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The official site for annual CO2 is Mauna Loa. The station at 11,300 feet high (3,444 meters), has a 131-foot (40-meter) tower that collects air to measure levels of carbon dioxide.
Charles Keeling choose to install an atmospheric carbon dioxide monitoring system on Mauna Loa, a volcanic peak on the Big Island of Hawaii as the remote location would allow only carbon dioxide that had mixed with the atmosphere to be measured.
The latest annual numbers are around 420 which averages 0.04% of the air. Levels are lowest during July as vegetation is using it in photosynthesis and releasing O2.
It varies greatly where we actually live because when we breathe in the air with just 0.04% (420) ppm CO2), when we breathe out, we release 42,000 ppm. CO2 levels are much higher in populated areas and especially when people congregate (churches, schools, restaurants. even you home when the family and pets are there).
ITS NOT POLLUTION
HOME AND OFFICE AND SCHOOLS
Levels exceeding 2000 ppm are found in small offices and Ken. C., a science teacher writes, “In one classroom of 30 students after lunch reached CO2 levels of 4,825 ppm with the door closed. According to ASHRAE, the effects of poor indoor air quality in classrooms has been known for years. Chronic illnesses, reduced cognitive abilities, sleepiness, and increased absenteeism have all been attributed to poor IAQ. There is no direct harm from CO2, the claim is that it reduces oxygen levels.
CARS, TRAINS AND PLANES AND SUBMARINES
Studies found carbon dioxide levels rise to over 3,000 ppm in 30 minutes in an enclosed automobile with a single passenger. In airplane cabins it may rise to 1700 ppm. The alarmists are more interested in the emission from the planes into the atmosphere and want those that fly (and drive or ride the rails) to be held accountable (see the proposed 50 tonnes CO2 per person as a lifetime limit here).
In submarines, levels range up to 11,300 ppm .
EDUCATING THE POPULACE
I have always considered myself an environmentalist and conservationist as well as a Meteorologist and Climatologist. I worked on my doctorate with an atmospheric chemistry grant.
In the post WWII boom, we had problems with air pollution from factories, coal plants, cars, inefficient home heating systems and incinerators in apartments. We had serious air quality issues with pollutants. We had problems with particulates, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone and lead. The worst episodes that really drove efforts to fight pollution were from a atmospheric chemical reactions - cold season water droplets in fog mixed with SO2 to cause sulfuric acid mist. Smog events in Donora PA 1948 led to 6,000 of the 14,000 population to experienced damaged lungs, and the Great London 4 day 1952 Smog Event produced between 10-12,000 deaths.
Events like that still occur in China.
We set standards that had to be met by industry and automakers. After my BS and MS work at Wisconsin in Meteorology, I received a grant to study Air Resources/Pollution at NYU while I worked 7 days a week producing the weather fro WCBS TV and radio and the National Network on the Special series on Energy. Many of my colleagues moved into air quality at the EPA and elsewhere, After he work we all did there and at many schools on pollution, we have the cleanest air in my lifetime and here in the U.S. in the world today.
CO2 IS THE GAS OF LIFE
Notice CO2 was not on the list. CO2 is a trace gas (.04% of our atmosphere). It is NOT a pollutant but a beneficial gas. CO2 is essential for photosynthesis. CO2 enriched plants are more vigorous and have lower water needs, are more drought resistant. Ideal CO2 levels for crops would be 3 to 4 times higher. They pump CO2 into greenhouses!
The climate models used to predict the impacts of increasing CO2 deliver warming over 2 times that observed by our NOAA orbiting satellite measurements of the air above the boundary layer where the greatest changes occur diurnally.
The apparent weak correlation to temperatures may be mostly the timing of the natural cycles. Longer term warming correlates with CO2 increases only 40% of the time.
Enlarged
Sadly there have been changes that minimized the warm period from the 1920s to 1940s to try to make the case stronger.
CONCLUSION: CO2 IS NOT POLLUTION BUT A VALUABLE PART OF LIFE ON OUR PLANET
I have 2 CO2 monitors - I bought one - actually using Amazon credits and it arrived the next morning. One high quality model was donated to me to use by the CO2 coalition. I found with my daughter and 2 small dogs in the room, levels rise to over 800. At a football gathering of 8, it rose from 420 to near 1700 ppm. Had our team been doing better, we may have had a gathering with twice a many people and CO2 levels would have been well over 2000. I used and talked about our findings at a church organized meeting.
Many people confuse/conflate CO2 with the potentially deadly CO. That included a decade ago the chair of NH Science and Energy committee when I was one of the testifiers. She said she was taught CO2 was a health hazard (confusing with CO).
I found the story can influence people with open minds. If the CO2 is seen to be locally much higher where people congregate, I am a bit afraid the radical movement and would take that fact on as another cause and try to enforce extreme measures (limiting driving, flying, congregating in large events), to pretend it will keep levels low and it becomes another costly program with much more harm than benefit as their assault on fossil fuel energy usage and the whole COVID episode has been the last 3+ years.
Weather Rant by Professor Art Horn, Meteorologist AMS
“What is necessary for the very existence of science and what the characteristics of nature are, are not to be determined by pompous preconditions, they are determined always by the material with which we work, by nature herself.” - Dr. Richard Feynman
Published at theartofweather.net
Tuesday September 5th, 2023
Love that quote by the good doctor above. It’s especially relevant to the story below! Be it scientific journals or from the sea of both established and fledgling media companies, they all have one goal it would seem and it’s not the truth but perhaps just part of the truth so that fits their predetermined narrative. Is a lie of omission really a lie or is it a willful desire to deceive (a lie) by appearing to tell the truth?
The story below is also instructive in that it should make one aware of the fact that the big government that is now in power is throwing BILLIONS of dollars at climate scientists and research facilities via the EPA, The National Science Foundation and a myriad of other federal agencies to propel their narrative that climate change is a serious threat to our future.
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Top scientist Patrick Brown says he deliberately OMITTED key fact in climate change piece he’s just had published in prestigious journal to ensure woke editors ran it - that 80% of wildfires are started by humans
Story by Lewis Pennock For Dailymail.Com
A climate change scientist has claimed the world’s leading academic journals reject papers which don’ ‘support certain narratives’ about the issue and instead favor ‘distorted’ research which hypes up dangers rather than solutions.
Patrick T. Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and doctor of earth and climate sciences, said editors at Nature and Science - two of the most prestigious scientific journals - select ‘climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives’.
In an article for The Free Press, Brown likened the approach to the way ‘the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause’ of wildfires, including the recent devastating fires in Hawaii. He pointed out research that said 80 percent of wildfires are ignited by humans.
Brown gave the example of a paper he recently authored titled ‘Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California’. Brown said the paper, published in Nature last week, ‘focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior’ and ignored other key factors.
Brown laid out his claims in an article titled ‘I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published’. ‘I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work,’ the article begins.
‘I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell,’ he wrote of his recently-published work.
‘This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives - even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.
“To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.’
A spokesperson for Nature said ‘all submitted manuscripts are considered independently on the basis of the quality and timeliness of their science’.
‘Our editors make decisions based solely on whether research meets our criteria for publication - original scientific research (where conclusions are sufficiently supported by the available evidence), of outstanding scientific importance, which reaches a conclusion of interest to a multidisciplinary readership,’ a statement said.
‘Intentional omission of facts and results that are relevant to the main conclusions of a paper is not considered best practice with regards to accepted research integrity principles,’ the spokesperson added.
Science was approached for comment.
Brown opened his missive with links to stories by AP, PBS NewsHour, The New York Times and Bloomberg which he said give the impression global wildfires are ‘mostly the result of climate change’.
He said that ‘climate change is an important factor’ but ‘isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus’.
Much reporting of the wildfires in Maui has said climate change contributed to the disaster by helping to create conditions that caused the fires to spark and spread quickly.
The blazes, which killed at least 115 people, are believed to have been started by a downed electricity line, but observers have said rising temperatures caused extremely dry conditions on the Hawaiian island.
Brown said the media operates like scientific journals in that the focus on climate change ‘fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it’.
Scientists whose careers depend on their work being published in major journals also ‘tailor’ their work to ‘support the mainstream narrative’, he said.
‘This leads to a second unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper,’ he added. ‘The authors should ignore - or at least downplay - practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change.’
He gave examples of factors which are ignored, including a ‘decline in deaths from weather and climate disasters over the last century’. In the case of wildfires, Brown says ‘current research indicates that these changes in forest management practices could completely negate the detrimental impacts of climate change on wildfires’.
Poor forest management has also been blamed for a record number of wildfires in Canada this year.
But ‘the more practical kind of analysis is discouraged’ because it ‘weakens the case for greenhouse gas emissions reductions’, Brown said.
