southern_cross

> Was it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit in accuracy?

No, not even close. You were probably lucky to get one-degree accuracy, if that.

This is one of the first red flags that I noted when I started paying closer attention to climate-related stuff about 15 or 20 years ago. I did a little digging, and it turns out that there is a mathematical theorem (I forget the name of it) that allows you to do things like this (derive a higher level of accuracy than the data would otherwise allow) if you know for a fact that the associated errors pretty much all cancel out. But you have to know this, from prior sampling or whatever; you can't just assume it. But that's what these folks are doing - waving their hands and just assuming that the errors mostly cancel out.

To add insult to injury, for other portions of the data they state that they have the right to make routine, automated adjustments because of systematic errors in the data. But you can't have it both ways - assuming that the errors mostly cancel out on the one hand, while on the other hand claiming you have the right to make adjustments because, you know, those errors don't actually cancel each other out after all.

> I'm not questioning the data per se

You should be! Most of the "data" here is either of remarkably low quality, or just pretty much made up.

The flooding that is (was?) occurring in Miami was largely the result of a poorly designed rain-drain system, one which was installed with little to no back-flow prevention. This new system, which was put in place into allow rainwater to flow into the ocean more easily and so prevent flash flooding, unfortunately also allowed the ocean to easily flow back into the streets when conditions were right and so caused tidal flooding instead.

This was all covered in detail in the press at the time the problem first started occurring, and of course it made everyone involved look really bad. But then someone came up with "climate change" as the cause instead, so now the guilty parties had something to hide behind. The press had a field day with it, too, using it as "proof" of dangerously rising sea levels.

The attempted solution here (which is why I said "was?") was to install drainage pumps much like the type you find in New Orleans, because apparently going back and adding the proper back-flow prevention devices was going to be too involved and too expensive. But, of course, just as soon as those pumps were activated people started complaining about how they were polluting the ocean. In fact, they probably aren't putting anything into the ocean that wasn't already going there eventually anyway; they just made the situation more obvious.

"The data are a mix of the CRUTEM4 land-surface air temperature dataset and the HadSST3 sea-surface temperature (SST) dataset. The HadCRUT4 data are neither interpolated nor variance adjusted."

This is your typical half-truth (lie of omission). Even if the HadCRUT4 folks themselves don't make these kinds of adjustments, the folks who provide the data sets which HadCRUT4 is based on most certainly do.

Yes, in the past I've been both a contractor myself and a contracting customer. And while I have seen newly built code bases thrown out for various reasons, from what I've seen that's not very common. AFAIK most of the code that I've ever written is still out there and working, unless maybe it died a natural death - company closed, got bought out, changed technologies, or what have you.

At my last gig as an independent contractor I did a lot of work on a project that mostly revolved around one of their largest customers. But then the employee who I was working with the most on this took early retirement due to medical reasons, which caused a change of direction somewhat because the employee who took over that job wanted to do things a bit differently. Then their big customer went out of business, which had a rather dramatic effect on the overall project. But as far as I know the code and such that I worked on is still in active use, it's just not nearly as critical to the business now as it used to be.

Before that I worked at a local mega-corporation, and there was one project there which I worked with on and off for ten years. But then one day, due to an act of legislative fiat, its reason for being just up and disappeared, so almost overnight all of the software and hardware that was used to make it work just went away.

But that same place suffered a bit from what you describe, in that it wasn't too unusual for them to spend money on software that didn't actually work, so it was ultimately abandoned. In fact, I had a running joke with them: "Gee folks, if I'd known that you were willing to settle for software that didn't actually work and that you were going to just throw out anyway, I would have only charged you half of what you paid those other folks to develop it!"

Bear in mind that even the best offshore wind systems only produce about 65% of their rated output, on average. You have no real control over the when and how much and for how long of that, either.

The "churn" thing may cut it the web world and such but not so much elsewhere. There's a local mega-corporation whose core code base is up to twenty years old now, and another whose is up to ten years old. Neither will probably be rewriting anything anytime soon because their current codes bases were the rewrites - expensive and time-consuming ones at that - so they're still adding new features and in some cases still trying to work out long-standing bugs. Neither is lately having much luck bringing in fresh graduates, either, because the young bucks don't want to work on that stuff - it's too old for them.

