Conclusive physical evidence for AWG?

[bw]

But what about the annual increase of atmospheric CO2 - which since 1995
or so has averaged about 17.6 gigatons per year while fossil fuel burning
accounts for more than that?

I mis-spoke earlier. I don't dispute the fossil fuel accounting for much of
the added atmospheric CO2 increase.

HadCRUT-3v is good enough to be cited favorably by The Register in their
"A Tale of Two Thermometers" article attempting to dispute AGW
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/).

Have a look at a graph of HadCRUT-3v, in the following link actually
provided by The Register in that article:

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/themi/g17.htm

Why did you pick 1908? HadCRUT-3v has 1908 being 3rd coldest year on
record since starting with 1850, behind 1911 and 1909.

Although 2008 was coolest since 2000, it was .881 degree C warmer than
1998 according to HadCRUT-3v.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

I now have time to examine Hadley more closely.
I picked 1908 only to illustrate a simple 100 year comparison. I don't trust
GISS data, it's easy to access, though.
A substantial response will take some time, I am examining the J. Geo. Res.
2007 paper by Pielke et al regarding the reliability of surface temp data. I
also will examine the Le Quere site, it looks very interesting.

 

[[email protected]]

I don't need to invent processes. I leave that to the AGW crowd.

Actually, you do. The only thing that is producing a dramatic change
in CO2 level at the moment is our burning fossil carbon. Summer/winter
changes in vegetation show up in the northern hemisphere CO2 records -
less than 10ppm at Mauna Loa - so if you want to imagine fluctuations
that would be masked by the 40-year lag, you need to imagine some
mechanism that could create them.

We currently have a rising CO2 level. The question is is this
atypical? Or has it happened before? If CO2 did vary during the period
where we only know the long term average it would be relevant.

In other words, you don't believe that our burning loads of coal and
oil is an adequate explanation of the current rise in CO2 level. The
accountants assure us that we are burning enough carbon to explain
about twice the current rate of rise in atmopsheric CO2, but you don't
want to beleive them

The minor facts I keep digging up, and that you would rather ignore,
do cast doubt on the validity of some of the AGW data.

What "minor fact" are you asserting that I want to ignore?

Yes my browsing is indiscriminate, I even look at realclimate.org.
Unlike you I am actually interested in both sides of the argument.

I'm interested enough. I dive into denialists web-sites quite often,
in the hope that they will have screwed up obviously enough to give me
counter-information that I can squeeze into a paragraph or two and
drop on one of our resident denialists. It's not a particularly
rewarding task - one denialist being rude about the hockey-stick curve
is one thing, but a hundred of them making the same mistakes is
decidedly boring.

As you know I have difficulties with the Mauna Loa location but the
overall data is broadly consistent with other sites such as Barrow,
Antartica, and Samoa. Note consistancy and accuracy are different
things, the results could be consistantly wrong, a point you made
about German chemical analysis a while back.

It is unlikely. Pretty much all the early work was done with off-the-
shelf industrial gas analysers - Mauna Loa used the same type of
Siemens unit for nearly fifty years - and they have to be stable and
reliable.

The earlier wet-way chemical analyses require rather more skill, and
took appreciably longer. Even so, the main problem with the earlier
data is probably where and when the air was sampled, rather than the
analytical technique. The first instrumental measurements were
bedevilled by exactly that problem, which is why the first permanent
monitoring stations are where they are.

 

[[email protected]]

[email protected] wrote:
There are biofuels that do make sense - Brazil's ethanol from sugar
cane apparently does reduce fossil carbon emissions - and there
schemes to exploit plants that grow on marginal land (that is useless
for growing food) which make even more sense, if they can be ever made
to work.
This paper cited by Martin in the earlier discussion
says ethanol from cane sugar is a loser too:
http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/Biofuels/NRRethanol.2005.pdf
  "[...]sugarcane is a more efficient feedstock for

 >>    ethanol production than corn grain (Pimentel and Pimentel,
 >>    1996). However, the energy balance was negative[...]

That was true during that period when oil was cheaper. When the price of
oil rises then their C4 sugar cane to ethanol method is reasonable. And
although there are environmental problems with it there is a significant
net energy gain. The Brazilian processes have improved since that paper
was written. The same is not true of ethanol from grain.

That 2005 paper says the sugarcane ethanol energy balance was
negative.  So, making it destroys energy while trashing the
environment, and--at least in their case--destroying capital too.
(That paper says the US *subsidy* on corn ethanol was $3/gallon
in 2003.)

