They’re dragging out ocean acidification again

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It’s getting tougher every year for ‘warmists’ to dream up climate scare stories that aren’t obviously just that.

American Elephants

James Delingpole, British writer, rants regularly at Breitbart about the utter goofiness of the world’s climate true believers.  He wrote today about a  climate “science” scam  that keeps on rearing its ugly head, in spite of being debunked thoroughly over and over.

Aside from the need to debunk once more, it’s a classic example of the workings of climate science. In this case, one of Delingpole’s articles was supposedly debunked in The Marine Biologist(the magazine of the marine biologist community). He wrote:

There was a time when I would have just ignored it: the guy who wrote it – one Phil Williamson – is the embodiment of Upton Sinclair’s dictum that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Not only is Williamson based at the “University” of East Anglia – aka Climate Alarmism Central, heavily featured in the Climategate scandal…

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Oregon is replacing coal power with wind – let’s see what happens

What the US government thinks wind power ‘could’ do

If Oregon is modelling its electricity supply policy on South Australia, it should know what to expect, as Hot Air reports.

If you live in Oregon and rely on certain fancy, high tech features of the industrial revolution such as having lights in your home and refrigerated food, you might want to start stocking up on candles and non-perishable goods.

The green energy warriors have pretty much taken over the state legislature in the Beaver State for more than the past decade and they’ve managed to pass all sorts of interesting laws. One of them was a rule which says that all coal fired power will be eliminated by 2020… a deadline which is pretty much right around the corner.

An Inconvenient Truth: Few Signs Of Global Warming In Antarctica

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Ah, natural variability – the curse of the fanatical warmist.
They don’t understand it and don’t want to believe it exists.
But it does, so they’ll have to put up with it.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/27/an-inconvenient-truth-few-signs-of-global-warming-in-antarctica/

From the Daily Caller:

Antarctica has confounded scientists, defying the dire predictions of scientists the South Pole would shrink and exacerbate sea level rise in the coming decades.

Climate models predicted Antarctic sea ice would shrink as the world warmed, and that warming would boost snowfall over the southern continent. Neither of those predictions have panned out, and now scientists say “natural variability” is overwhelming human-induced warming.

“Truth is, the science is complex, and that in most places and with most events, natural variability still plays a dominant role, and undoubtedly will continue to do so,” Chip Knappenberger, a climate scientist with the libertarian Cato Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“This applies to goings-on in Antarctica as well as in Louisiana,” Knappenberger said, referring to the recent flooding in Louisiana activists have already blamed global warming for.

What recent studies have shown is that…

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Solar cycle history extended back to cycle 7, newly digitised Schwabe data

Tim writes,

A new paper of considerable interest at the Talkshop…

Properties of sunspot cycles and hemispheric wings since the 19th century
Raisa Leussu, Ilya G. Usoskin, Rainer Arlt and Kalevi Mursula
http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201628335
Open access with registration.

Why Phi? – modelling the solar cycle

Credit: cherishthescientist.net

We’re familiar with the idea of the solar cycle, e.g.:
‘The solar cycle or solar magnetic activity cycle is the nearly periodic 11-year change in the Sun’s activity (including changes in the levels of solar radiation and ejection of solar material) and appearance (changes in the number of sunspots, flares, and other manifestations).

They have been observed (by changes in the sun’s appearance and by changes seen on Earth, such as auroras) for centuries.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle

Here we’ll try a bit of pattern-hunting, so to speak.

Biofuels increase, rather than decrease, carbon dioxide emissions: study

For how much longer?
[image credit: thecostaricanews.com]

Promoters of biofuel are running out of excuses for converting vast tracts of valuable farmland into fuel sources, as this Phys.org report shows. This non-solution to a debatable problem needs reviewing urgently.

A new study from University of Michigan researchers challenges the widely held assumption that biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel are inherently carbon neutral.

Contrary to popular belief, the heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas emitted when biofuels are burned is not fully balanced by the CO2 uptake that occurs as the plants grow, according to a study by research professor John DeCicco and co-authors at the U-M Energy Institute.

Scientists begin to unravel summer jet stream mystery

Forecaster highlights the jetstream over the UK [image credit: BBC]

Why jetstream shifts might be linked to Arctic ice (among other factors) is not made clear, so we’re left wondering.

Scientists have discovered the cause of the recent run of miserable wet summers as they begin to unravel the mysteries of the Atlantic jet stream, reports Phys.org.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield and The Met Office have identified a number of possible factors that may influence the Atlantic jet stream and therefore help to predict summer climate from one year to the next.

Eli Rabett bets on Arctic ice against Tallbloke – hopes to keep fur coat

Gerald Warner: Brexit ‘negotiations’ are a nonsense: we just need to say goodbye politely

Enjoyable piece from Gerald Warner

It is time to stop using the misleading term “Brexit negotiations”. Britain’s exit from the European Union is not subject to negotiation: it has been determined by the British people, the sole legitimate authority on this issue. One negotiates to enter an institution, not to leave it. We are simply checking out of the EU hotel; we paid our bill long ago and we are free to leave. We are merely saying a courteous farewell.

