Beaker wrote:
 
My beef is with an ignorant and superficial examination of a second-hand report of a scientific paper. The conclusions are so clearly wrong (and so easily disproven) it's comical.

There are legitimate complaints about hyperbole among climate alarmists. That does not mean every bit of science supporting their claims is wrong or dishonest, or that the hypothesis they're pushing (however far they're pushing it, and whatever their motives) is completely wrong.

But if you want to sound the bell about such things you have to avoid falling into the same trap—of trumpeting every scrap of evidence contrary to the hypothesis you disagree with as a smoking gun proving the whole thing is a tissue of lies. By all means point out flaws in the science! But to do that requires more than reading a blog written by people who clearly do not know what they are talking about. And the more often you post stuff like the above the less credible you'll be doing it.

If hoot means intellectually challenged, then yes, he is a hoot. He is not really capable of reading beyond the headlines. If you would like to know the big picture.

Figure 2: Annual global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and cement manufacture in GtC yr?1 (black), annual averages of the 13C/12C ratio measured in atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa from 1981 to 2002 (red). ). The isotope data are expressed as δ13C(CO2) ‰ (per mil) deviation from a calibration standard. Note that this scale is inverted to improve clarity. (IPCC AR4)

http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm

About 40% of human CO2 emissions are being absorbed, mostly by vegetation and the oceans. The rest remains in the atmosphere. As a consequence, atmospheric CO2 is at its highest level in 15 to 20 million years (Tripati 2009). A natural change of 100ppm normally takes 5,000 to 20.000 years. The recent increase of 100ppm has taken just 120 years.

Additional confirmation that rising CO2 levels are due to human activity comes from examining the ratio of carbon isotopes (eg ? carbon atoms with differing numbers of neutrons) found in the atmosphere. Carbon 12 has 6 neutrons, carbon 13 has 7 neutrons. Plants have a lower C13/C12 ratio than in the atmosphere. If rising atmospheric CO2 comes fossil fuels, the C13/C12 should be falling. Indeed this is what is occurring (Ghosh 2003). The C13/C12 ratio correlates with the trend in global emissions.

 Beaker wrote: 
Beaker, you are a hoot!

 Beaker wrote: 
Just picked a link at random and read the article "No rise in atmospheric carbon fraction over the last 150 years: University of Bristol". It reports that the fraction of carbon dioxide remaining in the atmosphere and that absorbed by the oceans hasn't changed in a long time and concludes that CO2 levels haven't risen in 150 years.

This conclusion is flat wrong, contradicted by numerous measurements from numerous sources and silly on the face of it. The rate of emission has risen dramatically over 150 years, so while the fractions heading to various fates hasn't changed the absolute amounts has—they've gone up, as every measurement anybody has tried to make has demonstrated.

This is like saying that since the strength of the beer I drink is the same doubling the amount I consume won't increase my alcohol intake.

Or maybe they tried that experiment over at Hot Air.

 Beaker wrote: 

Old shit. No, hurricanes are not considered to be a cornerstone in the IPCC report and again changes nothing on the basic premise of AGW, but serously doubt you are capable of complex thought.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/shear-turbulence/

"We have commented on the connections between hurricanes and climate change frequently in the past (see e.g. here, here, here, and here). The bottom line conclusion has consistently remained that, while our knowledge of likely future changes in hurricanes or tropical cyclones (TCs) remains an uncertain area of science, the observed relationship between increased intensity of TCs and rising ocean temperatures appears to be robust (Figure 1). There is nothing in this latest article that changes that."

It will be good to eliminate any questionable science or unsubstantiated assertions from the IPCC report. Those things only give ammunition to the climate-change-is-a-hoax crowd.

U.N. to create science panel to review IPCC

By Sunanda Creagh

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) - An independent board of scientists is to review the work of a U.N. climate panel, whose credibility came under attack after it published errors, a U.N. environment spokesman said on Friday.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) accepted last month that its 2007 report had exaggerated the pace of melt of Himalayan glaciers, and this month admitted the report had also overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level.

The report shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and has driven political momentum to agree a new, more ambitious climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

The remit and process of the review panel would be disclosed next week, said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the U.N. Environment Programme, on the sidelines of a UNEP conference of environment ministers and officials from more than 135 countries in the Indonesian island of Bali.

"It will be a credible, sensible review of how the IPCC operates, to strengthen its fifth report," he said.

"It should do a review of the IPCC, produce a report by, say, August. There is a plenary of the IPCC in South Korea in October. The review will go there for adoption. I think we are bringing some level of closure to this issue."

The latest, fourth IPCC report was published in 2007 and the next is due in 2014.

HUMANS TO BLAME

All options are on the table for the review, Nuttall said, including, how to treat "grey literature" — a term for academic papers which are not published in peer-reviewed journals.

