Guest smack-down by David Middleton
Funny thing… The writing of this post was disrupted by a preview of the Green New Deal in Dallas over the past 5 days… More on this later.
Losing Earth: A Recent History is a bad science fiction novel by Nathaniel Rich of The New York Times. It’s apparently an expanded version of a New York Times article he wrote. Last week, RealClearEnergy linked to an extract from this book on The Daily Maverick (whatever the frack that is).
Here’s an abbreviated version of the extract:
OUR BURNING PLANET: BOOK EXTRACT
What failure to reverse climate change could mean
By Nathaniel Rich• 27 May 2019By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change ― including how to stop it, according to the book, Losing Earth.
[…]
It basically goes on like this:
- James Hansen good.
- IPCC good.
- Al Gore mega-superhero.
- Oil companies evil.
- Orange man bad.
- Green New Deal Cultural Revolution NOW!
- Global socialism now, or Earth fries in 12 years!!!
The above isn’t a list of actual quotes from the article. It’s my flippant impression of the article … And I’m being generous; this book extract doesn’t even deserve flippant.
First off, this is beyond moronic…
What failure to reverse climate change could mean…
Nathaniel Rich
It’s impossible to “reverse climate change” . “Climate change” is directionless.
If, by climate change, this “eloquent science history” (according to Barbara Kiser of Nature) means “global warming,” a reversal of the warming we have experienced since 1978 would mean a return to “The Ice Age Cometh“…
A return to That 70’s Climate Show doesn’t seem like a brilliant idea to me. If the serially wrong climate models were even close to correct, AGW saved us from The Ice Age Cometh…
If, by climate change, this “eloquent science history” is referring to the more significant warming Earth has experienced since the depths of the Little Ice Age, it would be far more catastrophic than any RCP8.5 nightmare.
Great Famine
Beginning in the spring of 1315, cold weather and torrential rains decimated crops and livestock across Europe. Class warfare and political strife destabilized formerly prosperous countries as millions of people starved, setting the stage for the crises of the Late Middle Ages. According to reports, some desperate Europeans resorted to cannibalism during the so-called Great Famine, which persisted until the early 1320s.Black Death
Typically considered an outbreak of the bubonic plague, which is transmitted by rats and fleas, the Black Death wreaked havoc on Europe, North Africa and Central Asia in the mid-14th century. It killed an estimated 75 million people, including 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. Some experts have tied the outbreak to the food shortages of the Little Ice Age, which purportedly weakened human immune systems while allowing rats to flourish.
Iceland was one of the hardest hit areas. Sea ice, which today is far to the north, came down around Iceland. In some years, it was difficult to bring a ship ashore anywhere along the coast. Grain became impossible to grow and even hay crops failed. Volcanic eruptions made life even harder. Iceland lost half of its population during the Little Ice Age.
Tax records in Scandinavia show many farms were destroyed by advancing ice of glaciers and by melt water streams. Travellers in Scotland reported permanent snow cover over the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland at an altitude of about 1200 metres. In the Alps, the glaciers advanced and threatened to bulldozed towns. Ice-dammed lakes burst periodically, destroying hundreds of buildings and killing many people. As late as 1930 the French Government commissioned a report to investigate the threat of the glaciers. They could not have foreseen that human induced global warming was to deal more effective with this problem than any committee ever could.
The Little Ice Age (LIA) was most likely the coldest climatic period of the Holocene Epoch. In Central Greenland it was roughly the same temperature as it was during the Bølling-Allerød glacial interstadial.
Just how much climate change do we need to reverse?
Back to the last Pleistocene glacial stage? Back to the Eemian interglacial? Or further back than that?
The modern ~1 °C rise since pre-industrial times doesn’t break out of the Quaternary Period noise level… another 1 °C rise still won’t even break out of the Quaternary Period noise level.
If we reverse climate change back before the Quaternary Period, I don’t think that would work out so well either…
Earth’s average surface temperature is only a few degrees C above the coldest climate of the entire Cenozoic Era, the Late Pleistocene glacial stages.
Maybe by “reverse climate change,” is Mr. Rich just referring to lowering the atmospheric CO2 level back down to some imaginary Goldilocks concentration?
What exactly is the Goldilocks CO2 concentration?
Maybe he answers these questions in the book? I’ll never know… because I wouldn’t even check it out of a public library much less purchase it. So, let’s move on…
As Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, recently put it:
“We’re increasingly shifting from a mode of predicting what’s going to happen to a mode of trying to explain what happened.”
Nathaniel Rich
Of course “we” are… That’s the result of 30+ years of failed predictions.
And your predicitive skill is not improving.
