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We are back in the hunt for the main mystery drivers of our climate. The IPCC says it can’t be the Sun because the total amount of sunlight barely changes. Which is the usual half-truth that pretends the Sun is simple a ball of fire with no magnetic field, no solar wind, and has no changes in the “color” of the spectrum it emits. But the Sun has a massive fluxing magnetic field that turns itself inside out and upside down regularly, it churns off a stream of charged particles that rain on Earth, and if human eyes could see infra red and UV, we’d see the color of the Sun change through the cycle. We are only just beginning to figure out how these aspects affect the climate. But we know these factors influence ozone, probably cloud seeding, and possibly jet streams.
The only good long data we have on the Sun are the sunspots, which give us a reasonable idea of total sunlight since 1610. David uses Fourier maths to find the way that total solar irradiance (TSI) might relate to temperatures on Earth. TSI itself barely changes, so it could only have caused about 10% of the […]
Will Obama and the UN succeed in forcing “climate taxes” on the US?
h/t to GWPF for finding the stories that matter
When the press releases come out saying that Paris has succeeded (which will happen, no matter the outcome) the key factor is not just whether the agreement has any meaningful teeth, but whether it can be forced on the US without approval of Congress. The US didn’t approve Kyoto, and now, more than then, there is no reason to think anything significant would get through. The GOP Republican candidates are not paying lip service to the global warming meme anymore, things have changed so much they’re almost all competing to be skeptics. Just 6 weeks ago a poll in the US showed the amazing, astonishing result that 31% of respondents agreed with GOP candidates statement that Climate change is a total hoax.
The EU and UN players know they can’t convince the US people, and nor can they get past their elected reps so they are talking of doing things in ways that don’t require congressional approval. Naturally, if they had overwhelming evidence, and half a case, they wouldn’t have to do that.
No matter what country you […]
I’m travelling today…
7.4 out of 10 based on 17 ratings
How much further backward do things have to get?
In the great industrial nation of Germany power companies are going broke, and 350,000 households are getting their electricity turned off each year because they can’t afford the bills. In a nation of 82 million, power companies are issuing some 6 million threats to cut electricity.
Pierre Gosselin no trickszone: Socially explosive German homes losing power
From Speigel:
“Over the past three years it all totals to be a whopping 1.025 million households.”
“Spiegel writes that the price of electricity in Germany has doubled since 2002 in large part because of the renewable energy feed-in surcharge. Private households are the hardest hit; they have to pay some 45% more than the EU average (while German power producers get 30% less than the EU average)! The government-interfered market is grotesquely distorted.”
It is not only Germany’s power companies who are bleeding to death financially, but so are many private citizens, who are unable to pay for their power. A shocking situation in one of the world’s most technically advanced nations.
9.1 out of 10 based on 104 ratings
The evidence is overwhelming right?
Civilization is a pretty thin veneer, really.
Bullying and coercion is not just a school-yard thing. It’s everywhere and even at the highest levels.
This report on Australian surgeons was released a few months ago, uncovering bad behaviour from people we would normally think of as being outstanding and pretty darn smart. So bullying works even on people at the top of the pecking order, and in supposedly the most caring of professions.
We humans are a gregarious lot, and we pretend we’re all rational, but the pressure to conform and fit in is intense. Even for rational souls it’s easier to say nothing. No wonder the climate science debate is loaded with namecalling, bad manners, and petty mockery. Politicians and newspaper editors often don’t speak up because they are afraid of being called stupid or a “denier”.
Bullying-endemic-among-surgeons-but-victims-too-scared-to-speak-up
Bullying, discrimination and sexual harassment are rife in the surgical profession, a damning report has found.
Half the surgeons and trainees who responded said they had been victimized.
We are winning the debate on the science, but we need to win the social war too:
Although about three out […]
If only we had more electric cars and windmills, lives could’ve been saved.
Ponder that air conditioners can cause people to do random acts of murder. They might keep people in the room calmer, but outside that pollution* travels, heats the world, and lo, a terrorist is made.
