This was a surprise, but whatever the interpretation, the numbers speak for themselves.
‘Richard Christopher Carrington determined the solar rotation rate from low latitude sunspots in the 1850s and arrived at 25.38 days for the sidereal rotation period. Sidereal rotation is measured relative to the stars, but because the Earth is orbiting the Sun, we see this period as 27.2753 days.’ – Wikipedia.
What happens if we relate this period to the lunar draconic year?
Credit: NASA climatekids
Heavy rain in California and piles of snow in the Southeast may be signs another El Niño weather phenomenon is upon us, says CBS News.
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Heavy rain and mudslides in California, flooding in Texas, and up to 2 feet of snow in North Carolina — all these recent weather events are symptoms of the infamous climate phenomena called El Niño.
For months now we have been on the verge of an official El Niño, but so far the climate community has not pulled the El Niño trigger.
‘I am really sticking my neck out on this one!’ – IW. Indeed – good luck, results next week.
Note: El Niño link added, includes short video.
Information on the progress of the latest MJO that started on 02/12/2018
[As of 09/12/2018]
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/mjo/ – last accessed at 7:00 P.M. EAST 09/12/2018
Hypothesis: During periods leading up to the onset of El Niño events, nascent Typhoon/Cyclone pairs associated with the active phase of Madden Julian Oscillations are reinforced either at or 1-2 days after the maxima or minima in the Earth’s rotation rate that are induced by the monthly lunar tides.
Gateway to the COP24 climate conference in 2018
A diplomatic standoff over a single word could set the stage for a bigger showdown during the second half of this year’s U.N. climate summit, says Phys.org.
Negotiators took time out Sunday to rest after the first week of talks ended on a sour note the previous night, when the United States sided with Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in blocking endorsement of a landmark study on global warming.
A different view – source: ARGO marine atlas [credit: climatedepot.com]
The US government has funded more than 100 efforts to model our climate for the better part of three decades; none have come close to actual results, says ClimateChangeDispatch.
They are exercising precisely what prominent writer H.L. Mencken described as “the whole point of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”.
Not everyone is welcome
Civil society says the Polish government is violating human rights and undermining the global climate negotiations by denying entry or deporting climate advocates.
At least 12 members of civil society groups and at least one member of an official delegation to this year’s United Nations climate conference have been denied entry to Poland or deported, reports Pacific Standard.
Some were stopped at airports, others pulled from trains, and several were given paperwork to sign in languages they didn’t understand. So far, only one person, Zanna Vanrenterghem, Climate Action Network Europe’s climate ambition project coordinator, has been allowed re-entry after the Belgian embassy intervened.
Vanrenterghem was on a direct train from Vienna when, 30 miles outside of Katowice, border patrol officials entered her car [carriage] and scanned her passport. Soon, four officers sat in the seats around her and told her she was being denied entry into Poland.
She was escorted off the train and taken to what she believes was a border patrol facility, where she was able to call CAN officials and the Belgian embassy to ask for help. The Polish officials who detained her were unable to tell her why she was being turned away.
Nugzar Kokhreidze, a member of the Georgian delegation, arrived at the Katowice airport last night and was stopped at passport control, where officials told him his name was on “a list of dangerous persons.” Officials at the airport told him if he flew back to Georgia on Tuesday, he could return eventually, because “this measure was only for the COP,” but if he refused and challenged them in court, he could be deported and banned from Poland for five years.
These denials and threats of deportation appear to be related to a sweeping new surveillance law passed by the Polish government earlier this year, specifically related to the U.N. climate conference. The law banned unplanned protests within the city of Katowice, and included provisions that allowed Polish authorities to gather data on conference attendees.
It was immediately criticized for putting undue pressure on activists and human rights defenders, according to Chiara Liguori with Amnesty International.
Even before the conference began, Liguori says, the new law was already exerting a “chilling effect” on potential participants, with many activists from the Global South, who had to apply for visas, electing not to participate.
According to Liguori, Polish authorities’ enforcement of the law and efforts to turn away COP participants at the border violate the Aarhus Convention—an international agreement ensuring the general public has access to environmental negotiations.
Continued here.
