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From: meekerdb <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2014 9:10 PM
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 3/21/2014 9:59 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
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>On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:24 PM, Quentin Anciaux <[email protected]> wrote:
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>>2014-03-21 17:19 GMT+01:00 John Clark <[email protected]>:
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>>>On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 10:50 AM, Quentin Anciaux <[email protected]> wrote:
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>>>>>>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.
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>>>>For your information, that means "Regional Climate Prediction"
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>>>I'm pretty sure it's not "Russian Communist Party" but are you sure it's not
>>>"Representative Concentration Pathways"?
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>>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...
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>>>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.
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>I must disagree with you on this. John injects highly charged political views
>-- such as insinuating that environmentalists are genocidal maniacs for
>example, who advocate genocide because of their "green" ideology -- according
>to his view, not mine. There is nothing scientific about that. I have tried on
>numerous occasions to get John to engage on specifics -- such as the depletion
>rates of fracked wells. He avoids talking about hard numbers and returns to
>his fall back position of equating environmentalists with 1) fools 2)
>genocidal maniacs 3) Stalinists
>That is not what I would characterize as an attempt to have a reasonable
>discussion.
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>>>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.
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>He also has so far very much avoided addressing the data on the decline rates
>of fossil energy supplies; the rapidly falling return of capital invested for
>new fossil energy projects (both traditional and tar and shale); as well as
>the rapidly falling EROI for these projects.
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>John has an ideological perspective that dominates his replies on this thread.
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>- 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.
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>- 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.
Agreed -- the several trillion dollars that the Iraq war will end up costing
the US over the next decades as the long term costs of veteran disability care
begin adding up -- presents a massive opportunity cost. That same treasure
could have literally transformed the US energy landscape and built out a very
substantial and diversified energy supply infrastructure that could have been
far more weighted towards energy harvesting systems that harvested the solar
flux (directly or indirectly)
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.
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>- 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.
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>- 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.
If carbon fossil fuels had to build the currently externalized cost into the
price they charge for their products they would have far fewer buyers.
Chris
Brent
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