Nation at the crossroads: Japan contemplates its energy future

From Yahoo business news, a report on the imminent shutdown of Japan’s last running nuclear reactor this Sunday.

Japan has 54 nuclear power reactors, including the four at Tokyo Electric’s Daiichi plant in Fukushima that were damaged in the earthquake and tsunami, culminating in three meltdowns and radiation leaks for the worst civilian nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

One by one the country’s nuclear plants have been shut for scheduled maintenance and prevented from restarting because of public concern about their safety.

The last one running, the No3 Tomari reactor of Hokkaido Electric Power Co in northern Japan, is scheduled to shut down early on Sunday. Anti-nuclear activists will celebrate with demonstrations over the weekend.

The last time Japan went without nuclear power was in May 1970, when the country’s only two reactors operating at that time were shut for maintenance, the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan says.

Nicola Scafetta: Does the Sun work as a nuclear fusion amplifier of planetary tidal forcing?

Congratulations to Nicola Scafetta, who has just published another major paper on the relationship between planetary cycles and solar activity variation. This new paper explores a viable physical mechanism which potentially explains the now well known correlations the solar-planetary community has been discovering and documenting here at the Talkshop and elsewhere on the net (see the blog roll). Nicola has been successful in drawing together several of these discoveries and underpinning them with a coherent physical theory. Bravo Nicola! A landmark moment in the development of knowledge about our solar system. I’ll keep this post at the top of the blog while discussion develops.

Does the Sun work as a nuclear fusion amplifier of planetary tidal forcing? A proposal for a physical mechanism based on the mass-luminosity relation.

Nicola Scafetta, 2012.

Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 81–82, 27–40.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682612001034

Abstract

Numerous empirical evidences suggest that planetary tides may influence solar activity. In particular, it has been shown that: (1) the well-known 11-year Schwabe sunspot number cycle is constrained between the spring tidal period of Jupiter and Saturn, 9.93 year, and the tidal orbital period of Jupiter, 11.86 year, and a model based on these cycles can reconstruct solar dynamics at multiple time scales (Scafetta, in press); (2) a measure of the alignment of Venus, Earth and Jupiter reveals quasi 11.07-year cycles that are well correlated to the 11-year Schwabe solar cycles; and (3) there exists a 11.08 year cyclical recurrence in the solar jerk-shock vector, which is induced mostly by Mercury and Venus. However, Newtonian classical physics has failed to explain the phenomenon. Only by means of a significant nuclear fusion amplification of the tidal gravitational potential energy dissipated in the Sun, may planetary tides produce irradiance output oscillations with a sufficient magnitude to influence solar dynamo processes. Here we explain how a first order magnification factor can be roughly calculated using an adaptation of the well-known mass-luminosity relation for main-sequence stars similar to the Sun. This strategy yields a conversion factor between the solar luminosity and the potential gravitational power associated to the mass lost by nuclear fusion: the average estimated amplification factor is A=4.25×10^6. We use this magnification factor to evaluate the theoretical luminosity oscillations that planetary tides may potentially stimulate inside the solar core by making its nuclear fusion rate oscillate. By converting the power related to this energy into solar irradiance units at 1 AU we find that the tidal oscillations may be able to theoretically induce an oscillating luminosity increase from 0.05–0.65 W/m2 to 0.25–1.63 W/m2, which is a range compatible with the ACRIM satellite observed total solar irradiance fluctuations. In conclusion, the Sun, by means of its nuclear active core, may be working as a great amplifier of the small planetary tidal energy dissipated in it. The amplified signal should be sufficiently energetic to synchronize solar dynamics with the planetary frequencies and activate internal resonance mechanisms, which then generate and interfere with the solar dynamo cycle to shape solar dynamics, as further explained in Scafetta (in press). A section is devoted to explain how the traditional objections to the planetary theory of solar variation can be rebutted.

Bow shock shock: Its slower than we thought

Here’s a snippet from the Institute of Physics website at physicsworld.com. This is of interest in relation to Dayton Miller’s interferometry results from the 1930’s, which measured anisotropy in the speed of light.

