Author: Iowa Climate Science Education

Daily News 2 Sep 2024

Antidote for Radiation Myopia

On a previous post a reader queried me about my position. Taking him to be serious, I prepared a reply with resources that can serve anyone wanting to understand radiative GHG theory and reality. The key is to escape radiation myopia, that is focusing on radiative energy transfers in earth’s climate system to the exclusion of the other transfers. Energy in our world moves by conduction, convection and phase changes of H2O in addition to radiation. And not surprisingly at any place and time, the most active mode is the one with the least resistance.

The post triggering the question was this one:

The Original Sin of GHG Theory

My Reply to Questioner

Thanks for your response. Your inital question sounded trollish, but I take your comment seriously.

Firstly, you said “I’ve never seen anyone outside of the anti-GHG crowd ever talk about “back-radiation”. Actually references to that notion are readily found since it is the primary way global warming/ climate change is explained to the public. Some examples:

“However, GHGs, unlike other atmospheric gases such as oxygen and nitrogen, are opaque to outgoing infrared radiation. As the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere increases due to human-caused emissions, energy radiated from the surface becomes trapped in the atmosphere, unable to escape the planet. This energy returns to the surface, where it is reabsorbed.” UNEP

“Greenhouses gases are atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and water vapor (H2O) that absorb and re-radiate heat, which warms the lower atmosphere and Earth’s surface. This process of absorption and re-radiation of heat is called the greenhouse effect. Although greenhouse gases only make up a small percentage of the atmosphere, small changes in the amount of greenhouse gases can greatly alter the strength of the greenhouse effect, which in turn, affects the Earth’s average temperature and climate. UCBerkeley

“As CO2 soaks up this infrared energy, it vibrates and re-emits the infrared energy back in all directions. About half of that energy goes out into space, and about half of it returns to Earth as heat, contributing to the ‘greenhouse effect.’ ColumbiaU

The favored term now is “re-radiation” and it is central in the narrative everywhere, including among others, NASA, MIT and of course multiple UN agencies. So it is necessary to debunk the notion.

I know as well as you that back- or re-radiation is a caricature, and climate scientists make a different claim, namely raising the ERL which slows the cooling. That theory is also wrong for different empirical reasons. See:

Refresher: GHG Theory and the Tests It Fails

Secondly, the root issue is the abuse of Stefan-Boltzman law to create a fictious downward energy transfer, such as seen in energy balance cartoons, misleading and not funny. The equation calculates the transfer from the difference in temperature between two bodies in thermal contact, it does not attribute thermal radiation to each of them. Full explanation here:

Experimental Proof Nil Warming from GHGs

And regarding the failed energy balance diagrams:

Fatal Flaw in Earth Energy Balance Diagrams

For extra credit and insight, look at a Sabine Hosenfelder video to understand how current GHG theory goes astray. Link includes excerpts and critique.

Sabine’s Video Myopic on GHG Climate Role

Summary

“The Earth, a rocky sphere at a distance from the Sun of ~149.6 million kilometers, where the Solar irradiance comes in at 1361.7 W/m2, with a mean global albedo, mostly from clouds, of 0.3 and with an atmosphere surrounding it containing a gaseous mass held in place by the planet’s gravity, producing a surface pressure of ~1013 mb, with an ocean of H2O covering 71% of its surface and with a rotation time around its own axis of ~24h, boasts an average global surface temperature of +15°C (288K).

Why this specific temperature? Because, with an atmosphere weighing down upon us with the particular pressure that ours exerts, this is the temperature level the surface has to reach and stay at for the global convectional engine to be able to pull enough heat away fast enough from it to be able to balance the particular averaged out energy input from the Sun that we experience.

It’s that simple.” E. M. Smith

Aussie Green Economy Blame Storm Gathers Momentum

Essay by Eric Worrall

Australia’s federal treasurer has criticised the Reserve Bank for raising interest rates, instead of taking responsibility for the green inflation he and his fellow incompetents unleashed.

Jim Chalmers blames interest rate rises for ‘smashing’ the economy, expects weak economic growth

By political reporter Jake Evans

In short:

The treasurer has pointed the finger at successive interest rate rises for a stagnating national economy.