This doesn't exactly fit with Brazil using sugar-cane ethanol to
replace the oil they couldn't afford to import.
If the balance was negative, where was the extra energy coming from?
Wikipedia suggests that the extra energy came from burning what was
left of the suggar-cane after the sugar-syrup had been extracted.

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

"Brazil’s 30-year-old ethanol fuel program uses modern equipment and
cheap sugar cane as feedstock, the residual cane-waste (bagasse) is
used to process heat and power, which results in a very competitive
price and also in a high energy balance (output energy/input energy),
which varies from 8.3 for average conditions to 10.2 for best practice
production.[3][8]"

Gore's mantra in 1998 was that money and magic would fix the
negative balance.  It hasn't.

Yet. Dubbya was long on magic, but short on money to be spent on
potential competitors for the oil producers and importers who financed
his election campaigns

AFAICT a basic problem with all bioethanol is that, whatever
the feedstock and fermentation process, fermentation stops
around 10% concentration, and it takes 3x distillations to purge
the 90% that's water.  Distillation is energy intensive, ergo
the negative energy balance.

It doesn't follow. You need heat to boil the water ethanol mixture,
but you get most of it back when you condense the water-enriched and
ethanol-enriched fractions; counter-current heat-exchangers and the
occasiona heat pump can help a lot.

Plants capture only about 0.1% of the sun they receive; even
10% efficient photovoltaics are 100x better.  Fermenting and
distilling ethanol just makes things worse.

Photovoltaics do seem to be the way to go, but they do require
matching investment in over-night energy storage. Fuel tanks of full
of ethanol are cheaper.

I stand corrected on Brazil's motives.  But they're often held
up as an ethanol example to emulate, and they should not be.

Perhaps not, but ethanol from sugar cane is a great deal less stupid
than ethanol from corn.

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

"A 2006 University of Minnesota study shows a positive energy balance
for ethanol of around 25%, but also highlights many environmental and
economic limitations affecting the viability of corn ethanol.[7]"

which doesn't look too good against the Brazilian "high energy balance
(output energy/input energy), which varies from 8.3 for average
conditions to 10.2 for best practice production"

 

[[email protected]]

So you are happy for the Amazon rain forest to be torched because it
is marginal land?

As marginal land it wouldn't be much use for growing sugar-cane

How about the rain forest in Indonesia for palm oil
for bio fuel?

At the moment the Indonesians are cutting down their rain forest for
the timber. Planting palm trees for palm oil would be a small step in
the right direction. Not cutting down the rain forest in the first
place would be a much better idea, but Indonesia is one of the more
corrupt countries around

http://www.worldaudit.org/corruption.htm

at 115 in a list that run s from 1 to 149.

 

[Don Klipstein]

Why did you pick 1908? HadCRUT-3v has 1908 being 3rd coldest year on
record since starting with 1850, behind 1911 and 1909.

Although 2008 was coolest since 2000, it was .881 degree C warmer than
1998 according to HadCRUT-3v.

Typo on my part - I meant to say .881 degree C warmer than 1908.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

 

[Don Klipstein]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2009 16:29:39 -0800 (PST), [email protected] wrote:


So you are happy for the Amazon rain forest to be torched because it
is marginal land? How about the rain forest in Indonesia for palm oil
for bio fuel?

Somehow, to me "marginal land" means land that switchgrass can be grown
on but not crops that currently have lobbyists.

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

 

[Don Klipstein]

How well do we know the base line 280ppmv CO2 level?

The figure is based on ice core measurments. These measurements don't
give a point reading per year. The data is more an average over
several years. The trapped air is from 40 to 80 years after the ice
was formed. It seems reasonable to assume it is actually a mix of air
from when the ice formed to 40 to 80 years later. That's a big time
constant.

We have no idea how CO2 varied in the short term historically. There
are chemical measurments from 1810 onwards showing large fluctuations
in atmospheric CO2 although the reliability of this data is
questioned.

It sure seems that the ice core data has close to 280 ppmv being the
usual story for every discernable point in time from a few thousand years
ago to the Industrial Revolution.

It appears to me that chemically-determined measurements of CO2
concentration in surface-level air over land had their main failure being
from ground-level air on or shortly downwind from land with a lot of
biological activity intermittently having CO2 concentration deviating
greatly from "atmospheric baseline", usually upwards when lack of sunlight
disfavors both convective mixing and plants removing CO2 emitted by other
life forms. It appears to me that the "Wisconsin Tower" tells that story
well.