(Call me a skeptic, but I tend to think that if we turn off all the air-conditioners (or run them on solar power, which is almost the same thing) we might get more acts of terror rather than less, but what would I know?) Bernie Sanders says that we should stop terrorists by reducing our carbon emissions. Somehow, there were people who did not laugh at him.
Time Magazine : “Why Climate Change and Terrorism Are Connected”
Drought in Syria has contributed to instability
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders used the terrorist attacks in Paris to call for action to address climate change at a primary debate Saturday. But, while the plea attracted ridicule across the political spectrum, many academics and national security experts agree that climate change contributes to an uncertain world where terrorism can thrive.
U.S. military officials refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” […]
We’ve had a lot of requests for a single document to summarize the blog posts so far. Some people like to print and read all in one place (that’s me). I hope this helps. Skeptics on threads are busy cracking away at getting a rerouting mechanism fleshed out. The quest… thanks to everyone who is supporting this project in so many ways, whether it be via email, sharing with others, or through donations. We really do appreciate it. We’re going to figure this out. :- ) — Jo
Dr David Evans, 15 November 2015, David Evans’ Basic Climate Models Home, Intro, Previous.
I’ve prepared a synopsis of the 19 posts in this series. It’s a standalone document of 20 pages that explains the important points, some from a different point of view than the blog series. The summary and introduction at the front are non-technical and suitable for politicians and journalists. The synopsis is light on for equations — there are some, but you can pretty much ignore them because it mostly reads fine without them.
If you wanted to show someone the series, this is the document to use. It is downloadable from the project home page, […]
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7.7 out of 10 based on 20 ratings
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Paris is under seige — Multiple terrorists arrived with AK 47s and bombs strapped to themselves in six separate attacks. The latest toll is 153 127 dead, and France has closed its borders. Our thoughts go out to the victims of these pointless atrocities, to all of their friends and families, and to all of France, in shock.
The Bataclan concert hall was attacked and people taken hostage, “at least 112” killed. A SWAT team arrived and over 100 hostages were released. A suicide bomber attacked the Stade de France (the national stadium). President Holland had to be evacuated. There are gun attacks as well. There are reports of 14 people killed by gunshot at Le Petit Cambodge, a Cambodian restaurant.
Information from the CNN live update page.
Sky news Paris ‘bloodbath’ kills at least 160
UPDATE: Islamic State (ISIL) have claimed responsibility.
UPDATE: Death toll appears to be 127 plus 200+ injured, 99 critically.
Graphic sad stories in The Telegraph are rolling in.
With between forty and fifty thousand people converging on Paris in two weeks to start the UNFCCC COP21 meeting the obvious question is […]
This is a big deal. Here’s a state government telling people to be more scientific, and not blindly follow the IPCC. This is a win we need to translate to other areas.
The former Labor government in NSW had told councils they had to plan for sea-level rise “according to the IPCC”, but that made sea-side properties unsalable, and was pretty painfully stupid compared to what the tide gauges were actually saying (like in Sydney where the rise is a tiny 6cm a century). The new strategy says councils need to be scientific and look at the conditions on each beach separately.
In this issue, the costs of following the IPCC plan were borne by those living on the coast (and property developers), and that pain motivated them to press the State government to get the IPCC out of the way. This is a reminder that it is worth protesting and sane things do happen.
If we can get citizens of the free west to appreciate the true cost of the IPCC, it would surely be gone by 2020. Now there’s a target..
Rob Stokes announces shake-up of council coastal management
In an interview with The Australian, […]
Blame dry weather and electronic sensors for a lot of Australia’s warming trend…
In this provocative report, retired research scientist Bill Johnston analyzes Australian weather records in a fairly sophisticated and very detailed way, and finds they are “wholly unsuitable” for calculating long term trends. He uses a multi-pronged approach looking at temperatures, historical documents, statistical step changes, and in a novel process studies the way temperature varies with rainfall as well.
