chubbs
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Posts posted by chubbs
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21 hours ago, WolfStock1 said:
Sorry but the notion that *any* person or organization could have enough information to make such a judgment - let alone there be "consensus" on it, is laughable. This kind of judgment requires essentially omniscience - a full and complete view of the long lists of benefits and drawbacks, with appropriate weighting, and timescales, applied to each. This is some that people and organizations - even collectively - don't have. Let alone on an individual basis, such as what would be required for "consensus".
In case you're wondering why there's so much pushback - this is why. People don't like baseless statements like this.
Developing consensus is key part of the scientific process. Below is the leading paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on scientific consensus. Scientists are well aware of the scientific consensus in their field. They have to know the current state of knowledge to advance further. In the case of climate change, with high impact and a wide range of scientific disciplines, there are also governmental and technical organization activity to help develop and document the scientific consensus. IPCC is the leading example but there are many others. I encourage you to look at IPCC reports (link below). Most of our debates on this forum can be traced back to a lack of awareness of the scientific consensus. Often we are arguing about things that were settled decades ago.
Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the vast majority of active, qualified experts on a conclusion in a specific scientific discipline.[1] Scientific consensus results from the self-correcting scientific process of peer review, replication of the event through the scientific method, scholarly debate, meta-analysis, and publication of high-quality review articles, monographs, or guidelines in reputable books and journals to establish facts and durable knowledge about the topic.[2][3]
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2 hours ago, GaWx said:
Thanks, Charlie.
1. Isn’t the range of science based predictions of the amount of GW in the very longterm in a pretty wide range as opposed to a narrow range? My understanding is that he’s near the lower end of that range.
2. In addition to the warming effect of increased CO2, there are other factors that could come into play. Spencer believes that there are negative feedback factors that will ultimately limit the amount of GW compared to most model projections. That’s supposedly why he’s near the lower end of the range.
3. He said it MAY even be beneficial not that it would definitely be beneficial. There’s the potential benefit of larger global crop sizes due to a greener planet resulting from a combo of longer growing seasons where they’re currently grown, an increase in the amount of crops grown in higher latitudes, and the increased CO2 photosynthesis effect. Also, cold has killed a good bit more than heat from what I’ve read. However, I do realize that eventually deaths from heat will rise enough to potentially start killing more than cold though that would likely still be a long ways off if that were to happen.
Could these good things outweigh the bad things and make it net beneficial? I’m not saying that but it could be debated. Personally, I’m worried about rising sea levels.4. A greener Earth could be one of the negative feedbacks that Spencer has cited since greener means cooler highs such as has occurred in the Midwest. In addition, drought frequency in the Midwest has dropped since the 1990s.
The entire climate sensitivity range is the scientific consensus. By excluding most of the likely range, Spencer severely underestimates climate risk.
There is low and diminishing technical support for low climate sensitivity. Spencer's views are inconsistent with the temperature rise we have already experienced. Other arguments against low sensitivity include: large and increasing earth energy imbalance and the growing consensus on positive cloud feedback.
The scientific consensus is that the long list of CO2/warming debits far outweigh a couple of benefits.-
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13 hours ago, GaWx said:
Charlie,
I assume you realize that Roy’s been dismissive of alarmism related to AGW rather than the science of AGW, itself. He agrees that the globe has warmed due to AGW but doesn’t accept anything close to the worst case scenarios as being realistic because he feels that the warming from it is/will be less than the amount needed to result in the worst case due partially to negative rather than positive feedback. He feels that the alarmism is being largely fueled for political reasons.
Due to extreme difficulty in predicting how much more the globe will warm, his being on the lower side is imho not contradicting science. We’re dealing with variables rather than exact answers.
I personally feel that politics has a nontrivial affect on both sides of this issue as it affects so many things unfortunately. However, I do realize that outright AGW deniers do mainly reside on the conservative side of the aisle. These two statements aren’t conflicting.
Spencer is a long time critic of the scientific consensus on climate change. Its not that hard to predict the impact of adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. We have warmed pretty much as expected, much faster than Spencer acknowledged or expected. The scientific consensus does not describe the warming we have experienced as slow or beneficial.
