[Craig W. Thomson]

2015 was one of the lowest tornado years;

http://www.climatedepot.com/2016/03/10/noaa-number-of-major-tornadoes-in-2015-was-one-of-the-lowest-on-record-tornadoes-below-average-for-4th-year-in-a-row/

The models which predict increased storm activity are the same ones which have failed to predict the climate for 18 years. Surely more even temperatures would create conditions of less wind and storms. And tornadoes. [/color]

FALSE. The vast majority of the tornadoes in the world happen in Tornado Alley. That's because of geography. Air masses travel over the Rocky Mountains and dump all their snow. What is left is very cold, very dry air. In Tornado Alley, that air mass meets up with a very warm, very moist air mass travelling up from the Gulf of Mexico. That's what powers most of the world's tornadoes.

http://www.universetoday.com/75828/where-is-tornado-alley/

When the climate gets warmer, that shifts climate zones. When you warm up the atmosphere, that affects circulation patterns. If you shift the movement of air masses away from the geography that makes them clash, you get less tornadoes.

http://sites.sinauer.com/ecology3e/ccc/CCC-24-01.jpg

Again, you are led by Confirmation Bias. You start with a theory (climate change is not real), then cherry pick information that you believe supports your non-factual claim. That's the exact opposite of the Scientific Method, and your hypotheses therefore have no place in a scientific forum.

[alancalverd]

Yet, we've managed to influence the climate of the entire planet.

Unscientific statement. All we know is that whatever proxy some people have taken for global mean temperature has increased fairly recently. The presumption of cause is without foundation or precedent.

[Craig W. Thomson]

there has been no significant temperature change.

For the record I am something of a liberal with socialist tendancies. And an atheist. [/color]

For the record, science isn't about liberal or conservative points of view. Again, the SCIENTIFIC METHOD is what matters in science. Empirical evidence and the predictive power of a theory is the ultimate test of that theory. Again, I read Jeremy Rifkin's "Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World" in 1988. He made a lot of predictions in that book. I have watched them come true one by one for nearly three decades, falling like dominoes. That's what's scary. We don't want the rest of the dominoes to fall, trust me.

Here's the reality, in a form you can easily visualize:

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=4252

Now, let's address your comments about politics, but from a scientific point of view. Political views are not linear in nature. They are more like a field. People visualize the linear view anyway, defining thing in terms of left, right and center. That's not how it works.

Picture a bar of uncharged iron. You align it with the poles of the planet and start pounding on it with a hammer. You will impart it with a charge, magnetizing it. It now has a north pole and a south pole. That's a "field," in this case, a magnetic field. The thing is, neither the positive nor the negative charge emerged first. They emerged together. At no point is the magnet more positive than negative, or vice versa. The charges are always equal. They are always symmetric. That property is invariant. Invariance and symmetry are important concepts in science.

Now, let's apply that to politics. When everybody is equal, and everybody makes the same amount of money, and nobody is disenfranchised, there's no reason to for people to steal from each other. There's nothing to get upset about. Everybody gets to eat their fair share of granola, so they can hug trees. That's not "the left," that's "the center." That's the uncharged bar of iron.

When everybody is not equal, and millions of people don't get paid a decent living wage because every job is considered "entry level," and millions of people are disenfranchised because of voter ID laws, there's plenty to get upset about. When people have to steal or fight just to get a bowl of granola, the last thing they are worried about is hugging trees. That's the charged bar of iron you pounded on with a hammer. Remember, positive and negative charges don't emerge separate from one another. They emerge symmetrically, and that is an invariant property. When the haves start taking more than their fair share of granola, that creates scarcity in the marketplace for the have nots, and because they get hungry too, they have demands for some of that supply, so the liberals and conservatives arise in tandem. The wider the gap between the haves and the have nots, the more politically charged the atmosphere becomes. If you want to get back to the Center, you have to lessen the differential between the charges. A good way to do that is to stop redistributing income earned by millions of hard working people up to the top of a pyramid where alleged job creators remove it from the economy and put it in offshore tax shelters because, news flash: money is just like granola.

[Bored chemist]

So the sun provides about 15000 times more energy than we use.