New analysis of IBEX data – which has been carried out by David McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in Austin, Texas, and an international team – suggests that the bow shock does not exist after all. In other words, the solar system is not moving as fast as we though relative to the interstellar medium.

Launched in 2008, IBEX orbits the Earth and is designed to study fast-moving neutral atoms. What McComas and colleagues did was to use IBEX to characterize neutral atoms from the interstellar medium that cross into the heliosphere. Because these atoms are not electrically charged, they are not affected by magnetic fields – and so their speed should correspond to the relative velocity of the interstellar medium.

UK Weather summary: Not summery

From the Daily Torygraph
Up to three inches’ snow fell over the Highlands on Thursday after -5C overnight lows on Cairngorm, with lunchtime temperatures of 4C in parts of Scotland and 6-8C in the North.

MeteoGroup forecaster Nick Prebble said: “Umbrellas have been needed through an unsettled week, with below-average temperatures in the North.”

The North will be colder on Friday at 5-7C, with two inches more snow due in Scotland’s Highlands.

Met Office forecaster Charlie Powell said: “Sleet and snow were reported across Scottish mountains. There will be a north-south divide until next week, with the North drier and the South cloudier with rain but higher temperatures.”

The mercury is colder than February’s usual 7C highs, and up to 10C colder than May’s normal 16C peaks.

The Midlands will this weekend be 9C colder than the 18.7C at Coleshill, Birmingham, on February 23.

Did we say more secrecy? We meant more openness!

A.G. Foster Jr: LOD and sea level

I Picked this comment up on a recent WUWT sea level thread. LOD is Length of Day, a measurement of the Earth’s speed of rotation, which varies for several reasons. For some reason yet to be fully explained, its variation seems to correlate well with the changing disposition of mass in the solar system above and below the solar equatorial plane (SSBz), and detrended global average temperature.

agfosterjr says:

May 16, 2012 at 9:06 am

Jens Bagh says:
May 16, 2012 at 1:03 am
Were sea levels to be rising this would slow down the rotation of the earth. Has any change been noted in the rate of change of rotation and if so how does this compare to the present study?
=============================================================================
Oddly enough, LOD responds to sea level rise differently depending on whether the source is thermal expansion or melting ice. Of course thermal expansion adds no mass, but it does move it further from the center of gravity so that it flows toward expanding shallow coasts. It just so happens that shallow coasts are concentrated nearer to the poles than would be expected at random, much reducing the rate at which thermal expansion increases LOD or even reversing it, whereas rise due to melted ice should increase LOD by about .1ms per cm. So to determine the overall effect we have to know what fraction of rise is due to which source, when in fact the rise is so miniscule that neither satellites nor gauges can measure the combined effect accurately.

WordPress thread auto-subscription options

There is now a way to stop your inbox getting filled if you forget to untick the subscribe box when you respond to a thread which becomes busy. There is now a global setting in your control panel. If you don’t have a wordpress account just use the link at the bottom of the next mail. Full details on options below. 

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/follow-comments/

It’s now much easier for you and your commenters to keep track of the conversations you’re involved in across WordPress.com. Some recent tests have shown that by subscribing commenters to new comments by default, they are more likely to stay engaged and come back and comment more on your blog. With that knowledge, we’ve changed the default comment following behavior to help you get more conversations going on your blog.

We made the initial changes last week and after great feedback from you we just launched an update. Here’s how it works:

Hey! Whassup Ya-mal-feasant pseudo-scientists?

Reposted from WUWT, this article by Talkshop contributor Lucy Skywalker is excellent background to the latest episodes in the hockey stick wars between Realclimate.org and ClimateAudit.org, where Steve McIntyre has just delivered two more blows to the ‘Team’ treering chronology-temperature reconstructions. These have been used to support the ‘Hockey Stick’ graph drawn by Michael Mann using statistical techniques whixh have since been heavily criticised by expert statisticians. Mann was also selective in which tree ring chronologies he used, favouring ones which supported his conclusion, and excluding ones which didn’t. This kind of selection bias is frowned on in all scientific disciplines; except paleo-dendro-climatology apparently, where they have been known to cheerfully admit to it.

