Archives de catégorie : better to know…?

better to know...?, climate-debate

Is Mauna Loa Really The Best Location To Measure ‘Global’ CO2 Levels?

by K. Richard, Oct 19, 2020 in NoTricksZone

Highly anomalous terrain (an active volcano), 40 years of cooling temperatures, and a CO2 record that dramatically contrasts with fluctuating values from forests and meadows reaching 600-900 ppm all beg the question: Is Mauna Loa’s CO2 record globally representative?

Mauna Loa is the Earth’s largest land volcano. It has erupted over 3 dozen times since 1843, making this terrestrial landscape extremely unusual relative to the rest of the globe’s terrain. (Forests, in contrast, cover over 30% of the Earth’s  land surface.)

Mauna Loa has been thought to be the world’s best location to monitor global CO2 levels since 1958.

While Mauna Loa CO2 levels show a rise of 338 ppm to 415 ppm since 1980, Mauna Loa temperatures (HCN) show a cooling trend during this same time period. The only warming period in the last 65 years occurred between about 1975 and 1985.

Image Source: oz4caster

Forest CO2 fluctuations

As mentioned above, forests are orders of magnitude more terrestrially representative than the highly anomalous site of the Earth’s largest volcano.

In forests or tree-covered areas, CO2 rises from around 300 ppm in the warmth of the afternoon (~3 p.m.) to over 600 ppm before sunrise (~4 a.m.), when it is cooler (Fennici, 1986, Hamacher et al., 1994). This massive fluctuation occurs daily and CO2 values average out to be far higher than the Mauna Loa record suggests.

better to know...?, climate-debate

The Great Energy Non-Transition

by B. Everett, Oct 15, 2020 in CO2Coalition

One of the troubling characteristics of today’s civic discourse is the tendency to confuse predictions with reality.  Nowhere is this problem more severe than in the debate over climate and its associated issues.

The last hundred years have seen increasing emissions of carbon dioxide – a benign gas.  In reality, this slight increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations (from 0.03% in the nineteenth century to 0.04% today) has brought nothing but beneficial effects, including increased crop yields and greater drought resistance.  Nonetheless, climate alarmists argue that rising temperatures are bringing catastrophic storms, flooding, disease, inundation, extinction and general misery.  Unlike the benefits of CO2 which are clear and measurable, climate catastrophe remains nothing more than a prediction generated by computer models which have never produced meaningful forecasts of climate impacts.

A frequent corollary of climate alarmism is that the world has undertaken a radical transformation of the global energy system away from fossil fuels toward zero-carbon, renewable energy.  A Google search of the term “energy transition” yields over 5 million hits, many accompanied by terms such as “unstoppable” and “irreversible”.  But is this transition actually taking place? Three arguments are generally offered – none of them valid.

First, “energy transition” supporters point to the high growth rates for renewable energy sources with wind increasing at over 20% annually since 2000 and solar at over 40% per year, compared to less than 2% for fossil fuels.  Sounds great, but the absolute numbers tell a different story.  In 2019, despite forty years and trillions of dollars of subsidies, wind energy contributes about 2% of total global energy use and solar just over 1%.  Fossil fuels accounted for 84%, down just two percentage points over the last 20 years.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

LA NINA HAS ARRIVED: NEAR-TERM COOLING

by Cap Allon, Oct 11, 2020 in Electroverse

The following article is written by Bob Hoye of www.pivotaladvice.com.

Last week, the Global Warming policy Forum headlined “La Nina Is Here”. Why the headline? Because the warming El Nino is over and the change to the La Nina represents cooling. Like seasonal and actual climate change, it is a regular event. Which in physics means logical and predictable. And some cooling is showing up in various charts. Well, in those not altered by promoters of AGW.

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better to know...?, climate and geology, climate-debate

A Geological Perspective of Polar Bears

by D. Middelton, Oct 11, 2020 in WUWT

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Estimates have ranged from 70,000 to 5,000,000 years ago. The oldest confirmed polar bear fossil dates to 110,000 to 130,000 years ago… Meaning that polar bears survived the Eemian interglacial stage.