The federal government is anticipating further weak economic growth when figures are released this week.

What’s next?

Economic growth figures for the July quarter will be released on Wednesday.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has blamed successive interest rate rises for “smashing the economy”, as the government braces for more weak economic figures due this week.

Ahead of the release of the latest economic growth figures on Wednesday, Mr Chalmers said the government was focused on walking the tightrope of bringing down inflation without further pressuring people “already being hammered by higher interest rates”.

“With all this global uncertainty on top of the impact of rate rises which are smashing the economy it would be no surprise at all if the national accounts on Wednesday show growth is soft and subdued,” Mr Chalmers said.

…

Mr Chalmers later clarified at a press conference that “of course” his comments should not be interpreted as an attack on the RBA, but didn’t repeat the claim.

…

Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-02/jim-chalmers-blames-interest-rate-rises-smashing-economy/104298162

The failure of Chalmers and his fellow incompetents to address grid instability, plummeting dispatchable capacity, and unpredictable price spikes is particularly reprehensible, given that all they need to do to fix this problem is ditch all their green energy mandates, and encourage the construction of enough new coal plants to stabilise the grid.

In my opinion Australia is now all but un-investable. With an uncertain electricity grid, spiralling prices, crumbling wage restraint, rampant inflation and soaring interest rates, and an incompetent government which is more focussed on shooting the messenger than addressing the underlying economic problems, who in their right mind would risk investing in Australia?

At least the USA can hope for a Trump / Vance victory. In Australia our choice is between the current incompetents or the slightly less green mainstream opposition. Let’s just say neither of them is getting my vote in the next election – none of the mainstream parties is focussed on what I believe are the most important issues facing the Australian economy, energy affordability and reliability.

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September 2, 2024 at 04:02PM

Daily News 2 Sep 2024

New Study: Human Emissions ‘Irrelevant’ In Determining Changes In Atmospheric CO2 Since 1959

“The main factor governing the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration is the SST [sea surface temperature] rather than human emissions.” – Ato, 2024

Another day, another new scientific paper has been published reporting efforts to curb anthropogenic CO2 emissions are “meaningless.”

In this study multiple linear regression analysis was performed comparing SST versus anthropogenic CO2 emissions as explanatory factors and the annual changes in atmospheric CO2 as the objective variable over the period 1959-2022.

The model using the SSTs (NASA, NOAA, UAH) best explained the annual CO2 change (regression coefficient B = 2.406, P = <0.0002), whereas human emissions were not shown to be an explanatory factor at all in annual CO2 changes (regression coefficient B = 0.0027, P = 0.863).

Most impressively, the predicted atmospheric CO2 concentration using the regression equation derived from 1960-2022 SSTs had an extremely high correlation coefficient of r = 0.9995.

Thus, not only is the paradigm that says humans drive atmospheric CO2 changes wrong, but “the theory that global warming and climate change are caused by human-emitted CO2 is also wrong.”

“SST has been the determinant of the annual changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and […] anthropogenic emissions have been irrelevant in this process, by head-to-head comparison.”

Image Source: Ato, 2024

This is not the first study to have addressed this lack of correlation between annual changes in atmospheric CO2 and anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

Wang et al. (2013) assessed that CO2 emissions derived from human activity (fossil fuel combustion and land use changes) only account for about +0.1 to 0.3 PgC/yr of the annual change in CO2 concentration. This is about “10% of the variance (σ²) of the CO2 growth rate.”

Image Source: Wang et al., 2013

Jones and Cox (2005) have pointed out that the changes associated with annual fossil fuel emissions are unlikely to explain CO2 growth rate anomalies.

“…it is unlikely that these anomalies can be explained by an abrupt increase in anthropogenic emissions, as the anomalies are much larger than annual increases in fossil fuel emissions.”

Image Source: Jones and Cox, 2005

Dr. Jari Ahlbeck (2009) also assessed the correlation between fossil fuel emissions and the increase in CO2 growth rates is “clearly statistically insignificant.” He therefore excluded this factor from consideration in his analysis of the mechanisms of CO2 variability.

