Posts by Wilco 1 224 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2009
Wrong, we don't need CO2 to breathe. In fact too much CO2 kills you even if there is more than enough oxygen in the air. And the oceans can't absorb all CO2 as they are in equilibrium with the atmosphere.
Still trying to deny that burning oil causes an increase CO2? As CO2 concentration rises, oceans will heat up, thus absorbing less of the CO2 we are emitting and thus atmospheric CO2 will rise even faster.
The satellite does accurately measure ice coverage, even for broken up ice. No accurate measurements exist before 1979, so no surprise it "is only a 30 year record"... But the fact that ice coverage has been declining fast since the measurements started is telling. This year only 25% of the ice that existed in 1979 is left, and it is declining on a yearly basis.
Actually the extent of summer ice has decreased by more than 75% over the last 33 years (see eg. http://jcmooreonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Arctic-Ice-Volume2.jpg). If this trend continues there will be no ice in the summer by about 2025.
Note submarines can punch through several metres thick ice, so a submarine surfacing is nothing special. Obviously they'd prefer to surface through cracks in the ice whenever possible.
It happens to be winter overthere, big surprise. Overall Antartic sea ice has been steady, not growing, not receding. Quite unlike the arctic where sea ice loss is dramatic. Only a few weeks ago predictions that the arctic will be ice free in the summer within this decade were ridiculed by Lewis, but now it looks like we're well on our way to achieve exactly that...
It is a 30% increase in acidity indeed as the pH is a logarithmic scale. The pH change is most definitely relevant as it proves huge amounts of CO2 are being absorbed from the atmosphere (around 50% of all CO2 ends up in the oceans). Also organisms may not be able to adapt to large pH changes: human blood levels are regulated to be within a 0.1 range, go outside that and you get ill, about 0.4 over the limit and you're dead.
So yes, it's a significant change and it matters to all ocean life.
Ben, here is a good resource: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php.
It addresses all the fallacies, lies and hot air from the deniers with hard facts in a way which is easy to understand. The fact is that all the research points to the same conclusion, including research done by skeptics (such as the BEST studies).
It's funny you bring up "ClimateGate". Given that 3 separate investigations concluded they did do nothing wrong (most definitely not massaging stats), and 2 BEST studies produced the same hockey stick graph despite using different methods, it would be impossible to claim there is any doubt left unless you are a hardcore denier.
Are you similarly unconvinced about everything else in science? Things like evolution, physics, gravity etc? Do you also need more data and evidence before you accept those theories? If not, why make an exception for climate science?
Also can you explain what exactly is wrong with energy efficiency, cheap renewable energy, and the resulting energy independence? Even without climate change we will have to achieve that as the oil won't last forever while our energy needs are going up exponentially.
Mike, given that you made the claim, it is for you to provide the hard evidence to support your claim, which is frankly ridiculous. You didn't provide anything concrete at all, so I conclude you cannot even provide one quote from AR4 which has been proven false. That's typical for deniers, it's all hot air without any substance.
I have already done my own research and have concluded the scientists and IPCC are right. If anything they are a bit too conservative, it is looking we will end up with the more extreme scenarios due to inaction, the "burn, baby burn" attitude and deniers.
Would you care to provide citations for all the "deliberate misrepresentations, misquotes, arithmetic errors, near outrageous proven falsehoods, selective editing of sources, unsubstantiated claims and false claims" in AR4?
Without evidence your claim is simply an outright lie.
I don't see how you believe we are well within natural variation. According to the graph we have been at a peak around 10000 years ago and temperatures should now go down rather than sharply up. Current CO2 concentration is 30% higher than any time in the last 450000 years. Is that definition of "well within natural variation"?
And will set a new recored far below the previous 2007 low. Here is a graph showing the situation as of August 13: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
Note how the years are colored showing a clear trend over the last 30 years. I wonder how this fact will be spun on The Register?
I fail to see how you get from "shoddy coding" (nothing unusual at all across the whole IT industry) to concluding that climate researchers are all "highly accomplished liars".
I presume you would call the skeptics who did the BEST studies which confirmed all the previous work (including the results from the "East Anglia bunch") also complete liars? And dispute their conclusion that the heat island effect has actually very little influence on the final results?
It seems to me that your assumptions are:
1. All climate scientists are liars
2. All the raw data is incorrect
3. All the models are incorrect
4. All the results are incorrect
I wonder whether you also believe CO2 is not a greenhouse gas?
