Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[FJAG]

This one is for you FJAG and Thucydides:

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13925338_817149658386234_3086406773356730668_n.jpg?oh=b1eb43f9a07de7bc61ae0b357b21c13f&oe=584CB9B8

What more proof do you need?  ;D

:rofl:

:cheers:

 

[Kirkhill]

And on the actions front:

The Moltex reactor can run off existing spent nuclear fuel, cleaning up the legacy headaches of old nuclear plants. "We can process nuclear waste very cheaply instead of burying it at enormous cost in steel tanks for 200,000 years underground," he said. The plan is switch to thorium as a "greener" source of fuel once Britain's stockpile of nuclear waste has been consumed.

The Moltex design slashes costs by using a convection process that avoids pumping molten salt around the system. This reduces corrosion, the metallurgy barrier has bedevilled molten salt projects.

Dr Scott is the former chief scientist of Unilever and his technical advisory board includes Derek Fray at Cambridge, Paul Madden at Oxford, and Tim Abram at Manchester. The design is one of several projects being examined by the UK government in its competition for the best small modular reactor.

"We have done everything entirely without government so far, and frankly we have had much more interest in Canada where we were welcomed with open arms by the regulators," said Dr Scott.

Canada is now the crucible for molten salt reactors. Terrestrial Energy in Toronto is the most advanced such project in the world with an integral molten salt reactor, and is already pre-licensed. "We can bring our reactor to the commercial market in the 2020s," said the chief executive Simon Irish.


"Once we put a shovel to the ground we can build it in three to four years. The parts can be manufactured on a mass scale.  We believe we can produce power for 40-50 US dollars per megawatt hour," he said.

That is £31 to £38, a third of Hinkley. The reactor core - relatively cheap to make - is simply removed and replaced after seven years.

Molten reactors have a double advantage. They operate at 700 degrees centrigade, much hotter than light water reactors. This dry 'high quality heat' is itself valuable. It can drive steam electrolysis, make ammonia fertilizers or polymers,  and can even be turned into methanol for synthetic transport fuels.

Mr Irish said his 190 MW design is ideal for a new energy order dominated by renewables. "We can deploy extra power at peak times and pull it back into the troughs, and we can do it within minutes like a natural gas turbine. We tick all the boxes," he said. Old workhorse reactors cannot be switched on and off at will.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/08/17/britain-should-leap-frog-hinkley-and-lead-21st-century-nuclear-r/

One of these days we will be using reactors in the oil patch.

A different type of reactor - http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01/18/toshiba-oil-sands-reactor_n_2505738.html

And while we are talking about melting salt - how about using all those ruddy windmills to melt potash (Melts at 770 C and Boils at 1420 C) to store wind energy as high grade heat which can be used to generate steam and turn turbines on demand -  not just when the wind blows.

Edit:

Here is another article from AEP - this time extolling the virtues of SOME windmills

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/08/14/britains-vast-national-gamble-on-wind-power-may-yet-pay-off/

AEP is Not your usual proponent so I hear him with interest.  I still would be tying them to a storage system - like molten salts.

 

[Kirkhill]

More "solutions":

The site includes two energy centres and a network of over 11 miles of pipe work which control a small fleet of biomass boilers, combined heat and power plants and water storage units.

Mr Petrie explains that biomass provides the steady baseload power needed throughout the day by burning waste wood sourced from UK landscapers at 650 degrees. To meet energy demand over peak demand periods the energy can also be stored in hot water tanks which are topped up using combined and heat and power boilers which run on gas.

As a result the Olympic Park is able to generate 75pc of its own energy with carbon emissions 20pc lower than the rest of the UK while using smart technology to keep costs low.

It’s a feat Government can currently only dream of achieving at a national level as it grapples with the eye-watering economics of supporting large-scale low-carbon projects and the complexity of shifting households on to smart energy meters.

The reason Engie’s “decentralised” energy model works where traditional systems flounder is in the flexibility to build bespoke solutions which directly meet local needs.

“Depending on the type of customer and their energy usage you’ll have a different solution. Our Olympic Park scheme is different to the Whitehall district energy scheme we which designed and run in Westminster. There’s no one size fits all solution. On a national level we need a mix of large centralised energy projects. But decentralised solutions are always worked out with the local councils and local governments."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/08/19/how-the-london-2012-olympic-legacy-could-turn-the-energy-busines/

For me the key take-aways here are:

A high temperature water-based heat storage system
Heat supplied by various sources
Combined Heat and Power plants
District heating

With the hot water system it doesn't matter what the energy source is.  It can be from Windmills, hydro, incinerators, thorium, gas, coal or even (back to the future) ineffiecient wood fired boilers - now suitably rebranded as biomass boilers.

