Chris Knight
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Posts posted by Chris Knight
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Some say that it isn't economically viable.
Where's the evidence- and if so, where's the evidence that it will stay that way in the future?
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.
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Yes, of course it does. But, if said 'energy' is renewable, what's the problem??
Maybe not perfection, Chris? But, surely, better than nothing at all???
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!
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I thought that was made clear enough in the article- the CO2 is to be captured and stored underground?
Some good points elsewhere in the post re. turbines, which are often less efficient than they are made out to be.
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.
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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:
As in previous years, seasonal forecasts to 6-months ahead have been generated each month using the Met Office’s 41-ensemble coupled ocean-atmosphere global seasonal prediction system (known as GloSea). GloSea is based on the HadCM3 climate model. A performance assessment of the GloSea system is provided by Graham et al., 2005. Operational forecasts are initialised with ocean and atmosphere conditions valid for the first day of the current month. Perturbations to the initial conditions are applied to the ocean component only and are based on 5 parallel ocean assimilations, generated through application of perturbed windstress. Additional instantaneous SST perturbations are applied at initial time to generate the 41 starting states required for the ensemble. The forecasts run on the ECMWF computing facility in parallel configuration with the ECMWF system2 seasonal prediction model as part of a developing European multi-model system (the European Seasonal to Interannual Prediction Project – Euro-SIP).GloSea forecasts are expressed relative to a model climatology defined for each month of the year from a set of 15-member ensemble integrations initialised at the beginning of each month over the 15-year period 1987-2001. A range of forecast products are made available to NMSs, Regional Climate Outlook Fora, UK government agencies, the public and commercial companies. In 2005, a major upgrade of the Met Office seasonal forecasting web pages was released. Products now available include the following. Forecasts for anomalies in 3-month-average 2-metre temperature and precipitation, at one-, two- and three-month leads - corresponding to months 2-4, 3-5 and 4-6 of the integration. A probabilistic format is used giving probabilities for equi-probable tercile categories and also for two outer-quintile categories (20th and 80th percentiles). In addition to these probability products, maps indicating the most probable tercile category are also provided. Forecast products for monthly-mean Sea Surface Temperature anomalies in the tropical Pacific are also made available. Products may be viewed at www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/seasonal. Verification information indicating forecast performance has been generated, using WMO guidelines, and is available on the website. Verification diagnostics used include ROC curves, ROC score maps and reliability diagrams. On the website, forecasts from the GloSea system may be compared with corresponding forecasts generated using output from the Euro-SIP multi-model forecast database, which currently includes forecast ensembles from the Met Office, ECMWF and Météo-France seasonal systems. Currently Met Office products derived from Euro-SIP comprise an unweighted combination of the Met Office GloSea forecast ensemble and the ECMWF system2 seasonal ensemble.
It mentions that The European ENSEMBLES project:
In addition to other improvements, ENSEMBLES models will include, for the first time, realistic concentrations of green house gases, solar forcing and (at initialisation time) volcanic dust. The Met Office DePreSys system, designed specifically for decadal prediction, will also be included in the ENSEMBLES multi-model. In addition to the multi-model approach, alternative (or complimentary) techniques for representing model uncertainties will be investigated. In this respect the Met Office is investigating the benefits of a perturbed parameter technique in which an ensemble is generated by using perturbed versions of the CGCM physics to generate each member. The perturbed model versions are constructed by using different settings (from within a plausible range) for a number of tuneable physics parameters. The method has been previously developed and used to generate ensemble-based probabilistic predictions of climate change (Murphy et al., 2004). Initial conditions for the ENSEMBLES multi-model will be generated using improved ocean analysis techniques and observation datasets formulated as part of the FP5 ENACT project and further developed in ENSEMBLES. Techniques for representing initial condition uncertainty will also be compared. As part of the development and assessment phase of the ENSEMBLES system the GloSea model has been updated to allow realistic green house gas concentrations and volcanic dust (at initialization time), and hindcasts have been run for the 11-year period 1991-2001. Experiments using both the operational method of ensemble initialization (see Section 1.2) and a lagged start method have been conducted. The integrations are made in 9-member ensembles from May and November start dates out to at least 12 months ahead. Runs from May 1965 and 1994 have been integrated to 10years ahead. An extended1960-2001 hindcast set will be employed in final hindcast production starting in 2007.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?
