etudiant
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Posts posted by etudiant
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I have no expertise on the topic, but the uncertainties are indeed massive. Consequently it is questionable whether the researcher quoted in The Guardian can credibly assert that the oceans cannot absorb the needed amount of CO2. Of course, this also reinforces your other point, about the known and unknown risks inherent in any geoengineering effort.
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2 hours ago, Vice-Regent said:
The scale of the problem is completely different. You are talking about phasing out a few industries which utilized CFCs and now we are talking about phasing out civilization as we know it. The moral of the story is if the problem can be solved it will be solved within reason.
Climate change is a predicament with no solutions. Civilization is fundamentally incompatible with the biosphere. The science of steady-state civilizations is rather interesting but it is my belief that as long as capitalism is our model they will all fail in the end.
Ultimately we may need to go to war with capitalism particularly because it's consuming resources better utilized for steady-state civilizations and the urgency of climate change and the global biosphere. Large areas of agricultural and urban lands must return to nature as we attempt to re-stabilize the carbon cycle.
People don't want steady-state because it places restrictions on the individual's freedom but you can counter this by limiting the population to the planet's natural carrying capacity of 1 billion humans or 250 million humans with a 1950s per capita usage of resources.
Think about the beauty of a stable world. One or two children for each applicable couple. There's nothing wrong with limiting population especially as infant mortality has markedly decreased. Maybe with the passing of the generations we can move into a better future. I am not sold on the idea of the species being fundamentally untenable.
Transitions are not so easy. Just ask the Federal Reserve, trying to unblow the current zero interest bubble. That said, I think you overestimate the difficulties.
I think that populations are already under control in the industrialized world, with Europe, China, Japan and the US all under replacement fertility, leaving immigration to offset the decline.
Only Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia still have high birth rates, largely driven by poverty. That can be cured within a generation, as China demonstrated.
Separately, I do not think CO2 capture is a serious problem. The experiments in seeding the southern oceans with iron sulfate were hugely successful and underscore the late John Martins claim 'give me a half tanker of iron sulfate and I'll give you an ice age'.
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7 hours ago, wdrag said:
Hi,
Just letting you know they reanalyzed and her his the result. MUCH better. I also wrote NOHRSC when I criticized the post. They did not reply but here is their apparent final. I'll also open with this on a new topic shortly. Thanks for your review.
Walt
Thank you, that is a real contribution to keeping the record straight.
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Forecast is for heavy rain Dec 14th, so if your contractor works Saturdays, you should be able to find your leak.
That said, my limited experience with leaks is that the water usually drips down some distance away from the actual leak, so look around for all potential culprits. I found very high grade clear silicon caulk a very effective help, sealing generously between the chimney and the flashing, especially where the flashing abutted the chimney. The contractor had wanted to take down the bedroom ceiling, as that was where the leak was showing, so I was forced to try to find a less disruptive solution. Fortunately the roof had a flat section that allowed access to the chimney, as it would have been much more involved had ladders and scaffolds been required..
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1 hour ago, LibertyBell said:
we've let it go to waste many times before..... if we capitalized on every -NAO/-AO then NYC would average like 80 inches of snow a year lol. An east-based -NAO and/or a bad PAC make snow much less likely. I wish there were graphs that depicted exactly what type of neg NAO this would be.
It would be good to have the NYC annual snow fall totals for the 1600s and 1700s, as that covers the 'Little Ice Age' interval. My guess is that snow totals were above the recent 50" averages, but surely there is some historical record somewhere.
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19 hours ago, wdrag said:
Snowfall for this event interpolated-interpreted via NOHRSC. It see's more than 0.2" in CP. Something is wrong with NOHRSC analysis in and near NYC or with the obs. I'm moving forward.
Although the map is not clear, the NOHRSC estimate is at least a factor of 10 too high.
Central Park had barely enough snow to coat the grass, the 0.2" number given initially looked spot on to me.
It is not confidence inspiring when 'final revisions' are obviously wrong.
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Has anyone had any experience with the new IBM GRAF weather tracking/forecasting system?
It seems to be inaccessible to ordinary mortals, but does it even perform at competitive levels with the Euro or the GFS?
