Chris Knight

Yes Jethro, and there you have it - purely financial. But if we called it Carbon Capture, instead, and buried high carbon plastic waste in specially designated carbon prisons, we could claim carbon credits instead, and sell our services as waste reclaimers, like we did (still do?) with nuclear waste processing. We could become the Steptoe and Son of Europe. :lol: I loved the e-on article. The last bit on Gypsum left out the chemical reaction between limestone and sulphur dioxide: CaCO3 + SO2 + 1/2 O2 + 2H2O -> CaSO4.2H2O + CO2 The rest of it seemed to be on construction waste and ash, nothing on reclaiming carbon as such.

If it were economically viable to capture carbon, we would not be recycling plastics - we would be increasing our burial of them in landfill, or dumping them in the deep ocean - after all, they are predominantly carbon-based, long-lived, mostly inert materials (we package our food in them). Ideal for capturing fossil carbon, and returning it to a quasi-fossilised state. That would buy us time for several million years, with luck, until our dumps get subducted, and get recycled through vulcanism, or some clever bacterium, fungus or arthropod evolves the capacity to turn them into biomass.

Not when we have legislated ourselves into a position where we have to use all the renewable energy we can generate to supply our everyday energy needs - it will be an unaffordable luxury to reclaim fossil carbon emissions. The expenditure is greater than the return. Plant hardwood coppices and fast growing evergreen softwood as firewood by all means, but artificial trees have nothing going for them. Pipedream!

Doesn't it need energy to capture Carbon Dioxide - the carbon footprint cost of laying pipelines to processing plants, pumps to move the gas, reactors to make the carbon dioxide inert, raw materials to react the gas with? Even bioreactors require sterile, purified reagents, and sterile water unless they are going to become infected with unwanted bacteria or other putrefying organisms. That includes the harvested Carbon Dioxide - will it be separated from the other atmospheric gases chemically - by reaction with alkalis to carbonates, perhaps, or by cryoseparation at low temperatures? All of these stages take energy - supplied by what? The hard shoulder wind farms, perhaps? During periods of calm weather? The dream sounds great, the reality is just not economically viable.

There is some documentation from the WMO, which does not seem to indicate that the LRF used AGW model predictions in 2005, but were considering incorporation in the future. At that time: It mentions that The European ENSEMBLES project: So it would appear that the GloSea model has been updated to include Greenhouse Gas concentration variables, and I would presume, the uncertainties that are understood to be associated with that measure. heres the link to the WMO page But this may not be relevant to the UK long range forecast - or is it?

Sorry DXR, I disagree. The radiation from CH regions is indistinguishable from quiet sun regions except at the higher end of the spectrum - not cooler, or darker (in infrared to visible wavelengths), unlike sunspots. The CH's are always found at both of the poles of the sun, but tend to echo earlier sunspot disturbances towards the mid latitudes, as if they are remnants of the magnetic disturbance that was previously seen as the sunspot. Towards the solar minimum, CH activity takes over from sunspots and flares, causing auroras on earth. The CH areas represent areas of open magnetic field lines - magnetic field lines that do not loop back to the sun, but go outwards through the solar system to join the interplanetary magnetic field, thus are open to releasing plasma, which makes up the particles comprising the solar wind, way out towards the earth and other planets. This is the reason that both of the poles always have coronal holes, like in a bar magnet, the central polar magnetic field does not loop back to the other pole, but goes out into space. At the end of the solar minimum, even the CH activity dies down, because there have been so few sunspots in the previous months. As solar sunspot activity picks up it becomes more confused as both sunspot and CH activity increase, and flares become the major source of auroral activity.

I Think I Have It CB - The Earth's Population Is Getting Older - More Women Surviving To An Indefinite Age - More Hot Flushes - Shucks, We Even See It Here In General Climate Change Discussion!

If this deep minimum had happened fifty years ago, when the greatest sunspot maximum of the C20 was going on, would the amateur radio movement ever have got off the ground as it did? How would it have changed society?

A Sci-Fi novel I recently became acquainted with was Fallen Angels, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn. It is available online here Here's a short quote: Are there any other good books people have come across? - I seem to remember JG Ballard wrote about various disastrous futures in the 1960s.