So what happened? The common explanation today concerns the depredations of the fossil fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. Between 2000 and 2016, the industry spent more than $2-billion, or 10 times as much as was spent by environmental groups, to defeat climate change legislation.
Nathaniel Rich
I’m sorry… But $2 billion over 17 years (<$120 million/yr) isn’t even a tiny fraction of what environmental activist groups and government bureaucracies spend on efforts to destroy prosperity and individual liberty.
The Natural Resources Defense Council is totally dedicated to the destruction of prosperity and individual liberty in the USA and religiously devoted to the AGW myth. Their annual budget ($152 million) is more than the combined income of the American Enterprise Institute ($75 million), Cato Institute ($37 million), Heartland Institute ($5 million) and Competitive Enterprise Institute ($8 million).
The Federal government p!$$ed away $2 billion every 60 days promoting the Gorebal Warming scam as recently as 2017.
Furthermore, the “fossil fuel industry” (singular) not only doesn’t exist, but it didn’t cause this:
Global demand for plentiful, affordable energy caused it.
Oil & Gas and Coal are two very different industries… Both of which are essential to U.S. energy dominance, economic prosperity and individual liberty.
If the United States had endorsed the proposal broadly supported at the end of the Eighties — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees. A broad international consensus had agreed on a mechanism to achieve this: a binding global treaty.
Nathaniel Rich
“If the United States had endorsed the proposal broadly supported at the end of the Eighties — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 by 2005”… we would have committed economic suicide.
It has been said that regulating carbon dioxide emissions will make the United States the cleanest Third World country on Earth. And whoever controls carbon dioxide emissions will control the world.
And it would have had a Dean Wormer effect on the weather.
0.05°C is basically…
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change…
By 1979, we knew Jack Schist…
The atmosphere’s blanketing effect over the earth’s surface has been compared to the functioning of a greenhouse. Short-wave sunlight passes as easily through the glass of the greenhouse as through the atmosphere. Because glass is opaque to the long-wave radiation from the warm interior of the greenhouse, it hinders the escape of energy.
As a planet, the earth is not warming or cooling appreciably on the average, because it loses as much radiant energy as it gains.
Kolenkow, Robert J., Reid A. Bryson, Douglas B. Carter, R. Keith Julian, Robert A. Muller, Theodore M. Oberlander, Robert P. Sharp & M. Gordon Wolman. Physical geography today : a portrait of a planet. Del Mar, Calif. : CRM Books, [1974]. p. 64.
FORECASTING THE FUTURE. We can now try to decide if we are now in an interglacial stage, with other glacials to follow, or if the world has finally emerged from the Cenozoic Ice Age. According to the Milankovitch theory, fluctuations of radiation of the type shown in Fig. 16-18 must continue and therefore future glacial stages will continue. According to the theory just described, as long as the North and South Poles retain their present thermally isolated locations, the polar latitudes will be frigid; and as the Arctic Ocean keeps oscillating between ice-free and ice-covered states, glacial-interglacial climates will continue.
Finally, regardless of which theory one subscribes to, as long as we see no fundamental change in the late Cenozoic climate trend, and the presence of ice on Greenland and Antarctica indicates that no change has occurred, we can expect that the fluctuations of the past million years will continue.
Donn, William L. Meteorology. 4th Edition. McGraw-Hill 1975. pp 463-464
Suggestion that changing carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could be a major factor in climate change dates from 1861, when it was proposed by British physicist John Tyndall.
[…]
Unfortunately we cannot estimate accurately changes of past CO2 content of either atmosphere or oceans, nor is there any firm quantitative basis for estimating the the magnitude of drop in carbon dioxide content necessary to trigger glaciation. Moreover the entire concept of an atmospheric greenhouse effect is controversial, for the rate of ocean-atmosphere equalization is uncertain.
Dott, Robert H. & Roger L. Batten. Evolution of the Earth. McGraw-Hill, Inc. Second Edition 1976. p. 441.
By 1982, we knew what we know today… The models were wrong…
If there actually is a need to rapidly reduce carbon emissions…
This could only be accomplished through “the depredations of the fossil fuel” industries and the unleashing of the nuclear power industry.
Real Clear Energy
If carbon emissions truly were an existential threat, almost as severe as the economic threat of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution, then we need to find a way to economically capture and sequester the maximum volume of carbon dioxide. And there is only one way to do this. Capture carbon emissions from coal and natural gas fired power plants and use it for enhanced recovery projects in old oil fields.
OCTOBER 31, 2017
Petra Nova is one of two carbon capture and sequestration power plants in the worldThe Petra Nova facility, a coal-fired power plant located near Houston, Texas, is one of only two operating power plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the world, and it is the only such facility in the United States. The 110 megawatt (MW) Boundary Dam plant in Saskatchewan, Canada, near the border with North Dakota, is the other electric utility facility using a CCS system.
