'Climate Change' is an obsession or 'ideology'

Living in Harmony.

We often seek deep patterns in thought to explain ideas. For example eco-modernists see modern environmentalism as a prescription and ideal for humanity to live in harmony with nature. This harmonic notion is behind the organic farming fad. It animates enviro oppossition to scientific agriculture, finely-tuned genetic techniques to improve crops, and even fish-farming. It explains enviro worship of primitive lifestyles and beliefs of Wiccan, hunter-gatherers, and off-grid drop-outs. Harmonic obsessions help explain their fervour for renewable energy and land-intensive energy systems such as solar, wind and bio-energy systems. Eco-modernists believe that by leaving harmonic obsessions behind they've liberated environmentalism from its worst excesses.

Stasis and Equilibrium

It's a shame self-styled eco-modernists stopped their analysis at harmonic fixation. There is an even more pervasive 'idée fixe' ruling the thoughts of the modern enviro and climate intelligentsia: an obsession with equilibria. The common idea uniting many so-called Left and Environmental ideas is a notion that equilibria are desirable states to aim for. That anything which isn't aiming for equilibrium is pathological. These imaginary pathologies, falling short of the ideals, include: Capitalism, climate change, fossil fuel use, ...

We see it in both climate policy prescriptions and analyses. Analyses increasingly blame nearly all "climate change" on more atmospheric carbon dioxide! Not just recent change, but past change hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago. We know for sure that a lot of past climate change is due to Milankovitch cycles combined with continental drift. For example: the changes resulting in the current Ice Age which now dominates our climate. Once they started down the path of blaming carbon dioxide, climate scientists forgot the science and, instead became anti-carbon evangelists. I think Mann, Hayhoe, ... and their acolytes show these symptoms. They can't talk about climate without demonizing carbon dioxide.

Climate policy seems to actually believe that climate change can be stopped. That we can, and should, 'go back to' a mythic, perfect climate associated with 280ppm (or is that 350ppm?) CO₂. Surprisingly this is never really stated. It is assumed that we all desire this imaginary, perfect, past climate state - whether, or not, it ever existed! Seeking utopias is not a first for humanity. But harking back to an assumed utopia is a bit crazy?

Why do we dream up impossible ideals to aspire to?

Fear of resource depletion and losing balance became tied to a dreams of renewable energy, sustainable and 'circular economies. Our fears need alternative ideas to aspire to and counter negativity. That's part of our nature. Fear alone cripples us. Environmentalists created counter-narratives such as 'climate optimism' to rally around and diffuse their fears of resource depletion, over-population, Capitalism and environmental pollution. These optimistic narratives are invariably templated from equilibria. For example: 'climate optimism' promoted renewables where and when-ever. Not, at first, as a non-CO₂ energy technology, but purely for its own sake. Germany's Energiewende was a perfect example of that. Done at vast expense, Energiewende had nothing much to do with reducing CO₂ emissions in electricity generation. None of the major politicians promoting it gave emissions reductions more than a passing footnote. So don't be surprised it did nothing much to reduce Germany's carbon footprint.

Equilibrium-obsession syndrome

The main “intellectual fallacy” dominating climate alarmist’s ideas is the notion of a natural equilibria. It assumes our current climate is in equilibrium. That any climate change must be bad and man-made (upsets the equilibrium). That energy systems should be some variation of imaginary perpetual motion machines (they call it “renewable”, and say it makes “free” energy). The climate scare rename from "global warming" to: “climate change” was because it's the “change” that really scares. These people are afraid to stray from an imaginary stasis of equilibria. It’s an ideal or template they think all things should be in thrall to. They are not so much environmentalists, more “equilibrilists”. We see it in their neo-Malthusian economic suggestions too. It perfectly explains their hostility to none-CO2 emitting nuclear power as well. Many such people are called environmentalists, and may use that term for themselves. But anyone who prefers wind-turbines and solar farms to nature has travelled very far away from loving their environment.

I medicalized it by post-pending "syndrome" because it's become a pervasive pathological condition. These ideas are genuinely harmful to our fellows.

Notes

1. Unfortunately, for me, the term “equilibrist” is already in use and it means a circus performer who keeps things in balance during performance.
   equilibrilist seems to be some kind of TMed product.
2. “intellectual fallacy” = a wrong system of thought which dominates thinking. Examples: Marxism, Freudism, neo-Malthusianism. It’s basic precepts are taken for granted. It cannot be seen, by its believers, as a fallacy. It’s understood as “how the world works”. In this case as “how the world should work”
3. When I talk of neo-Malthusianism I refer to a general limits obsession in economics. To sustainable economics, scarcity thinking, and other systems which relegate human welfare behind equilibria concerns.

Scientific Consensus.

