By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Introducing David R. Legates, recipient of the 2021 Fredrick Seitz Memorial Award.
Physical Science develops with the constant conflict between ideas and evidence. What ideas best fit the physical evidence? When the physical evidence changes the ideas must change accordingly. Otherwise, the science becomes stagnant, dogmatic. That is what is happening to the science claimed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its followers, including many once noted US science institutions.
In 1988, the UN established the IPCC to (1) assess the scientific information related to changes in climate from emissions of greenhouse gases and 2) formulate realistic responses. The IPCC issued its first report in 1990.
Since then, a great deal has changed including:
1) human conditions have greatly improved thanks to the use of fossil fuels.
2) the physical evidence of what is happening in the atmosphere with increasing CO2 has greatly improved
3) the attitudes of Western governments to changing science have worsened
Over the last 30 years, one of the most remarkable changes is the tremendous reduction in people living in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is defined as person having a local purchasing power of $1.90 a day. It is estimated in local currency and adjusted to inflation and similar issues. The estimates used here come from Our World In Data and were updated in 2019
As you see, 30 years ago 1.9 billion people 36% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, mostly in Asia. Extreme poverty is life on the edge of death. In 2018, 650 million lived on the edge, about 9% of the world’s population. The great reduction in those living in extreme poverty is despite an increase in population of about 43%.
From 1990 through 2018 the world’s CO2 emissions increased by 60%. China’s CO2 emissions grew by 315%, more than three times. Today, Asia emits more CO2 than all other continents combined.
A second remarkable change is Space Age Technology which gives us the ability to observe and measure what is occurring in the atmosphere, where the greenhouse effect occurs. This evidence contradicts that early scientific speculation. Despite a 60% increase the influence of CO2 on global temperatures is modest, and not dangerous.
A third remarkable change is the obstinance of Western Governments and many western science institutions in ignoring the changing evidence. Contrary to the scientific method they are refusing to adjust their views, which they still call scientific, to the great expansion in physical evidence about the atmosphere and the effects of carbon dioxide. With mounting physical evidence, what began as a scientific speculation has drifted into world of science fiction and political myth.
Washington DC is a hotbed for science myths and attacking all who dare question them. Our honoree had already experienced what happens to physicists who challenge the accepted myths with physical evidence. In his experience in estimating precipitation, he always advocated those measurements must be checked and double checked, and when scientific concepts do not meet the evidence from experiments and observations, the concepts must be change. This winter, when given an opportunity he bravely stood up, and with the support of a few, declared certain myths popular in Washington are not science, and explained why.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have the privilege to present to you the honoree of the 2021 Fredrick Seitz Memorial Award, Dr. David Russell Legates
If you are thinking of going to Europe this winter, you might want to pack your long undies. A sweater or two as well.
Europe is facing its largest energy crisis in decades. Some countries will simply have no gas for heating and electricity production. Others won’t be able to pay for the gas which is available because prices are so high - five times what they were. Much of this is because Russia has severely curtailed the flow of gas into Europe, following on a wind drought.
Things are especially bad in Britain, which has been hit with a trifecta of woes. It started with a huge wind drought in the North Sea, normally one of the windiest places on earth. For the best part of six weeks, there simply wasn’t enough wind, and Britain is heavily invested in wind. Also, it has never installed much gas storage, which is one way of hedging against interruption.
Britain took to decarbonization with passion, confident of its great wind resource in the North Sea, where the wind is measured in degrees of gale force by the Met Office. The notoriously rough sea off Scotland hasn’t been getting its usual blow. Most European countries are 10-percent dependent on wind, but Britain relies on it for 20 percent of its power.
One result has been to propel gas prices into the stratosphere; consequently, the price of electricity has soared. Of 70 British electricity retailers, 30 have failed and others are expected to shut up shop as well. These arent generators but buyers and sellers of power, under a system that had been encouraged by the government when it broke up the state-owned Central Electricity Board during the Thatcher administration.