Successful papers also often use ‘less intuitive metrics’ to measure the impacts of climate change because they ‘generate the most eye-popping numbers’, he said.
He went onto to claim that other papers he’s written which don’t match a certain narrative have been ‘rejected out of hand by the editors of distinguished journals, and I had to settle for less prestigious outlets’.
Brown concluded: ‘We need a culture change across academia and elite media that allows for a much broader conversation on societal resilience to climate. The media, for instance, should stop accepting these papers at face value and do some digging on what’s been left out.’
‘The editors of the prominent journals need to expand beyond a narrow focus that pushes the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. And the researchers themselves need to start standing up to editors, or find other places to publish.’
ICECAP NOTE: See a telling media story on the deadly Maui wildfires real causes here and more here.
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By Francis Menton,
We highly recommend this site for science and data based related stories on climate and energy policies in this world where “stupidity rules”.
On May 23, EPA put out its long-expected proposed Rule designed to eliminate, or nearly so, all so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions from the electricity-generation sector of the economy. The proposal came with the very long title: “New Source Performance Standards for GHG Emissions from New and Reconstructed EGUs; Emission Guidelines for GHG Emissions from Existing EGUs; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.” The full document is 672 pages long.
Various not-very-far-off deadlines are set, ranging from as early as 2030 for some changes to coal plants, to at the latest 2038 for the last changes to natural gas plants. But how exactly is this emissions elimination thing to be accomplished? Today a substantial majority of U.S. electricity (about 60%) comes from one or the other of those fuels; and it is inherent in the burning of hydrocarbons that you get CO2 as a product. In all those 672 pages, EPA has only two ideas for how to eliminate the carbon emissions from combustion power plants: carbon capture and storage (CCS), and “green” hydrogen. Either you must implement one of those two ideas to meet EPA’s standards by the deadline, or you must close your power plant. But here’s the problem: both of those ideas are, frankly, absurd.
The deadline for commenting on the proposed Rule was August 8, although comments have continued to pile in after that date. Many hundreds of them have been received. If you have nothing else to do for the next month or two, you can review the comments at this link.
I have by no means made the effort to read all the comments, but I have gone looking for some of the more significant ones. Two that I can highly recommend are this one by a group of 21 red state AGs led by West Virginia, and this one by an overlapping group of 18 red state AGs led by Ohio. Both of those comments do an excellent job of dismantling the concept that either CCS or “green” hydrogen could ever work as a significant part of our electricity generation system. Of the two, the West Virginia comment is the much longer (54 pages) and goes into far more technical detail. But the Ohio comment, at 21 pages, has its share of good zingers as well.
The Ohio and West Virginia comments label the idea of CCS at the high rate demanded by EPA (90%) as either “infeasible” or not “viable,” and include recitations of the history of failed attempts to implement this frankly useless technology. From the Ohio comment (page 4):
A study of 263 carbon-capture-and-sequestration projects undertaken between 1995 and 2018 found that the majority failed and 78% of the largest projects were cancelled or put on hold. After the study was published in May 2021, the only other coal plant with a carbon-capture-and-sequestration attachment in the world, Petra Nova, shuttered after facing 367 outages in its three years of operation.
With the closure of Petra Nova, there remains in the entire world exactly one operating commercial CCS facility at a coal power station, the SaskPower Boundary Dam Unit 3 in Saskatchewan, Canada. That one is supposed to achieve the 90% capture rate that EPA demands, but with constant operating issues it has fallen way, way short:
[T]his [SaskPower] facility is the world’s only operating commercial carbon capture facility at a coal-fired power plant. And it has never achieved its maximum capacity. It also battled significant technical issues throughout 2021- to the point that the plant idled the equipment for weeks at a time. As a result, the plant achieved less than 37% carbon capture that year despite having an official target of 90%…
The West Virginia comment provides lots more technical detail on the failures of CCS. Why can’t a CCS system just easily suck up all the CO2 out of a power plant’s emissions stream? Because the effort to suck up the emissions takes energy from the output of the plant, and the higher the percentage of carbon emissions you seek to capture, the more of the energy output of the plant you consume. (I have previously described CCS efforts as a “war against the second law of thermodynamics."). In the limiting case, you can use up all the power output of the plant on the CCS system and still not capture 100% of the CO2. From the West Virginia comment, page 24-25:
Take efficiency to start. CCS units run on power, too. An owner can get that power from the plant itself. But this approach makes the plant less efficient by increasing its “parasitic load"-and CCS more than triples combustion turbines’ normal parasitic load… This is the cause the Wyoming study analyzed that showed installing CCS technology would devastate plants’ heat rates and lower net plant efficiency by 36%.
And that percentage relates to a system that captures well less than 100% of the plant’s carbon emissions. And these are only the start of the technical issues to be faced. For example, once you have captured all this CO2, where do you put it? Do you build an entire new national network of pipelines (at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars) to transport it to some underground caverns somewhere? And then, are there environmental issues with the chemicals used to snag the CO2 out of the power plant’s emissions stream? From the West Virginia comment, page 27:
The Proposed Rule would force utilities to adopt and communities to accept all aspects of CCS technology without fully understanding the ramifications. For example, the environmental and health effects of CANSOLV-the leading amine-based and EPA-recommended CCS solvent, 88 Fed. Reg. at 33,291- appear unknown; leading CANSOLV studies over the past decade don’t discuss its impact.
And then, if you have to increase the power output of the plant by 50% or so to power the CCS facility, doesn’t that then increase the emissions of nitrous oxides and particulates by a comparable amount? From the West Virginia comment, page 27:
Nearly a decade ago, the European Union’s European Environmental Agency released a study finding that CCS would increase “direct emissions of NOx and PM” by nearly a half and a third, respectively, because of additional fuel burned, and increase “direct NH3 emissions” “significantly” because of “the assumed degradation of the amine-based solvent.”
It goes on and on from there. And then there’s the idea of “co-firing” the power plants with “green” hydrogen, produced by using wind or solar power or something else magical to electrolyze water. EPA’s proposed Rule would impose such a requirement on existing natural gas plants to take them up to 96% hydrogen by 2038. A few insights from the West Virginia comment, page 35:
Most combustion turbines on the market today cannot handle anything more than a 5-10% blend [of hydrogen]; 20% is generally accepted as the absolute technological ceiling… Even in the best scenarios, a hydrogen volume fraction of 20% is usually the most technology currently can do.
And how about the problem (and cost) of producing the amounts of hydrogen that would be required. From the West Virginia comment, page 37:
America currently produces just .5% of the clean hydrogen we need under the Proposed Rule. The industry would have to close a 99.5% supply gap in just 15 years. EPA has offered no evidence showing that this gap will close.
There is much, much more on issues like transporting and handling the hydrogen, cost of production, and so forth.
The conclusion is obvious and impossible to escape: These proposed methods to allow combustion power plants to continue to exist are not real and can never work. EPA intends to force the closure of all such electricity generation facilities. Will we have an electricity system that can still function at that point? They neither know nor care. After all, we have a planet to save here.
Somehow, in the weighing of the costs and benefits here, the bureaucrats appear to have completely lost track of the enormous benefits that reliable access to electricity has brought to the people. They will destroy that without giving the subject a second thought.
By Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Western Journal.
Which is more environmentally friendly, an energy source that uses one unit of land to produce one unit of electricity, or a source that uses 100 units of land to produce one unit of electricity? The answer should be obvious. Nevertheless, green energy advocates call for a huge expansion of wind, solar, and other renewables that use vast amounts of land to replace traditional power plants that use comparatively small amounts of land.
Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus of the University of Manitoba in Canada, extensively analyzed the power density of alternative sources used to generate electricity. He defined the power density of an electrical power source as the average flow of electricity generated per square meter of horizontal surface (land or sea area). The area measurement to estimate power density is complex. Smil included plant area, storage yards, mining sites, agricultural fields, pipelines and transportation, and other associated land and sea areas in his analysis.
Smil’s work allows us to compare the energy density of electricity sources. If we set the output of a nuclear plant to one unit of land required for one unit of electricity output, then a natural gas-powered plant requires about 0.8 units of land to produce the same one unit of output. A coal-fired plant uses about 1.4 units of land to deliver an average output of one unit of power.
But renewable sources require vastly more land. A stand-alone solar facility requires about 100 units of land to deliver the same average electricity output of a nuclear plant that uses one unit of land. A wind facility uses about 35 units of land if only the concrete wind tower pads and the service roads are counted, but over 800 units of land for the entire area spanned by a typical wind installation. Production of electricity from biomass suffers the poorest energy density, requiring over 1,500 units of land to output one unit of electricity.
