Learn to love apartment living, prefer virtual leisure experiences over real-life ones and prioritise satisfaction over income.
This is practical advice from a veteran climate worrier on what you can do now to get ready for the "unrecognisable planet" which the Global Carbon Project warns will be our home by the end of the century.
New data shows greenhouse gas emissions are climbing too quickly to avert the effects of dangerous climate change by century's end. Our world will be 4 to 6 degrees hotter than now.
Eminent climate change scientist Andy Pitman of the University of NSW said research such as this "should come with a warning: 'Do not read this if you are depressed'".
"The main challenge is mental," admits Jorgen Randers, who has been feeling for 40 years what readers of the latest gloomy climate forecasts might now be experiencing.
The Norwegian business professor is co-author of the seminal work The Limits to Growth, which sounded the alarm on the planet's future in 1972.
He's now written 2052, A Global Forecast for the Next 40 Years, partly his final effort to "kick society into action" but also as an antidote to his grief over the "lost global opportunity" and "unnecessary suffering" which awaits us on the path to a world "less beautiful and less harmonious than it could have been".
Rather than have you despair, he offers some practical personal advice on how to adapt to a future compromised by ongoing poverty, population pressure and climate change.
I am wondering why you think Boyles law is important to describe the influence of C02 in the atmosphere where you have talked about 'basic gas law', where these approximations are so important that if C02 were not important, the laws of physics would be wrong according to you. That is what you said.
So I was wondering if you realise there are no laws describing basic things happening in the atmosphere but rather there are a series of approximations known as the ideal gas laws.
According to you earlier there are no gases that are transparant to IR so even to suggest there are, as a thought experiment, meant i was dealing in mythical things and goblins
Now you want to tell me that gases are transparant to short wave radiation
And once again you have managed to come up with a peculiar statement that has nothing at all to do with the topic in hand
>>The physics behind the expectation that increasing the concentration of gases that are shortwave transparent and long-wave opaque/grey in the atmosphere creating a warming effect at the surface is quite robust
Nobody is going to disagree with that statement. We all know what you mean by it. It is not controversial. 100% of scientists would agree with it - especially as water is overwhelming the most important so called greenhouse gas
The issue is why you are claiming that the laws of physics are wrong if man is not significantly warming the planet where in particular you mentioned Boyles law
*Sigh*. The atmosphere is a mixture of gases. You cannot understand how it works without the gas laws. To say the basic gas laws are irrelevant are like saying the chemistry of combustion is irrelevant to the operation of a Holden Monaro.
I studied gas behaviour at university in chemistry, physics, thermodynamics and even (a very little) fluid dynamics, so I think I know the difference between a real gas and an ideal gas. FYI, for the gases that make up the atmosphere at STP, it is stuff all compared to enthalpy effects from water vapour and radiative effects. It's a rounding error in the 3rd or 4th significant digit. For our purposes air is an ideal gas. But if you want to adjust for their departure from ideal gas behaviour, you can. There are physical laws for that as well.
There is no problems with the laws, they are well-understood and conform to reality to as many decimal places as you wish to take them. The difficulty is that there are no analytic solutions to the equations that arise, so they need to be solved numerically. This is certainly a work in progress.
At first I thought you were referring to a gas that could not absorb energy, rather than one that could just not absorb ER. Obviously Helium would be an example of such a gas, since it is monatomic. Of course, Helium is capable of absorbing phonons through conduction from a surface. And if you had an atmosphere made up of helium, it would be colder at altitude, not hotter. I suspect it would be because helium would be continually leaving the atmosphere taking with it the energy added by conduction at the surface, but it might be because transfer of energy across the boundary at the surface of the earth would balance out over time. You'd need to do the contour integral to sure. If the atmosphere were made from a short-wavelength-absorptive gas like O2 or O3, then it would be very hot up there because the atmosphere would be being heated from both ends - as it is in the real world.
