Oh yes!

This so perfect! Make sure I know that you plan to make me just as fat as you ... and even though you are gaining you are going to make me even fatter!

Remind me that with every pound of fat you put on me, I become even more yours!

Wow.

You are calling for a civil war my friend. Not a political we disagree deal, but an actual shooting war.

Most of this country will kill you to prevent you destroying their lives.

I sure hope we don't go there.

Let's shift this from talking tech to talking policy a bit.

This is a pie chart of CO2 emissions by country. Note the following points while looking at it.

CO2 emissions by the US have been going down over the past two decades. The US contribution to CO2 is 15%. about half of China even though the US economy is larger.

China is building hundreds of new coal powered generating plants and although they are getting more efficient their emissions are increasing quickly. Ditto for India.

In a few years, by continuing what is the US is already doing, without any special additional renewable efforts by the US, The US is going to be 5% or less of global emissions.

www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions

In truth, so long as the developing world continues to build fossal fuel plants, and they are because they need cheap energy to develop, global CO2 is going to rise.

This is one of the features of the "Paris Treaty", it essentially exempts China, India and what is called "Rest of the world" on the graph (56% of CO2 emissions today) with the result that those emissions will double over the next 10 years and probably comprise 90% pf emissions.

In short, if you are sincere about the desire to reduce CO2 emissions, focusing on the US is useless.

So what are your proposals for getting China, India, and the "Rest of the world" to reduce emissions, or at least emission growth? The "low hanging fruit" opportunity to slow the growth in emissions might be to develop more natural gas resources in the short run, but I am guess you won't favor that.

As a practical matter, focusing attention on massive revisions to the US economy to reduce CO2 emissions is a inefficient way to proceed.

The 80/20 rule applies in that the big improvements (reductions) are cheaper and easier like switching from coal to gas. Doing that in China and India would do more to reduce emissions than taking the US to zero, and at far lower cost.

Renewables make sense in certain applications, and over time will get better. But today, renewables are not going to make much difference, and especially if you are concentrating on deploying them in the US.

I love you guys coming to the party with data! It makes for a much more reasonable conversation.

I want to make a couple simple, but important points.

First, remember my saying that I agree that man is contributing to climate change. No need to convince me of that.

All this data is fine, but does not directly or effectively address my key points.

In order to decide to take some massive action with equally massive consequences, you have to know with some level of certainly what the actual impact of that action will be. This is of course the reason that the models are important, flawed as they are.

The irradiance data from NASA is good information but does not address any of my issues directly.

How much radiation from the sun impinges on the Earth and how much is absorbed by it depends on not just reflectance, but also solar output. We are substantially in the dark about what was going on with the sun historically over the period when the CO2 data (largely derived from CO2 stored in fosselized plants or arctic ice) took place.

The NASA data provides, for a relatively short span of time, a measure of how much solar energy impinged and how much may have been absorbed. (measurement method and precision are key here) It does not however, cover a long enough period to relate to climate as vs. weather.

At what point does the increased water vapor in the atmosphere related to increased temperature, impact the reflectance of the earth's atmosphere and reduce the energy from the sun heating the earth? Will this limit the temperature rise due to CO2 and mitigate the greenhouse effect? There are some scientists who think so.

I don't know, and in fact neither at this point does anyone else. We have lots of opinions and not many facts. These systems are just REALLY complicated and we lack understanding of them.

The information posted here is great (and not new to me), it just doesn't make a complete picture and is nowhere near what is needed to make valid predictions.

I am going to bow out at this point. I really appreciate everyone contributing and it is much better to exchange opinions with reason than with insults.

Since others are sharing creditials and experience I will too.

I am a PE Engineer in Control Systems. My career has been largely spent in Industrial Control Systems, a good part of which has been in some fairly sophisticated applications using "Advanced Controls" which is a marketing term for predictive models and some primitive neural nets (I would say ALL of our current nets are primitive!).

My experience has the concentration above, but I have worked in integrated circuit process (CMOS), designed VME based computer boards, and a variety of other things.

Thanks Guys!

Buddy, you will need to show your work on this. I will only provide a single, small example.

Everyone knows we have solar cycles. Those solar cycles have not always been consistent in period or severity. There are also multiple cycles superimposed. Some of these cycles are sufficiently long in period that they could look like the rise and fall of the Roman empire. Since there is no direct data on the solar radiation received in the past, how do you identify the contribution of this natural activity?

When you finish that, you can move along to volcanic activity that we know even less about.

Then, (this is right in your wheelhouse), what is the contribution and response time for increased absorption of CO2 in plankton, etc. and what portion gets stored long term on the ocean floor?

I have not said that there is no contribution to climate change by man, but rather we are not anywhere close to knowing what that impact is.

We aren't even REALLY sure if it will ultimately be warming or cooling, because we don't know if many of the factors in nature are positive feedback, negative feedback, or linear.

