Leif Svalgaard reveals his Solar Cycle 25 prediction “at last”

Solar scientist and part-time NSA operative Leif Svalgaard has produced a prediction for solar cycle 25, four years after Rick Salvador published his 86 year prediction in the swiftly censored “Pattern Recognition in Physics”.

It appears at the end of a 30 page pdf document he has published on his website. This is an interesting document, with a wealth of gayly coloured butterfly diagrams, polar field reconstructions and more. Leif self deprecatingly follows his Prediction title with (At last) not only because it comes at the end of 30 pages of preamble, but because he’s acutely aware of his method’s limitations.

Cooling Ocean Air Temps

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Despite warming due to atmospheric trace gases being a racing certainty according to the IPCC and like-minded theorists, evidence of it is getting ever harder to find.

Science Matters

Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system.  Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy.  Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements.  In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates.  Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.

Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST.  He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months.  This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

The May update to HadSST3 will appear later this month, but in the meantime we can look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6…

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Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

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As Dr Ed Berry says: ‘How can human carbon dioxide, which is only 5 percent of natural carbon dioxide, add 30 percent to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide? It can’t.’

Science Matters

Source :NOAA

Blaming global warming on humans comes down to two assertions:

Rising CO2 in the atmosphere causes earth’s surface temperature to rise.

Humans burning fossil fuels cause rising atmospheric CO2.

For this post I will not address the first premise, instead refer the reader to a previous article referencing Fred Singer. He noted that greenhouse gas theory presumes surface warming arises because heat is forced to escape at a higher, colder altitude. In fact, temperatures in the tropopause do not change with altitude (“pause”), and in the stratosphere temperatures increase with altitude. That post also includes the “meat” of the brief submitted to Judge Alsup’s court by Happer, Koonin and Lindzen, which questions CO2 driving global warming in the face of other more powerful factors. See Courtroom Climate Science

The focus in this piece is the claim that fossil fuel emissions drive observed rising CO2 concentrations. IPCC consensus scientists…

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Ed Hoskins: UK Weather Dependent Renewable Energy installations: Installed capacity, costs and output 2017

Introduction

This post is concerned with the two main forms of UK Weather Dependent Renewable Energy in the UK, Wind Power, (Onshore and Offshore), and on grid Photovoltaic Solar Power.  In the UK these amount to ~75% of all installed Weather Dependent Renewable Energy.  The other Renewable energy inputs are traditional Hydro power ~8% and the remainder are other sources such as biomass, waste and landfill gas amounting to ~17%.

The capacity percentage, or load factor, of any power generating installation is calculated as the actual electrical output achieved annually divided by the nominal maximum Nameplate output.  This article uses the real measures of capacity reported in up to date time series data of UK Renewable installations.  It thus provides reasonably correct comparisons of the efficacy of Weather Dependent Renewables as is reported annually by the Renewable Energy Foundation in the UK.
 

James Annan, Syd Levitus and the 35% exaggeration of Ocean Heat Content rise

I ran across this interesting exchange recently. In it, James Annan, one of the IPCC authors who got Pattern Recognition in Physics shut down after we published our findings on the solar-planetary theory in it because he thought it was wrong, doesn’t seem as bothered to deal with errors by his fellow oceanographer Syd Levitus. Not even when it’s a whopper that has been costing the taxpayer billions due to the climate! panic! James and his colleagues have promoted for years.

James Annan did eventually write a short letter to the journal, but it went unpublished. The Levitus papers were never corrected, though later IPCC reports show a figure for 1955-96 closer to 13×10^22J than the 18×10^22J Levitus et al reported. The increase was actually caused by the reduction in cloud cover letting more sunshine through, as measured by the ISCCP. The latest graphs have also ‘disappeared’ the fall in OHC between 2003-9 measured by ARGO buoys and replaced it with a rise.

Policymakers! Listen up!

I was trained as an engineer and then did a degree in the History and philosophy of science.

I know how to calculate forces, I understand thermodynamics and radiative theory and I don’t ignore data inimical to any hypothesis.

After thirty years of monitoring and appraising the data, the global warming hypothesis and working out what really causes climatic change I’ve concluded that it ain’t CO2. The real causes of climatic change at the planetary scale are the enormous forces transferring energy between solar system bodies.

Jupiter and Saturn between them hold over 85% of the angular momentum of the system. Venus has, within an order of magnitude, the same gravitational force on the Earth-Moon system as Jupiter. The two of them have shaped the orbit of our Moon, whose tidal forces have a profound effect on the overturning circulation of Earth’s oceans, which contain 1000 times more heat than the atmosphere of which CO2 comprises 0.04%.

Why Phi? – resonant exoplanets of star YZ Ceti

Exoplanet – NASA impression

YZ Ceti is a recently discovered star with three known planets (b,c and d) orbiting very close to it. Although some types of mean motion resonance, or near resonance, are quite common e.g. 2:1 or 3:2 conjunction ratios, this one is a bit different.

The orbit periods in days are:
YZ Ceti b = 1.96876 d
YZ Ceti c = 3.06008 d
YZ Ceti d = 4.65627 d

This gives these conjunction periods:
c-d = 8.9266052 d
b-c = 5.5204368 d
b-d = 3.4109931 d
(Note the first two digits on each line.)

