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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
Showing posts with label Carbon dioxide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carbon dioxide. Show all posts

Friday, August 12, 2011

12 August - Climatology and B.S.

BERLIN - DECEMBER 05: Activists dressed as (f...Image by Getty Images via @daylife

 The Kyoto Conspiracy (Gore, Enron, Carbon Trading, Global Warming)

Not one single day goes by in New Zealand now without a reference somewhere to global warming, and New Zealand’s requirement to comply with the Kyoto protocol. But few people realise that Kyoto was the brainchild of a corrupt multinational energy company, looking to make a buck out of the green movement. 

From 1994 to 1996, the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million dollars - $990,000 - to the Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project promotes global warming theories. Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on environmental groups that support international energy controls to “reduce” global warming. Executives at Enron worked closely with the Clinton administration to help create a scaremongering climate science environment because the company believed the treaty could provide it with a monstrous financial windfall. The plan was that once the problem was in place the solution would be trotted out. 

A 1998 letter, signed by Lay and a few other bigwigs asked President Clinton, in essence, to harm the reputations and credibility of scientists who argued that global warming was an overblown issue, because these individuals were standing in Enron’s way. The letter, dated Sept. 1, asked the president to shut off the public scientific debate on global warming, which continues to this date. In particular, it requested Clinton to moderate the political aspects of this discussion by appointing a bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission. The purpose of this commission was clear – high-level trashing of dissident scientists.

.....Enron stood to profit millions from global warming energy-trading schemes,” said Mike Carey, president of the Ohio Coal Association and American Coal Coalition. The investigation into the collapse of Enron will reveal much more about the intricacies of the Baptist-bootlegger coalition which was promoting the Kyoto cause within the Republican Party and within US business circles. Coal-burning utilities would have had to pay billions for permits because they emit more CO2 than do natural gas facilities. That would have encouraged closing coal plants in favor of natural gas or other kinds of power plants, driving up prices for those alternatives. 

While playing the climate-change card at the G8 Summit, the final Gleneagles’ declaration shows that the leaders of the developed world have no intention of sacrificing growth and economic success for an ascetic global warming religion.

Comments : One of Enron’s major consultants in that study was NASA scientist James Hansen, who started the whole global warming mess in 1988 with his bombastic congressional testimony 

Global Warming 

Global Emission of Carbon Dioxide: The Contribution from Natural Sources

Generating the Renewable Energy of Hope

- The Earth Charter Guide to Religion and Climate Change

 Climate Himalaya

Our Waterways: Learning from Failure in Mountains!

In terms of damage to the infrastructure the area most severely hit in Pakistan during 2010 flood was Khyber Pakhtun Khawa. In its 20 districts more than 4300 Km of road was damaged with an estimates of 13182 million rupees. 375 bridges were damaged including, eighty minor and seventy one major RCC bridges, twenty causeways and two hundred and four suspension bridges. Twenty nine bridges were damaged in the district Swat alone where the gushing water of Indus River devastated everything that came in its path and cut off all communication for weeks.

Pakistan Flood-Bridge collapseThe magnitude of the hazard in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was indeed very high and can be visualized from the fact that the annual rainfall in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is 962 mm, whereas the rainfall received during 28th July to 3rd August 2010 was 3462 mm which resulted in the highest ever water discharge flow in all head works and rivers. The total number of persons affected was 3.8 million with 1,070 dead and 1,056 injured.
While looking in to the reasons for such massive flood and disaster it is evident that, the huge flow of the logs in the river was the result of illegal deforestation and theft of trees by timber mafia that tremendously increased the energy of the river and smashed everything that came in its path. It seems that in most cases the causes of 2010 floods were ‘political’ than ‘natural’ regardless of the hazard that triggers them. 
( All of which is consistent with analysis presented by International Rivers in a PDF about concrete madness in the Himalayas.