Agree politics is important as is the action of powerful interest groups. Its the reason why most people don't have an accurate picture of what climate science is saying. Don't think Spencer has been helpful in that regard.
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6 hours ago, GaWx said:
“It is human nature to think the weather we experience has some sort of global significance. But look at NOAA’s best estimate of March 2026 temperature departures from “normal” (1991-2020 average) over North America (below). Yeah, the U.S. was unusually warm. But what about all the unusual chill over the northern parts of North America? Alaska and most of Canada were below normal.
As part of our monthly global temperature updates (posted separately) here are the March temperature departures from normal for the lower troposphere, 1979 through 2026 in the Lower 48 (top panel of Fig. 2). Last month was clearly the warmest in the 48-year satellite temperature record.
But when we examine the bottom panel in Fig. 2 we see that, averaged over all land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including Canada and Alaska), March 2026 was uneventful, and was even cooler than 2024 and 2025. In fact, 2026 was right on the long-term trend line.
The message here is that the unusual (and likely record) warmth of March 2026 in the U.S. was largely due to normal month-to-month weather variations, while the large-scale climate signal shows March was a continuation of the slow (and largely benign, and possibly even beneficial) warming trend we have been experiencing in recent decades.”
A couple of comments: 1) Yes, Roy is a long time climate dismissive 2) His dataset misses much of the warming in the early 2000s, 3) Best to look at the globe as a whole to judge warming, 4) Global UAH is more sensitive to ENSO than surface temperatures.5) Global UAH was very warm for a La Nina in March, the first La Nina well above the linear trend.
We've reached the La Nina bottom in UAH. A typical nino spike in UAH from these levels would be hard to dismiss.
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52 minutes ago, donsutherland1 said:
Bad methodology. Notice he uses MT and WY. 90s in March are virtually assured to be near or at zero. Thus he assures himself the kind of conclusion he seeks. A more robust approach would involve standardized measurements, e.g., the number of highs 1 sigma, 2 sigma, etc., above the 20th century baseline.
Another issue: the shelters 100 years ago were not aspirated. Inadequate or poorly sited shelter ran warm. With his number of days metric easy for one or two sites with bad data to bias the result. We saw that in the Chester county, where spuriously warm data from Phoenixville in the 1930s and 1940s biased the >95F day data, by providing the overwhelming majority of the County 95F+ days in that period.
Better to show the data for every station like chart below. That way a few bad apples don't skew the data. Threadx cities plotted below have the longest climate records.
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Solar uptake continued to accelerate in Africa in the last month before the energy crisis.
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1 hour ago, ChescoWx said:
Cherry picking always gives the desired answer.....
Yes, here's a good example of cherry picking. Do you have any specific technical complaints? I'll be adding other stations; but, why would the results change?. The other stations all have much shorter record lengths. Plus the modern stations are all warming rapidly in complete agreement with the Coatesville and Phoenixville data.
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19 hours ago, Typhoon Tip said:Yeah I've been keenly on this every day for the past month as we're globally getting set sail into this next ultimately unknown +ENSO. The warm/NINO phase is all but certain, but ...the amplitude and so forth, tbd.
The last time we were in switch from a NINA to NINO, there was a global temperature surge, air and sea, like never before observed since humanity first picked up the first burning stick, wondered, and the results of that wondering ultimately dooming their fate ( whole 'nother dystopian story). It's not clear that the NINA/NINO switch was causal in the global multi-metric temperature surge in 2023; it in fact preceded the on set of the NINO. However, intuitively ...having a warm tropical anomaly concurrent certainly is not helping to offset a warming world, incrementally.
This is concerning, this hot water curve above. +.58C as of that last tick ( to be verified but seldom do these not - ) is a mere .1 < than the 2024 historic max, which took place there nearing the end of April.
This sets off a chain of reasoning for me...