Britain, which opened the world’s first nuclear power station at Calder Hall in 1956, has been indecisive about new nuclear plants. Those now under construction are being built by Areva, a French company, which is partnering with the Chinese. This has raised questions about Chinese plans for a larger future role in British nuclear at a time when relations have soured with Beijing over Hong Kong and Chinese criticism of Britain’s right to send warships to the South China Sea, which it did in September.
One way or another, the input of electricity from nuclear in Britain has fallen from 26 percent at its peak to 20 percent today.
The biggest contribution to Britain’s problems, and to those of continental Europe, come from Russia limiting the amount of gas flowing into Europe. The supply is down 30 percent this year, and Russia looks set to starve Europe further if this is a cold winter as forecast.
Russia is in open dispute with Ukraine, which depends on Russia’s giant gas company, Gazprom, to supply gas for the Ukraine distribution system to other parts of Europe. At the heart of the Russian gas squeeze is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which has been completed but isn’t operating yet. It takes gas directly - 750 miles - to Germany under the Baltic Sea and parallels an older line. Its effect will be to cripple Ukraine as a distributor.
The United States opposed the pipeline, but President Joe Biden reversed that in May. Ukraine feels betrayed, and much of Europe is uneasy.
Going forward, Europe will be more cautious of Russian supplies and less confident that the wind will always blow. Its Russian gas shortage has put pressure on international liquified natural gas markets, and counties are hurting from China to Brazil.
Britain has a separate crisis when it comes to gasoline, called petrol in the United Kingdom: There is an acute shortage of tanker drivers to get the fuel, which is plentiful, from Britain’s refineries to the pumps. British service stations are out of fuel or facing long lines of unhappy motorists.
This problem goes back to Brexit. Driving tankers is a hard, poorly paid job - as is much road haulage - and Britons have stopped doing it. The average age of British drivers is 56 and many are retiring.
The slack was taken up by eastern Europeans when Britain was part of the European Union. But after Brexit, these drivers were sent home as they no longer had the right to work in Britain.
So, the electricity and gas shortages are compounded by a gasoline shortage, which is quite a separate issue but adds to Britain’s woes as a winter of discontent looms.
About the Author
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He wrote this for InsideSources.com
See the states that have gone down the carbon taxes or green alternatives fastest.
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Britain’s fragile electricity system is a national embarrassment and a warning to the world
London, 7 September
Yesterday, National Grid, the Electricity System Operator, was forced to paid over 20m pounds to “balance” the system and avoid blackouts, ten times more than normal.
The entire UK wind fleet was in effect completely absent for much of the day, only rising above a few percent of its theoretical output late in the day when the crisis was over.
As a result, conventional gas-and coal-fired generators had to be fired up. The UK’s creaking grid was therefore effectively being propped up by fossil fuels.
The cost of these actions was very high, with some units being paid as much as 4,000 pounds per megawatt hour to switch on, an exceptional price by any standard.
The balancing cost of avoiding blackouts has been increasing rapidly and is expected to hit 1-2 billion pounds this year, burdening consumers with ever more expensive electricity bills.
For a country claiming to be “Powering Past Coal” this is a disgrace. Worse still, in the run up to COP26 it gives the lie to any UK government claim to leadership in the delivery of Net Zero and leaves the Prime Minister no plausible platform from which to urge other countries to decarbonize.
None of this should come as a surprise. Power systems engineers and other analysts have known for decades that wind and solar power would make the UK electricity grid increasingly fragile and extremely costly. However, their warnings were ignored, and the government and the British public are now reaping the whirlwind.
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South Pole has the coldest winter on record (since records began in 1957).
Between April and September, a research station sitting on a high plateau in Antarctica, registered an average temperature of minus 78 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 61 degrees Celsius). That’s the coldest temperature recorded since record keeping began in 1957, and about 4.5 F (2.5 C) lower than the most recent 30-year average, according to The Washington Post.
The previous record for the coldest winter was minus 77 F (minus 60.6 C) in 1976, Stefano Di Battista, a journalist wrote on Twitter. The Post learned of this record through Battista, but then confirmed the information with Richard Cullather, a research scientist at NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office.
