Climate Ideology

Why Climate Doomsters Can’t Recant

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Ted Nordhaus writes at The EcoModernist Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist,
And why so many climate pragmatists can’t quit catastrophism.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In the book Break Through, Michael Shellenberger and I argued that if the world kept burning fossil fuels at current rates, catastrophe was virtually assured.  I no longer believe this hyperbole. Yes, the world will continue to warm as long as we keep burning fossil fuels. And sea levels will rise. About 9 inches over the last century, perhaps another 2 or 3 feet over the course of the rest of this century. But the rest of it? Not so much.

There is little reason to think that the Amazon is at risk of collapsing over the next 50 years. Agricultural yield and output will almost certainly continue to rise, if not necessarily at the same rate as it has over the last 50 years. There has been no observable increase in meteorological drought globally that might trigger the resource wars that the Pentagon was scenario planning back then.

Figure 3: CMIP6 GCM ensemble mean simulations spanning from 1850 to 2100, employing historical effective radiative forcing functions from 1850 to 2014 (see Figure 1C) and the forcing functions based on the SSP scenarios 1-2.6, 2-4.5, 3-7.0, and 5-8.5. Curve colors are scaled according to the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) of the models. The right panels depict the risks and impacts of climate change in relation to various global Reasons for Concern (RFCs) (IPCC, 2023). (Adapted from Scafetta, 2024).

At the time that we published Break Through, I, along with most climate scientists and advocates, believed that business as usual emissions would lead to around five degrees of warming by the end of this century. As Zeke Hausfather, Glen Peters, Roger Pielke Jr, and Justin Richie have demonstrated over the last decade or so, that assumption was never plausible.  The class of scenarios upon which it was based assumed very high population growth, very high economic growth, and slow technological change. None of these trends individually track at all with actual long term global trends.

Fertility rates have been falling, global economic growth slowing,
and the global economy decarbonizing for decades.

As a result of these dynamics, most estimates of worst case warming by the end of the century now suggest 3 degrees or less. But as consensus around these estimates has shifted, the reaction to this good news among much of the climate science and advocacy community has not been to become less catastrophic. Rather, it has been to simply shift the locus of catastrophe from five to three degrees of warming. Climate advocates have arguably become more catastrophic about climate change in recent years, not less.

When Is Weather Climate Change?

For me, the cognitive dissonance began as I became familiar with Roger Pielke Jr’s work on normalized hurricane losses, in the late 2000s. This was around the time that a lot of messaging from the climate advocacy community had started to focus on extreme weather events, not just as harbingers for the storms of our grandchildren, to borrow the title of James Hansen’s 2009 book, but as being fueled by climate change in the present.

If you want to know why Pielke has been so demonized over the last
15 years by climate activists and activist climate scientists,
it’s because he got in the way of this new narrative.

Integrated Storm Activity Annually over the Continental U.S. (ISAAC)

Pielke’s work, going back to the mid-1990s showed, again and again, that the normalized economic costs of climate related disasters weren’t increasing, despite the documented warming of the climate. And unlike a lot of researchers who sometimes produce studies that cut against the climate movement’s chosen narratives, he wasn’t willing to be quiet about it. Pielke got in the way of the advocacy community at the moment that it was determined to argue that present day disasters were driven by climate change and got run over.

Put these two factors together—the outsized influence that exposure and vulnerability have on the cost of extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the very modest intensification that climate change contributes to these events, when it plays any role at all—and what should be clear is that climate change is contributing very little to present day disasters. It is a relatively small factor in the frequency and intensity of climate hazards that are experienced by human societies, which in turn play a small role in the human and economic costs of climate related disasters compared to non-climate factors.

This also means that the scale of anthropogenic climate change that would be necessary to very dramatically intensify those hazards, such that they overwhelm the non-climate factors in determining the consequences of future climate related events, is implausibly large. 

A Sting in the Tail?

For a long time, even after I had come to terms with the fundamental disconnect between what climate advocates were saying about extreme events and the role that climate change could conceivably be playing, I held on to the possibility of catastrophic climate futures based upon uncertainty. The sting, as they say, is in the tail, meaning so-called fat tails in the climate risk distribution. These are tipping points or similar low probability, high consequence scenarios that aren’t factored into central estimates. The ice sheets could collapse much faster than we understand or the gulf stream might shut down, bringing frigid temperatures to western Europe, or permafrost and methane hydrates frozen in the sea floor might rapidly melt, accelerating warming.

But like the supposed collapse of the Amazon, once you look more closely at these risks they don’t add up to catastrophic outcomes for humanity.  While sensationalist news stories frequently refer to the collapse of the gulf stream, what they are really referring to is the slowing of the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation (AMOC). AMOC helps transport warm water to the North Atlantic and moderates winter temperatures across western Europe. But its collapse, much less its slowing, would not result in a hard freeze across all of Europe. Indeed, under plausible conditions in which it might significantly slow, it would act as a negative feedback, counterbalancing warming, which is happening faster across the European continent than almost any place else in the world.

Permafrost and methane hydrate thawing, meanwhile, are slow processes not fast ones. Even irreversible melting would occur over millennial timescales, fast in geological terms but very slow in human terms. The same is true of accelerated melting of ice caps. Even under very high warming scenarios, broadly acknowledged today as improbable, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets contribute around a meter of sea level rise by the end of this century. Those processes would continue far into the future. But even very accelerated scenarios for rapid disintegration of ice sheets unfold over many centuries, not decades.

Moreover, the problem with grounding strong precautionary claims in these known unknowns is that doing so demands strong remedies in the present in response to future risks that are both unquantifiable and unfalsifiable, a problem made even worse by the fact that “fat tail” proponents generally then proceed to ignore the fact that the unknown, unquantifiable, and unfalsifiable risks they are referring to are incredibly low probability and instead set about centering them in the climate discourse.

Clean Energy Without Catastrophism

Why do so many smart people, most trained as scientists, engineers, lawyers, or public policy experts, and all who will tell you, and I say this not ironically, that they “believe in science,” get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?

There are, in my view, several reasons. The first is that highly educated people with high levels of science literacy are no less likely to get basic scientific issues wrong than anyone else when the facts conflict with their social identities and ideological commitments. Yale Law Professor Dan Kahan has shown that people who are highly concerned about climate change actually have less accurate views about climate change overall than climate skeptics and that this remains true even among partisans with high levels of education and general science literacy. Elsewhere, Kahan and others have demonstrated that on many issues, highly educated people are often more likely to stubbornly hold onto erroneous beliefs because they are more expert at defending their political views and ideological commitments.

The second reason is that there are strong social, political, and professional incentives if you make a living doing left of center climate and energy policy to get climate risk wrong. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total. There is little tolerance on the Left for any expression of materialist politics that challenge foundational claims of the environmental movement.  Meanwhile the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk for which there is no consensus whatsoever.

Whether you are an academic researcher, a think tank policy wonk, a program officer at an environmental or liberal philanthropy, or a Democratic Congressional staffer, there is simply no benefit and plenty of downside to questioning, much less challenging, the central notion that climate change is an existential threat to the human future. It’s a good way to lose friends or even your job. It won’t help you get your next job or your next grant. And so everyone, mostly falls in line. Better to go along to get along.

