Category: Uncategorized

Finkel report: governments should control electricity market to change weather

Finkel report: governments should control electricity market to change weather

via JoNova
http://ift.tt/1hXVl6V

Tomorrow Chief Scientist Alan Finkel is delivering a report that could potentially split the Liberal Party. Turnbull was tossed out by the party in 2009 because he supported the bank-friendly emissions trading scheme.  Now the debate is back again in a different guise — called a LET scheme (low emissions target), or a CET scheme (Clean Energy Target). Details are scant at the moment. On the plus side, it appears it’s not necessarily a trading scheme (code for banker driver fiat currency) and it’s aimed at “emissions” directly instead of “renewables” (which makes it slightly more direct and gives the market a tiny bit more freedom, except of course, the market can’t choose “Nukes”.). On the downside, it’s still a pointless waste of billions of dollars in a futile attempt to slow storms for our grandchildren.  If it succeeds in reducing emissions, it will reduce airborne plant fertilizer.

Split coming in the Liberal Party again?

Tony Abbott has warned the federal government it would be making a big mistake if it adopted a low emissions target that made it hard to build new, more efficient coal-fired power stations. The former prime minister expressed his “anxiety” around reports […]

Rating: 10.0/10 (1 vote cast)

via JoNova http://ift.tt/1hXVl6V

June 7, 2017 at 11:03PM

Is Elon Musk Cracking Up?

Is Elon Musk Cracking Up?

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

Is Elon Musk losing it? His tweets have been more erratic than normal over the past week.

PayPal founder Elon Musk has always played the role of eccentric billionaire rather convincingly. Last year, he tweeted that he planned to circumvent Los Angeles traffic by digging a bunch of tunnels. A few months later Bloomberg confirmed that he had actually launched a boring company that was in the middle of digging a giant pit, a decision he made in the spur of the moment.

But lately, Musk has been a little extra. His tweets have been more erratic than normal over the past week, coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally) around the same time President Trump announced the United States would withdraw its participation in the Paris climate accord.

He tweeted this Tuesday night, in reference to a statement he had made explaining his erratic tweets during Tesla’s shareholder meeting on Monday.

As Forbes’s Bertel Schmitt explains, many of Musks’s plans for the car company — including his announcement that Tesla is going to build a new factory in an undetermined location in order to crank out SUVs by 2019 — are just as insane as his tweets.

Such a schedule could only be made under heavy doses of red wine, vintage records, and Ambien. Permit to completion, a single family house can take a year. A new car plant takes anywhere from three to five years from ground breaking to car making. Depending on the location, permitting could add another year. Musk doesn’t even know where that new Gigafactory will be, and he wants it to make cars in two years? It takes a lot of drugs and alcohol to come up with such a plan, preferably with ‘Lucy in the sky with diamonds’ on the turntable, or elsewhere. [. . . ]
 
Anywhere else in the auto industry, if you would announce plans like that, you would be submitted to a drug test, and fired. Anywhere else in the auto industry, you would design modular platforms that underpin many models, so that you don’t have to develop the same 80% of the car again and again. Anywhere in the auto industry, eight models and more roll off the same line, maximizing CapEx and capacity. Of course, if you build your cars from tangerine trees, marmalade skies, and a fistful of pills, and if you are high on a $60 billion valuation of your company, such rules do not apply.

This isn’t the first time Musk has made pie-in-the-sky promises to his investors, which often go unfulfilled. In March, SpaceX announced it planned to send two tourists to the moon by next year, a laughable goal. As I wrote back then, Musk’s companies don’t have a good track record of keeping their promises. SpaceX has repeatedly missed deadlines to send NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and keeps blowing up expensive payloads.

The day before the big Tesla investor meeting, Musk suggested he doesn’t wear underwear.

[…] This brings me to the question at hand: is Musk losing it? Are his tweets, his sleeping pill and wine cocktail confessions, and boring machines a desperate cry for help, or just a joke? What is not funny about any of his actions is the fact that my tax dollars are funding his eccentricities. American taxpayers have given Musk somewhere upwards of $4.9 billion in federal funds alone. Call me crazy, but I am not a fan of eccentric behavior I’m forced to fund.

