Climate Change(d)?

[steve_bank]

In the 60s in the summer when people got home and turned on air conditioning in the NYC area power voltages dropped.

On the old TVs the high voltage was directly tied to mains voltage and the picture would shrink.

If you can get hold of a digital multimeter you can check your mains voltage during the day. It will fluctuate with local loads. There are cheap ones online.

Switchng power supplies became common. They can compensate for wide variations in mains voltages.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Mr Tswizzle, ei simple thought experiment that requires no science.

Windows and doors are closed and you boil a pot of water. Turn off the stove and let it cool. Where do you think the heat goes? I'll give you a hint, it can't just disapear into nothing.

You are driving your car and the engine generates heat. You hit the brakes and kinetic energy in the car shows up as heat in the brakes. On race cars yiu can see the brake discs glowing red. Where does the heat go?

Could it be to the atmosphere? Heat is added to the atmosphere, where does it go? If the rate of increase in temperture of the atmosphere exceeds the abilty of the Earth to radiate it away thne the temperature of the atmosphere rises. Just like the air temperature in your kitchen does when you cook.

Simple, practical example: Parking garages. A busy parking garage is noticeably warmer than the surround despite being open to the air.

Second example, not quite so obvious: Main streets are warmer than side streets.

You can look at the Earth as being suspended in a giant vacuum bottle. I assume you know what a vacuum bottle is, like what you use to keep coffee hot.

Venturing into new knowledge can be a scary thing I imagine. You can choose to explore and challenge your own belifs or you can emotioanly wall yiurself off and hide.

And vacuum bottles have a thermal leak at the top--Earth has considerably better insulation.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Looks like we are being urged to cut back on power;

To prevent power outages, state officials asked residents and businesses to turn off lights and appliances and preset their thermostats to 78F (26C), especially during the critical hours between 4 and 9pm local time when demand typically peaks and solar power generation beings to ebb. Power systems withstood heat waves in 2021 but rolling blackouts for two days in August 2020 left about 400,000 households without power.

Teh Gruaniad

Because people don't want to spend the money on powerplants, nor do they want them around them.

 

[TSwizzle]

We are fucked anyway;

Scientists believe there is a one in six chance of a major volcanic eruption this century which could dramatically change the world's climate and put millions of lives in danger. an analysis of ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica by a team at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen found that a magnitude 7 volcanic eruption - which could be 10 to 100 times bigger than the one recorded in January - is a distinct possibility for this century. Eruptions of this size in the past have caused abrupt climate change and the collapse of civilisations.

Daily Mail

 

[Swammerdami]

Let's Go Brandon!

Is this the crap headline I saw last year where it's like 50million Hiroshima bombs going off every hour or something? Absolute tosh.

I find it fun and relaxing to work with big numbers. I took this as a challenge.

