Why I am leaving the Conservative party and joining UKIP

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First Doug Carswell and now Mark Reckless have left the Conservative party to join UKIP. Is the message getting through yet Mr Cameron?

Mark Reckless | UKIP

Today, I am leaving the Conservative Party and joining UKIP.

These decisions are never easy. Mine certainly hasn’t been. Many have been the sleepless nights when I have talked it over with my wife and thought about the future of our children.

But my decision is born of optimism, conviction Britain can be better, knowledge of how the Westminster parties hold us back, and belief in the fresh start UKIP offers.

We all know the problem with British politics. People feel disconnected from Westminster.

In fact, “disconnected” is too mild a word. People feel ignored, taken-for-granted, over-taxed, over-regulated, ripped off and lied-to.

And they have reason to.

MPs, with some honourable exceptions act, not as local representatives, but as agents of the political class. Too many focus, not on championing their constituents’ interests at Westminster, but on championing their parties’ interests in their constituencies.

We’ve even evolved a special vocabulary…

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Met Office Arctic sea ice extent, issue a forecast 2 months nearer the date?

The UK Met Office forecast for things they choose, such as Arctic sea ice extent but seem completely silent on Antarctica or even handedly dealing with both of pairs of extremes.

Ah well, wait a month or two… forecasting is better after the event IYSWIM

Annotated extract from Met Office Arctic sea ice forecast page
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/seasonal-to-decadal/long-range/arctic-sea-ice

It is possible the file dates do not reflect change in the documents.

NSIDC announcement for 2014 page here (where NSIDC also acknowledge the Antarctica extreme)

A woman in the eye of the political storm over climate change

Georgia Institute of Technology professor Judith Curry [image credit: Wikipedia]

Someone the current US President might do well to listen to before voicing opinions on climate matters is profiled here.

E & E News reports: Judith Curry thinks climate scientists view her as their “biggest threat.”

“I do not pay obeisance to the consensus and I think for myself, and they don’t like that,” said Curry, a professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Solar diameter measurement, new French facility, cycle 24

The size of the sun is of critical importance to solar studies yet this is poorly known, let alone if and how the size varies over time. Paper published this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Fig.1. Left: solar radius measurements (red symbols) made since the seventeenth century (Rozelot & Damiani 2012). The mean value of all these measurements is close to 960 arcsec. Right: focus on solar radius measurements made since 1970. …

Fig.2. Evolution of the solar radius variations over time for ground instruments (Solar Astrolabe, DORAYSOL and SODISMII monthly mean at 782.2 nm), balloon experiment (SDS), and space instrument (MDI) vs. daily sunspot number time-series. For each series, the mean has been
taken as reference value.

 

Ground-based measurements of the solar diameter during the rising phase of solar cycle 24
M. Meftah, T. Corbard, A. Irbah, R. Ikhlef, F. Morand, C. Renaud, A. Hauchecorne, P. Assus, J. Borgnino, B. Chauvineau, M. Crepel, F. Dalaudier, L. Damé, D. Djafer, M. Fodil, P. Lesueur, G. Poiet, M. Rouzé, A. Sarkissian, A.Ziad, and F. Laclare

Paper access is available with registration.

Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Sep 25 2014 – 13th Day Above the 2013 Record

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Deafening silence in most of the mass media about this. Why is that?

sunshine hours

Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Sep 25 2014 – 1,362,000 sq km above the 1981-2010 mean. Data for Day 267. Data here.

13th Day Above the 2013 Record. 184th Daily Record.

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German power grid at risk of widespread blackouts

[image credit: Wikipedia]

Pierre Gosselin at Notrickszone reports:

‘There was a time when Germany’s power was mostly generated by the traditional sources of coal, nuclear, oil, natural gas and hydro. These sources were reliable and keeping the power grid under control was a routine matter. Germany’s power grid was among the most stable worldwide. But then came Germany’s renewable energy feed-in act, and with it the very volatile sources of sun and wind.’

‘As a result, today’s German power grid has become a precarious balancing act, and keeping it from collapsing under the load of wild fluctuations has become a real challenge.’

Rise of Germany’s UKIP gives the EU another headache

German voters back AfD
[image credit: BBC]

Recent voting successes for the ‘Alternative for Germany’ party, which in some respects is similar to UKIP, have ‘upset the chemistry of German politics’ according to a Daily Telegraph report. Oh dear, how awful (!).

Report: ‘Attempts to discredit the party as a Right-wing fringe group have failed.’ A familiar tactic with the same result as in the UK.

Although they don’t advocate leaving the EU altogether, they are opposed to Germany being a member of the ‘eurozone’ currency union.

Influence of the Schwabe/Hale solar cycles on climate change during the Maunder Minimum

Solar timeline
[image credit: Wikipedia]

This is a follow-on from another recent Talkshop post:

The principal cause of bi-decadal climatic variation – The Hale cycle, or something else?

The subject is a paper that appeared in 2009 which relates to the discussion.
Hopefully the following abstract of it speaks for itself.

Solar cycle forecasts

 

This is based on the data provided from the “Solar Cycle Progression” web page, “Provided by the NOAA/Space Weather Prediction Center” except substantial data post processing has been done.

