Posts by DaWolf

Re: RE:".....so that the rock shot first..." No, no, that's not how they'll do it.

Soft on rocks: soft on the causes of rocks.

Re: Data collection in the *field* and data reduction to the latest *international* standards

context seems to be everything.

They lop off all the sites they don't like, and end up with a number (notably, at least in this piece, without error bars. So somewhere in the 0.13-0.14 per decade with their picked numbers, purely for the US land)

What's that? Surprisingly low? Let's check:

http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/global-warming-rate-is-014c-per-decade-says-uah-team.html

"On 25 November 2010 the UK Meteorological Office in a pre-Cancun press conference stated that it believed the increase in average global surface temperatures has been around 0.16C per decade between 1970 and 2000 but has ranged between 0.05C and 0.13C in the last ten years. The Met Office said that the trend figures for the period between 2000-2009 were based on data from three different source; one from NASA (0.13C), one from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (0.07C) and one from HadCRUT3 (0.05C) - the dataset managed by the Met Office and by the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit"

So basically, a group of sceptics have looked at the data, and come out with something that still shows climate change, and in a range which is comparable to other studies, albeit non worldwide so it's apples to oranges.

But if you read the spin on this article, you'd think they'd proved that no warming was happening.

Re: Temperature rises before CO2

No, this report confirms that in the time period studied, it is likely that CO2 rises lagged heat rises.

Those heat rises were probably caused by Milankovitch cycles or some such: haven't read the actual report yet.

However, their report implies that natural feedback effects are likely to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, making the likely impact worse.

Re: woah there! ...

not just writing, now editor I believe.

Re: Currently, Renewables Are NOT Sustainable

@Boring Hun Coder

"Besides, "renewable" energy from solar and wind is at least a factor of 10 more expensive than power from fossile or nuclear fuels"

No, it isn't. Unfortunately you are displaying an extremely poor grasp of the subject.

Re: Seriously

Lewis (and Orlowski) are so completely biased on this it's untrue. It just comes dripping through anything they write on the subject, they are completely incapable of an objective argument.

Unfortunately this also means they are bad journalists. A shame.

very small?

from the article

"The new results were derived by scientists including Professor John Wahr of Colorado uni. According to the new boffinry, glaciers and ice caps in places other than Antarctica and Greenland lost only 148 billion tons of ice each year from 2003 to 2010. This is some 30 per cent lower than had been previously estimated."

148 billion tons, not including Greenland or Antarctica, is very small?

"My problem is that an increase in atmospheric temperature cannot cause an increase in temperature in currents that is three times larger (than the atmospheric change)."

Don't think of it as temperature, think of it as radiation. Greenhouse gases lead to absorption and re-emission of some infrared radiation that was heading spacewards. The infrared radiation that heads back down earthwards *may* be absorbed by the atmosphere - or may be absorbed by the land/water underneath.

Or to put it another way: convection, conduction, radiation. It's the 3rd of these that is the overwhelming aspect imparting addional heat energy into the oceans in this case.

Aye. First thing I thought when reading it - sadly, one stupid statement ruins the whole piece. Shoddy jounalism frankly.

you don't sell them

you create a shell company, transfer the licenses to said shell company "Borders IP" for nothing, then sell the company.

The licenses themselves are then irrelevant, as long as you own "Borders IP".

I smell something bad....in the neighbourhood

" I have seen no evidence of change with a figure of around 311 ppm."

Well, that just says you are talking nonsense, as CO2 figures vary between summer and winter anyway by about 3-9 ppmv.

@Medium Dave

councils - the clue is in the s, which is a plural.

From this you may deduce that I was not just referring to Southwark Council.

3up, 3 down

(and counting) for a post which accurately summarises current thought on the subject.

Truely, el reg has some idiots who will vote against anything their beliefs don't allow.

answers

A) Yes, other planets have had comparisons done, some have gone up in temp slightly, some down slightly. Mostly explainable by orbital differences. And by slightly, I mean an order of magnitude less than on earth.

B) Somewhere in the range of 0.1-0.2 degrees c.

actually no

I read Lewis's summary - that's the report I was refering to, and skimmed the beginning of the actual John Muir report.

I got to this part

"During the study period, wind generation was:

• below 20% of capacity more than half the time.

• below 10% of capacity over one third of the time.

• below 2.5% capacity for the equivalent of one day in twelve.

• below 1.25% capacity for the equivalent of just under one day a month.

The discovery that for one third of the time wind output was less than 10% of capacity, and

often significantly less than 10%, was an unexpected result of the analysis."

And stopped reading. Because if you know Weibull functions, this isn't an "unexpected result".

For a Mean Wind Speed of 6.5ms-1 and a Weibull Shape Factor of 2, 34% of the time the Mean Wind Speed will be 4ms-1 or lower.

Only someone who doesn't know the subject would put in that this is an unexpected result.

Having since flicked through the rest, these parts stand out:

"This Report set out to test a few assumptions. One hypothesis which seemed likely is that if windfarms generate at 30% of their rated capacity on average, then it might be reasonable to expect that they will generate over 30% for about half the time and under 30% for about half the time. However, it is now clear that wind behaviour is not so simple."

Well, it wouldn't be so simple because only someone who can't remember their GCSE maths thinks that mean is the same as median.

"Over 30% rated capacity

20% to30%

10 to 20%

5 to 10%

2.5 to 5%

1.25 to 2.5%

Less than 1.25% of rated capacity."

Bias obvious here. Let's have 6 bands for under 30%, but only one band for over 30%.

Then you have their numbers (Appendix C)

"2009 27.18%

2010 21.14%

2009 AND 2010 23.63%"

(27.18+21.14)/2 = 24.16

Sure there are more, but I have work to do.

"Twenty years ago, a friend of mine....

....completed her Environmental Science degree....."

She might know what she's talking about - but the words you are putting into her mouth are nonsense, and if "she" really exists she clearly doesn't understand her subject well.

@Dale Richards

"Regardless of whether or not the OP is "utterly clueless", could you be more specific on what's actually wrong with his claim? I'm not taking sides here - I'm just interested."

It doesn't take a couple of days to turn on a coal fired power plant - it's generally given as taking about 3 hours to go from zero to full capacity (sorry, I haven't got a link to hand, but I have studied this in depth). Or to put it more simply - if it takes a couple of days to turn coal on and off, how come we already turn coal on anf off every single day as our consumption varies from ~25GW to ~50GW in each day?

Wind varies too, of course, but you can predict wind pretty accurately if you're only looking 3 hours away, so you already know if those plants need to come on. You could happily run a full wind/coal mix with no other energy inputs. In addition, you don't run coal fired power stations at capacity anyway (have a look at the variance in the uk's power consumption if you want more info).