I am reminded of the joke about the blind men trying to identify an elephant by touch. One encounters a leg and thinks it is a tree, another the tail and thinks it is a vine. Each has some of the data, but even together not enough to get it right. Seems to me we need to be less arrogant and spend a lot more time researching before we make predictions.

Also keep in mind that there are costs to taking dramatic action on (climate change) and there is no free ride.

How much loss in economic growth, or even negative economic growth will be involved? How much poverty will be allowed to exist to acheive lower energy use?

All of our current renewable options have environmental negatives. Our current best batteries use lots of lithium which is one the highest polluting mining operations in the world.

Wind is energy intensive (and uses petroleum) to build and install, tends to produce power far from it is needed (large transmission losses) and at the "wrong" times and when installed for high efficiency tends to kill lots of birds.

PV Solar uses lots of toxic chemicals to build, last typically about 30 years, are difficult to recycle and tend to produce power sporadically. In fact, rule of thumb is that for every 1 MW of installed solar power you need 0.5 MW of natural gas generation running to pick up the unplanned swing in load.

Nuclear is probably still the best bet for low carbon power generation, but nobody wants it in near them!

LOL,

My only sword is a two handed claymore..... seems like altogether too much effort.

Beers with reasoned debate is more my style.

That IS an excellent suggestion!

Awesome! A CJ7!

Have two X body Jeep Cherokees! And did some engineering for the old Jeep plant before the tore it down!

CJ7 is a reliable workhourse!

That is a structural/civil engineer dude.

See, that is the difference between science and religion. YOU treat it as religion, blindly following your chosen experts, accepting what they tell you on faith. I treat it as science, where everything is always up for review, and in need of proof.

Your way does not actually require you do any research, review any studies, or learn any details.

My way requires I do all of those things. I took the time to explain some of my reasoning so you would have a chance to understand. I see that was too much work for you.

In God I trust, all others bring data.

ok, now we are having a serious conversation.

The truth is that there is no question that there is climate change and there is no question that human activity plays some role.

In general however, we know very little of the detail of many of the natural subsystems that contribute to climate change.

The models are utter nonsense. That does not mean that the people working on them are stupid or dishonest, they are full of constants and placeholder formulas for natural relationships that we don't have real data on. If in fact all this stuff was well understood, there would not be 20 plus models that vary all over the place because they would all match.

I am in fact a Control Systems/Process Control Engineer and I do work with models. Getting a good working model without the full detailed understanding of all the subsystems requires that you be able to set up you model, run a simulation with a scenario, change the conditions, run it again and repeat that over and over until the model performs under all conditions. That is not practical with a global climate model because we can't vary one condition, rerun the climate and the model to compare them, and repeat over and over until we have refined it. Further, this is a daunting task with 15 variables, climate has thousands.

Many of the people in the climate field are taking the position in private that "the potential consequences of potential man-made climate change are so bad that it is better that we convince people we are sure so they will do something about it, that way even if we are wrong things will still be ok".

And there is another issue with people who get degrees in some of these fields. You can get a straight physicist, chemical engineer, or biologist to work on climate change related fields and most of the time the data they produce will be straight up.

Those who chose a degree like "Environmental Engineer" or "Climatologist" however, are often like the guy who goes into seminary. The guy goes into seminary not to find God, he already believes. He goes into seminary to learn more, to learn to convince others, etc.

There is a tendency for fields like those I mentioned to attract true believers. They don't go into climate related studies to learn with a open mind, but rather having already made up their mind they go into those fields to save the world.

So, I believe I have provided answers to your questions and explained them. Bias and groupthink exist everywhere, including climate fields. This explains to a great extent why there are surveys of scientists in fields related to climate that overwhelmingly question the certainty of man being the primary driver of climate change even as those
degreed in the specific fields of climate and meteorology tend to poll as believing in it.

With regard to my comment on bringing the data. NASA has changed the correction of historical temperature data gathered in different ways over time. Correction of instrumentation data is right in my "wheelhouse", the corrections they use are nothing more than judgement calls as they have no hard data basis to support the adjustment. The changes they have made are nothing more that reflections of the shifting politics in the agency. The "old" corrected data showed little warming, the "new" corrected data shows more warming.

Bring me the raw data and the expose how "you" did your work and I will evaluate your conclusions myself is my view. I actually have a open mind, but arguments based on "everybody says" or "all the experts say" cut no ice with me. When they refuse to disclose the formulas and code in the models, despite having received public grant money, I automatically assume they have something to hide.

Since I DO know how little we actually know, and that conventional methods of resolving models is not applicable in the case of climate, I will continue to maintain that we simply don't know what man's actual impact is.

I could go on, discuss the impact of positive and negative feedback potential in many natural subsystems related to climate, but I have already written a lot.

So the summary is, I don't take the position that man-made climate change is, or is not, a problem. I take the position, one I can support, that we don't actually know.