Archives de catégorie : better to know…?

better to know...?, energy and fields

Electric Cars Are Futile As A Solution To The So-Called ‘Climate Crisis’

by A. Watts, Dec 9, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory recently released a study titled, “Assessment of Light-Duty Plug-in Electric Vehicles in the United States, 2010 – 2021,” which shows that in 2021, privately-owned plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs) “saved about 690 million gallons of gasoline.”

However, that is a huge exaggeration because fossil fuels provide 61 percent of the electricity in the United States. [emphasis, links added]

This means we have to include the inefficiency of burning coal or natural gas to make electricity(around 45 percent), transmission losses (about 5 percent), and losses in the inverter to charge the battery(another 5 percent).

Considering those losses, less than 33 percent of that apparent savings is a real reduction in fossil fuel use, the equivalent of roughly 230 million gallons of gasoline.

The Argonne study also says that from 2010 to 2021, EVs saved 2.1 billion gallons of gas. So, using the guideline of 61 percent from above, let’s be generous and say that over 11 years, EVs have saved about a third of that, the equivalent of about 750 million gallons of gasoline.

Although 750 million gallons of gasoline sounds like a huge amount, when you put into perspective the larger picture of gasoline use, that savings is actually a drop in the bucket.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), “In 2021, about 134.83 billion gallons (or about 3.21 billion barrels) of finished motor gasoline were consumed in the United States, an average of about 369 million gallons per day (or about 8.80 million barrels per day).”

Using simple arithmetic, dividing those 750 million gallons of gasoline saved from 2010 to 2021 according to the Argonne Lab study, by the daily U.S. consumption of gasoline, we get 750/369 = 2.03 days.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen Rejects ‘Climate Change’ As ‘A Quasi-Religious Movement Predicated on An Absurd ‘Scientific’ Narrative’

by R. Lindzen, Dec 5, 2022 in WUWT

Dr. Richard Lindzen’s new paper: An Assessment of the Conventional Global Warming Narrative – Published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation – September 22, 2022: Climate change is “a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the US hobbling its energy system.” – “The Earth’s climate has, indeed, undergone major variations, but these offer no evidence of a causal role for CO₂.”

“Unless we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, this is likely only to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the current irrational demonization of CO₂.”

By: Admin – Climate Depot

Click to access 2022-09-22-Lindzen-global-warming-narrative.pdf

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CO₂ is a particularly ridiculous choice for a ‘pollutant.’ Its primary role is as a fertiliser for plant life. Currently, almost all plants are starved of CO₂. Moreover, if we were to remove a bit more than 60% of current CO₂, the consequences would be dire: namely death by starvation for all animal life. It would not likely lead to a particularly cold world since such a reduction would only amount to a couple of percent change in the radiative budget. After all, a 30% reduction of solar radiation about 2.5 billion years ago did not lead to an Earth much colder than it is today, as we earlier noted in connection with the Early Faint Sun Paradox.

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The Earth’s climate has, indeed, undergone major variations, but these offer no evidence of a causal role for CO₂. For the glaciation cycles of the past 700 thousand years, the proxy data from the Vostok ice cores shows that cooling precedes decreases in CO₂ despite the very coarse temporal resolution (Jouzel et al.,1987, Gore, 2006). Higher temporal resolution is needed to show that warming preceded the increase in CO₂ as well (Caillon et al, 2003). For earlier variations, there is no suggestion of any correlation with carbon dioxide at all, as shown in Figure 9a, a commonly presented reconstruction of CO₂ levels and ‘temperature’ for the past 600 million years or so.

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Australia, better to know...?, Biodiversity

Chicken Little Propaganda Dressed Up As Science

by P.  Ridd, Nov 26, 2022 in InstitueofPublicAffairs

ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE AUSTRALIAN

The Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO have delivered their ­biennial dose of depression about the climate, but their report ignores a slew of positive environmental changes.

The Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO have delivered their ­biennial dose of depression about the climate in their latest State of the Climate report. The climate has warmed by 1.5C and there is barely a single benefit – it is all ­disaster.

It is often said, “if it is too good to be true, it probably is” and you are being conned. What about too bad to be true? Can a gently warming climate have no significant benefits at all? The only marginally encouraging part of the report is about northern Australia. There might have been a slight reduction in cyclone numbers, and there has been a bit more rain in the recent decades.

Apart from that, the report reads like the Book of Exodus – one disaster after another. Only the frogs and boils are missing.