A chart included in the body of the paper reveals 5-year periods where there was either a decline in the annual CO2 emissions trend (5.33, 5.17, 5.13, 5.11, 5.29 GtC/yr for 1980-1984) or a flattened trend (6.40, 6.53, 6.63, 6.59, 6.57 GtC/yr for 1995-1999).

Image Source: Ahlbeck, 2009

Even an analysis detailed in the Carbon Brief blog from a few years ago suggests “global CO2 emissions have been flat – if not slightly declining – over the past 10 years.” This obviously does not support the conclusion that an increase in the CO2 growth rate has been driven by flat to declining human emissions.

Image Source: Carbon Brief

An additional side note found in the Ato paper addresses the lack of a link between human methane emissions and atmospheric methane growth rates.

Although human methane emissions have risen dramatically in recent decades, “atmospheric methane concentrations have declined since the 21st century.”

“…natural fluctuations are far more powerful than human emissions in terms of the influence on atmospheric methane levels.”

Image Source: Ato, 2024

So we not only have a lack of correlation between human emissions and annual variations in atmospheric CO2 (and CH4), we even have flat to declining trends in annual anthropogenic CO2 (and CH4) emissions in recent decades – the opposite explanatory directionality.

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September 2, 2024 at 03:36PM

Daily News 2 Sep 2024

Climate Science goes full-bore witchcraft: Your beefsteak makes bridges fall like Tinker-Toys

By Jo Nova

The Modern West is regressing to 8th Century occult science

Today the supposed “newspaper of record” for the most powerful nation on Earth is effectively telling people that the steak they eat, the car they drive and the heater they use could cause bridges to collapse “‘like Tinkertoys”. But you’ll have to join the dots yourself, because they never do. No one asks the experts: How many Tofu-burgers does it take to save Brooklyn Bridge? How many bus trips will we need to save the Golden Gate?

The worlds leading journalists never ask the obvious questions. They just leave a trail of breadcrumbs: Man makes CO2, CO2 causes Spooky weather and Spooky weather eats bridges. So good people drive EV’s!

Each breadcrumb looks like bread, like it might be real, but no one sees the whole loaf and before you know it, everyone is lost in the woods, installing solar panels to save their bridges.

Two days ago the breadcrumb said “good people go without air conditioners”.

Things are so bad the New York Times tells us that on a 95 degree day in summer, one bridge in Manhattan got stuck open “for hours”. (The tragedy). Another time a railway bridge in Iowa got washed away and would you believe, some pavement buckled in Maine.

The truth is the US bridges are a miracle. There are, seriously, more than 600,000 bridges across the country and yet this was all the catastrophe they could find in the leading paragraph. We’re supposed to believe that we’re in a bridge crisis, and that “extreme” heat, floods and “snap weather changes” are new, and worse, and we’re causing it.

Be afraid:

“…now, extreme heat and increased flooding linked to climate change are accelerating the disintegration of the nation’s bridges, engineers say, essentially causing them to age prematurely.

The New York Times doesn’t mention the big numbers, but they do say that a quarter of the bridges in the US were built before 1960. This means there are 150,000 bridges which are between 60 years and 327 years old. They’re trying to make out that old bridges weren’t built to cope with modern”climate change”. But who designs bridges that can’t handle warming of a half a degree?

The last time anyone died in a bridge collapse in the US it was not climate change but because a ship ran into it.

The time before that, the footbridge that collapsed was still under construction. People are not being killed by climate change, they’re being killed by incompetence.

The Professor was paid to find a crisis

And as I keep saying “we got what we paid for”:

“We have a bridge crisis that is specifically tied to extreme weather events,” said Paul Chinowsky, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder who researches the effects of climate change on infrastructure. “These are not things that would happen under normal climate circumstances. These are not things that we’ve ever seen at this rate.”

So if Prof Chinowsky found that “climate change” had no effect at all he wouldn’t get much of a grant next year. His field is hardly likely to be starring in emergency sessions at the UN and he probably won’t get a paid ski-trip to meet Harry and Megan at Davos either. On a more mundane level the top students won’t be beating a path to his door. Even if he is a decent bloke and a breadwinner, all roads in Science World serve the government.

The real problem in this story is that one sided government funding has killed science, and the journalists are conducting a seance with the ashes.

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September 2, 2024 at 02:43PM