Robert Bryce explains the basics at his substack blog Build It, And The Wind Won’t Come. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Weather-dependent generation sources are…weather dependent:
Last year, despite adding 6.2 GW of new capacity,
U.S. wind production dropped by 2.1%.
Three years ago, in the wake of Winter Storm Uri, the alt-energy lobby and their many allies in the media made sure not to blame wind energy for the Texas blackouts. The American Clean Power Association (2021 revenue: $32.1 million) declared frozen wind turbines “did not cause the Texas power outages” because they were “not the primary cause of the blackouts. Most of the power that went offline was powered by gas or coal.”
Damaged wind turbines at the Punta Lima wind project, Naguabo, Puerto Rico, 2018. Photo: Wikipedia.
NPR parroted that line, claiming, “Blaming wind and solar is a political move.” The Texas Tribune said it was wrong to blame alt-energy after Winter Storm Uri because “wind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter.” The outlet also quoted one academic who said that natural gas was “failing in the most spectacular fashion right now.” Texas Tribune went on to explain, “Only 7% of ERCOT’s forecasted winter capacity, or 6 gigawatts, was expected to come from various wind power sources across the state.”
In other words, there was no reason to expect the 33 GW of wind capacity that Texas had to deliver because, you know, no one expected wind energy to produce much power. Expectations? Mr. October? Playoff Jamal? Who needs them?
But what happens when you build massive amounts of
wind energy capacity and it doesn’t deliver —
not for a day or a week, but for six months, or even an entire year?
That question is germane because, on Wednesday, the Energy Information Administration published a report showing that U.S. wind energy production declined by 2.1% last year. Even more shocking: that decline occurred even though the wind sector added 6.2 GW of new capacity!
Um, yes. It would. And the EIA made that point in its usual dry language. “Generation from wind turbines decreased for the first time since the mid-1990s in 2023 despite the addition of 6.2 GW of new wind capacity last year,” the agency reported. The EIA also explained that the capacity factor for America’s wind energy fleet, also known as the average utilization rate, “fell to an eight-year low of 33.5%.” That compares to 35.9% capacity factor in 2022 which was the all-time high. The report continued, “Lower wind speeds than normal affected wind generation in 2023, especially during the first half of the year when wind generation dropped by 14% compared with the same period in 2022.”
Read that again. For half of last year, wind generation was down by a whopping 14% due to lower wind speeds. Imagine if that wind drought continued for an entire year. That’s certainly possible. Recall that last summer, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that U.S. generation capacity “is increasingly characterized as one that is sensitive to extreme, widespread, and long duration temperatures as well as wind and solar droughts.”
According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, corporate investment in wind energy between 2004 and 2022 totaled some $278 billion. In addition, according to data from the Treasury Department, the U.S. government spent more than $30 billion on the production tax credit over that same period. Thus, over the last two decades, the U.S. has spent more than $300 billion building 150 GW of wind capacity that has gobbled up massive amounts of land, garnered enormous (and bitter) opposition from rural Americans, and hasn’t gotten more efficient over time.
Wednesday’s EIA report is a stark reminder that all of that generation capacity is subject to the vagaries of the wind. Imagine if the U.S. had spent that same $300 billion on a weather-resilient form of generation, like, say, nuclear power. That’s relevant because Unit 4 at Plant Vogtle in Georgia came online on Monday. With that same $300 billion, the U.S. could have built 20, 30, or maybe even 40 GW of new nuclear reactors with a 92% capacity factor that wouldn’t rely on the whims of the wind. In addition, those dozens of reactors would have required a tiny fraction of the land now covered by thousands of viewshed-destroying, bat-and-bird-killing wind turbines.
If climate change means we will face more extreme weather in the years ahead — hotter, colder, and/or more severe temperatures for extended periods — it’s Total Bonkers CrazytownTM to make our electric grid dependent on the weather. But by lavishing staggering amounts of money on wind and solar energy, and in many cases, mandating wind and solar, that’s precisely what we are doing.
2024 Atlantic Hurricane Season – will be very active
with 20 Named Storms and 6 landfall Hot-Spots.
Tampa-Ocala, Florida, United States, February 1, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ —
The Atlantic Hurricane Seasons have been extremely active since 2016 – and will continue to be abnormally active for the next several years. This is not due to a global warming cycle – but instead– it is due to the naturally occurring Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) that enhances a cyclical ClimatePulse Cycle.
During the current AMO warm ocean cycle (warmest portion in 2016), the United States has experienced 40 named storms making landfall, with 20 of them being hurricanes – 9 of which were major hurricane landfalls. This very active hurricane cycle – will likely continue for another 10 years.
What Should We Expect in 2024
An average hurricane season has 12-13 named storms and 6 hurricanes. The combination of the AMO warm ocean water cycle, favorable atmospheric conditions, and the enhanced ClimatePulse Cycle – will provide favorable conditions for a very active and destructive hurricane season in 2024.
Professor David Dilley is predicting 20 named storms, 8 hurricanes with 3 to 4 of them being major hurricanes. The United States and Caribbean will have 6 Hot-Spots with 3 to 4 United States hurricane landfalls expected, and 1 or 2 in the Caribbean. In addition, there is the potential for 1 or 2 major hurricane landfalls.
GWO’s Hot-Spot Predictions 2023
Background Post: David Dilley: Signals of Global Cooling
Tom Nelson interviewed David Dilley last month and the video is above. For those who prefer reading I provide below a transcript from the closed captions, along with the key exhibits from the presentation.
Synopsis: Between the two oceans cooling down and the natural global cooling cycle coming down we’re going to see a big dip in the temperatures worldwide during the next 10, 15 years. The cold cycle’s going to take about 20 years to bottom out. We’re going to be in an extremely cold period during that time, colder than the 1960s and 50s here in the United States. So it’s going to be very cold.
TN: I have David Dilly here, and David could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
DD: I’m a meteorologist, climatologist, for which I have about 52 years of experience, and I’m still trying to figure that out because I’m only 30 years old. But but I’ve been in the business a long time. I was a weather officer in the Air Force in the National Weather Service. Then I left to set up my own company called Global Weather Oscillations; the easiest way to remember it is global weather cycles.com.
So we’re going to take a look today at something that NOAA is really talking about: the Carbon Dioxide and Climate Cycles. They’re just talking about today’s carbon dioxide values as far as the fossil fuel is concerned. You’re not going to see this out there anywhere on the web. It’s 78% of the atmospheric gases is nitrogen of all things, 21% is oxygen, 0.9 is argon that is 99.99 percent the atmospheric gases. That doesn’t leave much that’s just about all of what we call dry air. To be non-dry air includes the greenhouse gases. The greenhouse gases now are variable regarding how much of it is water vapor how much of it is carbon dioxide. Water vapor is anywhere from one to four percent of the atmospheric gases, that’s quite a bit. It can be zero percent of the Arctic and Antarctic because that’s a desert, but it can be all the way up to four percent. So one to four percent we’ll say.
Carbon dioxide of all things it’s a trace gas it’s less than .05%, a lot less than than water vapor. less than .05 now to put it in perspective, let’s just look at the greenhouse gases here and what we see is water vapor we’re gonna do the average of it two percent that’s 20 000 parts per million. Natural carbon dioxide what I’m going to show you later on in the presentation is 380 parts per million.
Now NOAA and the IPCC say it (natural CO2) is down around 285 parts per million,
we’re going to show you that’s false.
And so the natural is point zero four percent of the atmospheric gases, while fossil fuel I’m going to show you it’s only 35 parts per million; that’s point zero zero four percent or four one thousands of a one percent. And do you think that can cause climate change?