Most of those curves, in fact all of them at a glance with the exception of last year ... were already beginning to fall by now, the Ides of March. Last year, however, was the first in which that was not the case. The SSTs gained yet for another month - doing so during a NINA, no less?! The Earth had for the first time in decades, gained when the climatology inference clearly argued(s) it should have been falling. I don't believe that it trivial, albeit easily overlooked. More on that in the bottom paragraph.
When looking at the recent month(s) of this year, and combining with those aspect... there's no sense there that this curve isn't going to set a new record. We are preset at an elevated state, with yet an impending warm phase of the ENSO ...? Just beginning to register, and we only have .1 to spare.
It's my opinion that we are not done with the 2023 burst. I sense that was a first step during what could turn into a much more important total geological threshold/move. Last years odd global SST gains is an insidious way of signaling we are still in burst-prone' state ... Possible the same burst, but to our perception moving too slowly to notice. "Burst" in geologic time is misleading. It is going to be difficult to see to a sentience ( us ) whose perception of time moves too swiftly?
Here's another perspective on the oiSST data which shows the similarity to 2023. The last data point is March to date.
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21 hours ago, ChescoWx said:
Try consolidating your data you will find the story matches my above analytics.
OK I took an initial stab at consolidating the data using Chester County's 3 long-term COOP stations. My consolidation doesn't look at all like your "analytics". Why? I only use periods without major station moves: 1949-2025 for Coatesville and Phoenixville and 1894-1969 for West Chester. I also use the 1949-1969 overlap period to take out the temperature difference between the 3 stations. While it doesn't look like your "analytics", my consolidation is a good match to the data collected at individual Chester County stations, posted above. That's gives my confidence in this approach and I plan to extend this method to the rest of the data.
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Daily oisst has moved into record territory, continuing to track 2023; but 0.1 - 0.2C warmer. It is likely that SST will continue to set daily records until the developing nino fades sometime in 2027.
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On 3/22/2026 at 4:52 PM, ChescoWx said:
Below is how much faster the warming is just since 1960 at our local PHL Airport with their growing UHI problem. That warming slope is a wee bit different just around 25 to 35 miles west of the concrete and river warm oasis that is PHL Airport!
Reposting some of the charts I posted previously. Your line doesn't look anything like the raw data from individual stations. There is no significant difference in warming between individual Chester County stations and the Philadelphia Airport. Of course cooling station moves should be excluded. That's why the West Chester plot ends in 1969.
Per the table below, there are big changes in the Chester County station population that you aren't accounting for. In comparison, the Philadelphia airport heat island is mature and isn't changing much from decade to decade. If heat island is important, why ignore the movement of Chester County stations out of towns after World War II?
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1 hour ago, GaWx said:
Hey Charlie,
I looked and looked at this and still can’t see how this doesn’t have errors. What am I missing? Am I having a brain fart? Is this the # of days within March 1-22, 2026, with highs of 80+?
I came back and looked again to see if my brain had been missing something. I still don’t see how a good portion of the #s on the map aren’t off. Is this mislabeled?
I should have been clearer. The chart I posted is the ranking of the number of days over 80, with #1 being the highest. Below is the number of 80+ days on which the ranking is based.
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Days hitting 80F, month to date.
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2 minutes ago, paulm said:
Might have been a data artifact - am now seeing populated data for this chart:
Thanks for updating, what I posted must have caught the database at a bad time.
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45 minutes ago, GaWx said:
Thanks for posting these. I’ve seen similar charts showing lowered global wx related disaster costs in more recent years. Does anyone know the main reasons? Despite these drops (assuming these charts are accurate and not deceptive/being presented in proper context, which may very well be the case), are they projected to continue dropping as we continue to warm? That’s key to know.As explained in detail at the link below. Pielke's results have nothing to do with natural disasters. Instead they are an artifact of his analysis method. When the same database is analyzed properly. US disaster costs are increasing as percent of GDP and the number of disasters is increasing.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/334359/1/20251026_fix_roger_pielke_jr.pdf
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58 minutes ago, donsutherland1 said:
Yes, an NAO+ is correlated with warmth in the SW. In fact, it is correlated with almost CONUS-wide warmth.
That's what we have seen so far this month, CONUS-wide warmth.
