The Penguin

Tried it, but my keyboard froze. Whozitsay?

Daniel, this is a Friday night and I’ve ‘taken the long way home’ so I’ll say something that I wouldn’t normally say. Your interest in colder winters is understandable if, as I suppose, you are young and didn’t live through the old fashioned winters that some of us older fogeys did, but to keep harping on about a new ice age is not productive. Especially when your apparently sole source of reference is (even to me) questionable. Don’t get me wrong; in amongst all the fashionable Death Through Warming stories that the sensationalist media like to put about, your regular references to Death Through Freezing submissions are a welcome respite. But can I suggest that you look for corroborative sources of evidence to back up your favoured IAN references, and when you find a couple get back to us with those? The trouble is that you are doing your argument no good whatsoever by repeatedly banging on about one possible climatic evolution with limited back-up. The result of this is that folk are getting bored with it, which may be a shame if you could persuade them otherwise with a bit more, and wider, research.

Wait a minute Wibs, that looks suspiciously like the same moon Louby photographed earlier. You should be ashamed.

Agreed . . . . . . agreed. . . . . . . agreed . . . . . . agreed . . . . . . agreed. Yep, totally agree with you there, Dawlish.

The World Energy Council puts the figures at 44% for coal and nearly 60 % for gas. Sorry, I haven't yet found a figure for oil, but even so, at least these sources of generation are predictable. Edit: spelling mistake, sorry miss.

Okay, so wind turbine has become the accepted phrase; so be it. But be aware that their supporters use that phrase to imply a certain level of efficiency, which they just don’t have. And remember, historically windmill became the generic word for a piece of wind driven machinery whether it drove a mill or not - they can’t make that much flour in the Netherlands. Talking about efficiency, the current performance based analysis of actual output from wind farms in the UK is 25% of the theoretical maximum. Across the country this varies from 35% in Scotland and the Southwest down to less than 15% elsewhere. Hardly impressive figures, but worse is the fact that the wind farms are intermittent in their supply of power, that is to say, when it’s either not windy enough or too windy for the plant to operate they don’t produce. At all. Not the sort of thing to base a national energy strategy on, is it? At least with solar power there is some certainty of a source of supply during daylight hours, even when it’s cloudy. And with wave and more especially tidal derived energy production the output is more certain, and continuous, still. In principle I agree with developing non-carbon based energy generation, but what I don’t agree with is being led down the garden path by mono-agenda groups and a spin-it-up-coz-it-sounds-good government. Especially when the technology is weak and the capital and operational costs are excessive.

Pickles, I’m sorry but just about everything you say is incorrect. If you look at my earlier post dealing with the relative efficiency and land requirement of various power generation methods you will see that compared to traditional generators, which are arguably becoming environmentally more acceptable in a technological sense, wind power is by far both the least efficient and most intrusive. There is not the slightest chance of wind power being a practical substitute for CCGT or Nuclear generators in the foreseeable future. I would also respectfully question your assertion that ‘very few people want nuclear stations’, especially as the visual impact of these, as you cite, is miniscule compared to the visual impact of a corresponding output wind farm. As an aside, it is a complete misnomer to call these blooming great things ‘wind turbines’ as this is patently not what they are. A turbine denotes blades enclosed in a duct that greatly improves efficiency and control, which these windmills aren’t and don’t.

Stupid as in a total waste of space, in every possible definition of the phrase. Just stupid.

Yes, but wind turbines are still ugly, inefficient, (a 200 ft high wind turbine of 500 kW capacity will on average produce 125 kW - enough to boil 50 electric kettles,) expensive to build and expensive to maintain, and all of these except ugly gets far worse when relocated out to sea. Even on land, they make no sense as primary power generators and worst of all take far too much in land area to be at all commercial. In comparison with other generating types the land take is hopeless. Carno wind "farm", said to be the largest in Europe, sprawls over 1500 acres and produces an average output of 10 MW. The Baglan Combined Cycle Gas Turbine generator will cover 15 acres and produce 500 MW of reliable power. The Hunterston B Nuclear Power Station covers roughly 30 acres and produces an average of 8300 MW of reliable power. And the concept of ringing cities with wind farms is ludicrous. By my rough reckoning the calculation would be something like:- It takes one third of the Hunterston B capacity to power Glasgow. For this to be accomplished with wind farms an area close to 500 sq. km. or 125,000 acres would be required, which is nearly three times the area of the city.

Synoptics - (in meteorology) relating to data obtained simultaneously over a large area of the atmosphere.

It would appear that climate modelling, at least at the IPCC, is now twice as ‘good’ as it was five years ago. Is this an accurate reflection of the situation do you think, and if so what kind of improvement is expected over the next five years?

Wilson, what you say regarding lay science is self-evidently true, but it misses the point that with academic science (as applied to climate change) at its current level of development, any predictive analysis will also be a matter of opinion. Slightly more valid no doubt but still based on opinion.