The frigid winter is likely caused by a strong polar vortex in the stratosphere, the second layer of the planet’s atmosphere from Earth’s surface, according to the Post. “Basically, the winds in the polar stratosphere have been stronger than normal, which is associated with shifting the jet stream toward the pole,” Amy Butler, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA, told the Post. “This keeps the cold air locked up over much of Antarctica.”
What’s more, a strong polar vortex also leads to more ozone depletion in the stratosphere, which strengthens the polar vortex even more, according to the Post. Ozone is a gas made up of three oxygen molecules that is found high in the atmosphere. Ozone protects Earth’s surface from harmful ultraviolet rays and depleting it can expand the ozone hole over Antarctica.
While Antarctica logged the coldest known average winter temperature, satellites have detected individual temperatures that are far lower; as low as minus 144 F (minus 98 C), according to the Post.
Thanks to the frigid temperatures, sea ice levels around Antarctica were at their fifth highest extent on record in August, the Post reported. But the ice melted rapidly over the next several weeks, and by the end of September sea ice had thinned to some of the lowest levels seen at that time of year. Scientists told the Post that the climate in Antarctica is prone to rapid change and that a frigid winter doesn’t mitigate the seriousness of climate change.
Russia Steps In to Fill Demand as Europe Pumps Less Gas
A giant Dutch natural-gas field once pumped enough fuel to cover the current needs of Germany, Europe’s largest economy. Next year, the field is shutting over environmental concerns.
Natural-gas supply shortfalls have led to record prices for the fuel and electricity, stoking fears of a shortage and spotlighting European efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. The conflict is one economies worldwide face as they try to adopt cleaner energy sources.
The European Union taxes carbon emissions to discourage use of fossil fuels and has promoted renewable sources of energy to replace them. Some countries have also targeted production. Denmark has committed to stop pumping oil and gas by 2050. The Netherlands is shutting its vast field, near the town of Groningen, amid public pressure over earthquakes attributed to it. Dutch production cutbacks have left a hole in European output just as demand returns from lockdown-induced lows.
We recently published a new climate change report in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA). The nearly two dozen co-authors of our paper are experts in solar physics and climate science from 14 countries. We were looking at the role of the Sun in climate change. We found that, depending on which scientific datasets you choose, you could explain the global warming since the 19th century as being anything from mostly natural to mostly human-caused. The huge uncertainty over such a key question is a major concern.
A few days after our paper was posted online, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published their 6th Assessment Report (AR6). The IPCC AR6 concluded that it was “unequivocal” that recent global warming was almost entirely human-caused.
The journalist Alex Newman was struck by the contrast between the two different reports. He interviewed us, representatives for the IPCC, and several other scientists for an article in The Epoch Times.
People began sharing Newman’s article on social media. One of Facebook’s “independent fact-checkers,” Climate Feedback, quickly stepped in. This “fact-checker” website, financially supported by Facebook, TikTok, Google News Initiative, and others, declared the article to be “incorrect” and “misleading.” Facebook then began censoring any posts sharing the link.
When we discovered this, we carried out our own “fact-check fact-check.” Using the “fact-checking” framework developed by Climate Feedback, we found their farcical “fact-check” was guilty of 11 of the 14 classes of misinformation the website warns against, while Newman’s article made none of them.
We wrote an open letter to this supposed “fact-checker” website, asking them to correct their egregious “fact-check.” This can be read at Ceres-Science.com.
However, the almost comical nature of this supposed “fact-check” has prompted us to ask why science reporting is being subjected to “fact-checking” in the first place.
The two assessments on climate change came to different conclusions because they had different goals and used different approaches.
The IPCC was set up by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to provide “scientific information that [governments] can use to develop climate policies.” We can see what “climate policies” the UNEP have been interested in from a June 30, 1989, AP interview:
“[Director of the New York office of the UNEP, Noel Brown] says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. ...He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.”
The UNEP had already decided, even before the first IPCC report in 1990, that humans were to blame for climate change through their greenhouse gas emissions.
In contrast, our review was written by scientists for scientists. Our approach was to review the areas of scientific disagreement as well as agreement. We tried to describe the full range of scientific opinions - even if they might be politically inconvenient. This is different from the IPCC’s approach of enforcing a “scientific consensus” whenever there is a scientific disagreement.
