Comments JohnMashey has made

1) I think appealing to general morality indeed gets few new supporters.  Many people are concerned about people in proportion to their relationships, and places according to their geographical distance.

2) People are often more motivated by what they lose, than some optional thing they might not gain. I'm not sure reduction of ski trips and beach holidays is as strong a motivation as one might like.

3) The effects of AGW are very geography-dependent, and enumerating a general list just dilutes it.  I'd suggest that for instance , saying +2C sounds pretty attractive to someone in Canada.  On the other hand, more specific items like:

British Columbia: all your mature pines will be killed by pine beetles

Ontario: by 2020, kudzu will survive

(various places in Canada): West Nile virus will thrive as well

Oklahoma: how do you feel about the likelihood that your grandkids will nto be able to live in OK, and will become Okies? Ever see "Grapes of Wrath?"

Vermont: too bad about ski resorts and maple sugar business, go to Canada

Upper midwest: you get warmer, but expect worse flood

Realistically, there are bunch of places where people live, where  their grandhcildren will either not be able to, or it will be very expensive or very unpleasant.  In the West, we have ghost towns around,and they are pretty sad.

4) So: a suggestion: maybe Grist should do a series, in some standard format, area by area, describing:

a) What's already been seen in that state or area.

b) Effects to expect, either by year or by degree or both

c) Cover temperature, precipitation changes, snowpack issues, water, sea level rise, insurance, agriculture, ecosystem  changes, ins some standard format.

d) Ideally, do a series that covers USA & Canada, at least.

e) When possible, recruit climate scientists local to the area to write.

5) If I had a wish, it would be to get Andrew Dessler or one of the other Texas climate scientists to start.  See recent conference Climate Change Impacts on Texas Water, for example.  Texas scientists know they have serious issues ahead, with even less water in some places, and a lot more in other places.

But, without being doom-mongering, you have to be specific, and tell people things they relate to directly, and those are *very* geography dependent.

Google Scholar, etc

1) Yes, this is good advice, although of course Google Scholar works better for some names than others.  Also, it helps to know something about the journals.  See journal impact factor for example.

It's worth knowing that:
a) Getting something published in Science or Nature isn't easy.  Likewise PNAS and AGU professional journals.

b) Watch out for "Energy & Environment" - publishing there is not a plus.  Also,watch out for non-peer-reviewed society "newsletters", which sometimes publish odd things, like happened last summer with the American Physical Society's FPS/Monckton kerfuffle.

c) An important article has a high citation count, and not just from the authors(s) and  their associates.  Important articles get cited over years.  Be careful, though, sometimes Google Scholar ends up with multiple references to the same article, splitting the citation counts.

Still, if you see something with hundreds of citations, it's pretty serious.  It can also be worth Googling such an article to see where it's referenced outside the more restricted set done by Google Scholar.

d) Sometimes an article will get published, expressing  a set of conclusions from some data, and relatively quickly, there will be a flurry of refutations, either finding real errors, ore  reflecting new data.  Then citations die off.

e) Some articles just aren't interesting, and nobody cares.

2) HOWEVER, some of these people actually have published peer-reviewed articles in serious journals, in some cases, many.

a) In some cases, they have published many peer-reviewed articles in some other disciplines, and then have gone off into anti-science around climate, at which point they write OpEds, web articles, etc, etc.   This often happens near/at retirement time.

For example, Coby didn't mention the Heartland attendance of Syun-Ichi Akasofu, a fine aurora researcher with hundreds of legitimate publications ... who upon retirement started putting out truly embarrassing material on climate.  If a senior person, with hundreds of peer-reviewed articles, has real science, they know how to get it published in credible places.

It is a serious red flag if Instead, he puts out material on a website, writes OpEds, etc.
See my analysis of one of his website papers.  This is very sad, a bit akin to Linus Pauling's forays into Vitamin C or William Shockley's into eugenics.

b) In some cases (like Lindzen), people have published many peer-reviewed articles on legitimate climate science.  Here, you have to do more work, like looking at citations and seeing if the work stood up.  If someone else cites a 20-year-old paper, you want to check out what happened since.

You want to check out what someone writes in their peer-reviewed research and what they write in OpEds, say in interviews,  etc.  Modulo the inherent differences in audience, its is a red flag if those are too different.  No scientist with some truly world-shaking science (like disproving AGW) does it in a WSJ OpEd, they send it to Science or Nature.

Lindzen is a rarity in this area, and for some useful insights, see Logical Science comments, including especially quotes from old students. Perhaps compare with different reasons for anti-science.

3. It takes a while [years], but it is very instructive to watch people.  If they make mistakes, are they usually in the same direction? Do their opinions change as new data arrives, or not?  Do they cite long debunked claims (at least in OpEds)?  (One of the useful features of Coby's list is to see how often the same junk gets recycled again and again.]

4. Of course, people with experience in this turf learn who's who after a while, but it takes work.
   

-John Mashey

Another view on Lomborg

Take Lomborg seriously ... not for what he says, but for the cleverness of his political advocacy strategy.

See Lomborg and Playing the Long Game.

Keywords: right-wing thinktanks, reincaration of Julian Simon, misdirection arguments, sophisticated version of false dilemma.

-John Mashey

But is the consensus right (enough)?

I've raised this issue many places and still haven't got a good answer.

I've looked at Stern, the Nordhaus DICE model, MIT,  the assumptions by IPCC, etc.  Regardless of what else they say, they all seem to think that economic growth continues indefinitely like it has for the last century.  That in effect assumes no impact from Peak Oil and its relatives, which seems "odd".

I know it's a tiny minority opinion, but the work from Robert Ayres & Benjamin Warr, Charlie Hall, etc seem worth considering.
http://www.iea.org/Textbase/work/2004/eewp/Ayres-paper1.p ...

and especially
http://www.cge.uevora.pt/aspo2005/abscom/ASPO2005_Ayres.p ...

the last page of that models the US economy under various assumptions about efficiency, and it doesn't look like everlasting growth.

If you believe Ayres & co, we have to move even faster on investing fossil resources on energy efficiency and sustainable supplies, before the future downtrends in (oil&gas) wreck the economy or drive people to use even more coal instead of shutting it down.  Also, if you believe them, there are many scenarios in which energy efficiency+sustainability aren't just needed to help climate, but are actually negative costs, or at least, help avoid even worse economic downturns.

Companies often spend the profits from an existing  business that is clearly going way, to invest in replacements. If they do that while they still have capital, they stay in business, but if they wait too long, they go bankrupt.

Note: I don't want to get into arguments about whether or not economic growth is "good", simply express the worry that the consensus (that mitigation costs are modest) may be nowhere near strong enough, and they might have the sign wrong on costs...

In more detail:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/02/the_economists_co ...

-John Mashey

Good material, thanks Sean Casten. Jevons?

Note that it's William Stanley Jevons, not Jevon.