Finally, there is a widespread belief that one can’t make a strong case for clean energy and technological innovation absent the catastrophic specter of climate change. “Why bother with nuclear power or clean energy if climate change is not a catastrophic risk,” is a frequent response. And this view simply ignores the entire history of modern energy innovation. Over the last two centuries, the world has moved inexorably from dirtier and more carbon intensive technologies to cleaner ones. Burning coal, despite its significant environmental impacts, is cleaner than burning wood and dung. Burning gas is cleaner than coal. And obviously producing energy with wind, solar, and nuclear is cleaner than doing so with fossil fuels.

There is a view among most climate and clean energy advocates that the risk of climate change both demands and is necessary to justify a much faster transition toward cleaner energy technologies. But as a practical matter, there is no evidence whatsoever that 35 years of increasingly dire rhetoric and claims about climate change have had any impact on the rate at which the global energy system has decarbonized and by some measure, the world decarbonized faster over the 35 years prior to climate change emerging as a global concern than it did in the 35 years since.

Despite some tonal, tactical, and strategic differences, this basic view of climate risk, and corresponding demand for a rapid transformation of the global energy economy is broadly shared by the climate activists and the pragmatists. The impulse is millenarian, not meliorist.

Underneath the real politik, technocratic wonkery, and appeals
to scientific authority is a desire to remake the world.

For all its worldly and learned affect, what that has resulted in is the creation of an insular climate discourse on the Left that may be cleverer by half than right wing dismissals of climate change but is no less prone to making misleading claims about the subject, ignoring countervailing evidence, and demonizing dissent. And it has produced a politics that is simultaneously grandiose and maximalist and, increasingly, deeply out of touch with popular sentiment.

Shifting Climate Discourse

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Fun fact: Mentions of “climate crisis” in corporate media have all but imploded. Why? Because the PR propaganda campaigns aren’t needed when Democrats and their dark-money-funded NGOs aren’t pushing “green” bills or fundraising. H/T Tyler Durden

The climate crisis was merely the Democrat Party’s PR operation to siphon money from taxpayers.

Postscript on Story Counts

I don’t know the source and parameters behind the chart in Tyler Durden’s post.  Below is a chart I produced from Media Cloud based on U.S. National Online News sources.

Canada Update: Suddenly, Climate Hysteria is Gone

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Joe Oliver writes at Financial Post And suddenly, climate change hysteria is gone.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Only 4% of Canadians think climate change is our top problem.
But many of them are hard-core activists ready to block projects.

Over the past several months, public concern about climate change has declined dramatically, replaced by newfound enthusiasm for the development of Canada’s vast oil and gas reserves. The federal government is now under mounting political pressure to expedite the construction of pipelines to tidewater that will bring economic growth, employment, energy security and funding for social programs or tax relief.

What caused the sharp reversal in public opinion?
And will the government actually deliver?

Prime Minister Mark Carney has long championed climate catastrophism and a commitment to net zero, both in his various jobs on the world stage and in his 2021 book, Values. After entering politics, however, he has embraced fossil fuels, and the legacy media have joined him in a head-spinning abandonment of its obsessive focus on global warming’s alleged existential threat to humanity. Whether Carney’s transformation reflects transitory political expediency or is an overdue acknowledgment of economic and scientific reality is now key to Canada’s economic prospects.

Over the past four decades, incessant advocacy from the scientific establishment, media and opinion leaders made first global warming and then climate change the consensus view. Deviation jeopardized reputations and careers, especially for scientists and academics, who risked losing funding or even their jobs. It was no surprise, then, that in 2022, 73 per cent of Canadians believed we were confronting a climate emergency. But now, according to a recent Leger poll, only four per cent say climate change is the number one issue facing Canada.

President Donald Trump’s shocking tariffs and 51st-state talk have diverted Canadians’ attention from climate change. And so have the exorbitant costs of green policies, the growing realization that nothing Canada does can measurably impact global temperatures, and the fact that green policies either weren’t adopted in many countries or have became politically toxic in countries where they were. Despite literally trillions of dollars being spent globally on reducing emissions, hydrocarbons still account for over 80 per cent of the world’s primary energy.

According to McKinsey, achieving net zero globally by 2050 would cost the Western countries a prohibitive $275-550 trillion. That makes it politically untenable.

Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler recently argued that green policies are largely responsible for European GDP falling from equal to American in 2008 to just two-thirds of it today. Soaring energy prices have led to de-industrialization, compounding the effects of high taxes and social spending, intrusive regulations and a protected workforce. Canada also, and for similar reasons, suffered a lost decade: growth of just half a per cent in real GDP per capita — compared with 20.7 per cent in the U.S.

And maybe the public has finally become skeptical of endless prophecies of impending disasters: “endangered” polar bears almost tripled in the past 50 years; hundreds of Pacific islands have increased in land size; death from extreme weather decreased by 99 per cent in the past 100 years; nine times as many people die from the cold as the heat; and so on. The Little Ice Age ended in the late 19th century with a gradual rise in temperatures — if not, we would still be in an ice age. Yet just 14 months ago, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said we had only two years to save the planet.

Future psychologists, economists and historians will examine the early 21st-century phenomenon of collective climate hysteria, what drove it, what ended it (if it has ended) and what damage it wrought. One thing is all but certain: there will be no admission of guilt for the enormous harm inflicted on Canada and other economies. Although the public has moved on, a hard-core group of climate militants is prepared to exploit every legal and regulatory impediment to resource development in Canada. The federal government will have to use all its legislative and executive authority to push the new energy projects it says it favours through to completion. Only then will Canadians know whether Mark Carney has truly changed his core beliefs.

See Also

Update: Global Warming is a matter of opinion in Canada

In 2015 Canadians were asked:

1. “From what you’ve read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past four decades?”
Yes
No
Don’t Know (volunteered)

2. [If yes, solid evidence] “Is the earth getting warmer mostly because of human activity such as burning fossil fuels or mostly because of natural patterns in the earth’s environment?”

Human Activity
Natural Patterns
Combination (volunteered)
Not sure / Refused (volunteered)

So the 79% who said there’s solid evidence of warming the last 40 years got a followup question: mostly caused by human activity or mostly natural? Slightly more than half said mostly human, thus a result of 44% believing both that it is warming and that humans are mostly to blame.

Climate Model Assumptions Contrary to Balloon Data

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Recently Michael Connolly presented the evidence contradicting assumptions built into GCMs (Global Climate Models).  This post consists of the exhibits he used, and additional Connolly comments in italics from a similar talk this month to Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. (Video embedded later in post.)

Michael Connolly:

I’m an engineer and a scientist. As an engineer, I use computer models to design and make things. As a scientist, I look at the data to see if my computer models are correct. So, what we did at the center for environmental research and earth sciences (CERES) is that we looked at the data from 20 million radio balloons.

We then asked, can we look at this data and see how we can use it to check the computer models? And we found there’s two types of balloons. One: the average weather balloon does about a 100 measurements as it goes up to the stratosphere. But the ones which measure ozone do a measurement about once every second. So you have maybe four or 5,000 measurements on each sample. But all of the climate models, and by the way, nobody in the climate model community bothered to check the data to see if their models were correct, which I find very bizarre. But what all of the model community do is they divide the earth into a number of little boxes. So on a horizontal scale the boxes are about 1,000 mi long and on a vertical scale they’re about less than a mile in height.