As a practical example, compare the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the eastern California desert to the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant near Avila Beach, California. The Ivanpah facility produces an average of about 793 gigawatt-hours per year and covers an area of 3,500 acres. The Diablo Canyon facility generates about 16,165 gigawatt-hours per year on a surface area of 750 acres. The nuclear plant delivers more than 20 times the average output on about one-fifth of the land, or 100 times the power density of the solar facility.
To approach 100 percent renewable electricity using primarily wind and solar systems, the land requirements are gigantic. “Net-Zero America,” a 2020 study published by Princeton University, calls for wind and solar to supply 50 percent of US electricity by 2050, up from about 14 percent today. The study estimated that this expansion would require about 228,000 square miles of new land (590,000 square kilometers), not including the additional area needed for transmission lines. This is an area larger than the combined area of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. This area would be more than 100 times as large as the physical footprint of the coal and natural gas power systems that would be replaced.
The land taken for wind and solar can seriously impact the environment. Stand-alone solar systems blanket fields and deserts, blocking sunlight and radically changing the ecosystem, and driving out plants and animals. Since 2000, almost 16 million trees have been cut down in Scotland to make way for wind turbines, a total of more than 1,700 trees felled per day. This environmental devastation will increase the longer Net Zero goals are pursued.
Wind and solar are dilute energy. They require vast amounts of land to generate the electricity required by modern society. Without fears about human-caused global warming, wind and solar systems would be considered environmentally damaging. Net-zero plans for 2050, powered by wind and solar, will encounter obstacles with transmission, zoning, local opposition, and just plain space that are probably impossible to overcome.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and the author of the new book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
by Ron Barmby
Political tunnel vision on global warming has resulted in declaring increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide an existential threat. But the United Nations’ resolve to reduce carbon dioxide levels runs counter to its goals to end world hunger, promote world peace and protect global ecosystems. It fails to address the key question relating to those three goals: Which pathway creates the greatest good to the greatest multitude - reducing or increasing CO2?
The numbers since the year 2000 provide convincing evidence that increasing carbon dioxide has positive impacts and reducing carbon emissions entails dire consequences.
World Hunger
The pre-industrial (circa 1850) atmospheric CO2 concentration of 280 ppm (parts per million) compares to today’s 420 ppm, a 50% increase. Meanwhile, the global population has risen 560%, from 1.2 billion to 8 billion.
Those extra 6.8 billion people are mostly being fed, and it’s not all because of human agricultural productivity, pest control and plant genetics.
Observations of Earth’s vegetative cover since the year 2000 by NASA’s Terra satellite show a 10% increase in vegetation in the first 20 years of the century. Clearly, something other than agriculture is helping to improve overall plant growth.
In a recent study supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Dr. Charles Taylor and Dr. Wolfram Schlenker quantified how much of that extra greening resulted in food for human consumption since 2000. Using satellite imagery of U.S. cropland, they estimated that a 1 ppm increase in CO2 led to an increase of 0.4%, 0.6% and 1% in yield for corn, soybeans and wheat, respectively. They also extrapolated back to 1940 and suggested that the 500% increased yield of corn and 200% increased yield of soybeans and winter wheat are largely attributable to the 100 ppm increase in CO2 since then.
CO2 fertilization is not only greening the Earth, it’s feeding the very fertile human race.
World Peace
Though adding CO2 to the atmosphere does not promote world peace, attempts to stop CO2 emissions in the western democracies have increased the CO2 emissions, wealth and influence of totalitarian Russia and China.
Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union (EU), reports that the EU’s reliance on imported natural gas increased from 15.5% of its energy needs in 2000 to 22.5% by 2020. Russia was the main supplier of Europe’s natural gas. Holding Europe’s energy security in its pipelines not only helped finance Russia’s 2021 invasion of Ukraine, but it also limited the economic sanctions Europe could impose in retaliation.
According to the scientific online publication Our World in Data, between 2000 and 2020 the G7 nations lost 13.8% of the world share of GDP and China picked up 12%.
The West (the EU plus the UK, U.S., Canada and Japan) transferred GDP growth to China and energy security to Russia and was able to reduce CO2 emissions from 45% of the global total in 2000 to 25% in 2020. In the same period China’s CO2 emissions grew from 14% of the total to 31%, leading to an increase of 39% in total CO2 global emissions.
The unintended consequence of the West’s attempts to reduce CO2 emissions has been to shore up Chinese and Russian dictatorships-and in Russia’s case, to partly fund the invasion of a sovereign and democratic neighbor, Ukraine.
World Ecology
Much of the human footprint on Earth is where the products we consume originate: We either grow them on the planet’s surface or extract them from within its crust.
In testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce in 2021, Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, estimated that replacing each unit of hydrocarbon energy by “clean tech” energy would on average result in the extraction of five to 10 times more materials from the Earth than does hydrocarbon production.
Mills also pointed out that Chinese firms dominate the production and processing of many critical rare earth elements and that nearly all the growth in mining is expected to be abroad, increasingly in fragile, biodiverse wilderness areas.
Decarbonization will impose the heavy environmental cost of an unprecedented increase in mining.
One Last Number
Since El Nino induced a modern peak global average temperature in 1998, global warming has been essentially zero.
The numbers don’t lie. Allowing more CO2 emissions is better for ending world hunger, promoting world peace, and protecting global ecosystems.
This commentary was first published at Real Clear Energy, July 6, 2023, and can be accessed here.
Ron Barmby, a Professional Engineer with a master’s degree in geosciences, had a 40-year career in the energy industry that covered 40 countries and five continents. He is author of “Sunlight on Climate Change: A Heretic’s Guide to Global Climate Hysteria” and is a proud member of the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia.
Scientific Paper Concludes Refrigerants’ Gases Pose No Threat to Climate
CO2 Coalition, 28 June
The paper examines the warming potential of 14 halogenated gases, which are more specifically identified as hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). The gases are to be phased out as refrigerants because of their purported threat of dangerously warming the climate. The ban on these chemicals is being imposed under amendments to a 1987 international agreement known as the Montreal Protocol, which forced the abandonment of freon as a refrigerant because of concerns about that chemical’s capacity to destroy ozone in the upper atmosphere. The U.S. Senate ratified the so-called Kilgali amendment to the Montreal Protocol in 2022. Drs. Van Wijngaarden and Happer conclude that the 14 gases’ contribution to atmospheric warming amounts to only 0.002 degrees C per decade, a warming indistinguishable from zero.
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School Official Laments Cost and Performance of Electric Buses
Heather Hamilton, Washington Examiner, 29 May
One Michigan school official admitted his district’s move to using electric was less than the government has touted it to be. “Electric buses are approximately five times more expensive than regular buses, and the electrical infrastructure, which was originally estimated to be only about $50,000, give or take, for those four buses ended up being more like $200,000.
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Wind Fails Texas Again
Bill Peacock, Master Resource, 26 June
Wind’s market share is far higher in temperate months than in the hot summer months or the cold winter months when loads are heavy and generation is needed. In March, April, May, October, and November, wind’s market share is 31.7%. In the winter months of December, January, and February, wind’s market share drops to 25.7%. In the summer months of June, July, August, and September, wind’s market share plummets to 18.1%.
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Baseball Sized Hail Smashing into Panels at 150 MPH Destroys Scottsbluff Solar Farm
Kevin Killough, Cowboy State Daily, 27 June
Baseball-sized hail took out a solar farm in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, on Friday. The hail shattered most of the panels on the 5.2-megawatt solar project, sparing an odd panel like missing teeth in a white smile. “Just by looking at it, it looks destroyed to me,” [Scottsbluff city manager Kevin] Spencer said.
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London ULEZ Expansion Will Force 40% of Drivers To Give Up Their Cars in August
Felix Reeves, Express, 23 June
A new study has found that two in five Londoners will be forced to change or give up their current car under the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone coming into force in just over two months.
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EU Looks Into Blocking Out the Sun as Climate Efforts Falter
John Ainger, Bloomberg Green, 26 June
The European Union will join an international effort to assess whether large-scale interventions such as deflecting the sun’s rays or changing the Earth’s weather patterns are viable options for fighting climate change.
By Meteorologist Art Horn
“The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction.”
-Bertrand Russell 10/10/21
Published at theartofweather.net
Wednesday June 7th, 2023
There’s just too much going on not to talk about it. To quote Jack Klompus from Seinfeld “I’m sorry. I’m sitting here, the whole meeting, holding my tongue. I’ve known you a long time Morty, but I cannot hold it in any longer.”
