Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Ethanol has been touted as a weapon in the fashionable crusade against climate change, because when mixed with gasoline, it modestly reduces emissions of carbon dioxide. Reasoning that if a little ethanol is good, a lot must be better, Congress and the Bush administration recently mandated a sextupling of ethanol production, from the 6 billion gallons produced last year to 36 billion by 2022.

But now comes word that expanding ethanol use is likely to mean not less CO2 in the atmosphere, but more. Instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline by 20 percent - the estimate Congress relied on in requiring the huge increase in production - ethanol use will cause such emissions to nearly double over the next 30 years.
LINK TO HOW GOVERNMENT MAKES THINGS WORSE

My logical fallacy?

We briefly interrupt the high tech math class to bring you this message from the world of good intentions producing unintended bad consequences:

Excerpt

Quote:

Ethanol has been touted as a weapon in the fashionable crusade against climate change, because when mixed with gasoline, it modestly reduces emissions of carbon dioxide. Reasoning that if a little ethanol is good, a lot must be better, Congress and the Bush administration recently mandated a sextupling of ethanol production, from the 6 billion gallons produced last year to 36 billion by 2022.

But now comes word that expanding ethanol use is likely to mean not less CO2 in the atmosphere, but more. Instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline by 20 percent - the estimate Congress relied on in requiring the huge increase in production - ethanol use will cause such emissions to nearly double over the next 30 years.
LINK TO HOW GOVERNMENT MAKES THINGS WORSE

We briefly interrupt the high tech math class to bring you this message from the world of good intentions producing unintended bad consequences:

Excerpt

Quote:

Ethanol has been touted as a weapon in the fashionable crusade against climate change, because when mixed with gasoline, it modestly reduces emissions of carbon dioxide. Reasoning that if a little ethanol is good, a lot must be better, Congress and the Bush administration recently mandated a sextupling of ethanol production, from the 6 billion gallons produced last year to 36 billion by 2022.

But now comes word that expanding ethanol use is likely to mean not less CO2 in the atmosphere, but more. Instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline by 20 percent - the estimate Congress relied on in requiring the huge increase in production - ethanol use will cause such emissions to nearly double over the next 30 years.
LINK TO HOW GOVERNMENT MAKES THINGS WORSE

parados wrote:

My logical fallacy?

Yes, logical fallacy. You are making the same mistake here that liberals do with the economy. They take domestic output and apply an increase in tax rate and do a one dimensional calculation that says a x b = c. One problem, tax rate affects domestic output, so it is not a one dimensional equation.
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ican711nm wrote:

Parados,
To get your facts and calculations straight, study this:
Tell me which numbers in [my statement that follows that] you disagree with. Then tell me what you think those numbers you disagree with should be and why you think so.

I have additional questions for you that I'll ask after [you answer these two questions.]

...

A report from the EU's top two foreign policy officials to the 27 heads of government gathering in Brussels for a summit this week warns that "significant potential conflicts" are likely in the decades ahead as a result of "intensified competition over access to, and control over, energy resources".

The seven-page report, obtained by the Guardian, has been written by Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy supremo, and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the commissioner for external relations. It predicts that global warming will precipitate security issues for Europe, ranging from energy wars to mass migration, failed states and political radicalisation.

The report warns of greater rich-poor and north-south tension because global warming is disproportionately caused by the wealthy north and west while its impact will be most catastrophic in the poor south.

One point of interests, the document says the scramble for energy resources has already caused conflict. Who on planet earth was unaware of this?

Well, in the infamous programmer's acronym, GIGO--Garbage In, Garbage Out. Your argument can only be as good as your premises. And ican's premises as usual start with that capital G.

Actually the change in total solar irradiance is zero. I repeat, change in Total Solar Irradiance is ZERO. You can use ican's wacked mathematics if you want, but it's clear that even if you do, the effect of TSI on increased global temperature is ZERO percent. TSI-caused increased outgassing of CO2 from the oceans is ZERO. Because TSI has not increased.

For one thing, accurate measures of solar irradiance really only became possible with satellite sensors in 1978. Before then, such as ican's starting point of 1975, radiosondes and high altitude flights typically had possible errors of about +/- 3 watts, not much good when you're attempting to measure something where you want accuracy to a tenth of a watt per square meter.

But, hey, I'll take ican's figure of 1371 w/m^2 for 1975(even though the National Research Council, part of the NAS, called it 1367.1 in Decade-to-Century Scale Climate Variability and Change:A Science Strategy). Of course using 1975 and either datum actually results in DECREASE in TSI roughly twice as big as ican's alleged increase (if you use the NRC figure) or a DECREASE six times as big (if you use ican's figure). But hey, ican, go for it.

Now suspected increases in TSI are generally based on differences in irradiance at solar minima in the (nominally) 11-year sunspot cycle. The 11-year differences in maxima and minima are around 2 W/m^2, and that, according to Jim Hansen, barely shows up in the climate picture--at around 0.! degree centigrade (and it is of course cyclic and has been for thousands of years, so is not a factor in any recent climate change). And change in solar irradiance is going to be at most a tenth of that, and on the recent variation, not even that high.

