Related links: Washington Post article | Ocean warming video
via JunkScience.com
October 1, 2024 at 01:45AM
“The climate movement is dealing with a host of problems of its own making. The anti-CO2 crusade will have fewer and fewer defenders as reality continues to strike back.”
The Climate Industrial Complex wants to tax, regulate, and subsidize, not debate (“report, block, don’t engage,” says Michael Mann). But Climate Week NYC, hosted by Climate Group, allowed (a precious few) alternative voices to alarmism and forced energy transformation at its more than 600 advertised events and activities.
The hard core was upset. “Fossil Fuel Presence at Climate Week NYC Spotlights Dissonance in Clean Energy Transition,” complained Inside Climate News. “Blah, Blah, Blah,” wrote Liza Featherstone in TNR; “instead of being an urgent call to action, it is now the closest thing the climate movement has to a trade show, a week of fancy lunches and private drinks and flashy presentations announcing new investment funds, new green pledges from businesses and states, and thought leaders taking the opportunity to show their climate bona fides.”
AP described the event as a “money-focused fight ….” Time magazine called the confab “a Corporate Greenwashing Bonanza.” Remember what Enron CEO Jeff Skilling told his coal executive about the company’s interest in green energy and causes? “Mike, we are a green energy company, but the green stands for money.”
Anya Kamenetz, “award-winning journalist, former NPR correspondent, author of five nonfiction books, speaker, and consultant,” complained.
The The New York Times should be so embarrassed about platforming an oil executive during climate week, as well as Kevin Roberts of the The Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025. This CEO told the reporter she wants to burn every drop of oil and gas left in the ground. She holds up the bullshit, unscaled and unscalable technology of direct air capture as her indulgence. This is textbook predatory delay. Why should it deserve a public airing? I applaud Climate Defiance and everyone working to revoke the social license of the fossil fuel industry.
She added in a comment:
To be clear, in the name of journalism, I have no problem with the New York Times interviewing oil company executives, preferably in the context of accountability stories about their lies, their persecution of their enemies, and greenwashing. Putting someone on a stage at a fancy event with finger foods during climate week is not journalism, though. It’s journalism-adjacent, at best.
Secondly, yes we all use plastic and gasoline and jet fuel today and we will probably be using it next year too. My idea would be to nationalize the oil companies and commit to a strong program of ratcheting down production, while pouring resources into real, promising alternatives. Many uses of plastic can be banned immediately. Commercial air flights could get a lot more expensive and schedules can be reduced. Etc.
Nationalization? Making transportation more expensive? What about consumers? Taxpayers? Energy freedom? My comment on all this was deleted by Ms. Kamenetz. But note how the climate movement is dealing with a host of problems of its own making. The anti-CO2 crusade will have fewer and fewer defenders as reality continues to strike back, the subject of tomorrow’s post.
The post Eco Complaints at Climate Week NYC appeared first on Master Resource.
via Master Resource
October 1, 2024 at 01:13AM
The problem with the green U.K. economy, and its associated destruction of the hydrocarbon environment, is that there are very few jobs being created. The few remaining ‘workers’ in the ruling Labour party are starting to rumble all the luxury boondoggles that are set to further decimate well-paid jobs in their communities. The figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), trying to estimate the actual number of green jobs, are always a highly creative hoot, and the latest batch are no exception. Many jobs identified are simply displacement activity, with one repair or maintenance occupation taking over from another. Around 6% of the total are to be found in ‘environmental charities’, an interesting way to describe elite billionaire political funding to push the Net Zero fantasy. Such is the seeming desperation to rustle up a green job, the ONS even includes repairing home appliances, controlling forest fires and separating hydrogen by carbon dioxide-producing electrolysis.
The latest ‘estimates’ from the ONS cover 2021 and 2022, and they are said to show an increase in both years. But as the graph below reveals, the rises are pitiful over a decade, and the 2022 estimate of 639,000 is less than 2% of jobs in the economy as a whole.