However as we mentioned earlier on the subject of biological growth populations, this does not mean that one could not improve a chronology by reducing the number of series used if the purpose of removing samples is to enhance a desired signal. The ability to pick and choose which samples to use is an advantage unique to dendroclimatology.

– Esper et al 2003–

Or more succinctly

 you had to pick cherries if you want to make cherry pie

Rosanne D’Arrigo

They really need to read Lucia’s post on cherry picking.

Guest post by Lucy Skywalker

Let’s look closely and compare local thermometer records (GISS) with the Twelve Trees, upon whose treerings depend all the IPCC claims of “unprecedented recent temperature rise”.
For my earlier Yamal work, see here and here. For the original Hockey Stick story, see here and here.

Half the Hockey Stick graphs depend on bristlecone pine temperature proxies, whose worthlessness has already been exposed. They were kept because the other HS graphs, which depend on Briffa’s Yamal larch treering series, could not be disproved. We now find that Briffa calibrated centuries of temperature records on the strength of 12 trees and one rogue outlier in particular. Such a small sample is scandalous; the non-release of this information for 9 years is scandalous; the use of this undisclosed data as crucial evidence for several more official HS graphs is scandalous. And not properly comparing treering evidence with local thermometers is the mother of all scandals.

 

I checked out the NASA GISS page for all thermometer records in the vicinity of Yamal and the Polar Urals, in “raw”, “combined”, and “homogenized” varieties. Here are their locations (white). The Siberian larch treering samples in question come from Yamal and Taimyr. Salehard and Dudinka have populations of around 20,000; Pecora around 50,000; Surgut around 100,000; all the rest are officially “rural” sites. Some are long records, some are short.

Carl Brehmer: Fact trumps theory with the greenhouse effect: A case study

I plucked this comment off the Hockey Schtick, as it ties in well with a recent post which generated a lot of comment. That post was looking at back radiation over dry areas. This one looks at the role of water vapour – claimed to be a ‘positive feedback’ by co2 driven global warming theorists.

One version of the “greenhouse effect/water vapor feedback” hypothesis that involves the mid to upper levels of the troposphere and water vapor feedback recognizes that humidity causes a slower lapse rate, which raises the altitude at which the air temperature drops to -18C—the affective radiating temperature of the atmosphere. Some people call this altitude the “top of the atmosphere” (TOA).
This version of the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis then applies the standard lapse rate of 6.8C/km to both the older lower altitude and the newer higher altitude to calculate the projected ground level temperature at the bottom of these two respective atmospheric columns.

To better visualize this version of the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis lets use some actual weather balloon soundings from above Las Vegas (specific humidity = 1.04 g/kg) on a particular day and compare it to weather balloon soundings over Little Rock (specific humidity of 13.83 g/kg) that particular day. These soundings are from http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html and they were both recorded at 11:00 AM, June 1, 2011.

Bass-ackwards Big Bang Brainchild: Big Bulldust Blobs Beget Black-hole’s: Blazars Boil Bright Beam’s Biddy Bits

From the Academy of Ad Hoc Apologies Heidelburg Institute of Theoretical Studies via physorg.com comes news that long standing problems with Big Bang cosmology have been solved by a supercomputer simulation model. Scientists are “surprised” by the match between their simulation of the imaginary heating effect of the emission of gamma rays from ‘black holes’ (Earth directed ones have been named ‘Blazars’)  and the observed spectra of quasars. 

Physorg takes up the story:

Every galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Such black holes can emit high-energy gamma rays and are then called blazars. Whereas other radiation such as visible light and radio waves traverses the universe without problems, this is not the case for high-energy gamma rays. This particular radiation interacts with the optical light that is emitted by galaxies, transforming it into the elementary particles electrons and positrons. Initially, these elementary particles move almost at the speed of light. But as they are slowed down by the ambient diffuse gas, their energy is converted into heat, just like in other braking processes. As a result, the surrounding gas is heated efficiently. In fact, the temperature of the gas at mean density becomes ten times higher, and in underdense regions more than one hundred times higher than previously thought.  If the gas becomes hotter, weak [spectral] lines in the forest [in the spectra of quasars] are broadened. This effect represents an excellent opportunity to measure temperatures in the early Universe, while it was still growing up.