Of course not. We go down to Vostok in the Antarctic and there is a very deep frozen lake where they drill down fifteen thousand eight five hundred and eighty eight feet down to the bottom. That’s a long ways down over 500 000 years. So I take core samples and with the core samples they figure out how how much it is carbon dioxide what the temperatures are. These are approximate, but what they they get from a core sample is a an estimate of the temperatures and carbon dioxide during the past 500 000 years.
If we go back say 450 000 years, the red line is temperature. So what happened, we came quickly just in a few thousand years out of a deep Ice Age into a interglacial warm period. You can see the temperatures really slid up and the ice cores estimate the carbon dioxide to be right around 280 parts per million. Then we slide down out of the warm period into a deep Ice Age and you can see that the carbon dioxide is actually staying up high there. If carbon dioxide caused global warming, why did the temperatures drop; it does not make sense.
Eventually the carbon dioxide goes down because it’s being absorbed by the oceans. The oceans keep absorbing it over the course of a hundred thousand years. Then when you come up on your next interglacial warm period 338 000 years ago, the temperature goes up and the carbon dioxide is released from the oceans back into the atmosphere. And you can see the carbon dioxide lags behind the temperature rise and actually when you hit the peak of the temperature back 338 000 years ago, the carbon dioxide does not Peak out until 7000 years later. It takes quite a while but carbon dioxide peaked out at 298 parts per million. But look at that temperature then dropping quickly into an ice age while carbon dioxide is at its peak.
That’s proof right there the carbon dioxide does not cause global warming.
As we come over on the right hand side of the graphic this is about 18 000 years ago. It’s 11 000 years ago we came out of the glacial period, we warmed up quickly, we got up to about to 190 parts per million.
Then we started to take records in Hawaii in the 1950s and the instruments there said: Wow, all of a sudden now we’re up to 412 parts per million. We’ve never been that high before. This is what we’re going to investigate: what is going on with the glacial periods and also the core samples. This is a graphic of the carbon dioxide. The peak of The inter glacial warm periods is every 120 000 years ago we’re going back 800 000 years.
Now do we have other research that will confirm what I’m saying. This is about a year ago and they’ve been adding papers to it and this corrects NOAA’s calculations of the rise in carbon dioxide since 1850. It’s in a radiation safety Journal Health physics journal and this is the name of the paper itself. The authors are professors of radiological Sciences. They’re retired and that’s a big thing because if you’re not retired, if you’re at a university, you can’t do research like this because of federal grants and everything. You have to wait until you’re retired and then you can do real science when they were working they were at the department of physics at University of Massachusetts. It’s Kenneth Skrable, George Chabot, and Clayton French and here is what they found.
This is extremely important. Since 1850 the red here is saying the increase due to fossil fuel, and they’re showing all of that is the increase due to fossil fuel. Now how do we determine that well up on a high mountain in Hawaii we have a infrared spectrometer since 1958 it’s been been taking measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However three Isotopes of Carbon are 12, 13 and 14. and the spectrometer is taking the total of all three. It’s not separating what is natural from what is fossil fuel.
Because the ice core samples say we’ve never been above 300 parts per million
NOAA is assuming that the rise above 300 parts per million is all fossil fuel.
An assumption is all it is. It’s assumed by trying to take averages of how much CO2 is taken back in by the oceans how much of it is a given not from industry. Taking those assumptions some physicists made a formula to determine how much is fossil fuel and how much is natural going back all the way back to 1750. These red lines again are what NOAA says is the increase by fossil fuel.
Well their formula separates the carbon 12, 13 and 14 to determine what is what and this is their findings as I switched everything over to green. Green is the natural increase in carbon dioxide all the way up to 1958. Now remember it’s a paper going back to 2018, but it says the increase has been from 280 parts per million up to 408 and NOAA says it is all from fossil fuel. This research paper says No, it is nearly 80% natural just like what I showed on my formulations, eighty percent natural, onlyabout 20% industrial. That’s not enough to cause climate change.
Now I’m going to show you one last paper that will also verify the findings and this is using a different method fossilized plant leaflets and as you can see in this picture there’s little cells in there they call these stomata cells which are like the lungs in a human being. So they look at the fossilized plant leaflets and unlike the ice core samples where you’re taking an average over one thousand or four thousand years, the fossilized plant leaflets can give you the exact year going back the past thousand years so you can determine each year what is going on.
So the stomata cells are like the lungs in a human being or in animals but he’d found that if the leaflet has a lot of stomata cells it means a lot less carbon dioxide in the air at that time. When CO2 is plentiful, plants don’t need more oxygen lung power to get the carbon dioxide; if it has fewer cells that means there was a lot of carbon dioxide in the air.
And the beautiful thing about plant life taking in carbon dioxide is the byproduct is oxygen which we drastically need. What the plant stomata cells show during the past 1200 years: back in 800 A.D it says we were way up to 375 parts per million natural carbon dioxide and then dipped way down to 325 in one thousand A.D. Then it dipped way down to 230 and it dipped up down, up down, up down up, down. In year 2010 it was up at 375 parts per million.
Let’s look at the plant stomata that could be pretty darn real and also if you take a mean value of the plant stomata over the course of a thousand years you come out 301 parts per million. The main value of ice cores over a thousand year period 297 parts per million really darn close to being the same as now. Let’s take the plant stomata readings of the atmospheric carbon dioxide and overlay it onto our global warming and cooling Cycles during the past 1200 years. We have had six global warming Cycles during the past 1200 years as noted here in the red. This is back around 850 A.D and then you can see it cools down then we warm up again, cool down warm up cool way down and so on for six global warming cycles. People don’t talk about that but we have had six of them.
When we overlay the plant stomata atmospheric carbon dioxide, guess what: We see a perfect fit. The high values in carbon dioxide peak on global warming cycles, so that brings a lot more credibility into the plants stomata cells for recording carbon dioxide.
So putting it all together we since 1850 NOAA and the IPCC say that the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is 100% due to fossil fuel and human activity. The three studies I just showed you and the corrections I made on the ice core samples all show it’s 80% natural rise. Far too little fossil fuel effects to cause climate change, it is almost all natural.
Here we are today over here on the right the average is a global cooling cycle comes about every 230 years and the global cooling cycles last for a good 100, 150 years. So here we are right now, average for the return of the global cooling cycle is 230 years and the last global cooling cycle began in 1794. Add 230 to that and you calculate the year 2024.
This is 2023. so we should be sliding into a global cooling cycle, a natural global cooling cycle.
And we have signals that it is beginning. Global warming Cycles begin in the Arctic and the Antarctic when they warm up over the course of 20, 30 years or so. And as the Arctic and Antarctic warm up there’s less cold air available through the mid-latitudes. So over time the mid-latitudes warm up so that’s where global warming spreads.
In the next phase, global cooling also begins at the Arctic and the Antarctic.
What has happened just this past year, the spring and summer in the Arctic was the coldest on record. You had that during a global warming period, so that’s a signal that the Arctic is drastically cooling down. In 2021 the Antarctic had the coldest winter on record. How you have two records like that if you’re not sliding into global cooling? There’s more cold air available and it’s going to cool down the mid-latitudes and that starts our global cooling cycle. And we’re coming into that right now. Winter 2020 was a third coldest January and February on record from Alaska through Central Northern Canada into Greenland. Antarctica as I indicated winter of 2021 coldest on record. Arctic 2022 coldest spring and summer on record since 1958, and the most Arctic Ice extent in 8 to 16 years.
The real main point is carbon dioxide increase is mainly natural, it is not causing a global warming cycle. It’s a natural global warming cycle and we’re sliding back into a natural global cooling cycle.
TN: If you had to make a prediction what would you think of the cooling between now and 2050. Do you think it will cool between now and 2050 are you fairly confident?
DD: Actually we’re going to see a pretty good cool down here into January. The whole atmospheric circulation is beginning to change the La Nina out in the Pacific is now fading it’s going to be gone here by mid to end of January, and we can see changes in the atmospheric circulation going on now. The cold air in Canada is going to start making its way down more into the United States during late January.
