I was very gratified to see that all of the climate BS on the White House web site is now gone.
[Update a few minutes later]
Obama did leave one more last-minute turd in the punch bowl; he outlawed three-way bulbs. That should be one of the first things that Trump undoes. In fact, Congress should repeal that idiotic law.
Rick Perry, call your office. Then fire everyone.
Anthony Watts posted a good discussion posted at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/01/19/noaa-data-demonstrates-that-2016-was-not-the-hottest-year-ever-in-the-usa/.
Much of the discussion is about interpolation where data are missing, particularly at both poles. The highest 2016 global temperature anomalies are in the arctic where there are few measuring stations.
One contrarian comment. The outlawing of incandescent light bulbs took place under W. I was opposed to that at the time and remain so. But it did spur the production of LED light bulbs to the point now that price wise they would be very competitive with incandescent bulbs were they to magically reappear. And when you factor in life cycle and cost of use, LEDs are much cheaper to own.
Last year I spent some money replacing several three-way lamp switches with dimmers and converted them all to lumen equivalent 100W LED bulbs. I now have lamps that offer not only a superior range of illumination but no longer suffer from premature “bright filament ” burn-out so common with three way incandescents. Not to mention they consume only a fraction of the energy of the old three ways.
You can buy three-way LED light bulbs but they are pricey compared to the incandescent competitors. Similar to the situation we had prior to the outlawing of one-way incandescents. Now one-way LEDs are as cheap to buy as the old incandescents, would not the same happen for three-way LEDs?
Eh. The LEDs are a big win for most applications (incandescent still have a better color for a few purposes where that’s critical); but the initial effect of that rule was the godawful bulb fluorescents. The mercury put into the environment from the (inevitable) improper disposal of most of those hugely outweighs and other benefit, I suspect.
The outlawing of incandescent light bulbs took place under W.
I know. One of the many stupid things that happened on his watch. As a result, we had to suffer through CFLs.
Regardless of the outcome, it should be done by the market, not federal fiat.
Which begs the contrarian question I was getting to but in a poor fashion. It is possible to hit a local minimum in the marketing spectrum, whereby cost of ownership may not compete well against immediate cost of sale. In other words, although it might very well be possible that ownership of an LED (or CFL even) over the life of the bulb will be cheaper, the immediate cost of the bulb will put off most buyers when a (by sale) cheaper incandescent can be had immediately. Thus because the mfg. cost of production of incandescent bulbs have been optimized by over 100 years of production and optimization, new product, although superior in lifetime and energy cost cannot compete against the local minimum of cost of manufacture. Only by economies of scale can the cost of sale of competing superior technology be driven down to the point of being competitive against the existing solution. In this case that argument appears on the surface at least to be correct. Thus by regulation of efficiency, by making it impossible to continue production of the optimized solution the market is allowed to progress to a better long term solution. Note the use of the word “progress” in the previous sentence, as in “progressive” policy. Here might be an example of a prevailing argument of why market forces don’t always produce the best results. Curious to know the counter-argument. Anyone?
BTW on the topic of CFL’s I completely agree. I intend to eradicate all remnants of this toxic legacy from my house. I experimented briefly with them and was left less than impressed. Now considering removal of all fluorescent tech from my house for good. Not only to get rid of household toxins, but frankly dislike their color as well as inability to dim.
I think that the drop in the price of LEDs was inevitable, given the demand from battery-powered devices (including flashlights) and screens. Light bulb prices might not have come down as quickly as they did, but that wouldn’t have been the end of the world. Note also the irony that incandescents often had a secondary purpose (heat), so in some cases heating bills have gone up as lighting bills have gone down.
The replacement of incandescent bulbs with LEDs in traffic signals has also had some unfortunate side effects in areas where winter snow and ice accumulates, apparently the heat generated by the incandescent bulbs in traffic lights helped keep the accumulation off the lenses :
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/ConsumerNews/led-traffic-lights-unusual-potentially-deadly-winter-problem/story?id=9506449
I saw that last year, I think in Columbia, MO. Fresh snow and you could see the lights.
FWIW Rand resistive heating is the least efficient form of heating around. You’re better off with an air-conditioner or a heat pump if you live in a temperate zone or with a heat furnace elsewhere.
Resistive heating is said to be “inefficient” for heaters because a lot of the energy goes out as light instead of heat. Something like
E_total = E_heat+E_light
Eff = E_heat/E_total X 100%
But, when light is the primary purpose, and heat just a side benefit, that equation does not apply.
Or, rather, when heat is a desirable part of the output, that equation does not apply.
Am I the only person on the Internet who prefers the whiter light of CFLs to the yellowish incandescents?
Maybe I’m from Krypton.
Well, I can’t really see the difference. Does that count?
Yes…yes, you are. The flickering of those damned fluorescents is awful, and the way they fool the human visual system into thinking they are producing white light from a handful of strong emission lines can combine to give nasty headaches, as can the awful high pitched noise they can make during startup. I’m still furious about the forced dumping of mercury into the environment via fluorescents, having heard “mercury in tuna will kill us all” incessantly while growing up. If 10% of the bulbs are disposed of properly, I’d be surprised.
Statistics are odd.
If you have a record temperature T0 and a new temperature that is not measurably different from T0 and that has a measurement error of +- 0.1 C, the odds of the new temperature being exactly T0 + 0.01C are about 75%. The odds of it being higher than T0 are 100%.
It’s just the way math works out these days.
Hey, you’ve discovered another side-effect of massive human caused carbon pollution! It causes statistical functions to distort, probably from the unprecidentedly rapid heat build-up. Pity you didn’t get that written up before the inauguration. NASA (the NAtional climate Science Agency)* would have probably have thrown lots of money at you for studies.