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There's lots of stuff in here:
Chapter 9 covers data availability
Chapter 16 covers Trustworthiness of Long range forecasts
In fact there's so much stuff here which should start plenty of discussions off. 23 chapters in all.
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Coronol holes are dark, cooler patches on the Sun. At solar minimum (now) they are usually found at the polar regions, but during max can be found anywhere. The solar wind associated with these holes speeds up and sometimes can reach over 800km/s - this can give auroral displays but generally at higher latitutes (say Alaska).
For those who wish to see no sunspots continuing, you'll be happy to know the coronaol hole has no correlation with sunspots.
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.
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EDIT - I have said before, but shall repeat here for those of you who missed it, that the rate of temperature increase requires an increase of around one one-thousandth of a degree Celsius per month. It's not a lot.
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! -
Being a radio amateur operator, this lack of sunspots and solar flares really is depressing. I'm glad, though, others are enjoying the blank Sun. IAt this rate, it'll be ranked amongst the unique periods of inactivity!
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?
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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:
Thor noticed and smiled. He blew a few plaintive notes on his whistle; then declaimed:"Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire."
Everyone chuckled. "That's from 'Fire and Ice,' " Thor said. "By Robert Frost."
"Frost," said "Mike. "That's appropriate."
Will Waxman grunted. "Finish the stanza," he said.
Thor stopped smiling and looked out the side window at the shimmering horizon. After a while, he continued in a voice so soft she had to strain to hear him.
"But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice."
Are there any other good books people have come across? - I seem to remember JG Ballard wrote about various disastrous futures in the 1960s.
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The leaky integrator has been linked to climate, before: book
From that, a better theoretical basis for the LI model might be Torricelli's Law which is specific formulation (from that wiki) of Bernoulli's Principle although, of course, these are about fluid dynamics and not thermodynamics.
Might be time to do the hard work and link it formally.
Yikes.
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
Yeah - maybe a bit of a mistype by me. There are good at classifying patterns, that they haven't seen before, according to some internal classification scheme. For instance, your handwriting almost certainly hasn't been seen by, say, my neural network, but I bet it would do a good job at reading it.
I'll post an example, later.
Ha Ha - not even I can read my handwriting!! :lol:
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recognising patterns that they haven't seen before
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:
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The data is being made public so there is no reason to argue now. Let's all speculate about what's in the data instead.
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?
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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.
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Back to normal, then. Thank goodness. I thought I'd broken something!
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.
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The cam has tilted a bit in the last few days:
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The problem is that site location always has to be a tradeoff between getting the best possible location and practicality issues (like land ownership, setting up the site, maintaining it etc). In addition particularly in urban areas it is often impossible to find a site that doesn't have at least one or two minor location issues- as I think Paul's post refers to above.
Even if you find a perfect site you are always going to get local climate influences from topography and nearby settlements. For example, Abbotsinch (Glasgow Airport) used to be the main site that represented Glasgow, but it closed in 1999 and since then Bishopton has generally been used. Both sites are easily Met Office standard, but Bishopton is prone to radiative warming as it is nearer the west coast and higher up, while Abbotsinch can be something of a frost hollow at night, and can also be warmed by Glasgow city when a slight east wind blows.
It is true that there is a lot of money around in meteorology but you need to bear in mind that there are a lot of stations across the UK, so it isn't a case of forking out just a little bit of money for one or two stations- if the Met Office et al. were to go around buying up land for the "perfect" site locations, they'd end up incurring very heavy costs in terms of both time and money. Beyond a certain point (e.g. making sure that every official site fits the Met Office criteria at absolute minimum) the cost-benefit ratio is considered poor relative to other ways in which the time and money can be used.
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.
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was that meant to be a slip of the tongue there Chris?
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.
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This is a very interesting presentation indeed: -
http://permaculture.org.au/2009/07/28/six-ways-to-save-the-planet-with-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. -
It's a miracle, really, that any science of any sort ever gets done anywhere....all scientific data being, as we know, fudged or lied about, or incompetently gathered, or whatever....
All people currently working in science everywhere must be sacked, as they are all clearly corrupt and/or incompetent. We need a clean sweep, we'll start afresh. Bit like Pol Pot, as far as I remember - I think he called it "Year Zero".
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.
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But, a method of causation observable with a lab is arguably still a few steps ahead of something which has no method of causation attached to it at all?
