Pick Your A-Team: Arrhenius or Ångström

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Since Arrhenius was mentioned in the ‘conversation with Roger Pielke Senior’ post this week, let’s look at his science efforts a bit more closely — with Ron Clutz.

Science Matters

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”–George Santayana 1905

Interesting that Svante Arrhenius was elevated as the founder of AGW belief system. He was ignored for many decades after Knut Ångström and his assistant Herr Koch showed that reducing CO2 concentrations did not affect the amount of IR absorbed by the air. That’s almost as interesting as discovering that shutting down the global economy over fear of Covid19 has little effect on atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

As a fellow Scandinavian, Ångström agreed with Arrhenius that his projected warming would be a good thing, even in the lower estimates Svante made later on. Still, Ångström had two objections to Arrhenius’ conjecture about global warming from increasing CO2. In 1900, Herr J. Koch, laboratory assistant to Knut Ångström, did not observe any appreciable change in the absorption of infrared radiation by decreasing the concentration of CO2 up to a…

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Blowing in the wind: are Boris’s renewable ambitions realistic?

Boris Johnson wants us to set our gaze beyond the coronavirus pandemic to contemplate a future when our homes are powered by wind alone.

Is he tilting at windmills like Don Quixote? Victor Hill @ Master Investor is asking.

The vision thing

Right now, the British prime minister’s in-tray is full – but one of the items requiring his keen attention is the UK’s commitment to transition to a net carbon neutral economy by 2050, as decreed by his predecessor, Mrs May.

During his digital address to the virtual reality Conservative Party Conference 2020, beamed through cyberspace on 06 October, one of the key themes was to build back better by harnessing a valuable resource which Britain possesses in abundance: wind.

National Grid Forecasting Tight Margins This Week

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Something else for the usual miserablists to claim will be even worse after Brexit.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Joe Public

https://twitter.com/ng_eso/status/1316398489363001344?s=20

This is astonishing for a number of reasons:

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Hydrogen-based heating: UK research raises questions

Credit: mygridgb.co.uk

Questions such as: why bother? If it’s three times the cost of natural gas and it’s not technically possible to produce it at large scale from renewables, in what way does it make any sense, even to committed climate alarmists?
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Using hydrogen instead of natural gas for heating could help the UK to achieve net carbon-neutrality by 2050, according to new Imperial research, reports TechXplore.

Currently, non-renewable natural gas from fossil fuels is used to supply half of Europe’s heat demand, with national shares as high as 80 percent in the Netherlands and the UK.

However, the UK has committed to developing an economy with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, and one of the ways to achieve this might involve switching natural gas for hydrogen.

Another conversation with Roger Pielke Senior : What causes Earth’s Greenhouse Effect?

It’s always good to chat with Roger Pielke Senior. He’s informative, and more open minded than most climate scientists. Here’s a transcript of the conversation we just had on twitter.

 

Rog Tallbloke 

@RogTallbloke

 

Roger. Mt Everest summit winter avg -30C. Base camp -17C. Air pressure difference 20kPa. What really causes Earth’s ‘greenhouse effect’, 1% of water vapour + 0.04% CO2 or 100% of atmospheric MASS. Think man, think! CC @RogerAPielkeSr

 

Roger A. Pielke Sr

@RogerAPielkeSr

 

The LW radiative effect of CO2 and water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere is succinctly summarized in https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2006/05/05/co2h2o/… and https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2007/08/24/further-analysis-of-radiatve-forcing-by-norm-woods/…

 

 

Relative Roles of CO2 and Water Vapor in Radiative Forcing

In the second edition of our book “Cotton, W.R. and R.A. Pielke, 2007: Human impacts on weather and climate, Cambridge University Press, 330 pp”, we present a new analysis completed for…

pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com

 

 

Atmospheric dust levels are rising in the Great Plains – maybe due to biofuels

Whose drought?
[image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]

The spectre of the disastrous events of the 1930s is raised for the US Midwest, thanks in some measure to the change in land use brought about by subsidised biofuel production, according to this study. Another own goal for climate alarmist ideology?
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Got any spaces left on that 2020 bingo card? Pencil in “another Dust Bowl in the Great Plains”, suggests Phys.org.