Should some of those chemical analysis results have date and time and
weather condition notation for where the air samples were taken, then ones
with sample time of day and weather conditions favoring convection
(or time of year and location favoring low local/upwind surface-level
contamination) would be known to be the good ones.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html#replication

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

 

[Don Klipstein]

Plants capture only about 0.1% of the sun they receive; even
10% efficient photovoltaics are 100x better.

Where do you get that figure? Is that an upper limit or an average for
all plants on this planet? What is this figure for - ratio to theoretical
of 240 or 1366 W/m^2 for annual production of biomass per square meter?
Or what?

I am aware that conversion of light energy to chemical energy by
phoetchemicals in plants is limited to close to 10% due to limited
spectral ranges of good reception and a loss similar to the Stokes Loss
for reception of wavelengths shorter than the longest that are useful.

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

 

[Don Klipstein]

Do you imagine that "once the oil is pumped out" there is an oil-
pumped-out-sized cavity in the salt dome?

Probably less - the ground above the cavity would sink at least a little
and the earth below the cavity would rise at least a little. And the oil
could be in spaces between grains of sand or rocks of some size for all I
know. Possibly there may be need to do a little work removing sand or
rubble of some sort in order to have the needed cavity.

Then dump in vitrified high level waste, plug up the borehole with
concrete going a kilometer or two deep (in case of SW USA), and the stuff
is out of way of causing harm for 10's of millions of years or until it
decays to less of a problem (should take much less time than that) or the
"eyes in the sky" go out of commission.

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

 

[Richard Henry]

In <[email protected]>,








  Probably less - the ground above the cavity would sink at least a little
and the earth below the cavity would rise at least a little.  And the oil
could be in spaces between grains of sand or rocks of some size for all I
know.  Possibly there may be need to do a little work removing sand or
rubble of some sort in order to have the needed cavity.

  Then dump in vitrified high level waste, plug up the borehole with
concrete going a kilometer or two deep (in case of SW USA), and the stuff
is out of way of causing harm for 10's of millions of years or until it
decays to less of a problem (should take much less time than that) or the
"eyes in the sky" go out of commission.

 - Don Klipstein ([email protected])- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

When you wring the water out of a wet sponge, is there suddenly a
wrung-water-sized hole in the sponge?

 

[JosephKK]

On Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:24:23 +0000, Martin Brown
[snip]

The oldest reference I can find to lumped thermal and self heating SPICE
models goes a lot further back in time than I imagined when I made the
comment. It even includes some basic suggestions for how to do it
longhand with sample networks as requested. It is in Intusofts
newsletter for July 1988!

http://www.intusoft.com/nlpdf/nl10.pdf

For IS-SPICE/386 with the tagline "faster than a VAX 11/780"
(a claim I find rather surprising and a bit unlikely)

Except it's true. Virtually all Spice variants on a modern PC run
much faster, as in at least an order of magnitude, than on a VAX
11/780.

Poxy hell. I own a copy of IS_SPICE/386-4. The year is about right,
i may even have an original paper copy of that issue.

...Jim Thompson

But the question is: Did a 1988 PC (386 16MHz with IS_SPICE/386 on
MSDOS outrun a VAX11/780 with bare Berkeley PSICE 2G6 (same base as
IS_SPICE) on VMS or Ultrix.

 

[Jon Kirwan]

Where do you get that figure? Is that an upper limit or an average for
all plants on this planet? What is this figure for - ratio to theoretical
of 240 or 1366 W/m^2 for annual production of biomass per square meter?
Or what?

With Earth's albedo averageing some 30% being bounced back out, it's
more like only 1000 W/m^2 and that's at the equator and assuming that
all wavelengths are used and it's mid-day.

I am aware that conversion of light energy to chemical energy by
phoetchemicals in plants is limited to close to 10% due to limited
spectral ranges of good reception and a loss similar to the Stokes Loss
for reception of wavelengths shorter than the longest that are useful.

Perhaps James might try and put it in context with the following:
http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/30130

I'd be interested in that.

Also, I'm kind of glad there are plants here. I kinda need them.

Jon

 

[Raveninghorde]

It sure seems that the ice core data has close to 280 ppmv being the
usual story for every discernable point in time from a few thousand years
ago to the Industrial Revolution.