171 ya: Dr Ignaz Semmelweis makes hand-washing mandatory for obstetricians at Vienna General Hospital. The incidence of puerperal fever, a mass murderer of mothers, drops by 90% overnight, vindicating Semmelweis’ hunch that iatrogenic contagion is to blame. His students soon replicate this miracle in maternity wards throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire and publish their results in the scientific press.

153 ya: Almost two decades have passed since the empirical confirmation of Semmelweis’ ideas, but mainstream pathology perseverates in ignoring them, sticking to the ancient and evidence-free consensus on miasmas, ’humoral imbalance’ and leeching. Semmelweis himself has been vilified and hounded from his job by the medical establishment, to whom the very suggestion that their hands might be vectors of disease was an affront, coming as it did from a Jew with a low h-index. Unemployed, angry and deeply depressed by the needless deaths of thousands of women a year, Semmelweis is committed to an insane asylum. The guards welcome him with a savage beating. His injuries fail to heal and within a fortnight, at the age of 47, he has died of blood poisoning.

by Brad Keyes (part reblog from)

Hal Lewis. Resignation from The American Physical Society

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence – it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it…

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club.

"reads like someone outside their area of expertise wrote it"

Reblog of Twitter thread by: Ryan Maue | weathermodels.com | @RyanMaue

Tropical storm expert Ryan Maue said the new IPCC report section on tropical storms "reads like someone outside their area of expertise wrote it"

---

The Tropical Cyclones section in Chapter 3 of the IPCC 1.5°C Special Report is poorly written & referenced -- reads like someone outside their area of expertise wrote it ... including out of date 15-year old studies? This isn't 2005.

Don't waste printer paper or ink on the @IPCC_CH 1.5°C report for tropical cyclones. Reference this page ---> https://t.co/I908S7hCgb which is continually updated by experts.

1) Numerous studies have not reported a decrease in the number of global tropical cyclones or accumulated cyclone energy.

I'd know because I wrote the last papers cited in IPCC SREX that say otherwise.

The statement is just false -- makes no sense w/cited references. Bizarre.

2) This paragraph is awful -- fails to provide the consensus reached already in the previous IPCC AR5 and SREX and instead goes back to papers from 10-15 years ago -- long outdated and deprecated.

3) Tropical Cyclones in next 10-40 years? Same number globally -- probably a few more intense by percentage of total. A bit wetter near the eye ... and when making landfall.

That's it.

Will the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) destroy earth?

No.

Many of the particles which strike the Earth are orders of magnitude more energetic than anything we are ever likely to produce. Some particles like the infamous “Oh-my-god” particle which struck Earth in 1991 with an energy of 3×10⁸ TeV, hitting us at 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light defy explanation – we shall likely never find a way to produce particle energies of that magnitude (for comparison the Large Hadron Collider, Earth’s most powerful particle accelerator, produces particles at around the 4TeV range).

-- Eric Worrall

Greenhouse Effect flat earth physics diagram

Reblog. Authored by Stephen Wells

The goto paper for academic courses on the greenhouse effect which forms the basis of man made global warming alarmism. Taught in physics undergraduate courses across the world and responsible for the dumbing down of science for the last two decades.

I asked the following question to Astrophysicist Joseph Postma

"You’ve mentioned a few times that you were taught the Greenhouse Effect flat earth physics diagram in your undergraduate degree. May I ask why do you think you didn’t pick up on the pseudoscience back then? What conditions prevailed back then that obscured the errors from you?"

His answer:

"Now that’s an excellent question! Great of you to find the dichotomy there and realize that it is a question. If we can solve that question, perhaps we could solve it for others?

"Let’s see. Well, when I was in undergrad, it was simple: I trusted what I was being told. I saw the flat Earth, saw how it was mathematically formulated, and thought that since it was an average, then everything is OK. I simply didn’t question it or think about it. That’s what happens in a class-room: you accept what you are told. You believe it because nothing being taught in class would be wrong anymore, would it? How could they teach wrong things in a classroom, when in a classroom the point is to get the correct answers?

"Wow…that is scary. Doesn’t that show just how corruptible, corrupt, dangerous and useless our education system actually is. It’s all brain washing and conditioning at a subconscious level. How can anything taught in a class room be wrong when the point of being in a class room is to learn true things that you get rewarded for repeating with check marks and higher grades?

"So to answer your question, I think the answer is that the conditions which prevailed were: naivety. And that is a term I’ve used in recent articles criticizing how academics so readily accept bad science from “high” sources – they naively believe that other people are doing right things.

"What broke my naivety, then? I would say first, it was simply in reading reading “Fit for Life” upon recommendation of a girl I was dating. That started the process. Then it was solidified totally when I read “State of Fear” upon recommendation from another girl I was dating, and decided to look into the criticisms and their answers myself.

"Why would that work for me? I don’t know.

"But the key is that a person has to begin to realize that the world is not true as it has been presented to them. You have to realize just how much we take everything for granted, without truly understanding where these ideas came from. It takes a lot of work and a lot of critical thinking…and this is something that I guess most people aren’t interested in doing, or maybe they would be, but they’re too propagandized and distracted with trivia."

