CSIRO Boss Attacks Climate Lobby: ‘More Like Religion Than Science’

How many climate scientists is too many?
[image credit: NSIDC]

Thunder Down Under as the boss of some climate scientists dares to reshuffle his resources, shattering false dreams of endless opportunity for a group that seemed to believe it was bulletproof, career-wise. As Jo Nova pointed out, if the science is settled, how much work can there be left to do?

The CSIRO’s chief has told the ABC the backlash from his decision to restructure the organisation has made him feel like an “early climate scientist in the ’70s fighting against the oil lobby” and that there is so much emotion in the debate it almost “sounds more like religion than science”.

Obama’s climate plan is off the rails

From the BBC website

Image credit: ibd.com

President Barack Obama’s plans to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide from US power plants have been stalled by the US Supreme Court.

The court ruled that the president’s Clean Power Plan could not go forward until all legal challenges were heard.

Designed to cut US emissions by 32% by 2030, the scheme put huge emphasis on a shift to renewable energy.

Rugeley B power station calls it quits

Image credit: Express & Star

The owners of Rugeley B announced today that they are to close the power station this summer.

Lower climate sensitivity: Pre ice-age CO2 variability greater than previously thought

Earth and Planetary Science Letters Has an interesting paper in the works. A new proxy informs a model which finds bigger than expected swings in CO2 linked to smaller than expected temperature swings in the past five million years. This indicates that the Earth’s climate system is less sensitive to CO2 levels than previously thought. Maybe they should take more notice of Leaf Stomata calibrations than Antarctic ice cores?

CO₂ over the past 5 million years: Continuous simulation and new δ¹¹B-based proxy data

• Lennert B. Stap^{a, ,} ,
• Bas de Boer^{a, b},
• Martin Ziegler^{c, d},
• Richard Bintanja^e,
• Lucas J. Lourens^c,
• Roderik S.W. van de Wal^a

Abstract
During the past five million yrs, benthic δ¹⁸O records indicate a large range of climates, from warmer than today during the Pliocene Warm Period to considerably colder during glacials. Antarctic ice cores have revealed Pleistocene glacial–interglacial CO₂ variability of 60–100 ppm, while sea level fluctuations of typically 125 m are documented by proxy data. However, in the pre-ice core period, CO₂ and sea level proxy data are scarce and there is disagreement between different proxies and different records of the same proxy. This hampers comprehensive understanding of the long-term relations between CO₂, sea level and climate.

David Davis MP: #Brexit – what would it look like?

Oct 23-24 2015  Yougov   Feb 3-4 2016

Reblogged from Rt Hon David Davis MP’s website, this is a comprehensive look at the case for Brexit.

David Davis: Brexit – what would it look like? – 4 February 2016

It has been over 43 years since Britain joined the European Economic Community. For all that time there have been calls for Europe to reform. For Europe to be more democratic, more competitive, more functional. And for Britain to lead that reform.

The result? If anything Europe has become less democratic, less competitive and more dysfunctional. And Britain has become more side-lined.

The EU has been in decline for some time now. There is no change of course in sight. The risks involved in staying are clear for all to see – low growth, high unemployment, and waning influence.

In 1975 the EU was the bright future, a vision of a better world. Now it is a crumbling relic from a gloomy past. We must raise our eyes to the wider world.

Bloggies 2016. The end.

There will be no Bloggies this year, an era ends, life changes.
2001 .. 2015 is good going.

The Weblog Awards

After 15 years, I have decided to bring the Weblog Awards to a close. Visitor participation has declined to the point where there just aren’t enough nominees to form a broad enough spectrum of competition.

Thanks to all of those who supported the Bloggies in one way or another. I’m proud we were able to create such a notable ceremony without advertising or corporate sponsorship.

I congratulate all the winners of the past fifteen years and look forward to seeing how blogs will evolve in the future.

Nikolai Nolan

— http://bloggi.es

I agree with NIkolai’s analysis, there has to be “critical mass” for a group to hang together, a lesson I learnt 20 to 30 years ago.

Why Phi? – solar rotation notes

Carrington Rotations = CarRots [credit: dreamstime.com]

Tallbloke recently acquired a book by Hartmut Warm called ‘Signature of the Celestial Spheres: Discovering Order in the Solar System’ which offers this gem:
588 solar Carrington rotations (CarRots) = 587 lunar sidereal months
We’ll call this the HW cycle, about 43.91 years.

‘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

Picking this ball up and running with it, we find there are 308 CarRots (27.2753 d) per 331 solar sidereal days (25.38 d) in 23 years (331 – 308). This period, or a multiple of it, can be found in certain identified solar-planetary cycles (as discussed below).

Enormous blades could lead to more offshore energy in US

How big can wind turbine blades get? [image credit: scancomark.com]

Monster ‘SUMR’ wind turbines are on the US drawing board, says ScienceDaily. SUMO more like?

A new design for gigantic blades longer than two football fields could help bring offshore 50-megawatt (MW) wind turbines to the United States and the world. Sandia National Laboratories’ research on the extreme-scale Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor (SUMR) is funded by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program.

The challenge: Design a low-cost offshore 50-MW turbine requiring a rotor blade more than 650 feet (200 meters) long, two and a half times longer than any existing wind blade.

Moon was produced by a head-on collision between Earth and a forming planet, say researchers

Whether this is the last word on the origin of the Moon remains to be seen.

The moon was formed by a violent, head-on collision between the early Earth and a “planetary embryo” called Theia approximately 100 million years after the Earth formed, UCLA geochemists and colleagues report.