Full post

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

June 7, 2017 at 10:42PM

Dear Climate Alarmists: Now That The Paris Accord Is Settled, Please Grow Up Or Shut Up

Dear Climate Alarmists: Now That The Paris Accord Is Settled, Please Grow Up Or Shut Up

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

Dear Climate Alarmists,

We are exhausted.

It is not easy to write a letter like this. But we, the non-alarmist community, could not put it off any longer. We have quite simply reached the end of our rope. There are things you have to hear, even if it’s painful to hear them.

For the past few decades we’ve tolerated your hysterics, your cries of doom, your augurs of ecological catastrophe, your heralding of the coming global eco-pocalypse. We rolled our eyes and patted you on the head as you went after the plastic bags and the secondhand cars and the nice bright light bulbs. We even let one of your chief clarions come within a hairsbreadth of the White House—my goodness, was that 17 years ago this fall? Time flies when you’re having fun and predicting the end of the world every seven minutes.

But now the time has come for you to grow up or shut up. One or the other. Frankly, the former would be preferable, but we’ll take the latter in a pinch, in large part because we stopped genuinely listening to you years ago. Did you know that?

We’ve still kind of put up with your endless environmental wailing, and we’ve allowed your doomsayers to make regular appearances on cable news channels, the college lecture circuit, and even network television programs. But many of us have had a discrete iPod earbud in this whole time, listening to baking podcasts and binging on Netflix while you gnashed your teeth and rent your shirts and pulled your hair. A few of us even learned to doze with our eyes open! But we’re done with this charade now. It’s time to move on.

Yes, It Was Paris

“Why?” you might be saying. “Why now? What changed your mind?” Oh, my friends, spare us the ignorance—you and we both know it was Paris.

Ah, Paris—the city of lights, la ville d’amour, paname, ma belle. It’s a beautiful place, although we suspect that from now on you may not be able to look upon it without weeping like a Frenchman. Paris, once the eponym of one of your greatest achievements, has become synonymous with one of your great humiliations. It should come as no surprise that this is where we break. You knew this was coming—don’t stand there acting surprised.

Your hysterics surrounding the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris global warming arrangement have finally driven it home for us: this isn’t working. We can’t keep pretending as if you’re making any sense or anything remotely connected to sense. We have to end this.

So we—what’s that you’re asking? “What hysterics?” Oh, please, don’t play dumb with us. We—okay. You really want to do this? Fine. This isn’t going to be pleasant, but you apparently won’t have it any other way.

 

Full letter

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

June 7, 2017 at 10:28PM

17 New Scientific Papers Dispute CO2 Greenhouse Effect As Primary Explanation For Climate Change

17 New Scientific Papers Dispute CO2 Greenhouse Effect As Primary Explanation For Climate Change

via NoTricksZone
http://notrickszone.com

“[T]he absorption of incident solar-light by the atmosphere as well as its absorption capability of thermal radiation, cannot be influenced by human acts.”  – Allmendinger, 2017

“[G]lobal warming can be explained without recourse to the greenhouse theory.  The varying solar irradiation constitutes the sole input driving the changes in the system’s energy transfers.”  – Blaauw, 2017

“The down-welling LW radiation is not a global driver of surface warming as hypothesized for over 100 years but a product of the near-surface air temperature controlled by solar heating and atmospheric pressure.”  -Nikolov and Zeller, 2017


Allmendinger, 2017

The Refutation of the Climate Greenhouse Theory

“The cardinal error in the usual greenhouse theory consists in the assumption that photometric or spectroscopic IR-measurements allow conclusions about the thermal behaviour of gases, i.e., of the atmosphere. They trace back to John Tyndall who developed such a photometric method already in the 19th century. However, direct thermal measurement methods have never been applied so far. Apart from this, at least twenty crucial errors are revealed which suggest abandoning the theory as a whole. In spite of its obvious deficiencies, this theory has so far been an obstacle to take promising precautions for mitigating the climate change. They would consist in a general brightening of the Earth surface, and in additional measures being related to this. However, the novel effects which were found by the author, particularly the absorption of incident solar-light by the atmosphere as well as its absorption capability of thermal radiation, cannot be influenced by human acts.”