They then make a number of assumptions about how the air behaves within each of these boxes. So their first assumption is that the air in each box is in a state which we call thermodynamic equilibrium. which I’ll explain in a few minutes. So they assume that on a horizontal scale the air in a box is in equilibrium over a distance of a 1,000 miles. But on a vertical scale only in equilibrium for slightly less than a mile.

And they also assume that the different boxes are not in thermodynamic equilibrium with each other. Because if it turns out that the boxes are in thermodynamic equilibrium with each other, all of the assumptions of the climate models collapse because Einstein and his co-authors over a 100 years ago showed that if a system was in thermodynamic equilibrium, if you put in a greenhouse gas into that system, it would absorb more energy. But if it’s in thermodynamic equilibrium, it emits more energy. So increasing the level of greenhouse gases will increase the rate of absorption but also increase the rate of emission. So there’s no net change due to the radiation. So if it turns out that the assumption that the the different boxes aren’t in thermodynamic equilibrium is false, then the whole theory of man-made global warming collapses.

So how do we know if something is in thermodynamic equilibrium or not? Well, what you do is you take a system and you do all the measurements of the different parameters involved and if you can describe the system in what’s called an equation of state with using these parameters, then we say the state is in thermodynamic equilibrium. So in other words, obeying an equation of state is one side of the coin of being in thermodynamic equilibrium. They’re both different sides of the same coin.

So for the air, the equation of state is this. It’s called the ideal gas law. And this is the equation that’s used by the climate modelers in treating the different boxes as being in thermodynamic equilibrium. You can see down there it tells you the relationship between the different parameters, but it doesn’t tell you how much energy it would take to change the temperature of a system. For that you need to know the heat capacity of the system. And it doesn’t tell you anything about potential energy. In other words, if I take a cubic meter of air and lift it up and keep it at the same temperature and pressure, it would obey the same equation, but it would have gravitational potential energy because it takes energy to lift it up. That’s not reflected in the equation of state.

As a chemist I thought there was something dead obvious to do. The equation of state can be rewritten in a different form called the molar density form, and this form has been used by chemists for hundreds of years to determine the molecular weight of new gases. So we asked what happens if we describe the atmosphere in terms of molar density form instead of the energy form? We were the first and still the only people to have done this.

When we did that we got a big surprise. We found that if you plot the molar density versus pressure you get these two straight lines. Now this means that the atmosphere in the troposphere, that’s the lower bit, is obeying an equation of state. So that means it’s in thermodynamic equilibrium. And when you get to the tropopause it turns into another straight line. Now this is quite common in studying materials. If you can describe it in terms of one equation of state and then it changes into another equation of state, we call it a change of phase. For example, you can describe water using the gaseous water using the gas laws, but then when it turns into liquid water, you have to use a different equation of state.

 

Now we studied all the different weather balloons from all around the world and we found that this phenomenon occurred in all of them. The only difference was that in the tropics the change of phase occurred at a higher altitude and in the Arctic and polar regions it occurred at a lower altitude. So, when we were here in Tucson 5 years ago,  we made a video for the entire year of all of the radio balloon data for Tucson for 2018. And the reason for this video is that looking at a static graph like that, you don’t see any changes. Now, in the models that they’re using, the different boxes are isolated from each other, if you put energy into one of the boxes, it would kind of stay there. But if they’re in thermodynamic equilibrium, you put energy into one box, then all of the boxes will change because all of the energy will be distributed throughout the system. When you look at the video, the behavior of the boundary layer position moves up and down.

But also the temperature: if it moves to the right, the temperature is increasing. If it moves to the left, the temperature is decreasing. And what you will see once you watch the video, it’s all synchronized. In other words, if a change occurs, if the troposphere is warming up and the temperature is moving to the right, the tropopause moves down, the tropopause moves in the opposite direction. So in other words, when the troposphere heats up, the tropopause cools down. when the troposphere cools down the tropopause heats up and it does so in a synchronized way. So that synchronization shows that it’s thermodynamically connect connected. The idea that all of these boxes are not in thermodynamic equilibrium is contradicted by this data.  [The referenced video starts at 10 minutes into the embedded presentation below.]

So that’s the first assumption. Now looking at the second assumption.
Back in the day,  18th century or something, Hadley was looking to explain the trade winds. So he came up with this idea of what happens: The very hot temperatures landing on the equator heated up the atmosphere. here and this hot air then rose up. Then as it rose up it started to move towards the poles and as it moved towards the poles it cooled down and you got this circular phenomenon. They came up with three different types of circular cells: the Hadley cells; the Ferrel cells and the Polar cells. But all of these this theoretical stuff was based on ground measurements.

And again uh nobody bothered to check whether this is true or not. So I’ll just show how we checked it. But first of all I just want to explain what’s meant by mass flux. So if you take a square meter and you measure the air flowing through it and what weight of air that is the mass flux. So in the weather balloons they give you the speed of the air and they give you the direction in which it’s it’s going. So you can use this to calculate the mass flux. So we said fine. So can we use this to check the idea of the Hadley cells and it turns out that you can. So we did and we published a paper two years ago.

We found first of all if you take a balloon and you launch it up through one of these cells then if Hadley is correct you would expect the hot air was rising here in the tropics and that drags in the air from the colder regions and then it hits the tropopause. Now, when Hadley came up with the idea, nobody knew the tropopause existed, and it’s only 30 years before I was born that it was actually discovered. So, that’s telling something about my age.

Anyway, if you send a balloon up through the atmosphere, you would expect the mass flux flow to flow in that direction down at the lower levels. And then as you go up at some stage it would shift over and start going in the opposite directions. So since that was available that mass flux we could measure from the balloon data we did that and we got a surprise.

There was absolutely no circulation patterns at all. Instead what the atmosphere was doing. So if we point here you can see these ones are the lower ones. So you have the direction the north south direction of the mass flux. These are the ones at the lower half of the troposphere. These are the ones in the opposite half of the troposphere.

For a Hadley cell you would expect these ones to be flowing in the opposite direction to these ones. But instead what we find is they all flow in the same direction. And in a very unusual pattern. What happens is here it’s flowing south then the atmosphere slows down over a couple of days goes back and forth and so on. So instead of this circular pattern what’s happening is the whole atmosphere is moving like a giant pendulum back and forth. So we have the atmosphere going one way, then after a few days it turns around and comes back in the opposite direction. And this is for Iceland but we found the exact same thing occurred for all the different stations.

So in that published paper we we took a station from each of the different five climate types and we found the exact same sort of thing happened. Now people said: okay so maybe it’s going back and forward on a daily basis but over a period of a year it might average out. So we average the data over the five years for each of the stations.

And since we published that paper, we’ve analyzed over 250 of the weather stations in the tropics. And we found for these 82% of them are Hadley. 73 in the northern hemisphere. So the majority are not Hadley cells. And in the southern hemisphere they’re equally balanced. But the problem with even the ones that were Hadley cells is you can see here the mass flux grow flowing in this direction the area under the curve is not the same as the one up above. And if it was a proper Hadley cell, they’d have to be the same. So what we found is for none of them this worked out. So they don’t exist, right?