Statisticians are misled by bad data.

Statistics makes sense provided that the original data is clean. When the original data is dirty, adjusted, and infilled by up to 50%, can one still give credence to statistics, as Andrew Gelman does in this post?

I suggest the chart Andrew leads that post with is junk data. Too dirty, adjusted and infilled to form a record of reality.

1. USA's best land surface data, USCRN, U.S. Climate Reference Network shows no warming since it began operating 13 years ago:
   
2. That satellite record doesn't show dramatic warming either. UAH series is about 0.06ºC/decade over the last 3 decades now that man-made CO2 emissions are greatest. Only about 20% of what warmists think it is!
3. Warmists avoid using data which "hides their warming". Is this is the first time most of you reading have heard of USCRN? Why?, given that it is the most accurate, most scientific, faithful data for land surface temperatures in USA for the past 13½ years.
4. Andrew Gelman's data is "dirty, adjusted, and infilled by up to 50%"
5. Can Andrew Gelman to explain to us how warmist NASA GISS got their chart to disagree so widely with Hansen's from 1999, when both are based on the same data?

We Should Not Call Climate Alarmists "Liars".

Because they are far more dangerous and deluded than mere liars.

Calling alarmists liars is OTT, and counterproductive. It undermines criticism. OK, I admit: some of them have lied. But that's not the norm, nor was it responsible for their 15 years of fame. Their norm is a groupthink so biased, so committed to its mission, that it's almost insane. Groupthink and mission. But groupthink leads to incompetence. Mann was favoured and parachuted into position as IPCC lead author. His Hockey Stick was accepted as “science”. Even today, climate alarmists tell me it's “science”. No group-thinking climate alarmists looked at what Mann did. Not one looked at the nitty-bitty details. Only skeptics did that to find the flaws, and pseudo-science. Yet that same groupthink still believe it acceptable to drive skeptics out-of-work! (So some of them tell me), even when they can see the harm they’ve done, they still want to cause more. The “climate consensus” are dangerous, irresponsible people. But, in their minds, they do not tell “lies”. They do irresponsible “science” (modelling actually). Declare it to be “true”, settled and a consensus. All because it most accurately represents their bias, and fulfills their "mission", or purpose.

Wegman Report

The Wegman report was made in 2006. It is an independent analysis of the statistics used to create the Hockey Stick, which starred in the IPCC 3rd report. It is here.

The executive summary reports the primary problem with Mann's Hockey Stick paper:

“The controversy of Mann’s methods lies in that the proxies are centered on the mean of the period 1902-1995, rather than on the whole time period. This mean is, thus, actually decentered low, which will cause it to exhibit a larger variance, giving it preference for being selected as the first principal component. The net effect of this decentering using the proxy data in MBH98 and MBH99 is to produce a “hockey stick” shape. Centering the mean is a critical factor in using the principal component methodology properly. It is not clear that Mann and associates realized the error in their methodology at the time of publication.” Finding number 7 discredits claims that the 1990s were the hottest decade in a millennium: “Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis. As mentioned earlier in our background section, tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable.” McIntyre and McKitrick exposed the problems and showed that stationary trendless red noise would exhibit the same hockey stick shape after being processed using the MBH methodology! This was confirmed by Wegman.

Urban heat island effect

The urban heat island effect refers to the tendency of urban temperatures to be much higher than rural temperatures. The extra warmth is due to:

• more heat created by people
• landscape changes. For example roads and concrete surfaces absorb more solar heat
• less evaporative cooling. There's less vegetation and water evaporation in built-up areas. Water evaporation is one of the major causes of earth surface cooling.

Is the global warming scare due to misread thermometers?

• Actual measurements of the best rural ground stations, in USA, show no warming trend over the past 13 years, since the North American 'climate reference network' was built.

  When we look at average surface temperature but exclude urban data we get something like this:

  

  The chart above shows data from the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). This is a network of best practice surface stations from 114 sites, carefully sited to suffer no bias from an urban heat island effect. USCRN use the latest, highest quality measuring instruments. These are the most scientific, accurate, precise, direct, ground-level measurements made of temperature anywhere. USCRN shows no warming. The network is only 13 years old, and is only in the USA. Climate alarmists mostly pretend this network does not exist. They don't quote it.