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Here's a climate first. The Colorado snowpack is gone 15 days before the typical peak.
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Animation showing the records tied or broken in the past 24-hours. Pink are March records.
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15 hours ago, GaWx said:
I read this today from a pro-met. @donsutherland1and others, I’m curious about your thoughts about this:
“Many of the radiation absorption bands for CO2 OVERLAP with H2O. H2O is 95% of the planet's greenhouse gas effect(we would be a frozen wasteland without the BENEFICIAL greenhouse effect). Turns out that in areas with higher dew points, those overlapping absorption bands ARE ALREADY SATURATED by H2O!! In those cases and in those bands, it doesn't matter how much CO2 that you add. When they are already absorbing 100% of the long wave, heat radiation of what they are capable of because of water vapor/H2O, adding CO2 in those bands will have near 0 impact.
Now the kicker. Cold places lack water vapor in the dry air so CO2 will be impacting bands that are NOT saturated from H2O absorbing. We can see that on the graph above. However, DESERTS also lack water vapor, so they too are seeing a greater impact from CO2 than the rest of the planet at the same latitude. Even DESERTS located in already hot places, like Phoenix.
Turns out that DESERTS are warming at a similar, elevated rated to the Arctic.”
Opinions?
A couple of points to add to Don's. The absorption bands of CO2 and H2O are different. There's overlap in some regions, but CO2 also absorbs in regions where H2O doesn't. More importantly H20 has a much higher boiling point than CO2 and is a liquid at atmospheric temperatures while CO2 is a gas. Because of the higher boiling point, the amount of H2O in the atmosphere is controlled by temperature. As Don points out, CO2 is more important relative to H2O in the upper atmosphere where heat is radiated to space and it is too cold to hold much water vapor.
Per paper below, CO2 is the earth's thermostat. CO2 controls the amount of H2O in the atmosphere. If there was less CO2 there would be less water vapor and vice versa. As the paper states: Without the radiative forcing supplied by CO2 and the other noncondensing greenhouse gases, the terrestrial greenhouse would collapse, plunging the global climate into an icebound Earth state.
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7 hours ago, WolfStock1 said:
That's fine, except the rest of the world is generally in a different situation than the US. And the switch to renewables has been painful in many places. Germany has been the poster child, but their electricity prices have been skyrocketing, and their economy is struggling as a result. But even with that - most of their energy use is still fossil - well over 70%:
So again - what is the scale of those charts you posted? It's not there, for a reason. All they show is "up", but they don't show how *much* up, relative to actual fossil usage.
China has indeed been going full-bore to renewables, but they're still mostly fossil:
They're at about 10% wind and solar. Again - low-hanging fruit; not baseline power. And they generally have zero respect for the environment; doing big projects that just aren't feasible in the US.
With regards to EV sales - apples to oranges situation-wise. They're still heavily subsidized in most places. If they're a slam-dunk - then why are they so heavily subsidized?
China's EV sales have been doing great - and that's great - but Chinese workers are paid about 1/3 the salary of the US; they can afford to do everything cheaper. Low hanging fruit, as they try to catch up with the developed work economy-wise. If they had our level of prosperity they would not be able to do this. China is also building tons of new coal power plants BTW, along with their renewables growth.
Funny people can take the same data and come to different conclusions. The point you are missing is that energy technologies: solar, wind, batteries, EV etc., are getting better and cheaper on well established technology improvement curves. Until recently these technologies weren't competitive with fossil fuels. However, going forward they are going to have an increasing cost advantage and subsidies will be less and less important. As an example, China is ending their subsidies of electric cars. Yes, China is still building coal plants, but renewable share of electricity generation is still growing rapidly, and coal use in China dropped last year.
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10 hours ago, WolfStock1 said:
Except that data is old. And there's no scale. And it's obviously cumulative, not showing actual new deployments over time. In short - it's fluff propaganda, not reflecting reality.
