Zifnab
@R-Jud: They were clever enough about it. A few chapters came to liberal conclusions. A few came to conservative conclusions. A few dealt with sports. Everyone felt right at home reading the book. And it seemed like the sort of applied science and logical thinking you could put to personal use.
:-p Oh well.
Brick Oven Bill
As loading goes up, temperature within the reactor goes down as stored energy is removed from it, and due to the negative temperature coefficient of reactivity inherent in US plants, power goes up, following loading. It is a brilliant and safe system Zifnab.
In contrast, Chernobyl had a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity, so that when temperature went up, power went up. This was a bad design. KaBoom.
Ted Kennedy’s driving killed has more people than half a century of safe American civilian nuclear power.
In further contrast, when demand changes, the wind does not know this. So all the other conventional sources have to operate in an inefficient manner, making wind power counterproductive.
Wind power is a religion.
Morbo
@The Populist: Indeed, the answer is staring us right in the face. The real answer is to fly to Titan, harvest all the methane, and live indefinitely on that power source.
Thadeus Horne
@Brick Oven Bill: Oh, and by the way, windmills do work. I wouldn’t be writing this on my computer right now if it wasn’t for my wind turbine. Let me reiterate, BoB. You’re full of shit, as usual.
Brick Oven Bill
Condensate return Thadeus. Make up water is insignificant.
Zifnab
@Brick Oven Bill:
Fuck it, BoB. If you’re going to ignore how load balancing actually works and spout gibberish this pure, there’s nothing more to be said.
I don’t even know where to begin explaining how you’re wrong.
Brick Oven Bill
Bite me Zifnab.
El Cid
@Zifnab: Duh. Energy is removed from the productive nuclear reactor and then it is pumped into the big tank with the word “ENERGY” on the side. Then, when the ENERGY is needed, a walking light bulb plugs a giant electrical cord into the ENERGY tank and thousands of tiny running electrons with cartoon lightning bolt legs come running down the cord and down the street and then into somebody’s toaster and the smiling bread pops up!
JM
But temperatures have instead trended down.
In BOB’s mom’s basement.
norbizness
Good job, everyone in the thread (slow clap).
inkadu
@Reason60: Often overlooked in conservative argumentation is the free-market solution to terrorism. The argument is as follows: Terrorist-sponsoring countries are usually poor and/or disorganized; Bill Clinton had sex; therefore: USA! USA!
QED.
Don
There’s no point in arguing with the deniers. 99 times out of 100 you don’t even need to listen to them. You can just hand over the link to the New Scientist coverage of the same old canards that get trotted out and go on with your day, reasonably sure that whatever nonsense they have trotted out will fall under one of these categories.
inkadu
@inkadu: PS, all you liberals out there, my argument is iron-clad … unless you want to bring an end to American exceptionalism. [/luntz]
licensed to kill time
@Zifnab: Do you get the feeling that BoB is a dyslexic autodidact?
dfd
@El Cid: I thought underpants gnomes were involved at some point.
R-Jud
@Zifnab:
Oh agreed. Clever writers, bad scientists, as my then-boyfriend (who is now doing an econ Ph.D. himself) said at the time.
Zifnab
@licensed to kill time: Is that some sort of third world dictator?
JM
21 May 1946
A nuclear criticality accident occured at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. Eight people were exposed to radiation, and one, Louis Slotin, died nine days later later of acute radiation sickness.
30 December 1958
A chemical operator was exposed to a lethal dose of radiation following an incident involving the mixing of plutonium solutions, dying 35 hours later of severe radiation exposure.
3 January 1961
The world’s first nuclear-related fatalities occurred following a reactor explosion at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Three technicians, were killed, with radioactivity “largely confined” (words of John A. McCone, Director of the Atomic Energy Commission) to the reactor building.
24 July 1964
Robert Peabody, 37, died at the United Nuclear Corp. fuel facility in Charlestown, Rhode Island, when liquid uranium he was pouring went critical, starting a reaction that exposed him to a lethal dose of radiation.
27 July 1972
Two workers at the Surry Unit 2 facility in Virginia were fatally scalded after a routine valve adjustment led to a steam release in a gap in a vent line.
28 March 1979
A major accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. At 4:00 a.m. a series of human and mechanical failures nearly triggered a nuclear disaster. By 8:00 a.m., after cooling water was lost and temperatures soared above 5,000 degrees, the top portion of the reactor’s 150-ton core melted. Contaminated coolant water escaped into a nearby building, releasing radioactive gasses, leading as many as 200,000 people to flee the region. Despite claims by the nuclear industry that “no one died at Three Mile Island,” a study by Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh, showed that the accident led to a minimum of 430 infant deaths.
