Blacklisted: The Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a Terrorist

.
Another step towards tyranny in the US (and no doubt the UK too): Secret guidelines about adding people to ‘the little list’ (not so little these days).

Roger Harrabin: LaLaLaLa I can’t hear you

Oh dear. Roger Harrabin, the well known BBC climate mouthpiece, has been unable to take a home truth on the chin. I got into a short twitter row about the EPA’s ‘pollution’ controls with him and the outcome is below the break.

New study: Synchronization of North Atlantic, North Pacific preceded abrupt warming, end of ice age

From Physorg, news of a new paper  which may shed light on the rapid warming at the end of the last ice age. The young scientists don’t mention Milankovitch cycles in this presser, but these are slow to change in comparison to the rapid deglaciation, so maybe their theory lends something to the story. It does lead me to wonder if the precession cycle might be involved with bringing the oceanic oscillations into synch though.

From SoundonSound.com:
Here you can see the original waveforms of the two different kick-drum samples. It’s clear that they are drifting in and out of phase with each other. The resulting phase cancellation made it impossible to arrive at a consistent sound, so Mike had to edit them back into phase before processing.

Synchronization of North Atlantic, North Pacific preceded abrupt warming, end of ice age

A newly published study by researchers at Oregon State University probed the geologic past to understand mechanisms of abrupt climate change. The study pinpoints the emergence of synchronized climate variability in the North Pacific Ocean and the North Atlantic Ocean a few hundred years before the rapid warming that took place at the end of the last ice age about 15,000 years ago.

The study suggests that the combined warming of the two oceans may have provided the tipping point for abrupt warming and rapid melting of the northern ice sheets.

“If we really do cross such a boundary in the future, we should probably take a long-term perspective and realize that change will become the new normal. It may be a wild ride.”

Results of the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, appear this week in Science.

EU gets legal on 24 member states for failing to implement energy efficiency directive – New 30% target

From a memo put out by the unelected EU commissars, compelling evidence for why we should demand an EU referendum before our remaining industries are forced to flee to less oppressive regimes.

What is the Energy Efficiency Communication?

The Communication on “Energy Efficiency and its contribution to energy security and the 2030 Framework for climate and energy policy” (onwards, the Energy Efficiency Communication) does two things:

1. It assesses whether the EU is on track to reach its 2020 target to increase energy efficiency by 20% and outlines what is necessary to ensure that the target is achieved.

2. It proposes a new energy saving target of 30% by 2030. This completes the 2030 Framework on Climate and Energy which was adopted by the European Commission on 22 January 2014. The Framework called for a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 levels and for a renewable energy share of at least 27% of energy consumption, and indicated that the cost-effective delivery of the greenhouse gas emissions reduction target requires increased energy savings (http://ec.europa.eu/energy/2030_en.htm). That is what today’s communication is delivering on. When setting the target, the Commission aims to strike the right balance between expected benefits and costs.

Euan Mearns: Scotch on the ROCs

Reblogged from Euan’s excellent site, Energy Matters.

“The Scottish Government’s targets are for renewable sources to generate the equivalent of 100 per cent of Scotland’s gross annual electricity consumption by 2020.” What will the consequences be for the Scottish People?

This post models Scottish electricity production and consumption in 2020 and compares this with 2012. It is assumed that Scotland’s two nuclear power stations remain operational in 2020. The reader is asked to always recall that the numbers are based on models and the conclusions therefore carry uncertainty. The consequences of this energy policy may be:

• A large electricity surplus of about 15 TWh may be produced in 2020, worth about £2.5 billion at 17p / KWh.
• There are currently many ideas but no certainty about where this surplus might go. It seems possible that a large part may simply be wasted.
• Assuming that marine renewables remain negligible and hydro output remains unchanged in 2020 then the bulk of the expansion in renewables to meet the target will most likely be met by wind that will require a 5 fold increase relative to 2012.
• In an independent Scotland the subsidy payments currently made to renewables companies by 63 million UK citizens would fall pro rata on the shoulders of 5.3 million Scottish citizens. This, combined with the 5 fold increase in wind capacity may mean a 25 fold increase in the level of renewable subsidy born by Scottish electricity consumers. Electricity bills may double.

In summary, the Scottish Government energy plan may result in a large electricity surplus that at present has nowhere to go, the number of wind turbines may increase 5 fold and electricity bills may double.

Lewandowsky and Oreskes Are Co-Authors of a Paper about ENSO, Climate Models and Sea Surface Temperature Trends (Go Figure!)

