Foundations of Greenhouse Theory Challenged by New Analysis of Solar System Observations

Back in late 2011, the Talkshop splashed the story on a ‘Unified Theory of Climate’  developed by PhD physicists Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller. They set out to show that the ‘greenhouse effect’ is not a phenomenon arising out of the absorption and reemission of outgoing long-wave radiation by the atmosphere (as thought for 190 years), but is a form of compression heating controlled by solar radiation and the total atmospheric pressure at the Earth’s surface. Pressure is in turn a product of the gas mass contained in a column of air above a unit surface area, and the planet’s gravitational effect on that mass.

It’s been a long and treacherous road involving many revisions and refinements of the original study. On several occasions the manuscript was rejected unread, but Ned and Karl have finally got their greatly improved and expanded paper published. This latest version is a tour de force strengthened by the rigors of criticism from an army of peer reviewers at several journals along the way.

Using dimensional analysis (a classical technique for inferring physically meaningful relationships from measured data), they show that the long-term global equilibrium surface temperature of bodies in the solar system as diverse as Venus, the Moon, Earth, Mars, Titan and Triton can accurately be described using only two predictors: the mean distance from the Sun and the total atmospheric surface pressure. This type of cross-planetary analysis using vetted NASA observations has not been conducted by any other authors. It represents the first and only attempt in the history of climate science to assess Earth’s surface temperature in the context of a cosmic physical continuum defined by actual planetary-scale observations. The result is a new insight that planetary climates are independent of the infrared optical depth of their atmospheres arising from their composition, and that the long-wave ‘back radiation’ is actually a product of the atmospheric thermal effect rather than a cause for it.

Tim Channon

With sadness, I’m sharing the news that my Talkshop co-blogger Tim Channon passed away on Friday. Tim had been bravely battling with cancer for some time, and was still upbeat and lively-minded when I spoke with him last week. Since then unfortunately, medical complications set in.

Tim was one of a kind. A humorous, thoughtful and technically brilliant individual. His contribution to our understanding of cyclic phenomena through the analysis software he wrote propelled me into my own research. His patient recording of weather data and survey of UK weather stations demonstrate the depth of interest and passion he had for bringing facts to bear on the climate debate. His dedication, skill and good natured rebukes against uninformed speculation and bad theory puts him in the Pantheon of great sceptical thinkers and scientists.

Tim will be missed and remembered.

_____________________________________

Not so smart: ‘Smart meter said I owed thousands’

Electricity usage – one of these may cause a shock.

A woman has spoken of her surprise when her smart meter quoted thousands of pounds for a day’s usage of gas and electricity, due to a system error, reports BBC News.

Jane Allen was one of many confused customers who posted the strange readings from their SSE smart meters on social media. One customer’s display showed more than £30,000 for a single day.

SSE apologised and said no customers would be charged “the extra amounts resulting from errors”.

Smart meters send information on energy usage back to the supplier. They let the customer know how much electricity or gas they are consuming each day – and how much it’s costing them – in real time.

But for some customers, the readings have been somewhat higher than usual over the past week.

Support MASIE Arctic Ice Dataset

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Ron Clutz sings the praises of a useful Arctic ice dataset in need of your support.

Science Matters

MASIE: “high-resolution, accurate charts of ice conditions”
Walt Meier, NSIDC, October 2015 article in Annals of Glaciology.

The home page for MASIE (here) invites visitors to show their interest in the dataset and analysis tools since continued funding is not assured. The page says:
NSIDC has received support to develop MASIE but not to maintain MASIE. We are actively seeking support to maintain the Web site and products over the long term. If you find MASIE helpful, please let us know with a quick message to NSIDC User Services.

For the reasons below, I hope people will go there and express their support.

1. MASIE is Rigorous.

Note on Sea Ice Resolution:

Northern Hemisphere Spatial Coverage

Sea Ice Index (SII) from NOAA is based on 25 km cells and 15% ice coverage. That means if a grid cell 25X25, or 625 km2 is estimated to have at least…

View original post 1,139 more words

Advanced geometry used by prehistoric architects in US Southwest, say scientists

[click on image to enlarge]

Another one to add to the ‘how and why did they do that?’ list of ancient sites. Years of research lie ahead.

Imagine you are about to plan and construct a building that involves several complicated geometrical shapes, but you aren’t allowed to write down any numbers or notes as you do it. For most of us, this would be impossible.

Yet, new research from Arizona State University has revealed that the ancient Southwestern Pueblo people, who had no written language or written number system, were able to do just that – and used these skills to build sophisticated architectural complexes, reports Phys.org.