On the topic of water, the fact that it is an important greenhouse gas is not lost on the climate scientists. What seems to be lost on some of the skeptics and pseudo-scientists is that there are parts of the world where there is very little water in the atmosphere. One would expect, then, that warming would be most market in places like the Arctic and Antarctic where water is a very small component of the atmosphere - and this turns out to be the case. Incidentally, this is why I am still calling bullshit on the assertion that global warming will cause increasingly many and increasingly severe weather events. The weather is mostly driven by the temperature difference between the poles and the equator, and that temperature difference is decreasing. But there are currently nowhere near enough records to give an empirical answer either way.
Quote:
The issue is why you are claiming that the laws of physics are wrong if man is not significantly warming the planet where in particular you mentioned Boyles law
That's not what I said at all. What I said was that given the theory, it would be extremely surprising to *not* see an increase in temperature if you increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. You would have to question either your observations or your theory. That's how science works. Contradictions lead to new knowledge. To the extent that the systems are understood to date, theory and observation are in quite good agreement. And I mean theory and observation according to the scientists, not according to Penny Wong or Bob Brown or Julia Gillard who seem to have little understanding of the science. ("the science is in." Puhleeeeeze!)
Quote:
Ie why did you respond to me as follows when i mentioned the medieval warm period?
I was being flippant. It comes down to this: Humans have raised the concentration of GHG in the atmosphere. Theory and in fact observation show that when GHGs increase, the climate warms. Occam's razor would incline you to assume there was a causal relationship. The mediaeval warm period simply suggests that there are other possible causes for climate change. As far as I know we don't know what caused the mediaeval warm period. There was also a period of very extreme weather in Queensland in the 17th century. We don't know what caused this either.
As an analogy, I throw an iphone at a window and the window breaks. I also know that 15 years ago, before there were any iPhones, a window broke. Does that tell me it was not the iPhone that broke the window this time.
But in the end, whether it would be Boyles' law or some result of a bunch of well-established laws of physics that would be violated is irrelevant, and I think you know it. Picking on irrelevant details is a tried and trusted obfuscation technique which you used to obscure the issue.
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. --Gloria Steinem AREPS™
*Sigh*. The atmosphere is a mixture of gases. You cannot understand how it works without the gas laws. To say the basic gas laws are irrelevant are like saying the chemistry of combustion is irrelevant to the operation of a Holden Monaro.
I studied gas behaviour at university in chemistry, physics, thermodynamics and even (a very little) fluid dynamics, so I think I know the difference between a real gas and an ideal gas. FYI, for the gases that make up the atmosphere at STP, it is stuff all compared to enthalpy effects from water vapour and radiative effects. It's a rounding error in the 3rd or 4th significant digit. For our purposes air is an ideal gas. But if you want to adjust for their departure from ideal gas behaviour, you can. There are physical laws for that as well.
There is no problems with the laws, they are well-understood and conform to reality to as many decimal places as you wish to take them. The difficulty is that there are no analytic solutions to the equations that arise, so they need to be solved numerically. This is certainly a work in progress.
At first I thought you were referring to a gas that could not absorb energy, rather than one that could just not absorb ER. Obviously Helium would be an example of such a gas, since it is monatomic. Of course, Helium is capable of absorbing phonons through conduction from a surface. And if you had an atmosphere made up of helium, it would be colder at altitude, not hotter. I suspect it would be because helium would be continually leaving the atmosphere taking with it the energy added by conduction at the surface, but it might be because transfer of energy across the boundary at the surface of the earth would balance out over time. You'd need to do the contour integral to sure. If the atmosphere were made from a short-wavelength-absorptive gas like O2 or O3, then it would be very hot up there because the atmosphere would be being heated from both ends - as it is in the real world.
On the topic of water, the fact that it is an important greenhouse gas is not lost on the climate scientists. What seems to be lost on some of the skeptics and pseudo-scientists is that there are parts of the world where there is very little water in the atmosphere. One would expect, then, that warming would be most market in places like the Arctic and Antarctic where water is a very small component of the atmosphere - and this turns out to be the case. Incidentally, this is why I am still calling bullshit on the assertion that global warming will cause increasingly many and increasingly severe weather events. The weather is mostly driven by the temperature difference between the poles and the equator, and that temperature difference is decreasing. But there are currently nowhere near enough records to give an empirical answer either way.