The peak warmth of the Eemian interglacial stage marks the boundary between the Late Pleistocene Tarantian Age and the Middle Pleistocene Ionian Age.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

New book: Climate Change: The Facts 2020

by A. Watts, Oct 8, 2020 in WUWT

The Institute of Public Affairs today announced the release of a significant new book of research Climate Change: The Facts 2020 published by the Institute of Public Affairs and Australian Scholarly Publishing.

On 24 September 2019, the 17-year-old activist Greta Thunberg addressed the United Nations Climate Action Summit saying, “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” A day earlier, however, the climate policy foundation Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) sent the UN their World Climate Declaration, signed by 800 prominent scientists including Nobel Laureate Professor Ivar Giaever and Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore, stating that there is no climate emergency: “You’re tired of alarmism and failed predictions of climate models that can’t predict the past, let alone the future. You distrust the business leaders, politicians and scientists of the climate industrial complex – you just want The Facts.”

This book contains original research and new theories of climate and will arm you with these facts. Leading scientists are contributors, including former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Center Dr. Roy Spencer, and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report Professor Emeritus of Meteorology Richard Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and many more.

Climate Change: The Facts 2020 is the definitive guide to the latest international research and analysis on climate change science and policy.  Twenty experts in their field from across five countries have written original contributions on the key issues of scientific, political, and public debate about climate change.

​Some of the issues addressed in chapters in Climate Change: The Facts 2020 include:

  • the extent and variability of sea level change
  • the historical record of temperature and ice coverage in the Antarctic
  • the impact of climate change on polar bear populations
  • the manipulation of temperature data by the Bureau of Meteorology
  • whether the Australian bushfires 2019-20 were in fact ‘unprecedented’; and

the prevalence of ‘noble cause’ corruption in climate science.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Corona-induced CO2 emission reductions are not yet detectable in the atmosphere

by Karlsruher Institut für Technology, Sep 21, 2020 in EurekAlert

Based on current data measured in the energy, industry, and mobility sectors, restrictions of social life during the corona pandemic can be predicted to lead to a reduction of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions by up to eight percent in 2020. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cumulative reductions of about this magnitude would be required every year to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement by 2030. Recent measurements by researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) revealed that concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has not yet changed due to the estimated emission reductions. The results are reported in Remote Sensing (DOI: 10.3390/rs12152387).

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See also here =  Can We Measure a COVID-19-Related Slowdown in Atmospheric CO2 Growth? Sensitivity of Total Carbon Column Observations

better to know...?, climate-debate

A HISTORY OF CLIMATE FRAUD (I)

by Cap Allon, oct 5, 2020 in Electroverse

Much of the below analysis is courtesy of Kenneth Richard.

The combined Hadley Centre and Climatic Research Unit (HadCRUT) data set –which is featured in IPCC reports– underwent a revision from version 3 to version 4 in March of 2012, about a year before the next IPCC report was due.

At the time (early 2012), the HadCRUT3 was showing a slight global cooling trend between 1998 and 2012, visible in the graph below which uses HadCRUT3 and HadCRUT4 raw data. In conjunction with changing versions, the slight cooling trend had convenientlychanged to a slight warming trend:

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As recently as 1990, it was widely accepted that the global temperature trend showed a “0.5°C rise between 1880 and 1950”, as reported by NASA (Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987). This rise (as well as the 0.6C rise between 1880 and 1940) can clearly be seen in the NASA GISS graph from 1987:

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better to know...?

Tens Of Thousands Of Automotive Jobs On The Brink, Climate Policy Hammers Once Mighty German Auto Industry

by AR Göhring at EIKE, Oct 3, 2020 in NoTricksZone

Not only at Daimler, Volkswagen and others, but elsewhere the working people have to fear for their jobs after Brussels and Berlin have declared war on Germany’s most important industry. Now the automotive supply chain is also being hard hit.

Berlin, Brussels tighten the screws

The value-adding industry has already been badly shaken by the exaggerated, simply senseless corona measures of the Merkel IV government. Now the Brussels EU government (including former German minister Ursula von der Leyen) are tightening the screws even more as they love to ban internal combustion engines completely. The EU has just tightened the rules for limiting CO2 emissions. Not only the well-known car manufacturers are under pressure, but also their suppliers, hardly known by name, such as Mahle from Stuttgart.