I’m referring to the current situation of the Canadian wildfires and the resulting and persistent smoke issues down here in the United States. Under normal conditions a large very slow-moving storm rotating counterclockwise in the Canadian Maritimes would be circulating cool, dry, clean Canadian air into the New England. There is such a storm present in that location now. But with all these fires in Quebec Province the storm that is situated in the Maritimes is doing the opposite! The smoke from the fir...ta. In court on February 15th, 2022 she was convicted on four counts of mischief against property in connection with multiple arson fires in the Bonnyville area of Alberta Canada. She actually admitted to setting 32 fires at the hearing! Apparently she was quite proud of her destruction. She was sentenced to 9 months in jail but amazingly she served no jail time.
Can I prove that at least some of these current fires have been deliberately set by eco-terrorists? No, not until someone claims responsibility or is arrested but it seems plausible to me.
Why would someone want to destroy forests that they claim they are trying to save? At least part of the answer is that by starting the fires and then blaming the cause on climate change they get the news coverage they couldn’t get any other way. The news media actually does the work for them since they are obsessed with climate change causing everything! Today every natural disaster they report about is now the result of climate change.
As a side note I saw yet another of the seemingly endless stories about sea ice loss in the Arctic. This story from the thedailybeast.com reports that another computer model study forecasts that after the year 2030 there will be no sea ice in the Arctic Ocean by the end of the summer.
Of course, one has to only go back to 2007 when there were similar predictions warning that by 2022 summer sea ice would be long gone from the Arctic. Another in the long line of climate change forecasts fails. Actually, sea ice data from the Danish Meteorological Institute reveals that as of today the amount of Arctic sea ice is within 75 percent of the 1981 to 2010 average for this time of year. Where are you going to see that in the news? Nowhere!
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Note: Mark Perry on Carpe Diem here listed 18 major failures.
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By....[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
Erlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.” “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
Leonard Nimoy talked about the coming ice age in 1979 here.
Tony Heller exposes the fraudsters here.
Unlike the government, businesses must respect reality or they will go bankrupt.
The reality is that atmospheric CO2 is remarkably beneficial. Exxon knows that the byproducts of burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide and water, are more than completely benign. They are essential. All life on this planet comes from carbon dioxide and water. If we combine those two ingredients, we get soda water. But if we give them to a plant in the presence of sunlight, it will produce glucose and from that other sugars, starches, fats, proteins, and cellulose. In other words, all life.
What about warming from the Greenhouse Effect? CO2 is a greenhouse gas like water vapor. But water vapor completely dominates that effect, so much that climate alarmists quietly assume that it will produce most of the warming from rising CO2 in the atmosphere. But water vapor is self limiting, such that it does not produce catastrophic warming.
One important way that water vapor controls warming is through the formation of clouds that reflect sunlight back to space, before they can heat the ground.
The most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, John Clauser, thinks that clouds are the key to understanding our climate, not carbon dioxide. I agree with him and would add the entire hydrological cycle to the negative feedbacks that keep our climate stable.
John Clauser has joined us as a Director of the CO2 Coalition to refute the vast nonsense coming from the scientifically illiterate.
Exxon should be commended for finally standing up to the climate idiots, just like John Clauser is doing.
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Exxon Says World Hitting Mythical “Net-Zero” by 2050 is Nonsense
May 19, 2023
Finally, at least one Big Oil company is willing to go on the record countering the mass insanity of the left. The left wants humanity to kill itself in order to achieve mythical “net zero” (no extra carbon emissions) by 2050. Leftist lunatics have tried to brainwash the world that if we don’t hit net zero (which is impossible), that’s it. Lights out. The world toasts, and we burn ourselves to a cinder. There is no hope for the future. Which is complete nonsense. Exxon said as much in an official statement to shareholders in an SEC filing.
Proxy adviser Glass Lewis told Exxon (and shareholders) the company should prepare for the end of the world-as in the use of fossil fuels will be completely phased out by 2050, leaving Exxon without a business if it doesn’t change its product lines. After picking themselves up off the floor from laughing so hard, Exxon told Glass Lewis, via a response in an SEC filing (below), they are (our words) smoking something funny.
“Glass Lewis apparently believes the likelihood of the IEA NZE scenario is well beyond what the IEA itself contends: that the world is not on the NZE path and that this is a very aggressive scenario,” Exxon said. “It is highly unlikely that society would accept the degradation in global standard of living required to permanently achieve a scenario like the IEA NZE.”
In other words, ain’t no way people are ready to go back to the Stone Age and never travel beyond five miles from their homes. Ain’t no way people will give up their iPhones. Ain’t no way folks will throw on an extra sweater or two or three in the winter to keep warm. There ain’t no way to actually manufacture cars light enough to run on batteries-without fossil fuels to make the plastic! It’s bizarre. And yet, that’s what the weenies at Glass Lewis say is going to happen.
Exxon Mobil Corp. said the prospect of the world reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is “highly unlikely” due to the drop in living standards that would come with such a scenario.
The Texas oil giant made the comments in a regulatory filing that argued against proxy adviser Glass Lewis’ view that the cost of phasing out oil and gas operations would be a material financial risk. The International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Emissions scenario, which models a phaseout of most fossil fuels by 2050, has little bearing in reality, Exxon said.
“Glass Lewis apparently believes the likelihood of the IEA NZE scenario is well beyond what the IEA itself contends: that the world is not on the NZE path and that this is a very aggressive scenario,” Exxon said. “It is highly unlikely that society would accept the degradation in global standard of living required to permanently achieve a scenario like the IEA NZE.”
Climate pledges by governments would fall short of net zero by 2050 even if they were achieved, meaning there’s little chance of limiting global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, according to the IEA. Exxon has a net zero “ambition” by 2050 but is investing heavily in new projects - both fossil fuels and low carbon - that it believes will provide the flexibility to respond to multiple energy transition scenarios.
Exxon urged shareholders to reject a resolution, backed by Glass Lewis, that the company should produce a report at its annual meeting on May 31 on the cost of shutting oil and gas operations that no longer are needed.
ICECAP NOTE:
In addition to reporting the recent warm period is less than half that predicted by the greenhouse models, Happer and Lindzen showed the recent 50 year period 1957-2008 was a match to the 1895 to 1946 cooling then warming which the so-called scientists at the IPCC ignore or admit that was natural.
By Ross McKitrick is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph and senior fellow of the Fraser Institute.
An important new study on climate change came out recently. I’m not talking about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Synthesis Report with its nonsensical headline “Urgent climate action can secure a liveable future for all.” No, that’s just meaningless sloganeering proving yet again how far the IPCC has departed from its original mission of providing objective scientific assessments.
I’m referring instead to a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres by a group of scientists at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) headed by Cheng-Zhi Zou, which presents a new satellite-derived temperature record for the global troposphere (the atmospheric layer from one kilometre up to about 10 km altitude).
The troposphere climate record has been heavily debated for two reasons. First, it’s where climate models say the effect of warming due to greenhouse gases (GHGs) will be the strongest, especially in the mid-troposphere. And since that layer is not affected by urbanization or other changes to the land surface it’s a good place to observe a clean signal of the effect of GHGs.
Since the 1990s the records from both weather satellites and weather balloons have shown that climate models predict too much warming. In a 2020 paper, John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) and I examined the outputs of the 38 newest climate models and compared their global tropospheric warming rates over 1979 to 2014 against observations from satellites and weather balloons. All 38 exhibited too much warming, and in most cases the differences were statistically significant. We argued that this points to a structural error in climate models where they respond too strongly to GHGs.
But, and this is the second point of controversy, there have also been challenges to the observational record. Christy and his co-author, Roy Spencer, invented the original method of deriving temperatures from microwave radiation measurements collected by NOAA satellites in orbit since 1979. Their achievement earned them numerous accolades, but also attracted controversy because their satellite record didn’t show any warming. About 20 years ago scientists at Remote Sensing Systems in California found a small error in their algorithm that, once corrected, did yield a warming trend.
Christy and Spencer incorporated the RSS correction, but the two teams subsequently differed on other questions, such as how to correct for the positional drift of the satellites, which changes the time of day when instruments take their readings over each location. The RSS team used a climate model to develop the correction while the UAH team used an empirical method, leading to slightly different results. Another question was how to merge records when one satellite is taken out of service and replaced by another. Incorrect splicing can introduce spurious warming or cooling.
In the end the two series were similar but RSS has consistently exhibited more warming than UAH. Then a little more than a decade ago, the group at NOAA headed by Zou produced a new data product called STAR (Satellite Applications and Research). They used the same underlying microwave retrievals but produced a temperature record showing much more warming than either UAH or RSS, as well as all the weather balloon records. It came close to validating the climate models, although in my paper with Christy we included the STAR data in the satellite average and the models still ran too hot. Nonetheless it was possible to point to the coolest of the models and compare them to the STAR data and find a match, which was a lifeline for those arguing that climate models are within the uncertainty range of the data.
