Climate Change and Failing States

Why is it that when someone says "the weather's not any different here in ..." the AGW camp always shouts that you can't pick any one spot on the globe to point out that GW isn't happening, but at the same time point out other places where the weather is different, and claim that GW is the cause?

"A new study of the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Western Himalaya mountain ranges by researchers at England's Newcastle University shows consistent recent growth among the region's glaciers.

Researchers found cooler summers are failing to melt winter snows, which are themselves becoming more frequent, resulting in advancing ice sheets.

The study was published in the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate."

More recently, "May 5, 2009 -- Perched on the soaring Karakoram mountains in the Western Himalayas, a group of some 230 glaciers are bucking the global warming trend. They're growing.
Watch video: Is Alaska America's poster child for climate change?
Throughout much of the Tibetan Plateau, high-altitude glaciers are dwindling in the face of rising temperatures. The situation is potentially dire for the hundreds of millions of people living in China, India and throughout southeast Asia who depend on the glaciers for their water supply.
But in the rugged western corner of the plateau, the story is different, according to a new study. Among legendary peaks of Mt. Everest like K2 and Nanga Parbat, glaciers with a penthouse view of the world are growing, and have been for almost three decades.
"These are the biggest mid-latitude glaciers in the world," John Shroder of the University of Nebraska-Omaha said. "And all of them are either holding still, or advancing."

The ebb and flow of glaciers is not clearly understood, and quite a few glaciers (not just one or two) are growing, although the majority were decreasing up to last year. Pakistani glaciers may indeed continue to diminish (although the jury isn't in yet).

The threat to Pakistani environment is that the obvious response to this is dam building, which does have an impact. Precipitation is likely to increase in the area, but catching the earlier runoff (if melting does occur) will cost money and cause relocation of people and localised impacts on flora and fauna.

Are you going to be honest and present the clear overall picture with glaciers retreating worldwide? Denialists look more and more like creationists every day.

See

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/a-global-glacier-i...

Tom Fuller wrote: "I don't trust information from Real Climate, as the site is home to Mann, Steig and Rahmsdorf, who have infamously manipulated statistics and been caught doing so."

That's a blatant, despicable lie, Tom Fuller. And you know it.

And we know that you only "trust" the information you get from ExxonMobil and their phony "think tanks", via the phony "conservative" media.

Tom Fuller wrote: "He'll probably have one or two choice things to say about me shortly."

There's only one thing to say about you, Tom Fuller, and I'll say it again: You are a deliberate liar. You repeatedly post long-ago, many-times-over debunked lies, which have been repeatedly shown to your face to be lies. And when someone points out that you are lying, you whine about "ad hominems" and complain that people are "mean" to you.

I'll miss Hilzoy, too. I started reading her back on obisidian wings via tacitus (and to watch tacitus turn into redstate was just horrifying, i hope he writes a book about that mess). There haven't been many blog posts that have really moved me, but some of those few that have she's written.

What a loss. I've been feeling the wind come out of this whole blogging thing (man i hate that word so fucking much) for a while now, but this is a pretty big hole in the sail.

Kevin will have to find someone else to like to a half dozen times a week now.

Kevin,

Would you consider doing an "exit interview" with Hilzoy?

Marc wrote: "You've just written yourself out of being taken seriously Tom. These are serious researchers who've been slimed by people with an axe to grind."

Now, you see, Marc, when you say something like that, Tom Fuller will whine that you are engaging in "name-calling" and "ad hominems" and "refusing to debate the facts".

And when you show that his so-called "facts" are utterly bogus, and that he knowingly and deliberately repeats the same false claims over and over and over again, no matter how many times they've been exposed as lies, he will say that the fact that you object to his lies means that he wins the argument.

What it really means is that he has "won" his game of deliberately and maliciously wasting people's time with BS.

John Hansen,

I'm a progressive liberal-- and I don't think all skeptics are paid shills of Big Oil (pace Secular Animist), basically because I get accused of just that and I know it's not true, and note that many Big Oil firms now support Cap and Trade. As do I--except this version of it is garbage, and I would now prefer we junk Waxman Markey and go to a temporary and low carbon tax.

What locksteppers like Secular Animist do is throw enough mud around that we always have to start from first principles, so the conversation always has to center around day one, and hence can never progress.