Blaauw, 2017

“This paper demonstrates that global warming can be explained without recourse to the greenhouse theory. This explanation is based on a simple model of the Earth’s climate system consisting of three layers: the surface, a lower and an upper atmospheric layer. The distinction between the atmospheric layers rests on the assumption that the latent heat from the surface is set free in the lower atmospheric layer only. The varying solar irradiation constitutes the sole input driving the changes in the system’s energy transfers. All variations in the energy exchanges can be expressed in terms of the temperature variations of the layers by means of an energy transfer matrix. It turns out that the latent heat transfer as a function of the temperatures of the surface and the lower layer makes this matrix next to singular. The near singularity reveals a considerable negative feedback in the model which can be identified as the ‘Klimaversta¨rker’ presumed by Vahrenholt and Lu¨ning. By a suitable, yet realistic choice of the parameters appearing in the energy transfer matrix and of the effective heat capacities of the layers, the model reproduces the global warming: the calculated trend in the surface temperature agrees well with the observational data from AD 1750 up to AD 2000.”


Nikolov and Zeller, 2017

“Our analysis revealed that GMATs [global mean annual temperatures] of rocky planets with tangible atmospheres and a negligible geothermal surface heating can accurately be predicted over a broad range of conditions using only two forcing variables: top-of-the-atmosphere solar irradiance and total surface atmospheric pressure. The hereto discovered interplanetary pressure-temperature relationship is shown to be statistically robust while describing a smooth physical continuum without climatic tipping points. This continuum fully explains the recently discovered 90 K thermal effect of Earth’s atmosphere. The new model displays characteristics of an emergent macro-level thermodynamic relationship heretofore unbeknown to science that has important theoretical implications. A key entailment from the model is that the atmospheric ‘greenhouse effect’ currently viewed as a radiative phenomenon is in fact an adiabatic (pressure-induced) thermal enhancement analogous to compression heating and independent of atmospheric composition. Consequently, the global down-welling long-wave flux presently assumed to drive Earth’s surface warming appears to be a product of the air temperature set by solar heating and atmospheric pressure. In other words, the so-called ‘greenhouse back radiation’ is globally a result of the atmospheric thermal effect rather than a cause for it. … The down-welling LW radiation is not a global driver of surface warming as hypothesized for over 100 years but a product of the near-surface air temperature controlled by solar heating and atmospheric pressure … The hypothesis that a freely convective atmosphere could retain (trap) radiant heat due its opacity has remained undisputed since its introduction in the early 1800s even though it was based on a theoretical conjecture that has never been proven experimentally.”


Huang et al., 2017

“Various scientific studies have investigated the causal link between solar activity (SS) and the earth’s temperature (GT). [T]he corresponding CCM [Convergent Cross Mapping] results indicate increasing significance of causal effect from SS [solar activity] to GT [global temperature] since 1880 to recent years, which provide solid evidences that may contribute on explaining the escalating global tendency of warming up recent decades. … The connection between solar activity and global warming has been well established in the scientific literature. For example, see references [1–10]. … Among which, the SSA [Singular Spectrum Analysis] trend extraction is identified as the most reliable method for data preprocessing, while CCM [Convergent Cross Mapping] shows outstanding performance among all causality tests adopted. The emerging causal effects from SS [solar activity] to GT [global temperatures], especially for recent decades, are overwhelmingly proved, which reflects the better understanding of the tendency of global warming.”