Until now. In their new paper Zou and his co-authors rebuilt the STAR series based on a new empirical method for removing time-of-day observation drift and a more stable method of merging satellite records. Now STAR agrees with the UAH series very closely - in fact it has a slightly smaller warming trend. The old STAR series had a mid-troposphere warming trend of 0.16 degrees Celsius per decade, but it’s now 0.09 degrees per decade, compared to 0.1 in UAH and 0.14 in RSS. For the troposphere as a whole they estimate a warming trend of 0.14 C/decade.
Zou’s team notes that their findings “have strong implications for trends in climate model simulations and other observations” because the atmosphere has warmed at half the average rate predicted by climate models over the same period. They also note that their findings are “consistent with conclusions in McKitrick and Christy (2020),” namely that climate models have a pervasive global warming bias. In other research, Christy and mathematician Richard McNider have shown that the satellite warming rate implies the climate system can only be half as sensitive to GHGs as the average model used by the IPCC for projecting future warming.
Strong implications, indeed, but you won’t learn about it from the IPCC. That group regularly puts on a charade of pretending to review the science before issuing press releases that sound like Greta’s Twitter feed. In the real world the evidence against the alarmist predictions from overheated climate models is becoming unequivocal. One day, even the IPCC might find out.
Ross McKitrick is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph and senior fellow of the Fraser Institute.
The IPCC, the media and the clueless or green evangelists like AOC and are dead wrong and our future well being requires us to expose why. For one, C02 is a minor gas and one that feeds the world. We breath out with every breath 100 times more CO2 that we breathe in. Listen to Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace here.
Next let’s look at the success rate of of the climate forecasters.
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Then the very latest global data:
Newly released weather data shows average climates worldwide have remained unchanged for about nine years.
The data published by the National Space Science and Technology Center shows that there has been zero global warming since July of 2015, eight years and nine months ago.
The finding undermines arguments by the Biden administration and others that rising temperatures, in large part the result of emission from fossil-burning fuels, have become an existential threat and that needs to be stopped.
Steve Milloy, a former EPA transition team member for administration and founder of Junkscience.com, tweeted in response to the new data: “Just in… no global warming in 8 years and 9 months...despite 500 billion tons of emissions worth 14% of total manmade CO2. Emissions-driven warming is a hoax.”
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You have a fever with jaundice, feel crappy, and are vomiting.
You go to the emergency room at the local hospital.
The ER doctor does not run any tests, but based on the symptoms his diagnosis is acute alcoholism and prescribes abstinence or you will drink yourself to death.
“What about some tests, or a second opinion?” you ask. The doctor informs you that “the administration in this hospital has two rules: firstly, the only diagnosis we give out for these symptoms is chronic alcohol abuse; and secondly, we delete any data to the contrary from your file.”
You check into rehab but the fever, jaundice, and nausea persist. Six days later you die from acute fulminant viral hepatitis (Hep B). But sober.
A reasonable person would not accept a diagnosis dictated by the hospital administration and the deletion of conflicting data. Especially if you knew acute alcoholic hepatitis and acute viral HBV hepatitis present the same symptoms and it takes blood tests to differentiate them with certainty.
And that’s why you should ignore the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report because two similar rules govern their analysis and reporting. The cure is also similar: Net Zero CO2 by 2050.
The IPCC Report Cycle
The IPCC’s 1988 mandate from the United Nations was to review, “The state of the knowledge of the science of climate and climatic change”.
In that mandate, the UN expressed “concern that human activities could change global climate patterns, threatening present and future generations...” and also includes the conjecture “...emerging evidence indicates that continued growth in ‘greenhouse’ gases could produce global warming...”
For the last 35 years, the IPCC has developed this mandate into an industry of perpetual reporting on a six-year cycle designed to instill constant fear of human-caused global warming.
The foundation of each reporting cycle, which in its whole is termed an Assessment Report (AR), is the report from Working Group I (WG I) as that is the physical sciences basis addressing the UN mandate.
It is then followed by a report from Working Group II (WG II) which assesses the impacts of climate change and then Working Group III (WG III) dictates what needs to be done to mitigate the damages caused by climate change.
Each of these reports consists of between two thousand to three thousand pages, and each is condensed into a Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). Ultimately a Synthesis Report combining all three Working Groups is issued, again with its SPM.
A single AR cycle involves the release of these four separate reports over almost two years, and then the cycle starts all over again. An annual Conference of the Parties (COP) is held to fill in the press-release gaps between reports and cycles.
Sitting on top of the reporting pyramid is the short version (36 pages) of the Summary for Policy Makers of the Synthesis Report. That was just issued for AR6. Here is why you, a reasonable person, should ignore it.
Everything else is wrong if the science is wrong in WGI.
Following the Science: Working Group I
Given the UN’s 1988 concern that human-emitted greenhouse gases will threaten future generations, one might reasonably suspect that over 35 years it has caused considerable confirmation bias in the IPCC. A finding to the contrary would eliminate the IPCC and the industry built up around it.
Many leading scientists, engineers, meteorologists, and environmentalists have taken exception to the reports from WG I.
I found the AR6 WG I report to be deceptive and an alteration of climate history, while their proposed planet-saving carbon budget did not balance and their temperature forecasts to be quite dodgy. Altogether it represents a credibility crisis at the IPCC.
However, it wasn’t until I read an analysis from Dr. Richard Lindzen (Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at MIT and Lead Author of AR3), Dr. William Happer (Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Princeton University and former White House senior advisor), Gregory Wrightstone (MSc, Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition and Expert Reviewer for AR6) that I became aware that it is much more than confirmation bias.
Two Unreasonable Rules Which Nullify IPCC Science
The all-important Summary for Policy Makers of the Synthesis Report (and also the reports for WG I, II, and III) is governed by this truly well-hidden rule (see paragraph 4.6.1) as paraphrased by the authors above:
All Summaries for Policymakers (SPMs) Are Approved Line by Line by Member Governments.
And then is followed up with also this equally obscured rule (see definition of “Acceptance” to ensure the other 8,000 pages don’t conflict with the member government-approved statements (also paraphrased):
Government SPMs Override Any Inconsistent Conclusions Scientists Write for IPCC Reports
The first rule above states that political appointees of member governments have to agree with line by line on what the all-important Summary for Policy Makers says. The second rule says the scientists have to modify their report so it does not conflict with the Summary for Policy Makers.
The politicians are not “following the science”, the scientists must follow the politicians.
The Worst-Case Scenario
A particularly extreme climate-alarmist politician in one country can influence the entire IPCC process. Canada, for example.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau owes his three electoral wins to a large degree to his climate alarmism instilling existential fear in voters. Trudeau passed his fight against climate change to his Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Mr. Steven Guilbeault.
His qualifications include being a professional environmental activist that resulted in four arrests, including climbing the CN Tower in Toronto while employed at Greenpeace. Guilbeault’s radical past has earned him the nicknames “Green Jesus” and “Uneven Steven”.
For Guilbeault “Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” It could be reasonably argued that is also normal weather, but the IPCC’s science by political consensus means Guilbeault must be accommodated.
AR6 Synthesis Report Summary for Policy Makers Paragraph A
Six years of new work and 35 years of accumulated work are condensed into the 36-page short version of the AR6 Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers politicians and the news media to digest. Paragraph A.1.2 represents the damning conclusions of WG I, the physical sciences basis, which includes:
“The likely range of total human-caused global surface temperature increase from 1850 - 1900 to 2010 - 2019 is 0.8C - 1.3C, with a best estimate of 1.07C.”
Note to reader: I have added the bolding, and it likely means a 66% or greater probability. From ice cores, we know that the Little Ice Age was the coldest period in the last 10,000 years, and 1850 was the beginning of the end of it.
We can reasonably agree that the planet is 1C warmer than 1850, but here is a short but incomplete list of causes that should be considered and evaluated:
Warming is caused by increased solar activity causing increased radiation output and decreased cloud cover on Earth, both of which increase the energy reaching the Earth’s surface. Evidence suggests that the inverse of this caused the Little Ice Age.
Warming is caused by cyclical variations in ocean oscillation events such as El Nino, which would transfer existing energy from the oceans to the atmosphere. A linkage of the above two factors; or Human emissions of carbon dioxide, which the IPCC acknowledges have a very limited global warming capacity that has already been reached.
The IPCC political appointees in charge of reviewing the SPM only allow the last point to be included (and only up to the comma) and all other evidence to the contrary is deleted from all other reports.
And that’s why reading the rest of the AR6 Synthesis Report is simply pointless. The IPCC is not a scientific institution run by scientists; it is an intergovernmental organization run by politicians.