So, Tim's comment "No, the amount of heat produced directly by human activity is utterly tiny in comparison with the heat budget of nature."
is true

I also therefore, don't understand why you say such things , and yes, I think we can forget about your college degree.

But what matters is that, because the sun's energy supply is so huge, even a small change in how much is absorbed (because of CO2 levels rinsing, for example) will make a significant difference to our climate.

What's the total combined mass of humanity? About 500 million tons?

 Yeah, he's technically correct, but not really.

Two square meters of sunshine melts a rock that's been around for ten billion years. That could easily provide enough steam-generated power for an entire house, perhaps enough to move a train.

My! what a lot of nonsense you managed to put in there.
The combined mass of humanity is irrelevant. Please don't waste time with stuff like that again.
He's technically correct, and he's really correct.
It's you who has missed the point.
It's not the direct heating effect of burning fossil fuels that matters a damn.
The effect that makes a difference is the change in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
Two square metres of sunshine provides about 2.6 Kw.
I can use more than that trying to heat a single room
Good luck trying to heat a house with it.
And, for the record, a train uses something like a thousand times that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_locomotive#Diesel-electric

Please start posting stuff that's relevant rather than cobblers.

[Craig W. Thomson]

Yet, we've managed to influence the climate of the entire planet.

Unscientific statement. All we know is that whatever proxy some people have taken for global mean temperature has increased fairly recently. The presumption of cause is without foundation or precedent.

Please remove your head from the sand. We've released the solar energy stored in a hundred million years worth of fossil fuels in a mere 150 years, not to mention the carbon dioxide that goes with it. That is without precedent, unless you want to go all the way back to when organisms first figured out how to photosynthesize and store solar energy in the first place. Turns out, their success allowed them to change the atmosphere faster than organisms could adapt, which caused mass extinctions. And guess what? The changes they made took a lot longer than 150 years...

[Craig W. Thomson]

1) The combined mass of humanity is irrelevant. Please don't waste time with stuff like that again.

2) It's not the direct heating effect of burning fossil fuels that matters a damn.
The effect that makes a difference is the change in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

3)Two square metres of sunshine provides about 2.6 Kw.
I can use more than that trying to heat a single room
Good luck trying to heat a house with it.
And, for the record, a train uses something like a thousand times that.

1) Here's a word for you: "Context." In the context of his argument, we're supposed to be comparing the energy output of our economy to the Sun's total output, which he claims is 1/15,000. That's a silly argument because the context is all wrong. We're talking about the TOTAL CO2 CONTENT OF THE ENTIRE ATMOSPHERE, which has DRAMATICALLY RISEN BY 20% IN JUST 50 YEARS. So, I don't CARE if he's correct, or technically correct about the 1/15,000. That's not the "context" that matters. It's the fact that, left to her own devices, natural laws apparently kept the limit of atmospheric CO2 to a MAXIMUM level of 320 ppm for at least 800,000 years that we know of, and we have now pushed that to a full 20% PAST those levels, and in just 50 short years of geological time. Our atmosphere is not supposed to resemble one in which most of the Earth's forests are on fire, and they will in fact respond by catching fire. So will grasslands.

2) FALSE. That's what combustion is in the first place. Combustion is literally the act of unlocking energy from a fossil fuel, using the heat to produce work. That's why the hood of your car gets hot. When you eat, your body literally uses combustion. Your body temperature stays warm because on the inside you are unlocking molecules to release the energy they contain. Fossil fuels are just really just incredibly old, compressed versions of those same molecules. It is a FACT that combustion produces heat. It is also a FACT that our atmosphere operates according to the so-called Greenhouse Effect, which is what makes the Earth a habitable planet in the first place. The atmosphere keeps energy from bouncing off the planet and back out into space, so the planet's surface retains some heat instead of becoming cold. That's exactly how a blanket works. Without our atmosphere and the particular mix of gases it contains, conditions would not be suitable for life as we know it. The problem is, when we release a lot of heat into an atmosphere that already has properties that make it want to retain heat rather than letting it escape into space, plus we add a lot of carbon dioxide that helps the atmosphere retain even more of that heat, we're asking for trouble. Our old blanket worked fine, but we replaced it with an electric blanket, and turned up the heat setting. I hate trying to sleep when it's too hot and I'm sweating. I get the same sorts of dreams I do when I have a fever because in those circumstances, I can only attain a sort of "half-asleep" state. Is that what's wrong with you? Try soaking in a tub of ice.