The key issue is that the energy is converted into a storable, transportable form and that even low grade energy is utilized.

This is old news in Europe despite the article.  District heating from central power plants has been the norm since at least the 1930s.

In Canada, in Ontario, in Calgary or Vancouver - if the government wanted to make a difference then it would install neighbourhood power plants and pipe hot water, along with electricity, into the houses and businesses.  The powerplant could equally be the local incinerator with adequate sorting of the raw material and scrubbing of the exhaust.  You make up the energy shortfall with anything you like - agricultural waste, gas, oil, coal - transmitted electricity - thorium.

And again, if you must have windmills at least make them efficient by storing the energy as useable heat and not transient power.

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

Already done in Montreal, for Canada, for the longest time (started in 1947, but really took off in the 1960's): Most of the major skyscrapers in Montreal don't have boilers or main chillers: The centralized plant of the CCUM (Climatisation et Chauffage Urbain Montreal) provides the heating and the cooling from a single centralized plant in Griffintown for about one third of the downtown core buildings.

Much more efficient (and safer for the buildings occupants) than distributed plants in each buildings).

But the CCUM claims to be the second largest such system in Canada, so there is at least another one somewhere even bigger. Toronto?

 

[Kirkhill]

Already done in Montreal, for Canada, for the longest time (started in 1947, but really took off in the 1960's): Most of the major skyscrapers in Montreal don't have boilers or main chillers: The centralized plant of the CCUM (Climatisation et Chauffage Urbain Montreal) provides the heating and the cooling from a single centralized plant in Griffintown for about one third of the downtown core buildings.

Much more efficient (and safer for the buildings occupants) than distributed plants in each buildings).

But the CCUM claims to be the second largest such system in Canada, so there is at least another one somewhere even bigger. Toronto?

Could be OGBD.  I wouldn't be surprised if the system existed in a number of older urban cores but just went out of fashion because it was probably cheaper to develop subdivisions relying on coal and oil fired furnaces. 

I know Yellowknife is doing the district heating bit:

http://aea.nt.ca/blog/2013/07/biomass-district-heating-videos

 

[Journeyman]

But the CCUM claims to be the second largest such system in Canada, so there is at least another one somewhere even bigger.

Perhaps they were referring to Ottawa running on hot air, until that bubble burst creating the massive sinkhole? 

 

[a_majoor]

Nothing like watching UK newspaper wars. The Guardian gets it in the chin from the Telegraph, and the BBC gets a kick aimed at it as well:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/08/the-guardians-100-months-to-save-the-planet-was-always-just-a-fa/

[qote]
The Guardian's '100 months to save the planet' was always just a fantasy
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
Christopher Booker 8 OCTOBER 2016 • 5:30PM

You may not have noticed, but 2016 was the hottest year for over 100,000 years. At least this was the claim reported last week by The Guardian, under the headline  “Planet at its hottest for 115,000 years thanks fo climate change, experts say”.

The “experts” in question are a bunch of US scientists led by James Hansen, the former Nasa employee who did so much to set the great global warming scare on its way in 1988. And of course such a claim could only be made by ignoring all the evidence that the earth was actually hotter than today during the Mediaeval Warm Period, less than 1,000 years ago, and even more so during the thousands of years of the Holocene Optimum, following its emergence from the last ice age 10,000 years ago.

But Hansen and his gang do not stop there.  They argue that we can only hope to save the planet by finding ways to suck vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere, at a cost, they estimate, of up to $570 trillion. That figure which may trip off the tongue, but it equates to seven times the world’s entire current annual GDP, or $77,000 for every human being now alive.

If this only shows how dottily desperate some of our wilder climate alarmists have become, we may come back to earth a little by focusing on another version of the great climate scare which also got The Guardian very excited eight years ago, when it launched a campaign under the heading “The final countdown”. This proclaimed that we then had only “100 months” left to save the world from “irreversible climate change”: soaring temperatures, melting ice caps, dangerously rising sea levels, more hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and all the other familiar harbingers of catastrophe.

Now those “100 months” are up, it has prompted the diligent Paul Homewood to publish on his website, Not A Lot of People Know That, a set of graphs meticulously compiled from official data. The show what has actually happened to the earth’s climate in these past eight years. Despite the 2016 El Nino spike, now rapidly declining, satellite measurements still show that the trend in global temperatures has not risen for 18 years.

