Electric cars are overhyped.

I read here about a revolutionary new battery which:

"would allow electric cars to be recharged instantly" That is not true.

The energy density of batteries is still about 1% that of gasoline. So the engine and fuel of electric cars still weighs a lot more and the journey range is a lot less.

Modern electric cars only drive very well on a full charge. Once they lose a proportion of their charge they are much less responsive.

So there are 3 or 4 big issues with electric cars: (1) The long time taken to recharge during which the car is useless, (2) Short range, (3) Lack of infrastructure, (4) Low energy density of batteries compared to liquid fuels like gasoline. This causes the weight of the engine/fuel to be much higher. So lowering the efficiency.

I discussed the prospects of electric cabs with one of the cab drivers who drives me on my daily journey to work. He thinks electric cars need to be a lot better to be useable as cabs. Meanwhile the local council want every cabbie to have an electric cab in 5 years. My cabbie thinks the local council don't give a toss whether the tech works or not. I think they just want to be seen to be 'saving the planet'.

PS: The local council in question is St Albans in England. It's not a "socialist" council, nor is it Enviro-Stalinist. It is split between Tories and Lib Dems. The electric cab initiative is mostly Lib Dem - who are like a light green Green Party.

"We are now consulting on the Councils proposals to introduce fully electric Hackney Carriages and Private Hire Vehicles to be licensed. The consultation will last for 12 weeks and will end on 15th June 2017,we hope to report the responses to the Licensing and Regulatory Committee on 18th July."

How did the UN come to believe that 99.9% of substances/activities they'd tested might pose a cancer risk?

The Campaign for Accuracy in Public Health Research wrote a recent article about how the UN's cancer agency IARC flat out refuse to say that coffee is safe to drink.

For decades, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) warned coffee drinkers that their favorite beverage might cause cancer. Finally, the agency updated its assessment in June 2016 and downgraded coffee to Group 3 or “not classifiable as carcinogenic to humans.” While this decision is a step in the right direction, it raises new questions and concerns.

First, IARC did not categorize coffee as Group 4, “probably not carcinogenic to humans,” even though there is considerable evidence supporting the health benefits of coffee consumption, including protection against Parkinson disease, liver disease, type 2 diabetes and liver cancer. Second, IARC’s decision to classify coffee in Group 3 rather than Group 4 represents a pattern of ignoring scientific evidence that supports certainty and the safety of products and behaviors. In fact, IARC has examined almost 1,000 agents over the past 30 years, only once classifying a substance as Group 4. IARC has explained this by saying that to be downgraded to Group 4, science would have to “prove a negative,” a statement that is neither reasonable nor useful to the goal of providing meaningful information to the public. In the end, IARC’s treatment of coffee provides another example of the urgent need to reform both the Agency and its processes.

This blog is my attempt to explain how this peculiar state of affairs arose

The idea that science should 'have to “prove a negative,”' seems to me to come straight out of what's now called 'precautionary thinking'. It also defies the scientific method. How did they do that? The IARC seem to have taken the precautionary principle, PP, and cubed it. The original PP said we should place a moratorium upon technologies which might have the potential to cause widespread environmental change (foreseen or unforeseen), posing a potential existential threat to life. The PP was the environment movement's alternative to cost benefit analysis, CBA. A kind of 'radical' risk analysis. Their arguments against GMOs, nuclear power, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and recently, nanotechnology, try to derive existential threats from otherwise benign technology. I sense the PP was only ever there to avoid CBA. Today enviros often call it 'precautionary thinking', with an implication that it's a way to looking at the world, rather than a principle to be applied in extremis (as the PP was supposed to be). I would not be surprised to find the IARC have never published or acknowledged a CBA of coffee. Please tell me I'm wrong.

How big is human CO2 contribution compared to earth's CO2 budget?

Nicholas Schroeder May 13, 2017 at 10:10 am

Per IPCC AR5 Figure 6.1 prior to year 1750 CO2 represented about 1.26% of the total biospheric carbon balance (589/46,713). After mankind’s contributions, 67 % fossil fuel and cement – 33% land use changes, atmospheric CO2 increased to about 1.77% of the total biosphere carbon balance (829/46,713). This represents a shift of 0.51% from all the collected stores, ocean outgassing, carbonates, carbohydrates, etc. not just mankind, to the atmosphere. A 0.51% rearrangement of 46,713 Gt of stores and 100s of Gt annual fluxes doesn’t impress me as measurable let alone actionable, attributable, or significant.

