Kathy Sullivan Stands Firm at NOAA
She’s braved rough seas and space walks. Can she weather climate change skeptics?, Washington Post
“As I learned in the Marine Corps and Kathy learned in the reserves, we have core values,” said NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr., who flew with her on two space missions, including one that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. “They’re not challenging a bureaucrat or a traditional political appointee,” Bolden said of Republicans in Congress. “They’re challenging a scientist. They just picked the wrong person.” Just shy of two years into the job, Sullivan, 64, has been drawn into a lingering and passionate skepticism among some congressional Republicans of the mainstream scientific consensus that man-made pollution is behind the planet’s recent warming.”
– If This Can Happen to NOAA, It Can Happen to NASA, earlier post
“man-made pollution is behind the planet’s recent warming.” CO2 is not pollution. It’s that kind of nonsense that makes Freeman Dyson and my brains bleed.
Leaving aside the term “pollution”, would you concede that the CO2 is man-made and that is causing global warming?
Ah Ha! Giving me the wing nut test. The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is:
1 From all the history I’ve read, we are in the middle of Ice Age cycles, and due for another one pretty soon. How come that one little factoid never ever gets factored into the global warming predictions?
2 I heard a physicist give a talk where he predicted that eventually the waste heat from our appliances, computers, smart phones, etc. will dwarf the global warming effect of greenhouse gasses. Are any of us really ready to throw that stuff away?
3 I do not trust these politicians, who have carbon footprints the size of Transylvania, to make rational decisions in this regard.
4 And, although I’m in favor of humans cleaning up our messes, I don’t think we can stop global warming. But I will vote for anything that will slow it down without collapsing the world economy.
Because it’s not true. It was disproven back in the early ’80s. We’re a good 5000 years away from the next ice age, IIRC the research I read at the time.
Regurgitating 30yr old rightwing memes is the “wingnut test”, in which case, you did fail.
” It was disproven back in the early ’80s.”
May I have your source on that? You’re sounding a little nutty yourself.
From the ’80s? God no. But ten seconds of search found more recent work: Augustin et al, “Eight glacial cycles from an Antarctic ice core”. Nature 429, 623-628.
“The transition from glacial to interglacial conditions about 430,000 years ago (Termination V) resembles the transition into the present interglacial period in terms of the magnitude of change in temperatures and greenhouse gases.”
“The interglacial stage following Termination V was exceptionally long — 28,000 years compared to, for example, the 12,000 years recorded so far in the present interglacial period. Given the similarities between this earlier warm period and today, our results may imply that without human intervention, a climate similar to the present one would extend well into the future.”
Looks like they’re pushing the estimate out from the 15-17000 that I remember, to 28000.
(Berger & Loutre, otoh, argue that changes in orbital eccentricity will push the current interglacial out to 50,000 years; excluding human effects.)
From what I can tell, the shortest estimates are 1,500 years to onset, with several thousand years until significant glaciation.
Says the guy regurgitating the meme from IceAgeNow.
Thanks for the info. But, considering that there’s very little consensus on how the glacial cycle works, I’m not putting too much faith in predictions. However, when the next Ice Age does arrive , I hope that we both can agree that it’s going to be a real mess.
The recent sequence of ice ages appear to have been driven by orbital forcing as Milancovic threorized, making them reasonably predictable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
In contrast CO2 is now rising more rapidly than at any time in geologic history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
However the important thing is that Dr. Sullivan is standing up to those who want politics to triumph over science.
Daniel, thank you for your thoughtful contributions to the topic. I have three questions for you and Yale.
1-How in the real world do we reverse greenhouse gas emissions? (I don’t think it’s possible.)
2-How do we deal with the growing waste heat problem from our appliances and gadgets? (I don’t think it’s possible.)
3-How do we deal with the glaciation of the northern hemisphere when it begins? (I have no idea except through greenhouse gas emissions and waste heat.)
There’s plenty of politics and nonsense coming from the left and the right. That’s why I appreciate someone like you who is looking for the truth. Which brings me back to my original point from a few weeks ago. I welcome the Senate hearings on climate change. As a taxpayer I want to peer behind the curtain of the Executive branch. They owe us that.
Thanks for the Wiki links. Good stuff.
Waste heat from our stuff is NOT an issue if derived from renewable fuel sources. It is using stored energy sources, such as fossil or nuclear energies that that dump net excess heat into the environment.
