knocker

Who are the fanatical AGW supporters? Me, GW?

The lingering clouds http://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=1025

"Smokey Joe" Barton is known for apologizing to BP after the 2010 Oil spill, and harassing climate scientists.Turns out he's also been a key connection between the tobacco industry and the climate denial industry. Archival footage from ABC News on the tobacco wars of the 90s turns up sequences of Smoky Joe in action on behalf of Big Cancer.

Looking ahead ten days ( a lifetime in Met terms) with ECMWF. There is not much of significance in between.

Min here 0.7C, GM -7C 0600 temps

Last night I was mulling over the $64,000 question, at what point can the expense of mitigating action to alleviate the damage of GW be justified given the level of our current scientific knowledge and the possible, probable?, irreversible damage to the environment that will impact hugely on future generations? Personally I think we are past that point but this by no means a universally shared opinion. Whilst pondering this I was reminded of the arguments thirty years ago over acid pollution. A few bells started ring so I hoiked out my copy of Acid Earth-The Politics of Acid Pollution, by John McCormack. Sure enough there is a familiar ring to the story, although GW is undoubtedly more complicated, basically the principles are very similar. I won’t woffle on, I’ll leave that to the experts, but below is part of the introduction to the book. In 1852, a 35-year-old Scottish chemist studying the quality of air in and around his adopted home town of Manchester found local rainfall to be unusually acidic. Long concerned about the declining quality of air and water in the British midlands, Robert Angus Smith suspected a connection between the acidity and the sulphur dioxide released when coal was burned by local factories. Twenty years later, after more fieldwork in England, Scotland and Germany, Smith published his findings in his book Air and Rain: The Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology, spelling out the link between sulphur pollution and what he called 'acid rain'. He warned that plants and materials were being damaged, showed how the acidity of rain, fog and snow could be affected by wind direction, proximity to the sea, and the amount and frequency of rain and snow, and drew up a detailed strategy for analysing the chemistry of precipitation. Unfortunately, it was to be another century before his conclusions found a wider following in the scientific community. Researchers in Europe and North America found in them confirmation of the link between emissions from industry and environmental problems that began to sound an ever more familiar and disquieting litany: • Trees were being killed or damaged, crop yields were declining, and soils were becoming too acid to support plants. • Lakes were turning acid, especially in Scandinavia and Canada. • In smog-bound cities throughout the world, people with respiratory and heart complaints were ailing, even dying, from acid smoke and dust pollution. • Stone buildings were being eaten away, railway tracks and road vehicles corroded, and even paintings and books were being damaged. By the mid 1980s, acid pollution had become one of the most critical of all environmental issues, testing the ability of policy-makers to respond to the tension between the priorities of economic growth and environmental management. It showed only too clearly the flaws in the methods by which policy was developed and implemented, but also underlined the multidimensional nature of many environmental problems. First, it has a scientific dimension. The basic ingredients and chemical processes involved are well understood, but confirming and agreeing the causes, effects and scale of the problem has not been easy. Scientists disagree over the primary mechanisms and effects, monitoring and data gathering systems differ from one country to the next, and new theories about cause and effect are constantly emerging. This has complicated attempts to develop workable responses to the problem; governments for many years relied on fixed percentage reductions of the pollutants involved, but there has been a shift in recent years towards fixing those reductions to the effects pollutants have on the environment. Second, acid pollution has a political dimension. It is the kind of long-term problem that demands more than the business-as-usual approach of conventional political processes, limited as they are by the electoral cycle and by the need to balance the competing demands of regional and industrial lobbies, and of different social and economic sectors. Finally, it has an economic dimension. How much are we prepared to pay for a clean environment? Who is going to have to pay? Can conventional cost-benefit analysis be applied to questions as big and as nebulous as air pollution? While the costs of emission controls are relatively easy to calculate, it is much more difficult to quantify the costs of dead forests, acidified lakes, lost crops, corroded buildings, and declining human health. And how are environmental management priorities logically to be weighed against other urgent problems, such as poverty, drugs, racism, or terrorism? Despite all the questions and doubts, the governments of most Western industrialized states responded to air pollution problems during the 1980s, and substantial cuts were made in the emissions of several key pollutants. Public interest in acid pollution also tailed off as other more pressing issues-such as global warming and threats to the ozone layer-jostled for political attention. Since the amount of attention given to policy problems depends in large part on the media coverage they draw (and vice versa), the impression created was that acid pollution was no longer a serious problem. This, however, was a misleading impression. While emissions of sulphur dioxide in most industrialized countries have fallen, the battle to reverse nitrogen oxide emissions is still far from won. New research has also shown that other pollutants-notably volatile organic compounds (VOC) and ammonia-are involved in the chemical processes that lead to acidification. More worrying, emissions of many of these pollutants are growing in much of eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America. First published in 1985, Acid Earth is a study of acidification as a global public policy problem. It describes the dimensions of the problem and assesses the possible responses, arguing that acidification is ultimately a political issue that can only be adequately addressed by fundamental changes in public attitudes and public policy. So today there are huge decisions to make and little room for error but personally I feel we are too late. I hope I'm wrong but I won't be around to find out.