Mass job losses

The globally producing parts manufacturer still has around 12,000 employees in Germany (72,000 globally). In the country, 2,000 workers are expected to lose their jobs, globally 7,600, and this despite a partial switch to e-car parts. It’s not enough, says a works council member, because there is no concept for the domestic combustion engine factories to convert over to electrical parts.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Restoring Scientific Debate on Climate

by Jim Steele, Oct 3, 2020 in WUWT

The political genius of Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to unify the country during America’s most divisive time has been attributed to assembling a “team of rivals”. Likewise, scientific research is published so rivals and supporters of a hypothesis can independently and critically examine it. The great benefits of a team of rivals is also the basis for convening red team/blue team debates.

In 2017, Dr Steve Koonin, a physicist who served as Obama’s Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy, urged convening red-team blue-team debates for climate science in his article A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science.  “The national-security community pioneered the “Red Team” methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce—or at least understand—uncertainties. The process is now considered a best practice in high-consequence situations”.

Unfortunately, the public climate science debate has been framed as “deniers” versus “alarmists”, or “honest saintly scientists” versus “corrupt perpetrators of a hoax”.  The media pushes exaggerated claims of a crisis while some scientists misleadingly shield their hypotheses claiming the “science is settled”.  But science is a process and never settled. However, all sides do agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and concentrations have increased. All sides agree the climate is changing. That science is indeed settled. But complex climate dynamics are not driven solely by CO2 and many unsettled questions remain.  Scientists still debate whether climate has a higher or lower sensitivity to rising CO2. Answering that question depends on the unsettled science regards competing contributions from natural variability and landscape changes. And because rising CO2 and warmth benefits photosynthesizing plants, scientists debate the beneficial contributions of rising CO2.

Climate models could not replicate recent warming when only natural climate change was considered. But models could simulate recent warming since 1970s after adding CO2. That was the only evidence that supported the notion that increasing CO2 caused observed warming. However, there’s a flaw in such reasoning. Models limited to just natural climate dynamics failed to explain recent changes simply because our understanding is still incomplete. For example the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a major driver of natural climate change was only recently characterized in 1997, but has been shown to account for 100 years of changing climate along the coasts of the north eastern Pacific.

 

Urban Heat Island profile Image from Lawrence Berkeley Labs

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better to know...?, climate-debate

OUT-OF-SEASON SNOW BLANKETS BOTH HEMISPHERES

by Cap Allon, Sep 29, 2020 in Electroverse

A merdional (wavy) jet stream flow is diverting brutal polar air to the mid-latitudes in BOTH hemispheres. Every continent on the planet is currently receiving out-of-season snow and anomalous cold, with a few of the worst hit nations being New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and France.

 

NEW ZEALAND

A spring weather bomb has battered New Zealand, closing roads, dumping snow on beaches and causing dozens of flight cancellations.

The NZ Met service has described the low-pressure system moving up the country from Antarctica as “very unusual in how widespread and severe the weather is” — they have called it a significant weather event.

The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research said parts of the South Island shivered through record-breaking lows of -20C (-4F) on Monday and Tuesday.

Flights were cancelled up and down the South Island due to heavy snow.

Disruptive flurries were even reported a sea-level: very unusual for spring:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

11 SCIENTIFIC PREDICTIONS FOR THE UPCOMING GRAND SOLAR MINIMUM

by Cap Allon, Sep 18, 2020 in Electroverse

 There is ever-mounting evidence warning the next epoch will be one of sharp terrestrial cooling due to a relative flat-lining of solar output.

The exact time-frame and depth of this next chill of solar minimum is still anyone’s guess, and the parameters involved (i.e., galactic cosmic rays, geomagnetic activity, solar wind flux etc.) remain poorly understood. However, there are some great minds on the job, and below I’ve collated 11 best-guesses based on published scientific papers from respected researchers in the field. The list begins with eminent Russian astrophysicist K. Abdussamatov–though it is in no particular order.