The Guardian's online article with the headline "THE FINAL COUNTDOWN" and a caption "100 months to save the world" above a vast picture of the Earth viewed from space

This went well

Far from the ice caps melting, the total amount of polar ice in the world is almost exactly the same in today’s Arctic and Antarctic as it was when satellite records began in 1979. Despite all those computer models predicting otherwise, the rise in global sea levels has been barely detectible, not having accelerated in more than a century. Despite Hurricane Matthew, there has been no increase in the incidence or power of tropical cyclones. Tornadoes in the US have been at a historic low level. The number of severe droughts across the world since the first half of the 20th century has actually declined.

All the computer models which predicted these horrors were programmed to assume that they would be the inevitable result of that increase of CO2 in the atmosphere which has steadily continued all through these past 100 months. Yet not one of their predictions has come true. Indeed the most startling of Homewood’s charts (taken from the BBC website, no less) shows that the most obvious consequence of the rise in CO2 has been its effect, as plant food, on the “greening” of the planet, helping to boost a dramatic rise in crop yields across the world.

Yet to all this our politicians remain wholly oblivious. The irony is that 2008, when global warming hysteria was still at its height, was the very year when they landed us with the Climate Change Act, committing us to spending hundreds of billions of pounds on “decarbonising” our economy, at a time when other countries, led by China and India, are planning to increase their own “carbon” emissions by far more each year than the UK’s entire annual contribution to the global total. Until that totally insane Act is repealed, we really are heading for national suicide.
[/quote]

 

[Kirkhill]

Shutting Down Debate

The Planet is Getting Greener

Hillary on Kremlin Support of Environmentalists

 

[ModlrMike]

Funny how folks have a knot in their face over Russian funded anti-fracking protests, but are fine with US funded anti-oil sands protests.

 

[cavalryman]

Funny how folks have a knot in their face over Russian funded anti-fracking protests, but are fine with US funded anti-oil sands protests.

There's no such thing as coherence among the various anti-fossil fuels faction hypocrites.  Besides George Soros and the Tides Foundation pays better than the Russians  >

 

[FJAG]

Russian says we're heading into the next little Ice Age

http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/lawrence-solomon-proof-that-a-new-ice-age-has-already-started-is-stronger-than-ever-and-we-couldnt-be-less-prepared

:subbies:

 

[Chispa]

Russian says we're heading into the next little Ice Age

http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/lawrence-solomon-proof-that-a-new-ice-age-has-already-started-is-stronger-than-ever-and-we-couldnt-be-less-prepared

:subbies:

First I question anything deriving from the Russians, although (LIA), already accrued as the northern parts of the world froze over from ca 1300 -1850.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age


All this crying over Global Warming & Climate change is a easy $$$$$$$$$$$ grab, not counting years ago it was discovered most of the numbers were in fact fabrication.

The earth has warmed and cooled ca 5-7 times, while climate change, global warming and cooling is a natural phenomenon that happens with mother earth.

Canada has one of the highest natural release of gas owing too, forest fires, peatland, permafrost melting during the summer months, etc., what we humans contribute is quite small. 

Peatland fires and carbon emissions: Fire plays a significant role in forest ecosystems. An average of 9000 fires burn more than 2 million hectares each year in Canada. This is twice the average area burned in the early 1970s, and various modeling scenarios predict another doubling or more by the end of this century, because of warmer temperatures expected as a result of climate change. The growth in fire activity will have major implications for forest ecosystems, forestry activities, community protection and carbon budgets.

Impacts of climate change: Because peatlands vary in their moisture conditions and fuel structure, their vulnerability to burning and rates of fuel consumption also vary. However, human impacts, such as climate change and the draining of wetlands, are increasing the overall susceptibility of peatlands to fire.

Warming temperatures will lead to more droughts, greater evapotranspiration and a subsequent lowering of the water table, which will leave peat more vulnerable to burning. In North America, over the last 50 years, there has been an increase in both very large fires (greater than 100 000 hectares) and fires occurring late in the growing season, when the water table is usually lower.

Climate change may also lead to melting of permafrost, which can in turn lead to additional peat material being consumed by fire.

