Petition to withdraw from UNFCCC published
via Defeat Climate Alarmismhttps://defyccc.com
Dr. Richard Lindzen has sent a petition to President Trump, asking the President to withdraw the United States from the United Nations Convention on Climate Change. The petition has been signed by 300 hundreds scientists and qualified experts, and is still open for signing.
via Defeat Climate Alarmism https://defyccc.com
February 26, 2017 at 03:19AM
Shale Revolution Drives American Household’s Energy Cost To Record Low
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)http://www.thegwpf.com
The Business Council for Sustainable Energy, in partnership with Bloomberg New Energy, just released the 2017 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. The report covers the across-the-board benefits for the rise in natural gas use across the United States, with the most notable benefit being the fact that American consumers are now spending less of their incomes on energy than ever before in the modern era.
The factbook found that record-low natural gas prices enabled consumers to devote “less than 4% of their total annual household spending to energy in 2016, the smallest share ever recorded by the US government,” as the following chart from the report shows,
The factbook reports that retail electricity prices fell 2.2 percent from 2015 to 2016 and consumers paid 3.9 percent lower prices than a decade ago. These lower prices have been particularly advantageous to energy intensive industries, as the report notes,
“Exceedingly low natural gas and electricity prices have helped to reduce costs for industrial players, particularly those in energy-intensive sectors. Despite a surge in the value of the dollar over 2015-16, the United States remains among the lowest cost markets for electricity in the world for industrial customers, beating out other large countries such as China, India, Mexico and Japan.”
The report also highlights the fact that low natural gas prices have allowed the U.S. economy to grow at the same time as we’ve reduced greenhouse gas emissions — a previously unheard of decoupling trend. One reason, the report notes, is because of increased natural gas use for electricity generation. In fact, natural gas is now the top fuel source for electrical generation, which has driven U.S. CO2 emissions to their lowest levels since 1991,
“Within the power sector, the progress is even more noteworthy: in 2016, greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants dropped 5.3% in just one year. Since 2005, the power sector has shrunk its carbon footprint by 24% – in other words, the US is 75% of the way to the Clean Power Plan’s “32% by 2030” headline target, with 14 additional years left to go. In large part, this decarbonization is due to market forces: the boom in domestic natural gas production has provided the sector with a cheap, cleaner burning source of fuel (a natural gas combined-cycle plant emits roughly 60% less carbon than a coal-fired unit); additionally, renewable energy costs have fallen dramatically and corporations have captured cost-savings through energy efficiency measures.”
As the following chart from the factbook shows, natural as accounted for 34 percent of U.S. electrical generation in 2016 — up from 22 percent in 2007.
Theses trends, of course, are thanks to increased natural gas production and the development of better infrastructure throughout the country. The combination has given states and consumers better access to power from a variety of sources, from natural gas to electricity.
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com
February 26, 2017 at 02:22AM
Renewable Energy Fiasco: Global Hydropower Boom Increases Greenhouse Gas Emissions
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)http://www.thegwpf.com
Fom the Amazon Basin to boreal forests, and from the Mekong to the Himalayan foothills, rivers worldwide are being targeted for major new dams in a global hydropower boom that also aims to supply drinking water to exploding human populations and to facilitate navigation on the planet’s rivers; 3,700 new dams – 847 of them larger than 100 megawatts (MW) – are slated for construction.
Global distribution of future hydropower dams, either under construction (blue dots 17 %) or planned (red dots 83 %). Image: Zarfl et al (2014)
Number of future hydropower dams per major river basin. Image Zarfl et al (2014)
But one strong argument in favor of hydropower is now looking far weaker. Scientists have compiled the most comprehensive assessment yet of the global impact that dam reservoirs have on the world’s atmosphere and greenhouse emissions. And it isn’t good news.
Globally, the researchers estimate that reservoirs – long considered “zero emitters” by the United Nations climate program – contribute 1.3% of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions on this scale are comparable to those from rice paddy cultivation or biomass burning, the study authors write.
But despite their magnitude, these reservoir emissions are not currently counted within United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) assessments. In fact, countries are currently eligible under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism to receive carbon credits for their newly built dams. The study raises the question as to whether hydropower should continue to be counted as green power.
Construction at the São Manoel dam site on the Teles Pires River, Brazil, where three other dams are now nearing completion. These new hydropower dams also form part of the controversial Tapajos Complex of dams and reservoirs intended to support a vast industrial waterway for transporting soy from Brazil’s interior downriver to the Amazon River, to the coast, and on to China.
The study, published in BioScience, looked at the carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) emitted from 267 reservoirs across six continents. In total, the reservoirs studied have a surface area of more than 77,287 square kilometers (29,841 square miles). That’s equivalent to about a quarter of the surface area of all reservoirs in the world, which together cover 305,723 sq km – roughly the combined size of the United Kingdom and Ireland.