For this year we do see the drastic change and what we’re going to see really well through 2050 or so. The IPCC and NOAA say that the oceans are going to rise anywhere from eight to 26 inches during that time period. I say it may rise an inch, maybe not even that much because we’re going into a global cooling cycle now. The poles are cooling down.
Pacific Ocean has phases going back to the year 1580. For past 500 years we’ve seen these warm phase and cold phase Cycles in the Pacific Ocean which last for anywhere from about 25 to 40 years. The Pacific has been in a 40-year warm cycle which ties the record going back uh 500 years. Pacific is sliding into a cold or a cool phase ocean water cycle, and that’s going to help to cool down ,especially up around Alaska. And the Atlantic Ocean will be going into a cool phase of its own right after 2030 or so.
Between the two oceans cooling down and the natural global cooling cycle coming in we’re going to see a big dip in the temperatures worldwide during the next 10 to 15 years.
The global warming cycle took about a 20-year period to peek out warming from about the year 2000 up to about 2021 so it took 20 years to hit the peak; the cold cycle is going to take about 20 years to bottom out also at the coldest and that’s going to be around 2040 or so. Unitil the late 2030s so we’re going to be in an extremely cold period during that time, colder than the 1960s and 50s here in the United States.
TN: Is there any sort of a simple explanation as to what causes that 230 year cycle that you mentioned?
DD: The simple explanation is our glacial periods and interglatial periods become about every 120 000 years are due to the Earth path around the Sun; where the Earth swings out further away from the Sun and also the tilt of the earth also changes.
New data out is showing that we’ve actually been cooling down during the past five to six years. So this is all looking like we are already going gradually into a global cooling Cycle. But we’re going to see a more dramatic change in the cooling cycle.
What NOAA and IPCC are doing, their science is political science while we’re looking here today at real science. There’s a huge difference. Keep your eyes open the next few years and all of a sudden in a few years people are going to be saying: Wait a minute, what are we doing here? We’re down the wrong path we need to wake up.
Comment:
The underlying issue is the assumption that the future can only be warmer than the present. Once you accept the notion that CO2 makes the earth’s surface warmer (an unproven conjecture), then temperatures can only go higher since CO2 keeps rising. The present plateau in temperatures is inconvenient, but actual cooling would directly contradict the CO2 doctrine. Some excuses can be fabricated for a time, but an extended period of cooling undermines the whole global warming mantra.
It’s not a matter of fearing a new ice age. That will come eventually, according to our planet’s history, but the warning will come from increasing ice extent in the Northern Hemisphere. Presently infrastructures in many places are not ready to meet a return of 1950s weather, let alone something unprecedented.
Public policy must include preparations for cooling since that is the greater hazard. Cold harms the biosphere: plants, animals and humans. And it is expensive and energy intensive to protect life from the ravages of cold. Society can not afford to be in denial about the prospect of the current temperature plateau ending with cooling.
The Global Warming Potentials (GWP) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Table 2.14 of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) show the increase in warming by methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) is 21 and 310 times respectively that of CO2. There has been wide acceptance of these values since publishing in 2007. Nevertheless, they are inaccurate.
This study uses accurate methods to calculate the impacts of CO2, CH4, and N2O on the warming of the atmosphere. For example, this quantitative analysis from reliable physics shows the contribution of CO2 to warming at Amsterdam is 0.0083°C out of a difference of 26°C. The warming effect of CH4 on the Earth’s atmosphere is 0.408% of that of CO2, and the warming by N2O is 0.085% of that of CO2.
Thus, the warming effects of CO2, CH4, and N2O are too small to measure. The invalidity of the methane and nitrous oxide values indicates the GWPs of the remaining approximately sixty chemicals in the Table 2.14 list are also invalid. A recommendation is that the IPCC consider revising or retracting the GWP values in Table 2.14.
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to examine the Global Warming Potentials (GWPs) in Table 2.14 of the Fourth Assessment Report [1] of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Figure 1.The Global Warming Potentials (GWP) of methane and nitrous oxide calculated by the IPCC in Table2.14 have profoundly affected the decisions made by elected officials worldwide.
Nitrogen fertilizers have been restricted or banned in several countries because they emit a small amount of nitrous oxide. Nitrogen fertilizers are essential for the growth of plants, and nitrogen is often the limiting nutrient [2]. Restricting their use affects food production adversely and can cause food shortages. The IPCC claims that nitrous oxide has up to 310 times the warming effect of CO2. This value is so significant that we must determine whether or not this value of 310 is valid.
A similar situation occurs with methane, which is claimed to have 21 times the warming effect of CO2. Natural gas is virtually all methane transported widely by pipelines and pumping stations. The claim is that methane leaks from natural gas pipeline systems and processing are warming the Earth. Periodically, a scientist will quote Table 2.14 and raise the alarm about methane and the possibility of significant methane releases from the Arctic Tundra caused by the warming of the Earth [3].
The methodology of this study answers the question: “Of the temperature difference between two weather stations, how many degrees Celsius do CO2, CH4, and N2O contribute?”Four weather stations—Pond Inlet, Amsterdam, Colorado Springs, and Princeton, NJ—were selected to provide the answers. The temperature and relative humidity are recorded within the same.
Calculations for Table 2 Column D
In Row 5, the grams of CO2 per kilogram (kg) of dry air is (0.00041806 x 44 x (1000/29) = 0.630, where 44 and 29 are the molecular weights of CO2 and air, respectively. In Row 9, the grams of CH4 per kg of dry air are (0.000001927 x 16 x (1000/29)) = 0.001063, where 16 is the molecular weight of methane. Similarly, in Row 12, Column E, the grams of N2O per kg of dry air are (0.00000033675 x 44 x (1000/29) = 0.000511, where 44 is the molecular weight of nitrous oxide.There are 0.630/0.00106 = 594 grams of CO2 per gram of methane. Thus, there are (594 x 44)/16) = 1634 molecules of CO2 per methane molecule. Thus, because the molecular weights of CO2 and N2O are the same at 44, there are (0.630/0.000511) = 1235 molecules of CO2 for each molecule of N2O in the Earth’s atmosphere. Thus, in September 2023, CO2 molecules outnumber CH4 molecules by 1634 and N2O molecules by 1235.
Measuring the Contribution of CO2, CH4 and N2O to Temperature in the Earth’s Atmosphere
It is essential to understand that the measured and recorded temperature is the sum of all the factors affecting Earth’s temperature. These include warming caused by radiation from the Sun absorbed by CO2, CH4, N2O, feedback, and other warming or cooling effects. These factors also apply to temperature differences. The recorded temperature is input to the Humidair psychrometric program, which includes these factors in the heat content (enthalpy) and specific volume.
The following method quantifies the contribution of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide to the difference in temperature between three weather stations and Pond Inlet.Table 3 is a summary of the Excel calculations. The file for the Excel calculations is: “Excel calculations for GWP Mar 102024.xlsx.” From the Excel spreadsheet, Column H, the temperatures measured at Pond Inlet, Amsterdam, Colorado Springs, and Princeton on December 30, 2023, were -18°C, 8°C, 3°C, and 4°C, respectively. We set the recorded level of CO2 at 418.06 at the location with the lowest of the four temperatures, i.e., at Pond Inlet. This is because the number of molecules of CO2 per cubic meter falls as the temperature rises.
The grams of CO2 per kg of dry air in the Pond Inlet row of Table 3 are the same as in Column D of Table 2. The temperature contributions of CO2, CH4, and N2O to the difference in temperature in °C between Pond Inlet and the weather stations in Column A are in Columns G, H, and I. The total is in Column J. The upper lines in the titles of the columns are the locations in the Excel spreadsheet calculations. Note that the average CO2 for Table 2 was 418.06 in August 2023, and the level of CO2 during the recording of the values for the Excel spreadsheet was 422.3 ppm. The difference of 4.24 ppm has no significant effect on the results of this study.
