You can reasonably doubt your house will not burn down, and still insure it. You can reasonably believe your house will never burn down, and still insure it.

But if you stand on a beach and deny the existence of tides you have left reason behind. The laws of thermodynamics are inexorable. This put sceptics and denialists in the same basket for all practical purposes, although one may be merely ignorant and the other deliberately wilful.

And surface albedo. Which is why the falling ice levels in the Arctic is so important.

If I insure my house even though I doubt it will ever burn down, I’m a house fire sceptic.

If I don’t insure my house because I’m convinced it will never burn down, I’m a house fire denialist.

Fortunately for the sceptics and the politicians, the inertia of the system means the worst effects will likely not arrive for 3 decades or so. With a bit of luck, they will be dead before the mob arrives.

The climate change denialism of people like JonJ, assuming they are not the paid shills of the Oil Industry, reminds me of the extraordinary human capacity to willingly suspend disbelief. To accept this denialism, you really need to be willing to believe either/and/or:

1 That the world scientific community are in a criminal conspiracy against the public of the world, by “fixing” the science,
2 That most world governments are a part of this conspiracy against their publics,
3 That they are all doing this to either get more grant money, or to achieve a world government,
4 That pouring nearly 50 billion tonnes a year of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year, that would not have been put into the atmosphere without the presence of humans, will have no effect on global climate,
5 That all the known science of the last two hundred years by which the relationships between CO2 and the warming effect has been explained has been fraudulent,
6 That the observed changes that are occurring in our world, at a faster rate than ever before, are perfectly natural and there is nothing we can do about it,
7 That regardless of the science it is not to be believed because my understanding of the science transcends that of all the trained scientists in the world, despite the fact that I have no observable scientific credentials nor any real understanding of the processes that are at work.

Jared Diamond talks about this human capacity to ignore reality until it is too late in his descriptions of the disappearance of civilisations over the millennia. It appears to still be alive and well despite us believing that we have all reached a state of knowledge and wisdom never achieved before in history!

Till then, an ETS is just another tax.

And thanks to Ken Miles for the link. The graph in the linked article largely answers my query about the very recent temperature record. It provides much larger resolution than the one in my primary post, and therefore shows a fairly sharp rise in temperature in the second part of 2009. That’s exactly what you would expect to see with a weak El Nino on top of continued CO2-driven warming.

Thus on closer examination there appears not to be any anomaly requiring consideration of some other factor. That is especially so if, as the Wikipedia article I linked about the Solar Minimum asserts, solar activity remains at record lows:

During 2008-2009 NASA scientists noted that the Sun is undergoing a “deep solar minimum,” stating: “There were no sunspots observed on 266 of [2008's] 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of September 14th, there were no sunspots on 206 of the year’s 257 days (80%). It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: “We’re experiencing a very deep solar minimum,” says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is the quietest sun we’ve seen in almost a century,” agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the National Space Science and Technology Center NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center.

For global temperature to be again rising fairly strongly despite such low levels of solar activity appears unequivocally to demonstrate the very strong imprint of the warming influence of man-made carbon emissions.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/

If you check figure 7 you can see there is plausible justification for one step adjustment around 1941, but looking at figure 8 you see that the climate scientists actually inserted four step adjustments, all in favour of extra warming, and to date no one can explain the justification for these.

It’s not an isolated example either, we have seen various basic reference and research errors in the latest IPCC report (glaciers melting in a few decades which is completely implausible and should have been removed at a glance). This shows that the standard of review and cross-checking on this report has been generally poor.

Then there’s the infamous emails with corrupt peer review process and people deliberately chopping a few data points out of graphs here and there to improve the political impact of their statements. Or course, if you follow the money, there have been clear advantages to alarmists when it comes to extra grants or money flowing into corporate entities such as Tata Energy Research Institute.

Put all this together and we don’t know how much we don’t know anymore. I see this as a really big problem for climate science and for science in general once it gets politicised. This leaves no ability to make good quality decisions, without good quality input data. In short, they blew it.

Could there be a negative feedback mechanism that mainstream scientists have overlooked or underestimated?

Radiation is a fourth power law, so every degree of warming requires a bigger increase in available power than the previous degree of warming. Carbon Dioxide’s infra red absorption band buts up against water on one side and additional CO2 from where we are now also results in a diminishing return in a non-linear manner (approx log function).

Then there’s the rather substantial energy transfer caused by latent heat of evaporation at ground level and condensation up around the tropopause. This is also nonlinear thanks to the properties of water. By the way, since this convection cycle also converts heat to mechanical energy we would expect a strong linkage between warming and storms such as tropical cyclones. NOAA shows a gradual increase in “Named Cyclones by Year” for the past 100 years or so, the Australian BOM shows slight decrease in top-end cyclones over the past 40 years and Wikipedia’s graph of “ACE” shows the low-point around 1970 with a gradual increase after that while other people have managed to graph the same “ACE” data to get a different shape curve (weird huh).

http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/global_year_ace.jpg

I’d say there’s a lot of cleaning and revision required before we are anywhere close to being able to make reasoned judgements about how our activity effects global climate.