I see that Scientific American is once again easily attaining its recently lowered journalistic standards. Of course, if you're paying attention you'll note that this article wasn't written by their own staff, but is in fact a reprint of someone else's work which appears elsewhere. This way S.A. gets to maintain a certain amount of "plausible deniability", I guess.

Also, ff you've been paying attention then you'll know that quite a few so-called "extinct" species eventually pop up somewhere else, so maybe they weren't so much extinct after all! In fact, there was a report out just this week claiming that dozens of such species have recently been found, all concentrated in pretty much the same area. I haven't yet tried to verify that report, though.

> These are exactly the same arguments that creationists offer against evolution.

That's a rather bizarre association to make! I suggest that you refrain from making any further comments on the matter until you've done a little digging for yourself - looked at the backgrounds of the so-called "experts"; read some of the history of the matter, going back decades to centuries; and read some of the papers and critiques of those papers - instead of just depending on whatever the headlines tell you.

PDF link: http://www.tresamigasllc.com/docs/nclimate2921.pdf

The NOAA study being referenced is the one linked to below, from what I can tell. I mentioned that it was probably full of bogus numbers and wishful thinking, like many other similar studies I've seen, and you responded to that, and I responded to you with more details. Sorry if there was any confusion here.

http://www.tresamigasllc.com/docs/nclimate2921.pdf

A quick read of it suggests the following limitations, among others; take the time to read it for yourself if you like:

1. It seems predicated on the notion that we can have a system where any shortfall in one part of the country can be easily made up for just by using the excess generation in other parts of the country. This appears to be a rather "blue sky" assumption to make, and one that I personally wouldn't be willing to make.

2. For the numbers quoted, it makes no mention of "nameplate" capacity vs. actual average capacity, which of course makes a huge difference as to the item above.

3. It makes the rather bizarre statement that HVAC lines can't transmit power over long distances, which clearly isn't true. (They can stretch for thousands of miles if need be, although most aren't anywhere near that long.) It may be true, though, that with current technology HVDC lines can transmit power more efficiently and for longer distances than HVAC lines can.

4. If I'm reading it correctly, it admits to not taking short term variability (an hour or less) into account, when such variability can be substantial. I may be reading it wrong, though.

And so on.

So at best this study can be taken as an example of out-of-the-box, non-traditional thinking, and perhaps as an encouragement for doing more of the same. But it hardly qualifies as any kind of proof that what they describe is technologically or economically feasible.

Our real problem with the use of gasoline isn't really how much of it we use but rather how we use it so inefficiently, which of course leads to more usage and related pollution than necessary. IIRC, gasoline vehicles are only 20% or so efficient, while diesel vehicles are a bit better. And contrary to what you say, if we move more towards electric vehicles in a big way then I could foresee a day when we instead burn gasoline or some other fossil fuel equivalent in a more centralized and much more efficient manner, much like we do with natural gas today, and then use the electricity generated by that to power cars.

As to the PM 2.5 thing, like I said a lot of that gets oxidized to CO2 anyway, which adds up over time. Lately the EPA has been making a lot of noises about regulating this stuff, except that it turns out that much of it comes from places like our own kitchens. And nobody really wants the EPA involved with that part of it, hence the efforts to reign them in somewhat. But of course any talk of potentially restraining the EPA here is personified as "evil" in the press.

No, I think most of the folks spewing this stuff are mostly just functionally incompetent, a position which you might agree with yourself if you'd actually read any of their research and understood the "data" which they try to use to justify it. (Don't get me started!)

But some of them are also clearly dishonest, too, IMO. Michael Mann, for example, who is generally considered an esteemed climate scientist, got caught some years back attempting to commit perjury by claiming in court documents that he was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, which he clearly was not. (The situation with him - and a few others who made similar claims - got so bad that the Nobel folks eventually had to step in and put a stop to it.) And those who looked closely at the tree-ring data which he used to help build his famous "hockey stick" temperature chart found a lot of problems with that data and how he used it, but I don't remember all of the details. I do remember it being stated that tree ring growth responds primarily to changes in precipitation, though, rather than temperature.

I recently read a paper where two of the authors (out of several) are considered to be among the most esteemed climate scientists in the world. And I just shook my head at how bad that paper was, the ridiculous claims that it made, and at how seriously it was being taken, at least at first. One of those esteemed authors has of late taken to making such outrageous claims that even his own acolytes don't really want to talk about it much, so I was a bit surprised to even see his name on that paper to begin with.