9 December 1986
A feedwater pipe ruptured at the Surry Unit 2 facility in Virginia, causing 8 workers to be scalded by a release of hot water and steam. Four of the workers later died from their injuries.
6 January 1986
A container of highly toxic gas exploded at The Sequoyah Fuels Corp. uranium processing factory in Gore, Oklahoma, causing one worker to die (when his lungs were destroyed) and 130 others to seek medical treatment.
Zifnab
@El Cid: Yeah, but try and explain that in a way BoB understands, won’t you? He’s just hopeless on the details.
JM
No, obviously he can read.
On the other hand, there’s no way to prove he isn’t fingering himself.
Zifnab
@JM: Ted Kennedy rode into the Senate and fought to keep abortion legal, thus killing over a million babies a year and counting. QED.
The Populist
Zifnab, he’s only here to obfuscate and sell propaganda. He can be easily refuted on anything. When you prove him wrong, he keeps spouting the party line because people like BOB have no concept of debate and acceptance of being wrong.
The Populist
BOB and his ilk hate America. How do I come to this conclusion? Simple, they would rather argue the status quo and allow this country to de-fund public schools so they can pretend to be conservative.
They hate science. They hate innovation. Why else would they allow American companies the ability to move all their business OUT of this country and with it jobs and valuable tax dollars to fund research?
Idiots. A pox on all of them.
Deborah
@Jonny Scrum-half:
I’m not sure that I understand why even thinking about possible geo-engineering solutions to global warming is somehow a bad idea.
It’s not. But you are leaving out the half where the freak guys poo-poo the idea that global warming exists with really silly stuff that anyone who knows about the subject recognizes as bogus. e.g. solar panels must be black, the scientific consensus used to be global cooling, and of course everyone until them didn’t think about water vapor–the people doing modeling are aware of water vapor, thank you. It is complex and a lot of the reason human cause of warming is given 90% rather than 95% certainty. But it is not like climate scientists were unaware of water vapor. Just like first graders doing their water cycle drawings, the scientists were aware of water vapor. Not a new discovery!
Which to me, side note, suggests that the benefit of their earlier work was that people didn’t know much about, say, sumo wrestling, so whatever they wrote about cheating or not cheating was met with “huh. So that’s how sumo works.” Maybe they were just as wrong there, but because it’s a less urgent topic and fewer people know they were wrong, it gets glossed.
So on the cause side they’ve revealed themselves to be willfully ignorant. But come to solutions and they’re all “some guy says shoot sulfur into the sky–obviously this is the way to go!” There are issues with shooting a ton of sulfur into the sky, e.g. acid rain. Get a ton of volcanoes to erupt and you’ll get cooling, but you’ll get a lot of other effects besides. I think we will need geo-engineering at some point, though going for the easier savings in efficiency should be our short term goal. Thinking about it is good. But failing to recognize that any geoengineering plan has a lot of uncertainties and complexities and very significant costs–well, Kolbert has every reason to be shrill.
jl
I like the idea of differential equations with no derivatives. I also like the simplified carbon cycle with single pathways. So much simpler. I will make fewer mistakes doing calculations. I am no board with BOB math and chemsitry.
licensed to kill time
@Zifnab: Why yes,it is. BoB the Dicktator rules over the darkies digging that oil shale out of the ground and all wind power is banned in the Land of BoBistan.
Ed Drone
@Brick Oven Bill:
Actually, there should be a line through the whole of each of your posts, in truth.
@Ash Can:
If you can’t tell your ass from a hole in the ground, put your finger in, and try to walk away.
Ed
jl
The SuperFreakonomics global warming analogy to horseshit parable seems wrong to me. The mistake illustrated by the horsepoop parable is thinking that the horse technology was fixed and we have to think of more and more efficient ways of removing poop, which was a by-product of the energy needed to produce work. So everyone panics about how to remove mind boggling levels of the necessary poop.
But the technology used for producing energy needed for work changes unexpectedly, and no more poop was produced. So all the inventors planning ingenious ways to remove mass quantities of horse poop found no use for their inventions.
To keep a similar analogy to global warming: new technologies will remove the need for producing horse produced energy to do work, with the seemingly inevitable consequence of a gazillion tons of horse poop. Applied to global warming, a consistent analogy points to new technologies that remove the need for large injections of CO2 into the atmosphere by man as a by product of producing enough energy to do a certain amount or work. The consistent horse poop analogy would be new technologies involving conservation and non-fossil fuel energy production that reduce CO2 omissions needed for same amount of work produced.
