Climate Alarmism

[_DoubtingThomas]

Someone please tell WaterDog that power engineering and economics are not the same thing! Economics needs science, but science doesn't need economics!

[_canpakes]

I love how Dog does science. I can imagine a scenario in which he tests his conclusion above by sticking his head into a bag while standing next to a wind turbine, and upon recovering from the inevitable fainting, will conclude that the wind turbine was at fault.

I would love to have you walk me through the mental thought process that led to this comment.

I’m sorry. I can only mimic your style; I can’t actually get into your head to explain how you think. : )

[_Res Ipsa]

While I'm waiting for Sub to respond to my question about his first graph,

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=50277&start=21#p1152208

I'll move on to his second:



And, just as a reminder, here's Sub's introduction to the graph:

The worst case based upon the best data is that most climate science is alarmist and exaggerated with regards to impact, influence, and cause....most modern climate science is Policy Based Evidence Making:

Now, as Sub copied this graph from one of the most extreme denier websites, I personally wouldn't rely even on its accuracy without being able to check the methodology. First, is it based on adjusted or unadjusted USHCN data? That's important, as Sub's next graph shows:



This is another graph from the same website. I'll discuss the adjustments and why they are necessary in my next post. But one of the favorite tricks of climate science deniers is to use the raw data without making that clear on their graphs. They do this to exaggerate US temperatures in the past, especially during the period of the dust bowl.

Second, when the graph creator says "average," does he mean "mean" or "median"? The difference is important because outlier values in a data set skew the average. Bill Gates walks into a bar and the average wealth of the people in the bar increases by millions of dollars. That difference is important here because we do have an extreme event in the data: the dust bowl years.

Third, why 95 degrees? What does the graph look like at 90? At 100? Is it a cherry pick? We can't tell without having the other graphs to look at.

Fourth, the graph doesn't tell us how many of the 1218 stations are reporting these 95 degree days. If it's only, say, 10% or so, then the graph is simply ignoring what the other 90% of stations are telling us about whether the US is warming.

So let's look at all the data. Here is a graph of surface land temperatures in the US:



https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

So, a couple of things to notice. First, we're already average surface temperatures that equal or exceed the temperatures during the dustbowl years. Second, the dustbowl years were a spike in trend, while the the temperatures since 1970 appear to show a distinct upward trend.

We can also look at extreme highs and lows.



This graph shows the percentage of stations that reported a maximum temperature in the top 10% (red) or the bottom 10% (blue). Again, looking at more of the data puts the dust bowl years in perspective. The dust bowl is a relatively small spike in extreme high temperatures, while the last 30 years shows increasing extreme high temperatures, while the "low" maximum temperatures have steadily decreased.

We can do the same thing for low temperatures:



The trend here is even more pronounced. Over the last 30 years, extremely cold minimum temperatures have steadily decreased. At the same time, extremely warm minimum temperatures have increased. This is important, as one of the "fingerprints" of warming caused by increasing greenhouse gases is that temperatures at night warm faster than temperatures during the day.

Finally, we can also evaluate recent trends in extreme temperatures by looking at the ratio of record highs to record lows:



The trend is fewer record lows -- more record highs.

The dust bowl years were a catastrophic weather event. The consensus appears to be that it was brought about by poor soils practices by farmers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

It resulted in a spectacular heat wave beyond anything in our modern temperature record.



But what does the fact that there was an anomalous catastrophic event in the past tell us about the future projections of climate found in the scientific literature? Well, exactly nothing. The fact that a catastrophe like the dust bowl occurred at lower temperatures tells us nothing about the risks of raising temperatures.The dust bowl should be, perhaps, an object lesson. It's a case where, Americans just going about the ordinary business of living their lives, caused a catastrophic weather event. Today, humans are going about the ordinary business of living their lives and causing significant changes, not just to a tiny portion of the earth's surface, but to the entire earth's surface. The resulting changes will last centuries and are not reversible by any technology that we have today.