As shown in Table 4, the temperature increase caused by CH4 and N2O is a small percentage of the temperature rise caused by CO2.The warming effect of CO2 is too small to measure [9, 10].Thus, the warming effects of CH4 and N2O are also too small.The data in IPCC Table 2.14, showing that CH4 has 21 times the warming effect of CO2 and that N2O has 310 times the warming effect of CO2, are grossly incorrect.
Summary and Conclusions
This study provides evidence that the IPCC Global Warming Potentials are incorrect. It starts with the levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) measured as molecules per million molecules of dry air, which is the molar fraction. Then, quantitative results from reliable physics establish the enthalpy and specific volume at four weather stations. Chemistry determines the grams of each gas per kg of dry air. The increase in the temperature bycurrent levels of methane (CH4) and nitrous (N2O) in the Earth’s atmosphere isa small percentage of that of CO2.Conclusions 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 answer, “Of the temperature difference between two weather stations, how many degrees Celsius do CO2, CH4, and N2O contribute?”
6.1.In this study, the difference in temperature between Pond Inlet and Amsterdam is 26°C. The contribution of CO2 to this difference is 0.0083°C, but this amount is too small to measure.
6.2.The contribution of CH4 to the 26°C difference between Pond Inlet and Amsterdam is 0.0000338°C.This current level of methane in the atmosphere increases the temperature by 0.408% of that of CO2. It does not have 21 times the warming of CO2 as claimed by the IPCC.
6.3.N2O’s contribution to the 26°C difference between Pond Inlet and Amsterdam is 0.00000705oC. This is 0.085% of that of CO2. It does not have 310 times the warming of CO2, as claimed by the IPCC
6.4.The total contribution of all three gases to the 26°C difference between Pond Inlet and Amsterdam is 0.00833oC. This is a typical result; this difference is too small to measure.
6.5.The warming of the Earth’s atmosphere by CH4 and N2O is 0.408% and 0.085% respectively of that of CO2.
6.6.The warming by CH4 and N2O is so tiny in the Earth’s atmosphere that the IPCC estimates of warming by GWP over several years are irrelevant.
6.7.It is reasonable for the IPCC to consider revising or withdrawing Table 2.14 in the Fourth Assessment Report
Footnote:
If like me you are new to the term “psychrometrics”, it refers to an engineering method for assessing the thermodynamic properties of moist air. From Understanding The Psychrometric Chart
The psychrometric chart is a tool commonly used in the field of engineering to understand and analyze the properties of air. This chart provides valuable information about the thermodynamic properties of moist air, which is crucial for various applications such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. By understanding the psychrometric chart, engineers can make more informed decisions and optimize their designs for enhanced efficiency and comfort.
In addition to temperature, the psychrometric chart also includes other properties such as humidity ratio, enthalpy, and specific volume. The humidity ratio represents the mass of moisture present in the air per unit mass of dry air, while enthalpy is the total heat content of the air including both sensible and latent heat. Specific volume, on the other hand, is the volume occupied by a unit mass of air. Together, these properties provide a comprehensive understanding of the thermodynamic behavior of moist air.
John Bruyn writes at Quora answering the question: What does carbon dioxide have to do with climate change? He is a retired geophysicist with a background in exploration geology, geophysics, seismology, and in remote sensing by satellite. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The surface of Mars shows that CO2 is transparent to radiation in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum until it becomes reflective as dry ice at temperatures below its -78.5 C (109.3 F) freezing point. A black body radiating at such temperatures does so at wavelengths close to 15 µm (microns), i.e., very low energy at the far end of the far infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Energy is a function of frequency and should therefore be plotted on the x-axis (top of this figure) and units of watts should not be included on the y-axis. The colored lines show the spectral radiance predicted by Planck’s law for black bodies with different absolute temperatures. The energy of radiation absorbed by carbon dioxide is near 0.08 electron volts while the UV-B energy that reaches Earth when the ozone layer is depleted is near 4 electron volts, 48 times larger.
Such radiation is inconsequential on Earth where the much higher global mean surface temperature of about 15 C (59 F) makes that impossible and irrelevant in that it would violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The exception would have to be mid-winter on central Antarctica where the temperatures can get as low as -90 C (-130 F) but where the roughly 0.042% (420 ppm) CO2 concentration leaves the partial pressure too low for dry ice to form. As that minimum temperature shows, any infrared radiation disappears quickly into space at close to the speed of light.
The extra carbon atom makes CO2 more massive than air and
at 0.042% that concentration is critically low for photosynthesis.
Any CO2 we can contribute only serves to improve on that. The reason for that very low concentration is the very much greater abundance of the lighter than air H2O molecules bonding with CO2 inversely proportional to temperature to suspend it temporarily. However, that is restricted to the troposphere with 99% of the Earth’s atmospheric H2O that relies on the bonding with enough CO2 molecules to be able to precipitate and fill water bodies on land and the ocean, currently taking up almost 71% of the global surface. Helping H2O precipitate makes CO2 a cooling agent, including by supporting photosynthesis and ozone formation in the stratosphere.
It follows that the atmospheric CO2 concentration is controlled by the amount of water vapour in the air and that its concentration rises and falls with the variations in insolation and from variations in the speed of the Earth’s rotation. Together they drive the evaporation of H2O from global surface, as well as the CO2 emissions from the ocean in the tropics. Cooling and the declining speed of the Earth’s rotation toward higher latitudes cause evaporation and the ocean’s CO2 emissions to decline with latitude and to reverse that process, as well as making the ocean the world’s primary carbon sink.
The Milankovic cycles have been concentrating insolation in the tropics with the declining obliquity of the Earth’s spin axis for the last 10 millennia. Perihelion has been adding to that by moving north since the mid-13th century. The declining eccentricity of the Earth’s orbits has been adding to that by increasing the already supersonic speed of the Earth’s rotation and will continue to do so for about another 30,000 years. The increasing the centrifugal force (inertia) has been causing the atmospheric CO2 concentration to increase. However, as sea levels continue to decline at the highest latitudes (see Post-glacial rebound – Wikipedia) and will cause the shallow seas in the tropics to start running dry in about 5 millennia from now, CO2 emissions will start to decline accordingly.
This plot shows the day length (LOD) variations from Wikipedia and how these have been shortening by milliseconds as a result of the increasing speed of the Earth’s rotation from the declining eccentricity of the Earth’s orbits.
The oscillations match the the variations in the sun’s barycentric motions caused by the gravity and orbits of the 4 outermost planets (JSUN) with 99.6% of the planetary mass that control the ~11-year solar cycle, as well as the sun’s ~22-year magnetic cycle due to the vertical motion of Jupiter and Saturn with respect to the plane of the solar equator caused by the inclinations of their orbits with respect to that plane and controlled by the orientation of the gravity of the Milky Way galaxy.
These are the solar orbits around the barycentre of the solar system from 1970–2022 as generated with the Solar Simulator 2 (can be downloaded free of charge, no strings attached). As can be seen from the prior LOD image, the SS2 shows that when the solar motion is small, day lengths increase and when the solar orbits are large, day lengths reduce. This makes it highly probable that the minute changes in the global mean temperatures by fractions of a degree that may be picked up with climate models are from the annual variations in day lengths instead of CO2 increases.
This graph (own work, based on NASA JPL Horizons ephemerides) shows that the changes in the Earth’s climate have been happening as a result of the changing shapes of the JSUN orbits for the last 2 millennia (and before that) and their always changing perihelion distances. They show the real reasons for climate change with a 973-year millennial cycle, as well as the roughly 60-year cycle of the phasing of the orbits and great conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn according to the 5:2 ratio of their orbital periods of 12 years and 29.5 years respectively.