/sarc
* when George W. announced the exploration initiative, one of my colleagues at Ames said, disgustedly, “The ‘S’ in NASA no longer stands for Science”, to which I replied “Would that be the ‘S’ that stands for Space, or the other one?”. I know folks here have a negative view of building large rockets powered by liquid bureaucracy, but at least _that_ work has _something_ to do with Aviation and Space.
National Association of Saturn Aficionados?
Yeah, but they stop making those little cars . . .
Your colleague was a retard if he worked for Ames and didn’t know what NASA stands for..
Whole thing is silly. Hardly anyone disputes that CO2 has some positive effect on temperature. The money question is How Much. But regardless of how much, if temperatures are going up as a result, later temperatures are going to be higher than earlier temperatures.
Same is true if temperatures are going up due to some other cause.
The money question remains How Much, which is not being discussed because a lot of recent work says that How Much isn’t a lot.
If I did not understand the paltry evidence that argues for any significant CO2 sensitivity, I think I would still smell a rat in the blatant dishonesty being used to sell the panic. I think most supporters must be simply swept up in the Noble Cause aspect – the others are just stupid. I can’t count how many lay people have told me they support it, right or wrong, because it does good.
What they do not see are the misplaced priorities and enormous opportunity costs, as well as the actual harm done by cures that are worse than the disease.
I can’t count how many lay people have told me they support it, right or wrong, because it does good.
This ^^^
It’s insane and it really emphasizes the religiosity.
Also, brings up an area of disagreement that AGW alarmists ignore. That people could agree that the Earth is warming but disagree about the effectiveness of policies to do anything about it. And if you disagree with the policies, you instantly become a holocaust denier.
It’s easy to befuddle them by arguing that we need to raise the Earth’s temperature by 8 to 10 C to return the planet to natural conditions. Almost all life evolved for a much warmer, wetter, lusher environment.
Bart:
I am focused on the Carbon Cycle and the question as to how much of the 20th century increase in atmospheric CO2 can be attributed to human activity and how much is the result of natural processes. Murry Salby’s talk posted on Anthony Watts’ site got me interested in the possibility of thermally driven emission of CO2 and its role in the carbon cycle.
Who is Ferdinand Engelbeen, by the way, and what is his connection to Anthony Watts, if any? He is really intense about defending the increase-in-atmospheric-CO2-is-all-human-caused hypothesis. Does he view himself as some kind of “gatekeeper” that “increased CO2 is not (fully) human caused” is in his view on the “climate skepticism fringe” and he doesn’t want the Movement contaminated by those he regards as kooks?
Ferdinand recently linked to work by Pieter Tans, who I guess is the go-to scientist defending the CO2 hypothesis against the thermally stimulated emission brigade. I looked at the linked paper, and Tans, like Salby, uses correlational techniques to make inferences about the carbon flows, but Tans reaches a 180 degree opposite conclusion.
My own view is that correlational inferences have their limitation and are not a full substitute for a dynamic model, especially when there are non-linear effects involved.
Tans argues, like Engelbeen does, that the large year-to-year fluctuations in “net emissions” (essentially the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere because the atmosphere is a conservative system), that these fluctuations are short term and the result of short-term variations in decay of the leaf litter in primarily the tropical rainforests.
I know you are telling me to consider ocean upwelling in the carbon cycle and I am concentrating on the terrestrial side. But on the terrestrial side, I regard the “leaf litter” explanation as poorly backed up by even simple modeling.
We know the fully 25 percent of the human CO2 emissions are sequestered in the terrestrial biosphere — the amount could be even more if there are these other, natural, thermally stimulated additional sources of CO2 emission. Some of this sequestration is in living plants and some is in dead plants that are eventually incorporated into the soil.
Yes, most of the annual uptake of CO2 from plants is released by respiration of some kind, either by the plants, animals (including microbes) feeding on plant matter and including decay of that leaf litter. You see that in the steep slopes of the annual CO2 variation. So that most of the dead leaves decay within a year or two I can accept.
But that you are sequestering that much carbon means that you have an accumulation of dead leaves that eventually turns into soil. How big is that reservoir of carbon compared to a year’s leaf fall? Actually it is pretty big, multiples of the atmospheric carbon content. The year’s leaf fall is a small fraction of the atmospheric carbon — it is that annual “wiggle” in the Keeling Curve. How much of that soil carbon is accessible by bacteria and fungi that could respire it and emit it back into the atmosphere? I don’t think anyone knows, but there was that recent paper in Nature where they were measuring CO2 emission from soils and claiming large, temperature-stimulated emission that is longer term than the “leaf litter” explanation.
Does this make sense — your take on this?
It is not clear how much effect CO2 has on temperature on Earth at the concentrations we have observed over the past 70 years.
There are two little noted effects, neither modeled in the Global Climate Models: the first is the 14% observed increase in leaf cover over the land surface over the past 38 years. This increase in leaf cover is a fact, well attested by NASA satellite photography. It’s important because it changes the Earth’s albedo in the infrared. Plant leaves reflect most of the infrared, for good reason. They don’t want to overheat in the noonday sun.
The second factor is the marked reduction in plants’ transpiration of water vapor because of the increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas. Its concentration in the atmosphere over the land masses is significantly due to transpiration by land vegetation. Because of reduced transpiration, water vapor over the land masses should be less, a lot less.
Those are two reasons why a simplistic model of CO2 forcing is likely to be wrong.
Actually, we know the simplistic models based on CO2 forcing are wrong, already. Without exception, they have all failed to predict the observed temperatures for twenty years.
Richard Feynman said it well: ” It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. ”
Global warming theory, up to now in a nutshell.