• First off, the headline was 5 Hiroshima's per second which is a mere 18,000 Hiroshimas per hour. Was Mr. Swizzle inflating the figure to justify his "tosh" pronouncement? Nah, that would imply he dusted off his slide-rule to figure how many seconds there are in an hour. I think he just obfuscated to make it harder for any of us to double-check his "work."
• What does "tosh" mean anyway? Google shows me that it's either the comedian Daniel Dwight Tosh or
  tosh. / (tɒʃ) / noun. slang, mainly British nonsense; rubbish
  I *think* that means Mr. Swizzle thinks the 5-Hiroshima claim is false. Yayyy! We've finally gotten the inscrutable Mr. Swizzle to actually volunteer an (alleged) FACT! Yayyy!!
• Let's see. The Earth's oceans comprise 321,003,271 cubic miles. That's a lot of water! We'll have to drop quite a few A-bombs to warm it up. (Why aren't we using H-bombs for this chore?) One sig-fig is good enough for us; the oceans are 1.3 sextillion liters. (Those are American sextillions; the oceans have just 1300 trillion liters with old French numbering.
  Now what do we do? Multiply by Avogadro's number or something?
• Google also shows us that there is a gram of gold in every 100 million tonnes of sea water! Does that work out to 30 million atoms per gram of swallowed seawater? Should we be panning our shit for gold after visiting the beach?
  Anyway, this is all a red herring. We'd have to integrate over sea depth since temperature rise diminishes with depth.
• Ten parts per trillion isn't much, but that's still about 20 million tons of gold altogether. A fellow could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with that much gold. Though I guess I'd need a fleet of 100,000 jumbo-jets or so to haul it all in.
• Ah, shucks! See how I get side-tracked? Let's just Google-get https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-ocean-heat-content and see that NOAA shows 240 ZettaJoules — that's about a quarter of a septillion Joules for you metric prefix-phobes — as total heat increase for the oceans over the period 1995-2020.
• I apologize!! This was going to be a quick exercise but is taking more time than anticipated. Still, it's worth it. Mr. Swizzle has FINALLY deigned to give us the benefit of his expertise. It isn't often we get one of the world's top climatologists to tell us the "5 Hiroshima bombs per second" is "tosh." We should help him celebrate his triumph!
• I actually double-checked and triple-checked these numbers, even resorting to multiplication and divisions. I was reluctant to go with NOAA's nice summary since they work for Brandon and are therefore probably lying their asses off. But the smartest NOAA people are working on Islamo-Jewish space lasers to take down MTG, LB, Vladimir Putin and other fine patriots. So we can hope that the webpage I linked to was produced by moles working for Alex Jones and others who are interested only in TRUTH.
• Are you still here? We can divide the 240 ZettaJoules by 25 (years), then by 365 (days), 24 (hours) and 3600 (seconds) to get 304 TeraJoules. Ah! Is it comfortable to be working with small units again? The yield of the Hiroshima device is shown as 60 or 63 teraJoules. One final division yields 5.1 or 4.8 Hiroshima bombs per second.
• Good thing I wasn't stupid enough to think that the 1-degree rise in surface temperature implied that rise throughout the entire ocean. Make that error and the calculation would have finished with 100+ Hiroshimas, an absurdly high figure

DONE! Over 25 years the ocean heating has been equivalent to 4.8 or 5.1 Hiroshima bombs per second depending on which Hiroshima estimate we use. Let's split the difference and call it 4.95 bombs.

Conclusion. The headline Mr. Swizzle calls out states "5 Hiroshima bombs per second," and he calls it "tosh" (nonsense or rubbish). Careful calculation implies that 4.95 is indeed a fairer estimate, a full percentage point below the toshy estimate,

Kudos to Mr. Swizzle! Well done.

 

[steve_bank]

We are fucked anyway;

Scientists believe there is a one in six chance of a major volcanic eruption this century which could dramatically change the world's climate and put millions of lives in danger. an analysis of ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica by a team at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen found that a magnitude 7 volcanic eruption - which could be 10 to 100 times bigger than the one recorded in January - is a distinct possibility for this century. Eruptions of this size in the past have caused abrupt climate change and the collapse of civilisations.

Daily Mail

Old news and nothing to do with the present climate change issues. It is funny when decades old news suddenly becomes today's breking news.

I was living in Portland when St Helen's blew. Me and my housemates watched from the porch. I went up as high as crater rock on Mt Hood, the plug from the last eruption. It is warm and you can smell supher. From a high point in the Cascades you can see Helen's, Hood, and others al in a neat line, part the ring of fire. Glacier peak about 50 miles from Seattle isthought overdue. At one time I lived ner Mt Tabor in Portland an extinct volcano.

The Yellowstone super volcano could be catastrophic. It is not predictable.. A 1 in 6 estimate for a volcano is meaningless.

Year Without a Summer - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1 °F).[1] Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest on record between the years of 1766–2000.[2] This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.[3]

Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in April in the Dutch East Indies (known today as Indonesia). This eruption was the largest in at least 1,300 years (after the hypothesized eruption causing the volcanic winter of 536), and was perhaps exacerbated by the 1814 eruption of Mayon in the Philippines.

 

[Hermit]

Let's Go Brandon!

Is this the crap headline I saw last year where it's like 50million Hiroshima bombs going off every hour or something? Absolute tosh.

I find it fun and relaxing to work with big numbers. I took this as a challenge.