.

Tremendous post from Bob Tisdale. Lewandowsky strikes (out) again.

Bob Tisdale - Climate Observations

UPDATE 2:  Animation 1 from this post is happily displaying the differences between the “Best” models and observations in the first comment at a well-known alarmist blog. Please see update 2 at the end of this post.
# # # #
UPDATE: Please see the update at the end of the post.
# # #
The new paper Risbey et al. (2014) will likely be very controversial based solely on the two co-authors identified in the title above (and shown in the photos to the right).  As a result, I suspect it will garner a lot of attention…a lot of attention.   This post is not about those two controversial authors, though their contributions to the paper are discussed.  This post is about the numerous curiosities in the paper.  For those new to discussions of global warming, I’ve tried to make this post as non-technical as possible, but these are comments…

View original post 8,690 more words

Flannery Rattles His Climate Cup

Originally posted at Quadrant by Tony Thomas

Remember how the Climate Council was going to work pro bono to counter sceptics, deniers, carbonistas and all the other planet-fouling monsters in the warmists’ bestiary of evil doers? It seems volunteer efforts now come with a price tag.

Deep Oceans Are Cooling Amidst A Sea of Modeling Uncertainty: New Research on Ocean Heat Content

Watts Up With That?

Guest essay by Jim Steele, Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism

Two of the world’s premiere ocean scientists from Harvard and MIT have addressed the data limitations that currently prevent the oceanographic community from resolving the differences among various estimates of changing ocean heat content (in print but available here)^.3 They point out where future data is most needed so these ambiguities do not persist into the next several decades of change. As a by-product of that analysis they 1) determined the deepest oceans are cooling, 2) estimated a much slower rate of ocean warming, 3) highlighted where the greatest uncertainties existed due to the ever changing locations of heating and cooling, and 4) specified concerns with previous methods used to construct changes in ocean heat content, such as…

View original post 2,393 more words

US Antares and Atlas rockets use Russian engines

Image US Air Force

Under heading I didn’t know that there is a curious lack of sanctions so far on the stockpile of cold war era high thrust RD-180 and NK-33 rocket engines

Actually this is funny, Obama, Camaroon and the band pile onto Putin, in my view all damn silly, stop making trouble yet there we are US spy satellites, Mars stuff and goodness knows what else using Russian main engines.

“The Curiosity Rover, for example, departed for Mars atop an Atlas V for its …” madeinalabama site

And guess what there are long faces, talk of ‘we can design a new engine in 4 years given enough money’. Yeah right given only Soviet era perfected for that particular fuel combination.

Russian news site

Russia to Continue Space Rocket Engines Deliveries to US Despite Sanctions

Peru cops out before COP20 then changes prime minster

Whoa, what is going on?

GWPF have an amusing new story based on a Fox News article dated 20th July

In the run-up to the U.N. climate conference (COP20) in Lima in December, Peru’s government just rolled back environmental regulations in an effort to boost mining.

http://www.thegwpf.org/ahead-of-u-n-climate-talks-peru-slashes-environmental-regulations/

Reuters have a new story dated 23rd July

Peru’s Humala replaces prime minister amid political scandal

(Reuters) – Peru’s President Ollanta Humala said on Tuesday he is replacing his prime minister following an embarrassing political scandal that marks the start of his sixth cabinet and his third year in office.

Essex on Entropy, Hydrodynamics, Radiative Transfer, Steady State, Thermodynamic Equilibrium

A seminal moment came 1984 when three papers were published by Christopher Essex on thermal radiative transfer and thermodynamic equilibrium. This year, 2014, Essex joined the GWPF advistory council.
Given the ongoing heated discussions on the Talkshop on broadly this subject, perhaps this adds light. Fat chance!

Here is one of the papers (another can be found, third is paywalled)

Minimum entropy production in the steady state and radiative transfer

Essex, C.
AA(Department of the Environment, Canadian Climate Centre, Ontario)
Astrophysical Journal, Part 1 (ISSN 0004-637X), vol. 285, Oct. 1, 1984, p. 279-293. (ApJ Homepage) 10/1984

An extremum principle is developed for radiative transfer in a gray atmosphere by using a purely thermal example from Planck’s (1913) work on heat radiation. Entropy is accounted for, as is Prigogine’s (1947, 1967) theorem describing equilibrium as a thermodynamic state of minimal entropy.