And in some other words.

Earth’s carbon cycle contains 46,713 Gt (E15 gr) +/- 850 Gt (+/- 1.8%) of stores and reservoirs with a couple hundred fluxes Gt/y (+/- ??) flowing among those reservoirs. Mankind’s gross contribution over 260 years was 555 Gt or 1.2%. (IPCC AR5 Fig 6.1) Mankind’s net contribution, 240 Gt or 0.53%, (dry labbed by IPCC to make the numbers work) to this bubbling, churning caldron of carbon/carbon dioxide is 4 Gt/y +/- 96%. (IPCC AR5 Table 6.1) Seems relatively trivial to me. IPCC et. al. says natural variations can’t explain the increase in CO2. With these tiny percentages and high levels of uncertainty how would anybody even know? BTW fossil fuel between 1750 and 2011 represented 0.34% of the biospheric carbon cycle.

 555
----- = 1.2%
46713

Why increasing CO2 can not lead to catastrophic global warming

From the blog: Knowledge Drift; The Science of Human Error

The effectiveness of CO₂ as a greenhouse gas, GHG, tails off logarithmically. On doubling CO₂, from 280ppm (pre-industrial level) to 560ppm an extra 3.7 W/m² warming is expected.

That is expected to lead to about 1ºC warming of the average global surface temperature. Note: more CO2 does not cause 'global warming', it just slows down the rate of loss of atmospheric warmth. All other things being equal that would cause warming. All other things are not equal. There is a negative feedback operating called the Stefan–Boltzmann effect. As temperature rises the rate at which black bodies emit heat increases according to the 4^th power of temperature. When the temperature increases the Stefan–Boltzmann relation means that everything else (ground and oceans) emits more black body heat. This extra heat is eventually radiated to space so is lost to the climate. This built-in negative feedback on temperature rise keeps earth's temperature at a reasonable level : a temperature rise leads to a faster emission of black body (LWIR) heat. The black body formula (Stefan–Boltzmann relation) used to calculate how much heat is being dissipated to space is P = 5.76 × 10^-8 × T⁴ where P is power in watts per square meter and T is temperature in degrees K or Kelvin. So the amount of LWIR emitted increases according to the fourth power of the temperature.

CO2 radiative forcing		Stefan–Boltzmann effect
CO2 ppm	Addition (W / m²)	Subtraction (W / m²)	P	T (ºC)	Net warming (W / m²)
280			396.3	15
560	3.7	5.5	401.8	16	-1.8
1120	7.4	11.1	407.4	17	-3.7

Comment: multiple catastrophic errors

The errors climate alarmists seem to have made are many-fold:

1. Eliding how the CO2 GHG effect tails off logarithmically,
2. Assuming the atmosphere is a heat sink. It is not. The oceans are earth's heat sink. Earth's atmosphere has a tiny heat capacity compared to its oceans. Oceans have over 1000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere
3. Misuse of this saw them to invent 'catastrophic warming' by putting all their extra heat into the atmosphere! (which it isn't going to hold!). It was a convenient con because a body with a small heat capacity can (in theory) be made to warm quite fast!
4. Logically, it would make more sense to put their extra heat into the oceans. Because the amount of heat which could, in theory, warm the atmosphere by 10ºC can only warm the oceans by 0.01ºC. Fail. Put the heat in the oceans and catastrophic global warming is not 'catastrophic'.
5. Ignored basic physics of the Stefan–Boltzmann negative feedback.
6. The majority of climate models miss (forget, or never bothered to consider) many ocean oscillation effects. These are like smaller versions of El Nino. In the North and South Atlantic and Indian oceans. In this situation an area of the ocean collects warm water. Heat is transferred to the atmosphere by evaporative cooling, etc. So oceans heat the atmosphere. Not CO₂. CO₂ just slows down the rate of cooling. Ocean oscillations give global warming records a bumpy or spikey appearance.
7. ... on to infinity. There will always be yet one more 'error' they're prepared to make to push their alarmist/Luddite/Malthusian political agenda.

Global circulation model hindcasting - real or fabricated?