3) Watch the video again. You must have missed something. Using nothing more than two square meters of parabolic mirrors, the gentleman in the video was able to turn a large, solid metal bolt into molten lava in just a few seconds. At that rate, you could easily produce a gallon of molten lava per hour. Sorry, but if you can power a train cross country with a couple of guys shoveling coal into a chute by hand, you could certainly power a standard home for a day with the steam produced by several gallons of molten metal.

[Bored chemist]

1) The combined mass of humanity is irrelevant. Please don't waste time with stuff like that again.

2) It's not the direct heating effect of burning fossil fuels that matters a damn.
The effect that makes a difference is the change in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

3)Two square metres of sunshine provides about 2.6 Kw.
I can use more than that trying to heat a single room
Good luck trying to heat a house with it.
And, for the record, a train uses something like a thousand times that.

So, I don't CARE if he's correct

So, you are trolling.

[Bored chemist]

Yet, we've managed to influence the climate of the entire planet.

Unscientific statement. All we know is that whatever proxy some people have taken for global mean temperature has increased fairly recently. The presumption of cause is without foundation or precedent.

Please remove your head from the sand. We've released the solar energy stored in a hundred million years worth of fossil fuels in a mere 150 years, ... yada yada yada

Please stop pretending that the heat liberated by burning fossil fuels is a significant contributor- it is, as has been pointed out, tiny.

[Bored chemist]

And while we are at it, lets do some actual numbers on this claim " You must have missed something. Using nothing more than two square meters of parabolic mirrors, the gentleman in the video was able to turn a large, solid metal bolt into molten lava in just a few seconds. At that rate, you could easily produce a gallon of molten lava per hour. Sorry, but if you can power a train cross country with a couple of guys shoveling coal into a chute by hand, you could certainly power a standard home for a day with the steam produced by several gallons of molten metal."

OK I really don't think there's anything I can have missed here.
You say (twice) they are using two square metres of mirrors.
Well, that can't collect more power than falls on two square metres.
So that's two times the solar constant
which is 2 m^2 times 1.35 KW/m^2
which is 2.7 KW


And then there's your second unsupported claim there
"you could certainly power a standard home for a day with the steam produced by several gallons of molten metal"
That sounds more credible, but it's no great challenge to run the numbers.
Lets assume you are using an imperial gallon, rather than the smaller US gallon.
That's about 4.5 litres and you say "several"
Well, that's not very scientific, but lets pick a number and say 10, which I think is generous.
So that's 45 litres of "metal".
Again, I'm going to have to make an assumption or two here- firstly that the metal is steel and secondly that the heat of fusion of steel is comparable with that for iron.
So 45 litres of steel is (measured near room temp- which introduces an error- but it's in your favour) is about 350kg
And, the data from here
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/fusion-heat-metals-d_1266.html
tells me that it takes 272 KJ to melt each Kg of metal
So that's about 100,000 KJ of energy.
Sounds a lot.
Now lets also consider a 1 bar electric fire
That's 1KJ per second or about 85000 KJ per day.
But that's hardly going to heat your home.
To do that you need the sort of boiler they use for central heating.
This sort of thing
https://www.mrcentralheating.co.uk/boilers/boilers-by-type/combi-boilers/35kw-42kw
And it seems tha a typical boiler draws something like 30 KW
Which is about 25 times more energy each day than is needed to melt ten buckets of steel.

So, while I have no doubt that you were "certain", it doesn't detract from the fact that you are wrong.

And what really galls me is that I'd much rather be pointing out that the climate change deniers are the ones who can't do basic maths.
Why don't you try not talking nonsense? Then they won't be able to say "but the people who believe in climate change can't do basic physics".
And I think that's going to make more difference to the debate than randomly TYPING in all CAPS.
Also, please look up the meaning of the word "literally" because this
"When you eat, your body literally uses combustion. " is just plain ignorant.

