Archive for December, 2018


Prof Ray Bates discusses some points raised by a critic in response to his recent analysis of the latest IPCC summary report (SR 1.5).

Reply by Ray Bates to the blog post by Peter Thorne of Maynooth University
H/T The GWPF

A) General comments

1) Prof. Thorne states that my critique of SR1.5 was not peer-reviewed and should not be referred to as a paper.
His statement is incorrect. My critique was peer-reviewed.

I wouldn’t list it in my CV as a journal article, but it is correct to call it a paper (see the Oxford Dictionary). That said, it matters little to me whether my publication is called a critique, a piece, or a paper.

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Does it snow on Mars?

Posted: December 30, 2018 by oldbrew in atmosphere, Clouds, solar system dynamics
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Clouds on Mars [image credit: NASA]


H/T Discover Magazine

This wasn’t the first question that came to mind when I photographed these clouds, says Tom Yulsman @ ImaGeo.

But the beautiful phenomenon I witnessed eventually led me to it.
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Mars is certainly cold. With temperatures that can plunge to more than negative 100 degrees Celsius, it’s bloody frigid!

But as cold as it might get, does it snow on Mars?

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All the climate propaganda is getting to some people it seems. In this case they’re not taking any chances – the ‘hills’ they are heading for turn out to be in ‘some parts as much as 11 feet (3.35 meters) above sea level’. At least they should have a commanding view of the coast. 😎

Climate change is prompting Miami’s rich to abandon the oceanfront and head for the hills, says DW.com.

That’s bad news for the people of Little Haiti, a ridge-top immigrant community suddenly sitting on hot property.

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People are being sold an unachievable, impossible fantasy of fuel-free energy with massive and ever-rising costs, that can never work anyway.

Climate extremists, like other hucksters, usually emphasize how their favored policies (decarbonization in this case) will avoid various alleged disasters, which never seem to happen except in the distant future, says Alan Carlin.

Rarely do they explain what these efforts will cost.

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Shale gas drilling site [image credit: BBC]


If they applied the same rules to the railways there might not be many freight trains around. The Richter scale doesn’t even rate tremors below magnitude 1, and describes those between 1.0 and 1.9 as ‘Micro-earthquakes, not felt, or felt rarely’. Upto 2.9 is ‘Felt slightly by some people. No damage to buildings’.

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

Shale gas is unlikely to be developed in Britain unless strict limits on earthquakes caused by fracking are relaxed, the company with the biggest exploration rights has warned.

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This makes a lot more sense than the delusions of a wind-powered world churned out by climate obsessives.

PA Pundits International

By Katie Tubb and Nicolas Loris ~

Over the past few months, Energy Secretary Rick Perry has been delivering an important message to our country’s allies: America’s energy renaissance is your gift, too. As Perry said at the beginning of the year, “The United States is not just exporting energy, we’re exporting freedom.”

Now, he’s delivering that message in person.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry meets with Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis in Prague, Czech Republic, Nov. 14, 2018. (Photo: Michal Kamaryt/Zuma Press/Newscom)

Perry has proactively exercised his role to encourage new foreign markets for American companies. Whether it’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) or commercial nuclear power, American energy companies have a lot to offer.

That’s good for both economic and geopolitical reasons. When domestic producers have new customers abroad, America’s allies will have more energy choice as well as freedom from hostile actors that manipulate energy markets.

On a recent…

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Coal-hungry China [image credit: democraticunderground.com]


Brace for impact: ‘Hotter days will boost Chinese residential electric use’. Are we supposed to weep instead of sleep? The report refers to ‘China’s low-carbon policy’, which must be something other than the one which sees it opening a new coal-fired power station almost every week, and which led to a massive long-term import contract with Russia for natural gas. Who are they kidding?

A new study from Duke University and Fudan University in China is the first to estimate how much Chinese residential electricity consumption would increase due to climate change.

It’s a lot, says Phys.org.

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Drone or no drone? The question baffling UK police

Posted: December 24, 2018 by oldbrew in humour, News, Travel

Image credit: yournewswire.com


From the ‘you couldn’t make it up’ department.

‘Who’s heading this investigation? Inspector Clouseau?’ Twitter pokes fun at police claims there may not have been a drone flying over Gatwick with hilarious memes.

Flights were suspended for more than 36 hours from Wednesday, causing Christmas travel chaos at Gatwick airport in Crawley, West Sussex, reports the Daily Mail.

But police said the drone may never have existed.

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Another Tesla fire


The car was only three months old, and as the owner said, if it had happened at home the house could have been set on fire.