The datasets have been heavily normalised but the F10.7 earth distance problem (or something of a similar origin) has been partially compensated before normalisation.

Normalising brought the three datasets closer to the same.

Two sunspot data r2 > 0.98, SWO/F10.7 r2 > 0.93

The principal cause of bi-decadal climatic variation – The Hale cycle, or something else?

Paul Vaughan has suggested we hold a discussion on bi-decadal climatic variation, which exhibits quasi-cyclic patterns in various datasets. To get the ball rolling, Paul has kindly given some time to producing some very interesting plots which he has introduced across a few recent threads. This posts puts these in one place and acts as an invitation to those interested in a focussed discussion on the topic.

The Bidecadal Oscillation

Is it caused by the solar Hale Cycle as suggested by Tim Channon or is it caused by the velocity of the sun with respect to the solar system barycenter as suggested by Nicola Scafetta?

http://s18.postimg.org/74uty1eix/Bidecadal_SST_Sun_Velocity_Hale_Cycle.png

Met Office, HadSST3, CRUTEM3, HadCRUT3, questions over gridded coverage

The UK Met Office / Hadley Centre (Met Office) / Climatic Research Unit (UEA) construct and publish global time series for temperature based on published 5 degree gridded. How this is derived from land meteorological station readings and ship board for sea surface temperature is unclear. The gridded to eg. global is a simple (cosine) weighted average which takes into account the variable area of a linear grid representing a sphere.

I have put together maps showing the data counts for decades over a world shore outline. These are provided as vector plots (master work), PDF, or for casual looks, PNG. The results are disturbing and particularly in the light of the Met Office producing 100 different versions of HadSST3. “Each of the following files is a zip archive containing ten realisations of the HadSST3 data set. There are 100 realisations in total.”

Do I detect obfuscation, flapping for distraction?

[update] Roger Andrews has pointed out this work ought to use HadSST2, my mistake. I’m not sure what to do about this, updating the files is not too difficult but is there a material difference? I’ve created new files and am looking at introducing the hadcrut4 data.[update]

Rotational properties of the trans-Neptunian objects and binaries

The Talkshop has an interest in orbital periods, spin-orbit coupling, the equalisation by nature of the gaps between objects.

Rotational properties of the binary and non-binary populations
in the trans-Neptunian belt
A. Thirouin, K. S. Noll. J. L. Ortiz, and N. Morales
Published online 8th Sept 2014
Astronomy & Astrophysics (early access on registration)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201423567

Abstract

We present results for the short-term variability of binary trans-Neptunian objects (BTNOs). …

A second older paper may be of interest

 

CHARACTERIZATION OF SEVEN ULTRA-WIDE TRANS-NEPTUNIAN BINARIES
Alex H. Parker, JJ Kavelaars, Jean-Marc Petit, Lynne Jones, Brett Gladman, Joel Parker
Version 2 published late 2011
The Astrophysical Journal, open access copy, http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.2505v2
http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/743/1/1

The snowfall of 1956

This article has merit in interest but is a precursor to a following article containing the results from a large new work about Met Office gridded data CRUTEM3, HadSST3 and HadCRUT3. Links to the event of 1956 as a validation mark.

In looking for evidence of a major cold snap in France the following personal account article appeared, it has sunspots SSW and lots of falling snow.

The winter of 1956 in the Southern Hemisphere

That year ended with a terribly cold wave in the Southern Hemisphere, with snow mixed with rain at Geraldton in Western Australia, at a latitude 28.48 ° South, which was the snowfall at lowest latitude ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. Usually, cold waves affecting Europe and North America are a consequence of stratwarming, which is an unusual heating of the stratosphere above the North Pole, which in turn leads to tropospheric arctic anticyclones, with consequent descent of cold air to lower latitudes.

But not so in 1955-1956, the longest and geographically widest cold wave in the 20th century.

Ewan Morrison – YES: Why I Joined Yes and Why I Changed to No

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A thoughtful article recounting reasons for personal choice by someone who has considered both yes and no in the Scotland indyref. The parallels with the climate debate are striking.

wakeupscotland

 Ewan Morrison is an award-winning Scottish author and screenwriter.

Four months ago I joined the Yes camp out of a desire to take part in the great debate that the Yes camp told me was taking place within their ranks. Being a doubter I thought maybe I’d failed to find this debate and that it was exclusive to the membership of the Yes camp, so I joined hoping I could locate it and take part. But even as I was accepted into the ranks – after my ‘Morrison votes Yes’ article in Bella Caledonia, I noted that 5 out of the meagre 20 comments I received berated me for either not having decided sooner or for having questioned Yes at all. Another said, and I paraphrase: ‘Well if he’s had to mull it over he could easily switch to the other side.’ That comment in Bella Caledonia worked away…

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Understanding The Bulge

Real Climate Science

According the University of Colorado, sea level is rising much faster than 85% of tide gauges show, and forming a massive mound near the Philippines. Apparently they believe that water likes to pile up in mounds, and to help visualize their BS I created a 3D animation.

