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Just 85 days to go before COP 26

Helios

I am sort of excited , its like seeing what arrives at the Rainhill trials all over again (ok I don't time travel) , and we await the big government on heating , and the EV systems are still getting ironed out . I hope i have outlined in previous posts , why we need large scale efficiencies, particularly as we venture to green hydrogen new places , so is there anything new and exciting arriving yet … Well it depends where your start is , if you know who Rachel Carson is and her book silent spring , then your start is real ecology thinking , and your not tub thumping the bath asking for drill baby drill , the pollution problems are real , and we are finding stuff out about just how delicate and interrelated, the organic chemistry of life , really is , so I guess i am with the eco thinkers on pollution , if your an economic thinker and worried about not having a job , then you believe high tech will get us of the problem of impairment of the natural life systems of the planet , mmm which unfortunately i can only argue as such views being deluded , natural habitat loss , is just that, loss and all the fruit cakes who wanted sodium hydroxide trees removing CO2 , I think we are going to argue that . CCS has problems , both technically and in terms of trajectory , and even though George Monbiot has advocated nuclear , I dont really agree , and he hasnt explained the trajectory very well at all , but maybe hes hoping Fusion reactors work (which i dont think they do) , so its all getting a bit exciting in the tin foil hat and expensed wonk stakes , in technology choice awards , some bits can be nailed down but they are to do with infrastructure , and some quite massive changes can be achieved , with redesigning some aspects considering how the EV will work. The liquid fuels believers so called SAF fuels have appeared , and an interesting idea on electrifying HGVs by fitting them with a pantograph , to draw from an overhead line on the motorway , still a problem in HGV weight , and i think Sweden has looked at a centre rail in the road , mmm well problem there is stuff , roadkill getting washed into your concealed live conductor ,duct , still driving along and the kids saying , whats that smell as another bird or mammal is cooking on the centre again , had a biref fun moment . 

Anyhow been as I have designed some eco tech ,(starts rubbing hands feverishly) were reading for the wonk and tin foil hat market makers , the rules are you produce some (not necessarily perfect engineering figures , no more of this Hydrogen gas turbine hopey change thing ) , seems fair enough as alot of tax payers money will be going on some aspects of eco thinking , some are already self sustaining , for transport as LNG is doing well as a transport fuel .

Not happy with some of things the so called cop 26 climate ambassador has been saying so far , not the COP 26 panel (i am hard pushed to find any member truly knowledgeable on natural life system dynmaics and chemistry ) , but as they say only 85  days to go , and who knows anyhting could happen ? 

      

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    So, you think that a trace gas, carbon dioxide, is the problem?  It accounts for less than 0.05% of the atmosphere and is required to support life.

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    Rob Eagle: 
     

    So, you think that a trace gas, carbon dioxide, is the problem?  It accounts for less than 0.05% of the atmosphere and is required to support life.

    The problem is generally the emission of greenhouse gases. These are all expressed in the literature as CO2-equivalents, just as when you read in the newspaper in GB about how much something costs, it is expressed as a GB-pound equivalent.

    Exactly what warming effect proportionately increased atmospheric CO2 has was first estimated 125 years ago. It was pretty good. Modern estimates are quite near to it. 

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    Rob Eagle: 
     

    So, you think that a trace gas, carbon dioxide, is the problem?  It accounts for less than 0.05% of the atmosphere and is required to support life.

    Yes.  The science behind it is pretty clear.

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    I am not sure that the science is pretty clear, the detractors are denied media exposure but they certainly are out  there.

    I believe that only 3% of that 0.05% is attributed to human activity and the UK produces less than1% of that.

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    Ignore CO2 then. Some of us perhaps are not sure what it does, but it is only a proxy measure for burning stuff that was previously kept out of the loop by fossilization for the last few tens of ka.

    I presume you are over 50 ? 

    if so do you agree you have lived through the burning of more than half the worlds easily accessible oil reserves ?

    Is it reasonable to assume that the 2nd half will be harder to get out of the ground, and therefor come at ever greater cost or at an ever reducing rate of flow ?

    And, what is your plan for after the flow has reduced to an expensive trickle from places we do not want to go to ?

    Oh and by the way the world is warmer than it was 100 years ago, and may be warmer still in another 100 years, and we need to adapt our farming, our housing and our water supply to match that.

    Mike.

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    Yes, it is a lot warmer than it was during the ice age.

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    Rob Eagle: 
     

    I am not sure that the science is pretty clear, the detractors are denied media exposure but they certainly are out  there.

    The detractors are not really denied media exposure. 

    There are some US “think tank” type institutes that one could describe as taking an ACC-denial position. And before that, they doubted that anthropogenic CFCs caused the ozone hole. And before that, they doubted that acid rain was caused by anthropogenic sulphur and nitrogen emissions. And before that they doubted that there was any link between tobacco smoking and cancer. Those institutes and their members have throughout had very good access indeed both to news media and to politicians. 

    You can read the detailed history in Oreskes and Conway's decade-old book.

    Russia has been ACC-sceptic on the political level for decades (I don't know whether it still is). You can read what happened when a UK scientific delegation let by the UK Chief Scientific Advisor visited Moscow for a nominally “scientific” meeting about climate science in 2004 in Chapter 4 of Peter Stott's book Hot Air. Do you suppose the Russian news-media are ACC-acceptors?

    One detractor on another forum produced link after link after link to ACC-sceptical material, not only from the above sources. Those links would not be there if the media were to be “den[ying] exposure.” Indeed, in most of the world all anyone has to do is pay a domain registration agency (what for us is) a small amount of money, and they have a (mostly) world-wide accessible site for them to publish whatever they want.  And people do. 