SF, In global terms I think you’re probably right. However to the recipients, and to me though not directly, the issue of charity / aid is highly significant. Again though, as this is supposed to be a technical rather than speculative thread, I’ll leave my extended version to another time and place.

That’s a slightly different point from the one P3 made, although the answer isn’t all that different. A developer works out his financial appraisals on a calculation called residual value. Any development has a potential total income, a guess of sales value if you like, tested against experience and current trends. From that he takes off a profit margin, a percentage usually, and an amount which is absolutely fixed. From what’s left he takes off all his development costs like construction, overheads, finance etc. The amount left is the residual land value, the money he can offer for the land on which the development is built (both physically and financially). So in the case where the income value is depressed by market resistance, (and I personally would never invest in property on a flood plain – the clue is in the name – but an amazing number of people don’t seem to register the risk,) all that happens is income, and therefore profit, are slightly reduced, costs stay largely the same, so the land value goes down. But remember when judged against agricultural land values, development land values are stratospheric, so quite a degree of market depression can take place before the farmer won’t sell and a project becomes unviable.

I accept you have a point, but I am conscious that this is possibly not the correct place to pursue it. Now doubt there will be another opportunity elsewhere soon.

That’s not how it works though. The developer never concedes profit, he simply passes on costs to the end user.

I think you know what I mean. The difference between taking the global redirection curve on two wheels, and the potential long-term outcomes of GW, is obviously time. I suggest there would be plenty of opportunity to plan for climate change while immediate action on environmental policies would leave little time to react in support of marginal populations.

I fully understand your sentiments and don’t completely discount the supporting logic, but do you really believe that cutting out CO2 emissions, for instance, will be accomplished at no cost? Just assuming that bit by bit the nations of the world could be persuaded to join in, there would still be a huge investment to be made to switch to other sources of energy. This would involve individuals as well as countries diverting a substantial part of their resources into alternative technologies. I would think that far beyond eating into any extra we have, this would involve reallocating a good part of our core resources, which are already directed at essentials. The problem with that is there are people in the world that rely to a high degree for their existence on what the ‘Haves’ can afford to send their way, There is an argument to be had about whether that should be necessary, and even if it is necessary, whether it is expedient, but aid packages or charity is a fact of many peoples life today. So when you say there are no (important) losers, I would contest that you are wrong. There will, in all likelihood, be a great number of undeserving casualties if sensible environmental planning is not sensible enough.

Wow! Think of all the butterflies. Think of next year's hurricane season.

Not quite exactly. If I read Ruddiman correctly he ascribes 0.8C to the combined warming influence. If the cooling effect of a THC shutdown is 3.0C then that is not a balanced outcome.

Daniel - nobody, but nobody, knows what kind of weather we’ll have in fifty years. Maybe climate change will have evolved and we’ll have colder weather than today. Then again maybe it will fizzle out and we will have very similar conditions to now, or global warming will prove to be true and we will have a warmer climate. A minimal variation either way is entirely possible, but the massive global deep freeze you are looking for is far less so. But just supposing for a moment that we could find ourselves in the middle of a sudden fifty year ice age. The cause of such an event within your timescale is most likely to be associated with a large meteor impact, or a major volcanic eruption, and nothing whatsoever to do with any convoluted train of events you’ll find in IAN

I don't claim to have that knowledge. My point since starting on here has been fairly consistent - I don't believe anybody has. Edit: snowsure, I ve just read your last; you mention agreeable twice in relation to Stratos Ferric - the man must be slipping!

Well you won’t have to wait. There are those in here who can, and will, tell you exactly what’s around the corner.

Daniel, I have an advantage over you in that I am getting uncomfortably close to seeing my fiftieth August, autumn and winter, and I therefore have slightly more experience of weather than I suspect you do, but I have to tell you that your premise is simply wrong. I acknowledge that the weather I experience may be different from you or the CET area, for instance, but from memory the summers of 1976, 1985, and 1995 were either pleasantly or outstandingly warm while the following winters were notably cold. Other years have had coolish wet summers followed by warmer than usual conditions throughout the winter. In any case, your argument regarding cold winters following cool summers by necessity, seems over generalised. You might equally say that cool summers would automatically follow cold winters. And then you would get into a never-ending monorail pattern of weather that could not break out of it’s own laws of progression. This plainly is not the case. You admit yourself that June and July were warm and August is cooler. If the pattern of weather can change over the space of a month, it can obviously change over the space of a season or two. We are still some way away from accurate weather, never mind climate, prediction. Certainly too far away to be able to link August synoptics to those in December, January and February. Even the SACRA fundamentalists would have to admit that all their best planning for a freezing winter can be completely shot to pieces if some butterfly in the Amazon takes off and goes the in the wrong direction. Having said all that, you have as much right to your opinion as anyone else. Please just don’t get too carried away with unproven or simplistic methods of analysis. Edit – apologies; I see that other similar comments have been added while I was composing: this now looks like ganging up and it was certainly not meant as such.

P3, If there was a Clap Hands Smilie, I'd line them up right across the screen. Excellent work.