Both approaches have their pros and cons. Politics works best when everybody agrees with each other. Science works best when scientists are allowed to disagree openly.
Interestingly, the recent obsession with “fact-checking” scientific reporting seems to have begun with climate change. In the early 2000s, some people insisted the IPCC reports offered the definitive “scientific consensus” on climate change. They claimed journalists who applied “balanced reporting” to climate change were creating a “false balance” by implying that the supporters and critics of the IPCC reports were evenly split. As a result, now, many journalists promote this “scientific consensus” narrative by not reporting any findings that disagree with it.
Supporters of this approach call it “reliable reporting,” which sounds impressive. But a better description is “narrative-driven journalism.” Journalists decide on the narrative they believe is “reliable” and then suppress any opposing views.
This “reliable reporting” approach puts a very heavy burden on journalists. They effectively are asked to act as the arbiter of scientific disagreements.
More recently, social media platforms have created a similar burden in their foolhardy quest to quash the sharing of “Fake news.”
“Fact-checkers” claim to provide the solution. But a weaponized “Fact-check” is nothing more than a “narrative-check.”
Science thrives when scientists are allowed to investigate areas of scientific disagreement. So, when journalists and social media platforms use “fact-checkers” to suppress genuine scientific disagreements, they are effectively shutting down scientific inquiry.
The “climate emergency” appears to have died, far out on the scientific frontier. Word of this death has yet to reach the mainstream.
Professors William van Wungaarden (Canada) and William Happer (USA) have published some extremely important research on the radiation saturation of the major greenhouse gases. Their first report is titled simply “Relative Potency of Greenhouse Molecules”. It makes use of a major breakthrough in radiation physics.
Until recently the estimates of greenhouse potency were based on approximation bands of absorbed radiation wavelengths. Now the authors have done line by line spectral analysis, looking at over 300,000 individual wavelengths within these bands.
It turns out that saturation occurs much sooner than previously thought. In particular the primary greenhouse gases, CO2 and H2O, turn out to be “extremely saturated” at present atmospheric concentrations.
These results strongly suggest that the dangerous multi-degree warming assumed by the climate emergency simply cannot occur. Is CO2 significantly impotent? This should now be a major research question.
The paper is here. Their second paper - Dependence .of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases - is here.
The second paper extends the research to include methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. All three have important climate policy implications, including agricultural policy. Methane in particular has become the target of a climate policy witch hunt. Professor Happer has an illuminating video on this topic. See my introduction and the video here.
I first wrote about this ground breaking research a year ago, see my article. Since then I have done a bit of research on their research. There is almost nothing on greenhouse saturation in the scientific literature and that needs to change.
Aside: there is a huge literature on “CO2 saturation” but it is about the saturation of porous rock during deep well injection. This is a big problem with so-called carbon sequestration, where CO2 is removed from our emissions and (hopefully) stored underground.
There is also some confusion. As explained below, saturation is not an absolute, rather it comes in degrees. There is no such thing as complete saturation, so when a scientist says CO2 is saturated they mean a lot saturated, not completely saturated. This is important because I have found several articles where the author says skeptics claim CO2 is saturated and then points out that it is not completely saturated. This is just a straw man argument because skeptics who know the science never claim complete saturation.
CO2 Saturation explained: The surface emits a limited number of photons (or units of radiation) of the sort that atmospheric CO2 absorbs. In effect the molecules are competing for the available photons. So as the number of CO2 molecules increases the absorption per molecule goes down. More and more molecules are looking to absorb the same number of radiation photons.
The greenhouse warming is based on the absorption not on the number of molecules. Thus the warming potency of the CO2 does not rise nearly as fast as the number of molecules. This diminishing effect is called “saturation”.
The warming first drops off rapidly as the number of molecules increases. This means most of the warming occurs when the number of molecules is relatively small, far fewer than we have today. After that the warming changes very little as more and more molecules are added. That is where we are today, with a little over 400 ppm of CO2 molecules. The CO2 is extremely saturated. Even doubling the number of molecules to over 800 ppm would have relatively little warming effect.
