by Michael Kruger, April 21, 2018 in P Gosselin NoTricksZone
Michael Kruger at German skeptic site Science Skeptical here writes about how solar energy indutry in Germany has disintegrated spectacularly.
What follows are 4 charts that show us some shocking trends, and how in reality the German solar industry has seen a bloodbath that can be rated as one of the worst in a long time. The reality is that Germany’s green revolution is far from being a model for the world.
by Anthony Watts, April 22, 2018 in WUWT
In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 48th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 18 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey.
Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started
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by University of Warwick, April 21, 2018 in ScienceDaily
The famous Oxford Dodo died after being shot in the back of the head, according to new research. Using revolutionary forensic scanning technology and world-class expertise, researchers have discovered surprising evidence that the Oxford Dodo was shot in the neck and back of the head with a shotgun.
The significant and unexpected findings, made by Professor Paul Smith, director of the Museum of Natural History, and Professor Mark Williams from WMG at the University of Warwick, only became apparent when mysterious particles were found in the specimen during scans carried out to help analyse its anatomy.
by K. Richard, April 19, 2018 in NoTricksZone
The Arctic region was the largest contributor to the positive slope in global temperatures in recent decades.
Consequently, the anomalously rapid warming in the Arctic region (that occurred prior to 2005) has been weighted more heavily in recent adjustments to instrumental temperature data (Cowtan and Way, 2013; Karl et al., 2015) so as to erase the 1998-2015 hiatus and instead produce a warming trend.
Meanwhile, other scientists have been busy determining that only about 50% of the warming and sea ice losses for the Arctic region are anthropogenic, or connected to the rise in CO2 concentrations.
The rest of the warming and ice declines can be attributed to unforced natural variability.
by Tony Heller, April 20, 2018 in TheDeplorableClimSciBlog
The first half of April was third coldest in the past 110 years in the US, and the coldest since 1975. The three warmest first fifteen days of April occurred in 1910, 1930 and 1925, when about 80% of days were over 60 degrees.
by P. Gosselin, April 20, 2018 in NoTricksZone
I’ve been regularly bringing you climate and energy news from Germany, with Kenneth in USA posting on the latest science.
Now NoTricksZone is happy to report we are also working with skeptic Japanese climate blogger Kirye, who runs KiryeNet. This means we’ll also be occasionally presenting skeptic news out of Japan in English.
For example in last Tuesday’s post Kirye delivered the key parts on the Arctic Freezamageddon. Our aim is to provide more of such posts in the future.
Views from other countries like Japan are always extremely useful. There really isn’t any global climate science consensus. It’s fraudulent to claim that there is.
by Geological Society of America and in Geology, April 19,2018 in ScienceDaily
In early 2017 scientists announced the discovery of possible desiccation cracks in Gale Crater, which was filled by lakes 3.5 billion years ago. Now, a new study has confirmed that these features are indeed desiccation cracks, and reveals fresh details about Mars’ ancient climate.
“We are now confident that these are mudcracks,” explains lead author Nathaniel Stein, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Since desiccation mudcracks form only where wet sediment is exposed to air, their position closer to the center of the ancient lake bed rather than the edge also suggests that lake levels rose and fell dramatically over time.
by Energy Voice, April 17, 2018 in GWPF
Chinese shale gas production will almost double between now and 2020, energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie (Woodmac) has predicted.
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by Mark Fife, April 19, 2018 in WUWT
In today’s post I am going to go over how I went about creating a reconstruction of the history of temperature from the GHCN data sets using a variable number of stations reporting each year for the years of 1900 to 2011. Before I go into the details of that reconstruction, let me cover how I went about discarding some alternative methods.
I decided to create a test case for reconstruction methods by picking five random, complete station records. I then deleted a portion of one of those records. I mimicked actual record conditions within the GHCN data so my testing would be realistic. In different trials I deleted all but the last 20 years, all but the first 20 years or some number of years in the middle. I tried normalizing each station to its own average and averaging the anomalies. I tried averaging the four complete stations, then normalizing the fourth station by its average distance from the main average. In all cases when I plotted the reconstruction against the true average the errors were quite large.normalizing the fourth station by its average distance from the main average. In all cases when I plotted the reconstruction against the true average the errors were quite large.
by Garth Paltridge, April 18, 2018 in ClimateEtc.
