Month: March 2024

Daily News 17 Mar 2024

Scientists Don’t Know Why Oceans Have Warmed

By Paul Homewood

The fact that scientists do not know is very telling:

Every day for the last 12 months, the world’s sea surface temperatures have broken records.

Ocean scientists are growing increasingly concerned.

“It’s not just an entire year of record-breaking ocean temperatures, but it’s the margin it’s breaking them by — it’s not even close to what the previous record was,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. “That’s what’s raising the eyebrows of a lot of people.”

Average sea surface temperatures today are roughly 1.25 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they were from 1982-2011, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer. It’s a huge anomaly that could have significant effects on weather and ecosystems.

Human-caused climate change is likely playing a role, researchers said, but is probably not the only factor. Climate models predict a steady rise in sea surface temperatures, but not this quickly, and ocean surface temperatures also fluctuate and can be affected by natural climate variability, including patterns such as El Niño and La Niña.

So scientists don’t yet know precisely why sea surface temperatures have climbed so high.

“I pray we’re having a once-in-a-lifetime year of hot sea surface temperatures, but I do fear there may be something else going on that is causing a long-term change in sea surface temperatures we hadn’t predicted,” said John Abraham, a professor at the University of St. Thomas who studies ocean temperatures. “All bets are off now, this is something that is so unusual, it’s challenging our past expectations.”

If ocean temperatures continue to break records, that could bleach corals, generate more intense and fast-developing hurricanes, drive coastal temperatures up and make extreme precipitation more likely — events scientists already observed in 2023.

Temperatures first soared to record levels in mid-March last year, according to the Climate Reanalyzer, which tracks average measures of sea surface temperature data from across the globe. The data used to measure these trends dates back more than 40 years and comes from networks of monitoring buoys and robotic devices designed to help meteorologists make weather forecasts.

Abraham suspects the main cause of the trend is climate change, with some natural ocean processes that aren’t well understood playing a role, as well.

“It takes a lot of heat to raise water’s temperature,” Abraham said.

McNoldy listed other dynamics that may play a small role, including the weakening of trade winds in the North Atlantic, which has reduced the amount of dust blowing from Africa’s Sahara Desert toward North America. Dust absorbs the sun’s energy over the Atlantic Ocean, so it’s possible that more radiation is being absorbed into the ocean.

“That could be a factor, but I don’t have a good sense of being able to quantify it,” McNoldy said.

Some researchers have also suggested that changes to maritime shipping regulations may have reduced sulfur pollution in ship exhaust, ultimately reducing cloud cover and allowing the oceans to absorb more energy.

“All these little ingredients by themselves don’t explain what we’re seeing, but maybe in a combined sense, they do,” McNoldy said, though he added that he’s skeptical of the theory but can’t rule it out.

Among ocean scientists, he added: “We’re kind of all just observing something strange happening. At some point, someone will come up with an answer, but I haven’t seen that answer yet.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/oceans-record-hot-rcna143179

Remember this when the alarmist community tell us we must quickly stop using fossil fuels.

Although they say underlying global warming may have raised sea temperatures, the actual amount can only be tiny, given the ocean’s enormous capacity to store heat. Put simply, a warmer atmosphere cannot raise sea temperatures to any significant degree. Indeed, it is the other way round; it is ocean temperatures which affect atmospheric ones. We see this every time there is an El Nino event.

Although McNoldy dismisses the impact of sulphur pollution, scientists widely blamed this for global cooling between the 1940s and 70s. And there is considerable evidence that the much cleaner atmosphere we have nowadays has been in part responsible for rising global temperatures since.

There is also no mention of the Hunga Tonga eruption, and the resultant injection of incredible amounts of water vapour into the stratosphere, which many scientists say has contributed to warming in the last year.

But taking these two factors out of the equation, it is clear that natural factors have played the major role in the increasing sea temperatures. The fact that no climate scientists seem to have the slightest clue what these factors might be and how they might work rather makes a nonsense of their models and pretensions about what might happen in future.

And if oceans have warmed recently, they are just as likely to cool back down sooner or later.

So instead of lecturing us about fossil fuels, maybe they should try to understand what is going on under the waves!

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March 17, 2024 at 09:57AM

Daily News 17 Mar 2024

Patients Will Die, Thanks To The NHS Net Zero Drive

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby/Paul Kolk

Will somebody please stop this nonsense now, before people die!

The NHS is to introduce electric ambulances, raising concerns that its drive for net zero is being put above patient safety.

Paramedics fear patients will be forced to wait longer because of the hours lost recharging the vehicles, with particular concern about coverage of rural areas, given the limited range.