German coal: back to the future
[image credit: BBC]
Dismayed by the German government’s failure to meet climate protection targets, dairy farmer Heiner Luetke Schwienhorst has filed a lawsuit against Berlin to force it into action, reports Phys.org.
“Some describe this as a fight between David and Goliath. To me, that’s besides the point,” said Schwienhorst, who suffered his poorest harvest in three decades after a record drought.
Field lines of the bar magnet [image credit: brilliant.org]
New research describes striking similarity of laboratory research findings with observations of the four-satellite Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission that studies magnetic reconnection in space, reports ScienceDaily.
As on Earth, so in space.
A four-satellite mission that is studying magnetic reconnection — the breaking apart and explosive reconnection of the magnetic field lines in plasma that occurs throughout the universe — has found key aspects of the process in space to be strikingly similar to those found in experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).
At last, a people’s revolt against the tyranny of environmentalism. Paris is burning. Not since 1968 has there been such heat and fury in the streetsThousands of ‘gilets jaunes’ stormed the capital at the weekend to rage against Emmanuel Macron and his treatment of them with aloof, technocratic disdain. And yet leftists in Britain and the US have been largely silent, or at least antsy, about this people’s revolt. The same people who got so excited about the staid, static Occupy movement a few years ago — which couldn’t even been arsed to march, never mind riot — seem struck dumb by the sight of tens of thousands of French people taking to the barricades against Macronism.
Read the rest of this entry »
Arctic sea ice [image credit: cbc.ca]
New NASA research has found that increases in the rate at which Arctic sea ice grows in the winter may have partially slowed down the decline of the Arctic sea ice cover.
As temperatures in the Arctic have warmed at double the pace of the rest of the planet, the expanse of frozen seawater that blankets the Arctic Ocean and neighboring seas has shrunk and thinned over the past three decades.
Smoke from a California wildfire [image credit: BBC]
A powerful storm will crawl across the southern tier of the U.S. over the next several days, delivering snow, ice, rain, floods and even a few tornadoes, says USA Today.
A powerful storm that slammed southern California Thursday will crawl across the southern tier of the United States over the next several days, delivering a nasty mix of snow, ice, heavy rain, floods and even a few tornadoes.
Ahead of the storm, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin declared a state of emergency for all 77 counties in her state.
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Playing around with CO2 levels doesn’t work, either in climate models or real life.
Run the above experiment 1 billion times and you will get 1 billion identical outcomes. Now, look at the “settled science” of climate science. They have multiple models, none of them agree, and worse, they don’t accurately reflect reality. The only thing “settled” about climate science is that the climate experts don’t have a clue as to how to model the climate.
Don’t take it from me, listen to the true experts.
Many new scientific papers affirm climate model results conflict with one another, diverge from observations, and aren’t fully rooted in established physics. (Source)
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This may or may not have its uses, but any idea that the whole world could get electricity mainly from the sun and the wind is not credible, with today’s technology at least.
MIT engineers have come up with a conceptual design for a system to store renewable energy, such as solar and wind power, and deliver that energy back into an electric grid on demand, says TechExplore.
The system may be designed to power a small city not just when the sun is up or the wind is high, but around the clock.
The new design stores heat generated by excess electricity from solar or wind power in large tanks of white-hot molten silicon, and then converts the light from the glowing metal back into electricity when it’s needed.
The researchers estimate that such a system would be vastly more affordable than lithium-ion batteries, which have been proposed as a viable, though expensive, method to store renewable energy. They also estimate that the system would cost about half as much as pumped hydroelectric storage—the cheapest form of grid-scale energy storage to date.
“Even if we wanted to run the grid on renewables right now we couldn’t, because you’d need fossil-fueled turbines to make up for the fact that the renewable supply cannot be dispatched on demand,” says Asegun Henry, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “We’re developing a new technology that, if successful, would solve this most important and critical problem in energy and climate change, namely, the storage problem.”
Henry and his colleagues have published their design today in the journal Energy and Environmental Science.
Record temps
The new storage system stems from a project in which the researchers looked for ways to increase the efficiency of a form of renewable energy known as concentrated solar power.
Unlike conventional solar plants that use solar panels to convert light directly into electricity, concentrated solar power requires vast fields of huge mirrors that concentrate sunlight onto a central tower, where the light is converted into heat that is eventually turned into electricity.
