Friday, February 26, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Interview with Dr. Colin Campbell
KUULATA!
Colin Campbell, founder of the Association for the Study of peak Oil and Gas, is officially retired from his career as oil geologist and Peak Oil pundit but kindly agreed to this interview for the zone5 podcast.
Colin is the author of several books on the impending peak in world oil production and the implications for modern civilisation including the influential Oil Crisis in 2005 and most recently An Atlas of Oil and Gas Depletion
In this interview he discusses his career as an oil geologist and how this lead to an awareness of the limits to future production.
Some listeners may be surprised to hear Colin’s scepticism regarding anthropogenic climate change. When I asked him about it later he assured me that he makes no claim to know much about climate change per se, but pointed me to this important paper by Hook, Sivertsson and Aleklett, which examines the projected supply of fossil fuels in scenarios used in the IPCC Emission Scenarios.
These projections by the IPCC seem to take little if any account of the imminent peaking and decline of fossil fuels in the next few years, assuming higher production rates in some cases than even the industry expects to be feasible.
Perhaps concern about this failure by the IPCC to incorporate such essential information leads to questioning its other conclusions.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Õliahvi sünd - ISIS "20 Minutes/ 40 Years"
Tendrils extend from the cloudy black mass
They slither and slide through the ones and zeroes
Prophecy of collapse unfolds
Last grains of sand spiral down the hole
Chance has graced me with a gift
Grasp at gold before the dark descends
Sun beats down and panic reigns
In this time of ending
Eyes shut, feet bare
For this journey, I'm unprepared
I walk on
Sight renewed
Seek new life
I seek new life
Walk on
Seeking her the one
I wish to see
She wanders the outerlands
From the grasp of wolves I will pluck her
Twin arteries flow with the pulse of one mighty heart
Monday, February 15, 2010
Daily Mangle
Daily Mangle
Yesterday, the Daily Mail of the UK published a predictably inaccurate article entitled “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995″.
The title itself is a distortion of what Jones actually said in an interview with the BBC. What Jones actually said is that, while the globe has nominally warmed since 1995, it is difficult to establish the statistical significance of that warming given the short nature of the time interval (1995-present) involved. The warming trend consequently doesn’t quite achieve statistical significance. But it is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years–a point we have made countless times at RealClimate. It is also worth noting that the CRU record indicates slightly less warming than other global temperature estimates such as the GISS record.
The article also incorrectly equates instrumental surface temperature data that Jones and CRU have assembled to estimate the modern surface temperature trends with paleoclimate data used to estimate temperatures in past centuries, falsely asserting that the former “has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’”.
Finally, the article intentionally distorts comments that Jones made about the so-called “Medieval Warm Period”. Jones stated in his BBC interview that “There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia” and that “For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.”
These are statements with which we entirely agree, and they are moreover fully consistent with the conclusions of the most recent IPCC report, and the numerous peer-reviewed publications on this issue since. Those conclusions are that recent Northern Hemisphere warming is likely unprecedented in at least a millennium (at least 1300 years, in fact), and that evidence in the Southern Hemisphere is currently too sparse for confident conclusions. Mann et al in fact drew those same conclusions in their most recent work on this problem (PNAS, 2008).
Unfortunately, these kinds of distortions are all too common in the press nowadays and so we must all be prepared to respond to those journalists and editors who confuse the public with such inaccuracies.
Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
A headline in the Daily Mail has spread like wildfire, claiming that Phil Jones, ex-director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, said "there has been no global warming since 1995". Not only did Phil Jones not say these words, this interpretation shows a poor understanding of the scientific concepts behind his words. To fully understand what Phil Jones was saying, one needs to read his actual words and understand the science discussed. Here is the relevant excerpt from the BBC interview:
BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
BBC: How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
Phil Jones: I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
Phil Jones is saying there is a warming trend but it's not statistically significant. He's not talking about whether warming is actually happening. He's discussing our ability to detect that warming trend in a noisy signal over a short period. To demonstrate this, look at the HadCRUT temperature record from 1995 to 2009. The linear trend is that of warming. However, the temperature record is very noisy with lots of short term variability. The noisy signal means that over a short period, the uncertainty of the warming trend is almost as large as the actual trend. Hence it's considered statistically insignificant. Over longer time periods, the uncertainty is less and the trend is more statistically significant.
Figure 1: HadCRUT global temperature change in degrees Celsius. Blue is yearly average. Red is linear trend (HadCRUT).
It bears remembering that the HadCRUT record only covers around 80% of the globe. Analysis by European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and NASA GISS (Hansen 2006) find that the areas omitted by HadCRUT are some of the fastest warming regions in the world. Consequently, the HadCRUT record underestimates the warming trend, as demonstrated by the NASA GISS record which covers the whole globe:
Figure 2: NASA GISS Global temperature change in degrees Celsius. Blue is yearly average. Red is linear trend (NASA GISS).
However, even this doesn't give you the full picture. Surface temperature is only a small fraction of our climate with most of global warming going into the oceans. When all the heat accumulating in the oceans, warming the land and atmosphere and melting ice is tallied up, we see that global warming is still happening.
Figure 3: Change in total Earth heat content from 1950 (Murphy 2009).
Posted by John Cook at 12:02 PM
GAASI KOLLAPS
Virtuaalne blogosfääri gaasihinna kollaps
:)