What people like Marc do is ignore the record about Real Climate's mistreatment of statistics--and the political process of getting them into the IPCC and Copenhagen Summit before their mistakes are exposed. See Wegman, see Bishop Hill, see Wikipedia, see Climate Audit. Which is very convenient for him in blog posts and threads, but makes it impossible to advance the discussion. Good tag team effort, though. Everyone who disagrees with Secular Animist and/or Real Climate and/or Marc is 'deliberately deceptive' 'manipulative liar,' etc.

Hi Marc,

Perhaps you overlooked this in my original comment: "Throughout much of the Tibetan Plateau, high-altitude glaciers are dwindling in the face of rising temperatures. The situation is potentially dire for the hundreds of millions of people living in China, India and throughout southeast Asia who depend on the glaciers for their water supply." Where do I 'deny' that overall glaciers are declining? What more context do you need?

Smearing is not what I'm doing to Mann, Steig and Rahmsdorf. Smearing is what they did to their data. You can defend them if you like--but Wegman said it best, and he's neither a hatchet denialist nor a partisan skeptic. You seem to think everybody or anybody should care about the provenance of criticism, rather than the data. Michael Mann manufactured the Hockey Stick chart by incorrectly use of PCA and adding in bristlecone pine data into a paleoclimatic temperature range, explicitly ignoring the warning of the scientist who collected the data that it could not be used for temperature measurements. Without the misuse of principal component analysis and without the inclusion of bristlecone pine data, the hockey stick disappears.

The sad thing is that you know this and are just trying to see if I have energy enough to keep refuting your nonsense. These thread wars are very much a case of Last Man Standing.

Steig and Mann spread their Antarctic temperature data too thinly to be of value, making the real and rising temperature of the West Peninsula in the Antarctic weigh more than the stable and often declining temperatures in the remaining 95% of the continent.

Rahmsdorf blatantly ignored IPCC procedures when he changed his 11 year smoothing to 15 year smoothed averages to get a result that looked better on the chart used by the Copenhagen Summit.

And you know these things too. The tragedy in all this is that global warming does exist, it is real, we need to address it, but the bozos on your bus are undermining the credibility of other scientists who don't play games with the data just to get in the sexiest new publication. It's pathetic. It's disgusting--and it's documented.

Tom Fuller wrote: "Smearing is not what I'm doing to Mann, Steig and Rahmsdorf. Smearing is what they did to their data."

Smearing is exactly what you are doing, Tom, when you deliberately, knowingly repeat the industry-sponsored denialist cult's blatant, despicable lies about legitimate scientists.

You are accusing Mann, Steig and Rahmsdorf of intentional fraud. That's a lie. That's a blatant, despicable, vicious lie, that comes directly from the phony pseudoscientific rubbish churned out by ExxonMobil-funded propaganda mills, that is then circulated through the phony-baloney denialist propaganda sites where you go for your "facts", which you cut-and-paste into your comments here, even though it's obvious you don't even understand the pseudoscience that you are regurgitating.

I don't think you are a paid shill for ExxonMobil, Tom. Why should they have to pay you, when you enthusiastically embrace and repeat their lies, for free? When you smear and lie about the work of actual scientists and dishonestly accuse them of fraud, while touting the pseudoscientific garbage of denialist blogs like ClimateAudit all for free, why should ExxonMobil have to pay you?

And of course, when your lies are exposed, you whine. And whine. And whine. "Oh, that mean old SecularAnimist is calling me a liar again! Boo hoo hoo!"

Well, quit lying and I'll quit calling you a liar.

And of course you think you are clever to call yourself a "progressive liberal" -- as though someone's political views had anything to do with the scientific reality of anthropogenic global warming. Because you call yourself a "liberal", we are all supposed to let you get away with lying, is that your idea? I don't think so.

"Liberal" or "conservative" or whatever, who cares. Your comments are just as despicable and dishonest as those of Ditto-Head John Hansen, with his idiotic Limbaugh-inspired ranting about "elites".

Secular Animist, just on a personal note, if you could find a different adjective than 'despicable' then I wouldn't have this reoccurring image of Daffy Duck every time I read your comments.

May I suggest for your consideration:

Dastardly
Devilish
Dinosauric (okay, I made that up)
Damnable
Degenerate
Dissembling
Drunken
Doltish
Drugged
Dipsomaniacal

Thank you for your consideration.

Thersites,

You're correct, but I don't think their opinion will be sought on this matter. Do you?

Sec An, you're certainly entitled to your opinion of those three, and of myself as well. I don't accuse them of fraud however, although that won't stop you from accusing me of it. I 'accuse' them of trying to do their statistical analysis without getting help, using the wrong techniques, getting the wrong answer, and trying to bluff their way into journals with results that have to be retracted and excused.