[…]
Petra Nova’s post-combustion CO2 capture system began operations in January 2017. The 240-megawatt (MW) carbon capture system that was added to Unit 8 (654 MW capacity) of the existing W.A. Parish pulverized coal-fired generating plant receives about 37% of Unit 8’s emissions, which are diverted through a flue gas slipstream. Petra Nova’s carbon-capture system is designed to capture about 90% of the carbon dioxide ( CO2 ) emitted from the flue gas slipstream, or about 33% of the total emissions from Unit 8. The post-combustion process is energy intensive and requires a dedicated natural gas unit to accommodate the energy requirements of the carbon-capture process.
The carbon dioxide captured by Petra Nova’s system is then used in enhanced oil recovery at nearby oil fields. Enhanced oil recovery involves injecting water, chemicals, or gases (such as carbon dioxide) into oil reservoirs to increase the ability of oil to flow to a well.
By comparison, Kemper had been designed to capture about 65% of the plant’s CO2 using a pre-combustion system. The capital costs associated with the Kemper project were initially estimated at $2.4 billion, or about $4,100 per kilowatt (kW), but cost overruns led to construction costs in excess of $7.5 billion (nearly $13,000/kW). Petra Nova CCS retrofit costs were reported to be $1 billion, or $4,200/kW, and the project was completed on budget and on time.
Principal contributor: Kenneth Dubin
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that 85 billion barrels of oil could be recovered from old oil fields through CO2 EOR. While, for most fields, CO2 EOR is uneconomic with oil prices below $85/bbl, if a drastic reduction of CO2 was really a matter of urgency, a little bit of taxpayer money spent on subsidizing carbon capture storage and utilization (CCSU) would have a much greater impact on carbon emissions than all of the taxpayers’ money p!$$ed away on wind and solar boondoggles.
My preview of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution
For the past three years, I have been commuting between Dallas and Houston. My wife and I and our 11 dogs live in Dallas and I have been working in Houston since March 2016. On Sunday, we went out for lunch at a nearby Tex-Mex restaurant before I headed back to Houston. We knew that thunderstorms were in the forecast, but we were not expecting this…
High Wind, Debris Causes Major Damage in Dallas
By Diana Zoga
Published Jun 9, 2019The high winds on Sunday afternoon blew out windows of skyscrapers and took down trees and traffic signals in downtown Dallas.
The city’s office of emergency management said there were no reports of injuries related to the broken windows or downed trees.
Repairing traffic signals would be one of the city’s first priorities, officials said at a Sunday night press conference. Repairs will be made first to lights that are completely inoperable, while lights that are flashing red will be next.
[…]
The storm hit while we were eating and the power was quickly knocked out. The winds were so strong that it looked like footage of a hurricane through the restaurant windows. We had to wait for the winds to die down before we could rush home (less than 1/4 mile away). The drive was harrowing. There were trees down everywhere. We were worried sick about our “fur babies.” When we got home, we could only find 10 of the 11. Our 6-month old Corgi puppy was missing… But we found her hiding under a toilet. We had a few tiles blown off our roof, one of which hit the hood of my Jeep and everything on the patio had blown into the pool, including a glass table top (instead of shattering on the patio). A large piece of metal artwork blew off the wall, across the pool, and wedged into a tree right in between two windows. Miraculously, no windows were broken. Apart from a traumatized Corgi puppy, the family was unharmed.
The worst part of the storm was the power outage.
Oncor Expects Vast Majority of Customers to Have Power Wednesday Night
Dallas says residents without power who need refuge from the heat can find temporary relief at libraries and rec centers
Published Jun 9, 2019About 16,000 Oncor customers, most in Dallas County, are still without power in North Texas Wednesday. Power has been restored to more than 330,000 homes and businesses. An Oncor spokeswoman says they expect the vast moajority of power to be restored by tonight, but that could stretch until tomorrow in the hardest hit areas.
“Just right now the kind of restoration that we are having to do, it’s the most complex types of outages, because we are having to reconstruct a lot of these distribution equiptment. So instead of just you know showing up and tunring it on immediately, we are having to remove the trees, remove the damaged polls, re-dig holes for the polls, re-put in the polls and then restring the lines,” said Kerry Dunn of Oncor.
At it’s peak, as many as 350,000 customers lost power across the Metroplex Sunday — with Dallas County seeing the most outages, according to Oncor Electric. Oncor had warned the outage was expected to last for several days.
“This storm was really unique because we saw damage akin to something we’d see with a tropical storm or a tornado. But instead of a small area, we’re seeing a very large portion of Dallas County with major damage,” said Oncor spokesperson and meteorologist Jen Myers.