The author of that book, Walter A Robinson, sounds like a really experienced professor of atmospheric science. I wonder if it would be possible to get him to comment on your work, VP? His CV is here Ha Ha - not even I can read my handwriting!! :lol:

That's a strange one - re (again) co (with) gnoscere (to become aquainted) - recognising requires deja vu. I suppose they could identify novel patterns by internal matching - reflection, symmetry, chirality etc., tho. :lol:

Let's not speculate. The data was public or available to all who knew how to FTP the CRU server, it is not now, due to the intense publicity this stunt has generated. Are we richer or poorer now?

There are lots of points and quotes here, I hope that NW people view and listen to the lecture and comment on them. Don't take notice of my silly headline - it takes a quote from the lecture, but does not cover its scope. LINK

Some folk think it was broken already! Too much power in the hands of a mere mortal. Wow, Noggin, you is a MODERATOR!! Now what of climate, what has changed, since this thread was temporarily sundered. Hast the pole refrozen? Both!! Is a tenth of a degree in the last 3 months over the neutral range on the ONI 3-4 enough of an excuse for NOAA to call an "El Nino" - of course it is! (four months of negative ONI 3-4 less than -0.5 only garnered a "La Nina conditions" qualification tho. The moon remains spotless.

The cam has tilted a bit in the last few days:

Not wishing to be rude, TWS, but you are making a good case for rubbishing the temperature record from ground based stations in the UK. Not the actual results, which are important meteorological data, but the stuff that filters into the long-term record, used in climatological studies. It is a difficult area, where two different philosophies have to resort to the same data, collected historically with a single purpose in mind.

Isn't it a contraction of "MAnchego, GromIC?" (aimed at the Eastern European Market!) I love wild mushrooms, but they have been rather late in my part of the world this year. They need both warmth and rain. So far, some Agaricus and Marasmius since the end of July, both species on grass in "fairy rings", but a world away (in taste and texture) from the supermarket mushrooms.

Magic! PP, don't forget to post in the 'flu thread that the Japanese are being saved from swine flu by eating Reishi and shi*ake with their antiviral and antimicrobial properties, as mentioned by Stamets! Nice link tho.

Have you ever worked in "science" Osm? On two memorable occasions, I have had 2 different Professors visibly upset when the actual experimental results I reported to them did not confirm what they had already sent off for publication. On another occasion I was asked to get some results for a patent application they had sent off - on the basis of no prior experiment.

Except, with respect, Pete, there is no co-relation between the steady average rate of increase of a minor atmospheric component greenhouse gas (CO2), and the ups and downs of the average global temperature anomaly of the last 300 years. Any correlation here, too, is "magical", or belief-based.

We are not warm. Any anomalous temperature increase is due to lack of ice in the Arctic. Ice has the ability to keep the temperature at the freezing point of water about -1.5 deg C for sea water. Otherwise, sea water tends to equilibrate at a few degrees above freezing. There is little ice spread about because there are no strong winds in the Arctic, as has been the weather pattern there for about four years. Anomalies against a frozen or icy Arctic of 30 years ago make up the apparent warming. Just look at the red in the above image, and think what it is compared to - something different. The rest of the ocean is cool or normal, and that is 70% of the surface. Nothing to do with neutral to El Nino conditions in the central Pacific. On land we are apparently warm, although there are differences between the SSTs for instance the southern ocean and Antarctica land temperatures, and it is difficult to understand how Japan, for instance, can be surrounded by cold oceans, yet have warm land temperatures.

Ah, "balance" - either there is climate change or climate equilibrium, or it appears at some time as one or the other. With open systems, only the potential for equilibrium exists, the balance may never be reached. Hence quasi-cycles, hysteresis loops and so forth. There are obvious reasons: the earth is not homogeneous, with irregular ocean and land masses existing within various circulating air masses at different temperatures in space and time. What's more, is that the atmosphere and oceans are in constant motion, so if there are irreproducible variations, and an imperfect method of energy measurement cannot elucidate the actual ins and outs, the internal shuffling is all we really have. An approximately equal energy input is available each year to the upper atmosphere of earth. A variable amount of energy reaches variable portions of the surface during the year due to chaotically variable atmospheric chemistry, cloud and surface conditions. A variable amount of energy leaves the earth at variable surface locations each year due to variable atmospheric chemistry, clouds and surface conditions. I don't think any of this is predictable, more than a day or two ahead. I would like to see some actual mathematics from David that define the shape of the "PFM" cycles, over the shorter and longer term cyles mentioned in the book, and some evidence of HP masses shifting in synchronicity with these cycles. I too remain a sceptic.

deja vu

Apparently not:

It is politely called adjustment, Dev. If they were wildly out of whack, people would disbelieve them.