E.g. EV sales are now on the decline - e.g. see CA and NY who have detailed trackers on sales, due to their mandate (which will clearly not be met at this point)
As I've maintained - much of renewable energy has been "low hanging fruit" so far, in particular in the U.S. Specifically - nearly all of our wind-based electricity and our solar-based electricity in the US is generated in places that have... lots of wind and lots of sun. But - not coincidentally - that tends to be places where there aren't as many people living. The fraction of renewable generation and use that happens in states that don't get as much sun is much smaller. The problem is that the highest population concentrations in the US live in those areas - in particular the NE population corridor.
No the big difference in my EV chart and yours, is the US vs global. The final numbers aren't in yet, but global EV sales grew by roughly 20% last year, held down by slowing sales in the US. The US is a laggard in both EVs and solar with costs higher than the rest of the world due to tariffs and other factors. Expect the global EV ramp to continue in 2026 spurred by the current oil crisis.
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/international-issues/ev-sales-grew-20-globally-in-2025/
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10 hours ago, WolfStock1 said:
Making a blanket statement like that shows how how much you've been influenced by the propaganda machine, and generally ill-informed. In general no - renewables are not cheaper in most circumstances, when all factors are considered (inclusion of additional baseline power sources for when the wind and sun don't cooperate, additional transmission infrastructure, higher land use, etc.). They can be cheaper only in specific circumstances when the stars align; they are not cheaper in a broad-use infrastructure sense.
If they were cheaper, then power companies wouldn't need the much-higher-level of subsidies to incentivize their use.
Most of the misleading information I see comes from fossil fuel and utility incumbents. For instance, per top link below, the "expense" of additional baseline power to backstop renewables is a fossil fuel fallacy. Renewables are becoming cheaper. Not everywhere and in every application; but, the long term trend is clear. In the future fossil fuels will be less competitive than they are today. Its not only renewables. A number of key energy technologies are on long-term improvement curves: batteries, EV, heat pumps etc. They work together to make energy generation, storage, transmission and use cheaper and more efficient. Meanwhile fossil fuel use is a mature technology; that uses a diminishing resource; and, that carries geopolitical and climate risk that isn't baked into the price.
https://www.electrotech-revolution.com/p/renewables-allow-us-to-pay-less-not
https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
https://www.electrotech-revolution.com/p/what-is-electrotech-and-what-will
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19 hours ago, WolfStock1 said:
Presuming that you're talking about nuclear - the problem is that there has always been *too much* talk about the tail risk; i.e. blowing out of proportion.
The other problem for nuclear has been CO2 accounting. We'd have much more nuclear with stronger climate policy. I am bullish on nuclear long term reflecting ongoing technical progress; but, it isn't going to contribute much in the US in the next decade or two. We should be on a build everything path, with a cost penalty for CO2.
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19 hours ago, csnavywx said:
RE will continue to get more expensive on a PPA basis so long as we continue to ignore the issues plaguing transmission, distribution and direct competition between industrial scale AI/DC buildout and the insane lack of investment in upstream base materials supply (like spinning up mining and refining). I maintain that negative prices on the spot market are a sign of market failure, not something that should be cheered.
These prices certainly are not going to get better this year:
The correct take is that *all energy* will continue to get more expensive in the world we've built for ourselves now. (Disclosure that I am long ICLN -- because yes, most of these companies will try and expand their margins off the backs of the ratepayer and externalizing the grid cost -- my PNL tells me if I'm right or not, so far, so good.)
Yes the grid is a big problem in the US. Link below is a long thread on the US vs China grid. We aren't competitive, as an illustration per chart below, China gets 25x the payback from grid investment dollars.
The thread doesn't mention batteries, which can mitigate grid investment somewhat. The developing global south, with abundant local solar, may avoid heavy grid investment.
https://x.com/NiyerEnergy/status/2032265048723259781
Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change
in Climate Change
Posted
Linked the Geological Society of London's 2021 review article on climate change in the geological record.
Observations from the geological record show that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are now at their highest levels in at least the past 3 million years. Furthermore, the current speed of human-induced CO2 change and warming is nearly without precedent in the entire geological record, with the only known exception being the instantaneous, meteorite-induced event that caused the extinction of non-bird-like dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
https://www.lyellcollection.org/doi/full/10.1144/jgs2020-239