His two major findings are that local rainfall (or lack of) has a major impact on temperatures in a town, and that the introduction of the electronic sensors in the mid 1990s caused an abrupt step increase in maximum temperatures across Australia. There will be a lot more to say about these findings in coming months — the questions they raise are very pointed. Reading, between the lines, if Johnston is right, a lot of the advertised record heat across Australia has more to do with equipment changes, homogenisation, and rainfall patterns than a long term trend.
Bill Johnston: On Data Quality [PDF]
“Trends are not steps; and temperature changes due to station changes, instruments and processing is not climate change”, he […]
Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) study: Inside Divestment (pdf)
The Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement (FFDM) is running on more than 1000 American colleges and universities, and about 30 of them have “divested”. It’s embedded in the tertiary sector, some 4,000 profs have signed supportive petitions, and some teach it in lectures.
The authors of a new 290 page study on Divestment Campaigns say that it’s not the grassroots thing it poses as, but is driven by professional political activists and funded by wealthy donors and foundations. The organization pushing the US campaign, 350.org, pays and trains students to be activists. Key dates and events are decided from the top down.
It’s all another charade — the holier than thou promises to sell fossil fuel stocks are often just empty PR stunts. Most divestment declarations are empty PR — 66% of the universities are saying they divest but hanging on to some fossil stocks. And four universities have not sold a thing — including Oxford. (Where are those protests?). But in the end, it doesn’t matter whether the divestments actually happen, a mere detail, […]
Don’t underestimate the importance of the nameless basic model. It sounds small, but in the culture and philosophy of climate science it’s bigger and carries more weight than the massive hairy GCMs. Like an invisible gossamer web, it’s overarching. It spans and defines all the other models. When they produce “dumb” answers, the basic model holds them in, for thou shalt not stray too far from the climate sensitivity defined by the basic model. It defines what “dumb” is. (It’s just “basic physics” after all.) One model to bind them all. What could possibly go wrong?
A lot, apparently. The physics might be right, but the equations are calculating imaginary conditions. The answers might be arithmetically correct but useless at the same time. They miss the real route that energy flows through to space.
By definition, as long as the basic model is wrong, the GCM models can never get it right.
It’s not like climate scientists consult the oracle of the basic model every day, or even once a year… they don’t need to. They were taught it their climate larval stage, often long before they’d written one paper. The basic model shows that the warming of […]
Suppose we give billions to the bureaucratic geniuses in Paris. Suppose they are right about how global warming works (though we know they are not). What do we get for all that money?
Combined, all plans, carried out, successful best case, at a cost of hundreds of trillions + : 0.17°C
More realistic more pessimistic case: 0.05°C
If the infra-red reroutes through the atmosphere and climate sensitivity has been overestimated by 5 – 10 fold: 0.02°C
The UN wants us to spend $89 trillion by 2030 to “green up” everything. For that we hope in theory, if we’re lucky to get a reduction of one sixth of a degree 70 years later. Rush, Rush, buy that plan today! Order two, and don’t count the dead.
The real reduction, using the best empirical data, and a corrected basic model, is more likely to be in the order of one thousandth of a degree 9 decades from now.
9.4 out of 10 based on 96 ratings […]
What hockeystick eh?
A new atlas shows droughts of the past were worse than those today — and they cannot have been caused by man-made CO2. Despite the claims of “unprecedented” droughts, the worst droughts in Europe and the US were a thousand years ago. Cook et al 2015[1] put together an old world drought atlas from tree rings data as a proxy for summer wetness and dryness across Europe. They compare the severity and timing of European droughts with the North American Drought Atlas (NADA) released in 2004. Yes, it’s a tree ring study with all the caveats about how trees are responding to several factors at once etc etc. But at least the modern era is measured with the same proxy as used in the old eras.
Something else is causing droughts, something modern models don’t include:
“megadroughts reconstructed over north-central Europe in the 11th and mid-15th centuries reinforce other evidence from North America and Asia that droughts were more severe, extensive, and prolonged over Northern Hemisphere land areas before the 20th century, with an inadequate understanding of their causes.”