Understanding and acting on the implications of peat fires: Canadian Forest Service scientists are collaborating with other peatland researchers from government agencies and universities in Canada, the U.S. and Russia to study peatland fire and understand the implications of changing fire regimes on northern peatlands and the circumboreal forest. http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/forests/climate-change/forest-carbon/13103

Countless of antiquity civilizations pre and post bible, North and South American Indians disappeared from the face pf the earth owing to climate change in the areas they lived.

Note according too studies, the family dog contributes more in one year then a SUV.


C.U.

 

[a_majoor]

Climate alarmists are 1800 out of sync with the real world:

http://www.financialpost.com/m/wp/fp-comment/blog.html?b=business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/lawrence-solomon-proof-that-a-new-ice-age-has-already-started-is-stronger-than-ever-and-we-couldnt-be-less-prepared

Lawrence Solomon: Proof that a new ice age has already started is stronger than ever, and we couldn’t be less prepared
Lawrence Solomon
Thursday, Dec. 22, 2016
Nathan VanderKlippe /National Post, file

“The New Little Ice Age Has Started.” This is the unambiguous title of a new study from one of the world’s most prestigious scientific institutions, the Russian Academy of Science’s Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg. “The average temperature around the globe will fall by about 1.5 C when we enter the deep cooling phase of the Little Ice Age, expected in the year 2060,” the study states. “The cooling phase will last for about 45-65 years, for four to six 11-year cycles of the Sun, after which on the Earth, at the beginning of the 22nd century, will begin the new, next quasi-bicentennial cycle of warming.”

Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of space research at Pulkovo and the author of the study, has been predicting the arrival of another little ice age since 2003, based on his study of the behaviour of the Sun’s different cycles and the solar activity that then results. His model — informed by Earth’s 18 earlier little ice ages over the past 7,500 years, six of them in the last thousand years — led to his prediction more than a decade ago that the next little ice age would occur between 2012 and 2015. Unlike the global warming models of scientists, which were soon disproved by actual measurements, Abdussamatov’s models have been affirmed by actual events, including the rise of the oceans and the measurable irradiance sent earthward by the sun. This record of accuracy — which he has repeatedly demonstrated in studies between 2003 and now — leads him to now confidently state that in 2014–15, we began our entry into the 19th Little Ice Age.

Abdussamatov was once a lonely voice in the view that Earth could be embarking on a prolonged cooling spell due to solar, not manmade, factors. No longer. Because sunspots are eerily disappearing from the face of our sun — just as they disappeared during the Little Ice Age in the late 1600s — speculation of another cooling period has been widespread by bodies such as the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Riken research foundation. Last year, a team of European researchers unveiled a scientific model at the National Astronomy Meeting in Wales predicting a “mini ice age” from 2030 to 2040 as a result of decreased solar activity.

For one thing, we can deep freeze dreams of economically exploiting the vast energy wealth of the Arctic Ocean, which geological surveys indicate is the richest in petroleum of all the oceans. The conventional belief that global warming would soon melt the Arctic, and make economic the large-scale infrastructure needed to operate in its inhospitable environment, had many in the oil industry — and in governments — gearing up to claim their share of this new frontier. Their dreams will now need to be set aside for the cold century ahead.

The “upcoming new Little Ice Age will have a very serious impact” on energy security, Abdussamatov explains, because “deep cooling in the new Little Ice Age in the middle of this century would make it almost impossible to exploit offshore fields and pump oil and gas tens to hundreds of kilometres from the coast at depths of hundreds of meters.” Freezing conditions will also curtail energy developments elsewhere over many decades, elevating the need for energy conservation in a much more heat-needy world.

But Earth’s new climate will affect much more than the energy sector. Abdussamatov leaves us with a dire warning.

“The world must start preparing for the new Little Ice Age right now. Politicians and business leaders must make full economic calculations of the impact of the new Little Ice Age on everything — industry, agriculture, living conditions, development. The most reasonable way to fight against the new Little Ice Age is a complex of special steps aimed at support of economic growth and energy-saving production to adapt mankind to the forthcoming period of deep cooling.”

An overheated planet has never been a threat, say climate skeptics, not today, not ever in human history. An underheated planet, in contrast, is a threat humans have repeatedly faced over the last millennium, and now we’re due again.

“The upcoming climate change will be the most important challenge and a priority issue for the world and define the main events in politics, the economy, and the most important areas of the whole of humanity in the coming decades,” Abdussamatov concludes. It’s time we took the threat of climate change — of the real climate change — seriously.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

Thuc,

I do not take this as "proof" of anything (any more than I take warmistas claims at face value).

