It's unanimous: "Climategate" a non-issue

[snousle]

We now have seen the release of the third of three independent investigations into "Climategate", and all three say the same thing: the CRU needs to be more open about their data, but the integrity of their research and their conclusions is not in doubt.

Personally, I think Phil Jones et al. have acted like doofuses, and their defensive attitude has played directly into the hands of their attackers. But in a community of several thousand researchers, you're always going to get doofuses; it's inevitable.

In the meanwhile, I came across an interesting page on Wikipedia that lists more than fifty scientific organizations that have issued statements supporting the conclusion that anthropogenic C02 is warming the planet. The number of organizations that reject this idea? Zero.

Anyone who, at this point, believes that global warming reflects a conspiracy among scientists is dismissing the judgment of the entire scientific community. The idea that there is any "controversy" among scientists on the central ideas of AGW, beyond a small number of individual dissenters, is simply false. Ten years ago, there was room for debate, but today, the rate at which individual professional scientists reject AGW outright is probably smaller than the number who believe they've been abducted by aliens. In other words, it's down to the lone crazies. Rejecting AGW today is to reject all of science. If one doesn't believe AGW, it would be logically inconsistent to grant any credibility to any scientific theory whatsoever.

Thoughtful conservatives have come to the same conclusion. Besides Jim Manzi, who I wrote about earlier, an essay by Ronald Bailey, a libertarian science columnist over at Reason, explains how he came to agree that AGW is real. His account illustrates the difference between honest skepticism and dishonest denialism; he considered the data that came to light over the past decade and revised his opinions accordingly.

It's amazing to see outright lies on this subject - things I know personally and directly to be false - not just treated as fact, but paraded around with pride by people who fancy themselves to be "independent thinkers" and superior in their judgment to, well, just about everyone. It neither surprises nor bothers me that people are misinformed about complicated matters, but their arrogance in holding on to and defending this misinformation is truly disturbing.

Comments

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

It needs to be renamed from "AGW" to something like "Warming You Are Causing That Is Going To Harm You and Kill Your Children".

Can we please get some religious zealots on-side?

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I don't think it would help very much. I'm actually an optimistic fatalist - my best guess is that the world will do exactly nothing, all available fossil fuels will be burned, and the result will be "not terrible", at least not all by itself. A lot is going to happen between now and 2100, things that could, for better or worse, make climate change seem like a quaint concern of old.

Of course, I don't discount the possibility of avoidable, climate-driven catastrophe, though it probably won't happen in our lifetimes. Hard to put a figure on it, but I give it a roughly 5% chance of being both avoidable and catastrophic.

My more immediate concern is for the future of science itself. This has been a big, big deal, with a shift in US public opinion of 10% away from agreement with AGW. It's been covered in the front section of Science and Nature almost every week for the past six months.

Policymakers, with few exceptions, give no credit to climate change denialists and continue to take the advice of scientists seriously on this and other matters. Even George Bush acknowledged AGW. But the narrative of "you're privileged with special knowledge and smarter than a thousand scientists" is very seductive to the public, many of whom are jealous of the power wielded by science, and the Internet has made this attitude much more widespread. One of the most disturbing aspects of AGW denialism is that it does not correlate with educational level. I'm VERY concerned that American society will not be able to deal with Internet-borne epidemics of viral propaganda, and the US will descend to the level of say, South Africa, where HIV denialism has already killed hundreds of thousands of people.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

all available fossil fuels will be burned, and

…and perhaps we'll be busily and cost-effectively scrubbing ≥5ppm CO₂ per year from the atmosphere, with a net-profitable process.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Interesting, that is the most optimistic take on scrubbing I've seen so far. Not sure it could ever be profitable, though - you can make other products from C02 but the energy required to make those products would itself generate C02; even if you don't use fossil fuels to generate that energy, it still increases net demand.

For scrubbing to work it needs to remove the C02 for good, not turn it into more fuel!

[danthered.livejournal.com]

I bought this issue of SciAm in Seattle for plane reading, but I'd be surprised if you haven't got access one way or another. Go read the whole article; it rather comprehensively addresses the matter of what to do with the CO₂. One of the interesting prospects is to use it as a feedstock for synthetic gasoline, as Sasol have been doing in South Africa for many years. Another, more prosaic possibility: sell the CO₂ for its numerous existing agricultural and industrial purposes, and pocket/plough the profits. Another intriguing prospect: scrub the expected CO₂ emissions from driving a vehicle 100 kilomiles before that vehicle is built. Do read the article (or perhaps Google around for other articles on the same subject)

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I did read the article. The point that I'm making is that while the conversion of C02 into synfuels may be a particularly useful way to store energy in liquid form, it does not in itself result in a C02 reduction.

