On 3/21/2014 9:59 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:24 PM, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com
<mailto:allco...@gmail.com>> wrote:
2014-03-21 17:19 GMT+01:00 John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com
<mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com>>:
On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 10:50 AM, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com
<mailto:allco...@gmail.com>> wrote:
The thing I most want to know about RCP4.5 is what RCP
stands for,
Google seems to think it's "Rich Client Platform" but that
doesn't
sound quite right. It must be pretty obscure, Wikipedia has
never
heard of RCP either.
For your information, that means "Regional Climate Prediction"
I'm pretty sure it's not "Russian Communist Party" but are you sure
it's not
"Representative Concentration Pathways"?
I'm pretty sure you must be dumb as dumb if you really think this... As I
see we are
in a thread talking about climate...
This thread seems to be mostly about politics. To be fair, John seems to be in the
minority here in wanting to discuss this from a scientific and technological perspective.
He raises a number of points that I have raised myself in previous discussions. Instead
of focusing on such issues, pop culture distractions (Fox News etc.) and political
tribalism seem to get all of the attention.
- Given the number of climate models and the fact that the majority of them failed to
predict the climate of the last decade, how confident can we be in further predictions?
"Failed" is a relative term and "decade" is too short to constitute climate. So what
exactly do you mean by "failed". My view is that they were relatively accurate about some
things and not so accurate about others. They all include a calculated range of
uncertainty. Have they "failed" if the observed weather is withing the range of
uncertainty. The deniers and obfuscators seize on uncertainty as an obstruction to
action, but uncertainty cuts both ways.
As for further predictions, it's not as if we have to pick one (or a set) of these models
and make THE prediction. What we need to do is figure out why they were inaccurate in to
some vaiables and improve the models. As has been pointed out, the effect of clouds is a
major source of uncertainty. Clouds are generally much smaller than the grid size of
GCMs, ~100Km square, and so it's not practical to directly model them within a
simulation. The technique has been to use separate models just of cloud formation and
dissipation to determine which GCM state would produce or dissipate clouds. Those models
are being improved by including the effects of aerosols and freezing/thawing.
Another source of uncertainty in *weather* is how the extra energy absorbed due to
greenhouse gases is distributed. How much goes into warming the ocean vs the atmosphere?
Model projections have to make assumptions about human activity too.
- With current technology, how much would we have to shrink the global energy budget to
transition to sustainable sources?
Read Donald McKay's book "Without Hot Air", which is free online at withouthotair.org. He
has detailed estimates of what it would take for the U.K. to almost eliminate fossil fuel
consumption and still retain the same standard of living. It takes a lot of change, but
it is less per capita than, for example, the U.S. war in Iraq over a time scale of a few
decades.
What would the human impact of that be? This is too serious an issue for wishful
thinking. Theres 7 billion of us and counting. We need hard numbers here, that take into
account the energy investment necessary to bootstrap the renewable sources, their
efficiency and so on.
- What is the probability that a climate catastrophe awaits us vs. the probability that
an abrupt attempt to convert to sustainable sources would create a human catastrophe itself?
What's "abrupt". You're raising spudboy's bugaboo. NOBODY wants to do something
"abrupt". It's just a Faux News scare point. Isn't is obvious that the longer we wait to
address a problem the shorter will be the time to solve it.
- Given that environmentalists are claiming that it might even be too late to advert
disaster, why aren't we seriously considering geoengineering approaches, as the one
proposed by Nathan Myhrvold, which can be easily and cheaply tested and turned off at
any moment?
It's being considered just as seriously as any other unproven technology to address the
problem - which is to say, hardly at all. If we started penalizing ExxonMobil, BP, Texaco,
and Shell for the cost they are externalizing maybe they'd fund Myhrvold's scheme.
Brent
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