As can be seen, environmental charities employ 40,000 people, almost as many as the 47,000 that work in renewable energy. But the charities figure does not include all those make-work jobs in environmental consultancy and education or what is described as in-house environmental activities. If all the displacement, invented or re-badged jobs in repair, electric vehicles, waste disposal, water treatment, energy efficiency, Net Zero promotion, teaching and the ubiquitous bureaucracy are rightly ignored, it is unlikely that more than 150,000 new jobs have been created. Fairly small pickings, it might be thought, from all the cash sprayed at subsidy-hunting chancers over at least two decades. Even worse, any new jobs are easily offset by the occupations being destroyed in steel making, refining hydrocarbons, coal mining and oil and gas exploration. Fracking for gas would transform a number of deprived areas in the U.K. at little environmental cost, as it has done in the U.S. Energy security would likely be achieved, and the tax take would be considerable. But fracking is anathema to the major political parties in the U.K., except the emerging Reform party.
Last week saw some real push back on the madness of Net Zero and the so-called green economy. The boss of GMB, the third largest trade union in the country, told the annual Labour party conference that its plans to decarbonise the energy network by 2030 will cost up to one million jobs, decimate working communities and push up bills for the poorest. According to Smith, Government’s plans for Net Zero were “bonkers” and “fundamentally dishonest”. In a week when it was revealed that British consumers, both industrial and private, had some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world, he charged that current energy policy amounted to virtue signalling by politicians. He accused them of exporting jobs and importing virtue because the jobs were being created abroad rather than in the U.K.
Meanwhile, a recent paper published in Science came to a damning conclusion that will not surprise sceptics, namely that 96% of climate policies over the last 25 years, ultimately designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, have been a waste of money. “That’s where green spin has got us,” writes George Monbiot, although these days the Guardian’s extremist-in-chief seems to have given up on all life enhancing processes that run the risk of disturbing anything on the planet. “Finally, 15 years and a trillion dollars too late, George Monbiot says what sceptics have been saying all along,” observes the sceptical journalist Jo Nova. “Nearly every single carbon reduction scheme is a useless make-work machination that creates the illusion that the government is doing something,” she says.
As we can see, the ONS survey is full of these make-work schemes providing jobs that can only exist by rigging free markets and providing eye-watering subsidies from consumers and taxpayers. As the more concerned trade unionists can see, much of the cost of these fantasy ventures falls on the poorest members of society forced to pay higher prices for many of the basic essentials of life. In addition, as we have observed, most green schemes make mugs of the wider investing public, with the RENIXX, a stock capitalisation global index of the 30 largest renewable industrial companies, showing near zero growth since it was started in 2006. None of this matters, of course, to the Mad Miliband and his weird wonks at the U.K. Department of Energy, who are ramping up ideological plans to hose cash at daft ideas like carbon capture, battery energy storage and hydrogen production.
But all is not lost on the jobs front – opportunities must be taken when they occur. Earlier this year, Gary Smith was able to point to some new employment clearing away the animal casualties of wind farm blades. “It’s usually a man in a rowing boat, sweeping up the dead birds,” he observed.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
via Watts Up With That?
October 1, 2024 at 12:01AM
“The heat retention in the greenhouse Earth is caused by all gas components…mainly by nitrogen and oxygen. It is not permissible to exclusively assign the GH effect of 33° to water vapour, CO2, and the other trace gases.” – Ullman and Bülow, 2024
Chemical physicists Helmut Ullman and Martin Bülow have published a new paper detailing the lack of meaningful or noticeable “specialness” that trace greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2, 0.042% of the atmosphere) and methane (CH4, 0.00018%) possess in determining Earth’s greenhouse effect heating.
Image Source: Ullman and Bülow, 2024
The imagined 33°C greenhouse effect thought experiment
The popularized greenhouse effect thought experiment requires imagining what temperature the Earth would be if there were no atmospheric greenhouse gases (water vapor, CO2, CH4). It is believed these trace (less than 0.1% of the atmospheric composition combined) heat-absorbing gaseous agents, combined with water vapor (up to 4% of the atmosphere in tropical areas), are the only gases capable of restricting heat loss to space. Thus, greenhouse gases are thought to ultimately keep the Earth’s land and ocean surface temperature 33°C warmer (288 K vs. 255 K) than it would otherwise be in their imagined absence.