So what we were left with, until the last couple months, were essentially two relatively accurate data points to work with--the solar minima of (roughly) 1986 and 1996. And indeed 1996 was slightly higher than 1986. To the extent that ican's data ever make any sense, I would assume those are the points he is using for his period 1975-2005. HOWEVER, we have just passed the solar minimum that ended cycle 23 in Dec.07-Jan08,and started cycle 24. And the preliminary data show that the minimum was negligibly different from the cycle 21 minimum in 86, and may actually, in some of the graphs I've seen be somewhat lower. Which means that TSI is not increasing. And the '07 value was about 1365.1, which makes it about 6 W/m^2 LESS than ican's 1975 figure. For example, a graph of TSI over the last several decade, slightly before the last minimum (even then below the previous minima )http://publishing.royalsociety.org/media/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf

ican's contention thus fails: TSI cannot be shown to be increasing, so none of the effects he contends are happening because of increasing TSI (several of which are nonsense) and hence are the cause of global temperature rise, are attributable to increase in TSI, since it's not increasing.

Try something else, ican, that bird don't fly.

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/nowarm.htm
He [Essenhigh] cites a 1995 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a panel formed by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme in 1988 to assess the risk of human-induced climate change. In the report, the IPCC wrote that some 90 billion tons of carbon as carbon dioxide annually circulate between the earth's ocean and the atmosphere, and another 60 billion tons exchange between the vegetation and the atmosphere.
Compared to man-made sources' emission of about 5 to 6 billion tons per year, the natural sources would then account for more than 95 percent of all atmospheric carbon dioxide, Essenhigh said.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.land_and_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat
1975 thru 2005 Yearly Mean Measurements Atmospheric CO2
1975 -0.0319
1976 -0.1107
1977 0.1282
1978 0.0503
1979 0.1406
1980 0.1887
1981 0.2293
1982 0.1133
1983 0.2716
1984 0.0798
1985 0.0625
1986 0.1496
1987 0.2870
1988 0.2888
1989 0.2087
1990 0.3700
1991 0.3241
1992 0.1894
1993 0.2227
1994 0.2815
1995 0.3981
1996 0.2586
1997 0.4615
1998 0.5764
1999 0.3947
2000 0.3630
2001 0.4934
2002 0.5573
2003 0.5565
2004 0.5337
2005 +0.6046

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/ann/global.html
The 1901-2000 average combined land and ocean annual temperature is 13.9°C (56.9°F), the annually averaged land temperature for the same period is 8.5°C (47.3°F), and the long-term annually averaged sea surface temperature is 16.1°C (60.9°F). [Temperature in degees Kelvin = 13.9 + 273.16 = 287.06°K]

http://co2.cms.udel.edu/Increasing_Atmospheric_CO2.htm
Emissions of Carbon from Human Activities
Several human activities release CO2 into the atmosphere (called anthropogenic, human-origin, emissions). Fossil-fuel burning is the predominant anthropogenic source of CO2, but cement production and other activities also contribute (including the "land-use" activity of deforestation). Using a combination of modern and historic data, scientists estimate that humans have sent a total of 305 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere since 1751; half of these emissions have occurred since the mid-1970s.
…
About half of the recent emissions are not accumulating in the atmosphere, but are going into the ocean and, to a lesser extent, into soils. These are considered "sinks" in the global carbon budget because they take up atmospheric CO2. The chemistry of the ocean changes as a result of increased CO2 concentrations; this subject is further examined in the section on "Ocean Acidification".

Southern Baptists Back a Shift on Climate Change

By NEELA BANERJEE
Published: March 10, 2008
Signaling a significant departure from the Southern Baptist Convention's official stance on global warming, 44 Southern Baptist leaders have decided to back a declaration calling for more action on climate change, saying its previous position on the issue was "too timid."

The largest denomination in the United States after the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, with more than 16 million members, is politically and theologically conservative.

Yet its current president, the Rev. Frank Page, signed the initiative, "A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change." Two past presidents of the convention, the Rev. Jack Graham and the Rev. James Merritt, also signed.

"We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues has often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice," the church leaders wrote in their new declaration...

Carbon Output Must Near Zero To Avert Danger, New Studies Say

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 10, 2008; Page A01

The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.

Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.

Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.

"The question is, what if we don't want the Earth to warm anymore?" asked Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, co-author of a paper published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "The answer implies a much more radical change to our energy system than people are thinking about."

parados wrote:

My logical fallacy?

Yes, logical fallacy. You are making the same mistake here that liberals do with the economy. They take domestic output and apply an increase in tax rate and do a one dimensional calculation that says a x b = c. One problem, tax rate affects domestic output, so it is not a one dimensional equation.

Same principle to adding 5% co2. In the first place, natural co2 emissions and sinks are certainly not constant, so you cannot assume your 300 marbles are constant in your marble illustration.

To make a long story short, I have no interest in trying to debate your mathematical calculations.

You're not interpreting them correctly, ican. It's your problem not mine.

And average TSI has been declining since the 86 minimum, at the same time temp has been going up. Solar variability doesn't explain what's happening. Sorry, but that's the fact.

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The net effect HAS been constant for centuries until humans started adding CO2.