Viterito, 2017

“The Correlation of Seismic Activity and Recent Global Warming (CSARGW) demonstrated that increasing seismic activity in the globe’s high geothermal flux areas (HGFA) is strongly correlated with global temperatures (r=0.785) from 1979-2015. The mechanism driving this correlation is amply documented and well understood by oceanographers and seismologists. Namely, increased seismic activity in the HGFA (i.e., the mid-ocean’s spreading zones) serves as a proxy indicator of higher geothermal flux in these regions. The HGFA include the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the East Pacific Rise, the West Chile Rise, the Ridges of the Indian Ocean, and the Ridges of the Antarctic/Southern Ocean. This additional mid-ocean heating causes an acceleration of oceanic overturning and thermobaric convection, resulting in higher ocean temperatures and greater heat transport into the Arctic. This manifests itself as an anomaly known as the “Arctic Amplification,” where the Arctic warms to a much greater degree than the rest of the globe. Applying the same methodology employed in CSARGW, an updated analysis through 2016 adds new knowledge of this important relationship while strengthening support for that study’s conclusions. The correlation between HGFA seismic frequency and global temperatures moved higher with the addition of the 2016 data: the revised correlation now reads 0.814, up from 0.785 for the analysis through 2015. This yields a coefficient of determination of .662, indicating that HGFA [high geothermal flux area] seismicity accounts for roughly two-thirds of the variation in global temperatures since 1979.”


Hertzberg et al., 2017

“This study examines the concept of ‘greenhouse gases’ and various definitions of the phenomenon known as the ‘Atmospheric Radiative Greenhouse Effect’. The six most quoted descriptions are as follows: (a) radiation trapped between the Earth’s surface and its atmosphere; (b) the insulating blanket of the atmosphere that keeps the Earth warm; (c) back radiation from the atmosphere to the Earth’s surface; (d) Infra Red absorbing gases that hinder radiative cooling and keep the surface warmer than it would otherwise be – known as ‘otherwise radiation’; (e) differences between actual surface temperatures of the Earth (as also observed on Venus) and those based on calculations; (f) any gas that absorbs infrared radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface towards free space. It is shown that none of the above descriptions can withstand the rigours of scientific scrutiny when the fundamental laws of physics and thermodynamics are applied to them.”


Song, Wang & Tang, 2016

A Hiatus of the Greenhouse Effect

“In the last subperiod [2003-2014], the global averaged SULR [surface upwelling longwave radiation/greenhouse effect] anomaly remains trendless (0.02 W m−2 yr−1) because Ts [global temperatures] stop rising. Meanwhile, the long-term change of the global averaged OLR anomaly (−0.01 W m−2 yr−1) is also not statistically significant. Thus, these two phenomena result in a trendless Gaa [atmospheric greenhouse effect]. …  [A]remarkably decreasing Gaa trend (−0.27 W m−2 yr−1) exists over the central tropical Pacific, indicating a weakened atmospheric greenhouse effect in this area, which largely offsets the warming effect in the aforementioned surrounding regions. As a result, a trendless global averaged Gaa [atmospheric greenhouse effect] is displayed between 1991 and 2002 (Fig. 2).  … Again, no significant trend of the global averaged Gaa [atmospheric greenhouse effect] is found from 2003 to 2014 (Fig. 2) because the enhanced warming effect over the western tropical Pacific is largely counteracted by the weakened warming influence on the central tropical Pacific.”


Manheimer, 2016

“[T]he actual data show that up to now fears of imminent climate catastrophe are not supported by data, or else involve processes occurring since long before excess CO2 in the atmosphere became a concern. Based on actual measurements and reasonable extrapolation of them, there is no reason why the responsible use of fossil fuel cannot continue to support worldwide civilisation. The argument to greatly restrict fossil fuel rests entirely on the theoretical assertion that at some point in the near future there will be a sudden and dramatic change in the very nature of the data presented here. If implemented, these would be sufficient to greatly upset the lifestyle of billions of people, and to further impoverish the already most impoverished parts of the world. …  [N]othing in the past suggests that future climate will be significantly different before mid century because of rising levels of CO2.”


Hertzberg and Schreuder, 2016

“The authors evaluate the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) consensus that the increase of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is of anthropogenic origin and is causing dangerous global warming, climate change and climate disruption. The totality of the data available on which that theory is based is evaluated. The data include: (a) Vostok ice-core measurements; (b) accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere; (c) studies of temperature changes that precede CO2 changes; (d) global temperature trends; (e) current ratio of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere; (f) satellite data for the geographic distribution of atmospheric CO2; (g) effect of solar activity on cosmic rays and cloud cover. Nothing in the data supports the supposition that atmospheric CO2 is a driver of weather or climate, or that human emissions control atmospheric CO2.”