 

 

John Stossel Goes Off on Big Green Racketeers

Posted on by Ron Clutz

H/T Mark Krebs, who commented:  This 5-minute by the great John Stossel packs a punch. Like me, he’s a recovering environmentalist who is still a conservationist but has become sick and tired of the manner in which huge elitist tax-exempt NGOs have used the cause to empower and enrich themselves.

For those who prefer reading, below in italics is the transcript from closed captions with my bolds and added images.

Climate change. We are seeing the impacts more and more each day.
So, what are you doing about it? Our future is on the line.

You can help save the world, say these environmental groups, just donate!The first thing that comes up on their websites is donate. Donate.

Why is it so important to donate to this fundraiser for Greenpeace?
Because it’s too hot, because it’s too cold, because it rains, because it doesn’t.
So, give us money. Money.

Your gift will help NRDC come to the defense of polar bears.
To get more money they lie. They are facing extinction in this century.
They say polar bears are disappearing. They aren’t.

They claim bees are dying off. Greenpeace set itself a challenge to put a stop to the deaths of thousands of bees. But bees are doing fine.

Environmental groups claim nuclear energy is dirty and dangerous, when it’s better than alternatives.

They call climate change an existential threat. It’s a problem, but not existential.  These scares drive donations.

Science writer Jon Entine.
They always feel that the only way they can talk about environmental issues is to frame it with hysteria, crisis. But they’re not trying to trick people. They believe it.

Sometimes they believe it. But they also recognize that hysteria generates donations and the oxygen for these organizations is money donated by people who think they’re doing good.

So, you give billions to these groups. Insufficient attention has been made to following the money.

Physicist Mark Mills.
The environmental industrial complex actually has more money in the PR game, in the lobbying game, than the real industry. The media portray the activists as plucky underdogs, the little guy. But they’re not.
Greenpeace pulls in more than $400 million a year and they want more.

Our fundraisers are doing street or door fundraising. They pay young people to accost you.
Even if it’s only two or three people each day, knowing that they’re gonna be giving to Greenpeace for a hell of a long time.

Some of your millions in donations to the World Wildlife Fund help pay for its 250,000 sq foot headquarters with, as they proudly put it, a “stunning eight-story, sky-lit atrium.” They call this, “wise use of donated funds.”  Support WWF’s global conservation work. That’s just 40 cents a day.

The Natural Resources Defense Council spends some of your millions on galas with fashion brands and celebrities, who also make ads for them. This is our moment!  Give to the Sierra Club and you can attend their lavish ball here.

The so-called environmentalists are now the big guys, rolling in money.  It’s bad enough that they lie to us and get paid. Worse is the damage they do.  They block progress. They have billions of dollars to not build a thing, but just to oppose building things.

There’s a rich sense of irony there. Irony because while they say they’ll save the bees. Ultimately that donation goes to a lawyer suing someone, preventing you from using gasoline.

Some of your money does go to people cleaning parks or rivers, but groups like the NRDC and Sierra Club spend millions more on lawsuits.

In the past year our legal team has stopped thousands of miles of fossil fuel pipelines and dozens of large power plants.

We have the Sierra Club active in every state, actively suing. A natural gas pipeline that was supposed to span 3 states has been cancelled. Environmentalists sued to stop it.

They sue to stop nuclear power. They even oppose solar projects and wind farms.
It’s that apparatus that’s keeping us from building.

It used to be NIMBY, not in my backyard. Now it’s BANANA.
Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone.

And unfortunately, what that means is we don’t get the lifestyle that we want.

If you wanted to build a new house, for example, what kind of permits do you have to get?
Who do you have to talk to? Is the Sierra Club gonna sue you for building the wrong thing?

I’m ashamed that I once fell for their scams. Years ago my TV station ran ads promoting my alarmist environmental reporting. Now I realize that what today’s big environmental groups mostly do is stop progress and make lawyers richer.

We invited the groups to come here and explain to me why I’m wrong.  Defend your work.
Not one would agree.

I still want to ask them how they justify making it so hard for people to build anything.
It’s a shame because really when I think about what America could be, what we could be building, we could be so prosperous, so much more prosperous than we are.

See Also:

Time for Billionaires to Fund Climate and Social Realism

Abolishing the Climate Politico-Legal-Media Complex

 

The Real Climate Science Crisis: CAGW Hypothesis Lacks Scientific Evidence

Posted on by Ron Clutz

From C3 headlines The Real Climate Science Crisis: The Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) Hypothesis Is Without Scientific Evidence.  Excerpts in italics with my added images.

For a hypothesis to reach the status of being a legit theory, it requires withstanding the onslaught of observed empirical evidence. The CAGW hypothesis is no such animal.

Known by its more contemporary aliases, such as ”climate crisis,” “climate emergency,” “climate collapse,” or “existential threat,” the CAGW has zero empirical evidence to support it.

Unlike the related hypothesis regarding greenhouse gases (GHG) and global warming, at least the GHG hypothesis has warming global temperature data that somewhat coincides with increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, putting aside the growing possibility that the purported cause-and-effect direction is probably the reverse.

In order to reach a CAGW climate disaster, global warming
temperatures must change rapidly in an accelerating manner
that will initiate a ‘tipping point’ for the climate.

The rapid acceleration would present its occurrence in a continuous increasing of the slope, i.e., trend, of temperatures, such as monthly temperatures. Each subsequent month would represent a greater temperature magnitude increase than the month before, hypothetically.

But those tipping point precursors are not occurring in the real-world climate.

For example, it is agreed by all climate scientists that oceans play a very major role in the world’s climate and its global temperatures due to their being both the world’s largest carbon sink and its largest heat content storage.

However, despite these characteristics, in totality, the global oceans HAVE NOT warmed since the year 2014. And certainly, there is no empirical evidence that oceans exhibit constant temperature increases of magnitude.

Quite the contrary, combined oceans exhibit a regular pattern of temperature decreases and increases, as the adjacent plot of NOAA’s monthly ocean data indicates.

Specifically, this is a plot (dark blue) of moving 5-year temperature changes ending each month of the 60-year period from March 1963 through March 2023.

[Explanation: the first data point is the temperature change for the 60 months ending on March 30, 1963; and the chart’s last temperature change data point is for the five 5 years (i.e. 60 months) ending on March 2023.]

The chart also includes a plot (green) of the moving 60-month CO2 level changes over the same sixty year period, plus a linear trend for both CO2 changes and ocean temperature changes.

The trend of the 60-month CO2 changes significantly exceeds the slight positive trend of ocean temperature changes by a factor of 117x. This huge differential undercuts the belief that global warming is primarily the result of GHGs. Which is confirmed by the paltry R^2 of +0.06 – an almost non-existent relationship between 5-year atmospheric CO2 changes and 5-year changes in ocean temperature.

Not only are the large increases in CO2 levels not causing a concerning uptick of temperature change magnitude, it also has not lead to any type of acceleration, per the linear trend since 1963.

Specifically, with a trend of a tiny +0.0001°C, that would project out 20 years to be an increase of 5-year temperature changes to an insignificant amount of +0.024°C – definitely not an existential threat of ‘runaway warming’ or a CAGW ‘climate crisis’ as portrayed by bureaucrats, politicians and Hollywood celebrities.