That's not what I said at all. What I said was that given the theory, it would be extremely surprising to *not* see an increase in temperature if you increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. You would have to question either your observations or your theory. That's how science works. Contradictions lead to new knowledge. To the extent that the systems are understood to date, theory and observation are in quite good agreement. And I mean theory and observation according to the scientists, not according to Penny Wong or Bob Brown or Julia Gillard who seem to have little understanding of the science. ("the science is in." Puhleeeeeze!)
I was being flippant. It comes down to this: Humans have raised the concentration of GHG in the atmosphere. Theory and in fact observation show that when GHGs increase, the climate warms. Occam's razor would incline you to assume there was a causal relationship. The mediaeval warm period simply suggests that there are other possible causes for climate change. As far as I know we don't know what caused the mediaeval warm period. There was also a period of very extreme weather in Queensland in the 17th century. We don't know what caused this either.
As an analogy, I throw an iphone at a window and the window breaks. I also know that 15 years ago, before there were any iPhones, a window broke. Does that tell me it was not the iPhone that broke the window this time.
But in the end, whether it would be Boyles' law or some result of a bunch of well-established laws of physics that would be violated is irrelevant, and I think you know it. Picking on irrelevant details is a tried and trusted obfuscation technique which you used to obscure the issue.
I have a degree in Chemistry from an English Polytechnic and both my parents were English and English speaking
If you were not able to realise from my writing, that a gas that was not an absorber emitter was not a gas that was unable to be heated significantly by conduction it would explain some of the strange comments you made regarding the atmosphere being at absolute zero.
Many many times I tried to get you to focus on why your response was so strange. To help you I suggested that an oxygen nitrogen argon atmosphere would not be so very different
Instead you repeatedly told me these gases were absorber emitters. Yes I know they are absorber emitters but they are not significant Long wave IR absorber emitters at ordinary temperatures and pressures. They can still be heated by conduction.
I have no idea what you are talking about as regards phonons and the ability or lack of ability of a gas to be heated by conduction.
Modern thermodynamics seems to be teaching some very strange ideas about the nature of Heat.
At the time of Planck, Einstein and all those who came before them like Kelvin or Tyndall and just about any major figure you can think of Heat was kinetic motion of matter
These days many thermodynamics teachers are claiming that if you talk about heat content of an object you are talking about the much earlier idea of heat as a substance and any such talk is wrong wrong wrong. Heat they say is only an energy in transition.
They claim this is the modern or classical view of heat. Attempting to point out to such people they are totally confused is pointless.
Perhaps you can explain to me please what phonons have got to do with heating a gas and why you are so massively resistance to the ability of a gas to be heated by conduction with a solid.
I have a degree in Chemistry from an English Polytechnic and both my parents were English and English speaking
If you were not able to realise from my writing, that a gas that was not an absorber emitter was not a gas that was unable to be heated significantly by conduction it Many many times I tried to get you to focus on why your response was so strange. To help you I suggested that an oxygen nitrogen argon atmosphere would not be so very different
Instead you repeatedly told me these gases were absorber emitters.
They are absorber emitters. Their absorption and emission spectrum has a huge effect on the characteristics of the atmosphere above the tropopause and indeed the nature of ER that reaches the earth's surface.
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. --Gloria Steinem AREPS™
They are absorber emitters. Their absorption and emission spectrum has a huge effect on the characteristics of the atmosphere above the tropopause and indeed the nature of ER that reaches the earth's surface.
The points are
1. For the purposes of an atmosphere that is unable to emit radiation until the atmosphere becomes far hotter than todays atmosphere they are not absorber emitters of any significance at all
2. A gas that is not an absorber emitter can still be heated significantly by contact with a solid by conduction
3. You appear to be muddling up poor gas to gas conductivity with reasonable solid to gas conductivity
4. You keep mentioning phonons. These appear to be something to do with a collective vibrational state associated with condensed matter such as solid and some liquids and not something associated with a dilute gas which has more or less no collective ability to vibrate. I dont think they had Phonons in my day.
5.
Your computer is cooled by either dry or typical air being heated by touching a solid using a fan blowing gas against hot metal
miw
4 Dec 2012, 05:09 PM
in the end, whether it would be Boyles' law or some result of a bunch of well-established laws of physics that would be violated is irrelevant, and I think you know it. Picking on irrelevant details is a tried and trusted obfuscation technique which you used to obscure the issue.