The ~60-year great conjunction cycle of Jupiter and Saturn has long been recognised by ancient astronomers and in the Chinese calendar. The cycle peaked in 2019 and the vertical motion of all 4 of the outermost planets, Jupiter (318 E-mass), Saturn (95 E-mass), Uranus 14.5 E-mass), and Neptune 17.1 E-mass) to a total of 99.6% of the planetary mass all converged well south of the plane of the solar equator in 2022, pulling the Earth with just 0.22% of the planetary mass a bit further south too and exposing more of the northern hemisphere to the sun. And that’s just one of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW)/climate change tricks, cherry picking the hemispheres and the poles at certain times.
This image (own work) of the vertical motion of the 4 outermost planets (JSUN) with 99.6% of the planetary mass shows that according to the NASA JPL Horizons ephemerides their orbits put all 4 of them well below the plane of the solar equator with the effect of forcing the Earth orbits a bit further south too and exposing the Arctic to more insolation.
At the temperatures of the troposphere are above the freezing point of CO2 it is transparent to electromagnetic radiation., but not when frozen as dry ice in the lower stratosphere with sub-100 C temperatures. In the troposphere, the up to 100 times higher concentration of the lighter than air H2O molecules suspend the CO2 molecules and prevent these from forming a dense high pressure high temperature surface layer as they do on Venus where 1 day takes longer than a year.
It follows that driving the best and the largest evaporative cooling and air-conditioning system on Earth is the centrifugal force (inertia) of the supersonic roughly 1,677 km/h (1,042 mph) equatorial speed of the Earth’s rotation and mountain ranges that spins CO2 out into the upper atmosphere. On the way back down, CO2 loses its energy in the lower stratosphere and freezing when reaching -78.5 C to become reflective as dry ice but that radiation, where and when it happens is too weak to have any effect on a much warmer troposphere where CO2 gets defrosted by bonding with H2O molecules and helping these condense, form clouds, and precipitate as slightly acid rain, pH of 5.6 or less but increasing inversely proportional to latitude. The reason for that upward pH gradient toward the poles is from H2O requiring fewer CO2 molecules to precipitate as temperatures decline and the centrifugal force (inertia) of the Earth’s 24-hour rotation period goes to zero. The Earth’s oblateness also causes gravity to increase to its maximum by bringing the surface at the poles closer to the Earth’s core.
So, the simple proposition is that in the tropics, where the intensity of solar radiation is the greatest, where humidity and cloud cover are the highest, and where the surface temperatures are high, water in the atmosphere does more reflecting while transporting solar energy to higher latitudes to precipitate and where opposite conditions make water in the atmosphere do more reflecting of surface energy as infrared radiation. However, as we well know, water does not reflect all of the surface energy but lets a lot of that through to still leave a substantial cooling effect, as can be noticed from snow and ice accumulation. It means that what shade cloth is to solar radiation in warmer climates, moisture in the air is to surface radiation in colder climates. And, deserts show that where moisture is low, the temperatures plummet overnight.
Simply put, we cannot have any control over Earth’s global mean temperatures without significantly increasing the supply of solar energy or changing the distribution of insolation, to melt some of the snow and ice in the Arctic or on Antarctica and raising sea levels. Doing so artificially would reduce the impacts of the impending ice age to some extent (not to be advised from an evolution point of view) by maintaining higher sea levels and keeping the continental shelves covered by water instead of drying out as they are known to have done during the last few ice ages and on the last occasion permitted our early-ancestors to leave Africa and migrate to other continents.
It follows, that as a ‘greenhouse gas’ CO2 is irrelevant by doing the opposite of what is claimed in support of the climate change hoax and Ponzi scheme, aimed at making us change over to alternatives energy sources to fossil fuels to prevent these from running out during the further cooling of this millennium, as well as making some people a hell of a lot of money. Not the least in that are Elon Musk and the oil, gas, and coal companies that love the higher energy prices from Saudi Arabia cutting back oil production but most tragically also fuelling past and present oil wars including the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
And in the Longer Term, Geoclimatic forces will continue to operate:
Nobel Prize–winning economist Esther Duflo thinks rich countries should pay poor countries $500 billion in compensation each year for climate-change damages. It is our “moral debt.” She proposes an international 2-percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich and an increase in the global minimum corporate tax rate to fund this $500 billion transfer.
You and I may be shocked by such a suggestion but don’t worry: “It’s really necessary. And it’s reasonable. It’s not that hard.” Only someone in an elite, progressive bubble could say something like that. Let’s check her reasoning.
Duflo claims that climate change creates costs, specifically through “excess” deaths due to excessive heat. Poorer countries from the global south near the equator will see more days of extreme heat, and so will see a disproportionate increase in excess deaths.
Other economists translated those deaths into an externality cost of $37 per ton of CO2. Multiply that by the roughly fourteen billion tons of CO2 emitted by the US and Europe and voila, wealthy countries generate $500 billion in externality costs per year.
She proposes paying for this by increasing the global minimum corporate tax rate from 15 percent to 18 percent and introducing an international 2-percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich, which she defines as the 3000 richest billionaires. We can’t go into the many problems and obstacles to such funding mechanisms here — suffice it to say such ideas will be nearly impossible to implement.
But Duflo’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, besides missing the bigger picture, are so speculative as to require playing make-believe. Let’s play along for a moment to see why. We’ll start by reverse-engineering her $500 billion number into a measure of harm.
Regulatory agencies and insurance companies use the concepts of “statistical value of life” or the “statistical value of a life-year” to do cost-benefit analysis on risk and the monetary value of life. These concepts are slippery, however, and calculated in a variety of ways with a wide range of estimates.
To keep things simple, let’s assume that the value of one life-year is $200,000. The $500 billion number proposed by Duflo suggests that the cost imposed by wealthy countries burning fossil fuels is the loss of roughly 2.5 million life-year” in poor countries per year. That sounds like a staggering number!
But what about the benefits that have accrued to developing
countries from activities that generate CO2 emissions?
Important advances in medicine, such as antibiotics and vaccines, were developed in modern industrialized countries. So, too, were refrigeration, cars, the internet, smart phones, radar; modern agricultural methods with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers; improvements in plumbing, building materials, manufacturing, and much more. “Polluting” activities in industrialized countries improved nutrition and safety around the world. These advances, and many others, significantly increased people’s life expectancies — especially in poor countries.
Surely the value of these improvements should weight the opposite side of the scale from the expected harm of climate change — especially since the crusade against fossil fuels and carbon emissions will assuredly slow economic growth and innovation. Let’s consider the case of India for a moment.
Life expectancy in India has basically doubled from about 35 years in 1950 to about 70 years in 2024. If you consider that India has just over a billion people living in it, modern technology developed by rich CO2-emitting countries has added 35 billion life-years in India alone.
Translating life-years back into dollars, 35 billion life-years times $200,000 per life-year means that the benefits from greater life expectancy in India over the past 75 years is the equivalent of $7 quadrillion dollars — or in annualized terms, an annual benefit of about $93 trillion dollars. In other words, the benefits to India alone are over a hundred times larger than Duflo’s estimate of costs!
Nor is India cherry-picked. China has a similar story with life expectancy risingfrom 43.45 years to 77.64 years. Similar improvements in life expectancy occur across the global south.
Of course, one could argue that developed industrial countries are not solely responsibleforincreases in life expectancy around the world. But one could just as easily say the same about whether developed industrial countries are solely responsible for global CO2 emissions, climate change, or harm to people in the global south due to hotter weather. Connecting these two issues makes perfect philosophical sense, because the production of CO2 has historically been directly associated with increases in economic growth; which in turn is necessary for all the developments increasing longevity around the world.