Of course, in the press the paper was being hailed as breakthrough research at the time. But I noticed that it kind of fell off the radar pretty quickly, so I guess a lot of other folks had quietly come to the same conclusion as to how bad it was. I have to see any public acknowledgement of that, though.

BTW, I read somewhere that there are something like 200x as many climate papers being published today as there were a generation or so ago. So if there is a research bandwagon that someone might want to jump on in order to get funding and get their papers published, that's probably a good one to go for. But it turns out that an awful lot of so-called "climate experts" publishing such papers actually have little to no formal training in matters of climate, which I find very telling. Some of them have little to no STEM training at all, in fact.

A carbon tax on gasoline is pretty much a non-starter, because gasoline prices have been much higher in the past than they are now but that didn't have much impact on demand, if reducing demand is your goal. (Otherwise it's just a money grab.) You would probably have to increase gasoline prices by a factor of maybe 3x or 4x or more in order to have any real impact.

Gasoline prices are headed down to below $2 a gallon in some parts of the country right now, but from what I understand California prices are going to stay at least twice that, and might even go higher. So we'll have to see what effect that has on demand there, if any.

> No comment on PM 2.5 restrictions, entirely different topic.

Carbon emissions are carbon emissions; it's not just all about CO2. PM 2.5 carbon particles and visible soot and such will likely eventually oxidize to CO2 anyway, though. And a lot of it oxidizes almost as soon as it's emitted, given its high temperature and its exposure to fresh supply of oxygen.

> Catastrophic climate change.

Which is probably just not going to happen, for the most part. The people pushing this stuff are generally just lying about it (lies of omission in many cases), and they should be ashamed of themselves. And we as a whole should be treating them quite harshly for it, rather than accommodating them.

By way of example, lately they've been talking a lot about how melting permafrost will release lots of CO2 and methane (greenhouse gases), as biological activity kicks in which causes old organic matter to break down. But what they fail to mention (and this is an intentional omission on their part, in my opinion) is that pretty much as soon as that starts happening, other biological activity will kick in which mitigates those emissions, since a lot of things use that stuff for food. So while some extra CO2 and methane might very well be emitted, this will be far more limited in scope than they let on. It's just scare tactics, mostly.

Doing a full rewrite is often asking for trouble, though. Somebody out there on the internet maintains a list of companies which have pretty much put themselves out of business by doing full rewrites. Why is this? Because it turns out that a lot of that "old, ugly code" is in fact various types of bug fixes and other operational accommodations. And when you do a full rewrite you tend to lose track of a lot of that stuff, meaning that you get to deal with it all over again, often in a quite painful manner.

A former employer of mine had switched from using custom code to packaged code, which introduced plenty of problems of its own but overall things were generally going about as well as could be expected. Then they decided that they just had to have the latest and greatest version of that code from the vendor, which promised all kinds of flashy bells and whistles. They unwisely jumped into this with both feet (they were an early adopter), only to find that when those bells and whistles were added a lot of the old code had been rewritten, too, which introduced (or maybe re-introduced) a large number of very serious bugs. By the time those bugs were corrected (if they ever really were), the company (which was by now my former employer) was in such bad shape that they were basically forced to close their doors. They had pretty much lost control over their inventory and financials, for example, and had committed themselves to fulfilling contracts which were based on cost figures that were woefully incorrect.

This stuff was usually easily adjustable, so you could compensate for various irregularities. But some turntables had built-in strobe lights for aiding in adjustments, so if the line frequency was off then the strobe would be off and then your adjustments would be off, too. And even if generally well-adjusted, should the line frequency vary too much while playing a record then you would probably notice that. During musical passages it would probably definitely be noticeable, while during singing and speech maybe not at all.

Yes, that was exactly the kind of thing I had in mind. Old-fashioned TVs depended on this, too, IIRC, and probably a lot of other stuff. (Newer TVs might still depend on it, for all I know. I haven't really looked into the matter.)

As I recall, the original goal was to try and maintain a solid 60Hz at all times. Then that was relaxed to trying to maintain an average of 60Hz over a 24-hour period. And I think that requirement has now mostly gone away, too, which is a good thing because with so many renewables in the mix these days you probably can't really do it anyway. But you can't let it slip too far because then you still might run into any number of operational problems.