And one more minor detail. They used to have the map below on their site, but have removed it. It showed that their error was almost as large as their trend – meaning their data is basically worthless

This complete garbage forms the basis of the IPCC claim that sea level rise suddenly doubled in 1992, when they switched measurement systems.

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Coal, There’s Just No Alternative

Tony Thomas mentions he has an opinion piece up on Quadrant about the reality of electricity and human wealth in all the ways not so obvious, but also right on the past cries of environmentalists deeming the undeveloped world must not get wealth.

Thomas discusses US author and energy specialist Robert Bryce

Bryce didn’t discuss the merits of the catastrophic human-caused global-warming hypothesis. He just delineated the irrationality of draconian global and national targets to cut CO2 emissions, given the developing world’s determination to use electricity to lift its people from poverty:

“I’m a resolute agnostic about the climate issue. Tell me CO2 is good, tell me it’s bad. I’m bored with the nastiness.

“The question that too few people are willing to ask is this one: where, how, will we find the energy equivalent of 27 Saudi Arabias and have it all be carbon-free?”

Oh yes, nastiness, a hallmark of forcing others to do your bidding…

UK government approves new gas fired power station but includes self stupidity provision

Given a winter of disconnect is mooted by some, any introduction of a real power station is news but not just yet.

3 The Order, if made, would grant development consent for the construction and operation of a thermal generating station that would operate either as a Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plant or as an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plant, with a total electrical output of up to 470MWe at North Killingholme, Lincolnshire. The generating station would only be able to burn other types of fuel such as coal and biomass[1]  if the full Carbon Capture Storage chain is in place. A separate Environmental Permit, controlling emissions from the plant, will also be required from the Environment Agency before the generating station can be operated.
–http://infrastructure.planningportal.gov.uk/projects/yorkshire-and-the-humber/north-killingholme-power-project/

Combined Cycle Gas Turbine is one of those over-egged technologies with party trick claims. As sustained base load the thermal efficiency is good but part load is dreadful, becomes a gas turbine, one of the less bright inventions which has a redeeming feature of great power in a small space. A lot to do with heat engines is counter intuitive. A weakness is always a sharp drop in thermal efficiency with power reduction, how rapidity it drops varies greatly with the technology.

And IGCC? That is where things get bad.

Hockey Schtick: CO2 does what exactly?

Oh the irony!
Cutting CO2 emissions is…

 

And

Yes, that’s right, deadly man-made CO2 is the largest cooling agent of the stratosphere as demonstrated by this computer-modeled representation of stratospheric cooling rates:

Image from blog article, originally in E M Smith’s article chiefio.wordpress.com/2014/06/01/le-chatelier-and-his-principle-vs-the-trouble-with-trenberth/

Miles Mathis: The Cause of the Solar Cycle

One of the advantages of being billed by the most self important climate discussion website in the world as being a purveyor of ‘way out there theory’, is that I can publish whatever I like with no risk of further reputational damage. So when Stuart (Oldbrew) spotted that Miles Mathis has written a paper inspired by the same NASA material we have been discussing recently, I thought, why the hell not? Miles has been developing his ideas about a fundamental photon charge field underlying observed electro-magnetic phenomena for several years now, and has built up quite a corpus of work. This makes it difficult to absorb his stuff without clicking through to read his previous papers, and you soon find yourself in a labyrinth of ‘too many tabs’ open in your browser. Nonetheless, he is always entertaining, and thought provoking, even if it will be a while before we can see whether the predictions he makes based on his theory turn out to be correct. At least he has the guts to make definite predictions in the first place. None of your mealy mouthed ‘may’, ‘could’ and ‘perhaps’ ‘narrative scenario projections’ with Miles. He shoots fro the hip. Good lad. 🙂

First published September 6, 2014

One of my readers sent me a link to wonderful new data from NASA. Although NASA and the rest of
the mainstream are not so good when it comes to theory, they are quite adept at compiling data, so I
have to thank them in this case. Without their numbers I could do nothing.

It has been known for a long time that the main Solar cycle is about 11 years, but that is just an
average. It goes from a minimum of about 9 years up to about 14 years. Although some theories have
been presented, the cause of all three numbers is unknown. I will show you the correct answer here.
The reason I so quickly hit on the right answer is that I knew where to look. In my other long paper on
Sun cycles (ice ages), I have already shown that Jupiter is the cause of the secondary variance. In this
case we will see that Jupiter is the cause of the primary variance.

Scared Witless: The New Science Site that Gets the Communication Right

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Lolz

CLIMATE NUREMBERG

In a recent post we broke the news that a heroic band of scientists was finally making Australia look good.

A number of readers questioned whether it actually takes courage to have the courage to admit you’re scared of climate change.

Er, yes. Yes it does. The great medieval leader Edward “Ed” Stark explained this better than any science communicator could:

Bran thought about it. ‘Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?’

‘That is the only time a man can be brave,’ his father told him.

Speaking of historical dramas, my thirteen-year-old thinks he’s getting the 300 box set for his birthday tomorrow. But I reckon he’ll be even more popular with his mates when he opens his actual present: a donation to the Scared Scientists in his name!

(The ScS team, caving in to the demands of ordinary climate mums and dads around the country, have reluctantly…

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