“A new paper argues that cutting greenhouse gas emissions, switching to nuclear or geothermal power, and even sequestering carbon in the earth won’t stave off massively disruptive climate change. Greenhouse gases are less a threat to stable climate than is the excess heat produced when fuel is burned to create energy, say Swedish researchers Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet.”
I’m just reporting what I read. They also mention appliances, etc.
http://www.wfs.org/Oct-Nov0…
You are simply agreeing with my point.
Notice that you wrote: “switching to nuclear…won’t stave off massively disruptive climate change”
Reread my post:
Waste heat from our stuff is NOT an issue if derived from renewable fuel sources. It is using stored energy sources, such as fossil or nuclear energies that that dump net excess heat into the environment.
“You are simply agreeing with my point.”
I’m just reporting what some of the latest thinking is on the subject. Here’s a little more from that article. Are you ready to give up your appliances and gadgets?
” In terms of electricity usage, even extremely efficient devices, appliances, and gadgets give off a lot of warmth in their operation. This is why your laptop needs a fan and why a car that’s been turned off is still hot to the touch after it’s been driven.”
The above reference is NOT an uncritical endorsement of waste heat. It also states: “Chaisson argues that curbing climate change from greenhouse gases is a much more pressing challenge than is curbing waste heat. ‘I do think that the Swedish authors have greatly overestimated the effects of anthropogenic heating currently, and they seem completely unaware of other, detailed work on the same topic that has been done within the past year by other researchers,’ “
The problem is not the process heat, which is radiated into space. Global warming is caused by the change in radiation balance caused by increasing atmospheric CO2. Nuclear energy does not contribute to global warming.
Currently the main component is various GHG equivalents. As energy usage increases thermal forcing by waste heat eventually dominates the equation. As I was pointing out to PK SINK, using renewable energy sources has a much smaller effect that non-renewables like nuclear.
[CLICK ON IMAGE TO EXPAND]
Here is a link to the paper by Cowern and Chihak.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.0…
While I don’t disagree with their concern for waste heat, please note that they assume CO2 emissions will be completely eliminated by 2100 (hard to achieve without nuclear) yet total energy production will continue to increase at 1% per year indefinitely. Even in this situation forcing from waste heat will not exceed forcing from CO2 for more than 250 years. Moreover solar energy has an impact on waste heat forcing almost as great as nuclear because it increases Earth’s absorption of solar energy.
Global warming is caused by the change in radiation balance caused by increasing atmospheric CO2.
No, it isn’t. You can repeat this canard until the cows come home, but repetition of falsehood does not magically transform t into truth. Science is about measurement, not models.
Some of it is man-made. But prior warming eras exhibited atmospheric CO2 increases that lagged, not lead, the warming. Most of the warming over the past 250 years occurred before man-made CO2 was significant. And there has been no warming for nearly 20 years even as the Chinese and Indians have rapidly industrialized. Atmospheric CO2 is pretty obviously not the simple-minded rheostat for global temperature that climate change ideologues and their pet computer models proclaim. Even the now-discredited models don’t directly indict CO2, it’s just supposed to be the trigger for more atmospheric water vapor which is supposed to do most of the heavy warming labor. Problem is, actual measurements of atmospheric water vapor don’t agree with the models.
I try to refrain from using terms like “ideologues”. Pejorative attacks are seldom conducive to informative debate.
Regarding CO2, the Cryogenian period appears to have been ended 635 million years ago by increasing CO2, possibly from volcanoes, which preceeded the warming. The more recent ice ages, periods of glaciation and warming over the past 2.5 million years, were triggered by external forcing factors such as the Milankovitch cycles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… However this external warming caused massive amounts of CO2 to come out of solution in the oceans, a form of positive feedback which indeed followed the temperature change induced by orbital forcing but amplified it greatly. Warming induced by other effects such as increasing CO2 from burning fossil fuels is likely to trigger similar positive feedback. I would be interested to know what models you are referring to in your final sentence. It appears that measurements and models have improved considerably: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/…
I should also point out that atmospheric
CO2 is currently rising faster than at any point in geologic history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
It is certainly rising, but, as noted in my previous comments, the theory that CO2 rise will inevitably force higher global average temperatures is not borne out by actual data, only by junk science computer models. The only effect of CO2 rise that does seem supported by actual data is rising rates of plant growth. I’m old enough to remember when the “sky is falling” complaint du jour was about growing “desertification” in the Sahel. Funny how you don’t hear much about that anymore.