It appears to me that chemically-determined measurements of CO2
concentration in surface-level air over land had their main failure being
from ground-level air on or shortly downwind from land with a lot of
biological activity intermittently having CO2 concentration deviating
greatly from "atmospheric baseline", usually upwards when lack of sunlight
disfavors both convective mixing and plants removing CO2 emitted by other
life forms. It appears to me that the "Wisconsin Tower" tells that story
well.

Should some of those chemical analysis results have date and time and
weather condition notation for where the air samples were taken, then ones
with sample time of day and weather conditions favoring convection
(or time of year and location favoring low local/upwind surface-level
contamination) would be known to be the good ones.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html#replication

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

It will be interesting to compare data from AIRS with the current
measurements at Mauna Loa, Barrow etc.

http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/story_archive/Pre-Release_CO2_Data_Available/

 

[Martin Brown]

On Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:24:23 +0000, Martin Brown
[snip]
For IS-SPICE/386 with the tagline "faster than a VAX 11/780"
(a claim I find rather surprising and a bit unlikely)

Except it's true. Virtually all Spice variants on a modern PC run
much faster, as in at least an order of magnitude, than on a VAX
11/780.

Poxy hell. I own a copy of IS_SPICE/386-4. The year is about right,
i may even have an original paper copy of that issue.

...Jim Thompson

Maybe a collectors item by now if in mint condition...

But the question is: Did a 1988 PC (386 16MHz with IS_SPICE/386 on
MSDOS outrun a VAX11/780 with bare Berkeley PSICE 2G6 (same base as
IS_SPICE) on VMS or Ultrix.

It seems on paper at least that I have fonder memories of the good old
VAX 11/780 than are entirely justified. It was a long time ago in my
defence.

According to netlib on drystone MIPS the 386 at 2.5-20MIPS was well
ahead of the VAX 11/780 and on floating point the 386/387 20MHz combo at
130kFLOPs was just ahead of the VAX 11/780 FPA at 110kFLOPS (source
netlib linpack). And at 16 MHZ they were about equal on LinPack.

http://www.depi.itch.edu.mx/apacheco/asm/Intel_cpus.htm
http://www.netlib.org/performance/html/PDSbrowse.html

It doesn't accord with my recollection in real life on large floating
point arrays where the 386 only became really competitive for floating
point when paired with the Weitek 3167 or the later and cheaper Cyrix
cloned x87. And the 32bit toolset on the early 386 PCs was crude
compared to VAX VMS development environments.

Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[JosephKK]

On Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:24:23 +0000, Martin Brown

[snip]

The oldest reference I can find to lumped thermal and self heating SPICE
models goes a lot further back in time than I imagined when I made the
comment. It even includes some basic suggestions for how to do it
longhand with sample networks as requested. It is in Intusofts
newsletter for July 1988!

http://www.intusoft.com/nlpdf/nl10.pdf

For IS-SPICE/386 with the tagline "faster than a VAX 11/780"
(a claim I find rather surprising and a bit unlikely)

Except it's true. Virtually all Spice variants on a modern PC run
much faster, as in at least an order of magnitude, than on a VAX
11/780.


Regards,
Martin Brown

Poxy hell. I own a copy of IS_SPICE/386-4. The year is about right,
i may even have an original paper copy of that issue.


...Jim Thompson

But the question is: Did a 1988 PC (386 16MHz with IS_SPICE/386 on
MSDOS outrun a VAX11/780 with bare Berkeley PSICE 2G6 (same base as
IS_SPICE) on VMS or Ultrix.

You seem to have forgotten that there was a (387) math co-processor.

...Jim Thompson

Yes and no. You are right about it being a separate chip. The
program would refuse to run without one, it even refused SW emulation
of one (with good reason). So if it ran, the coprocessor was
physically present. It required a DOS extender as well, you remember
those don't you?

 

[Charlie E.]

...

Nothing exists that remotely resembles this "map". Your analogy
falls apart from the start. If you want to get off the bus and start
walking backwards, go ahead. Don't expect the rest of us to
buy into your fantasy.

Actually, some politicos take out some scribbled on paper, and says
"This freeway ends in a brick wall!" and the driver says "You want to
sit down back there..."

There ain't no map. There are some computer generated fantasies and a
lot of political power grabbing going on, but no map.

Charlie

 

[Charlie E.]