A study from University of Utah researchers and their colleagues finds that atmospheric dust levels are rising across the Great Plains at a rate of up to 5% per year.

The trend of rising dust parallels expansion of cropland and seasonal crop cycles, suggesting that farming practices are exposing more soil to wind erosion.

And if the Great Plains becomes drier, a possibility under climate change scenarios, then all the pieces are in place for a repeat of the Dust Bowl that devastated the Midwest in the 1930s.

Climate models: the limits in the sky

The debate about the role of clouds in climate — whether in isolation, or relative to other possible factors — rumbles on, and on, and adequate data is just not available. A rather large hole in the IPCC-claimed ‘settled science’, it seems.
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Climate modellers hope machine learning can overcome persistent problems that still cloud their results, says E&T Magazine.

The discipline of climate modelling has entered its sixth decade. Large-scale analyses of Earth’s behaviour have evolved considerably but there remain significant gaps, some persistent.

One in particular helps illustrate challenges that are now being tackled by, almost inevitably, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

China requires $5trn to reach 2060 carbon-neutrality pathway

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

Doesn’t sound very likely, somehow. How much are 40-year policy announcements worth anyway? The report speaks of ‘the lack of scalable low-carbon alternatives’, and requires sales of EVs well over 300 million to help meet the so-called carbon neutrality target.
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China requires over $5 trillion of investments to reach its pathway for carbon-neutrality by 2060, according to a new study released by Wood Mackenzie, reports PEI.

China needs to expand its solar, wind and storage capacities by 11 times to 5,040GW by 2050 compared to 2020 levels, to be able to meet its 2060 goal.

Coal-fired power capacity will need to be halved while gas ends at the same level as in 2019. Total power output will need to expand by nearly 2.5 times to 18,835TWh by 2050 compared to current levels.

One challenge restricting China to reach its carbon-neutral goal is the lack of scalable low-carbon alternatives in the transport and industrial sectors.

Scientists return from Arctic with wealth of climate data

Arctic sea ice [image credit: BBC/Getty Images]

Arctic sea ice doesn’t undergo natural seasonal melting any more — it ‘dies’, according to the latest climate alarm propaganda. But researchers still need an icebreaker to ‘kill’ a bit more of it in order to study its supposed demise.
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An icebreaker carrying scientists on a year-long international effort to study the high Arctic has returned to its home port in Germany carrying a wealth of data that will help researchers better predict climate change in the decades to come, reports AP News.

The RV Polarstern arrived Monday in the North Sea port of Bremerhaven, from where she set off more than a year ago prepared for bitter cold and polar bear encounters — but not for the pandemic lockdowns that almost scuttled the mission half-way through.

“We basically achieved everything we set out to do,” the expedition’s leader, Markus Rex, told The Associated Press by satellite phone as it left the polar circle last week. “We conducted measurements for a whole year with just a short break.”

Delingpole: Doom Pixie Greta Thunberg spurned AGAIN by Nobel Prize

The world has something far more pressing to be miserable about, this time for good reasons, and attention-hungry climate doomsters hate that.
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For a second year running Greta Thunberg has failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize, notes James Delingpole @ Breitbart.

This year she was beaten by the UN World Food Program.

In 2019 she was beaten by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed as his reward for securing peace with neighbouring Eritrea.

Perhaps the Nobel prize committee has noticed something increasingly apparent to the rest of us: that the world has long since reached Peak Greta; the Doom Pixie has delighted us all quite enough.

Part of Thunberg’s problem may be that her cause has been superseded by that of Chinese coronavirus.

Earlier in the pandemic, Thunberg made a bid for ongoing relevance by co-authoring an angry letter to European Union leaders, demanding that climate be taken seriously as coronavirus.

It screeched:

The last few months the world has watched with horror how the COVID-19 pandemic has hit people all over the globe. During this tragedy, we are seeing how many – not all – world leaders and people around the world stepped up and acted for the greater good of society.

It is now clearer than ever that the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis, neither from the politicians, media, business, nor finance.

The letter’s petulant tone is an indication of the growing frustration among climate activists that their thunder has been stolen by COVID-19.

Full article here.