Even if we massage the assumptions in Duflo’s favor, the results remain favorable to industrialization. Suppose western technology and industrial activities contribute 50 percent to improvements in life expectancy. That’s still a $46 trillion annualized benefit to India. Reduce the value of a statistical life-year to $100,000 — that’s still a $23 trillion/year benefit from industrialization in the west. Exclude India from the analysis and cut the population we focus on down to 500 million people — that’s still over $12 trillion/year in benefits. Reduce the improvement in life-expectancy by six years — that still leaves about $10 trillion/year in benefits.
So, even after making tons of assumptions to reduce their size,
the estimated benefits of industrialization are still about twenty
times larger than Duflo’s estimate of its costs.
Worrying about hypothetical, indirect costs of CO2 emissions when it comes to human well-being is like scrounging for pennies while ignoring $100 bills lying on the sidewalk. Actually, it is worse than that. It is like lighting $100 bills on fire to help you search a dark alley for some pocket change of human welfare.
Economic development, driven largely by Adam Smith’s dictum “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” which includes strong private property rights and limited government intervention, has improved human living standards in unprecedented ways over the past 300 years. These remarkable improvements in human welfare are not limited to wealthy, developed economies but are enjoyed around the world.
Duflo talks about the (external) costs of industrialization on certain countries without considering the truly massive (external) benefits of industrialization to those same countries.
If anything, with a proper accounting, developing countries owe rich countries gratitude for the benefits they have received from industrialization and the corresponding CO2 emissions.
Rex Murphy was never taken in by climatists’ claims. He was an early lucid and frequent detractor of CO2 hysteria and exposed its promoters as charlatans. In remembrance of his passing yesterday, here is his take on the climategate exposure of the scam. It was broadcast on CBC 14 years ago, when reasonable people could still dissent from the party line. Transcript from closed captions in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T blackfarms
When John Stewart the Bantam rooster of conventional wisdom makes jokes about it, you know climategate has reached critical mass. Said Stewart: Poor Al Gore, Global warming completely debunked via the very internet he invented. Stewart was half joking but climate gate is no joke at all.
The massive emails from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University, let loose by a hacker or a whistleblower, pulls back the curtain on a scene of pettiness, turf protection, manipulation, defiance of Freedom of Information, lost or destroyed data and attempts to blacklist critics and skeptics of the global warming cause.
Now the CRU is not the only climate science advisory body but it is one of the most influential and feeds directly into the UN Panel on Climate Change. So let’s hear no more talk of the “Science is Settled.”
When it turns out:
Some of the principal scientists behave as if they own the very question of global warming;
They seek to bar opposing research from peer-reviewed journals, to embargo journals they can’t control;
They urge each other to delete damaging emails before Freedom of Information takes hold;
They talk of hiding the decline; when they actually speak of destroying the primary data.
And when now we do learn that the primary data has been lost or destroyed, they’ve lost the raw data on which all the models, all the computer generated forecasts, the graphs and projections are based. You wouldn’t accept that at a grade school science fair. Now CRU is not the universe of climate research but it is the star. These emails demonstrate one thing beyond all else that climate science and global warming advocacy have become so entwined, so meshed into a mutant creature, that separating alarmism from investigation, ideology from science, agenda from empirical study, is well nigh impossible.
Climategate is evidence that the science has gone to bed with advocacy and both have had a very good time. The neutrality, openness and absolute disinterest that is the Hallmark of all honest scientific Endeavor has been abandoned to an atmosphere and a dynamic not superior to the partisan caterwalls of a sub-average question period. Climate science has been shown to be in part a sub-branch of climate politics. It is a situation intolerable even to serious minds who are on side with global warming, such as Clive Crook who wrote an Atlantic magazine about this Scandal, as follows:
The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. Climate science needs its own reset button and climategate should be seen not primarily as a setback but as an opportunity to cleanse scientific method, to take science away from politics, good causes and alarmists, and vest climate science in bodies of guaranteed neutrality, openness, real and vigorous debate. And away from the lobbyists the NGOs, the advocates, the Gores and professional environmentalists of all kinds.
Too many of the current leadership on global warming are more players than observers, gatekeepers not investigators, angry partisans of some global re-engineering rather than the humble servants of The Facts of the case. Read the emails you’ll never think of climate science quite the same way again.
Footnote from Background Post
9 . Climategate. Climategate was a notorious event initiated by leaked emails in 2009 (with a second batch released in 2011) allegedly revealing the deceit and deception practiced by a prominent group of British (Climatic Research Unit or CRU) and American climate researchers (including Michael Mann of Penn State) who promote the theory of CAGW and supply much of the climate and temperature data and reports to the IPCC. The latter gives this group tremendous influence regarding the UN’s climate change agenda.
“There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.
“But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to ‘adjust’ recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.
“The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.”
As the Biden administration moves forward with expensive and economically devastating regulations on vehicles, dishwashers, stoves and other major appliances under the guise of fighting “climate change,” Americans are questioning the efficiency, validity and cost of the agenda.
New polling from Monmouth University shows a significant drop in “serious concern” over the issue of “climate change,” particularly among young people.
National Climate Concerns Dip
Younger adults express less urgency than in prior polls
West Long Branch, NJ – Most Americans continue to acknowledge the existence of climate change, according to the latest Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll, but the number who see this as a very serious problem has fallen below half.Support for government action to reduce activities that impact the climate has dipped below 6 in 10 for the first time since Monmouth began polling this topic nearly a decade ago. The poll finds that the drop in the importance and urgency of climate change has been most pronounced among younger adults.
“Most Americans continue to believe climate change is real. The difference in these latest poll results is a decline in a sense of urgency around this issue,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.
METHODOLOGY The Monmouth University Poll was sponsored and conducted by the Monmouth University Polling Institute from April 18 to 22, 2024 with a probability-based national random sample of 808 adults age 18 and older. Interviews were conducted in English, and included 163 live landline telephone interviews, 349 live cell phone interviews, and 296 online surveys via a cell phone text invitation. Telephone numbers were selected through a mix of random digit dialing and list-based sampling. Landline respondents were selected with a modified Troldahl-Carter youngest adult household screen. Interviewing services were provided by Braun Research, with sample obtained from Dynata (RDD, n=484), Aristotle (list, n=168) and a panel of prior Monmouth poll participants (n=156). Monmouth is responsible for all aspects of the survey design, data weighting and analysis. The full sample is weighted for region, age, education, gender and race based on US Census information (ACS 2021 one-year survey).
Demographics (weighted) Party (self-reported): 25% Republican, 44% Independent, 31% Democrat Sex: 49% male, 50% female, 1% other Age: 30% 18-34, 32% 35-54, 38% 55+ Race: 61% White, 12% Black, 17% Hispanic, 9% Asian/other Education: 38% high school or less, 29% some college, 17% 4 year degree, 16% graduate degree
A Monmouth poll released last month found only 15% of voters view climate change as a determinative issue in how they will vote in the 2024 presidential election, ranking far lower than inflation, immigration, and abortion. Compared to three years ago, climate change concern has declined by 8 percentage points among both Democrats (77% very serious, down from 85% in 2021) and Republicans (13%, from 21%) and by 13 points among independents (43%, from 56%).
My Comment:
The survey seems competent and credible. It is obvious that global warming/climate change serves as a political wedge issue favored by Democrats and disfavored by Republicans. Interestingly, with the decline of urgency in all groups, independents have flipped from slight majority favorable to unfavorable.
Note that climate change is undefined except as causing extreme weather and rising sea levels. I also think that the sequence of questions shows a bias for climate change to warrant governmental action. Putting that question first sets a context for expressing belief and concern over the climate, and then sets up the final question of support or opposition. The question of human vs. natural causation includes a “Both Equally” response, which typically masks unwillingness to say “Don’t Know.” However, even a 50-50 split between human and natural weakens the case for reducing human activity. Then the next question about preventing climate change presumes humans are causing it and can stop it. Yet the urgency is diluted by 17% “Too Late”, 51% “Still Time” and 23% “Not Happening.”