But the SuperFreakonomics dudes propose ingenious ways to remove horse poop (CO2) that must be produced as a byproduct of an existing technology of horse produced energy needed to do work, that is, to remove CO2 that must be produced as a byproduct of existing technologies for producing energy needed to do a certain amount of work.
I think SuperFreak did not think things through even on the level of consistent use of analogies.
I think consistent use of the horse poop analogy points to
non-fossile fuel energy production
conservation (reducing energy reguired to do a given amoutn of work)
reducing required work to produce final goods an services (telecommuting and conferencing).
jl
point being, analogies are tricky and it is better to end with them after working things out in a straightforward way, rather than beginning with them.
ericblair
@Deborah: I’m not sure that I understand why even thinking about possible geo-engineering solutions to global warming is somehow a bad idea.
To sum it up, it may be necessary but it’s very risky. You’re deliberately doing something with large, planet-wide consequences in an immensely complex system, and you’re asking a good number of the governments of the world to sign onto it. There will be a good percentage of the population that will be, rightly or wrongly, completely freaked out and probably rioting about it. There will be (relative) winners and losers. The easiest thing to do will be to drag any decision out for as long as possible until doing nothing now is worse than acting now, at which point the situation will be so bad we’re probably significantly buggered whatever happens.
I’m an engineer who has been involved in large government projects, and it is immensely difficult to get this kind of consensus for low-risk high-impact projects, nevermind screwing with the entire environment. Either these people are the kind of consumer technoweenies that have never had to get anything big done, or a bunch of liars who are just making shit up to justify not doing what needs to be done until they’re dead and gone. Or both; why choose.
NobodySpecial
You know what I hate most about arguments about power generation?
The fact that idiots like BoB are effectively taking nuclear power off the table as a possible helper simply because they’re full of shit, and no one wants to listen to the blind squirrel, even if it occasionally runs across an acorn every so often long enough to keep it from starving to death.
There’s a LOT of work we COULD be doing on nuclear power to ameliorate our power generation problems with CO2 right this second. And we’ll never do any of it as long as the people who hoist the banners for it are either clueless BoBs or just plain greedy Exelons.
jl
From a Chicago style (and London School of Economics) economics of property rights point of view, I guess just shooting mass quantities of pollution into the atmosphere would seem more efficient than to an ordinary person.
Some one with enough resources, a rich country for instance, could just start doing it. If now one came up who could pay off the rich country not to do it, there are theoretical arguments that shooting the pollution into the air is the efficient thing to do.
We could just pay the Chinese to make their coal plants more polluting, with higher smokestacks.
But, I agree with other commenters, the pollute to the max is risky. Better to research the more reasonable and less risky geoengineering solutions as an emergency option, and concentrate on conservation and alternative energy.
The half life of the global cooling pollution is much shorter than that the greenhouse gases. If you went that way, you would be committing yourself to counteracting an ever increasing stock that will kick in dangerous warming with a continually increasing flow of pollution that cannot be stopped without very uncertain and risky consequences. It is a very highly uncertain high risk strategy that boxes you in. Kind of like modern finance on unregulated markets.
Calouste
@Zifnab:
Or the Spanish. Spain has a lot of windmills for electricity generation on their northern coast, and last winter during a heavy storm, those windmills provided more than 50% of Spain’s electricity.
Of Bugs and Books
@SpotWeld:
I think BOB might be based on Cliff Clavin three years and 7000 beers after losing his job.
jl
William Nordhaus at Yale and Roy Radner at Stern Business School at NYU are serious economists who have done serious work on global warming.
You can google them and get their homepages quickly.
Nordhaus wants a carbon tax right now of at least $30 a ton. He wants to set up an international carbon tax authority to enact and enforce increases in case the worst case predictions look like they will be realized.
Radner thinks most economists under estimate the potential damage of global warming and is working with others on the types of international treaties and agreements that will be most effective in reducing CO2 emissions.
FYI just so people do not think all economists would be impressed with the SuperFreak appraoch.
twiffer
@Deborah: they bring up water vapor? have they never heard of a thing called “rain”?
it’s always fun, too, when people trot out the “there was less water vapor during the last [glaciation] ice age, so there!” i assume these people have never experienced winter.
Neutron Flux
@Zifnab: I replied to your earlier post at #118.
And as much as it pains me to say this: BOB is right at #131.