The weasel term “negotiations” – too uncritically accepted by Leavers – suggests we can only leave the EU by gracious permission of the Brussels apparatchiks, that they will decide whether a partial break with the EU is permitted and how many laws, regulations and even payments into the EU budget will still be imposed on Britain. Unhappily, many British civil servants who will be involved in the “negotiations” share this absurd mindset.

Mag 6.2 ‘quake central Italy, significant fatalities

Tim writes,

Figure 1, plot from http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/space-weather-enthusiasts

Earthquake at 01:36 UT

Once again the spectre of space weather correlation with earthquakes turns up.

UK needs to invest £215bn in energy by 2030, say analysts

Credit: telegraph.co.uk

Note: for ‘energy’ read ‘electricity supply’ in this report from Utility Week on the UK’s crumbling National Grid.

The UK will need to invest an “eye-watering” £215 billion in its energy system by 2030 in order to replace ageing assets and decarbonise, analysis by Barclays Research has found.

As the country undergoes an “energy revolution” nearly half – £95 billion – will need to be spent on disruptive technologies such as renewables, battery storage and distributed generation.

Paper using analogy between atomic and planetary spin-orbit coupling

On researchgate, I found this interesting paper by I.A. Arbab which proposes an explanation of planetary spin rates by leveraging an analogy with the electron spin-orbit coupling in the Hydrogen atom.

Food for thought. Here’s a taster:

Ed Hoskins: Incredible waste on solar installation knowingly overseen by defunct DECC

Ed Hoskins has sent me a summary of his latest post on ‘green energy’ profligacy, which well worth a click and read.

It seems that the UK with the least performant solar energy environment  in Europe has allowed to be invested about £30 billion with an output of less than 1 GW as and when the sun shines.

This amounted to a total of about   9.6GW nameplate solar installations yielding the equivalent of about 0.9GW of power, but only when the sun shines.  The capacity factor for Solar energy in the UK is only ~9%.  This is the least performant solar power in the whole of Europe.

Even though according to David Mackay DECC well understood that solar energy should never have been considered viable in the UK, the department still oversaw these huge continued expenditures and dispensed with about £19,000,000,000 in 2014 and 2015.  That amounted to more than the full cost of Hinckley Point C:  the wasted expenditure seems never to have been questioned or discussed.

Astronomy shown to be set in standing stone

Brodgar standing stones, Orkney [image credit: BBC]

University of Adelaide research has for the first time statistically proven that the earliest standing stone monuments of Britain, the great circles, were constructed specifically in line with the movements of the Sun and Moon, 5000 years ago. H/T ScienceDaily

The research, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, details the use of innovative 2D and 3D technology to construct quantitative tests of the patterns of alignment of the standing stones.

Hubris: The Troubling Science, Economics, and Politics of Climate Change

Interview at Lifesitenews with Michael Hart.

Michael Hart is a former official in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and now emeritus professor of international affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he has taught courses on the laws and institutions of international trade, Canadian foreign policy, and the politics of climate change. He held the Fulbright-Woodrow Wilson Center Visiting Research Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations and was Scholar-in-Residence in the School of International Service, Senior Fellow at American University in Washington, and is the founder and director emeritus of Carleton University’s Centre for Trade Policy and Law. In addition, he has taught courses in several other countries. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of more than a dozen books and several hundred articles.

LifeSiteNews interviewed him during a conference on Catholic Perspectives on the Environment, sponsored by the Wojtyla Institute for Teachers, held at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom in Barry’s Bay, Ontario, August  4-6, 2016.

1)  Professor Hart, your book Hubris: The Troubling Science, Economics, and Politics of Climate Change, has recently been published. In it, you challenge a worldwide project that has become something of a sacred cow. Can you tell our readers what motivated you to begin your research into the subject?

I was initially motivated by questions from my students – and my wife – about the policy implications of climate change. The more I looked into it, however, the more I learned the extent to which it fit with one of my research interests: the extent to which modern health, safety, and environmental regulatory activity relies on poor science advanced by activists to push an agenda. I learned that both domestic and international actors had succeeded in using the poorly understood science of climate change to advance an ambitious environmental agenda focused on increasing centralized control over people’s daily lives.

Serial climate disinformer Michael Mann waffles about “extreme weather” again.

In a recent interview, Prof ‘taking the Mickey’ Mann said this about floods in the US:

NOOR: So we’ve seen this historic flooding not only in Louisiana but more recently in West Virginia, even right here close to Baltimore in Ellicott City. Is it, are we seeing more and more of this and is this connected to climate change?