The reason the authers have to mention AGW is because otherwise deniers will use the paper as "proof" that solar spots are solely responsible for any warming. It's sad that we are in this situation despite proof to the contrary (someone already posted the graph), but that's the way it is.
You're right to bring up pollution levels - salinity, waste heat from power stations and industrial pollution might have changed. However with much stricter environmental controls the quality of the water has likely improved markely in 50 years - after all, downstream countries use it for drinking water.
How many more disasters before you work out that nuclear power is not safe and never will be as long as we allow humans to design, build and control them? If it were safe we wouldn't be able to quote a long list of nuclear accidents. Not many people have been killed, but that is not the only measure of safety. Large areas of land have been polluted and the cleanup costs have been enormous. If nuclear power were as safe as claimed there would be not a single accident.
Recycling is a nice idea if only it worked. Sellafield was a disaster in every possible way - reprocessing waste turned out to be much more expensive than expected (far more expensive than mining new uranium), incredably dirty and polluting (they lost hundreds of kilos of plutonium, some of it within the buildings, some of it was dumped into the sea - yes really) and never was commercially viable. So after being funded and built with taxpayer money, it is now being closed down, dismantled and cleaned up (as far as that is feasible), again at a huge cost to the taxpayer.
So recycling spent fuel has been tried and failed dismally. And there are still people who claim nuclear power is cheap AND safe?
Upward of 100 you mean: current estimates of the Fukushima cleanup are $235 billion! And we may not have seen the worst yet, there are reports that the fuel pools are unsafe and too unstable to withstand the next earthquake which most likely will happen during the cleanup as it will go on for decades...
This whole sad story proves yet again how nuclear power can become a huge disaster by just a few minor decisions to save a few bucks. Spending a few million on waterproofing the backup generators or increasing the height of the tsnunami defenses would have resulted in $200 million minor damage instead of a $200 billion disaster. I wonder how many other nuclear power companies take similar shortcuts to increase their profits?
Indeed. And more importantly what are the costs? Chernobyl is expected to cost $235 billion. Fukushima will cost $250 billion by the latest estimate. In the UK we are paying $72 billion to clean up our own nuclear mess.
You can't argue nuclear power is either safe or cheap with these astronomical costs to society.
And guess what, it is always the tax payers which end up paying for it, never the power companies! These kinds of huge sums could easily be used to transform a whole country to use renewable energy.
I'm all for nuclear power if it could be done safely and cheaply, without any subsidies or extra taxes. But is it actually possible?
I don't think giving aid to developing countries would work. The market simply isn't there, few people can afford anything but a tiny panel (and don't need 4KWhp either), which means you never get the required volume to drive the costs down. On the other hand, the large takeup in Europe and US following subsidies has increased volume and driven prices down far more than direct aid to developing countries could ever achieve. So I don't agree that developing countries have lost out somehow, they greatly benefit from the much lower prices.
A 10 percent margin is all that common and it's far from guaranteed (panels and inverters can break). I did the sums myself a few years back, got a 15-20 year payback, and figured that improving my loft and wall insulation would be far more cost effective: an immediate noticeable benefit, payback well under 10 years, all at a fraction of the cost. Given the ~17% yearly cost reduction of solar PV, in 5-10 years it will be a similar no-brainer without any subsidies. The feed-in subsidies ensure we will be getting to that point much quicker than otherwise. I don't see people making money out of it as a big issue as you seem to. We all benefit from their investment in the long term.
You sound like you are really disappointed about missing out on solar subsidies... The nuclear subsidy of 2.8p/KWh applies to ALL electricity generated by the UK over 50 years. The solar feed in tarrifs apply to a tiny fraction of electricity generated by small domestic solar panels over at most 25 years, and add up to £8.50 per year per electricity consumer. That's about 0.25p/KWh based on the average consumption of 3300KWh per year. That means the nuclear subsidy is at least 20 times larger (and that's just the subsidy for the cleanup). I know which subsidy I prefer based on cost alone.
But the really good thing about feed-in tarrifs is that in 5-10 years you don't need them anymore as solar will be at grid parity - precisely due to having small subsidies initially. In contrast, nuclear operators are asking for ever more handouts to subsidise the building of more nuclear power stations, to decommission old reactors and foot the bill if things go horribly wrong (it's telling nobody is willing to insure a nuclear reactor - none of the current designs are inherently safe). With nuclear it seems you can either have safety or cheap electricity but not both.