That H2O is also extremely saturated is very important. Much of the amplified warming built into the emergency computer predictions is based on a strong positive water vapor feedback from the relatively modest CO2 induced warming. But as water vapor is already extremely saturated this strong feedback cannot occur, even if the number of water vapor molecules increases a lot.
More broadly, all of the scary IPCC warming projections are entirely based on these five gases creating a lot of future warming. None of the climate models include the high degree of saturation found by Professors van Wujngaarden and Happer. And according to these researchers, their pioneering results are confirmed by satellite measurements of radiation.
In short it looks like the IPCC climate modeling is simply obsolete. The models need to be redone to include all this saturation. And of course there is a lot more research to be done on greenhouse saturation itself.
But in the meantime it looks like the so-called climate emergency is dead. It has been killed by a big breakthrough in radiation physics. The greenhouse effect does not work the way the scary computer models have all assumed, instead it is dominated by saturation.
This is how science is supposed to work: hypotheses die as science advances.
We told you our team was providing input on climate and energy issues to OMB to try and give them pause to take aggressive harmful to everyone policies that have failed worldwide. They included:
And chapters from Evidence Based Climate Science on Surface Temperature Issues, Solar and Ocean Cycles.
All of the efforts have been done pro-bono. We lost another contributor recently, 2 in the last year 6 since we began this work. Though a large number share our objective views, many have either been silenced or even forced out of the science they love. If you can help support our continuing efforts at this important time - see the secure donate button on the left column.
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The media continues to hype extremes here in North America and in Eurasia.
The Wall Street Journal story reported:
“Another heat wave will hit parts of the drought-stricken Western U.S. this weekend. The heat could meet or exceed daily records in parts of Montana and Idaho over the weekend and into early next week, said Julie Malingowski, an emergency-response meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Temperatures are forecast to exceed 100 degrees in parts of Montana beginning Saturday, with hotter temperatures reaching Idaho on Sunday. Western states have faced several record-setting heat waves this summer, including one in June that left more than 100 people dead in the Pacific Northwest. This bout of high temperatures likely won’t last as long as previous heat waves”, said Ms. Malingowski.
“The sequence of heat waves in the region this year is unprecedented and has exacerbated drought and fire conditions”, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
He talked about the relationship to global warming and deemed it consistent with the greenhouse models predictions of increased extremes. Actually the summer data for the Northwest and Northern Rockies and plains have not been getting hotter the last 100 years (source NOAA NCEI).
See the Northwest and Northern Rockies and Plains trends for maximum temperatures the last century.
Daniel is part of the academic/governmental/environmental climate cabal that waits for the inevitable extreme event to join with the media in hyping it as scientific proof their failing theory is validated. Surely some of the alarmists know cycles in weather and extremes of temperature and extreme weather are not man-made but are either silenced by the threat of cancellation/job loss or lured by the funding is (trillions of dollars!). There are other younger people who have been indoctrinated in this nonsense in school and believe it is true. They spend no time looking at possible other natural causes partly because they are not taught those in school.
Dr. Cliff Mass at the University of Washington has been a realist voice in that region on the Cliff Mass Weather Blog/:
“Society needs accurate information in order to make crucial environmental decisions. Unfortunately, there has been a substantial amount of miscommunication and unscientific hand-waving about the recent Northwest heatwave. This blog post uses rigorous science to set the record straight… It describes the origins of a meteorological black swan event and how the atmosphere is capable of attaining extreme, unusual conditions without any aid from our species.”
See another fact-check of the claims by Meteorologist Anthony Wattshere. He notes:
”What I find most interesting is when you examine official statewide maximum temperatures since record keeping began in about 1895, only two out of fifty have occurred in the twenty-first century. Most of the high-temperature records across the nation happened in the first half of the twentieth century. According to government records, Oregon’s record high temperature of 119F was recorded twice, both times in 1898, more than 120 years of global warming ago. Washington State’s maximum temperature of 118F was recorded first in 1928 and tied in 1961, nearly 100 and 50 years of global warming ago, respectively. Forty states’ record high temperatures were set before 1960, with 25 of the record highs being set or tied in the 1930s alone. New high-temperature records have been set in only two states since 2000, meaning more states’ record highs were recorded in the 1890s than in the first two decades of the current century.”