“The reason that technology is interesting is, once you do this process of focusing the light to get heat, you can store heat much more cheaply than you can store electricity,” Henry notes.
Concentrated solar plants store solar heat in large tanks filled with molten salt, which is heated to high temperatures of about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. When electricity is needed, the hot salt is pumped through a heat exchanger, which transfers the salt’s heat into steam. A turbine then turns that steam into electricity.
“This technology has been around for a while, but the thinking has been that its cost will never get low enough to compete with natural gas,” Henry says. “So there was a push to operate at much higher temperatures, so you could use a more efficient heat engine and get the cost down.”
However, if operators were to heat the salt much beyond current temperatures, the salt would corrode the stainless steel tanks in which it’s stored. So Henry’s team looked for a medium other than salt that might store heat at much higher temperatures.
They initially proposed a liquid metal and eventually settled on silicon—the most abundant metal on Earth, which can withstand incredibly high temperatures of over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Last year, the team developed a pump that could withstand such blistering heat, and could conceivably pump liquid silicon through a renewable storage system. The pump has the highest heat tolerance on record—a feat that is noted in “The Guiness Book of World Records.”
Since that development, the team has been designing an energy storage system that could incorporate such a high-temperature pump.
Continued here.
Research article: Secular decrease of wind power potential in India associated with warming in the Indian Ocean
Image credit: mirror.co.uk
The warming of the Indian Ocean due to global climate change may be causing a slow decline in India’s wind power potential, according to a study, as Financial Express reports.
India, the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China and the US, is investing billions in wind power and has set the ambitious goal to double its capacity in the next five years, said researchers from the Harvard John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
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It has been billed as The Comet of The Year.
Nov. 26, 2018: Small but hyperactive Comet 46P/Wirtanen is approaching Earth and could soon become visible to the naked eye. On Dec. 16th, the kilometer-wide ball of dirty ice will be less than 11.5 million km away–making it one of the 10 closest-approaching comets of the Space Age. It already looks magnificent through amateur telescopes. On Nov. 26th, Gerald Rhemann took this picture using a 12-inch reflector in Farm Tivoli, Namibia:
“The comet is currently gliding through the southern constellation Fornax,” says Rhemann. “If you look carefully at the image, you can see galaxy NGC 922 near the comet’s head, and another galaxy ESO 479-2 on the left.”
Rhemann says that the comet’s emerald green atmosphere is 50 arcminutes wide. In other words–almost twice as wide as a full Moon. Its apparent diameter could double in the weeks ahead as the comet comes even closer. Because Wirtanen’s brightness is spread…
View original post 168 more words
Image credit: The GWPF
Macron’s decision to suspend the carbon tax increase ‘sends a very bad signal,’ warn campaigners. KATOWICE, Poland — France’s sudden U-turn over an unpopular fuel tax in the face of violent anti-government protests sent shivers through the COP24 climate summit.
That’s because the sight of one of Europe’s most climate ambitious countries beating a hasty retreat over a proposal that would have hiked gasoline tax by 4 cents, or just under 3 percent, highlighted the difficulty of imposing any economic pain in the name of tackling climate change.
The spirit of Heath Robinson lives on.
The experimental device is part of the secretive Google X research lab, reports Euronews.
One day, generating renewable energy could be as simple as flying a kite — but not just any kite.
After more than a decade of development work, an experimental “energy kite” capable of tapping into strong high-altitude winds is now being tested on Hawaii’s Big Island, West Hawaii Today reported.
While this may all seem a bit vague, it looks like a step in the right direction.
Historic space weather could help researchers better predict future events and atmospheric cycles, a new study in Space Weather reports.
This finding comes from scientists at the University of Warwick, who tracked space weather in solar cycles for the last half century, reports The Space Reporter.
That then revealed a repeatable pattern in the way space weather activity alters over each solar cycle.
Paris protest scene [image credit: BBC]
French government sources have indicated that a fuel tax hike, which has sparked violent protests, will be suspended, says DW.com.
Prime Minister Edouard Philippe is expected to announce the move later on Tuesday.
Note: red lines added to original image.
While Space.com writers should know quite a bit about the other planets, the article was a fount of misinformation and gross exaggeration, says Dr Roy Spencer.