 This allows us to elegantly solve a long-standing problem with the quasar data

says Dr. Ewald Puchwein, who conducted the large simulations on the supercomputer at HITS.

Solar wind stripping atmospheres: Earth-Mars comparison

This ESA article was flagged up by Ulric Lyons and I though it was a good followup to Tim Cullen’s recent post on magnetospheres.

Earth’s magnetic field provides vital protection

8 March 2012

Propagation of a solar wind stream

A chance alignment of planets during a passing gust of the solar wind has allowed scientists to compare the protective effects of Earth’s magnetic field with that of Mars’ naked atmosphere. The result is clear: Earth’s magnetic field is vital for keeping our atmosphere in place.

The alignment took place on 6 January 2008. Using ESA’s Cluster and Mars Express missions to provide data from Earth and Mars, respectively, scientists compared the loss of oxygen from the two planets’ atmospheres as the same stream of solar wind hit them. This allowed a direct evaluation of the effectiveness of Earth’s magnetic field in protecting our atmosphere.

They found that while the pressure of the solar wind increased at each planet by similar amounts, the increase in the rate of loss of martian oxygen was ten times that of Earth’s increase.

More on Heathrow, a mystery

As can happen with blog posts something contentious turns up, it won’t lie down, I was trying to move on to other things. Roger Andrews emailed me about some movement results he has unearthed, which relate to this earlier post on UHI at Heathrow Airport.

No head image here, are too large, read on to see.

Andrew McKillop: Energy policy confusion as the IEA vascillates

With European power grids teetering on the edge of instability, and economies in recession, the energy question is becoming acute. What we could really do without right now, is flannel and fakery from the organisation supposed to be offering coherent and well informed leadership on the energy question. A case of trying to serve too many conflicting interests?

CARBON, LOW CARBON, AND NO CASH
Andrew McKillop

STIRRING TIMES FOR SOME
Opening the IEA’s high level conference by-lined “Clean Energy Progress” in London, late April, the
IEA’s deputy director Ambassador Richard H. Jones didn’t beat around the bush: he said that global
average temperatures were set to rise by “at least 6 degrees centigrade by 2050”, and we should all be
very unhappy to leave that behind us, as our legacy to future generations. To be sure, getting that surge
in global temperatures in an eyeblink of planetary time would need something rather special and
strange, in fact catastrophic. This could include the most intense and quickest acting explosion of
volcanic activity the planet has ever known – but Ambassador Jones told the respectful audience,
including serried ranks of the world’s media and Britain’s PM David Cameron, it was all due to tailpipe
emissions from four-wheel-drives and fossil fuelled power stations. So low carbon was right back high
on the menu ! Like the loudest shills in the global warming business, such as Britain’s James ‘Lysenko’
Lovelock had always shilled for, through an incredibly long decade in which global warming junk
science ruled and it was absolutely OK – despite Lovelock himself recanting and admitting, also in late
April that basically speaking he had been lying. Lysenko had also been contrite, at the end.

Solar Forcing of Climate, C. de Jager

In Surveys in Geophysics

Solar Forcing of Climate
C. de Jager
Received: 4 November 2011/Accepted: 16 April 2012
(c)The Author(s) 2012.

This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com here.

UHI at Heathrow Met Office site

Figure 1

Thermal signature at Heathrow April 2010.

Tony Thomas: Grossly graphic gun-play in Goulburn

Here’s a partial repost from Australia’s ‘Quadrant’ magazine, be sure to read the rest of this entertaining article at their site. H/T the author ‘tthomas2′ .

UPDATE: Nick stokes reveals the mystery gunman’s identity in comments.

Doomed Planet
“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”

Vaclav Klaus – President of the Czech Republic
Blue Planet in Green Shackles

Grossly graphic gun-play in Goulburn
by Tony Thomas

May 11, 2012

---

Now that the 11 “death-threat” emails sent to climate scientists at the Australian National University are on the public record, we can read them with appropriate bemusement.[1]

---

Privacy Commissioner Tim Pilgrim was quite right to say there ain’t no death threats. But there are some four letter words and in one case, he says, an exchange that was intimidating and at its highest perhaps alluding to a threat, with danger to persons being only a possibility, not a real chance.[2]

I happen to be aware of the details about that exchange, and suggest that the person involved suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from prolonged patronising by the ANU climate academics.