Whatever your energy source for creating the synfuel, you're taking C02 out of the atmosphere, putting energy into it, getting that energy back out by burning the synfuel, and putting the same carbon you exctracted back into the atmosphere. When compared to different ways of transferring that same input energy to a vehicle, say through a battery rather than synfuel generation, this is neither an energy savings nor a net carbon reduction. (There may be energy issues in the manufacture of electric vs. gas cars that make synfuel desirable for other reasons, but for the moment I'm ignoring that.)

This may be obvious, but I'm belaboring the point because alternative energy strategies have a terrible way of ignoring this or that input to make the system look much more desirable than its alternatives, when in fact it is often worse.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I agree that converting CO₂ to synfuel does not reduce CO₂ overall. I think we have to define the question more precisely: a CO₂ reduction relative to what?

Gasoline-fuelled vehicles are overwhelmingly prevalent, and this will continue to be the case for a very long foreseeable future, barring an unforeseen great leap in battery and battery-related capacity and performance factors. Sure, it'd be nice if we had a magic wand to replace all the ICEs with solar-electric motors, but it just plain will not happen to anywhere near the degree needed to make a substantial dent in CO₂ emissions, nor at anything like the needed pace. We have to deal with that reality.

I find it helpful, when considering my response to the article, to momentarily disregard the prospect of cleaning up past emissions by removing existing CO₂, and focus instead on the prospect of—starting mañana—removing exactly as much CO₂ as might be emitted by any particular vehicle. It seems to me that widely deploying CO₂ scrubbers and using the scrubbed CO₂ to synthesise gasoline would at least move our transport activities much closer to being a homeostatic closed loop. Ending our momentary disregard for the prospects beyond that, the article suggests such a course could go further than that, pulling CO₂ out of the atmosphere at a greater rate than it is accumulating therein.

I agree with you that we need to look realistically and with appropriate scepticism at any and every proposal of this general nature, but we also need to avoid letting our desire for immediate perfection spoil our achievement of gradual improvement.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Right, so if we take the lack of battery vehicles as a problem, and we see CO2 derived synfuels as a way of channeling non-carbon energy to a vehicle when we don't actually have an electric vehicle to use it on, then this does reduce carbon compared to that alternative.

But if you are burning fossil fuels to make the energy that goes into synfuels, or if your strategy pushes other users of carbon-free energy into carbon intensive sources, then you don't have a net gain. The problem is that I don't think we have enough carbon-neutral energy sources to avoid the latter problem. Putting it another way, there is no lack of existing uses for carbon-neutral energy, so a new use might always end up displacing an existing one.

If we ever end up in the happy situation of having an excess of carbon-neutral energy and don't know how to make it displace fossil fuels, this would be a very promising approach.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

if you are burning fossil fuels to make the energy that goes into synfuels […] you don't have a net [improvement].

I think that probably depends on whether the carbon released in the production of synthetic gasoline is greater than, less than, or equal to the carbon released in the production of an equivalent amount of fossil gasoline. We'd also want to look at factors beyond carbon emissions, e.g., political factors related to the source of the feedstock for our motor fuels.

if your strategy pushes other users of carbon-free energy into carbon intensive sources, you don't have a net [improvement].

Agreed—which is the obverse of what gives me pause about cap-and-trade—but my agreement extends only as far as the self-professed Libertarian's train of thought, i.e., not very far; my reaction does not assume the mythical invisible hand is left alone to do its usual ineffectual job of, erm, everything it's ever been left to do on its own. Magic-wand time again: this time we wave it and this carbon-scrubbing, feedstock-producing idea springs into full implementation. The optimal upshot of this new source of high-volume, low-cost, non-fossil feedstocks for fuels traditionally made from petroleum buys breathing space (literally!) to lessen the attraction of carbon-intensive energy, by means of e.g. a carbon tax. The pessimal upshot, of course, is a price drop at the pump and business otherwise as usual. Thoughtful regulation and an energy policy that takes a sufficiently broad and long view can make it possible to adjust the market such that the optimal outcome becomes more likely than the pessimal. I would like to think attaining good, thoughtful policy is less likely than the successful realisation of this CO₂ scrubbing process!

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I think that probably depends on whether the carbon released in the production of synthetic gasoline is greater than, less than, or equal to the carbon released in the production of an equivalent amount of fossil gasoline.

