This is bad news for those who have invested in renewables, but according to this article they are losing money and likely to continue to do so. I have never invested in this sector, so I cannot speak from experience. Time to invest in the weapons industry, my BAE shares are at an all time high!
Green Hedge Fund executive says the whole Clean Energy Sector Is Dead « JoNova
via climate science
March 8, 2025 at 09:20AM
Kevin Kilty
The original essay from February 24 to which this addendum applies had several opportunities for discussion items that could be expanded.
First, there was some question about what a radiometer would see if pointed down at the surface. Figure 1 is educational in several ways. It is from the SURFRAD site at Desert Rock, Nevada on June 22, 2024. The four curves correspond to total downward solar radiation, total upward solar radiation, Upward and downward directed LWIR. I have also included the local wind speed and 10m temperature in the lower diagram.
Figure 1. A description of the site’s 10m tower where many of these instruments are mounted, and a photo of the area, is available here.
Sunrise is around 6am local time (1300UTC; Local PDT=UTC-7hr). Almost immediately after the sun peeks over the horizon the surface begins to warm and the pyrgeometer detects a rise in upward directed LWIR. Downward directed LWIR rises with about an hour’s delay from the heating of the surface but well before surface convection begins to heat the atmosphere which is quite apparent on the wind speed chart starting at around 10-11 am. The peak of upward directed LWIR occurs a half an hour or so past noon at a value of 658W/m2. With an assumed surface emissivity of 0.97 this suggests a surface temperature of 137F – far above the peak temperature at 10m elevation of 100F which occurs late in the day. There is a super adiabatic layer of heated air near the surface. The situation is exactly as I described it, using two atmospheric soundings at Albuquerque, Nex Mexico from August 3, 1993 in this addendum. This also, perhaps, explains why GEOS Band 16 images taken around Winter Solstice sometimes show northern Chile to be 60oC.
Downward directed LWIR curve, the Greenhouse effect, begins its rise almost coincident with both the rise in upward directed LWIR and the rise in 10m temperature, but reaches its peak value well after the peak in upward LWIR but long before the peak in 10m temperature. The Greenhouse effect results from rising air temperature, but this, in turn, results both from bulk transport from the surface and from absorption and re-emission of LWIR from the surface. It is not exclusively a function of air temperature as was claimed.
That upward directed LWIR remains 80W/m2 above the greenhouse effect throughout the night demonstrates how it is that natives in elevated and dry places have traditionally made ice overnight even when temperatures remain far above freezing (20F above) [1] and something I observed while camping overnight at Joshua Tree Monument on March 6 of 1982.
Violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
An idea that arises, it seems, in every post about the Greenhouse effect, is that energy cannot flow from the cold atmosphere to the warmer ground without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This argument will simply not go away.
Simply put, molecules and atoms do not have temperature – they have energy. Temperature is assigned by the distribution of kinetic energy in an ensemble of molecules and atoms, as in the Boltzmann distribution, where temperature is the only assignable parameter. Individual atoms and molecules are not guided by a temperature gradient in any way, but what net heat transport they accomplish is statistically in the direction from hot to cold.
Tom Shula provided a darned good reference to Harde (2013) that states…
“…any back radiation from colder and higher atmospheric layers can be absorbed by the lower and warmer layers, and this back radiation can also be absorbed by a warmer surface of the earth without violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics.”
I might mention that careless application of the Stefan-Boltzmann formula is almost guaranteed to end up with a violation of the Second Law.[2]
Is the radiation field isotropic?
There was some discussion about the radiation field being isotropic, in fact, about the necessity of it being so. The radiation field, meaning the distribution of emitted radiant energy in the atmosphere, cannot be isotropic when there are temperature gradients involved. At each point in space (we call this the field point) there is an emitted field originating at that point. This emitted field is isotropic.[3]
In addition there is also a contribution originating at other points in the domain of the problem and passing through the field point. This field component is not isotropic as it is reflective of whatever is emitted by all objects and material within view of the field point. The total field is a vector integration of the two. A truly isotropic total field could only occur inside a cavity at uniform temperature, which would be an instance of thermal equilibrium, of a true blackbody, and without net heat transfer in any direction. When heat is transported, the field doing so is not isotropic.