• The chart below shows: Annual-mean temperature in California, averaged over population centers exceeding 1,000,000 (upper) & of less than 100,000 (lower). Superimposed is the record of Global Mean Temperature (GMT) from the network of surface stations (dotted). The warming trend is clearly far higher in densely populated areas. Source: Goodridge, J, 1996: Bull Am Meteorol Soc, 77, 1588–1589.
• The 3rd chart is a Histogram of observed temperature trend over California, as a function of population. This chart implies near zero warming in lightly populated areas. Source: Robinson, A, Balliunas, S, Soon, W, and Z Robinson, 1998: Med Sent, 3, 171–178.
• The UHI effect got worse over time. Paradoxically, since we began worrying about 'global warming' scientists took lower quality surface readings. They included a higher proportion of stations corrupted by UHI effect. In 1990s thousands of rural surface weather stations were closed. Leaving a strong bias with urban weather stations.
• For 20 years, climate scientists have been making massive adjustments to surface temperatures. They justify these adjustments by claiming to be fixing the corruption introduced by UHI! Adjustments are massive in both the number of adjustments and the size of those adjustments. Here is an example from Iceland. This seems strange to me that climate scientists should be so reliant on temperatures measured at surface stations. Because:
  • most are so unreliable. Temperature measurements are usually just the maximum and minimum temperature recorded per day. So no 'average' daily temperature is never measured. Error bounds are usually around +/- 2C
  • the excuse for closing so many surface stations in the 1990s was that, in future, scientists would rely on (more accurate and precise) satellite measurements. Satellites give:
    1. far both more accurate,
    2. more precise, measurements
    3. made at far more locations (at least ten times more),
    4. a much better picture of isolated areas (which we would otherwise hardly know about).
    5. Satellites eliminate the bias introduced by relying on stations corrupted by the urban heat island effect.
    To summarise: Satellites allow scientists to:
    1. avoid an urban heat island effect biasing temperatures
    2. not interpolate (invent data) for isolated areas where they don't take surface station readings
    3. take more accurate and precise readings
    4. avoid the issue of broken and malfunctioning surface stations
    5. obtain far more readings
    Why did climate scientists continue to use the obsolete ground surface measurements?, and make such a big deal of them in the media. Satellite readings are available for the past 40 years? It seems to me, unscientific to claim that adjusted surface readings, containing massive amounts of interpolated data are more reliable than Satellite readings. But that's what they say. Scientists complain that the Satellite record is corrupted by cloud and atmospheric effects. That is true. Yet what of the massive adjustments they make to the surface record. Today scientists interpolate (make up) nearly half the data they use, and adjust some of the rest.

The last 11,000 years show no remarkable recent climate warming.

One might think that scientists are able to compare the effect of errors introduced by relying on either 1) satellites, or 2) existing ground stations. I never see them quote these errors to give any measure of reliability, or any measure to compare the quality of satellite against ground station measurements. They seem to have no agreed method to calculate the degree of error. So their choice of one over the other (their preference for massively adjusted ground station data) is a subjective judgement.

Today's climate scientists are not behaving as real scientists.

Is average global temperature warming or cooling?

Temperature Evidence

1. Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert, retired geologist & data computation expert, examined all NASA GISS’s temperature data series, from 1153 stations, going back to 1881. On comparing raw data to NASA’s revisions he found earth has been cooling since 1940, not warming.
2. The GHCN climate stations show there is no statistically significant warming – or cooling. GHCN = Global Historical Climatology Network.
3. The UAH statellite record shows 0.3C warming in the last 40 years. But the climate also showed considerable cooling from 1940s to mid-1970s and the satellite readings only date from 1978.

Uncorrected NASA GISS data should show warming because beginning with the climate scare (1988) vast numbers of climate surface stations were shut. Many of them rural. The stations left open are mostly urban which should be subject to the Urban Heat Island UHI effect, which has increased over time. So uncorrected data should show warming purely on the basis of this massive station shutdown with the warmest stations surviving. If no warming was found (as is the case since the early 1940s) I conclude the climate must be cooling.

Science, as it was once imagined

It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

-- Richard Feynman.

---

Richard Feynman: Cargo-Cult Science speech, 14 June 1974, Caltech, California, USA

Arctic Warming

This is due to warmer temperatures in Winter. Whereas it used to be very cold there, it is now just cold.

Arctic ice isn't about to collapse because 'global warming' makes nights, winters, and very cold regions (such as the Arctic) slightly warmer. All of that is good for people.

Much of the work that supports the AGW conjecture is based on these inherently useless simulations.

Reblog from: WUWT

Wiliam Haas

The reality is that based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. The AGW conjecture is based on only partial science and is full of holes. For example, the AGW conjecture depends upon the existence of a radiant greenhouse effect in the Earth’s atmosphere caused by trace gases with LWIR absorption bands. Such a greenhouse effect has not been observed in a real greenhouse, in the Earth’s atmosphere or anywhere else in the solar system for that mater. The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction hence the AGW conjecture is science fiction as well. Computer simulation of the weather is only reasonable good for about 10 days. The climate simulations are not as good as the weather simulations because of an increase in spatial and temporal sample sizes and inherent instabilities with the simulation process. The idea that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is hard coded into the simulations, begs the question and makes the climate simulations useless. Much of the work that supports the AGW conjecture is based on these inherently useless simulations.