Many thanks to Brock Pullen, MD! Ron Barmby (ronaldbarmby.ca) is a Professional Engineer with a Master’s degree, whose 40+ year career in the energy sector has taken him to over 40 countries on five continents. His book, Sunlight on Climate Change: A Heretic’s Guide to Global Climate Hysteria (Amazon, Barnes & Noble), explains in layman’s terms the science of how natural and human-caused global warming work.
Joseph D’Aleo
My dear wife Emily passed away March 5 from complications of COVID. We all in the household got COVID February 10. Much of what we had to do and are dong still is very painful, but the easiest thing was to give the Eulogy on this wonderful life-long Partner at the Funeral Mass.
EULOGY
I had God’s great gift of knowing Emily for 60 years and as my dear wife for 54 years. Her high school friend Dorothy who briefly dated my brother told Emily she thought that we would be a perfect match. She set up the phone call.
She was so easy to talk to. The 5-minute call I expected went 50 minutes. She asked me to take her to the Brooklyn Public library on a first date to do a term paper for school on psych drugs - a preview to her nursing school and career. She was beautiful… always was. I met her parents and found them intelligent, sweet. I left thinking this had real promise.
I went off to college, then she went to Bellevue Nursing school. We would talk frequently and every break and summer we were together until I finished my undergrad degree. We were married September 1969 and she returned with me to my grad school in Madison, Wisconsin,
That was start of a 7-stop journey - a little like a military family.
She was very supportive of the job moves and we saw first hand that with prayers God provided the next, even better opportunity just when we needed it. Prayer works.
She devoted 35 years to nursing. Bellevue training was like being a graduate of Harvard. When we moved to VT from NYC for my college professor role, Emily went to the local hospital and said she was looking for work, her training was at Bellevue Hospital in NY. The women stopped her and said “when can you start"… the beauty of being a nurse and Belleview grad.
She had our 2 daughters in Vermont and after, she worked the evening shift so we were so we had 24 hours coverage. Her mom and dad moved to Vermont in 1977 and lived very close by. He loved Vermont, it reminded him of his youth in Sicily.
But 3 years later God had other plans for us. In 1980 I joined John Coleman to work nights producing Good Morning America and help him plan for his dream of a cable TV Weather Channel and suddenly we were off to Atlanta to make it happen. It was a huge success. We all loved the 10 years in Atlanta.
In 1989, we came to NH to be closer to her mom and dad, who were not well. I worked for the technology and weather data partner to The Weather Channel. After her dad died, her mom came to live with us. Emily worked nights, again so she would be home when I was at work. She sadly passed before my daughter Christine married Jeff Willett. But Emily and I were able to see our girls excel in college and Christine and Jeff bring Joy into our lives with beautiful, sweet and talented Grace, Abby and Elle.
We all made lifelong friends over the years. Emily and I and the girls cherished them. Many are here, some from many miles away. Many others very close in our youth are here in spirit, as they can’t travel. Her friends could fill the church.
Starting 20 years ago, I have worked out of my home with God’s grace, I had a chance to be with my sweet Emily full-time.
Emily was a devout Catholic. I have to believe after she took her last breath a few feet away from me and she left us, an image firmly imprinted on my mind, she was on the express line through the pearly gates into heaven.
Matthew 16 and 18
“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church… I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”
I believe St. Peter welcomed her - took her inside to see Jesus, her mom, dad, family and friends. From there, she can watch and from afar maybe help guide us. I sense that a bit already.
Like most couples, we split responsibilities - she dealt with our finances.
During the first week after her death, when I could not find important papers I panicked. Somehow maybe with her guidance from above, I would suddenly calm down and find what I needed. I constantly look up and talk to her - “How am I doing babe” “Thanks for your help” “I really miss you”
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This sudden loss is very tough as less than a month ago, she was well and in good spirit and looking forward to her favorite season, the spring. Donna is arranging to have Emily interned in the spring in Lyndonville VT next to her mom, dad and grandma in a Catholic cemetery by a beautiful small ski lift called the Outing Club. My daughter Donna goes up there to clean their tombstones every few years. It will be a celebration of Emily’s life and her legacy.
John 14 gives me hope for Emily and a reunion ”My Father’s house has many rooms...and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me… that you also may be where I am.”
Save a spot for me with Emily, Lord.
We thank all of you for your prayers and show of support for us, and affection for Emily. It means so much to us.
From The DAILY SCEPTIC
Chris Morrison
Two independent groups of scientists have destroyed the always improbable claim that vertebrates across the planet have declined by 69% since 1970. The averaged claim is made by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). It is a bedrock climate and ecological scare story repeated endlessly in the mainstream media and broadcast everywhere from UN platforms to school classrooms. A group of Canadian biologists have shown that the figure is a statistical freak. They reveal that the estimate is driven by 2.4% of wildlife populations, adding, “If these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.”
The 69% scare is contained in the Living Planet Index (LPI) compiled by the WWF and the ZSL. The latest bi-annual report was released late last year to coincide with the COP15 Biodiversity Summit in Montreal, and claimed the decline was “an average fall in species population numbers between 1970 and 2018”. Commenting on its report, the ZSL said one million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction. The joint report is said to have looked at 32,000 populations of animals from over 5,000 species.
The report is highly political, arguing for a complete transformation of society. The planet is said to be in the midst of a biodiversity and climate crisis, and we have a last chance to act. “A nature-positive future needs transformative - game changing - shifts in how we produce, how we consume, how we govern, and what we finance. We hope it inspires you to be part of that change,” say the authors. Less inspiring might have been the message that 2.4% of vertebrate populations are currently doing badly - it’s nature, it happens - but the rest on average are just dandy.
This latest debunking of a cherished green scare is further bad news for publicity-seeking climate catastrophists. Introducing the LPI report, the ZSL also noted that a 0.3C warming would result in a loss of up to 90% of warm water coral, a scare that has a very ‘last decade’ look about it, given that corals on the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere have rarely been in better shape. Slowly recovering Arctic ice, including the Greenland ice shelf, plateauing global surface temperature, and more polar bears hunting more seals, have all added to the recent misery.
The essence of the debunking scientists’ argument is that trying to distill disparate population trends into a single global index distorts the full picture. Calculating the straight line average across populations is strongly influenced by outliers, or extremes. For example, the biologists put forward a hypothetical scenario in which one animal population declining by 99%, while a second population increases 50 fold, or 393 populations increase by 1%. In this scenario, the geometric average - the metric used by the WWF and the ZSL - would show a catastrophic decline of 50%.
This work was done by the Canadian biologists before the last 2022 LPI report. The dotted line above indicates overall population stability. The red line shows a 50% decline averaged across all populations, but the removal of just 2.4% of separate populations produces a positive trend. The scientists observe that such clusters of decline require different conservation measures compared to widespread falls across the planet. But such a subtle understanding of focused conservation measures is entirely missing from the unhinged view spread throughout politics and the media that the planet and climate is under mortal threat, and urgent, collectivist Net Zero measures must be immediately implemented.
Accounting for extreme clusters “fundamentally alters the interpretation of global vertebrate trend”, say the scientists. The sensitivity of global average trends to outliers “suggests that more informative indices are needed”, they add.
Last month, a group of Finnish biologists joined the scientific fray over the Index and noted that statistical calculations prevented any straightforward interpretation in the change of animal abundance. The LPI measure is biased downwards because proportions are measured, not actual abundance. In fact, the more populations vary in their rate of increase or decrease, “the more downwardly biased the LPI will be as a measure of abundance”. Even worse, the scientists go on to show, the downward past bias is baked into future calculations, since previous index values are multiplied with the current one. Overall, the Finnish scientists take on board the outlier problems identified by the Canadians, but observe the trouble with the LPI methodology “is deeper than that and cannot be resolved by removing extreme population trends from the analysis”.
The LPI garners massive publicity and it is also used as an indicator for international negotiations within the UN Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD)."We urge scientists that have used the LPI methodology to scrutinize the conclusions of their work, and those negotiating future indicators for the UN CBD to critically review the interpretation of the LPI,” they conclude.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
By William M. Briggs
If you’ve never seen the above entire episode, I urge you to do so.
Note that in Buffalo, the more things change the more, etc. Also note the hopeful ending.
Amusing to think the propaganda in this is more accurate than the putrid stuff they serve us today. Yes, it’s another indication of decline. But then it had to be more accurate.
Consider TV in 1978. No real cable, three or four main channels, some local fare. The majority got their signals over the air. Meaning that if people tuned out, the advertising dollars dried up, and shows were canceled.
Which in turn meant network shows could not be as acerbic and outrageous as they can now, and even must be. Because even if you never watch, say, CNN, part of your cable fee still goes to them. They don’t need you to watch to prosper. So their best strategy (mimicked by both sides of the uniparty) is to build a loyal audience, a strategy that rewards more peculiar and extreme programming.