Where have you been? Solar is getting very close too, so give it a few more years as prices are falling rapidly. And yes it is fair to subsidise renewable energy given fossil fuels and nuclear power are getting much higher subsidies (note that the subsidies are already being reduced due to wind and solar maturing and reaching grid parity). The most recent estimate for cleaning up the UK's nuclear mess was £72 billion, all funded by the taxpayer - if nuclear power were so cheap why don't the nuclear power companies fund it themselves?
A datapoint for an actual server is the Boston Viridis server which has 48 Calxeda nodes (192 cores), 192GB of RAM and 24 disks. Total power (including disks, fans and power supply) is less than 300W, or just 6.25W per node (a lot less than the random guess of 11W per node!). So you end up with about 880 requests/J, still 29% better than the Ivy Bridge server.
But remember the Viridis has 24 times more DRAM, 24 times more disks, 100 times the IO bandwidth (2x 10Gbe switches per node) and does 7.5 times the number of requests/second. Therefore to make the comparison fair, you'd have to kit out 8 Ivy Bridge servers with the same amount of memory, disks and IO bandwidth, and then measure total power consumption.
Finally things will become even more interesting when Calxeda moves to a 28nm process and switches from Cortex-A9 to Cortex-A15.
No that is engine efficiency, not tank-to-wheel efficiency. If you just want to compare engine efficiency, an electric motor can be over 90% efficient. An ICE can never get anywhere near that.
http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/transportation/consumer_tips/vehicle_energy_losses.html
Extraction and distribution costs are relatively low for electricity generation, around 12% for gas and 11% for coal. In the UK overall generation efficiency is 33% for coal, 42% for gas, and 32-35% for wind energy.
That shows that even with coal, an electric car would beat a diesel: 80% efficient electric car * 33% coal efficiency = 26.4% vs 17.7% well-to-wheel efficiency of a modern diesel (according to http://cta.ornl.gov/TRBenergy/trb_documents/an_assessing_tank.pdf). That means 33% less CO2 emissions for electric cars even when powered with 100% coal.
In the US about 50% of a barrel of oil can be turned into petrol, but then the amount of diesel you can get is much lower. In Europe refineries are tuned to produce much more diesel. You're right that the "waste" is useful in many other ways, but the bulk of oil is "wasted" in inefficient IC engines.
An electric car gets ~80% efficiency based on 99% battery charge/discharge efficiency, 87% electric motor efficiency and 94% drivetrain/wheel efficiency.
Unlike a ICE, an electric motor only requires energy when you drive/accelerate, and when you do it always works at maximum efficiency. This is why hybrids and start/stop can make a big difference.
I was talking about cars, not just the engine. Peak engine efficiency is only obtained at a narrow rpm range, so you typically don't drive at maximum efficiency. And engine efficiency doesn't include transmission losses, gearbox and wheel losses. Tank to wheel efficiency is far lower than maximum engine efficiency.
See: http://cta.ornl.gov/TRBenergy/trb_documents/an_assessing_tank.pdf
Petrol car: 14.8% tank-to-wheel efficiency
Diesel car: 20% tank-to-wheel efficiency
Neither does the petrol magically come into existence at a petrol station, or does it? If you want to compare well-to-wheel for an electric car, then you have to do the same for petrol/diesel.
Efficiency of pumping oil out of a well, transporting it, refining it, and transporting it again is at best 80%. Only about 50% of a barrel of oil can be turned into petrol (lower quality oil such as tar based oil does about 25%). So given a barrel of oil in the ground, at best you end up with a 40% of that at the petrol station, less than electricity generation efficiency (60% for a combined cycle plant).
So well to wheel efficiency of an electric car is far better than a petrol/diesel car, which is why they emit less CO2 overall. With more low-CO2 generation the electric car efficiency improves even further.
It's easy to spread FUD if you don't know what you are talking about.
Actually overall efficiency of an electric car is 80%, nowhere near the 20% you claim. Petrol cars do about 15% and diesel about 20% (diesels can reach 40% efficiency but only in huge engines such as used in ships).
Since electric cars are so much more efficient, even if you used coal to generate the electricity, it would emit less CO2 than a diesel. In the UK for example, using an electric car saves 40% on CO2 emissions over its lifetime, even taking into account recycling the car and battery.
This is not news at all. The sinks have increased because our CO2 emissions have increased even more. Only about half of the CO2 we emit is being absorbed, so the sinks don't avoid global warming, just slowing it down. However the worrying bit is that sinks like the ocean have a limited capacity, so as they warm, the amount they can absorb will reduce.