I am not obfuscating. I am not lying or cheating of fucking around for any hidden purpose at all
I am wondering openly and honestly why you keep talking about things I can make no sense of whatsoever.
6. It appears to me that you need to seriously review your understanding of the nature of heat, where heat is not generally speaking an energy that is absorbed, even though some heat energy can be held in higher level temporary transitions that return to the lower level once the kinetic motion of the matter reduces. The cause of what we call heat is kinetic motion of matter.
Perhaps you can explain to me please what phonons have got to do with heating a gas and why you are so massively resistance to the ability of a gas to be heated by conduction with a solid.
Heat (or if you prefer energy) can be transmitted by conduction, mixing or radiation. Conduction within an insulating solid is via lattice vibration, which is quantised into phonons. When energy is conducted from a solid to a gas, the mechanism is that when a gas molecule comes in contact with the surface, it steals a phonon, which adds kinetic energy to the molecule. Simple enough for you?
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. --Gloria Steinem AREPS™
Heat (or if you prefer energy) can be transmitted by conduction, mixing or radiation. Conduction within an insulating solid is via lattice vibration, which is quantised into phonons. When energy is conducted from a solid to a gas, the mechanism is that when a gas molecule comes in contact with the surface, it steals a phonon, which adds kinetic energy to the molecule. Simple enough for you?
I like things to be explained in simple terms. So simple is good.
Are you saying a phonon is a real particle?
It appears to be a fictitious particle?
Either way, phonon or not, why are you putting massive obstacles in the way of a solid being able to transfer energy by raising the idea heat can only be transferred by the absorption of energy into the fundamental matter of the object being heated?
Why do you think heat transfer *mainly* involves energy absorption into the fundamental particular matter?
miw
At first I thought you were referring to a gas that could not absorb energy, rather than one that could just not absorb ER. Obviously Helium would be an example of such a gas, since it is monatomic. Of course, Helium is capable of absorbing phonons through conduction from a surface.
I cannot yet understand why you are focusing on the atomic structure of the gas, so as to determine its ability to be heated by contact with a solid
miw
if you had an atmosphere made up of helium, it would be colder at altitude, not hotter.
Maybe not.
If you allow gases to expand into a vacuum without them doing work against something they do not change temperature very much, where the effect is zero for an ideal gas - The Joule effect.
But if you allow real gases to expand where they do work via for example a restriction (fridge for example) or pushing their way thru the restricting force of the surrounding air?, then they either get hotter or colder depending upon their Joule Thompson inversion temperature!
Helium is an oddity along with Hydrogen and Neon in that the inversion temperature is well below room temperature. Helium has to be cooled below 51K before it will become colder upon expansion via a restriction - otherwise it gets hotter.
Oxygen has an inversion temp of 491C and Nitrogen 348C
So in a real Universe it would seem to be true that an unheated planet existing in a 4K environment would have no gases doing work and all of the gas at any altitude would eventually be at a uniform 4k
Once heating of the surface begins then what happens depends upon the atmospheres components
The world's largest industry is taking climate change very, very seriously.
by Allie Wilkinson - Dec 25 2012, 3:12am AUSEDT
Although many industries have fought to prevent action on climate change, there's at least one major business that's taking it seriously, according to a recent perspective in Science. Climate change is estimated to cost the world economy $1.2 trillion annually, which is proving to be a stress test for the insurance industry. Lest you think that's a niche concern, insurance accounts for seven percent of the global economy and is the world’s largest industry.
Increasingly, weather and climate related catastrophes are costing insurers. The number of weather-related loss events in North America has nearly quintupled in the past three decades, according to a recent report from MunichRe. Sandy alone cost New York and New Jersey $80 billion, affecting individuals and business, and impacting health. Claims have more than doubled each decade since the 1980s (adjusted for inflation) and paid claims now average $50 billion a year worldwide.
Many insurers are using climate science to better quantify and diversify their exposure, more accurately price and communicate risk, and target adaptation and loss-prevention efforts. They also analyze their extensive databases of historical weather- and climate-related losses, for both large- and small-scale events. But insurance modeling is a distinct discipline. Unlike climate models, insurers’ models extrapolate historical data rather than simulate the climate system, and they require outputs at finer scales and shorter time frames than climate models.