But it is significant that the period when Egyptians were building pyramids, which was hotter than today’s climate, is often called the Holocene Climatic Optimum. The word “optimum” was an indication that scientists working in the era before climate alarmism could see some advantage of a warmer climate.

A sure sign that the report tries too hard to find disaster is when it discusses coral bleaching and the Great Barrier Reef. It stresses that there have been four bleaching events in the past six years, which it implies were devastating. But for some reason the report fails to mention that this year the reef recorded its highest amount of coral since records began in 1985.

This proves that all the hype about the coral loss from bleaching was greatly exaggerated. But the report writers were obviously ­untroubled by the contradictory evidence. They ignored it.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

The Top FIVE Climate Change LIES

by L. Fox, Nov 28, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Laurence Fox breaks apart the lies repeatedly fed to the public and details the manipulation by the billionaire-funded lobby groups and activists.

If you’re skeptical about climate change or the impact of the environment on our planet, this video is for you.

Climate Lie Number One: Wind Power Is NINE Times CHEAPER Than Gas

Climate Lie Number Two: Island Countries Are SINKING Into The Sea

Climate Lie Number Three: Net Zero WILL Make YOUR Bills Cheaper

Climate Lie Number Four: Storms Are Getting MORE Frequent And MORE Intense

Climate Lie Number Five: Climate Change Is KILLING People

WATCH:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

“There’s No Emergency” – Dissident Climatologist Dr Judith Curry on Climate Change

by J. Curry, Nov 26, 2022 in WUWT

SEE VIDEO 

There are particular fields in which those that stray from the official narrative are instantly shunned as dissidents. Climate change is one of these. Dr Judith Curry, Professor Emeritus and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has become known as one of the outspoken scientists who doubt the “scientific consensus” on climate change. As a result, she was “academically, pretty much finished off” and “essentially unhirable”. However, this didn’t slow down the bold climatologist.

BizNews spoke to Curry about her views on climate change and the impact that human beings have had on the planet. A delightfully fascinating discussion ensued in which Curry explained her objection to the “manufactured consensus of scientists at the request of policy makers” and how far reality really is from the grim picture painted by environmental activists. Curry made sense of recent extreme weather events and indicated that “Earth has survived far bigger insults than what human beings are doing”. An eye-opening interview.

better to know...?, climate-debate

Study Finds The CO2 Greenhouse Effect Is Real…But Dangerous Global Warming From Rising CO2 Is Not

by K. Richard, Nov 24, 2022 in NoTricksZone

German physicists claim to have experimentally demonstrated the greenhouse effect from greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4 is a real phenomenon, but assess the climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 with feedbacks is “only ECS = 0.7°C … 5.4x lower than the mean value of CMIP6 with ECS = 3.78°C.”

“The derived forcing for CO2 is in quite good agreement with some theoretical studies in the literature, which to some degree is the result of calibrating the set-up to the spectral calculations, but independently it determines and also reproduces the whole progression as a function of the gas concentration. From this we deduce a basic equilibrium climate sensitivity (without feedbacks) of ECSB = 1.05°C. When additionally assuming a reduced wing absorption of the spectral lines due to a finite collision time of the molecules this further reduces the ECSB by 10% and, thus, is 20% smaller than recommended by CMIP6 with 1.22°C.”
“Detailed own investigations also show that in contrast to the assumptions of the IPCC water vapor only contributes to a marginal positive feedback and evaporation at the earth’s surface even leads to a significant further reduction of the climate sensitivity to only ECS = 0.7°C (Harde 2017 [15]). This is less than a quarter of the IPCC’s last specification with 3°C (see AR6 [1]) and even 5.4x lower than the mean value of CMIP6 with ECS = 3.78°C.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Climategate: Never Forget (12th anniversary)

by Master Source, Nov 22, 2022 in WUWT

 

“The growth of the technical skeptical blogosphere (pioneered by Steve McIntyre) has challenged traditional notions of expertise, i.e. credentials and sanctity of journal publications, through Climate Audit’s blogospheric deconstruction of many publications, particularly related to paleo proxies. “–Judith Curry.

By Robert Bradley Jr. — November 22, 2022

“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.

It has been 12 years since the intellectual scandal erupted called Climategate. Each anniversary inspires recollections and regurgitation of salient quotations. These quotations speak for themselves; attempts of climate alarmists to parse the words and meaning distracts from what was said in real-time private conversations.

