The Carbon Sense Coalition has awarded its Inaugural Golden Fleece Award to Kevin Rudd and coal industry leaders for “flagrant fleecing of community savings in futile ‘research’ on Carbon Capture & Sequestration, a costly and complex process designed to capture and bury carbon dioxide gas produced by burning carbon fuels such as coal, oil and gas”.
It is obviously possible, in an engineering sense, to collect, separate, compress, pump and pipe gases, so new “research” is largely a waste of money. Engineers know how to do these things, and their likely costs. But only foolish green zealots would think of spending billions to bury a harmless, invisible, life-supporting gas in hopes of cooling the climate some time in the century ahead.
About 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced for every tonne of coal burnt in a power station. To capture, compress and bury it could take at least 30% of the electricity produced, greatly increasing the cost of the limited amount of electricity left for sale, more coal used, increased electricity costs, for ZERO measurable benefits.
We have come to expect stupidity from politicians, but coal industry leaders who agreed to waste money on this should be sued by shareholders for negligence. Maybe they were just drooling at all the extra coal they would sell in order to produce the same electricity.
Kevin Rudd wins this award for “a Flagrant Fleece of $400 million taken from tax payers to fund the fatuous Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.” There is little to show for the millions already spent except a lot of receipts for high class salaries, consultants, travel, entertainment and “operational expenses”.
Pumping gases underground is sensible if it brings real benefits such as using waste gases to drive oil recovery from declining oil fields
Normally, however, CCS will just produce more expensive electricity
This result is not needed as politicians have already invented dozens of ways of doing just that.
The increases in winter snows have been ignored but the focus shifted to ‘spring snow declines’ in the warmist reports. Well, this spring is running well above normal, just like the winter.
Snowfall data from NOAA Rutger’s Snow Lab for April is in. It ranked 9th greatest, high enough to make the cold season (November to April) average the HIGHEST in the record (back to 1966).
“Defiant as ever, the state that gave rise to Sarah Palin is bucking the mainstream yet again,” says this article in the Alaska Dispatch.
“While global temperatures surge hotter and the ice-cap crumbles, the nation’s icebox is getting even icier.”
“That may not be news to Alaskans coping with the coldest winter in two decades or to the mariners locked out of the Bering Sea this spring by record ice growth”, says author Alex DeMarban.
In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
“That’s a “large value for a decade,” the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks said in “The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska.”
The cooling is widespread - holding true for 19 of the 20 National Weather Service stations sprinkled from one corner of Alaska to the other, the paper notes. It’s most significant in Western Alaska, where King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula saw temperatures drop most sharply, a significant 4.5 degrees for the decade, the report says.
“Most noticeable was that for the first time last year, the Bering Sea ice shelf extended south nearly to the edge of the Alaska Peninsula,” said Don Hatten, the National Weather Service forecaster in King Salmon.
“Researchers blame the Decadal Oscillation, an ocean phenomenon that brought chillier surface water temperatures toward Alaska.”
German meteorologists say that the start of 2013 is the coldest in 208 years and now German media has quoted Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov from the St. Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, who says it is proof that we are heading for a “Mini Ice Age.”
Talking to German media, the scientist said that based on his sunspot studies, we are now on an “unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop.”
Building on observations made by English astronomer Walter Maunder, Dr Abdussamatov said he had found that the Earth cools and warms in a 200-year cycles.
The last big freeze, known as the Little Ice Age, took place between 1650 and 1850 which he said coincided with Maunder’s findings that there had been no sunspots between 1645 and 1715.
“The last global decrease of temperature (the coldest phase of the Little Ice Age) was observed not only in Europe, North America and Greenland, but also in any other part of the world during the Maunder minimum of sunspot activity and of the total solar irradiance in 1645 to 1715 years,” says Abdussamatov.
People forced to leave settlements that had been inhabited for several centuries
“All channels in the Netherlands were frozen, glaciers were on the advance in Greenland and people were forced to leave their settlements, inhabited for several centuries,” Abdussamatov continues.
Humanity has always prospered during warm periods and suffered during the cold ones
“The Thames river in London and Seine in Paris were frozen over every year. Humanity has always been prospering during the warm periods and suffering during the cold ones. The climate has never been and will never be stable.”
Heavy snow and cold driving UK into triple-dip recession
Abdussamatov’s warning that cold weather would hit prosperity follows news that Britain is heading for an unprecedented triple-dip recession as economists warned that the combination of heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures might be a crucial factor in whether the economy expanded in the first three months of 2013.