I often see Jevons' Paradox referenced reflexively as a reason to ignore efficiency.  Wikipedia's discussion is actually pretty useful.

But in any case, it's one thing to say:

• increasing efficiency leads to economic growth
  
• and hence to more use of energy

• the era of cheap, high-EROI fossil energy is drawing to a close; see Charlie Hall's Balloon Graph, although Sean's post seems to indicate the current EROI of coal is lower than  shown there.
  
• and we have to work very hard on efficiency just to keep ( work = energy-used * efficiency) ~constant while we spend decades building up renewables and getting them down cost curves.

-John Mashey

John Mashey

How?  Lobby in the Senate, obviously.  Easier than the House.

-John Mashey

Jobs

I don't have specific data, but it is actually quite plausible that many "good" new jobs will indeed be provided.

a) It is pretty clear that there is more funding to turn more green R into green D, which helps well-paid R&D people, a relatively small number.

There is expansion in new kinds of consulting jobs, and in "green-our-company" folks.  I attended a conference recently, with 4 such folks on the panel, of which 3 were female (and very good).

b) It may help some manufacturing workers, given that a lot of higher-efficiency stuff needs to be built.  Increasing costs of transport should unwind some of the worldwide JIT supply chains, which will move manufacturing around.

c) But, I think the main "green jobs" area people are talking about are the large number of construction-like jobs and support staff for them.  Such jobs would seem to be more widely accessible to many people, as there is a fighting chance to enter them with relatively little formal education, and then move up with experience.

-John Mashey

John Mashey

SolarCity, http://www.solarcity.com/ , does a lot of installations around here.  I've talked to their CEO Lyndon Rive, who emphasized the importance of building and retaining a good workforce, and talked about how to do that.

Elon Musk is the chairman,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk .

Here's SolarCity's overall jobs page:
http://www.solarcity.com/tabid/71/Default.aspx
which includes various sales jobs.

Here's the jobs page for installers:

http://solarcity.com/Default.aspx?tabid=184

Here's the entry position:
PV Installer

This is a great position for construction workers, roofers, electricians who want to get started in the solar industry.

Required skills/experiences
    * No specific PV experience required. However, knowledge of electrical installation, roofing, and general construction is required.
    * Willing to be learn about PV solar electric systems installations

General Qualifications
    * The below qualifications are required for all of the above positions
    * Must have excellent customer relation skills
    * Must be very organized, and be able to meet aggressive timelines
    * Willing to do residential, commercial & service work
    * Willing to work in extreme environments (hot sun, high places/roofs & crawl spaces).
    * Be able to lift at least 100 pounds and not afraid of roof top heights
    * Must have a clean valid drivers license
Benefits:
    * Paid vacation.
    * Medical, dental, and vision.
    * Stock options

They were here doing a mass install in our (little) town:
http://www.solarcity.com/Default.aspx?tabid=200

I used to bump into their installers at the local deli, and talk to them, as there were usually several trucks' worth there at lunch every day for months, and talking to the real workers is always a great way to assess a company.  I have no firsthand experience with their hiring practices.

In general, they were enthusiastic about the company and seemed to enjoy what they were doing.  Of course, 6-8 people is hardly a large sample, and there were no women, although given the modest percentages in construction, that's unsurprising.  

Most were Hispanic, of various skin shades, so if all such count as "white guys", that's what they were, if it matters to somebody.

The website shows recent installations, and residential installations are mostly in suburbs ... but what would one expect?

Houses in suburbs:

• usually have enough roof space/family to be useful, which tends to be less true for denser housing, although new (low) condo/apartment complexes are tending to get built with solar builtin, which is easier.  In towns around here, single-family house's roofs are big enough to have a fighting chance to cover electricity bills, and maybe leave something for PHEV.  Some people are building outright ZEHs.

• have higher rates of ownership versus rental, which makes it more likely that someone will buy,

• on the San Francisco Peninsula, even places called cities are really more like suburbs,

• and in this case, have a lot of fairly wealthy owners who are also early adopters and can afford the upfront capital costs. On the other hand, the least expensive area around here is East Palo Alto, and Clarum has built some ZEH's or near-ZEHs there with integrated PV, one of the things needed to get the prices down, along with volume and more efficient PV materials. There is also solar going in in less expensive places, in the East Bay and Central Valley.

SolarCity and others are also doing government & commercial, which is a little easier in cities, as there is roof space, and less complexity with ownership issues.

Anyway, I make no claim that this area is anything like representative, but it's at least some real data.

-John Mashey

Illinois

I have no idea whether coal is good for Obama's constituency, [I rather doubt it, if it were me, I'd spend it on supporting more things like efficiency improvements, encouraging investments in industries like wind-turbines, etc.]

I simply point out that if there's a pot of "free" Federal money to be had, then it is very hard for state legislators to resist competing for it, even if the usage of it is to build bridges to nowhere or even pyramid-equivalents. (jobs! bring home the bacon for the district!)

The general idea of CCS is less bad than those, after all, even James Hansen says it's important.

The issue is whether or not this particular CCS example is a good usage of money.  R&D is supposed to follow "progressive commitment":

1. research
   
2. applied research
   
3. exploratory development
   
4. development
   
5. scaleup and deployment

-John Mashey

Unsurprising, and oddly, related to CA/EPA

http://www.bcnys.org/whatsnew/2001/1211balance.htm lists the "balance of payments" of states with the Federal Government, i.e., the difference between money paid to the US Government, and money received back.  This was for 2000, so it's a little old, but I suspect the overall structure hasn't changed.

I did a spreadsheet with:
Paid
Received
Difference = paid - Received
% Return = Received/Paid

and sorted by Difference, with a few interesting states:

CA -$63B, 75%  [largest net contributor]
NY -$47B, 72%  [2nd largest]
....
MD +$5B, 112%
....
VA +$13B, 126% [largest net recipient]

==
Also interesting is that of the 15 states that made net contributions [CA, NY, IL*, NJ, MI*, CT, MA, MN*, WA, WI*, PA, OR, NH*, DE*, VT}, 9 are with CA in fighting the EPA (* aren't), along with RI, ME, MD, FL, CO, UT, AZ, NM, i.e., 17 states total.

If your take those 17, of the money sent to the Federal Govt that didn't come back $290B), we paid 70%, despite being 46% of the population.

There seems to be a strong correlation between states that worry about energy&climate, and those who don't.  It may well be that being well-subsidized by the rest of us helps a state ignore such issues...

-John Mashey

We're not there yet ... but UK?

Consider what the UK does.  recall that AIR was sent out to schools, there was a lawsuit, the judge said fix a few things, the government said yes, and the slightly-updated advice package went out the door to the teachers:

http://publications.teachernet.gov.uk/default.aspx?PageFu ...