And the scandal got worse after the fact when, according to Paul Stephens, “virtually the entire climate science community tried to pretend that nothing was wrong.” Whitewash exonerations by the educational institutions involved and scientific organizations– was a blow to scholarship and standards as well. The standard of fair, objective, transparent research was sacrificed to a politically correct narrative about the qualitative connection between CO2 forcing and temperature (see Wiki).

Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming (2010) was a rare mainstream-of-sorts look at the scandal. Michael Mann is the bad actor, despite his I-am-the-victim take in his account, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012). [1]

Background:

On November 19, 2009, a whistle-blower or hacker downloaded more than 1,000 documents and e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University (United Kingdom). Posted on a Russian server, these documents were soon accessed by websites around the world to trigger the exposé.

These e-mails were part of confidential communications between top climate scientists in the UK, the United States, and other nations over a 15-year period. The scientists involved had developed surface temperature data sets and promoted the “Hockey Stick” global temperature curve, as well as having wrtten/edited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) physical-science assessment reports.

Branded “Climategate” by British columnist James Delingpole, the emails provided insight into practices that range from bad professionalism to fraudulent science. Bias, data manipulation, dodging freedom of information requests, and efforts to subvert the peer-review process were uncovered.

Some of the more salient quotations follow.

Man-Made Warming Controversy

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Willie Soon speaks at the University of Chicago

by Andy May, Nov 20, 2022 in WUWT

Dr. Willie Soon gave a great presentation at the Federalist Society Chapter at the University of Chicago Law School on November 18, 2022. The title of his talk is:

“The Corruption of Environmental Rulemakings at the US EPA: Climate Change, Mercury Emissions, and Air Quality”

Willie Soon, 2022

Dr. Soon’s slide deck is excellent reading and he has kindly sent it to me, you can download it here. If you prefer to watch his presentation, you can do so on YouTube here. Soon’s presentation starts about 22:46 minutes into the video.

Soon’s key points:

  • Given the daily, seasonal, and annual range of temperatures around the Earth, the warming of the past 125 years is trivial.
  • Except for ENSO variations, the global average surface temperature has hardly changed in over 20 years.
  • Willie humorously dismantles the article on him in Wikipedia and Gavin Schmidt’s criticisms, these slides are worth the download!
  • Willie plugs the article he wrote with 23 co-authors entitled: “How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere Temperature trends? An ongoing debate.” Seriously, this is probably the best climate change article written in the last thirty years in my humble opinion, I refer to it all the time. The bibliography alone is worth it. If you never read another climate article in your life, you should read this one. Download it here.
  • He destroys the Mercury pollution nonsense that is permeating the media. Possible spoiler, don’t drink Coca Cola!
  • Is it air pollution or weather?

Finally, President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about “public policy [becoming] the captive of a scientific-technological elite” was correct:

“It is time to face a hard truth: the seventy-year experiment to federalize the sciences has been a failure. The task now is to prevent the Big Science cartel from further dehumanizing society and delegitimizing science. There is a second hard truth: the necessary reforms will not come from within. Rather, it will be the people and their representatives that will have to impose them. To restore science to its rightful and valuable place, break up the Big Science cartel.”

(J. Scott Turner, Professor of Biology (emeritus), SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, December 10, 2021)

I wish I had said that.

 

better to know...?, energy and fields

Germany’s Compounding Energy Woes: Even Wind Power Industry Is “Sliding Into Crisis”

by P. Gosselin, Nov 15, 2022 in NoTricksZone

Germany’s Blackout News here reports that not only is Germany’s energy supply faltering profoundly, but so is its wind industry as well, reporting  that it is “sliding into a crisis”.

Gloomy outlook also for Germany’s wind energy industry. Photo by P. Gosselin

Wind energy is supposed to step in and play a key role in supplying Germany with energy as other sources get cut off. But that too is not going to plan.

“Nordex is closing its plant in Rostock, Siemens Gamesa is sliding deep into the red and at Vestas the workforce is on strike,” reports Blackout News.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Russian Temperature Records Are Not Cooperating With The CO2-Driven Climate Narrative

by K. Richard, Nov 14, 2022 in NoTricksZone

Two new studies indicate there has been no modern warming in the last centuries in western (Urals) and eastern (Kolyma) Russian mountain ranges.

A new 27,000-year temperature reconstruction assesses it was ~2.5 to 4.8°C warmer than today from 8.9-5.2 ka BP in the Ural Mountains, or when CO2 is said to have hovered in the 265 ppm range.

Summer temperatures were also warmer during the Medieval Warm Period, or from 1.2-0.7 ka BP. After a post-Medieval cool-down fostering in the Little Ice Age, the reconstructed record suggests there has been no warming since 0.5 cal ka BP, or for the last several centuries.

The smoothed temperature record shown in the study indicates there was only one brief period in the last 10,000 years that was not warmer than today.

“The reconstructed TJuly [8.9-5.2 cal ka BP] are the highest recorded, reaching up to 4.8 °C higher than today’s air temperature. … Present day T July have persisted since 0.5 cal ka BP.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Now It’s Claimed Anthropogenic Global Warming Is Driven By Aerosol Emissions Reductions, Not CO2

by K. Richard, Nov 10, 2022 in NoTricksZone

An increase in effective radiative forcing from human activity is now said to be mostly driven by a decline in aerosol pollution, superseding the effects of CO2 emissions.

The majority of an alleged acceleration in anthropogenic global warming in the 21st century “is driven by changes in the the aerosol [effective radiative forcing] trend, due to aerosol emissions reductions” (Jenkins et al., 2022).

Abstract

Estimates of the anthropogenic effective radiative forcing (ERF) trend have increased by 50% since 2000 (+0.4W/m2/decade in 2000-2009 to +0.6W/m2/decade in 2010-2019), the majority of which is driven by changes in the aerosol ERF trend, due to aerosol emissions reductions. Here we study the extent to which observations of the climate system agree with these ERF assumptions. We use a large ERF ensemble from IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) to attribute the anthropogenic contributions to global mean surface temperature (GMST), top-of-atmosphere radiative flux, and aerosol optical depth observations. The GMST trend has increased from +0.18°C/decade in 2000-2009 to +0.35°C/decade in 2010-2019, coinciding with the anthropogenic warming trend rising from +0.19°C/decade in 2000-2009 to +0.24°C/decade in 2010-2019. This, and observed trends in top-of-atmosphere radiative fluxes and aerosol optical depths support the claim of an aerosol-induced temporary acceleration in the rate of warming. However, all three observation datasets additionally suggest smaller aerosol ERF trend changes are compatible with observations since 2000, since radiative flux and GMST trends are significantly influenced by internal variability over this period. A zero-trend-change aerosol ERF scenario results in a much smaller anthropogenic warming acceleration since 2000, but is poorly represented in AR6’s ERF ensemble. Short-term ERF trends are difficult to verify using observations, so caution is required in predictions or policy judgments that depend on them, such as estimates of current anthropogenic warming trend, and the time remaining to, or the outstanding carbon budget consistent with, 1.5°C warming. Further systematic research focused on quantifying trends and early identification of acceleration or deceleration is required.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

97% Consensus on Climate Change? Survey Shows Only 59% of Scientists Expect Significant Harm

by WUWT, Nov 9, 2022

Humans are likely causing some warming, but substantial scientific disagreement exists on whether there will be significant impacts

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (November 8, 2022) – A new poll of scientists conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that only 59 percent of respondents think global climate change will cause “significant harm” to the “living conditions for people alive today.” That is far short of the “97 percent consensus” narrative pushed by climate alarmists and their media allies across the globe.

The survey, conducted in September and October 2022 by Fairleigh Dickinson University and commissioned by The Heartland Institute, polled only professionals and academics who held at least a bachelor’s degree in the fields of meteorology, climatology, physics, geology, and hydrology.

The key question of the survey asked: “In your judgement, what will be the overall impact of global climate change on living conditions for people alive today, across the globe?” Fifty-nine percent said “significant harm.” Thirty-nine percent said either “significant improvement,” “slight improvement,” “no change,” or “slight harm.” Two percent were not sure.

Among respondents with the most experience – those at least 50-years-old – less than half expect significant harm for people alive today. Scientists 30-years-old and younger were the only age group for which more than 60 percent expect significant harm.

Like prior surveys of scientists, the new poll shows the vast majority of scientists agree the planet is warming. On average, respondents attributed 75 percent of recent warming to human activity. More importantly, scientists disagree among themselves on whether future warming will be much of a problem.

The poll also found only 41 percent of respondents believe there has been a significant increase in the frequency of severe weather events. The majority say there has been no change or only a slight increase.

In reality, objective data show hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, drought, and other extreme weather events have become less frequent in recent decades.

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

Dramatic Cooling And Recent Ice Shelf Advance Over The Antarctic Peninsula

by K. Richard, Nov 3, 2022 in NoTricksZone

Scientists struggle to keep their stories straight regarding the anthropogenic CO2 impact on polar climates.

It is claimed that anthropogenic CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are responsible for amplifying warming (“polar amplification“) and ice melt in polar climates, consistent with pronouncements pertaining to anthropogenic global warming.

However, Antarctica’s Larsen Ice Shelf station indicates a massive cooling trend, -1.1°C per decade, has been ongoing since the late 1990s (Bozkurt et al., 2020).

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better to know...?, climate-debate

How IPCC’s 1990 Predictions Expensively Failed

by C. Monckton of Brenchley, Nov 8, 2022 in WUWT

It is now almost a third of a century since 1990, when IPCC made its first predictions about the weather. Since IPCC (2021) continues to predict the same 3 C° midrange long-term warming (equilibrium doubled-CO2 sensitivity, or ECS, broadly equivalent to 20th-century anthropogenic warming from all sources) as in 1990, it is high time someone examined IPCC’s medium-term predictions to shed light on the plausibility of its long-term predictions.

IPCC’s key medium-term prediction in 1990 was as follows –

“Based on current model results, we predict:

  • “under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0.3 C° per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 C° to 0.5 C° per decade). This is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years. This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1 C° above the present value by 2025 and 3 C° before the end of the next century. The rise will not be steady because of the influence of other factors.”

IPCC also predicted as follows –

This second business-as-usual prediction was that there would be 1.8 C° warming from preindustrial times to 2030. Deducting the 0.45 C° warming up to 1990, the prediction amounted to 1.35 C° or about 0.34 C°/decade. Thus, IPCC predicted 0.3-0.34 C°/decade medium-term warming. However, only 0.14 C°/decade has occurred since 1990

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better to know...?, climate-debate

New Research: Eastern U.S. Warming Over Last 50 Years Overstated By 50%

by C. Morrison, Nov 24, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The widespread use of regularly adjusted global and local surface temperature datasets showing increasingly implausible rates of warming has been dealt a further blow with new groundbreaking research that shows 50% less warming over 50 years across the eastern United States.

The research attempts to remove distortions caused by increasing urban heat and uses human-made structure density data over 50 years supplied by the Landsat satellites. [bold, links added]

The 50% reduction in the warming trend is in comparison with the official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) homogenized surface temperature dataset.

The research was compiled by two atmospheric scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Dr. Roy Spencer and Professor John Christy.

They used a dataset of urbanization changes called ‘Built-Up’ to determine the average effect that urbanization has had on surface temperatures.

Urbanization differences were compared to temperature differences from closely spaced weather stations. The temperature plotted was in the morning during the summertime.

A full methodology of the project is shown here in a posting on Dr. Spencer’s blog.

Dr. Spencer believes that the ‘Built-Up’ dataset, which extends back to the 1970s, will be useful in ‘de-urbanizing’ land-based surface temperature measurements in the U.S. as well as other countries.

All the major global datasets use temperature measurements from the Integrated Surface Database (ISD), and all have undertaken retrospective upward adjustments in the recent past.

In the U.K., the Met Office removed a ‘pause’ in global temperatures from 1998 to around 2010 by two significant adjustments to its HadCRUT database over the last 10 years.

The adjustments added about 30% warming to the recent record. Removing the recent adjustments would bring the surface datasets more in line with the accurate measurements made by satellites and meteorological balloons.

Of course, if the objective is to promote a command-and-control Net Zero project using widespread fear of rising temperatures to mandate huge societal and economic changes, a little extra warming would appear useful.

But warming on a global scale started to run out of steam over 20 years ago, and the stunt can only be pulled for so long before the disconnect with reality becomes too obvious.

There is a danger that the integrity of the surface measurements will be put on the line. Earlier this year, two top atmospheric scientists, Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen told a U.S. Government inquiry that “climate science is awash with manipulated data, which provides no reliable scientific evidence.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

THE UNSTOPPABLE GROWTH OF GLOBAL GHG EMISSIONS

by R. Lyman, Oct 2022 in FriendsOfScience

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Contributed by Robert Lyman © 2022. Robert Lyman’s bio can be read here.

Advocates of the thesis that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing catastrophic climate change claim that United Nations-led international conferences will succeed in causing the countries of the world collectively to radically reduce fossil fuel use by 2050.

The “climate change” issue is a global one. It concerns the global effects of global emissions and the possibility that collective action by all the countries of the world (or, at least, the vast majority of major emitters) can so reduce emissions and concentrations as to eventually change global impacts. Since 1992, there has been a series of international conferences, mostly under the auspices of the United Nations, seeking agreement on how, by how much, and when to reduce emissions. In spite of these conferences and the series of agreements and lofty political statements they have produced, emissions actually rose by 60 per cent from 1990 to 2020. By 2021, China alone accounted for 30 per cent of world emissions, and was the fastest-growing source of emissions, followed by India.

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better to know...?, energy and fields

The problem with hydrogen

by Global Witness, Sept 1, 2022

Hydrogen could be an important part of the renewable energy transition, but not if the fossil fuel industry has its way.

At first glance, hydrogen seems to be the perfect solution to our energy needs. It doesn’t produce any carbon dioxide when used. It can store energy for long periods of time. It doesn’t leave behind hazardous waste materials, like nuclear does. And it doesn’t require large swathes of land to be flooded, like hydroelectricity.

All in all, hydrogen seems too good to be true. No wonder the energy industry is currently pushing hydrogen as the fuel of the future. So…what’s the catch?

Not all hydrogen is created equal

While it’s true that hydrogen is carbon-free at the point of use, this only tells part of the story. Before we get to the stage where hydrogen is used, it first needs to be produced. And it’s this process where the complications begin.

There are several different ways of producing hydrogen, with varying levels of carbon intensity. One is to pass an electric current through water, splitting the water molecules apart into their constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms. With this method, the key is what kind of electricity you’re using to create the electric current. If the electricity is from renewable sources, then the overall process will be effectively carbon free. If you’re using electricity generated by burning fossil fuels, then the hydrogen will be very carbon intensive.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Shellenberger: Climactivists Turn To Temper Tantrums As Primary Tactic

by M. Schellenberger, Oct 25, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Dumping milk onto floors. Hurling food onto walls. Refusing to eat. Gluing body parts. Throwing paint. Refusing to leave. Threatening to pee and poop in your pants. Screaming accusations.

Are those the behaviors of a toddler’s temper tantrum? Yes. But they’re also the dominant tactics of today’s climate activists. [bold, links added]

Consider the case of Gianluca Grimalda. On October 19, Grimalda, along with 15 other members of a climate activist group called Scientist Rebellion, glued himself to the floor of the visitors center next to a Volkswagon factory in Germany.

The VW security guards brought pizza to Grimalda and the other activist scientists, but Grimalda felt disrespected and so he declared a hunger strike in retaliation.

Grimalda immediately expressed outrage at his treatment. “VW told us that they supported our right to protest,” he complained on Twitter, “but they refused our request to provide us with a bowl to urinate and defecate in a decent manner while we are glued, and have turned off the heating.”

Many were quick to point out the childish nature of the protest. “I’m a serious scientist protesting against fossil fuels,” wrote one user. “Now turn the gas heating on and bring me my potty.”

The activists say that such childish tactics were necessary. Grimalda tweeted that he and his colleagues are protesting “until our demands to decarbonize the German transport sector are met.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

“It was an Ambush”: The Long Fight against Climate Deniers

by E. Worrall, Oct 22, 2022 in WUWT

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Read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/10/20/the-long-fight-against-climate-change-deniers

I’m not sure why Stott seems to think the Paris Agreement is such a success. The world is currently burning record amounts of coal, so I think we can safely add the Paris Agreement to the scrapheap of failed climate initiatives, regardless of political rhetoric.

As for Russia, Russians have likely been skeptical of Western climate science ever since Western scientists ignored Russian advice there was no evidence of unusual warming in the 20th century.

In 1998 scientist Rashit Hantemirov, of the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, Russian Academy of Sciences, tried to explain to Keith Briffa, who helped Michael Mann construct his iconic hockey stick, that the position of the polar timber line, the northern most point at which trees can grow, was the tree metric Russia uses for measuring historic changes in Arctic temperature. Hantemirov’s advice to Briffa was “… there are no evidences of moving polar timberline to the North during last century…“. That same polar timberline metric showed evidence of substantial movement during the medieval warm period, and other well documented historic warming and cooling events (Climategate email 0907975032.txt).

Western scientists seem to prefer tree rings – but even Mann’s colleagues admitted amongst themselves that tree rings are a questionable gauge of historic temperature. Climate scientist Tom Wigley wrote an email to Professor Michael Mann in 2003, in which he explained how his own son performed a high school science experiment which demonstrated Mann’s tree ring metric was likely measuring changes in precipitation rather than changes in temperature (Climategate 2 email 0682.txt).

We can only guess what Russian scientists thought of all this absurdity – but the evidence suggests they decided it was too funny watching Western climate scientists act like fools, to make a serious effort to interrupt the joke.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Phantom Forests: Why Ambitious Tree Planting Projects Are Failing

by Fred Pearce, Oct 6, 2022 in YaleEnvironment360

High-profile initiatives to plant millions of trees are being touted by governments around the world as major contributions to fighting climate change. But scientists say many of these projects are ill-conceived and poorly managed and often fail to grow any forests at all.

It was perhaps the most spectacular failed tree planting project ever. Certainly the fastest. On March 8, 2012, teams of village volunteers in Camarines Sur province on the Filipino island of Luzon sunk over a million mangrove seedlings into coastal mud in just an hour of frenzied activity. The governor declared it a resounding success for his continuing efforts to green the province. At a hasty ceremony on dry land, an official adjudicator from Guinness World Records declared that nobody had ever planted so many trees in such a short time and handed the governor a certificate proclaiming the world record. Plenty of headlines followed.

But look today at the coastline where most of the trees were planted. There is no sign of the mangroves that, after a decade of growth, should be close to maturity. An on-the-ground study published in 2020 by British mangrove restoration researcher Dominic Wodehouse, then of Bangor University in Wales, found that fewer than 2 percent of them had survived. The other 98 percent had died or were washed away.

“I walked, boated, and swam through this entire site. The survivors only managed to cling on because they were sheltered behind a sandbank at the mouth of a river. Everything else disappeared,” one mangrove rehabilitation expert wrote in a letter to the Guinness inspectors this year, which he shared with Yale Environment 360on the condition of anonymity. The outcome was “entirely predictable,” he wrote. The muddy planting sites were washed by storms and waves and were otherwise “ecologically unsuited to mangrove establishment, because they are too waterlogged and there is no oxygen for them to breathe.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

LA Times reveals 2020 CA Wildfire CO2 Wiped Out 18 Years of the State’s Emissions Reductions

by L. Hamlin, Oct 22, 2022 in WUWT

The article notes that “researchers estimated that about 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent were released by the fires, compared with about 65 million metric tons of reductions achieved in the previous 18 years.”

The Times article provided the usual climate alarmist hype that “climate change” is responsible for the California’s increased wildfire damage noting:

“Forests have long played a role in that system, with large trees sequestering carbon and helping to alleviate some emissions. But California’s new breed of climate-change-fueled fires are burning hotter and faster than those of the past, sometimes slowing the regrowth process and even converting some areas from coniferous trees into grasslands, shrubs and chaparral, the researchers said.”

However a 2021 prior WUWT article addressed the fact that year 2020 wildfire emissions likely wiped out the state AB 32 emissions reductions and also addressed in detail the huge state government forest management failures that have contributed to the states wildfire growth and increasing risks over the past decade with these critical failures hidden from view in the Times article.  This prior WUWT article notes:

“California’s climate alarmists claim “climate change” is responsible for this wildfire outcome but an extensive 2018 California Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) report presents clear and compelling evidence demonstrating that decades of forest mismanagement by the state have in fact created the growing wildfire crisis.

The LAO report notes that increased fire risks are present throughout California driven by forest conditions that have been allowed by the state to develop for decades.”

Provided below are some of the highlights (or lowlights) of the state governments forest management failures that have led directly to increased wildfire growth and risks that have nothing to do with “climate change” as addressed in the states LAO analysis and presented in the prior WUWT article.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Willie Soon on the Tom Nelson Podcast

by C. Rotter, Oct 20, 2022 in WUWT

This CO2 stuff is…pure delusion. You cannot find any signature of that.

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Dr. Soon was an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, from 1991-2022. He served as receiving editor for New Astronomy from 2002-2016, astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory from 1992-2009. He is also on the editorial board of Geoscience, an MDPI publication since 2020 as well as serving as Review Editor of Frontiers in Earth Science starting 2022. Dr. Soon has also held the role of visiting professors at various institutions including University of Putra, Malaysia, Institute of Earth Environment of Xian, China and State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science at Xiamen University. Since September 2021, Dr. Soon is also affiliated with Hungary’s Institute of Earth Physics and Space Science.
Dr. Soon earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in science and a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California.

“The whole point of science is to question accepted dogmas. For that reason, I respect Willie Soon as a good scientist and a courageous citizen.’’ — Freeman Dyson in the Boston Globe, November 5, 2013

About Willie Soon: https://www.ceres-science.com/willie-soon
103 of his peer-reviewed papers: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/
“How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate”: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1674-4527/21/6/131
CERES news: https://www.ceres-science.com/news
Please help support independent science by donating to CERES-science.com:
https://www.ceres-science.com/support-us
——
Tom Nelson’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/tan123
Substack: https://tomn.substack.com/
About Tom: https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2022/03/about-me-tom-nelson.html
Notes for climate skeptics:
https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2019/06/useful-notes-for-climate-skeptics.html

better to know...?, climate-debate

Everything you need to know about COP

by Global Witness, Oct 11, 2022 in Blog

COP stands for ‘Conference of the Parties’, which is a generic phrase in International Relations-speak meaning a committee created after an international treaty is signed, tasked with making decisions about how that treaty is implemented.

There are all kinds of COPs for various international agreements, from chemical weapons to combating desertification. But the term COP has come to be associated with the meetings of one particular committee: that created after the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

 

154 countries signed the UNFCCC in June 1992, agreeing to combat harmful human impacts on the climate. Since then, COP meetings have been held (almost) annually to discuss how exactly that should be achieved, and monitor what progress has been made. Each COP is usually referred to by its number in the series, e.g. COP26 was the 26th COP meeting.

Each year a different country becomes the COP president, in charge of organising and running that year’s meeting. Usually this means that the host city moves each year, too. Any new agreements which are made at COP tend to be named after the host city, e.g. the 2015 Paris Agreement or the 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact.

Who is involved in COP?

 

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Greta Thunberg Fractures German Greens With Her Call To Continue Operation Of Hated Nuclear Power Plants

by P. Gosselin, Oct 16, 2022 in NoTricksZone

German talk show host Sandra Maischberger interviewed climate activist Greta Thunberg in her native Sweden. The interview aired on Wednesday.

Many climate policy critics see Greta Thunberg (19) as a puppet of interest groups who can’t possibly have any motivation of her own due to her young age and lack of education. It is noticeable, however, that she occasionally makes recommendations that can generate downright hatred, especially in Germany, among Green and Fridays for Future circles.

In 2019, Greta already classified nuclear power as a “small part of a big new carbon-free energy solution” – even citing publications from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

She was harshly criticized for this and avoided the topic for three years. Since the Greens began in the mid-1970s as scattered citizens’ initiatives against nuclear power plants – which only later also turned to various aspects of nature conservation – energy generation from nuclear fission has become considered as a high-risk technology, and not only in left-wing educated bourgeois circles.

The fact that the civilian use of nuclear power has resulted in far fewer deaths and injuries than, for example, modern traffic or conventional power generation, is often overlooked or deliberately not communicated. The factual situation therefore no longer plays a role here, but only its political usability.

Nevertheless, Thunberg has ventured forth once again with the topic of nuclear power – albeit cautiously – and compares it to coal power, which is also maligned. In words: “If they [the German nuclear plants] are already running, I think it would be a mistake to shut them down and turn to coal.”

In FfF circles, this can already be called courageous because Greta’s popularity is especially large in the rich and populous German-speaking countries where a green-loaded media landscape made Thunberg’s idol figure possible in the first place. Next to Stockholm, Berlin is her main field of activity and here she is always received effusively and with much attention.

From the point of view of the inclined EIKE reader, the above quote is of course at best  pragmatic over the short-term, yet it does not show an attitude favorable to a sustainable economic and social welfare development. However, since Brussels redefined nuclear power as a “green” technology months ago, it can be assumed that increasingly parts of the FfF movement are also losing interest in the German government’s misguided energy policy. Perhaps in the near future Greta will already recommend the inherently safe new breeder and DFR reactor types, which already theoretically can no longer be called risky.

The fact that Greta got anointed as an expert without any objective reason is now being questioned from the point of view of nuclear power despisers.

Some in Berlin are trying to denigrate her view. The taz points to approval of Greta’s remark by the CDU conservatives and the FDP free democrats. In addition, lobbyists such as the brother of Eckart von Hirschhausen or Armin Simon are quoted:

“Greta Thunberg is mistaken when she implies that nuclear power plants could help in dealing with the current gas crisis.” (Simon)

“Nuclear power cannot be an instrument of climate policy”, (Hirschhausen, Scientists for Future).

Completely wrong – the more nuclear power plants are on the grid, the more electricity there is, and the cheaper the energy is, which is old familiar market logic. And if there is more electric power, less gas has to be burned to generate it, which benefits the bankruptcy-threatened metal and food industries. Hirschhausen is an economist and thus, in contrast to Greta, an expert. How can it be that the activist without a degree knows more about economics than the economics professor?