Owen Patterson speaks out about the “Green Blob”

Owen Patterson was, until last week, the Secretary of State for the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (UK). He lost his job in the reshuffle, apparently for a number of reasons, which will not be gone into here and now.

He has now written an article for the Telegraph newspaper. The GWPF to which Mr Paterson is to deliver the Annual Lecture, has produced a slightly abbreviated version Read Here. His article is directed, not at the Prime Minister and those within the Government that lobbied for his removal. The target is what he calls “The Green Blob”.

It is not very often that a Policy Maker expresses an opinion of their own, as they are bound by the rules of the Cabinet “Tent”. To express such strong opinion so soon is rarer still. It seems unlikely that Mr Paterson go quietly and even (pure speculation on my part) opens the possibility that he may eventually replace Nigel Lawson.

“You can judge a man by the quality of his enemies” said Oscar Wilde. They cannot resist gloating at his downfall. Friends of the Earth & George Monbiot, amongst many others were quick to react. While Greenpeace did not openly celebrate, a Press release earlier this year, shows how much they wanted to have him removed.

 

Australia repeals carbon tax

Note from the co-moderator. We welcome Andrew as a new Talkshop contributor.

The biggest story in energy and climate politics, by a mile this week, is the news that at 11:15 EST Thursday the Australian Senate voted 39-32 to repeal the Climate Tax.

Following the vote, Prime Minister Tony Abbott declared it a “Useless destructive tax, which damaged jobs, which hurt families’ cost of living & which didn’t actually help the environment”. Tony Abbott made removing the bill the key promise of his election campaign.

Not everything has run smoothly for supporters of the repeal. In the days before the Senate vote Clive Palmer, leader of the PUP with 3 key senators, stood next to Al Gore while apparently discussing an emissions trading scheme. He then prevented the first attempt to repeal the bill. After the vote Opposition leader Bill Shorten described Abbott as an “environmental vandal”. This comes on the eve of Australia hosting the G20.

The reaction has been global. The Guardian is not amused, Graham Readfern writes “Science denial, so-called “free market” ideology and the interests of the fossil energy industry are the termites chewing away at the base all efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions”.

Slate ” In Australia, as the Simpsons joke goes, the water goes down the toilet counterclockwise . Now with its government voting to repeal the country’s tax on Carbon – in the process killing it’s most significant means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions – it seems that Australia’s new Prime Minister Tony Abbott, is determined to take the country in the same direction”. While some on Twitter hope for other countries to punish Australia.

On the other hand The Wall Street Journal headline simply  reads ” Tony Abbot shows that climate absolutists have a problem : democracy”. There is an Emission Reduction Fund White Paper as consolation for the supporters of the bill, but the Abbott Government seems intent on further cuts to the Green gravy train.

Gravesend 32.3C, why so hot?

The Met office Gravesend weather station is a little notorious as runs hot in what is the hottest part of the UK where there is a lot of history over dubious temperature measurement. (some findings yet to be revealed)

This Gravesend station is one of the few which regularly tops daily readings. I was prepared so I ran a capture of the Met Office web site hourly data for England, numbers are then plotted here. No better information is published, nor is this a full weather station, a subset.

What happened turns out to be interesting.

Solar magnetic dipole reversals, paper on model vs. observed

Reversals of the solar magnetic dipole in the light of observational data and simple dynamo models
V. V. Pipin., D. Moss, D. Sokoloff, and J. T. Hoeksema

Astronomy & Astrophysics, July 17th 2014

http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201323319

ABSTRACT
Context. Observations show that the photospheric solar magnetic dipole usually does not vanish during the reversal of the solar magnetic field, which occurs in each solar cycle. In contrast, mean-field solar dynamo models predict that the dipole field does become zero. In a recent paper it was suggested that this contradiction could be explained as a large-scale manifestation of small-scale magnetic fluctuations of the surface poloidal field.
Aims. Our aim is to confront this interpretation with the available observational data.

Wind subsidy harvesting industry’s reputation up in smoke: 10 times more fires than reported

H/T to Glenties WiG for this Yachting Monthly report:

Wind turbine blaze scandal

Up to 120 wind turbines catch fire annually, according to the journal of Fire Safety Science. This is 10 times the number reported by the industry, The figures, compiled by engineers at Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh, make fire the second-largest cause of accidents after blade failure.

The researchers claim that out of 200,000 turbines around the world, 117 fires take place annually, many more than the 12 reported by wind farm companies.