Add to that, the natural world is an adaptive system so even once we know what is happening now, we still won’t know what the adaptation will do in the future.

Sequestration needs an aweful lot of big bunkers (the best sequestration sofar known is called a coal field. We are de-sequestrating very rapidly).

I believe that limestone is a bigger repository of carbon than coal although no one knows exactly how much of either substance is down there.

But if so, he would be one of only a handful of “sceptics” capable of being convinced by the evidence (Ken being another, though as he says, his original position was better described as agnosticism since “sceptic” in this context means “dogmatic and credulous disbeliever”.)

The really striking case here is that of the satellite data. Back in the 1990s, it appeared to show cooling. Then, with correction of some statistical errors and more data, it showed warming, but without a statistically significant trend. Then with yet more data, a warming trend, but notably less than at the surface. Now, there is no significant difference.

Any genuine sceptic who had placed substantial weight on the satellite data ought to have been convinced that the evidence was against them. But nothing of the sort has happened. Roy Spencer, who (with Christy) is the satellite guy most closely associated with the “sceptical” interpretation has jumped over to the “no recent warming” camp, dumping most of his data, and cherrypicking starting and ending points to support this.

It’s a very rough estimate and at very best just a guess. There are so many other things happening that it makes it impossible to know if you’ve guessed right or not. “We” may think “we” have a good idea is just hubris.

And here is a peer reviewed paper on the topic (pdf)

Here is a link to a blog post which looks at adjusting the temperature for volcanic and El Nino/La Nina. Once these are done, the rate of temperature change is much more linear.

Like this, right Ken? No one has any idea about short term fluctuations and anyone suggesting the can adjust for this or that is not performing science but ‘voodoo science”, to use the term in the appropriate way it ought to be used.

I’ll repeat, no one can make any short-term assertions for non-linear chaotic systems. If they say they can ask them if they’re the richest people in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_breeder_reactor

As of 2006, all large-scale FBR power stations have been liquid metal fast reactors (LMFBR) cooled by liquid sodium. These have been of one of two designs:

* Pool type, in which the primary heat exchangers and circulators are immersed in the reactor tank.

Ken Miles.

Please. Short term temp isn’t linear and anyone suggesting they can find linearity in essentially a chaotic system is a joke. I hope this isn’t leading us to the science is settled again particularly around the Himalayan mountains.

The Indian dude isn’t discussing what is and what isn’t commercially viable right now and what will be in the near future.

We’re not exactly talking about nuclear energy as a new source, as it’s been around since the 60′s and if we hadn’t applied an anti-science attitude to it we’d be much further down technology pipeline by now instead of where we are.

Those two reactors in the Emirates are essentially tailored, making them more costly than where it will be once economies come into play.

Those that think that renewable can provide for our needs are dreaming. It won’t and once the public catches on that it was a subsidized con it could further imperil action to reduce emissions.

The mis-information about nuclear is extra-ordinary. It was only recently that Garret told people there were 20,000 deaths are a result of the Chernobyl accident. He’s either lying or extremely ill-informed for a person in his position.

Nuclear is the safest and cleanest energy mode we know of. However it gets a anti-science bad rap. It’s regulated to the crapper while dilute sources like solar and wind are subsided to heaven. We have our priorities all screwed up……..Subsidize dilute forms of energy and try to kill off the one that shows the most promise. Meanwhile we want something done about emissions.

Some points:

* I wouldn’t pay much attention to short term changes in the temperature as there is lots of noise in the data. You risk spending your time looking for patterns in static.

* The question of what causes this noise is (in my mind) far more interesting.

* Here is a link to a blog post which looks at adjusting the temperature for volcanic and El Nino/La Nina. Once these are done, the rate of temperature change is much more linear.

France did most of it in 15 years. The initial stages are the hardest as most of the tech is bespoke at the moment and doesn’t take into account potential scaling.

Following on from that, how long do you think it would take to get renewables up and running in a very hypothetical situation that you could use solar and wind turbines? Every unit has to be installed and there would be thousands dotting the landscape.

yes, the dimming hypothesis is a fascinating one. I quite like the wikipedia entry on this one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming) which includes a whole discussion of the use of dimming for geo-engineering.

Sequestration needs an aweful lot of big bunkers (the best sequestration sofar known is called a coal field. We are de-sequestrating very rapidly). Nuclear takes a long time to set up.