[alancalverd]

Some more numbers.

You need about 10,000,000 joules per day from food to stay alive

Most of that energy is actually used to keep you warm enough to digest your food, move the blood around your body, and keep your brain functioning. Very little (about 10%) is available to do "useful" work.

Western Man uses an additional 150,000,000 joules of "artificial" energy each day to grow food, process transport and cook it, pump water and sewage, build and destroy things, heat and cool space, and waste time with computers. The number varies with region - a bit less in the Mediterranean and at least double in North America.

At least two thirds of the world's population regards 1.5 kW per capita as an aspirational figure, and intergovernmental "climate agreements" recognise this as some kind of human right.

So whatever you propose as a reasonable level of population or a sensible means of supplying its energy needs, you will have to find a way of providing at least 1.5 kW per head.

I beg to differ with BC in one small way. We ingest carbohydrates and hydrocarbons, inhale oxygen, and exhale carbon dioxide and water. The energy conversion efficiency of human digestion is around 90%, which is as close as you need to "combustion". Admittedly the chemistry is a lot more subtle, but the physics is indistinguishable.

[Craig W. Thomson]

So, you are trolling.

Nope. Apparently, you don't understand internet lingo any better than you understand physics. "Trolling" is when you adopt an anonymous username so you can flame people without them knowing who you really are.

I am Craig W. Thomson.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=craig%20w%20thomson

Nothing anonymous about that. Now, is your name really "Bored Chemist" ?? I don't think so. Practice what you preach, troll.

[Craig W. Thomson]

Please stop pretending that the heat liberated by burning fossil fuels is a significant contributor- it is, as has been pointed out, tiny.

Please stop pretending you are a chemist. You are not a big fan of reality, huh? Remember my analogy about having a fever? It only takes a few little degrees above 98.6 Fahrenheit, and you will die. That can be achieved with less than a gram of bacteria. What makes you think a 500 million tons of humans can't do the same thing to the planet?

Also, your logic is flawed. Of course, EVERYTHING that happens on earth is tiny compared to the sun, because the sun is HUGE. That doesn't prove ANYTHING.

[Craig W. Thomson]

And what really galls me is that I'd much rather be pointing out that the climate change deniers are the ones who can't do basic maths.
Why don't you try not talking nonsense? Then they won't be able to say "but the people who believe in climate change can't do basic physics".

I'm not talking nonsense. You are. No scientist would ever say the stupid things you do. When you apply combustion to 100 million years of fossil fuels, that produces heat. It's not a coincidence that the planet is getting warmer as a response. That's the easiest way to explain it do a skeptic or denier. You can overcomplicate things as much as you like, but you are still wrong.

Again, it's not the size of the 1/15,000 ratio of our output vs. the sun's that is important. I worked with live tropical fish for 4 1/2 years and raised them at home even longer. One thing you need to know about aquariums is that they require STABLE conditions. If you let the pH of the water or some other condition drift the tiniest fraction from where it should be, you can throw off the whole system and kill your fish, your reef, everything. As a chemist, you should be able to understand that. It doesn't take a whole lot extra of something to make a huge difference in the system to which you introduced it when you start tinkering with stable or self-regulating systems.

If you're bored, try learning chemistry and climate science correctly INSTEAD OF FIGHTING PEOPLE ONLINE. How's that for all cap use?

[Craig W. Thomson]

Some more numbers.

You need about 10,000,000 joules per day from food to stay alive

Most of that energy is actually used to keep you warm enough to digest your food, move the blood around your body, and keep your brain functioning. Very little (about 10%) is available to do "useful" work.

Western Man uses an additional 150,000,000 joules of "artificial" energy each day to grow food, process transport and cook it, pump water and sewage, build and destroy things, heat and cool space, and waste time with computers. The number varies with region - a bit less in the Mediterranean and at least double in North America.

At least two thirds of the world's population regards 1.5 kW per capita as an aspirational figure, and intergovernmental "climate agreements" recognise this as some kind of human right.

So whatever you propose as a reasonable level of population or a sensible means of supplying its energy needs, you will have to find a way of providing at least 1.5 kW per head.