“The new study confirms that reservoirs are major emitters of methane, a particularly aggressive greenhouse gas,” said Kate Horner, Executive Director of International Rivers, adding that hydropower dams “can no longer be considered a clean and green source of electricity.”
Importantly, the study teased apart the relative emission contributions of each of the three gases – a crucial consideration as these gases have varying degrees of impact on global temperature.
Methane and nitrous oxide are many times more potent than carbon dioxide, and they also behave differently over time once released into the atmosphere, and both of these factors are relevant in the context of short and long-term policies on emission targets. Over a 100-year timeframe, methane’s effect on global warming is more than 30 times, and nitrous oxide’s effect is almost 300 times, greater than CO2.
But the study authors argue that the next 100 years are not nearly so relevant as the next 20 years for determining climate change policy aimed at quickly curbing global warming and meeting global emission targets set out in the Paris Agreement. And because methane “is relatively short-lived in the atmosphere (atmospheric lifetime on the order of a decade) relative to CO2 (atmospheric lifetime on the order of centuries),” they write, CH4 “has a higher global warming potential over the shorter 20-year time horizon.”
In fact, methane’s effect is 86 times greater than that of CO2 when considered on this two-decade timescale. Importantly, the study found that methane is responsible for 90% of the global warming impact of reservoir emissions over 20 years.
Around half of the methane emitted from reservoirs is released in bubbles, which rise from sediment and travel through the water column to the reservoir’s surface. The gas trapped inside these bubbles in the water column, “is the most direct route for methane to reach the atmosphere without being turned into carbon dioxide via [interaction with] oxygen,” said Tonya DelSontro, one of the study’s co-authors, of the University of Quebec, Montreal.
Accounting for the contribution of methane bubbles is therefore a vital component of accurate reservoir emission estimates, but measuring them is challenging. Bubbles are hard to locate, explained DelSontro, who has studied methane emissions from lakes and reservoirs in Switzerland, Zambia and Canada.
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com
February 26, 2017 at 01:51AM
What’s wrong with ‘alternative facts’?
via Climate Etc.http://judithcurry.com
by Kip Hansen
‘Alternative facts’ is a term in law to describe inconsistent sets of facts put forth in a court given that there is plausible evidence to support both alternatives. The term is also used to describe competing facts for the two sides of the case. – Wikipedia
So . . . what exactly is a ‘fact’? From the Wikipedia:
A fact is something that has occurred or is correct.
Facts may be checked by reason, experiment, personal experience, or may be argued from authority.
In the most basic sense, a scientific fact is an objective and verifiable observation, in contrast with a hypothesis or theory, which is intended to explain or interpret facts.
With this context, it is not surprising that there are competing ‘facts’ of which their proponents are equally certain. ‘Facts’ are being confused with hypotheses and theories, and too many ‘facts’ are being asserted by authority.
So . . . what’s wrong with ‘alternative facts?’
Nothing — absolutely nothing. Quite the opposite, really. Alternative facts are what we use to learn new things about the world around us. Science is the subject of using alternative facts to come to a better understanding. Discovering that there are alternative facts about something – even better, seemingly contradictory facts – is what points us to an area of study that promises the reward of new insights into the natural world.
Out in today’s world of U.S. Two-Party Politics – an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque landscape being repainted daily in the “news” and “social” media – a lot of ill-mannered, Queen-of-Hearts-style nonsense is being churned out by turning this perfectly good and useful idea – alternative facts – into a mockery of truth-finding — turning Truth into an one-word oxymoron.
Facts vs factoids
Much of what we know as facts, and much of what are presented to us as facts, are more correctly characterized as “factoids” – a word believed coined by Norman Mailer – which has two closely related meanings:
1) a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print.
a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually or strictly true, or an invented fact either deliberately created or created by sloppy thinking, poor logic skills, lack of critical thinking or poor journalism believed to be true because it appears in print, in a journal article, in mainstream or social media, on a web site or has ‘gone viral’ on the Internet.
2) a brief or trivial item of news or information.
Factoids are often presented to us as numbers – which influence us to find them somehow truer or more believable – or are presented as impossibly simplistic assertions about complex topics. Factoids most often are used rhetorically [as in argument, debate, or propaganda] in opposition to other facts in a fact-vs-fiction construction, explicitly stated or implied – “Here are the facts!” – implying that all else is fiction, all other ‘facts’ are false.
Tied to the use of factoids is the principle of “Only One Fact”. This is the rampantly popular idea that for each subject there exists only one fact (or set of related facts) and, from that, it follows that all other statements on the subject are falsehoods, lies, or errors. We hear this in common speech: “The fact is…” and we see on single issue websites “The Facts are…”. This “Only One Fact” version of reality is a serious cognitive malfunction – and a leads to serious critical thinking errors.
Climate science, and the never-ending debate about its implications, is particularly rife with Factoids and Alternative Factoids. Each side, mostly from the extreme edges of the field, sling factoids at one another in endless streams of numbers, graphs, trend-lines, echo-chamber talking-points (prepared by their own side’s experts) – spiced with an truly incredible number and variety of personal opinions presented as if they were facts.