(we really need a new icon for "yawn - yet another anti AGW spin article on the Register")
Muller certainly was a sceptic, one of his main criticisms was that the hockey stick graph was a due to an error in the statistics ("When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape! That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen?"). But now he has independently verified it using his own analysis on his own data.
Watts? What are you talking about? This is an article about Muller's latest BEST work which is a reconstruction from 1750 onwards. Muller's results independently confirms the existing graphs with a significant rise in the last 50 years. So he validates the last part of the hockey stick graph, the bit that actually matters most.
There are lots of different things that can be used as temperature proxies, you can go back 800,000 years with ice cores for example. However it doesn't matter what you use as a proxy, or whether you use actual thermometer or satellite readings - all show the same hockey stick graph.
So don't post again unless you have a clue what you are talking about.
While his research isn't groundbreaking (just confirming what we have known for the last 30 years), and may not be perfect (as he is new to the whole climate research), it is interesting to see someone independent reproduce the hockey stick graph using very different methods and statistics. That alone proves that the exact method doesn't matter all that much or that the UHI effect has much influence. And it's great to see a sceptic doing actual research instead of being ... just a sceptic without evidence to support their claims.
Please read this paper: http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/sinden06-windresource.pdf
So low winds across at most 50% of the UK occur for less than 100 hours per year, and at 92% for less than 1 hour per year! Also, crucially, low wind conditions typically occur during low demand hours, and less during high demand hours. So all in all, talk of weeks of no wind is just rubbish.
Of course you always need backup as any power station could go offline due to an emergency. Backup is currently primarily used to fill in differences in demand, but can equally be used to fill gaps in supply. The key is that this backup already exists and unless you aim for an insane amount of wind energy, you don't need any new backup.
You only need a small amount of storage to deal with fluctuations in generation and demand, and this doesn't change much when you add renewables up to 50%. Wind and sun are predictable days in advance and when spread around a country become even more predictable, so calling them unreliable is just a lie. We already have plenty of links with other countries, so you could say we already have a supergrid. I haven't noticed prices becoming 20x as a result or any outages. So that's just more lies.
Well since you have all the solutions for nuclear, why don't you tell us the secret? We are spending over £70 Billion on decommissioning our existing nuclear power plants. Sellafield has been a total failure - reprocessing costs are 2-4 times as much as using new uranium and waste storage. I'm all for cheap nuclear power if it is actually feasible (AP1000 seems like a step in the right direction) but not if it means cheating by making taxpayers pay for the enormous waste and decommisioning costs.
The definition is clear to me - you have to include external costs. How you do that exactly doesn't matter much. A carbon tax, while not perfect, shows the true cost of coal. It is fact that coal has huge external costs, so that's not fabricating evidence at all. Ignoring the external costs is equivalent to sticking your head in the sand and hoping everything (pollution, GW, sea level rise etc) will magically go away.
Backup plants already exist today even with mostly fossil fuel plants in use. Similarly storage in the form of pumped hydro already exists. You need a backup for any power plant, so you also have to add the cost of backup and storage to all plants, not just to renewables.
And before you say with solar/wind you need more backup/storage, it has been shown that if you spread installations around a country and have connections with Europe the variability reduces significantly - it's always windy somewhere. There have been previous articles on here showing that up to about 50% electricity generation from windpower would be feasible for the UK without increasing backup.
The carbon tax is a reasonable proxy for the external costs - it doesn't include everything but more polluting/dangerous energy sources do have higher carbon tax, just like they should. So for fossil based fuels I think the definition is fine. For nuclear I'd agree we should include the decommissioning costs as those can be far higher than the cost of building a nuclear power station (UK decommissioning costs for old plants is over £70B and only rising - guess who is paying for that?).
The exact definition of cheapest doesn't matter much, the fact is that coal and nuclear are most definitely not the cheapest options.
It's not a redefinition - it's taking the external costs on society (pollution, deaths, destruction and global warming) and internalizing them as a cost. It's exactly the same thing as making companies pay to recycle their waste responsibly rather than allowing them to pollute at will (as was often done in the past). Sure it makes things more expensive, but that is hardly a burden compared to the alternative.
The tax is necessary to account for the pollution. Coal not only creates a huge amount of CO2 but is also the most polluting, environmentally damaging and dangerous form of energy. Such costs are not currently included, but paid for by deaths of miners, deaths due to lung deseases, destruction of the countryside, and of course global warming effects.
Nuclear power could also be made really cheap if you didn't mind having a Chernobyl disaster every year or so.