Dr. Sherry Towers, a professor with the ASU Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center, uncovered these findings while spending several years studying the Sun Temple archaeological site in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, constructed around A.D. 1200.

“The site is known to have been an important focus of ceremony in the region for the ancestral Pueblo peoples, including solstice observations,” Towers says. “My original interest in the site involved looking at whether it was used for observing stars as well.”

However, as Towers delved deeper into the site’s layout and architecture, interesting patterns began to emerge.

5,000-year-old calendar rock found in Sicily excites archaeologists

Winter solstice sunrise at the historic site in Sicily [image credit: Giuseppe La Spina]

A team of researchers exploring the southern coast of Sicily have found an intriguing prehistoric calendar rock, reports Ancient Origins.

After conducting some empirical observations, they discovered the rising sun of the winter solstice aligns perfectly with a large hole in a rock formation on a hill near a prehistoric necropolis.

They also discovered a fallen megalith that would have stood directly in front of the hole. Stonehenge-like comparisons abound in the media.

Alien solar system Kepler-80 has tightly spaced planets in synchronized orbits

Synchronized orbits of the Kepler-80 system [Credit: Florida Institute of Technology]

Another example of planetary resonance has been discovered thanks to NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
H/T Phys.org

Located about 1,100 light years away, Kepler-80, named for the NASA telescope that discovered it, features five small planets orbiting in extreme proximity to their star.

As early as 2012, Kepler scientists found that all five planets orbit in an area about 150 times smaller than the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, with “years” of about one, three, four, seven and nine days.

New Dawn Of Truth: London Climate Change Conference 2016

It’s finally happening. Thanks to Herculean efforts by Niklas Morner, we are presenting a two-day conference in central London on the 8-9th September. Speakers are coming from all over the world to present their work, and it is not to be missed!

Take the 8-9th September off work and join us for this historic event. The first UK climate conference in decades which will counter the scaremongering of the IPCC with a cool, rational approach to the study of climate change, presenting alternative explanations, new data, theory and commentary. Topics include solar-planetary theory, causes of ENSO, sea ice extent, sea level, ozone depletion, volcanos, regional forecasting, journal gatekeeping and many more.

The list of contributors is long, we are packing a huge number of presentations into this two day event. Speakers include Niklas Morner, myself, Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller,  Nicola Scafetta, Per Strandberg, Jan-Erik Solheim, and thats before lunch on day one! Piers Corbyn will be there! So will  Christopher Monckton! See the full programme and the extended abstracts in this 35 Megabyte document for full details. There are also some travel and booking details on the geoethic.com website. An updated version is available on reseachgate

ESA finds a frigid surprise hiding at Venus’ poles

Ultraviolet image of Venus’ clouds [credit: NASA]

Is it the cloud cover or the enormous atmospheric pressure at the surface that makes Venus hot? Whatever, it seems the poles are colder than Earth, and by a wide margin, as Astronomy.com reports. Models based on a ‘greenhouse effect’ weren’t expecting this.

Thanks to a thick layer of cloud cover trapping in heat, Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system, with temperatures boiling over at 850 degrees Fahrenheit (454 C). But in a study published last week in Nature Physics, the European Space Agency found something surprising at the planet’s poles: temperatures more frigid than anywhere on Earth.

Ancient floodstones sought to help predict climate change

Water gauge on the Danube [image credit: EuroTravelogue.com]

A slight problem in England could be that parts of the south e.g. London have been slowly sinking into the clay for centuries, so readings might not tell the whole story.

When it comes to predicting climate change, most scientists use state-of-the-art supercomputers to model future trends. But researchers at the University of Sheffield are hoping to gather information that is a little closer to home. 

Scientists are hunting for ancient floodstones which record the high level of water going back hundreds of years.

RSS satellite temperature update consolidates with UAH

There’s been a lot of loud rhetoric flying around about the update to the RSS satellite temperature series. What it actually amounts to is a consolidation of the satellite temperature measurement effort.

The two time series are now in good agreement and exhibit a warming rate of 0.13K/decade during the 1980-2015 period.

Missing sea level rise due to parched earth, claims NASA study

credit: John Evans and Howard Periman, USGS

In between the climate scare stories come the excuses for the non-events the scares were about. How the world becomes ‘increasingly hot’ with little or no increase in average temperatures is not addressed.

As glaciers melt due to climate change, the increasingly hot and parched Earth is absorbing some of that water inland, slowing sea level rise, NASA experts said Thursday.

Satellite measurements over the past decade show for the first time that the Earth’s continents have soaked up and stored an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers, the experts said in a study in the journal Science. This has temporarily slowed the rate of sea level rise by about 20 percent, it said.