Has anybody around here ever seen SPICE predict a component failure? I
have not found such a feature. If someone here has, please tell me
where to find that versions of SPICE. Send me a link to the input
file of the simulation as well, i want to see the device models.

It is called Smoke Test, and is a part of the Advanced Analysis
package for PSpice, versions 10.3 and beyond.

You will find that there are additions to the device models that add
limits of voltage, amperage and power to many components.

Charlie

 

[Martin Brown]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:35:00 -0700, Jim Thompson

On Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:24:23 +0000, Martin Brown

[snip]
The oldest reference I can find to lumped thermal and self heating SPICE
models goes a lot further back in time than I imagined when I made the
comment. It even includes some basic suggestions for how to do it
longhand with sample networks as requested. It is in Intusofts
newsletter for July 1988!

http://www.intusoft.com/nlpdf/nl10.pdf

For IS-SPICE/386 with the tagline "faster than a VAX 11/780"
(a claim I find rather surprising and a bit unlikely)
Except it's true. Virtually all Spice variants on a modern PC run
much faster, as in at least an order of magnitude, than on a VAX
11/780.

Regards,
Martin Brown
Poxy hell. I own a copy of IS_SPICE/386-4. The year is about right,
i may even have an original paper copy of that issue.

...Jim Thompson
But the question is: Did a 1988 PC (386 16MHz with IS_SPICE/386 on
MSDOS outrun a VAX11/780 with bare Berkeley PSICE 2G6 (same base as
IS_SPICE) on VMS or Ultrix.

You seem to have forgotten that there was a (387) math co-processor.

...Jim Thompson

The floating point was still pretty laggardly compared to the VAX FP.
however you are right on MIPS the 386 even at 16MHz was nearly twice as
fast as a VAX 11/780. Although it never felt that way...

Yes and no. You are right about it being a separate chip. The
program would refuse to run without one, it even refused SW emulation
of one (with good reason). So if it ran, the coprocessor was
physically present. It required a DOS extender as well, you remember
those don't you?

From about 1989 onwards 32 bit floating point code would run twice as
fast by using the oddly implemented Weitek 3167 EMC instead. It was
neither pin compatible nor code compatible but it was twice as fast for
single precision reals and about the same for doubles.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/3167/

Later on Cyrix did a cheaper faster pin compatible x87 clone. The spec
for that uncovered various minor defects in the Intel implementation.

I found a webpage that describes their rough and ready performance:
http://www.weitek.com/textual/products/wtl3167.html

Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[[email protected]]

Actually, some politicos take out some scribbled on paper, and says
"This freeway ends in a brick wall!" and the driver says "You want to
sit down back there..."  

There ain't no map.  There are some computer generated fantasies and a
lot of political power grabbing going on, but no map.

This was always a pretty terrible analogy, If anybody in our society
can be seen as "the bus driver" it is the politicians, and some years
ago they set up the IPCC, to take the rather complicated and tentative
map that the climatologists had been putting together, and annotate it
with warning notes - in big letters that everybody could read.

Setting up the IPCC was an example of politicians acting responsibly,
not any kind of power grab.

Scientists have been working on that map for about fifty years now. It
is still pretty rough, and we can't forecast the small hills and
valleys that are going to show up over the next few years. What we can
say is that if we keep on going the way we are, the road is going to
get to pretty horrible in another twenty or thirty years, and there
are a couple of huge cliffs further down the road which could entirely
wreck the bus and kill pretty much everybody on board.

 

[Raveninghorde]

This was always a pretty terrible analogy, If anybody in our society
can be seen as "the bus driver" it is the politicians, and some years
ago they set up the IPCC, to take the rather complicated and tentative
map that the climatologists had been putting together, and annotate it
with warning notes - in big letters that everybody could read.

Setting up the IPCC was an example of politicians acting responsibly,
not any kind of power grab.

Scientists have been working on that map for about fifty years now. It
is still pretty rough, and we can't forecast the small hills and
valleys that are going to show up over the next few years. What we can
say is that if we keep on going the way we are, the road is going to
get to pretty horrible in another twenty or thirty years, and there
are a couple of huge cliffs further down the road which could entirely
wreck the bus and kill pretty much everybody on board.

You like the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/11/climate-change-misleading-claims

/quote

The Met Office Hadley Centre, one of the most prestigious research
facilities in the world, says recent "apocalyptic predictions" about
Arctic ice melt and soaring temperatures are as bad as claims that
global warming does not exist.

/end quote

So claiming huge cliffs ahead is bad science.