So, if 5 years of increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere barely influence 5-year changes in temperature over a 60-year span, either in magnitude or acceleration rate, then it is highly unlikely that this trace gas would cause a catastrophic climate disaster or an extinction event.

Thus, it is fair to state that for all those scientists pushing a narrative of an imminent climate change catastrophe from CO2 without the requisite empirical evidence, this has become the real climate science crisis facing society.

Meet Téa Johansson, Teenage Climate Realist

Posted on by Ron Clutz

For those who prefer reading, below is a transcript lightly edited from the closed captions with my bolds along with some of the exhibits and added images.

Life on Earth is in crisis crop failure, social and ecological collapse, mass extinction.  We have a moral duty to take action.  These statements made by Extinction Rebellion reflect the climate alarmist narrative that has continued to escalate across the Western world.  Hysteria over climate change can be seen throughout history, from the human sacrifices of the Aztecs to bring back rain, to the Salem witch trials to eliminate the women they blamed for crop failure during the little ice age.

Today the climate industrial complex is funded by trillions of dollars seeking to control what we buy, eat and where we are allowed to travel,  all in the name of sustainability and achieving net zero carbon emissions.  This fear campaign is rooted in the belief that we will not look into the data ourselves, but instead look to the governments and to the media to tell us what is true.

Today I will demonstrate that temperatures fluctuate and are not unprecedented, and that natural disasters are not getting worse. I will also highlight the unreliability of climate data and the role of CO2.  Ultimately I will present scientific evidence to show that we are not in a climate crisis.

Historical temperature records indicate that we are not in the climate crisis western governments claim.  We are looking at a graph of the past 65 million years from NOAA.  The Earth today seems to be in a particularly cool period; in fact the Earth is still coming out of an ice age. History demonstrates that life has existed and thrived in much warmer temperatures, and that temperatures have been much higher without the human influence of industrial CO2 emissions.  

Historical temperature records indicate that the temperature of the Earth naturally fluctuates over time as it has for the past 65 million years.  In just the past 2,000 years there have been two warm periods and two cold periods.  The Roman warm period, also called the Roman optimum, was known as a time of prosperity.  This of course goes against the entire narrative that warming threatens human life.  Following the Roman warm period came the cold dark age,  the medieval warm period, and the Little Ice Age.  The current warming from 1800 onwards is the warming of recovery from the Little Ice Age.  However temperatures are still cold compared to distant times and continue to visibly fluctuate.  

Given this evidence,  the claim by scientists and news pundits that 3° Fahrenheit is the end of civilization is not cause for alarm.  Because it is not unprecedented and because temperatures will continue to fluctuate today.  The argument for climate change is rooted in the belief that warmer weather and CO2 emissions have been causing natural disasters to become more frequent and more violent.   However after studying hurricane and wildfire data, it became clear that actual activity goes against this global warming narrative.

This graph from the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society shows the number of hurricanes in the US per year since 1900 showing a slight downward trend for the past 120 years.  The strength and duration of hurricanes shows a similar lack of crisis.  

A graph from the National Hurricane Research Laboratory illustrates the North Atlantic hurricane intensity from 1920 to 2016, where there is evidently no trend. However the data presented to the public by the 2014 National Climate Assessment of the United States is limited to the portion highlighted in red creating an illusory upward trend.

This graph starting in 1920 shows that the number of acres burned by wildfires in the US has been decreasing.  Similarly the number of acres burned globally since 1900 has steadily declined as well. Ultimately the presented evidence goes against the narrative that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have been making the weather worse.

To understand the science behind the climate crisis claims of today, it is necessary to highlight the unreliability of available data.  This is most evident in the disparity between climate model predictions and the observed data.  In this graph illustrating temperature change, the blue line representing data taken from weather balloons matches up well with the green line showing data taken from satellites. However the red line represents the climate models used by the UNIPCC to predict future global warming.  These observations show that actual warming is about one third of that predicted.

Temperature measurements are greatly affected by what is called the urban heat island effect.  Since concrete picks up heat, temperatures taken in cities are much higher than those taken in rural areas.  For example in a thermal radiation map of the city of Paris, the middle of the city produces a deep red color representing heat, while the rural areas around the city project a green to bluecolor representing milder temperatures.  

This gap represents one way that climate alarmists can instill fear by embellishing data to serve their agenda. Perhaps the greatest tool of the climate industrial complex is the supposed evil of CO2.  However CO2 is not the control knob for climate change mainly because it is only 0.04% of the atmosphere.  I’ll say it again:  CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere.  A visual comparison of CO2 to the other atmospheric gases shows how barely negligible is the gas in comparison.  

Although the mainstream media has tried to alarm its consumers with the accelerating emissions of CO2, the Earth is actually in a CO2 famine.  Current levels are about 423 parts per million; however in the past they have been at least a thousand parts per million and have likely reached 8,000 parts per million.

While the narrative states that CO2 directly causes the rise in temperature, it has been found that quite the opposite is true.  The relationship between CO2 and temperature is not that more CO2 causes a rise in temperature, but that a rise in temperature causes an increase in CO2.   Carl Wunsch, professor of oceanography at MIT, found that when the ocean warms more CO2 is released into the atmosphere.  On the other hand when the ocean is cold, CO2 is absorbed into the water.  

In a graphical correlation between temperature and CO2, it is found that when a rise in temperature occurs, a rise in CO2 follows a few centuries later.  In this graph CO2 rose 800 years later in response to a surge in temperature.

Like everything else in the world, CO2 may have some small factor in climate, while there are countless of other factors affecting temperature.  Some examples are volcanic activity, cosmic rays, and the sun.  This highlights how if we were to limit CO2,  it would only stunt biodiversity while having almost no effect on temperature.  Because of the fact that it is only one small factor in a sea of greater causes.

Some call CO2 the gas of life because it plays an instrumental role in the process of photosynthesis. It comes as no surprise that most farmers use high levels of it in their green houses to produce a better crop.  In this picture four pine trees are shown growing at different levels of added CO2, from normal atmospheric CO2 to an added 150, 300, and eventually 450 parts per million.  More CO2 is evidently beneficial for plant growth.  Physicist Lubos Motl, former professor at Harvard, summarized the importance of CO2, saying “It is the key compound that plants need to grow, and indirectly every organism needs to have food.  At the end it is clear that CO2 is not, as the New York Times frighteningly put it, a tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom.   Nor will it cause famine as many claim; if CO2 increases it will only green the planet and increase the food supply.

Across the western world climate change has been coined as an existential threat to mankind.  While this sentiment is not new over the course of history, as it can be seen through the Aztecs and even in the Salem witch trials.  It has once again become relevant in today’s culture with policies such as carbon taxes and individual CO2 budgets being proposed in our governments.  We are seeing the climate issue creep into every part of our lives.

This is why I I found it necessary to pursue the truth and the climate debate.  In my speech I presented the scientific evidence behind historical temperature change and natural disasters,  discovering the unreliability of climate data, the small role of CO2 in climate, and its essential role in biodiversity.   As a result I’ve concluded that the climate crisis is a hoax that we must arm ourselves against by pursuing the truth and by looking into the data ourselves.