Though I have not looked at the details of synfuel production, the energy inputs are almost certainly more than you get from the resulting fuel. Gasoline burns to create energy, C02 and water. If you could turn C02 and water into gasoline using less energy than that, you'd have a perpetual motion machine. That's why it's appropriate to think of these synfuels as a sort of lightweight liquid battery that stores energy, rather than a source unto itself.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

I agree with your concept of synfuels, but that's also the definition of a gallon of (petro) gasoline or diesel, a gallon of ethanol or methanol from any source, a cubic metre of natural gas or LPG or hydrogen, a battery (the proper technical term for which is "storage battery"), or anything else of the like: a means of storing and transporting energy.

I'm not sure what the energy input/output looks like for synthetic gasoline, and I'm not sure what proportion of the input is in the production of CO₂. Then again, there is at least the appearance of substantial disagreement over whether bioethanol as currently produced in America is net-positive or net-negative.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

the narrative of "you're privileged with special knowledge and smarter than a thousand scientists" is very seductive to the public

To say nothing of fatuous equation of scientific consensus with religious fairytales, the former being dismissed—by those wholly unqualified to judge it—as mere bought-and-paid bafflegab. I have no idea what can be done about it when the general public still grossly misunderstand the word "theory".

Can we please get some religious zealots on-side?

[ursine1.livejournal.com]

It's all in God's plans.

Chuck, tongue firmly in cheek

[bluebear2.livejournal.com]

I find it amazing that anyone would doubt it's existence. We've known about this for more than twenty years.

But there are many regular folks who are changing their lives quietly to not depend on fossil fuels for their lives and at some point the numbers of them will be large enough to at least give us other options.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Something which probably pisses environmentalists off is that I consider those people to be "suckers". They make personal sacrifices for no net gain. Nice as a demonstration, but ineffective at actually reducing carbon emissions. I can get behind proposals that reduce everyone's energy use through global initiatives. But in the current market, voluntary conservation, even on a grand scale, would simply encourage wasteful use by others by lowering demand and reducing prices.

The shame is that it probably wouldn't be all that hard to reduce energy intensity by more than 50%, if people would accept substantial changes in their lifestyle. Our energy use is incredibly wasteful and unnecessary - averaged over time, it's currently at 10 KW per person!

[hickbear.livejournal.com]

10 KW per person

Per...what? A day? A year? Or an entire lifetime (which, given HVAC systems and the like, I find hard to believe)?

[snousle.livejournal.com]

A kilowatt is a measure of power, or energy per unit time. It's about the power used by a hairdryer set on medium. The whole country uses roughly three terawatts, which comes out to about ten kilowatts per person.

If the whole US energy use was devoted to running hairdryers, everyone could run 10 hairdryers 24 hours a day.

Not sure if this figure incorporates energy used to make imported products.

The human body, BTW, operates at about 100 watts. So we're diverting energy at 100x the rate our own bodies use it.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

...or if you prefer, ten kilowatt-hours per hour. LOL.

[hickbear.livejournal.com]

Duhr. Between the heat, and no A/C, and trying to help Bryon after his surgery, my brain is fried.

We've known about this for more than twenty years

[ursine1.livejournal.com]

More like 50 years. I first learned about this back in high school.

Chuck

[barbarian-rat.livejournal.com]

Rejecting AGW today is to reject all of science. If one doesn't believe AGW, it would be logically inconsistent to grant any credibility to any scientific theory whatsoever.

Which is the exactly the result some people want. Then people will turn to religion to 'save' them, because god must be punishing them for allowing .... [insert the boogyman of yer choice] ...

[snousle.livejournal.com]

OH NOES TEH SKY FAIRY IS STILL PWNING US FOR EATIN TEH APPLE!!! FCKING WOMEN AND SNAKES RUIN EVERYTHNG!!!

[barbarian-rat.livejournal.com]

LOL

I love apples ... and snakes ... sometimes together

[jstregyr.livejournal.com]

snousle writes: "... lists more than fifty scientific organizations that [support] the conclusion... The number of organizations that reject this idea? Zero."

If you don't adjectivize the second use of organizations in the sentence above, I'm sure there are some non-zero number of organizations that will reject it: Republicans; Tea-Partyers; Flat-Earthers; Jesus-Tamed-The-Dinosaurs Believers...

Perhaps saying "the number of scientific organizations that reject..."? Or does parallel sentence structure in your previously written paragraph immediately imply that? (Help me, Obi-Gra MmarNazi, you are my only hope... ;-)

[broduke2000.livejournal.com]

Two things that make me mad, because the media won't touch the subject:

1) All of your jobs wet to China due to corrupt politicians and the corporations that control them.

2) There's too many fucking people! Quit having babies, learn how to masturbate, and we'll have this Global Warming thing go away.