Scientists had already known about this high-speed crash, which occurred almost 4.5 billion years ago, but many thought the Earth collided with Theia (pronounced THAY-eh) at an angle of 45 degrees or more — a powerful side-swipe. New evidence reported Jan. 29 in the journal Science substantially strengthens the case for a head-on assault.

Another power station closing early

credit: Kirkpia.org

Britain’s energy situation goes from tight, to critical, with an announcement from SSE.

Conversation with Paul Pukite

Jamal Munshi: An Empirical test of the chemical theory of ozone depletion

My thanks to talkshop reader Jamal Munshi for alerting me to his paper on ozone and aerosols. It makes a strong case for viewing the ozone level above the Antarctic as a special case due to its unique geography, calling into question conclusions about human emissions drawn by scientists and acted on by the Montreal protocol. This is important as this agreement has been used as a template for ‘climate action’ subsequently.

ABSTRACT:

The overall structure of changes in total column ozone levels over a 50-year sample period from 1966 to 2015 and across a range of latitudes from -90o to +71o shows that the data from Antarctica prior to 1995 represent a peculiar outlier condition specific to that time and place and not an enduring global pattern. The finding is inconsistent with the RowlandMolina theory of chemical ozone depletion. 1 1.

INTRODUCTION

In 1971, renown environmentalist James Lovelock studied the unrestricted release of halogenated hydrocarbons (HHC) into the atmosphere from their use as aerosol dispensers, fumigants, pesticides, and refrigerants. He was concerned that (1) these chemicals were man-made and they did not otherwise occur in nature and that (2) they were chemically inert and that therefore their atmospheric release could cause irreversible accumulation. In a landmark 1973 paper by Lovelock, Maggs, and Wade he presented the discovery that air samples above the Atlantic ocean far from human habitation contained measurable quantities of HHC (Lovelock, Halogenated hydrocarbons in and over the Atlantic, 1973). It established for the first time that environmental issues could be framed on a planetary scale and it served as the first of three key events that eventually led to the Montreal Protocol and its worldwide ban on the production, sale, and atmospheric release of HHC (UNEP, 2000).

R.J. Salvador: 2016 prediction for changes in Earth’s Length of Day (LOD)

My thanks to talkshop contributor and PRP author R.J. Salvador for sending me an updated prediction for changes in LOD during 2016. This plot has been produced using R.J.s model, which has been developed using the planetary periodicities we have been working on here at the talkshop over the last few years.

R.J. has kindly agreed to send a monthly update showing the progress of the model output against IERS observations as the year progresses. This is real science in progress. Creating a hypothesis, building a model, and testing it against reality.

Paul Vaughan: NOAA Corruption of SST records

NOAA’s vandalism of ERSSTv3b2 (good) to ERSSTv4 (corrupted) hinges on a single point.

Visual catalog of the beautiful natural patterns being systematically defaced:

— —

1. Secular

— —

Al Gore’s biofuel policy threatened by Ted Cruz win at Iowa Caucus.

From Reuters:

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s victory on Monday in corn-rich Iowa could represent a major blow to the nation’s controversial biofuels program, reflecting its waning influence over politicians even in the U.S. farm heartland.

The conservative senator from Texas and outspoken opponent of the Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS, upset Republican front-runner Donald Trump in the Iowa caucuses, the first of the state-by-state battles to pick nominees for the Nov. 8 election to succeed President Barack Obama.

Cruz won with 28 percent of the vote, compared with 24 percent for Trump, a billionaire businessman..

The result was a setback for corn farmers in the country’s biggest ethanol-producing state, who have lobbied hard to protect the policy from being dismantled after more than a decade.

Why Phi? – a unified precession model

Combined precession cycle [credit: wikipedia]

‘Because of apsidal precession the Earth’s argument of periapsis slowly increases; it takes about 112000 years for the ellipse to revolve once relative to the fixed stars. The Earth’s polar axis, and hence the solstices and equinoxes, precess with a period of about 26000 years in relation to the fixed stars. These two forms of ‘precession’ combine so that it takes about 21000 years for the ellipse to revolve once relative to the vernal equinox, that is, for the perihelion to return to the same date (given a calendar that tracks the seasons perfectly).’ – Wikipedia

Here we’ll fit the three precession cycles into one model and briefly examine its workings.

#Brexit: The Movie needs your help

 

UPDATE: The talkshop pledge is now up to £500 + a reserve, see comments.

We see your pledge going up – Thank you @RogTallbloke and your readers! @kickstarter @Martin_Durkin

— Brexit:The Movie (@BrexitTheMovie) February 2, 2016

Brexit: The Movie, is a new project set up by Martin Durkin, of ‘The great Global Warming Swindle’ fame. Martin is a top documentary maker, but none of the big TV channels are going to finance this one. Check out the trailer above and you’ll know why.

Climate sceptics have a lot of reasons to be eurosceptics too, given the nutty energy policy being dictated to the UK from Brussels thanks to their mad climate policies.

Clive Best: Trends in Atmospheric Water Vapour

Reblog from Clive Best’s site.

The basis of IPCC predictions is that any moderate warming caused by increased CO2 levels is enhanced by more evaporation from the oceans. Water vapour is itself a strong greenhouse gas and this increase results in a large “positive feedback” boosting climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 as high as 6C.
This is all just  theory however, so it is important to observe whether water vapour in the atmosphere has actually increased or not in response to increasing CO2. The data shown below are from the NASA NVAP [1] project based on radiosonde, TIROS,TOVS & SSM/I satellite based data. This data was kindly brought to my attention by Ken Gregory [2].

The data from NVAP shows little change in  water vapour from 1988 until 2001 at all levels in the atmosphere.  If anything a  small decrease in the important upper atmospheric layers  in the detail shown below Fig1b.