I beg to differ with BC in one small way. We ingest carbohydrates and hydrocarbons, inhale oxygen, and exhale carbon dioxide and water. The energy conversion efficiency of human digestion is around 90%, which is as close as you need to "combustion". Admittedly the chemistry is a lot more subtle, but the physics is indistinguishable.

Thanks for that. Don't know where you got your numbers, but they fall in line with what I know. Jeremy Rifkin stated a figure in his Entropy book around 1988 that it takes about 2,000 calories to sustain a human, but in the US, it was more like 200,000 calories per capita at the time, which seems to agree with your numbers that take into account European countries.

I also agree with your "aspirational figure" comment. I am very ambivalent about this issue. I am a Democrat because I want to see the Middle Class expand. When all the wealth is concentrated in just a few hands and masses of consumers don't have money to spend, consumer economies get bogged down and resource consumption slows. When Middle Class consumers have money, the economy reaches full steam and resource consumption increases drastically. Sharing the wealth is great in principle, but resource depletion is more likely that way. I don't know what to do about that.

I can stop myself from buying a lot of stuff I don't need, but I can't stop anyone else. That would require a change in the entire culture. In the US, "winners" make lots of money and buy lots of stuff, "losers" hug trees and eat granola. For most of my adult life, I've chosen to not own an automobile whenever possible. I'm paraphrasing here, but do you have any idea how many Americans have said to me over the years, "Yeah, sure you're an environmentalist. You probably don't own a car because you can't afford one, eat vegetables because you can't afford steak either, recycle because you need the spare change, and don't have kids because nobody wanted to have kids with a broke loser, hyuck hyuck." Surprisingly, that goes for Texas AND California. Sadly, that's just part of our materialistic culture. Low entropy lifestyles are mocked in the US, and discouraged in a capitalist society in general.

[alancalverd]

So we have some agreement on the figures.

It happens that the "aspirational figure" is equal to the average daily solar input on 2 square meters of the earth's surface. The earth's surface area is about 5 x 10¹⁴ sq m, so even if we had already achieved the aspirational figure (and remember that only one third of the population has actually done so) our net additional contribution from fossil fuel consumption would be equivalent to

7.4 x 10⁹/2 x 5 x 10¹⁴ = 0.74 x 10^-5

of the solar energy - less than one part in 100,000.

Since at least half of the heat reaching the earth's surface actually comes from radioactive decay inside the planet, the largest possible effect of direct heating from fossil fuels is probably closer to 3 parts per million, or about 0.001 degree.   

[Craig W. Thomson]

Since at least half of the heat reaching the earth's surface actually comes from radioactive decay inside the planet, the largest possible effect of direct heating from fossil fuels is probably closer to 3 parts per million, or about 0.001 degree.

"Probably" isn't good enough for me. This is what the IPCC has to say about it:

https://www2.ucar.edu/climate/faq/how-much-has-global-temperature-risen-last-100-years

That's what's important. When your average body temperature increases by a couple of degrees in a relatively short period of time, you are probably getting sick. I don't see why the Earth would be any different. The Earth's atmosphere has maintained its temperature and carbon dioxide content between well defined parameters for at least 800,000 years, and in about 50 years, it is now 20% above the high spot for one of those parameters, and at the same time, there's visual evidence that glaciers around the world are dissappearing at an unprecedented rate, and lots of elderly people saying things like, "I remember when I was a kid, the lake used to freeze over every year, and we would go ice skating." That's not just a coincidence.

Now, let's talk about some basic physics. I'm pretty sure you're familiar with the principle of Mass/Energy Equivalence. So, when you apply combustion to a pile of coal or a barrel of oil, all you're doing is turning a teeny, tiny bit of mass into energy. However, in the overall context, part of that process is that the set of molecules you have after the reaction are a different set of molecules, with a different set of properties. Think about burning a solid log, which turns it into a wispy pile of ash, floating dust and soot particles, and dissipated heat. All those substances and their properties are absorbed by the environment; it is all part of the mass/energy transaction of combustion. One of the molecules created by processes like these is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide molecules have properties that make them especially good at absorbing heat radiation and re-emitting it, an insulative property in the context of the atmosphere.

