Forum Index > Public Lands Stewardship > Global Warming
 This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies.
Previous :: Next Topic
Author Message
Sculpin
Member
Member


Joined: 23 Apr 2015
Posts: 1376 | TRs | Pics
Sculpin
Member
PostThu Mar 14, 2019 9:22 am 
drm wrote:
The NASA-funded research was published recently in the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Research Letters.
Can you please post a link to the paper so that I don't have to go looking for it? Thanks in advance.

Between every two pines is a doorway to the new world. - John Muir
Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
MtnGoat
Member
Member


Joined: 17 Dec 2001
Posts: 11992 | TRs | Pics
Location: Lyle, WA
MtnGoat
Member
PostThu Mar 14, 2019 9:42 am 

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
MtnGoat
Member
Member


Joined: 17 Dec 2001
Posts: 11992 | TRs | Pics
Location: Lyle, WA
MtnGoat
Member
PostThu Mar 14, 2019 9:44 am 

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
drm
Member
Member


Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 1376 | TRs | Pics
Location: The Dalles, OR
drm
Member
PostThu Mar 14, 2019 11:31 am 
Regarding nuclear power, I think it's worth pointing out that it very much is a part of the plans for addressing climate change, just not so much in the US. While I'm not a big supporter, the strongest case for it is in countries where significant populations do not have access, or adequate access, to electricity, and they need new sources of power, and for whatever reason, wind and solar are not available. I think India and China and others are building such plants. Whether or not you think that is a good idea, it is being done, and we will see how it works out, how long it takes to bring that online and what the costs work out to be, including in countries with no anti-nuclear politics. In the industrialized countries we mostly need to replace how we get energy, and while I agree it is wrong to shut down nuclear plants while especially coal sources are still in operation, and fossil fuels in general, the time and cost to nuclear means that other sources of non-fossil fuel make more sense for building from scratch to replace fossil. I have constantly heard about limitations in how much wind and sun we can integrate into the grid, followed by case studies of blowing right past those limitations. The biggest limitations wind and solar face in the US now are political: the land they require and the transmission lines needed to connect them to demand. So if you think the only thing holding back nuclear in the US is politics, get in line. Sculpin - Sorry I didn't save the link but you can easily search using the phrase I gave and find reports on it.

Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
MtnGoat
Member
Member


Joined: 17 Dec 2001
Posts: 11992 | TRs | Pics
Location: Lyle, WA
MtnGoat
Member
PostThu Mar 14, 2019 12:06 pm 
Not available for whatever reason...like night or the wind ceases. There is a reason civilization left wind and solar behind long ago. A power grid is worse than useless without 24/7/365 full capacity generation. The time and cost of nuclear is driven by regulatory policies and is an artificial barrier which can be changed with legislation changes. It makes zero sense to waste money (and thus footprint) on sporadic sources requiring full backup at all times to begin with. The biggest limitations of wind and solar are...reality and it's costs. The political opposition flows from those facts. All of this ****ery over a non issue, to serve folk's ideals when they won't even slash their own standards of living to live what they claim to believe. What a total waste of everyone's time, energy, and resources.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
Anne Elk
BrontosaurusTheorist



Joined: 07 Sep 2018
Posts: 2410 | TRs | Pics
Location: Seattle
Anne Elk
BrontosaurusTheorist
PostThu Mar 14, 2019 1:14 pm 
One element that hasn't been discussed here, and seems to get short shrift in the climate debates, is the impact of worldwide deforestation; it came to mind as several posts here were mentioning water cycles - https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-deforestation-affecting-global-water-cycles-climate-change

"There are yahoos out there. It’s why we can’t have nice things." - Tom Mahood
Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
Sculpin
Member
Member


Joined: 23 Apr 2015
Posts: 1376 | TRs | Pics
Sculpin
Member
PostFri Mar 15, 2019 7:54 am 
drm wrote:
Sculpin - Sorry I didn't save the link but you can easily search using the phrase I gave and find reports on it
I'm not detecting much interest in the science from you. Here is the link: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2008GL035333 This paper does nothing to answer the pertinent questions. Specifically, negative water vapor feedback is hypothesized as part of a theory known as "adaptive iris." One potential mechanism for that is enhanced heat loss from tropical thunderstorms, which can extend out into space. Dessler et al basically show that in locations where the climate warms, oceans evaporate faster. I don't mean to make it sound trivial because any findings based upon measurement data become the gold standard and result in incremental progress, and the faster evaporation is baked into climate model projections. But it does nothing to elucidate the stabilization mechanisms that keep our global average temperature tolerable for life, which is the question that interests skeptics.