[…]
Crews from 11 states are working around the clock.
[…]
I want to thank Alabama Power. We were without power from Sunday through Wednesday evening. On Sunday night, Oncor crews restored power to parts of our neighborhood. Then we saw no one until Tuesday afternoon, when an Alabama Power vehicle “scouted” our neighborhood. Yesterday, Alabama Power crews were in the alley, clearing debris from the power lines.
Four days of relying on the Sun and batteries for light and electricity seems like a pretty good preview of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution. On top of that, it forced me to take an unplanned week of vacation from exploring for oil & gas, to cut up tree limbs with a battery-powered electric chain saw. We still don’t have Internet service (the phone line caught on fire while they were fixing the power lines and AT&T can’t understand why that might be a problem). I’m using my smart phone as a hot spot… So I still can’t explore for oil & gas from home – the connection is too slow to remotely access my workstation. I can’t imagine a better demonstration of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution. On top of that, I wrote most of this post Sunday morning and scheduled it to be published Monday morning, figuring I would finish it up Sunday night in Houston. No electricity, no oil & gas exploration and a silenced AGW skeptic… We should call the Dallas wind storm, Superstorm Alexandria… 😉
Fortunately, it was unseasonably cool for June in Dallas over the past few days… And, oddly enough, the storm appears to have been driven by sudden cooling…
Dallas-Fort Worth faced its own sort of perfect storm Sunday.
“We had everything in place — a very unstable atmosphere, heat, humidity — then, of course, we had the cold front, which cooled us down quickly,” said Patricia Sanchez, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
Dallas-Fort Worth faced its own sort of perfect storm Sunday.
“We had everything in place — a very unstable atmosphere, heat, humidity — then, of course, we had the cold front, which cooled us down quickly,” said Patricia Sanchez, a National Weather Service meteorologist.[…]
The temperature at DFW International Airport reached 90 degrees before noon, and hovered there until about 2 p.m., according to the weather service.
Then, as the storm moved through the area accompanied by a cold front, the temperature dropped to 70 in less than an hour. As the dry air of the cold front collided with the warm, moist air already in the area, the humidity plunged from 90% at 1 p.m. to 58% by 3 p.m. It’s that mixing of two air masses that can spark violent storm activity.
The weather service had seen the possibility of strong storms Sunday morning, when Dallas-Fort Worth was warned of an enhanced risk for severe weather.
[…]
The storm’s silver lining is that lower temperatures carried by the cold front have made conditions more bearable for the tens of thousands of people without electricity.
Temperatures are expected to stay below normal in the 80s through at least the middle of the week, KXAS-TV (NBC5) meteorologist Grant Johnston said. Dallas-Fort Worth is also expected to stay dry through the work week.
Conclusions
We are not “Losing Earth.” It’s actually physically impossible for us to lose Earth. On the other hand, at some point in the future, Earth will probably lose us.
Featured Image
References (will be expanded later)
Alley, R.B. 2000. “The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland”. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.
Alley, R.B.. 2004. “GISP2 Ice Core Temperature and Accumulation Data”.
IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series #2004-013. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.
Berner, R.A. and Z. Kothavala, 2001. “GEOCARB III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic Time”. American Journal of Science, v.301, pp.182-204. February 2001.
Pagani, M., J.C. Zachos, K.H. Freeman, B. Tipple, and S. Bohaty. 2005. “Marked Decline in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations During the Paleogene”. Science, Vol. 309, pp. 600-603, 22 July 2005.
Pearson, P. N. and Palmer, M. R.: Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 60 million years, Nature, 406, 695–699,https://doi.org/10.1038/35021000, 2000.
Royer, et al., 2001. Paleobotanical Evidence for Near Present-Day Levels of Atmospheric CO2 During Part of the Tertiary. Science 22 June 2001: 2310-2313. DOI:10.112
“The Ice Age Cometh?” Science News, The Society for Science & the Public , 1 Mar. 1975, http://bit.ly/2Xb7plB.
Tripati, A.K., C.D. Roberts, and R.A. Eagle. 2009. “Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years”. Science, Vol. 326, pp. 1394 1397, 4 December 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1178296
Ward, J.K., Harris, J.M., Cerling, T.E., Wiedenhoeft, A., Lott, M.J., Dearing, M.-D., Coltrain, J.B. and Ehleringer, J.R. 2005. “Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA102: 690-694.
Zachos, J. C., Pagani, M., Sloan, L. C., Thomas, E. & Billups, K. “Trends, rhythms, and aberrations in global climate 65 Ma to present”. Science 292, 686–-693 (2001).
via Watts Up With That?
June 14, 2019 at 08:25AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.
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