Nearest matching period:
34 c-d = 303.50457 d
55 b-c = 303.62403 d
89 b-d = 303.57838 d

34,55 and 89 are Fibonacci numbers.
Therefore the conjunction ratios are linked to the golden ratio (Phi).

Phi = 1.618034
(c-d) / (b-c) = 1.6170106
(b-c) / (b-d) = 1.618425

Data source: exoplanets.eu

More renewables mean less stable grids, researchers find

Who knew? Apart from nearly everyone who ever gave it any thought, that is. But if confirmation and analysis from published research is needed, PEI reports it here. It seems to be worse than they thought.

Grid stability is likely to be increasingly challenged as power distribution moves from a centralized to a more decentralized model, new research has found.

According to a paper published this week in the journal Nature Energy by researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the UK’s Queen Mary University of London, integrating growing numbers of renewable power installations and microgrids onto the grid can result in larger-than-expected fluctuations in grid frequency.

Why Wind Power Is Not Equal To Coal Fired Power

Hazelwood power station, Australia – closed in 2017 [image credit: Simpsons fan 66 at English Wikipedia]

How much enforced variability in electricity generation can a country’s power system tolerate? A close look at the numbers for Australia is not encouraging, to say the least.

How often have you heard that Wind power is intermittent, but has anyone ever explained that to you, or shown just how it actually is intermittent, and what it means, asks TonyfromOz.

What if you need a dedicated amount of power all the time? Can wind power be relied on to generate that dedicated amount of power?

Over the last Month, I have been detailing the closure of the 53 year old Hazelwood brown coal fired power plant in the State of Victoria here in Australia, and comparing that plant’s power generation with wind power across the whole of Australia, and that Post is at this link.

The main comparison was with all the wind plants across the whole of Australia, but I was also including the data for just the wind plants in the same State that the Hazelwood plant was in, Victoria.

Reality Check: Are hurricanes getting worse?

Track of Hurricane Harvey [image credit: Overlord / Wikipedia]

Looks like a fairly sober BBC analysis from weather forecaster Chris Fawkes, avoiding some of the more extravagant climate claims the BBC is sometimes guilty of.

The past year has been a busy one for hurricanes.

There were 17 named storms in 2017, 10 hurricanes and six major hurricanes (category 3 or higher) – an above average year in each respect.

The 10 hurricanes formed consecutively, without weaker tropical storms interrupting the sequence.

The only other time this has been recorded was in 1893.

Are these storms getting worse? And does climate change have anything to do with it?

North Atlantic Oscillation synchronizes tree reproduction across Europe

The researchers back the idea that ‘a strong NAO synchronizes climate across large parts of Europe’, reports ScienceDaily. ‘Large scale changes in pressure’ are involved.

Research has found a strong correlation between the North Atlantic Oscillation and synchronized tree reproduction across Europe, supporting the idea that this phenomenon plays a greater role in large scale masting, the process whereby forest trees produce large numbers of seeds in the same year.

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) refers to the large scale changes in pressure that occur naturally in the North Atlantic region. It has been shown to have a strong effect on atmospheric circulation and European climate.

It is known that tree reproduction tends to be strongly synchronised within local populations, so that if one tree is producing a very heavy seed or fruit crop, it is very likely that a neighbouring tree will also be heavily fruiting.

Study: satellites show no acceleration in global warming for 23 years

NOAA weather satellite [image credit: NASA]

‘Official’ climate science response: claim satellite data is not reliable, and play shoot-the-messenger. Predictable, as the results obviously don’t fit theories of man-made warming.
H/T The GWPF

Global warming has not accelerated temperature rise in the bulk atmosphere in more than two decades, according to a new study funded by the Department of Energy.

University of Alabama-Huntsville climate scientists John Christy and Richard McNider found that by removing the climate effects of volcanic eruptions early on in the satellite temperature record showed virtually no change in the rate of warming since the early 1990s.

“We indicated 23 years ago — in our 1994 Nature article — that climate models had the atmosphere’s sensitivity to CO2 much too high,” Christy said in a statement. “This recent paper bolsters that conclusion.”

Renewables to make up half the UK’s power supply

Wind turbines towering over the landscape

When they say ‘flexible power sources’ they mean the ones that are needed when unreliable renewables have largely gone to sleep, for example at night or when it’s not windy. The costs of running such a dual system or the consequences of power shortages, especially in winter, are not mentioned, although they admit that there will be “entire weeks and months” where solar and wind will produce “little energy”. It all sounds unreal.

Renewable energy will account for more than half of the UK’s power supply by 2026, according to a new study, reports Utility Week.

The report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance and commissioned by Eaton and the Renewable Energy Association, claims there will be a “significant acceleration” in the shift to renewable sources over the next 20 years and that this move will create new opportunities for new flexible power sources.

By 2040, almost two thirds (63 per cent) of power will be generated from renewable sources, according to the report and at “certain times” wind and solar energy along could meet total power demand in both the UK and Germany.