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better to know...?, biology+acidification

BEACHED PILOT WHALES ARE A SIGN OF THE MAGNETIC POLE SHIFT AND WANING MAGNETOSPHERE

by Cap Allon, Sep 26, 2020 in Electroverse

Since 1850 Earth’s magnetic field has been weakening. At the turn of the millennium it then began reducing exponentially, at more than 10% per decade — this drop off is extreme and concerning, and here’s why.

Earth’s magnetic field protects us from space radiation. Our shields going down is very bad news for all life on our planet, and could possibly even lead to the next mass extinction.

“As the magnetic field weakens, the poles shift,” says David Mauriello of the ORP and MRN. For the past 100-or-so years, both north and south poles have been rapidly headed towards the equator (shown below), and their pace is increasing, warns Mauriello. The south pole is now off the Antarctic continent and making a beeline for Indonesia, and the north pole is shifting across the Arctic circle towards Siberia, it too headed for Indonesia–where the pair are likely to meet within the next few decades, perhaps around 2050.

This “meeting” will lead to one of two eventualities: 1) a full flip will take place (aka a “reversal” where the magnetic poles switch places), or 2) a “snap-back” will occur where the poles quickly return to their original starting points (aka an “excursion”).

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better to know...?, climate-debate

In Parts Of Japan, Mean Maximum Temperatures May Be More Impacted By Remote Ocean Cycles Than By CO2

by P. Gosselin, Sep 26, 2020 in NoTricksZone

Today, according to government scientists, CO2 is supposed to be the dominant climate driver, overwhelming all the other power natural forces such as solar variability and oceanic cycles.

Map (right): JMA

Yet when we compare (untampered) datasets, we often find surprising parallels and underlying correlations with these now ignored natural factors, which tell us CO2 isn’t what the activists want us to believe it is and that things are really much messier than the simplistic CO2-temperature correlation.

Today we look at a plot of the annual mean daily maximum temperature from Uwajima, Japan, together with the plot of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) going back almost 100 years.

Data: data.jma.go.jp/ / psl.noaa.gov/

Of course, nothing in a complex system like climate is going to show a perfect correlation, yet the above general fit is quite remarkable, which thus suggests regions are climatically interconnected in many yet to be understood ways. Such things aren’t accidental.

In summary: climate science is far from being understood, let alone settled. Anyone suggesting otherwise is likely just trying to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn – or they simply don’t know much about the subject and only parroting media sound bites.

better to know...?, climate-debate

CLINTEL puts hard climate questions to Bill Gates

by D. Wojick, Sep 23, 2020 in CFACT

Bill Gates is throwing several billion dollars at climate change. Mind you he is not throwing it away, because it is mostly venture capital for new energy technologies, which could pay off handsomely without climate change.

Gates can do what he likes with his riches, but he is a leading figure and lately he has become a serious climate change scaremonger. This has prompted CLINTEL to put some hard questions to him, in the form of a registered letter.

On the scaremongering side, last month Gates published an article claiming that climate change will be far worse than the present Covid outbreak. He imagines many millions dying from climate change. The press spread his doomsday words far and wide.

Here are some doomful excerpts:

“I am talking about COVID-19. But in just a few decades, the same description will fit another global crisis: climate change. As awful as this pandemic is, climate change could be worse.“

“I realize that it’s hard to think about a problem like climate change right now. When disaster strikes, it is human nature to worry only about meeting our most immediate needs, especially when the disaster is as bad as COVID-19. But the fact that dramatically higher temperatures seem far off in the future does not make them any less of a problem—and the only way to avoid the worst possible climate outcomes is to accelerate our efforts now. Even as the world works to stop the novel coronavirus and begin recovering from it, we also need to act now to avoid a climate disaster by building and deploying innovations that will let us eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

The unfortunate ‘climate anomaly’ of the First World War revealed

by P. Homewood, Sep 4, 2020 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

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A new research paper states this anomalous weather coincided with battles where: “The mud and water‐filled trenches and bomb craters swallowed everything, from tanks, to horses and troops, becoming what eyewitnesses described as the ‘liquid grave’ of the armies.”