A Tesla Model S ignited three times in one day, a northern California car owner and firefighters told ABC News.

While driving on a highway on Dec. 18, the driver got a tire pressure warning indicating a flat tire, and had the car towed to the nearby Los Gatos Tire and Auto Repair, Santa Clara County Fire Captain Bill Murphy told ABC News.

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Credit: BBC


Media efforts to bludgeon the public into believing the human-caused warming claims of the IPCC have largely failed. The ever-increasing alarm that is put forward is surely a response to the lack of success in scaring people, rather than any reflection of actual facts on the ground (or in the air). In short, media hype has led to climate fatigue.

Public interest in “climate change” peaked in March 2007 as Al Gore and “An Inconvenient Truth” basked in the glow of an Academy Award win, but faded away ever since, The GWPF reports.

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BBC And The Extinction Rebellion

Posted: December 22, 2018 by oldbrew in alarmism, climate, Critique, ideology, Idiots
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What are they trying to do – make Greenpeace look tame?

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

From the Guardian:

image

The BBC’s central London headquarters has been put on lockdown due to a protest by climate change campaigners who are demanding it uses its status as national broadcaster to declare a “climate and ecological emergency”.

Extinction Rebellion, a direct action group that has recently shut down key London roads, has demand the BBC makes the environment its “top editorial issue”.

Broadcasting House was locked down early on Friday afternoon, with BBC staff and guests unable to enter or leave the building while security kept the peaceful but noisy protesters away from the entrance.

Extinction Rebellion activists, who are demanding a meeting with the BBC director general, Tony Hall, said the corporation had a duty to broadcast about climate change with “the level of urgency placed on informing the public about the second world war”.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/dec/21/bbc-london-headquarters-put-on-lockdown-over-protest-by-climate-change-campaigners-extinction-rebellion

A case of the biter bit!

The BBC…

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Hoover Dam


Another headache for the ‘carbon-free’ crowd. When there’s less water in the dams, they have to crank up the power stations. Is a study needed to find this out?

When hydropower runs low in a drought, western states tend to ramp up power generation—and emissions—from fossil fuels, says Phys.org.

According to a new study from Stanford University, droughts caused about 10 percent of the average annual carbon dioxide emissions from power generation in California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington between 2001 and 2015.

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Not exactly shock news perhaps, but words like ‘extreme’ and ‘unrealistic’ ought to be embarrassing for those who summoned over 20,000 people from around the world to Poland to spend several days discussing it.

From The GWPF.

London, 20 December: One of Europe’s most eminent climate scientists has documented the main scientific reasons why the recent UN climate summit failed to welcome the IPCC’s report on global warming of 1.5°C.

In a paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation Professor Ray Bates of University College Dublin explains the main reasons for the significant controversy about the latest IPCC report within the international community.

The IPCC’s Special Report on a Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5) was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in advance of the recent COP24 meeting in Katowice, Poland, but was not adopted by the meeting due to objections by a number of governments.

Professor Bates examines some key aspects of the SR1.5 report. He assesses if the IPCC report exhibits a level of scientific rigour commensurate with the scale of its extremely costly and highly disruptive recommendation that carbon emissions be reduced to zero by mid-century.

The paper concludes that such a level of scientific rigour is not present in the report. Specifically, SR1.5 is deficient in scientific rigour in the following respects:

● It departs from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report in conveying an increased sense of planetary emergency without giving rigorous scientific reasons for doing so.

● It fails to communicate to policymakers a considerable body of important observationally-based research evidence that has accumulated since the Fifth Assessment which reduces the sense of a looming emergency.

● It fails to communicate important information made public by climate modellers since the Fifth Assessment regarding the empirical tuning of models to achieve desired results.

The paper concludes that, in view of these deficiencies, the SR1.5 report does not merit being regarded by policymakers as a scientifically rigorous document.

“There is much recent observational and scientific evidence that the IPCC report has failed to include and which supports a more considered mitigation strategy than the extreme and unrealistic measures called for in the SR1.5 report,” said Prof Bates.

Continued here.

About the author
Professor J. Ray Bates is Adjunct Professor of Meteorology in the Meteorology and Climate Centre at University College Dublin. He was formerly Professor of Meteorology at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and a Senior Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. In his early career he was Head of Research at the Irish Meteorological Service. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in physics at University College Dublin and a PhD in meteorology at MIT. His PhD supervisor at MIT was Jule G. Charney, chairman of the committee that wrote the 1979 ‘Charney Report’ on the effects of carbon dioxide on climate. Professor Bates has been the recipient of a number of awards for his scientific work, including the 2009 Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal of the European Geosciences Union. He is a former President of the Irish Meteorological Society. He has served as an Expert Reviewer of the IPCC’s Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the Academia Europaea and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the Royal Meteorological Society.