And a note on sources. Wikipedia is not a reliable source for information on any topic for which there is an established left-wing orthodoxy. Global Warming/Climate Change qualifies in spades. You will find no climate skepticism on Wikipedia as any that appears is instantly expunged by the legions of lefties who stand ready to put anything non-congenial down the memory hole. NASA and NOAA, most regrettably, are also hives of climate alarmists and are nearly as untrustworthy.
Pejorative attacks are seldom conducive to informative debate.
Agreed. Perhaps you can have a word with pretty much any of the huge numbers of Global Warming/Climate Change acolytes who make so free with baseless calumnies aimed at people such as myself who have looked upon the Emperor and still say he’s naked.
Beyond mere ideologically motivated trash talk, attempting to criminalize fact-based dissent from unsupportable pseudo-science claims and harassing the dissenters with fishing expedition subpoenas, as Rep. Grijalva and others have attempted to do, is really not conducive to informative debate. But, in the near total absence of facts to support their case, good old-fashioned statist lawfare is always a predictable tactic. If you can’t beat ’em, sue ’em.
As the Climategate e-mails made clear, the entire field of climate science has become deeply corrupt. A transatlantic cabal of climate “scientists” schemed in secret to subvert the peer review process by replacing uncooperative editors of science journals with fellow travelers and deliberately suppress research that questioned the agreed-upon climate orthodoxy. People even modestly skeptical of this narrative have been repeatedly subject to campaigns of public abuse and hounded out of academic positions. What, if not ideologues, would you call people who do these sorts of things? I can certainly think of many other words that apply, but ideologues is about the mildest one that comes to mind.
As for your question about models, I was referring to the two dozen or so mathematical models that form the core of the alleged Global Warming/Climate change case. Again, as the Climategate e-mails revealed, these pieces of software are rife with both software engineering and mathematical methods malpractice. They have proven incapable of retrospectively “predicting” the past and cannot account for the near-two-decade pause in the very modest recent warming trend. A single defective computer model is also the only basis for claims of growing ocean acidification. Actual measurements don’t show this to be occurring.
Warming induced by other effects such as increasing CO2 from burning
fossil fuels is likely to trigger similar positive feedback.
Yeah, that’s the theory embodied in all the worthless “models” floating around the climateverse. Thing is, even the models don’t assume CO2 to be responsible for alleged warming. The increased CO2 is supposed to increase tropospheric moisture and this water vapor is supposed to cause most of the predicted warming. Unfortunately for the models the atmosphere doesn’t seem to agree and stubbornly refuses to get significantly more humid.
CO2 is most certainly a pollutant. It is the direct and primary cause of the potentially catastrophic ocean acidification which in my opinion is a greater and more immediate threat than climate change (as bad as that is).
https://www.google.com/webh…
As to is definition as a pollutant in terms of GHG emissions, it also fits the definition in the Clean Air Act and has been directly confirmed as such by the Supreme Court: “Because greenhouse gases fit well within the Act’s capacious definition of “air pollutant,” EPA has statutory authority to regulate emission of such gases from new motor vehicles. That definition— which includes “any air pollution agent . . . , including any physical, chemical, . . . substance . . . emitted into . . . the ambient air . . . ,” §7602(g) -embraces all airborne compounds of whatever stripe.”
“confirmed as such by the Supreme Court:”
Well, I guess that settles the science. You sure told me.
The Court simply concurred with the definition written into the Clean Air statutes.
Well then, let me put your mind at ease. Turns out ocean acidification, just like global warming, is a figment of bad mathematical modeling. In this case, modeling done by Drs. Feely and Sabine of the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, two researchers who’ve waxed and grown fat off government “research” grants based on their politically useful results. The actual data, don’t show any decrease in ocean pH.
Please note pH is on inverse scale
Update: http://www.judicialwatch.or…
“Less than week after Judicial Watch served its lawsuit on NOAA, the agency finally turned over the targeted documents to Congress.”
So much for standing firm. Surely NOAA has lawyers bright enough to know that this was inevitable. What was the point of drawing out the public circus?