Our Atmospheric Heat Engine

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Climate as heat engine. A heat engine produces mechanical energy in the form of work W by absorbing an amount of heat Qin from a hot reservoir (the source) and depositing a smaller amount Qout into a cold reservoir (the sink). (a) An ideal Carnot heat engine does the job with the maximum possible efficiency. (b) Real heat engines are irreversible, and some work is lost via irreversible entropy production TδS. (c) For the climate system, the ultimate source is the Sun, with outer space acting as the sink. The work is performed internally and produces winds and ocean currents. As a result, Qin = Qout.

A previous post presented Michel Thizon’s description of gravity’s effect on the mass of air functioning as a climate thermostat. Some years ago Dr. Murry Salby wrote in detail about the troposphere operating as an heat engine and the stratosphere as a refrigerator. This post consists of excerpts from Salby’s textbook entitled Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate. The title is a link to pdf version of the book Salby (2012). Text in italics with my bolds and added images.

A closed system that performs work through a conversion of heat that is absorbed by it is a heat engine. Conversely, a system that rejects heat through a conversion of work that is performed on it is a refrigerator. In Chap. 6, we will see that individual air parcels comprising the circulation of the troposphere behave as a heat engine.  By absorbing heat at the Earth’s surface, through transfers of radiative, sensible, and latent heat, individual parcels perform net work as they evolve through a thermodynamic cycle (2.13). Ultimately realized as kinetic energy, the heat absorbed maintains the circulation against frictional dissipation. It makes the circulation of the troposphere thermally driven.

In contrast, the circulation of the stratosphere behaves as a radiative refrigerator.  For motion to occur, individual air parcels must have work performed on them. The kinetic energy produced is eventually converted to heat and rejected to space through LW cooling. It makes the circulation of the stratosphere mechanically driven. Gravity waves and planetary waves that propagate upward from the troposphere are dissipated in the stratosphere. Their absorption exerts an influence on the stratosphere analogous to paddle work. By forcing motion that rearranges air, it drives the stratospheric circulation out of radiative equilibrium, which results in net LW cooling to space. Salby (2012) p. 83.

Irreversible processes in the atmosphere. Neglecting radiative processes (not shown here), the largest sources of irreversibility in the atmosphere are those associated with the hydrologic cycle: evaporation, the mixing of moist and dry air, and the melt–freeze cycle (60–80% collectively), and the fallout of precipitation (5–15%). Those contributions limit the entropy generated by frictional dissipation of the winds (5–15%), which ultimately places a limit on the work performed by the atmospheric heat engine in generating circulations. Percentages are estimated based on global climate simulations12 and idealized high-resolution simulations.8

Changes of thermodynamic state that accompany vertical motion follow from the distribution of atmospheric mass, which is determined ultimately by gravity. In the absence of motion, Newton’s second law applied to the vertical reduces to a statement of hydrostatic equilibrium (1.16). Gravity is then balanced by the vertical pressure gradient force. This simple form of mechanical equilibrium is accurate even in the presence of motion because the acceleration of gravity is, almost invariably, much greater than vertical acceleration of individual air parcels. Only inside deep convective towers and other small-scale phenomena is vertical acceleration large enough to invalidate hydrostatic equilibrium.

Because it is such a strong body force, gravity must be treated with some care. Complications arise from the fact that the gravitational acceleration experienced by an air parcel does not act purely in the vertical. It also varies with location. According to the preceding discussion, gravity is large enough to overwhelm other contributions in the balance of vertical forces. The same holds for the balance of horizontal forces. Horizontal components of gravity that are introduced by the Earth’s rotation and other sources must be balanced by additional horizontal forces. Unrelated to air motion, those additional forces unnecessarily complicate the description of atmospheric motion.  Salby (2012) p. 150.

The temperature of a dry air parcel decreases with its altitude at the dry adiabatic lapse rate. To a good approximation, the same holds for a moist air parcel under unsaturated conditions – because the trace abundance of water vapor modifies thermal properties of air only slightly. Under saturated conditions, the adiabatic description of air breaks down due to the release of latent heat that accompanies the transformation of water from one phase to another. Latent heat exchanged with the gas phase then offsets adiabatic cooling and warming, which accompany ascending and descending motion. Salby (2012) p. 162

Net heat absorption and work performed by individual air parcels make the general circulation of the troposphere behave as a heat engine, one that is driven thermally by heat transfer at its lower and upper boundaries. Work performed by individual parcels is associated with a redistribution of mass: Air that is effectively warmer and lighter at the lower boundary is exchanged with air that is effectively cooler and heavier at the upper boundary. This redistribution of mass represents a conversion of potential energy into kinetic energy. The conversion of energy maintains the general circulation against frictional dissipation. Salby (2012) p. 163

The idealized behavior just described relies on heat transfer being confined to the lower and upper boundaries of the layer, where an air parcel resides long enough for diabatic influences to become important. Between the boundaries, the time scale of motion is short. For motion that operates on longer time scales, typical of the stratosphere, the evolution of an individual air parcel is not adiabatic.

Radiative transfer is the primary diabatic influence outside the boundary layer and cloud. It is characterized by cooling rates of order 1 K day−1 in the troposphere (see Fig. 8.24). Cooling rates as large as 10 K day−1 occur in the stratosphere and near cloud (Fig. 9.36). (2012) p. 164

Unlike the troposphere, buoyancy in the stratosphere opposes vertical motion because, invariably, warm (high-θ) air overlies cool (low-θ) air. To exchange effectively-heavier air at lower levels with effectively-lighter air at upper levels, work must be performed against the opposition of buoyancy. The rearrangement of mass represents a conversion of kinetic energy (that of the waves driving the motion) into potential energy. Manifest in temperature, the potential energy is dissipated thermally through LW emission to space. (2012) p. 168

See Also

Fearless Physics from Dr. Salby

In reading the textbook, I found two main reasons why Salby is skeptical of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarm. This knowledgeable book is an antidote to myopic and lop-sided understandings of our climate system.

  1. CO2 Alarm is Myopic: Claiming CO2 causes dangerous global warming is too simplistic. CO2 is but one factor among many other forces and processes interacting to make weather and climate.

Myopia is a failure of perception by focusing on one near thing to the exclusion of the other realities present, thus missing the big picture. For example: “Not seeing the forest for the trees.”  AKA “tunnel vision.”

2. CO2 Alarm is Lopsided: CO2 forcing is too small to have the overblown effect claimed for it. Other factors are orders of magnitude larger than the potential of CO2 to influence the climate system.

 

Lop-sided refers to a failure in judging values, whereby someone lacking in sense of proportion, places great weight on a factor which actually has a minor influence compared to other forces. For example: “Making a mountain out of a mole hill.”

Gravity-induced Atmospheric Thermostat

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Michel Thizon published in 2024 a paper explaining why earth’s always variable climate is constrained within a narrow range.  Influence of Adiabatic Gravitational Compression of Atmospheric Mass on the Temperature of the Troposphere.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images

ABSTRACT

The temperature that the Earth’s surface would have without the greenhouse effect, with an atmosphere completely transparent to infrared radiation, or even without an atmosphere at all, is generally estimated at -18°C. The greenhouse effect is estimated to induce a warming of 33°C to justify the surface temperature of +15°C.