UK Supreme Court hears climate case on Heathrow airport expansion

A Friends of the Earth lawyer claimed, re. the ruling now being challenged: “It is the first case that has ruled that government plans for a massive infrastructure project are unlawful on the basis of the Paris Agreement,” she said. But that gives a misleading impression of the verdict, as this report shows. Big infrastructure projects haven’t been declared illegal.
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Heathrow Airport is challenging a ruling that quashed plans to build a third runway earlier this year, based on the UK commitment to the Paris Agreement, says Climate Home News.

Heathrow appeared in front of the UK Supreme Court this week in a bid to overturn a judgment that blocked Europe’s busiest airport from expanding.

In February, campaigners claimed a historic victory in the Court of Appeal, which quashed plans for a third runway at Heathrow on climate grounds. The case was brought by litigation charity Plan B and campaign group Friends of the Earth.

Three appeal judges ruled that government approval of the expansion plan was unlawful because, among other reasons, it failed to consider the Paris Agreement on climate change.

£2bn fund earmarked for 16 ‘mini’ nuclear power stations

Small modular reactor [credit: ANS Nuclear Cafe]

The aviation industry is on the ropes, so Rolls-Royce needs other work to try and remain profitable, and hopes nuclear can be part of the government’s green splurge.
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Development of mini nuclear power stations could be boosted by a £2bn government investment as the industry fights to stay afloat, says New Civil Engineer.

The aid plan could facilitate the design and construction of 16 sites by 2050, with work undertaken by a Rolls Royce-led consortium.

In January of this year, the consortium first announced plans to build the small modular reactors (SMRs) at former nuclear sites in Cumbria and Wales.

Large-scale changes in Earth’s climate may originate in the Pacific

Some interesting theorising arises from this research, but as one expert commented: “These new data may raise more questions than they answer.” At least one existing belief about long-term climate change finds itself challenged.
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The retreat of North America’s ice sheets in the latter years of the last ice age may have begun with “catastrophic” losses of ice into the North Pacific Ocean along the coast of modern-day British Columbia and Alaska, scientists say.
[Science News reporting].

In a new study published October 1 in Science, researchers find that these pulses of rapid ice loss from what’s known as the western Cordilleran ice sheet contributed to, and perhaps triggered, the massive calving of the Laurentide ice sheet into the North Atlantic Ocean thousands of years ago.

That collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet, which at one point covered large swaths of Canada and parts of the United States, ultimately led to major disturbances in the global climate (SN: 11/5/12).

The new findings cast doubt on the long-held assumption that hemispheric-scale changes in Earth’s climate originate in the North Atlantic (SN: 1/31/19).

Russell Cook: BBC ( sort of … ) Corrects Radio 4’s “How They Made Us Doubt Everything”

Guest post by Russell Cook, who for a long time has been setting the record straight on the lies propagated by climate alarmists about the oil and gas industry. Check out his website at http://gelbspanfiles.com/

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And in doing so, they inadvertently dug a deeper hole for themselves.

The longer backstory to this situation is in my July 31, 2020 “BBC Radio 4 vs Rush Limbaugh” blog post, and in my August 5 followup, concerning unsupportable claims in a BBC podcast report about Limbaugh’s alleged involvement with a fossil fuel industry-orchestrated disinformation campaign that supposedly targeted a specific ethnic group, and Limbaugh’s outrage over the false accusation and the silliness of the ‘targeted people’ line.

Reducing the root problem to one paragraph: back in the late 1990s, the otherwise long-forgotten environmentalist group Ozone Action gained fame for its ‘bombshell report’ about a so-called leaked memo set which were alleged guidelines for an industry conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” through an informational campaign targeting “older, less-educated males” and “younger, lower-income women.” Kert Davies, formerly at Ozone Action and Greenpeace who’s currently heading Climate Investigations Center / Climate Files, has been telling and retelling the narrative of how that memo set proves the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. He did so in an obscure podcast back in late 2018, and he did so again in this two month-old BBC podcast report.

Fuel cell-electric double-decker bus debuts in Aberdeen: The start of the ‘hydrogen economy’?