The IPCC had said that the Himalayas could melt by 2035, but an original source spoke of the world's glaciers melting by 2350, not 2035. The IPCC report had cited the 2035 year from a non-peer reviewed WWF paper, which in turn had referred to a Scientific American article.

Public conviction of global warming's risks may have been undermined by the panel's errors and by the disclosure of hacked emails revealing scientists sniping at skeptics, who leapt on these as evidence of data fixing.

Pachauri told Reuters on Wednesday that the IPCC stood by its main 2007 finding — that it was more than 90 percent certain that human activities were the main cause of global warming in the past 50 years.

Governments and ministers attending the conference this week in Bali reaffirmed their confidence that manmade greenhouse gas emissions were stoking climate change, said Nuttall.

"There was absolutely no government, no minister of environment who attended that meeting who said that the IPCC was the wrong vehicle for understanding the science of climate change," Nuttall added.

The IPCC's 2007 assessment report on the causes and impacts of climate change was over 3,000 pages long, cited more than 10,000 scientific papers and is policymakers' main data source.

 helenofjoy wrote: 
What Ice Shelves? 

How 'bout them ice shelves?

 kestrel wrote: 
              

The FP Guide to Climate Skeptics
Can't tell the legitimate concerns from the nonsense? FP is here to help.

Standard issue denialist and pseudo-skeptic Inhoaxer:

Putting together an EARTH web site for teachers/students/people incl page on climate change, still under construction, but please take a peek.

http://murphsearthreport.com/

 oldviolin wrote: 
The problem is that the embedded energy that goes into making the stuff that we throw away is lost forever.
You may get the equivalent of a barrel of oil's worth of energy out of burning a ton of garbage, but it likely took 4 barrels to make the stuff in the first place.
It doesn't make economic sense.These facilities are not scaleable and are built to burn at a certain efficiency rate. If the garbage is reduced at any point the contract usually allows the operator to bring ingarbage from another jursidiction to keep the burn rate constant.
It does nothing to encourage reduction of consumerism or waste reduction.
And then there are the air emissions...dioxins being one of the worst players.
I could go on...and on!

 Beaker wrote:

 

So it is irrelevent that they have under-estimated? This is either willfully ignorant or you really do not understand the scientific process. I suspect this will be same tired argument that will be brought up as the IPCC revises their estimates in the future based on newer and better data/research. The earth's climate is extremely complicated and there is still much they do not know but on the other-hand there is much they do know and nothing has changed to the  2 under-lying facts. A.) Global warming is occuring and B.) It's prevalent cause is the greenhouse gases made by people.

 Inamorato wrote: 

What if the exhaust could be redirected to amplify the output of a steam turbine, as with a turbocharger? It would take some fairly simple engineering for some gifted folks in that field I would think. There would obviously be some further exhaust gases, but maybe a different output could be concieved, on until there were only nominal pollutants.

 Welly wrote: 
There are, and some not far away, like me. I think there is a growing awareness that burning things to get energy is ultimately not very green, as appealing as it might seem to make our vast amount of trash just "disappear" into energy.

Any RPeeps in Minneapolis?

Finance & Commerce

Tech and Energy February 24, 2010 by Bob Geiger Staff Writer

Following last week’s introduction of a bill that would scrap municipal garbage burning and landfill gas as renewable energy sources, the chair of a House panel said existing burners may be exempted from a proposed ban.

“We make exemptions for things all the time. And this is a thing that I think can be dealt with,” said state Rep. Bill Hilty, DFL-Finlayson, who heads the Energy Finance and Policy division of the powerful House Finance Committee. Hilty said he “can’t think of a compelling use for refuse burners,” or for having the public produce enough waste to feed landfills containing materials that generate methane gas — some of which are tapped by utilities to generate energy.

His comments came after the Feb. 18 introduction of H.F. 3060 by state Rep. Frank Hornstein, DFL-Minneapolis. That measure would delete municipal garbage burners and landfill gas from technologies that utilities can claim as sources of renewable energy. That’s pertinent to utilities because it takes away two energy technologies specified in 2007 legislation that requires Minnesota electric utilities to produce at least 25 percent of their energy from renewable resources by 2025.

Both waste-to-energy and landfill gas are considered renewable energy technologies under that legislation, which established Minnesota’s renewable energy standard. Hornstein voted for that bill, but said Hennepin County’s 2009 proposal to increase the amount of garbage from 1,000 tons to 1,212 tons a day renewed his interest in the issue.

“To look at garbage as a renewable fuel means encouraging production of more garbage because it produces more energy,” said Hornstein, who added, “I think we need to have a real, honest conversation about what is renewable energy and what are the characteristics of renewable energy.”

Read the rest here

 marko86 wrote:
That should be "a new pseudo-skeptic argument has emerged"...

Also interesting, demographically:

 jadewahoo wrote: 
Watch it, buddy. I carry a pitch-fork with your name on it.

 oldviolin wrote: 

Dig.