The following 69-pager gave teachers advice on using various subsets of using AIT, planning shot lessons, full days, links to further resources, etc.

http://publications.teachernet.gov.uk/eOrderingDownload/F ...

-John Mashey

Thanks, and one more question

Justlou, it's been a while since I spent much time in the mid-West. Can you prognosticate for me?
What is a plausible evolution of corn-belt farms over the next few decades, especially after:

• fertilizer gets real expensive
  
• petroleum gets real expensive
  
• some transport costs get more expensive

What are Iowa farms likely to look like, 10, 20, 30, 40 years off?  (I figure 40 is enough to make oil and natural-gas-based fertilizer really expensive). Compared to what they grow now, what will they likely be growing? What should they be growing? Is that how you think they should look, or should they be something else?  Do you think farmers will be able to make more money?  I've seen one comment that the mid-west should turn into vegetable farms. Is there any plausibility to that?  Anyway, what do those mid-west farms grow and who do they sell it to?

Anyway, Grist often has a lot of posts that are in effect proposing farm policy, and a few are from experts, but an awful lot are from urbanites who've apparently never forked manure on a real farm :-)

Hence,  knowledgable opinions are valued, and since the farm population is now ~2%, there aren't as many around as there used to be.

-John Mashey

Justlou: thanks

I'm all for electricity [after avoidance & efficiency], but I can't say I'm thrilled with corn monoculture.  I still don't see how having switchgrass in -place of corn makes it worse for fauan, so can you say more onthat? I like no-till/less-till when possible.  I'd like to see less pesticide/fertilizer when possible, and I'd like to see farmers grow stuff that makes a decent living.

In any case, talk about fertilizer use.  How is the current amount of corn going to be kept growing?

-John Mashey

Justlou, please say some more

Since (unlike a lot of posters) you demonstrably have farm expertise, can you clarify a few things.  You clearly disagree with the practicality of winter crops, and then disagree with the general idea of using perennial grasses as fuel. These are two different kinds of disagreements ("doesn't work" and "shouldn't be done."

I'm interested in getting more specific comments of the first type on the rest of Vinod's comments, and a little more on the winter crop issue.[To what extent is that geographically determined? or the specific crop combinations?  Certainly, some people, some places use winter cover crops.  We never grew the soy/corn combination, so I have no experience with thaht one.]

A lot of what he said made a lot of sense, but then I'm many years off the farm, so I'd love to hear of other things that don't make technical sense.

As context, I'm assuming/hoping that:

1. Cars go serial PHEV and EV as fast as they can, with EV's ramping faster if Better Place works out, and they or somebody create modular battery infrastructure, and if more areas create charign stations (like Fry's Electronics does here).

2. Some places must get as many cars as possible into PHEV/EV, such as Los Angeles and the CA Central Valley, even if ethanol/biodisel were free.  Stanford's Mark Z. Jacobson has done a lot of good work on modeling changes with different fuels, such as: "Effects of Ethanol (E85) versus Gasoline Vehicles on Cancer and Mortality in the United States."
   

Put another way, there are some areas where cars at least, have got to stop burning anything (except hydrogen, and I'm not holding my breath), and the less that cars are burning in metropolitan areas, the better ...  

3) My concern is not so much cars, but more with Class 8 trucks, railroads, off-road machinery, bigger tractors [I've seen smaller solar electric ones], ships, etc.  I'd be happy if everything that was really necessary got electrified, but I certainly expect that those fleets turn over much slower than cars, which sounds like we're going to need fuels for a long time (although diesel seems more important) just to get crops to market, unless a lot of railroads get electrified, including all the abandoned shortlines.

Put another way: suppose gas+diesel were going to disappear in 5-10 years.  Would farmers be able to go totally electric, or would some fuel still be needed?

4. http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FertilizerUse/ tables 7, 8, 9 tells me that nitrogen fertilizer prices are going up, that corn uses a lot, and the massive corn farms don't usually have a lot of manure handy. Given that Peak Gas can't be that many decades away, I don't understand how high-fertilization corn production is going to be a long-term thing, i.e.,  more crop rotation / polyculture / perennials seem like good things to me, since I Don't see how Iowa/Kansas et al turn into big vegetable farms.  Am I missing something?  I'm not sure how the water issue, especially with the Ogallala, plays out.

5. Personally, I'd much rather see big chunks of corn-land turn into perennials some of the time., Less corn in the US might raise the percentage of grass-fed meat, lower the amount from CAFO, and provide less HFCS, and less diabetes.

6. Given that rare/endangered species aren't likely to be hanging out in corn anyway, I'm not quite sure why it's worse for the fauna to have perennials, even if it isn't better, although maybe "nursery fields" help. (?)

-John Mashey

On corn

1. I'd love it if we got rid of distorting ag subsidies which have created mountains of corn that seem to benefit ADM and Cargill a lot more than they benefit farmers.

2. However, given that all that corn gets grown anyway (until the  Ogallala gets sucked dry, and they run out of fertilizer) ....

[Well, if CAFO beef is food, if High-Fructose Corn Syrup is food...  Is there any correlation with diabetes? We've only had HFCS since ~1980.]

Are people really fighting to keep those uses of corn just like they are?
Read The Omnivore's Dilemma, for example, and:
http://www.iowacorn.org/cornuse/cornuse_3.html

Put another way, over-produced corn, in general, is a real problem, and corn ethanol is just one outcome, and probably not even the worst.

-John Mashey

Thanks, say some more

Pompey Road: thanks.
I'm looking for firsthand experience with the various important fuel uses that aren't cars and light trucks. [Among other things, I used to work for the US Bureau of Mines, but that was 40 years ago.]

Can you talk about (or give pointers to studies on) the extent to which your part of the mining business is
a) Already electrified, i.e., what's the balance between:

• electricity
  
• diesel fuel
  
• gasoline

b) Speculation on what you could do if the two fuels get more expensive?

[In general, as in short/moderate-distance EV cars, and in electric tractors, machinery that stays within a relatively small radius, is sized for reasonable batteries, and has compatible usage patterns seems the easiest to electrify.]

If I understand Shai Agassi's views right, I think battery change-out stations are part of the vision for Better Place & related efforts.

-John Mashey

Shorter work week

I love the idea, especially as a half-retired consultant.

Does this wish apply to farmers, by the way?  I'd have loved it when I was a kid on a farm, given that we worked 7 days a week.  A 4-day week would ahve been wonderful.

-John Mashey

No useful recent sim tool experience, sorry

The SimCity comment of course wasn't mean for serious simulations, but as a convenient learning tool, i.e., which tends to make people aware that there are numerous nonobvious interactions, and that one must plan ahead.  In particular, there is a cost to allocating land to a transport path you don't yet need, but the cost of tearing down a lot of infrastucture to build it later ends up being horrendous.

Here might be some places to look:
http://www.stevekrause.org/steve_krause_blog/2007/10/revi ...