It is, however, a very interesting theory that does seem to fit the available evidence. It should certainly be tested further.

 

[YZT580]

With apologies to the intrepid souls from the east coast:  Weather prediction can now be 100% accurate by analysing a single piece of neufie rock.

If the rock is wet, it's raining.
If the rock is swinging, the wind is blowing.
If the rock casts a shadow, the sun is shining.
If the rock does not cast a shadow and is not wet, the sky is cloudy.
If the rock is not visible, it is foggy.
If the rock is white, it is snowing.
If the rock is coated with ice, there is a frost.
If the ice is thick, it's a heavy frost.
If the rock is bouncing, there is an earthquake.
If the rock is under water, there is a flood.
If the rock is warm, it is sunny.
If the rock is missing, there was a tornado.
If the rock is wet and swinging violently, there is a hurricane.
If the rock has white splats on it, watch out for birds.

 

[a_majoor]

The best part is because it is real science, it is testable.

 

[a_majoor]

Science is a wonderful thing...especialy when you match observations to predictions like the ice sheets will be gone in 10 years....oh wait....

http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/02/greenland-enters-2017-adding-extraordinary-amounts-of-ice-and-snow/

Greenland Enters 2017 Adding Extraordinary Amounts Of Ice And Snow
Photo of Michael Bastasch
MICHAEL BASTASCH

A small fishing boat heads out into the sea ice near the town of Uummannaq in western Greenland March 18, 2010.  REUTERS/Svebor Kranjc (GREENLAND - Tags: ENVIRONMENT) - RTR2BS7F  A small fishing boat heads out into the sea ice near the town of Uummannaq in western Greenland March 18, 2010. REUTERS/Svebor Kranjc (GREENLAND - Tags: ENVIRONMENT) - RTR2BS7F
Greenland’s ice sheet kicked off 2017 gaining about eight gigatons of snow and ice, which is well above what’s usually added to the ice sheet Jan. 1 for the last 24 years, according to Danish meteorologists.

In fact, Greenland’s ice sheet has been gaining ice and snow at a rate not seen in years based on Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) data. DMI reports the Greenland ice sheet’s “mass surface budget” has been growing significantly since October.

Greenland’s “surface mass budget” for winter 2016-2017 is already more than two standard deviations higher than the northern ice sheet’s mean snow and ice accumulation over the last 24 years. DMI data shows the ice sheet added 8 gigatons of ice and snow Jan. 1, well above the standard deviation for that day.

Screenshot from the Danish Meteorological Institute's website
Screenshot from the Danish Meteorological Institute’s website

Greenland’s booming snow and ice gains come after the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) found the northern ice sheet had an “above average” melt season.

NSIDC found “near-average to below-average coastal snowfall levels that exposed bare ice earlier in the melting season, combined with warm and sunny conditions at lower elevations, led to high overall ice loss from runoff.”

Greenland “had a high early-season melt area, the pace slowed in mid-July relative to the warmest years,” NSIDC reported. Early 2016 saw an incredibly strong El Nino warming event.

Greenland’s extraordinary ice sheet gains also come as Arctic sea ice levels stand more than two standard deviations below normal. Arctic sea ice coverage shrank in November, setting a record low, due to “unusually high air temperatures, winds from the south, and a warm ocean.”

DMI notes Greenland’s ice sheet “snows more than it melts,” but adds that “calving of icebergs also adds to the total mass budget of the ice sheet.”

“Satellite observations over the last decade show that the ice sheet is not in balance,” according to DMI. “The calving loss is greater than the gain from surface mass balance, and Greenland is losing mass at about 200 Gt/yr.”

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[Fishbone Jones]

I got totally hung up on the 'eight gigatons of snow and ice'. Now I'm sitting here wondering what that would look like. I don't think I've ever heard a weight term, that big and that specific.

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

For reference sake, I just looked up the stats from the City of Montreal, who trucks its snow in winter. On average, they move, per winter, 3 million tons of snow, that come from an average snowfall of 225 cm.

So 8 gigaton is about 2667 times the amount of snow that falls on Montreal in one winter.

 

[Good2Golf]

For reference sake, I just looked up the stats from the City of Montreal, who trucks its snow in winter. On average, they move, per winter, 3 million tons of snow, that come from an average snowfall of 225 cm.

So 8 gigaton is about 2667 times the amount of snow that falls on Montreal in one winter.

[pedant]

Was that 3M tons or 3M tonnes?

[/pedant]

;D