An essay on the state of climate change science.
(1) Is the science of climate change ‘settled’?
The scientific uncertainties associated with climate prediction are the basis of most of the arguments about the significance of climate change(25), and as well are the basis of much of the polarized public opinion on the political aspects of the matter. Perhaps the most fundamental of the uncertainties can be illustrated by reference to a simple ‘thought experiment’ as follows.
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(2), (3), (4)
by Arizona State University, April 17, 2018 in ScienceDaily
About 252 million years ago, more than 90 percent of all animal life on Earth went extinct. This event, called the “Permian-Triassic mass extinction,” represents the greatest catastrophe in the history of life on Earth. Ecosystems took nearly five million years to recover and many aspects of the event remain a mystery.
A research team, led by scientists from Arizona State University and funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, is helping to understand why this extinction event happened and why it took life so long to recover. The study, published in Science Advances, was led by ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration graduate student Feifei Zhang, with direction from school faculty member Ariel Anbar.
by P. Homewood, April 17, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
I was at the Mall last weekend, and came across this local anti fracking group holding some sort of a workshop.
One wonders if they realise where the energy they use every day comes from?
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by Uzbek, 2 avril 2018 in ClimatoRéalistes
La Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) a publié son rapport sur l’état du climat pour 2017. Etabli par Ole Humlum, Professeur émérite à l’Université d’Oslo, ce rapport est un examen complet du climat mondial.
En voici les 10 principales conclusions :
1. Il est probable que 2017 ait été une des années les plus chaudes depuis le début des mesures instrumentales en 1850, moins chaude cependant que 2016.
2. À la fin de l’année 2017, la température moyenne à la surface de la planète avait retrouvé les niveaux antérieurs à l’épisode El Niño. Cela montre que la hausse récente des températures mondiales a été causée principalement par ce phénomène océanographique dans le Pacifique. Cela suggère aussi que le « hiatus » se poursuivra dans les années à venir.
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by Julius Sanks, April 16, 2018 in WUWT
When discussing climate with people who do not have technical backgrounds, I have learned much of the climate discussion is a foreign language to them.
So, I take them through a few examples of how much energy is involved and how miniscule human activity is by comparison. Done properly, this lets a non-STEM person grasp the huge amounts of energy involved.
One of my favorites is Anthony’s essay that debunks the Hiroshima equivalent alarmism:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/23/getting-cooked-by-hiroshima-atomic-bomb-global-warming/
by Antero Ollila, April 16 in WUWT
COP21 does not define the scientific basis of the agreement for the warming effects of the anthropogenic emissions, but it refers to a scenario. This scenario has not been defined in the COP21, but it can be found. The scientific resource of United Nations as well as of the COP21 is IPCC. The exact specification of IPCC is (Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2014. Mitigation of Climate Change”): “Baseline scenarios, those without additional mitigation, result in global mean surface temperature increases in 2100 from 3.7 °C to 4.8 °C compared to pre-industrial levels (range based on median climate response; the range is 2.5 °C to 7.8 °C when including climate uncertainty)”. Even though IPCC refers to multiple scenarios in the text above, the surface temperature increase to the average value of 4.25 ⁰C means one scenario only.
by Sidney Stevens, July 5, 2016 in mother.nature.network
Yes, islands are disappearing — most recently the five Solomon Islands lost to rising sea levels. But don’t despair just yet. For every island that goes the way of the dodo bird, the Earth is busy creating new islands.
Some erupt into being through volcanic activity. Others grow from ocean sandbars. Still others reveal themselves after glaciers retreat. A few are only temporary, while some materialize and erode on a regular basis. However they’re birthed and however long they last, island-building is part of the amazing mystery of our living, breathing planet.
Here are 10 of Mother Nature’s newest islands formed in the past two decades (and one still in the embryonic stage).
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by James E. Kamis, April 16, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Recent changes to Lake Hazen, the world’s largest high-Arctic lake, are from increased heat flow from the area’s known geological features, and not from global warming as per the many alarmist media reports.
Evidence supporting this is abundant and reliable.