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001622.html

-John Mashey

Computer games

One could wish that SimCity4 had a more useful/realistic approach to farming.

-John Mashey

Nano and Peak Oil

1) Without running the numbers, I'd conjecture that long before all Nanos together generate anything like the CO2 emissions of California alone, it will run into price pressure from Peak Oil.

I haven't looked much at the Nano.  Does anybody know enough about it to say whether or not it's a useful step towards PHEVs and then EVs?  Either would be a heck of lot more useful driving around Mumbai or Bangalore, even given the traffic that was there in the mid-90s, and it must ber worse now.

2) To me, the real issue is investment patterns that may get stranded.  For example, if there are more Nanos around, will there get to be a lot of free parking? (and thus attendant hidden subsidies).

I recommend UCLA Prof. Donald Shoup's "The High Cost of Free Parking" as the classic study of the investment skew and deoptimized resource allocation caused by it.

-John Mashey

Re: ships

I have no kneejerk anti-nuke stance, having for most of my undergrad days been training to go into nuclear or high-energy physics. I certainly regard Rickover with high respect, as an exemplar of great engineering practice dedicated to perfection.  I understand R&D efforts that work well when done in small quantities by the sharpest people with large budgets.

But there are at at least 40,000 substantial ships out there.
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:ONN4v8DcUt8J:www.isl ...

I need a lot of convincing that the world's Navy experience is safely and economically scalable to widespread commercial use by average engineers and sailors, some of whom do things like running into bridges in San Francisco Bay.

The history of commercial nuclear ships, so far, doesn't seem encouraging.  Can you provide something more specific and positive than a general Google that gave webpages like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_shi ...
which gave me 4 nuclear merchant cargo ships, of which exactly 1 seems to be still in operation.

-John Mashey

The real world

Brian: I'm an old farmboy & engineer/(scientis) who's had to live in the real world forever, and I could care less about handwaving.  I used to help sell supercomputers to oil guys, to help them find more oil.

Maybe I misunderstood your comment earlier, but I just observe that:

a) In the 1970s, less-well-off folks got clobbered by the oil crunch.  For a while, we made good improvements in efficiency, and then we slacked off.

b) It is totally impossible to go cold turkey off oil, in particular, because big chunks of American farming would totally collapse.

c) But, I'd claim that a whole lot of people would be a lot better off if we hadn't slacked off; I think California [even with it's car love-affairs] is better off for having pushed hard on efficiency issues, and likewise Europe.  [Gas is expensive, and that's forced a lot of infrastructure choices.]

d) I simply think that doing everything we can, including sensible/rising carbon taxes, to try to send clear signals to people, and increase efficiency, is less likely to smash up poorer people, than to pretend there is no issue.

e) With regard to global warming, it seems like a lot of economists are out to lunch regarding being able to pay for adaptation because 100 years from now, everyone will be a whole lot richer.  They may be able to buy Terabyte iPods, but paying for dikes and seawalls will be really expensive, especially with little petroleum left.  I guess there's always men with shovels.

-John Mashey

Electrify transportation

Nickz: I'm all for this, but please help me out:
We know about cars, and light trucks, but how about:
-class 8 trucks
-offroad vehicles, like combines [400HP, 300-gal diesel tanks]
-the entire rail network
-ships

- I don't ask for airplanes.

I'm really, really trying to understand how to do these, or if they are simply going to disappear.  When you said it was easy, did you mean these?

If long-distance travel (except selected rail, and  (mostly)wind-powered ships) is to disappear, we need to start thinking how to restructure the USA big-time, and it's going to take a while (longer than I'll be around).

This is a serious question: I'm assuming that:
a) Cheap conventional oil gets used up
b) We avoid doing tar sands, oil shale, coal-to-liquid.
c) We forbid biofuels, since that's the clear message here at Grist.
d) But, we (eventually) get plenty of renewable electricity, with some sequestered coal.

Anyway, please start talking seriously about the hard parts of the transport system, not the relatively easy part.

-John Mashey

More detail on the transport section

The following diagram from EERE shows oil use in transportation:

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/office_eere/pdfs/figure2_oil_ ...

I.e., it takes the light blue section from the chart above and splits it up, and projects it forward.

I'd observe:
1) Cars and some of the light trucks [SUVs and pickups that really are primarily used for personal transport] are plausibly convertible to mostly-electric usage, and usage conserved.

THIS IS THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT, and the most obvious, which is why people talk about it a lot.

2. Some pickups (really used as pickups), delivery vans, etc, get some help from being hybrids.

3. Class 8 trucks get a little help from being hybrid (regenerative braking, idling), but not much.
   

I'd guess off-road vehicles don't get much help either, and worse, big trucks and combines and such tend to have long lifetimes, which means they are really stranded assets.

4. Some trains can cost-effectively be electrified, diesel-electric trains can get some modest help from hybrid-regenerative braking. (GE)

5. There's some pretty serious work to do (see Hirsch Report) to get the total usage (1) down to the domestic production line and (2) down to the long-term number eventually required, i.e., ~0.

6. Some of these applications have no obvious electrification possibilities, in which case:

c) OR this all gets extended by tar sands / oil shale / coal-to-liquid ... and THEN we get to a) or b), but with a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere.

-John Mashey

Useful, thanks

1) This may be an overgeneralization as well, but I suspect some of the bad attitude may be LA & NYC.  There are certainly plenty of people around here [SF Bay Area] who have more congenial views, appreciate the local farmers' markets, etc. [You do understand of course that if anyone in SF says anything nice about LA, they get thrown out :-)]

A few miles away is Jesse Cool, for example:
http://www/cooleatz.com/about/index.html

One of the most famous chefs in the Bay Area would be Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame, who would probably die of apoplexy if she read Stein's article.

2. Time: ugh.

3. It would do urban/suburban dwellers a lot of good to actually spend some time on a working farm  in a large farming area.  A lot of well-intentioned, but silly, comments might disappear.

4. One last question if I may: how far is the nearest railhead?
   

-John Mashey

Bicoastal blather?

1) With all due respect, are you asserting that LA is representative of both East and West Coasts? :-)
Actually, I think Joel Garreau's "The Nine Nations of North America" is more appropriate.  Certainly, anyone in most of California, of all places, should be able to get great meals that haven't traveled too far.

2. Stein clearly doesn't understand Peak Oil, and I suspect, like most Americans, doesn't understand much about farming...

3. Can you say some more about:
   

• the distance distribution of food served in your restaurant?
  
• How you get the food? Do farmers deliver? Do you get together at markets?  Do you have an Amish suppliers>
  
• Of food that comes from further away, how much comes by trucks versus rail?  If rail, is it electrified?

As an old farmboy, I'm at a loss to understand quite how this would work in the mid-West, but maybe the world has changed.  [I'm less clear how one feeds New York via local-only food, but that's a separate issue :-)]

It sounds like you're in the middle of good example of what can be done in you're located in the middle of excellent farm country, so you might be able to provide informed opinion in place of blather that sometimes appears.