Prof Alexander F More, who led the research for Harvard, explained: “Atmospheric circulation changed and there was much more rain, much colder weather all over Europe for six years.” “It was a once in a 100-year anomaly.”

This anomaly wreaked havoc on battlefields beginning with the First Battle of Champagne in 1914 , where British, French, and German troops suffered flooded trenches and frostbite while mud “slowed down the movement of troops and artillery”.

The Somme and Verdun in 1916, and the Third Battle of Ypres-Passchendaele in 1917, were slogged out in quagmires caused by the freak downpours which increased casualties.

Royal Artillery signaller John Palmer described his trauma at seeing men “sinking into the slime, dying in the slime” on the Western Front.

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WOW!! And no mention of CO2!

better to know...?, climate-debate

Claim: Svalbard glaciers lost their protective buffer in the mid-1980s and have been melting ever since

by B. Noel & M.  van den Broeke, Sep  23, 2020 in WUWT/U.Utrecht

The archipelago of Svalbard, a land of ice and polar bears, is found midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Its capital Longyearbyen on the main island of Spitsbergen is the world’s most northerly city, some 800 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

Svalbard is also home to some of the Earth’s northernmost glaciers, which bury most of the archipelago’s surface under no less than 200 metres of thick ice. Taken together, Svalbard glaciers represent 6% of the worldwide glacier area outside the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica – if they totally melted, they would raise the sea level by 1.7cm.

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Svalbard is roughly the size of Ireland or Sri Lanka, but largely covered in ice. Google Maps

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better to know...?, climate-debate, pollution-contamination, renewable energy

Solar panels generate mountains of waste

by D. Flanakin, Sep 19, 2020 in WUWT

They also heat the planet, blanket wildlife habitats and cause other ecological damage

The problem of solar panel waste is now becoming evident. As environmental journalist Emily Folk admits in Renewable Energy Magazine, “when talking about renewable energy, the topic of waste does not often appear.” She attributes this to the supposed “pressures of climate change” and alleged “urgency to find alternative energy sources,” saying people may thus be hesitant to discuss “possible negative impacts of renewable energy.”

Ms. Folk admits that sustainability requires proper e-waste management. Yet she laments, “Solar presents a particular problem. There is growing evidence that broken panels release toxic pollutants … [and] increasing concern regarding what happens with these materials when they are no longer viable, especially since they are difficult to recycle.”

This is the likely reason that (except in Washington state), there are no U.S. mandates for solar recycling. A recent article in Grist reports that most used solar panels are shipped to developing countries that have little electricity and weak environmental protections, to be reused or landfilled.

The near-total absence of end-of-life procedures for solar panels is likely a byproduct of the belief (and repeated, unsupported assertion) that renewable energy is “clean” and “green.” Indeed, Mississippi Sierra Club state director Louie Miller recently claimed that unlike fossil fuels and nuclear energy, “Sunshine is a free fuel.” Well, sunshine is certainly free and clean. However, there is a monumental caveat.

Harnessing sunshine (and wind) to serve humanity is not free – or clean, green, renewable or sustainable.

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better to know...?, climate and geology

Undersea earthquakes shake up climate science

by C. Rotter, Sep 20, 2020 in WUWT

Despite climate change being most obvious to people as unseasonably warm winter days or melting glaciers, as much as 95 percent of the extra heat trapped on Earth by greenhouse gases is held in the world’s oceans. For that reason, monitoring the temperature of ocean waters has been a priority for climate scientists, and now Caltech researchers have discovered that seismic rumblings on the seafloor can provide them with another tool for doing that.

In a new paper publishing in Science, the researchers show how they are able to make use of existing seismic monitoring equipment, as well as historic seismic data, to determine how much the temperature of the earth’s oceans has changed and continues changing, even at depths that are normally out of the reach of conventional tools.

They do this by listening for the sounds from the many earthquakes that regularly occur under the ocean, says Jörn Callies, assistant professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech and study co-author. Callies says these earthquake sounds are powerful and travel long distances through the ocean without significantly weakening, which makes them easy to monitor.