Indeed, forecasters who must predict the ups and downs and risk of extremes look at natural factors on a global scale to make their predictions ahead of each month and season. The warmists simpleton solution is always that we can expect extremes and we are responsible. They have no sense of history and when they do trend analysis, they prove that cherries are their favorite fruit. See a government report trend bars that conveniently left out the earlier more significant heat.
Satellite measurement of our atmosphere not contaminated by urban heat island effects shows a warming about 1/3 that of the greenhouse models.
The satellite record starts in the late 1970s and if it was available back 120 years would have shown the warming which started in 1979 was just part of a 60 year natural cycle related to ocean temperatures and solar input. Even during this period, models have overstated by a factor of three the warming.
See why natural factors can explain all the variability here.
So what caused the heat waves this summer in the northwest US and southwest Canada?
While the central and southeast has been very wet and cool for summer, the west has been very warm and in late June for several days extremely hot. It is due to an unusual location of a classic pattern of a dome of hot air we call a ‘heat ridge’ that often is the culprit on summer heat waves.
The easterly flow beneath pushed heat from the Great Basin to the west where it is forced to descend. When it descends the warm air gets warmer due to compression - and in this case to record levels - over the last 3 days of June.
When hot air descends from the mountains, it warms by compression. This occurs in the plains when heat comes east and also in the eastern cities when it descends the Appalachians. This is how 100F heat waves occur.
When you see heat waves they are usually surrounded by areas that are cooler and often wetter than normal. The patterns in hot summers are amplified with strong heat ridges and deeper than normal cool wet troughs. In the US it has been an unusually wet and cool for summer season in the south central and southeast.
Dallas has not hit 100F yet. Summers have had as high as 71 days over 100F.
DALLAS 100F DAYS ANNUAL TOP 10
Atlanta has had only 5 90F days (the record there is 91 days).
Extreme summer heat is typically enhanced in droughty areas, which also correlates to heat ridges where the very warm temperatures aloft augmented by sinking air and the lack of available moisture keep it rain free. That has been the case in the northwest and southwest Canada since last fall. This heat waves was localized compared to the great heat waves of the past especially the1930s, when 100F readings were reported in 45 of the lower 48 states and the state all-time heat wave records for 22 states still hold.
THE INCONVENIENT COLD
They already forgot the record cold in the plains for February 2021. At least 217 people were killed directly or indirectly by severe cold, and the damages are estimated to be at least $195.6 billion (2021 USD).
The cold snap peaked from February 14-16, NOAA reported “...approximately 30% of available US sites set cold maximum records, and about 20% set minimum records.” During that peak period, the analyzed temperatures were 40 to 50 degrees below average over much of the central and southern Plains. More than 3,000 daily record cold temperatures (minimum and maximum) were reported from February 12-17 at long-term observations (75+ years of data).
Based on preliminary data, 62 all-time daily cold minimum temperature records were broken from February 11-16 and 69 all-time daily cold maximum temperature records occurred February 15-16, said NOAA.
EURASIA MIRRORS NORTH AMERICA
A similar see-saw was observed in Eurasia where a dipole pattern mirrored the one here in in North America. An early summer heat ridge in Eastern Europe nudged into western Russia this month where sudden high heat stressed crops. Meanwhile, the strong trough behind in this amplified pattern produced very heavy rains and disastrous and deadly flooding damage in central Europe.
See the forecast of cold and warm bands in Europe into Russia.
And the extremes west to east in the U.S.
Forecasters know ocean temperature configurations (warm and cool pools together with antecedent conditions (winter and spring dryness for example) help determine whether the pattern is amplified and persistent or more zonal and variable. They also tell us the risk of severe events like tornadoes, hurricanes, drought and floods, and heavy snows.
This year they have correctly seen the amplified pattern and extremes.