The efficiency of generating hydrogen is about 50%. And fuel cell efficiency is around 60% for existing cells (90% has been achieved in research). So overall efficiency achieveable today is 30%, lower than some diesel engines.
A battery powered car would get ~90% efficiency. So hydrogen simply makes no sense at all.
Oh btw, wind power is at grid parity - that means it is not outrageously expensive at all. Solar power isn't quite there yet, but it may well be in the next 5 years or so.
Forget about hydrogen indeed, it's never going to be efficient, even if we find a good way to store it - the inefficiency is in making the hydrogen in the first place.
For wind turbines on good sites efficiency is usually above 20% and for offshore it can be close to 30%. That is the average over a year, so it includes days when there is little or no wind or days when there is too much wind. By using multiple sites (eg. all around the UK, both on and off shore), the chance of all of them having little or no wind becomes exceedingly small.
I was talking about mobiles and tablets (if you wanted a low power supercomputer you certainly wouldn't use x86 cores or GPUs but a purpose designed ARM core similar to the undisputed #1 BlueGene/Q in the Green500). What you'll see next year is fast Cortex-A15 cores paired up with tiny power efficient Cortex-A7 cores. When you don't do anything CPU intensive it will automatically switch to the A7 core, thus saving power.
ARM already supports up to 8 cores with the A15, so extending that to 16 or more doesn't seem too far fetched. Calxeda designed their own interconnect between chips (like Hypertransport) which is different and more difficult.
But what I really meant with designing cores much faster is that due to the inherent simplicity of RISC it is possible to create new CPU designs with less effort. And it's not just ARM, Qualcomm, Marvell, and AMCC doing the same. This would not be possible if it was x86.
Intel has the high-end performance advantage, so much so that the fastest x86 chips are similar to POWER (the last big RISC still standing) in performance. However low-power x86 chips aren't nearly as competitive, for example the 32nm Atom doesn't look good at all compared with 40/45nm ARM on either performance or power consumption. So the interesting battle is next year with next-gen 22nm Atoms and 28/20nm ARMs.
One area where ARM has a big advantage (due to the ability to design new CPUs much faster than Intel) is heterogeneous multiprocessing where you combine several really fast cores and a few power efficient ones.
Typical rocket exhaust temperature is about half at exit of the nozzle than it was at entry, so it's still thousands of degrees (in this particular engine 2760C). Those icicles were formed due to cooling the nozzle with liquid hydrogen. A thin layer of steam along the inside of the nozzle condensates into water. At high power icicles wouldn't form, but when you switch to low power the excess water will form icicles, see eg. http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/on_demand_video.html?param=http://anon.nasa-global.edgesuite.net/anon.nasa-global/MARSHALL/CECE_Engine.asx
I guess you have been seeing too many Intel bunny commercials. In terms of performance Medfield can't keep up with modern ARMs despite running at a higher frequency. Tegra3 and Krait based phones beat it in Browsermark (which measures how good a CPU is at rendering websites). Also Android 4.1 has software optimizations for ARM which significantly improve the scores. So x86 has no magic that somehow make it better for surfing the web.
Accurate measurements as in lots of weather and CO2 level monitoring stations, satellites measuring solar activity, earth albedo and IR emissions, polar ice coverage and height, global ocean levels etc. If you want to call these measurements inaccurate or biased then you've got to show convincing evidence. Merely alluding to heat island effect doesn't do it as it only affects a small subset of monitoring stations and is already corrected for (obviously).
The fact that CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas is irrefutable. Releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gasses in a short timeframe so that CO2 sinks and other feedbacks cannot keep up will cause catastrophic climate change. A 2-3 degree temperature rise is already unavoidable, so you will experience yourself how bad that turns out to be for humankind.
Modern diesels are very clean, and all cars are regularly tested to conform to strict emission limits. As a result air quality has improved dramatically in the last 30 years. However to get a much larger reduction you'd have to use electric or plug-in hybrids in town, improving efficiency, moving most emissions outside the city and allowing them to be filtered at the power station.
All chemical reactions slow down with decreasing temperature, so tree rings become narrower as the tree grows more slowly. This only applies if it doesn't get too hot or too cold for the tree to survive.
That's not true at all, we have accurate measurements of how much the climate is changing. Despite that there are plenty of deniers of the hockey stick graph, which was confimed by the recent BEST study. And in evey climate thread on here there is at least someone who claims it got colder in the last 10 years or that all those scientists somehow forgot to take the solar cycle into account...
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