Telling the public that the AGW conjecture is not based on only partial science is pure propaganda and should not be supported with the tax dollars. The federal government should not be funding explanations of global warming and the greenhouse effect that are just plane wrong.

There is ‘No Role of CO2 in Any Significant Change of the Earth’s Climate’

An updated review about carbon dioxide and climate change Vol.:(0123456789)1 3Environmental Earth Sciences (2018) 77:262 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-018-7438-y , by Dr. Rex J. Fleming

“One can summarize these calculations as follows: whatever the “climate-change regime,” whatever surface heat from the Sun on any given day within that regime, that heat is fully absorbed and fully vertically redistributed throughout the troposphere—there is no propensity for CO₂ to store heat in a systematic way over time to produce a climate change effect (as defined in the introduction).”

“Why does the integrated effect of CO₂ have so little effect on the total temperature profile? The reason is that the Planck function change with height (temperature) is very strong in reducing the intensity of those relatively few lines with large absorption coefficients. Another reason is that the longwave radiation is diffuse which depletes the intensity rapidly over distance. The diffuse nature of the radiation also leads to the fact that the net radiation for a given level (that sent upward at the bottom of a layer, minus that sent downward at the top of a layer) further reduces the adsorbed CO₂ radiation intensity.”

“Other so-called “greenhouse gases” (some with larger absorption coefficients, but all with significantly less concentration) have their intensity quickly transferred upward and depleted by the same strong Planck function intensity change that applies to CO₂ and H₂O. From the historical record and from these calculations one sees that the CO₂ concentration had no impact on temperature. It contributes low-level heating and allows upper level cooling for a zero net effect.”

Discussion at NTZ.

Global warming reduces summer mortality.

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased summer temperatures in Spain by nearly one degree Celsius on average between 1980 and 2015.

We analysed a dataset from 47 major cities in Spain for the summer months between 1980 and 2015, which included daily temperatures and 554,491 deaths from circulatory and respiratory causes, by sex.

Despite the summer warming observed in Spain between 1980 and 2015, the decline in the vulnerability of the population has contributed to a general downward trend in overall heat-attributable mortality.

See: Heat-related mortality trends under recent climate warming in Spain: A 36-year observational study by Hicham Achebak, Daniel Devolder, Joan Ballester, Published: July 24, 2018

Discussion at WUWT

Erroneous IPCC

Extract from G Dedrick Robinson's book:

Maybe they [IPCC] didn't think it mattered enough to policy makers to waste their time on them [errors]. The important thing is the graph projecting warming, isn't that so? That makes the danger clear.

Yes, the graph certainly does that, but only if one does not understand the importance of the errors. Consider just one of the uncertainties, the 25 W/m² in shortwave radiation reflected into space. As mentioned in chapter Five, 1.6 W/m² is the total estimated positive radiative forcing for all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.¹² Now consider that the uncertainty from just one physical parameter is more than 15 times that. There are similar uncertainties for outgoing longwave radiation and surface heat flux. How then, can someone claim to predict something such as warming, if the error involved in the procedure is more than 15 times greater than the effect one is trying to predict? Another imponderable is why the IPCC puts a graph in their only short, easy-to-read and hard hitting publication, the Report for Policymakers, that contains a graph labeled with one standard deviation error, when the uncertainties in the GCMs are greater than the effects they're claiming to predict.

page 85, G Dedrick Robinson (PhD) "Global Warming, Alarmists, Skeptics and Deniers: A geologist looks at the science of climate change"

How to debate climate science. Advice from the 'experts'.

Climate Science. Model: true, Reality: false.

Hansen et. al (2011) admit that the claimed "ENERGY IMBALANCE" at the top of the atmosphere used to attribute recent warming to increasing "greenhouse-gas" concentrations is a result of MODEL CALCULATIONS, not direct observations. see paper:

Q: Will global warming cause the oceans to boil away?

I saw this science chart showing that oceans are gaining massive amounts of heat. Will this cause them to boil away?

No.

Why Not?

Short answer: Because the oceans are massive and massive amounts of heat are needed to change them. Relative to the size of the oceans the warming is trivial.

Long answer: First we need to know how much oceans are warming. One NOAA chart I saw showed about an 180 ZJ rise in 30 years. That works out at 6 ZJ/year. [1 ZJ = 10²¹ joule]

Next we need to know how much ocean there is. Total mass of water on the earth's surface = 1.35 × 10²¹ kg, almost all of it ocean.

That conveniently works at at 6 J per 1.35 kg of water, because 1 ZJ = 10²¹ J. Which works to be 4.444 J per kg of water.

How will that much heat affect water?

Adding energy to water will increase its temperature. To find out by how much, we need to know the heat capacity of water. Heat capacity is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature by 1 ºC.

The heat capacity of water = 3993 J/kg/K, which means 3993 joules of energy will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree celsius.