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Manhattan UES did not see much, a few desultory flakes disappearing on the wet ground. No slush at all.
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Lot of moving parts to this. Difficult to be confident here in a snow forecast three days out.
Fortunately I don't have to drive anywhere Wednesday morning, so can consider the outcome with equanimity.
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Seems to be mostly a raw weather event here in Manhattan, thirties, windy and raining. No substantial snow thus far.
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Very nice paper, thank you for posting this.
I'm intrigued that the warm pool has been tracked since the start of the 1900s, a more than doubled warm area is massive and deserves to be highlighted more.
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Saw that phenomenon in progress this morning in NYC Central Park , where there are lots of Ginkos.
In still air, their leaves were just showering down, so by the afternoon, the trees were almost bare, with the leaves carpeting the ground right under the trees.
It was very pretty in the afternoon sun, the green and gold leaves encircling the tree trunks.
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quiet bar playing Xmas music= bad credit risk
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I can see the appeal, but can't see how that type of place could earn enough to stay in business.
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21 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:
Reposting this here:
https://twitter.com/i/events/1191456175449088006
The innovations include an energy-trapping molecule, a storage system that promises to outperform traditional batteries and an energy-storing laminate coating that can be applied to windows and textiles.
Swedish scientists develop energy storing molecule that can be applied as a transparent coating to windows, houses, cars, clothes and release heat when exposed to a catalyst. Still a few years from commercialisation - but pretty amazing potential if it comes good.
Scientists say they’ve figured out how to store solar power for decades, a major energy breakthrough
Scientists in Sweden have figured out how to harness solar power, store it and release it on demand in the form of heat decades after it's been captured
All these links refer to the same Bloomberg article, which has very little detail. It is easy to store solar heat for decades, just grow some trees.
The new molecule, cost unspecified, stores and releases some unquantified amount of heat, but there is nothing about how fast or how the release is controlled.
At this point, the article seems click bait, rather than useful reporting.
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11 minutes ago, BillT said:
the greenhouse effect is an insulating effect.....can anybody here name any insulator that ADDS heat to the system it is insulating?
my understanding of insulation is it SLOWS the movement of the heat energy but in no way traps that heat and does NOT in any way ADD any extra heat to the system.....
if my understanding is wrong please show an insulator that ADDS heat?
Afaik, the issue here is that incoming energy from the sun is more short wave, which is not as obstructed by greenhouse gases as are the longer wave length heat radiations,
The effect is same energy incoming, less outgoing, resulting in a heating effect.
Note that this leaves lots of room for discussion, as we have no full agreement on the effects of water vapor, the predominant green house gas, or of clouds, or of atmospheric convection, ocean heat flows etc etc. It is a very complex system and it is frankly a major achievement to have it modeled as well as it is. Major uncertainties still remain, but the existence of greenhouse effects is not one of them.
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43 minutes ago, Juliancolton said:
I always forget that ToT is a real thing folks do. Been at least 20 years since I've had anyone come around.
It flourishes still in NYC, hordes of kids shepherding adults in silly costumes.
Fortunately nobody has to walk far from one apartment block to the next.
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9 hours ago, forkyfork said:
choose a big breed
feed with lots of compost
only allow one pumpkin per vine
Still hugely impressive, 2000 pounds in a 200 day growing season requires 10 pounds a day average weight gain, so probably closer to 50 pounds per day at the peak.
That plant might as well be directly connected to a tap, it must guzzle like fury. Wonder if it gets warm because it is growing so fast.
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Thank you, csnavywx, very helpful links. Even without ability to pass the paywall, the summaries and the charts tell the story. The charts especially are pretty alarming.
Sadly, seen that coal fired power plant construction is still very strong, particularly in China and India, i see no possibility of arresting the CO2 uptrend. We will see this future, like it or not.
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4 hours ago, csnavywx said:
I'm still reading through that paper. From what I've read so far, the change is on the order of 0.25 pH post-impact. We've had around 0.15 of change so far, but this hasn't eaten into the aragonite buffer enough to cause undersaturation at the surface or in the mixed layer in most locales so far. That is due to change sometime in the 2030s in the Southern Ocean and the waters next to Antarctica (where colder SSTs allow more gas to dissolve). From there it will spread rapidly across seasons and area.