Between every two pines is a doorway to the new world. - John Muir
Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
drm
Member
Member


Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 1376 | TRs | Pics
Location: The Dalles, OR
drm
Member
PostFri Mar 15, 2019 9:00 am 
I think the issue on the previous page was water vapor and what we know about it wrt climate change. You said that this statement: "changes in [water vapor] concentration [are] also considered to be a result of climate feedbacks related to the warming of the atmosphere rather than a direct result of industrialization" had no basis in science, which is not true. Everybody, skeptics and all, are interested in how we keep temperatures tolerable for life, as you say. But it wasn't what we were discussing then.

Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
Parked Out
Member
Member


Joined: 18 Sep 2011
Posts: 508 | TRs | Pics
Location: Port Angeles, WA
Parked Out
Member
PostFri Mar 15, 2019 1:54 pm 
Anne Elk wrote:
One element that hasn't been discussed here, and seems to get short shrift in the climate debates, is the impact of worldwide deforestation; it came to mind as several posts here were mentioning water cycles - https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-deforestation-affecting-global-water-cycles-climate-change
It actually looks like forest cover at the global scale is going in the other direction: https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offset.html In addition to the net growth of forested land, leaf area index (a measure of green leaf area per unit of ground surface) has increased by an area about twice the size of the contiguous US over the past 30 years or so: https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offset.html https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth So often the media likes to include a photo of some bleak, lifeless landscape to accompany their latest climate apocalypse story - it's very misleading. Apparently about 10% of atmospheric water vapor comes from plant transpiration, so I wonder if increasing vegetation is having its own feedback effect? Who knows.

John
Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
Parked Out
Member
Member


Joined: 18 Sep 2011
Posts: 508 | TRs | Pics
Location: Port Angeles, WA
Parked Out
Member
PostFri Mar 15, 2019 2:37 pm 
MtnGoat wrote:
It makes zero sense to waste money (and thus footprint) on sporadic sources requiring full backup at all times to begin with. The biggest limitations of wind and solar are...reality and it's costs. The political opposition flows from those facts.
100% agreed. Intermittency and the low energy density of wind & solar make these sources non-starters from the get-go. A high-penetration Mark Jacobson-style wind-water-solar scheme like the Green New Deal envisions would be a massive industrial undertaking and probably create bigger problems than any it happened to solve. Here's a critique of Jacobson's specific plan for New York State that gives you an idea of the absurdity: https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/critique-100-percent-renewable-energy-new-york-plan

John
Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
drm
Member
Member


Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 1376 | TRs | Pics
Location: The Dalles, OR
drm
Member
PostFri Mar 15, 2019 3:58 pm 
Parked Out wrote:
Apparently about 10% of atmospheric water vapor comes from plant transpiration, so I wonder if increasing vegetation is having its own feedback effect?
You can't have more than 100% relative humidity or it will rain. The amount of water that constitutes 100% humidity goes up with temperature, so you can only have more water in the atmosphere if something else, like long-lasting greenhouse gases (not short-lasting ones like water), forces the temperature up, allowing the atmosphere to hold more water. So if there is increased transpiration from more plants (due to increased agriculture from irrigation generally), it would just rain more, other things being equal. This is exactly what happens in rainforests - they cycle their own water. I don't know if there are any ag areas that do this or not. Agriculture has definitely expanded the acreage under green cover due to irrigation, but it isn't there year round, it gets cut. And it is a very shallow height, unlike thick forests, whose canopy is very high.

Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
Randito
Snarky Member



Joined: 27 Jul 2008
Posts: 9495 | TRs | Pics
Location: Bellevue at the moment.
Randito
Snarky Member
PostFri Mar 15, 2019 5:54 pm 
I'm entertained by the folks that choose either/or scenarios. E.g. favoring nuclear over solar or vice versa. Meanwhile across the Pacific, China is just moving forward so they can keep growing their economy. They have 46 operating nuclear plants, with 11 under construction with 43 GW or current capacity and 11 more coming online. At the same time they have built 174 GW of solar power and 174 GW of wind capacity. They have canceled construction 259 GW of coal plant generation capacity. I don't know that they canceled the coal plants because of CO2 emissions concerns or just from plain old smog considerations. But the dense smog outbreaks that used envelope their major cities have diminished. Maybe it's time for the USA to stop bickering like a Seattle city council public meeting and start building for the future.

Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
Parked Out
Member
Member


Joined: 18 Sep 2011
Posts: 508 | TRs | Pics
Location: Port Angeles, WA
Parked Out
Member
PostFri Mar 15, 2019 7:45 pm 
drm wrote:
You can't have more than 100% relative humidity or it will rain. The amount of water that constitutes 100% humidity goes up with temperature, so you can only have more water in the atmosphere if something else, like long-lasting greenhouse gases (not short-lasting ones like water), forces the temperature up, allowing the atmosphere to hold more water.
But below saturation, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere isn't just a function of temperature, otherwise a map of the world by average humidity would closely resemble a map of the world by average temperature. So hypothetically, if the presence (vs the absence) of vegetation increased the average amount of water vapor by 10%, the IR radiation absorbed by that increase would constitute a radiative forcing, right?

John
Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
Sculpin
Member
Member


Joined: 23 Apr 2015
Posts: 1376 | TRs | Pics
Sculpin
Member
PostSat Mar 16, 2019 7:37 am 
drm wrote:
I think the issue on the previous page was water vapor and what we know about it wrt climate change. You said that this statement: "changes in [water vapor] concentration [are] also considered to be a result of climate feedbacks related to the warming of the atmosphere rather than a direct result of industrialization" had no basis in science, which is not true. Everybody, skeptics and all, are interested in how we keep temperatures tolerable for life, as you say. But it wasn't what we were discussing then
This got twisted around, let's see if we can get it straightened out. We started with this: "changes in [water vapor] concentration [are] also considered to be a result of climate feedbacks related to the warming of the atmosphere..." The problem is that water vapor goes both ways. More vapor absorbs more heat, but when the vapor condenses into clouds, heat is reflected. The net effect changes if the clouds are over water, snow, or vegetation. So the only way to know if changes in the water vapor cycle affects surface temperature - or only respond to it - is to measure the total energy flux escaping the planet and determine what percentage of that was caused by a change in water vapor. We are no where near able to do that! If you read the paper from Desser et al, all it really shows is that: "Positive q values indicate that q was higher during the warmer period (DJF07), consistent with an intuitive expectation of increasing atmospheric moisture with a warming planet." ...where q is humidity. In other words, if you heat the atmosphere more water evaporates. Despite some unsupported assertions by Dessler et al, this does not tell us anything about the total flux exiting the system. There are numerous mechanisms that are consistent with water vapor being a negative feedback and the Dessler et al paper being accurate. None of this is high school physics. In my senior year in college, I took "Control Systems." It was in that class that I learned that stable systems are governed by negative feedbacks and damping. Yet when it comes to climate, the AGW folks claim that all feedbacks are positive, resulting in compounded warming. Clearly something is wrong. And the most likely thing that is wrong is the assumption that the net forcing of the water vapor cycle is zero. So I stand by my claim that there is currently no scientific basis for claiming that the net forcing of water vapor over long time intervals is zero. It is still set to zero in climate models because we lack the data to set it anywhere else, not because we have verified that it is zero.

Between every two pines is a doorway to the new world. - John Muir
Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
Sculpin
Member
Member


Joined: 23 Apr 2015
Posts: 1376 | TRs | Pics
Sculpin
Member
PostSat Mar 16, 2019 7:49 am 
Parked Out wrote:
But below saturation, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere isn't just a function of temperature, otherwise a map of the world by average humidity would closely resemble a map of the world by average temperature. So hypothetically, if the presence (vs the absence) of vegetation increased the average amount of water vapor by 10%, the IR radiation absorbed by that increase would constitute a radiative forcing, right?
In general, yes. But you have to be careful because once the IR absorption bands are saturated, there is no more energy at those wavelengths to absorb. Saturation does occur for CO2 and I think water vapor as well. From there you get into somewhat complicated heat transfer stuff. The original paper by Arrhenius from 1896 - supposedly the cornerstone of AGW theory - was about how you could get more warming despite saturated bands. Here is a link: http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

Between every two pines is a doorway to the new world. - John Muir
Back to top This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies. Reply with quote Send private message
   All times are GMT - 8 Hours
 This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies.
Forum Index > Public Lands Stewardship > Global Warming
  Happy Birthday speyguy, Bandanabraids!
Jump to:   
Search this topic:

You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum