Archives par mot-clé : Fun?/Discussion

better to know...?, climate-debate

In The Climate Debate, It’s Either Fake News, Biased News, Or No News

by Ed Walbroehl, Nov 27, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Take your pick. The Mainstream Media (MSM) are using all three to stifle debate on climate change just like the current presidential election. What has happened to the American news media in this country?

I can remember a time when the MSM would do a story and would give you both sides of the issue and let the viewer decide what to think.

It’s amazing to see a business so willing to undermine its own credibility to push a certain narrative thinking everybody is stupid and will buy whatever they say.

In the case of the climate change issue, they even went as far as announcing no more so-called climate skeptics would be invited on their shows to give other opinions as is the case with NBC’s Meet the Press for example.

So much for a fair and balanced debate. Oh! I forgot. According to them, the science is settled. By who? That phrase the science is settled is the first clue that tells you a scientist is probably not a real scientist.

Real scientists know that new methods, learning, tools, ideas, and experiments will come about that will change our current knowledge and understanding of many scientific issues.

The MSM are even willing to lose viewers by lying to them. Look how foolish they looked when all this Russian collusion with the president turned out. Many viewers left after they found out they were being lied to.

Look what’s happening now as people start checking the facts on their own about climate change. They’re seeing that they are being lied to once again.

It’s probably why in many polls, the American people rank climate change near the bottom of what worries us, and why trust in the media is so low.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

SKEPTICISM RISING – 150+ scientists including 60 Nobel Prize winners doubt that ‘climate change is caused by humans.

by J.G. Matkin, Nov 28, 2020 in AcademiaEdu

Surveys of public opinion show that a significant minority of the population are sceptical about climate change, and many suggest that doubt is increasing. The Internet, in particular the blogosphere, provides a vast and relatively untapped resource of data on the thinking of climate sceptics. This  paper focuses on one particular example where over 150 climate sceptics  provide information on their background, opinion on climate change and reasons for their scepticism. Although this data cannot be regarded as representative of the general public, it provides a useful insight into the reasoning of those who publicly question climate science on the web. Points of note include the high level of educational background, the significant numbers who appear to have been converted from a position of climate concern to one of scepticism, and the influence of blogs on both sides of the climate debate.
 
https://www.academia.edu/12247717/Why_are_people_sceptical_about_climate_change 
 The main concern of this group of sceptics is with the quality of the science, focusing on issues such as statistics, data handling and reliance on models, with the hockey stick picture acting as the icon for the dispute.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/… It is behind a paywall but there is a preprint version here: https://ipccreport.files.wordpre… The paper is based on comments that 150 skeptics wrote on a blog thread asking them about their background. Reasons include:
 
Hyped, exaggerated claims in the media
 Previous experience of scare stories that have failed to materialize
Political activism
Climategate
Shoddy science Full detail of survey results below :
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better to know...?, climate-debate

Carbon dioxide levels continue at record levels, despite COVID-19 lockdown

by WMO, Nov 23, 20°20

 

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2020 Trends

The Global Carbon Project estimated that during the most intense period of the shutdown, daily CO2 emissions may have been reduced by up to 17% globally due to the confinement of the population. As the duration and severity of confinement measures remain unclear, the prediction of the total annual emission reduction over 2020 is very uncertain.

 

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unclassified

Browse: Home / 2020 / November / 20 / “Sinking” Maldives Clear Forests, Pave Beaches, To Construct Four New Airports For Future Tourism! “Sinking” Maldives Clear Forests, Pave Beaches, To Construct Four New Airports For Future Tourism!

by P. Gosselin, Nov 20, 2020 in NoTricksZone

Despite all the money-generating gloomy predictions of sinking islands, we reported in 2013 on how the Maldives was planning to build 30 new luxury hotels for future tourists.

The resort island of Landaa Giraavaru (Baa atoll), photo by: Frédéric Ducarme – CC BY-SA 4.0.

Underwater in 7 years?

We recall how in 2012, the former President of the Maldives Islands, Mohamed, Nasheed said: “If carbon emissions continue at the rate they are climbing today, my country will be underwater in seven years.”

4 new airports!

Well, today the islands have not gone underwater and remains popular with tourists like never before. And to help with the job of ferrying the 1.7 million (2019) tourists to and from the resort islands, the Maldives have recently opened 4 new airports, according to German site Aero here!

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better to know...?, climate-debate

“We do not deny climate change”: Rupert Murdoch Responds to Accusations

by E. Worall, Nov 20, 2020 in WUWT

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Tolerating diversity of opinion, in the form of providing wildly popular Murdoch Media personalities like Andrew Bolt a platform, does not mean Murdoch agrees with everything those personalities say.

But I guess old fashioned ideas like news managers giving their best journalists editorial freedom are no longer encouraged, at least when it comes to climate change.

Greens can be unforgiving of minor deviations from their dogma, even from people who helped found their movement.

Retired NASA scientist James Hansen, whose 1988 testimony pretty much kick started the climate movement, was accused of being a “denier” in 2015, because he does not think renewables alone will be enough to curb global CO2 emissions.

It is difficult to imagine someone being more alarmist than James Hansen; Hansen thinks the oceans will literally begin to boil if we don’t rapidly curb CO2 emissions. But Hansen still faced accusations of being a “denier”, because he thinks nuclear power should be an important part of the solution to climate change.

climate-debate

Modern Climate Change Science

by A. May, Nov 12, 2020 in WUWT

The first modern theoretical estimates of ECS were reported in 1979 in the so-called “Charney Report” (Charney, et al., 1979). They reported, on page 2, a theoretical ECS of 1.5°C to 4.5°C per doubling of the CO2 atmospheric concentration. This estimate included an estimate of water vapor feedbacks, the effect of ice and their assumed uncertainties. Absent any water vapor feedback their computed value was 1°C per doubling of CO2. They also supply a likely value of 2.4°C on page 9, although on page 2 they offer a value “near 3.0.” The page 9 value is not far off from the empirical estimate of 2°C made by Guy Callendar in 1938, but significantly higher than the 1.2°C to 1.95°C (17% to 83% range, best estimate 1.5°C) given by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry (Lewis & Curry, 2018).

The IPCC, in their AR5 report (Bindoff & Stott, 2013), estimate ECS as lying between 1.5°C and 4.5°C and provide no best estimate. This range is precisely the same as the Charney Report made 34 years earlier. While the empirical, observation-based, estimates have narrowed significantly, the theoretical range has not changed, despite thousands of government-funded scientists spending billions of dollars trying to do so. The data is very much the same today and churning it faster with more powerful computers and billions of dollars doesn’t seem to matter. It works the same way with manure.

Digging deeply into the AR5 internals, as Monckton, et al. did in MSLB15, a paper entitled, “Why Models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model” (Monckton, Soon, Legates, & Briggs, 2015), we see that the elements of the AR5 theoretical calculations suggest that the range is narrowing in a downward direction. Given the political environment at the IPCC, one can easily suspect that the politicians do not want to admit the theoretical risks of CO2-caused climate change are lessening. As more empirical estimates of the CO2 effect appear and more theoretical work is done, one wonders how long the politicians can support the clearly inflated range of 1.5°C to 4.5°C?

Estimates of ECS have been declining for a long time, as shown in 2017 by Nicola Scafetta and colleagues. Figure 1 is from their paper:

The decline in estimates of ECS from 2000 to 2015. Source: Scafetta, Mirandola, and Bianchini, 2017.
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climate-debate

North Atlantic Cycle Change? Northern Europe October Temperature Trends Suggest Autumn Coming Sooner

by P. Gosselin, Nov 11, 2020 in NoTricksZone

Today we look at October mean temperatures for the emerald island country of Ireland, the Scandinavian country of Sweden and Finland.

Global warming alarmists claim that the globe is warming, which intuitively would tell us summers should be getting longer, which in turn would mean the start of fall is getting pushed back. In such a case, September and October temperatures should be warming, but they are not!

Cooling Ireland

First we plot the mean temperature for 7 stations in Ireland for the month of October, for which the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has sufficient data going back 25 years:

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Data source: JMA

Seven of 7 stations in Ireland have seen a strong cooling trend for October since 1995.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Fake Invisible Catastrophes & Threats of Doom

by P. Moore, Sept 24, 2020 in Gofundme

I am a co-founder Of Greenpeace in 1971-1986. I left because they became a fundraising racket using sensationalism, misinformation and fear. I became a sensible environmentalist and have spent 36 years promoting the balance of environmental, social and economic priorities. I am writing a new book based on the fact that most of the scare stories today are based on things that are invisible or remote or both. Therefore the public must rely on activists, media, politicians, and scientists, all who have a huge financial and/or political stake in the “narrative” they are pushing. This includes climate, tree, coral reefs, polar bears, GMOs, extinction, etc.
The book is based on this essay:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u9dd56qo16naqcy/Fake%20Invisible%20Catastrophes%20and%20Threats%20of%20Doom%20%28Essay%29.docx?dl=0

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climate-debate

New Study Effectively Eliminates Confidence In Human Attribution For Modern Global Warming

by K. Richard, Nov 5, 2020 in NoTricksZone

The forcing uncertainties and lack of observational measurements in the top-to-bottom global ocean preclude an assessment that modern warmth is due to anthropogenic activities.

Key points from a new paper (Gebbie, 2021):

• 93% of the changes to the Earth’s energy budget, manifested as warming of the Earth system, are expressed in the global ocean. Just 1% of global warming is atmospheric.

• Even with the advent of “quasi-global” temperature sampling of the ocean since 2005 (ARGO), these floats “do not measure below 2,000-m depth.” This means that temperature changes in “approximately half the ocean’s volume” are still not being measured today.

• To detect the effects of anthropogenic forcing, it would require energy budget imbalance measurement precision of 0.1 W/m² at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). Uncertainty in the forcing changes affecting climate are ±4 W/m², meaning that uncertainty is about 80 times greater than an anthropogenic signal detection.

• Past changes in global ocean heat content, such as the last deglaciation, have been 20 times larger than modern changes.

• Ocean heat storage during the Medieval Warm Period (Medieval Climate Anomaly, or MCA) was much greater than modern. Modern global ocean heat uptake is “just one-third” of what is required to reach the levels attained during Medieval times.

climate-debate

Study suggests no more CO2 warming

by C. Rotter, Oct 26, 2020 in WUWT

By David Wojick |October 26th, 2020|Climate

Precision research by physicists William Happer and William van Wijngaarden has determined that the present levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor are almost completely saturated. In radiation physics the technical term “saturated” implies that adding more molecules will not cause more warming.

In plain language this means that from now on our emissions from burning fossil fuels could have little or no further impact on global warming. There would be no climate emergency.  No threat at all. We could emit as much CO2 as we like; with no effect.

This astounding finding resolves a huge uncertainty that has plagued climate science for over a century. How should saturation be measured and what is its extent with regard to the primary greenhouse gases?

In radiation physics the term “saturation” is nothing like the simple thing we call saturation in ordinary language, just as the greenhouse effect is nothing like how greenhouses work. Your paper towel is saturated when it won’t pick up any more spilled milk. In contrast greenhouse gases are saturated when there is no more milk left to pick up, as it were, but it is far more complex than this simple analogy suggests.

Happer is probably best known to our readers as a leading skeptical scientist. He co-founded the prestigious CO2 Coalition and recently served on the staff of the National Security Council, advising President Trump. But his career has been as a world class radiation physicist at Princeton. His numerous peer reviewed journal articles have collectively garnered over 12,000 citations by other researchers.

In this study Professors Happer and van Wijngaarden (H&W) have worked through the saturation physics in painstaking detail. Their preprint is titled “Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases“. They have gone far beyond the work done to date on this complex problem.

To begin with, while the standard studies treat the absorption of radiation by greenhouse molecules using crude absorption bands of radiation energy, H&W analyze the millions of distinct energies, called spectral lines, which make up these bands. This line by line approach has been an emerging field of analysis, often giving dramatically new results.

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Clearly this is work that the climate science community needs to carefully consider. This may not be easy given that three major physics journals have refused to publish it. The reviews have been defensive and antagonistic, neither thoughtful nor helpful. Alarmism is in control of the journals, censoring contrary findings, hence the preprint version.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Roger Revelle – the backstory of the father of Atmospheric CO2 monitoring

by A. May, Oct 321, 2020 in WUWT

Roger Revelle was an outstanding and famous oceanographer. He met Al Gore, in the late 1960s, when Gore was a student in one of his classes at Harvard University. Revelle was unsure about the eventual impact of human carbon dioxide emissions on climate, but he did show that all carbon dioxide emitted by man would not be absorbed by the oceans. For an interesting discussion of Revelle’s work in this area see this post on “The Discovery of Global Warming,” by Spencer Weart (Weart, 2007). The original paper, on CO2 absorption by the oceans, published in 1957 by Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, is entitled: “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2, during the Past Decades” (Revelle & Suess, 1957). This meant that human emissions of carbon dioxide would accumulate in the atmosphere and that the CO2 atmospheric concentration would increase, probably causing Earth’s surface to warm at some unknown rate. This is not an alarming conclusion, as Revelle well knew, but Al Gore turned it into one.

One of Revelle’s good friends was Dr. S. Fred Singer. Singer was a professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia and both Revelle and Singer had been science advisors in the U.S. Department of the Interior. They first met in 1957 and were more than professional colleagues, they were personal friends (Singer, 2003). Unfortunately, Revelle passed away in July 1991 and Singer passed away in April 2020, so we will refer to them and their friendship in the past tense. Both were leading Earth scientists and at the top of their fields, it was natural they would become friends. They also shared an interest in climate change and chose to write an article together near the end of Revelle’s life.

 

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Indeed, ten years later, CO2 emissions were still increasing, but the world had started to cool as shown in Figure 1. This casts considerable doubt on the idea that human emissions somehow control global warming, since some other factor, presumably natural, is strong enough to reverse the overall warming trend for ten years. Revelle was correct to encourage the government to wait for ten more years. Just a year before their paper was published the IPCC reported that warming to date fell within the range of “natural variability” and that the detection of a human influence on climate was “not likely for a decade or more.” (IPCC, 1990, p. XII).

Figure 1. In 1990 and 1991, respectively, the IPCC and Roger Revelle and colleagues said it was too early to do anything about possible man-made climate change, they thought we would know more in 10 years. The plot is smoothed with a 5-year running average to reduce the effect of El Nino and La Nina events. This makes the longer term trends easier to see.

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energy and fields

The West Intends Energy Suicide: Will It Succeed?

by T. Doshi, Oct 10, 2020 in Forbes

Suicide is viewed as a crime in many countries. In a court of law, it is a serious charge and the evidence needs to be conclusive for such an accusation to stand (e.g., did you actually see him attempt to jump off the bridge?). But when societies (or at least their leaders) attempt it, one can say that it safely falls under the rubric of the sovereign right to misrule. In the hallowed tradition of Western liberal democracy, so long as its political leaders are elected in free and fair elections, misrule leading to societal death by suicide is merely an unfortunate outcome of either gross negligence or culpable intention led by, say, an ideology of de-industrialization. Nevertheless, let us proceed with the case for the prosecution.

The Circumstantial Evidence Of Societal Suicide

The first piece of evidence is an astonishing article published last week in the Boston Review by a professor of anthropology in Rutgers University . The good professor opined that Zimbabwe and Puerto Rico “provide models for what we might call ‘pause-full’ electricity”. The West, he continues, has created a vast infrastructure for generating and consuming electricity 24/7, 365 days a year. Since this is based on “planet-destroying fossil fuels and nuclear power”, we need to emulate the aforementioned poor countries and save the climate by giving up the demand for the constant supply of electricity.

To be fair, the professor also noted that the Zimbabweans and Puerto Ricans did not choose to accept electricity rationing but were imposed upon by the gross negligence and corruption of their governments. The professor cannot be lightly dismissed, and the Boston Review shares its domicile with MIT and Harvard University, the temples of wisdom in modern Western civilization. And the Review has its share of kudos, at least for those of a particular persuasion: “When it comes to publishing fresh and generative ideas, Boston Review has no peer” says Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles and Naomi Klein, activist and New York Times NYT-0.5% best-selling author, opines that “Boston Review is so good right now.”

Let us move on to our second piece of evidence, this time from the other side of the “climate emergency” aisle.  Professor Fritz Vahrenholt is a giant among environmental circles in Germany. (The country is well known as the world’s leading champion for all things environmental and for pushing Europe to “net zero emissions by 2050”.) Prof. Vahrenholt holds a doctorate in chemistry and started his professional career at the Federal Environmental Agency in Berlin (responsible for the chemical industry) before joining the Hessian Ministry of the Environment. From 1984 until 1990 he served as state secretary for environment, from 1991 till 1997 as minister for energy and environment in the state of Hamburg.

One day before the publication of the Boston Review article on October 5th, Prof Vahrenholt stated baldly in a German TV interview that climate science was “politicized”, “exaggerated”, and filled with “fantasy” and “fairy tales”. He pronounced that “The [Paris] Accord is already dead. Putin says it’s nonsense. […] The Americans are out. The Chinese don’t have to do anything. It’s all concentrated on a handful of European countries. The European Commission in massively on it. And I predict that they will reach the targets only if they destroy the European industries.” He lambasted Germany as a country “in denial when it comes to the broader global debate taking place on climate science”. He went on to characterize Europe’s recent push for even stricter emissions reduction targets to madness akin to Soviet central planning that is doomed to fail spectacularly.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Les chercheurs prenant le plus l’avion sont… les experts du climat

by Le Point, Oct 29,  2020

Selon une étude britannique, les climatologues voyagent en moyenne davantage en avion que les scientifiques spécialisés dans d’autres domaines.

Les arroseurs arrosés. Les climatologues alertent régulièrement et, à raison, sur les effets sur le climat des déplacements en avion, fortement émetteurs de gaz à effet de serre. Mais une étude publiée en ce mois d’octobre dans la revue Global Environmental Change vient mettre le doigt sur certains de leurs comportements. Selon cette étude britannique coordonnée par l’université de Cardiff, et relayée par Nature et Courrier International, les experts en réchauffement climatique sont les scientifiques qui voyagent le plus souvent en avion, en comparaison avec leurs collègues d’autres disciplines. Au total, plus de 1 400 chercheurs, provenant de 59 pays différents et de domaines scientifiques divers, ont été interrogés.

En moyenne, les experts du climat, qui représentaient environ 17 % des personnes sollicitées, prennent l’avion à raison de cinq fois par an. En comparaison, les chercheurs spécialisés dans d’autres disciplines disent effectuer quatre trajets par an en avion. Les vols effectués par les climatologues sont davantage domestiques qu’internationaux. Toutefois, ils avancent souvent des raisons professionnelles pour ces trajets, ce qui n’est pas forcément le cas de leurs autres collègues scientifiques. Les professeurs spécialisés dans le dérèglement climatique voyagent en avion environ neuf fois par an en moyenne, contre huit fois pour leurs collègues d’autres spécialités.

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climate and geology, climate-debate

“Where’s the sea ice?” Right where it’s been for most of the Holocene.

by D. Middleton, Oct 30, 2020 in WUWT

This is sort of a sequel yesterday’s post: Where’s the sea ice? 3 reasons the Arctic freeze is unseasonably late and why it matters.

What a difference a day can make! Looks like it’s starting to crust over:

Figure 0. Daily sea ice extent map, October 29, 2020. (NSIDC)

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Two key takeaways:

  1. Maximum Holocene sea ice extent occurred within the past 500-1,000 years at every location.
  2. The current sea ice extent is higher at all of the locations than over 50% to 85% of the Holocene.

While this doesn’t tell us what the sea ice extent was in million km2, it does tell us that the modern sea ice extent is larger than it was over most of the Holocene Epoch. It also tells us that the areas of currently seasonal sea ice extent have been seasonal or reduced over most of the past 5,000 years and ice-free or nearly ice-free over the prior 3,000 years or so. Here’s is the Kinnard graph plotted at the same horizontal scale as the Stein cross section:

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climate-debate

Guardian Needlessly Alarmed By Late Freeze

by P. Homewood, Oct 27, 2020 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

For the first time since records began, the main nursery of Arctic sea ice in Siberia has yet to start freezing in late October.

The delayed annual freeze in the Laptev Sea has been caused by freakishly protracted warmth in northern Russia and the intrusion of Atlantic waters, say climate scientists who warn of possible knock-on effects across the polar region.

Ocean temperatures in the area recently climbed to more than 5C above average, following a record breaking heatwave and the unusually early decline of last winter’s sea ice.

The trapped heat takes a long time to dissipate into the atmosphere, even at this time of the year when the sun creeps above the horizon for little more than an hour or two each day.

Graphs of sea-ice extent in the Laptev Sea, which usually show a healthy seasonal pulse, appear to have flat-lined. As a result, there is a record amount of open sea in the Arctic.

“The lack of freeze-up so far this fall is unprecedented in the Siberian Arctic region,” said Zachary Labe, a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University. He says this is in line with the expected impact of human-driven climate change.

“2020 is another year that is consistent with a rapidly changing Arctic. Without a systematic reduction in greenhouse gases, the likelihood of our first ‘ice-free’ summer will continue to increase by the mid-21st century,’ he wrote in an email to the Guardian.

The warmer air temperature is not the only factor slowing the formation of ice. Climate change is also pushing more balmy Atlantic currents into the Arctic and breaking up the usual stratification between warm deep waters and the cool surface. This also makes it difficult for ice to form.

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climate-debate

Science and politics

by Judith Curry, Oct 26, 2020 in WUWT

“I’m reaching out to scientists this week about the election. How do you feel about it? Which of the candidates has the best plan, for you, in science and technology?”

The above question was emailed to me today by a reporter.

My response:

I am not happy with either the Democratic or Republican plans for science in the U.S.  Both sides seem to want to use and misuse science as a club to further their political agendas.  The Republicans seem to prefer to ignore science, while the Democrats cherry pick science to further their political agendas.

Here is the long response,some text from something that I’m working on:

Dutch regulatory lawyer Lucas Bergkamp summarizes the challenge in this way. Science has become an instrument used by politicians and agencies to arm themselves with powerful arguments in complex value-laden debates. Scientists have let the politicians hijack the scientific enterprise. Both policy makers and scientists exploit scientific uncertainty to avoid debate on the relation between science and politics, facts and values. Armed with science, politicians are able to avoid accountability for decisions. Serious debate is avoided because politicized science has purged doubt and skepticism. Activist climate science makes use of a series of strategies and tactics to influence public opinion and politics. Bergkamp concludes that climate science itself has come under siege.

Scientization of policy is a response to intractable political conflicts that transforms the political issues into scientific ones. The rationale for scientization is the belief that science can act as a neutral arbiter of policy — if we could only determine the facts of a matter, the appropriate course of action would become clear. The problem is that science is neither neutral nor capable of answering political questions. The answers that science gives depend on what questions are asked, which inevitably involves value judgments. Science is not designed to answer questions about how the world ought to be, which is the work of politics.

Policy makers are culpable in the misuse of science for policy making by:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Creepy Climate Conversations

by Donna Laframboise, Oct 21, 2020 in BigPicturesNews

Tony Thomas has a disturbing piece over at Quandrant.org, concerning an Australian organization allegedly run by child activists. It’s now urging kids to initiate creepy conversations with adults as a means of spreading climate propaganda.

Matters may not develop as expected, though. Because any adult who was around for the global cooling scare, who was told acid rain would wipe out the worlds forests, and that the hole in the ozone layer would induce widespread skin cancer has, in fact, heard it all before.

It’s interesting that the SchoolStrike4Climate.com website can’t stay on topic. Its front page tells us Australia was stolen from First Nation communities, and that “there can be no climate justice without first nations justice.” If you click the large button labelled: Black Lives Matter Resources, you’re taken to a 7-page Google document that similarly declares: “There is no climate justice without racial justice…”

These statements, call to mind 17-year-old Greta Thunberg’s assertion that “We can not have climate justice without gender equity.”