Jupiter dominates the solar system


Scientists predict the next parting of Jupiter’s veil of clouds for 2019. We like ‘regular pattern’ planetary mysteries.

New research finds a pattern of unique events at Jupiter’s equator, reports ScienceDaily.

A regular pattern of unusual meteorological events at Jupiter’s equator has been identified by planetary scientists at the University of Leicester.

Jupiter’s striped appearance of light zones and dark brown belts provides breathtaking views through amateur and professional telescopes alike. But Jupiter’s stripes can change and shift over poorly-understood timescales, sometimes expanding and contracting, sometimes fading away entirely.

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Sabine Pass LNG Terminal, Louisiana [image credit: naturalgasnow.org]


As well as wanting to avoid dependency on Russian gas, Poland has no intention of freezing in the dark to appease so-called climate activists.

Poland is seeking to reduce its dependence on Russia and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline for its LNG supplies, says DW.com.

The deal should provide for 15 percent of Poland’s daily gas needs over the next 20 years.

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The orbit of 2014 MU69 with the path of New Horizons [credit: NASA@Wikipedia]


“Ultima Thule” (2014 MU69) means “beyond the borders of the known world.” It takes nearly 300 years to orbit the Sun. Scientists ‘have no idea what to expect’.

After several weeks of sensitive searches for rings, small moons and other potential hazards around 2014 MU69, a Kuiper belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule, the dozen-member New Horizons hazard watch team gave the ‘all clear’ for the spacecraft to remain on a path that takes it about 2,200 miles (3,500 km) from Ultima Thule, instead of a hazard-avoiding detour that would have pushed it three times farther out, reports Sci-News.

“New Horizons is now targeted for the optimal flyby, over three times closer than we flew to Pluto. Ultima, here we come,” said New Horizons principal investigator Dr. Alan Stern, a researcher at Southwest Research Institute.

New Horizons will make its historic close approach to Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. EST on January 1, 2019.

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Take your time, plenty to choose from. Either enter the comp or tell us here on the blog – or both.

An international competition for our readers, friends and supporters, says The GWPF.

We at the Global Warming Policy Forum like to keep a close eye on what the press and the broadcast media have to say about global warming science.

Some of it is, it’s fair to say, pretty far removed from anything a reasonable person would recognise as, well, science.

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The idea that humans can ever know exactly what the temperature is or was, everywhere on Earth – including the vast oceans – all the time, is amusing but not much else.

Science Matters

Reification is the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. It is a mental process by which someone comes to believe that an abstraction (idea or concept) is a material, physical object in the real world. Mike Hulme observes that many people are obsessing over global temperatures, not realizing they are abstractions and not things to be feared. He provides calm and sensible views regarding global temperature reporting. The post at his blog is Climatism and the Reification of Global Temperature. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Over the last 40 years global-mean surface air temperature – ‘global temperature’ for short – has gained an extraordinary role in the science, politics and public discourse of climate change. What was once a number crudely calculated through averaging together a few dozen reasonably well-spaced meteorological time series, has become reified as an objective entity that simultaneously measures Earth System behaviour, reveals the future, regulates…

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BMW HQ in Munich, Germany


It looks like the EU is aiming to limit the supply of non-electric vehicles in order to reach an arbitrary ‘climate target’. What, if anything, this might mean for imports is not clear but their own manufacturers are not happy, for obvious reasons.

European Union members and the European Parliament on Monday agreed to slash carbon dioxide emissions from new cars by 37.5 percent by 2030, the European Commission announced.

The announcement comes two days after the end of the COP24 summit in Poland where one of the largest disappointments for countries of all wealths and sizes was the lack of ambition to reduce emissions shown in the final text, says Phys.org.

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When folk are told they need to pay ever-rising ‘carbon’ taxes, based on guesswork, to somehow control the climate, many aren’t impressed and may take their discontent to the streets.
H/T The GWPF

Seek out the most basic cause of the French riots and you’ll come to a bizarre answer: carbon dioxide.

More specifically, the demonization by political activists of that vital element of the earth’s atmosphere. French President Emmanuel Macron stirred popular rage by trying to raise the gasoline tax by about 25 cents a gallon.

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