A good question at this point might be: how come GHGs absorb/re-emit longwave radiation during laboratory-based spectroscopic analyses but, according to some, are transparent to those very same frequencies when they [said GHGs] are floating around in the atmosphere? Do CO2, CH4 and H2O etc. gain some 'magical' quality during the process of being captured?
As I've tried to say before, I accept Milankovitch cycles, Solar cycles, plate tectonics and GHG-buildup as climate-forcers. But, as far as lunar-gravitation and Mercury's geomagnetic field are concerned, I'll need more than a correlation...
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.
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As promised a thread to discuss why we have warmed so much.
Some might not think it exceptional or even noteworthy to have had such a warm globe recently, but I do. This isn't to discuss regional variations, as there will always be regional variations but rather as was said on a different thread recetnly the heat budget of the earth.
So what do I mean my warming.
- Well we've had the warmest oceans on record in June according to NOAA.
- GISS/HAD/NCDC have had the last 3 months all in the top 5 months category with NCDC and GISS 2nd warmest on record, HADCRU 3rd warmest, RSS MSU has recently come in as the 3rd warmest and even hot off the press UAH has finally joined the party with the 2nd warmest July on record.
- I am sure the other July updates will all be in the very hot category.
- The Lower troposphere according to the sats also recorded it's warmest day ever recorded in it's history last month.
- UAH and MSU have recorded the biggest monthly increase every recorded etc etc.
Remember these are all Global figures.
So given all this why ?.
The obvious answer is ENSO as given by Watts, however there is normally a 3 month time lag for ENSO and 3 months ago we were not even in an ENSO. Going by the CPC ENSO figures we only entered ENSO in July at 0.6, in June we were only at 0.2, May was -0.1.
Enso is still only weak at the moment even going by the weekly figures, (I fully expect it to get stronger but that is several months away).
So If it is ENSO then we have a very short lag and some incredibly warm temperatures which certainly didn't happen in the past. Indeed temperatures of this level have never been recorded from a weak ENSO before.
Is it down to Solar ?......I think that's an easy answer "NO" unless you think that the heat of the last solar maximum can be hidden and not recorded somewhere suddenly to pop out now across the globe.
Is is down to a particularly positive AO.PDO.NAO etc etc, Again "NO" not that I have seen anywhere but I am happy to be shown otherwise.
Is it even down to Rogers magnatism or David's PFM ? Again they might be able to answer this but I doubt this very much. I think the claim re gravitional effects was of cooling throughout 2008/2009.
Is it down to UHI's or something, again the answer is likely to be no, as we are in a recession, global and regional industrial output has actually gone down.
Maybe it's down to rogue data, but again that would require rogue data throughout all the data sets, across satelites, land measurments etc which is unbelivable.
Many know the theory that I subscribe to about GHG induced backgroud trend warming, which would mean that a weak El Nino would raise temps more now than 10 or 20 years ago and this might play a part.
However Even I admit that this amount of trend warming is beyond what I thought. (I honestly thought we would have to wait until late Autumn to get these kinds of global temperature anomalies.)
I would really like to hear peoples views on this.
BTW I am not trying to pretend that a few months of exceptionally high temps are a new trend for Global warming, you need years to prove that. But there does need to be a driver for a few months of exceptionally high temps and by all accounts excluding AGW we should really be cooling.
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.
- Well we've had the warmest oceans on record in June according to NOAA.
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Yes Chris, but that's all just internal shuffling. It doesn't affect the overall energy balance; it neither adds heat nor subtacts it from the system. It just creates a more circuitous route towards equilibrium?
If anyone can demonstrate that lunar gravitational-shifting of air masses adds energy to or subtracts energy from the system, then fairy snuff...
PS: I remain to be convinced that lunar effects actually do move 'selected' airmasses up and down the globe as David claims. That said, I treat many of the more extreme claims of the AGW camp in just the same way...I am a sceptic!
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.
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What, you mean to suggest the people concerned get together to make sure the trends are credibly the same? Are you being serious?
deja vu
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What, you mean to suggest the people concerned get together to make sure the trends are credibly the same? Are you being serious?
Apparently not:
UAH have obviously been thrown out of the club then for being naughty.
Shucks, We Even See It Here In General Climate Change Discussion! 
(aimed at the Eastern European Market!)
Carbon Capture And Storage
in Space, Science & nature
Posted · Edited by 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.