Mikhailovich et al., 2016

About the Influence of the Giant Planets on

Long-Term Evolution of Global Temperature

“The observed variability of global temperature is usually explained through the decrease in the coefficient of the grayness of the Earth caused by increased content of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as CO2, i.e. by the anthropogenically caused increase in the greenhouse effect. The validity of such views raises some doubts, as their validity is based either on the results of the climate simulation, or on the results of the regression analysis, in relation to which the fullness of the used set of regression does not seem certain. At the same time, just the results of climate modeling do not seem to be quite reliable … The effects associated with the displacement of the center of gravity of the solar system under the influence of giant planets (Jupiter and Saturn) are discussed. Based on the hypothesis of parametric resonance in the variation of global temperature with disturbances in the photosphere shape and the Earth-to-Sun distance due to the oppositions of said planets, a regression model that explains the observed long-term evolution of global temperature is built. It was shown that residuals of the model are close to white noise, i.e. the [influence of planets] hypothesis almost entirely explains the effect of temperature increase for the period presented in the vernacular crutem3 database [1850-present].”


 Vares et al., 2016

… Earth’s Magnetic Dipole Intensity … Geomagnetic

Activity … Causal Source for Global Warming

“Quantitative analyses of actual measurements rather than modeling have shown that “global warming” has been heterogeneous over the surface of the planet and temporally non-linear. Residual regression analyses by Soares (2010) indicated increments of increased temperature precede increments of CO2 increase. The remarkably strong negative correlation (r = -0.99) between the earth’s magnetic dipole moment values and global CO2-temperature indicators over the last ~30 years is sufficient to be considered causal if contributing energies were within the same order of magnitude. Quantitative convergence between the energies lost by the diminishing averaged geomagnetic field strength and energies gained within the ocean-atmosphere interface satisfy the measured values for increased global temperature and CO2 release from sea water. The pivotal variable is the optimal temporal unit employed to estimate the total energies available for physical-chemical reactions. The positive drift in averaged amplitude of geomagnetic activity over the last 100 years augmented this process. Contributions from annual CO2 from volcanism and shifts in averaged geomagnetic activity, lagged years before the measured global temperature-CO2 values, are moderating variables for smaller amplitude perturbations. These results indicated that the increase in CO2 and global temperatures are primarily caused by major geophysical factors, particularly the diminishing total geomagnetic field strength and increased geomagnetic activity, but not by human activities. Strategies for adapting to climate change because of these powerful variables may differ from those that assume exclusive anthropomorphic causes.”


Easterbrook, 2016

“CO2 makes up only a tiny portion of the atmosphere (0.040%) and constitutes only 3.6% of the greenhouse effect. The atmospheric content of CO2 has increased only 0.008% since emissions began to soar after 1945. Such a tiny increment of increase in CO2 cannot cause the 10°F increase in temperature predicted by CO2 advocates. Computer climate modelers build into their models a high water vapor component, which they claim is due to increased atmospheric water vapor caused by very small warming from CO2, and since water vapor makes up 90–95% of the greenhouse effect, they claim the result will be warming. The problem is that atmospheric water vapor has actually declined since 1948, not increased as demanded by climate models. If CO2 causes global warming, then CO2 should always precede warming when the Earth’s climate warms up after an ice age. However, in all cases, CO2 lags warming by ∼800 years. Shorter time spans show the same thing—warming always precedes an increase in CO2 and therefore it cannot be the cause of the warming.”


Chemke et al., 2016

The Thermodynamic Effect of Atmospheric

Mass on Early Earth’s Temperature

Observations suggest that Earth’s early atmospheric mass differed from the present day. The effects of a different atmospheric mass on radiative forcing have been investigated in climate models of variable sophistication, but a mechanistic understanding of the thermodynamic component of the effect of atmospheric mass on early climate is missing. Using a 3D idealized global circulation model (GCM), we systematically examine the thermodynamic effect of atmospheric mass on near-surface temperature. We find that higher atmospheric mass tends to increase the near-surface temperature mostly due an increase in the heat capacity of the atmosphere, which decreases the net radiative cooling effect in the lower layers of the atmosphere. Additionally, the vertical advection of heat by eddies decreases with increasing atmospheric mass, resulting in further near-surface warming. As both net radiative cooling and vertical eddy heat fluxes are extratropical phenomena, higher atmospheric mass tends to flatten the meridional temperature gradient.