Fuel cell bus from Wrightbus

The obvious problem for the imagined ‘hydrogen economy’ is that there isn’t any natural source of hydrogen gas. The viability of using electricity generated only from renewables to convert water into industrial-scale hydrogen supplies is questionable, to put it mildly. Brace for the usual ‘green jobs’ claims having a tendency to be wildly over-optimistic.
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The first zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell-electric double-decker bus has arrived in Aberdeen, reports Route One.

Aberdeen City Council (ACC) says the delivery, part of an £8.3m project funded by ACC, the Scottish Government and the European Union Joint Initiative for Hydrogen Vehicles across Europe (JIVE) project, underlines the city’s role as the ‘energy capital of Europe’ and its commitment to the transition of green energy in a net zero vision.

Hydrogen offers greater range and faster refuelling while maintaining the efficiency of battery-electric equivalents, the council says.

At solar minimum, the largest ozone hole over Antarctica in years

Credit: earthhow.com

As Accuweather explains here, research has shown that a combination of conditions at solar minimum can create this effect.
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The European Union’s Earth observation program said Tuesday that the ozone hole over Antarctica has swelled to its largest size and deepest level in years, reports Phys.org.

Experts at the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service said a strong, stable and cold polar vortex has driven the expansion, and called for greater international efforts to ensure countries abide by an international accord to phase out use of ozone-depleting chemicals.

Vincent-Henri Peuch, who heads the service, said in a statement that the ozone hole was “definitely” among the largest in the last 15 years.

New 3-D model could explain the formation of a hexagon storm on Saturn

Another round of the enduring hexagon mystery.
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With its dazzling system of icy rings, Saturn has been a subject of fascination since ancient times, says Phys.org.

Even now the sixth planet from the sun holds many mysteries, partly because its distance away makes direct observation difficult and partly because this gas giant (which is multiple times the size of our planet) has a composition and atmosphere, mostly hydrogen and helium, so unlike that of Earth.

Learning more about it could yield some insights into the creation of the solar system itself.

One of Saturn’s mysteries involves the massive storm in the shape of a hexagon at its north pole.

UK will be ‘the world leader’ in offshore wind – forgetting wind power is not continuous

Time for another airing of the usual tedious waffle about wind powering x number of homes, ignoring its chronic intermittency and tendency to almost disappear for hours, or even days, at a time. The greater the dependency on it, the greater the potential disruption to electricity supply. Fantasies of ‘slowing climate change’ are just that: fantasies.
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Boris Johnson will promise to “build back greener” in his conference speech on Tuesday, announcing new investment in offshore wind energy, reports BBC News.

The PM will pledge £160m to upgrade ports and factories for building turbines, setting a target for wind to produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of every UK home by 2030.

The plan aims to create 2,000 jobs in construction and support 60,000 more.

He will say the UK is to become “the world leader in clean wind energy”.

Dust dampens albedo effect, spurs snowmelt in the heights of the Himalayas

Himalayan region

The researchers say “It’s likely that these results translate to other high mountain chains”. Above 4,500 metres dust is found to be ahead of other forms of pollution.
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Dust blowing onto high mountains in the western Himalayas is a bigger factor than previously thought in hastening the melting of snow there, researchers show in a study published Oct. 5 in Nature Climate Change.

That’s because dust—lots of it in the Himalayas—absorbs sunlight, heating the snow that surrounds it, reports Phys.org.

“It turns out that dust blowing hundreds of miles from parts of Africa and Asia and landing at very high elevations has a broad impact on the snow cycle in a region that is home to one of the largest masses of snow and ice on Earth,” said Yun Qian, atmospheric scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Ecologist journal: The unsustainability of the electric car

The only viable option for carbophobes is significant degrowth (their term) according to this article. With present delusional plans to control global warming the numbers just don’t add up for ‘greenhouse gas’ obsessives, so even greater futile sacrifices are demanded.
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Shifting to electric vehicles while maintaining current travelling habits will not deliver emissions reductions required by the European Green Deal and Paris Agreement.

The European Green Deal sets ambitious targets for decarbonising the European economy.

This includes a European Commission proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030, with the European Parliament’s Environment Committee demanding a more ambitious 60 percent cut.

The EGD also calls for the EU to become carbon-neutral by 2050.