In spite of the above attempts to bias, the body politic does not give majority support for government climate action.
News comes from Financial Times that the prestigious scientific Royal Society is honoring it’s motto: “Take Nobody’s Word For It” (translation of Latin phrase above.) Of course, a great many UK academics were outraged at the refusal to take for granted their claim that “Climate Science is Settled.” The article by Kenza Bryan is Royal Society and academics clash over influence of oil and gas industry. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Three-centuries-old institution rebuffs call to
declare fossil fuel companies culpable for global warming
A clash between Britain’s 363-year-old Royal Society and more than 2,000 UK academics has escalated over the national academy of scientists’ refusal to attribute the role of oil and gas companies in climate change.
The academics had expressed their concerns about the influence of fossil fuel companies on scientific research in a letter last year to the Royal Society, founded in 1660 as a fellowship that included the likes of Isaac Newton.
But the Royal Society has now rebuffed their request to issue an “unambiguous statement about the culpability of the fossil fuel industry in driving the climate crisis”.
Treasurer Jonathan Keating wrote in reply last week that it would “not be appropriate” to do so, as there was a need for “multiple actors” to engage with the complexity of the climate crisis.
The academics’ concerns about the influence of oil and gas companies extend to separate allegations that ties to BP were not disclosed by a Cambridge professor in a Royal Society policy briefing document produced by a working group that he chaired in 2022.
Professor Andy Woods held the title of head of the BP Institute, a research arm that it funds, which was renamed the Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows by Cambridge last year. He also has the formal title of BP professor, a position endowed by the oil and gas company. These affiliations were not included in the reference in the document.
The Royal Society briefing document called for an “enormous and continued investment” into geological carbon capture and storage, a technology promoted by the fossil fuel industry as a way to keep expanding while storing the emissions.
A CO₂ storage adviser to BP and a director for CO₂ storage at the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate also contributed to the report. Woods’s expertise in geophysical fluid flows and the BP affiliation are listed elsewhere by the Royal Society in its fellowship directory. BP and Woods did not respond to a request for comment. The Royal Society said the document gave “clear affiliations” for contributors and that it publishes a wide range of research.
The tensions reflect the discord in academia about funding or
participation in research by oil and gas companies, as well as
rising activism on campuses among the student body and staff.
The Royal Society’s decision not to call out the industry was described as “moral cowardice” by James Dyke, earth system science professor at Exeter university.
Another signatory to the original letter, Bill McGuire, professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, said it was “mind-boggling” that a respected scientific organisation would not attribute the role of fossil fuel groups in climate change.
Student campaigners at Oxford university have also targeted the author of a set of green principles used by the university to help guide decisions on whether to invest in or receive grants from oil and gas companies.
Under freedom of information provisions, the student campaigners identified Myles Allen, the university’s head of atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics, as having had 18 meetings where a representative was present from one of the major oil and gas groups, including either BP, Shell, Exxon or Equinor.
Those meetings in 2021 and 2022 included five occasions organised by Shell, three of which focused on the oil and gas group’s strategy and climate scenarios, according to the freedom of information response.
Allen, who was head of the Oxford Net Zero research initiative until earlier this year, told the Financial Times he had used the meetings to highlight the need for fossil fuel companies to pay for carbon capture and storage technologies.
It is a solution to the reduction of future carbon dioxide emissions that he has long advocated. “We all have a duty to help the fossil fuel industry not make the problem worse but to fix it,” he said.
Oxford said its “partnerships and collaborations with industry” allow for research on pressing global issues, including climate-related ones.
The campaigners called on Oxford to conduct an independent assessment about its approach to fossil fuel sector donations and investment. Cambridge university in March temporarily stopped accepting grants and donations from the sector in response to similar concerns.
Mark Steyn knows something about this movement and provides his usual cutting analysis of what is going on. The article at his blog isThe Three Rs, well worth reading. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Does anyone still talk about the Three Rs in education? That would be reading, writing and racism …whoops, my mistake, ‘rithmetic.
It isn’t difficult. Every weekend, my inbox fills up with readers demanding to know what I think about this or that news story, but in the end all the news stories are the same. Just from the last couple of days:
~At McGill University in Montreal, cute young predominantly female students in masks and keffiyehs take over the campus to demand “intifada until victory”;
~At the University of Texas in Austin, a comedian attempts to point out to members of Trans 4 Palestine the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition, and for his pains gets beaten up;
~At Châteauroux in central France, fifteen-year-old Mathis Marchais is stabbed to death by an Afghan “migrant” known to the gendarmes for two previous stabbings earlier this year but loosed on the public by an indulgent judge just last Monday;
~In Hamburg, over a thousand protesters march through the streets calling for an Islamic caliphate in Germany.
The Three Rs: Read the Writing on the wall – and do the ‘Rithmetic. Like I said, it’s not difficult – although it seems to be for some of the willing dupes who brought us the western world’s new reality.
They belong to the “Official Jews” for whom mass Muslim immigration is less of a threat than those awkward types who point out the obvious consequences of mass Muslim immigration. The “Official Jews” are not confined to Canada: America is awash with them, as is the United Kingdom. And unless, as Kathy Shaidle used to say, they’re “too stupid to be Jewish” what’s happening cannot have come as a surprise. Me a zillion years ago:
Young Muslims do not like Jews: that is a simple fact, and it’s a waste of everybody’s time denying it. Where Muslims predominate, Jews vanish – as in Molenbeek, across the canal from downtown Brussels. I remember from my childhood the main drag, the Chaussée de Gand (or Steenweg op Gent, if you’re Flemish, as my mum was), as a bustling strip with many Jewish businesses. But in the first decade of the 21st century they all disappeared, and their former owners chose to remain silent – because it was easier that way.
And thus the seeming paradox of the post-war era – that, as a certain “niche Canadian” has been saying for years, the principal beneficiary of western Holocaust guilt was Islam. The Canadian Islamic Congress and America’s ADL and their European equivalents did not choose merely “to remain silent”: they enthusiastically welcomed it, and did their best to crush those who disagreed.
This isn’t about Jews, except insofar as they are presently
at the sharp end of a convulsive cultural shift.
About six months after 9/11, I took a little trip to Western Europe and the Middle East and, waiting for a friend in Vienna, I noticed that everybody going in and out of the maternity shop across the street appeared to be Muslim. That’s just anecdote, as the bien pensants who dismissed my book as “alarmist” like to say. But two decades on it’s borne out by statistics. Back then, Muslims made up of four per cent of Austria’s population; now it’s over eight per cent. Me, again years ago, from the expanded e-book edition of Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade:
According to the Vienna Institute of Demography, by mid-century a majority of Austrians under fifteen will be Muslim. This is a country that not so long ago was ninety percent Catholic. But “not so long ago” is another country:
Salzburg, 1938, singing nuns, Julie Andrews — “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”
Salzburg, 2038:How do you solve a problem like sharia?
“Eight per cent” doesn’t sound like a lot. But, in western societies of elderly native populations, they skew young, and make up an ever larger percentage of your youth – close to a majority in certain European cities. Jews, on the other hand, are old. So, for those cutesy coeds, young Muslims are all around and young Jews are very thin on the ground.
The salient feature of the demonstrations roiling McGill, Columbia and
other western campuses is not that the pasty blonde trustiefundies are
“pro-Palestinian” but that they’re cool with being culturally Islamic.
Oh, to be sure, it’s mostly just keffiyehs and a few other fashion accessories; not yet full body bags and clitoridectomies. But why wouldn’t it have a purchase on them that Mr Housefather’s bleatings about how everyone should feel safe do not? The young want to belong, and what they most want to belong to is the future – and they grasp instinctively where the future’s headed.