It is simultaneously imagined that even though oxygen (O2, 21%), nitrogen (N2, 78%), and argon (Ar, 0.9%) together account for 999,000 ppm (99.9%) of the atmosphere’s gaseous composition, none of these gases absorb and re-emit heat, and thus they cannot slow cooling or count as contributors to the imagined 33°C warmer Earth atmosphere. Only the trace gases and water vapor – the so-called greenhouse gases – can slow cooling, or retain heat.
That’s what the thought experiment says, anyway. Physics say otherwise.
The O2 and N2 greenhouse effect
Ullmann and Bülow point out that the greenhouse effect is not only not exclusively determined by trace greenhouse gases like CO2 or CH4, but these trace gases play such an unimportant role that they’re not even noticeable. Only water vapor has the capacity to absorb heat to a degree that is detectable. The primary gaseous determinants of Earth’s greenhouse effect are not trace gases like CO2 and CH4, but, consistent with their atmospheric abundance, N2 and O2.
“The basic constituents of the atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen, are the main contributors to heat storage in the Earth’s GH [greenhouse effect].”
“The heat retention in the greenhouse Earth is caused by all gas components…mainly by nitrogen and oxygen. It is not permissible to exclusively assign the GH effect of 33° to water vapour, CO2, and the other trace gases.”
Non-greenhouse gases absorb heat too
There is good reason to conclude O2 and N2 are the primary greenhouse effect determinants. Contrary to popular belief, real-world experiments show that N2, O2, and Ar actually do absorb heat, albeit about 20% less effectively than the so-called greenhouse gases do. A mere 20% dropoff is not significant when the abundance (99.9%) of these gases is considered relative to the abundance (less than 0.1%) of greenhouse gases.
“The heat capacities of polyatomic gases, H2O and the trace gases such as CO2, CH4, and SO2 are a further approx. 20% greater than those of O2 and N2 molecules. … Multiplied by the low concentration of trace gases, they cannot noticeably increase heat storage in the air. Only H2O…is able to store great amounts of heat.”
As mentioned, this phenomenon has been observed experimentally. For example, when air (99% O2 and N2), pure (100%) CO2, and pure (100%) Ar are warmed in experimental conditions, they all absorb heat to nearly the same degree.
Image Source: Allmendinger, 2016
Scientists agree: O2 and N2 are greenhouse gases
An earlier work published in Geophysical Research Letters (Hopfner et al., 2012) also clarifies that O2 and N2 should be considered “natural greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere.” Although O2 and N2 absorb heat (infrared radiation) more weakly than CO2 and CH4, they do indeed absorb heat, and they do not have a negligible role in Earth’s greenhouse effect because of their relative abundance when compared to CO2 and CH4.
“This work challenges a common perception on the negligible role of O2 and N2 as natural greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere…”
“It is in fact the large abundance of oxygen and nitrogen which compensates for their only weak interaction with infrared radiation…”
“Due to the atmospheric concentration of atmospheric N2 (O2) that is about 2000 (550) times higher than that of Co2 and about 4.4 x 10⁵ (1.2 x 10⁵) times more abundant than CH4, even the weak infrared absorption of N2 (O2) can become radiatively important.”
“Thus, we object to the view that the radiative forcing of N2 increase operates only indirectly by broadening the absorption lines of other gases.”
Image Source: Hopfner et al., 2012
CO2 is nothing special
Finally, Drs. Ullmann and Bülow emphasize just how non-special CO2 is as a greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere. As noted above, they point out that CO2’s contribution to the greenhouse effect is not even noticeable. They also assert that the laws of physics require there is no so-called “hotspot” in Earth’s atmosphere due to the conglomeration of CO2 molecules. There is nothing CO2 does that is thermally “special” relative to other gases.
“According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, heat is distributed from hot to cold molecules; there are no hotspots among molecules or types of molecules in the atmosphere. A special role of carbon dioxide cannot be confirmed.”
via NoTricksZone
September 30, 2024 at 08:27PM