Here’s No 5 email:

Using quasars as standard clocks for measuring cosmological redshift

Using quasars as standard clocks for measuring cosmological redshift
De-Chang Dai¹ , Glenn D. Starkman² , Branislav Stojkovic³ , Dejan Stojkovic⁴ , Amanda Weltman^1
1 Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravity Centre, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Private Bag, 7700, South Africa
² CERCA/ISO/Department of Physics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106-7079
³ Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SUNY at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-1500 and
⁴ HEPCOS, Department of Physics, SUNY at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-1500

We report hitherto unnoticed patterns in quasar light curves. We characterize segments of quasars’
light curves with the slopes of the straight lines fit through them. These slopes appear to be directly
related to the quasars’ redshifts. Alternatively, using only global shifts in time and flux, we are able
to find significant overlaps between the light curves of different pairs of quasars by fitting the ratio of
their redshifts. We are then able to reliably determine the redshift of one quasar from another. This
implies that one can use quasars as standard clocks, as we explicitly demonstrate by constructing
two independent methods of finding the redshift of a quasar from its light curve.

The energy question is hotting up: Time to uncover the issues

IEA Deputy Director Richard “6C by 2050” Jones
– Image courtesy OECD/IEA –

Following up Andrew McKillop’s recent post on the IEA Deputy Director’s ludicrous assertion that there would “probably” be a 6C rise in global average temperature by 2050, I culled this from Wikipedia’s page on the IEA:

The IEA Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (PVPS) is one of the collaborative R&D Agreements established within the IEA and, since its establishment in 1993, the PVPS participants have been conducting a variety of joint projects in the application of photovoltaic conversion of solar energy into electricity.

According to a 2011 projection by the International Energy Agency, solar power generators may produce most of the world’s electricity within 50 years, dramatically reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases that harm the environment. Cedric Philibert, senior analyst in the renewable energy division at the IEA said: “Photovoltaic and solar-thermal plants may meet most of the world’s demand for electricity by 2060 — and half of all energy needs — with wind, hydropower and biomass plants supplying much of the remaining generation”. “Photovoltaic and concentrated solar power together can become the major source of electricity,” Philibert said.^[17]

In 2011, IEA chief economist Faith Birol said the current $409 billion equivalent of fossil fuel subsidies are encouraging a wasteful use of energy, and that the cuts in subsidies is the biggest policy item that would help renewable energies get more market share and reduce CO2 emissions.^[18]

Poetry Corner: Reflections on the Yamal Peninsula

We’ve read about the hockey CRU
And Phil Jones’ neck of brass
Now McIntyre’s grabbed the stick
And shoved it up their

Andrew McKillop: Forget Global Warming and face up to real Climate Change

FORGET GLOBAL WARMING AND FACE UP TO REAL CLIMATE CHANGE
Andrew McKillop

Ambassador Richard H. Jones, deputy director of the IEA, opened the IEA’s April conference by-lined
‘Clean Energy Progress’, by saying global temperatures are “probably” going to rise by “6 degrees
celsius” by about 2050. The main problem, apart from this being totally impossible – barring massive
meteorite attack or massive volcanic eruptions – is that fewer and fewer persons believe this story.
One person who ferociously believed in the story, because he helped invent it is Britain’s James ‘Gaia’
Lovelock. Today however, in an April 23 interview with MSNBC, Lovelock has retracted and describes
himself, and Al Gore as unnecessarily “alarmist”, although this of course helped them sell a lot printed
matter and get invited to speak at lucrative rates, spreading alarm on the coming catastrophe. In 2006,
in an interview with the UK ‘Independent’ paper, Lovelock went as far as to say that “billions would
die” from runaway global warming leaving only “a few breeding pairs” of humans, forced to retreat
near the poles, to keep the human race breeding. Lysenko had almost as much leverage as this, touting
his half-baked genetic theories in Stalin’s USSR.