Bogus numbers: Wind and solar are always portrayed using "nameplate" capacity; their full theoretical capacity under ideal conditions, which rarely happens. (They generally have no control over this, either.) On the other hand, something like a natural gas plant can usually produce at its full capacity pretty much on demand, although it probably only does this on relatively rare occasions, too.

To use a local example, I have a solar plant nearby which is rated at one megawatt "nameplate". But for whatever reasons it is currently maxing out at only 60% of that, even under ideal conditions. And it looks like its average output may be as low as 17%, depending on how you count things. (I generally use 25% as a round, ballpark figure for wind and solar, although it looks like off-shore wind power at least is generally running much higher than that.)

Wishful thinking: The wind and solar folks like to pretend that with enough storage (battery, pumped hydro, and so on ) then these can be as reliable and productive as more traditional power sources. Except that the storage stuff only has limited capacity, and is remarkably limited in many cases (to hours of capacity if not just minutes), so they're going to need something much more robust for backup. And that's generally means that the traditional sources will still be needed to fulfill this role. Which may be mostly fine technologically, but economically it will be quite expensive, and you need to include that added expense in the overall costs for wind and solar. It is wishful thinking to just ignore these factors.

Google, which was quite into renewals themselves a while back, long ago stated that it was obvious that these were never really going to work out for them. Given that Google has pretty much unlimited intellectual and financial resources (or at least it did at the time), if there was anybody who could make this work it would probably be them. But apparently not so much.

> You dump carbon emissions into the air; nobody charges you (editing for clarity - I'm talking about breathing).

And from your vehicle(s), and from your yard equipment, and from your fireplace, and probably from your heating system, and maybe from your kitchen, and maybe from your clothes dryer, and so on. And don't even get me started on things like outdoor grills, which could be considered major polluters (along with fireplaces and such). Heaven help us if the EPA ever decides to crack down on this stuff, especially enforcing PM 2.5 restrictions, because this could potentially have a major impact on us at home.

One of the things not mentioned here is that increasing use of wind and solar is forcing grid operators to make compromises in the traditional standards of how they run the grid. For example, IIRC the ability to maintain a rock-solid 60Hz power frequency has largely gone out the window. In the past this was considered critical for maintaining the stability of the grid and the various equipment that is plugged into it, but now maybe not so much.

Also, as I understand it the various control systems which used to kick in just on occasion and take somewhat heroic measures in order to maintain grid stability are now having to do that constantly. This isn't the exception anymore but rather the rule, in other words, so it's probably not so much a matter of "The system is working well" as it is "We're making it work as best we can, at least for now". This is an important distinction because while in the past an outage or a hack or whatever would have probably had limited scope, today the same might end up bringing a much larger part of the grid down.

IIRC, something like 90% of a software engineer's career will be spent doing "maintenance" work - working on existing code bases, some of which may (eventually) be quite long in the tooth. So it's something that the young bucks are going to have to get used to pretty quickly.

Also, a lot of the "new" stuff that they want to work on is really old stuff, just with a new name and a new coat of paint. Having been in the business for several decades now I see of lot of this, and I am by turns both amused and appalled by it.

I gave up on Science decades ago. I started reading more Nature instead thinking it might be better, but I've given up on it now, too. Some folks who have read Nature for far longer than I did will tell you that it has always been problematic, even more so than Science. I fail to understand why either of these publications is held in particularly high regard.

I don't think I've seen the particular study you reference, but if it's like most others that I have seen then it's probably mostly hogwash, based on bogus numbers and wishful thinking.

BTW, the Oklahoma-to-Tennessee transmission line referenced in this article was supposed to terminate in my area, where it would connect to TVA's system. But TVA told them that they didn't need the electricity and didn't want it (see below), so nothing ever got built. Between this and the other difficulties referenced in the article, they finally gave up on the notion and sold out to someone else, and that someone else now finds itself on the wrong side of some bankruptcy issues. To wit, certain customers of theirs are having financial difficulties and are trying to get out from under their contracts, with at least one very large customer now using bankruptcy as a lever.