An increase in atmospheric mass causes an increase in near-surface temperatures and a decrease of the equator-pole near-surface temperature gradient. Warming is caused mostly by the increase in atmospheric heat capacity, which decrease the net radiative cooling of the atmosphere.

[No mention of CO2 as a factor in warming the Earth-Atmosphere system]


Haine, 2016

“Notably, the three studies [Jackson et al., 2016;  Böning et al., 2016; Robson et al., 2016] report an absence of anthropogenic effects on the AMOC, at least so far: the directly observed AMOC weakening since 2004 is not consistent with the hypothesis that anthropogenic aerosols have affected North Atlantic ocean temperatures. The midlatitude North Atlantic temperature changes since 2005 have greater magnitude and opposite sign (cooling) than those attributed to ocean uptake of anthropogenic heat. The anthropogenic melt from the Greenland ice sheet is still too small to be detected.. And despite large changes in the freshwater budget of the Arctic, some of which are anthropogenic, there is no clear change in the delivery of Arctic freshwater to the North Atlantic due to human climate forcing.”


Ellis and Palmer, 2016

Conclusion: “[I]nterglacial warming is eccentricity and polar ice regrowth regulated, Great Summer forced, and dust-ice albedo amplified. And the greenhouse-gas attributes of CO2 play little or no part in this complex feedback system.”


Evans, 2016

“The conventional basic climate model applies “basic physics” to climate, estimating sensitivity to CO2. However, it has two serious architectural errors. It only allows feedbacks in response to surface warming, so it omits the driver-specific feedbacks. It treats extra-absorbed sunlight, which heats the surface and increases outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR), the same as extra CO2, which reduces OLR from carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere but does not increase the total OLR. The rerouting feedback is proposed. An increasing CO2 concentration warms the upper troposphere, heating the water vapor emissions layer and some cloud tops, which emit more OLR and descend to lower and warmer altitudes. This feedback resolves the nonobservation of the “hotspot.” An alternative model is developed, whose architecture fixes the errors. By summing the (surface) warmings due to climate drivers, rather than their forcings, it allows driver-specific forcings and allows a separate CO2 response (the conventional model applies the same response, the solar response, to all forcings). It also applies a radiation balance, estimating OLR from properties of the emission layers. Fitting the climate data to the alternative model, we find that the equilibrium climate sensitivity is most likely less than 0.5°C, increasing CO2 most likely caused less than 20% of the global warming from the 1970s, and the CO2 response is less than one-third as strong as the solar response. The conventional model overestimates the potency of CO2 because it applies the strong solar response instead of the weak CO2 response to the CO2 forcing.”


Gervais, 2016

Anthropogenic CO2 Warming Challenged By 60-year Cycle

Conclusion: “Dangerous anthropogenic warming is questioned (i) upon recognition of the large amplitude of the natural 60–year cyclic component and (ii) upon revision downwards of the transient climate response consistent with latest tendencies shown in Fig. 1, here found to be at most 0.6 °C once the natural component has been removed, consistent with latest infrared studies (Harde, 2014). Anthropogenic warming well below the potentially dangerous range were reported in older and recent studies (Idso, 1998; Miskolczi, 2007; Paltridge et al., 2009; Gerlich and Tscheuschner, 2009; Lindzen and Choi, 2009, 2011; Spencer and Braswell, 2010; Clark, 2010; Kramm and Dlugi, 2011; Lewis and Curry, 2014; Skeie et al., 2014; Lewis, 2015; Volokin and ReLlez, 2015). On inspection of a risk of anthropogenic warming thus toned down, a change of paradigm which highlights a benefit for mankind related to the increase of plant feeding and crops yields by enhanced CO2 photosynthesis is suggested.”

via NoTricksZone http://notrickszone.com

June 7, 2017 at 09:22PM