The find out the number of years, needed to raise the temperature of all the water on earth by 1 ºC, we divide 3993 by 4.444. That is 898½ years. So currently the average ocean temperature increase is about 0.0011 ºC per year. In 898 years time, oceans could be 1 ºC warmer at this rate. Or, the next deep glaciation may be well be underway by then, and oceans may have started cooling.

Hansen Against the World

Reblog: Hansen by Bernie Lewis.

The interesting thing is not that Hansen’s ‘detection’ science was rubbish — that was known at the time, and everyone, including the authors of the IPCC detection chapter (Wigley, Barnett), publicly said so at the time.

No, what is interesting is how that did not matter. At the very beginning of the climate policy push, already the science did not matter. More important for the rest of us outside the USA was what happened today 30 years ago, when the Toronto conference statement was released, opening with:

Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.

At that meeting John Houghton and John Zillman from the IPCC protested at its outrageous claims. That did not matter. The science never mattered. The funding for science kept coming. The science did not matter. Why? And what does this mean about the role of science in society?

Berie's book is here: Searching for the Catastrophe Signal: The Origins of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Notes

• Dr. Hansen’s Statistics, by Willis Eschenbach

Who are the real ‘flat earthers’ here?

One of my better comments in reply to:

It’s not so much that scientific bodies are accused of fabricating data. More a case that scientific bodies can modify data according to bias. In climate science, they call much of their data modification: ‘homogenization’. It's been scientifically shown that when climate scientists homogenize data, the net result is often warmer than reality. e.g.

(1) “data homogenization for [temperature] stations moved from downtowns to suburbs can lead to a significant overestimate of rising trends of surface air temperature.” – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00704-013-0894-0

(2) “the global temperature increase during the last century is between 0.4ºC and 0.7ºC, where these two values are the estimates derived from raw and adjusted data respectively” – http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/getfile/1212/2/documents/EGU2012-956-1.pdf

Homogenization can nearly double actual global warming. Anyone who believes their bias or imagination before the facts must be termed a ‘flat earther’ too. I hear you ask me: Q: ‘how are these climate scientists biased?’. A: we are all biased, but some of us have critics to moderate our worse excesses. In contrast, where they can, climate scientists drive their critics out of work. e.g. Roger J. Pielke, Peter Ridd, …

You may say that a few mistakes here and there are justified. But these 'mistakes' are systematic; almost the norm now. Any scientist who does statistics without checking for their own bias is either incompetent or does not care about bias because they believe they have an 'important narrative to tell us'. With climate scientists, I think it is probably both. I don't really think they are flat-earthers; just dangerous and out-of-control.

PS 1: My original comment edited here

PS 2: The authors of the article I wrote about are both scientists. They are projecting demons of their imagination onto their critics. Something we all do when we demonize our opponents.

Ocean acidification myth

pH is a measure of acidity (or basicity). When pH is below 7 solutions (like the oceans) are said to be acidic. With pH above 7 they are basic. Ocean pH is about 8, basic. It actually varies quite a lot depending on which ocean you measure, at what depth.

Climate alarmists claim CO₂ from fossil fuel combustion is acidifying oceans, because it makes "carbonic acid".

NOAA claim:

"In the past 200 years alone, ocean water has become 30 percent more acidic"

due to CO₂ from burning fossil fuel.

National Geographic claim:

"Over the past 300 million years, ocean pH has been slightly basic, averaging about 8.2. Today, it is around 8.1, a drop of 0.1 pH units, representing a 25-percent increase in acidity over the past two centuries."

Let me examine NOAA's claim:

1) There is 38,000 Gt on carbon dissolved in oceans (27ppm). Mostly as the bicarbonate ion HCO₃^- Total carbon available in fossil fuel reserves = 5,000 Gt. If all that fossil fuel burnt, and the CO₂ produced then dissolved in the oceans it will raise the ocean carbon content to 31ppm. To put things into perspective: in contrast to the 27ppm of carbon, oceans have 35,000ppm of salt in them.

Total carbon emissions (as CO₂) since before industrial times ~ 500 Gt. Not all that can end up in oceans. Some stays in atmosphere, some is sequestered on land (in plants and trees), more is sequestered by oceans.

2) When carbon dioxide dissolves in water. It first becomes CO₂(aq). Then:

CO₂(aq) + H₂O(aq) ⇌ H₂CO₃(aq) ... (A)

H₂CO₃(aq) is "carbonic acid".

But when this happens only 0.3% of the CO₂ dissolving in the oceans becomes "carbonic acid". The rest mostly stays as CO₂(aq).