LD50
@Brick Oven Bill:
Therefore, global warming isn’t real, or even if it is, we shouldn’t do anything about it. Sure.
I have to admit, I’m as fond of the ironic ‘Al Gore is fat’ joke-response to any new news of GW, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen someone actually use it as part of a real argument.
jl
@Neutron Flux:
Is BOB right about this, though?
“In further contrast, when demand changes, the wind does not know this. So all the other conventional sources have to operate in an inefficient manner, making wind power counterproductive.”
I do not see why networking wind power, and the similar sort of power storage techniques used by hydroelectric plans cannot be adopted by wind and solar power. (wind and light cannot be pumped around and run downhill by gravity, so there will have to be some adaptations).
General Winfield Stuck
OT
Agree or disagree with having the Stupak amendment in the Houses HC reform bill, if anyone doubts that Nancy Pelosi is not one ruthlessly pragmatic Speaker when it counts, they should read this Politico synopsis of what happened before the vote/ This is what a real leader does to win when the chips are down.
Neutron Flux
@jl: As usual with BOB he takes a little knowledge and extrapolates it to point of just being wrong.
When these turbines come on line, they will generate more power on some days than they do on others.
The bitch in the electric utility sphere is that on the good days they willl have to “back down” the other generators and on bad days they will have to “ramp up” the generators.
However since the load is NEVER completely stable on the grid, it changes as power comsumption changes, we have a pretty good handle on compensating for load changes today.
Shorter answer, yes he is full of shit on this one.
DBrown
@Brick Oven Bill: You are so ignorant of reactor physics that you prove that stupidity is a learned behavior. Try reading on a subject before you talk nonsense like
“due to the negative temperature coefficient of reactivity inherent in US plants, power goes up, following loading.”
This is just mostly words put together that say’s nothing. The first part is high sounding words that mean nothing and the last part is beyond stupid – just because a reactor is “loaded” does not cause its power to go up. Really, those concepts are not even close to what happens in a boiling water fission reactor. Try taking a book from your local library that any high school student could master in a weekend and learn what these reactors really do.
If this is an example of his knowledge on reactors then he has not the grasp I had in middle school. This is display on bobby o boy’s part is just embarrassing.
jl
@Neutron Flux: California already has massive energy storage projects for its hydroelectric system.
The new CA water bill institutes, for the first time, aquifer monitoring and management. I had no idea California did not already do it, one of the few states that did not (hard to believe). I’ve heard reports that the feasibility of connecting the pumping needed to use aquifers for water storage to electric grid load management will be studied.
I have no idea how that would work. Most of the water would would be pumped deep underground into depleted aquifers.
For the hydroelectric system, the water is pumped into reservoirs above huge underground spillways when demand is low, and then released down the spillway to generate electricity when demand is high.
But the water storage for aquifer management and water conservation is down in the dirt and rocks. Maybe they will build some more of those resevoir/spillway systems.
Neutron Flux
@DBrown: Uhhh, this WILL be the last time I say this. BOB is correct on this point. US Reactors do have negative MTC. Reactor power DOES follow steam demand. If you increase power in the reactor, by increasing steam demand, and you do nothing to change the reactivity in the core, it will shut itself down.
And depressingly enough to me, it is known as inherent stability.
It truly pains me to tell you this.
Seanly
@Brick Oven Bill:
To paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bentsen:
BoB, I studied differential equations, I know differential equations, differential equation were in my master thesis. BoB, that was not a differential equation.
jibeaux
To borrow a phrase of wingnuts and apply it appropriately, these guys have a book to sell.
What possible other explanation could there be for proposing as a solution to climate change the “cheap and simple solution” of an eighteen-mile-long hose to spew sulfur dioxide directly into the stratosphere? Good grief, it’s like something the Brain from Pinky and the Brain would come up with to take over the world.
Neutron Flux
@jl: You have it right on the pump storage concept. Pump the water up when demand (=rates) are low, and let it come back thru the turbines when demand (rates) are high.
I have no knowledge of this aquifier concept. It would seem that there are some inherent difficulties in that the storage is lower than the pump, but hey, some of the new engineers are really smart folks.
I will have to look into this further and ask my peeps if they know anything about this.
licensed to kill time
Gosh, it’s like 99 against BoB, 1 for (only on the one point, Neutron Flux, I understand). I’d say game over, only BoB will never quit and will be spouting the same garbled talking points next time he shows up. Kudos to everyone for acting like he’s worth the time to argue with, I learn a lot from your posts.