To explain this discrepancy, we examine, with the ideal gas law, to which the Earth’s atmosphere obeys with its normal conditions of pressure and temperature, the role that the adiabatic compression of the atmospheric mass subjected to gravity can play. The dimensional analysis of the ideal gas law demonstrates that compression of the atmosphere produces energy, which can be calculated in Joules.

The temperature of the atmosphere near the Earth’s surface is influenced by
its invariable atmospheric mass, solar irradiation and the greenhouse effect.

This calls into question the commonly established Earth’s energy budgets which consider almost exclusively radiative effects, and which deduce a back radiation attributed to the greenhouse effect which is abnormally high.

Earth temperature without atmosphere or greenhouse effects

Goody et al., estimated the solar energy available to heat, both directly and indirectly, the earth and its atmosphere at an average of 224 W/m-2 [1]. Applying the Stefan-Boltzmann law they assumed that the Earth radiates as a perfect black body in the infrared band at a temperature of 255.5 K (or min 17.6°C) for the effective emission temperature [2]. These authors noted that this temperature is lower than the average temperature of the Earth’s surface and indicated that much of the radiation to space must come from the atmosphere rather than from the surface. Goody et al., arbitrarily assigned a value of 1 to the emissivity ε for the calculation, while Jacquemoud assigned a value of 0.98 [3].

According to Hansen, a solar irradiance of 1367 W/m-2 or generally accepted today 1361 W/m-2, but varying with solar fluctuations, leads to a surface temperature of 255 K (or min 18°C), which induces a greenhouse effect of +33°C [4]  Cotton reported that the emission temperature is -19°C and the earth temperature is +14°C, which corresponds to a global greenhouse effect of +33°C [5]. The global greenhouse effect is also estimated at +33°C [6-8]
.
Logically, at -18°C the surface of the earth without an atmosphere or with an atmosphere totally transparent to longwave radiation and that plays no physical role, without any greenhouse effect, should be entirely frozen and covered with frost over its entire surface. This would result in a high Albedo which could be on the order of 0.5 to 0.9 instead of an albedo of 0.30 or 0.29 generally accepted in its current state. In this situation, instead of the solar energy absorbed by the surface reaching approximately 160 to 168 W/m-2 (Figure 1) this energy could be on the order of 70 W/m-2 [9-11]. The Stefan-Boltzmann formula yields a potential surface temperature of approximately -85°C [2]. Note that at these temperatures the water vapor pressure above ice is infinitesimal and could only generate an infinitesimal greenhouse effect. However, according to Nikolov et al., the effects linked to the atmosphere would bring approximately 90°C and not 33°C to the surface at a temperature of 15°C [12,13]. This would suggest that the global  natural effect of atmosphere could be on the order of 90°C rather than the 33°C of the traditional purely radiative approach as reported by almost all the authors.

Global mean energy budget of the Earth

Many authors have endeavored to establish an overall assessment of the energy flows to which the earth is subjected to justify the surface temperature in an essentially radiative system. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself places great emphasis on this in each of its reports. The Figure 1 summarizes the values and differences obtained while Table 1 summarizes the main authors who evaluated this earth assessment over a period of approximatively twenty years.

Figure 1. Range of nine energy balances (minimum/maximum according to the authors).

Table 1. Global energy balance of the Earth according to the authors.

The dispersion and imprecision of the results do not allow the effect on surface temperature to be deduced with sufficient accuracy. These budgets must be improved as noted by Lupo et al. [22]

Effect of atmospheric pressure

Few authors have mentioned the role that an atmospheric mass subject to gravity could play in temperature. We can nevertheless cite Leroux [23] Jelbring [24], and Chilingar [25] but these authors evoke a potential role of atmospheric pressure on a qualitative level without seeking to calculate and quantify the effects, probably given the difficulty of integrating the atmosphere as a whole. Nikolov et al. clarify the role of atmospheric pressure for several planets through a complex semiempirical iterative approach [11]

Dimensional analysis of the ideal gas law PV=nRT

The ideal gas law PV=nRT is one of the most fundamental laws of physics and applies entirely to the lower troposphere under its usual conditions of pressure and temperature. This universally accepted law, established in 1834 by Émile Clapeyron, has been perfectly stable for nearly 200 years, which is the case for very few physical laws.

  • P is the pressure (Pa);
  • V is the volume of the gas (m3);
  • n is the quantity of material (mol);
  • T is the absolute temperature (K);
  • R is the universal constant of ideal gases (8.314 J K−1 mol−1);

Dimensional analysis leads to:
R=PV/nT i.e., J K−1 mol−1=Pa.m3 K−1 mol−1, Hence J=Pa.m3=energy

The volume of air multiplied by the pressure to which it is subjected is considered energy (Joules). The atmosphere is heated by compression due to the gravitational field to which it is subjected. Isolated in space, the Earth can only exchange energy with space by radiation, but the atmospheric mass cannot radiate spontaneously since its homonuclear constituents O2, N2, and Ar are passive and cannot radiate.

The earth’s surface is warmer and the atmosphere cannot cool down on contact with it. The compression is thus adiabatic. The greenhouse gases contained in the atmosphere at low levels, mainly H2O and CO2, are capable of radiating at long wavelengths but do not interact radiatively with O2 and N2; additionally, they are under the influence of permanent terrestrial infrared radiation, which they are capable of absorbing, and which is generated continuously from the solar energy received by the Earth’s surface.

The process includes the upward expansion, toward vacuum of the agitated molecules whose kinetic energy decreases and therefore the pressure, which causes cooling with altitude. It is not due to a  decrease in gravity which decreases by less than 3/1000 at a 10 km altitude but of a struggle between gravity and the suction of the vacuum, until the equilibrium which defines an adiabatic thermal gradient. Gravity nevertheless prevents air molecules from escaping into space. Only some H2 molecules can reach the release speed.

RESULTS  Heating of the atmosphere in °K by adiabatic compression

Table 2. Data for an air layer 100 m thick. The left part is from U.S. Standard Atmosphere, according to The EngineeringToolBox [26]

As a tight approximation, for 100 m of atmospheric thickness
Altitude 0 m

  • PV=(10.13 × 104 Pa) (5.101 × 1016 m3)=5.167 × 1021 J
  • Volumetric heat capacity of air C=1256 J m−3 K−1 (at 0 m, 15°C)
  • For 5.101 × 1016 m3 of air; +1°K requires 1256 × 5.101 × 1016 J=6.41 × 1019 J
  • 5.167 × 1021 J/6.41 × 1019 J=80.7
  • +80.7 K overheating due to pressure

Note: With an air layer of 200 m the precision is lower and leads to an overheating of 80.6 K

Gravity compression results, to the Earth’s surface, in 80.7°C of natural greenhouse energy equivalence, which means that to reach 15°C the initial temperature without atmosphere would be -65.7°C, very different from the -18°C admitted by radiative approaches for an inactive atmosphere.