It's not talked about much and my suspicion is that it won't be until that starts to occur.
That is a stunning change. Is there a reference which you could point me to? I've seen some reports, but nothing that suggests global loss of alkalinity on that scale.
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24 minutes ago, adiabatic13 said:
Education, education, education, not the kind that teaches you facts and hard skills, but the kind that teaches you how to think, reason and look deeply, that's the only hope for our species. Until proven otherwise I will assume that intelligent life arises quite often in our universe, it seems designed for life (in so many particulars: i.e. gravity, the specific properties of H2O, oxidation-reduction, etc...not sure if these imply a sense of agency there); at any rate, most if not all self-aware species I'm guessing "progress" to precisely the point where humankind presently sits and because technological evolution inherently outpaces biological evolution for multi-cellular critters, they, in essence, commit species-wide suicide.
It is not obvious that human style intelligence is a common feature anywhere, afawk it has evolved just once in the several hundred million years that multi cellular life has existed on this earth.
Actually the constraint is even stricter, industrial technology is only a few hundred years old, so about a millionth of the multi cellular life span. That suggests intelligent life as we know it is a very fleeting apparition, even if we assume that it has longevity once achieved. However, as noted, the lack of wisdom which humans are showing in their dealing with their own biosphere strongly suggests longevity may be limited for our technological society.
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20 hours ago, Windspeed said:
Well the micro-vortex is the tiny eye we observed with Hagibis. Really this phenomenon is no different than your average microcane or small hurricane eyewall in general, it just takes a very low shear environment + very high maximum potential intensity w/ high TCHP to get something like a Hagibis or Wilma; and even still, the aformentioned type of micro-vortex may still not occur. Otherwise, outer banding influences in the formative stages usually starves off or dissipates a smaller vortex before MPI can be achieved. Usually the intensification phase of the entire tropical cyclone's broader core cuts off or diverts outer low level convergence rather quickly away from a tiny interior vortex, if it happens to exist, while a larger eye or concentric band takes over. This is usually prior to the system even becoming a hurricane or typhoon. It's just a really chaotic and unpredictable process, at least until the main eyeband or core has consolidated, to know how large or small the dominate vort will be.
In short, there really isn't a way to model the chaotic nature of such a phenomenon. It is rather part luck on how small and aligned an MCS-induced mid-level vort is in conjunction to the low level vort underneath. If that can resolve and the MPI is sky high, a small vort can become dominant and remain that way through rapid intensification all the way into the sub-900s hPa. But it's really a crapshoot to know the probability of such occurring. Sometimes the original vort max is just larger and remains that way.
Thank you for this more complete explanation, although it is really over my head. For a novice such as me, TCHP and MPI are not familiar terms, so there are gaps in my understanding of the process. But I gather the hurricane formation is much more chaotically competitive than I'd thought, so that very small vortices sometimes play a pivotal role. Is that correct?
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5 hours ago, Windspeed said:6 hours ago, etudiant said:Don't think I've ever seen something like this before. Is it usual in cyclones?
Rare is a better term. I mentioned some others above: Pam, Patricia, Wilma, Gilbert and Allen all had similar structures. There have been a number of others that developed a super intense >5nm micro-vortex eyewall within a much larger banded concentric envelope. Still, it's not something we see with regards to such extreme sub 890 hpa estimated intensities on a yearly basis. Think perhaps once every 5-10 years globally within the satellite era.
Thank you, a very informative summary.
Has there been any explanation or modeling that would shed light on how this comes about? Why and how would a micro vortex spin up within the eye?
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2 hours ago, Windspeed said:
Incredible inner micro-vortex....
Don't think I've ever seen something like this before. Is it usual in cyclones?
Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change
in Climate Change
Posted
Agree 100%, but of course the concern is that humans are already geoengineering the globe, with massive distortions in soil, water and air management due to agriculture, industry and settlement. So the threshold for intervention is correspondingly much lower, even though the uncertainties are as large as ever.