They also get that these guys mean it. It is not coincidental that white upscale females are now among the most enthusiastic proponents of Hamas. For two generations, their menfolk have made the mistake of believing all that What Women Want bollocks, and the result is legions of “new males”, metrosexuals, soyboys – or, alternatively, depressive methheads chugging back Bud Light down in the man-cave. Me again: “We have made a world of men that women don’t want and women that men don’t want, and that doesn’t seem likely to end well.”
And suddenly there’s Ahmed and Shahid doing their Sheik of Araby Xtreme Sports routine:
At night when you’re asleep
Into your tent I’ll creep.
Whatever the respective charms of abortion or same-sex marriage, both are a biological dead-end. So, more obliquely, is the interminable prolongation of education and the impact of mass immigration on affordable housing. All four lead to later – and smaller – family formation. So men and women who would have been twenty-seven-year-old suburban dads and mums are now on the frontlines at McGill picking out their keffiyehs. Throw in open borders – and, as the icing on the cake, encourage your middle-school girls to prioritise “gender identity” and thereby render themselves infertile.
So the fertility-rate comeback that David Frum predicted almost two decades ago failed to materialise. Indeed, all that has happened since then is that America has joined Europe in the demographic death-spiral.
Two decades back, there was still time to change course. Instead, the governments of the west doubled down on the madness, and today averting the inevitable requires measures they have no stomach for. Yet, even as their parents drone on with their multiculti bromides, our youth get the reality: Queers 4 Palestine may be a delusion, but not as insane a delusion as “diversity is our strength”.
It’s not difficult: Do the math.
Footnote: Maybe We Get a Break from Climate Crisis Parades
Climate protests are so last year, it appears, as the same crowd now preoccupies itself with Gaza demonstrations. Is the truth that Left-wing protests are just fads chasing the latest issue du jour? The Telegraph‘s Ross Clark thinks so.
It’s hard not to notice a distinct switch in the targets of Lefty protesters over the past few months. They seem to have lost interest in protesting about climate change and have switched to Palestine and asylum-seekers instead.
The shift can be dated to last November during a protest held in Amsterdam, when Greta Thunberg suddenly seemed to decide that the planet was no longer worthy of her complete attention. She told the crowd that there “can be no climate justice on occupied land”, before blathering on about Palestine. It didn’t please one of her fans, who stormed the stage and seized her microphone, but as ever with Greta she seemed to manage to set a trend.
In the months since we have seen fewer and fewer climate protests as progressive mobs find other things to work themselves up about instead. Never mind that we are supposedly heading for climate Armageddon if we don’t abandon all oil and gas more or less instantly, a more urgent injustice seems to be that asylum seekers are being taken out of three star hotels and housed on a barge instead – a barge which, by the way, seemed to be perfectly adequate in its previous incarnation as accommodation for oil workers (although I guess in the minds of climate activists they needed to be punished).
“Like most Left-wing causes,” Ross suggests, climate change was “just a passing fad”. “The same crowd seems to have evolved seamlessly from anti-globalisation to the Occupy movement, to climate change and now to Palestine.”
Don’t forget BLM!
“If you want to be on trend with your protesting, better opportunities now lie elsewhere,” Ross concludes
Here’s a great short video for those who like to think science is settled on global warming/climate change, as only one example of hubris despite our limited understanding of natural phenomena. Further on is a discussion of the climate system we see as chaotic, another way of saying its behavior surpasses our understanding.
Readers here will know that I report frequently on the changes in Arctic ice extents during the year. So I was impressed to learn about fundamental mysteries underlying even this ordinary process. We do know a lot about the phase change of liquid water into ice. And we have a theoretical law that is predictable, but only when water is absolutely pure, i.e. only H2O with no gases or impurities dissolved in the sample. As the researcher explains, almost all of the water in nature has impurities and thus parts of the process are still beyond our scientific knowledge.
Our Chaotic Climate System
h/t tom0mason for inspiring this post, including his comment below
Foucault’s pendulum in the Panthéon, Paris
The Pendulum is Settled Science
I attended North Phoenix High School (Go Mustangs!) where students took their required physics class from a wild and crazy guy. Decades later alumni who don’t remember his name still reminisce about “the crazy science teacher with the bowling ball.”
To demonstrate the law of conservation of energy, he required each and every student to stand on a ladder in one corner of the classroom. Attached to a hook in the center of the rather high ceiling was a rope with a bowling ball on the other end. The student held the ball to his/her nose and then released it, being careful to hold still afterwards.
The 16 pound ball traveled majestically diagonally across the room and equally impressively returned along the same path. The proof of concept was established when the ball stopped before hitting your nose (though not by much). In those days we learned to trust science and didn’t need to go out marching to signal some abstract virtue.
The equations for pendulums are centuries old and can predict the position of the ball at any point in time based on the mass of the object, length of the rope and starting position.
Pictured above is the currently operating Foucault pendulum that exactly follows these equations. While it had long been known that the Earth rotates, the introduction of the Foucault pendulum in 1851 was the first simple proof of planetary rotation in an easy-to-see experiment. Today, Foucault pendulums are popular displays in science museums and universities.
What About the Double Pendulum?
Trajectories of a double pendulum
A comment by tom0mason at alerted me to the science demonstrated by the double compound pendulum, that is, a second pendulum attached to the ball of the first one. It consists entirely of two simple objects functioning as pendulums, only now each is influenced by the behavior of the other.
Lo and behold, you observe that a double pendulum in motion produces chaotic behavior. In a remarkable achievement, complex equations have been developed that can and do predict the positions of the two balls over time, so in fact the movements are not truly chaotic, but with considerable effort can be determined. The equations and descriptions are at Wikipedia Double Pendulum
Long exposure of double pendulum exhibiting chaotic motion (tracked with an LED)
But here is the kicker, as described in tomomason’s comment:
If you arrive to observe the double pendulum at an arbitrary time after the motion has started from an unknown condition (unknown height, initial force, etc) you will be very taxed mathematically to predict where in space the pendulum will move to next, on a second to second basis. Indeed it would take considerable time and many iterative calculations (preferably on a super-computer) to be able to perform this feat. And all this on a very basic system of known elementary mechanics.
And What about the Climate?
This is a simple example of chaotic motion and its unpredictability. How predictable is our climate with so many variables and feedbacks, some known some unknown? Consider that this planet’s weather/climate system is chaotic in nature with many thousands (millions?) of loosely coupled variables and dependencies, and many of these variables have very complex feedback features within them.
Hurricane Gladys, photographed from orbit by Apollo 7 in 1968 (Photo: NASA)
Summary
To quote the IPCC:
The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.
But as the IPCC emphasizes, the range for future projections remains enormous. The central question is “climate sensitivity” — the amount of warming that accompanies a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As of its Fifth Assessment Report in 2013, the IPCC could estimate only that this sensitivity is somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5°C. Nor is science narrowing that range. The 2013 assessment actually widened it on the low end, from a 2.0–4.5°C range in the prior assessment. And remember, for any specific level of warming, forecasts vary widely on the subsequent environmental and economic implications.
For now, though, navigating the climate debate will require translating the phrase “climate denier” to mean “anyone unsympathetic to the most aggressive activists’ claims.” This apparently includes anyone who acknowledges meaningful uncertainty in climate models, adopts a less-than-catastrophic outlook about the consequences of future warming, or opposes any facet of the activist policy agenda. The activists will be identifiable as the small group continuing to shout “Denier!” The “deniers” will be identifiable as everyone else.
Climate System Summation
Esteemed climate scientist Richard Lindzen ends a very fine recent presentation (here) with this description of the climate system:
I haven’t spent much time on the details of the science, but there is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.
Flow Diagram for Climate Modeling, Showing Feedback Loops
Paul Mueller does the analysis in his AIER article
Science Matters 