Note: For the 0.3% claim see: "Carbon Dioxide, Dissolved (Ocean)" by Zeebe & Wolf

3) When this "carbonic acid" is made it is a very weak acid. With a K_a = 4.2E-04 (K_a = dissociation constant). This is the dissociation of H₂CO₃(aq) to make acid:

H₂CO₃(aq) + H₂O ⇌ H₃O⁺(aq) + HCO₃^-(aq) ... (B)

The actual (active) acid here is H₃O⁺(aq), sometimes written as H⁺(aq), and referred to as "hydrogen ions", or hydrated hydrogen ions. This is what pH measures. pH is literally "the negative log of the hydrogen ion concentration".

Such a low dissociation constant implies about 0.5% of the carbonic acid (H₂CO₃) will act as acid (as hydrogen ions). [calculated as the square root of K_a a by a "very back of envelope" method!].

So 0.5% of 0.3% of 500Gt is how much actual acid could have been made. Insignificant.

Note: In comparison a strong acid like hydrochloric acid is almost 100% dissociated to make actual "acid", or hydrogen ions, which may be written H⁺(aq) or H₃O⁺(aq).

4) Carbon dioxide dissolving in oceans acts as a buffer, not an acid. As the name implies, a buffer prevents, or greatly reduces, pH changes.

5) What kind of pH change might we really expect?

I will do "very back of the envelope" calculations here. If I make a mistake, please laugh at me. Then correct me.

Assuming the pH of oceans = 8.1, as National Geographic claim, lets do the back of envelope calculations to figure out how much pH may have fallen in the last 200 years.

The mass of oceans is usually given = 1.4E24 grams. How much acid is that?

A pH = 8.1 says that the [H₃O⁺+] = 10^-8.1 = 7.9433E-09.

Multiply the two. Grams of H+ = 1E16 grams (very approximate!). A lot of hydrogen ions, but then, our oceans are very big.

How many hydrogen ions may we expect from 500Gt of carbon (dissolving as CO₂)? The Atomic Mass of C = 12. 500Gt of carbon = 500 × 1000,000,000 t = 500 × 1000,000,000,000,000 g = 50E16 g of Carbon = 50/12 × 10¹⁶ moles, or 4E+16.

4E+16 × 0.3% × 0.5% = 6E+11 hydrogen ions. The ratio of hydrogen ions added is 18600:1 We increased the acidity from 18600 to 18601. Big deal! By adding all that CO₂ we made the oceans more acidic by 1 extra hydrogen ion in 18600. An addition of 0.0054%, not 30% as NOAA said. The pH change we may expect to actually get is too small to measure. It will be within the error bounds of any measurement we make. We won't be able to distinguish it from signal noise.

The claimed pH change from 8.2 to 8.1 as NOAA and National Geographic claim is a 26% change in acidity (remember pH is a logarithmic scale). The actual change must be less than 0.0054%. They exaggerate by over 3 orders of magnitude. By 26% ÷ 0.0054% = 4819. National Geographic by 4819 times. NOAA by 5560 times.

6) Evidence suggests fraud in the "science" as well.

The pH data has been tampered in the CO₂-AGW consensus paper on declaring ocean water acid by 0.1 decrease. The reanalysis of public pH data from the same source in Univ of Hawaii shows the data tampering in the peer-reviewed consensus paper.

Note: The pH standard deviation range = 0.19 - 0.28.

Note: Ocean acidification of the North Pacific Ocean (pdf), by Richard A. Feely, Victoria J. Fabry and John M. Guinotte

7) A reply from a critic

There is at least one attempt to refute me here: Bad Science or "Climate Alarmism". You tell me

Summary:

1. The relative change in the carbon content of oceans in the last 200 years is small.
2. Only 0.3% of carbon dioxide dissolving in oceans becomes carbonic acid.
3. This carbonic acid is a weak acid, with 0.5% of it dissociating to actual acid (hydrogen ions).
4. CO₂ in sea water acts as a buffer. To prevent changes in pH (acidity)
5. NOAA exaggerate the change in likely pH 5560 times over.
6. Reanalysis of the scientific paper claiming oceans have become more acidic by 0.1 pH shows the paper cannot be trusted.

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This is the best reply I've had so far.

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chiralSPO, Global Moderator, Naked Science Forum King!

• Quote (selected)

Re: How can climate scientists claim 30% acidification of the ocean due to CO2?

« Reply #5 on: Today at 16:42:44 »

Ocean pH is due to only one thing [H⁺]. Yes, there are many other ions in solution, each of which might play a role in determining [H⁺], though not as many as you seem to be indicating (it doesn't matter how much salt there is: Na⁺, K⁺, Cl^–, and Br^– will have NO effect on pH in the range of plausible pH values, as the pK_a values of Cl^–, and Br^– are < 0).

There is a complex "buffer" related to concentrations of CO₂, HCO₃^–, CO₃^2–, H₂PO₄^–, HPO₄^2–, B(OH)₃, B(OH)₄^2–, Mg²⁺, Ca²⁺, etc.

As you say in your blog:

Quote

I will do "very back of the envelope" calculations here. If I make a mistake, please laugh at me. Then correct me.