As far as TVA itself goes, they currently have a good mix of hydro, nuclear, coal, natural gas (some of which has recently replaced coal), a little bit of wind (with no plans to add more AFAIK), and now some solar, which is a growing part of their base. (There's also been some noise lately about maybe finishing up a nuclear station that was halted halfway and mothballed decades ago, but I don't think that's going to happen.) The article mentions a politician who apparently is anti-wind and may have caused some difficulties here. But there is also another politician who is pro-solar and who may be influencing TVA's activities in that regard.

As time goes by there is going to be more and more "old" code out there, and generally that will either have to be maintained in its current state or converted to something newer. And to do that you're going to have folks who are both familiar with it and are willing to work on it - except that the young bucks today just really don't want to do that.

I'm hearing from IT employees of local corporations that if their code base is twenty, ten, or even just five years old now, they can't find young folks who are willing to work on it. And even if they do find them, they don't necessarily have the skills to do that work, nor any particular inclination to really learn those skills, nor are they willing to stick around for very long even if they do start the process.

Recent research suggests that flood maps (at least in the US) now and always have understated flood-prone areas by a factor of something like 3x. So those 100-year and 500-year and such flood pronouncements may be equally off, too.

It has been pointed out that tree rings respond mostly to changes in precipitation rather than temperature. If you can properly compensate for that, and for various other potentially confounding factors, then maybe you can derive some proxy temperature data from them. Other proxies have their own problems too, of course.

See my comment(s) elsewhere in this thread.

That's mighty big talk for someone who probably has done little to no due diligence on the data themselves. But I have, and here's just some of what I've found, specifically in reference to Berkeley Earth (BEST):

1. The initial BEST report (I haven't really looked at later ones) had some remarkable things buried down in the footnotes which, if taken at face value, put everything else they had to say in serious doubt.

2. If I go to their web site and look at the temperature data for my local area, it's obvious that the first 100 or so years of that data is basically fake. I happen to know from previous research that there are no local temperature records going back that far, and if you pay attention to the details they admit as much themselves.

3. Furthermore, I've lived in this area for over 40 years now, and during that time it just so happens that I've experienced both near-record highs and lows for the area - the hottest and coldest that I've ever been in my life. Yet those highs and lows don't show up in the Berkeley charts, which leads me to believe that the whole data set that they're using is basically garbage.

4. If I generate a "Stripes" report for my area, it looks little to nothing like the regional/global stripes reports currently being bandied about.

5. Last but not least, not long ago a researcher publicly pointed out (in considerable detail) the generally remarkable lack of quality control of various climate data sets, on which Berkeley (among others) depends. And he was immediately attacked by Steven Mosher, one of the main Berkeley guys. But Mosher was so anxious to try and discredit the guy that he apparently didn't read the new report too well before trying to point out "obvious mistakes" in it. For example, he (Mosher) used the wrong date ranges, the wrong filtering criteria, and so on in his critique - not the same ones that the report itself was actually using - and this was quickly pointed out to him. (The "problems" that he pointed out mostly went away if you used the correct criteria.) So Mosher was the one who ended up with egg on his face, and I don't think he ever properly apologized for this, either.

But rather than just take my word for such things, you should probably go do some looking for yourself.

Go here to look at Berkeley temperature charts for your area; read through all of them, and pay attention to the details: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/city-list/

Go here to generate stripes for your area: https://showyourstripes.info

Well, "nameplate" capacity is always the maximum theoretical output under ideal conditions, and how often does that happen? And with solar you have to deal with nighttime, so there goes fully half of it right off the bat!

As to that local installation, I drove by it the other day and saw no obvious tracking issues or anything like that. When I took a tour of it about a year after it opened, they said that it had already become obvious that the inverter system was going to be finicky and that it was going to an ongoing challenge to keep that in tip-top shape, given the expense involved. So after five years I could easily envision a situation where the panels and tracking system are still going strong, but the inverter system has degraded to the point where it can only spit out 60% max.

I remember reading about some of the criminal charges that were being filed, and in one instance at least, someone was being charged for "criminal negligence" (or whatever) in the water testing that they did. But after reading about the procedure they used, I thought to myself that AFAIK their procedure seemed valid, so I couldn't understand why they were being charged.

Now granted, it could probably be argued that their procedure could have been more comprehensive. But for the testing they were actually trying to do (determine how much lead was leaching from the main water lines) the procedure they did use seemed to me to be a valid one.