Once we weed out the truly daft opinions, the obvious non-physical misunderstandings and the delicious-and-nutty fruit-cakery served up from the far edges of climate alarm and hard-core “its all a big hoax” skepticism alike, we are still left with a huge number of seemingly true statements, facts, that seem to contradict each other, sometimes apparently in direct opposition.
Competing ‘facts’ about the Amazon
How’s that, you ask? Let’s look at an example. It has long been considered a fact, and still is by almost all environmental movements, that:
[T]he Amazon forests are pristine forests, never touched by humans….the rain forests of the Amazon were untouched by human hands before the arrival of European explorers in the 15th century. [The Amazon is] an old-growth forest — primary forest, virgin forest, primeval forest — is a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance and thereby exhibits unique ecological features and might be classified as a climax community [a biological community of plants, animals, and fungi which, through the process of ecological succession the development of vegetation in an area over time, had reached a steady state].
Yet, reappearing again in the science press this week is the story of ancient earthworks deep in the Amazon forest:
Deep in the Amazon, the rain forest once covered ancient secrets. Spread across hundreds of thousands of acres are massive, geometric earthworks. The carvings stretch out in circles and squares that can be as big as a city block, with trenches up to 12 yards wide and 13 feet deep. They appear to have been built up to 2,000 years ago.” The study [ doi: 10.1073/pnas.1614359114 ] states “We reconstructed environmental evidence from the geoglyph region and found that earthworks were built within man-made forests that had been previously managed for millennia.
The existence of these earthworks, and their antiquity are facts – actualities, they really exist and strong, replicable evidence exists for the dates of creation.
The facts reported by Watling et al. (2017) in regards to the earthworks are not only alternative to our accepted facts [above] about the Amazon; they directly contradict long-standing, almost universally-accepted, facts. It is because they are contradictory that we can begin to develop a new and better understanding of the ecology of the Amazon rainforests, their history, their evolution and the South American nations within whose boundaries these forests exist, can create national policies based on this better understanding.
By combining the two sets of seemingly contradictory facts– alternative facts, we can see that while the Amazonian forests are certainly old-growth forests, having existed in their current states for hundreds, up to thousands, of years, they are not “virgin forest, primeval forest” at all but have actually been created by long-term interactions with the human civilizations that lived within them.
This is not a trivial example of “new discoveries lead to better understanding”, though it could be viewed that way. There has been a long constant stream of alternative facts to the background fact of a pristine, primeval Amazon. The investigation of a soil type named “Terra Preta” (Portuguese for “black soil”) began producing alternative facts in the 1960s and they have rolled out regularly since. Yet it was fact not long ago, despite these alternative facts, that the land of the Amazon was relatively useless for agriculture.
Now we see that there is very strong evidence that the Amazon is not being newly deforested but is apparently being re-cleared, re-claimed as arable land. It is land that in the past was cleared and used for agriculture, speculatively thought to be a sort of ancient perma-culture, and for the building of extensive towns and cities.
Example: climate science ‘alternative facts’
Consider the following statement:
“Earth’s average surface temperature has risen by about 0.8° Celsius since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.”
Well, we have a fact – “Earth’s average surface temperature has risen”; a number related to the magnitude of the temperature increase (which must be considered subject to some degree of factual uncertainty); and a time period. The statement can be considered, factual (subject to some caveats) or true. However, the statement implies causation — that the warming was caused by the Industrial Revolution–which makes it a factoid because the cause of the warming is a hypothesis.
Consider the following alternative statement:
“Earth’s average surface temperature has risen for the last several hundred years, since the depths of the Little Ice Age*, and by about 0.8° since the mid-19th century, which is the beginning of the instrumental temperature record.”
[* = “three particularly cold intervals: one beginning about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850, all separated by intervals of slight warming.”]
This statement is equally true but again implies causation – “since the depths of the LIA”.
It is possible to construct a clear Fact about changes in global mean surface temperature changes and the associated uncertainties. However the IPCC’s mandate to focus on man-made climate change resulted in a conclusion dictated by their mandate that is arguably a factoid.
Conclusion
Not all alternative facts lead to a better understanding. Some just stand in opposition to one another until such time as new and better facts or evidence emerge from the confusion to help clarify the situation. Those new facts or evidence will be, at first, Alternative Facts – they should not necessarily be expected to match either of the preferred climate science factoids above.
As these new alternative facts emerge, they should be embraced and seriously considered by all sides and positions in the climate debate. Those new, alternative facts –those few that survive the fire of massive open public review– will lead to better understandings of the physical actualities of Earth’s climate which in turn will allow policy makers to make better climate policy.
Moderation note: As with all guest posts, please keep your comments civil and relevant.
via Climate Etc. http://judithcurry.com
February 26, 2017 at 01:32AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 