The move next month is part of a series of measures that whistleblowers fear put green credentials above medical priorities.

The drive had created a bureaucracy that was diverting vast sums from the front line, and placing “grossly unethical” obstacles in the way of clinical decisions, one whistleblower warned.

NHS England has set up a Greener NHS team with a combined salary bill of £3 million a year, leaked documents reveal.

Officials created 48 roles, including five on six-figure salaries, as part of efforts to pursue an environmental agenda which means every medicine and product has to undergo an “evergreen assessment”.

The 135-question process means that no decision can be taken without a product’s social values and contribution to emissions targets being considered.

One supplier alleged that devices such as plastic cannulas were routinely being rejected on environmental grounds, despite the fact they would improve patient safety.

An extra layer of bureaucracy will be added next month, with every NHS supplier asked to draw up a carbon reduction plan.

Other eco-initiatives being rolled out include “climate-friendly pain relief” for mothers in labour and chemotherapy deliveries and GP visits via e-bikes.

A whistleblower told the Telegraph: “Every part of the NHS is under-resourced and waiting lists remain historically high, but commitment to green zealotry remains unchanged.

“The amount of resources dedicated to the green agenda is astounding, and the fact that it is now impacting clinical decision-making is, I believe, grossly unethical.”

Next month, electric ambulances will be piloted across swathes of the country. Under the scheme, electric ambulances will be trailed across the North West, East of England, Yorkshire, South West and London at a cost of around £150,000 each.

The West Midlands has already introduced the vehicles, although last year board papers from the West Midlands Ambulance Service revealed major concerns.

An evaluation of the pilot scheme found the ambulances took up to four hours to charge and travelled an average of 70 miles between charging, with the papers warning “range and recharge time is a significant limiting factor”.

While the vehicles had a range of 100 miles, which would cover a shift in urban areas, this would not be the case from most of its hubs, it states, adding: “Rural areas in particular are covering twice this mileage and more in a shift.” The report says that, as a minimum, ambulances need to be able to cover 160 miles.

Standard ambulances can cover up to 800 miles a day and be filled up in just minutes.

It follows warnings that ambulances are already spending vast amounts of time off the road, with two millions hours lost to waits in hospital car parks in the 12 months ending March 2023, while heart attack and stroke victims faced average waits of 36 minutes in 2023, twice the target.

Paramedics said they were fearful of the risks if electric ambulances were rolled out widely without a proper safety assessment.

Richard Webber, a paramedic and spokesman for the College of Paramedics, said he could see the benefits of such schemes in urban areas, for short distances.

He said: “I think they really need to produce the evidence that this is safe before this is rolled out beyond urban areas. I would be very wary of that. If I have got a very sick patient, someone who has had a heart attack and I am trying to get them to hospital I don’t want to be worrying about the battery.”

“Staff will want some convincing,” Mr Webber added, urging the health service to “go very cautiously” pushing the green agenda when safety was at risk.

One emergency medical consultant said: “If they could put the charging points at hospitals I would have less of a concern: waits are so long at Emergency Departments you could charge a jumbo jet. My worry is that they are looking to have charging points only in the ambulance station, so that’s even more time lost.”

One in 10 ambulances already spends more than an hour waiting outside hospitals, latest NHS data show.

The emergency medical consultant said: “The worst-case scenario is running out of juice with a patient in the back. I think this is untested territory, I would rather they started testing all of this in Patient Transport Services, where patterns are much more predictable, than in emergency care.”

Paul Bristow, a Tory member of the Commons health and social care committee, said: “Saving lives and patient safety must always come first. The idea that anyone can consider that climate concerns and green zealotry should come before what is best for patients boggles the mind.

“If concerns of first responders and ambulance crews are being overridden it just shows that eco group-think in our NHS is a very real concern.”

Mark Francois, a Conservative member of the public accounts committee urged the NHS not to forget its true purpose.

He said: “Florence Nightingale once famously said that ‘the very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.’ While achieving net zero is a laudable aim, we cannot allow it to trump common sense, especially if it compromises patient safety.

“The most important consideration must be patient safety, comfort and wellbeing.”

An NHS spokesman said: “NHS services must always put patients first when procuring products and it is also right we seek green alternatives, but only when they save the taxpayer money.

“The new electric ambulances are benefiting thousands of patients, hospitals report they are working efficiently, and they could help deliver annual operational savings of £59 million.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/14/nhs-electric-ambulances-concern-net-zero-above-patients/

The chart shown above highlights everything that is wrong with the NHS’s obsession with Net Zero. Anybody who thinks it is appropriate to analyse carbon emissions in such minute detail, even down into supply chains, should not be working in the NHS. Or for that matter in any position of public responsibility.