Spencer on Lindzen and Choi climate feedback paper

The authors showed that satellite-observed radiation loss by the Earth increased dramatically with warming, often in excess of 6 Watts per sq. meter per degree (6 W m-2 K-1). In stark contrast, all of the computerized climate models they examined did just the opposite, with the atmosphere trapping more radiation with warming rather than releasing more.
The implication of their results was clear: most if not all climate models that predict global warming are far too sensitive, and thus produce far too much warming and associated climate change in response to humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions.
While I tend to agree with the Lindzen and Choi position that the real climate system is much less sensitive than the IPCC climate models suggest, it is not clear to me that their results actually demonstrate this.

New theories over methane puzzle

Scientists say that there has been a mysterious decline in the growth of methane in the atmosphere in the last decades of the 20th Century.
Researchers writing in the journal Nature have come up with two widely differing theories as to the cause.
One suggests the decline was caused by greater commercial use of natural gas, the other that increased use in Asia of artificial fertiliser was responsible.
Both studies agree that human activities are the key element.
And there are suggestions that methane levels are now on the rise again.

 

Congress Searches Universe for Grand Unified Theory

The marching orders have already been written, the lobby lizards are working the aisles and congress is drooling over the checks that are about to hit their campaign accounts.
Social Security and Medicare will be cut, programs that benefit working people and society as a whole will be slashed, the incomes of the wealthy and the powerful will be carefully protected and corporations will be given still more incentives for jobs which they have no intention of creating. The deficit will be attacked by digging deeper into the pockets of the middle class and allowing the country to devolve further into third world status.
This talk of a “grand bargain” may sound like the congress is searching for some arcane and elegant unified field theory but it’s just a delay to allow time to slather more makeup on the hideous beast they are about to shove on the political stage.

 Media Watch Dog

 Consortiumnews

One of the strange mysteries from the Reagan-Bush era is where did George H.W. Bush go on one Sunday in October 1980 when some witnesses placed him meeting with Iranians in Paris. More than three decades later, Bush’s supposed alibi remains a state secret, Robert Parry reports. 

Climategate ( RSS Feeds ! )


 

ClimateDepot

Bishop Hill


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Thursday, February 3, 2011

3 February - Morning Report

Precession of Earth's rotational axis due to t...Image via Wikipedia

The Reference Frame

Do the causes of temperature changes matter?

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A key part of the climate panic methodology is to take the data and numbers out of their proper context. This procedure is being systematically applied to all quantities describing the atmosphere, all climatic phenomena, all weather events, as well as their real or hypothetical impacts.

But I will choose to discuss the most important one, the importance of particular temperature changes.

During the last 100 years, the temperature changed by something like 0.6 °C. Is that much? Well, the world hasn't noticed. Sediment records showing the fluctuating seque...Image via Wikipedia
Milankovitch cyclesImage via Wikipedia...........Any sensible comparison shows that regardless of the cause, the temperature trend we have been observing in the instrumental era is totally negligible. Nevertheless, some people - especially the people inclined to be infected with the climate panic - often suggest that we shouldn't compare temperature changes caused by different things.
I have been trying very hard to determine the reason why those people thought that one should have "separate budgets" for temperature changes caused by an underlying trend we don't quite understand - and that may be partly formed by the CO2 greenhouse effect - from the temperature changes caused by many other effects whose name is known.

Those people clearly believe something of the sort even though it must be obvious to a small schoolkid that the same temperature change has the same impact, regardless of the cause. So we simply can't blow one term out of proportion just because someone finds such a selective inflation convenient.

Well, a part of the answer is surely that many people have been brainwashed and they're literally unable to think about the concept of "temperature" rationally. However, there is another, superficially more reasonable, factor that plays a role:

Many people think that all the other processes contributing to the temperature get "undone" after some time.

Now, is it true?
Oh, really? Should we apply double standards here? Why?
Well, first of all, in a striking contradiction with their beliefs, it is more or less true for the warming induced by the carbon dioxide, whatever its magnitude is. In a few centuries after we stop burning compounds of carbon, the oceans and the biosphere will absorb the CO2 "above the equilibrium value" (that depends on the temperature) from the atmosphere. Consequently, the greenhouse effect from the extra CO2, whatever its magnitude will have been, will be reverted, too.
Long-term average precipitation by month (mm/d...Image via WikipediaOn the other hand, many of the other drivers are aperiodic or even unpredictable - and they have no reason to "return to the average". Well, days and nights are pretty periodic, much like seasons. But even the orbital parameters are changing during the Milankovitch cycles - those that led to the ice ages. 
Range of the tilt of Earth's axis of rotation ...Image via WikipediaThe idea that the Milankovitch and other variations are "cyclic" is an artifact of the reasoning that led Ptolemy to the theory of epicycles. He thought that it was inevitable that the motion of celestial bodies had to take the form of a summation of some circular motions - he pretty much assumed that the Fourier transform of the trajectories had to be a combination of a few delta-functions, if I use a modern language.