Thanks!

-John Mashey

See the original report

There's a link on the page mentioned.

Also, see Jacobson's website, which has a lot of high-quality material, including that earlier study on ethanol E85 versus gas.

-John Mashey

On cows and cars and such

Bio-d:

1. R&D management: OK, we won't go off into that, but can you say what sorts of things you would and wouldn't fund?  I assume biofuels research would be zeroed, but what would you fund?

2. Can I assume you've spent substantial time living / working on farm(s), including some in mid-west (since that's where the biofuel action mostly is)?  If so, can you say a little about farm size, crops grown, location, what sort of machinery was used, how far from a railhead?

3. At some point, it would be nice to move to a discussion of what a reasonably-sustainable future might look like, say in the canonical 2100, but at least some time after petroleum is ~gone.

4. The cow-vs-car example ....  In the long run, there are a bunch of other tradeoffs that strike me as much more relevant, including quite possibly cow-vs-horse, for which we at least have historical precedent.
   

-John Mashey

John Mashey

Bio-D:

1) Massive research funding: when you say that, can you give a rough breakdown of:
a) Where the funding goes?
b) What's the profile of spending over the next 10-20 years?

I.e., I'm trying to understand where the money goes, and who spends it, and how, and to get beyond generalities.

2) Regulations that do not allow biofuels to compete for food.

If I understand this right, that is a law that forbids any farmer from growing any biofuel crop on any land that might grow any food.  Yes?

Again, just to understand what you mean, it would be illegal, for instance, to grow something like miscanthus on grazing land (unsuitable for grains)?

Would it also be illegal to raise grain to be fed to animals? (I.e., only grazing-fed meat is allowed?)  

Presumably, these laws happen after the law that outlaws tobacco growing? [Which after all, consumes prime farmland, and fuel for curing.]

-John Mashey

John Mashey

Minor correction:  I rather doubt that Inhofe is scanning the Internet: this is a {Marc Morano & colleagues}.  Inhofe just funds the work.  Discredit where discredit is due.

-John Mashey

Optimization problems; question for Sean

Assuming we go al-out on efficiency, and doe verything we can for local generation to minimize distribution losses, the tension Sean mentions remains.

However, in some ways, it is akin to the problems faced by the old Bell System in trying to build distributed networks while placing switches & trunks to keep costs down.

Sean: "because it fits so naturally into the present utility paradigm"

Can you give any comments about the extent to which different US states are or aren't changing that paradigm?
 

-John Mashey

Dyson, Kurzweil, et al

1. In science fiction, Dyson is most famous for the idea of "Dyson Sphere", of which Larry Niven's "Ringworld" is a famous offshoot.  No doubt, those would solve our problems, but there's a minor matter of engineering.

2. Ray Kurzweil is a fine inventor, and his book "The Singularity Is Near" is worth reading.

3) In general, when futurists tell you about things that will be easy, they are akin to "economists who predicted 9 of the last 5 depressions", and the further they get from disciplines they really know well, the more thigns get predicted.

-John Mashey

The 17 states pay most of the bills

To add insult to injury, the 17 states (CA + NY +...) pay a lot of the bills, and this is what we get.

From: http://www.ppinys.org/nybalpayments.htm, we find that in 2000 (last year I could find):

In $Millions, i.e., the first # is $1.977T
$1,977,113  all states sent to Washington
$1,687,116  all states got back
-$ 289,997  net balance for all states

-$ 202,814  net deficit for those 17 states
$1,006,305  17 states sent to Washington

Thus, the 17 states paid more than half of the taxes, and in fact, paid 2/3 of the money that didn't come back.  Hmmm.

-John Mashey

Oil, gas, and coal

I'm all for this, but realistically:

a) It's hard to understand how we'll avoid burning most of the oil and gas we can get.  [Of course, a lot of oil will still be there, because that's the way oil reservoirs work.  Also, gas reservoirs, being gas, tend to drop sharper after the peak.]

b) It's coal I worry about, as there is going to be terrific pressure to burn more of it as oil (& especially gas) prices jiggle their way up.

c) Suppose people get scared enough to start doing the right things on efficiency. Suppose later a new oil/gas field pops up.  Should we wish to leave it in the ground, or hope to use it to fend off coal?

Any gap between (oil+gas decreasing) and efficiency+renewable increasing => terrific pressure for coal.  [I grew up near coal country, and have read Jeff Goodell's Big Coal.  Please, No.]

At least, so far, we're not drilling in ANWR, and California has long tried to deny renewals for offshore oil leases.

-John Mashey

Sean: Q on funding?

I couldn't quite tell how much of this is public finance and how much private.  Do you know?

If I were Illinois & Texas, and somebody said they were going to spend $1.5B in my state, I'd probably fight for it also :-)

Of course, if the US said "We've got $1B to build a pyramid", people wouldn't turn it away.

-John Mashey

Economics; physics;farming;non-substituion

I'm just catching up, but:

1) Could anybody (especially the economics-knowledgable) please comment on:
Ayres & Warr, "Accounting for Growth: the Role of Physical Work",
http://www.iea.org/Textbase/work/2004/eewp/Ayres-paper1.p ...

They make a lot of sense to me, and unsurprisingly seem much more connected with the real world & physics, than say, Solow.  Of course, my early background was physics, so I may be biased.

I have commented more on why Ayres&Warr might be relevant:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/12/8/103236/174

But I'd like more opinions from people who've read what they say.

If they are right, wealth ~ exergy = efficiency * energy-used, and energy-used isn't going to go up very fast in the face of Peak Oil and Gas.  In fact, it will likely go down, unless we go mad with coal, even if we build wind & solar like crazy.

2) Speaking as an old farmboy, the idea that agriculture is only 3% and therefore NO PROBLEM just tells me whoever said it is disconnected from the real world and may well think food just appears in grocery stores.

Water and food are not substitutable goods; no amount of cheap iPods help.

Everybody should be careful to avoid over-applying Moore's law way into the future.  Moore's law was just an observation about: (a) density growth of transistors.  For many years, we also got (b) performance improved simply as transistors shrinkage improved clock rates relatively easily.

(a) Probably has at least 10 years to go, but beyond that, there have to be really radical technology changes, and it will take serious work even to keep CMOS&related tech on that path beforehand.  We've been on a ride for decades, but it's getting harder.

(b) is pretty much over, at least for CMOS.  This is why Intel & ADM have eschewed GHz races in favor of "how many cores I can put on a chip and keep power low".

Of course, there are some good uses of microelectronics to help improve agricultural yields, but no amount of chips makes the Ogallala Aquifer refill, or fix the CA snowmelt problem.