Direct application of the ideal gas law T=PV/nR

  • Altitude 0 m T=(10.13 × 104 × 5.10 × 1016)/(2.165 × 1018 × 8.314)=287.1 K (+14.0°C)
  • Altitude 5,000 m T=254.9 K (-18.2°C)
  • Altitude 10,000 m T=222.4 K (-50.7°C)
  • Altitude 15,000 m T=215.3 K (-57.8°C)

The standard thermal gradient from 0 to 10 km is -6.49°C/km. The ideal gas law explains phenomena linked to temperatures up to 10,000 m in altitude. Beyond that, the results diverge, and other factors and phenomena are involved, like ozone and UV influence.

CONCLUSION

The temperature on the surface of the earth is mainly determined by the action of gravity on the atmospheric mass, which is an immutable fact on a scale of millennia. Climatic variations are the result of lesser phenomena. The solar influence is felt during the day by the direct radiation received, mainly when the sun is at its zenith, and the balance is modified by direct thermal exchanges between the sunny surface and the air in contact. The earth’s surface and the upper layers of the atmosphere radiate permanently towards space by emitting infrared radiation day and night, thus restoring the overall balance.

Surface infrared radiation is probably less intercepted in the lower troposphere by greenhouse molecules than is usually thought, thus explaining the surface temperature. However, there is an atmospheric dynamic, in particular through the water cycle, by evaporation-condensation, but whose overall energy balance is zero. Air mass movements and convection contribute to the overall dynamics, mainly due to the rotation of the Earth and the alternations between the presence and absence of solar radiation.

Astronomical fluctuations in sunshine, surface phenomena such as ocean currents, El Niño or La Niña phenomena, extreme weather phenomena or even volcanic eruptions, as well as other factors that are probably poorly characterized, lead to variations in surface temperature that nevertheless remain relatively damped due to the stabilizing effect of the invariable atmospheric mass subject to gravity.

See Also

Planetary Warming: Back to Basics

 

Green Schemes Hidden by Greenhushing

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Transcript excerpted from captions of  Interview with Bjorn Lomborg What is behind business ‘greenhushing’? [FN refers to comments from FOx News interviewers, BL to Bjorn Lomborg]

FN: From Climate Talk to climate realism. As energy secretary Chris Wright says climate change is a side effect of building the modern world. Banks and businesses seem to be finally getting on board with this. But moving from unrealistic promises, greenwashing lies and environmental fear-mongering, risks some engaging in greenhushing, purposely keeping quiet about sustainability actions.

Our next guest says climate solutions come with their own set of costs [you can read his op-ed excerpted later in this post]. And joining us now, and Brian and I are both huge fans of Bjorn Lomborg’s work. He’s Copenhagen Consensus President. Bjorn, so great to see you.

What are you concerned with in terms of going from greenwashing to then kind of burying what these corporations are doing now?

BL: Well the real problem is for a long time corporations have been saying “Oh we’re going to be so green,” and they got lots of applause and everybody said “Oh this is great in Davos and stuff.” And of course it’s not what businesses mostly should be doing. But now with Trump and everything else, people are realizing, “Oh wait, this is not a good idea.” So they’ve stopped talking about it but they’re still doing a lot of it. And actually a new survey of of about 4,000 sustainability people in these big corporations said, “Yeah we’re going to talk a lot less about it, but we’re still going to do it. We’re actually going to do a little more.”

And that’s troublesome because this is not what businesses should be doing.
They should be in the business of making great products and high profits.

FN: So there’s a debate out there. You’ve got the CEOs of these companies and the question is: Do they really believe in the green thing or were they just doing it because the social pressure was so strong? And now they’re pulling back because really at the end of the day they agree with you, they just want to run their businesses.

What I hear you saying is in fact the guys running these businesses really are bought into the green agenda and they will do it again when the political environment lets them speak more freely. Is that what you’re saying?

BL: It’s hard to know. I think you’re right a lot of the CEOs are saying, I actually want my business to run and drive a profit. But now they’ve hired so many other people, sustainability experts and everybody else. Of course if that’s your job, you’re pushing for doing more of that. So I think it’s important for businesses to rein in and say:

“Look we’re not going to be doing this anymore, we’re actually going to go back and focus on what we’re good at, namely servicing customers.”

FN: This goes to something else that you’ve written about, that corporations need to focus on creating things profitably, because the environment improves as nations prosper. And the greatest polluter is poverty. We saw with John Kerry here in the United States and him talking to subsaharan Africa about cutting off any funding and financing for them to extract fossil fuels from the earth and thereby bring their nations out of poverty. Keeping nations poor makes the environment worse, rather than allowing them to develop into modern societies.

BL: Absolutely. I wrote two things for Earth Day. First we have to recognize there are environmental problems. And it’s great that we get a better environment, and fundamentally when you get rich you can actually afford to do a lot of this. And as you point out poverty is the biggest polluter, because if you’re poor, you quite frankly have other important issues. So you’ll cut down your rainforest or whatever else you need to do.

Secondly, it also emphasizes as you just pointed out that most nations and especially poor nations need to get out of poverty by doing what we’ve done. They want to have access for a lot more energy and mostly that is going to be fossil fuels. Remember when Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe decided to say “All right we’re not going to go and get any energy from Russia.” But they didn’t say “Oh so we’re going to go all green.” They actually went to Africa to buy up their fossil fuels because we want to keep our living standards. But they simultaneously told the Africans, “But you shouldn’t be using it, you should actually go all green.” That’s just hypocrisy absolutely.

Excerpts from Lomborg op-ed Time to pull the plug on corporate virtue-signaling

The era of being cheered on for every green promise and vow
– regardless of how silly or self-defeating – has come to an end

Climate change is undeniably a real problem which has tangible economic impacts. However, climate solutions also come with their own set of costs, often demanding that businesses and individuals rely on pricier, less dependable energy sources. The decision to balance the expenses of climate policies with the advantages of climate action falls rightly under the responsibility of governments, not profit-driven businesses.

Yet over the past decade, even major contributors to climate change – such as the fossil fuel industry itself – invested in extraordinary green policies. Five years ago, BP made an astonishing promise to slash its oil and gas production by 40% by 2030, while increasing green energy generation twentyfold and becoming net-zero.

Now, along with other big, Western oil companies,
it has abandoned those farcical green promises and
recommitted to its primary activity: fossil fuels.

No doubt, this U-turn will be lamented by green activists. But the truth is that these promises were always an inefficient way of helping the planet, and very shortsighted for fossil fuel companies. Even after the world has spent $14 trillion on climate policy, more than four-fifths of global energy remains supplied by fossil fuels.

Over the past half-century, fossil fuel energy has more than doubled, with 2023 again setting a new record. Consumers and businesses are crying out for more energy, while competitor state-owned oil companies from the Middle East have continued to provide more fossil fuels. It is a foolish energy company that declares it will supply less energy.

Banks also had a fling with green policies, and have now dumped them, with the six largest U.S. banks leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, and Wells Fargo officially abandoning its goal of achieving net-zero emissions across its financial portfolio by 2050.

In the peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a study finds that of 1,500 “climate” policies announced around the world, a mere 63, or 4%, produce any reduction in emissions.

While some industries are moving faster than others, there are signs that many companies will just change their language, and not their inefficient climate policies.

As leaders of international organizations and corporations scramble to adapt to an entirely new world, it’s important they go further than just shifts in rhetoric. The era of being cheered on for every green promise and vow – regardless of how silly or self-defeating – has come to an end. Now it’s time for those leaders to get back to business.