At the time of the dust bowl, the average land surface temperature was about 1F over pre-industrial. Today it is about 3F. The IPCC mean worst case scenario is 8F. But, because the surface temperature over land increases faster than that over the ocean, the worst case is actually around 12F over land. Three degrees down, nine to go.

[_Res Ipsa]

Can someone please explain to WaterDog what is the difference between economics and power engineering?

No. Water Dog is trolling, and targeting you hard for it. Deniers will go to great lengths to disrupt any attempt to disrupt any discussion of the actual science of global warming. When you respond to his crapping all over the thread, you just help him do it.

[_Res Ipsa]

Someone please tell WaterDog that power engineering and economics are not the same thing! Economics needs science, but science doesn't need economics!

Again, no. i'm not sure what you mean by the assertion that "science doesn't need economics," but figuring out what, if anything, to do about climate change in general, and our CO2 emissions in particular, does require economics. In my opinion, trying to talk about the economic issues before understanding the magnitude of the problem is putting the cart before the horse.

Step 1: assess the risks
Step 2: put a price tag on the risks
Step 3: assess the costs of mitigation/adaptation and the avoided costs.
Step 4: Profit.

I'd hoped we could have a focussed discussion on step 1. Climate deniers, however, don't want to talk about step one because that involves looking at the science that they deny out of hand. So, they will interject practically anything into the disruption to keep people from looking at the science. Please don't help them.

[_Chap]

... they will interject practically anything into the disruption to keep people from looking at the science. Please don't help them.

Yup. Please just ignore the trolls. They have nothing worth our attention.

[_Gunnar]

And if you take wind turbines as a case study. Not only are they bad in terms of being an effective energy source, but they are harming the environment. They're killing birds and other flying lifeforms.

Please let's stop being ridiculous. Wind turbines are very, very low on the list of things that are hazardous to birds!

Wind turbines kill around 300,000 birds annually, house cats around 3,000,000,000

For North-America:

Wind turbines kill between 214,000 and 368,000 birds annually — a small fraction compared with the estimated 6.8 million fatalities from collisions with cell and radio towers and the 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion deaths from cats, according to the peer-reviewed study by two federal scientists and the environmental consulting firm West Inc.
"We estimate that on an annual basis, less than 0.1% ... of songbird and other small passerine species populations in North America perish from collisions with turbines," says lead author Wallace Erickson of Wyoming-based West.

For those who don't have an envelope nearby to do the math, that's about 10,000x more deaths from just house cats than from wind turbines.
And that's not even looking at some of the other biggest bird killers out there: building and vehicles. That's probably millions, if not hundreds of millions or billions, of other birds right there. In the grand scheme of things, wind turbines are probably lost in the margin of error.

This doesn't mean that wind power operators should stop doing what they can to protect birds. Wind farms should be properly sited and everything should be done to mitigate any risks.

But bird lovers need to go against the real enemies rather than spending precious energy fighting one of the main tools that we have to clean up our power grid and have a greener world.
Via USA Today

The truth is that you have nothing but fossil-fuel-funded disinformation and the very flimsiest of straws to support your arguments against climate change and renewable energy sources.

[_DoubtingThomas]

Again, no. i'm not sure what you mean by the assertion that "science doesn't need economics," but figuring out what, if anything, to do about climate change in general, and our CO2 emissions in particular, does require economics.

Yes, but science itself isn't giving us the best solution. Or is it?

[_DoubtingThomas]

In my opinion, trying to talk about the economic issues before understanding the magnitude of the problem is putting the cart before the horse

Exactly!

[_Res Ipsa]

Again, no. i'm not sure what you mean by the assertion that "science doesn't need economics," but figuring out what, if anything, to do about climate change in general, and our CO2 emissions in particular, does require economics.

Yes, but science itself isn't giving us the best solution. Or is it?

It depends on what you mean by the “best” solution. Science can give us options and help predict the responses of the natural environment to any actions we take. Economics can help us predict how people will react to any actions we take. The application of both can give us an idea of the cost and the benefit of the possible alternatives.