Climate justice. First Nations justice. Racial justice. Gender equity. What does this collection of causes tell us? That these young people aren’t rebels at all. Nor are they independent thinkers.

Rather than being sincere and passionate about a single issue they themselves have carefully investigated, these youngsters are merely hopping aboard the bandwagon known as fashionable left wing politics.

If you truly believed your future was imperiled, wouldn’t you keep on topic? Wouldn’t your anxiety focus your attention? Wouldn’t you pursue a single, realistic, achievable goal?

Instead, these high school students are being encouraged to believe that, by skipping school, they’ll convince the rest of us to do their bidding – not just about the climate, but with respect to other complicated, longstanding social issues. Everything will be transformed. Fixed to their satisfaction. All at the same time, no less.

Only a naive young person could imagine this to be remotely possible.

 

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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climate-debate, renewable energy

Study: Renewable Energy does Nothing to Reduce CO2 Emissions

by E. Worall, Oct 14, 2020 in WUWT

h/t Dr. Willie Soon / James Delingpole / Breitbart; A group of high profile scientists, including Dr. Willie Soon, have published a meticulously referenced study which discuses the pros and cons of various CO2 reduction strategies.

 

The abstract of the study:

Energy and Climate Policy—An Evaluation of Global Climate Change Expenditure 2011–2018 

by Coilín ÓhAiseadha 1,*, Gerré Quinn 2, Ronan Connolly 3,4, Michael Connolly 3 and Willie Soon 4

1 Department of Public Health, Health Service Executive, Dr Steevens’ Hospital, D08 W2A8 Dublin 8, Ireland
2 Centre for Molecular Biosciences, Ulster University, Coleraine BT521SA, Northern Ireland, UK
3 Independent Scientists, Dublin 8, Ireland
4 Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES), Salem, MA 01970, USA*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Concern for climate change is one of the drivers of new, transitional energy policies oriented towards economic growth and energy security, along with reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and preservation of biodiversity. Since 2010, the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) has been publishing annual Global Landscape of Climate Finance reports. According to these reports, US$3660 billion has been spent on global climate change projects over the period 2011–2018. Fifty-five percent of this expenditure has gone to wind and solar energy. According to world energy reports, the contribution of wind and solar to world energy consumption has increased from 0.5% to 3% over this period. Meanwhile, coal, oil, and gas continue to supply 85% of the world’s energy consumption, with hydroelectricity and nuclear providing most of the remainder. With this in mind, we consider the potential engineering challenges and environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the main energy sources (old and new). We find that the literature raises many concerns about the engineering feasibility as well as environmental impacts of wind and solar. However, none of the current or proposed energy sources is a “panacea”. Rather, each technology has pros and cons, and policy-makers should be aware of the cons as well as the pros when making energy policy decisions. We urge policy-makers to identify which priorities are most important to them, and which priorities they are prepared to compromise on.

Read more: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/18/4839/htm

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climate-debate

The “Warmest September Ever” Is A Myth… Cooler Times Likely Ahead As NASA Foresees Strong La Nina…

by P. Gosselin, Oct 9, 2020 in NoTricksZone

Our friend “SnowFan” here looks at the claims that September 2020 was the warmest ever recorded. It turns out that other measurement advanced satellites don’t agree.

According to the much ballyhooed data, temperatures in Europe in September this year were on average 0.2 degrees Celsius higher than in the previous record September 2018. The service providing the data is part of the European earth observation program Copernicus.

But the satellite data from the UAH and RSS both agree that this is not really the case!

 

Above the global satellite data from UAH (left) and from RSS (right) in the tables clearly clearly show the monthly deviations from the WMO mean 1981-2010 (UAH) and from the climate mean 1979-1998 (RSS): September 2020 was not the warmest since satellite measurements began in 1979. At UAH, September 2019 was slightly warmer while at RSS even September 2017 was warmer.

Strong La Nina may be in the works

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energy and fields

Pic de la demande de pétrole : mythe ou réalité ?

by M. Cordiez, 9 Oct 2020 in ConnaissancedesEnergies

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Et si on considérait le problème dans l’autre sens ?