Now the Russian scientist, who first made his prediction in 2005, says the new mini Ice Age will begin next year and will last for 200 years.
The Met Office has warned that temperatures will remain below average until about 20 April, not just in the UK, but in the rest of the world.
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And as Joe Bastardi of weatherbell.com reported on Cavuto today and in a post on WB:
SECOND COLDEST START TO SPRING IN US HISTORY
The only year when the spring started colder was 1975.
Also NoTricksZone reports the spring snows also were seen in Spain and allegedly in Saudi Arabia. Don’t suppose Andrew Freeman at Climate Central has written on this.
Suzanne Goldenberg displayed the establishment media’s inexcusable ignorance and/or willful distortion of the global warming debate in a Thursday ‘news’ article in the prominent U.K. newspaper The Guardian.
Writing about an effort by the Obama administration to politicize the global warming debate and direct public ridicule at Republicans who are skeptical of alarmist global warming claims, Goldenberg describes that effort as one that will “shame members of Congress who deny the science behind climate change.”
Expressing skepticism about alarmist global warming claims and alarmist predictions by one segment of the scientific population whose prior alarmist claims and alarmist predictions have routinely proven to be false is not “denying the science behind climate change.” Subjecting theories, predictions, and scientific claims to critical scrutiny is the lifeblood of science. Attempting to vilify, stifle, and shut down critical scientific analysis of scientific theories, predictions, and claims is the very definition of anti-science.
Goldenberg’s distortion and bias merely grow worse as the article continues. Describing an Obama administration video that attacks Republicans on the topic of global warming, Goldenberg writes that the video features Republicans “who are notorious for denying the existence of climate change, or positing bizarre notions about its causes.”
A key point made by global warming ‘skeptics’ is the Earth’s climate is constantly changing. The nature and extent of current climate change must be viewed within the context of the nature and extent of climate change that has occurred for billions of years. To the extent any faction in the global warming debate “denies the existence of climate change,” it is the alarmists who contend that any climate change that may be occurring now must be unprecedented and alarming. It is these alarmists not skeptics who deny climate change. Both factions agree the Earth’s climate is currently changing, but alarmists deny the longstanding and ongoing existence of past, present, and future climate change.
Regarding Goldenberg’s comment about Republicans “positing bizarre notions about its causes,” she does not identify any examples. How convenient for Goldenberg that she does not feel an obligation to factually justify derogatory opinions that she inserts in her ‘news’ columns.
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Every one of the claims the president (and clueless members of the administration and congress like Markey, Waxman, Boxer) made in the SOTU address were wrong. See John Christy’s testimony to the senate. See this fact checking analysis PDF.
Physicist Clive Best has analyzed the latest NASA satellite and radiosonde data to find that global water vapor has declined despite the consensus belief among climate scientists that it would rise in response to man-made carbon dioxide. Dire predictions of global warming all rely on positive feedback from water vapor. The argument goes that as surface temperatures rise so more water will evaporate from the oceans thereby amplifying temperatures because H2O itself is a strong greenhouse gas. The fact that water vapor has instead declined indicates water vapor feedback is negative, overwhelming alleged warming from CO2, and accounting for the stall in global temperatures over the past 16+ years. As Dr. Best notes, “All climate models (that I am aware of) predict exactly the opposite. Something is clearly amiss with theory. Is it not now time for “consensus” scientists to have a rethink?”
Reblogged from Clive Best by Clive Best [emphasis added]:
Dire predictions of global warming all rely on positive feedback from water vapor. The argument goes that as surface temperatures rise so more water will evaporate from the oceans thereby amplifying temperatures because H2O itself is a strong greenhouse gas. Climate models all assume net amplification factors of between 1.5 and 6. Has the water content of the atmosphere actually been increasing as predicted?
NASA have just released their latest NVAP-M survey of global water content derived from satellite data and radio-sondes over the period from 1988 to 2009. This new data is explicitly intended for climate studies . So lets take a look at the comparison between actual NVAP-M atmospheric H2O levels and those of CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa. I have extracted all the daily measurement NVAP-M data and then calculated the global average. Figure 1 shows the running 30 day average of all the daily data recorde between 1988 and 2009 inclusive. The 365 day (yearly) running average is also shown. Plotted on the right hand scale are the Mauna Loa CO2 concentration data in red over the same period.
Fig1: Total precipitative H2O (running 30 day average) compared to Mauna Loa CO2 data in red. The central black curve is a running 365 day average.