We have hard work ahead just to keep food & water  even with current population, much less do a reasonable job for 9B.  Given Peak Oil, I wouldn't want to live anywhere where most of my food comes from a long distance, especially via fuel-burning ships.

The Economist's lead story last week was:
The end of cheap food
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_i ...

[Some people simultaneously believe in "eat local" and "the poor of the world need North American grain".  One of those seems a fine idea to the extent it's possible; the other one is probably wrong in the first place, but mostly seems likely to get drastically reduced anyway post-petroleum. Any likely shipping fuel will be biodiesel or perhaps cellulosic ethanol, not oil, and it better not be coal-based synfuels.]

3)For a serious integrated analysis of energy issues, I recommend as an example:
http://www.energy.ca.gov/2007_energypolicy/index.html

Read the Executive Summary, and then if you're a glutton for detail, the full report is 300 pages,and it is interesting to see the range of participants, pp.279-.  Very hard work ahead.

I'm interested in serious similar documents from other states or countries [CA of course is one with some behavior like the other] so I can calibrate best practices & learn ideas to copy.
Can anyone post pointers to similar planning documents?

-John Mashey

Economists; negative (?) discounts

1. I've argued slightly elsewhere with Michael that scientists need to do science, but that actions need to be informed also by:

• engineering
  
• politics
  
• economics [i.e., economics is actually relevant]

2. We've had some comments earlier about problems with neoclassical economics, and tidal has mentioned Ayres and Warr, of which I strongly recommend one of the studies that tidal alludes to:

Ayres & Warr, "Accounting for Growth: the Role of Physical Work", http://www.iea.org/Textbase/work/2004/eewp/Ayres-paper1.p ...
Using exergy = energy used x efficiency, they make a pretty good case that much of the growth in GDP has come from increasing exergy [specifically, more energy used or better efficiency].

This makes sense to me: subsistence farmers with no draught animals are rarely rich.  A horse, or even better a tractor, helps a lot. [I grew up on a farm.]

• Skip the differential equations and look at Figure 8, in which US GDP is compared (most importantly) with the line labeled UB - MSE = 0.9.    The two lines are fairly close, with some extra GDP growth since ~1980, believed to be from extra efficiency & computing.  Using exergy as an input to GDP seems to model it much better than Solow's noeclassical labor & capital.  Put another way, the "Solow residual" mostly disappears.  I could never understand how one thinks one knows what's happening if the residual is bigger than the amount of change explained.

• Figure 10 shows the marginal productivities of Labor (~.1), Capital (~.3), and Work (Exergy) (~.7)

"From a long-term sustainability viewpoint, this conclusion carries a powerful implication.  If economic growth is to continue without proportional increases in fossil fuel consumption, it is vitally important to exploit new ways of generating value added without doing more work.  But it is also essential to develop ways of reducing fossil fuel exergy inputs per unit of physical work output (i.e. increasing conversion efficiency).  in other words, energy (exergy) conservation is probably the key to long term environmental sustainability."

Anyway, all of this economics actually makes sense to me anyway, but then I'm no economist, and maybe I've misread this.

3. I would claim that if exergy is indeed a big piece of GDP, and if Peak Oil has either just happened (T. Boone Pickens) or will within next 10 years, the part of the exergy increase due to burning increasing amounts of oil is over, and the exergy increase from burning lots of natural gas will be over in a few years.

Fortunately, there is a lot of room for efficiency improvements, even when actually burning oil&gas - see the excellent book by Sovacool & Brown, eds, "Energy and American Society - Thirteen Myths", 2007, and of course, we hope to avoid silly uses of energy, and replace fossil with renewable.

4. However, it's not at all obvious that over this next 100 years, that there are going to be huge increases in exergy/person.  Why? Well, oil and gas are going away, and we're going to be scrambling hard to increase efficiency fast enough to stay even.

5. IF that is true, then all of this "don't waste money on climate change mitigation, because our descendants will be much richer and they can then easily afford to pay for adaptation." is fantasy.  In fact, rather than a big positive discount rate (which many economists claim), or the near-zero discount (which Stern uses), if it turns out that descendents are poorer (even for a while), that's a negative discount rate.

6. But, as both Stern and Sterner [really] note, discount rates can differ for different kinds of goods.  For example, in 100 years, one can probably have an iPod with a Terabyte of storage really cheap, i.e., those people are rich in what they can buy in some areas.

7. Unfortunately, consider things that people need:
   

• water [in presence of Ogallala usage, decreased snowpack, saltwater incursion]

• food [and with natural gas going away, there 's this problem with some kinds of fertilizer, and with oil going away, it's not going to get much cheaper to move food around from where it's grown, and even trying hard to eat local doesn't go very far in some places.  How does everyone in NYC eat local?  In Tokyo? in London?]

• housing, which uses exergy to build

• and for adaption, in some areas, dikes, seawalls, or rebuilding major infrastructure somewhere else.  All of this is energy-intensive stuff, and depends on steel&concrete or earthmoving, and no amount of cheap iPods helps this much.

• Put another way, different goods have different discount rates, and unfortunately, the goods needed for climate change adaptation sure look like they don't ahve a large positive discount rate to me, i.e., I don't expect them to get terrifically more affordable for a while.

-John Mashey

White whales; harpoons, rusty butter knife

The white whale analogy is great, and I've often referenced it elsewhere.  But particularly in the light of Tim Lambert's unequivocal finding of plagiarism at:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/schulte_replies_t ...

I think "harpoon" is wrong.

in this case, Ahab took a piece of a broken 2005 harpoon, handed it to a non-swimming landlubber, who turned it into a rusty butter knife.  Ahab announced that the whale was clearly dead, and the blogiodicy reported it so all along the shore.  The landlubber has yet to actually get in a leaky boat and assault the whale, but Anytime Now...

-John Mashey

re: climate change worries harming patients

drfrances: There actually may be some truth to this, in this particular case.

Recall that the Schulte report came to light via Lord Christopher Monckton, who is well-known in the UK for his views on anthropogenic climate change [ridiculous, not happening].  He is easy to Google, but the following is useful:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2073267,00 ...

It notes that Monckton has required a series of operations for an endocrine complaint.

Dr. Schulte is an endocrine surgeon, whose wegbsite says: "We are one of the largest centres in the UK for endocrine surgery...", at Kings College Hospital (a good place)

Now, I have zero evidence that Monckton has met Schulte, or been treated by him, but if so, then Schulte would have seen at least one patient worried about exaggerated  scares of climate change....

This could be a coincidence, of course, but it has been a puzzle why a well-published endocrinologist  suddenly charges off into the buzz-saw of global warming fights...

-John Mashey

re: skepticism

As a skeptic in the classic scientific sense, as well as a long-time reader of Skeptical Inquirer,  and a long-time contributor to measurement-over-intuition in my field, I love rational skepticism.