Unlike buses, for instance, ambulances are needed around the clock, so every hour of downtime recharging is an hour when patients are not being treated/taken to hospital. This can only lead to patients dying – it is that simple.

The NHS claims electric ambulances will save £59 million a year, but this is farthings in terms of the £100 billion cost of running the NHS, even if true, which anybody with an ounce of commonsense would know disbelieve. (To be fair, patients dead on arrival will save the NHS money).

And note they use the weasel words “operational savings, but don’t mention the extra capital costs entailed in buying electric ambulances, and of course installing all of the charging points/sub stations required.

In any event, the NHS’ overriding priority is healing patients. If it is that concerned about money, it would immediately disband its decarbonisation team.

As usual the Telegraph’s commenters show why they should be deciding policy, but this comment stands out:

As we know too well, EVs struggle to get anywhere near their advertised mileage even in the best of conditions, never mind in winter.

Poppy is quite right to point out all of the other energy hungry devices in an ambulance. No wonder they only average 70 miles per charge.

And in an average environment, that would mean recharging maybe three or four times a day. In short, ambulances will be out of action for half of the time.

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March 17, 2024 at 09:57AM

Daily News 17 Mar 2024

Monday

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March 17, 2024 at 09:25AM

Daily News 17 Mar 2024

Pandemic and Climate Change Response

Roger Caiazza

An article about response plans for pandemics by Joe Nocera writing at the Free Press described the plans by the scientist credited for eradicating smallpox for combatting an epidemic. I was struck by the parallels between the differences between his recommendations and the lockdown plan response to Covid and the plans to transition the electric system to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

D. A. Henderson

The Free Press has a weekly series of articles, The Prophets, about “fascinating people from the past who predicted our current moment and make our world more understandable today.” Joe Nocera’s article “spotlights D.A. Henderson, the epidemiologist who warned that pandemic lockdowns won’t stop a disease but could instead lead to a public health disaster.” It is a very interesting article and I recommend it highly. He writes:

In 2006, ten years before his death at the age of 87, the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson laid out a plan for how public health officials should respond to a major influenza pandemic. It was published in a small journal that focused mainly on bioterrorism—and was quickly forgotten.

As it turns out, that paper, titled “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,” was Henderson’s prescient bequest to the future. If we had followed his advice, our country—indeed, our world—could have avoided its disastrous response to Covid.

Nocera describes Henderson’s background. After graduation from medical school, he took a job at the U.S. Communicable Disease Center—the original name for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. In 1960 as the head of the CDC’s new disease surveillance department smallpox was “high on his list of concerns—and for good reason. Ancient, airborne, and highly contagious, smallpox was estimated to have caused around 300 million deaths in the twentieth century alone.” At that time smallpox was under control in the United States but he was worried about the possibility that an infected person could come and start an outbreak. “When the World Health Organization announced a program aimed at eradicating smallpox, Henderson’s superiors at the CDC transferred him to the WHO in 1966 to take charge of what many scientists believed was a futile mission.”

There was an effective vaccine for smallpox but many thought that it wasn’t possible to vaccinate enough people to eradicate the disease. Henderson’s plan was to place doctors and volunteers in all the places where the disease was still rampant and respond to breakouts as quickly as possible. Quarantines and better vaccination technology enabled people to rapidly vaccinate everyone associated with a local breakout of the disease. Henderson was the driving force to implement the plan across the world. Nocera states:

In 1980, after two years without a single recorded case of smallpox, the World Health Organization declared it eradicated. Science writer Richard Preston, who wrote the introduction to Henderson’s book on the effort, described this feat as “arguably the greatest lifesaving achievement in the history of medicine.”

Pandemic Response

During G. W. Bush’s Administration, a program to develop a plan for a pandemic was put in place:

This was prompted by the book he brought on vacation in 2005, The Great Influenza, a terrifying account of the 1918 flu pandemic estimated to have killed 50 million people worldwide. Bush had already been caught flat-footed on 9/11. He did not want the government to be unprepared in the case of a killer virus. So he ordered that a plan be devised for responding to such a deadly microbe. “Look,” the president said, “this happens every hundred years. We need a national strategy.”

Nocera explains the response developed:

When a team of government scientists completed the plan two years later, among its central tenets was that schools and other institutions should be closed, and that there should be “reduced contact among adults in the community and the workplace.” This meant lockdowns. This was exactly the opposite of the wisdom about pandemics Henderson had acquired during his long career. He tried to tell them that, but his words fell on deaf ears.