Wenbo Wu, postdoctoral scholar in geophysics and lead author of the paper, explains that when an earthquake happens under the ocean, most of its energy travels through the earth, but a portion of that energy is transmitted into the water as sound. These sound waves propagate outward from the quake’s epicenter just like seismic waves that travel through the ground, but the sound waves move at a much slower speed. As a result, ground waves will arrive at a seismic monitoring station first, followed by the sound waves, which will appear as a secondary signal of the same event. The effect is roughly similar to how you can often see the flash from lightning seconds before you hear its thunder.

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IMAGE: AN ARTIST’S RENDERING OF UNDERSEA EARTHQUAKE WAVES. view more CREDIT: CALTECH

better to know...?, energy and fields, minerals and ores

Censored: Australian scientists say suppression of environment research is getting worse

by D. Lewis, Sep 21, 2020 in Nature

Environmental scientists in Australia say that they are under increasing pressure from their employers to downplay research findings or avoid communicating them at all. More than half of the respondents to an online survey thought that constraints on speaking publicly on issues such as threatened species, urban development, mining, logging and climate change had become worse in recent years.1

The findings, published this month in Conservation Letters, reflect how politicized debates about environmental policy in Australia have become, says Saul Cunningham, an environmental scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra. “We need our publicly funded institutions to be more vocal in defending the importance of an independent voice based on research,” he says.

Australian scientists aren’t the only ones who have reported interference in science or pressure — particularly from government employers — to downplay research findings. Scientists in the United States, Canada and Brazil have also reported such intrusions in the past decade.

Scale of the problem

Two-hundred and twenty scientists in Australia responded to the survey, which was organized by the Ecological Society of Australia and ran from October 2018 until February 2019. Some of the respondents worked in government, others in universities or in industry, for example in environmental consultancies or non-governmental organizations.

The results show that government and industry scientists experienced greater constraints from their employers than did university staff. Among government employees, about half were prohibited from speaking publicly about their research, compared with 38% employed in industry and 9% of university staff. Three-quarters of those surveyed also reported self-censoring their work.

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better to know...?

Bjorn Lomborg: CA Fires Caused By Century Of Suppressing Controlled Burns

by R. Kraychik, Sep 18, 2020 in ClimateChangeDisptach

Ongoing forest fires in California are mostly a function of poor forest management, particularly insufficient controlled burns to clear away accumulated fuelwood, explained Bjorn Lomborg, presidentof the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of False Alarm,offering his remarks on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

“It has fairly little to do with climate change, and it has almost everything to do with the fact that we haven’t managed our forest well,” said Lomborg of California wildfires. “We haven’t done prescribed burning. We haven’t ensured that these fires won’t burn out of control.”

Lomborg added, “We’ve just simply allowed fuelwood to build up to cause almost uncontrollable fires in California.”

Prescribed burnings are necessary to reduce the risk of uncontrollable forest fires, Lomborg stated. “If we did prescribed burning, we could, in a few years, reduce the fire risk dramatically and actually get people’s lives back to — pretty close — to normal.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate, unclassified

FIRE

by J. Curry, Sep 15, 2020 in WUWT

Subtitle: our failure to live in harmony with nature.

I’m taking a breather today from nonstop hurricane stuff. Well, ‘breather’ may not be quite the right word.

As I’m writing this, I’m looking out into the smoke from the California fires that are blowing into Reno (not to mention much of the rest of the U.S.).  Schools in Reno are supposed to be open (they have a good COVID protocol), but have been closed more than half the time for the past month owing to bad air quality from the fires.

The mantra from global warming activists that manmade global warming is causing the fires, and therefore fossil fuels must be eliminated,  is rather tiresome, not to mention misses the most important factors.  More importantly, even if global warming is having some fractional impact on the wildfires, reducing fossil fuels would fractionally impact the fires but only a time scale of many decades hence.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Climate Scientists Admit Clouds are Still a Big Unknown

by E. Worrall, Sep 12, 2020 in WUWT

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The authors assert that if we had a better understanding clouds, the spread of model predictions could be reduced. But there is some controversy about how badly cloud errors affect model predictions, and that controversy is not just limited to climate alarmists.