RSA
A second-order differential equation once bit me on the ass, but I didn’t know what it was at the time.
Neutron Flux
@licensed to kill time: Oh yeah man, I am all for the hatin on BoB. When it launches off into one of those things where starts disrespecting women and minorities, I would just like to slap him upside his/her head.
When that happens, it just starts eatin the pie.
jl
@Neutron Flux: I do not know enough about nuclear engineering to bring it up on my own, but I do remember reading about different nuclear power designs after the Chernobyl disaster and what you say seems correct to me too, though I do not remember enough to know whether BOB’s explanation is correct, or even if the dimensions of the terms BOB uses come out right.
About the pumps, I would guess if the pump is higher than the water, the pumping cycle produces too much of a net loss in energy (izzat right?). There is no problem with a pump being higher than the water per se (we did that all the time on the farm, but always used submersible pumps whenever possible to save on the electric bill). I hope I am remembering that right.
But, I heard reports about feasibility studies for tying the aquifer storage into electric grid load management, not that they knew that it would work
Svensker
@El Cid:
You been peeking in my kitchen?
licensed to kill time
@Neutron Flux: It eats the pie or it gets the hose again….
Mike G
these idiots must truly HATE America to not want to revel in being the best in science, research, etc.
The conservatard approach to objective data stating that the US has mediocre world rankings and is bested by other nations in health care, science, technology, education, infrastructure, etc., is to shout it down, proclaim it all a pack of librul-commie-nazi-hippie-French lies, puff out their chests and proclaim that MURKA IS THE BESTEST AND THAT’S THAT, and anyone who says otherwise is a librul-commie-nazi-hippie-Frenchman who hates baby Jeebus and loves terrists. Because Rush said so. Cognitive dissonance solved.
Zam
Guess who had some holocaust teabaggers on campus today.
Neutron Flux
@Thadeus Horne: I saw upthread that you were a Machinists Mate. Me too! Anchors aweigh!
slippy
@Brick Oven Bill: Bill, your understanding of climate science is even more feeble than your understanding of logic and english grammar.
Your pathetic attempts to play the “intellectual” conservative don’t fool anyone here. You’re a moron, like all conservatives in todays Moron Conservative world. Accept that, and realize that the odds are your IQ is lower than the IQ of almost anyone you read or respond to on this site. You will benefit tremendously from this acceptance.
slippy
@aimai: The Freakonomics guys are just contrarians, and the only thing distinctive about someone who always has to be contrarian is that they’re ASSHOLES.
Once I started thinking about it that way, they stopped bothering me. It’s just a couple of assholes with a book they would like to sell to other assholes.
sgwhiteinfla
A week or so back people were questioning whether Ezra Klein would call Fred Hiatt out on his bullshit for an oped he wrote. At the time I thought he would in a generic fashion. I am not sure he ever did though.
HOWEVER
He HAS responded today, and it wasn’t generic at all.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/11/in_a_world_with_a_broken_congr.html
I don’t know what that means for his job security but my hat is definitely off to him!
Qbert
Jon Stewart had one of the authors on recently explicitly to give him time to slander his critics as folks who have turned global warming into a “religion” while insisting their book was in no way a denialist tract. Stewart not only did not demur, he nodded in agreement throughout and suggested the authors were getting a raw deal. Not one of Stewart’s finest moments.
r€nato
@El Cid:
If you’re over 40, you’re probably old enough to remember when the nuclear power lobby bragged about, “electricity too cheap to meter!”
WRT petroleum… add in to the hidden costs of petroleum, a substantial part of the yearly Pentagon budget.
We would not be forced to meddle in bloody, messy Middle Eastern affairs if industrial nations didn’t need petroleum so badly.
Citizen_X
@Neutron Flux: It would seem that there are some inherent difficulties in that the storage is lower than the pump
It could work if the aquifer is up in the hills. As long as the point of outflow is at lower elevation than the point of storage (allowing for friction within the aqueduct), it will flow under gravitational power.
So you can’t do it in Kansas, but California? Possibly.
Zifnab
@Neutron Flux: I was under the impression that nuclear waste was the irradiated detriment of the steam cycle.
And even with that all said, the closed steam cycle still uses the same general mechanics – pressure building up and being released to generate electricity – that any other pump system would use.
The original premise, that you can store nuclear energy but you can’t store wind or solar energy, is still full of shit.
I admit my ignorance of nuclear reactor mechanics combined with BoB’s vast credibility problems, left me to jump the gun on doubting him.