Study: Arctic seafloor methane releases double previous estimates http://uafcornerstone.net/ESAS2013/

Severe Storms to Threaten Damage and Holiday Travel in Florida, Georgia http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/florida-georgia-severe-weather/20323503

Hot Whoppers comment at the end of her critique of Walt Cunningham's talk at Warsaw rather sums up some points made earlier in the thread. And sums up my position exactly. What is it with science denying organisations wheeling out ageing astronauts to make fools of themselves in public?

No direct correlation between galactic cosmic rays and earth surface temperature http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273117713005978

I already have and I don't really think I can spare ten seconds to do it again. I really think you should join your fellow fantasists. Oh dear a link. http://www.skepticalscience.com/skepticquotes.php.

What an amazing mind and ego you have. You manage to delve into the complexity of climate change without the need to read scientific papers from scientists of various disciplines who might, just might, know more about the subject than you do.Anthony Watts has perfected this. I assume this also explains the invisible links as they are only connected to your ego brain. Perhaps an example of your scientific reasoning.

http://forum.netweather.tv/topic/76448-scepticism-of-man-made-climate-change/page-41#entry2845205 I see you have become one of Mr Watts band of acolytes. It's a pity you don't abandon the boring invective and direct your thoughts to some constructive scientific reasoning for a change. Perhaps that's too much to ask as that's probably a concept you are not familiar with.

Led by the larger than life Erasmus Darwin, the Lunar Society of Birmingham were a group of eighteen century amateur esperimenters who met monthly on the Monday night nearest to the full moon. But sticking with Darwin. Working with Watt, Priestley and Joseph Black on properties of water Darwin added some imaginative speculations, working out - for the first time - how air cools when it expands, and applying this to explain how clouds form when air rises and expands in the less pressurized higher reaches of the atmosphere, cooling and condensing in the process. This courtesy of Jenny Uglow. This group of men came up with an extraordinary number of ideas and inventions. Source. Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men, Faber and Faber, 2002.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/25/silence_of_the_owls_could_mean_reallife_whisper_mode_for_helicopters_planes_etc/

The forecast was correct. The Sc dissipated around 1130 and now virtually clear skies.

Get a widget. 4 Hiroshima bombs per second: a widget to raise awareness about global warming http://www.skepticalscience.com/4-Hiroshima-bombs-per-second-widget-raise-awareness-global-warming.html#.UpLempRIcm8.twitter

Of course. You get macro climates just in Cornwall from the Scilly's to Bodmin Moor. I was talking about Camborne so differ as much as you like.

The frosts haven't been very severe down here. Not least because we seem to have a permanent layer of subsidence Sc. Perfectly normal of course. This morning 8/8 Sc about 3,500ft. temp 4C and calm. The forecast is Sc dissipating during morning but I have my doubts.

Arctic Storms, Warming Mean More Methane Released http://www.climatecentral.org/news/storms-warming-mean-more-arctic-methane-being-released-16775

Deleted, wrong thread.

Isn't that another of the mysteries. How Mars lost it's atmosphere. http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2013/11/18/how-did-mars-lose-its-water-new-orbiter-aims-to-find-out

Much like the Grand Canyon, Nanedi Valles snakes across the Martian surface suggesting that liquid water once crossed the landscape, according to a team of researchers who believe that molecular hydrogen made it warm enough for water to flow. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-unusual-greenhouse-gases-ancient-martian.html#jCp

Update http://www.weather.com/news/weather-winter/winter-storm-boreas-southwest-texas-oklahoma-kansas-northeast-20131122?hootPostID=32af3659e4df4c171a9e34d14ae5222c