So, long story short, combustion doesn't just supply you with energy. The mass left over after the chemical transformation has different properties than the mass before the combustion process. The warming caused by extra CO2 is a byproduct and a manifestation of that same combustion process, not some completely different, separate phenomenon. Extra warmth from extra CO2 is ultimately a byproduct of combustion on a mass scale, just another facet of the original mass/energy transformation that took place, plain and simple.

[alancalverd]

Even allowing for the fact that nobody has even defined, let alone measured, mean global temperature for the last 100 years, the IPCC assertion cannot be directly ascribed to heating from combustion of fossil fuels, by three orders of magnitude.

If you want to blame fossil fuel for the allegedly observed temperature rise you have to invoke the notion of carbon dioxide being a vastly more significant greenhouse gas (by a factor of at least 3000 times) than water. Which, by measurement, it isn't.

Only a fool would deny that climate changes - it is inherently and observably unstable. But it takes a committed liar to insist, or a gullible nonscientist to believe, that CO2 is the driver of climate change.

[Bored chemist]

So, you are trolling.

Nope. Apparently, you don't understand internet lingo any better than you understand physics. "Trolling" is when you adopt an anonymous username so you can flame people without them knowing who you really are.

I am Craig W. Thomson.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=craig%20w%20thomson

Nothing anonymous about that. Now, is your name really "Bored Chemist" ?? I don't think so. Practice what you preach, troll.

Just plain wrong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll

[Bored chemist]

And what really galls me is that I'd much rather be pointing out that the climate change deniers are the ones who can't do basic maths.
Why don't you try not talking nonsense? Then they won't be able to say "but the people who believe in climate change can't do basic physics".

I'm not talking nonsense. You are. No scientist would ever say the stupid things you do. When you apply combustion to 100 million years of fossil fuels, that produces heat. It's not a coincidence that the planet is getting warmer as a response. That's the easiest way to explain it do a skeptic or denier. You can overcomplicate things as much as you like, but you are still wrong.

Again, it's not the size of the 1/15,000 ratio of our output vs. the sun's that is important. I worked with live tropical fish for 4 1/2 years and raised them at home even longer. One thing you need to know about aquariums is that they require STABLE conditions. If you let the pH of the water or some other condition drift the tiniest fraction from where it should be, you can throw off the whole system and kill your fish, your reef, everything. As a chemist, you should be able to understand that. It doesn't take a whole lot extra of something to make a huge difference in the system to which you introduced it when you start tinkering with stable or self-regulating systems.

If you're bored, try learning chemistry and climate science correctly INSTEAD OF FIGHTING PEOPLE ONLINE. How's that for all cap use?

OK, I will try again.
Do you understand that the problem with the Earth getting hotter would carry on- even if we stopped burning anything- because the CO2 in the air would still keep on trapping CO2 for years until it was absorbed by plants and/ or the ocean?

That's why it's not an issue of the tine heat produced by  burning fossil fuels it's a problem with the zillion tons of CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels.

That's why the combustion heat (which is tiny) is irrelevant.

[Bored chemist]

I beg to differ with BC in one small way. We ingest carbohydrates and hydrocarbons, inhale oxygen, and exhale carbon dioxide and water. The energy conversion efficiency of human digestion is around 90%, which is as close as you need to "combustion". Admittedly the chemistry is a lot more subtle, but the physics is indistinguishable.

The physics is very easy to distinguish, one of the differences is subtle. The process by which the body oxidises glucose takes place in a number of smaller steps. This makes it more nearly a reversible system and thus more efficient at getting work from that energy.
The other difference is less subtle- there are no flames. or as WIKI puts it "Combustion  or burning is a high-temperature exothermic redox chemical reaction between a fuel and an oxidant, usually atmospheric oxygen"
Well, 37C isn't high a temperature.

There's a fairly close analogy but my point was that while the body's use of food might figuratively be described as combustion it can't be (legitimately) described as "literally" combustion- because the two process are different.

If you want to put a word into a sentence, make sure it's the right word.
This
"When you eat, your body literally uses combustion. " is plain wrong but this
"When you eat, your body uses combustion. " is acceptable hype.
Adding the wrong word is pretentious and ignorant, no matter what the underlying science looks like.