Neutron Flux
@jl: It would be cool if you could hook me up with a link on that aquafier business. I would like to know more about that.
Yeah, his terms are right only WRT to what happens inside the reactor. There are two kinds of reactors in the US. Pressurized water reactors (PWR) engineered by Westinghouse and Boiling water reactors (BWR) engineered by General Electric.
Both GE and Westinghouse are in so globalized these days that when you buy parts from GE they are made by Toshiba and with Westinghouse it is usually Emerson.
BTW, what BoB never talks about is that to expand the US nuclear fleet would take a huge jump in manufacturing capability. It is just not available in the US anymore.
At my place, we are buying a new turbine rotor. It costs $100 million dollars and is being made in………..Japan. Plus it took six years to get it from ordered to delivered.
I do not believe that with these kind of lead times we will see a significant jump in nuclear plant construction.
Plus, all of the skilled craftsmen are retiring. This is a huge problem for us.
slag
@sgwhiteinfla: It was an impressive post. And I love that the first commenter takes Ezra’s hyperbolic “republic collapse” seriously. But I love even more that the commenter feels it’s the conservative’s job to merely slow the rate of the collapse of the republic. Funny stuff.
Neutron Flux
@Zifnab: It’s all cool. We are on the same side here.
Nuclear waste comes directly from the reactor. We use the fuel for three cycles ( 1 cycle = 18 months), take it out of the core and then store it. It is effectively radioactive forever after that. And there is no safe place to store it.
Several utilities are suing the government for not meeting their obligation to build the storage facility. The irony of this is that the government charges each nuclear facility several million dollars each year to build this thing. I mean it is YOUR money and we still have no long term solution.
Finally you are right. Electricity gnerated from a nuclear plant is no different from that gnerated in coal or gas plants. The only difference is what is used to heat the water to make the steam that rotates the turbine that turns the generator.
jl
@Citizen_X: (and Neutron Flux) you make an interesting point. Water storage in aquifers in CA is currently done in the Kern Basin, a depression at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. That is where Bakersfield is. It is done on a large enough scale that some small to medium sized cities with limited local storage have stored enough water there to get them through the current drought withouth water rationing. The Kern aquifer storage system works like a big water bank.
If you get water to edge of the basin, I would guess most of it flows intot the basin, not out to the Pacific through the San Joaquin River. They get the water there somehow now from the CA canal system, so maybe that is what they are thinking about.
I do not have a link, it is something I heard in a radio interview with a water expert after Arnold announced the new water deal.
Neutron Flux
@Citizen_X: I belive aquafers are several hundred feet below the surface. If they can be at elevations higher than that in the mountains, that would indeed make things less problematic.
jl
@slag: the elderly John Adams was that kind of conservative: the best thing to do was to delay inevitable decline and ruin, in the very long run. It is an old kind of conservatism not very appealing to Americans when stated so baldly. Conservatism has fallen off quite a bit from Adams, though.
jl
@Neutron Flux: If CA can recharge its Central Valley aquifers, I believe they would be 30 to 200 feet below the surface. They are much lower than that now in many places, but that is after decades of apparently uncontrolled pumping, mostly for agriculture.
Neutron Flux
@Citizen_X: What makes you think I am from Kansas?
jl
@jl: I mean the water would start to be pumpable at those levels. I do not know how deep the water table goes below that. I remember when water was pumped from wells 50 to 100 feet deep on farms where I grew up. It is much deeper now.
DBrown
@Brick Oven Bill: A final word on bobby’o boy – his claim about math and global warming modeling is utter nonsense because he attempts to say that a vastly complex system that is nonlinear can be modeled using a trivial second order differential equation – impossible. The very least (after simplifying) you would need to use partial 2nd order differential equations to even begin to model such a complex system in a manner to get a first order approximate answer for carbon dioxide/water vapor using a single surface like the surface of the ocean (forget clouds, and forest semi-forest, grass or bare terrain much less adding water or bare soil etc.) Even then, a lot of fitting would have to be done usin greal systems in a very complex manner.
But bobby’o boy try’s to say that global warming is a parabola – this is so bad that words fail me. A solution to a second order differential equation is NOT a parabola! What a joke. Integrating a second order linear equation in a single variable is trivial when the system is explicit with no complex boundary conditions – look it up bob before you show that you failed calculus.
Citizen_X
Hmm. If they’re storing it under Bakersfield, yeah, that’s at pretty low elevation already (~400 ft.), so they don’t have a lot of gravitational potential to work with. That’s gonna require pumping.
Citizen_X
@Neutron Flux: Oh, nothing. I was just using Kansas as an example.