Global circulation models - AKA climate models claim to be legitimate because they say they can hindcast previous atmospheric temperatures. i.e. They claim their model projections reproduce past climate. For example: The global cooling period from the early 1940s to mid-1970s. This was done by adding a special factors (aerosols) for this period which they claim is no longer important today. Some people this is just fabricated data to give the GCMs a gloss of legitimacy. Just about all GCMs run too hot. They mis-forecast future temperatures too hot.

This is another 'reblog' of a comment.

---

Allan M.R. MacRae January 9, 2017 at 5:47 am,

Ladies and Germs,

Have you looked at the model-hindcasting/fabricated-aerosol issue, as described below?

The climate models do not honestly hindcast the global cooling period from ~1940 to ~1975, because their authors fabricated false aerosol data to force hindcasting.

Therefore, the models cannot forecast anything, because they cannot hindcast. except through fraudulent inputs.

Hypothesis:

The climate models cited by the IPCC typically use values of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 (ECS) values that are significantly greater than 1C, which must assume strong positive feedbacks for which there is NO evidence. If anything, feedbacks are negative and ECS is less than 1C. This is one key reason why the climate models cited by the IPCC greatly over-predict global warming.

I reject as false the climate modellers’ claims that manmade aerosols caused the global cooling that occurred from ~1940 to ~1975. This aerosol data was apparently fabricated to force the climate models to hindcast the global cooling that occurred from ~1940 to ~1975, and is used to allow a greatly inflated model input value for ECS.

Some history on this fabricated aerosol data follows:

More from Douglas Hoyt in 2006:

The P-T (extinction) event was caused by global cooling, not warming as previously blamed.

Hot off the press - revolutionary climate finding - The worst extinction event in earth's history (according to wikipedia) was caused by global cooling - not by global warming (as previously thought). So much for "the science is settled"

Quote (from WUWT):

... Scientists from the UNIGE explain the global temperature drop by a stratospheric injection of large amounts of sulphur dioxide reducing the intensity of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth. “We therefore have proof that the species disappeared during an ice age caused by the activity of the first volcanism in the Siberian Traps,” added Urs Schaltegger. This ice age was followed by the formation of limestone deposits through bacteria, marking the return of life on Earth at more moderate temperatures. The period of intense climate warming, related to the emplacement of large amounts of basalt of the Siberian Traps and which we previously thought was responsible for the extinction of marine species, in fact happened 500,000 years after the Permian-Triassic boundary ...

--WUWT

Alarmists think CO₂ caused the P-T event, 252 million years ago, by causing run-away global warming. They got everything precisely back to front. They are exactly wrong. This P-T event is one of the reasons they get so uptight and rude when you don't believe their propaganda. Many of them think they are saving the world from an analogous P-T extinction by stopping "carbon pollution". Idiots!!!

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”

-- T.S. Eliot

Ref: Timing of global regression and microbial bloom linked with the Permian-Triassic boundary mass extinction: implications for driving mechanisms, by Björn Baresel, Hugo Bucher, Borhan Bagherpour, Morgane Brosse, Kuang Guodun & Urs Schaltegger. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 43630 (2017). doi:10.1038/srep43630

Polar bear "decline" ?

This is a rare example in the climate debate where the evidence is clear cut: one side lies and the other tells the truth, and it's obvious. Counting polar bears is quite simple (compared to most other climate science).

That's why I picked this example. It's impossible to disagree on the science without lying.

• Climate alarmists say that polar bear populations are on the decline because the arctic ice is melting. On this side we have the Royal Society twitter account, Desmogblog, National Geographic, and The National Wildlife Federation, etc.
• Climate 'deniers' say that polar bear populations are increasing since we banned hunting them. On this side is zoologist Susan Crockford who's studied polar bears extensively and wrote a few books on them. She tweeted.

Crockford 2017 https://t.co/prBw00Zp1Z

Armstrong et al, 2008 were right (in critique of USGS #polarbear survival forecasting) to conclude: pic.twitter.com/OF7vu1EkFP

— Susan Crockford (@sjc_pbs) March 2, 2017

The challenge is: If Susan Crockford is wrong on polar bears, read her paper and explain to me how and where she goes wrong. If you believe Susan Crockford is wrong and Desmogblog are right, but you can't point out an error in Susan's paper then you are anti-science.