The lockdown plan was based on a computer model advocated by Robert Glass, a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico:

Robert Glass found that when he entered different variables on how to stop a respiratory virus from spreading, the most effective way was to close schools—along with other parts of society as necessary. Glass managed to get this model to the two government scientists leading the team developing Bush’s pandemic plan, Dr. Carter Mecher and Dr. Richard Hatchett, who quickly embraced it.

Though none of them were epidemiologists, Mecher, Hatchett, and Glass were convinced that computer modeling would transform epidemiology. In The Premonition, Glass reflected on old-school scientists like Henderson with a kind of pity. “I asked myself, ‘Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?’ ” he told Lewis. “They didn’t figure it out because they didn’t have the tools.” Tools like computer models.

At this point I was struck by the similarity between these modelers and the academic energy system modelers. In particular, the arrogance that their models are the be all and end all tool to address the problem at hand and the condescension towards experts in the field.

Nocera notes that Henderson tried to respond:

Henderson, on the other hand, believed that basing pandemic mitigation strategies on hypothetical models—models that themselves were based on hypothetical assumptions—could lead policymakers deeply astray. He said that people behaved in unpredictable ways that models could not capture.

Before the plan was finalized Henderson and other epidemiologists met with the modeling team. The meeting did not go well with the epidemiologists all “berating the Bush team for failing to back up their draconian shutdown proposals with real-world evidence”.

But Mecher and Hatchett stuck by their model, and that was reflected in the pandemic plan, which was published in 2007. Henderson never stopped believing that the path the Bush administration chose was potentially disastrous.

The paper Henderson and his three younger colleagues wrote in 2006, after Henderson’s meeting with Bush’s team, was their last-ditch effort to stop the lockdown plans of the modelers. In retrospect, it was more than a mere journal article. It was a warning about what public health should and shouldn’t do during an outbreak of a highly contagious respiratory illness. It was also a manifesto about the purposes, and limits, of public health.

As he and his co-authors wrote in the 2006 paper:

What computer models cannot incorporate is the effects that various mitigation strategies might have on the behavior of the population and the consequent course of the epidemic. There is simply too little experience to predict how a 21st century population would respond, for example, to the closure of all schools for periods of many weeks to months.

We now know exactly how school closures affected the nation. The answer is very badly.

Nocera describes the negative consequences. For example, the performance of students during the lockdown was disastrous and will have long-term effects. If the lockdown had been effective at stopping the spread of the virus there would at least be a mitigating factor. Nocera quotes Michael Osterholm, the prominent University of Minnesota epidemiologist, , “Look at what happened in China. They locked down for years, and when they finally relaxed that effort, they had a million deaths in two weeks.”

Parallels to the Net-Zero Energy System Transition

D. A. Henderson was a hands-on epidemiologist. His mentor taught him the value of “shoe-leather epidemiology” which is shorthand “for the activities of an epidemiologist who left his office to personally investigate epidemics—collecting data and interviewing patients and officials”. He also demonstrated hands on leadership in the fight to eradicate smallpox. My point his position was developed based on personal experience.

My primary concern is the New York Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act net-zero transition. As part of that transition the Climate Action Council (CAC) is responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlines how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.” There also are two modeling approaches for the transition plan. The entities responsible for electric system reliability rely on bottom-up models based on decades of experience with the all the components of the electric system. On the other hand, the basis of the Scoping Plan is modeling by academics that is a top-down approach. I am convinced that the top-down modeling to date overlooks too many critical aspects of the electric system to be credible. That the state has not reconciled the differences between the New York Independent System Operator electric system projections and the analyses performed by the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority is a prescription for the same disastrous outcome as the pandemic response.

Conclusion

I have enough modeling experience to opine on their use. Observations always trump model projections. The reliance on models like the Global Climate Models that can never be properly verified by comparison to observations must always keep that in mind. The net-zero transition energy modeling is in two camps. The academic top-down approach can be verified but the results are unimpressive. Even the bottom-up models used by the entities responsible for electric system reliability have issues but there is a constant improvement based on refinements to address observations.

This article clearly shows that the Covid response should have relied on the epidemiologists whose observations suggested a different approach more akin to what Sweden did. “Sweden’s death rate wound up being one of the lowest in the world—4 percent during 2020 and 2021. The U.S. excess death rate in the same period was 19 percent.” I fear that ignoring the responsible energy experts and relying on theoretical energy system modeling will have similarly disastrous impacts.

Finally, note that it is clear that the United States plan for the next pandemic has to be changed. I can only hope that the advice of D. A. Henderson will be heeded this time.

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Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. More details on the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act are available here and an inventory of over 370 articles about the Climate Act is also available. This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.

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March 17, 2024 at 08:02AM