As a result, I'm always rationally skeptical of people who claim the mantle of rational skepticism & improvement of science, when their true feelings are so strong that there is no hope of fruitful discussion of evidence and uncertainnty, because their beliefs are driven by economic interests, politic, ideology, or philosophy, not by science.

As a 20-year participant in on-line bulletin boards, I long ago learned to use KILLFILEs, but since blogs don't generally support them, I just use virtual ones.  Life is too short.

I don't see any point in continuing to attempt rational discussion (I did try, mostly because it was an excuse to virtually revisit Switzerland) with someone whose earliest visible posts on this were 3 separate copies of:

"Max Anacker says...

How foolish can we be?
To seriously believe all the hype that man is causing a climate disaster that will destroy the planet is not only basically stupid, it is extremely arrogant.

We insignificant humans do not have the power to destroy this planet. Never did.

We also do not have the ability to change the current climate trends, or even to accurately forecast what is going to happen over the next 10 let alone 100 years.

Let's hope things will get warmer, rather than colder. We don't need another ice age.

Forget all the junk science by so-called experts that are all in on the multi-billion dollar "climate research scam".

Forget all the disaster reports being sold by environmental activists via the sensationalist media.

Forget all the self-righteous calls for action by power-hungry politicians.

Use your common sense. It's all a hoax."

-John Mashey

More on glaciers

Max:
Thanks for the pointers; I think we share the belief that careful study of glaciers is useful in understanding climate gyrations. Combined with other evidence, they tell us more than just "the temperature changes up and down."

Thanks for reminding me of Grosser Aletsch - you may want to look at "Glacier and lake-level variations in west-central Europe over the last 3500 years" [1]. Figures 2 (Aletsch, Gorner and Lower Grindelwald) and  5 (Aletsch + lakes) are particularly useful. From eyeballing the chart, it wouldn't claim assert that that the current retreat is noticeably slower or faster than the previous ones, although it's clearly retreating faster than it was ~1900, from [9] and [10].

Although glacier mass balance is certainly not a perfect direct proxy for temperature (since precipitation matters), it is still very useful,  As mentioned in [1],  glaciers offer helpful time-filtering effects, i.e., longer glaciers don't notice quick transients, like volcanic eruptions.  They say Aletsch has a reaction time of about 24 years, and a response time of 50-100 years.  I.e., if you suddenly raised the temperature and kept it there, it would take Aletsch a while to even notice, and then much longer before it shrank enough to get back into equilibrium.  Thus, they say "The present-day position of the glacier front is therefore a reflection of the climactic conditions of past decades."

There is very strong known data, plus Ruddiman's hypotheses [3, 4], that offer reasonable explanations for most of these glacier gyrations, some of which are natural, and some of which are virtually certain to be anthropogenic.  In fact, in some ways, the long-term Swiss glacier gyrations are among the strongest data we have for supporting anthropogenic influences before the current AGW, and of course, the last 100 years of data show AGW's fingerprints. A good discussion by a Swiss author can be found in[5].

Anyway, it's worth reading [1] and [3], at least, and if I get unbusy enough, I'll try to put all this together in one table: Figure 5 in [1] Figure 13.1 in [4], plus some other series on solar irradiance & insolation, plus sunspots (Maunder & oher Minima)... and maybe some population numbers from [8].  This is not as easy as I'd like given different scales, and fact that people draw dated charts both left-to-right, and right-to-left.  maybe someone has one like that they can post.

In general, typical summer solar insolation (which drives glacier retreat if above some threshold) peaked about 10,000 years ago, and is still going down (Milankovitch cycles), i.e., why we've had cyclic ice ages for a while.  There are of course 11-year (small) jiggles from sunspot cycles, and occasionally sunspots go away (Maunder Minimum), but the general long-term temperature trend should  be downward, for a while, with jiggles.  Specifically, typical Summer solar insolation is lower than it was 3,500 years ago [putting together [3], Fig 1 and [1], Figure 5.],

There are natural reasons for some jiggles. There are anthropogenic reasons for others[i.e., the plague part of Ruddiman's hypotheses to help cause coolings pre- and post- MWP].  Right now, the large anthropogenic CO2 effect is strong enough to overpower most jiggles, and that effect is clearly seen in Aletsch, especially with the effect since 1950.  [Some of the earlier rise is thought to be due to increase in solar irradiance, which then leveled off a while back.]

In [1], they describe "periods when glacier size was similar or smaller than it is today." Aletsch:
1350BC-1250BC: ~1000m shorter than today
200BC-40AD: about same as today, or maybe somewhat shorter (Roman optimum)
750AD-1000AD (or so): about same as today (MWP)

If you see Figure 13.1 in [4], those periods line up pretty well with periods of good health & growing populations.

Three of the  big advances in Aletsch, peaking at 600AD,  1369AD, 1666AD, 1859AD) mostly follow major pandemics ([4], p. 132. It's worth checking column "Census.gov"  of [8], for periods when populations drop or are flat.

Correlation is not causation, and I certainly wouldn't ascribe all of these effects to humans, but they are certainly suggestive of spikey effects that happen on the necessary timescales. Read [4] for the detailed discussion of mechanisms to connect pandemics with colder temperatures, possibly explaining the some of the otherwise puzzling ice-core CO2 gyrations [3] Figures 7 & 10.

Roughly, one might summarize Ruddiman's second hypothesis as: "Growing populations cleared forests, burned wood, and when large enough, more or less canceled or slowed the natural cooling trend.  Major pandemics caused subsistence farms to return to forest, absorbing CO2 and lowering the temperature."

Hence, even knowing that [8] has some wild guesses, one compares with Aletsch:
500BC-1AD: large population growth [retreat]
1AD-200AD: drop [stable]
200AD-700AD: drop/flat [slow advance, then faster]
700AD-1200AD: big rise [fast retreat, then stable]
[then, LIA, fast jiggles in population, fast jiggles in glaciers, with confounding factors of various solar Minima.  I don't know if these population estimates include the effects of the massive die-off of Native Americans [11] ... but it is somewhat ironic if the diseases caught from early European settlers (a) caused a Native American (b) die-off that helped drop the temperature during the Little Ice Age, which caused grief in Europe, including migration from Switzerland (c) to the US.

Figure 5 of [1] shows that after earlier steep retreats, Aletsch decelerated, and then they think it stayed in a small size range for hundreds of years [i.e., Roman warming period & MWP].  If understand [1] Fig 5 right, the last data was 2002, and it's gone down ~250m since then ... which is quite interesting, given:

a) The lag times described by the authors, so that Aletsch is not yet responding to the last decades' strong temperature rises.

b) As noted earlier, typical summer solar insolation should be lower than it was 3,500 years ago, so that it should be colder. One would expect Aletsch to be longer than it was 3,500 years ago [which it seems to be], and slowly advancing....

c) But instead, it is plunging rapidly.  I think the last data in [1] was 2002, in which case the glacier has already retreated another 250m. With another 750m retreat, Aletsch will hit the bottom of the 3,500-year chart in [5], probably sometime between 2020 and 2025, assuming no acceleration. Then it will keep retreating ... for a long time.