Of course, this belief wasn't right. Although the epicycles look like a good "model" to qualitatively agree with what we see, they're simply not the right model. The right model is given by nonlinear Newton's equations of classical mechanics. And they don't imply any periodicity of coordinates in gravitationally bound systems with at least 3 bodies. Newton's theory is not about epicycles so the perturbations may lead to an arbitrarily high deviation of the Earth's axis from the present value although some very high variations are unlikely.

The climate, which is influenced by the orbital irregularities, is even more non-linear which means that there are even smaller reasons to think that the temperature changes are periodic.
Animated global map of monthly long term mean ...Image via WikipediaIn practice, if you observe the temperature variations during the last 600,000 years or so, you will see that the global mean temperature was kept in an interval whose length is at most 12 °C or so. Larger excursions were apparently very unlikely - even though they probably existed during most distant geological epochs.

However, if you try to increase the accuracy and substantially reduce the figure 12 °C, you will simply get a wrong model. Even if you use the word "noise" for all the complicated wiggles in the temperature graphs, you won't become able to actually predict the temperature for centuries in advance with a better accuracy than 1 °C.

In fact, the real-world models can't even predict the right temperature changes for a decade with an error margin that is substantially smaller than 100 percent of the predicted temperature change. Whenever people tried to use fancy methods to get a more accurate prediction, they actually obtained much worse predictions.

This leads me to a related point of the people who like to "discriminate" different sources of temperature change: they just believe that the "signal and noise" can be sharply separated and they must be treated separately.
However, there exists absolutely no scientific separation of the temperature as a function of time to "signal" and "noise". Just try to design an operational method how to separate them and you will see that it will inevitably depend on your completely arbitrary conventions how a function should be divided into two.

The only real temperature we're observing is the actual temperature. Trying to pretend that "a part of the temperature" is not real or interesting is just a denial of the data. If the ENSO cycles change the global mean temperatures by half a degree, these are real changes.

Saying that the temperature is bound to go up by the year XXXX is just a speculation.
The Keeling Curve of atmospheric CO 2 concentr...Image via WikipediaSo in January 2011, the ecosystems and everyone else are simply experiencing temperatures that are below the average January temperatures from the 1980-2010 period. You can't do anything about it. It also means that if the cold global temperatures may be identified as a culprit of some problems in the U.S., U.K., or elsewhere, it is also inevitable to say that a small part of these problems was caused by the people responsible for attempting to cool the planet - although they have only cooled it by 0.0001 °C or so, for a few trillion of dollars so far.

There is absolutely no way to honestly introduce double standards here. If one decides to claim that the temperature deviated from the average of some random era are a bad thing, it must inevitably be true that whoever helped to increase this deviation has done a bad thing. You can't use two different temperatures - the real temperature measured by thermometers and an "adjusted one" from which some "speculative noise" was subtracted - and you can't choose the "more convenient one" depending on what you find more convenient for your claims.

Such an attitude is a flagrant case of dishonesty. However, this is exactly what alarmists - including softcore alarmists - are doing pretty much all the time. The only possible conclusion is that they don't want the policies to depend on the actual temperatures measured by thermometers - or any honest data, for that matter: they want the policies to depend on whatever fabricated data that are good enough to justify the pre-decided policies.

That's why this stuff has nothing to do with the scientific method and is just a dirty form of politics.

Discovery

HAND PREFERENCE IN HUMANS, ANIMALS EXPLAINED

Whether you more frequently use your right hand or your left isn't so much a choice as it is hardwired in your brain.

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