Northeast Canada’s Lake Hazen lies adjacent to the world-class Greenland/Iceland mantle plume.
by S. Writers, April 16, 2018 in TerraDaily
A recent study published in an esteemed academic journal indicates that volcanic eruptions in the mid 500s resulted in an unusually gloomy and cold period. A joint research project of the Chronology Laboratory of the Finnish Museum of Natural History and Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) suggests that the years 536 and 541-544 CE were very difficult for many people.
Also here in Nature, University of Helsinki
by Dennis Avery, April 7, 2018 in WUWT
In a recent New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof misleads us about the awful history of Easter Island (2,300 miles west of Chile), whose vegetation disappeared in the cold drought of the Little Ice Age. In doing so, he blinds modern society to the abrupt, icy climate challenge that lies in our own future.
Kristof repeats the archaeological myth that Easter Island’s natives committed “ecological suicide,” by cutting down all their palm trees. They supposedly used the logs as rollers to move their famous huge statues. Afterward, they could no longer build canoes to catch the fish that were their key protein source. Worse, he says, clearing the trees resulted in so much soil erosion that most of the population starved and/or killed each other in famine-driven desperation (…)
by C.J. Wu et al., April 5, 2018 in Astronomy&Astrophysics
The solar activity in the past millennia can only be reconstructed from cosmogenic radionuclide proxy records in terrestrial archives. However, because of the diversity of the proxy archives, it is difficult to build a homogeneous reconstruction. All previous studies were based on individual, sometimes statistically averaged, proxy datasets. Here we aim to provide a new consistent multi- proxy reconstruction of the solar activity over the last 9000 years, using all available long-span datasets of 10Be and 14C in terrestrial archives.
by Judith Curry, April 15, 2018 in Climate.Etc.
Global mean sea level (GMSL) has increased by about 8–9 inches since 1880, with about 3 inches occurring since 1993. As discussed in Part VI, scientists expect that GMSL will continue to rise well beyond the 21st century because of global warming that has already occurred and warming that is yet to occur.
The recent NOAA Report Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States has stated that even the relatively small increases in sea level over the last several decades have been associated greater storm impacts at many places along the U.S. coast. Further, the frequency of intermittent flooding associated with unusually high tides has increased rapidly in response to increases in local sea level, becoming a recurrent and disruptive problem.
by H.. Svensmark, June1 , 2016 in Principia.Sci.International
The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.
If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.
by P. Gosselin, April 14, 2018 in NoTricksZone
The New York Times recently published an article penned by Erica Goode on the controversial Harvey et al paper, where 14 scientists (sophomorically) attacked polar bear researcher Susan Crockford and climate science skeptics.
Sloppy biased journalism
So it is no surprise that Erica Goode at the New York Times sided up with the 14 scientists of the Harvey publication to attack the so-called climate “denialists” in her most recent article. Unfortunately Goode made the fatal journalistic error of failing to keep a healthy distance from the alarmist side and as a result was blinded from seeing the glaring mountain of scientific research showing polar bears are in fact doing fine.
by Dr. Willie Soon, April 14, 2018 in WUWT
Dr. Willie Soon is an independent solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been studying the Sun and its influence on the Earth’s climate for more than a quarter of a century. A short while ago, he had a conversation with Mr. Grégoire Canlorbe, an independent journalist who is also vice president of the French Parti National-Libéral (“National-Liberal Party,” conservative, nationalist, and free-marketist). Here Dr. Soon speaks for himself.
Canlorbe: You say polar bears are far less endangered by global warming than by environmentalists dreading ice melt. Could you expand?
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by Eric Worrall, April 13, 2018 in WUWT
h/t Geoff Sherrington – Coal is being rehabilitated as an essential component of the clean energy future.
Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-12/coal-to-hydrogen-trial-for-latrobe-valley/9643570
Coal to hydrogen is not a new idea, the Water-gas shift reaction was discovered in 1780 by Italian Chemist Felice Fontana.
There are still some kinks to be worked out. The process to generate hydrogen from coal produces a monstrous amount of CO2 – far more CO2 per unit of useful energy than simply burning the coal would produce. But with hydrogen production, unlike hydrocarbon combustion, all the CO2 is produced in one place. This creates an opportunity for carbon sequestration, when technologies to sequester carbon on such an impressive scale are developed.