Neutron Flux
@jl: Oh OK. If you are saying that if you could place a generator lower than the source on the way to the tank (aquafer)….. yeah, I see.
Fascinating. Well to me anyway.
Neutron Flux
@Citizen_X: Sorry, I guess it my reflexive reaction……….To being from KANSAS.
jl
@Citizen_X: But it has to flow downhill from Northern California snow pack to get there. Water tables need to recharged, and potentential for storage in Central Valley is often at higher elevations.
You guys figure it out. I think it is just a dream right now. I just heard a water expert mention it on the radio.
But, there are plenty of higher places in Northern California where you could store on its way to the Kern Basin. It would not go out into the Pacific all that fast.
Neutron Flux
@DBrown: No argument there. That is what is amusing about Bob. He goes from basic facts to incredible at the speed of light.
I find it mildly amusing, until it does the other thing and then it is not funny at all.
Then it pisses me off.
jl
For those interested, below is relatively simple explanation about feedback lags in climate science. Takes awhile to work though, but nothing very complicated.
The interesting bit is that the mechanism of the feedbacks and lags involving water vapor and other factors, etc, means that the probability of tail events will be difficult to estimate (even more so that tail events normally are in statistics).
Science 318, 629 (2007);
Gerard H. Roe, et al.
Why Is Climate Sensitivity So Unpredictable?
I don’t think this version is behind a firewall, not sure:
http://science.samxxzy.ns02.info/cgi/content/full/sci;318/5850/629
Cain
@licensed to kill time:
Fixed.
cain
DBrown
@Neutron Flux: Reactor power DOES follow steam demand. If you increase power in the reactor, by increasing steam demand, and you do nothing to change the reactivity in the core, it will shut itself down.
Let me get this straght – if the control rods are removed and the reactor increases power (fission rate) by increasing demand(?), the reactor power goes down? How does the reactor fission rate go down? The rate of fission is controled by the loss of neutrons which depends on the control rods and the amount of fuel – I do not follow.
HyperIon
Apologies for skipping to the end w/o reading all the previous 208 comments but I searched on Real Climate here and got no match in the comments so…..
This is an excellent read.
The writer really eviscerates those guys. Very satisfying for a scientist to read and only a modicum of snark.
jl
Just glanced at the conclusion of the Science paper in previous link (I read it awhile ago). To be more precise: the relatively linear positive feedback mechanism that amplifies a given increase in stock of CO2 in atmosphere means: more the warming, greater the uncertainty in worse case tail scenarios.
Interesting situation, if that paper is correct.
Reason60
Back to the Freakonomics parable of the hosepoop; a seemingly intractable problem was solved in the nick of time, and afterwards everyone laughed at how hysterical they were for worrying about it.
Heres another one:
Somewhere in the 1930’s the Soviet Union decided to divert the water that fed the Aral Sea to irrigate cotton crops.
The inland sea began to shrink, and by the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, it had nearly dried up.
The resulting salt plains caused enormous ecological, economic, and health problems for the surrounding communities.
But something was “bound to turn up” in the words of the Freakonomics- some unusual new technology that would render the salt dust storms irrelevant, that would restore the economic livelihoods to the fisherman who had depended on the sea?
Sadly, no.
After the demise of the Communist rulers, saner heads took action to help restore the sea; today the sea is beginning to recover, slowly, and only after tremendous political will and effort and investment.
But the fishermen lost their livelihoods, tens of thousands of people were sickened and some died from the salt dust storms, and an entire ecosystem was on the brink of collapse.
You see, for every horse poop fable that turns out well, there are a dozen others that end not so well. For every teenager who drives drunk and lives to laugh about it later, there are others who end up in the grave.
So we may well witness a miraculous new technology that renders global warming irrelevant; or we may end up with the American midwest becoming a desert wasteland, and Manhattan under 10 feet of water.
Neutron Flux
@DBrown: @<a OK this will take a minute (or 5)to compose……
Neutron Flux
@DBrown: This will take minute to compose……….
DBrown
@Neutron Flux: Thanks – I appreciate it.
Thadeus Horne
@Brick Oven Bill: “Illinois is flat.” So’s your fucking head. Small wonder you can’t pull it out of your ass. Fuck off, BoB.
Thadeus Horne
@Neutron Flux: Snipes forever.
Thadeus Horne
@Brick Oven Bill: Tell that to the evaporator man.
Neutron Flux
@DBrown: OK, here is what happens.