A trio of global initiatives have been developed to respond to the push of shareholders and regulators and the pull of markets: the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative, ClimateWise, and the Kyoto Statement. These in aggregate include 129 insurance firms from 29 countries. Since the mid-1990s, members of the initiative have supported climate research, developed climate-responsive products and services, raised awareness of climate change, reduced in-house emissions, quantified and disclosed climate risks, and incorporated climate change into investment decisions.
In an effort to adapt to climate change and mitigate losses, some insurers are trying to assist vulnerable customers by improving their resilience to a changing climate. Insurers are supporting interventions with benefits for both emissions reduction and adaptation. Many aim to curb green-house gas emissions from homes, businesses, transportation, industry and agriculture. They've brought over 130 products and services for green buildings to market, and introduced more than 65 offerings for renewable energy systems. Many pay claims that fund rebuilding to a higher level of energy efficiency after losses.
But climate change may end up impacting insurance policy and governance. When risks are too great or undefined, insurers tighten availability, increase prices, and modify terms of coverage. They often end up dually exposed, to both internal risks such as underestimating climate-related losses, and the risks taken by their customers. More than one in four corporate directors anticipate liability claims stemming from climate change. They have responded with new liability products, and by excluding climate-change claims where customer behaviors are unnecessarily risky.
But the insurance industry’s steps towards climate change mitigation and adaption are necessarily going to be limited, and the risks of climate change my eventually become uninsurable. And it seems that many companies are struggling to define their approach. Mandatory risk disclosures identified a broad consensus on the relevance of climate change among insurers in the United States, but only one in eight companies has a formal strategy.
Insurers publicly voiced concern about human-induced climate change four decades ago, and have warned that loss-prone development is unsustainable. Lloyds of London views climate change as the industry’s number one issue.
With record-breaking extreme weather causing havoc around the nation, it's important that Australians understand what climate scientists are saying about the climate in future. But the conflation of two aspects of climate information is misleading the public, either maliciously or carelessly.
The first concerns average temperatures, the second what's happening at the extremes. These are different aspects of climate change, and climate scientists deal with them using different methods.
Is the world warming or cooling? This is a question about average temperature, and the answer can only be found by examining many decades of climate records. That's because there's a lot of annual variability in average temperatures.
By selectively choosing a few years of records, you can tell any story you want. But the trend over the longer term is undeniable. The world is warming, and Australia is 0.9 of a degree Celsius warmer than it was a century ago.
Editors know that headlines tell the story, which is why it's concerning that The Australian chose the headline ''Climate results validate sceptics'' for an article on the British Met Bureau's latest four-year forecast. Here is what the forecast in fact said: ''Global average temperature is expected to remain between 0.28°C and 0.59°C (90 per cent confidence range) above the long-term (1971-2000) average during the period 2013-2017, with values most likely to be about 0.43°C higher than average . . . This means temperatures will remain well above the long-term average and we will continue to see temperatures like those which resulted in 2000-2009 being the warmest decade in the instrumental record dating back to 1850.''
The spin matters. If Australians believe that the warming trend is over, and are suspicious of meteorological reports, they are likely to be less well prepared for extreme weather.
The evidence for an increase in such weather is clear. The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology have reported that Australia has experienced fewer very cold days and more very hot days than it did 50 years ago.
The current heatwave is breaking many temperature records. The nation's hottest day occurred on Monday, January 7. For seven days in a row, from January 2-8, the average maximum temperature across Australia was above 39 degrees. And with the extreme heat has come bushfires, destruction, health problems, and disruption of infrastructure.
Record-breaking heat is, by definition, weather not experienced for as long as records have been kept. But it's not just unprecedented heat the nation is facing.
In 2011, sea-surface temperatures to the north-west of Australia reached record highs. Increased water evaporation contributed to the wettest year on record in Australia. The vegetation of the inland flourished. But then the region experienced its longest period ever without rain, drying the vegetation. Now, the record heatwave is allowing fires to flourish.
It's a chain of climatic extremes that can have deadly consequences.
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