Historiquement, le succès des compagnies pétrolières était jugé à leur capacité à renouveler, voire accroître, leurs réserves par des découvertes. Avec le temps et l’épuisement des ressources aisément accessibles, cet exercice est devenu de plus en plus complexe pour les majors privées (BP, Total, ENI…). L’essentiel des réserves conventionnelles sont aujourd’hui détenues par des compagnies nationales (Saudi Aramco, National Iranian Oil Company, Iraq National Oil Company…). Quant aux pétroles non conventionnels, il s’agit de ressources chères à exploiter, non rentables au cours actuel du baril, et sur lesquelles un positionnement reste de l’ordre du pari. Des sommes colossales ont été perdues par les fonds et entreprises qui ont investi dans le pétrole de roche mère aux États-Unis(6).

Les discours sur l’arrivée opportune d’un pic de la demande ne seraient-ils donc pas également un moyen pour les compagnies pétrolières d’offrir une narration positive face à leur incapacité à renouveler leurs réserves ? La conséquence de cette contrainte est alors présentée comme le fruit d’une stratégie : il n’est plus besoin de renouveler les réserves, vu que la demande va diminuer. Cette approche est en outre favorable en termes de communication car elle renvoie l’image de compagnies responsables vis-à-vis du climat, tout en portant un message optimiste : les émissions de gaz à effet de serre baisseront naturellement sans effort particulier, du fait d’une demande pétrolière qui diminuera d’elle-même.

Hors pandémie de Covid, nous devons garder à l’esprit que la consommation pétrolière – donc la demande – était croissante jusqu’en 2019 inclus. Elle a augmenté de 924 000 barils/jour entre 2018 et 2019, soit une augmentation de 0,9%(7). L’idée d’un pic de la demande est séduisante et rassurante, mais elle reste aujourd’hui une hypothèse prospective. D’ailleurs, plusieurs entreprises pétrolières telles que l’Américaine ConocoPhilips et la Russe Gazprom Neft prévoient une reprise de la croissance de la demande une fois la pandémie maîtrisée(8). Nous ne pouvons pas miser notre avenir sur le pari d’un déclin naturel de la demande de pétrole, qui serait poussé à temps vers la sortie par des solutions plus compétitives et déployables à large échelle.

Face aux incertitudes qui planent sur la pérennité de l’offre(9)(10) et à la nécessité impérieuse de réduire nos émissions de gaz à effet de serre pour atteindre la neutralité carbone, nous devons agir et tout mettre en œuvre pour assurer le déclin de la demande pétrolière. Répondre à cet enjeu nécessite d’aller au-delà de nos seules espérances quant au potentiel des technologies futures. Cela implique de faire évoluer notre rapport à l’énergie et à ses usages.

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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renewable energy

UK ‘will take 700 years’ to reach low-carbon heating under current plans

by F. Harvey, Oct 8,2020 in TheGuardian

Ministers must come forward with stringent new plans for low-carbon heating, as targets to insulate homes and generate more power from offshore wind are inadequate and sales of gas boilers showed a record rise last year, energy experts warned.

At current rates, it will take 700 years for the UK to move to low-carbon heating, and at least 19,000 homes a week must be upgraded between now and 2050. There was a record rise last year of 1.8% in the number of new gas boilers installed, showing that the UK is going in the wrong direction.

Government plans will see only about 12,500 homes in total installed with low-carbon heat pumps, according to a report from the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC).

“We must move away from this situation where the government is sitting on its hands,” said Robert Gross, director of UKERC and co-author of the report.

No new homes should be built with gas boilers, the experts said. The government’s pledge to build millions of new homes does not specify that they must be built with low-carbon heating.

The prime minister pledged this week that offshore wind would power and heat every home by 2030, with 40GW of turbines. But those plans are geared towards existing levels of electricity usage, UKERC experts pointed out. Demand for electricity is set to double as drivers switch to electric cars and as we cease to heat our homes with fossil fuels. According to one estimate, heating the UK’s homes alone would require 67GW of offshore wind power.

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According to one estimate, heating the UK’s homes alone would require 67GW of offshore wind power.Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

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