    By contrast, we could look at the peer-reviewed climate science published in scientific journals. Mark Lynas and his colleagues just did. They took a randomised sample of 3,000 of the 88,000+ articles that have been published since 2012, found 4 with ACC-sceptical material in the abstract, and 28 with ACC-sceptical keyword sequences in the body.

    https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966

    That suggests that, in the entire peer-reviewed climate science literature since 2021, there are probably only 800-850 papers exhibiting such characteristics. Lynas et al don't analyse and present the arguments in the articles they found, but it might be fun to do so, and the task seems doable (about a person-year).

     

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    mapj1: 
     

    Ignore CO2 then. Some of us perhaps are not sure what it does, but it is only a proxy measure for burning stuff that was previously kept out of the loop by fossilization for the last few tens of ka.

    Better said, Mike, if I may, that all atmospheric greenhouse gases are measured in CO2 equivalent units, where “equivalent” refers to the absorption of infra-red EM radiation. 

    Also, greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere anthropogenically by more than burning. The total is about 51 bn tonnes of CO2-equivalents per year, if I have the numbers right. 

    The question is what all that extra greenhouse gas does. The first answer was given 125 years ago and more recent answers (except for Rob Eagle's) are not so very different.

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    Peter Bernard Ladkin:

    By contrast, we could look at the peer-reviewed climate science published in scientific journals. Mark Lynas and his colleagues just did. They took a randomised sample of 3,000 of the 88,000+ articles that have been published since 2012, found 4 with ACC-sceptical material in the abstract, and 28 with ACC-sceptical keyword sequences in the body.


    iopscience.iop.org/.../ac2966





    Thank you, the letter "Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature" is interesting indeed; I recommend to read it in full, and to study Tables 3 and 4 in particular. The 97% consensus claimed by the Cook et al 2013 paper referred to has been refuted by many a long time ago.


    Considering the present atmosphere in mainstream climate science, I find the below assertion of the authors in section "4. Discussion" questionable:

    "For example, a majority of the papers we categorized as being about 'impacts' of climate change did not state a position on whether the phenomenon they were studying—the changing climate—was human-caused. It seems highly unlikely that if researchers felt sceptical about the reality of ACC they would publish numerous studies of its impacts without ever raising the question of attribution."


    I would rather propose that such papers may offer the opportunity for "reading between the lines", with authors trying to avoid being labelled as "denialists" or "detractors" with all the possible consequences in future financial support. To me such position seems comparable to claiming that all people living under oppressive regimes who did not explicitly express their dissenting position were fanatic supporters of the dominating ideology, be it communism, nazism, eugenics, racism, Lysenkoism, etc.  


    The following statement renders the quality of the categorisation employed highly questionable:

    "In another example, we gave rating '2' ('explicit endorsement without quantification') to all papers referencing future emissions scenarios in their abstracts, because emissions scenarios by definition imply an evaluation of humanity's role in GHG emissions and their subsequent impact on climate."


    Considering the above and looking at the number of abstracts in Table 3 rated as "1—Explicit endorsement with quantification", only 19 out of 3000 abstracts explicitly support ACC / CAGW which yields only 0.633% on my calculator. That is very far from "exceeding 99%", and remains so even when considering rather passive categories "2" and "3": (19 + 413 + 460) / 3000 = 29.733%.


    As the above excercise clearly demonstrates, judging science based on paper abstracts may be a slippery road. I am sure that while that paper will soon be reffered to in the mainstream media as another proof of "settled climate science", there will be voices saying it is just pre-COP26 alarmist propaganda.


    I have noticed that while during early years the human mind is open to all concepts, trying to evaluate their veracity based on accumulated knowledge and experiences, at certain age arbitrary band-pass or notch filters may start forming inside the grey matter; on green wavelengths for some, on red for others.
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    Peter Bernard Ladkin:
    By contrast, we could look at the peer-reviewed climate science published in scientific journals. Mark Lynas and his colleagues just did. …….

    iopscience.iop.org/.../ac2966


    [AU] Thank you, the letter "Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature" is interesting indeed; I recommend to read it in full, and to study Tables 3 and 4 in particular. The 97% consensus claimed by the Cook et al 2013 paper referred to has been refuted by many a long time ago.

    Ah, here you are again, with yet another reference to a ACC-denialist WWW site, to go with all those others you have been recommending over the last few weeks.

    You are self-confessedly not au fait with climate science. Indeed, in a month of trying I couldn't find out what you do and don't believe about the climate and climate change.

     

     

     


    The following statement renders the quality of the categorisation employed highly questionable:

    "In another example, we gave rating '2' ('explicit endorsement without quantification') to all papers referencing future emissions scenarios in their abstracts, because emissions scenarios by definition imply an evaluation of humanity's role in GHG emissions and their subsequent impact on climate."

    Considering the above and looking at the number of abstracts in Table 3 rated as "1—Explicit endorsement with quantification", only 19 out of 3000 abstracts explicitly support ACC / CAGW which yields only 0.633% on my calculator. That is very far from "exceeding 99%", and remains so even when considering rather passive categories "2" and "3": (19 + 413 + 460) / 3000 = 29.733%.

    As the above excercise clearly demonstrates, judging science based on paper abstracts may be a slippery road. I am sure that while that paper will soon be reffered to in the mainstream media as another proof of "settled climate science", there will be voices saying it is just pre-COP26 alarmist propaganda.

    I have noticed that while during early years the human mind is open to all concepts, trying to evaluate their veracity based on accumulated knowledge and experiences, at certain age arbitrary band-pass or notch filters may start forming inside the grey matter; on green wavelengths for some, on red for others.

     

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