Pat Frank, who produced the diagram at the top of the page in his paper “Propagation of Error and the Reliability of Global Air Temperature Projections“, argues that climate models are unphysical and utterly unreliable, because they contain known model cloud physics errors so large the impact of the errors dwarfs the effect of rising CO2. My understanding is Pat believes large climate model physics errors have been hidden away via a dubious tuning process, which adds even more errors to coerce climate models into matching past temperature observations, without fixing the original errors.

Climate skeptic Dr. Roy Spencer disagrees with Pat Frank; Dr. Spencer suggests the cloud error biases hilighted by Pat Frank are cancelled out by other biases, resulting in a stable top of atmosphere radiative balance. Dr. Spencer makes it clear that he also does not trust climate model projections, though for different reasons to Pat Frank.

Other climate scientists like the authors of the study above, Paulo Ceppi and Ric Williams, pop up from time to time and suggest that clouds are a significant problem, though Paulo and Ric’s estimate of the scale of the problem appears to be well short of Pat Frank’s estimate.

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Whoever is right, I think what is abundantly clear is the science is far from settled.

better to know...?, climate-debate

California Has Always Had Fires, Environmental Alarmism Makes Them Worse Than Necessary

by M. Schellenberger,  Sep 10, 2020 in Forbes

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“California was a very smoky place historically,” says Malcolm North of the US Forest Survey.“Even though we’re seeing area burned that is off-the-charts, it’s still probably less than what used to be burned before Europeans arrived.”

Many reporters note that more area has burned this year in California than at any other point in “the modern period,” but that period began in 1950. For the last half of the 20th Century, the annual area burned in California was just 250,000 acres a year, whereas the best-available science suggests 4.4 and 12 million acres burned in California annually before the arrival of Europeans.

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See also: California Has Always Had Fires, Environmentalism Makes Them Worse
better to know...?, energy and fields

European research project aims to understand concrete degradation

by World Nuclear News, Sep 10, 2020

A new research project supported by the European Union aims to clarify, enhance and unify methods of structural integrity assessment of safety-critical concrete infrastructure in support of long-term operation of nuclear power plants. Coordinated by Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre, the collaborative project seeks to improve the understanding of ageing and deterioration of such concrete.

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In September 2018, Belgian utility Electrabel announced that scheduled outages at Tihange 2 and 3 had been extended while concrete degradation issues in adjacent non-nuclear buildings were addressed (Image: Electrabel)

The ACES project, which began on 1 September and will run until 31 August 2024, has a total budget of just over EUR5 million (USD6 million), of which the European Commission is funding almost EUR4 million under the H2020-Euratom-1 programme.

The consortium involved in the project comprises 10 European companies and research partners, and one international partner. They are: Engie Lab and SCK-CEN of Belgium; CTU and CVR of the Czech Republic; CEA, EDF and IRSN of France; ZAG of Slovenia; Energorisk of Ukraine; and, ORNL of the USA.

The project will study the deterioration and ageing mechanisms of reinforced concrete, such as in reactor containment buildings, as well as predicting the occurrence of corrosion. It aims to develop an innovative inspection tool for early detection of corrosion.

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better to know...?, energy and fields

Charting the Flows of Energy Consumption by Source and Country (1969-2018)

by Govin Bhutada, Sep 9, 2020 in VisualCapitalist

Charting Energy Consumption by Source and Country

View the interactive version of this post by clicking here.

Over the last 50 years, the world has seen a colossal increase in energy consumption—and with the ongoing transition to renewable energy, it’s interesting to look at how these sources of energy have been evolving over time.

While some countries continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas, others have integrated alternative energy sources into their mix.

This visualization comes to us from Brian Moore and it charts the evolution of energy consumption in the 64 countries that have data available for all of the last 50 years.

Tera-What? The Most Prominent Sources of Energy (2009-2018)

First, let’s take a look at which sources have produced the most energy over the last decade of data. Energy consumption is measured in terawatt-hours (TWh)—a unit of energy equal to outputting one trillion watts for an hour.

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