Collision rates being far greater than emission rates
There was a discussion about why the emitted power from a molecule like CO2 is so intense when collisions de-energize the CO2 15u line at a rate of “29,000” times the emission rate. The fact that this collision rate, which redistributes kinetic energy locally and continually, occurs with far greater speed than the emission or absorption rate is responsible for maintaining local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE).[4] It allows us to use atmospheric temperature in conjunction with the Planck function to calculate emission. It is what connects radiation to local atmospheric temperature.
Radiation annihilated?
Someone made a claim to the effect that “… The surface field is completely annihilated and converted into sensible heat. The thermal atmospheric field is produced exclusively by collisional excitation and exists throughout the atmosphere all the way down to the surface….”
For this to be so, radiation leaving the surface would have to be completely absorbed and through collisions converted completely to kinetic energy. Moreover, once converted completely to kinetic energy, would collisions be effective or not at raising IR active gasses from their ground state to a higher energy state?
The present radiational cooling of Earth involves different transport behavior at different wavelengths. In places the atmosphere is quite transparent and transport is ballistic, in other areas the emission is created locally through collisions. Just to drive this point a bit further, Figure 2 shows an LWIR spectrum measured from satellite over the polar ice cap from the publication by Harde (2013).
Figure 2. From Harde (2013).
Red arrows point to segments of the spectrum from within the atmospheric window where there is little IR active gas to absorb radiation. The spectrum nicely follows a blackbody spectrum (dashed curves) just below the 268K ice surface temperature. There is nothing nearer the satellite with this temperature than the ice cap itself. Meanwhile, blue arrows point to other portions of the spectrum which suggest much lower temperature. These occur over wavelengths where IR active water vapor and CO2 hide the surface from direct view and emit radiation from lower temperature higher in the polar atmosphere.
Even if Earth’s atmosphere were more opaque than it presently is (greater optical depth), radiation from the surface would still make its way skyward. Photons would “diffuse” through a very opaque atmosphere much like thermal conduction except with a “thermal conductivity” proportional to temperature cubed (the Rosselund approximation).
References:
[1]-My handwritten notes from 45 years ago are not entirely clear, but the report of natives of Bengal making ice overnight is probably: S. Tamara, Monthly Weather Rev., 33; 55, 1905.
[2]-A good example is Q=σ(A1T14-A2T24), where sigma is the Stefan constant. Just using areas for different radiators can lead to a large cold radiator delivering heat to a small hot one. Generally I don’t make reference to my own work, but this link will bring up a lecture I produced as a guest for a nearby community college nearly a quarter century ago that shows how little a person can accomplish with only the Stefan-Boltzmann formula and what little else is needed to make it useful.
[3]-Any radiation can be considered scattered. A phase function describes how the scattering takes place. For example, the “scattering” phase function of isotropic radiation is 1.0, unlike the phase function of, say, Rayleigh scattering which is 0.5(1+cos2Θ), where the scattering angle is measured from the line connecting the Sun and the scattering object or volume. It explains why the blue of the sky is not uniformly blue.
[4]-LTE is simply a state of being close enough to thermal equilibrium to make reasonable use of results from true thermal equilibrium.
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via Watts Up With That?
March 8, 2025 at 08:04AM
53.84509 -2.46994 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 The World’s longest continuously running site temperature record from 1846.
In researching for background information regarding Stonyhurst I was astonished at the amount of what I can only describe as propaganda that I had to wade my way through. Quite why this station is allegedly so controversial is a puzzling mystery that I will try to resolve.
Stonyhust College is a public school in Lancashire that had its original observatory and weather station built in 1846. This was later moved to a new building in 1865 with the original records carrying over to the new site. This leads to the claim of being the world’s longest continuously running temperature though there are other counter-claiming sites. Quite surprisingly the CEDA archives have not archived any temperature readings for the years 1979 to 1999 inclusive . The “Measurements Made” section indicates manual readings (DLY3208) ended 30/6/1978 with automatic readings (AWSDLY) not being resumed until 1/8/1998. It is unclear if records actually do exist for the interim period.