• First off, the headline was 5 Hiroshima's per second which is a mere 18,000 Hiroshimas per hour. Was Mr. Swizzle inflating the figure to justify his "tosh" pronouncement? Nah, that would imply he dusted off his slide-rule to figure how many seconds there are in an hour. I think he just obfuscated to make it harder for any of us to double-check his "work."
• What does "tosh" mean anyway? Google shows me that it's either the comedian Daniel Dwight Tosh or
  tosh. / (tɒʃ) / noun. slang, mainly British nonsense; rubbish
  I *think* that means Mr. Swizzle thinks the 5-Hiroshima claim is false. Yayyy! We've finally gotten the inscrutable Mr. Swizzle to actually volunteer an (alleged) FACT! Yayyy!!
• Let's see. The Earth's oceans comprise 321,003,271 cubic miles. That's a lot of water! We'll have to drop quite a few A-bombs to warm it up. (Why aren't we using H-bombs for this chore?) One sig-fig is good enough for us; the oceans are 1.3 sextillion liters. (Those are American sextillions; the oceans have just 1300 trillion liters with old French numbering.
  Now what do we do? Multiply by Avogadro's number or something?
• Google also shows us that there is a gram of gold in every 100 million tonnes of sea water! Does that work out to 30 million atoms per gram of swallowed seawater? Should we be panning our shit for gold after visiting the beach?
  Anyway, this is all a red herring. We'd have to integrate over sea depth since temperature rise diminishes with depth.
• Ten parts per trillion isn't much, but that's still about 20 million tons of gold altogether. A fellow could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with that much gold. Though I guess I'd need a fleet of 100,000 jumbo-jets or so to haul it all in.
• Ah, shucks! See how I get side-tracked? Let's just Google-get https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-ocean-heat-content and see that NOAA shows 240 ZettaJoules — that's about a quarter of a septillion Joules for you metric prefix-phobes — as total heat increase for the oceans over the period 1995-2020.
• I apologize!! This was going to be a quick exercise but is taking more time than anticipated. Still, it's worth it. Mr. Swizzle has FINALLY deigned to give us the benefit of his expertise. It isn't often we get one of the world's top climatologists to tell us the "5 Hiroshima bombs per second" is "tosh." We should help him celebrate his triumph!
• I actually double-checked and triple-checked these numbers, even resorting to multiplication and divisions. I was reluctant to go with NOAA's nice summary since they work for Brandon and are therefore probably lying their asses off. But the smartest NOAA people are working on Islamo-Jewish space lasers to take down MTG, LB, Vladimir Putin and other fine patriots. So we can hope that the webpage I linked to was produced by moles working for Alex Jones and others who are interested only in TRUTH.
• Are you still here? We can divide the 240 ZettaJoules by 25 (years), then by 365 (days), 24 (hours) and 3600 (seconds) to get 304 TeraJoules. Ah! Is it comfortable to be working with small units again? The yield of the Hiroshima device is shown as 60 or 63 teraJoules. One final division yields 5.1 or 4.8 Hiroshima bombs per second.
• Good thing I wasn't stupid enough to think that the 1-degree rise in surface temperature implied that rise throughout the entire ocean. Make that error and the calculation would have finished with 100+ Hiroshimas, an absurdly high figure

DONE! Over 25 years the ocean heating has been equivalent to 4.8 or 5.1 Hiroshima bombs per second depending on which Hiroshima estimate we use. Let's split the difference and call it 4.95 bombs.

Conclusion. The headline Mr. Swizzle calls out states "5 Hiroshima bombs per second," and he calls it "tosh" (nonsense or rubbish). Careful calculation implies that 4.95 is indeed a fairer estimate, a full percentage point below the toshy estimate,

Kudos to Mr. Swizzle! Well done.

What a waste of time. TSwizzle doesn't do facts. They'd destroy his mantra consisting of the word "cult".

 

[Swammerdami]

What a waste of time. TSwizzle doesn't do facts. They'd destroy his mantra consisting of the word "cult".

Obviously I didn't do it for Mr. Swizzle. I did it for my own amusement — Maybe I was in a funny mood.

I was rather startled that the answer worked out to 5 Hiroshima bombs per second, exactly as in the headline.
If the use of "Hiroshimas" as an energy unit is politically incorrect, the power of the ocean's heat rise can also be expressed as 2.3·10³⁹ electron-Volts per fortnight. I don't know how to calculate the power of right-wing ignorance. Is it in about the same ballpark?