Solar hard UV is weakening.

The EUV spectrum of the Sun: Irradiances during 1998–2014
G. Del Zanna 1 and V. Andretta 2
A&A 584, A29 (2015)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201526804
(c) ESO 2015
Open access on registration

Examples from paper Fig 6

From abstract

… show that the irradiances in the hot (2–3 MK) lines are significantly
lower for the cycle 24 maximum compared to the previous one.

From Introduction

1. Introduction
The present paper is part of an on-going effort to provide the
best possible solar spectral irradiance in the extreme ultraviolet
(EUV). The solar EUV variability causes dramatic changes in
the temperature and density of the thermosphere, and it could
also have some indirect effects on the climate. Indeed, some of
the current global circulation models also require EUV irradi-
ances to properly take the solar forcing into account.

Phi and the Great Pyramid of Khufu

Great Pyramid of Giza from a 19th-century stereopticon card photo [credit: Wikipedia]

Let’s have a look at some numbers for the Great Pyramid.

Source: Building the Great Pyramid (aka Cheops)
Copyright 2006 Franz Löhner and Teresa Zuberbühler

Dimensions as designed (in Egyptian royal cubits):
Length: 440
Height: 280
Slope: 356

Original dimensions as built (a,h and c in the pyramid diagram below):
Length: 230.36m (half = 115.18m)
Height: 146.59m
Slope: 186.42m

Why pendulums swing in harmony – new theory

Perfect harmony? [image credit: homedit]

From the believe-it-or-not file, Phys.org reports a possible solution to an old puzzle:

Almost 350 years ago, Dutch inventor and scientist Christiaan Huygens observed that two pendulum clocks hanging from a wall would synchronise their swing over time.

What causes the phenomenon has led to much scientific head-scratching over the centuries, but no consensus to date.

‘But now’ – as Tomorrow’s World presenters used to say…

The temperature hiatus is back – or, it never went away

Pacific ocean [image credit: Wikipedia]

H/T GWPF
Let’s see if this new paper in the same journal as the ‘what hiatus?’ effort gets the same level of publicity as the other one, given that ‘Nieves et al…find substantially less warming in the top 100 m of the oceans in the current decade than in the previous one.’

If there is one topic that illustrates the state of climate science it is that of the so-called “pause” or hiatus – the observational fact that global surface annual average temperatures, as well as satellite data on the lower troposphere, hasn’t changed for a decade or more.

England and Wales temperature as seen by satellite

This is an experimental work which I am sure has been done far better by professionals who will have proper access to special data and expertise. [updated with corrections]

Figure 1, overlay plots of pairs of almost raw datasets, in each case the Met Office areal mean temperature data for England and Wales, less annual, against gridded UAHTLT V6 beta 2, UAHTLT V5.6, RSSTLT V3.3, Hadcrut4 V4.3.0.0, the latter is unfair because it is gridded at 5 degrees instead of 2.5 degrees. In all cases the geographic area overlap is very approximate.

Click image for larger but preferably download this PDF (106KB) since as a vector plot zoom/enlargement and pan allow examination in great detail.

Arctic sea ice volume not lowest on record

US Coastguard icebreaker [credit: NSIDC]

Once again reports of the imminent death of Arctic sea ice have been greatly exaggerated. As even the pro-alarmist BBC has conceded, ‘to understand Arctic sea ice requires measurement of both area and thickness’, and it turns out that sea ice volume is well above the lowest recorded level for the time of year.

BBC: Although Arctic sea ice set a record this year for its lowest ever winter extent – that was not the case for its volume, new data reveals.

Europe’s Cryosat spacecraft routinely monitors the thickness of floes in the far north.

The thinnest winter ice it has ever seen was in 2013. This February, in contrast, the Arctic floes were about 25cm (17%) thicker on average.

Solar eclipse March 2015 as seen by Chilbolton Observatory instruments

As I promised here is the result from the thermal radiation instruments where as expected little was seen through light cloud.

Figure 1. CNR1 radiometer. (two pairs, looking up/down, short/long wavelength)

There is a minor effect during the eclipse. I live close by where the sun could be made out through light cloud. Around 12 hrs the cloud cleared abruptly. Video taken at Chilbolton shows similarly sudden sunshine.

Two factors in figure 1 need comment.

Temperature adjustments: simmering science scandal ?

Weather station [image credit: Peter West/National Science Foundation]

Long-time critic of climate alarmism Christopher Booker has no doubt what the answer should be in his latest piece at the Telegraph:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.