There is indeed some correlation in the data from 1988 until 1998, but thereafter the two trends diverge dramatically. Total atmospheric water content actually falls despite a relentless slow rise in CO2. This fall in atmospheric H2O also coincides with the observed stalling of global temperatures for the last 16 years. All climate models (that I am aware of} predict exactly the opposite. Something is clearly amiss with theory. Is it not now time for “consensus” scientists to have a rethink?
The ongoing battle over Global Warming with Western Washington University geology professors has been fascinating for what it reveals about second tier supporters of the apocalypse who have backgrounds in science but not in climate science. These are not the knowledgeable first string players on the ‘Hockey Team,’ working together to manipulate climate data and keep opponents from challenging them in the scientific journals, as Climategate revealed. There are no Michael Manns, no Phil Jones, no Gavin Schmidts, and no James Hansens here. These are the Inspector Clouseaus of the climate clique, the suave but hopeless practitioners of bumbling politicized science.
What distinguishes them from the Great Global Warming Guru James Hansen? The most obvious thing about Hansen is that he can discuss a wide range of topics related to Global Warming and display considerable scientific insight. He does not resort to popular political tactics based on consensus, authority, or belief.
For instance, he and I agree about the lack of global warming for more than a decade, about Milankovitch cycles, nuclear power, and radiation safety. He even uses a temperature reconstruction of this Holocene interglacial period similar to what I prefer. It shows the gradual average temperature decline over the last few thousand years as we sink toward the next ice age. We also agree that ethanol based motor fuel is a carbon reduction scam that needs to be abandoned. I chuckled with him about the difficulties he must face coming from Iowa where government-subsidized corn ethanol is very popular among those making money from it.
Had we gotten into a detailed discussion of carbon dioxide, we would have disagreed substantially. But that would have involved questions of ‘climate sensitivity’ where he is completely aware of the need to invoke an amplification from water vapor, because CO2 alone lacks sufficient horsepower. Perhaps it was the wine or the fact that we are both astrophysicists that kept things constructive. Clearly, neither of us wanted to fall into the black hole of scientific nonsense, even though our disagreements about a climate catastrophe are profound.
The Professor Clouseaus from WWU are a world apart. Gone is the congenial atmosphere and discussion among colleagues where the objective is to find common ground before addressing difficult questions. These professors are going for a knockout blow against ‘deniers’ whom they equate with cranks. Emeritus Professor of Geology Don Easterbrook was their lone crank, until I came along. Then there were two! When I pointed out that many well-known physicists have views similar to mine, they supposed that physicists do not understand the complexities of climate, as they do. “FINE,” I said, “Show me!” “Let’s have a seminar at WWU.” That precipitated panic and retreat with a helpful twist. One professor admitted to an insufficient knowledge of climate science to argue with me.
But just as one blunder after another never discouraged Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther, Professor Clouseau (played in this case by Dave Hirsch) was sure that ‘consensus’ is the way we properly do things in science. Oh, really?
The geological establishment has been famous for clinging to the majority opinion even when it is no longer scientifically viable and consequently being wrong time after time. One prominent example involves J. Harlen Bretz, once a high school biology teacher from Seattle, who proposed that the unusual geology of Eastern Washington was caused by catastrophic floods from an ice age lake in Montana and not by gradual erosion over millions of years. He spectacularly prevailed over the ‘consensus’ with convincing logic and evidence. Similarly, the concept of ‘continental drift’ overcame stiff establishment resistance to become the present paradigm.
In 1905 a little Jewish man who was but a clerk in a patent office challenged the perception that Classical Physics was ‘settled.’ He recognized that the two hundred year old theory of Newtonian Mechanics had to be significantly modified to keep Maxwell’s equations unchanged in a moving frame. Although popular opinion quickly embraced Albert Einstein, he was content to wait decades for the necessary physical evidence to back up his new concepts of space, time, and gravity. To no surprise, Einstein understood how science works.
The Professor Clouseaus at WWU fall flat with their attempts to short circuit the scientific method using ‘consensus.’ If they want to legitimately participate in climate discussions, they should learn something about this topic and discuss it with their peers, including physicists. Although many scientists seek assistance in understanding complex topics by consulting the most informed among us (like Don Easterbrook), the bottom line still comes down to the best ‘logic and evidence.’ All else is a sideshow.
Gordon J. Fulks has no conflicts of interest on Global Warming, lives near Portland, Oregon, and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago, Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.
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