 

[Jarhyn]

What a waste of time. TSwizzle doesn't do facts. They'd destroy his mantra consisting of the word "cult".

Obviously I didn't do it for Mr. Swizzle. I did it for my own amusement — Maybe I was in a funny mood.

I was rather startled that the answer worked out to 5 Hiroshima bombs per second, exactly as in the headline.
If the use of "Hiroshimas" as an energy unit is politically incorrect, the power of the ocean's heat rise can also be expressed as 2.3·10³⁹ electron-Volts per fortnight. I don't know how to calculate the power of right-wing ignorance. Is it in about the same ballpark?

Well, add the average right winger caloric intake, consider that they spend at least as much time as you or I spend thinking and being angry, at watching Faux Noise and being angry, the entire energy budget for running consumer trucks more than 1 mile from a farm, perhaps the entirety of the energy spent on the war in Iraq, all the air fare and driver budget for all of Trump's rallies...

The data you would need to pull in on
.. all of that...

Maybe you could, in lieu of that, find the average energy cost of a spent dollar and then sum the total of that spent on right wing political interests, and add on top of it the energy cost of climate change itself (probably massively larger than the rest) and then you have your number.

 

[Elixir]

Newsom and the green fascists are determined to shut down California nuclear plant.

You're behind the times. That Insufferable Prick Gavin Newsom is fighting for your team at the moment.

No I am not behind the times. I posted earlier that Newsom was merely deferring the closure. And we know he is doing this to try to stop brown outs which would make him look even more dumb than he actually is. Closing the nuclear plants is the end game.

And today is the start of our "flex alerts". We are to avoid using electricity between 4:00pm and 9:00pm in case we overload the grid and cause black outs. It's like I'm living in fucking Mumbai or something and not the "fifth biggest economy in the world!!111!!!1" ^tm

Utilities will be able to serve you so much better once Trump’s Civil War really kicks off. I hope your survival skills are up to snuff.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Meanwhile in... the press and science...

In some isolated cases, the rainfall would qualify as a 1-in-1,000 interval flood. The downpour marked the latest such flood that has occurred over the past few weeks across the United States. In one week alone, three 1-in-1,000-year rain events occurred — inundating St. Louis, eastern Kentucky and southeastern Illinois. While controversial, the term is used to describe a rainfall event that is expected once in every 1,000 years, meaning it has just a 0.1 percent chance of happening in any given year.

*sigh*
Okay folks, here we go.

1) There is rainfall and there are floods. The two are linked, as rains cause flooding, but they are not proportional or equatable terms. If memory serves, the Michigan dam that gave way, that was a record flood, but not a record rain storm. How? Saturated ground allowed for less precip to absorb. Oddly enough, dry ground has the same property, though for a different reason. Soil doesn't have a static permeability value until fulling saturated. Soil needs water in it to help water flow through it. And this is ignoring horizontal verses vertical permeability... which we'll go into in the next Ted Talk.

2) There is nothing "controversial" about percent exceedance of events. This is all statistically based. The potential problem is that what was a 0.1% chance of exceedance event 40 years ago, might not be the same today. And these numbers are important. We can design cities and residential areas to be flood proof.... if we spend way too much money. 1% exceedance events are often looked at for engineering because design costs can become exceedingly high for larger events. 0.1% events are often used for huge water projects that could lead to substantial loss of property of life if it is overrun.

3) Other stuff causes flooding, primarily impervious surfaces like pavements and roofs. Sprawl leads to reduced areas for stormwater to absorb into the ground. Though, this is a bigger issue for smaller creeks, streams, and runs. In order to flood a city, you need inundation of rain.

 

[TSwizzle]

OMG!!! It's a catastrophic 74f today in Santa Monica.

 

[steve_bank]

OMG!!! It's a catastrophic 74f today in Santa Monica.

Today is what people live in Seattle for.

Around 80 degrees, a breeze, and sunny skies.

No worries.

What's up that megaflood predicted for Ca? I have always thought the Great Spirit was gong to cause Ca to break off and slip into the ocean.

 

[thebeave]

Meanwhile in... the press and science...