WCC4 Rome: Interview with Nikolov and Zeller

I got back from Rome last night following the highly successful World Climate Conference. Quite a number of CO2 sceptics gave presentations, which were politely received and discussed by all present. We even made a few converts. Here’s a short interview I made with Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller where they give their impressions and some insight into their paradigm shifting discovery of the temperature-pressure relationship which holds good across the entire solar system.

Ned and Karl’s two papers are here:

New Insights on the Physical Nature of the Atmospheric Greenhouse
Effect Deduced from an Empirical Planetary Temperature Model

On the average temperature of airless spherical bodies and the magnitude of Earth’s atmospheric thermal effect

They show that the uplift in temperature on Earth’s surface due to the presence of the atmosphere is not 33K as the current greenhouse theory states but 90K, and is due to atmospheric pressure at the surface, not the back radiation from ‘greenhouse gases’.

We’ve been following Ned and Karl’s work since 2010 here at the Talkshop. They are finally getting heard in a wider forum.

Two Decades of Temperature Data from Australia – Not Fit for Purpose – Jennifer Marohasy

Credit: aboutaustralia.com

What is going on with Australian temperature data? It doesn’t look good, as Jennifer Marohasy explains.

Australia is a large continent in the Southern Hemisphere. The temperatures measured and recorded by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology contribute to the calculation of global averages.

These values, of course, suggest catastrophic human-caused global warming. Two decades ago the Bureau replaced most of the manually-read mercury thermometers in its weather stations with electronic devices that could be read automatically – so since at least 1997 most of the temperature data has been collected by automatic weather stations (AWS).

Before this happened there was extensive testing of the devices – parallel studies at multiple site to ensure that measurements from the new weather stations tallied with measurements from the old liquid-in-glass thermometers.

Why we need to leave the single market

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Ben Somervell lays out a full and well supported case for leaving the single market on #Brexit

Ben Somervell's Brexit Blog

In this article, I will use the terms “single market”, “internal market”, “European Economic Area” and “EEA” interchangeably as they are all effectively synonyms. (The following article is a full significantly extended, revised and updated version of a much shorter article which I wrote for the “Comment Central” website which was, in turn an extended version of a 952-word article here which I wrote for the “Student Voices” website in July).

I originally thought that Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech in January (transcript here), her letter to the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, invoking Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon (here) and the Government’s Brexit White Paper (here) had once and for all nipped the idea of continued single market membership after Brexit in the bud. However, since the Conservatives lost their parliamentary majority in the General Election this year, it…

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The Catch-22 of Energy Storage

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H/T @hockeyschtick1 for this great article on the non-viability of wind/solar as large-scale replacement for fossil/nuclear. Now can we scrap the CCA please?

 

Brave New Climate

Pick up a research paper on battery technology, fuel cells, energy storage technologies or any of the advanced materials science used in these fields, and you will likely find somewhere in the introductory paragraphs a throwaway line about its application to the storage of renewable energy.  Energy storage makes sense for enabling a transition away from fossil fuels to more intermittent sources like wind and solar, and the storage problem presents a meaningful challenge for chemists and materials scientists… Or does it?

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Guest Post by John Morgan. John is Chief Scientist at a Sydney startup developing smart grid and grid scale energy storage technologies.  He is Adjunct Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at RMIT, holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry, and is an experienced industrial R&D leader.  You can follow John on twitter at @JohnDPMorgan.  First published in Chemistry in Australia .

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Several recent analyses of the…

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The real cause of climate change over the last millennium

Fig 1. Integration of solar data departing from long term average as a proxy for OHC

OK, this the last post before I go. This is a comment I made this morning over at Pierre Gosselin’s place.

To understand the effect of solar variation on a large heat capacity mass like Earth’s oceans, you have to integrate the solar data to get a reasonable proxy for ocean heat content. If you look at empirical comparisons of average sunspot number during periods when the ocean temperature is steady, you can derive a value of approximately 40 sunspots per month. This also happens to be the average sunspot number over the period of record from 1749 to today. Integrating the sunspot numbers as a running total departing from this average produces a reasonable proxy for OHC.

Calibrating the Steinhilber et al TSI reconstruction based on 10Be to the same baseline, we obtain a reconstruction which compares well to the Mann et al 2008 millennial temperature reconstruction, as seen in Fig1.

The Road to Grenfell Hell was clad with Green Intentions

Report written by commenter ‘stickywicket’ at Spiked online

Everyone has been shocked to the core by the images of the inferno that engulfed the Grenfell Tower, killing 79 people. Most were horrified by the suggestion in the Times that the cause of the fire might have been penny-pinching on the type of cladding used in the recent refurbishment of the building. It seems unbelievable that they didn’t spend an extra £5,000 for fire resistant cladding.

This is probably not the whole story. The revelation that a further 70+ tower blocks have failed fire safety tests tells us that there is an endemic problem. We don’t know the precise reasons for the fire yet, but we should certainly look at the influence of slavish devotion to green regulations.

MET Office ‘adjusts’ the data to bring us the hottest day since 1976

The BBC breathlessly reports a MET-office reported temperature of 34.5C at Heathrow yesterday, but what does the actual data say?