Unsettled science: Uncertainty around the continuum absorption of water vapour

H/T to ‘intrepid Wanders‘ for this repost from the Uni of Reading meteorology section. No settled science here, and lab model derived from far IR wavebands used in climate models and energy budget diagrams rests on a bunch of assumptions. Who knew? Obviously not Trenberth, who has no error bounds on his energy budget. So along with cloud microphysics getting the predicted absorption of energy by clouds wrong by a large margin, we have big uncertainty in the spectral absorption lines of water vapour. Ho hum. Business-as-usual in climate science land.

Water vapour continuum

  In addition to the spectral lines, it has long been recognized that water vapour possesses a continuum absorption which varies relatively slowly with wavelength and pervades the entire IR and microwave spectral region. This has a marked impact on the Earth’s radiation balance with consequences for understanding present day weather and climate and predicting climate change. It is also important for remote sensing of the Earth and its atmosphere.

  Discovered by Hettner (1918) as a low-frequency component of water vapour absorption in atmospheric transparency window 8-14 mcr, this phenomenon remained unexplained for 20 years, until Elsasser (1938) suggested that the continuum is an accumulated far-wingcontribution of strong water vapour spectral lines from neighbour bands. This hypothesis was generally accepted until the end of 70th years when the strong quadratic pressure dependence of the continuum absorption (which could not be explained by Lorentz (1906) line profile) as well as the strong negative temperature dependence have been detected (Bignell et al.,1963;Penner and Varanasi,1967). In this connection Penner and Varanasi (1967) and Varanasi et al. (1968) suggested that the main contribution to the self-continuum could be caused not by far wings of water monomer lines but rather by water dimers. Similar assumption was made also by Viktorova and Zhevakin (1967) for microwave spectral region.

What ‘back radiation’ does and doesn’t do

There has been some progress in the greenhouse. On the ‘toy planet’ thread, physicist Tim Folkerts now agrees with me that longwave infra-red radiated from the air towards the surface doesn’t directly heat the ocean but makes it harder for the ocean to cool. In my view this is due to IR radiation from the ocean making the air warm, reducing the temperature differential between ocean and air, slowing the rate of the Sun warmed ocean’s heat loss. Tim says:

LWIR is indeed incapable of “heating” the oceans in the strict sense of the word (net transfer of thermal energy). The best it can do is aid in making it “a far more difficult task escaping” for the energy.

But it’s hard for him to let go of ingrained notions, so his next comment is full of ambiguities, which I have tried to deal with in my followup comment:

Tim Folkerts: The DWIR DOES amount to ~ 330 W/m^2.

Fine, no problem.

This energy DOES get absorbed by the ocean.

In the top few microns, and is soon re-emitted along with an additional ~60W/m^2 IR, upwards.

The ocean IS warmer than it would be without this DWIR from the atmosphere.

But not because it is absorbed and re-emitted from the top few microns of ocean. The thermalisation of IR in the bulk air helps keep the air warm and that warm air slows the sun warmed ocean’s heat loss.

But the reason the air is warm is because the ocean warms it with the energy it emits into it which is absorbed and re-emitted, or conducted to the O2 and N2 in the air, by water vapour (from the ocean) and co2 (mostly from the ocean). Air has very little heat capacity of its own, and is nearly transparent to incoming solar short wave radiation. And this ocean warmed air is usually convecting upwards.

Rounders, Baseball, wots wrong with the game

Bit off base for the Talkshop

Extreme UV recorded in Bolivia 2003 , index 43

Record solar UV irradiance in the tropical Andes
Nathalie A. Cabrol, Uwe Feister, Donat-Peter Häder, Helmut Piazena, Edmond A. Grin and Andreas Klein

High elevation, thin ozone layer, and clear sky produce intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation in the tropical Andes. Recent models suggest that tropical stratospheric ozone will slightly decrease in the coming decades, potentially resulting in more UV anomalies. Data collected between 4300 and 5916 m above sea level (asl) in Bolivia show how this trend could dramatically impact surface solar irradiance. During 61 days, two Eldonet dosimeters recorded extreme UV-B irradiance equivalent to a UV index (UVI) of 43.3, which is the highest ground value ever reported. If they become more common, events of this magnitude may have societal and ecological implications, which make understanding the process leading to their generation critical. Our data show that this event and other major UV spikes were consistent with rising UV-B/UV-A ratios in the days to hours preceding the spikes, trajectories of negative ozone anomalies (NOAs), and radiative transfer modeling.

Front. Environ. Sci., 08 July 2014 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2014.00019