The world’s longest running “national” temperature record is the Central England Temperature Series (CET) with data running on a monthly basis from 1659 and thence daily from 1772. It is worth noting that the stations used to compile even the more recent data have changed over the period. Despite Stonyhurst’s longevity it was not continuously included in the CET being removed in 1959 and only reintroduced to the series in 2004 replacing the Ringway highly meteorologically compromised aviation site. Other notable exclusions from the CET include Cambridge University Botanic Gardens.
More detail on the CET amendment can be found here
The potential age of any site is, of course, scientifically irrelevant – it is the quality of the site throughout the period that is important. Below is a close up of the site from an odd but useful source of information – a bee keeper.
The site is not enclosed and there are no indications from Google Earth Pro historic images that it has ever been in the period of its re-inclusion in the CET. However, the earlier images do not indicate any screen at all at the current quoted site prior to 2015. It would appear there have been several re-locations within the site over its lifetime. The evidence of one’s own eyes shows the current screen unusually close to a large potentially shading structure with it also being near to brickwork, paved areas and a tarmac footpath. Most importantly the Met Office themselves expressly do not consider this site to be representative of the wider area in classifying the site as Class 4 with a defined
2.5 Class 4 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 2 °C)
The Met Office clearly states in its own online information pages
” the WMO classification simply informs the data user of the geographical scale of a site’s representativity of the surrounding environment – the smaller the siting class, the higher the representativeness of the measurement for a wide area.”
This clearly demonstrates that “the smaller the sitting class” i.e. Class 1 or 2 represents a wide area whilst a higher rating i.e. Class 4 does NOT represent a wide area. There are currently only 3 stations in the CET – Rothamsted (Class 1), Pershore College (Class 4) and Stonyhurst (Class 4) as a modern addition known to be unfit for purpose. These are intended to represent the large area north of the M4 and south of Scotland – the old definition of “The Midlands” clearly does not apply with this Lancashire site inclusion.
The reality of representation of the wider area question is excellently portrayed by this apiarist’s site for whom an understanding of the climate is critically important. It starts discussing, “The Weather at Stonyhurst” with the remarkably direct comment – “In the next four pages the difference between theory and practice is explored” {take note Met Office}
As the apiarist points out “Stonyhurst being in the Forest of Bowland lying just south of the Lake District is one of the wettest places in England. It has also one of the lowest sunshine records in England.” and then continues to compare the stark differences of the climate there with that of Hull at a similar latitude.
Despite the obvious and acknowledged unrepresentative nature of Stonyhurst, the Met office still opted to return the site to the CET. As I emphasized in my review of Pershore College, this marks the demise of the CET credibility – a straightforward case of GIGO – garbage going in and getting garbage out. Of course everything that I have stated above is likely to be “Misinformation” in the eyes of the Met Office – why do I say that? Well consider the Met Office own web page concerning the CET.
In the style of criminal under police questioning this descriptor page of the CET actually spends the majority of the discussion “denying” claims of tampering with the CET and accusing others of spreading “Misinformation” Reads very much like a “guilty conscience” – who decided what “misinformation” Anyone may encounter?
I personally find the outstanding hubris of claiming – “To take account of changes in technology and the weather station network over time requires a careful process of adjusting the contributing data to produce a consistent series.” – to be quite breathtaking.
Further online investigation into the CET and data manipulation subsequently led down far more avenues and shameless propaganda than I could mention here. However, one that truly amazed me came from the BBC and a programme I mercifully missed.
“The Climate Wars”, “Fightback”, “counter-attack”, “The Battle Begins”, Fight for the Future” – What on earth does science have to play in this sort of rhetoric?
In summary, Stonyhurst is a long running site of rather dubious provenance that is poorly sited and only reflects a particularly wet and “unsunny” small area. The Met Office have reintroduced this known very unrepresentative site into the World’s longest running temperature series to seemingly corrupt its erstwhile integrity. Same old, same old.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
March 8, 2025 at 07:25AM