But, come on--can you just say, 'That's dethpickabull' --just once?

Is it possible that we could quiet some of the most ardent denialists by endorsing a return to nuclear power? I'm not saying that it's actually a good idea, but perhaps some of them simply can't abide the idea that energy won't always be cheap.

Avatar wrote: "Nuclear isn't without its drawbacks, but it's the ONLY non-carbon-emitting energy generation technique that has been proven in industrial use, and can be deployed widely to take a significant percentage of our nation's energy use away from carbon. Yes, solar is a cool technology, there's a place for wind, but we just don't know enough about either to build out 20% of our electricity generation into one or the other in a few years. We COULD do it with nuclear."

That's all just plain wrong.

First of all, the technologies for centralized, utility-scale as well as distributed, small-scale wind, concentrating solar thermal and photovoltaic power generation are mature and at the same time are improving rapidly. Utility scale wind and solar power have not only been "proven" but are growing rapidly all over the world, at record-breaking double-digit rates year after year after year. In 2008, wind power accounted for over 40 percent of all newly installed generating capacity in the USA, and within a few years will account for the majority of all newly installed capacity. Solar is also expanding rapidly with major utilities investing in industrial-scale photovoltaic and concentrating solar thermal power plants. Utilities and major IT companies like Intel and Google are partnering to develop the next-generation smart grid technology that will allow us to integrate diverse, regional portfolios of clean, renewable energy generation -- baseload and intermittent, centralized and distributed -- for a one hundred percent renewables-powered grid.

And the potential of wind and solar is huge. The USA has vast commercially exploitable wind and solar energy resources. A peer-reviewed study from solar thermal manufacturer Ausra found that installing solar thermal power plants on only one percent of the USA's deserts could power 90 percent of the US grid. A study by Solyndra, a manufacturer of cylindrical photovoltaic arrays, found that installing PV on existing commercial rooftops -- warehouses, factories, shopping malls, etc. -- could produce 185 gigawatts of electricity, the equivalent of more than 100 new nuclear power plants. A new Harvard study just published by the National Academy of Sciences finds that the wind energy resources of the lower 48 states is 16 times more than the total US electrical demand, and that worldwide wind energy resources are 40 times more than total world electrical demand.

And worldwide, private venture capital investment is pouring into wind and solar, at the rate of billions of dollars per year. In 2008, the largest single recipient of private venture capital in the USA was Nanosolar, a manufacturer of advanced, high-efficiency thin-film photovoltaic arrays for the municipal utility market.

On the other hand, nuclear power is the most expensive, and least effective, technology for reducing GHG emissions from electricity generation. It is simply not possible to build enough nuclear power plants, fast enough, to have any significant impact on reducing GHG emissions in the time frame in which that needs to happen. Wind and solar can be -- and are already being -- scaled up and widely deployed much faster, which is crucial.

In contrast to the rapid expansion of wind and solar, little or no new nuclear power is being built worldwide -- barely enough for nuclear to hold its percentage of world electricity supply at around 16 percent. The new nuclear power plants that are being constructed -- like the French AREVA designed power plant being built in Finland, which was supposed to be the flagship of the so-called "next generation" nuclear power plants that could be built faster and cheaper and more safely -- are years behind schedule, billions of dollars over budget, and have the same serious safety issues that have afflicted nuclear power forever. The government of Ontario just canceled a contract to build two new nuclear power plants when every proposal that the nuclear industry put forward was billions of dollars more than originally budgeted.

Nuclear power is a proven economic failure. Investors won't touch it -- unless the taxpayers and ratepayers are forced to absorb all of the costs and all of the risks up front, including the risk of economic losses if the power plants are obsolete and unprofitable by the time they are built.

I find that most people who say "wind and solar can't do it, nuclear is the only answer" are unaware of how far along renewables already are, both technologically and in terms of their rapid ongoing deployment and growth, and are equally unaware of the realities of the nuclear industry.

Wind and solar not only CAN do the job of providing abundant, ubiquitous, economical, renewable carbon-free energy, they ARE doing the job. And nuclear simply CAN'T and WON'T do the job.

By the time we could build and bring online even a single new nuclear power plant in the USA -- which would be at least ten years down the road if we started today -- we could easily be powering the entire grid from wind and solar, at far lower cost and with none of the very serious dangers and problems of nuclear power.