The worst megadrought in the California and Nevada regions was from 832 to 1074 CE (golly, […]
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7.6 out of 10 based on 24 ratings
This video gives me hope. Finally we are starting to see more sane commentary in western parliaments. David TC Davies MP shows how politicians can master enough of the scientific details on this debate to crush the usual bumper-sticker trite “consensus” hogwash. He talks of Roman warming, the Medieval Warm Period, the Younger Dryas, the age of the Earth. It’s high school science type level, but more than enough to expose some of the silliness. He also counters the “climate change denier” tag. He cites just enough key numbers to back up each of his points. His skill here is in prioritizing the numbers that matter. Here’s hoping a few of the silent political skeptics will feel more confident to speak out. The bullying and namecalling breaks when enough people stand up to it. That’s coming.
No one I’ve ever met has ever suggested the climate never changes…
Even the IPCC is not saying that most of the warming [since industrialisation] is caused by humans …
It is absolutely certain that the more we rely on renewable energy the more we have to pay for it. No politician from any party should be running […]
There is a mystery peak in global CO2 levels in 1990. For some reason from 1989 suddenly global carbon levels jumped higher than they normal would and by 9,000 million tonnes (that’s equivalent to 2,500 mT of carbon)*. It’s only a little blip in an upward line, but as a deviation from the long steady norm, it’s a dramatic change (see the second graph below). Within a few years the excess disappeared and the reasonably straight line increase in CO2 resumed. The sudden jump is equivalent to nearly half of our total annual human fossil fuel emissions. Nothing about this peak fits with the timing of human induced fossil fuel emissions. These were not big years in our output (indeed it coincides with the collapse of the soviet block when inefficient Russian industry was shut down) .
The mystery of the massive CO2 bubble exposes how little we know about why CO2 levels rise and fall, and whether human emissions make much difference. The world is spending $4 billion dollars a day trying to change this global CO2 level of 0.04% (400ppm) but apparently other large forces are at work pushing up CO2, and then absorbing […]
Image: NASA
In years to come it may be recognized that this blog post produced the first modeled accurate figure for climate sensitivity. Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity sounds dry, but it’s the driving theme, the holy grail of climate science. The accurate figure (whatever it is) summarizes the whole entirety of carbon dioxide’s atmospheric importance. That number determines whether we are headed for a champagne picnic or a baking apocalypse.
To calculate a better estimate, David identified the flaws of the conventional basic model, and rebuilt it. The basic climate model is the top-down approach looking at inputs and outputs of the whole system. It defines the culture and textbooks of the modern global warming movement. GCMs (the big hairy coupled global models) are bottom-up approaches, doomed to failure by trying to add up every detail and ending up drowning in mile-high uncertainty bands. But the GCMs are ultimately tweaked to arrive at a similar ballpark climate sensitivity as the textbook model for the “basic physics” dictates. Hence this core model is where the debate needs to be. (Everyone knows the GCMs are broken.)
For decades the world of conventional climate research has been stuck in a groundhog day […]
The devastating result of the latest CSIRO survey: 54% of Australians don’t believe the experts at the IPCC, and are not convinced that humans are the dominant cause of climate change. Starkly, only 28% of Liberal voters agree with Malcolm Turnbull. Amazingly 40% of Labor voters and even a quarter of green voters don’t accept the IPCC litany. Presumably they think humans have some effect but are not the major cause.
More importantly, even most of those who believe are not motivated. When it comes to spending money on the environment, 80% of Australians don’t voluntarily do it and 80% don’t care enough to change their vote because of this issue. Despite all the relentless propaganda, despite all the government funded groups being in lock-step, the trends are slowly falling for believers (from 2010-2014), though not “statistically significantly”. (Though longer term studies from 1990 to now show that falling trend).
The survey: CSIRO — Australian attitudes to Climate Change, 2015 PDF
Don’t miss below how a climate science professor reveals that most of the people he knows just follow their political team’s fashions. How telling? Also below, see how the ABC spins this to meaninglessness to support the […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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