That’s not the whole of it, but it’s close enough.
And then we have that everything is now connected, which intensifies extremes.
Imagine, for instance, that you were made to watch Spock tell you every day in school that the Ice Is Coming. Not just every day in school, but in every class every day, and for every year until you graduated. Imagine Ice Doom was by mandate the focus of all subjects, directly or indirectly.
Do you think you could graduate unscathed? Do you think you could remain a skeptic of the idea that we were all going to freeze to death? Would you retain your sanity?
Or would you worry? Be fretful and nervous for the future? Would you develop climate anxiety? Would you be immune to all contrary evidence, such as warm sunny afternoons?
Washington Post headline: ”In one state, every class teaches climate change - even P.E.”
There was one minute left on Suzanne Horsley’s stopwatch and the atmosphere remained thick with carbon dioxide, despite the efforts of her third graders to clear the air.
Horsley, a wellness teacher at Toll Gate Grammar School, in Pennington, N.J., had directed the kids to toss balls of yarn representing carbon dioxide molecules to their peers stationed at plastic disks representing forests. The first round of the game was set in the 1700s, and the students had cleared the patch of playing field in under four minutes. But this third round took place in the present day, after the advent of cars, factories, electricity and massive deforestation. With fewer forests to catch the balls and longer distances to throw, the gases were accumulating faster than kids could retrieve them.
Third graders.
“In 2022, we got a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Horsley. “What’s the problem with it, what is it causing?”
“Global warming,” volunteered one girl.
Girls always know the right answer at that age.
Two years ago, New Jersey became the first state in the country to adopt learning standards obligating teachers to instruct kids about climate change across grade levels and subjects. The standards, which went into effect this fall, introduce students as young as kindergartners to the subject, not just in science class but in the arts, world languages, social studies and physical education. Supporters say the instruction is necessary to prepare younger generations for a world - and labor market - increasingly reshaped by climate change.
Kindergarten to graduation. All subjects.
Historically, climate change has not been comprehensively taught in U.S. schools, largely because of the partisanship surrounding climate change and many teachers’ limited grasp of the science. That started to change in 2013, with the release of new national science standards, which instructed science teachers to introduce students to climate change and its human causes starting in middle school.
Science. Science. Science.
Its no wonder we are so addled.
Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.
Subscribe or donate to support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card click here. For Zelle, use my email: matt@wmbriggs.com, and please include yours so I know who to thank.
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Another of my hero friends, Steve Milloy:
Milloy climate tweet sets Twitter abuzz; Even Musk admits he is no believer
This tweet has had 13 million views. Even Musk commented. The Twitter censors tried to ‘add context’ but just showed what liars they are. Here’s my explanation and no-lose prediction for the CO2-warming hoax.
Here’s the tweet.
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See the UAH Lower Troposphere monthly temperatures over the same period
By Steven Koonin
A recent National Aeronautics and Space Administration report yet again raises alarm that New Yorkers are about to be inundated by rapidly rising seas. But a review of the data suggests that such warnings need to be taken with more than a few grains of sea salt.
The record of sea level measured at the southern tip of Manhattan, known as the Battery, begins in 1856. It shows that today’s waters are 19 inches higher than they were 166 years ago, rising an average of 3.5 inches every 30 years. The geologic record shows that this rise began some 20,000 years ago as the last great glaciers melted, causing the New York coastline to move inland more than 50 miles.
There is no question that sea level at the Battery will continue to rise in coming decades, if only because the land has been steadily sinking about 2 inches every 30 years because of factors including tectonic motion, rebound from the mass of the glaciers, and local subsidence. Rather, the question is whether growing human influences on the climate will cause sea level to rise more rapidly. To judge that, we can compare recent rates of rise with those in the past, when human influences were much smaller.
The nearby chart shows how much sea level rose during the 30 years prior to each year since 1920. That rise has varied between 1.5 and 6 inches. The 5-inch rise over the most recent 30 years is higher than the centurylong average but isn’t unprecedented and shows no sign of increasing.
As the Earth warms, changes in sea level at the Battery will depend in part on global changes. These include the loss of ice from mountain glaciers, Greenland and Antarctica as well as the ocean’s expansion as it warms. It’s very difficult to predict these changes - many factors influence ice loss, and the oceans absorb only 0.25% of the heat flowing through the Earth’s climate system. The 30-year rises in the latter half of the 20th century were diminished by about an inch due to the filling of reservoirs behind dams and changes in groundwater around the world.
The Battery’s sea level also depends on local changes in the sea and the sinking of the land. Most important is the natural variability of winds, currents such as the Gulf Stream, salinity and temperatures of the North Atlantic, which cause variations in sea level along the entire U.S. Northeast coast. Because of these many variables, climate models can’t account for the ups and downs so evident in the graph.
Despite this, the recent NASA report echoes a February National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report predicting more than 1 foot of rise at the Battery by 2050. Such a rise during the coming 30 years would be more than double the rise over the past 30 years and more than triple the past century’s average. Even more remarkably, the NOAA report says this rise will happen regardless of future greenhouse-gas emissions. There is no way of knowing if this prediction is correct.
So while New Yorkers should watch the waters around them, there is no need to dash to higher ground. The Battery’s sea level hasn’t done anything in recent decades that it hasn’t done over the past century. And although we’ll have to wait three decades to test the predicted 1-foot rise, measurements over the next decade should tell us how quickly we’ll need to raise the seawalls.
Mr. Koonin is a professor at New York University, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”
ICECAP NOTE:
See how the flatttening of sea level rise in recent decades relates to a flattening of the AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation)! It would suggest as the next AMO cold phase bout to begin takes hold, sea level rises will slow further not accelerate.
See the lack of any warming in the tropical oceans AND cooling in the troposphere in recent years. That would suggest NO acceleration of sea level rise but a decreased rate even on areas where land is subsiding.
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The last week as intense cold moved from west to east, every state (including Hawaii (atop Mauna Loa Observatory) saw temperatures fall below freezing and parts of 44 states reach 0F or below!
Here is the 7 day departure from average.
Snow fell in at least part of 47 states!
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SCIENTIFIC COMPETENCE - THE ABILITY TO CORRECTLY PREDICT
by Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., October 20, 2021, Update December 24, 2022
https://correctpredictions.ca/
“The ability to correctly predict is the best objective measure of scientific and technical competence.”
THE GREENS’ PREDICTIVE CLIMATE AND ENERGY RECORD IS THE WORST
[excerpt from https://correctpredictions.ca/ ]
The ability to predict is the best objective measure of scientific and technical competence.
Climate doomsters have a perfect NEGATIVE predictive track record - every very-scary climate prediction, of the ~80 they have made since 1970, has FAILED TO HAPPEN.
“Rode and Fischbeck, professor of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020.”
By the end of 2020, the climate doomsters were proved wrong in their scary climate predictions 48 times. At 50:50 odds for each prediction, that is like flipping a coin 48 times and losing every time! The probability of that being mere random stupidity is 1 in 281 trillion! It’s not just global warming scientists being stupid. But no sensible person makes a 50:50 prediction - at 60:40 the odds against being this wrong are 1 in 13 quintillion; at 70:30 the odds against being this wrong are 1 in 13 septillion.
These climate doomsters have not been telling the truth - they displayed a dishonest bias in their analyses that caused these extremely improbable falsehoods, these frauds.
The global warming alarmists have a perfect NEGATIVE predictive track record - they have been 100% wrong about every scary climate prediction - so nobody should continue to believe them.
There is a powerful logic that says no rational person or group could be this wrong for this long - they have followed a corrupt agenda - in fact, they knew from the beginning of their catastrophic global warming narrative that they were lying.
The radical greens have NO credibility, make that NEGATIVE credibility - their core competence is propaganda, the fabrication of false alarm.
The alleged global warming crisis is a decades-old scam that is past its due date - as global cooling happens and people freeze, even the most obtuse warmists will realize they have been conned. The extreme-left needed a new global-scale scam, and that new global scam is Covid-19.
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LAST WEEK we wrote
A major cold outbreak and snow blitz has begun today and will spread rapidly east with sub-zero cold and howling winds and locally heavy snows (whiteouts). Power failures are a threat. Frigid temperatures coast to coast and border to border continues through Christmas. The fast moving cold air mass will ease next week but is likely repeat this winter as La Nina gradually weakens and high latitude blocking repeats. See link to a Weatherbell story on that storm here
Before you read and trust any of the government, AMS, research center or environmental advocacy organization “state of the climate” nonsense, see one that can be trusted by Professor Ole Humlum here.
See the video by Ole Humlum
Dr. Charles Battig in American Thinker on A Winning Trifecta for Climate Science and rationality here.