In some isolated cases, the rainfall would qualify as a 1-in-1,000 interval flood. The downpour marked the latest such flood that has occurred over the past few weeks across the United States. In one week alone, three 1-in-1,000-year rain events occurred — inundating St. Louis, eastern Kentucky and southeastern Illinois. While controversial, the term is used to describe a rainfall event that is expected once in every 1,000 years, meaning it has just a 0.1 percent chance of happening in any given year.

*sigh*
Okay folks, here we go.

1) There is rainfall and there are floods. The two are linked, as rains cause flooding, but they are not proportional or equatable terms. If memory serves, the Michigan dam that gave way, that was a record flood, but not a record rain storm. How? Saturated ground allowed for less precip to absorb. Oddly enough, dry ground has the same property, though for a different reason. Soil doesn't have a static permeability value until fulling saturated. Soil needs water in it to help water flow through it. And this is ignoring horizontal verses vertical permeability... which we'll go into in the next Ted Talk.

2) There is nothing "controversial" about percent exceedance of events. This is all statistically based. The potential problem is that what was a 0.1% chance of exceedance event 40 years ago, might not be the same today. And these numbers are important. We can design cities and residential areas to be flood proof.... if we spend way too much money. 1% exceedance events are often looked at for engineering because design costs can become exceedingly high for larger events. 0.1% events are often used for huge water projects that could lead to substantial loss of property of life if it is overrun.

3) Other stuff causes flooding, primarily impervious surfaces like pavements and roofs. Sprawl leads to reduced areas for stormwater to absorb into the ground. Though, this is a bigger issue for smaller creeks, streams, and runs. In order to flood a city, you need inundation of rain.

So, in summary, are these clusters of floods evidence of climate change? Or not? Or don't know?

 

[bleubird]

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/french-activists-fill-holes-with-cement-protest-watering-exemptions-2022-08-14/

I think golf is dumb anyway.

 

[bleubird]

Europe's dry rivers reveal creepy "hunger stones"

When rivers dry up in Central Europe, "hunger stones" with ominous inscribed warnings from centuries past reappear.

bigthink.com

500 years.

 

[Swammerdami]

So, in summary, are these clusters of floods evidence of climate change? Or not? Or don't know?

What's the difference between a scientist and a crackpot?

Spoiler

A scientist will often say "We can't be sure."
A crackpot is often wrong but NEVER in doubt.

 

[Swammerdami]

Europe's dry rivers reveal creepy "hunger stones"

When rivers dry up in Central Europe, "hunger stones" with ominous inscribed warnings from centuries past reappear.

bigthink.com

500 years.

If you’ve recently dumped a dead body in a reservoir, these must be nervous times. Global drought is shrinking rivers and lakes, revealing much that had been hidden below the surface.

Sorry I guess, bleubird, if this is how Google led you to the hunger-stones page.
. . .

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Again, your tactics are transparent.

I have no tactics. I merely point out the absurdity of the climate catastrophe claims that you believe in and the religious fervor with which it is embraced.

Or at least, continue obsessing about them, while hundreds died in heat waves in Europe and NW USA, SW Canada.

All you do is concentrate on the far end of the spectrum, when we know there is warming and communities are currently dealing with these realities, because this isn't climate change... it has already changed and continues moving in the warmer direction. Some island areas are currently trying to address sea level changes. Coastal communities are dealing with the public infrastructure issues of higher tides. Building codes are being adapted requiring AC in places were AC wasn't necessary because sustained heat waves weren't a thing. These aren't religious cults, these are public institutions dealing with actual problems now.

The Earth isn't going to explode, but the infrastructure in our nation is adapting now because of the climate that has already changed.

 

[lpetrich]

The world's rivers are drying up in drought and heat. Here's how 6 look from space - CNN

A painful lack of rain and relentless heat waves are drying up rivers in the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Many are shrinking in length and breadth. Patches of riverbed poking out above the water are a common sight. Some rivers are so desiccated, they have become virtually impassable.

The human-caused climate crisis is fueling extreme weather across the globe, which isn't just impacting rivers, but also the people who rely on them. Most people on the planet depend on rivers in some way, whether for drinking water, to irrigate food, for energy or to ship goods.

Colorado River (SW US, NW Mexico), Yangtze River (S China), Rhine River (W Germany), Po River (N Italy), Loire River (France), Danube River (E Europe)