I will skip the first step, and focus on the second:

Quote

Assuming the pH of oceans = 8.1, as National Geographic claim, lets do the back of envelope calculations to figure out how much pH may have fallen in the last 200 years.

The mass of oceans is usually given = 1.4E24 grams. How much acid is that?

A pH = 8.1 says that the [H3O++] = 10^-8.1 = 7.9433E-09.

Multiply the two. Grams of H+ = 1E16 grams (very approximate!). A lot of hydrogen ions, but then, our oceans are very big.

How many hydrogen ions may we expect from 500Gt of carbon (dissolving as CO2)? The Atomic Mass of C = 12. 500Gt of carbon = 500 × 1000,000,000 t = 500 × 1000,000,000,000,000 g = 50E16 g of Carbon = 50/12 × 1016 moles, or 4E+16.

4E+16 × 0.3% × 0.5% = 6E+11 hydrogen ions. The ratio of hydrogen ions added is 18600:1 We increased the acidity from 18600 to 18601. Big deal! By adding all that CO2 we made the oceans more acidic by 1 extra hydrogen ion in 18600. An addition of 0.0054%, not 30% as NOAA said.

The above approach is fundamentally flawed (I have stricken the primary mistake through). As you point out, the system is buffered, by the equilibrium of H⁺ CO₂, H₂CO₃, HCO₃^–, and CO₃^2–. This complex buffering means that the linear relationship assumed in the above calculation is not valid. Instead, we need to consider the relationship between all of the species. You have also not considered how much of each of the carbon-related species are already in solution, and what their relationships are to each other and to pH.

I recommend studying up on this more before posting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicarbonate_buffer_system#Henderson%E2%80%93Hasselbalch_equation
http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~russ/620_04OceanChem.pptx (downloadable lecture slides)

It is also worth emphasizing (and you have noted it, but I think you should consider the ramifications more carefully), that the system is NOT IN EQUILIBRIUM. The pH is not the same everywhere because the ocean is not mixed perfectly well. This means that at the very surface, where the ocean is in contact with the acidifying CO₂, the buffer can be temporarily over-burdened, before more bicarbonate comes up from the depths to restore equilibrium. This is bad news for marine life in shallow waters (read: everything you can see while snorkeling), which is damaged by the imbalance, even if it is temporary.

Essentially, the calcium carbonate in the marine organisms serves as the base in the equilibrium.

Nazis and Environmentalism

James Delingpole interviews Rupert Darwall, author of "Green Tyranny"

In addition

The Nazi's were very concerned about German food sustainability. A big factor in Germany's WWI loss, was the Allied blockade leading to starvation in Germany. By the end of 1918, 763,000 German civilians died from starvation and disease. This was followed by 15 years of economic devastation and poverty for many.

Nazi's believed that the US standard of living, which they envied, was directly proportional to its agricultural production. Hitler wanted a better living standard for Germans. They also believed that German agricultural productivity was maxed out by the 1930s. That German agriculture could make no big gains in productivity.

Hence, before WWII, Germany secretly proposed to Poland, no less than eight times, a join German-Polish invasion of the Soviet Union because the Nazis wanted to annex the Ukraine for Germany. German farmers would then colonize the Ukraine; one of the most fertile agricultural regions, close to Germany.

This belief in the absoluteness of limits to the economy, we can call it neo-Malthusianism, is central to Green thinking.

Leading Nazis were vegetarians too. Not because they loved animals, but because they considered it morally repugnant to eat meat. Because arable land can support 15 times the population that pastoral land does. Eating meat, while other Germans starved was morally repugnant to them.

Revealed in Black Earth, by Timothy Snyder.

Naturalism is the root cause of green fallacies.

Environmentalists assume that environmental change caused by humanity is bad, but that much larger 'natural' changes are neutral. This is because they often suffer a 'naturalist fallacy' or "appeal to nature". Because natural is defined as good in their eyes, they can't imagine a bad natural change. In contrast, every man-made change is assumed to be bad, even when the man-made change improves the environment.

This leads to anti-human, anti-environment policies. e.g. Calls for bans against: fishing, genetic engineering, plastic bags, nuclear power, fossil fuels, factory farming, 'chemicals', including pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Greens propose: organic farming, natural energy such as renewable energy systems: wind-, solar-, hydro-, geo-, bio- energies. Every green solution is worse for the environment than the technologies it is designed to replace. Because greens long ago abandoned cost benefit analysis for the 'precautionary principle' they can't even know whether their proposals make sense. Perhaps this may explain why their policies are senseless and they attract so many incompetents to their ranks?

The green sense of moral superiority (rarely made explicit) is often glanced through their outrage against perfectly good technologies which benefit the environment, such as fossil fuel burning. Giving up on cost-benefit analysis means the give up on basic evidence too. This moral superiority is misplaced, and is really outrage against humanity for living so well and improving our lot.