Also Bjorn Lomborg’s well resourced book False Alarm (How Climate Change Panic Cost Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.
Dr John Christy, distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has been a compelling voice on the other side of the climate change debate for decades. Christy, a self-proclaimed “climate nerd”, developed an unwavering desire to understand weather and climate at the tender age of 10, and remains as devoted to understanding the climate system to this day. By using data sets built from scratch, Christy, with other scientists including NASA scientist Roy Spencer, have been testing the theories generated by climate models to see how well they hold up to reality. Their findings? On average, the latest models for the deep layer of the atmosphere are warming about twice too fast, presenting a deeply flawed and unrealistic representation of the actual climate. In this long-form interview, Christy - who receives no funding from the fossil fuel industry - provides data-substantiated clarity on a host of issues, further refuting the climate crisis narrative.
We should note a 1 degree F change since 1979 is in the noise compared to a normal 30F range in an average day, seasonal variations of 50F from coldest to warmest month, and extremes in temperatures that range from coldest to warmest ever for all states except Hawaii that exceeds 100F with 31 states over 150F (as high as 187F in Montana).
See how as CO2 has increased the number of 90F days has declined.
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Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
Government agencies, energy companies, auto and major corporations are increasing their support of decarbonization programs and policies (including taxes, mandated reduction of our use of fossil fuels, pushing not ready for prime time alternatives). This has proved to be a disaster where this unwise radical agenda has been imposed.
CO2 - NOT A POLLUTANT BUT THE GAS OF LIFE
CO2 is a beneficial trace gas (0.04% of our atmosphere). With every breath we emit out 100 times more CO2 than we breathe in so it is not harmful. The increase in CO2 has caused a significant greening of the earth, with increased crop yields feeding more people at lower cost.
Dr. Craig Idso of CO2 Science noted recently “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and it is most certainly not causing dangerous global warming. Rather, its increase in the atmosphere is invigorating the biosphere, producing a multitude of benefits for humanity and the natural world, notwithstanding the prognostications of the uninformed.”
Dr. Will Happer, Princeton Physicist talks about the great benefits of CO2 to the biosphere and to all of humanity.says we are coming out of a CO2 drought and humanity would benefit from CO2 being 2 to 3 times higher.
Dr Patrick Moore, ecologist and co-founder of Greenpeace says we are coming out of a CO2 drought and humanity would benefit from CO2 being 2 to 3 times higher.
It’s not the first time we were told we faced an existential threat due to ‘climate change’. In 1970, Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich warned that because of population growth, climate stress (then cold) and dwindling energy that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off” which was too late to stop. Even as each subsequent dire forecast failed (see how the alarmist/media record is perfect (100% wrong) in the 50 major claims made since 1950 here), the alarms continued, each pushing the date forward - 2000, 2020, and now 2030. Last summer, at Glacier National Park signs “Warning: glaciers will be gone by 2020” were quietly removed as ice and snow has increased.
The greenhouse climate models used to predict the future have all failed miserably.
Enlarged
That is because they have used failed assumptions and models tuned to manipulated (fraudulent) data. Dr. Mototaka here exposes that:"The supposed measuring of global average temperatures from 1890 has been based on thermometer readouts barely covering 5 per cent of the globe until the satellite era began 40-50 years ago. We do not know how global climate has changed in the past century, all we know is some limited regional climate changes, such as in Europe, North America and parts of Asia.”
See detailed peer reviewed studies on this here.
I have spent 50 years focusing on attribution science - starting with my Master’s thesis on what caused bomb east coast snowstorms in winter. I have spent the decades doing correlations of weather patterns and extremes with natural factors. The last few years, I worked with a team of scientific experts evaluated today today’s 12 most commonly reported claims and found them all either unfounded and explainable by natural factors - see here.
Tony Heller has a kick butt video that exposed the fraud using a unique data tool that exposed their tricks and the real story.
Heat records have declined since the 1930s, which holds 22 of the 50 state hottest ever temperature records. The 2010’s was the second quietest decade for landfalling hurricanes and major hurricanes since 1850. It was the quietest decade for tornadoes since tracking began in the 1950s. Sea level rises have slowed to 4 inches/century globally. Arctic ice has tracked with the 60-year ocean cycles and is similar to where it was in the 1920s to 1950s. NOAA could find no evidence of increased frequency of floods and droughts (last spring had the smallest % of US in drought on record).
Snow which the university scientists here predicted would disappear, actually has set new records (fall and winter) for the hemisphere and North America, and both Boston and NYC have had more snow in the 10 years ending 2018 than any other 10 year period back to the late 1800s.
Wildfires cause havoc but were far more prevalent before the forest management, fire suppression and grazing of the 1900s. They are problems now because more have left the failing cities to move out of state or to the beauty of the foothills. The power lines to service them can spark new fires when the cold air rushes through the mountain passes this time of years downing trees onto the power lines.
In the U.S., with low cost energy, low taxes and elimination of stifling regulations, we had the lowest unemployment for the nation in decades or history and for the first time in a long time significant wage increases! Here in NH, we had the lowest unemployment in the nation. The U.S. is energy independent, a long time thought unachievable goal. Our air and water is cleanest in our lifetimes well below the tough standards we put in place decades ago.
The real existential threat comes would come from radical environmentalism and their prescribed remedies. The climate scare is politically driven, all about big government and control over every aspect of our lives. AOC’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti in May admitted that the Green New Deal was not conceived as an effort to deal with climate change, but instead a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing” - nothing more than a thinly veiled socialist takeover of the U.S. economy. He was echoing what the climate change head of the UN climate chief and the UN IPCC Lead Author said - that is was our best chance to change the economic system (to centralized control) and redistribute wealth (socialism).
The economy in every country that has moved down an extreme green path have seen skyrocketing energy costs - some 3 times our levels.
Renewables are unreliable as the wind doesn’t always blow nor the sun shine. And don’t believe the claims millions of green jobs would result. In Spain, every green job created cost Spain $774,000 in subsidies and resulted in a loss of 2.2 real jobs. Only 1 in 10 green jobs were permanent. Industry left and in Spain unemployment rose to 27.5%.
Many households in the countries that have gone green are said to be in “energy poverty” (25% UK, 15% Germany). The elderly are said in winter to be forced to “choose between heating and eating”. Extreme cold already kills 20 times more than heat according to a study of 74 million deaths in 13 countries.
Politicians in the northeast states are bragging that they stopped the natural gas pipeline, shut down nuclear and coal plants and blocked the northern Pass which would have delivered low cost hydropower from Canada. In Concord, they are now scurrying to try and explain why electricity prices are 50 to 60% higher than the national average here and are speculating they have not moved fast enough with wind and solar. Several states have even established zero carbon emissions. This will lead to soaring energy prices and life-threatening blackouts. For a family of 4 in a modest house with 3 cars, the energy costs could increase well over $10,000/year
(based on a sample of households and their energy costs multiplied by 3 as has occurred in countries with a onerous green agenda). And by the way like in Europe where this plan was enacted or planned, many will lose their jobs. They are being told what (if) they can drive and what they can eat. Prosperity always delivers a better life AND environment than poverty.
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REALITY CHECKS LARGELY GETTING NO MEDIA ATTENTION
There are a few recent important reports that show what the impact of these plans are likely to be. The radical environmentalists and globalists believe that people are stupid and can be counted on to believe what government leaders, progressive think tanks and the well paid scientific cabal say. There are a few recent reports that show what the real impact of some of these plans now on the drawing board are likely to be and they are very scary.
U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE’S GLOBAL ENERGY INSTITUTE’S ENERGY ACCOUNTABILITY SERIES 2020
Candidates for elected office have pledged to ban the very technology that has enabled the boom (and the never thought possible energy independence) - fracking. This raises an important question: what would happen to American jobs and the economy if fracturing was banned? In this report, the Chamber’s Global Energy Institute has undertaken the modeling and analysis to answer that question.
Simply put, a ban on fracking in the United States would be catastrophic for our economy.
Their analysis suggest after a ban on fracking, oil leases were cancelled and pipeline projects stopped, by 2025 it would eliminate 19 million jobs and reduce U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by $7.1 trillion. Job losses in major energy producing states would be immediate and severe; in Texas alone, more than three million jobs would be lost. Tax revenue at the local, state, and federal levels would decline by nearly a combined $1.9 trillion, as the ban cuts off a critical source of funding for schools, first responders, infrastructure, and other critical public services.
Energy prices would also skyrocket under a fracking ban and pipeline projects stopped and refining reduced, energy prices would skyrocket. We already saw a doubling of gasoline, household electricity and fuel for heating. With the cold season just starting, the sky is the limit. The administration will blame the energy companies not their policies.