MANN: We often hear about events being characterized as thousand year events and what that means is just given the usual statistic of the weather, we wouldn’t expect such an event to happen more than once in a thousand years. Meaning we probably wouldn’t expect to see it during our lifetimes. And yet we are seeing a plethora of these thousand year events. Whether it’s the flooding events in South Carolina, in Arizona, in Texas as I said and of course this latest event in Louisiana and Alabama. We are seeing thousand year events far too often to be able to attribute them just to randomness. We are seeing the loading of the random weather dice by climate change.

Mann is disinforming the public here. 1000 year or 100 year flooding events measure the likelihood of that event occurring on a specific stretch of river, not in a selection of whichever random states happened to get a flood that year.

Wiki: In the United States, the 100-year flood provides the risk basis for flood insurance rates. Complete information on the National Flood Insurance Program is available here. A regulatory flood or base flood is routinely established for river reaches through a science-based rule making process targeted to a 100-year flood at the historical average recurrence interval.

Regarding ‘1000 year’ events. How long have we been keeping flood records in the US. It’s unlikely they predate Columbus’ discovery of the continent in 1493, so, not more than 500 years. How well established is the basis of characterising a flood as ‘once in 1000 years’ then? You can be sure there’s a model for it…

It’s also worth remembering that there’s around a 60%chance of seeing more than one ‘100 year flood’  in a specific location during a 100 year period anyway.

Wiki: A common misunderstanding exists that a 100-year flood is likely to occur only once in a 100-year period. In fact, there is approximately a 63.4% chance of one or more 100-year floods occurring in any 100-year period. On the Danube River at Passau, Germany, the actual intervals between 100-year floods during 1501 to 2013 ranged from 37 to 192 years.^[4] The probability P_e that one or more floods occurring during any period will exceed a given flood threshold can be expressed, using the binomial distribution, as

where T is the threshold return period (e.g. 100-yr, 50-yr, 25-yr, and so forth), and n is the number of years in the period. The probability of exceedance P_e is also described as the natural, inherent, or hydrologic risk of failure.

There is of course the possibility that Mann simply doesn’t understand the stats, given his previous record. There again, if that’s so, he shouldn’t be professor of rubber ducks, let alone a science with such enormous cost implications for public policy.

GWPF: New Paper Reveals Hidden Cost Of UK Climate Policy

A new paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)  confirms suspicions that previous governments have misled the public about the impact of climate policies on businesses such as Tata Steel.

There are three main faults in government analysis:

 

1. Instead of showing the impact of climate policies on profitability (Gross Operating Surplus), the government has compared policy costs to the total expenditure of a business, which is misleading. In 2014, for example, the sector had an operating surplus of £169m, yet energy costs were equal to 330% of that sum.

19 U.S. Senators trying to muzzle climate change sceptics

Credit: therightplanet.com

US think tank KPI bemoans the aggressive attitude of some US politicians towards groups that question supposedly ‘official’ climate science.

Nineteen U.S. senators are working to destroy free speech and silence dissent, defying the Constitution they swore to defend and uphold.

Senators Harry Reid, Tim Kaine, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and fifteen other Democrats took to the Senate floor last month to demonize their ‘enemies list’ of fossil fuel companies, think tanks and journalists for having the temerity to disagree with their views.  

Wind power debacle: South Australia an international joke

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Renewable energy: fantasy meets reality in South Australia and it’s not pretty, as STT reports.

STOP THESE THINGS

Tom Koutsantonis: the ‘Joker’ in the pack, but SA isn’t laughing.

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South Australia is, thanks to its ludicrous attempt to run on sunshine and breezes, now on the World stage: for all the wrong reasons.

With total and totally unpredictable collapses in its wind power output, SA is now accustomed to routine load-shedding (dropping suburbs and whole regions off the grid to keep the rest running) and the odd state-wide blackout. Then there’s the small matter of retail power prices which, for businesses have doubled in 12 months and which are all set to double again.

A suite of consequences which have energy experts around the globe quietly giggling and saying ‘we told you so’. One of them is London based Senior Research Analyst with the World Nuclear Association, Ian Hore-Lacy.

Here’s the yarn being spun from London about South Australia’s perfectly avoidable energy calamity.

South Australia’s green dream…

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Now California’s Climate Cops Are Going After the Cows

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Climate obsessives never know when to stop being ridiculous.

American Elephants

California is sliding slowly into the abyss. It’s not enough that 9,000 companies have packed up and moved to more tax-friendly states. The Bay Area is so expensive that few can afford to live there. Progressives run the place like their own personal slot machine.

The California Air Resources Board has issued regulations to cut the state’s greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, but the board is getting worried about their climate agenda. It could all be ruined by natural phenomena.They’ve gone after the oil producers, the manufacturers and now they are going after the cows.

It’s methane, which”according to the board is a ‘short-lived climate pollutant with an outsized impact on climate change in the near term.” ” “Cow manure and ‘enteric fermentation’ (flatulence) account for half of the state’s methane emissions.”

“If dairy farms in California were to manage manure in a way to further reduce methane…

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