Barring another Maunder Minimum, a nuclear war, a really major pandemic, based on straightforward GHG physics, and assuming even conservative temperature rises, I'd say the Aletsch is headed into completely off-the-chart retreat over this century, with the main human-controlled variable being how far off he chart it goes.  Fortunately for Switzerland, this isn't such a bad thing, unlike high temperatures, low rainfall, and (slower) sea level rise are for some others.  [If what Los Angeles is seeing right now is any hint of what is to come, it is not going to be nice.]

Fortunately, I'm sure the Swiss will continue to keep fine temperature records, as these things are really quite helpful!

So, that brings me back to how I got embroiled in this blog: I said I didn't care about exact comparisons with the MWP, but rather the rate of change when we were were already at/near one edge of the usual range. I cared more about the first and second derivatives, rather than the current value.

I'd say the same for Aletsch, which seems a pretty good, well-smoothed, lagging indicator of temperature changes.  I don't care that it ha not yet retreated as far as Bronze Age ... because it will fairly soon have retreated much further, although it is certainly long enough to hag in there, unlike a lot of other glaciers.

Regards

[1] Holzhauser, Magny, Zumbuhl http://www.unige.ch/forel/PapersQG06/Holzhauser2005.pdf

[2]
http://glaciology.ethz.ch/messnetz/

[3] William Ruddiman, "The Anthropogenice Era Began Thousands of Years Ago." 2003
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Pap ...
(maybe start with the Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plows,_Plagues_and_Petroleum ...
but it is well worth getting the main article, as it has information that does not show up in the book.]

[4] William Ruddiman, "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum" [2005, book, well worth having].

[5]  Wallace Broecker, Thams Stocker, "The Holocene CO2 Rise: Anthropogenic or Natural".
www.climate.unibe.ch/~stocker/papers/broecker06eos.pdf, Part of an ongoing debate with Ruddiman, others are mentioned in Wikipedia.

[6] Fritz Gassmann. Seven Clues to the Reality of Global Warming,
http://people.web.psi.ch/gassmann/greenhouse/seven-clues- ...

[7] T Crowley, "Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years" [2000], used in [3].
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/crowley.html

[8] World Population Estimates
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates

[9] http://glaciology.ethz.ch/messnetz/glaciers/aletsch.html

[10] http://glaciology.ethz.ch/messnetz/data/aletsch.html

[11]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Americ ...

-John Mashey

On charts, lines, uincertainties: reply to GryFlcn

The problem is that these charts do not capture and display uncertainty very well...

If you're a glutton for detail, I refer to a posting I did in Google Groups sci.environment July 3, 2003 [1], basically expressing concerns about the unnecessarily over-prominent role of the "Hockey-Stick" chart in the IPCC TAR.  This came to unfortunate emphasis with McIntyre/McKitrick and then the Wegman Report.  Via Joe Barton, it yielded the denialist-dream result of getting climatologists into public battles with (serious world-class) statisticians (over the wrong things, IMHO), and generating great chances for selective quoting, again.  Sigh.

When paleolimatologists perform temperature reconstruction, they must extract a signal from noisy data.  This is hard work, they only have one Earth, and it's not like working in a lab where you can rerun experiments ... and hence, there are heroic efforts to extract signals.  Published primary research papers normally try hard to quantify uncertainty with proper error bars ... but later, for simplicity of presentation, these things tend to get deemphasized or disappear.

As cited Wikipedia entry correctly says:
"It should also be noted that many reconstructions of past climate report substantial error bars, which are not represented on this figure."
THAT IS REALLY IMPORTANT, BUT IT'S NOT OBVIOUS FROM THE GRAPHS, which is why I usually go back to the original research articles.

When I see any kind of average, I also want:

• standard deviation (or equivalently variance), to show the dispersion of the data.
  
• confidence intervals/error bars[which include effects from both variance and sample size].
  
• some idea of the randomness of the sample
  
• some idea of the independence of the data

For example, in that Wikipedia example:

-Various studies had their own error bars, and without careful work, it's hard to tell what they mean.  I've seen studies in which the size of the error bars remained constant going back from 1600AD to 1000AD, despite having fewer and fewer data series.  That seems counter-intuitive, unless most of the data series did't matter, or if the earlier data was somehow more reliable, not usually the case with tree-rings.  The original Mann-Bradley-Hughes papers was carefully caveated, but caveats get lost, and error bars get lost or deemphasized, because they make graphs very busy.

- One must be very careful to understand the commonality of underlying datasets.  In many cases, various reconstructions share the use of a lot of data (which is fine), but it makes those studies less independent than is obvious when looking at such a chart.

I recommend [2], from 1999:
"However, many more data and much work are necessary before we can reduce the large uncertainties associated with reconstructions of medieval and earlier temperatures on large spatial scales."  and

"Unfortunately, very few of the series are truly independent: There is a degree of common input to virtually every one, because there are still only a small number of long, well-dated, high-resolution proxy records."

Now, data has improved since then, but it's a good warning that one must be very, very careful from drawing overly-strong conclusions by eyeballing graphs in which possibly-common data has already been summarized.  Although I sympathize, the wish to emphasize certainty may give determined opponents an easier target.

Anyway, one more time: reconstruction uncertainties show up in primary papers, but they often disappear in graphs ... but fortunately, they don't really matter to any substantive decisions that we need to make.

I think Wegman [3] got it right (although denialists never quote this part):

'As we said in our report, "In a real sense the paleoclimate results of MBH98/99 are essentially irrelevant to the consensus on climate change.  The instrumented temperature record clearly indicates an increase in temperature." We certainly agree that modern global warming is real.  We have never disputed this point.  We think it is time to put the "hockey stick" controversy behind us and move on.'

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/sci.environment/browse_frm ...

[2] K. R. Briffa, T. J. Osborn, "Seeing the Wood from the Trees," Science 284 (5416): 926.

[3] energycommerce.house.gov/reparchives/108/Hearings/07272006hearing2001/Wegman.pdf

-John Mashey

MWP & evidence of wineries in UK

I recommend the lovely book "The Winelands of Britain", by Richard Selley (an Imperial College geologist):
http://www.winelandsofbritain.co.uk/book.htm

A useful chart can be found:
http://www.winelandsofbritain.co.uk/lecture.htm
which summarizes the meticulous historical detail of the book itself, showing the ebb and flow of wineries over the last 2000 years.

• From this, it looks like we're now "about as hot" as during the Medieval Warm period.
  
• The line is moving North.
  
• He expects, that after 2100, there will be some fine Scots wineries, especially near Loch Ness.

[www.amazon.co.uk has it].

-John Mashey