Let’s say we are running along at 80% power and everthing is stable. The reactivity in the core is balanced. Neutron production= neutron losses. No problem.
Well hell, lets just say we do nothing. We just all go on strike and leave the control room.
As the uranium atoms are split, this creates fission products. One of these products is XE 135. This is a poison in that it absorbs neutrons. As more and more XE is produced and nothing is done to offset this reactor power will just slowly go down. After about 12 hours the reactor will be shutdown and no power produced.
Let’s take the case of increasing power from 80%. We admit more steam to the turbine. This causes generator power to increase which = more MWe to be produced. Now typically we operate with the control rods (CR) near the top of the core.
As the steam demand is increased, this causes reactor power to go up. When we increase steam demand, we take more steam from the steam generators. This means that the temperature of the water going back into the reactor is “colder”. The water in the reactor is more dense. More dense means that less neutron leak from the core, so more available for fission. Reactor power increases.
As in the case of if we just walk away, more power means more fission product poisons produced, which means that over time the increase in Xenon will take away the extra neutrons from the increase in power.
What we do in this case is change the soluble boron solution in the reactor coolant system. Less boron = less neutron lost to this factor. This offsets the loss due to Xenon and again we can reach equilibrium.
Operators constantly monitor the reactivity in the core and adjust boron concentration to reach equilibrium.
The control are only there for “gross” adjustments.
I hope I have not confused the issue here.
Neutron Flux
@Thadeus Horne: I hear that. First on, last off.
Neutron Flux
@Thadeus Horne: Yeah that was just bullshit. Why does every closed steam cycle plant have a Condensate Storage Tank, and a whole water treatment system to make sure it is full?
BOB = dumbass
DBrown
@Neutron Flux:I find it difficult to believe bob was right – either I believe you (with your excellent explanation) and have to admit bob was right and I was wrong or be a repub-a-thug; damn.
Sorry bob, you were right on this one and I was wrong. My apologies.
Neutron Flux
@DBrown: Yes but just because a very small part of his rant was correct, do not forget that he is sooooo wrong on his conclusions as to be well, laughable.
Don’t forget that.
And don’t think that am a shill for nuclear power. I understand our problems and challenges more that most I think.
LD50
@Brick Oven Bill:
No you don’t. You spend all your time posting here.
chrome agnomen
more proof that global warming is a hoax.
al gore: from the latin; algor=coldness.
if that doesn’t disprove it, nothing will.////////////
different church-lady
You know, the Freakonomics guys remind me of how a lot of Porky Pig cartoons used to go: Porky can’t get rid of the mice, so he gets a cat. Now he can’t get rid of the cat, so he says, “I gotta get me a d-d-d… a d-d-d-d… a dog!” Etc, etc…
Wile E. Quixote
Nathan Myhrvold was on KUOW the other day where the always sycophantic Ross Reynolds gave him a blowjob over his plans to inject massive quantities of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, aka “The Stratoshield!”. As soon as I heard that Myhrvold was in favor of this idea I was against it, and once he mentioned that it had been mentioned in “Super Dooper Extreeme to the Nth Degree Freakonomics”, or whatever the fuck the book is called I was more against it.
Now, perhaps I missed it, but not once during the interview was it mentioned that sulfur dioxide causes acid rain. Oh, and Myhrvold attempted to defend the use of sulfur dioxide by saying that it’s been in the environment since the earth was created.
Maybe there is something to the idea of the Stratoshield. Maybe it would buy us some time, but before we even think about implementing it or any other form of geo-engineering we ought to be going balls out on non-carbon forms of energy such as wind, solar and nuclear. Dumping SO2 into the upper atmosphere so we can continue to burn lots of coal which is dumping lots of CO2 into the lower atmosphere strikes me as being roughly as smart as a diabetic jacking up his insulin dosage so he can eat a carton of chocolate ice-cream.
dSquib
On contrariness and the “sulfur solution”, the side effects have been mentioned already, but I think from Levitt and Dubner’s POV this was just too delicious for them, and they likely spent even less time actually thinking about and researching the idea than they did the rest of them. It is I think more about scoring a victory for unabated pollution, and rubbing it in the faces of all those environmentalists with all their restraint-based, non-polluting solutions, to lessen the presumed philosophical/political/economic blow to libertarianism by the fact that unrestrained consumption can sometimes lead to very undesirable consequences. For those who have tellingly exerted more effort trying to deny the very existence of global warming than actually come up with libertarian or non-government solutions this is something of a breakthrough.
The Libertarian
Oops. Sorry folks I just farted……..